| Title | : | The Dream and the Underworld |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0060906820 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780060906825 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1975 |
The Dream and the Underworld Reviews
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A very strange and radical book, especially from a man who later achieved very mainstream success in his field with The Soul's Code. Hillman here tries to reverse our relationship to dreams inherited from Jung and Freud.
He says that these two titans were too prone to fish out dreams from the darkness of our souls and fry them in the light of day in the fires of our waking rational consciousness in order to dissect, comprehend, and consume them. To oppose this Hillman posits that dreams are a literal journey into the underworld where our souls live and interact with the dead and gods and mythical figures. These gods and mythical figures are acted out in our dreams by figures more familiar to us, such as friends and relatives, as gods and mythical figures cannot be represented directly. In order to understand these journeys we must resist reducing their meaning(s) by applying waking rational consciousness to them. Instead we must contemplate dreams as works of soul art that can not be summarized; we must so to speak transport our waking consciousness into this underworld and let it absorb the journey's meaning through direct experience.
This underworld which we experience through dreams is closer to being our true reality than the conscious sunlit surface of this earth. Our souls live fully in this underworld and never completely leave it, and so it's in our own best interests to train our conscious minds to conform to the dictates of the underworld, as it is more truly our home than the sunlit earth, rather than trying to force the weird ambiguous multivalent unlimitedness of the underworld into packets of conscious facts and knowledge. -
This book changed the way I look at dreams, or maybe the book taught me what my heart always wanted me to understand. Hillman looks at the dream as happening in the “Underworld” – a place of death – and wants us to enter into that world to understand the dream instead of trying to drag the dream up into the day-world by interpreting it.
Some quotes from the book:
“Freud’s method projects the persons in a dream back over the bridge into the dream-day, even if for the sake of their latent meaning. We associate my dream-brother and dream-father to my day-brother and day-father and, by this association, return the dream to the day. Jung’s method of interpretation on the subjective level takes the dream persons into the subject of the dreamer. They become expressions of my psychic traits. They are introjected into my personality. In neither method do we ever truly leave the personal aspect of the dream persons, and thus they remain in the upperworld. Dare I say it loud and clear? The persons I engage with in dreams are neither representations of their living selves nor parts of myself. They are shadow images that fill archetypal roles; they are personae, masks, in the hollow of which is numen.”
“Public performance on a stage, perhaps because it puts us into the underworld of theatre, also constellates the curious interplay between life-soul and image-soul. The almost depersonalization experience of stage fright makes one feel deserted by one’s soul. All that one memorized and trained for has suddenly vanished. It is as if another soul must play the role, and this moment of going on stage is like a rite de passage, a transition into death.”
“For a dream image to work in life it must, like a mystery, be experienced as fully real. Interpretation arises when we have lost touch with the images, when their reality is derivative, so that this reality must be recovered through conceptual translation. Then we try to replace its intelligence with ours instead of speaking to its intelligence with ours.”
Hillman notes that when we see a killer in a dream, we tend to fear him. But Hillman looks at this figure as a helper who is trying to initiate us into the Underworld land-of-the-dead; the dream world:
“There is a divine death figure in the killer, either Hades, or Thanatos, or Kronos-Saturn, or Dis Pater, or Hermes, a death demon who would separate consciousness from it life attachments.
Hillman, in one section of the book describes the circus as a metaphor of the Underworld:
“Where else but the circus will we ever see the underworld in daylight: the tent of enclosed space, the rings, everyone as close to death as his or her art will allow, the freaks of nature that are beyond nature, and above all, the precise performances of repetitive nonsense, as if Ixion, Tantalus, and Sisyphus had once worked for Ringling Brothers.”
“The comic spirit masquerades in all things we do and say; we are each a joke and do not need to put on a white face. The matter is not one of becoming a clown but of learning what he teaches: making an art of our senseless repetitions, our collapsing and our pathologizings, putting on the face of death that allows the dream world in and watching it turn ordinary objects into amazing images, our public persons into butts of laughter.”
