A Blue Fire, Part I with James Hillman

James Hillman's A Blue Fire Part I burns through the entire range of his life's work in this lecture.  Recorded during a seminar weekend in Rowe, Massachusetts, this talk is a conflagration of ideas.  The result is Hillman revisions himself, his work, and archetypal psychology.

Hillman reads from and reflects on his life's work.

"Philosophers have tried to keep the line between spirit and soul by keeping soul altogether out of their works or assigning it a lower place. Descartes confined soul to the pineal gland, a little enclave between the opposing powers of internal mind and external space. More recently, Santayana has put soul down in the realm of matter and considered it an antimetaphysical principle. Collingwood equated soul with feeling and considered that psychology had no business invading the realm of thought and ideas. The spiritual point of view always posits itself as superior, and operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes.

Philosophy is therefore less helpful in showing the differences than is the language of the imagination. Images of the soul show first off all more feminine connotations. Psyche, in the Greek language, besides being soul denoted a nightmoth or butterfly and a particularly beautiful girl in the legend of Eros and Psyche. Our discussion in the previous chapter of the anima as a personified feminine idea continues this line of thinking. There we saw many of her attributes and effects, particularly the relationship of psyche with dream, fantasy, and image. This relationship has also been put mythologically as the soul's connection with the night world, the realm of the dead, and the moon. We still catch our soul's most essential nature in death experiences, in dreams of the night, and in the images of "lunacy."  

From James Hillman,
Revisioning Psychology, p. 68.

Running Time: 118 minutes
ISBN: Digital Download 978-1-61544-237-9