The following is a transcript of a video that I did for Zer0 Books and Repeater Media’s YouTube Channel. Watch the video here. Please support Acid Horizon!
There’s a particular type or style of advice that people sometimes offer when their friends or family encounter emotional obstacles, particularly when they suffer from bouts of depression. This advice is often couched in the language of ownership, battle, responsibility, or goal-orientation—the presumption being that depression is something responsive to a heroic approach. A concerned friend or family member might phrase a question like “What are you doing to take ownership of your problems?” Or perhaps more commonly “You just need to conquer your demons and move on!” Of course, you do want to move on, and get back to your goals. But let’s imagine for a moment that the extent of the depression becomes so great that you start having intense dreams or nightmares. So you go to a therapist to find out what it all means, you know, someone who can help you pull those images into the daylight so you can get a handle on what’s brewing deep in recesses of your unconscious. And with the help of the analyst as your guide, you can mobilize your deep dive into the dreamworld to get a clearer picture about to get back to functioning as member of your family or society. At the very least, something in those dreams and nightmares might provide the empowerment or psychological leverage needed to get back to your personal goals and projects…
For archetypal psychologist and writer James Hillman, this is an absolutely flawed approach to therapy. Moreover, he sees this approach as pervasive in domains outside of the clinic or office of the psychoanalyst. For Hillman, a certain ego-centered, Herculean orientation to psychology has long correlated with various social and political challenges, particularly in the way we do things like organize institutions, conduct urban planning, and also in the way we haplessly exacerbate crises such as the ongoing climate catastrophe. In this video, I will highlight Hillman’s provocative “anti-egoism of the psyche” which he believes not only has consequences for fostering a psychological relationship with ourselves, but also brings to bear on our sociopolitical landscape.
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Hillman’s idea of the ego is best understood through the figure of Hercules, the paradigmatic hero of Greek mythology. For Hillman, what is unique about Hercules is that he becomes an “enemy of death”; he’s an antagonist of the underworld and its many shadowy denizens. According to one of Hercules’ myths, Hercules makes a descent into the underworld to fulfill the task of capturing the Cerberus, the three-headed beast who guards the entrance to Hades. His heroic intervention no doubt demonstrates his magnanimous strength. But unlike other figures of the Greek pantheon who also descended into the underworld, Hercules stands out as one among them who brought one of its beasts into daylight. For Hillman, it remains a question whether Hercules, like those other deities and demigods, was ever initiated into the Eleusianian mysteries. This is important mythologically because the ritual of initiation bestows upon the initiate the gift of what Hillman describes as “the nightworld consciousness”, a sensibility which would allow the initiate to adequately observe the risks of trying to pull the dwellers of the underworld into the world of daylight. What’s more, Hercules conquest of Cerberus symbolically leaves open the gate to the underworld. With Hades gate unguarded, there are two risks: 1) dayworld entities infiltrating the nightworld and 2) the shadows of the nightworld straying from the native domain where they thrive. In psychological terms, the collapse of this boundary entails the risk of approaching images with the literalism and positivist heuristics of the dayworld. For Hillman, we best enter the underworld on its own terms, by taking up a “metaphorical attitude” and dispensing with an approach to our dreams and fantasies which attempts to cast them into “true” or reductive interpretations. In Hillman’s view, psyche, or the domain of imaginal entities, does not observe the reality principle of the Herculean ego. Rather it is Hades, the name shared by the god and the underworld itself, that becomes the preeminent metaphor of the imagination. Hades is the realm where images are born and live. The connection that the images of dreams and fantasies maintain with the dayworld is complex, but for now we’ll simply say that Hillman asserts that the quality of our relationship with the imaginal is determined by our receptivity to images versus, for example, attempting to appropriate images for dayworld projects.
