Animal Presence

I prefer not to consider animal images as instincts inside us… To look at them from an underworld perspective means to regard them as carriers of soul, perhaps totem carriers of our own free-soul or death-soul, there to help us see in the dark.

This passage establishes Hillman’s foundational methodological claim: dream-animals must not be reduced to vitalistic instinct but attended as autonomous soul-carriers requiring their own mode of watchful approach.

Hillman, James, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Why must we exchange the living image for an interpretative concept? Are interpretations really psychological defenses against the presence of a god? Remember: most of the Greek gods, goddesses, and heroes had a snake form.

Hillman argues that symbolic interpretation of the dream-animal — translating it into ‘the unconscious’ or repressed content — functions as a defense against the animal’s own numinous, divine presence.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The many difficulties of the ‘dream-I’ with the animal in dreams… definitely correspond with the dreamer’s devaluation of the animal in the dream… The strained relation between human and animal in contemporary dreams recapitulates the Western tradition and its degradation of the animal.

The dreamer’s fearful or controlling behavior toward dream-animals is diagnosed as the psychic residue of the Western theological and philosophical degradation of the animal kingdom.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The restoration of the animal kingdom is thus a restoration of ourselves to that kingdom via the dream… to motifs of learning from the animal, amazed by its beauty, touched by its pain, reconciliation with it, being borne, helped, saved by the animal.

Dreams enacting reconciliation with animals are interpreted as an archetypal movement of ecological and psychic restoration, recovering the Edenic motif of animal-as-succor.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

For archaic psychology in cultures the world over, the divine is partly animal and the animal partly divine… a tremendum can come in small tremulous ways, a mere tremor, a shake, brush, shrug – the swift reaction to an insect.

Hillman universalizes the human-animal relationship through a comparative theological claim: animal presence is a form of theophany, and even the smallest creature may carry numinous force.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The animal continually reminds that the play of creation is revelation. To be is to be seen; beauty is given with existence… the coat is genetically prior to the eye that sees the coat.

Drawing on Adolf Portmann’s biological aesthetics, Hillman argues that animals present self-revelatory beauty as their primary ontological function, exceeding human utility or symbolic meaning.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

We have to imagine them. Get into them as imaginal beings, into them as images. That’s what Adam did: he looked at these images parading by and read their names out of their natures. He was inside the animal. He knew the animals of his imagination.

Hillman proposes an imaginative participation with the animal — entering the animal as an imaginal being — as the proper psychological mode of relationship, modeled on the Adamic act of naming.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This other vision imagines the garden as ever there at the level of animal intelligence and in the images of animal presences. In the tactile dimension of divine earthliness… a garden to be entered any evening when the bright mind cools.

Animal presences are identified with a perennial, recoverable paradise — not a historical past but an ongoing imaginal dimension accessible when ego-consciousness relaxes.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The dog becomes familiaris (the old word for household soul carrier) because owner and animal are familiar in soul, angel to angel, each knowing how deep the soul can delve, how dark the passage.

The domestic animal — specifically the dog — is shown to function as a soul-carrier and apotropaic daemon, embodying a mutuality of psychic natures between human and beast.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

These white bears could be theophanies, displays of divinities, presenting the dilemmas, the agonies, the potentialities in precise detail of what Jung called the ‘religious instinct.’ Yet a bear is more than, other than a religious instinct.

Hillman affirms the bear as theophanic while simultaneously exceeding the Jungian reduction to ‘religious instinct,’ insisting that an irreducible residue — the animal itself — remains after all interpretation.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

As empirical scientists we did not achieve much. As phenomenological psychology our work attuned my ears to hearing the voices of the creatures and gave me the eye to see the habitual mistakes and cruelties the dreamers make vis-à-vis the animals that come in the night.

Hillman describes the methodological genesis of his animal dream research at the Jung Institute, privileging phenomenological attunement over empirical classification.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

These animals have done so much for us for thousands of years. They’ve brought us food, they’ve brought us dances, they’ve brought us wisdom, they’ve brought us technical skills.

Hillman articulates a reciprocal debt owed to animals across evolutionary time, grounding the psychological imperative to attend to them in a deep history of inter-species cultural exchange.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

It was the tenuous reality of the animal, that it was there and not there, much like the animals in our dreams that can be so terrifying, so startling, and yet are ‘only dreams.’

In dialogue with painter Margot McLean, Hillman aligns the ontological ambiguity of painted animals — present yet evanescent — with the peculiar phenomenology of the dream-animal.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Perhaps there is a cosmic push in the intention of the bugs… they may be the animal compulsion in the sensate body of the world beyond human feeling, that brainless, bloodless insistence upon moving out and moving on.

