Dionysus in Depth Mystes Madness and Met PDF

CHAPTER 3
Dionysus in Depth: Mystes, Madness,

and Method in James Hillman’s
Re-visioning of Psychology
David M. Odorisio
Introduction
Dionysian logic is necessarily mystical. (Hillman 1983, 39)
James Hillman, critical of reductionist, materialist, and even “Jungian”

approaches to depth psychology, called for an imaginal, symptomatic,
Copyright © 2018. Palgrave Macmillan US. All rights reserved.
ideational, and multiple, or “polytheistic” approach to the psyche. He

termed his re-visioning, archetypal psychology, drawing inspiration from
neo-Platonic philosophy, Renaissance revivalists of ancient Greek culture,
and modern thinkers such as Henri Corbin. Hillman’s turn toward phi-
losophy and the humanities, as well as his poetic approach to psyche as
“soul,” formed an imaginative and original psychological hermeneutic
that considered seriously an inherently mystical, erotic, and transforma-
tional dimension of the unconscious.
D. M. Odorisio (*) 
Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
© The Author(s) 2018 37

T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism,
Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_3
Depth Psychology and Mysticism, edited by Thomas Cattoi, and David M. Odorisio, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2018.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5394733.
Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2018-05-22 15:35:08.
38 D. M. ODORISIO
This paper 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 psycholog-
ical 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.
At the same time, as a postmodern thinker, Hillman’s creative engage-
ment with classical Dionysian scholarship grounds his archetypal claims
in the historical past, while simultaneously reimagining Dionysus as con-
temporarily alive (or denied) in therapies, ideas, and cultures of the pres-
ent. Hillman’s “Dionysian hermeneutic” thus serves a multidimensional
depth psychological function: (1) as an embodied and erotic hermeneu-
tical tool for investigative research; (2) as a critical approach to disem-
bodied, misogynist, or normative biases in scholarly thinking against
potentially transformative mystical subjectivities; and (3) as an originative
methodology in the depth psychological evaluation of mysticism within
the field of religious studies.
This essay is structured around Hillman’s three focused works on
Dionysus and traces the varieties of his Dionysian methodological
unfolding. I begin with his The Myth of Analysis (1972), followed by the
essay, “Dionysus in Jung’s Writings” ([1972] 2001), and finally, Healing
Fiction (1983). In following these erotico-mystical strands, a certain
epistemology and methodology emerge that can be understood as char-
acteristically “Dionysian.” In conclusion, I will explore what implica-
tions Hillman’s “Dionysian logic” might have for a depth psychological
inquiry into mystical phenomenon, and consider how his Dionysian cor-
rective to certain arenas of “Apollonian” analysis might influence scholar-
ship within the discipline of religious studies.
Mystes: Dionysian Consciousness in The Myth of Analysis

Hillman’s The Myth of Analysis (1972) can be read as a direct address
to limitations he found both within psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and in
the scientific materialism of his day. With extended historical surveys—
and critiques—of medical, psychiatric, and depth psychological history,
3 DIONYSUS IN DEPTH: MYSTES, MADNESS, AND METHOD … 39
the book as a whole demonstrates the scope and vastness of Hillman’s

scholarship, as well as the creativity of his vision, and the scathe of his
tongue.
The three essays that comprise Myth were composed in response to
Hillman’s invitation to participate in the Eranos gatherings in the sum-
mers of 1967, ‘68, and ‘69, in Ascona, Switzerland. The later essay, on
Dionysus, Hillman entitled, “On Psychological Femininity,” and was
written in the midst of personal and professional crisis due to an affair
with a patient that went public while Hillman was Director of Studies
at the Jung Institute in Zurich. In a letter to his wife, dated March 11,
1969, Hillman wrote that this paper was written with “a great sense
of time and urgency” (Russell 2013, 630), mirroring perhaps not only
his own personal and professional crises, but also the collective cultural
waves of the late 1960s in both Europe and America.
This paper, on the “secondary position of women,” undermined “the
whole venture of scientific psychology,” which Hillman came to decon-
struct as, “aimed at repressing the Dionysian” (Russell 2013, 630). In
his turn toward and invocation of Dionysus, Hillman would intention-
ally recover an undercurrent in Western depth psychological thinking
that would restore and bring to the center of his archetypal project the
themes of emotionality, eros, the body, and materiality in general, as well
as the theoretical collapse of the repression of these qualities as projected
onto a denigrated “feminine.” In disassembling what he considered to
be the “Apollonic” logic behind scientific methodology and psycho-
logical analysis, Hillman reconstructs in Myth a depth psychology that

embraces these “feminine” qualities and finds a champion in that most
effeminate, and bisexual god of women—Dionysus.
“On Psychological Femininity”

