Dehumanizing

Dehumanizing is the fourth and climactic movement of Re-Visioning Psychology, paired with soul-making in the chapter’s dual title. The term is counterintuitive: Hillman does not mean the erasure of the human but the release of the human from archetypal overload. “We cannot carry the Gods because we are human. Were we not alone responsible, but supported by their persons and sharing in their myths, then burdens, blame, and forgiveness would no longer be so central” (Hillman 1975).

The diagnosis is that modern humanism, having lost the gods and the myths, compels persons to bear archetypal weight alone. “Of course our mothers fail, for they must always be Great, having to be each an archetype, having to supplant the dead depersonified world and be the seasons and the earth, the moon and the cows, the trees and the leaves on the trees. All this we expect from persons when we have lost the myths. And who can be a God?” (Hillman 1975). Dehumanizing restores the non-human registers — gods, animals, world — in which soul breathes freely, so that the human is no longer asked to be everything.

The move opens Hillman’s later trajectory into anima-mundi thought: the soul of the world reclaimed from its modern depersonification, the things of the world readmitted to psychic reality. “Until psychology admits the world into the sphere of psychic reality — there can be no amelioration” (Hillman 1992).

Relationships

• hillman-revisioning-psychology
• soul-making
• anima-mundi
• polytheistic-psychology
• hillman-thought-heart

Primary sources

• hillman-revisioning-psychology (Hillman 1975)
• hillman-thought-heart (Hillman 1992)