[PREVIEW] James Hillman | The Dilemma of Depth Psychology in Relation to Social Change

Excellent talk by Hillman where he deconstructs the fantasy of individualism and points toward an imaginal approach that reveals the community of autonomous inner figures — elders, ancestors, family, animals — and offers a step toward repairing the sense of disconnectedness and isolation that our culture and its psychotherapies reinforce.Here are some excerpts:"My deconstruction of individualism is an exhortation.We can never do enough for the city because it is and has been since the the Greeks, the heroic way of Soul Making.That [the reason] our cities today, our political life is in such disarray results from one profound psychological error: the internalization of the ideals of the hero into a personality cult of an individual self.Which leave the city without foundation and our therapeutic psychology deluded."Q: Is there an archetype of the community?JH: "Tribal societies often speak of a community of elders, or the community of ancestors. In the Greek world they had the community of Olympus, with very different articulated personalities but they all inhibited each other.I think the real answer to the question is that we haven’t yet worked out what communitas really is. We have a great idealization of it at the moment. We all speak of it all the time. I think that’s an attempt to get out of individuality. But it doesn’t mean we have really understood what that is.So the question is excellent. “What else is there for defining ‘community’?”The way I’m using it is certainly not limited to human beings sitting in the same place.""We have to realize also what individualism has done to the world, and the fundamental isolation of being an “individual” by definition.It sets up the whole therapeutic world.Finding a relationship because by definition you’ve set up a monad that has no windows. And so everybody’s unrelated, by definition."Q: So how do we get beyond that?JH: "Breakdown is of great help. The breakdown of your own sense of what you think and believe what you are. And you find other things.Life itself helps you realize you are not just an isolate. But it’s more a matter of realizing how our tradition, since Descartes if not earlier (St. Augustine) emphasizes the isolated individual personality."