“To speak of my anima and my soul
expresses the personalistic fallacy.
Although these archetypal experiences of the personal give salt and
substance to my personal individuality, making me feel that there is indeed a
soul, this “me-ness” is not mine. To take such experiences literally as mine
puts the anima inside me and makes her mine.
The more profoundly archetypal my experiences of soul, the more I
recognize how they are beyond me, presented to me, a present, a gift, even while they feel my most personal
possession. Under the dominion of anima
our soulfulness makes us feel unique, special, meant – yet paradoxically this is when we are least individual and most collective. For such experiences derive from the
archetype of the personal, making us feel
both archetypal and personal at the same instant. “
From
Revisioning Psychology
James Hillman is one of my favorite thinkers/writers. I often agree with him, often disagree. It is in the areas that I disagree that I
enjoy him most. Wrestling with his
thought when I disagree is almost always an educational experience, an occasion
for a growth of understanding.
Hillman frequently criticizes spirituality. His reasons for this are very complex, well
thought out, interesting. Ultimately,
though, I think Hillman is in fact the most spiritual of psychologists – it’s just
that his spirituality cuts much deeper than most of the tender-minded
spirituality of our time. The above
quote (where the emphasis are mine), is one example. It would be interesting to do a lengthy compare
and contrast of this piece with something like Emerson’s The Oversoul, but here a few brief comments will have to do.
In the so-called “Perennial Wisdom”, it is a common place
that the spiritual traditions from all over the world have in common a
particular experience -- I will term it the experience of non-duality, though
the different traditions characterize it under many terms and symbols. In brief, that experience is a direct
experience of the contingency of individuality and the experience of the “otherness”
that is the real foundation of our being.
This is sometimes characterized as a unity with God, Nature, the Tao,
etc. “Unity,” however, is understood to
be a kind of poor approximate for this experience, which ultimately defies all
words – “The Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao.”
Hillman’s quote above (unintentionally I think) provides a
somewhat novel formulation of the perennial wisdom. The “otherness” in this case is archetypal
experiences of the soul. This otherness,
paradoxically, is precisely that which gives "me" my experience of “me-ness”, yet
this otherness is common to all – we all get our sense of individual “me-ness”
from a collective source. The self,
which to a large extent is created out of words, states “I have the experience
of these archetypes,” but in fact it is the archetypes that give rise to the “I”.
It is this illusion of the “I” that the various forms of
perennial wisdom seek to penetrate – “Thou Art That” is the formulation of The Upanishads, which are probably the earliest
and most comprehensive source of the perennial wisdom.
One last note, “the anima” is symbolized as feminine; Hillman’s formulation can be seen as a return to the perennial wisdom as
experienced under the aspect of the Goddess, rather than its common later
formulation under some form of male personage.
The whole body of Hillman’s writing, in some ways, is a great call
for a return to the Goddess – not the sentimentalized Goddess of the New Age,
but the all encompassing Goddess, represented by Kali and Hecate, that contains
all the horror and ugliness of life, all the beauty and goodness, and finally
represents a wisdom that comes of giving honor to all that is encompassed in
living deeply.
