Once in a while I’d like to use this blog to answer questions people have asked me that might  interest others. This time it’s the psychological term “projection.” Technically, the word refers to a person who is unconsciously disturbed by some matter and instead of owning up to it finds it in someone else.  Say a person has a tendency to lie but accuses someone else of lying when there is no evidence. We might say that he’s projecting. Sometimes we use the word more loosely to mean that a person assumes something about another person, when he really doesn’t know the facts. I do a lot of public speaking, and often I hear people making assumptions about me because they don’t know me as a person but only as an author. You could say that they’re projecting these things onto me. Yet another form of projection has to do with belief. Freud described the notion of God the father as a projection of one’s own parent into the sky. People who talk about projections also recommend dissolving them or withdrawing them—taking them back since they belong to you in the first place.

Although I certainly know that people make assumptions about me that have little relation to the person I know myself to be, I wouldn’t call this “projection.” For one thing, “projection” is one of those words that come too easily to our lips. Sometimes projection seems to describe pretty well what’s going on, but more often the situation is far more complicated. I’d rather use fresh words that describe with some subtlety and complexity what is going on in this particular situation. Once I was standing in the back of a hall just before giving a lecture to a large crowd. Two women standing next to me were talking about me. “He’s only here to give a talk so he can make more money,” one said to the other. The fact was that I was doing the talk for nothing as a favor to the sponsoring group. Should I say that the women were projecting onto me, or were they angry about having to pay for the lecture or angry about public speakers who presume to know something the audience doesn’t. I’d rather investigate the problem than pack it into a snowball word like projection.

These days I frequently quote a passage from Thoreau’s Walden where he says he saw blue angels in the shimmering waves of Walden Pond. Does it serve us to say that he was projecting angels into the water? I don’t think so. I’d rather understand Thoreau as a mystical person who could look at something physical and have his spiritual imagination waken and come into play. The mystical explanation is richer and is a practice we could all emulate. Projection pathologizes the experience. It also reduces an enchanted world to the problematical mind of the person beholding a spiritual dimension in ordinary life. We move from an animated world to a projecting person. We hyper-subjectivize our experience, to use an awkward word. So, in general I prefer to avoid the word “projection” altogether and instead use more informative and precise language for what is going on.

As a therapist I’m not in the business of withdrawing projections. If my client is making unwarranted assumptions, we can discuss that without giving it a pejorative label. If someone is making assumptions about me that have no basis, I can discuss them without giving them a psychoanalytical cachet by diagnosing with the term projection. If we must talk about projections, I’d like to see them as interesting forms of imagination, not always negative and not always representative of a person’s repressed unconscious. Many of my “projections” come from a desire to see the world in a much better light. Projections can lead us deeper into the world, and so instead of withdrawing them I might like at times to foster them, to do more projecting than less. But, of course, I wouldn’t want to call them projections.

The biggest problem with talk of projections is that we reduce a fascinating world of imagination to a psychological syndrome. We limit an entire conversation about assumptions and perceptions to a single, unrevealing word. Projection is a lazy tool, a word that doesn’t say as much as we hope to say and gives the illusion of presto magico!—we have unveiled a complicated, self-serving and neurotic twist of linguistic manipulation. My guess is that most of the time there is no manipulation going on at all. We are simply trying to see and say something and getting it rather wrong. But if we stay on the track, instead of withdrawing it, we may arrive at the desired and accurate observation. I never noticed James Hillman, the sharpest psychologist of all time, or Ernest Hemingway, the sharpest observer and narrator of all time, ever use the word projection.

 

 

 

Several years ago when I was doing a project on the “Jesus Sutras,” versions of the Gospels found in China and combining Taoist and Greek terms, I came across the idea that the body is the “physical life of the soul.”  It reminded me of William Blake’s statement that the body is the soul perceived by the senses in our time.

Today we are reversing that point of view, seeing the body as primary and the soul as something amorphous, ill-defined and difficult to fit into the modern paradigm. Even “enlightened” healthcare workers speak easily of “mind-body-spirit” medicine, not even noticing that the soul is missing. The classical trinity has always been “body-soul-spirit.”

Recently I have been helping my daughter, who is about to begin her senior year at the university, look for a graduate program in psychology where she can pursue her interest in the arts, Jung, archetypal psychology and yoga as a combined resource for her work with adolescents in trouble.

