What remains of James Hillman in an age of rampant psychology

A month before his death, fifteen years ago, from complications arising from bone cancer, James Hillman wrote a letter to family and friends: “I am dying,” he announced, “and yet I could not be more committed to living”. As an essayist, he had earned a reputation as one of the most original proponents of Carl Gustav Jung’s psychological thought, systematically challenging the clichés that had arisen around and alongside psychoanalysis, and taking on doctrinal rigidity, sectarian tendencies and orthodoxy. With the coffin ready at the entrance to his home in Thompson, in the Connecticut countryside – a coffin built by his neighbour, a woodcutter (a certain Eric), who had felled a tree in the garden – Hillman had decided that his final adventure was to be crossing the threshold between life and death with the utmost clarity of mind. For this reason, he had even argued with the doctors who insisted on administering the amount of morphine stipulated by the protocols, which he feared might cloud his mind.

“I remember it as the most extraordinary moment of my life,” says Silvia Ronchey, a Byzantinist, who was called by Hillman to his bedside to finish a book they had begun in 2008 in Ravenna, published thirteen years later under the title L’ultima immagine. “James had had the bed moved into the central hall of the house, in front of a large bay window overlooking the New England countryside. The house was bathed in glorious autumn sunshine. It was October. He was now just skin and bones. It was as if his body were no longer there. Yet there was his face, his mind, his soul. And an unyielding determination to experience the passing with his eyes open.” Right up until his final day, Hillman had continued to work. He dictated emails and chatted with friends. He had also edited another book in dialogue form, this time with the historian of psychiatry Sonu Shamdasani, centred on Jung’s Red Book. This text later became The Lament of the Dead.

But what remains of Hillman today? What has endured of this prolific and brilliant author, who was at one time even fashionable – perhaps a little too much so – yet was nonetheless capable of dismantling clichés? Psychology has permeated everyday life, everyday language and the way we view reality. Not a day goes by without someone labelling their neighbour a ‘narcissist’, ‘passive-aggressive’, ‘avoidant’, ‘toxic’, ‘borderline’ or ‘bipolar’. From the ‘plague’ of society, as Sigmund Freud called it, psychotherapy seems to have transformed itself into its guardian. It protects us from dangerous relationships, from complicated people, from the risks of the wrong encounters. It erects protective walls around our sense of self, providing it with support, care, trust and attention. But what, then, has become of psychological thought? The ability to make the ground give way beneath our feet? To open up chasms, to challenge our certainties, to weaken our convictions, to make us lose our way home, to see other possibilities?

Epictetus said that life is like a cup: it has two handles (as some cups in ancient Greece did). And Hillman would systematically grasp it by the other handle – the less common one, the one few people use. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in a hotel room owned by his parents, Hillman arrived in Jung’s realm, in Zurich, in 1953. Six years later, having qualified as an analyst, he was appointed to head the Institute’s studies, a post he held until 1969. His favourite moment in analysis was not the moment when the patient’s face lit up because, suddenly, they had understood something that had never been clear to them before and, all of a sudden, gained a completely new perspective on their own life. Instead, his favourite moment was when the patient would lower their head and say: ‘Oh shit’, ‘Oh cazzo’, and ‘What on earth am I supposed to do with this muck that’s come out now?’

Hillman’s talent did not lie in offering reassurance. He spoke of betrayal to demonstrate its necessity. Of power to re-evaluate it morally. Of psychoanalysis to argue that, a hundred years after its inception, the world was getting worse and worse. Unlike Jung, who held an archaic, ancient, peasant-like conception of man, Hillman was, by contrast, urban, pluralistic and modern. “His great contribution,” says Luigi Zoja, one of Italy’s leading Jungian analysts, “was to shift the centre of gravity of contemporary psychological thought from the ‘I’ to the ‘we’.” In other words: “Whilst in the age of mass ideologies, Jung’s genius lay in focusing on individuation – on what makes each individual different from the next – thereby resisting the scourge of massification; conversely, the strength of Hillman’s thought, in a historical phase in which individualism has become the new mass ideology, lies in emphasising the power of archetypes – that is, what unites people, that which makes them equal to one another, challenging the myth of the ‘I’ and the loneliness that plagues the life of contemporary man”.

Professor Zoja met Hillman in Zurich in 1968, in the midst of a sex scandal that had ensnared him and driven him into a corner, sending shockwaves through the entire world revolving around the Jung Institute. It transpired that his first wife, Kate Kempe, had had an affair with their shared analyst, Carl Alfred Meier, the Institute’s first president. Hillman had met Kate in a Paris nightclub in 1947 and married her in 1952, in Stockholm, following a whirlwind romance and an adventurous trip to Africa. “It seems our love is endless,” he wrote to her in a letter in the summer of 1963, by which time they had already had their four children: Julia, Carola, Susanne and Laurence. Shortly afterwards, Hillman discovered his wife’s affair with Meier, and the first thing he did was to confront him in person. Meier initially played down the affair, saying it had been brief, then justified it by explaining that “it was necessary to prevent Kate from having a psychological breakdown”. At that point, Hillman would have loved to have beaten him up. “But I didn’t,” he confessed to his biographer. “And I’ve regretted it.”

