James Hillman: The Dream and The Underworld – Bridge
It is sometimes said that most ideas can be put into a few words-like one of those pre-Socratic fragments-and these few words condensed into a title, so that what one calls a · book is no easy matter.
Among the possible titles for this work have been “The Dream Bridge,” or “The Dream Between World and Underworld.”
Freud had already used a similar metaphor; he called the dream a royal road, the via regia to the unconscious.
But because this via regia, in most psychotherapy since his time, has become a straight one-way street of all morning traffic, moving out of the unconscious toward the ego’s city, I have chosen to face the other way.
Hence my title, which is a directional signpost for a different one-way movement, let us say vesperal, into the dark.
So, at the beginning, I must admit to working this bridge with a certain singleness of intent.
This little book attempts a different view of the dream from those we are used to. Its thesis does not rely on ideas of repression (Freud) or of compensation (Jung), but imagines
dreams in relation with soul and soul with death.
I have come to believe that the entire procedure of dream interpretation
aiming at more consciousness about living is radically wrong.
And I mean “wrong” in all its fullness: harmful, twisted, deceptive, inadequate, mistaken, and exegetically insulting to its material, the dream.
When we wrong the dream, we wrong the soul, and if the soul has the intimate connection with death that tradition has always supposed, then mistaken dream interpretation deceives our dying.
What this dying and this death is in relation to dreams will be explored in
the following pages.
We begin by asking an obvious, though overlooked, question: To what mythological region, to what Gods, do dreams belong?
The assumption in the question is: were we to know “where” dreams belong, then we would know better what they want, what they mean, and what we are to do with them.
The consequences of the answer put the dream theory in this book on the base of myth-it is no secret that dreams belong to the underworld and its Gods, for our title announces this, and the short second chapter shows that a mythic base for dreams is an old story.
Freud, more or less unwittingly, made exactly this move, turning to the mythical underworld for grounding his theory of dreams.
What is new in what follows is the attempt ,to re-vision the dream in the light of myth.
Theories of dreams there are aplenty. Any well-stocked analytical community-uptown Manhattan, Harley Street or Hampstead, Beverly Hills,
Zurich-can display wares of all sorts: Freudian, orthodox Freudian, neo-Freudian, modified psychodynamic Freudian, Jungian in various contours and pastels, Gestalt-dramatical, transcendental-mystical, scientific-empirical, ego-behavioral, primal-parapsychological, as well as existential and phenomenological approaches that reach back to the romantics and
earlier.
Yet, none I know asks the mythic question; none tries to suggest a theory, and a praxis with it, derived from an archetypal approach to the whole business of dreams.
Others have seen myths in dreams and have used myths for smplifying dream motifs.
It is, however, another vision altogether to look at dreams as phenomena that emerge from a specific archetypal “place” and that correspond with a distinct mythic geography and then, further, to reflect this underworld
in psychological theory.
By connecting psychological theory with mythological theoria (“viewing,” “speculation”), we are essaying a psychology of dreams that tries to keep a sense of underworld always present in our work with them.
This move backwards from logos to mythos, this move against the historical stream of our culture, has. been taking me quite some time.
I first presented themes of this essay in a lecture in 1972 in New York City to the American Society of Arts, Religion, and Culture, under the genial chairmanship of Stanley Romaine Hopper, at the invitation of David Miller
and James Wiggins.
It was next expanded into my contribution to the Eranos Conference in Ascona, Switzerland, for the year 1973 and published in Correspondences in Man and World, * edited by Adolf Partmann and Rudolf Ritsema.
Though now much wider and fuller, it yet bears the marks of Eranos, where for several years I have been elaborating specific archetypal themes and the ways they influence our consciousness, particularly the ideas and attitudes of psychology.
I have looked at the psychology of ego development and growth in terms of the child archetype (1971), at the psychology of age versus youth in terms of the puer-senex pair (1967), at the diagnosis of hysteria and inferior femininity by means of the archetypal configuration of Dionysos (1969), and at the therapeutic concern with changing abnormality into normality
through the figures of Ananke and Athene (1974).
Each of these has been an attempt to see through accepted * Eranos Jahrbuch 42 (1973) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975).
psychological positions by placing them against a relevant
mythic background.
The hope has been that archetypal perspectives can rectify our vision of the psyche and give a more psychological (i.e., self-reflective, imaginal, and deeper) account of what psychology is saying and doing.
