The Capitalism of the Ego: James Hillman's Critique of the Ego Function in Psychoanalysis

There's a particular type or style of advice that people sometimes offer when their friends or family encounter emotional obstacles, particularly when they suffer from bouts of depression. This advice is often couched in the language of ownership, battle, responsibility, or goal orientation. The presumption being that depression is something responsive to a heroic approach. A concerned friend or family member might phrase a question like, "What are you doing to take ownership of your problems?" or "Perhaps you just need to conquer your demons and move on." Of course, you do want to move on. But let's imagine for a moment that the extent of the depression becomes so great that you start having intense dreams or nightmares. So you go to a therapist to find out what it all means, you know, someone who can help you pull those images into the daylight so you can get a handle on what's brewing deep in the recesses of your unconscious. And with the help of the analyst as your guide, you can mobilize your deep dive into the dream world to get a clear picture about how to get back to functioning as a member of your family or society. At the very least, something in those dreams and nightmares might provide you with the empowerment or psychological leverage needed to get back to your personal goals and projects. For archetypal psychologist and writer James Hillman, this is an absolutely flawed approach to therapy. Moreover, he sees this approach as pervasive in domains outside of the clinic or office of the psychoanalyst. For Hillman, a certain ego-centered, herculean orientation to psychology has long correlated with various social and political challenges, particularly in the way we do things like organized institutions, conduct urban planning, and also in the way we haplessly exacerbate crises, such as the ongoing climate catastrophe. In this video, I will highlight Hillman's provocative anti-egoism of the psyche, which he believes not only has consequences for fostering a psychological relationship with ourselves, but also how this way of thinking brings to bear on our socio-political landscape. Hillman's idea of the ego is best understood through the figure of Hercules, the paradigmatic hero of Greek mythology. For Hillman, what is unique about Hercules is that he becomes an enemy of death. He's an antagonist of the underworld and its many shadowy denizens. According to one of Hercules' myths, Hercules makes a descent into the underworld to fulfill the task of capturing Cerberus, the three headed beast who guards the entrance to Hades. His heroic intervention no doubt demonstrates his magnanimous strength. But unlike other figures of the Greek pantheon who also descended into the underworld, Hercules stands out as one among them who brought one of its beasts into daylight. For Hillman, it remains a question whether Hercules, like those other deities in Demigods, was ever initiated into the Ellucinian mysteries. This is important mythologically because the ritual of initiation bestows upon the initiate, the gift of what Hillman describes as the night world consciousness, a sensibility which would allow the initiate to adequately observe the risks of trying to pull the dwellers of the underworld into the world of daylight. What's more, Hercules' conquest of Cerberus symbolically leaves open the gate to the underworld. With Hades' gate unguarded, there are two risks, day world entities infiltrating the night world and the shadows of the night world straying from the native domain where they best thrive. In psychological terms, the collapse of this boundary entails the risk of approaching images with the literalism and positivist heuristics of the day world. For Hillman, we best enter the underworld on its own terms by taking up a metaphorical attitude and dispensing with an approach to our dreams and fantasies which attempts to cast them into true or reductive interpretations. In Hillman's view, psyche or the domain of the magical entities does not observe the reality principle of the Herculean Ego. Rather, it is Hades, the name shared by the God and the underworld itself, that becomes the pre-eminent metaphor of the imagination. Hades is the realm where images are born and live. The connection that the images of dreams and fantasies maintain with the day world is complex, but for now we'll simply say that Hillman asserts that the quality of our relationship with the imaginal is determined by our receptivity to images versus attempting to appropriate them for day world projects. Hillman believes that one of the primary challenges we face when developing a relationship with the imagination is that we often conflate the work of the imagination with the Herculean or day world notion of labor. He says we need to make a distinction between the reality principle of the Ego, which is characterized by its moral consciousness and its ambition to profit. The reality of the imagination is quite different. The imagination is a font that produces images boundlessly without a desire to profit from what it produces. Its activity is more over undertaken in a way that combines play, work, and pleasure. The Herculean Ego's relationship with the imagination can be characterized as a kind of economic reductionism. The Ego seeks to exploit images for day world meanings, turning the workings of the imagination into the economics of work. Hillman writes that "This is