But Hillman was a towering presence long before he was a star. His post-Jungian "archetypal psychology" -- fleshed out in such earlier works as Re-Visioning Psychology, Inter Views, and The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World -- is the guiding force behind psychotherapy's rekindled interest in notions like soul and imagination as keys to the psyche; all of Thomas Moore's many bestsellers, from Care of the Soul on down, are in effect popular translations of Hillman's rich body of ideas. And no one has offered more trenchant criticisms of the great American therapy industry -- its relentless insistence that we are merely products of our respective family histories, its inflation of "feelings" psychology, its refusal to turn from inner pathologies to the sickness of the world at large.
The Force of Character, which deals with the psychology of aging, is ostensibly far removed from The Soul's Code, a book about the struggle in youth to find one's "calling" in life. But the real subject of both books is the discovery and embrace of the most stubborn, idiosyncratic, irreducible elements of oneself. "In America," says Hillman, "we're very prone to the sociological generalization -- about Southerners, about blacks, about women, about old people. It's almost as if we don't have a sharp enough eye to see peculiarities."
The Stranger: There's a theme running through your writing to the effect that the psychology of soul is intimately tied up with an underlying awareness of death. Yet here, in a book about the later stages of life, you stubbornly avoid the subject of death, writing at one point that it's important to "decouple death from aging." I'm curious about the shift in emphasis.
James Hillman: Well, maybe we have to re-understand what that death is that I was emphasizing in earlier writings, like The Dream and the Underworld. There, I was talking about what's called hyponoia, the underside of life that deepens it, darkens it, puzzles it, negates it. That whole darkness that shadows life. That's the "death" that the soul is connected with.
Is it fair to say that the contemplation of death is more rightfully the province of the younger person?
Yes, that's a very good point. Because the younger person is usually so embraced by life, so carried on the wave of it, that death comes as a terrible surprise. You fall off the mountain or you drown in the sea. It's somehow not part of life as it is in old age. It is important in youth to think about the darkness that shadows life.
You write early in the book that as one approaches the later part of life, "character learns wisdom from the body." It reminded me of an image I came across once in a poem, suggesting that whatever is supple and bending is vital, and whatever is upright and hard tends toward mortification and death. Which implies that the physical infirmities associated with aging can do a lot to deepen character and soul if one engages them, tries to have a conversation with them, rather than simply resisting them.
You're right there -- it's the fighting that produces... it's like the old warrior in astrological lore. The aging Mars turns to rust, and lives in a tower. His activity becomes rigid. But what the body goes through -- the body's always a teacher in some way, if you listen. It's really very important; it's why one gets involved with all these kinds of exercises old people do, like tai chi. These are ways of getting more familiar with how the body speaks,whereas the medical approach to the aging body somehow is a displacement from the body to the medicine. People say, "What are you taking for it?" and you talk about dosage, and whether you're getting results from it.
You think it's a reflection of our culture's terrible fear of death that we go to such lengths to anesthetize pain and camouflage discomfort?
I don't know if it's -- it's either death or darkness, in part, but that doesn't satisfy me. I really don't know what makes American culture so absolutely obsessed with youth. It's also the belief that we're a young country. And we're not. We're not a young country demographically, and we're not a young country historically.
It's always struck me that a lot of what we call maturation or the getting of wisdom is simply a product of the growing incapacity to outrun troublesome situations, or bull our way through them by virtue of sheer stamina.
Hemingway said life breaks everyone. And it's a question of what you do with the breaks. So you're saying wisdom is the result of defeat.
Right -- of being no longer able to outrun problems and contradictions to the extent we once could.
So our culture has three shibboleths: Have a nice day; hey, no problem!; and smile. And we just heard the principal of Columbine High School welcoming the students all back. They walled off the library so that the site of the tragedy can't even be entered. They don't know what to do with it. And then he ranted to the student body -- I heard his voice on the radio -- we will not tolerate racial slurs, gender discrimination... he ran down a long list. Essentially he said they would not tolerate intolerance. And the parents of the dead were insulted that there was not a moment of remembrance. The principal said that that was behind us now, and we must move forward. Now that's the American reaction. I don't think it was the American reaction after the Civil War at all. But something has happened. Something has happened.
Well, empire happened, for one -- the American consciousness is pretty conditioned to the notion that consequences, pain, history... they're all for suckers. They're for other people to deal with. If you're a winner, as we are, then part of the spoils is that you don't have to deal with those things. And of course that will color the way you view age and infirmity and the gaining of wisdom. What's wisdom, after all? It's superfluous; it's not action.
No. And you don't need education. That's very dearly held in America. People in corporations, people at the top, usually have worked their way up through the ranks. The way up in America is meeting the challenges and killing the bull. Winning. Everybody at the top is a winner, and the more we emphasize winning -- well, of course every race has losers. So the more we emphasize winning in America, the more losers we create. But the delusion remains that we can all be winners. And one way of proving we can all be winners is gambling.
Ah -- that's interesting. It pertains to this book in a way I hadn't considered: Who flocks to the casinos? Busloads of retired people are a pretty prominent part of the crowd.
It's the chance still to be lucky, to win at the end, even though you feel everything's gone and you didn't win. You may still be a winner. You may still fulfill the American Dream -- starting from nothing and finding gold in the streets. I came out of a log cabin, like Lincoln. Or from Hope, Arkansas.
And it's also the American Dream to learn nothing in the process, to be unfazed by every experience along life's path. Part of the way Americans cling to a sense of vitality is by this perverse refusal to change their behavior, to act as if they've learned nothing in getting older.
Okay, now we're at the true folly of old age. In my mind, what I would condemn is innocence. That's what the writers who left the country -- Mark Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald -- that's what they felt: that Americans were just perversely innocent. And so the aim in America is too often not to be a wise old woman, but to be a naive old woman. I mean, I'm being very hard here, because there's certainly an awful lot of old women and old men who are trying to help their families, who are working in hospices and taking care of people. But the deepest psychic wish in America is not to be savvy, not to have a face that looks like someone in Kosovo or South Africa or the south side of Chicago. It's to have a face that looks sweet and perky and belies your age -- that proclaims the innocence of your soul. That's why they want to change their faces; they really want their faces to look as unlined, as unmarked, as untragic, as they themselves wish to feel.
One of the qualities you associate with advancing age is that "the elemental things in life assume a greater significance." The British TV dramatist Dennis Potter talked about this in his final interview -- the staggering and beautiful particularity he was seeing in each thing and each moment as he neared the end of his life. This is really what Buddhism seeks to inculcate in its students, and defines as the pinnacle of "awakening." Is it possible -- is it desirable -- to cultivate this awareness prior to what you call the "leaving" stage of life?
Hmm. Well, you catch me there. I think you have to live the life you're called to live. And if you're called at 24 to do that, then it may be your way. I don't want to generalize about stages of life. I only do know that the world of action, career, ambition, desire, calls one much more strongly between 20 and 40 than it does between 70 and 90. And particulars seem to strike with more amazement in later years. I've seen that myself. One old woman I knew was very content to watch a couple of sparrows -- she would sit on a park bench and watch them all morning. It occupied her mind. I think if a 24-year-old is doing that, I'm a little worried. I'm not sure you're supposed to drop out at 24. But as I say, I don't want to get sociological about it. There may be 24-year-olds who must do that.
