The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume I: The Making of a Psychologist
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The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume I: The Making of a Psychologist
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611459319 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 05/09/2013 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 704 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
ATLANTIC CITY
"Coming into this particular body, and being born of these particular parents, and in such a place, and in general what we call external circumstances. That all happenings form a unity and are spun together is signified by the Fates."
— Plotinus, II.3.15, Enneads
James Hillman, originally named Julian after his father, was born towards mid-morning on April 12, 1926, in Room 101 of an Atlantic City hotel that faced the sea. His family was at the time occupying a suite of rooms at the Breakers Hotel that his grandfather owned and his father managed, located on the New Jersey resort's Boardwalk. It was also where the younger Hillmans resided whenever renovations to their home were taking place. James was the family's third child. "How lovely to have a blonde boy with blue eyes!" his mother Madeleine, daughter of a renowned rabbi, exclaimed. His arrival was announced in the local Atlantic City Press, including a photo of Madeleine "receiving congratulations" with a fur stole draped around her neck above a set of pearls.
In James Hillman's astrological birth chart, which he would study in later years, Sun and Moon were closely aligned in the zodiacal sign of Aries. In Chinese astrology, he would recall, it was the Year of the Tiger. It was also the year that the Sphinx was fully revealed for the first time in more than 2,000 years after being buried under Egyptian sand, and that one cosmologist (Patrizi Norelli-Bachelet) recorded the beginning of the Age of Aquarius. In 1926, the NBC Radio Network came into being, as well as the first sound motion picture (Don Juan). A host of future Jewish comedians were born (Jerry Lewis, Don Rickles, Mel Brooks, and Shelly Berman), African-American jazz legends (Miles Davis and John Coltrane), poets (Allen Ginsberg, Robert Bly, and Robert Creeley), and singers who would croon and rock the nation (Tony Bennett and Chuck Berry). Not to mention Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth, Hugh Hefner, Alan Greenspan, and Fidel Castro.
In his best-selling 1996 book, The Soul's Code, Hillman would write that "the self starts off amid the smells of a geography." Elsewhere, he would link that geography to the way he approached his work: "There is not a systematic metatheory behind my thought. I come from New Jersey where we have sea gulls who fly right down and get what they want from the oceanside. I am like them, dropping down into the depths of our culture and seizing what I need to understand things and make a point!"
In one of his lectures, Hillman would recall the disembodied feeling of the barrier island that contained Atlantic City. This was a place with no soil, no roots, where all the dirt for people's gardens had to be trucked in from the mainland. "The highest point on the sandbar is ten feet above sea level. You can be wiped out by one wave," he remembered.
Despite being Julian Arthur Hillman, Jr., on his birth certificate, from the very beginning he was called by the nickname Jimmy. His legal given name would not even make it onto his school report cards. He spent his first six months taking in the bright sunshine of Atlantic City's high season, overlooking the ocean in his baby carriage from a lower balcony of the U-shaped hotel. "My mother later had the idea that she put me too much in the sun and that's why I had glasses from a very early age," he recalled. (His sister, Sue, six years older, and brother, Joel, four years older, did not.)
Yet, what Jimmy and his siblings (another sister, Sybil, soon joined the Hillman family) must have absorbed of Atlantic City! The amusement piers, their circus-like arenas built out into the Atlantic Ocean for as far as half-a-mile, were vast fantasyscapes, where tens of thousands might visit on a single summer's day. A constant hullabaloo rose up from the beaches and the Boardwalk, described in the prose of the day as a "sweep of color," a "riot of sound and chaos of movement," in this "wildly extraverted place." The range of imaginative possibilities must have been stunning.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, Atlantic City was a narrow barrier island that had belonged predominantly to mosquitoes and blacksnakes. Only seven houses existed when a quack doctor had the idea to create a bathing village and health resort offering purported cures for such ailments as consumption, cardiac dropsy, and insanity. Eager developers invested in sixty miles of railroad track so that Philadelphians wouldn't have to travel all day in a hot, open stagecoach to reach a stretch of beach that was overlooked by the 600-room United States Hotel (then largest in the nation), and the four others that were rushed to completion. In fact, the first woodplanked Boardwalk was built to prevent visitors from tracking sand into hotel lobbies.
Neighborhoods developed of second-generation Irish, Italians, and Jews, mostly by way of Philadelphia, as the resort's year-round population swelled from under 2,000 in 1875 to nearly 30,000 by 1900. Jewish merchants like Joel Hillman, James's grandfather who arrived at the turn of the century, played a crucial role in Atlantic City's development. "Through the commercialization of the Boardwalk, recreational buying came into vogue," writes Nelson Johnson in Boardwalk Empire. "The spending of money as a sort of pleasure was introduced to the working class and became part of popular American culture ... The Boardwalk created the illusion that everyone was part of a huge middle class parading to prosperity and social freedom." Or, as the Atlantic City-based novel, Down by the Sea, put it: "People need a place where they can pretend to be something else. They want to believe that if they pretend hard enough, whatever they want to happen will happen."