the capitalism of the Ego, now acting as the captain of industry, who by increasing his flow of information is at the same time is stranging himself, both from the source of his raw material, nature, and his workers, the imagination." We might say that Hillman advances his own psychical theory of capitalist alienation. Hillman believed that when we embody this attitude in a therapeutic setting, we set ourselves up to fall victim to the same psychological illnesses familiar to those who wholly immerse themselves in the Ego fantasy in their day world exploits. We can witness the work of this fantasy in the day world in just about every venue of life where people strive for success. However, this fantasy is pronounced in places where ferocious competition abounds, such as in business, in athletics, and in prestigious professions. For people predisposed to the Herkulean attitude, therapy often becomes just another object of conquest, an obstacle to be surmounted. We should also talk about Hillman's theory of the imagination and its relationship to science. Hillman by no means reject science. However, he does believe that the hero archetype has also pervaded our quest for scientific knowledge. This heroic paradigm manifests itself prominently in medical disciplines, especially in the realm of pathology. A typical response to identifying something wrong with a body or with a mind often entails an allopathic, excision of those causes or local structures said to be the source of the problem. In other words, reduce a problem to an offending part or parts, cut those parts off or cut them out, and by doing so, ignore the broader set of determinants of a bodily, psychological, or social totality. Hillman believed this disposition ultimately came to infuse psychoanalysis, but the problem of psychology wasn't limited to the heroism of clinicians alone. A certain kind of heroism remains at work in the attempt to ground the imagination in the epistemological predicates of modern science. From its inception and throughout the 20th century, many of the major figures associated with psychoanalysis maintained an ambition to construct a dovetail between psychoanalytic theory and science broadly construed. Freud insisted that dreams were the Viregia or Royal Road to the unconscious. Along this road, we could transport dream images back into the day world for the work of scientific inquiry. A similar, scientific impulse was also shared in part by both Jung and Locom, whose systems of psychoanalysis engendered a preference for interpreting unconscious content under the rubric of categories, types, and science. The concessions made to the demands of an empirical science by their respective analytical methodologies not only meant an uphill battle to establish their scientific legitimacy, but this tendency compromised what human believes are the core modalities of psychoanalysis, fictionalizing, fabulating, and mythologizing activities which nourish psyche or what human calls "soul." The kind of knowledge that we ultimately gain in our underworld encounters is not a knowledge of the psyche or about the psyche. To reference Tillman's reading of Neo-plateness philosopher Proklaus, image work demands a different kind of epistemology, a knowledge in the psyche, a logos which itself subsists and manifests in its encounters with psyche. In short, our attempt to make dreams and fantasies congruent with intelligible categories or forms of symbology or forms of typology inevitably innervate the life of images. Thus, Hillman demands another approach. The Herkulean hero knows only polar opposition but craves something beyond their manarchy and way of being. They crave depth. Without this experience of depth, their threshold for acting remains constrained to two manners of expression, an external heroism or an inward one. They are either out slaying dragons in the external world or, as Nietzsche would contend, in times of peace, the warlike temperament of the hero turns inward and attacks itself. Typically, the Herkulean inward turn is characterized by its quest for salvation or the expiation of guilt to use the images as leverage to get the hero out of the intensity of the images which haunt them. Hillman proposes a third alternative, which is to embody depth, to engender depth, to dive into the images and to take them on their own terms and not to see them simply as something salvageable for a project of the self-savalerization or its salvation. In an age where we so often talk about capitalist desire, imagining new futures and how to change the objects of our desire, Hillman puts forward an important provocation with respect to our relationship with the imagination and the reflexive determinations operative between our psychological and political realities. In part, what increases our relationship with psyche is not dragging images into the light of day world heuristics but fostering acts of imagining through a kind of play with images and developing a sensitivity to a marginal event through what Hillman called "seeing through" or "noticing" and the practice of sticking with images. That is a discussion I will say for another video in the meantime to enjoy an undistilled engagement with Hillman's psychology in all of its richness you should look at his work for yourself. On this particular topic, I would absolutely recommend Dream in the Underworld where he writes in depth on the themes I've discussed today. 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