James Hillman: Toward a poetic psychology

InThe Dream and the Underworld James Hillman continues to deepen and to refine Jung's recovery of the spontaneous image-making of the soul. Hillman's contribution lies in his imaginai reduction-relating of images to their archetypal background in Greek mythology. Myth is seen as the maker of the psyche, and, in turn, the soul-making ispoesis-a return to the imaginal and poetic basis of consciousness. Dreams, understood poetically, are neither messages to be deciphered and used for the benefit of the rational ego (Freud) nor compensatory to the ego (Jung); they are complete in themselves and must be allowed to speak for themselves. Hillman also sees dreams as initiations into the underworld of death-the other side of life where our imaginal substance is unobstructed by the literal and dualistic standpoints of the dayworld.The author ofImagination is Reality: Western Nirvana in Jung, Hillman, Barfield and Cassirer(Spring Publications, Inc.: University of Dallas, Irving, Texas, 1980)