Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Speaking of betrayal on Spy Wednesday

A brilliant and unusual essay on betrayal, especially in relation to the father.

James Hillman, who died recently, was a post-modern pioneer within, and eventually beyond, the classical Jungian tradition. This is an early work of his, before he broke out on his own --betrayed his colleagues?--as the father (sic) of archetypal psychology. The school where I gained my psychology degree was far more indebted to him than to Jung himself.

A 1995 essay on him, from Ex Cathedra. (With apologies for the bad formatting. My first attempt to link a Google doc to Blogger.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

broke out on his own --betrayed his colleagues?

"[The word "heresy"] comes from a greek noun form (hairesis) of a verb in the middle voice (haireisthai) meaning “to take for oneself” — to choose. This concept corresponds aptly to the conviction that there can be no faith without personal decision...

There are... two principle ways people arrive at convictions. If a person’s beliefs, however many or few, are to be really his, he should choose maturely which of the two ways appears the more sound and then apply its methodology to select or form such beliefs. This is his heresy: his choosing for himself. The results of such choosing may also be heresy in the other, more commonplace, sense of the word... Therefore, if both the positive and negative meanings of hairesis are taken into account, every truely believing individual is heretical in the positive sense, whether or not what he has chosen to believe is heretical in the negative sense."
- Bishop James Pike, If This Be Heresy.

Every religious leader was, by definition, a heretic of his day.

- Trevor

Anonymous said...

... What accounts for HIllman's acceptableness at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Zimmermania, Calif.? Does he permit or even promote implicit and explicit declarations that the American olam is crap, and the (patriarchy's) institutions of psychotherapy have aggravated the whoe American trend of worthlessness? ...

I would like to believe that when he complains of the deterioration of the world and politics cause by the neglect of politics and the world promoted by private Self-indulgence, he points to corrections, as from America's own origins in Western Christendom, the Bible and Greece. But I worry that his "plurality of meanings" archetypal psychology is only one more private 'inner path' that forsakes or gelassenheits to a needed quasi-external, not-American, not-Western, not-Christian political rescuer who has an "outer path" he ostensibly isn't ashamed of.

"We" can't decide ("Who's to decide?") to attend to politics with its necessity for responsibility for decisions and value judgements because each of us, no matter how totally the same except for this or that lifestyle filigree, has only irreducibly private specific "views of the good" (conservative Intercollegiate Review, Spring 2012 p. 23). ... The "plain men" (cf amen of the plain à là cities of the plain) can't agree on political values of our own (Plato and Nietzsche are too difficult for our simple IQs). But apparently we can agree on the proper sort of external ruler who is confident of his outer path upon us?

But why the bashful non-Ego Islam of Henri Corbin and other Traditionalists? Nietzsche is not at all ashamed of his value judgements, and ready to directly accept responsibility for his Ego sum to rule the world and without blasting populations with routine not spiritual armaments! (Walter Kaufmann, ed., Genealogy of Morals, p. 344).

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