Recovering Imaginal Language in Psychology

From James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) & Myth of Analysis (1972)

“Even psychotherapy, which began as a talking cure—the rediscovery of the oral tradition of telling one's story—is abandoning language for touch, cry, and gesture. We dare not be eloquent. To be passionate, psychotherapy now says we must be physical or primitive. Such psychotherapy promotes a new barbarism. Our semantic anxiety has made us forget that words, too, burn and become flesh as we speak.

A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word—and angel means originally “emissary,” “message-bearer”— how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? How can anything of worth and soul be conveyed from one psyche to another, as in a conversation, a letter, or a book, if archetypal significances are not carried in the depths of our words?

“We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects. For words are persons. This aspect of the word transcends their nominalistic definitions and contexts and evokes in our souls a universal resonance.

“Man is half-angel because he can speak. The more we distrust speech in therapy or the capacity of speech to be therapeutic, the closer we are to an absorption into the fantasy of the archetypal subhuman, and the sooner the archetypal barbarian strides into the communication ruins of a culture that refused eloquence as a mirror of its soul.”

(Re-Visioning Psychology, 217-218)

“While other nineteenth-century investigators were polluting the archaic, natural, and mythic in the outer world, psychology was doing much the same to the archaic, natural, and mythic within.

Therapeutic depth psychology shares this blame, since it shares nineteenth-century attitudes. It gave names with a pathological bias to the animals of the imagination. We invented psychopathology and thereby labeled the memoria a madhouse. We invented the diagnoses with which we declared ourselves insane.

After subtly poisoning our own imaginal potency with this language, we complain of a cultural wasteland and loss of soul. The poison spreads; words continually fall “mentally ill” and are usurped by psychopathology, so that we can hardly use them without their new and polluted connotations: immature, dissociation, rigid, withdrawn, passive, transference, fixation, sublimation, projection (the last three notably different in alchemy), resistance, deviate, stress, dependence, inhibition, compulsion, illusion, split, tranquilized, driven, compensation, inferiority, derange, suppression, depression, repression, confusion—these words have been psychologized and pathologized in the past 150 years.

So Psyche requests the psychologist to remember his calling. Psychological remembrance is given by the kind of speech that carries remembrance within it. This language is both of culture and uncultured, is both of art and artless. It is a mythic, metaphoric language, a speech of ambiguities that is evocative and detailed, yet not definitive, not productive of dictionaries, textbooks, or even abstract descriptions. Rather, it is a speech that leads to participation, in the Platonic sense, in and with the thing spoken of, a speech of stories and insights which evoke, in the other who listens, new stories and new insights, the way one poem and one tune ignite another verse and another song.

It is conversation, letters, tales, in which we reveal our dreams and fantasies—and our psychopathology. It evokes, calls forth, and creates psyche as it speaks. It speaks of mood: of “sadness” and “despair” before “depression”; of “rage” before “aggression”; of “fear,” “panic,” and “anguish” before “anxiety attacks.” This speech is “not fashioned in schools,” and it will be “simple and rude,” as Tertullian said. It will have “corporeal similitudes,” that is, body images, speaking from and reaching to the imaginal body in order to provoke the soul's movements. It must be speech that works as an “imaginative agent,” stirring fantasy. Such speech has impact because it carries body in it; it is speech alive, the word itself alive, not a description about a psychic state by a psychologist, not carefully defined, but freely imagined….

Such speech meets every human at the ultimate levels, beyond education, age, or region, just as the themes of our dreams, panics, and passions are common to all humanity. If the language is of the street and workshop, then psychology has already taken another step out of the consulting room. The soul's confusions and pains need words which mirror these conditions through imagination. Adequate descriptions of the soul's states will depend less upon right definition than upon accurate transmission of style.”

(Myth of Analysis, 205–206, 208)