Beautiful reminiscences of the late James Hillman from Pythia Peay (excerpted from her book, America on the Couch) posted on the Depth Psychology Alliance Facebook group....
"Today is Halloween, and tomorrow is The Day of the Dead, that time of year when the leaves on the trees turn gold and red, and when it is said that the veils between worlds thin, and the spirits and ancestors of the other world are believed to draw nearer the world of the living. And so today I’m also thinking of and honoring the memory of the great Jungian thinker James Hillman, who did so much to bring history, both personal and collective, back into psychology, and whose last book "Lament of the Dead" also inspired me to create this “wall of ancestors” in my study. Here is a selection from "America on the Couch," in which Hillman discusses depression from a very different angle than the way our “heroic” culture sees it, and also the “invisibles” of the other world who are our constant companions.
James Hillman: Part of depression forces us to think philosophically. What am I doing here? Why am I alive? What is life about?…I just did a commentary on a documentary for the BBC called Kind of Blue. There were about three or four seriously depressed people in it; I could see it in their eyes. The reason I mention this is because the people in the film were all able to express profound thoughts and feelings. They revealed a dimension of life that I call melancholy. Depression, in fact, is the secular word for melancholy; it’s melancholy without the Gods.
Melancholy deepens depression toward more profound, impersonal things: Gods, art, music, beauty, religion, spirit, soul—all those deeper things. There’s even an aspect of nature that’s depressed; we can feel the trees in the winter, without leaves. So depression is a season of the year. Japanese poetry expresses that beautifully—brooding, exile, loneliness, and death. All these things give a different angle to depression.
PP: Does depression, I wonder, make us more aware of something else you’ve spoken about: the “inner community” existing inside each person? And perhaps you could explain more exactly what you mean by that.
JH: We’re all living with what I call “the invisibles.” The relationship with the invisibles is very important in therapy, because most of us don’t know the other people that we live with, or listen to the voices in the other rooms of our psychological house.
When someone is thrown back on their own in extreme cases, for instance, like people who sail around the world alone, or who go to the Arctic to do research, or who climb mountains—again and again, they have invisible companions. So when it’s quiet, the people in the other rooms of the house appear. Children have these invisible companions between five and ten years old; but statistics show that they lose touch with these companions as they get older, and when the ego takes over. But I think that when we cohabit with the people of this inner community, we’re more like the archaic tribal peoples who live with the invisibles.
PP: Can you give me some guidelines or guidance for dialoging with these invisibles?
JH: For example, there are warnings we pick up. We go to a party and we meet someone new, but for some reason we don’t like them, and we have a feeling that we’d better watch what we say, and we don’t want to get too close. Where does that intuition come from?
PP: I don’t know. Where does that come from?
JH: Socrates had a daimon who told him what to do and what not to do. We still have those guardian angels.""
Replies
Some years ago I was decompressing after a conference with James Hillman and Rick Tarnas and Susan Griffin; and Hillman asked us, "What god do you think was in charge of the conference?" It was "Nature and Human Nature," co-hosted by Pacifica; each speaker had only 20 min. We scratched our heads, and Hillman blurted, "I think it was Chronos." Incidentally, he was the only one I know of you kept inside the 20 min; the rest of us ran over and had to be cut off.