City and Soul

273 Pages·2013·1.945 MB·English

by  James Hillman

1
Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman
Volume 2: City & Soul
Copyright © James Hillman 2006
All rights reserved. eISBN 978-0-88214-900-4 (Kindle/iBooks Edition 2013, v.
2.21) Published by Spring Publications, Inc. Putnam,
Conn. www.springpublications.com Cover illustration: James Lee Byars, Untitled, 1960.
Black ink on Japanese paper. Estate of James Lee Byars; courtesy Michael Werner Gallery,
New York, London, Berlin The Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman is
published in conjunction with Dallas Institute Publications, Joanne H. Stroud, Director The
Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, Dallas, Texas as integral part of its publications
program concerned with the imaginative, mythic, and symbolic sources of culture. Additional
support for this publication has been provided by The Fertel Foundation, New Orleans,
Louisiana, and by the Pacifica Graduate Institute and Joseph Campbell Archives and
Library, Carpinteria, California.

2
JAMES HILLMAN

CITY
&
SOUL

Edited by

Robert J. Leaver
With an introduction by

Gail Thomas

SPRING PUBLICATIONS, INC.

PUTNAM, CONNECTICUT
Editor's Preface

3
When I asked James Hillman some years ago to edit these papers, I wanted to make his work
more visible and accessible to a wider range of thinkers and planners who are shaping our cities:
urbanist architects, developers and planners, community psychologists, activists, and artists
serving the public realm. Since cities are, perhaps, the major container in which the soul of the
world comes alive, these papers have a lot to say to each profession as they do their work in
making places.
The following chapters span thirty-two years, from 1973 to 2005. The style of thinking and
writing shows several phases. The earlier papers rely more on myth for observations and
insight, while the second period, addressed directly to an engaged public, places the observer
in the thick of it all, cajoling citizens to attend more acutely to the world around them. Later
work reflects on summary themes, blends observer with activist, and hints at future
possibilities.
The original format of these papers includes delivered lectures on formal occasions, journal
articles, transcription of audio tapes, pieces from magazines, and letters to editors. In each case
the form defines the voice, and I have left each voice as I have found it. Because basic ideas
— the importance of mythical and archetypal foundations, anima mundi and animating the soul
of the world, the politics of beauty and ugliness, city as nature, community and the common
— are central to Hillman’s thought, these themes repeat throughout the book, a repetition that
is necessary to the integrity of its inspiration. – Robert J. Leaver

4
Introduction

This is a book for city planners, for developers, and for the heads of departments of city
services. It is also a book for psychologists of all persuasions because the city is the metaphor
for the collective psyche. The city is the soul, given physical form, animated, and speaking.
In this book of his collected talks and papers on the city, James Hillman asks, “What are our
cities for?” Hillman has always asked the difficult question. And, I have learned, he asks the
question he most desires to answer himself. The city is an appropriate topic because it is big
enough and complex enough to challenge his probing imagination.
What are cities for? Ultimately, Hillman will claim that cities offer a way of recovering our
soul life. He sees no disconnect between cities and our individual soul work.

It’s our inside that counts, says the psychologist. And the very interest in the exterior of
projects – the arts district, the malls – reflects the exteriorization of our interior concerns.
Human beings adapt to their surroundings, and we shall have human beings designed like
our interiors, human beings of gold and silver and glass, with hollow atriums, uniformly
illuminated by shadowless light, without upper orientation, and with only the crassest,
simplest right-angled norms and straight rules for connecting the principles of the heavens
with the ways of the earth. These shall be the inhabitants if these be our inhabitants.