“At the time,” says Zoja, “there were many analysts who had relationships with their patients.” After all, Jung himself had had an affair with one of his patients, Sabina Spielrein, who later became an analyst; and then also with Toni Wolff, a woman with whom he had a relationship that lasted a lifetime – a sort of second wife. The same happened to James Hillman shortly after he discovered his wife’s infidelity. The patient was a twenty-five-year-old woman, a former airline hostess. Her husband discovered the affair by reading a letter that Hillman had sent her in the summer of 1965, in which he wrote that the purpose of analysis is ‘to serve human love’. Unlike previous instances, which had remained internal to the Institute, the woman’s husband launched a campaign against Hillman that sparked a public scandal. Even Meier, Kate’s lover, turned against him. The Jungian community split, and after a three-year siege, Hillman was forced to resign as director of studies. “It was a stupid thing to do,” Hillman said years later. “Looking back, I think I unconsciously felt the need to fall, the need for something terrible to happen, in order to get started.”

Since then, the relationship between analyst and patient – even within the Jungian tradition – has been subject to stricter regulations. But perhaps analysis was not Hillman’s true calling. From the 1980s onwards, he stopped seeing patients, devoting himself solely to books and lectures. In this way, he achieved worldwide success. It is worth noting that, between the ages of eight and ten, he had serious difficulties with writing at school: he would dip his pen in the inkwell and all that remained on the blank sheet of paper were blotches of black ink, incomprehensible marks, formless matter. Words struggled to emerge clearly from his hands. He had dreadful marks in handwriting – among the worst in the class. So much so that, once regular lessons were over, he had to stay behind at school every day until late to practise writing. “It was a failure, the hallmark of my childhood.” But, paradoxically, many years later, writing became precisely his preferred form of expression, the way in which he best manifested his intellectual courage, his contrarian streak, his desire to shake people’s minds. “It was the call of my demon,” he would say many years later. “Because your demon can seize you in two ways: either through talent, or through difficulty.”

Among his most fascinating theoretical concepts is that of the “acorn”, set out in one of his most famous books, The Code of the Soul. Today, mainstream psychology explains human beings in terms of the wounds they have suffered, narcissistic parents, insecure attachments and traumas. Hillman, on the other hand, speaks of what each person is called to be: just as, says Hillman, the entire oak tree already exists in potential within the acorn, so each of us is born with our own image, character and vocation, which demands to be fully lived out and rooted. In this sense, difficulties, quirks and failures are not symptoms to be cured, but may be the way in which our acorn manifests itself, resisting a life that does not belong to it.

Born in April under the sign of Aries, Hillman described himself as the ‘son of Mars’. His very being had a taste for battle and conflict. There was something warlike about his world of ideas. Enlisted at the age of eighteen in the US Navy Medical Corps, he had cared for Second World War veterans who had returned blind and maimed. When George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq, he conceived one of his most controversial books, "A Terrible Love of War", an essay that today would risk being regarded as the work of a warmonger or a psychoanalyst in a helmet. The text is a deeply unsettling attempt to penetrate the meaning of a line spoken by General Patton in a war film, in a scene depicting him inspecting the battlefield after a battle; surrounded by corpses and burnt-out tanks, he lifts a dying officer towards the sky and says: ‘How I love all this. God help me, I love it more than my life’. Hillman argues that unless we come to terms with this passion for war – this tremendous attraction that mankind feels towards it – we will never understand why humanity continues to unleash one conflict after another, and it will therefore also be impossible to realistically pursue peace.

‘Blasphemy’ is how critics of rearmament, the rainbow-flag advocates, would describe it today. But for Hillman, the truth is that it is impossible to erase Mars from history. “It is futile to flee from the gods,” he says in another of his books. It is pointless to try to escape them. The only thing one can do, if anything, is to try to seduce them, distract them, lead them elsewhere. This is why Hillman had wanted to go to Ravenna, the city where the fall of the Western Roman Empire took place. ‘Il crollo’ he called it, using the Italian word. He arrived there in September 2008, just as the global financial system was collapsing following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. He wanted to see what splendid images people had produced whilst their world was falling apart, amidst wars, famines and migrating peoples.

“For Hillman,” says Silvia Ronchey, “restoring people’s ability to see beauty was the only true way to engage in politics, the only bulwark against collapse.” With this same idea in mind, he staged the scene of his own death, the most radical moment of transition. The light-coloured wooden coffin, at the entrance, had been lined with fabric from a suit that Hillman had asked Zegna – who were admirers of his – to provide, on the pretext of having a suit made. At home, Ronchey recounts, “bottles from his wine cellar were being opened. He drank what he could, whilst we drank the rest. I remember, amidst the drama of the moment, a joyful, almost festive atmosphere’. Friends who dropped by would cook. “Those coming from Cape Cod brought fish. As for me,” recalls Ronchey, “he asked me to make a carbonara. ‘I want to taste it one last time,’ he said”. On a small table next to the armchairs lay a little book of Japanese haiku about death, which someone would leaf through from time to time. Hillman, between one conversation and the next, would drift off to sleep. Someone was always by his side, jotting down in a notebook the things he said whilst asleep, to discuss them when he woke. “Words,” he used to say, “are like cushions: they ease the pain.” He died on 27 October 2011, whilst awake, just as he had wished. “The ancients,” says Ronchey, “recounted the exemplary deaths of illustrious men. I think Hillman’s death followed that pattern. It was an example. Proof that death is not the end, but the fulfilment of the art of living. It was this, I think, that he wanted us to experience during those days. Not merely that death is a moment in life. But that it is a moment in which life’s intensity is heightened.”