Abstract
This chapter examines the mystical and erotic in Hillman’s early thought through the influence of the ancient Greek god Dionysus. With a focus on the embodied, emotional, and erotic nature of Dionysus, I will show how these qualities came to formulate the core theoretical vision of Hillman’s archetypal hermeneutic and served as a critique of traditional psychological epistemologies, as well as of normative scholarly approaches in both the humanities and sciences. In “saving” image, symbol, and even the “mystical,” from an analytic, disembodied, and misogynist reductionism, Hillman’s archetypal psychology champions a form of transformational subjectivity, and personally redemptive mysticism, through an ontological affirmation of what Jung (1937) understood as the reality of the psyche.
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Notes
- 1.
Hillman (1972) defines the “first-Adam-then-Eve fantasy” as that “which turns every investigation comparing the morphology of male and female bodies into the misogynist discovery of female inferiority”; he combines this with “the Apollonic fantasy, with its distance to materiality—a fantasy which denies a role to the female in the propagation of new life” as his two main critiques following his survey of Western scientific history (248).
- 2.
Hillman (1972) writes, “Our misogynist and Apollonic consciousness has exchanged [Dionysus] for a diagnosis. So without initiation into Dionysian consciousness, we have only that Dionysus that reaches us through the shadow, through Wotan and the Devil of Christianity” (274). Hillman is assuming here that a subjective and immediate experience (“initiation”) into the Dionysian is possible outside of the original ancient Greek context.
- 3.
“Thus therapeutic psychology has an inherent contradiction: its method is Apollonic, its substance Dionysian” (Hillman 1972, 290). A dismantling of the Apollonian resolves (dissolves) this tension.
- 4.
“This is surely what a Dionysian individuation might look like: a kind of psychological dismembering, in which the multiple consciousnesses which reside in our belly, our feet, our genitalia and elsewhere gain recognition, and are given voice again” (Saban 2010, 115). This statement has profound implications for a depth psychological “hermeneutic of the body.” See also Levin (1985), Part III, “The Fleshing out of the Text” (206–23).
- 5.
Hillman (1983) summarizes Jung’s dramatic interpretation of the dream as: “Statement of Place, Dramatis Personae, Exposition; Development of Plot; Culmination or Crisis; Solution or Lysis,” (36).
- 6.
Parsons (1999) is referring specifically to psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with three historical (yet overlapping) “waves,” or trends: (1) Freudian reductionism, (2) neo-Freudian “adaptive” approaches to religion, and (3) “transformational” approaches favorable to religious or mystical experiencing (10–11).
- 7.
“In Greek to initiate is myein…the initiate is called mystes, and the whole proceedings mysteria” (Burkert 1985, 276). Hillman (1972) adds: “Dionysian events…make sense through a psychological hermeneutic, as reflections of psychic events…. Accordingly, it will be in terms of psychic consciousness or mystery consciousness that the…phenomena are to be comprehended” (277–78).
- 8.
- 9.
Compare to Kripal (1999): “For [some] scholars, academic method and personal experience cannot be so easily separated…. There is something genuinely ‘mystical’ about the work of such scholars…. They do not so much ‘interpret’ religious ‘data’ as they unite with sacred realities, whether in the imagination, [or in] the hidden depths of the soul…. Their understanding, then, is not merely academic. It is also transformative, and sometimes salvific. In a word, it is a gnosis ” (369).
- 10.
By “normative,” I am referring here to “monosyllabic,” i.e., androcentric and logocentric approaches that often discount embodied, intuitive, or imaginal experiencing in research. Coppin and Nelson (2005) and Romanyshyn (2007) outline a variety of such hermeneutic and methodological possibilities from within a depth psychological orientation that could be considered “Dionysian.”
- 11.
Kripal (1999) adds, “Many scholars of religion, no doubt, remain relatively unaffected [by their material], protected as they are by a thick skin of skepticism, objectivity, relativism, and religious doubt” (368).
- 12.
Hillman’s remarks on “centering and wholeness” are made in the context of his critique of the “defensive” possibilities inherent within Jung’s psychology of the mandala; Hillman’s move toward de-centering the self would “encourage a loosening of central (ego) control in the interests of experiencing the essential diversity of the self” (Saban 2010, 115; see also Samuels 1983).
- 13.
Ferrer (2003) defines the term cognicentrism as “the privileged position that the rational-analytical mind (and its associated instrumental reason and Aristotelian logic) has in the modern Western world over other ways of knowing, e.g., somatic, sexual-vital, emotional, aesthetic, imaginal, visionary, intuitive, contemplative” (39, fn. 3); for an example of such a “corrective” approach in practice, see Ferrer (2011).
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Odorisio, D.M. (2018). Dionysus in Depth: Mystes, Madness, and Method in James Hillman’s Re-visioning of Psychology. In: Cattoi, T., Odorisio, D. (eds) Depth Psychology and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_3
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