I scanned several counseling psychology programs looking for any respectable approach that wasn’t strictly science-based. After all, etymologically psycho-logy is the logos of the soul. But even the religiously founded universities that I found have programs in counseling limited to studies of the brain and neuroscience. To treat psychology as a brain science is to reduce centuries-old studies of the psyche to a physical organ and to render the field itself materialistic.

For years I’ve been teaching psychiatrists and social workers and lecturing at medical schools and hospitals, trying to soften the hard science. I have met many men and women who started out with a burning desire to understand the human condition and to help people sort out their lives. Immediately they run into requirements concerned with quantified research and behavioral studies. Soon they forget their initial inspiration and become believers in the mechanistic methods of their fields.They become believers in this new religion that sometimes has all the moralism and fundamentalism we associate with old forms of belief.

I’m not saying that science and research are not valuable, and I don’t want to put a wedge between science and the humanities and spiritualities. I am alive because of high-tech medicine. I have two stents in my heart and I’ve had a few surgeries for which I’m very grateful. I applaud each new discovery and any tool we can develop to deal with illness. But the cost to our society of insisting on materialism in psychology and medicine is great.

I have been a psychotherapist for thirty-five years, and most of that work has centered on dreams. To work better with dreams, I’ve studied mythology, religious ritual and narrative, the writings of Jung, Perls, and Hillman. Dreams help me see the patterns in a life, developments that neither the client nor the therapist can grasp in a purely rational manner. My daughter understands and appreciates depth psychology and also sees in a deep way how yoga helps a person relax and find a spiritual way of life that eases symptoms. I have no doubt that one day she will be in great demand—she is already—and yet she can’t find a mainstream, highly respected graduate program that could give her the further education and credentials she needs.

My daughter has a sharp mind and quick wit, but she doesn’t have patience with the materialistic approach to education. For better or worse, she grew up in a household where art, yoga and the soul are all taken seriously and where a human being is understood to be made up of a body, soul and spirit. Is it too much to ask for a reliable psychology program, recognized as valid and valuable by the society, with a soul?

(After a few weeks of experimenting with a blog with comments, I’ve decided that it’s better for me to write the blog as an essay without comments. If readers would like to offer comments, they can do so easily on Facebook.)

 

 

 

This image from Robert Fludd (1574-1637) shows the three octaves of human experience: body, soul and spirit.

It’s been a week now since James Hillman’s funeral in Connecticut. I haven’t yet got used to a world without his voice and presence. We were scheduled to appear this coming week with Robert Sardello at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture to celebrate the institute’s 30th anniversary.  The three of us were active in the institute, giving lectures and workshops, in the early 1980′s especially. For me, that period was a rich one, like a post-graduate education. We had free lectures on Wednesday evenings, and often one could expect an extraordinary presentation of ideas that set you afire. I remember several by James and Robert that sent me off in fresh directions. Others by Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, Patricia Berry, William Burford, Ivan Illich, Donald and Louise Cowan and Gail Thomas are still in my memory, like planks in a psychology of the world. Under the guidance of Joanne Stroud we studied Gaston Bachelard, especially his fascinating way of exploring the imagination of place and  building. At the institute I could test my ideas and get experience leading groups on a whole range of themes. It was at a conference there that I gave a carefully prepared talk on angels and the story of the Annunciation and where I developed my skills in working with dreams in a group.

I remember some particular ideas: Pedraza talking about how to slip out of tight situations in therapy, Patricia Berry on finding the Great Mother in the supermarket, Illich speaking on “successful avoidance,” Guggenbühl-Craig saying that we can never explain sex, Burford on luxury, Donald Cowan in the “myth of fact,” Sardello on the soul of money and other cultural commonplaces, Gail Thomas on the soul of the city and Hillman profoundly re-imagining just about everything.

We’re gathering in Dallas next week to talk about beauty. James treats beauty in two extraordinary pieces of writing:  the first part of his book The Myth of Analysis, where he says we can’t grasp beauty without honoring its shadow or by treating it as an embellishment rather than a source of meaning; and in The Thought of the Heart, where he moves more thoroughly into the myth of Aphrodite. (Once, he and I gave joint lectures at a church in New York on pornography and Venus.) I intend to speak on the reasons why we can’t seem to create a thoroughly beautiful society. I’m sure Keats will be quoted more than once at Dallas:  “Beauty is truth.”