His keen intelligence teases us to drop our preconceived notions of how things are and to
consider the invisible forces from which our notions emanate. It is, of course, these invisible
forces that are seldom considered by the makers of cities. And it is these considerations that
make this book so important.
Joanne Stroud, Robert Sardello, and I invited Hillman to Dallas in 1978. Though he would be
ending thirty-five years of expatriate experiences in Europe, he came because he was
psychologically intrigued with an aggressive modern city like Dallas. He identified Dallas as
“the city of Aphrodite” because of its allure, and possibly, because he felt Dallas to be
psychologically fascinating with its focus on ornament and display while aspiring toward
power and control. He wanted to know what made it work.
A group of educators working together at the University of Dallas was concerned about the
ever-increasing shallowness of our culture and the compartmentalizing of our education. We
were seeking a deeper understanding of the needs of the human soul, observing how
phenomena actualize in the physical world when basic soul needs are denied. Hillman became
an active part of this group, which met frequently and exchanged challenging ideas to develop
a vision for education, culture, and the future of the city. This exchange of ideas led to the
formation of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, of which he was one of the six
founders. Hillman became an active participant in city affairs, speaking to the Dallas City
Council at City Hall, and to other civic organizations. He came to Dallas, as he said, “to move
the furniture around.” And he did.
James Hillman is uniquely gifted in rearranging the furniture. He calls it “seeing through,”
and his vision penetrates every aspect of our taken-for-granted everyday life. Imagination is
the whole thing. No matter if he is considering transportation issues or beauty, the police, or
violence in sports, how ceilings determine our relationship with the cosmos or the artist as civic
leader, Hillman gives a complete set of tools with which to work. First one must realize the
idea, then allow the image to form, then proceed with the practical application. When we read
Hillman, we recognize what we are all missing, whether we are city planners, or
administrators, or educators: We are missing the image, and we are missing imagination. If we
get the image right, it (the image) actually moves the project.
5
Much has changed in the twenty-five years since James Hillman first began speaking of the
soul of the city. The wave of New Urbanism in city planning has caught the attention of city
builders and has stimulated a concern for attention to the character of towns and cities. We in
the twenty-first century are now aware that we must use a different perspective in the making
of cities. It has been a slow change during the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Now
the change is escalating at a rapid pace. In major cities today, every new project seems to
display a “Green” perspective. Whether the developer has become more sensitive to human
needs for walkable and livable places, or this shift is an effort to attract financial backing from
environmentally conscious funding resources, or it is to receive tax benefits from the city is not
known. We do know, however, that city planners, architects, park departments, water utilities
departments, and river authorities are all using different words than they were uttering twenty
years ago. There seems to be more concern for forces at work other than just efficiency and
productivity.
These forces comprise the spirit of place. And, the most powerful of these forces is Love.
“The city is for lovers,” Hillman says. He asks us to love the city. He claims we have an erotic
connection with a city, and if cities are to survive, we must become re-enchanted with them.
And Hillman enchants us as we read, not only with words but with powerful, provocative
images … images that beckon and captivate. James Hillman’s words and images reflect his love
of poetry, art, architecture, history, politics, and governmental affairs. Consider these enticing
allures:

An erotic imagination pervades great cities.

The city belongs to the saxophone. And to the Imagist poets. In “A Station of the Metro,” Ezra
Pound witnesses, “Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall / She walks by railing of a
path in Kensington Gardens …”

It is luxury per se to be the seat of all seven sins. It is pure appetite, a mammoth magnet, a
Rabelaisian consumer of hopeful innocents.

The most repressed of all phenomena in today’s world is beauty. And this repression helps
explain much of the boredom, monotony, and blatant ugliness in the cities of today
.
I do believe that were the public to awaken to its hunger for beauty, there would be rebellion
in the streets. Was it not aesthetics that took down the Berlin Wall and opened China? Not
market consumerism and Western gadgets, as we are told, but music, color, fashion, shoes,
fabrics, films, dance, lyrics, and the shapes of cars.

Boredom and monotony are such soul-destroying experiences because they are the very devil.
In administration we find the Devil in the in-basket – office memos, officialese, routines, and
meetings that dull the mind, dull language, dulled hours, copied and recopied, screaming for
coffee.

