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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.

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
Important
Doctor
Thinking
Psychology
People
Doctors
Trust
Went
Expert
Change
Collectives
Used
Collective
Ideas
Experts

More quotes by James Hillman

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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.
James Hillman
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We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
James Hillman
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I don't think anything changes until ideas change.
James Hillman
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The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means portion. Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism.
James Hillman
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I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.
James Hillman
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The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it's also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don't see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that's been there all along.
James Hillman
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Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.
James Hillman
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The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?
James Hillman
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Each person enters the world called, like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
James Hillman
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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.
James Hillman
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Teachers today can't take to a child.
James Hillman
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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.
James Hillman
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Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.
James Hillman
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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.
James Hillman
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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
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The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm's length because they are so full of love
James Hillman
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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
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Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time no one has any leisure.
James Hillman
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Art, for example, becomes art therapy. When patients make music, it becomes music therapy. When the arts are used for therapy in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.
James Hillman
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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.
James Hillman