Alchemical on the New York Times Best-Seller List for Nearly a Year
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JAMES HILLMAN (b. 1926 – d. 2011) was a pioneering psychologist whose imaginative psychology has entered cultural history, affecting lives and minds in a wide range of fields. He is considered the originator of Archetypal Psychology. Hillman received his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 1959 where he studied with Carl Jung and held the first directorship at the C. G. Jung Institute until 1969. In 1970, he became the editor of SPRING JOURNAL, a publication dedicated to psychology, philosophy, mythology, arts, humanities, and cul- tural issues and to the advancement of Archetypal Psychology. Hillman returned to the United States to take the job of Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Dallas after the first International Archetypal Conference was held there. Hillman, in 1978 along with Gail Thomas, Joanne Stroud, Robert Sardello, Louise Cowan, and Donald Cowan, co-founded The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture in Dallas, Texas. The Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman is published by Spring Publications, Inc. in conjunction with The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. The body of his work comprises scholarly studies in several fields including psychology, philosophy, mythology, art, and cultural studies. For the creativity of his thinking, the author of A Terrible Love of War (2004), The Force of Character and the Lasting Life (1999), and Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1996) was lchemical A on the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year. Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, The Myth of Analysis (1972), and Suicide and the Soul (1964) received many honors, including the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic. He held distinguished lectureships at the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Chicago, and Syracuse, and his books have been translated into some twenty languages. sychology The influences shaping the core of Hillman’s work are not limited to depth psychology. His ideas have P firm grounding in the classical Greek tradition and are also deeply influenced by Renaissance thought and Romanticism, encompassing the contributions of psychologists, philosophers, poets, and alchemists. Hillman described his own line of thought as part of the lineage of Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Vico, Ficino, Schelling, Coleridge, Dilthey, Freud, and Jung. Other influential authors in Hillman´s work are Keats, Bachelard, Corbin, Nietzsche, Paracelsus, and Shelley. Throughout his writings, Hillman criticized the literal, materialistic, and reductive perspectives that often dominate the psychological and cultural arenas. He insisted on giving psyche its rightful place in psychol- ogy and culture, fundamentally through imagination, metaphor, art, and myth. That act he called soul-making, a term borrowed from Keats. He is recognized as one of the most important radical critics and innovators of contemporary culture. The Dallas Institute Publications publishes works concerned with the imaginative, mythic, and symbolic sources of culture. The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture 2719 Routh Street | Dallas, Texas 75201 | P: 214 871-2440 | dallasinstitute.org Alchemical Psychology two hundred articles in books, magazines, newspapers and online journals. His titles include: The Idiot: Dostoevsky’s Fantastic Prince (1984); The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh (2000); Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life (2003); Harvesting Dark- The 2016 James Hillman Symposium ness: Essays on Literature, Myth, Film and Culture (2006); with Glen Slater he coedited Varieties of Mythic Experience: Essays on Religion, Psyche and Culture (2008); with Jennifer Selig he co-edited Reimagining Education: Essays on Reviving the Soul of Learning (2009); Day-to-Day Dante: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Exploring Personal Myth Through The Divine Comedy (2012); Creases in Culture: Essays Toward a Poetics of Depth; Our Daily Breach:Exploring Your Personal Myth Through Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. He has also published six volumes of poetry and one novel. He offers (W)riting Retreats on personal mythology using the writings of Joseph Campbell and others to Jungian groups and organizations in the United States and Europe. Dear Attendees, Currently he is co-editing with Evans Lansing Smith a volume on the letters of Joseph Campbell. Joanne H. Stroud received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology and Literature from the University of Dallas and lectures in Dallas, New York City, and Connecticut. She is a Founding Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, Director of Institute Publications, and Editor of the WELCOME to the 5th Annual James Hillman Symposium held here in Dallas. We are so glad that you will Gaston Bachelard Translation Series, which consists of seven works on elemental imagination written by the French twentieth-century philosopher join us as we celebrate