“Unfortunately psychology emphasizes attention and recall; the dayworld wishes to have, must absolutely have, a ‘good memory’; a bad memory is more devastating to success than is a bad conscience. Forgetting therefore becomes a pathological sign. But depth psychology based on an archetypal perspective might understand forgetting as serving a deeper purpose, seeing in these holes and slips in the dayworld the means by which events are transformed out of personal life, voiding it, emptying it. Somehow we must come to better terms with Lethe, since she rules many years, especially the last years, and we would be foolish to dismiss her work only as pathological. The romantics took Lethe most seriously.” -
Clearly an innovative work, I could not help but think that Hillman's admixture of psychology and esotericism was often strained, or at least at odds with itself. This is what happens when one tries to wrest both psychology and mythology out of their "traditional" contexts (the ones our intellects are accustomed to) and place them in a new, unique relationship. Hillman eschews many aspects of Freudian and Jungian analysis, while embracing others (particularly the idea of "depth psychology") in his new paradigm.
My issue in trying to fit The Dream and the Underworld in my head is the habit of Hillman in seeming to reject certain aspects of the waking world in relation to the sleeping world.
What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. We are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it..
This seems intuitive, on the face of it. But later in the book, Hillman espouses the need for therapy (which inevitably takes place in the waking world) that encourages the patient to immerse themselves in their dreams and simply run with it. There's really no clinical diagnosis taking place (none that I can see, anyway) beyond just encouraging people to dream and dream deeply, rejecting any imposition of waking world ideas on the sleeping world.
There's a certain pedantism present also. For example, Hillman lists three "habits of mind that impede grasping the idea of the underworld as the psychic realm": Materialism, oppositionalism, and christianism. I see his points and at least partially understand each one, but I find it interesting that rather than explain how the underworld can be understood as the psychic realm up front, he first sets out to imply that misunderstanding such is an error in judgement. That may be true, but there is little coaching (as one should expect from a clinical therapist) on how rejecting these impediments help the patient to get any kind of resolution to their issues.
Now, I probably sound like I hated this book, but that is completely untrue. I laud Hillman for "freeing" the dreaming world from the waking world. Rather than trying to translate dreams into waking world analogues, he encourages us to dive deeper, to plumb the depths of the underworld, with the understanding that it is a dangerous, strange place, an internal hell (in the Classical Greek and Roman sense of the word, not in a Dante-ish sense) that is intentionally separate from our day-to-day experience.
I admit that after having read this, I have allowed myself to delve deeper in my dreams, to leave the workaday world behind, and have felt a fresh breeze of good mental health, as a result. Ironically, one of the dreams I have had since reading this, a darkened hell-scape in which I met three witches over a pentagram, resulted in one of the most resful nights of sleep I've had in years. There was no night terror, no fear at all, really. I felt that I was embracing the place and that these crones were more guides than guardians. I don't remember all of the details, nor do I want to. I want the incentive to return and see where things go now.
One personal note: Hillman notes that dreams and death are closely intertwined, as if dreams were a practice run for death (which is reminiscent of
the argument that Brian Muraresku makes in The Immortality Key that practitioners of ancient religion may have descended into the underworld by "dying" while taking psychoactive drugs in the well-known phenomanon of "ego-death" that often occurs while tripping on a heroic dose of psilocybin, for instance). Sometime during the early stages of the Covid outbreak, before I moved to my current home, I had a profound, extremely intense dream in which I saw and spoke with my deceased maternal grandmother (another crone, perhaps?). I saw her crystal-clear, as I remember her when I was a child, but with bright light streaming from her - an angel in the darkness, you might say. We spoke briefly, and I had the most profound sense of love and gratitude that I had felt in a long, long time. The dream ended when I "burst" with love and "died". I have no other way of putting it. I exploded with love and felt it in every single atom of my body, then, I simply expired. I awoke shaking and crying (for joy, not for sorrow), but felt physically exhilirated (resurrected, perhaps?), ready to face the many changes that were taking place in my life at that time.
