James Hillman Receives Medal of The Presidency of the Italian Republic

HIGH HONORS IN ITALY

from PACIFICA IN DEPTH
Summer/Fall 2002 Edition

On October 21 2001, James Hillman was awarded the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic at a conference in Rimini, Italy. Following is the text of Mikhail Gorbechev's Introduction and Dr. Hillman's acceptance speech.

If the origins of psychoanalys is coincided, in the words of its founder, with some sort of attempt to debunk the myth of the psyche, transforming "metaphysics into metapsychology," as announced in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1904, then its post-twentieth-century course is being ushered in with the reintroduction of all those mythology-based constitutional motifs on the psyche that traditional psychoanalysis has scattered to the four winds. Despite almost a century in the wilderness, we are now gradually witnessing the reintegration of the permanent underpinning afforded by the individual’s imaginative activity or creative mobility—in a nutshell, his or her spiritual life—which has had to pay such a heavy tribute to critical reason in terms of its impoverishment and the hounding out of the soul. The author of this neo-mythical insurrection of deep psychology is James Hillman, the most impressive theoretician of the late-20th-century archetypal reform of psychology.

With his extraordinary dismantling of the monocentric, personalistic and nihilistic assumption of reductivist Western knowledge, Hillman has criticized the traditional concepts of psychotherapy, re-establishing a classic Renaissance route, both to the actual world of places and things by personified reanimation and to the archetypal world of myth, the imaginative, narrative, and deiform dimension of the psyche. Thereby he has turned analytical technique inside out, transforming it beyond the subjectivist empiricism of the isolated individual enacting "the myth of analysis," into a form of soul-leavened psychodramatics. For these outstanding merits, which make him one of the great reformers of our style of knowledge in this period of transition between two eras, the Italian nation is honored to make this award to James Hillman.

—Mikhail Gorbechev

Justice and Beauty
Foundations of an Ecological Psychology
by James Hillman

A great consensus of beings [regardless of their deliberative capacities and linguistic abilities] sense in varying styles and degrees that this planet, their home and the home of their ancestors from the beginning, is now so severely threatened that its viability, and therefore theirs, may not endure into another century.

What role has the discipline of psychology in the widest sense played in the progress of this hastening deterioration, and what part might it play in slowing this progress, or better, altering its course? I believe this is the only important question for psychology today [—psychology which still attracts hundreds of thousands if not millions the world over of bright young students into university classrooms, experimental laboratories, and even more numbers of all ages seeking help in clinics, counseling centers and private consulting rooms of therapists of every stripe]. What bearing has psychology on the environment, and can psychology become ecologically effective?

The record is not encouraging. Here we must admit that psychology [from its beginnings in German universities, French asylums, and Viennese consulting rooms] is fundamentally flawed. It entered the world with a birth defect, [it bore] the ancestral curse of Cartesian rationalism, which divided the world into subjects and objects, conscious human minds and dead material things. The actual world was not psychology’s province.

The compound word psyche-logos declares psychology is the study of the soul, yet since the very inception of this discipline the psyche has been confined wholly to the human, placed inside the human skin, and denied existence anywhere apart from the human. Not only has the psyche been identified with human subjectivity and interiority, but as well the logos of psyche, its method of study, has been restricted to, and by scientific method. An early maxim of the discipline stated: "Whatever exists, exists in some quantity and therefore can be measured." In this way, the immeasureables were ruled out of existence, and the method applicable to the Cartesian res extensa, the extended world of materialized objects, became the only method allowed for the study of the soul.

Thus restricted to a science of the personalized individual subject, psychology as conceived and practiced has placed itself outside the planetary dilemma. Insulated by the self-reflecting mirror of its world-view, psychology is quite irrelevant to the anguish affecting the great consensus. Even that anguish and those dilemmas are internalized into personal psychological "problems" to be resolved apart from their source in an ugly, unjust, and unhealthy world.

