psychology – Page 5

Creativity is Divine

🌟🌟🌟 “Creativity is divine! To me it is the virgin soul opening to spirit and creating the divine child. You cannot live without it. That’s the meaning of life, that creative fire………::”

“::….. My soul is fed. I see, I smell, I taste, I hear, I touch. Through the orifices of my body, I give and I receive. I am not trying to capture what is absent. It’s that interchange between the embodied soul and the outside world that is the dynamic process. That’s how growth takes place. That is life.”🌟🌟🌟

Marion Woodman

{self Portrait series at Kennedy peak 8-6-24}

This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.
Marion Woodman

To me, real love, the move from power to love, involves immense suffering. Any creative work comes from that level, where we share our sufferings, just the sheer suffering of being human. And that’s where the real love is.
Marion Woodman

When the power comes from within us and we claim it as our own, then we no longer have to affirm ourselves by dominating others. The irony is that we are actually afraid of our own power.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

Only by discovering and loving the goddess lost within our rejected body can we hear our own authentic voice.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul

I yearned for lightness; I still yearn for lightness. Lightness is freedom — freedom from the heaviness of too much stuff, too many words, too heavy a pull toward inertia. I feared being buried in stone — becoming stone.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life

Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you’re left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life

In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety—in fact, most neuroses and compulsions—are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition. We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light. Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

The Goddess is the unspeakable wisdom that grows into the very cells of the body. She lives with this sacramental truth at her center: the beauty and the horror of the whole of life are blazing in Her love. She is dancing in the flames.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

In the story of Persephone and Hades there is a child. Hades abducts Persephone and takes her into the Underworld, where in some versions of the myth she has a child. In many of the myths, Leda and the swan, Danae and the shower of gold, for example, the human woman is impregnated by the god. In other words, matter is penetrated by spirit and the child of the union of matter and spirit is the divine child.

Marion Woodman

You think of yourself — light, fast, free — free of earth, free of bondage to your body. In your ‘perfect’ body, you are in control, addicted to the light that keeps you out of body. You’re a swan maiden, addicted to wings, addicted to spirit. You refused to eat in order to fly.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life

The solid line throughout was my trying to make space to fly and forever smashing my wings against the bars of the cage. Granted, the cage grew bigger and very big, but I was always beyond the collective in my soul and always cut back by the collective in my body.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life

The word ‘feminine,’ as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

Why put them through the danger of the fire? And then, I heard, as though it spoke, the voice of the guardian-head: “Each piece must go through the fire. The cowl, the wings, the pneuma, the source, the flow. All must go the way that I have gone. Each may crack in the process, as I have cracked. But look, the crack has healed. I did not break. Without the fire, the piece is untested, unlived, raw. Each must go through the fire.

Marion Woodman, Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity

Kundalini power, the symbol of raising the energy coiled at the base of the spine upward through the chakras, is called by Sri Chinmoy, ‘the power of the Supreme Goddess.’ Repressed or coiled in a circle, she can be poisonous both to the body and the psyche, but once risen and standing upright, she is beneficent. The power of the serpent, rightly understood, is one of the ways the Goddess overcomes duality.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

So long as she is obedient to a mother—actual or internal—who unconsciously wishes to annihilate her, she is in a state of possession by the witch; she will have to differentiate herself out from that witch in order to live her own life.

Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study

The way to healing an addiction lies in finding a connection between body and soul.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul

If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life. We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment. A life that is being truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

Many people are being dragged toward wholeness in their daily lives, but because they do not understand initiation rites, they cannot make sense of what is happening to them. They are being presented with the possibility of rebirth into a different life. Through failures, symptoms, inferiority feelings and overwhelming problems, they are being prodded to renounce life attachments that have become redundant. The possibility of rebirth constellates with the breakdown of what has gone before. But because they do not understand, people cling to the familiar, refuse to make the necessary sacrifices, resist their own growth. Unable to give up their habitual lives, they are unable to receive new life.
Unless cultural rituals support the leap from one level of consciousness to another, there are no containing walls within which the process can happen. Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem—alone.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

What I learned is the difference between of destiny and fate. We are all fated to die. Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life. Fate is the death we owe to Nature. Destiny is the life we own to soul.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life

Linearity does not come naturally to me. It kills my imagination. Nothing happens. No bell rings. No moment of here and now. No moment that says yes. Without these, I am not alive. I prefer the pleasure of the journey through the spiral. Relax. Enjoy the spiral. If you miss something on the first round, don’t worry. You might pick it up on the second—or third—or ninth. It doesn’t matter. Relax. Timing is everything. If the bell does ring, it will resonate through all the rungs of your spiral. If it doesn’t ring, it is the wrong spiral— or the wrong time— or there is no bell.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul

A free woman has a strong neck—an open connection between heart and head, a balance between reality and ideals. To fall into the complex is to damn herself for her imperfections; to accept the attitude of the virgin is to accept her human life and open herself to her own truth.

Marion Woodman

Without embodied soul, spirit cannot manifest through human feeling.

Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

Whether we like it or not, one of our tasks on this earth is to work with the opposites through different levels of consciousness until body, soul and spirit resonate together. Initiation rites, experienced at the appropriate times in our lives, burn off what is no longer relevant, opening our eyes to new possibilities of our own uniqueness. They tear off the protective veils of illusion until at last we are strong enough to stand in our own naked truth.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

A woman must be able to stand in the face of power, because ultimately some part of that power will become hers.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

So long as consciousness is enslaved by the darkness of unconsciousness, we blindly live out these handicaps in our lives, projecting them onto our men or choosing defeated men as an image of our own defeat. The flames of our fear, grief and rage burn without light. Without realizing what we are doing, we can allow consciousness to fall into the service of darkness. If, on the other hand, we are conscious of the darkness, that very consciousness is the light that illumines the darkness. This is the journey into mature consciousness, with arms and legs, heart and genitals, strong enough to bear the lights.

Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to
try to be better than you are than to be who you are.

Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride:

William Blake says the body is ‘that portion of soul discerned by the five senses.

Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman

Love is the real power. It’s the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with–everyone blooms.

Marion Woodman

The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power.
Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

Women are, by nature, disposed to relationship and connectedness; yet true relationship cannot be embraced until a woman as a deep sense of her at-one-ment. Without this essential independence from all roles and bonds, she is a potential victim for servitude.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

She dreams she is in a glass coffin. From her prison, details have beauty. In her aloneness, she imagines emotions. Her husband is the perfect bridegroom, the trickster, the small boy looking for mother. She is goddess and mirror, siren and friend, femme fatale and sacrificing wife. He is attracted to her girlhood purity, her desire to sacrifice, to serve. At first he may be flattered: she sees him as a god.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body & Soul

Since she has not been present in the culture, she has not been readily accessible to the conscious awareness of modern women. Without her, even the dynamic symbols of Virgin and Mother are distorted. The Crone is a woman is that part of her psyche that is not identified with any relationship nor confined by any bond. She infuses an intrinsic sense of self-worth, of autonomy, into the role of virgin and mother, and gives the woman strength to stand to her own creative experience.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

Can I really believe I am worth an hour a day? Am I, who have given my life to others, selfish enough to take one hour a day to find myself?

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body & Soul

Change means change. We may have all the insights, but if we do not incarnate them, they are all in vain.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

We know we can change ourselves when we realize that we are not dependent on how we feel, nor on how others feel about us, nor
on what the situation is around us. The values we hold, the choices we make within ourselves and for iourselves remain our prerogative. In most situations, if we begin to change, to do our own inner work, to accept our own darkness and work toward consciousness, the situation will change. We will begin to emanate a different energy, one
that exudes a sense of autonomy and authenticity.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

It takes great courage to break with one’s past history and stand alone

Marion Woodman

Once the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her “mysterious and exotic darkness” inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this “dark” side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over “marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth.” The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.

Marion Woodman

We are all unconsciously bound to the wheel of fortune. It goes round and round and we go blindly around on it until one day something happens that wakes us up, face to face with ourselves. What for years we could not or would not see is made visible. The unconscious is made answerable to consciousness. The Self demands a reckoning: the ego must recognize what it has long feared and rejected. Whether we grow or wither in that encounter depends on whether we cling to our ego’s rigid standpoint or whether we choose to trust the Self and leap into the unknown.

Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

Archetypal psychology

🔥 In contrast, archetypal psychology holds that the true iconoclast is the image itself which explodes its allegorical meanings, releasing startling new insights. Thus the most distressing images in dreams and fantasies, those we shy from for their disgusting distortion and perversion, are precisely the ones that break the allegorical frame of what we think we
know about this person or that, this trait of ourselves or that. The “worst” images are thus the best, for they are the ones that restore a figure to its pristine power as a numinous person at work in the soul…

….A more general result of nominalism is “logophobia,” a dread of words especially of big words which might harbor irrealities. Our difficulty with the word archetype and with envisioning the reality of archetypal images and ideas is one of the effects of nominalism. We are in peculiar double bind with words; they fascinate and at the same time repel. For because of nominalism words have become both bloated in importance and dried in content. In the modern language-games of Wittgenstein, words are the very fundamentals of conscious existence, yet they are also severed from things and from truth. They exist in a world of their own. In modern structural linguistics, words have no inherent sense, for they can be reduced, every single one of them, to basic quasi-mathematical units. The fantasy of a basic number of irreducible elements out of which all speech can be constituted is a dissecting technique of the analytic mind which applies logical atomism to Logos itself–a suicide of the word.

Of course there is a credibility gap, since we no longer trust words of any sort as true carriers of meaning. Of course, in psychiatry, words have become schizogenic, themselves a cause and source of mental disease. Of course we live in a world of slogan, jargon, and press releases, approximating the “Newspeak” of Orwell’s 1984.

As one art and academic field after another falls into the paralyzing coils of obsession with language and communication, speech succumbs to a new semantic anxiety. 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. Without the inherence of soul
In words, speech would not move us, words would not provide forms for carrying our lives and giving sense to our deaths. “Death” itself, and “soul” “Gods,” “persons, would become, as Antiphon the Sophist said thousands of years ago, mere conventions and artifacts.’ Personifying would be simply a manner of nominalistic speech.

It is this person in the word, its angelic power, that nominalism dreads. Nominalism is not simply a philosophical position which would disembowel words, emptying them into windbags, fatus voci. It is a psychological defense against the psychic component of the word. The bigness it fears and would reduce refers to the complex nature of words
which act upon us as complexes and release complexes in us. Philosophy works wholly with words, so it must bring their complexities into rational order. This is the job of rational speech whether in logic,
theology, or science. In fact, rational use of words was what the word “sanity” originally meant in Latin. Therefore, nominalism refuses to recognize the person in the word or to personify them; to do so implies insanity.

I admit that the personifying path we are on is, indeed, deviant if not mad. But it is from this psychological perspective that we must look at
all judgments against personifying. For these judgments come from a tradition that has progressively depotentiated both images and words
in order to maintain a particular vision of man, reason, and reality. This vision divides the world into objects and egos, giving to the soul no more place than the pea-sized pineal gland, to which island in the middle of the brain Descartes banished the psyche at the beginning of our modern period….🔥

🌟James Hillman , Re-Visioning Psychology pg.8-10

Anthropomorphism

🌜✨🌟….Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human form and character …..ascription of a human attribute of personality to anything impersonal or 'irrational" enters the English language in 1793 via the
French. Animism , the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena “, occurs a century later in the present sense made familiar by the anthropologist Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871).
The first is an emissary into English of the French Enlightenment with its acute sensitiveness to the irrationality of religion and its investment in the Cartesian world of dead and impersonal objects. The second is a product of Victorian progressive scientism. Both are heritages of nominalism. Both deprive that mode of experience to which they purportedly refer of its native validity. So we shall not use the terms anthropomorphism and animism but rather the term personifying to signify the basic psychological activity- the spontaneous experiencing
envisioning and speaking of the configurations of existence as psychic presences- and hopefully thereby save this authentic activity from being condemned as personification.

Personification is a psychologism. It implies a human being who creates Gods in human likeness much as an author creates characten out of his own personality. These Gods depict his own needs; they are his projections. Personification cannot imagine that these psychic presences (Gods, daemons, and other persons of the mythical realm) have autonomous substantial reality. It cannot imagine that an author, say, is driven to bear the messages of "his" characters, that it is their will that is done, that he is their scribe, and that they are creating him even
while he creates them. An author's fictions are often more significant than his own reality, containing more psychic substance, which lasts long after their
"creator" has gone. An author creates only by their
authority. The notion that literary fictions have an inherent autonomy is itself visioned by means of a personified Muse, without whose aid the entire writing venture becomes precarious.

All three terms- anthropomorphism, animism, personification - contain one basic idea: there exists a “mode of thought” which takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same time making this content
alive, personal, and even divine. These three terms by saying that human beings tend to imagine things into souls, are actually describing a manner of soul-making. But by calling this activity a "mode of
thought" it becomes an act we perform- conscious or unconscious- rather than something we immediately experience. Where these three
terms assume thought makes soul, personifying recognizes soul as existent prior to reflection. Personifying is a way of being in the world and
experiencing the world as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences that touch us, move us, appeal to us.

But as Van der Leeuw has said we waste breath trying to disprove the theory of animism. It can, however, be seen through as a psychological statement saying less about the soul of primitives than about the primitive soul of those writing about them. Animism is an anthropological report about the soul of anthropology. “In its entire structure and
tendency," says van der Leeuw, “this theory suits the second half of the nineteenth century far better than it does the primitive world."

The theory of animism represents a condition of soul (anima) which cannot find soul except as projected into infantile behavior, psychopathology of fetishism, the common people of the collective mind, or the dark places and peculiar behaviors of exotic peoples in distant islands or insane asylums. Through these concepts —personification, anthropomorphism, animism-- reason could indeed make stones live again and even create souls and Gods. The rational tradition, having lost its base in the psyche, was trying to Rediscover it through the anthropology of animism. “ 🌟✨🌛

James Hillman, are-Visioning Psychology ,pg.12-13

Animistic

🔥🃏🔥 But there was another tradition, which continued to regard personifying as a necessary mode of understanding the world and of being in it
It began with the Greeks and Romans, who personified such psychic powers as Fame, Insolence, Night, Ugliness, Timing, Hope, to name but a few. These were regarded as “real daemons to be worshipped and propitiated and no mere figments of the imagination. And, as is well known, they were actually worshipped in every Greek city. To mention Athens alone, we find altars and sanctuaries of Victory, Fortune, Friendship, Forgetfulness, Modesty, Mercy, Peace, and many more.

Many consider this practice as merely animistic, but it was really an act of ensouling; for there is no question that the personifying of the ancient Greeks and Romans provided altars for configurations of the
soul. When these are not provided for, when these Gods and daemons are not given their proper place and recognition, they become diseases -a point Jung made often enough. The need to provide containers for the many configurations of the soul was formulated in the third century A.D. by the greatest of all Platonist philosophers, Plotinus. In a section of his Enneads called appropriately "The Problems of the Soul" we find this passage:

~”I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed
insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readilywhen an appropriate receptacie is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or
representing it and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.”~

When in the next passage (IV, 3, 12) he speaks of "the souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus," he seems again to be referring to the ability of the soul to divide into many parts, and that
its portions and phases reflect the various images of divine persons. Personifying not only aids discrimination; it also offers another avenue of loving, of imagining things in a personal form so that we can find access to them with our hearts. Words with capital letters are charged with affect, they jump out of their sentences and become images. The
tradition of depersonifying recognized full well that personified words tend to become cherished and sacred, affecting the reason of the heart. Hence nominalists disparage the personified style of expression, calling it rhetoric with emotive meaning only. But this very recognition, that personifying emotionalizes, shift the discussion from nominalism to imagination, from head to heart.

The image of the heart- “l'immagine del cuor"- was an important idea in the work of Michelangelo who was strongly influenced by the Platonist tradition. Imagining with the heart refers to a mode of perception that penetrates through names and physical appearances to a personified interior image, from the heart to the heart. When Michelangelo portrayed Lorenzo and Giuliano Medici in the Sacristy of Sen Lorenzo, the features which he depicted were unnatural, not as they appeared in life but rather transfigured to conform with the true image
of their persons in the heart. While the scientific Renaissance (Bacon and Galileo) insisted on the primacy of sense perception, Michelangelo’s “imagine del cuor" implied that perception is secondary to imagination. By imagining through and beyond what the eye see, the imagination envisions primordial images. And these present themselves in
personified forms.

