James Hillman

Tribute to James Hillman by Mary Smail Director of the Sesame Institute

Dr James Hillman, founder of Archetypal Psychology and Patron of the Sesame Institute since 2006 died on Thursday 27 October 2011 after a long struggle with lung cancer. I wrote to him six weeks ago to keep him abreast of our news, and heard from Margot his wife who said:

 I must tell you sadly that James is very ill with the recurrence of the lung cancer diagnosed two years ago. We are home in CT and he is weak and frail. I have  printed your email for him to read, With warm regards to you and all the best for your work with Sesame Institute,

James Hillman challenged the behavioural and cognitive approaches of psychology seeing these as reductive, materialistic and literal.  They left psyche out – his work was to restore Soul to psychology.  He saw Soul at work in imagination, through myth and metaphor.  Soul he said, revealed through pathology and the speech of Soul was often first heard through suffering. 

When I invited him to become a Patron of the Sesame Institute he accepted and in 2006 he came to a myth enactment of the Myth of Er.  He did not participate but watched as 63 people retold the story in enactment.  At the end he said to me, “This is amazing.  This Soul thing is real”. I remember wanting to say to him “Yes it’s just like James Hillman says …..” until I remembered that I was talking to James Hillman.

What he saw in the Sesame work was the embodiment of everything he wrote about. As we know through Sesame, enactment is a way of research.  It uncovers what the head could not find. 

Participants on that day remembered these fragments of what James spoke about:

 Thomas Moore wrote this of James:

I wonder if one day the world will really discover Hillman’s genius and the importance of his work. I don’t know of anyone, present or past, who has had a deeper understanding of human life and culture.  For me he was the standard against which I measured all other work, and I understand the great thinkers of the past through him. It is the Hillman Freud, the Hillman Jung that excites me. …. He makes you see the most ordinary things in a fresh light and will inspire you to live closer to live with profound appreciation of the world that displays itself to your senses. 

Over the past ten years, Sesame and Soul have been moving together.  My hunch is that the treasure at the centre of the Ali Baba story and the ideas that James holds about Soul are one and the same.  When people find the new in a Sesame session it is because they are coming in touch with their Soul – the deepest part of themselves which connects to the More Than, the Visceral, the Numinous, Great Spirit, to God.  The Psyche and Soma course is the Soul edge of Sesame and one which all the more we must take our place to represent in a world which so needs soft qualities that give meaning to brokenness and show the way to depth riches. James Hillman commitment to psyche-soul imperative must not end. We each have to take the work on in our individual ways, making harbours for Soul or however you address that Healing Grace which comes about when creativity, health and love are allowed out to play.

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Hillman at Sesame

In 2006 James Hillman came to the Sesame Institute Studio (then in Battersea) and took part in an afternoon of myth, movement and conversation.  The event was written up in the Sesame Journal and the following is taken from that article.

Invisible Mystery


by Richard Davis and Katie Herdman

On 31 March 2006, over sixty people came to the Sesame Studio in Battersea for an afternoon of myth and movement followed by conversation with James Hillman.  Becky Mackeonis read passages from James' work (see below), which were responded to in movement by five current Central students.  Di Cooper and Mary Smail then led a session based on the Myth of Er from Plato's Republic.  After tea we gathered to listen to James's responses to the enactment and to his thoughts on Fate and Calling, which he had considered in The Soul's Code.  A lively discussion followed.  At the end James was presented with a key and an acorn.

First Movement
"If something keeps pulling you or presenting itself to be done, if it has animistic life, it must be attended.  The creative happens through intense devotion to what is yet unknown." (Lecture on Creativity and Imagination, Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education, 30 April 2005)

Second Movement
"Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience.  It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, deep." (Re-Visioning Psychology, 1976, p69)

Third Movement
"Logos, when working beautifully, leaves the soul out - if you bring the soul in, you start to stutter or you'll go around in circles or you'll be unable to elocute it in a way that does justice to it - you will be in half-darkness.  My point is that soul means inferiority - something sensitive, something...well...pathologized.  Soul makes the ego feel uncomfortable, uncertain, lost.  And that lostness is a sign of soul." (Interviews, 1983, p.17)

The Myth of Er
[enacted in sections by four separate groups]
Ten days after his death on the field of battle, Er the warrior returns to life and tells of what he has seen in the invisible world.  There are two abysses in the earth, and two others matching them in the sky above.  Between them sit the judges ordering souls either skywards or down to the dread realm below.  At the same time, souls are returning from their journeys above and below and as at a festival greet each other, telling their stories.

The returning souls move on until they reach a rainbow pillar of light between the heavens and the earth from which hands the spindle of Necessity.  Around the spindle sit the three Fates singing to the music of the spheres: Lachesis of things past, Clotho of things present, Atropos of things future.  The souls go before each of the Fates, and the Interpreter throws lots from which the souls choose their next life.

The souls then go before Lachesis who allots to each a daimon who remembers the life the soul has chosen, and accompanies the soul as a guide to its calling.  Soul and daimon go before Clotho under whose spindle the soul's choice is confirmed, and then to holy Atropos whose threads weave an unalterable fate around the soul's choice.  Finally all pass beneath the throne of Necessity, proceeding to the plain of Lethe.

In the evening, the souls drink from the river of forgetfulness and remember nothing of Necessity or her three daughters; they forget the lives they have chosen; they forget even the daimones who stand guard over their callings.  At night they sleep, until thunder and earthquake send them spinning like shooting stars in all directions to the times and places of their birth.

Some participant feedback
He's obviously very clever and not only that, ranks with Indiana Jones when it comes to sandy coloured outfits.  And when he did a backward and upward glance and referred to 'this lot', did he mean Christians?
'Be fascinated' and the power of 'embodying' (in all senses) the image and letting it do the work.
A feeling of making sense, valuable to go back to the source.
An honour to meet and listen to Mr Hillman.
It was like we were selling the Sesame idea to him.
I came out holding onto one thought.  That there is difference in these two experiences: 1. experiencing the image and valuing the experience; 2. thinking and reflecting upon the importance of the experience of the image.
I enjoyed hanging out with my daimon.
The playfulness, the metaphor and the deep insight emerging from the non-verbal enactment of the Myth of Er helped me realise once more how precious the oblique method is, moving under the resistances and bringing one closer to the Soul!
You all do a great job there and I was excited meeting younger dramatherapists working passionately for what they believe.
...delight in the myth and in Mary's gift for storytelling, respect for Hillman's clarity, enjoyment for the informality and relaxed feel to the afternoon.  It re-inspired me.

What participants remembered James saying:

"I'm just an old man talking."

"Improved rather than changed."

"We are on the earth for appreciating that we are here to appreciate."

"Nothing wrong in investing in the requirements of civilisation as long as you're not paying for it with soul."

"How do you get the soul into the academy?"

"Our work [therapy] is work of culture not of civilisation."

"Culture erupts and surprises."

"We can work within institutions but we don't join them."

"Enacting a story connects imagination in the body.  It does not turn imagination into meaning as psychoanalysis has been doing for the past hundred years."

"Humming connects us with the vibration of the body."

"The myth stresses the importance of honouring necessity, of the lot that is chosen for us by Fate.  Necessity is 'that which could not be otherwise' (Kant).  Therapy is about unveiling, about explaining and appreciating what is.  It is a process of companioning the misery.  When we work for change we work against what is."

"Your patient is the monster as well as the child."

"Our trade is necessarily subversive, concerned with culture rather than civilisation."