On topics ranging from psychiatry to social media, the post-Jungian depth psychologist – born 100 years ago – still has much to teach us
James Hillman (1926–2011) was born a hundred years ago this month in Atlantic City, New Jersey. For the uninitiated, Hillman was a radical voice in 20th-century psychology who challenged the assumptions of mainstream, clinical, and developmental approaches to the understanding of persons and, indeed, whole societies. A puckish provocateur of formidable learning, he pioneered an archetypal psychology with soul at its core. By soul, Hillman didn’t mean a religious essence, but rather a way of seeing that lingers on depth, complexity, and – crucially – the transformative power of images. Drawing on Jungian roots but forging his own path and firmly rejecting Jung’s reactionary politics, Hillman urged analysts to move beyond literal explanations, whether clinical diagnoses or rationalist certainties, towards an understanding of the “poetic basis of mind”.
In his pathbreaking text Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), Hillman laid out a bold critique of what he saw as modern psychiatry’s reductionism, its obsession with pathology, and its narrow focus on the ego. Mental suffering, he proposed, is a signal to be heeded, not a noise to be quieted. In his typically evocative and baroque style, he writes of depression, for example, that it “brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness” and that anybody experiencing the condition should “be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering through it till it turns, nor theologizing it – but discovering the consciousness and depth it wants”.
Resonating with the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, Hillman’s writings on mental distress also align with contemporary perspectives in critical psychology. They seem particularly pertinent to our present “age of diagnosis” (as Suzanne O’Sullivan has recently called it), in which television advertisements and social media influencers barrage the public with a myriad of questionable psychiatric labels and medications of dubious efficacy. For Hillman, the human psyche is fundamentally mythopoetic – that is, determined not by the linear causality of brain chemistry, but by stories, images, and archetypes. Rather than viewing psychological symptoms as problems to be eradicated or medicated, Hillman saw them as expressions of the soul, deserving interpretation rather than correction. Re-Visioning introduced Hillman’s notion of a ‘polytheistic psychology’ in which the psyche contains many voices, gods, and figures – none of which should dominate or be repressed in the name of ‘mental health’.
Hillman was critical of the ways in which modern therapeutic regimes reinforce individualism and disengagement from society. In We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy–and the World’s Getting Worse (1992), co-authored with journalist Michael Ventura, he lamented how therapy had become an inward-looking, privatized solution to what are often collective and cultural problems. Emotional suffering, he argued, cannot be healed in isolation from the social and political realities that shape it, and the therapeutic focus on “relationships” often obscures more fundamental problems, such as the lack of satisfying work and meaningful political community. Therapy, as it stands, too often serves to adjust people to a sick society, rather than helping them to comprehend, or collectively resist, a pathological world order that increasingly strips away human values.
Hillman called for a psychology that could ‘see through’ surface appearances to the deeper, symbolic meanings behind events, places, and behaviours. In The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (1981), he developed the concept of the anima mundi, or world soul. He argued that the soul is not only inherent within individuals, but embedded in the environment, cities, architecture, and the aesthetic life of the world. The modern loss of soul, in this perspective, is reflected not just in personal malaise but in ecological devastation, cultural sterility, and a mechanistic outlook on life. Such a holistic point of view has much value today, as the exigencies of biospheric collapse force us to realise – perhaps too late – that concern for human wellbeing is inseparable from care for ‘the environment’.
Hillman’s fundamental and lasting contribution lies in his effort to restore imagination, myth, and meaning to personal and collective life. He rejected narrowly clinical, progress-driven models of self-improvement in favour of a poetic, pluralistic, and soul-centred psychology – one that sees human beings as part of a larger, mysterious cosmos, where images speak louder than facts, where symptoms may be guides rather than errors, and where the force of character (to echo the title of another of Hillman’s books) takes precedence over physiological determinism. His work remains a powerful resource in the struggle against what another late cultural critic, Mark Fisher, called the “boring dystopia” of contemporary capitalist society.
In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer had already noted that, “in the enlightened world, mythology has permeated the sphere of the profane”. Hillman was particularly alert to modernity’s displacement of myth into culture. For him, culture is a psychic field, alive with archetypal dramas. Seen through this lens, today’s media industries are not just channels for information and entertainment, but vast and noisy theatres of the soul. Celebrity scandals play out as ritual dramas of rise, hubris, and expulsion, echoing age-old tragedies of kings and martyrs. The public shaming of female celebrities such as Britney Spears or Meghan Markle represents the reanimation of the archetypes of the witch, the exile, and the unruly feminine, while in online spaces, looksmaxxers, gym bros, and biohackers channel the spirit of Narcissus. Even climate reporting often takes the shape of an apocalyptic narrative, with fire, flood, and extinction imagery saturating the collective imagination.
