OCT 2023 collective obsession with growth from James Hillman’s critique of our obsession with psychological growth finds a curious echo in the economics of GDP.
DEC 2021 idealisations of growth family and relationship both The ideal of growth makes us feel stunted and the ideal family makes us feel crazy, though we don’t see any of these ideals in life.
DEC 2021 individual neighbours separated actual self both Your true self is your actual self in each little system you inhabit, with your furniture, your food, your cat: a self among, not a self apart.
DEC 2021 psychotherapy assumption processing traumas both To James Hillman, processing heartbreak makes a processed psyche, like processed food; wounds and scars are the stuff of character.
DEC 2021 psychotherapy denies soul in things both The fluorescent tube over your head all day is what drives you crazy, yet you take your rage to therapy and work it out in your relationships.
DEC 2021 psychotherapy pushes people into forced false normality both Psychotherapy needs a new wildness before it is co-opted as one more device for shrinking people into a forced, false normality.
DEC 2021 repressing processing ore of imagination both For artists, hatred, resentment and worthlessness are ore, and therapy’s urge to fix what’s wrong represses the ore instead of feeling it.
DEC 2021 self-sufficient villages not families both For thousands of years tribes and villages were self-sufficient, not families, so the burden of relationship and meaning was shared.
DEC 2021 therapy mistakes knowing precedes doing both Therapy makes a philosophical mistake in assuming knowing precedes doing, when reflection has always come after the event.
DEC 2021 therapy wordly skills and power both Therapy teaches feeling skills, how to remember and find words for invisible things, but nothing about politics or how the world works.
DEC 2021 denying world’s body destroys our souls after Going through the world for our own benefit destroys our souls, and even the best deep therapy contributes to the world’s destruction.
DEC 2021 extending individual therapy to collective after Therapy is not wrong, only unfinished: until its theory connects with the world, it cannot treat the whole individual.
DEC 2021 extending individuation into the world of things after James Hillman would keep the word individuation only by extending it to each moment, action, relationship and thing: the individuation of things.
DEC 2021 individual impulses felt as compulsion traverses collective after An impulse courses through the collective and is felt by artists and scientists as a compulsion to express; talents were once called gifts.
DEC 2021 interior soul neglects exterior world after Soul-making need not mean introversion; using the world as obstacles and monsters for making an interior soul neglects the world.
DEC 2021 convivo ergo sum both Redefine the self as community turned inward and the cogito of Descartes becomes convivo ergo sum: “I am because I party.”
DEC 2020 acorn figures inner people both For James Hillman, each of us carries an acorn: a certain person who appears early in life and stays all the way through.
DEC 2020 changeless parts of psyche and pseudoskins both James Hillman urges shedding pseudoskins, the dead wood of stale ideas, habits and company, while honoring what in the psyche never changes.
DEC 2020 child archetype worship both Looking backward to childhood in therapy means not looking around, and it summons the child archetype, apolitical and disempowered.
DEC 2020 fantasy of growth in therapy both Therapy’s fantasy of an ever-expanding, ever-integrating person leaves out the awkwardness of real growth and sets people up to fail.
DEC 2020 growth project of therapy from After a certain age you do not grow, and if you start growing it’s cancer; growth is a word appropriate to children.
DEC 2020 history is our causality developmental psychology both Developmental psychology’s myth is that our history is our causality; James Hillman reads childhood instead as a cameo of the whole life.
DEC 2020 memory is a form of fiction both Memory is a form of fiction: we are the creation of stories we tell ourselves without knowing it, and the memory is what creates the trauma.
DEC 2020 personal names in tribal societies after Tribal societies, thought to have the least individuality, give the most individual names, drawn from dreams or deeds and rarely handed down.
DEC 2020 therapy investigates aggravetes abuse both It is not only trauma that harms but remembering traumatically, keeping the patient locked in the child’s view of the past.
DEC 2020 work at personal relationship and love both Love doesn’t result from working at something; it is aesthetic, sensuous, a kind of joy, like a good moment at breakfast.
DEC 2020 archetypal fantasy of ego development after Ego development is heroics: an archetypal fantasy that casts each life story as a Battle for Deliverance from the Great Mother.
DEC 2020 archetypal gods and literary reflection after Each god persuades us into its own myth: gravity with Saturn, speed with Mercury, beauty with Venus, vehemence with Mars.
DEC 2020 attitude which interiorizes inner events after The way we imagine our lives is the way we will go on living them, and our stories are the genre through which events become experiences.
DEC 2020 continually internalizing and externalizing process after Psychic reality moves in a process that is continually internalizing and externalizing, gaining insight and losing it.
DEC 2020 factual history claims literal truth after History is a lie when it claims literal truth: Freud found his case histories recorded fantasies of events, not true accounts.
DEC 2020 hero stays on top of any story after For Patricia Berry, narrative tends to become the ego’s trip: the hero has a way of finding himself in the midst of any story.
DEC 2020 history symptom-making of the psyche after Sickness joins Plato’s dialectic, love, ritual and poetry as a way an event becomes an experience and is made into soul.
DEC 2020 masochistic enjoyment of psychological horrors after A patient needed her story doctored, not herself: she had taken her tale of sickness and abuse literally and become its victim.
DEC 2020 old wise man who uses diagrams numbers and crystals after For James Hillman, presenting psychology through diagrams, numbers, crystals and the Old Wise Man belongs to the senex consciousness of Saturn.
DEC 2020 picaresque mode parody of the individuation after The picaresque is a psychopathic parody of the individuation epic, but individuation might be a paranoid organization of the picaresque.
DEC 2020 see the literature in psychology after Literature sees the psychology in fiction; it is psychology’s turn to see the fiction in psychology.
DEC 2020 sophisticated therapeutic class after The “therapeutic class” arrives with stories already formed into the therapeutic genre, self-reflective and focused on the main character’s problems.
DEC 2020 systematically connecting function of consciousness after Writing about the psyche can be hermetic, aphroditic, Dionysian or anima-like, but the analyst’s case writing connects systematically.
DEC 2020 the mistake of historical literalism after Historical literalism mistakes what a history records for what actually happened, putting history all on one side and fiction on the other.
DEC 2020 therapeutic fiction genre after Fictions are fantasies by which we fashion, or “fiction,” a life into a case history, with therapy as the theme that strings the incidents together.
DEC 2020 therapist-patient collaborating in a mutual fiction story after A therapy session is also a contest between singers, reenacting one of the oldest cultural enjoyments humans know.
DEC 2020 empiricism prevents solipsism after Empiricism is the fantasy that makes us feel safe from the isolation and paranoid potential of solipsism.
DEC 2020 poiesis of psychoanalysis after Psychoanalysis is a work of imaginative tellings, poiesis, making by imagination into words.
DEC 2020 rewriting undigested remnants after Much remembering is recapitulation, revising the chapter again before it can close; rewriting heals the fiction of its undigested remnants.
DEC 2020 solipsism after Solipsism holds that only one’s own mind is sure to exist, and that the external world and other minds might not exist outside it.
JAN 2020 dissonance of maximum amplitude after Every symptom is a compromise, as Freud saw: the heights seek the depths, even by suicide, ruinous contracts or entangling emotional messes.
JAN 2020 the need to be in love after The heart’s image needs anchors of every sort: loyal friends, stable contracts, reliable health, the schedules of the clock, the facts of geography.
JAN 2020 to live consumerism rather than community both We have become mere numbers, James Hillman writes: we live consumerism rather than community.
SEP 2019 Senex and puer in Hillman from Senex is heavy with time, order and tradition; puer is light, adventurous and idealistic, raising the spirits but prone to crashing down.