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Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.

James Hillman

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James Hillman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 12
Died: 2011
Died: October 27
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Atlantic City
New Jersey
Instead
Functioning
Seeing
Stops
Makes
Sets
Phenomenon
Depression
Damn
Miserable
Cold
Dysfunction

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Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.
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Loss means losing what was. We want to change but we don't want to lose. Without time for loss, we don't have time for soul.
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Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid it's also in the system, the society.
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You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault.
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The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vitality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to one predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer?
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The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul.
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I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.
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Each person enters the world called, like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
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I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can't go back over that again. I can't put that into a two-word answer. I can't. Wherever I go, people say, Can I ask you a quick question? It's always, a quick question. Well, my answers are slow.
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We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child's beauty and singling that child out. That's how the mentor system works - you're caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.
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We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
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I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.
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I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.
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Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.
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Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That's a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be.
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We're an air bag society that wants guarantees on everything that we buy. We want to be able to take everything back and get another one. We want a 401-k plan and Social Security.
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The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.
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It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: Now we're going to hear the opposing view. There is never a third view.
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You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
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People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology.
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