In Dallas I also hope to talk once again about Botticelli’s allegorical and beautiful painting la Primavera. I want to focus on the role of one of the Graces, Castitas, chastity, known by the Greeks as Aidos, Restraint. We don’t often think of restraint as part of the world of sex, beauty, sensuality and grace, but this painting makes it the turning-point in Venus’s universe. In the painting Restraint allows an opening to Hermes, the imagination of the world and insight into life. He points to clouds with his traditional magic wand, suggesting that we see images in an otherwise only practical and literal world. We need to pause and appreciate the beauty and significance of all that we behold with our senses.

When I lived in Dallas many years ago, I enjoyed the city’s silky materialism. It’s my conviction that a good way to spirituality, among many others, is through a deep appreciation for the material world. Years later, I returned to give a talk at a Unitarian Universalist church there and urged the crowd to make Dallas America’s Tibet, in the sense of a spiritual center, a place people would visit from around the world to find spiritual depth and insight. I don’t know how the city is doing in that way. I’ll take a close look next week. I do know that if it is progressing along those lines, the lifelong contributions of Gail Thomas will be a key factor. The institute could never have existed or been sustained without her special talents and constant attention and without the quiet support and guidance of Joanne Stroud.

So, I truly have something to celebrate and honor when I’m in Dallas next week. I couldn’t imagine my life work without the stimulation, education and understanding of these leaders. I look forward to being with Robert Sardello once again, a man who keeps stirring up new thoughts about culture, as he has done for decades, and whose support and friendship got me through many difficult times of criticism and failure. Looking over the conference schedule, I know that I will once again learn new ideas that will seep into my own life and work. How precious is an unfailing source of fresh thoughts and conversations of discovery. Every city should have an educational resource that makes the imagination come alive and offers hope when entropy seems the rule of the day.

 

 

 

 

I often tell the story of how I found my dissertation topic. I was in the university library when I happened to reach up to a top shelf and pull down one of several black volumes of a journal called Annales Musicologiques, if I remember correctly. I opened it at random and found an article on Marsilio Ficino, an astrologer, philosopher, musician, translator, priest and magus of 15th century Italy. I translated and commented on his book, On Designing Life to be Like the Sky.  I rewrote the book as The Planets Within.  Ficino talks about magia naturalis, natural magic. He studied the ancient history of magic and explored many methods himself, including astrology, music, aroma, color, geomancy, image-making, plants, and architecture. He influenced many who followed him over the centuries, largely, I think, because of the accent on “natural” in his magic. I interpret him saying that we can make a more spiritual and more soulful world if we appreciate the power of ordinary things to affect our emotions and sense of meaning. The colors we use, the sounds that surround us, the timing of our projects, the images that we allow to impact us—the objects in our lives are not there just for their utility or their beauty but for their power to affect us profoundly.

This magical philosophy puts a different slant on the arts especially. For Ficino, an art piece is not just an aesthetic object of pleasure but a talisman, an object that has a degree of power for our lives. It’s important what colors we choose for the home and the workplace. Architecture, he said, is the most important of the arts because it affects how we live and accomplish anything. Advertisers know about these things and are always looking for the magic that will sell products. But imagine a natural, everyday magic that would make us healthier and happier, that would support our personal relationships and our work.

In a later book, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, I tried to spell out for our contemporary life how all this could work. Some readers took the book to heart, quit their day jobs and created a more magical lifestyle. Others followed the recipes in less dramatic ways. Currently I apply the ideas of natural magic to my work with hospitals, suggesting how to make entrances, furnish patients’ rooms, and use color and sound to promote healing and health. I suggest certain images, such as Jesus healing the blind man, the blue Buddha and Quan Yin, among many others. I don’t use the word, but I’m using the technology of the talisman in a purely natural way.

With this background I’m also interested in designing contemplative quiet into many aspects of our culture. I recommend that doctors wear some blue to represent the Lapis Lazuli Radiant Healing Buddha. In my own writing room I have images of Daphne, Asklepios, Quan Yin, the blue Buddha and Thomas More. Just outside my room are the Tabula Smagdarina, the Emerald Tablet, which is an ancient summary of the magic Ficino used, and the Heart Sutra, which I consider the basis of all spiritual and magical endeavors. Also just outside my door is a contemporary painting by a Korean artist of the squared circle, so important in alchemical magic.