Nearer our own times another Mediterranean, the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno (b. 1864), returned to the relationship of heart and personified images and explained the necessary interdependence between love and personifying:

~”In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves, everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only love--that which is like ourselves . . . it is love itself that reveals these resemblances to us. ... Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.«”

He sums up, saying: "Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it, is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify.
Personifying is thus a way of knowing, especially knowing what is invisible, hidden in the heart.
In this perspective personifying is not a lesser, primitive mode of apprehending but a finer one. It presents in psychological theory the attempt to integrate heart into method and to return abstract thoughts and dead matter to their human shapes. Because personifying is an epistemology of the heart, a thought mode of feeling, we do wrong to
judge it as inferior, archaic thinking appropriate only to those allowed emotive speech and affective logic- children, madmen, poets, and primitives. Method in psychology must not hinder love from working
and we are foolish to decry as inferior the very means by which love understands. If we have not understood personifying, it is because the
main tradition has always tried to explain it rather than understand it.

James Hillman , Re-Visioning psychology pg. 13-15

Mythic Perspective

🌀🌟To the mythic perspective the world appears personified, implying a passionate engagement with it. We do not ask: "Are things alive or dead?" or "Are Gods real or are they symbolic projections?" Questions of this sort “may be thought illegitimate," says the most psychological of all classicists, E. R. Dodds, “so long as myth-making is a living mode
of thought to confront it with this sort of brutal either-or' is to force upon it a choice which destroys its being. Mythic consciousness answers with Cassirer: "There is nowhere an 'it' as a dead object, a mere thing.'* Subject and object, man and Gods, I and Thou, are not apart and isolated each with a different sort of being, one living or real, the
other dead or imaginary. The world and the Gods are dead or alive according to the condition of our souls. A world view that perceives a dead world or declares the Gods to be symbolic projections derives from a perceiving subject who no longer experiences in a personified way, who has lost his ‘immagine del cuor.’

To rekindle this life we start with soul, reimagining its internal processes anthropomorphically.This leads to the ultimate conclusion that we do not actually per sonify at all. Mythical consciousness is a mode of being in the world that brings with it imaginal persons. They are given with the imagination and are its data. Where imagination reigns, personifying happens. We experience it nightly, spontaneously, in dreams. Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us. The persons present themselves as existing prior to any effort of ours to personify. To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real. The late German classical scholar who had the deepest insight into the nature of mythical persons, Walter F. Otto, made this same point in an attack against his rationalist and reductive colleagues:

~There is no such thing as personification, only a depersonification--just as there is no mythologizing (in the authentic sense) only a demythologizing. Schelling said that the question how did man ever come to God is senseless; there is only the question, how did man ever come away from God. So-called abstract concepts and words would never have been raised into the personal had they not been from the very beginning personal, that is, divine forms."

James Hillman , Revisionimg psychology pg.16-17

Personifying

Jung’s early work with word associations did not rest with quantifying results; he personified them. He discovered complexes which were invested with feeling, intention, autonomy, and fragments of consciousness. They were independent entities because they behaved as such. The same complex can alter the association of words, show itself as unwanted symptoms, and appear as a person in a dream. Dream persons are complexes walking around; symptoms are the irruption of these persons into our normal lives. Our personal complexities are indeed the persons of our complexes.

Where other psychologists might have used a so-called objective and neutral language of numbers, structures, or functions to account for the
same disturbances, Jung reverted courageously to the direct mode of personifying which in his day was still considered a primitive formulation.” He stood firmly by his method of naming, explicitly comparing
it with the spontaneous speech of the insane and the noncivilized. What was radically courageous then we now take for granted, so easily imagining ourselves to play roles, enter into games, and be composed of
different characters.

James Hillman , are-Visioning Psychology pg.21/22

“Jung’s animism is tightly tied to his notion of anima,” which is the word he uses for one’s personal and personified soul-image. The Anima Is a person and anima is a conceptual notion and anima means soul. Jung calls her “she,” and she it is who creates conflicting confusions and attractions, who brings moods and desires and neurovegetative symptoms, who kindles the peculiar fascinations of fantasy that turn
one’s head, and yet also conveys a vague sense of interiority, a sense of soul.”
~James Hillman

A person may converse with her, as for example, when a poet talks With his muse, a philosopher with his daimon, a mystic with his tutelary angel, or a madman with his hallucination. We find her in mythology In countless forms, and expressly as the maiden Psyche. ~ James Hillman