An article in the New Republic stated in 1920, "If you would know the best that the American bourgeoisie has thus far been able to dream, then, come to Atlantic City and behold." By that time, Atlantic City had proclaimed itself "The World's Playground," and it was a place of many American firsts. The Easter Parade and the Ferris wheel were introduced here. Color views of the skyline graced America's first picture postcards. The term "airport" was coined to name Atlantic City's flying field. The Convention Hall was the largest auditorium ever built without interior roof posts or pillars, and it hosted the world's biggest pipe organ. Steeplechase Pier boasted the world's most substantial electric sign: 27,000 light bulbs that advertised Chesterfield Cigarettes. The world's largest typewriter was viewable on Garden Pier, an Underwood that stood eighteen feet high and weighed fourteen tons. It worked perfectly, although someone had to physically sit on each forty-five-pound letter-key to make it type.
This was a geography of exaggeration. The Boardwalk fronted the world's largest assemblage of luxury oceanfront hotels, each with its own uniquely lavish character. The Traymore was a fourteen-story, twin mosaic, tilt-domed structure. The Queen Anne-styled Marlborough, named after the domicile of the Prince of Wales, had merged with the Spanish-Moorish Blenheim with its extravagant dome and steamship-like smokestacks. Years later, Hillman mused over the hotel's European architecture, and whether this may have subconsciously influenced his own distrust of progress. "There is an archaism in my work," he said. "Anything new was suspect, it had to pass the test of time."
Nightly entertainment blared forth from the nearby Ocean Pier, Million Dollar Pier, Steel Pier, Steeplechase Pier, Garden Pier, and Iron Pier. Of the sixteen fastest trains in the world at that time, eleven were in service to Atlantic City, where the unexpected was the norm. The local characters were as over-the-top as their creations. Captain John L. Young, one of Atlantic City's early developers and the man behind the Million Dollar Pier, lived there initially in a Tudor cottage 1,700 feet from land, where he bragged about catching fish from his bedroom window. His wife claimed the ocean breezes meant she never had to dust the furniture. The captain's next residence, listing an address of Number One Atlantic Ocean, was a three-story, twelve-room Italian Villa, with hand-carved chairs in the shape of giant seashells. The home contained a $10,000 chandelier that once hung in Vienna's royal palace, and the formal garden was filled with classical nude statues from Florence. According to one historian's account: "His Adam and Eve group especially caused a sensation when a bolt of lightning struck Eve in an embarrassing spot.
When James Hillman was around seven, his older brother, Joel, would put him on his shoulders so that James could see (and breathe) in the midst of the teeming Boardwalk crowds. Images would embed themselves in streams of consciousness. Midgets, snake charmers, and giants ... adult female Siamese twins joined at the hip, fantastic fat people, and incubated babies ... fighting kangaroos, dancing tigers, and Professor Nelson's Boxing Cats ... Rex, the water-skiing dog, and chickens that could hit baseballs.
Also on the wondrous piers, Harry Houdini made himself disappear and Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly set a world's record for sitting atop a flagpole for forty-nine days and one hour. "You'd want to look at the flagpole sitters," Hillman would recall. "How did they stay up there? And for us kids it was, how do they go to the toilet up there?" Polar explorer Richard Byrd showed up with his husky dogs pulling their sleds (one of them bit James's brother, Joel).
Here were taffy pulls, and giveaway pickles from H.K. Heinz, and free nuts from Mr. Peanut, who paraded the Boardwalk. Here was the Egyptian tent, and the Japanese Tea Garden, and the "authentic" Hawaiian village. Here was the FBI booth with the counterfeit money John Dillinger used. Here, too, was the phenomenon of the "rolling chairs." Dating back to 1887, the concept had emerged when invalids coming for the sea air would utilize small cane wheelchairs to get around the streets. These had evolved into white wicker rolling chairs with steel wheels and room for as many as three passengers, "like baby buggies for grownups under bearskins, pushed by quietly considerate old black men," Hillman would describe them more than sixty years later.
The most popular Boardwalk attraction was the High-Diving Horse. As many as six times a day, carrying on its back a scantily clad young lady in circus sequins, the horse would leap forty feet from a wooden tower into a pool of water. The lovely Sonora Webster Carver was a featured rider. Because of the water's impact striking her face, she suffered detached retinas and soon became completely blind. Keeping her blindness a secret, after a few months adjustment she resumed riding and continued in her role for another eight years. In her eighties, she would tell an interviewer: "It was a wonderful thing to do, a wonderful time to be alive, in the greatest city on the earth."
