Healing Fiction by James Hillman

Newsletter

Vol. X, No. 2, Fall 1994

Healing Fiction. By James Hillman. (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill Press, 1983, 145 pages.)

Healing Fiction serves as both title and continuity of the three essays which make up this book. For a full appreciation of Hillman’s intent, one must turn to the third chapter, “What Does the Soul Want – Adler’s Imagination of Inferiority,” which appeared originally in Eranos–Jahrbuch–46, 1977 as “Psychotherapy’s Inferiority Complex.”

In common with Jung and Adler, Hillman is saying that a sense of purpose, of telos, is necessary to man, but its literalization into definite, overriding goals must be avoided. We may enter therapy seeking healing, yet we become “healed of that goal when we recognize it as a fiction.”

So the best psychotherapy can do is attune the fictional sense. Then the goals toward which therapy strives—maturity, completion, wholeness, actualization—can be seen through as guiding fictions. Then they do not close the way. (Reviewer’s emphasis) (p. 105)

The extent to which Jung’s followers have overemphasized and concretized certain aspects of his thought is not new to Hillman’s readers. Less familiar is the extent to which Freud and Adler have been “literalized by minds less subtle than theirs.” What emerges from Healing Fiction is a respect for the contributions of all three pioneers of Depth Psychology, and for an intellect which can make this comparison possible.

The opening chapter, “The Fiction of Case History – A Round With Freud” was published initially in 1975, in Religion as Story, edited by James B. Wiggins. Its starting point is a 1934 interview with Freud in which Freud states that he is an artist who of necessity has become a scientist, and that in psychoanalysis, the literary schools of the nineteenth century have been translated into scientific jargon. Freud further substantiates his position by saying that psychoanalysis has received wider acceptance and understanding among artists and writers than doctors. That this is consistent with Hillman’s psychology, outlined in his 1972 Terry Lectures, where he assumes a poetic basis of mind, need hardly be added.

In Freud’s instance, however, the poetic intention of his case histories was unconscious. Although he, like Jung, continued to subject himself to empirical criticism, and to defend the empirical nature of his findings, the plot, his Oedipal theory, determined the outcome. Freud was a writer of fictions; Jung, a writer on fiction—alchemy, astrological aeons, parapsychology and others. In Hillman’s view, “They would have been better served had they turned for help to the field in which they were themselves working, the field of the literary imagination.”

An imaginative approach to therapy forgoes interpretation, analysis and translation into the language of the therapist. Hillman’s response to the image of a patient is an equivalent act of imagination. “Successful therapy is thus a collaboration between fictions, a revisioning of the story into a more intelligent, more imaginative plot, which also means the sense of mythos in all the parts of the story.”

Perhaps our age has gone to analysis ... to be given a case history, to be told into a soul story and given a plot to live by. This is the gift of case history, the gift of finding oneself in myth. In myths Gods and humans meet. (p. 49)

Any suggestion that Hillman’s perspective is an amalgam of all three founding fathers is dispelled by the central chapter, “The Pandaemonium of Images – Jung’s Contribution to Know Thyself,” which was first presented at a conference at Notre Dame University in April, 1975. As reported in his autobiography, when Jung was overwhelmed by “an incessant stream of fantasies,” he wrote them down and let them transpose themselves into images. The key to the metaphorical mode of active imagination was (that) Jung treated the forces which peopled his inner world as if they were real people. In contrast to other forms of introspection, the complexes or “little people,” were in opposition to his conscious will.

Imaginational morality “lies in recognizing the images religiously, as powers with claims.” It is not a question of ethical relativity according to Hillman, nor a new ethics of shadow integration. For it is the daimon, not the ego, “who is our preceptor, our spiritus rector.” This may serve to clarify an aspect of Hillman’s thought which has troubled many of his readers or listeners.

In retrospect, Healing Fiction is less an introduction to James Hillman’s psychology than an opportunity for the person who is acquainted with his writings to deepen his understanding. Unlike some of his books, such as Inter Views, where the author tends to exaggerate his position, almost to absurdity, the mood is serious, and every argument or reflection is worth pursuing to its conclusion.

—Alice Johnston