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Abstract
This paper examines ambiguities and tensions within James Hillman's ideas about the psychological value of the architecture of the built environment in contrast to that of the natural world. In his published works Hillman often describes the built environment and the natural world as equivalent in value, but on other occasions he celebrates the latter to the detriment of former. These contrasting approaches have significant implications for his celebrated conception of anima mundi, where psyche is found in the ‘outside’ word as much as ‘within’ our individual minds. The decisive question therefore is whether the psyche for Hillman is found as readily within the built environment as it is the natural world. This paper argues that Hillman's overall position does not allow a split between city spaces and the natural world: that the built environment is no less a site for psyche than the natural world. After describing instances of Hillman's apparent denigration of the built environment within his published and unpublished archival material, I outline a resolution to the perceived split by utilising his notions of ‘pathologizing’ and aesthetics. The paper concludes that not all, but most, buildings and urban spaces fail to house psyche in the world. For Hillman, only a built environment that is able to engage our aesthetic sensibilities can succeed in doing so, but the vast majority of urban spaces remain anaesthetised by the ego's preoccupation with all things superficial, pleasurable, pretty, and functional.
Acknowledgements
I thank Safron Rossi, the curator of the Archives, who was especially helpful and efficient in overseeing my time there, and also the uninvited bat who, against all odds, flew into the secure room where Safron and I were working.
Notes on contributor
Lucy Huskinson (PhD) is Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy and Religion at Bangor University, UK. She is co Editor-In-Chief of the International Journal for Jungian Studies, and author of numerous works of analytical psychology and philosophy, including Nietzsche and Jung (Routledge, 2004). She has also edited and contributed various anthologies of essays, including Analytical Psychology in a Changing World (Routledge, 2014); Dreaming the Myth Onwards (Routledge, 2009); and New Interpretations of Spirit Possession (Continuum, 2010).
Notes
1. I discuss the issue of this split in more detail elsewhere (Huskinson, Citation2014). There, the built environment and natural world are examined in turn to ascertain the extent to which they concern themselves with the different categories of experience that are traditionally associated with the two: the sublime, numinous, and uncanny. The psychodynamic nature of these categories is explored in order to demonstrate the psychological value of the built environment as no less veritable a ‘site for psyche’ as the natural world, and no less efficient an environment for the facilitation of psychological health and the integration of self.
2. See for instance, Roszak, in The Voice of the Earth, who writes, ‘But what if [madness] derives not from the distant ancestral past but from something more recent: the beginnings of civilized life, the social and economic transition that rooted our species out of its original environment and relocated it to the city’ (Citation2002a, p. 83).
3. For instance, John Clinebell, in Ecotherapy: Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth, asserts ‘the need of city-dwellers to find healing in wilderness’. He argues, ‘Entering the wilderness and its microcosms – gardens and parks – gives us an opportunity to reconnect with that instinct and rests our fragile psyches from the exhaustion of trying to stay intact in the civilized world, which is so alien to many of us’ (Citation1996, p. 46).
4. See for instance, Yi-Fu Tuan, who maintains that ‘the virtues of the countryside require their anti-image, the city, for the sharpening of focus, and vice-versa’ (Citation1990, p. 102); that is to say, ‘of city corruption and rural virtue’ (Citation1990, p. 108; cf. 103–109).
5. All unpublished sources of James Hillman's notes and correspondence are from: Opus Archives and Research Center James Hillman Collection, Box 185A, Series: Letters. Often sources are undated and untitled because no date or title is given on the original source. Where the date and/or title is known, it has been cited. Citations of archival material are indicated in the text by JHC, and followed where applicable by the date and title of the piece. Often Hillman's notes – especially handwritten ones – contain errors of spelling, punctuation, syntax, and grammar. I have not corrected these, and cite them as they appear in the archived material. Often too, sources are inconsistently labelled or titled (for instance, one file is titled both ‘TOWER’ and ‘TOWERS’). Again, I have maintained the original citation of material throughout.
6. Hillman's endorsement is as follows. ‘Because it's thorough, because it's right, and because it speaks the ideals of a passionate heart, Roszak's book lays a groundwork for the theory and practice of psychotherapy for the coming century’ (Roszak Citation2002a, back cover).
7. See Huskinson (Citation2013) for detailed discussion of Jung's house of psyche, and its various aspects in relation to Gaston Bachelard's misappropriation of it in his celebrated work The Poetics of Space (Citation1957/Citation1958).
8. However, in one brief standalone note he does refer to the lower parts of the building, albeit cryptically. With reference to tower-like structures, he notes that they, ‘depict the soul of a person who lives up so high that he has disdain, Jews too, everything that is below – even his own digestive system, and the common people’ (JHC, 1993, ‘TOWERS. 2’).
