A Contradictory Soul : James Hillman, Author of ‘The Soul’s Code’ and Ex-Therapist, Calls Even His Own Teachings a Myth

James Hillman, author of “The Soul’s Code” (Random House), has been a professor at Yale University and the University of Chicago, a student of Carl Jung and director of studies at the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich. Yet, asked which of these accomplishments he prefers to be known by, he squirms. He prefers, he finally says, to be known simply as an “independent thinker.”

Hillman believes “an author should stay at home and write and not be involved in salesmanship.” Yet even writing 26 books that have been called “brilliant,” “acute” and “powerful” does not necessarily lead to book sales. Thus, his current 15-city, two-month national tour, including a recent talk and signing at the Bodhi Tree bookstore in West Hollywood.

Hillman, 72, was a practicing therapist for 35 years. Yet, in the midst of this career, he coauthored with Michael Ventura “We’ve Had One Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, and the World’s Getting Worse” (HarperCollins, 1992). In short, Hillman, who “prefers not to get my photo taken because it invades my sense of privacy,” yet whose photo appears on his book’s flyleaf, and who recently even guested on that sanctuary of pop psychology shows, “Oprah,” is a difficult man to peg. For every statement one can make about him, a seemingly opposite statement is also true.

Which is precisely Hillman’s point. For, he says, while Americans may talk a good game about how we respect rugged individualism, we are driven to conform to the latest poll-driven norms, the ecstatic peak, if you will, of the bell-shaped curve. And in this rush to conform, many of us have sacrificed our personal meaning, our very souls.

This refusal to explore who we really are is why so many are addicted to quick-fix programs, religious orthodoxies, rampant materialism, escapes to Nepal, quests for gurus, and alcohol and drugs. Yet, says Hillman, should we remain insistently aware, “Sooner or later, something seems to call us to a particular path.”

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This something, he says, is the call of the soul.

“You may remember this something as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination . . . struck like an annunciation--this is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have, this is who I am.”

And it is here that Hillman makes the leap that has rendered him famous, yet controversial. For he pushes aside conventional psychology’s focus on examining our growing-up traumas (nurture) and our environment (nature) to explain who we are.

This attention to outside events, argues Hillman, empties us of our true identities. It renders our lives meaningless “accidents.”

What if our soul chose the circumstances of its birth, including our brutalizing father and absent mother? What if our soul deliberately picked out the despised minority group into which we were born? What if our soul deliberately chose our crippled body, our predisposition to disease, our scorned race, our not-yet-equal gender, our “blasphemous” orientation, our grinding poverty in order to learn something?

Would not that quest make up our individual journey, our muse?

It’s not that Hillman necessarily believes all this. Indeed, in one more contradiction, he calls his own teachings “a myth.” What’s important, he says, is the myth’s power to free the individual from feeling victimized.

According to the New York Times Magazine, “Hillman developed a psychoanalytic theory few could understand, until his protege Thomas Moore translated it for the masses,” principally in his best-selling “Care of the Soul” (HarperCollins, 1993). In “The Soul’s Code” Hillman has simplified his former complexity into straightforward prose.

Hillman views children not as empty vessels molded by their environments, but as mythical, pint-sized souls already revealing their intuitive talents. These talents, he argues, are best revealed by child prodigies such as pianist Van Cliburn, who, merely from listening to “a complex little number that required crossing left hand over the right with tricky rests and syncopations” could play it at age 2. Similarly, director Martin Scorsese deepened his cinematographic abilities because his asthma prevented him from playing with his friends in New York’s Little Italy. The window panes framing the boy’s vision of the street games became the camera frame capturing the adult’s vision.

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Conventional psychology’s explanation of behavior as reactions to external events negates the role of the soul’s call. The result, he says, is a field overrun with “psychological seminars on how to clean closets or withhold orgasms. And so, psychology has become a trivialized, banal, self-help, egocentric pursuit, rather than an exploration of the mysteries of human nature.”

Although Hillman’s views may once have been outside the mainstream, over recent years they’ve gained increasing currency. “There are many psychologists who, in their later years, have returned to a spiritual perspective. Many psychologists would wholeheartedly agree with [Hillman],” says Stuart Fischoff, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Psychological Assn. And yet, the study of the soul is “something psychologists stay away from because they can’t quantify it.” This, Fischoff said, Hillman raises theories “with no evidence to support them.”

Retorts Hillman: “There are endless experiences in life which can’t be quantified. Just because they can’t be quantified, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. To think this way is absurd and infantile.”

Hillman concedes formal proof is absent. But, he insists, the soul can be felt, awakened each time we delight in a rainbow or dare to love another, sensed each time we feel at one with our ancestors.

So, how has Hillman’s calling manifested in his life? Hillman volunteers one-sentence answers about each of his two “long” marriages, and one sentence altogether about his four “very grown” children. Even as the resident of rural Connecticut tells stories about others following their soul’s calling, his own life is to remain private. Yet one more contradiction in a contradictory soul.