myths also tell of universals in specific images of figures and places, exact happenings which have never happened but always do happen.41 Happenings need reflection and patterning in something that is beyond happening and of another ontological order, where the wonders of nonevents are the events. Or, as Karl Otto Muller said, myth is where "the marvellous is truth,"42 so that its extraordi-nary, strange wonder stands behind all kinds of truth. "Myth," says Hermann Broch, "is the archetype of every phenomenal cognition of which the human mind is capable. Archetype of all human cognition, archetype of science, archetype of art-myth is consequently the ar- Psychologizing or Seeing Through / 155 chetype of philosophy too."43 So, too, myth is metapsychology and metapsychopathology. This Jung and Freud each showed: Jung simply by describing his own psychological ideational processes as "mytholo-gizing"44 Freud by creating what Wittgenstein called "a powerful myth-ology" which one must "see through."45 We see through it first in the obvious-Oedipus, Eros, Thanatos. We see it more subtly and signifi-cantly in the mythical "child" on whose mighty little shoulders rests the huge hydraulic machine of psychoanalysis. Let us recall that Freud's theory of infantile sexuality is not squarely based on the empirical child. Freud never analyzed children, and the memories of childhood which confirmed his theory were taken from adults whose reminiscences were fictions or myths, that is, "expression-perceptions" rather than literal "thing-perceptions." The figure of a polymorphous perverse infant that is depicted in his Three Essays on the Theory o f Sexuality (1905) is thus a mythical (contraposed to em-pirical, factual, literal) creation. This child is not only mythical but mythic, for it has been believed in, its reality has been "confirmed" by "studies" and by personal revelation (witness), and it gives support to a school of teaching and a view of the world, as does any mythic person. The myth that is alive is not noticed as mythical until seen through.46 We practitioners go on mythologizing, deriving our tough-minded empirical facts from an extraordinary form of fiction: the case history, the anamnesis, the "write-up," by means of which the details of a life are composed into a story, receive a vision, and thereby a mythical person becomes the personification of a fate which issues into the therapeutic process. One beauty of mythic metaphors is that they elude literalism. We know at the outset that they are impossible truths. Like metaphor itself, the power of which cannot satisfactorily be explained, a myth also speaks with two tongues at one time, amusing and terrifying, serious and ironic, sublimely imaginative and yet with the scattered detail of ridiculous fancy. The metaphors of myth condense past and present together, so that the past is always present and the present can be felt from the detachment of the past.47 Myths also make concrete particu-lars into universals, so that each image, name, thing in my life when experienced mythically takes on universal sense, and all abstract uni-versals, the grand ideas of human fate, are presented as concrete ac-tions.48 And always a myth is the psyche telling of itself in disguise, as if it had nothing to do with psychology
— James Hillman
Hillman's move here is to catch the clinical enterprise in the act of mythologizing without knowing it — and the Freudian child is the perfect exhibit. That invented infant, polymorphous and perverse, was never abstracted from real children but assembled from adult retrospection, which is to say from imagination dressed as memory. The case history, the anamnesis, the write-up: these are not transcriptions of a life but compositions of one, fictions that bestow fate. Hillman's point is not that this makes them false. It makes them mythic — and mythic means alive, operative, capable of organizing a world, and invisible as myth until the seeing-through occurs.
What this should unsettle is the assumption that rigor lives on the side of the literal. The polymorphous infant is believed in, confirmed by studies, witnessed to in personal revelation — exactly the grammar by which a myth achieves reality. The fact that it cannot be verified against any actual child is not a weakness the theory overcame; it is the condition of its power. Myths elude literalism, Hillman says, because they speak two tongues simultaneously: the universal and the particular, the ancient and the immediate, the amusing and the terrifying. A theory built on such a figure is not therefore discredited. It is disclosed — shown to be doing psychological work that no empirical survey could do in its place, because the work was never about the data.
James Hillman·Re-Visioning Psychology·1975