2025-11-11
A Reading Note
One of the imperatives in contemporary, professional work culture is to “grow.” There is often a sense of height or largeness with that imperative, as if growth must be measured in your distance up the ladder, your territory across the way. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman implores us to think rather of growing down, of growth not of branch but root, of becoming more grounded, sturdier, less able to be pushed around by the whims of others. Here that notion of growth shifts our relationship to work:
As we said above concerning Hercules and as we saw above with Freud, work is usually imagined in terms of the ego and his muscles. Because Cartesian earth is still outward in visible reality, personality ca…
2025-11-11
A Reading Note
One of the imperatives in contemporary, professional work culture is to “grow.” There is often a sense of height or largeness with that imperative, as if growth must be measured in your distance up the ladder, your territory across the way. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman implores us to think rather of growing down, of growth not of branch but root, of becoming more grounded, sturdier, less able to be pushed around by the whims of others. Here that notion of growth shifts our relationship to work:
As we said above concerning Hercules and as we saw above with Freud, work is usually imagined in terms of the ego and his muscles. Because Cartesian earth is still outward in visible reality, personality can only be made by a strong ego coping with tough problems in a world of hard facts. But the dream-work and the work on dreams returns work to the invisible earth, from literal reality to imaginative reality. Through dream-work we shift perspective from the heroic basis of consciousness to the poetic basis of consciousness, recognizing that every reality of whatever sort is first of all a fantasy image of the psyche. Dream-work is the locus of this interiorization of earth, effort, and ground; it is the first step in giving density, solidity, weight, gravity, seriousness, sensuousness, permanence, and depth to fantasy. We work on dreams not to strengthen the ego but to make psychic reality, to make life matter through death, to make soul by coagulating and intensifying the imagination.
It may be clearer now why I call this work soul-making rather than analysis, psychotherapy, or the process of individuation. My emphasis is upon shaping, handling, and doing something with the psychic stuff. It is a psychology of craft rather than a psychology of growth.
The question I hear is, what does it mean to see our work as craft rather than as growth? What are we shaping, handling, or doing something with? The metaphor of growth is one of hunger, consumption, acquisition—to acquire more pips on your collar, more titles after your name, more people under your domain. But craft asks instead, what are you doing? What reality comes into being with your shaping and working? What is in your hands and in your heart?
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Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman posits that we are each accompanied by what he variously calls our “acorn,” “daimon,” or “angel”—that mystical being who both protects us and insists on driving us toward our soul’s calling.
“When we wrong the dream, we wrong the soul.”