Desire as Image not Program

james-hillman insists that a desire is to be read as an image of the soul rather than executed as a program for action. The argument is consistent across his writings and operative for any ratio-desiderii. “Hillman seeks the body of images themselves. He recommends that we encounter images as they present themselves, embodied in their own imaginal, yet precise, detail. Surprisingly, he says, imagination itself provides grounding and body” (A Blue Fire, prologue).

The corresponding clinical move is to refuse the equation I want X, therefore I should obtain X. The ratio asks instead: what does it mean about my soul that this is the image my longing has taken? The image is the data; the acquisition would be a destruction of the data.

The position has consequences for how analysis treats desire. Hillman names them: “What the soul needs and craves is the experience of the world” in its imaginal density, not the achievement of life-strategies (A Blue Fire, “The Divine Face of Things”). Where a medicalized psychology asks how do we satisfy or sublimate this desire, archetypal psychology asks what does this desire show about the soul that holds it. The former closes the metaxy; the latter inhabits it.

The position is not anti-action. It is anti-literalism. To act on a desire that has been read is one thing. To act on a desire that has not been read is what Hillman calls being lived by the literal — a kind of unconsciousness performed as agency.

Relationships

Primary sources

hillman-blue-fire (Hillman 1989)
hillman-revisioning-psychology (Hillman 1975)