The soul returns through the same door of its exile. (Hillman 2010, 290)
Hillman’s essay “On Psychological Femininity” traces the misogy-

nist underpinnings of Western notions of science and psychology from
Classical Greece through Galen to Freud, with the final conclusion
that, “The same view of female inferiority…runs with undeviating fidel-
ity from antiquity to psychoanalysis” (1972, 246–47). Hillman adds to
his medical and psychological review his own theoretical critique of the
archetypal dominants operating unconsciously throughout these histori-
cally male-oriented paradigms as well.
40 D. M. ODORISIO
Following Jung’s psychological interpretation of the Assumption of

Mary, Hillman argues in favor of a reclamation of “the earth, darkness,
the abysmal side of bodily man with his animal passions and instinctual
nature, and to ‘matter’ in general” (Jung 1954, 195; Hillman 1972,
215)—all qualities which have historically—and negatively—been pro-
jected upon “the feminine.” In other words, to Hillman, “the abys-
mal side of bodily man” is less about male bodies than it is about the
denigration of women through a “First Adam, then Eve” (1972, 248)
phenomenon where female bodies—and women in general—come to rep-
resent unconscious, or “shadow,” aspects of male psyches.1
To Hillman (1972), psychiatric and scientific misogyny has “resulted
in the need for psychotherapy to develop the inferior and feeble femininity”
(249). In other words, the method (founded in a form of scientific misog-
yny) has created the pathology (hysteria), which has necessitated the cure
(psychoanalysis). However, the “talking cure” remains incomplete in
that it is limited by the misogynist assumptions inherent in its underlying
method; therefore, as Hillman puts it, “the method defeats itself” (247).
Acknowledging that scientific methodology arose from specifically
male fantasies, Hillman (1972) writes, “We know next to nothing about
how feminine consciousness or a consciousness which has an integrated
feminine aspect [would] regard…the same data” (249). He continues:
Even the determination of what constitutes appropriate data, the very ques-
tions asked, the way the eye perceives through the microscope are deter-
mined by the specific consciousness we call scientific, Western, modern, and

which is the long-sharpened tool of the masculine mind that has discarded
part of its own substance, calling it ‘Eve,’ ‘female,’ and ‘inferior.’ (250)
Hillman refers to this kind of consciousness as “Apollonic, for, like its

namesake, it belongs to youth, it kills from a distance (its distance
kills), and, keeping the scientific cut of objectivity, it never merges with
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 dis-
tance 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).
or ‘marries’ its material” (250). Hillman concludes his methodological

deconstruction with, “Until the structure of… consciousness itself and
what we consider to be ‘conscious’ change[s]… man’s image of female infe-
riority…will continue” (251).
It is from this place that Hillman initiates his reconstructive move-
ment: the turn toward the Dionysian. Hillman (1972) first argues in
favor of Dionysian bisexuality and “androgynous consciousness” (259) as
a therapeutic corrective to normative approaches and methods. He then
unpacks a half-century of historical biases and scholarly projections upon
Dionysian “madness” as psychiatric diagnosis (i.e., hysteria), agreeing
with Dodds (1960) that, “our first step must be to unthink all this” (xii;
Hillman 1972, 274).2 He then comes to the denouement of his essay,
entitled, “The End of Analysis.”
By “end,” Hillman (1972) means both telos, or purpose, of psychoa-
nalysis, and its “termination in time: therapeutic psychology as over and
done with” (288). Arguing against an analytical and scientifically oriented
psychotherapy that leaves out, “Matter, body…female—and psyche too”
(288), Hillman instead positively revisions psychology along Dionysian
lines, with its emphasis on “prolonged moistening, a life in the child, hys-
terical attempts at incarnation through symptoms, an erotic compulsion
toward soul-making” (294). “Cure” then comes to be equated not with
scientific objectivity or Apollonian technique, but when “those realities of
the psyche called ‘feminine’ and ‘body’ are integral with consciousness”
(294). This necessitates a change in definitions of “consciousness,” as the
“therapeutic goal” is now experienced as a “weakening of consciousness,”

