Healing Fiction by James Hillman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fascinating read! Hillman’s book contains three parts primarily addressing Freud, Jung, and Adler.
I think I was most fascinated by the first section because it contained a concept new for me. Though I’ve got a good handle on Freud himself, Hillman takes us specifically into examining case history and what Freud brought to it. Ultimately, case history itself serves as a type fiction: the person telling the story of their experience(s) is presenting a fiction, their interpretation and memory of the events; the analyst is then recording that story, with his/her (un)conscious interpretation of the events. Fascinating perspective. And, it leads us to the underlining theme of the whole text: why do our souls want this healing fiction??
In the second section, Hillman works with ideas of Jung, images, and Knowing Thyself. Just coming out of my Jungian course and really being fascinated by so much of his work, I soaked up this section. Hillman leads us into the use of active imagination and discussing healing, something of deep interest to me for my possible dissertation topic.
In the third and final section, Hillman looks at Alder and what the soul wants. The focus here lies on inferiority and community, and then leads to Hillman’s final conclusion on what the soul wants. He concludes that, despite that various answers he’s given through out, this is the key: we don’t need to know WHAT the soul wants but THAT it wants. And this is something psychotherapy can deliver.
