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My Offering some reflections on Shelburne's article on Hillman's approach to the dream arises out of my appreciation of it and gratitude to the author for the issues he raises. He has, in my opinion, achieved an attitudinal stance that is balanced and objective, despite the provocative rhetoric that marks Hillman's prose and the swings between total acceptance and total rejection so often engendered in his readers by that style. Apart from that, Shelburne manages in his paper to combine something of a holistic and imaginative approach to his subject with a logical appraisal of it that succeeds in doing justice to, and playing fair by, Hillman's proposals.
Shelburne has responded to a wide range of topics raised by Hillman's challenge, so that I personally only wish to add some reflections on a few topics: the origins of the notions of logos and mythos; certain features of ego-consciousness; some implications in Hillman's views of a religious nature; problems around the setting up of growth, wholeness, balance, self etc. as aims, and problems of the relationship between dream symbolism and personal experience.
To begin with, the postulated entity, logos, is contrasted by Hillman with another postulated entity, mythos. For some minds this opposition carries exciting and dramatic penumbrae hinting at contrasting and warring factors in the human psyche-soma and maybe even in the cosmos. We should not, however, lose connection with the psychological background of those entities. For this we need to start with the phenomena of the person in interaction with his environment, personal and non-personal. Here we find a wide spectrum of modal responses—imaginative, penetrative, receptive and mutative. They