I was told by a friend once, who had clinically died after a stroke, then came back, that "dying was the coolest thing I've ever felt." If that's what dying feels like, I'm really not worried about it at all. In the meantime, though, I'll be satisfied to dream a little deeper. I've still got a lot of things to do in the waking world! -
This book is typical of Hillman ideas about Jung. Hillman did not like what he called Jung's bias towards unity and wholeness. In this work Hilman makes it clear he does not want the dream brought up into daylight meaning into ego consciousness. Hillman wants the dream images left in what he calls the Underworld. Hillman preferes to leave the dream in its parts. He does not want to interpret the dream. He feels by leaving the dream in its parts and be doing so creates soul, or what he calls soul making.
Hillman's Archetypal Psychology is full of his theme of leaving the dream images as they appear without bringing the dream up into what he called the Solar Hero for understanding. In Jung's life time he warned against a more purely esthetic point of view meaning to admire the dream images without descernment and understanding. Hillman's point of view is just that. He wants to admire and to look at the dream images without getting to the meanings in the dreams.
From my point of view Archetypal Psychology can be understood as Hillman's symptom, for he was famous for fragmenting during his lectures and flying into a rage over questions put to him. At bottom, Hillman has said nothing new, but his bias toward the many against unity and wholeness showed in his life.
However, this book is worth the read for those serious about Jung to gain understanding of what the revisionists are saying. -
This book is, frankly, bizarre, but in a beautiful, complicated, confounding rather than repelling way. I have the sense that Hillman's version of mythology is a myth spun about myths, but in a certain sense it doesn't matter whether any particular claim in this book is true or false. Through opening up new (old?) layers of depth and inviting one to view and feel things from a different perspective, Hillman's achievement is not contained within his own imagination but rather within what he inspires in the imagination of others. I'm grateful to have read this book.
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This is now my favorite of James Hillman's books, and the best book on dreams I have ever read. Read it; it will change your life (or at least make you feel less grumpy at work on Monday morning).
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This book is ostensibly the conclusion to the author's trilogy begun by "The Myth of Analysis" and "Re-Visioning Psychology", which started out as critical re-appraisals of traditional Western psychology as incepted by Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung but end up closer to New Agey mysticism in the vein of G. I. Gurdjieff, Colin Wilson and Alejandro Jodorowsky with each book.
Imagine my surprise, then, that "The Dream and the Underworld" turns out to be a straightforwards history of how dream interpretation has evolved through the history of psychology as well as the differences between the dream symbolism of different mythologies. Hillman being Hillman the bulk of the comparative mythology focuses on Greek and Roman paganism. However, he also examines the roles dreams play in the Bible - going into detail about how Judaism and Christianity treat dreams differently. Just like both Jodorowsky and Wilson, and for that matter also Friedrich Nietzsche, Hillman treats Judaism with a level of utmost respect he never affords Christianity.
The most eye-opening insight I found here myself is Hillman pointing out that in the original Greek and Roman myths, Hades/Pluto the god of death and the underworld is a stern but just authority figure who often helps the gods of the daytime world sort out their problems, a point often lost in popular culture's depictions of classical mythology where Hades is portrayed as more of a malicious or untrustworthy demonic figure. Hillman argues that this is something modern Westerners should pay more attention to, and ponder the implications hereof. I also quite enjoyed the information about the roles that tombs and monuments played in the ancient world's societies, an impressive amount of obscure information about the Greco-Roman antiquity is to be expected in any book by Hillman. And to be frank, as far as high strangeness is concerned that is positively mundane compared to the "re-invention of psychology as pagan mysticism" rabbithole the author went down in his previous book.
