Alchemical Psychology (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman) by Hillman James

Author:Hillman, James [Hillman, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology
Publisher: Spring Publications, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

But what are these doves in our whitening? How are they our silver? Jung remarks in passing that “the tender pair of doves” “would be capable of an interpretation downward.” (CW 14: 205) Here he has been brushed by their wings. [137] Interpretation from above downward follows their descending motion that announces a new vision of things. This is the moment, in Corbin’s language, of ta‘wil, that shift in mind enabling us to experience the sensate world of perception by means of the imaginal world. And it is this move that tames the lion, depriving him of his usual power as king of the physical world. We can now see all things, not spiritually through a glass darkly or naturally through a green lens, but first through a silvered imagining, an exegesis of events that leads them out of their physical encasement.

“Interpretation from above downward” is another way of describing the gift of tongues brought by the dove. This is not some peculiar pentecostal babbling, but rather a recognition that the dove is forever possible within our spontaneous speech, that speech is a gift and that the love of speech, its peitho or persuasiveness, is a tongue of fire as strong as love’s desire which can at any moment ignite any thing with the whiteness of a silvered image simply by use of an inspired word. We wrote above of a psychology based in the vi´shuddha chakra of the throat, psychology as an act of speech, a work of sound and listening, and we are trying to continue in that style of psychology here. Yes, Freud was right: therapy is a talking cure, and the doves cure the tongue of its nigredo talk: opaque concepts, deadening ideas in dull language, densities of plodding protocols, prose – interpretations from below. The doves teach trust in the sudden word, that miraculous appearance of the silver, which interpretations from below have called complex indicators, slips of the tongue, poetic license, puns, and lunacy.

Interpretations from below are necessary when reduction in Berry’s sense is necessary. [138] Then we need nigredo talk, the hermeneutic of shadow: mortifying, depressive and nasty. But to carry on reduction when the dove is dawning from the lead occludes the whitening and frustrates imaginal realization. The shadow is not a panacea.

The hermeneutic of shadow is misplaced especially when literalized as the nigredo, shadow as only black. For this misses the shadows in whiteness, protecting the albedo from primal innocence.

Shadow conceived only as darkness forces the albedo to defend itself by intensifying its whiteness, thereby returning the albedo to the very condition for which it is under attack: innocence, ignorance, smoothness, purity. Then, whiteness is driven to anima extremes, becoming lofty, cold, and hard. Cure of white is not by opposites, but by sames, or at least similars – the blues, gray areas, foggy densities, mooniness, and other cloudings of consciousness that are the true shadows of white.

The actual shadow lies concealed in the nature of whiteness itself. For as the writers on color

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