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: Subjectivistic and completely unscientific
Review: James Hillman in "The Soul's Code" contends, among other things, that criminality is derived from a 'bad seed', i.e., an overly strong demonic force of Platonic, otherworldly origin which the weak personality cannot cope with. H. says (p. 246): "Society must have rituals of exorcism for protecting itself from the Bad Seed." This implies trying to come to terms with the daemon by reaching into the transcendent sphere with ritual enchantments. H. says (p. 243): "So long as our theories deny the daimon as instigator of human personality, and instead insists upon brain construction, societal conditions, behavioral mechanisms, genetic environments, the daimon will not go gently into obscurity." H. dismisses the modern findings of psychology, such as the importance of the upbringing, genetic determination, et cetera, and denotes this "the parental fallacy" and a "Mother-myth." Hillman stands for a primitive psychology (= the "acorn theory") which can be equated with pre-Christian notions of demoniac possession. The book is very subjectivistic and completely unscientific which H. readily admits: "The reason we resist the myth of the daimon, I believe, is that it comes clean. It is not disguised as empirical fact. It states itself openly as a myth." H. rejects the scientific method and advocates instead a method of subjectivistic phantasy. No one can take H. seriously. However, if people do, then we would risk falling back on witch-hunts again. This book is hideous. Mats Winther
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 simplistic but valuable introduction to the "daimonic"
Review: Mercurial Jungian analyst James Hillman, with all due respect, has written numerous very substantial, sophisticated and penetrating--if not sometimes overly self-indulgent-- books over the years. But this simply is not one of them. Hillman endeavors here to reintroduce readers to the ancient yet very timely Greek notion of the "daimon," and deserves credit for doing so. But his description and definition of the daimonic is, in my view, superficial, stilted, unsophisticated and one-sidedly deterministic. He likens one's congenital daimon to an acorn, which indelibly determines what one becomes. But people are not oak trees. I disagree that the daimon is fully developed at birth, believing rather that it is continuously formed (or deformed) as the result of various life experiences. Nor is one's destiny or character wholly determined at birth by the daimon, or, for that matter, by five years of age as Freud suggested. Hillman here gives short shrift to the crucial role of personal freedom, responsibility, and the myriad ways in which one's conscious and unconscious responses decide how (or even whether) our sacred daimon will be expressed: positively or negatively, destructively or constructively, as evil or creativity. For readers wanting a more in-depth, extensive and existential elucidation of the theory of the daimonic, I highly recommend Rollo May's rich discussion in LOVE AND WILL, which presaged this simplistic presentation by almost thirty years.
Rating:
Summary: The one that (literally) changed my life
Review: No matter what critics said here, when I found this book in a shop in Helsinki (of all places!) I was very unhappy - when I started reading, somehow I found strenght to cope with life.It gives me back the glow on the face, my self-confidence and hope - soon after I started reading this book, I know I should listen my inner voice: I quitt the job that made me very unhappy and moved to another country where I feel much better.It seems that I finally have life in my hands, but then,Mr.Hillman would probably said that everything HAS to be that way anyway.I cant find words to describe how strongly this book influenced me, this is the first time in my life that I am reading very slow because I simply dont want to finish.I like Mr.hilman ideas and his writting style which is very comforting, and I will look for everything that he wrotte.
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.
|
