Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by James Hillman

Image
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.
James Hillman
Image
Each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver’s seat.
James Hillman
Image
It's not enough just to be a mother. It's not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them.
James Hillman
Image
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.
James Hillman
Image
Teachers today can't take to a child.
James Hillman
Image
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.
James Hillman
Image
It's the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.
James Hillman
Image
To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
James Hillman
Image
By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God
James Hillman
Image
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.
James Hillman
Image
I don't think anything changes until ideas change.
James Hillman
Image
Food is so fundamental, more so than sexuality, aggression, or learning, that it is astounding to realize the neglect of food and eating in depth psychology.
James Hillman
Image
Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul.
James Hillman
Image
Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.
James Hillman
Image
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
Image
Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time no one has any leisure.
James Hillman
Image
We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
James Hillman
Image
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.
James Hillman
Image
The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.
James Hillman
Image
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.
James Hillman