DREAM & THE UNDERWORLD

Rating:
Summary: Builds on, and refutes, established dream theories.
Review: Hillman wrote this book in the mid-seventies, and it is surprising to me how little effect it seems to have had on the various schools of dream interpretation. Perhaps this is because Hillman's "underworld" is an ambiguous, sometimes frightening place, a place where each psyche is rooted into the Beyond, and where daytime morality has no dominion. The underworld and its dreams contribute to the making of Soul, and are not to be used as helps to fix up our daytime life. To do so is an act of exploitation. This clearly is at odds with our culture's fixation on mining one's dreams for images, ideas, information that can help us be more productive and functional players in the status quo world we inhabit during waking hours.

Hillman carefully develops his ideas through looking at the work of Freud, Jung, and other twentieth century dream workers. He winnows out the wheat from the chaff, and uses the wheat to thrust dream interpretation forward, and farther away from the safe, cozy realm the ego would so much like to stay wrapped up in. One gets the feeling reading this book that safety does not a strong soul make.

Being an inveterate "miner" of dreams myself, I was at first rather resistant to Hillman's thesis. Eventually, though, I came around to his point of view (with reservations), mainly because I realized that dreams and soulwork are very much like art. Just as art should not be made for any practical "daytime" use, so with our souls and dream images.

However, this opens a question. For thousands of years, shamans have traveled into the underworld to bring back energy for healing and other practical uses. They act as conduits for energies traveling up from that lower realm so that this world can be "seeded" and keep evolving. Is this, too, an act of exploitation? I'm not sure. But I do think after reading this book that we should be aware of, and careful about, how we use the images that come to us in our nighttime existence.

Rating:
Summary: Mortality is fatal ! A down to earth approach to dreams.
Review: I have written in the cover of this book:

"This is the book of Hillman's I have been waiting for. After his 'Facing the Gods", "The Myth of Analysis", "Puer Papers", "A Blue Fire" and getting little entrees from each, finally here is the main meal."

I came to this book from the wastelands of clinical depression rather than dreams but recognised immediately the realm of soul here described by Hillman. He suggests that dreams are messengers or reminders of soul and thus of our mortality, of (our) death; a healthy antidote to the 'immortality' syndrome to which we are all prone until we live through a life threatening illness or crisis.

I must admit to reading this book somewhat 'impressionistically' without necessarily trying to follow his arguments, but even then, the impression was compelling. Without a classical training I had to infer the meaning of a lot of the greek words he uses (eg. telos, phrenes, thymos, topos) from the context. I'm still not entirely clear as to their meaning even now. A glossary would have been useful for lay readers, though I don't think they were necessarily the target audience. I have yet to find a layman's glossary or dictionary of Jungian and Archetypal Psychological terms. Certainly my education has been broadened.

Why haven't we heard more of this approach in the popular books on dreams ? It is original, compelling and as cogent as any other approach to interpreting dreams. Is it so 'down to earth' that we would rather cling to the 'fantasy' of approaches that massage our egos a little more.

Rating:
Summary: Mortality is fatal ! A down to earth approach to dreams.
Review: I have written in the cover of this book:

"This is the book of Hillman's I have been waiting for. After his 'Facing the Gods", "The Myth of Analysis", "Puer Papers", "A Blue Fire" and getting little entrees from each, finally here is the main meal."

I came to this book from the wastelands of clinical depression rather than dreams but recognised immediately the realm of soul here described by Hillman. He suggests that dreams are messengers or reminders of soul and thus of our mortality, of (our) death; a healthy antidote to the 'immortality' syndrome to which we are all prone until we live through a life threatening illness or crisis.

I must admit to reading this book somewhat 'impressionistically' without necessarily trying to follow his arguments, but even then, the impression was compelling. Without a classical training I had to infer the meaning of a lot of the greek words he uses (eg. telos, phrenes, thymos, topos) from the context. I'm still not entirely clear as to their meaning even now. A glossary would have been useful for lay readers, though I don't think they were necessarily the target audience. I have yet to find a layman's glossary or dictionary of Jungian and Archetypal Psychological terms. Certainly my education has been broadened.

Why haven't we heard more of this approach in the popular books on dreams ? It is original, compelling and as cogent as any other approach to interpreting dreams. Is it so 'down to earth' that we would rather cling to the 'fantasy' of approaches that massage our egos a little more.

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of Depth Psychology.
Review: Many readers may be familiar with James A. Hillman's best selling "The Soul's Code." As a best seller, that was within the genre of popular psychology. "The Dream and the Underworld," however deals with the area within psychology of "depth psychology." Our present culture is a milieu in which psychology and psychiatry deal with matters such as biopsychiatry, psychopharmacology, brief psychotherapy, quick fixes. A lot of this climate has to do with third party payments, either by an insurer or an Employee Assistance Plan. A qualified psychiatrist or clinical psychologist may often use Depth Psychology in conjunction with the prescription of medications where time and money are not an issue. Depth psychology seeks to treat the causes of a psychiatric disorder rather than just provide relief from the symptoms. Dream analysis is an art, or science, that has a long-respected history dating back to Biblical times. More recently, it has been the subject of extensive writing by 20th century psychiatrists such as Freud and Jung.