Care of the soul is not just about figuring yourself out psychologically or finding your spiritual home. It’s mainly about making a sensual, concrete world that supports and inspires you, and that project requires natural magic.

 

I had just had a remarkable discussion with my stepson, Abe, who is just back from a very successful competition in Washington, DC, where he submitted a house, designed and built by his team at Middlebury College, to be both a well-engineered building and a home for real people.  We talked about architecture as being an art for human beings who need shelter, a sense of home, comfort, safety, memory and a base for an active life. An architect is a theologian of sorts. In fact, architecture, I said, is a sub-branch of theology. Take a door, for instance. Some would say a door should have human dimensions, not too high or wide. Others would say that a door may take you to a transcendent level of experience and should be high and thick and graded, showing the stages of movement from the secular to the sacred. We see many church doors like this, and I often advocate that hospitals, devoted to the mysteries of illness and healing, should have spiritual, theological doors that suggests the vastness of experience. I could imagine architects taking courses in theology that is not limited to a particular religion.

I often recall reading about a person in Palladio’s time who wanted to build a majestic home. He acquired the services of a musician, a theologian and an architect to make the design. We are not capable today, generally, of imagining such a thing. I am writing in a room that has the proportions of 4:2:1 A fourth, an octave and the unison, pleasing musical sounds. You could play my room on the piano, and it would sound harmonious. It feel harmonious. Its acoustics are harmonious.

Abe and I discussed the Shakers, who made beautiful buildings. Their aesthetic came from their theology. I recommended that for a future project Abe study the theology of the Shakers closely and find out how to realize their vision in building. Their highly praised simplicity comes from their simple theology. They were able to accomplish something that has eluded us in modern times:  a full merging of the material world with a spiritual vision. This is not materialism, and yet it derives from a love of material things, a love that leads to beauty and practicality, a pleasant and effective lifestyle.  We tend to see an opposition between the spirit and matter. That is a severe weakness in our spirituality.

Many spiritual people do not love their bodies or the material world, and they suffer because of this unnecessary and ill-conceived polarization. It affects their sexuality and their enjoyment of life. How can you be spiritual and not take pleasure in living?

 

It must have been around 1987 that I approached James Hillman with the idea of putting together a reader of his works. I had heard about other people having similar thoughts. He and I were close friends, and he was warm to the idea. But I told him it had to be my book. I would consult him before publishing it, but it would take the form I wanted. He agreed and I got to work. It was probably the most difficult book I’ve ever created. I wrote a long introduction, cut and pasted photocopies of passages from his writings, and wrote introductions to each section. Then I created my own framework for the book, dividing it into the major areas of soul, world and eros, and then creating sub-categories. Hugh Van Dusen, our good friend and senior editor at HarperCollins, helped us get it published and advised us. After finishing my work, I spent three days at James’s house in Connecticut, where we went over every word with a magnifying glass. At first he was shocked at my language and structure, but then he seemed to get comfortable with it. He made small changes on at least every other page, and at the end he came up with the title and epigraphs.  I was happy and I think he was, too. The book is now used in several universities and institutes and sells rather well, for what it is, even after all this time. Its one limitation today is that it doesn’t include his more popular recent books or his many recent essays. Someone should do a new version. Many people find Hillman’s writing difficult, and so this book would be very useful, almost like a course on early James Hillman. I see it as an homage to his genius and a gift to him, a way to spread his ideas.

James and I have had a correspondence all these years, right up to now, and just recently had a very moving telephone conversation. I saw him last spring in New York, where we talked about his continuing interest in the role of images in human life and culture. We are scheduled to speak together with Robert Sardello in Dallas next month, but I’m afraid sickness will prevent him from going. If there is one person in the entire field of reflective writing that you should read, it’s James Hillman. I don’t think you will fully understand myth, literature, art or religion without first taking lessons from him.

 

 

When I was living in Dallas from 1976 to 1985, I was in contact with some of the most profound people I have ever met. James Hillman, Robert Sardello, Patricia Berry and Ivan Illich affected me most and we were friends. Gail Thomas had the magic to bring us together productively. One of our most important visitors was Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, a mythologist and psychologist in the best meaning of the words. Rafael taught me many things with mere gestures and a few words that I’ve never forgotten. His few books are extraordinary, each worth a lifetime of study, maybe none more than Hermes and His Children. If you read this book and understand it, you will be well on your way to appreciating the essence of archetypal psychology and the idea of soul. It isn’t an easy book, but it’s worth reading again and again, as I have done. Rafael died just last January, and I feel a deep gap where his presence in Caracas always assured me that our work would go deeper.

