James Hillman: (1926-2011)

With the passing of James Hillman on 27 October, 2011, at his home in Thompson, Connecticut, the field of depth psychology has lost one of its most controversial and creative figures of the last half century. Hillman was drawn to Jungian psychology in the early 1950s, but began to break away from ‘mainstream’ Jungian thinking by the early 1970s, initiating what he called ‘archetypal psychology’. He claimed that the Jungian world had become dogmatic and resistant to new ideas, and he wanted to experiment with the Jungian legacy, which for him meant championing creativity, philosophical enquiry and risk-taking. His school or movement attracted a great deal of interest from fans and critics alike who watched closely as ‘archetypal psychology’ began to expand across North America, influencing fields as diverse as literary studies, the creative arts, phenomenology, ecological studies, urban planning, Neoplatonic studies, art history and psychotherapy. What we found in early Hillman was a revival of the human spirit, and his goal was larger than psychology itself: he sought the restoration of imagination to a central place in experience and the restitution of poetry and vision to consciousness.

I sometimes imagine that Hillman deliberately styled himself as a psychologist of the postmodern era. He emphasized and developed those features of Jung's psychology that chimed in with the postmodern condition: polytheism, plurality, the poetic basis of mind, imagination, subjectivity, criticism of science and medicine, the rise of the feminine, disillusionment with religious systems, and a mocking tone toward academic psychology. The aspect of Hillman's work that was not postmodern was his focus on archetypes and universals. Strict postmodernism would seek to ‘deconstruct’ these ‘essences’ and not treat them as absolutes. Hillman's stance, however, was that archetypes did not ‘exist’ in themselves, but were phenomena expressed mainly in image and metaphor. Hillman distanced himsel