rather than a [Jungian] heroic “increase”; a “loosening and a forget-
ting…a true loss of what we have long considered to be our most pre-
cious human holding: Apollonic consciousness” (295).3
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.
42 D. M. ODORISIO
Hillman’s call for an “end” of analysis, and even a “postanalytic

age” (1972, 294), can be read biographically as a result of his separa-
tion from the Jung Institute and departure from Zurich. Theoretically,
his critique of science and return to psychological aspects relegated to
“the feminine” revisions and continues Jung’s work in creative and
novel directions. Through a transformational encounter with aspects
of the psyche considered “feminine,” so-called Apollonic conscious-
ness shifts into an emotionally toned and embodied awareness of the
psyche that is no longer one-sided in its approach. “Mystical, erotic,
[or] depressive” experience is no longer something that one “has,”
but is rather integrated within a multivalent and “bisexual” psyche
(Hillman 1972, 290).
Madness: Dionysus in Jung’s Writings

Hillman ([1972] 2007) further develops the theme of embodiment as
central to a “Dionysian” consciousness in his essay, “Dionysus in Jung’s
Writings.” Here, Hillman traces two divergent Dionysus’ as they develop
in Jung’s corpus: the first, a Wotan-conflated Germanic hybrid, and the
second, Dionysus dismembered, “a psychological process [requiring] a
body metaphor” (27). As in Myth, Hillman’s turn toward the Dionysian
is a turn toward the body—here as hermeneutic key—with dismember-
ment as metaphor for locating consciousness in the body. Hillman writes,
“Dionysus offers new insight into the rending pain of self-division, espe-
cially as a body experience” (27). This “rending…can be understood as

[a] particular kind of renewal…. necessary for awakening the conscious-
ness of the body” (28–9). Dionysus dis- and re-membered initiates psy-
che into the “archetypal consciousness of the body” (29), through a
Dionysian hermeneutic of renewal.4
4 “This is surely what a Dionysian individuation might look like: a kind of psycholog-
ical 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).
Method: Dream, Drama, Dionysus

In Healing Fiction (1983), Hillman again returns to his Dionysian
depth psychological project begun in Myth. His focus again is method,
only here, the interpretive landscape is the dream. Upending Freud’s
(1900) interpretation of the dream as leading from latent to manifest,
Hillman instead draws from Jung’s (1945) dream theory as “dramatic
structure” with its nature and content “read as theater” (Hillman 1983,
36).5 From this perspective, dream figures are read as actors on a stage,
and the dream as enactment rather than as an analytically interpreted
“coded message” (37) to be deciphered allegorically (e.g., Freud). In
other words, in shifting from allegorical to metaphorical, Hillman evokes
Dionysus as god of drama.
To Hillman (1983), “The unconscious produces dramas, poetic fic-
tions; it is a theater” (36). Hillman frames his “Dionysian hypothesis”
as a “logos” in its own right—not as opposed to, but different than, the
clarity of the Apollonian. Dionysian “theatrical logic” aids in understand-
ing “the dreaming soul from within” and speaks to its “theatrical poet-
ics” (37). Healing (catharsis) occurs through finding “freedom in playing
parts, partial, dismembered…never being whole but participating in the
whole that is a play” of one’s own life (38).
Embracing Dionysian division, Hillman (1983) writes, “The self divided
is precisely where the self is authentically located… Authenticity is the per-
petual dismemberment of being and not-being a self, a being that is always
in many parts, like a dream with a full cast” (39). Hillman’s Dionysian
logic shifts the interpretive frame not only from the perspective of below,
but viewed from the interior as well. This vantage point is not that of the
Apollonian or scientific view from above, exhibited by Pentheus “up his
tree” as the “detached observer” (39). Rather, “Dionysian logic is neces-
sarily mystical and transformational…requiring [a] process of esotericism,
of seeing through,” embodying characteristics of “movement, dance, and
flow” (39). Resolution occurs not through “conceptual opposites” (e.g.,
Jung), but through “dramatic tensions” (40). In the Dionysian portrayal,
“we are composed of agonies not polarities” (40).
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).
44 D. M. ODORISIO
Hillman’s dramatic lens shifts consciousness from mono Apollonian-