I have to say "The Dream and the Underworld" felt like a total anti-climax, since I kept expecting Hillman to go full Jodorowsky here but instead we only have a competent book examining dream symbolism's role in different mythologies and psychological systems of analysis. If one written in the author's trademark purple prose. -
you know when you’ve read books, over a period of months or years, that have distilled themselves into subliminal residues, which over time have crystallized or mineralized in disparate hidden strata throughout your mind ?
they’re there - occasionally they break free and surface - but tend to disappear again almost as soon as they appeared, as if the combinations or situations or incantations evoked them is as elusive as they themselves are.
there’s a quote i read recently that’s from andy warhol: “i never fell apart because i always fell together.” this book is for people who fall apart, clumsy awkward people, who bump into people and drop their things all the time, watching their fruit rolling beneath someone’s feet & wondering how it is people are so put-together.
words, like images, are playful, put on masks, trade roles and places - even when they’re reified as concepts or interpretations, there’s a scene being staged, acts being given or directed.
for people used to rotting, molting, becoming catatonic, withering beneath the fixity of the stage lights, the sun’s light — this is a good place to start, find your ground, catch your breath, maybe even go deeper.
tbh, i really wish i had read this book earlier in my life (would have saved me a lot stress, maybe even a few hospital visits [just kidding]) -
I'd forgotten to add this until I saw it here as a recommendation.
I had a little trouble with this book when I read it. It's very good, and right down my alley, but there were some concepts that my mind for whatever reason wanted to resist, such as the idea of dreams not having any time element, or rather the interpretation not needing to address time. It's possible I misunderstood this and a lot of Hillman's other ideas. It's a thought-provoking book that I will likely reread, possibly at a time with fewer distractions, or now that I know what to expect, with less resistance on my part. I do like the whole "underworld" concept, because I know from experience it's too easy to relate a dream to outer life rather than inner life. Possibly this is because so often they're related, and we're trained from infancy that the really important events and processes are "out there."
I recommend this book not for someone new to Jungian psychology but as a possible must-read for anyone deeply interested in Jungian, or any other method, of dream interpretation or inner work. -
The dream as a descent into the underworld and Dionysian dismemberment of the ego-self, dream work as a process of revealing and building soul, the dreamworld as a more real reality than the day world, some interesting ideas about clowns.
You'll need a good dictionary. You'll need to carefully re-read many paragraphs. It will change the way you think about dreams. -
Brief note before the review (see my review of The Tempest for complementary preface note). As I contemplate retirement in a couple of more years, I'm reengaging the process of engagement with my dreams that began when I encountered Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections in high school and has continued over what's now almost 35 years of (very) intermittent work with my dream guide/analyst, Dennis Merritt). Part of that will involve reading/revisiting some of the base texts of "Jungian" psychology; some of it will involve chronicling the books my dreams more or less suggest/instruct that I read.)
The Dream and the Underworld is an extremely important contribute to Jungian psychology, in ways as important as anything Jung wrote himself. I'm not positive that I agree with Hillman's reading of Jung, but that doesn't really matter; I'll leave the squabbling over dogma to the Freudians.) What is crucial is Hillman's insistence that when one approaches the bridge between "dayworld" and "nightworld," lived experience and dream, you have to understand that the street runs both ways. Especially in our therapeutical/self-help culture, the most common attitude toward dreams/analysis is that you pay attention to dreams to learn things you can apply to your waking life. As Hillman phrases it, most psychotherapists either "analyze" or "interpret" dreams. In contrast, he argues that dreams have their power precisely because that are grounded in a different (to use the Jungian term "archetypal" sphere). They manifest the actual interconnections between aspects of experience we (at least in the West) typically see as discrete spheres. The implication of his approach is that the best thing to do with dreams is not to "understand" them but to let their images and their complicated emotional/intellectual power linger, to let them, gradually and non-ideologically, shape your conscious work. It reminds me of the African-American lesbian feminist Audre Lorde's brilliant, brief essay, "The Uses of the Erotic."
