What follows are a couple of rough quotes from the audio....hillman threw out Jung’s concept of the self as he considered it a fascist idea… restricting the polytheistic openess of the psyche
By doing so he threw out the centerpiece of jungian psychology...at 57 minute mark
this was my second pass through this zurich labs audio .. it is worth the effort.
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I haven't read much of hillman. This is mainly because as an eager young student of the unconscious/jung I attended one of his public lectures in London . I was appalled by his intellectualized distance from the subject matter. He was like a dead intellect talking to someone who had recently been in ecstasy for a whole week after reading crime and punishment.
Well different strokes for different folks. When i stayed over night in Oxford way back when I dreamt of dead heads in the water. That is what the tip of log sticking out of the water is called by canadian boaters. It may have been because I had bought and read a book on Greek drama by an Oxford or Cambridge don. The entire content could be summed up in one sentence. Greek drama is not logical. And he proved it too as a bonus.
Max Winther has a great critque of hillmanand david johnson as well. Tacey is supposed to have his critique published in the very near future. I believe i left links for the Winther and Johnson articles on this thread.
Klemens, thank you for the comments about James Hillman. I just read The Dream and the Underworld and am fascinated by his approach to the gods and the underworld. Yet, I think his bold comments about losing a whole chunk of Jungian thought are off the mark and probably unsubstantiated. I’m still going to read Re-visioning Psychology but I am gaining some perspective about what people were always saying about him.
I read Lament of the Dead but his comments weren’t so out of line in that book, if I remember correctly.
Alek all roads lead to Rome but some take a little longer to traverse than others. Hillman is not for me personally but there are many who may appreciate his work and rally round his banner. Ecumenism in its broadest context is OK by me...
Debra shortly after the western world stopped believing in Gods the ego Gods set off a great holocaust that lasted from 1914 to 1945. Over 100 million died..... The same rational good people ego gods have now positioned the world economy for the mother of all economic Armegeddons.....Dostoevsky Jung and Nietzsche predicted and analyzed the key elements of this plague that is infesting our age.. The first two searched for solutions to it.
No matter where we project such we need some kind of spiritual authority to protect us from ourselves.
well as to Hillman I suspect he like freud did not like what he found in his own unconscious and so he set about to the task of sealing himself off from his own soul whilst retaining the glamor and glitch of the incredible energy and interest that Jung and the concept of a soul attracted. There is no self... archetypes aren't really real but just something to inspire our poetic imagination.... jungians are second rate people and third rate thinkers. But I am great cause i can strip what i like from the jungian carcass and add it to my negation of Jungian thought to make a name for myself. Anyone can watch Hillman's performance at the Smithsonian Red Book symposium. They will see a man who used the red book podium to promote and glorify hillman. It was an embarrassing...and spiteful performance. Being ecumenical and knowing Hillman ain't all that important to the Jungian dynamic ------reading Tacey's new book i suspect and mats winther or david johnson can set you straight on the psychology of hillman--- jungians can safely leave hillmans thought in the flotsam of intellectual history...
There really isn't one truth, it depends. I don't know about the flotsam, it's more like the difference between throwing things at the wall (The Red Book compared to the rest of Jung's work) and seeing what sticks. Sometimes the process of throwing can be ridiculous and childish, and sometimes what sticks on the wall seems too much so let's throw some more.
I hope I am not ripping Tacey's thought totally out of context, but he raised a few reasons in regard to why academia has refused to acknowledge Jungian thought. First up was archetypes. The tabula rasa tribe cannot will not and will never submit the superordinate authority of the ego to the authority of archetypal forces of indeterminate definition. Isns't that the same as saying the ego is God. Second, the tabula rasa crowd would never accept the re-enchantment of the world. i.e. They will never accept the existence of the soul. here are some notes I took from the David Tacey audio
around 16 minutes into david tacey audio…. jung unacceptability is due to his concept of archetypes
intellectual world into a rational sterility. Why do they so aggressively disassociate themselves from the soul/disenchantment. Is this a sickness. Did god have to die and the ego become god so these nincompoops could be shown their intellectual impotency. I can't even comprehend how tacey can even read these dead heads.... never mind take their disembodied discombobulation seriously. Thank God the kingdom of heaven is being built on earth by those who have not been as severley sickened as our intellectual elites... Yeah as Tacey says some of these guys are discovering Jung at the other end of their journey through their madness. Anyways you have to break some eggs to make an ommellete huh? lol Now and seriously speaking Jungians have dropped the ball in regards to being taken seriously in the intellectual community. Say it isn't so Holly.
