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Get a new perspective on Hillman's work in James Hillman: Postmodern Romantic Reductionist, and Trickster by Michael Bogar:

 For more than a decade James Hillman has been my favorite writer and most influential teacher. I discovered him in 1996 when The Soul's Code was published, which I devoured, or perhaps more rightly stated, which devoured me. My ideational world was turned inside out. From The Soul's Code I went on to read Hillman's opus,Re-Visioning Psychology.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Ideas from this Pulitzer Prize nominated book changed practically everything about the way I viewed psyche, religion, myself, others and the larger world--specifically through the four main chapters titled PersonifyingPathologizing, Psychologizingand Dehumanizing, which the author describes as "four ideas necessary for the soul-making process" (ix).His view of pathologizing was especially revolutionary, helping me to make room for emotional suffering and psychic fragmentation in a culture obsessed with chronic emotional well being and wholeness. In short, I am a devotee of Hillman's work.
However, over time I have become troubled by some of Hillman's postmodernist and Romantic predispositions and their implications for psychology and socio-cultural ethics. I want to stress the word "some" when I say I am troubled by Hillman's work since I also feel that his radical correctives are extraordinarily necessary. That being acknowledged, James Hillman's methodological approach is heavily slanted in a modernist/postmodernist direction, which Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker describes
Beginning in the 1970s, the mission of modernism to afflict the culturally secure and comfortable] was extended by the set of styles and philosophies called postmodernism. Postmodernism was even more aggressively relativistic, insisting that there are many perspectives on the world, none of them privileged. It denied even more vehemently the possibility of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values. It was more Marxist and far more paranoid, asserting that claims to truth and progress were tactics of political dominion which privileged the interests of straight white males. According to the doctrine, mass-produced commodities and media-disseminated images and stories were designed to make authentic experience impossible. (Blank 411)
Hillman clearly sets out to afflict the culturally comfortable and psychologically secure, approaching the soul by utilizing the postmodern procedures of relativistic fantasies and labyrinthine meanderings--minimizing psychological universals, fixed meanings and any kind of preordained psycho-social linear development....

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  • Stick to the image. There is some quality going on, just stick to the image.

  • Organization

    Well read Chateaubriand then. He is numinous and will sweep you away in a romantic whirlwind. [no he is not a true romance novelist] His work is especially numinous to the feeling type. From the admittedly little Hillman I have read he talks the talk of romanticism but doesn't walk the walk. Hillman intellectually evokes the romantic mind set and the drew some of the romantics among us to the flame.  

  • You and Aleksandar should come take the Hillman alchemy class with me and Debra. :) It would be good to get a little action going in that discussion group.
  • Yes I've read Mats' essay and no, I don't see the polarization, or the antagonism for that matter. This isn't Keynes vs. Hayek.
  • "The Sorrows Of Young Werther?" Read it. Not clear on how it competes with anything Hillman has written.
  • Good morning and thank you for this which is helpful.

  • Klemens, instead of a direct response, I'll just ramble for a while under your comment.

    I am actually very interested to know what is real and possible. Hillman already was, according to those who had elected in Zurich, the president of those who dig deeper. There really wasn't any reason to make a name for himself out of nothing. Just imagine some imaginary book: "We've Had Two Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and No One Is Left to Write This Book".

    There are pros and cons of his approach. Maybe, just maybe, active imagination could break its way into the system. Whatever that means. Not that Hillman had some secret agenda, conspiracy, or anything like that.

    • Organization

      So hillman was into politics too huh? lol And what are your thoughts on politicians Alek. They made a fine mess of yugoslavia which was once a very prosperous nation

    • Organization

      Why read Hillman. Read Wurther [goethe] or Chateaubriand the original Romantics. I have and Hillman does not hold a candle to them. 

  • What, is this like Team Edward vs Team Jacob? Are the stakes really that high (is it truly an "assault") or is this just two ways of looking at the psyche?

    I mean, is Hillman entirely wrong?
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