The psychologist James Hillman died late last year of bone cancer at the age of eighty-five.

Over
a ten-year period The Sun published three interviews with Hillman, covering such topics as the
failures of therapy, the benefits of aging, and the limits of parents influence on their children. To
honor him and his contribution to the world of ideas, were reprinting portions of all three
interviews, accompanied by a personal tribute from Hillmans friend and writing colleague Michael
Ventura.
Born in 1926 in New Jersey, Hillman served in the U.S. Navy Hospital Corps during World War II.
He went to college in France and Ireland before earning his PhD at the University of Zurich in
Switzerland, where he studied with Carl Jung. Hillman went on to become the director of studies
at the C.G. Jung Institute and wrote more than twenty books over the course of his career,
including the seminal Re-Visioning Psychology, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and,
with Michael Ventura, Weve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the Worlds Getting
Worse. The collection A Blue Fire, edited by Thomas Moore, is perhaps the best introduction to
his work.
Hillman was a frequent critic of mainstream psychology, perceiving its focus on improving the self
to be limiting. He believed each individual has a purpose or calling in life that reveals itself in
childhood and reappears, often as a set of so-called symptoms, until it is heeded. Harnessing this
potential is what he considered the great mortal, and moral, challenge. He once said our duty is
not to rise above life but to grow down into it.
Hillman was the epitome of an independent thinker, unsettling people wherever he went, a fact
that seemed to delight more than concern him. Many Jungians considered Hillman a renegade
because he attempted to refine several of Jungs theories, treating none of them as sacrosanct.
An editor who rejected one of Hillmans early manuscripts said it would set psychology back
three hundred years. It is doubtful Hillman would have minded doing just that; he felt, above all,
that we need a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern
consciousness.
The interviews reprinted here are from three separate conversations: Sy Safransky, editor and
publisher of The Sun, conducted the first interview in North Carolina in 1990; writer Scott London
did the second in California in 1997; and the late writer Genie Zeiger spoke with Hillman at his
home in New England in 2000.
As Safransky put it in the introduction to his interview, listening to Hillman is like stepping off a
bus into the clamorous, exotic, slightly menacing streets of a foreign city. Youre asked to leave
behind fantasies of growth and self-improvement; to search the narrow, twisting alleys for better
questions, not answers; to be prepared for trouble.
Tim McKee, Managing Editor
Safransky: Youve criticized modern psychology for giving feelings too much emphasis. Youve
said weve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and
the world is getting worse and worse.
Hillman: I dont think that feeling has been given too much attention. What one feels is very
important, but how do we connect therapys concerns about feeling with the disorder of the world,
especially the political world? As this preoccupation with feeling has grown, our sense of political
engagement has dropped off. How does therapy make the connection between the exploration
and refinement of feeling, which is its job, and the political world, which it doesnt think is its job?
Therapy has become a kind of individualistic, self- improvement philosophy, a romantic ideology
that suggests each person can become fuller, better, wiser, richer, more effective. I believe we
have now two ideologies that run the country. One is economics, and the other is therapy. These
are the basic, bottom-line beliefs that we return to in our private moments these are what keep
us going.
Safransky: When you say the country, dont you mean those people who share certain cultural
and intellectual attitudes? The insights of therapy dont seem mainstream.
Hillman: The insights of therapy are part of the mainstream. We have mental-health clinics all
over the nation, in every city and county. And they all produce pamphlets about how to deal with
the problems of addiction, battered wives, childhood disorders. There are therapists throughout
the country, and theyre very important, because they pick up the refuse of the economic-political
system. Someone has to pick these people up, and therapy does it. But therapy operates with an

ideology an individualistic, must-learn-to-cope ideology. The individual has to learn how to

