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I first read these three essays in 1989, and re—reading them for this review made me realize their influence, both upon my own orientation within analysis, but also upon ideas now being developed by others. For example, the function of narrative, the ‘case story’, in analysis; plurality of the psyche, multiplicity and fragmentation; and the debate over questions of the literal and the symbolic, and the aims of psychotherapy.
Quoting Jung, Hillman reminds us that although we all have psyches we are not all psychologists. We need to learn to listen to what the soul wants: ‘This suggests that a reason for psychotherapy of whatever school and for whatever complaint is to gain psychology - a logos of soul that is at the same moment a therapeia of soul. We need to gain the intelligent response that makes the soul intelligible… if logos is its therapy, because it articulates the psyche's wants, then one answer to what the soul wants is psychology’ (p. 94).
Hillman's three essays are based around the three seminal psychologies of Freud, Jung and Adler, examining each as different fictions that heal. In the essay entitled ‘What does the soul want? Adler's imagination of inferiority’, Hillman asserts that ‘the uncertainty about what the patient and I are really there for is in fact what we are really there for’ (p.86), and this inarticulate desire of the soul, this wanting in uncertainty, ‘makes us feel a woeful inferiority’ (p. 86). He discusses Adler's theory of a psychology rooted in a basic inferiority, re—reading it within the imaginal frame less as scientific psychology and more as a ‘poetics of life’ - in other words, examining it for its use as healing fiction. Hillman points out how we devise mental constructs to cope with feelings of inferiority and insecurity and these act as our ‘guiding fictions’, the fantasies with which we apperceive the world. Of these the most basic construct is the fiction of opposite poles, and Hillman offers us a new slant on the Jungian con