THE DREAM AND THE UNDERWORLD

by James Hillman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 19, 1979

James Hillman is an unexpected pleasure--an expositor of Jung who manifests intelligence, sensibility, and even a comic spirit as he intuits notions of psyche and soul, and explores what he believes to be the Really Real of dreams. It is no less than a descent into depth, into the underworld, the lair of Hades or the Hebrew shaol; it is adumbrations of stasis, silence, death. Freud and Jung applied the word depth to their psychology correctly, but the path psychoanalysis took was out of the depths, bringing light into darkness, so that the heroic ego could triumph over the evil below, like Hercules cleansing the Augean stables. That is wrong, Hillman says; what we should do is go deeper, explore the dream world, let the ""dream work"" be to learn from the shadows, the images, and the metaphors what psychic reality is all about. Thus Hillman departs from both Freud and Jung, espousing a radical thesis ""to make life matter through death."" Dreams, he writes, are imaged with ""emotions crafted into distinct materialized shapes."" They reflect the human consciousness of mortality out of which all religions, philosophies, and schools of psychology take their roots, reflecting over and against death. Take the ""against"" away, Hillman says, examine the contents of dreams for what they are. And with suitable cautions, he proceeds to do just that in a final chapter enlarging upon common dream themes: gates and oceans and animals, sickness and remembering and forgetting and revelry. . . . No, not a book for your logical positivist friends, but an extraordinary intellectual exercise that is deft and incisive yet elusive and mysterious.

Pub Date: July 19, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION