The Sixties
Investigating conscientious-objector status, attending a rock festival, plucking strychnine tufts from a bag full of peyote buttons
The Myth Of Therapy
An Interview With James Hillman
What one feels is very important, but how do we connect therapy’s concerns about feeling with the disorder of the world, especially the political world? As this preoccupation with feeling has grown, our sense of political engagement has dropped off. How does therapy make the connection between the exploration and refinement of feeling, which is its job, and the political world — which it doesn’t think is its job?
Who Sees What
One morning I came upon him in one of the more remote parts of the park. He’d spread his sleeping bag out smoothly, and he was about to get inside. He was wearing his knitted cap. I approached him from behind, and hoped he didn’t see me seeing him. Going to bed is not supposed to happen in broad daylight in front of strangers.
Catching Up
I’m never going to read them all. My wife knows it. My children know it. They exchange sly smiles when I haul a big box of magazines along on family vacations. Or when I announce at the beginning of the new year, as fervently as the president promising a balanced budget, that I’m finally going to get caught up. They know I’ll subscribe to more magazines, that the stack of unread issues — already taller than I am — will grow taller still.
In Search Of Soul
From A Blue Fire: Selected Writings By James Hillman
Anthropologists describe a condition among “primitive” peoples called “loss of soul.” In this condition a man is out of himself, unable to find either the outer connection between humans or the inner connection to himself. He is unable to take part in his society, its rituals, and traditions. They are dead to him, he to them. His connection to family, totem, nature, is gone. Until he regains his soul he is not a true human.
Luchita And The Radio Man
A Searing, True-Life Tale of Broadcasting, Love, and Deception
The two of us are on a fact-finding expedition to Philo, California. At first, Luchita hadn’t wanted to come; she knew I was researching a magazine article, and she’s still a little peeved at certain references I made to her in a profile of Lola Falana I wrote some months back. But she knows I like her company, and that this article is important.
Tanganyika
The night of the day that Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, my parents had gone to the art museum in Cleveland to see a stunning painting by Titian of Mars and Venus, a fat naked Venus and a Mars clad in Renaissance armor. But instead of eating a fancy dinner or making love in a motel room, they were frantically trying to book a flight back to Newark, New Jersey, which was burning to the ground.
