In honor of the upcoming debut event, "Cross-cultural Perspectives In James Hillman's Archetypal Psychology: North/South" with Patricia Berry and Brazilian Gustavo Barcellos, let's log a stream of our favorite quotes from Hillman to honor his contribution to Archetypal Psychology.
Just look for "Reply to this" below, type or paste your quote, and then scroll down and hit "Add Reply."
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Quoted (slightly paraphrased because the entire quote is much longer) from The Myth of Analysis:
The myths we have inherited, although necessary, are no longer adequate. Freud's Oedipus (1900) and Jung's heroic night-sea-journey (1912) represent the opening of human consciousness toward individual destiny, but are we not beyond this phase in ourselves?
Separation from the unconscious and rebirth through it no longer constitute the heroic task. The heroic age in psychology is past. The problems we meet today require a "new mythology."
At the first level these problems are ones of love, marriage, and divorce; couples in confusion; erotic promiscuity—the desperate compulsive search for psychic relatedness and erotic identity. We must turn rather to the creative instinct as it appears to the psyche, that is, to the phenomena of love, to find out what has gone so wrong. To meet the new problems in the analysis of today we need a new myth. The shift in great classical themes from Oedipus and the hero to Eros and Psyche provides a description by means of metaphor for the archetypal change taking place in the psyche.
"We bomb and exploit and take and kill as if it has no effect in the soul of our own people, let alone other people...I'm worried about the soul of our country from the effects of what we do." ----- James Hillman, from an interview at Pacifica (see YouTube: James Hillman Soulless Society)
“By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God.” —James Hillman
“What is going on in the body is trapped in the mind’s idea of the body.” - James Hillman
"Breaking the vessels is the return, the turn again to the world, giving back what we have taken from it by storing inside ourselves its soul. By this return we regard the world anew, having regard for it as it shows its regard for us and to us in its face. We pay respect to it simply by looking again, re-specting, that second look with the eye of the heart."
James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World
"Therapy must focus on relations rather than on contents, substantialities, things that matter, because connection becomes the main work of therapy when the world is dead: ego psychology is inevitable, for the patient must find ways to connect the psyche of dream and feeling to the dead world so as to reanimate it."
--James Hillman, "The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World," Spring Publications. Kindle Edition.
"The intensity of the needs of the boy reflect the immensity of from which it comes, the source.
The little boy and his needs are your vine into the other world."
-James Hillman, Fathering the Boy Inside, Minnesota Men's Conference, 1988
“Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify. Personifying is thus a way of knowing, especially knowing what is invisible, hidden in the heart.”
--from Re-Visioning
"To let the depths rise without our systems of protections is what psychiatry calls psychosis: the images and voices and energies invading the emptied cities of reason which have been depersonified and demythologized and so have no containers to receive the divine influxes."
—James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, p. 224