Grumpy old archetypes

James Hillman, bestselling author and gadfly to the therapy movement, talks about the fine art of aging gracefully.

By Steve Perry

Sept. 10, 1999 | For more than a generation now, James Hillman has played the role of infidel in the temple of psychotherapy. Alternately a skeptic, a provocateur and a bad conscience, he has gleefully assaulted many of the proudest tenets of popular psychology -- not least among them the notion that the journey of life is about growth. "Becoming more and more oneself -- the actual experience of it is a shrinking, in that very often it's a dehydration, a loss of inflations, a loss of illusions," he says in the book "We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse," a collection of his dialogues and correspondences with writer Michael Ventura. "Shedding is a beautiful thing."

This vision of shedding, stripping away the false and inessential -- and prodding at whatever's beneath it -- is a unifying thread in Hillman's post-Jungian "archetypal psychology," and more specifically in his last two books, both of which exhort readers to work at uncovering and cultivating the most intractable, idiosyncratic elements of themselves. In his 1996 bestseller, "The Soul's Code," it was the "acorn" of one's life's calling (inborn, or so went the book's unfashionably Platonist thesis) that Hillman chased after. In the just-released "The Force of Character and the Lasting Life," it's the edifice of personal character that, he asserts, emerges more clearly as one gets old.

Salon Books spoke with Hillman by telephone from his home in Connecticut late last week.

At a number of points in the book, you refer to similarities between childhood and old age. There's a saying that's often made about the elderly, and usually in a pejorative way: "He or she is entering a second childhood," meaning basically that the person is losing hold. Could you talk about the parallels between childhood and old age in a more instructive way?

First thing that comes to mind is the Japanese idea that at 60, you're no longer responsible. And you're much more like a child in your delight and in your spontaneity and in your being excused from certain social formalities. Of course everyone looks up to the old in Japan, but there is that freedom from responsibility -- I think that's the crucial similarity. Another is the release of imagination: In old age and in early years, your imagination is usually freer and less chained to the practical. Partly because you're freed from responsibility and partly because you're being marginalized by the society itself. So you're allowed your fantasies; there's more room for them.

In both cases there's often a diminished regard for social conventions and conventional wisdom. Your insight can be less encumbered than it is in the prime of life.

Yes. The Bible says, the old men shall so-and-so and the children shall so-and-so; they're treated together again and again. There is the freedom of lack of conformity, of oddity, of idiosyncrasy, of imagination. A peculiar connection to nature. In some societies, tribal societies, the grandfather and the grandson are connected, and they both have a common enemy, you might say, in the generation between.

You quote this aphorism from Santayana: "Our distinction and glory, as well as our sorrow, will have lain in being something particular." How do you think aging serves to bring the more particular aspects of character to the surface?

I think some of that middle section about symptoms and disorders speaks to this. They tend to make one a little bit less fit for one's daily rounds, a little more odd. People find themselves dealing more with peculiarities in their physical lives and psychological lives. Then the character structure emerges more vividly. If you take the question of irritability -- that knack for sudden irritability that older people have -- I have it. And things seem so much clearer: This is out. It doesn't belong. I won't have any of it. My character announces itself through these very sharp distinctions and sharp refusals -- these immediate emotional responses to things I love or hate. Music that moves me, say. And there is in this a revelation of what's really essential to you. You don't have the space or time for what is not appropriate to you.

Next page: The case against plastic surgery