"The essence of Jung is that the idea that God is dead is an illusion. It's an illusion of our own making. God is dead as Jung said in "Psychology and Religion" because we are dead to God. Look, I'm not a churchy person, Shawn, and I'm not a big champion of Christianity or Judaism or anything, but I think that God is a metaphor for a purposive directional force in creation, and I think that...I know old John Spong, the radical bishop from New Jersey, he referred to God as a bias toward wholeness in a recent book of his you know and I thought, wow, that's getting close to Jung. A bias toward wholeness, and I kind of liked that. But I think that certainly the old grayified anthropomorphic ontotheological God has died and that's probably, you know, good riddance to that. But just because that old image of God as a supernatural being in the sky has died it just means that the puppet show's over and now we can do the real philosophical work on finding out what this...what the idea of God actually meant in the first place. You know, to me it all got sabotaged by anthropomorphic thinking and by sentimental churchmen and theologians that kept saying God's watching over us and taking care of us, and all that had to die. Nietzsche was right when he said *that* God had died. But I think Jung, and this is where I think Jung and Giegerich are miles apart, Jung is actually bearing witness -- he's a prophet. He's bearing witness to the rebirth of God in post religious, and indeed even post secular, times. And what we see in the current up-to-the-minute philosophy that's going on around the world is that this philosophy is engaged in the same project. "
wink wink alek are you playing fetch with me... I am familar with some of mats winther's writings. He has an excellent critique of Hillman. I just don't have time to chase after every interesting topic that comes up... I may take up this subject later ...
Debra I appreciated your post on Paris. I don't agree with David Tacey when he says. We can't back to Greeks. Besides the Judeo/Christian heritage we also possess a Greco/Roman heritage.The Christian religion of the dying christ was able to take hold because the Greco-roman civilization was dying from corruption from within and being overwhelmed by barbarians from without. The end of the civilized world was nigh. The dying and reborn Christ promised salvation and eternal life in the face of an inundation of darkness, barbarism and oblivion. Total oblivion of the civilized world. Who was to know the ferocious Byzantine Christians would survive. Who knew their libraries et al would give birth to a Greco Roman renaissance in Italy. Our Greco Roman heritage is a foundation stone upon which Christianity is grounded. Tacey was wrong about going backwards to the Greeks. His academically orientated objective reasoning mind all but originated from his Greek civilizational heritage. We should be going back to the Greeks to mine more of its munificent endowment. How could such a small populace have been so prolific and creative. They are the Fountainhead of so much of the best of our civilizational legacy.
I am not sure of his exact thoughts on polytheism lie, so i hesitantly say we in the modern world will be much better off when we do finally reach an understanding of the polytheistic component of Greek civilization....The Greek Gods are a subset of the archetypal sphere..so his complete thoughts on archetypes might be useful...first sentence half covered.oh oh
In my opinion the Christian civilization is still intact and evolving to wherever the Symbol/archetype/son of god christ is transforming us towards. If our christian consciousness has evolved to the point where the ego has emerged as an autonomous entity it is only natural for that evolved ego consciousness to have an inflated sense of its own self worth. i.e. to see God as having died and left the world to the ego's dominion. The ego as usurper... or the emergence of the possessed or devils as dostoevsky called them...if God is dead the ego has become a God... jung.... well these days of madness will pass and the ego will destroy man kind or be humbled by his experience and rediscover Christ....and God... Christianity is not dead it has ejected us into the dominion of the ego.... which must rediscover God or self destruct due to its own inflated and maladapted nature..
In an ecumenical matrix hillman is entitled to his opinion
will try to respond to your other paragraphs a bit later
The point is in the word self (like in doing it to yourself, not how Jung was using the word self) in self destruct. For instance, regardless of how awful this might sound, it seems that after that tragedy in Paris some individuals have a masochistic sense of pride and intensity. I've seen a photo of a woman in Sarajevo from the 1990s walking "proudly" and not worrying about Serbs shooting from the hills. The cause of that war was a document "Islamic Declaration" written in the 1970s by a "dissident" Alija Izetbegovic who was elected in the 1990s to be the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The key point in that document is that Muslims must "become" the majority in Bosnia. And that's what the Western establishment and propaganda were supporting (Christians are still the majority in Bosnia) in Bosnia (and later in Kosovo - supported by that French magazine).
Polytheistic, monotheistic, or something else, we should be capable to find intensity and beauty in our "boring" everyday lives when every day seems to be the same (it isn't), when cameras aren't recording.
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