More than 50% of the world population are now living in cities. We are no longer able to
tolerate the soul destroying experiences we encounter in towns and cities that have lost their
character and their calling. The making of good cities has become the highest noble enterprise.
And, the makers of cities have been waiting a long tome for this book. – Gail Thomas

6
PART ONE

Patient as Citizen

7
1

City

The City is the greatest of all human works of art, said Lewis Mumford, thereby placing the
city in the realm of imagination. What amazing fantasies are these phenomena arising from
fields and forests, besides rivers and oceans — these incredible symphonic blasts un-needed
except to give physical grandeur and tumultuous extrapolations to human imagination.
Beehives, anthills, rodent burrows are necessities to their constructors; but ours? What really
are our cities for? We imagine them into existence and afterwards we explain them with our
ideas.
So, there are many, many ideas of the city — their origins, their importance, their functions,
ideas proposing to account for the preposterous cluster of disjuncted habitations, ceremonial
avenues, engineered facilities, and the sophistications of styles, speech, and manners, the
plagues and invasions, the downfalls and dispersions. In dreams we find ourselves in cities we
have never visited, cities that do not exist on earth, dream cities like Oz’s Emerald City,
conjured by their names alone, cities of redemption like Jerusalem, of fear and mystery like
Calcutta, of whitened memory like Athens. Where are they now, the magnificent cities of
empires and holiness, and where are the grand ideas of cities that encompass their
magnificence?
Instead, Megapolis, Metroplex: a vast res extensa of throw-away suburbs, exurbs, divisions
and subdivisions; beltways, strips, squatters, squalor, slums, and smog; choked traffic on
clogged arteries; cities as way-stops for transients, commuters, tourists, shelters for the
homeless; buried shopping malls and high-rise car parks amid faceless offices of restless
despair. Cities become look-alike “centers.” “You can resume your flight whenever you like,”
writes Italo Calvino, “but you will come to another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail.
The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end — only the name
of the airport changes.”
Ideas of cities have compacted into the “problems” of cities. Abstractions in computer files
marked: Congestion. Security. Emergency. Evacuation. Crime. Taxable Assessment. Rent
Control. Waste Disposal. Demographics. Commuter Transportation. Parks and Recreation.
Centers. Zones. Codes. Departments. The imagination of city dissected into a corpse for
committees of particularized specialists who elaborate its life-support systems.
That flowing imagination which founded the city in the first place can be refound. It is planted
in our midst always ready to flower — if we begin, not with the “problem” of what needs to
be changed, or moved, or built, or demolished, but begin with what already is here, still stands
and sings of its soul, still holds the sparks of the mind that initiated it — whether in a Roman
wall, or a clapboard New York hot-dog stand, whether an Osaka street of vertical neon, or an
overgrown yard behind a Glasgow row-house. The chaotic jumble of any bright downtown or
decayed neighborhood can discriminate into its particular images in words, paint
or photographic prints, revealing the intimacy of the impulse that continues to make cities.
The poiesis of cities. Cities not like Trude that are planned to solve problems, but cities formed
by desire into works of art, shoulder to shoulder anachronisms, purposeless cacophonies,
8
utterly miraculous that they can function at all, that they can rise at dawn, their millions of feet
striding into each new day.
The city asks for discovery, for fresh perception, not for new planning; the secret city, the
momentary eternal city that springs from imagination and surprises the heart. We may catch it
in a glance through a doorway, reflected in a puddle, heard in the closing of a heavy door. The
city belongs to the saxophone. And to the Imagist poets. “In a Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound
witnesses “The apparition of these faces in a crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Again:
“Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall / She walks by the railing of a path in
Kensington Gardens …”
An erotic imagination pervades great cities. We love them because they hold us in their
bodies, excite us, exhaust us, don’t let us leave. Or, we quit them as from a lover because we
can’t take it anymore. The eros emanating from a stranger, at a bar, in the waiting room of a
city office. Possibilities of seduction on a crosstown bus: not the frames and builds of agrarians
but city bodies wrapped in allure. Falling in love by the Seine, the Neva. Bridges, quais, thin
canals in winter, even the paving stones are in love. And where love, there is revolution: the
cities as cores of polis and the hot blood of politics.
Like failing in love and like revolution, the city is the ultimate luxury not because of its
polished offerings, but because it is luxury per se, the seat of all seven sins as zealots since the
Bible have declared. It is pure appetite, a mammoth magnet, a Rabelesian consumer of hopeful
innocents. Luxurious, yet nonetheless needed, if not by its inhabitants or for its functions, cities
are necessary to Mnemosyne and her daughters, the Muses. They own the apartments and meet
in the cafés. Smaller towns have smaller memories — perhaps a battle, a singular product, the
birthplace of a native star — while the countryside has no memory: it moves in seasonal waves
and tides. The great city is a record, a document, a memorial. Not the spirits of nature, but the
ghosts of civilization inhabit the city ground. It is constructed of deeds, deeds that arise in
private minds, often in the quiet desperation required by the Muses who are the true ghosts of
civilization.
These ghosts nourish the intimacy, the extraordinary privacy found only in great cities.
Despite all the pastoral romance of musing by a brook, the arts and sciences constellate in the
minds of crowded cities — dense, complex, elegant. Cities are novels, poems, dances, theories.
They are packed with ideas that tell of the transactions of the Muses. Their mother, Memory,
needs cities for the sake of her daughters, that they may flourish, wildly, that they may be
honored with libraries and concert halls and theatres, remembered in museums, and permitted
private intercourse with poets and painters in the intimacy of conversations.1

