Rating: 
Summary: Meandering along aimlessly...
Review: I've never written a negative review before, but keep looking if you're trying to find a book on the "soul". The writer meanders aimlessly through the book, almost like a very long free-association about anything and everything... yet, ironically about nothing substantive at all. It's full of generalities and countless shallow ideas-- like the basic analogy that runs through the work: the acorn theory of calling, fate, and character. (Yawn.) Other words that come to mind to describe this: inane, trite, boring, obvious. And the extensive peppering of references to the great minds of philosophy and psychology (etc.) doesn't raise the level of the work. Did you ever have a college professor that could drone for an entire hour and say virtually nothing? That's what we have here in written form. Finally, the style is awkward. An example: "The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. If environment means literally what's around, it must also mean whatever is around." (What?!) Get ready for almost 300 pages of that.
Rating: 
Summary: A celebration of the uniqueness of each of us
Review: If you have a Jungian slant to your view of the person than this book is for you. If you think it was your parents who "did it to you" then this book will set you free of that fantasy. Parents are not as important as we, and our culture make them out to be in the overall grand scheme of things. For example, think of the role non-parents had in helping shape who you are. Could these people be natural mentors? Hillman says so. This is not easy reading I read it twice only because the first time I finished it I could not stop thinking about it so was driven to read it again, and lo and behold, I got way more out of it the second time. Read it and see you life from a different view point. Enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: This is a superb Book!
Review: If your searching for something, looking for some direction, feel lost or depressed, this is a great book to read. It really provides a context from which to view you life from and COULD be all you need to get you back in the groove.
Rating:
Summary: This is a superb Book!
Review: If your searching for something, looking for some direction, feel lost or depressed, this is a great book to read. It really provides a context from which to view you life from and COULD be all you need to get you back in the groove.
Rating: 
Summary: Worthwhile
Review: In this book, James Hillman resuscitates the platonist notions of fate and the soul. Basically, the soul of each of us is given a unique daimon which slips into our bodies before we are born and then we pretty much spend the rest of our lives figuring out what the daimon wants from us. One way to do that is to pay close attention to our motivation, our urges for creative expression which reside in our feelings of uniqueness and grandeur and the restlesness of the heart. Another way is to pay close attention to the invisible world. Hillman is very helpful in drawing our attention to the many ways that the invisible can manifest itself through, such as the spirit of a place, the quality of a thing, the soul of a person, the mood of a scene, the style of an art, the goosebumps of a memory...The role of the daimon is to keep the invisibles attached (to the soul) and the spirits (the manifestations of the invisible) smiling and pleased. When the invisible forsakes your world and life is no longer backed by it, the daimon gets mad and the world tears you apart. This happens a lot in our culture. "Our modern passages are so narrow and with such low ceilings" sez Hillman, "that the invisibles must twist themsleves in freakish shapes in order to come through". How then does one bring the invisible forth? One way is by paying attention to intuition (which is our vessel for mythic perception), another by giving respect to our ancestors and our spirit friends and yet still another by cultivating beauty. Beauty has been defined by the neoplatonists as invisible presence in visible form and a divine enhancement of earthly things. According to JH, beauty is food for the soul. Since the daimon is closest to us when we are young, it is crucial to pay a lot of attention to harmonize one's child's life to beauty and to the ancestor spirits, which are concerned about the welfare of the descendant's soul, through which they can see the world. How does one go about nurturing the child's soul? JH suggests 3 important elements: (1) parents must have a fantasy about the child (imagination is the language of the daimon) (2) there must be odd, eccentric fellows around the child and (3) obsessions must be given courtesy. The worst of all atmospheres for the daimon arises when your parents have no fantasy for you because they themselves have suppressed their own daimons and consequently, never grew up. As a result, the father capitulates to the child and we get "a child dominated fatherless culture with dysfunctional children with pistol-packing power". Although this book has many valuable passages, I have to confess that for me it was slightly disappointing - i think that it is not written according to standards we have come to expect from Hillman. The prose has an air of hastiness, incompleteness and (perish the thought) simpleness. most of the ideas have been already elaborated at length in other H.s books, such as the (splendid) Dream and the Underworld and the Psychology Revisited. On the good side, this book is probably less opaque than both aforementioned ones and may represent a good way for the novice to enter the conversation with an erudite, deep and fascinating investigator of the human condition.