Let me tell just one story, one that I’ve often retold. I had just begun my life as a psychotherapist and felt fairly secure with my work, except that I didn’t feel that I handled shadow issues and matters of aggression well. One day James and Pat and I were walking down a street with Rafael and his wife Valerie. I happened to be next to Valerie for a while and I told her my problem. She went and told Rafael, and he came back and shoved me into a small alley. He looked at me ferociously and said in his Cuban and South American manner:  “SADA.” I didn’t know what the word meant and so I ran ahead—we were all still on a walk—and asked Valerie. “He’s telling you read the Marquis de Sade,” she said. So I went out and bought all the thick volumes of Sade’s fiction I could find, thousands of pages, and then went to Austin, where they hold many of Sade’s unpublished works in French and read some of his essays. I became convinced that Sade was a forerunner of archetypal psychology and had a fundamental insight that was essential. True, his life and his writing are vile. They would turn your stomach. But Rafael taught me a lesson I always try to pass on to students of psychotherapy:  You have to have a huge capacity for the light and the dark to do this work. You also have to know how to see the poetic nature of very dark images, whether in dreams, literature or psychology.

I went on to write about Sade rather briefly in one of my early books, Dark Eros. James Hillman had the insight and guts to publish it, and his friend Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig had the vision to write a foreword for it in its later edition. A major New York publisher rejected the book, telling me that it was in bad taste to put theological ideas and Sade in the same manuscript. Incidentally, the book was recognized as one of the ten best books of 1994 by Screw Magazine and got an excellent review there, one of the most intelligent I have ever had.

Rafael had a genius for working with mythology and art without treating them as templates, matching a myth with a psychological syndrome. He was infinitely more subtle than that. His treatment of the Titans of myth was especially useful, and you can find that in his book Cultural Anxiety. His powerful essay on Duende is also in that book.

I would like to look closely at a single idea in Hermes and His Children, but as I scour the book I see so much and realize how subtle it all is and how one thing connects to another. It isn’t easy to highlight one idea. Still, let me try. Rafael suggests that the image of the Hermaphrodite is part of Hermes fantasy and is essential and important in psychotherapy. He stresses one point: the Hermaphrodite suggests weakness. “Psychotherapy tends to demand a realization in life mostly in opposition to weakness. Even in Jungian psychology the battle is for strength, coping, making decisions, responsibility, tough creative work, etc.” Nevertheless, he goes on to say, the achievement of the Hermes/Hermaphrodite transference is weakening. The achievement is to be weakened.

Rafael moves then to a related idea, that the important fantasy of the Hermaphrodite, which I might interpret as meaning freedom from gender thinking or any thinking that separates what should be joined, moves toward a new sensibility. Rafael says: “This is not simply a curing therapeutic transference, but more the living of a lifetime in terms of transferential movement. Our memory, our relationships to others, our vision of the world , and of ourselves, metamorphosize in life. Explicitly, living life is more important than the illusion of a concrete achievement gain through psychotherapy.” Think about this last line: the illusion of a concrete achievement through psychotherapy.” It’s more important to allow and watch these changes take place in life. In other words, therapy is not the place for change.

In my own therapeutic work I usually try to embody the learning I’ve taken from Rafael. I try not to be gender-bound or to get lured into oppositions. I know that I am in need of therapy at least as much as my clients are. I try not to be a man always, but some other kind of being, a borderline person, neither this nor that. I realize that insights come accompanied by further ignorance, light with more shadow, a sense of health with an even deeper sense that something is wrong. The weakening of psychotherapy is as important as any strength accomplished. I, myself, will be weakened by it as much as I’m strengthened.

These are not easy lessons. They take a lot of very personal meditation. They ask us to let go of many sentimental ideas that look good only on the surface. Rafael is a challenge. I encourage you to read him.

As you can see, I’m starting a number of posts that can be continued at another time. Today I begin with people who have influenced me in my life and work. I start with Emily Dickinson.

Her art, naturally, is the first thing. She didn’t worry about being clear for her readers. I suspect her readers were, like Blake’s authors, in eternity. Her key words seem to angle off toward meanings she discovered in that vast and mysterious room of her imagination. Her poems take you where you’ve rarely visited before. She introduces you to a new experience. And all the while, she has an amazing economy of language. She says so much with so little.