This essay, like those, is therefore an essay in epistrophe, reversion, return, the recall of phenomena to their imaginal background.
This principle-regarding phenomena in terms of their likenesses-derives more immediately from the work of Henry Corbin, a friend at Eranos, and the method of ta ‘wil that he has so profoundly explained and illustrated in his own immense work.*
Reversion through likeness, resemblance, is a primary principle for the archetypal approach to all psychic events.
Reversion is· a bridge too, a method which connects an event to its image, a psychic process to its myth, a suffering of the soul to the imaginal mystery expressed therein.
Epistrophe, or the return through likeness, offers to psychological understanding a main avenue for recovering order from the confusion
of psychic phenomena, other than Freud’s idea of development and Jung’s of opposites.
Besides, this method has two distinct advantages.
First, it makes us look again at the phenomenon: what is actually dreamed, actually stated, actually experienced, for only by scrutinizing the event at hand can we attempt to find which of many archetypal constellations
it might resemble.
“Which of many” is the second advantage: a single explanatory principle, regardless how profound and differentiated its formulation, such as Jung’s Self and its opposites or Freud’s development of the libido, does not offer the psyche’s native variety a diversity of resemblances.
Epistrophe implies return to multiple possibilities, correspondences with images that can not be encompassed within any systematic account.
- Ta ‘wit means literally, he says, ” ‘reconduire, ramener’ une chose a son origine et principe, a son archetype” (“to lead something back to its origin and principle, to its archetype”).
The image has been my starting point for the archetypal re-visioning of psychology.
This emphasis upon images is carried further and worked into more detail in this book.
In fact, this book becomes the main bridge-or tunnel-into my other writings.
For here the psychology of the image is placed more definitely within a psychology of dreams and of death.
A depth psychology which relies upon the shadowy images of fantasy, upon deepening and pathologizing, and upon therapy as a cult of soul is referring mythologically to the underworld.
To start with the image in depth psychology is to begin in the mythological underworld, so this book provides the mythical perspective to our psychology of the image.
The claim that images come first is to say that dreams are the primary givens and that all daylight consciousness begins in the night and bears its shadows.
Our depth psychology begins with the perspective of death.
The sp.ifts of perspective aim not only to criticize and rectify what has already been said in psychology, in this case about the dream.
More: the sudden shaft of insight that occurs when the bridge is struck between an ordinary event or a concept and its mythic resemblance can yield startling new perspectives in the taken-for-granted psychology of our own experience, as well as the all too familiar psychology of our
contemporary theory.
Despite my penchant for the radical and the scandalously new and my childish delight in seeing through the Emperor’s clothes, I have tried to keep strict limitations.
I would like to make these principles of limit clear at the outset, for they
are as much a description of scope and method as they are a statement of faith.
First, no matter how far up or down we go in the psyche with our speculations and soundings, we shall try to stay within the bounds of the Wes tern psyche, its cultural, geog’raphical, and historical roots in our tradition.
The romantic endeavor to explore and disclose is possible only within the
classic confines of the old, the known, and the limited.
Newness from this perspective means nothing more than renewal,
renascence, recuperation-not creation; what is said is addressed
to the dead and the past-not to the future, which will do what it will; it is a commentary, a footnote, upon what others have done before and better, a bridge backward.
So, second, we shall try to stay within the field of psychology. As Freud and Jung abjured anatomy, biology, natural science, and theology for their psychic premises, so the tradition of depth psychology is to stay at home and to create its own ground as it proceeds.
This ground~psychodynamics, psychotherapy, psychopathology-is surely well trodden by now, even if the field is only 80 years old.
But I do not imagine the grass to be greener in the other fields-it can
be green right under our feet, providing we work it afresh, which in depth psychology means digging ever deeper, a bridge downward.
Third, to make my limitations even more strict, that part of the psychological field we till is the very same field worked by Freud and by Jung.
It is, in fact, their field.
We shall plow it, however, from another _angle, not with their plow or in their furrows, but turning their soil in our style.
The contours that emerge may differ, but the field is the same limited one: the psyche of Western man in his historical tradition and cultural predicament; and the intention is the same as theirs: to articulate a psychology that reflects the passionate importance of the individual soul. A bridge inward. ~James Hillman, The Dream and The Underworld, Page 1-6
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