scientific logic to the polyphonic, theatrical, and “Dionysian” hermeneu-
tic of enactment, personae, movement, and flow. In doing so, he argues
against Freud’s reductionist hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur 1970)
and embraces a participatory re-visioning, where consciousness itself is
multivalent, with a variety of actors invoking numerous gods through
multiple masks.
Conclusion: Mystes as Means and as Method

Hillman’s Dionysian depth psychological re-visioning can be contextual-
ized within what Parsons (1999) refers to as both a third-wave “transfor-
mational approach” (11) within therapeutic psychology, and operating
within the framework of “psychology as a religion” (13).6 Furthermore,
Hillman’s formulations of a Dionysian hermeneutic can not only be read
alongside but also potentially contribute to Kripal’s (2001, 2007) inves-
tigations regarding the transformative dimensions of a “hermeneutical
union” that can be considered academically gnostic (Kripal 1999, 369).
Writing from within a strong psychology as religion orientation, how-
ever, distinguishes Hillman from Kripal’s (2007) Feuerbachian and gnos-
tically informed “mystical humanism” (88), in that Hillman places the
revelatory and ontological implications of his transformational hermeneu-
tic firmly within the imaginal capacities of the psyche itself. To Hillman
(1972), it is through engagement with archetypal material (as image), that
one emerges as mystes. In this sense, Hillman’s underlying epistemological

claims can be considered not only “mystical” in the classical sense,7 but
also “gnostic,” in that he affords a revelatory and ontologically numinous
dimension to the psyche’s image-generating orientation.8
6 Parsons (1999) is referring specifically to psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with three his-
torical (yet overlapping) “waves,” or trends: (1) Freudian reductionism, (2) neo-Freudian
“adaptive” approaches to religion, and (3) “transformational” approaches favorable to reli-
gious 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 Although Kripal remains agnostic on certain ontological claims, his later work on comic
books and the image-generating and symbolic capacity of the psyche is more in alignment
with Hillman's position here (see Kripal 2011, 2017).
Articulating these claims, Hillman (1972) describes the psyche’s

“reflective subjectivity, its own afflictions, pathologies, and fantasies” as
the locus “where the archetype can speak individually and directly, where
our psychopathology is a revelation, a gnosis” (217).9 This is Hillman’s
own “mystical hermeneutic” par excellence and reveals his ontologi-
cal assumptions about the inherent numinosity of the psyche and firmly
establishes his claims within the context of a psychology as religion
framework. Hillman’s telos is the transformation of consciousness itself.
His interest is not in novel or adaptive therapeutic ideation alone; rather,
Hillman’s depth psychological project is mystical, methodological (i.e.,
hermeneutic), and gnostic at its core.
I would like to conclude with a few open-ended considerations for
the depth psychological study of mysticism, orientated in two directions:
(1) toward scholarship within the discipline of religious studies, spe-
cifically within the field of comparative mysticism, and (2) toward the
scholar as practitioner/witness-participant of mystical realities (Kripal
2001). If Hillman (1972) can question the “Dionysian possibilities for
therapeutic psychology” (266), I believe it is fair to ask the same of
certain methodological assumptions within the field of religious stud-
ies as well, and to question these implications for scholar-practitioners
of mystical orientations. To Hillman, “consciousness informed by the
Dionysian approach brings quite a different point of view” (263). What
layers of meaning would such an approach reveal if implemented within
the academic study of religion? If the moisture of Dionysus, the embod-
iment of his dance, or the multiple personae of his dramatic troupe were
suddenly—and without warning—let loose upon what is often consid-
ered methodologically “normative”?10
9 Compare to Kripal (1999): “For [some] scholars, academic method and personal expe-
rience 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 salv-
ific. In a word, it is a gnosis” (369).
10 By “normative,” I am referring here to “monosyllabic,” i.e., androcentric and logo-
centric approaches that often discount embodied, intuitive, or imaginal experiencing in