I also feel a connection to her because of her strong spiritual views. On different occasions she referred to herself as a pagan. In one place she says that sermons on unbelief especially attracted her. Yet she attended church with her family and spoke affectionately of her family religion. This blend of sharp skepticism and romantic devotion appeal to me. It seems that she understood the religion that lies beneath religious structures and didn’t worry much about the structures. That’s the way I live and think.

I appreciate her eccentricity, her ease at remaining in the family homestead for most of her life and being with just a few people, even if it meant sending down a note or a gift by wire (physical) from the upper landing.  To dress in white  and to be known as “the myth” didn’t worry her.  There is strength and delicacy in her writing and her lifestyle. I wonder if such close contact with the muse makes a person eccentric and not too worried about social expectations. She seemed to trust her art and remain faithful to it over a long period.

Let me give you one sample:

 

There is a solitude of space

A solitude of sea

A solitude of death, but these

Society shall be

Compared with that profounder site

That polar privacy

A soul admitted to itself -

Finite infinity.

I like the shifts in alliterative groupings from the “s” at the beginning to the “p” and then the “f.” I wonder if the polar privacy is the North Pole or a polarity between society and the withdrawn soul.  And then finite infinity says so much in two words about the soul.  She was a soul writer long before Jung and Hillman and others.  But then, so were Emerson and Thoreau.

Dickinson said that the hills that can be seen overshadowing Amherst were her friends.  Thoreau could also speak of nature in ways that pointed out both its otherworldliness and its human intimacy.

Put all this together, and you have someone I would want to have as a teacher, not only of ideas but about life.

When Hari Kirin and I were first married we lived in Brookline, Massachusetts for most of a year. It was the time when Care of the Soul was being edited and produced, when I was waiting and wondering if it would be a book that was read or another one to place virginal on a shelf.  Siobhán was born in November and in the spring we decided to move out to Shutesbury, just above Amherst. When the children were small we would take them for ice cream or pizza just a minute’s walk from Dickinson’s grave, and we would often pass her house on walks into town. One summer Hari Kirin painted in her back yard. Years previously I practiced therapy just a block away from the gravesite. So I feel a certain neighborly connection with her and know that simple human connections like that were important to her, though she handled them as curiously as I often do.

I see Emily Dickinson as one of the natural mystics appearing in mid-19th-century America. We misread her when we treat her just as a poet and separate her life from her writing. In general, we have not yet embraced the vision and insight of her and her contemporaries, but their writings stand waiting for discovery as a source of our own deepening.

 

People often ask what books to read. In this blog and over time I’d like to discuss a basic library, and today I’d like to start with three books that have meant a lot to me and that I think would be of interest to my readers.

First, C. G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  There is some discussion today whether this is really an autobiography or more the collected notes of Jung’s assistant. Certainly as a book it reads like an autobiography of the soul. There isn’t much information about Jung’s external life, but there are several massive biographies that give all the facts.  This is the story of a soul. But the point in reading it is not so much to satisfy curiosity about Jung as to learn how to deal with the life of dreams, fantasies, emotions, memories and especially the figures and personalities that loom in the imagination. I read this book many times over the years and keep going back to it to learn more about being a psychotherapist and specifically how to deal with images and dreams. Jung understood that he wasn’t an artist but that he was using the skills he had to paint and carve the figures that visited his imagination. For his intense interior life he has been criticized as being mentally disturbed. I was once denied an important grant on that account since I was basing my work on Jung. It’s almost necessary to read this book closely before studying The Red Book, the beautiful collection of Jung’s notes and images that were published in 2009.

Next, I recommend James Hillman’s Loose Ends.  This was an early book published in 1975 and is not one of Hillman’s major works. It’s a collection of essays that have practical importance. When I was a novice therapist, this book helped me with many central issues, and I think it would still help people who read my work for guidance in their lives. Maybe the most striking essay is “Betrayal,” a study of trust, betrayal and forgiveness that, as usual for Hillman, doesn’t go the usual route. He makes several unexpected turns and comes up with an excellent idea about dealing with betrayals in relationship and with maintaining the capacity to trust.  Another essay, “Abandoning the child,” covers material about children and the so-called child within or archetypal child. Hillman helps us appreciate the children who appear in dreams and the child that sneaks out in our adult lives. Again as usual, he avoids sentimentalizing the child figure and helps us take care of this child that stays with us throughout life. He also has an essay on the masturbation inhibition. I’ve always read this in more general terms as a guide to dealing with any situation where you’re faced with the choice of suppressing and urge or acting on it. He speaks for both sides of the issue.