9. Interestingly, Hillman makes a similar remark in the context of ceilings: ‘What statements are these ceilings making? What are they saying about our psychic interiors? If looking up is a gesture of aspiration and orientation toward the higher order of the cosmos, an imagination opening towards the stars, our ceilings reflect an utterly secular vision – short-sighted, utilitarian, unaesthetic. Our heads reach up and open into a meaningless and chaotic white space’ (Citation1997, p. 196).
10. He says, ‘I think when you go past a street where the buildings have been burnt, or where the windows are boarded up, the windows are smashed, it's a terrible feeling, it's like you're looking at a face with the eyes out’ (Kidel, Citation1994, episode 3). In his preparatory notes for this episode, Hillman emphasises the problems of windows that don't open, and those that are double or triple glazed. These windows, he says, ‘reinforce the isolation or loneliness of the person inside. They come out of a paranoid fantasy that anything can come in on me, invade me, and so they reinforce our social isolation. You're absolutely hermetically sealed’. Interestingly, Hillman notes that the development of different styles of window designs (from the early Roman fortress with its small-slit windows to later, larger glass pane windows) ‘parallels the development of our kind of minds. They get bigger’; they allow more ‘light [to] come through into [the] interior’ (JHC, 1993). In another related note, Hillman asserts that in contrast to the fortress wall, with its slit windows that denote ‘paranoia’, the glass window represents ‘a very different fantasy’ – one that is decidedly ‘open’ (JHC). If we read the two notes together, we can advance the idea that our minds have developed in a way that suggests we have become more open and less paranoid. However, this idea does not chime with Hillman's general view on this matter.
11. In a handwritten note, Hillman boldly states, ‘huge investment in [the] Front Door [e.g.] Oak door. Carved Door. SIGNIFY REPRESSION’ (emphasis is in the original note; JHC, 1993, ‘DOORS’). In other words, the door becomes in this note the means by which the ego can barricade itself inside and defend itself from all that is outside.
12. Hillman's use of the term ‘ugly’ is also ambiguous. At times, he refers to it as a problem; for instance, when he asks: ‘Why is the USA so ugly and what might be done about it?’ (Citation1995b: 189); and in statements such as: ‘it becomes the citizen's duty […] above all, to work to protest actively against ugliness wherever it appears, or threatens to appear’ (Citation1995b, p. 193). ‘Ugly’ for Hillman is often a problem that is symptomatic of ‘careless design’ such as ‘cheap dyes, inane sounds, structures and spaces […] direct glaring light […] bad chairs […] hum of machine noise, looking down at a worn, splotched floor cover, [being] among artificial plants […] project housing’ (Citation1991, p. 176). At other times, he uses it more positively to refer to a sublime effect of the unconscious, to feelings of distress, which are necessary reminders or wake-up calls to alert us to the kinds of problem he maintains we encounter with careless design, as alluded to above. In this second sense of the term, ugliness enables us to take leave of all that is ugly! Hillman writes, ‘The cost of ugliness gains a further meaning. Ugliness costs us pain. We hate it, we are shocked, dismayed at so much ugliness everywhere. We find ourselves outraged, emotional life in disarray. But this pain to our senses may be the entrance fee, the cost required for attaching ourselves to the world, re-finding our love for its beauty. It costs ugliness to awaken our contemporary anesthetized consciousness’ (Citation1997, p. 203).
13. Hillman says that the ugly stirs us more than the beautiful. But elsewhere he says, on the contrary, that ‘Nothing stirs the heart, quickens the soul more than a moment of beauty’ (Citation1995b, p. 188). Furthermore, he equates ugliness with the very lack of having been stirred, with numbness: ‘[you must protest against ugliness] otherwise you remain “anesthetized” – without aesthesis, without the awakened aesthetic response – passive and compliant with whatever is going down’ (Citation1995b, p. 193). We find a similar idea already in the ancient ‘Art of Memory’ (a tradition Hillman himself cites as influential to his own thinking on the dynamic qualities of pathological images: Citation1972, pp. 177–182), whereby ugly, distorted images were deemed most likely to stir the imagination and incite the soul. An early protagonist of the Art, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, claims that architectural imagery – especially striking images of buildings, houses, arches, colonnades, and ramparts of a city – are the most stirring and memorable (Quintilian, Citation1922, pp. XI, ii: 17–22).
14. Graffiti in this reading is an attempt to restore the repressed aesthetic impulse, an attempt to beautify the desensitised building through a shock of the ugly.
15. Hillman promotes a traditional notion of the sublime: beauty tinged with monstrosity and terror. But he does not endorse its notion of ‘vastness’. He seeks instead a notion of sublime ‘particularity’: ‘I am suggesting a reduction in the scale of awe from a romantic and sublime immersion in vastness – the American way – to joy in pondering the particular’ (Citation1995c, p. 168). However, this particular point does not accord with a more positive comment he makes within the same essay regarding ‘the experience of inspiration’ one may get ‘from the towering structures of glass, steel, and aluminium’ when ‘walking down Fifth Avenue in New York’ (Citation1995c, p. 168) – a comment that clearly contrasts with his spate of negative comments on towers that I cited earlier.