Out at the edge of Million Dollar Pier, every hour a barker would beckon the crowds to gather around what was apparently a trapdoor, to witness the Deep Sea Net Hauls. These especially fascinated young James. "They'd let a gigantic net down to the bottom of the sea, and then drag the net up with pulleys, with the most crazy-looking fish you ever saw — crabs, clams, eels, flat fish, everything. That interested me more than the diving horse on the Steel Pier; more than the freaks on the Boardwalk." One historian relates that nearby snack vendors would time their preparations so that "their tempting aromas of fried, steamed, or stewed seafood would waft over the crowd just as the net was dropped back into the briny deep." To Hillman, however, what mattered most was imagining what went on in that dark undersea world. He was also intrigued by the steel bathysphere, in which deep-sea divers "wearing giant helmets and giant shoes" would immerse themselves. What if, like the hero in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, they got their foot caught in a giant clam and were never able to surface again?
One day, his older brother showed James how to sneak under the tent where Ringling Brothers was setting up. Years later, Hillman would write in The Dream and The Underworld (1979): "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 performance of repetitive nonsense, as if Ixion, Tantalus, and Sisyphus had once worked for Ringling Brothers."
The circus' High Diving Hawaiians also wore big steel helmets and plunged straight into the Atlantic from tall towers. For James, this was the primary image that would linger, along with the questions: How long could they hold their breath? What about getting the bends? While showing much interest from a distance, the boy shied away from the water itself. "My mother years later reminded me," Hillman said, "that I used to scream like crazy stepping into a pond where my foot would touch squishy mud in the summer and I couldn't see the bottom. I was also afraid of the ocean. As a little kid, I remember being caught in an undertow and turned upside down. I didn't learn how to swim until I was about fourteen years old." The one recurring dream he would remember from childhood was watching in awe as a tidal wave approached from offshore.
Hillman scholar Scott Becker offers this interpretation: "How do we understand Hillman's phobia and his recurring nightmare? It may be tempting to interpret both from a safe distance, but we might choose instead to stand with him on the shore, watching the giant wave approach. Without resorting to reductive explanations, we might say that the dream teaches the dreamer a sense of awe in the face of images, that the image of the tidal wave is best understood as itself — a towering, ultimately overwhelming, primal force. The (recurring) image of the wave instructs the dreamer how to receive any image: with an awareness of their raw energy, their engulfing beauty. If we remember Hillman's account of the bullfighter, Manolete [in The Soul's Code], who as a child hid behind his mother's skirts, we gain further insight into Hillman's encounter with the tidal wave: What child would have been ready to face the vast, archetypal forces headed his way as an adult psychologist? The tidal wave, in this sense, was a premonition and an initiation into an awareness of the power of images to wash away everything in their path, including our small, fragile egos. The wave(s) taught Hillman so that he could teach us."
Hillman would be in his mid-twenties when, in the early stages of embarking on a Jungian analysis in ZÃ1/4rich, he began the experience of what Jung had termed "active imagination." "One of the most important moments was that I pictured myself going down into the sea, and realized that I could breathe underwater. In other words, the fear of being submerged was gone."
In 1988, addressing a gathering of men in the woods of Mendocino, Calilfornia, Hillman revealed: "In my own life, the terribly needy little boy is always there, and when I get massaged, for example, he lives in my arms. I always feel the puniness in there. When those places are touched, I feel that little, tiny boy with his thin little neck on the New Jersey beaches where I grew up, trying to keep this head on. Unable to hold that head, with these weak arms that couldn't do it, couldn't do it. It's absolutely crucial that we remember neediness, puniness like that. I mean, you don't need to remember it, because it comes up and grabs you and pulls you down."
THE "DOUBLE-SIDEDNESS OF AMERICAN CULTURE"
Five years before James Hillman was born, the Miss America Pageant began in Atlantic City. King Neptune arrived on a barge at the Yacht Club, surrounded by a costume-ball entourage, which included twenty white beauties and an equal number of male black "slaves." Holding fast to his scepter, King Neptune led the seven female finalists past a panel of artists who served as judges. The winner received a hundred dollars and the Golden Mermaid Trophy. By the late 1920s, the beauty contest had expanded to include eighty-three contestants from thirty-six states. "The pageant of innocence: here she comes, Miss America!" Hillman later wrote. "Secluded, chaperoned, so cleaned up that not a follicle of personal sin remains on her shining front of bared flesh, exposing her 'talent' for the leering judges."
