James Hillman quotes:

When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.

All we can do when we think of kids today is think of more hours of school, earlier age at the computer, and curfews. Who would want to grow up in that world?

It's important to ask yourself, How am I useful to others? What do people want from me? That may very well reveal what you are here for.

In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.

Futurism is another American myth: whether Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan or Obama, American presidents all come into office with a new program, and the conviction that the country is going to be better than ever.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

The culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world?

We have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.

I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.

Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough.

The older people that one admires seem to be fearless. They go right out into the world. It's astounding. Maybe they can't see or they can't hear, but they walk out into the street and take life as it comes. They're models of courage, in a strange way.

You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.

If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.

The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?

The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.

The elder who is eliminating what time has done to the face, what life has done to the face, is making a statement for others to see: This is the way to be a good old person - it is to defeat this body that is doing things to you. Because you haven't changed. Your body's changing.

Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society.

The circumstances, including my body and my parents, whom I may curse, are my soul's own choice and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.

We need to have an educational system that's able to embrace all sorts of minds, and where a student doesn't have to fit into a certain mold of learning.

Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here.

The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.

Fear is a huge thing for older people.

Loss means losing what was We want to change but we don't want to lose. Without time for loss, we don't have time for soul.

Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path... this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am.

It's very important for men to look downward, to the next generation.

As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.

I'm in favor of destruction, aggression, hating things. Not bearing things anymore. We think the breakdown comes because our life is in bad shape. But maybe the ideas cause the disorder. Something tries to break through and causes the disorder.

We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?

I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.

It's very hard to know what wisdom is.

Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.

I don't have answers. I have questions.

Remember that in the early days of the feminist movement, they refused to have a leader; different women would just stand up and speak. The early feminists were very careful to not put what was spontaneously arising back in the old bottle.

Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.

The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm's length because they are so full of love

We're an air bag society that wants guarantees on everything that we buy. We want to be able to take everything back and get another one. We want a 401-k plan and Social Security.

We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.

I'm cautious about a lot of words

Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.

If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination.

The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.

I know my own deficiencies, one of which is that I had lived away from America for such a long time. It's called expatriate

Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.

To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.

Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism, protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the repression, of the anima mundi.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

The self divided is precisely where the self is authentically located. . . We all have identity crises because a single identity is a delusion of the monotheistic mind. . . Authenticity is in the illusion, playing it, seeing through it from within as we play it, like an actor who sees through his mask and can only see in this way.

The comic spirit masquerades in all things we say and do. We are each a clown and do not need to put on a white face.

From my perspective as a depth psychologist, I see that those who have a connection with story are in better shape and have better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced.

Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies - the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding.

Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.

Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in.

How can we know ourselves by ourselves? . . . Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount.

We carve out risk-free lives where nothing happens.

Whether we like it or not, men have more of the offices, more of the higher jobs, more of the seats in Congress. Men need to re-examine what their power is. We need to understand how to use it.

The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder.

We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.

Vessels expose the invisible Zeitgeist, the visible formed by the invisible.

I know my own deficiencies, one of which is that I had lived away from America for such a long time. It's called expatriate.

I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.

You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy.

Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.

Anytime you're gonna grow, you're gonna lose something. You're losing what you're hanging onto to keep safe. You're losing habits that you're comfortable with, you're losing familiarity.

Not just any talk is conversation; not any talk raises consciousness. Good conversation has an edge: it opens your eyes to something, quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates: it keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. That reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness; your mind's been moved. You are at another level with your reflections.

Reconnecting to the animal means getting to a more sensitive, more artful and more humorous place in the psyche.

Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one's character.

People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology.

Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem

Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.

Psychotherapy makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong.

One strand of psychotherapy is certainly to help relieve suffering, which is a genuine medical concern. If someone is bleeding, you want to stop the bleeding. Another medical aspect is the treatment of chronic complaints that are disabling in some way. And many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. So there is a reasonable, sensible, medical side to psychotherapy.

Your life is not predestined, as in Calvinist thought, where everything is written down in the book of life long before your birth and is inescapable. There are choices, accidents, hints and wrong paths, and the ego you, or whatever you call yourself, is a factor in all this. But there is still this other factor that keeps calling. At some moment, people turn, in despair or when they are unable to go any longer on a certain route, and this inner voice says, "Where have you been? I've been waiting for you to turn to me for a long time."

To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.

What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child's destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child.

Loss means losing what was We want to change but we don't want to lose. Without time for loss, we don't have time for soul

I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.

Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.

I think there is such a thing as a bad seed that comes to flower in certain people. The danger with that theory is that we begin to look for those "troublemakers" early on and try to weed them out. That's very dangerous, because it could work against kids who are just routine troublemakers.

How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don't think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it's a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation - like Charles Manson.

It's a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood - the sense that motherhood isn't itself a calling - also arises from economic pressure.

Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depends perhaps the other cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first receives attention.

Many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic.

Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being.

We vote for Perot. We think he's a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It's unbelievable, yet it's part of that worship of individuality.

I think the worst atmosphere for a six-year-old is one in which there are no expectations whatsoever. That is, it's worse for the child to grow up in a vacuum where "whatever you do is alright, I'm sure you'll succeed." That is a statement of disinterest. It says, "I really have no fantasies for you at all."

As the popular trust in science fades - and many sociologists say that's happening today - people will develop a distrust of purely "scientific" psychology. Researchers in the universities haven't picked up on this; they're more interested in genetics and computer models of thinking than ever. But, in general, there is a huge distrust of the scientific establishment now.

Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too.

Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well.

The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it's also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don't see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that's been there all along.

We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child's beauty and singling that child out. That's how the mentor system works - you're caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.

There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this "something" as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am.

It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view." There is never a third view.

You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed.

In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it's hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it's not a vocation.

Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life.

'Mediocre' tends to mean 'undistinguished', while snobs enjoy their distinguishing hallmarks of style - how they wear clothes, use words, where they go and gather and gossip. ...Whatever the circumstances the genius has put you into, the fact of individuality defends the soul against all class-action claims. No soul is mediocre, whatever your personal taste for conventionality, whatever your personal record of middling achievements.

Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.

An individual's harmony with his or her 'own deep self' requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.

I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper.

Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.

I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can't go back over that again. I can't put that into a two-word answer. I can't. Wherever I go, people say, "Can I ask you a quick question?" It's always, "a quick question." Well, my answers are slow.

Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?

I don't think anything changes until ideas change.

I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.

The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul.

My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.

By seeing differently, we do differently

Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.

I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy.

I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.

Art, for example, becomes "art therapy." When patients make music, it becomes "music therapy." When the arts are used for "therapy" in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.

In the cosmology that's behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything.

It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate. Translators use "plot" to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.

...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.

You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things.

Each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver's seat.

The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasions, less able to mobilize defenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be perceived by others as a person of character. The dislocation of self from center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel blest by everything.

We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerge from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel. . . . And, most amazing, it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it.

Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering.

The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world.