If you don't have any prior knowledge of Jung, this might be a bit dense. The first several chapters bog just a bit in the inside baseball of psychoanalysis, but once he starts rolling, he rolls. For me, the chapter on "Praxis," a walk through Hillman's understanding of a set of particular images, was disposable. Like Freud and to a lesser extent Jung, his knowledge base is almost entirely Western, his mythic references Greek and Roman. But I didn't have any trouble drawing connections with African diasporic, Native American, Sami, Aboriginal, etc., analogs. Hillman's whole point about dreams is that they open us to connections rather than narrowing us to generalizations makes that feel natural. -
Giving a bit of sacredness back to the underworld and dreams.
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One of the most important books I've read in my life. It may sound cliché, but this is one of the few books where you know something has changed once you've read it, and there's no way to "unlearn" the new awareness you've gained thanks to Hillman.
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This book was helpful to me for several reasons, but most notably in how it associated the Imaginal/imagistic method of Swedenborg and Henry Corbin with the dream. The dream is fundamentally image and symbol, and any attempt to literalize it through interpretation is to kill its vitality (the life hidden within death). It also helped me understand the imaginal world of dreams as something that synthesizes opposites, for in dreams an image can mean any number of things at once. I developed that same attitude in my reading of scripture, and so I can attest that it is a valid one.
I didn't like Hillman's emphasis that life requires death, and not the other way around. On the contrary, I believe (due to my religion, reading, and personal experience) that the dead strive toward embodiment just as much as we move inevitably toward the grave. Life and death need each other, and any attempt to emphasize one over the other is misguided. -
This is an interesting book. It was recommended in the reading I did of Bill Plotkin. I wanted something on dreaming that was neither Freudian nor Jungian. However, this author is still tied to psychology and grecoroman myth0logy. I confess some terms were like those in a philosophy text. I know what the words mean ostensibly, and yet I do not understand the sentence, and I feel the author waxing rhapsodically rather than attempting to seriously convey an approach. I do acknowledge that his approach IS that we must relate to dreams on their own terms rather than those of the ego/conscious mind. I'm good with that. But I think a case study or a little help in how to meander down that path would have been more helpful. Sigh.
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An offshoot of 'traditional' Freudian and Jungian dream work, Hillman posits an approach to dream as image, a corollary of the myth of the Underworld (in contrast with the unconscious), not to be interpretated as symbol or archetype but as pure image.
A bit of a muddle, but a stimulating muddle, allowing the reader to see dreams, and analysis, in a different, if related light.
The extra star is for effort, acknowledging the author's willingness to expose his theories shortcomings as well as strengths. -
This is a great book on the dark shadowy dreams that we all have. Hillman stretches Jung's work (as usual) almost beyond recognition. However, it is an important book to read for anyone familiar with Jung's or Stephen Eisenstadt's work on dreams
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Some mythology mixed with Freud and Jung's ideas on dream interpretation, all brought together in a new way of looking at dreams and the underworld. Gave me a lot to think about, but then I like this kind of stuff already!
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Critical reading for depth psychologists and anyone who wants to come into a relationship with the dream world. Hillman takes the basic ideas of Jungian psychology, flips, twists, turns, and son you find you've got an entirely new perspective on what it means to be human.
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Very dense and esoteric read. Understood about 10% of the subject matter. Great historical background on the many different cultures and psychologists who have studied the Dream. Overall not a book recommended for someone casually wanting to know about dreams.
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"Is it the transition to light that gives the dream its shadowy quality? We all know how much of an art it is, not to dream, but to recall it."
I haven't read nearly enough on dreams to have an informed takeaway on the theories Hillman raises in this book, I just know I'm receptive to the way he approaches the subject and am appreciative of the slant perspective he brings to discussing the dream-experience. -
Gave me nightmares. Literally.
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This book offers a healing perspective on the primacy of soulwork, which is also dreamwork and deathwork. Dreams arise from the psyche speaking to itself in its own language, digesting the waking life and creating soul from it.
For Hillman, the waking life of humans is but the shadow of the dream reality, and to really see this means a shift in how one perceives the heroic ego and how one lives, imagines, and dreams. To let dream images take primacy means no longer forcing them into rigid, singular interpretations or to connect them into an overarching metaphysics but to allow for a multiplicity of meanings. We don't work on dreams to improve the human ego but to instead forge the soul and meet it where it is: "the human being is made by the divine images in the soul."