Hillman said he grew up surrounded by a "double-sidedness of American culture. Here was a family resort where everybody could come and bring the children. It was both a Quaker and a Kosher city — so Puritan that, as a little boy, I had to wear a top on my bathing suit. Even little boys couldn't have bare chests! Nobody was allowed on the beach after nine at night, so there could be no 'hanky panky.' Yet, the other side, the underbelly of Atlantic City, was filled with corruption."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Life and Ideas of James Hillman"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Dick Russell.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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Table of Contents
PREFACE,
INTRODUCTION: "The Figure in the Carpet",
I ATLANTIC CITY,
THE "DOUBLE-SIDEDNESS OF AMERICAN CULTURE",
THE FAMILY HOTEL BUSINESS,
THE GREAT DEPRESSION,
THE FAMILY,
THE HOTEL "UNDERGROUND",
THE EMERGING DAIMON,
THE MYTH AND MEANING OF ATLANTIC CITY,
II LEGACIES OF THE ANCESTORS,
THE RABBI,
HEBREW UNION COLLEGE,
ENCOUNTER WITH TOLSTOY,
THE BINSWANGERS,
THE HOTELMAN AND THE REVOLUTIONARY,
TO THE BOARDWALK,
ANCESTRAL INHERITANCES,
III COMING OF AGE IN THE WAR YEARS,
GOING SOUTH,
GEORGETOWN,
ENCOUNTERS WITH LATIN DICTATORS AND WAR CORRESPONDENTS,
THE NAVY,
INTRODUCTION TO THE THERAPEUTIC,
IV ARRIVAL IN EUROPE: 1946-1948,
RADIO NEWS WRITER,
PARIS,
KATE,
FOUR DAYS WITH SANTAYANA,
VISITING THE KEMPES,
WRITING,
WOMEN,
HOUSE ARREST IN YUGOSLAVIA,
V DUBLIN I: TRINITY COLLEGE,
EDUCATION,
THE SANITORIUM,
EDUCATION,
CHARACTER STUDIES,
EDUCATION,
"MORE AMERICAN THAN ANYBODY",
VI DUBLIN II: ENVOY MAGAZINE — THE LITERARY LIFE,
POETS AND PUBS,
PSYCHOLOGICAL FORESHADOWINGS,
ADVENTURES WITH ENVOY,
THE JEWISH QUESTION,
JAMMET'S,
VII THE AFRICAN TEST,
IN THE MAHDI'S PALACE,
AMONG THE DINKA AND MANDARI,
TO CONGO AND KENYA,
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ANIMAL,
THE NEXT PORT,
VIII JOURNEY TO THE EAST,
"MARRIED" LIFE WITH KATE,
WRITING,
PSYCHOLOGICAL GLIMMERINGS,
AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE,
IX OF PEAKS AND VALES,
HIGH IN THE MOUNTAINS,
PEAKS AND VALES, SPIRIT AND SOUL,
WEDDING IN SWEDEN,
IMPACT OF THE EAST,
X ZÜRICH: THE EARLY STUDENT YEARS,
THE JUNG INSTITUTE,
ANALYSIS,
JUNG,
TRIP TO AMERICA,
BIRTH,
XI BREAKTHROUGH,
THE "UNDERWORLD",
WRITING,
VISITS WITH JUNG,
CASE HISTORIES,
SPIEGELMAN AND STEIN,
GREECE,
ANALYST WITH A "SUMMA",
XII DIRECTOR OF STUDIES,
RESEARCHING THE CUTTING EDGE,
THE FIRST BOOK: EMOTION,
FUNDRAISING IN AMERICA,
THE DEATH OF JUNG,
FRIENDS AND ENEMIES,
MEIER,
RETURNING SOUL TO PSYCHOLOGICAL LANGUAGE,
GUGGENBÜHL,
LECTURING IN AMERICA,
AMONG THE JUNGIANS: HOMAGE AND HERESY,
XIII BETRAYAL,
PORTENTS,
FACE-ON WITH THE CHRISTIAN MINISTERS,
FATEFUL ATTRACTION,
"THE COURAGE TO RISK FAILURE",
THE GATHERING STORM,
FRIENDS, ENEMIES, AND KATE,
TOWARD THE FUTURE,
XIV ERANOS,
MEETINGS WITH KERÉNYI,
THE ROAD TO ERANOS,
"ON PSYCHOLOGICAL CREATIVITY",
UNDER "CONSTANT ATTACK",
"SENEX AND PUER",
AMERICA BECKONING,
XV TURNING POINT,
ERANOS 1968,
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO,
FORCED OUT,
TRANSITION,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
BOOK TITLES IN ENGLISH BY JAMES HILLMAN,
INDEX,