research. Coppin and Nelson (2005) and Romanyshyn (2007) outline a variety of such her-
meneutic and methodological possibilities from within a depth psychological orientation
that could be considered “Dionysian.”
46 D. M. ODORISIO
If Dionysus were to be invoked as “loosener” (lysios), what, in the aca-

demic study of religion or comparative mysticism, would need “setting
free, deliverance, collapse, breaking [of ] bonds [or] laws, [or] the final
unraveling…[of ] plot” (Hillman 1983, 29)? What would be the impli-
cations of going to pieces alongside one’s scholarly material, or encoun-
tering ideological dismemberment of one’s “objective” apparatuses?11
Hillman (1983) suggests, “if we miss the possibilities for light in expe-
riences of dissolution [or dismemberment], we then tend to emphasize,
as a defensive compensation, centering and wholeness” (30).12 Perhaps
more relevant here would be a defensively “monotheistic” or Cyclops-
esque reliance on cognicentric interpretations of mystical phenomenon.13
From this perspective, some approaches to scholarship, while perhaps
commendably constructed at the altar of Apollo, might simultaneously
be serving a defensive, even colonizing strategy, limiting or reducing the
same material one sought to illuminate, thus defeating (in this case) the
mystical with one’s own method (Hillman 1972, 247).
A Dionysian methodology would attempt to “stay always within the
mess of ambivalence, the comings and goings of the libido, letting inte-
rior movements replace clarity, interior closeness replace objectivity, the
child of psychic spontaneity replace literal right action” (Hillman 1972,
295). Religious studies as a discipline, and its study of mystical phenom-
enon in particular, when approached from the perspective of Dionysian
consciousness, might not resemble “scholarship” at all, at least not as it
has been traditionally defined or currently envisioned. An “end of schol-
arship” might just occur, lest scholars of mysticism become, as Hillman

warns, like “trained analysts of greater ‘consciousness’ who are also imag-
inal duds” (297).
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, relativ-
ism, and religious doubt” (368).
12 Hillman’s remarks on “centering and wholeness” are made in the context of his cri-
tique 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, emo-
tional, 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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CHAPTER 3

Dionysus in Depth: Mystes, Madness,

James Hillman, critical of reductionist, materialist, and even “Jungian”

ideational, and multiple, or “polytheistic” approach to the psyche. He

© The Author(s) 2018 37

Mystes: Dionysian Consciousness in The Myth of Analysis

the book as a whole demonstrates the scope and vastness of Hillman’s

logical analysis, Hillman reconstructs in Myth a depth psychology that

“On Psychological Femininity”

Hillman’s essay “On Psychological Femininity” traces the misogy-

Following Jung’s psychological interpretation of the Assumption of

mined by the specific consciousness we call scientific, Western, modern, and

Hillman refers to this kind of consciousness as “Apollonic, for, like its

or ‘marries’ its material” (250). Hillman concludes his methodological

“therapeutic goal” is now experienced as a “weakening of consciousness,”

[Dionysus] for a diagnosis. So without initiation into Dionysian consciousness, we have

Hillman’s call for an “end” of analysis, and even a “postanalytic

Madness: Dionysus in Jung’s Writings

cially as a body experience” (27). This “rending…can be understood as

Method: Dream, Drama, Dionysus

of Place, Dramatis Personae, Exposition; Development of Plot; Culmination or Crisis;

Hillman’s dramatic lens shifts consciousness from mono Apollonian-

Conclusion: Mystes as Means and as Method

one emerges as mystes. In this sense, Hillman’s underlying epistemological

6 Parsons (1999) is referring specifically to psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with three his-

Articulating these claims, Hillman (1972) describes the psyche’s

centric approaches that often discount embodied, intuitive, or imaginal experiencing in

If Dionysus were to be invoked as “loosener” (lysios), what, in the aca-

arship” might just occur, lest scholars of mysticism become, as Hillman

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CHAPTER 3

Dionysus in Depth: Mystes, Madness,

Madness: Dionysus in Jung’s Writings

Conclusion: Mystes as Means and as Method