Personifying

Personifying, in Hillman’s usage, is not a literary device applied to psychic contents but the soul’s native activity of giving face and voice to itself. “Psychology, whose very name and title derives from soul (psyche), has stopped soul from appearing in any place but where it is sanctioned by this modern world view” (Hillman 1975). Against the inherited Puritan suspicion that treats personification as “a defensive mode of perception, a projection, a ‘pathetic fallacy’” (ibid.), Hillman restores it as the first of four methodological moves of archetypal psychology.

Personifying is taught by the anima: “She teaches personifying, and the very first lesson of her teaching is the reality of her independent personality over and against the habitual modes of experiencing with which we are so identified that they are called ego, I” (Hillman 1975, p. 44). The figures of dream, symptom, and myth are persons because psyche encounters itself as persons. To meet them is to learn the polytheistic grammar of the soul.

Hillman traces the loss of personifying to post-Reformation iconoclasm: “Cromwell’s men acted out the new literalism that was losing touch with metaphorical imagination. Their abstract monotheism and one-sided view of doctrine had psychological concretism at its back. But they had lost imagination, for intolerance of images is iconoclasm” (Hillman 1975). Recovering personifying therefore recovers a pre-literal mode of psychological seeing.

Relationships

• hillman-revisioning-psychology
• anima
• polytheistic-psychology
• image-as-psyche
• soul-making

Primary sources

• hillman-revisioning-psychology (Hillman 1975)
• hillman-archetypal-psychology-brief (Hillman 1983)