cope, and the therapist helps that person stay in control. This ideology is based on the idea of
individual growth and potential. Most schools of therapy share the idea that theres an inner world
that can be made to expand and grow, and that people are living short of their possibilities, and
that they need help to . . . what shall we call it? Fulfill their potential.
Safransky: Still, it seems to me that those who run the country arent more sensitive but instead
deny their own woundedness. Its hard to see how the increased popularity of therapy has led to
a degraded politics.
Hillman: I wont insist on a cause-and-effect relation. But I do believe theres a correlation, for two
reasons. The first concerns the child archetype in therapy, an archetype that tends to depoliticize
the client. Once one is engaged in feeling abused, in feeling victimized, one also feels powerless
and seeks to locate blame outside of oneself. The client is concerned with the past, with what
happened to him or her, with ones own individual growth. Yet the child is apolitical per se, is not a
political being. Second, the class that first bestowed power on those who rule is composed of the
white American suburbanites, who also happen to be the people in therapy. I may be wrong about
this; I dont know the statistics. But there have been fewer and fewer people voting since the
Nixon-Kennedy race. The withdrawal from the political arena of the better people, the more
intelligent, the more sensitive people, has allowed those now in power to gain power in the first
place.
Safransky: Isnt the emphasis on the individual at the heart of the American experience? Theres
always been a mythology here of rugged individualism.
Hillman: There are many who have located the roots of the therapeutic movement in the
individualism embraced by nineteenth-century modernism, in which everyone is the author of his
or her intentions and is responsible for his or her own life. Own. Own is a very big word in
therapy; you own your life, as if there were a self an individual, enclosed self within a skin.
Thats individualism. Thats the philosophy of therapy. I question that. The self could be redefined,
given a social definition, a communal definition.
Safransky: Can you say more about the child archetype and the emphasis in psychology on going
back to the past in order to learn who we are in the present?
Hillman: Where you are is as important as where you came from. What you do every day is as
important to the soul, to the revelation of the soul, as what your parents did to you, or what you
were like when you were five or ten. We dont generally subscribe to such notions, not really;
instead we emphasize the notion of individual career, personal biography. This notion is faulty
because its too singular to begin with. We could fault this model of the self even further. But its
hard to sit here and imagine other models. Do you see what I mean? Its hard to shift to an
emphasis on the end of life, or to the social, geographical context of life, to the you who is what
you do, to the you that you create with every move. Now, that would be a Zen thing, wouldnt it?
Every move you make, every bite you eat, every word you say is inventing yourself. We think the
soul is already made by what happened early on, and were always trying to fix it, to adjust it. But
suppose Im making it now, as I talk?
Safransky: Yet who you are, talking, is also made up of who you were.
Hillman: Thats what we think. But can we conceive of the possibility that I change what I once
was by what I say now? That I am no longer what I was? Perhaps what I was is only a fantasy,
just as the time of time past is a fantasy.
Now, in a Judeo-Christian culture, that is tough thinking. Because our Judeo-Christian culture
believes absolutely in the reality of history. We believe in it to such an extent that we send
archaeologists to Palestine to find remnants of the historical Jesus. But Jesus is powerful not
because he was in Palestine two thousand years ago, but because hes a living figure in the
psyche. We dont have to dig up a remnant to show that hes powerful. But our culture is very
historically minded. There are other cultures that are not historically minded at all. Theyre much
more concerned with whether or not the trees are in good shape and are speaking to you. Much
more concerned. Or whether the river has changed course: thats something to worry about. My
goodness, if the fish turn belly up, that is far more important to my soul than what my mother did
to me when I was four.
Can we imagine that way? What Im trying to do is simply imagine in this way, rather than make a
literal statement that the fish are more important than my mother.

