James Hillman (1926 to 2011) was an American psychologist, trained in Carl Jung’s tradition in Zürich, who founded the school known as archetypal psychology. He put soul and image back at the centre of psychology, kept soul (the way down, into depth) distinct from spirit (the way up, into the heights), and warned that psychology had cut the human soul off from the world around it. Therapeutic Shamanism draws on his images of soul and spirit, but where Hillman treated soul and its figures as ways of imagining, the shamanic Soul and the beings met in a journey are real.
Who was James Hillman? #
A Jungian who became one of Jung’s most original critics. Hillman was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1926, enrolled at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich in 1953, and was its director of studies for about ten years from 1959. From the mid-to-late 1980s he led gatherings of men with the poet Robert Bly and the storyteller Michael Meade, part of what became the men’s movement, and in 1997, at the age of seventy, his book The Soul’s Code reached the bestseller lists. He died at his home in Thompson, Connecticut, in October 2011.1
What is archetypal psychology? #
A psychology of soul and image. Hillman took the image, the figures and scenes of dreams, fantasies and stories, to be the primary stuff of the psyche, not a disguise for something else. He refused to pin soul down as a thing. “By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself”, he wrote, and he described soul as what deepens events into experiences, as having a special relation to death, and as the imaginative possibility in our natures.2
He also refused the idea of a single, unifying centre to the psyche. In his view the soul is naturally many, and needs a psychology that honours many figures instead of trying to fold them all into one Self; he called this a polytheistic psychology.3 And he spoke of the anima mundi, the soul of the world, holding that psyche “is already there with the world itself”, so that psychology’s task includes hearing it “speaking through all things of the world”.4
How did Hillman tell soul from spirit? #
By direction. Hillman insisted that psychology keep soul and spirit distinct, and pictured them as opposite directions, with spirit rising towards height, unity, order and transcendence, soul going down into depth, the valleys, the many and the particular.5 His best-known way of putting it is the one Therapeutic Shamanism uses for the two parts of the selfParts of the self. There are four parts of the self, the realm-corresponding members of the Inner Tribe: the Body and the middle-world self (both of the middle-world), the Soul (of the Lower-World) and the Spirit (of the Upper-World). The Aware Self, also called the Witness, is not a fifth part but a capacity: the awareness that can watch all four, with compassion and equanimity. Read the full answer: “whilst our Spirit loves the peaks and dazzling heights, our Soul wants to lead us to the valleys and the depths. When we follow our Soul, we experience a sense of ‘deepening’.”6
In Therapeutic Shamanism this is more than a metaphor. The Spirit is of the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer, less an individual than a spark of Father Sun within us. The Soul is of the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, part of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this and also the unique individual that Mother Earth intended each of us to be, and the untamed part of us, free of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this.7 A culture that values only the climb towards Spirit leaves the Soul unvisited, which is why the journey downwards matters as much as the journey up. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body? and What is spiritual bypassing, and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
What did Hillman think psychology had forgotten? #
The world. Hillman was a sharp critic of his own profession, and one of his questions goes to the heart of Therapeutic Shamanism. How could psychology cut itself off from reality, so that the human soul is divorced “from the spirits of its surroundings”? His answer was that psychology needed to wake up to “one of the most ancient human truths: We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet”.8
The same blind spot runs through almost the whole of psychotherapy, psychiatry and psychology, which have had problems thinking outside human concerns. Spiritual bypassing, for example, is usually counted only by its cost to people, when its cost to the rest of the living world has been devastating.9 Therapeutic Shamanism starts from where Hillman’s question points, with the human soul as one member of a living world full of other Peoples. See What can psychotherapy and shamanism offer each other, and where should they remain different?
What is The Soul’s Code about? #
Calling. In The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Hillman set out what became known as his acorn theory, the idea that each person comes into life carrying a unique image of who they are to become, much as an acorn carries the pattern of the oak, and that a life is the slow living out of that image.10 It sits close to the Therapeutic Shamanism teaching that each Soul is the unique individual that Mother Earth intended a person to be, and that living from Soul means living a life that is true to it. See What does rewilding Soul mean, and how do we discover our gifts and life direction?
Was Hillman an animist? #
No, and he said so. Hillman took care to set his polytheistic psychology apart from “undifferentiated pantheism, holy vitalism, and naturalistic animism”. The gods of archetypal psychology, he wrote, “are not some primal energy suffused through the universe nor are they imagined to be independent magical powers working on us through things”; they are imagined, and approached through psychological methods.11 His under-world, too, is a mythic name for psychic depth and death, not the Lower-World a shaman journeys to.
This is where Therapeutic Shamanism differs from him, whilst still valuing his images. The Soul in Therapeutic Shamanism is a part of the self in its own right, belonging to the Lower-World, and the GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this, Power AnimalsPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer and AncestorsAncestors. The human Oversoul: the whole of humanity held as one Lower-World being. Distinct from individual dead ancestors (small a), who are not worked with in this approach. Read the full answer met there are beings in their own right, not figures of the imagination. Hillman’s soul of the world and Therapeutic Shamanism’s living world can be set side by side; the first is a way of seeing, the second a world of others to be in relationship with. See What is animism?