1 Preface to an Italian book of paintings by Pierluigi Isola and poems by Gabriella Pace entitled Ars Memorativa
(Florence: Galleria Falteri, 2003).

9
City an2d Soul

It seems presumptuous for a psychologist – a depth psychologist who works with soul – to
address the subject of city and in such expert company. Psychology’s work, soul work, is
notoriously so shut away, closeted in a consulting room, two persons in armchairs far above
the street, not even the telephone interrupts. Yet what walks into the consulting room is the
street: the welfare mother in the confusion of urban blight, the depressed suburban matron, the
delinquent, the runaway, the addict, and the success-driven office-and-airport man hell-bent on
suicide. Our work is with city people and the city is in the soul of our clients, so, of course,
you find us depth psychologists in the big cities. You won’t find many of us in Cheyenne or
Bismarck. The founders of our field had their schools named after their cities: Paris, Nancy,
Vienna, Zurich, as if to confirm that soul work belongs to city culture.
allBecause psychology belongs in cities, there have been arguments which blame psychic
illness on city life. In the eighteenth century, it was gin mills and poverty or chocolate and
luxury. In the nineteenth century, the fast locomotion of train travel, bad air and crowding,
parasols and too much reading; in short what British psychiatry in 1867 called “the feverish
activity of life” caused psychic distress. A French psychiatrist, in 1819, said: “Cities of four to
five hundred thousand persons are deviations from nature.” The soul ails from urban stress.
One of humankind’s favorite fantasies is that the soul is best off in nature and needs to slow
down to nature’s pace, for in cities the psyche becomes sophisticated and corrupted. The Yellow
Emperor of China in 2600 B.C. was already bemoaning the intemperate and disorderly
behaviors of his civilization compared with those of a more ancient era. Wrong habits of food,
sleep, sex, and drink – already then, 4500 years ago at the dawn of history. Clearly, some part
of the human soul continually imagines a better, truer life “back in nature,” away from the city.
There is a statistical third in each of us that just wants out, a driving urge with no rational
ground. If we must blame the ruin of downtown, the death at the heart of the city, upon
someone, then let it be blamed on Jean-Jacques Rousseau who evoked the feelings for the
return to nature and took our heart out of the city.
I do not at all accept this anti-city view and warn you from being lured by its sentimental
charm. It places city and soul in opposing camps, resulting in soulless cities and city-less souls,
uncivilized souls, simple, romanticized animals, barbarians who abandon civilization for a
hermit’s cell or a hippie’s dig in the wildwood. An ecology that restores the soul does not take
place in the High Sierras only, out and away from it all; we restore the soul when we restore
the city in our individual hearts, the courage, the imagination and love we bring to civilization.
Let’s recall that the word “soul” itself returned into our popular vocabulary from the streets
of the big and hurting cities, its soul music, its soul food and soul brothers.
I have understood my job today as one of reaffirming the soul-city connection. This I would
like to do by showing in a few broad lines how and where soul exists in city. To do this we
must rely on a few traditional ideas and images of soul.
The first one is the idea of reflection. The soul has always been associated with a reflective
part in us or the reflective function. This is built into our cities as pools, ponds, malls, shades,
10