Rating:
Summary: Ideas as Art
Review: Like other Hillman books I have read, The Souls Code seems best read as a myth rather than a statement of metaphysical reality. The myth either resonates or not. The Soul's Code thesis that human beings are born with a daimon - an encoded destiny - is best judged as an artistic work of imagination rather than an assertion of objective truth. I found Soul's Code well worth reading for its many provacative and creative ideas but less resonant than several other Hillman works such as Re-Visioning Psychology in which Hillman sets forth his vision of the human psyche as essentially plural, and the essay Peaks and Vales, which draws a fascinating distinction between spirit and soul. I can't quite reconcile Hillman's notion of a destiny (which seems psychologically monotheistic) with his image of the polytheistic personality, which I understand to be one of the bedrock assumptions of archetypal physchology. If the human psyche contains many persons, it would seem that the pursuit of a destiny would require repression of the many selves and inflation. I enjoyed Hillman's challenges to psychotherapy, which I believe has a huge power shadow. I agree that the fantasy that parenting is the source of all adult misery should be rejected. I believe, however, that Hillman may have misrepresented family system therapy as promoting this view. In my experience, the goal of family system therapy is to establish an adult to adult relationship that includes the capacity to know one's parents in their complexity. Parental wounds become only one element in a much larger and more paradoxical story. I also found it interesting that Hillman seems to disagree with his friend and colleague Robert Bly by questioning the notion that the "absent father" is a fundamental source of male woundedness. One last point: I thought the section entitled Loneliness and Exile (p. 53) was particularly profound and moving. My favorite passage from the book: ...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived." (p.259)
Rating:
Summary: Read it Relaxed and Gain a New Perspective
Review: Many of the reviews I've read have focused on what they fell Hillman is trying to push, speaking as though he is on a mission to convert us to some ancient religion. He makes no such attempt. His desire is that we indulge ourselves in a walk through the mythical. It is his hope that by viewing human personality through an ancient prism, we might better come to apply the pscyhological disciplines which humanity has built over the past few centuries. Parent as determinant of personality is indeed largely a myth, as is genetic theory of personality. Neither has been reasonably proven within the guidelines of scientific method. Science is currently failing to help us understand personality because it can't take a step back from its current path to re-examine its approach. Hillman's criticism of the psychological establishment is thus well deserved. If they were being raised in the West today, I have reason to believe that many of the greatest leaders, artists, and thinkers of all time would have had their genius drugged out of them during childhood by 'scientists' who claim dominion over the still almost completely mysterious nature of human mind and personality.
Rating:
Summary: A REFRESHING ANTIDOTE TO CURRENT PSYCHOLOGICAL PRACTICE
Review: One does not have to agree with everything James Hillman covers in this study of character as vocation. I found the chapter on "The Bad Seed" particularly iffy; it seems as if imaginal psychology has not yet found a way to explain creatures like Hitler, to whom the epithet "human" hardly applies, or the fatal attraction they exert on others (read Elias Cannetti's "Crowds and Power" for that). However, I have always found his books challenging in that they shake one's most profound beliefs and prejudices about the nature of the psyche. And, given the current prevalence of "victim theory," it is absolutely necessary to have someone remind us that we have a free will, that the soul is sovereign, and that we cannot go around blaming fate, God, the devil or society for the negative aspects of our lives. I found that message in the Seth books by Jane Roberts many years ago. All in all, an important book for those who have left Freudian and Lacanian systems of thought, and have accepted imagination as the soul's predominant mode of knowledge.
Rating:
Summary: A book about biographies, especially one's own
Review: This book is as much about the search for character and calling as it is an elucidation of Hillman's neo-Jungian/neo-Platonist theory of psychology, termed the 'acron' theory. It is a very readable book, with a lot of biographical anecdotes from the lives of such a broad spectrum of famous personages as Churchill, Josephine Baker, and Yehudi Manheim.Because of this it is a joy to read, and succeeds in invoking a sense of one's own life story as an unfolding drama. One, moreover, that is seperate from the individual ego, and demands its outward manifestation at all costs. This is a well crafted book, and although sometimes quite theoretical, it never loses touch with the beauty of the biographical stories it invokes, and, in a larger sense, the drama of the individual soul desperate to bring its given talent into fruition. If you've never read Hillman this is a very good place to start. You won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Have the courage to live out your character
Review: This is a tightly packed book that was challenging to read. I read with reasonable care, but probably absorbed only 30-40% of what Hillman was saying. So much for 8 years of higher education. (Though I have to say, having seen some of the tendentious, slash-and-burn reviews below, I'm happy that period in my life is finished.) Hillman's thesis is that we are unique after all, that we have callings in life, and that our caretaker soul guides us, in fits and starts, but nonetheless inexorably, towards the achievement of that destiny. It is a wonderful thesis for people, like myself, who have felt that the path they are treading neither fulfills their childhood expectations nor conventional ideas of success, and who are not sure exactly it is they are supposed to be. The acorn theory urges us to continue on toward our destiny, even if it remains invisible through much of our lives.
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