the works of renowned archetypal psychologist and Founding Fellow of the Dallas Institute, of science. The 2002 Bachelard Symposium she chaired in Dallas, “Matter, Dream, and Thought,” attracted international attention. The series James Hillman. We, Drs. Gail Thomas, Robert Sardello, and I, assisted by Dr. Larry Allums as Director of the Institute, completion in 2011 was celebrated with a Bachelard Day on the 30th Anniversary of the Dallas Institute. She served on the Board of Overseers of Harvard University for 12 years and serves on the Boards of the University of Dallas and the Southwestern Medical Foundation currently. She has are engaged in keeping James Hillman’s valuable words alive in the world. By hosting these annual symposiums and taught literature and psychology and is author of: The Bonding of Will and Desire; the four-volume series Choose Your Element: Earth, Air, Fire and by producing a publication each year in the series Conversing with James Hillman, we seek to share Hillman’s wit and Water; Time Doesn’t Tick Anymore; Gaston Bachelard: An Elemental Reverie on the World’s Stuff; and Towers 2 Tall. wisdom with longtime friends as well as new ones, making our way, year-by-year, through his multivolume Uniform Natasha Stroud, Ph.D., served on the psychology faculty for the University for Humanistic Studies in Solano Beach, CA, and for the San Diego Uni- versity for Integrative Studies. In private practice in San Diego, she has lectured and written on the subject of psychology and Classical Chinese Med- Edition that the Dallas Institute co-publishes with Spring Publications. icine. Dr. Stroud taught Qi Gong for the Turning Point Crisis Center in Oceanside, CA. She has studied Chinese calligraphy for the past seven years. Rodney C. Teague, Ph.D., resides outside the town of Notasulga in rural, central Alabama with his wife Erin Leigh and three children. He was born Our subject this weekend is Alchemical Psychology, volume 5 of the Uniform Edition. In this original volume, Hillman and reared in central Oklahoma. As a child wandering the ranchland there, he discovered a stone-roofed “dugout” that was tucked into the prairie makes a study of the transformative processes suggested by the arcane alchemical processes that were adapted during land-run days, and which he considers his imaginal first home. For eighteen years preceding his current country-mouse experiment in in late life by Jung as a basis of understanding depth psychology. Hillman carries this idea forward, arguing that the Notasulga, Teague lived in Atlanta, Dallas, and Pittsburgh while earning a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology from Duquesne University. While at Duquesne—and previously at the University of Dallas—he studied psychology as a human science from existential, phenomenological, and images and language of alchemy provide a much more valid, less abstract picture of human nature: instead of cold critical perspectives. He came to psychology initially through literature—through Faulkner, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare viewed in light of a col- concepts, sensate images. By incorporating the aesthetic approach, alchemy teaches, in Hillman’s words, “with its lective (un)conscious, and he continues to make his way back to and through literature. Mentors at the University of Dallas, the Dallas Institute, and Duquesne University nurtured—and go on nurturing—this trajectory. Currently, his clinical work is with veterans who are diagnosed with colors, and minerals, its paraphernalia and enigmatic imagistic instructions . an aesthetic psychology.” mental illness, addictions, and who have had experiences of combat and other trauma. This work connects him to his late grandfathers, both decorated World War II veterans. It also connects him with the vast capacity of the human soul for suffering and resilience. Existential and narra- Following the symposium, we will again publish a compilation of written papers from this weekend in the third install- tive perspectives inform his work. ment of Conversing with James Hillman. If you have not yet read the first two volumes in the series,City & Soul and Gail Thomas, Ph.D., serves as President and CEO of The Trinity Trust Foundation in Dallas to remake the Trinity River Corridor. She was co-founder in 1980 of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and served as its Director for seventeen years. Dr. Thomas’ life work has been the study Senex & Puer, I urge you to do so. They will enrich your understanding not only of Hillman’s psychology but also of our and transformation of cities. For over thirty years she has conducted seminars and conferences on cities and city life. She began in 1982 a series culture, its archetypes, and its myths. of conferences called “What Makes a City?”, attended by city planners, artists, scientists, poets, teachers, and business and civic leaders. She was instrumental in the creation of Pegasus Plaza in downtown Dallas and co-chaired the Dallas Millennium Project to restore Dallas’ icon, Pegasus, the Best regards, Flying Red Horse. For the Trinity project, her efforts helped inspire the philanthropic gifts for the design of Dallas’ two Santiago Calatrava bridges.