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hillman

Page history last edited by SkyRon 8 years, 4 months ago

 Passage from Inter Views: Conversations with Laura Pozzo on Psychotherapy, Biography, Love, Soul, Dreams, Work, Imagination, and the State of Culture (1983) by James Hillman. (from Chapter 7: Old and New - -Senex and Puer)

 

(Florence, Italy - the birthplace of the Renaissance --photo by jb)

 

"Laura Pozzo": In reading all you have written one hardly ever finds references to what is modern: you hardly ever report on your cases, and in speaking of culture, your models come always from the old humanistic classical culture. The old culture has the upper hand. Why?

 

James Hillman: The old culture has the upper hand because I think it’s more important! One reason—you are looking for reasons—is that living in America I see the danger of connecting everything to what is immediately topical. America is a complete immersion in what is happening; it’s a Now-culture, utterly Now. So, involvement with the past should be seen as a way of stepping out of the Now, rather than making social comments on it. Of course, that step is already a comment because you can’t really step out of where you are. There is nowhere else to step to. The Renaissance is not another place or another time. It’s a mode of being in Now or looking at Now and talking about it. But it means that my comment doesn’t have to be stated in Now language. The very fact that I talk in mythical and historical terms is my comment on Now. Those are fantasy landscapes by means of which you can see the Now or save the phenomenon from being lost in Now.

 

LP: So the reason you moved to the Renaissance in your latest books . . .

 

JH: . . . It’s evident that in a culture that is floating and lost I’m making the same move that people made at other times; they went back. In the Renaissance—and they were lost then, too— they went back. This is a move made by artists, by thinkers, by cultures, the move of going back so that one stands somewhere . . .

 

LP: More solid? The past better than the present?

 

JH: No, not solid: but one has an eye that has been trained by stepping back . . .

 

LP: The eye of the old?

 

JH: Yes, the old eye, the call of the old, and it may be the essential eye. It is to gain essence, not time: it’s to train the eye to read and the hand to make the right move and not simply because it’s old. I think that calling it “old” is already a prejudice of the Now. The Now is not a matter of time. The Now is simply the unreflected, the naturalistic perspective, the way things happen, the “forgetful” as the phenomenologists say. “Now” means here, close, appearance; therefore distance, depth, and essence are given by the old. Now-consciousness doesn’t understand that the old has nothing to do with time. The old doesn’t belong to the senex in some sterile dusty way. If you see the Renaissance as old, you are in Now-consciousness. I don’t see the Renaissance as old, I see the Renaissance as having been concerned with the same things, but more essentially. I don’t see tradition as historical, I see tradition as contemporary, as informing what we do, what we feel. What is it that still makes people so interested in Greek temples, pyramids, Riace’s bronzes or Altamira caves? It is not history: that’s only the first level of it, people asking themselves, “Oh, my goodness, people did this four thousand years ago, isn’t that extraordinary, they could build these pyramids without modern cranes?” That’s the first level of the reaction. But after that first impact, which begins to break down the Now, the level and the quality change and one gets in touch with something essential. Essential doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to have been there for a thousand years. But in some way, being in a Greek temple or seeing the pyramids or seeing the graffiti on the walls of a cave in Spain evokes the eternal, essential images of the soul. It does not have to be the actual pyramid that I am seeing: that is the literalism of it. You are seeing the ancient images, the archetypal images, not merely the pyramids themselves: but seeing the pyramids evokes the archetypal sense that there are eternal images, and those give you a sense of essence.

 

LP: What do you mean exactly by eternal images, archetypal images?

 

JH: What make us able to be in touch which what we are given, the forms of recognitions, the basis my knowledge is founded on, everything that I sense of being right or being off, doing it right or wrong, the governing bodies of my imagination - - those are the essential images. And they are essentially human; they are what make me human and deepen my compassion for human history, let me understand things, feel into things way beyond the limits of my personal education and personal experience. You see, by opening up the essential imagination we also expand our compassion.

 

LP: That is the old argument of the humanists, too: the belief that culture expands the heart and makes it more sensitive, 'human.'

 

JH: It's how I understand "morality," too. If you don't have those governing bodies of imagination, if you don't have an eternal, archetypal sense in the midst of the Now, then you don't have any sense of where you are going, what structure you are in, and your animal response is off. Instinct. Jung said that instinct and images are the same thing. When you lose that sense of the essential images, then instrinct is off and you build ugly buildings, and you overeat, you become obese, and your whole structure is disoriented. You become immmoral. I mean irrelevant, without any instinct, sort of anesthetized. I go back more and more to old places, not because that is where essence is, but because it evokes the sense of essence. So I definitely do not mean that you "have to know history": it's not history, but a sense of essence, and that deliteralizes history. That is very important because history is such a big burden when it's taken as a senex thing . . . .

 

LP: It kills everything . . . .

 

JH: It kills everything, absolutely. History is nothing at all in itself - -  just a statue in the park for pigeons. Only as an avenue for seeing the Now in perspective is it valuable. You can't see up close; everything flattens out. You don't have to make history relevant, because once you have a historical sense then it gives relevance and sorts out the trivia in events by giving perspective.

 

LP: "Perspective" appears again and again in your writings. You speak of the Gods as perspectives and that myths give us perspectives, so that we can see events differently. Could you say more about your notion of "perspective"?

 

JH: I'd like to come at it in terms of something I've been thinking about recently. Old and new, or what we've been calling essential and Now, can be seen in terms of foreground and background in Gestalt psychology. Whatever you focus on becomes a foreground, that is, really seen, if there is a background. Take any event that's obsessing us, some item of Now - - some symptom, some topic in the news, some argument in psychology like narcissism - - it's just utterly, immediately up-close and literal. But the moment we bring in the Renaissance or Egypt or Greek myth, the moment we introduce a phrase from Shakespeare or Keats, we see it as a foreground phenomenon. It's tied into a background, it can resonate. It's still up close and blown up, but it has become suddenly relativized; because it has background, it is only foreground. The Now becomes only now and not the whole Gestalt. It becomes an image and not just an event. It's the same way with cases. They are only cases, utterly literal real people with real problems until we get an essential perspective, some kind of background, an archetypal fantasy, if you like. Then the cases become images. But be careful here, not images of the archetypal myths or fantasies - - that's to get into a Platonic argument - - but images as foreground phenomena because there is a background. History is one way of making a gestalt: historical references, figures from the past release the foreground event from being stuck in only what it says it is.

 

LP:  But this is also a rhetorical topos, the past as a "topos" that makes sublime everything that is being talked about, whereas the present is used as a way of trivializing the argument . . . .

 

JH:  That's of course senex - - the perspective of Saturn, the old established wisdoms: the past deepens, makes more valid, becomes proof. You know, this is a classical Latin way of proving something:  "Truth stands the test of time." But if one is at the opposite pole of this senex mode of consciousness, if one is in the archetype of the child, if a puer, youthful myth is dominating, as is often the case when you are fourteen and even when you are much older, then you throw out every reference to the past as out of the question. History and time would ruin your position completely. The puer never learns with time and repetition: he resists development and is always unique. No precedents, no past - - that's how it feels to him. A culture in that archetype, like our culture, cannot help but be radically against the past, against what has already become and therefore is not unique. This shows in every aspect of the culture. For example, an American textbook in sociology, psychology, anthropology, even history, cannot be more than three years old or it will not be listed in the catalogs . . . three years old and the book has to be revised. Instant revision! Only the newest is valid.

 

LP: When you introduced the idea of "re-visioning" you didn't mean "up-dating" or modernizing. You meant rather looking again, gaining a new vision based on going back. Is your book Re-visioning Psychology a new psychology or an old one?

 

JH: Why ask that question? What difference does it make? It keeps us paralyzed in the puer-senex: new or old. The main thing is to recognize that the really new is not the Now. It's more like re-new. What matters is the little syllable "re"- - that's the most important syllable in psychology: remember, return, revision, reflect . . . .

 

LP:  . . . . recognition, which is a knowledge coming from what is already in the soul and in the culture.

 

JH: Yes, and response. Responding to what's right there.

 

LP:  React . . . .

 

JH:  Yes, re-act, both as repeating and responding . . . .

 

LP: Repetition would be a way of "going back."

 

JH: These are the important words - - even repent and remorse - - religious words.

 

LP:  Re-ligion itself has been explained to mean linking or tying back . . . .

 

JH:  . . . . or connecting again. Of all these "re" words, maybe the most important is re-spect, which means to look again. Did you know that? And that's all that psychology does, that's the whole thing in a single word. That's what our dreams are doing and our memories: bringing us to respect ourselves - - not inspect with guilt - - to re-gard what happened yesterday. what happenend in childhood and re-spect it. We look again at what was forgotten or repressed, we even look again at the mechanisms of forgetting and repressing, and whatever we look at again we gain a new respect for - - whether in ourselves or the culture. But to do this, you have to let it be as it is and not try to up-date it, make it new. Just the looking again, the respect, renews it. The up-dating process is constantly wiping out history; nothing in our culture is more hated, more repressed than the old. There is a desperate fear of the senex, as if he were Old George the Third - - senex turned into ogre. But the senex is also the old wise man, the old whale, the old ape. And if you stick only with the new and the future, you only have the bluebird or the mosquito: no whale, no old ape. We still are all positivists: we believe you move forward by turning against the past, whereas in the Renaissance we move forward by looking backward - - that was a favorite maxim. So was Philosophia duce regredimur . . . .  (We retrace our steps under the guidance of philosophy--jb)

 

LP: Aren't you now doing exactly what I said a moment ago: using the rhetorical topos of the past, or let's say, the senex, in order to ennoble the old?

 

JH:  Oh, sure! The puer could come along and say: historical references to the Renaissance deaden an argument while references to Star Wars make it lively, relevant, immediate. This teaches us that we are always in one or another archetypal style of rhetoric. You can't open your mouth without an archetypal perspective speaking through you. Rhetoric doesn't mean just the art or system of persuasive argument; by rhetoric I mean that all speech is rhetorical in that every archetype has its own mode of rhetoric, its way of persuading you.

 

LP: Again, the Renaissance, especially the Italian Renaissance. . . . Why?

 

JH: I do not talk of the Renaissance as a "philologue" or as anyone knowledgeable about the culture . . . . I don't regard myself in any way to be a scholar of Greece or of the Renaissance or of history. I don't see myself as an historian, but I feel that these materials are our roots, our Western historical roots, and they have been locked up by the academics, put into universities, put into museums, so we citizens, you and I, have been cut off from our roots by the academics who claim they are educating people to have culture, but who actually cut us off from culture because they've made it a preserve of the academic. You have to go through decades of scholarly brainwashing in order to work on the Renaissance. It needs to be opened up again for the citizen to reclaim his own culture . . . . We live in a terrible split. Maybe the Renaissance did, too, but they had maxims for healing the split, like gloria duplex, keeping the consciousness of both sides. The danger lies in splitting the duplex into only senex or only puer. Exclusive. One turned against the other. We had one-sided puer in the sixties, and now that chaotic style of destruction is giving way to a programmed style of senex destruction - - political repression, armaments, CIA again - - in the name of economics and security, which are senex ideals. If gloria duplex sounds too old-fashioned, too Italian for you, then what about our little syllable "re"? It takes the old and gives it a puer twist. It turns things back and turns things upside down at the same moment.

 

LP:  How else can you imagine the re-union of senex and puer?

 

JH: I think first we have to watch out for anything simple. Simplifications are already part of the rhetoric of one or another side of the split. Gloria duplex means complicated answers, not many single answers lined up as alternative scenarios.  A string of alternatives is not what I mean by "poly" which is always complex. The Renaissance, as Edgar Wind depicts it, for instance, spoke of complicatio instead of explanatio or simplicitas. When we complicate in the right way we begin to force imagination to work. Simplification stops the imagination . . . . as we imagine the world, as we imagine our historical problems, they begin to be interiorized, they begin to be psychological. But it isn't we who make those complications - - it's the psyche, the anima. That's what anima does - - messes things up, blurs the edges. She gets things tangled - -  isn't that what "plicated" means, folded? So the beginning of a puer-senex reunion means letting the anima get at both sides, letting the dried-out senex feel soul again, little bits of moisture, little gipsy fantasies, and letting the high-flying, fire-eating puer feel inferior and moody and confused. A little lonely and outcast and misunderstood like the senex. It's so hard to realize that big pathological problems can have fuzzy solutions, pathological solutions. The only difference between the dangerous old admiral and the wise old whale is that anima connection.

 

LP: Then there is a great difference between your devotion to the old as a mode of giving value and essence and simply being caught in the senex as a conservative or a patriarch - - tradition glorified for its own sake and used to suppress the young.

 

JH: The main task for me is to keep in touch with the senex in all its different facets. The senex slips in unawares - - not just in depressions and cruelties. It's very easy to become unconscious of the senex as a psychological factor because it tends to concretize its perspective as "real", "hard," and "out there" . . . . economics, for instance . . . . Saturn as fixations into literalisms and materialized abstractions.

 

LP: This seems to be again a lack of concern for the concrete world and its laws, so common with the Jungians . . . .

 

JH: Isn't that the senex speaking right there in your sentence? I'm not at all unconcerned with the concrete world, the world of matter, just the contrary! I'm writing on all sorts of material questions, even chemistry and bus transportation and downtown buildings. But one particular view of matter - - call it scientific, economic, sociological - - is killing our civilization slowly. Or it will kill it fast by setting up the puer in his exclusive one-sidedness . . . . then the puer will react and kill the worldview of the senex quickly, anarchically, the fire of apocalypse. So the job of psychology is to keep senex always in some sort of psychological context, to keep Saturn from becoming paranoid, antisocial, which is potential in his nature. That's why I struggle so with monotheism: I see Saturn in it, his dangerous "singleness of vision." That senex intolerance and blindness could wipe us all out. By blindness I mean particularly soulless concreteness.

 

LP: Your approach to the material world - - even if it is concrete, is not soulless. Isn't that what you mean when you call for concrete immediacy, for instinct and instinctual attention to the actual material world?

 

JH: Exactly! My approach to the world is via the anima mundi, as a world ensouled. The senex, as we have been talking of it just now, is fixated literally on the concrete - - economics, power politics, energy, whatever - - without any psychological, without any anima overtone. The world for the senex, as we have been speaking of it, is not an expression of soul; it is the countervalence of soul. And this soulless concretism dominates both the N-(neutron, ca. 1983) bomb project and the terroristic attitude, and this shows that they share the same archetypal reality, the same insanity. Both think what is most real are the physical and external structures. Soulless concretism. I think what's most real are the structures of consciousness, of imagination, so that when ideas move, when the mind moves, when the images move, then the other things also move. By attacking and defending the same concrete and institutional structures both sides reinforce the very conflict. The Old Guard and the Red Guards only make each other stronger and don't conserve anything or renew anything. The soul isn't really touched so nothing moves. The anarchic, the terrorist vision is to my mind very old-fashioned, an early-nineteenth-century vision of reality that we have to see through and let go of - - prepsychological, premetaphorical, prephenomenological. On the other hand psychoanalysis needs more dissidents, more even than Laing and the antipsychiatric movement; it needs its own "terrorists of soul" in the sense of a radical seeing through of its fixed investments in profession - - its banks and insurance, its law courts, its palaces of bureaucracy - - to return soul to the world.

 

LP: This sounds messianic, like the rhetoric of the puer again.

 

JH: Why not - - for a moment at least! Doesn't that just show how the puer breaks through when one fantasizes on the old. The archetype of old and new can't really be separated. It seem better to me to focus carefully, painfully on the old and let the puer break in spontaneously as it just did now to us, rather than to focus on the new so literally that the senex absorbs it and makes it concrete and soulless in the same old dried-out patterns.

 

LP: This topic of old and new, of age and youth, is so very old itself, such a basic topos in literature, and it repeats in psychoanalysis in Oedipus and in Totem and Taboo, the fathers versus the sons; and yet it is always new. Expressing it with Latin terms deliberately keeps it old, and in our culture gives it a new sound. We can hear or see the questions differently. Conflicts of generations, renewal of civilization, conservatism versus radicalism - - even arguments about style in art, architecture, and literature - - can be conceived within this archetypal pair and thought about so as to enlighten conflict, making it more psychological, rather than merely to go on in the same old ways that are always presented as new ways.

 

JH: Enlightening conflicts means nothing more than making them psychological, remembering that the two, senex and puer, have to appear together. You can't have one without the other somewhere near.

 

LP: The terms themselves, senex and puer, illustrate so very well just what we have been talking about: the value of going back to the Italian Renaissance, which at the same time brings something fresh into psychology.

 

 

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