Insect dream-presences are interpreted as instinctual cosmic vectors of individuation — small in appearance but carrying an impersonal, world-force that transcends personal psychological content.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The parallel with the carcass of the dead lion in which is a hive of honey bees (Samson’s story in Judges 14: 8) suggests the solar component of the bugs, that they bring or are the new light.

Through biblical amplification, Hillman reads dream insects erupting from decay as solar, regenerative presences — the new life emerging from the death of an old psychic configuration.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

We may long for their presence in some subliminal way; our behavior, however, keeps them ‘out there.’ There remains a deep moat between them and us, despite the safari vacations, the snorkeling, and the nostalgia.

Hillman identifies a structural dissociation in contemporary culture: a subliminal longing for animal proximity coexists with behavioral and psychological mechanisms that enforce distance.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

There are also images like the Minotaur where you have a bull’s head and a human body… you get this terrible feeling – it’s so sad it makes you cry – of being caught inside that bull’s head.

Through the polarity of Chiron and the Minotaur, Hillman explores what makes animal-human hybridity monstrous or healing, arguing that the quality of integration determines the psychological valence.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In dreams, too, horses are carefully slaughtered, sometimes flayed, put to death with a bullet, bled from the neck, buried in a pit. The dreamer is shocked, afraid for his or her own life, as if the death of the horse —

Dream sacrifice of the horse is read through comparative religious practice — the Roman October Horse, the Hindu horse-sacrifice — situating the dream-animal’s death within a mythological economy of power and divinity.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Gleaming white, at the farthest edge of earth, at the end of his rope, at the top of the pole, upright and pointing to heaven, this bear – for all his power at that place – is in agony.

Close phenomenological reading of a polar bear dream demonstrates Hillman’s method: attending to spatial, gestural, and emotional qualities of the animal’s appearance before any interpretive move.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Whether the fox considers itself ‘devious,’ whether its habit of preferring a sinuous path… are adequately described by such adjectives as ‘devious,’ ‘clever,’ ‘stealthy’… is really a moral issue.

Hillman interrogates the moralistic projection embedded in animal-descriptors, arguing that human ethical categories falsify animal presence and require decolonization through imaginative re-vision.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

It extends the idea of soul, and the experience of animation, from our subjective personalism so that the individual human is less isolated and sick.

Protection of animals and nature is grounded psychologically in the extension of soul beyond the human subject — a therapeutic argument for ecological engagement as cure for modern isolation.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Things are different in this world without ‘the past’ and ‘the future,’ my body quivering in this space like an animal. I know well that, in some time out of this time, I must return to my house and my books. But here, too, is home.

Abram’s phenomenological account of bodily immersion in an animal’s present-tense world offers a philosophical complement to Hillman’s imaginal approach, grounding animal presence in perceptual reciprocity.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The dog went to Sleep and Death, and she was led there too by feelings of loss, lethargy, and aloneness. The animal doctor is also a doctor-animal or one who has animal wisdom, able to perform the death rites of therapy.

Clinical case material illustrates the psychopomp function of the dream-dog, guiding a patient into a nekyia — a descent into underworld material — through its own chthonic nature.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

As the wasp works its way through the screen that is supposed to keep it outside… the dreamer gradually — [realizes something more subtle].

Dream-insect intrusion is read as a phenomenologically precise event in which the animal’s own behavior — penetrating the boundary between outside and inside — enacts the psychological transformation the dream announces.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Artemis can be a young Native American woman, a woman naturalist, veterinarian, or zookeeper… or she might be an independent woman, a feminist, Wonder Woman, a mother bear, or a deer.

Signell extends the animal-presence motif into feminist clinical practice, demonstrating how goddess-figures in women’s dreams assume animal forms that carry archetypal authority and instinctual wisdom.

Signell, Karen A., Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Womens Dreams, 1991supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Neither group feels it is nature. The first group is the good shepherds, the caretakers, basically moralists… The second group is the conquerors… But both groups stand apart, forever doing something to or for or with nature.

Hillman identifies a shared psychological root beneath conservationism and exploitation — both positions enact estrangement from nature — gesturing toward a third way rooted in felt identity with the animal world.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The animals, plants, rocks, and waters of this place are specific. Considering now San Francisco Bay, the life of indigenous people in this place… gave rise to divine persons, Kuksu and possibly Coyote among them.

Bioregionalist and indigenous perspectives are invoked to argue that specific animal presences — Coyote, Kuksu — emerge from long habitation within a particular landscape, linking place, soul, and animal-deity.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The two spiders spun independently of each other, but to my eyes they wove a single intersecting pattern. This widening of my gaze soon disclosed yet another spider spiraling in the cave’s mouth.

Abram’s account of perceptual absorption into spider-activity exemplifies the mode of attentive, non-interpretive engagement with animal presence that Hillman’s depth-psychological method calls for.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →