James Hillman was my dear friend, from whom I learned much at our dinners, on walks and drives, and during collaborations in writing and speaking. He was devoted to the ideas of C.G. Jung and yet was fiercely willing to go his own way. He was always on the lookout for soul, always the therapist, even when he turned his attention away from individuals to the world. To me his key ideas are: psychological polytheism, the individuation of everyone and everything, the importance of beauty, the primacy of narrative and image, a distaste for making everything conscious, seeing through everything including oneself, and giving up all literalism and symbolic talk. For the most part he was critical of things spiritual, and this is where he and I differed, at least in style.
I would like to take this three-part series as a rare opportunity to talk about what I learned from James Hillman, the man as I knew him, and how his ideas, so carefully crafted, could solve most of the world’s problems today.