Jung’s position here states that the fundamental facts of existence are the “fantasy-images” of the psyche. All consciousness depends on these images. Everything else–ideas of the mind, sensations of the body, perceptions of the world around us, beliefs, feelings, hungers–must present themselves as images in order to become experienced. ” ‘Experience’ is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images.”‘ Should we ask: just what is psyche? What do you mean by psychic experience and psychic reality?
The answer is: fantasy- images. “Image is psyche, ” says Jung. “The psyche consists essentially of images . … a
“picturing’ of vital activities.” In the beginning is the image; first imagination then perception; first fantasy then reality. Or as Jung puts it: “The psyche creates reality
every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy. “
Man is primarily an imagemaker and our psychic substance consists of images; our being is imaginal being, an existence in imagination. We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on. Since we can know only fantasy-images directly and immediately , and from these images create our worlds and call them realities, we live in a world that is neither “inner” nor
“outer.” Rather the psychic world is an imaginal world, just as image is psyche. Paradoxically, at the same time these images are in us and we live in the midst of them. The psychic world is experienced empirically as inside us and yet it encompasses us with images. I dream and experience my dreams as inside me and yet at the same time I walk around in my dreams and am inside them.
James Hillman

Because our psychic stuff is images, image-making is a via regia, a royal road to soul-making. The making of soul-stuff calls for dreaming, fantasying, imagining. To live psychologically means to imagine things; To be in touch with soul means to live in sensuous connection with fantasy. To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the
basic reality of fantasy.
~James Hillman

Anima manifest

…….🔥🔥🔥🔥Anima🔥🔥🔥🔥……..

This vision cannot be enacted unless archetypal persons strike us as utterly real. To experience imaginal reality, a psychic function–the specific function of the imaginative soul–must be active. This soul person is the person of our moods, self-reflections, and reveries, of our sensuous longing beyond the sensately concrete, the spinner of fantasy who is the personification of all unknown psychic capacities that lie waiting, drawing us seductively, uncannily inward to the dark of the uncut forest and the deeps below the waves. Anima means both psyche and soul, and we meet her in her numerous embodiments as soul of waters without whom we dry, as soul of vegetation who greens our hope or blights with symptoms, as Lady of the Beasts riding our passions. She is father’s daughter and mother’s daughter, and my sister, my soul. She is also a worrying succubus drawing off our life’s juice, a harpy with talons, a cold white wraith with mad addictions–but a nurse as well, and a serving maid, a Cinderella nymphet, vague with no history, a tabula rasa waiting for the word. And she is also the Sophia of wisdom, the Maria of compassion, the Persephone of destruction, compelling Necessity and Fate, and the Muse.

The multiplicity of her forms in fictions and lives, and the intensely personified and intensely subjectified reality of her nature, bespeak a world into which she calls and over which she rules.

James Hillman

Polycentricity

Clinically, this polycentricity would be condemned as schizoid fragmentation, demonstrating the ambivalence of a center that cannot hold.
But mythically we might look for a God in the disease, perhaps Hermes-Mercury or the Trickster. For schizoid polycentricity is a style of consciousness and not only a disease; and this style thrives in plural
meanings, in cryptic double-talk, in escaping definitions, in not taking heroic committed stances, in ambisexuality, in psychically detached and separated body parts.

Or this style of consciousness could be given another clinical name: hysteria.” Then we might look for Dionysus and his community, where self division, dismemberment, and a flowing multiplicity belong to a mythical pattern. Again, consciousness is not heroic and fixed to one point, but seeps as if through mystical participation in a processional
of personifications, interfused, enthusiastic, suggestible, labilc. Whether schizoid and Mercurial, whether hysterical and Dionysian, there are archetypal patterns at work, Gods affecting our styles of consciousness.

~James Hillman , Re-Visioning psychology pg 35

Anima

As the latter, anima has a series of meanings." First. (a) she is the personification of our unconsciousness-our stupidities, follies, intractable problems. Then (b) she is a particular personification appearing in a particular moment- call girl, shopgirl, schoolgirl--who presents a precise image of the current emotions of the soul. She is also (c) the feeling of personal interiority. She brings the sense of having an interior life, changing events into experience that means “me." She makes possible the inner ground of faith in myself as a person, giving the conviction that what happens matters to the soul and that one's existence is personal and important." She thus (d) personalizes existence. Anima, moreover, is (e) that person by means of whom we are initiated into imaginal understanding, who makes possible experiencing through images, for she embodies the reflective, reactive, mirroring activity of
consciousness. Functionally anima works as that complex which connects our usual consciousness with imagination by provoking desire or clouding us with fantasies and reveries, or deepening our reflection. She
is both bridge to the imaginal and also the other side, personifying the imagination of the soul. Anima is psyche personified, as Psyche in the ancient story of her by Apuleius personified the soul.