In this way, Hillman’s psychology constitutes a counterweight to the literalism of twenty-four-hour news and viral outrage. His writings remind us that beneath every headline lies a mythic undercurrent, the psyche staging itself in public. In a society in thrall to ‘big data’, Hillman would likely say that what our age lacks is not information, but soulfulness – the wisdom to discern what knowledge contributes to human flourishing rather than the accumulation of profit. And in an era of political polarisation and algorithmic persuasion, Hillman’s notion of soul reminds us to pause before reacting, to look beyond surface appearances and discern the significance of the images at play. He often criticised the “anaesthetising” aspects of modern culture and, if he were alive today, he would undoubtedly have valuable insights into ‘doomscrolling’ and other toxic byproducts of ‘social’ media. Indeed, Hillman was sceptical of modernity’s tendency toward abstraction, rationalisation, and the flattening of imagination by technology. He posited that technology isn’t merely ‘neutral’, but a psychic image, and he’d likely view the contemporary obsession with large language models such as ChatGPT as the expression of a cultural fantasy: humanity’s longing for intelligence without soul – or life without labour. He would ask what archetypal figures AI constellates: the Promethean drive to create life, the Pygmalion dream of making a perfect companion, or the Gnostic fantasy of transcending the flesh? And he’d surely not fail to notice how AI is debated in newspaper headlines as either saviour or destroyer – two archetypal figures that recall the myth of Prometheus and the spectre of Frankenstein.
For me and many other admirers of Hillman, the elements of romanticism and even irrationalism in some of Hillman’s writings can be troublesome, and his archetypal approach sometimes runs counter to the findings of more materially grounded investigations. Take, for example, the 1996 book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, in which Hillman introduced his ‘acorn theory’ – the Neo-Platonic idea that each person is born with a unique potential or daimon that calls them into being. The book usefully challenges models that attribute human behaviour to genetics (a virtual obsession among scientists in the 1990s); but many would say that its argument underestimates the role played by environmental factors and parenting experiences in shaping early life experiences. Doubtless, there is more than a touch of Eurocentrism about Hillman’s writings, too: for all his avowed ‘polytheism’, the myths in which Hillman was primarily interested were those of the Graeco-Roman world, while indigenous mythologies – for example, those of Native Americans in his own country – are given short shrift.
Yet even where Hillman’s central arguments are questionable, there is barely a page of any Hillman book that doesn’t bristle with urgent insights. His emphasis, in A Terrible Love of War (2004), on the perennial human fascination with military conflict is somewhat difficult to reconcile with the best socio-historical scholarship on armed violence, such as the anthropological work of R. Brian Ferguson, which convincingly shows that human warfare is not a timeless human constant. Nevertheless, the text is packed with sharp and counterintuitive arguments that speak powerfully to our present-day predicaments. Rejecting “the retreat to love” as an all-too-simplistic answer to the horrors of war, for example, Hillman asks: “why is Christianity, which entered the world as a religion of love and has distinguished itself from other world religions by the message of love […] also so martial?” The question cuts to the core of the religiose bellicosity currently animating a certain U.S. president and his coterie. Like so many of Hillman’s questions, it compels us to reflect upon how ostensibly progressive systems of belief – whether religious, psychiatric, or technological – are distorted and undermined by the dark powers shaping our soulless world.
References
Adorno, T. W. and Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ferguson, R. B. (2023). Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill?, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hillman, J. (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology, New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J. (1981). The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, Washington: Spring.
Hillman, J. (1996). The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, New York: Random House.
Hillman, J. (1999). The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, New York: Random House.
Hillman, J. (2004). A Terrible Love of War, New York: Penguin.
Hillman, J. and Ventura, M. (1992). We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy–And the World’s Getting Worse, San Francisco: Harper.
Stephen Harper is Associate Professor in Critical Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His writing focuses on the mediation of mental distress and the cultural representation of war and conflict. His single-authored books include Madness, Power and the Media (Palgrave 2009), Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media (Zero 2012), Screening Bosnia: Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992-95 War (Bloomsbury 2017), and Hot Planet, Cool Media (Clairview 2023).
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