Re-Visioning Psychology

Rating:
Summary: A Coup de Grace
Review: Hillman boasts in his foreword that this book is packed with ideas. He was being humble. It will take several rereads to fully savor all the things he has said and all the things he has intentionally left for our imagination to grasp and intuit. This is one of the few 20th century books I have come across that does indeed deal with psyche-ology--understanding the soul. The closest contender I have seen is Rollo May's "Love and Will." After reading Hillman other works read like elementary textbooks.

Many may be repelled by Hillman's seeming anachronistic and animistic return to gods, daimons, and personifications; as if taking the field of psychology on a regress. Hillman may even seem to some as living in a fantasy world concocted out of what he's read between Plato and the Renaissance period. But this is not mere atavism on his part, to revive a nostalgic time and worldview. As Hillman states in his latest book "The Soul's Code" we need only fall madly in love to admit of a daimonic possession. Gods--archetypes--animate us. Some gods may be dead but many others certainly are up to the task of roiling us.

Hillman is a master writer. He is effusive as any scribe of the soul should be. He is poetic and mythic; he provokes the reader and evokes a litany of images and connections. Helmsmen Intuition and Imagination are continually steering Hillman's hand. If there are contradictions in this work then they are most welcome, and even sought. How else can it be? Simple sciences breed simplistic answers. Something as complex as the soul and as great as the imagination cannot but procreate that which to Logic appears as contradictions. And so his style and objective as he admits is to confuse and confound rather than reduce and ground (in the empirical and, therefore, to a halt). There can be no pat and final answers or theologies of the soul and the gods, and Hillman makes certain of that.

Rating:
Summary: The man is in his work.
Review: I can only thank the four previous reviewers for saying so well what I feel, not only about the book, but man. Courageous comes to mind. These ideas are thrilling. And the man is in his work.

Rating:
Summary: Seeing Through the Serious Business of Psychotherapy
Review: I think Jung would have appreciated the irony: in a way this book both completes and thoroughly undermines the Jungian project. At least that's how it worked for me.

Hillman is a genuinely wise man (I do hope he never reads this, or if he does, that he forgives me for saying so! :-). Yes, he is certainly a poet, a mythologist, a psychotherapist, a thinker, an iconoclast, a scholar etc, etc... But above all, he is a wise man -- a shaman, a guide. In this book he turns his gift for "seeing through" to the subject of psychotherapy itself. I can only describe the result as an astonishing, erudite, profoundly beautiful and ultimately liberating dance, in which Hillman, on our behalf, engages (and disengages!) himself with the psychological stuff of psychotherapy. This is healing of the highest order, and I never expected to encounter it in such an accessible form.

Having read this book, I can no longer think of Psyche in terms other than those of polytheistic "seeing through". And I can no longer read any books on psychotherapy, except through Hillman's playful, re-visioning eyes -- no, not even Jung, nor Hillman himself. The circle is complete. The thesis and anti-thesis have combined into synthesis, and in the four-step magical dialectics, got transmuted into a new totality. Where do we go from here? I have no idea, but it will be somewhere else.

Rating:
Summary: Seeing Through the Serious Business of Psychotherapy
Review: I think Jung would have appreciated the irony: in a way this book both completes and thoroughly undermines the Jungian project. At least that's how it worked for me.

Hillman is a genuinely wise man (I do hope he never reads this, or if he does, that he forgives me for saying so! :-). Yes, he is certainly a poet, a mythologist, a psychotherapist, a thinker, an iconoclast, a scholar etc, etc... But above all, he is a wise man -- a shaman, a guide. In this book he turns his gift for "seeing through" to the subject of psychotherapy itself. I can only describe the result as an astonishing, erudite, profoundly beautiful and ultimately liberating dance, in which Hillman, on our behalf, engages (and disengages!) himself with the psychological stuff of psychotherapy. This is healing of the highest order, and I never expected to encounter it in such an accessible form.

Having read this book, I can no longer think of Psyche in terms other than those of polytheistic "seeing through". And I can no longer read any books on psychotherapy, except through Hillman's playful, re-visioning eyes -- no, not even Jung, nor Hillman himself. The circle is complete. The thesis and anti-thesis have combined into synthesis, and in the four-step magical dialectics, got transmuted into a new totality. Where do we go from here? I have no idea, but it will be somewhere else.

Rating:
Summary: An Archetypal Approach to the Soul
Review: James Hillman (who I came to through Thomas Moore and Robert Sardello) delves deeper into the processes of the Soul than any other writer I've read. His view of psychology (or re-viewing if you prefer) is to take the emphasis off of the Mind and put it back upon the Soul. It is this dialogue with our Soul (or daimon) that will make us (and our culture) feel better. In this work he redefines the approach to psychology and therapy in a dynamic voice.