Safransky: To some people, changing society and working on oneself arent mutually exclusive.
Hillman: Freud argued that the self is truly noncommunal, fundamentally individual. Jung said that
we are each makeweights in the scales that what you do in your psychological life tips the
balance of the world one way or another. The pervasive therapeutic ideology today urges a
similar point: if I really straighten myself out the rainmaker fantasy if I really put myself in
order, then the world
Safransky: Whats the rainmaker fantasy?
Hillman: Its the old, mystical idea that once the rainmaker puts himself or herself in order, the rain
falls. Its the shamanistic idea that unless Im in order, I cant put anything else in order. Its also
an idea basic to modern therapeutic practice: How are you going to help the world if youre not in
order? Youre just going to be acting out; youre going to be out in the street, making trouble. First
get inside yourself, find out who you are, get yourself straightened out, and then go out into the
world; then you can be useful. Understand, Im arguing the therapeutic point of view now: Put all
the architects, the politicians, the scientists, the doctors into therapy, where theyll find
themselves, get in touch with their feelings, become better people. Then they can go out and help
the world.
Weve held to that view, but I dont think thats it; I dont think it works. I wish it did, but I dont think
it does.
Safransky: Youve written that pathology is not a medical problem to be cured but the souls way
of working on itself. I was curious how that perspective extends to the question of addiction.
Hillman: Addiction is one of the big words of our time. Do you think addiction is located
intrapsychically? Is the problem located inside me? Consider bulimia, the eating disorder. Now, I
think an eating disorder is a food disorder. I think theres disorder in the food, in our relation to
substances, so that we become addicted to them. We could say the addiction is a symptom; a
symptom is always a compromise between an appropriate relation to a substance and a sick
relation to a substance. Whats important in an addiction is the value of the substance, the value
of something external to me, on which I depend totally. Its this that the addiction recognizes:
there is something outside of me with which I must be in touch. Whether it involves
codependency Im talking here of a love object, of someone to whom Im addicted in a
relationship or addiction to a substance, the result is the same: my psyche cant live without
this other. But [the author] Eric Hoffer said: You can never get enough of what you dont really
want. You dont really want the alcohol. If you can find out what you really want, if you can find
your true desire, then youve got the answer to your addiction.
Safransky: To what extent do you feel twelve-step groups recognize this?
Hillman: They partly recognize it. They channel the desire toward something spiritual. But these
support groups bother me, too. When you were a child, if you lived in a city, your father probably
went out on Tuesday night to a ward meeting with the Democrats or the Republicans, to some
meeting dealing with politics. Now we go out because were fat; we go out on a Tuesday night to
meet other fat people. On Wednesday night we go out because our parents abused us; Thursday,
because we drink too much. We meet single-issue people. We meet through our symptoms.
Its a new way of organizing the political world, the communal world: in terms of pathology. For
everyone to sit around a room because theyre fat I dont know if thats a way civilization can
continue. I want to meet with people who are fat, and black, and green, and white, and
exhibitionists, and Republicans. Thats what a democracy is about.
Safransky: I understand your point, but maybe you feel this way because youre not struggling
with being fat or with having been an abused child.
Hillman: But why? Why is it that I have so reduced my struggle the struggle of life, the very
engagement that is life to the fact that I am obese or that I fall in love too much? You see what
I mean?
Safransky: Im trying to see it from the point of view of someone in such a group.
Hillman: I think that group of overeaters could begin to realize what goes on in school lunches,
and what goes on in advertisements for potato chips. There are acutely political dimensions here,
dimensions that this group could work to identify. There has to be some imagination on their part,
some effort, if they are going to see that their problem is not just something inside their own skin.
Theres also the matter of the cell physiology, the physiological problems of obesity. There are
lots of things. But all of them, all such points of view, tend to narrow the problem and in this way

keep it from the communal. And I want it to go on into the communal. Theres a fundamental
political task. As Aristotle noted, Man is by nature a political animal. Thats very important.
Suppose we begin seeing ourselves not as patients but as citizens. Then what would therapy be
like? Suppose the man or woman coming to you as the therapist is, above all else, a citizen. Then
youre going to have to think about these people a little differently; theyre no longer just cases.
Im not sure what this leads to, but it points to a fundamental shift in emphasis.
Safransky: Youre rather an uncompromising critic of spiritual movements and everything called
new age. You once suggested that meditation is a fascistic activity, that people who meditate
are as uncaring as psychopathic killers.
Hillman: I did once remark that meditation, in todays world, is obscene. To go into a room and sit
on the floor and meditate on a straw mat with a little incense going is an obscene act. Now, what
do I mean? What was I saying, for Gods sake, aside from shooting off my mouth? I was saying
that the world is in a terrible, sad state, but all were concerned with is trying to get ourselves in
order.
I remember hearing a student say something once that threw me into a real tizzy. He said we
should meditate and let computers take care of world problems. They could do it much better
than humans. I mean, he was really spiritually detached from the world.
Safransky: It sounds like he was also emotionally detached, but something called spirituality
gets the rap.
Hillman: Your question is very legitimate. I dont want to be locked into an antimeditation position.
I think every consumer for that is what we actually are needs a lot of neutral time, a lot of
turnover time: idleness, fantasies, images, reflections, emptiness; not necessarily disciplined
meditation. But when meditation becomes a spiritual goal, and then the method to achieve a
spiritual goal thats what worries me.
Safransky: And the goal youre suspicious of is transcendence.
Hillman: Yes. The quest to flee the so-called trivia of the lower order seems misguided. Personal
hang-ups, fighting with the man or woman you live with, worrying about your dreams this is the
souls order.
Safransky: What if the goal is merely a few minutes of calm?
Hillman: If thats the goal, whats the difference between meditation and having a nice drink? Or
going to the hairdresser and sitting for an hour and flipping through a magazine? Or writing a long
letter, a love letter? Do you realize what were not doing in this culture? Having an evenings
conversation with people; that can be so relaxing. I think weve misguidedly locked on to
meditation as the main method for settling down.
Its better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all. I know when
somethings wrong. And I can say, This is outrageous. This is insulting. This is a violation. And its
wrong. I dont know what we should do about it; my protest is absolutely empty. But I believe in
that empty protest.
You see, one of the ways you get trapped into not going into the world is when people usually
in positions of power say, Oh, yeah, wise guy? What would you do about it? What would you
do about the Persian Gulf crisis? I dont know what Id do. I dont know. But I know when I feel
something is wrong, and I trust that sense of outrage, that sense of insult. And so, empty protest
is a valid way of expressing feeling, politically. Remember, thats where we began: how do you
connect feeling with politics? Well, one of the ways is through that empty protest. You dont know
whats right, but you know whats wrong.