Hillman believes one of the primary challenges we face when developing a relationship with the imagination is that we often conflate the “work” of the imagination with the Herculean or dayworld notion of labor. He says we need to make a distinction between the reality principle of the ego, which is characterized by its moral consciousness and its ambition to profit. The reality of the imagination is quite different—the imagination is a font that produces images boundlessly without a desire to profit from what it produces. Its activity is, moreover, undertaken in a way that combines play, work, and pleasure. The Herculean ego’s relationship with the imagination can be characterized as a kind of economic reductionism: the ego seeks to exploit images for dayworld meanings, “turning the workings of the imagination into the economics of work”. Hillman writes that “This is the capitalism of the ego, now acting as the captain of industry, who by increasing his information flow is at the same time estranging himself both from the source of his raw material (nature) and his workers (imagination).” We might say that Hillman advances his own psychical theory of capitalist alienation. Hillman believed that when we embody this attitude in a therapeutic setting, we set ourselves up to fall victim to the same psychological illnesses familiar to those wholly immersed in the ego fantasy in their dayworld exploits. We can witness the work of this fantasy in the dayworld in just about every venue of life where people strive for success. However, this fantasy is pronounced in places where ferocious competition abounds, such as in business, athletics, and prestigious professions. For people predisposed to the Herculean attitude, therapy often becomes just another object of conquest, an obstacle to be surmounted…
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We should also talk about Hillman’s theory of the imagination and it’s relationship to science. Hillman by no means rejects science; however, he does believe that the hero archetype has also pervaded our quest for scientific knowledge. This heroic paradigm manifests prominently in medical disciplines, especially in the realm of pathology. A typical response to identifying something “wrong” with the body or with the mind often entails an allopathic excision of those causes or local structures said to be the source of the problem. In other words, reduce a problem to an offending part or parts, cut those parts off or cut them out, and by doing so ignore broader set of determinants of a bodily, psychological, or social totality. Hillman believed this disposition ultimately came to infuse psychoanalysis, but the problem of psychology wasn’t limited to the heroism of clinicians alone. A certain kind of heroism remains at work in the attempt to ground the imagination in the epistemological predicates of modern science.
From its inception and throughout the 20th century, many of the major figures associated with psychoanalysis maintained an ambition to construct a dovetail between psychoanalytic theory and science broadly construed. Freud insisted that dreams were the via regia, or royal road, to the unconscious. Along this road, we could transport dream images back into the dayworld for the work of scientific inquiry. A similar scientistic impulse was also shared in part by both Jung and Lacan, whose systems of analysis engendered a preference for interpreting unconscious content under the rubric of categories, types, and signs. The concessions made to the demands of an empirical science by their respective analytical methodologies not only meant an uphill battle to establish their scientific legitimacy, but this tendency compromised what Hillman believes are the core modalities of psychoanalysis: fictionalizing, fabulating, and mythologizing, activities which nourish psyche or what Hillman calls “soul”. The kind of knowledge that we ultimately gain in our underworld encounters is not a knowledge “of” the psyche or “about”the psyche. To reference Hillman’s reading of Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus, image work demands a different kind of epistemology: a knowledge “in” the psyche, a logos which itself subsists and manifests in its encounters with psyche. In short, our attempt to make dreams and fantasies congruent with intelligible categories or forms symbology or forms of typology inevitable enervate the life of the image. Thus, Hillman demands another approach.
The Herculean hero knows only polar opposition but craves something beyond their Manichaean way of being—they crave depth. Without this experience of depth, their threshold for acting remains constrained to two manners of expression, an external heroism or an inward one.
They are either out slaying dragons in the external world or, as Nietzsche would contend, in times of peace the warlike temperament of the hero turns inward and attacks themselves. Typically, the Herculean inward turn is characterized by its quest for salvation, or the expiation of guilt, to use the images as leverage to get the hero out of the intensity of the images which haunts them. Hillman proposes a third alternative, which is to embody depth, to engender depth, to dive into the images and to take them on their own terms, and not to see them simply as something salvageable for a project of the self’s valorization, or its salvation.
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In an age, where we so often talk about capitalist desire, imagining new futures, and how to change the objects of our desire, Hillman puts forward an important provocation with respect to our relationship with the imagination and the reflexive determinations operative between our psychological and political realities. In part, what increases our relationship with psyche is not dragging images into the light of dayworld heuristics, but fostering acts of imagining through a kind of play with images and developing a sensitivity to imaginal events through what Hillman called “seeing through”, “noticing”, and the practice of “sticking with images”.
That is a discussion that I will save for another video. In the meantime, to enjoy an undistilled engagement with Hillman’s psychology in all of its richness, you should look at his work for yourself. On this particular topic, I would absolutely recommend ‘Dream and the Underworld’ where he writes in depth on themes I’ve discussed today.
Excuse the shameless self-promotion, but as Hillman and the left is quite niche, in the interest of linking up those influenced by Hillman and socialism, here is a piece I just had published: https://www.conter.scot/2023/8/1/anima-publicae-the-archetypes-that-haunt-our-culture-war/
Love your work and the Acid Horizon podcast!