To really embrace this attitude is to let go of the "anthropomorphism called reality" and the solid defenses against soul, to welcome metaphorical modes of perceiving. It's a shift in attitude, and although Hillman doesn't use these words, I would say it's an attitude of humility and devotion to mysterious images that greet us night after night to lovingly urge us into depth and expansion. -
I have mixed feelings about this one. Hillman's Post-Jungian theory of dreams stands the test of time, but many aspects of this book do not. Before reading, I was guilty of dragging my dreams up from the night world into the day world realm of ego-driven interpretation. Now I know to keep them down in the dark, and interpret them on their own terms, and I find this approach to be much more effective. I enjoyed reading this book before bed, and while it did reshape how I relate to my dreams, I found the author's consistent assumption that the reader is a member of "Western culture" to be dated and narrow-minded. It wasn't until I got to the Praxis section and he started making unapologetically racist interpretations of dream symbols that I had to put the book down for good.
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i read this over and over again
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James Hillman, on his birthday April 12
"It's important to ask yourself, How am I useful to others? What do people want from me? That may very well reveal what you are here for. "James Hillman
Everything James Hillman has written is wonderful and more important, will help you navigate through life. You could make his work a field of study; I certainly did, coming from a Jungian background as did he and with similar concerns for the culture in which we are embedded.
One could begin with The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, which collects and summarizes his landmark revisioning of Jungian archetypal psychology. Next I suggest Dreaming the Dark , and thereafter The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling,The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, and Kinds of Power and Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung's Red Book, A Terrible Love of War. Pan and the Nightmare, and We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World's Getting Worse.
Also he authored two important works at the intersection of poetry and psychology; Opening the Dreamway; gathers the discussion of the poet Robert Duncan and his circle, including Nor Hall, James Hillman, Charles Boer, and Michael Adams , and The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men; from the co leader of the men's psychology movement (along with ARobert Bly), a collection of some 400 poems to live by.
Inter Views: Conversations With Laura Pozzo on Psychotherapy, Biography, Love, Soul, Dreams, Work, Imagination, and the State of the Culture is a marvelous work, and as Amazon says in its summary. "a deconstruction of the interview form itself". -
Disclaimer: "Re-Visioning Psychology" was one of the most (if not THE most) important books I've read. No surprise then that I would find "The Dream and the Underworld" both brilliant and refreshing, especially after a multi-month slog through Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams." James Hillman, always staying with the essence of things, rejects the tendency to extract hidden messages from the dream using "ego-consciousness," and "dayworld" interpretations; instead he restores the dream to the night, back to the underworld—to its origin as an image of the soul. And in doing so, Hillman also helped me to find great appreciation for Freud's groundbreaking ideas about dreams, despite the resulting awkward interpretive process and system of classification for that which is better approached in the realm of myth. In fact, one of the most beautiful images in the book comes from Freud, himself, observing the ultimately confounding, subterranean nature of the dream; the "tangle of dream thoughts which cannot be unravelled ... this is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown, like a mushroom out of its mycelium." Five stars. "The Dream and the Underworld" is a field guide to the shadowy, enchanted world of Hades. If it's answers you seek, this book will frustrate!
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A very difficult slog to read, but well worth it. Someone more versed in Greek mythology than I am would undoubtedly have a much easier time of it. And oh, by the way, this is my second read of it.
My description begins with the often used metaphor of horizontal and vertical dimensions where the horizontal is our relationship to the "day world" and the vertical one is our relationship to the divine, is in the heavenly or, I would say, to the underworld also, the "other" end of the vertical axis. Hillman's principal theme is to recast the dream's purpose is to acquaint the reader with this dimension and to rebut the "day-world" purposes, with life-symbolism, life-predictions, etc., so many dream interpreters use as a violation of the dream itself. I came away with a greater appreciation of dream work and of the death process as being part of a much larger cycle than we know.