London: In The Souls Code you talk about something called the acorn theory. What is the acorn
theory?
Hillman: Well, its more of a myth than a theory. Its Platos myth: that you come into the world with
a destiny, although he uses the word paradigm instead of destiny. The acorn theory says that
there is an individual image that belongs to your soul.
The same myth can be found in the kabala. The Mormons have it. The West Africans have it. The
Hindus and the Buddhists have it in different ways. They tie it more to reincarnation and karma,
but you still come into the world with a particular destiny. Native Americans have it very strongly.
So all these cultures all over the world have this basic understanding of human existence. Only
American psychology doesnt have it.

London: In our culture we tend to think of calling in terms of vocation or career.

Hillman: Yes, but calling can refer not only to ways of doing meaning work but also to ways
of being. Take being a friend. Goethe said that his friend Eckermann was born for friendship.
Aristotle made friendship one of the great virtues; in his book on ethics, three or four chapters are
on friendship. In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But its hard for us to think of friendship as
a calling, because its not a vocation.
London: Motherhood is another example that comes to mind. Mothers are now expected to have
a vocation above and beyond being a mother.
Hillman: Right, its not enough just to be a mother. Its not only the social pressure placed on
mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on
them. Its a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to
have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation
of motherhood the sense that motherhood isnt itself a calling also arises from economic
pressure.
London: What implications do your ideas have for parents?
Hillman: I think what Im saying should relieve them hugely and make them want to pay more
attention to their child, this peculiar stranger who has landed in their midst. Instead of saying,
This is my child, they must ask, Who is this child who happens to be mine? Then they will gain
a lot more respect for the child and try to keep an eye open for instances where the kids destiny
might show itself like in a resistance to school, for example, or a strange set of symptoms one
year, or an obsession with one thing or another. Maybe something very important is going on
there that the parents didnt see before.
London: Symptoms are so often seen as weaknesses.
Hillman: Right, so they set up some sort of medical or psychotherapeutic program to get rid of
them, when the symptoms may be the most crucial part of the kid. There are many stories in my
book that illustrate this.
London: How much resistance do you encounter to your idea that we choose our parents before
we are born?
Hillman: Well, it annoys a lot of people who hate their parents, or whose parents were cruel and
deserted them or abused them. But its amazing how, when you ponder that idea for a little bit, it
can free you of a lot of blame and resentment and fixation on your parents.
London: I got into a lengthy discussion about your book with a friend of mine. Shes the mother of
a six-year-old and, though she subscribes to your idea that her daughter has a unique potential,
perhaps even a code, she is wary of what that means in practice. She fears that it might saddle
the child with a lot of expectations.
Hillman: Shes a very intelligent mother. I think, however, that the worst atmosphere for a sixyear-old is one in which there are no expectations whatsoever. That is, its worse for the child to
grow up in a vacuum where whatever you do is all right. Im sure youll succeed. That is a
statement of disinterest; it says, I really have no fantasies for you at all.
A mother should have some fantasy about her childs future. It will increase her interest in the
child, for one thing. To turn the fantasy into a program to make the child fly an airplane across the
country, for example, isnt the point. Thats the fulfillment of the parents own dreams. Thats
different. Having a fantasy which the child will either seek to fulfill or rebel against furiously
at least gives the child some expectation to meet or reject.
London: What is the first step toward understanding ones calling?
Hillman: Its important to ask yourself, How am I useful to others? What do people want from
me? That may very well reveal what you are here for.
Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy
your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for
help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS.
What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation
mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling, too. When you
look into the archetypal nature of taxation, you realize that all civilizations have had taxation of
one sort or another. Some of the earliest Egyptian writing is about tax collecting the scribe
recording what was paid and what wasnt paid.
So when you consider the archetypal, historical, and cultural background of whatever you do, it