I struggled with the writings of both Freud and Jung on dreams in university courses, having found that they did not read all that well. Rather than say that I follow a particular school of psychological theory, I like the more pragmatic approach of taking what is meaningful from those that I read. Hillman's thesis for "The Dream and the Underworld" is briefly outlined in Chapter 1. It is more like the opening statement that a lawyer might make in presenting a case rather than the abstract that a psychologist might write at the beginning of a journal article. Hillman does not rely on repression or compensation, but deals with the dream in relation with the soul and the soul with death. In the context used by Hillman, the "soul" takes on a meaning that equates to the human "psyche" but with a quasi-religious quality. You should not take Hillman's concept of the soul as necessarily being the same as the soul discussed at church or Sunday school. To study the soul, we must go deep. The study of the soul (going back to the Greek origins of the word "psychology") implies a journey into the depths of the soul.

Classical Greek and Roman literature locates the dreams in the House of Hades. Hillman uses images to begin in this mythological underworld. In many ways, it is similar to his "Pan and the Nightmare." He emphasizes both observation and the insight that follows from drawing of inferences from the metaphor of the myth. This is not a "how to" book. There is an emphasis on the analysis of the dream as a modality of therapy, however, in other pieces of Hillman's writings, he posits the concept that "self therapy" is not effective. One of the essential things Hillman emphasizes is that we should be aware of our dreams. Although not actually so stated, there would be an advantage to keeping a journal where the subject logs his/her dreams. I feel that "The Dream and the Underworld" provides a road map to a greater level of self understanding.

Rating:
Summary: Thus, Thus It Is A Pleasure To Go Beneath The Shades
Review: Originally written and published for the 42nd edition of the Eranos Yearbook in 1972, controversial psychologist James Hillman's The Dream And The Underworld (1975) will appeal initially to general readers and students of psychology who have found Freud's and Jung's theories on dreams less than fully persuasive. Unfortunately, Hillman's rather unpleasant book is imprecise and often moves strictly in circles; by its conclusion, many readers may feel that the book's murky argument could have been more convincingly stated in several succinct paragraphs. Written in a style that owes much more to Jung than to Freud, Hillman bases his discussion on early philosophical commentary on Egyptian and Greek mythology, apparently forgetting that neither the writings of Heraclitus, Aristotle, or Plato nor the mythologies themselves are verities, facts, or scientific conclusions. Unlike the best of Jung's writing, readers will seldom get the impression that Hillman has committed himself the kind of practical, empirical busywork that Jung dedicated his life to performing.

Amplifying what he feels is correct in Freud and Jung, Hillman also attempts to scrupulously document the point where each of his famous predecessors went astray. However, Hillman's summaries of their dream theories are both airy and vapid, making it almost impossible to discern whether his argument, which builds on theirs, is truly a viable one. Readers may come away from The Dream And The Underworld with little ability to judge whether the book has any merit whatsoever or is simply another example of intellectual or academic harum - scarum. Clear, grounded, and rationally argued Hillman's book is not.

Hillman believes - or appears to believe - that the realm of the unconscious is a "dead" world whose contents, including dreams, have little if anything to do with conscious reality and the "daylight" world of the living. Thus, in his view, the unconscious is the grim, almost barren home of the archetypes and the more bloodless of the daimons, those pure embodiments of the psyche that are primarily concerned not with the fulfillment of the individual's destiny (as in Jung), but with the soul's exclusive preoccupation with death itself. Hillman also sees the unconscious as base, static, and subhuman rather than as transcendent: in his view, it is both pathological and sociopathic, and, for this reason among others, is incapable of actively having anything to do with the vitality of human existence or even of being understood in terms of human reality. Hillman goes so far as to suggest that human consciousness (and identity, personality) may be the naive tip of the psychic iceberg, a mere and unimportant reflection of the more fundamental if alien and ultimately unknowable pure state of the sterile, timeless inner realm. How readers are to apply the author's theory constructively to their own experiences and dream memories is one question among many the book leaves unanswered. Where the metaphorical "truth" of a particular mythology or philosophy ends and its reality as a psychic fact begins is another.

Can the unconscious, envisioned as rich, oceanic, and primordial by Jung, really be more accurately "re - visioned" as an icy, brittle, utterly lightless abode of merciless "shades," like the land of the dead portrayed in Ursula Le Guinn's 1972 novel The Farthest Shore? If Hillman is correct, how did human feeling, much less human consciousness and raw instinct, ever arise from this dead and deathless abyss? The birth of consciousness presupposes a kind of evolutionary chain, a process Hillman's hypothesis pointedly ignores. Even when taken strictly in terms of its all - important image theory, The Dream And The Underworld is negatively distinguished by an absence of missing links.

There are enough flashes of brilliance in The Dream And The Underworld to convince its audience that Hillman, a best - selling author, is about to make an important theoretical breakthrough at any moment. But instead of keen intuitive deduction and perceptive erudition, in each case Hillman heads off on another tangent or takes up the thread of a previously addressed argument for the third or fourth time in as many chapters. Those readers who believe both Freud and Jung were only partially correct (or entirely incorrect) will very likely come away from the odd, static The Dream And The Underworld disappointed, irritated, and questioning the book's uncertain reputation as an important contribution to the field of dream psychology.

Rating:
Summary: Hades
Review: While this book is somewhat difficult to read due to it's intensity of style, it represents a radical departure in the art of dream interpretation. If one picks up its clues, one's understanding of the world of dream will deepen far beyond the usual run of the mill dream analysis methods used in modern psychotherapy for ego development. This book deserves to be studied carefully. The author's references and allusions to the Greek and Egyptian ideas of soul are very significant.