Here is the New York Times obituary of James Hillman, who passed away yesterday. Hillman was one of the founders of Archetypal Psychology, an elaboration of Jungian Psychology. He was an enormously creative person, a champion of the soul, and a prophet of the imagination. His passing represents a tectonic shift in the Jungian world and the world of psychology at large.
Hillman's work was primarily about rescuing psychology from the narrow, medicalized world to which it had been confined and to argue for the primacy of the imagination in our lives and in the world. In Re-Visioning Psychology, he wrote:
"I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that neither starts in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the processes of imagination."
Hillman's work was formative for me. His Re-Visioning Psychology and The Soul's Code were infuriating, exciting, and ultimately, liberating books that I continue to revisit. The work I do as a psychotherapist is rooted in his idea of the reality of the imagination, and I take as my motto his quote: "The way we imagine our lives is the way we will go on living our lives."
Hillman described the purpose of therapy and of life as "soul-making." He was the inspiration for Thomas Moore's extremely successful book, Care of the Soul. The final paragraph in the New York Times obituary conveys the nature of his work and vision:
“Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled,” Mr. Hillman wrote in 1976. “But these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning, a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness.”
R.I.P. James Hillman. You will be missed.