gives you a sense that your occupation can be a calling and not just a job.
London: What do you think of traditional techniques for revealing the souls code, such as the
wise woman who reads palms, or the village elders whose job it is to look at a child and see that
childs destiny? Would it be helpful to revive these traditions?
Hillman: First of all, I dont know if you can revive traditions on purpose. Second of all, I think
those traditions are still going on underground. Many people will tell you about some astrologer
who said this or that to them, or some teacher. So its very widespread in the subculture.
What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the childs destiny. You
have to have a feeling for the child. Its almost an erotic thing, like the filmmaker Elia Kazans
stories of how his teacher took to him. She once wrote to him in a letter, When you were only
twelve, you stood near my desk one morning, and the light from the window fell across your head
and features and illuminated the expression on your face. The thought came to me of the great
possibilities there were in your development. She saw his beauty. Now, that, you see, is
something different from just going to the wise woman.
London: In your book you tell a similar story about the author Truman Capote.
Hillman: In Capotes case his teacher responded to his crazy fantasies. He was a difficult boy who
threw temper tantrums in which he would lie on the floor and kick, who refused to go to class,
who combed his hair all the time an impossible kid. She responded to his absurdities with
equal absurdities. She took to him. Teachers today cant take to a child. It will be called
manipulation, or seduction, or pedophilia.
London: Or preferential treatment.
Hillman: Right. James Baldwin is another example. He attended a little Harlem schoolhouse of
fifty kids. Conditions were appalling. His teacher was a Midwestern white woman. And yet they
clicked.
You see, we dont need to get back to the wise woman in the village. We need to get back to
trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a childs beauty and singling that child out.
Thats how the mentor system works youre caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your
imagination and theirs come together.
London: Of all the historical figures you studied while researching your book, who fascinated you
the most?
Hillman: They all did. All these stories fascinated me. Take Martin Scorsese, another filmmaker,
for example. He was a very short kid and had terrible asthma. He couldnt go out into the streets
of Little Italy in Manhattan and play with the other kids. So he would sit up in his room and look
out the window at what was going on and make little drawings cartoons, with numerous frames
of the scene. In effect he was making movies at nine years old.
London: You write that the great task of a life-sustaining culture is to keep the invisibles
attached. What do you mean by that?
Hillman: It is a difficult idea to present without leaving psychology and getting into religion. I dont
talk about who the invisibles are or where they live or what they want. There is no real theology in
it. But its the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to
something other than humans.
London: God?
Hillman: Yes, but it doesnt have to be that lofty.
London: Our calling?
Hillman: I think the first step is to realize that each of us has such a thing. And then we must look
back over our lives at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and
sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that
when peculiar accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. It
doesnt necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of highlevel magic that the new age hopes to press on us. Its more a sensitivity, such as a person living
in a tribal culture would have: The concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential
way of living.
London: When you talk in those terms, it seems to me that the boundary between psychology and
theology gets blurred. Psychology deals with the will, and religion deals with fate. Yet this is not
clearly one or the other but a bit of both.
Hillman: Youre right. It isnt such an easy thing as the old argument of free will versus

predestination. The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means portion. Fate rules a portion of
your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics,
and so on. So its not all written in the book before you get here, such that you dont have to do
anything. Thats fatalism.
London: What is the danger for a child who grows up never understanding his or her destiny?
Hillman: I think our entire civilization exemplifies that danger. People are itchy and lost and bored
and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do
all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture.
They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has
come with them into the world.
London: Is it possible never to discover that something else to turn your back on it or to resist
it and therefore waste your life?
Hillman: I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not. You may not
become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness, or divorce, or unhappiness. But I
think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those
things.