Is this a man?

One of the fascinating parts of Hillman’s analysis of Freud, is the exploration of how personal agency is taken away from the patient, and given over to the interpreter—the narrator of the greater plot. “We do not enter into the inside of the case as we do in a novel, sympathizing with Dora, but remain outside, laying bare tissues, analyzing with Freud” (7). According to Hillman, Freud engineers a new genre, describing the literary in terms of the scientific.

Hillman says that the cure of the patient has very little to do with their own courage and personhood. The plot line which, in Freud’s case is always concerned with identification and cure, is governed by “psychodynamics” (8). If the therapist/literary interpreter can link the anxiety to an aspect of the greater Oedipus complex, the psychotherapist has conquers over the patient’s problem. The romance/comedy is then complete.

Freud’s plot is termed “elegant” by Hillman. It’s odd…I have heard of “string theory” or the Big Bang described in the same terms, referring to an elegant universe. Here we have an elegant psyche. For Freud, the “lifting of repression through prolonged recognition (in therapy) was the end all. Neurosis is identifiable and curable. In a sense this can be understood as the antithesis of the romantics (Rousseau’s) conception that each individual has a completely free and open consciousness at Birth—individual’s stories and plots are therefore, their own. In Freud’s universe, and especially in the case studies, everybody is inevitably affected by the same pathological curse (Hillman shows that the mythic and scientific diagnosis is synonymous pg. 11). Hillman exposes the Freudian fantasy as conforming to the mythic level: “plots are myths.” We should understand the meta-plot of all Freudian analysis to be connected to the mythic. Jung is a smidge better because his archetypes are variegated and involved in a forwards and backwards process of individuation.

Interesting Parallel: Christianisms projection of its own hellish image onto hell, forms an interesting parallel with Freudianism, if “Civilization and its Discontents” is merely, as Hillman writes, “A diagnosis is indeed a gnosis: a mode of self-knowledge that creates a cosmos in its own image” (15). It is almost absurdly strange that a Christian and a Freudian world view are condemned by Hillman on the same basis. Jungian and Freudian psych. are both criticized on the basis of their reductivism; turning images into psychological abstractions and processes. I think the main reason that Jesus, Jung and Freud are somewhat lumped together is that they form a direct transference and parallel between the underworld and the world of sleep, and the world of interpretation. Hillman critiques his colleague’s POV, stating, “these one to one parallels should not be forced: polytheistic psychology cannot speak straight on, one to one” (23). Can polythiestic psych be critiqued on the same basis as Freud—creating its own fantasy of how the soul is constructed?

Hillman goes one step farther than Freud in his “discontents”: not only is the conscious mind NOT the basis for human motivations and understanding, the subconscious CANNOT be translated vis-à-vis rationalism: Hillman proposes that reflection and the response of images is the proper hermeneutic, Hermes the proper god, but Hermes reflects a plethora of images/gods (30). The work of interpretation is to reflect the dream image and keep it ingesting in the bowels of the underworld...ha ha ha.