The ecological result of this inheritance is double. First, psychology is anthropocentric. Its definition of consciousness, for instance declares per definitionem it impossible for anything but humans to be conscious. The self is still imagined like a pineal gland, a self-enclosed atomistic unit, neither inherently or necessarily communal. The planet is an alien place, essentially nihilistic, into which the individual human is thrown, alienated and anomic. Second, human-centered psychology fosters a disordered, senseless, and enslaved planet. By ripping the human soul from its womb in the anima mundi, the world soul, this mother of all phenomena becomes a corpse, reduced to measurement, experimental dissection and cannibalization of its body parts. Rivers and rocks, flowers and fish, defined as soulless in themselves can find value only by human assessment. For many centuries of our history and in most other cultures, an idea of the world soul endows all phenomena with meaning and intelligible intentions—and their own individual inwardness. Depth of soul lies not just in us; it resides in the planet’s own nature.

Clearly, we need to start again. [We need principles that start not in the human mind but are given to the mind with the world.] We need to imagine an ecological psychology that takes its starting point [not in human concerns only but] in the planet’s concerns and its beings concerns, which we humans serve with our mental capacities. [That is, we do not dig in our philosophy, science, or theology for principles, nor turn only to our human experience; rather] we can attempt to formulate the principles already at work within the cosmos, grounding the value of all participants.

I submit Justice and Beauty are such [formulations of universal] principles from which an ecological psychology could be derived.

Justice and Beauty offer universals of archetypal strength because they are recurrent in time and ubiquitous in place, trans-cultural, immensely fecund. They muster emotive and symbolic expression and are instantly recognizable in daily affairs—and not only of humans. [Justice and Beauty are universals on which cultured communities and human dignity rely and aim to further.] Without them, existence becomes nasty and brutish. With them, the psyche finds itself in a cosmos of value, and psychology becomes the study of the ways any phenomenon measures its place in the world.

An idea of Justice has hardly been important to psychology, which has proceeded as if Justice can be ignored. Yet, Justice is the ruling principle of society, and of the natural world, formulated as natural law. The Greeks considered Justice (Themis) foundational, a great earth Goddess like Gaia, whom Zeus had to obey. She lies at the roots of the polis, the city, making civic cohesion possible, giving each its rightful place and cautioning each not to overstep its bounds.

Justice makes possible an inherently co-related society of beings [where mutual dependency is] based not on mutual usefulness and economic exchange, but on the bare fact of participatory existence. If all beings belong, then all are needed and useful, and justice prevails for each and every. Justice lies so deep, feels so innate, it works like an instinct. Transgressions spring quick to the eye; injustice stinks and wounds long fester. A sense of justice comes with the newest soul: the smallest child cries: "That’s not fair."

Like this innate response to injustice, so there is an innate aesthetic response. All beings present themselves first of all aesthetically to each other as visible forms, textures, aromas, patterns, rhythms. The world is intelligible by means of these displays, allowing all beings to recognize one another. [The old Roman word for the display of phenomena was ostentatio, a Latin rendering of the Greek phantasia; phenomena show themselves as fantasy images giving impetus to imagination and asking for an imaginative response. The arts are thus the first mode of being in the world and responding to its display. Beauty and ugliness derive neither from personal taste, societal norms, or objective rules of form, but are given with the phenomenal cosmos in its presentation of itself. In fact, the original meaning of kosmos means fitting, decorous, the display of adornment, and is closer to our current world "cosmetics" than to the emptied out cosmos of vast gaseous space in which drift weightless cosmonauts above and beyond gravitas. And, because kosmos also means right order, beauty promotes justice.

I submit these principles are basic to cultures everywhere because they are given with the cosmos itself, and, since primordially given they are ecological guarantors. Psychology’s task is to rebuild its learning and its therapies on these ecological archetypals, so that the great wide world and its beings can never be outside its purview. [Because] justice and beauty [are not merely humanistic, religious, scientific or regional, they] allow many modes of implementation; yet transcend all implementation with an ideal claim of transcendental value, inspiring artistry, dignity and respectful are, and prompting lasting rectification of ugliness and wrong. For precisely ugliness and wrong are the major cause of a suffering planet, that blue ball wrapped in a whirlwind, so fragily afloat in a sea of stars.

© JAMES HILLMAN 2001 No portion of this article may be reproduced in any format without written permission from the author.