So the movement into psychological existence proceeds through her in one form or another. The movement through the constructed world of concepts and dead things into an animistic, subjective, mythical
consciousness, where fantasy is alive in a world alive and means follows anima. She teaches personifying, and the very first lesson of her teaching is the reality of her independent personality over and against the habitual modes of experiencing with which we are so identified that they are called ego, I. The second lesson is love; shé comes to life through love and insists on it, just as Psyche in the old tale is paired forever with Eros.

Perhaps the loving comes first. Perhaps only through love is it possible to recognize the person of the soul. And this connection between love and psyche means a love for everything psychological, every symptom or habit, finding place for it within the heart of imagination, finding a mythical person who is its supportive ground. The connection between love and psyche means as well bringing a psychological eye to all of love's manifestations-that all its mad and deviate cravings seek ultimately the connection with psyche.

Whether we conceive of this interior person as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, or a Paredros, or one of the personified souls in the traditions of ancient China and Egypt, this figure is indispensable to the notion of human personality. Some traditions, in fact, have asserted that an individual without his soul figure is not a human being. Such a one has lost soul.

James Hillman , Revisioning Psychology

Pathologizing

Images of the soul show first of all more feminine connotations. Psyché, in the Greek language, besides being soul denoted a night-moth or butterfly and a particularly beautiful girl in the legend of Eros and Psyche. Our discussion in the previous chapter of the
anima as a personified feminine idea continues this line of thinking. There we saw many of her attributes and effects, particularly the relationship of psyche with dream, fantasy, and image. This relationship has also been put mythologically as the soul's connection with the night world, the realm of the dead, and the moon. We still catch our soul's most essential
nature in death experiences, in dreams of the night, and in the images of "lunacy."

The world of spirit is different indeed. Its images blaze with light, there is fire, wind, sperm. Spirit is fast, and it quickens what it touches. Its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-straight, knife-sharp, powder-dry, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle, making forms, order, and clear distinctions. Although there are many spirits, and many kinds of spirit, more and more the notion of
"spirit" has come to be carried by the Apollonic archetype, the sublimations of higher and abstract disciplines, the intellectual mind, refinements, and purifications.

We can experience soul and spirit interacting. At moments of intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with natural urges, memories, fantasies, and fears. At times of new psychological insights or experiences, spirit would quickly extract a meaning, put them into action, conceptualize them into rules. Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, prefer-
ing labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the "patient" part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It Is water to the spirit's fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit
into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury-to use an image from St. Augustine -a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior.

They differ in another way: spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negativa. “Neti, neti," it says, "not this, not that." Strait is the gate and only first or last things will do. Soul replies by saying, "Yes, this too has place, may find its archetypal significance, belongs in a myth." The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything
can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.

I have drawn apart soul and spirit in order to make us feel the differences, and especially to feel what happens to soul when its phenomena are viewed from the perspective of spirit. Then, it seems, the soul must be disciplined, its desires harnessed, imagination emptied, dreams forgotten, involvements dried.?? For soul, says spirit, cannot know, neither
truth, nor law, nor cause. The soul is fantasy, all fantasy. The thousand pathologizings that soul is heir to by its natural attachments to the ten thousand things of life in the world shall be cured by making soul into an imitation of spirit. The imitatio Christi was the classical way; now there are other models, gurus from the Far East or Far West, who, if followed to the letter, put one's soul on a spiritual path which supposedly leads to freedom from pathologies. Pathologizing, so says spirit, is by its very nature confined only to soul; only the psyche can be pathological, as the word psychopathology attests. There is no "pneumopathology," and as one German tradition has insisted, there can be no such thing as
mental illness ("Geisteskrankheit"), for the spirit cannot pathologize. So there must be spiritual disciplines for the soul, ways in which soul shall
conform with models enunciated for it by spirit.

But from the viewpoint of the psyche the humanistic and Oriental movement upward looks like repression. There may well be more psycho-
pathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. For any attempt at self-realization without full recognition of the psychopathology that resides, as Hegel said, inherently in the soul is in itself pathological, an exercise in self-deception. Such self-realization turns out to be a paranoid delusional system, or even a
kind of charlatanism, the psychopathic behavior of an emptied soul.

~James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology pg.68-70