DIALOGUE

 For more than a decade James Hillman has been my favorite writer and most influential teacher. I discovered him in 1996 when The Soul's Code was published, which I devoured, or perhaps more rightly stated, which devoured me. My ideational world was turned inside out. From The Soul's Code I went on to read Hillman's opus,Re-Visioning Psychology.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Ideas from this Pulitzer Prize nominated book changed practically everything about the way I viewed psyche, religion, myself, others and the larger world--specifically through the four main chapters titled Personifying, Pathologizing, Psychologizing, and Dehumanizing, which the author describes as "four ideas necessary for the soul-making process" (ix).His view of pathologizing was especially revolutionary, helping me to make room for emotional suffering and psychic fragmentation in a culture obsessed with chronic emotional well being and wholeness. In short, I am a devotee of Hillman's work.

However, over time I have become troubled by some of Hillman's postmodernist and Romantic predispositions and their implications for psychology and socio-cultural ethics. I want to stress the word "some" when I say I am troubled by Hillman's work since I also feel that his radical correctives are extraordinarily necessary. That being acknowledged, James Hillman's methodological approach is heavily slanted in a modernist/postmodernist direction, which Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker describes: 

Beginning in the 1970s, the mission of modernism to afflict the culturally secure and comfortable] was extended by the set of styles and philosophies called postmodernism. Postmodernism was even more aggressively relativistic, insisting that there are many perspectives on the world, none of them privileged. It denied even more vehemently the possibility of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values. It was more Marxist and far more paranoid, asserting that claims to truth and progress were tactics of political dominion which privileged the interests of straight white males. According to the doctrine, mass-produced commodities and media-disseminated images and stories were designed to make authentic experience impossible. (Blank 411)

Hillman clearly sets out to afflict the culturally comfortable and psychologically secure, approaching the soul by utilizing the postmodern procedures of relativistic fantasies and labyrinthine meanderings--minimizing psychological universals, fixed meanings and any kind of preordained psycho-social linear development....