The final book I suggest on this list is Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I have an entire section of my library devoted to books on Zen, and it has been foundational for my personal life and my work. I like Suzuki Roshi’s approach very much, because this is the Zen that is part of daily life and utterly devoted to the idea of sunyata, spiritual emptiness, without using the word. The book is a series of short talks meant to teach and inspire and has a beautifully written preface by my former teacher and old friend Huston Smith. The emptiness of Zen is not nihilism, not a void.  It’s the realization that everything we do has a meaning that is not quite of this world and that everything we say is an image, an approximation, an attempt. It’s best not to be stuck on our words and formulas and habits and even those things we revere. I often quote from Suzuki Roshi’s prologue: “There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen.” And this in a book on Zen practice.  Imagine saying, “There’s no need to have a deep understanding of Jung or soul or your religion.” Zen pulls the rug out from under anything we make too precious, including the very thing to which we are most devoted.

 

Recently, several people have asked me about the creative life. How do you get ideas? How do you organize your thoughts? How do you deal with responses from readers?

Here are a few points about my own approach to having to be creative almost daily:

1. Be in good physical condition.  I can’t have a creative thought when I’m tired and drained. A good sleep helps. Eating regularly. Exercise. The whole routine. To come up with fresh ideas and language regularly requires physical energy.

2. Have an active life in the arts.  I need to listen to good music, look at imaginative visual art, read carefully, and have regular experiences of other arts. One art definitely feeds the other. I can hear solutions to creative problems in music that I can then apply to writing.  I watch good films, too. They can be relaxing even as they educate the imagination.

3. Look for what’s needed in the world. I don’t like to create in a vacuum. I want to respond to a need. Bach wrote much of his music because it was needed for Sunday services. I keep my ears open to find out what issues are on people’s minds.

4. Don’t take anything as given. I learned this rule years ago. You don’t have to do what you’re told. Someone asks for an article on the environment, and I write about bathrooms because I see a connection between taking care of your body and taking care of the world’s body.

5. Make a contribution to humanity.  This is a ground rule, one that lies behind the others. I don’t have any time to waste in this short life, and I believe that my job is to make a contribution. I can turn almost any subject into one that could move us along as a people on a planet. I don’t get heavy about this. Very simple and fun topics can help humanity. I think my book of short stories on golf is a contribution.

6. Build up to a tipping point.  To express myself creatively, I need a good storehouse of ideas. If I start a project too soon, I sit there trying to squeeze an idea out of me.  When the time is right and when the pantry is stuffed, I’m ready to go.

7. I talk over ideas with my family and friends. I find that my own isolated ideas are slim and impoverished compared to what they become after a good conversation. Sometimes I speak with experts, but most of the time it’s someone close that I can trust.  My friend Pat Toomay, a brilliant writer himself, has the special gift of being able to tell me exactly what he thinks, good and bad, and yet be encouraging.

8. Allow yourself many false starts.  I don’t pressure myself to create something excellent on the first try, or the second. I keep starting over. I throw away dozens and sometimes hundreds of pages. Initial ideas and language are never very good for me, except that usually they have life in them and the core of an idea.  I’ve read that Joyce Carol Oates, who on rare occasions in my life has encouraged me, writes two drafts.  I can’t do that. Revision is the main part of my creative life, and I love it. I like the working out of an idea more than the initial inspiration.

9. Consciously aim for beauty.  I believe strongly in the craft of writing, something I’ve had to learn over years of working with editors and reading books on style. Once a year I read my favorite books on the craft of writing. I see this in Bach, too. He was amazingly inventive, but obviously he couldn’t have been if he hadn’t had perhaps the greatest sense of craft in history.  Craft is the first step, and beauty of expression, not separate from craft, is next. There is no need for pedestrian language, except maybe in a blog in this form.

10. Help the reader/spectator.  Editors also taught me to respect and aid my readers. I tend to be cryptic, leaving out essential information. I’ve learned to help the reader. I focus on the overall form of a piece and try to make the flow of the material as clear and pleasing to the reader as possible. I know I fail in all these things all the time, but these are my ideals.