James Hillman - Animal Presences

Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman

Volume 9: Animal Presences

Copyright James Hillman 2008

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-0-88214-596-9 (Kindle Edition 2012, v. 1.3)

Published by Spring Publications, Inc.

Putnam, Conn.

www.springpublications.com

The Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman is published in conjunction with Dallas Institute Publications, Joanne H. Stroud, Director

The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, Dallas, Texas

as integral part of its publications program concerned with the imaginative, mythic, and symbolic sources of culture.

Additional support for this publication has been provided by The Fertel Foundation, New Orleans, Louisiana, and by the Pacifica Graduate Institute and Joseph Campbell Archives and Library, Carpinteria, California.

A Preface

T he reader will find collected here essays and lectures devoted to specific animal forms as well as the major Eranos paper from 1984 addressing the theme of this volume as a whole: the presence of animals to the human psyche. I say to the human psyche rather than in, since the latter preposition would suggest their enclosure within anthropocentrism. To leaves their location unassigned.

While reviewing the checklist of my writings to make the selection for this volume of the Uniform Edition I found that the theme of animal permeates works all along the way: UE 5, animal images in alchemy; UE 6.1, animal shapes of Greek gods; UE 3, animal images in depression and the figure of the ape; and more philosophically in UE 8, which includes lectures in Caracas (Culture and the Animal Soul), at Tenri University in Japan (Cosmology for Soul), and in Dallas, Bachelards Lautramont. The Dream and the Underworld has a short chapter on animals, and the study of the goat-god of the ancient world, Pan and the Nightmare, opened the door to the animalistic animism in all the above-listed later writings already in 1972.

Yet these particular references do not reflect the full presence of animals infused in my work. My first piece of fiction, published in 1950, climaxes in a bullfight, and my first book on psychology, Emotion, published in 1960, aimed to lift repression from a force once called animal spirits. I did not then make the connection between the vitality of the psyche and the psyches animal images that the animal spirits are indeed animal spirits! Now, at this late stage, I see that I have been consistently trying to preserve in psychology that which Cartesian rationality fears and condemns. Indeed, if there has been a steady line, an actual dominating narrative in my subversive service to psychology, it is what this present volume elucidates: the preservation of, even obeisance to, the animal spirits.

J.H.
March 2008

The Animal Kingdom
in the Human Dream

Polar Bear

D uring one of my itinerant teaching seminars on animal images in dreams, a woman handed me this dream:

I was flying in an airplane piloted by my husband. As he was flying, I was looking at the scenery below. Then I told him, Look, I see a polar bear under some water down there. My husband kept on flying. Then I looked at his radar screen and the polar bear had registered on it along with something else as two Xs. Then my husband said, I think Ill take a look, and he turned the plane around until we saw the polar bear again, still sitting under water.

When the dreamer is flying and piloted by her husband what she is coupled with, to, by, in that syzygy she looks down on the world as scenery. The scenery consists in the waters below, where there is a living animal. At first, the animal appears in the flying plane on the radar screen an abstract kind of awareness of the bear in the flying, looking-down mind, which makes the husband say, I think, and to re-spect, that is, look again, by turning the plane around, revising his forward direction. The polar bear registers as an X, an unknown quantity, in fact, as two Xs, for the dream says, The polar bear has registered on the radar screen along with something else as two Xs. The bear is qualified by the number two; something else is with it, something more to it, a second bear, a ghost bear, resonance registering only abstractly. What is this double bear still sitting, sitting still under water? A Jewish legend says that each animal species has a corresponding one in the water. Is this bear in the water the bear that did not get into the ark? Why does this bear sit there in the waters below? Who is this bear? Why must they see it?

Another polar-bear dream from a woman in her thirties:

A polar bear is after me. I am terrified and try to close a door to keep him out. A man goes after him, and then I see the bear come back, hurt. He has been hit by a car and his shoulder is all torn and bloody and he keeps looking at it confused. I feel sorry, anguished that this happened. I didnt want him hurt, I just didnt want him to hurt me.

The dream exhibits the familiar motif of pursuit by the animal. But does the bear pursue her because it comes after her because she stays ahead of it, counterphobic to it, closing doors against the white animal that comes for her? An anonymous man goes after the bear, resulting in its being hit and bloodied and confused by a car such is the strength of the man in this womans dream and the vehicle of her drive. It can confuse the animal. But now there is reconciliation through pain: as the bear is wounded, she is anguished a relationship conceived in terms of hurt. Perhaps hurt has opened the door between them.

A third dream comes from a woman of fifty-two:

I see a large huge strong polar bear gleaming white and standing on the very far edge of his earth a point of ice and snow at the top of the pole, and facing blue, icy water. He stands on his hind legs, upright, and his head is thrown back, nose pointing to heaven, and he bellows, rends the air with anguish. Watching, I recognize that he is at the end of his rope from searching for his mate and child and calls out in terrible agony and helpless power.

Gleaming white, at the farthest edge of earth, at the end of his rope, at the top of the pole, upright and pointing to heaven, this bear for all his power at that place is in agony. Not because he is hunted or wounded but because in this extreme vertical northernmost pointedness he cannot find his mate and child; he is alone. Large, huge, and strong, yet helpless. What terrible anguish is rending the air of her dream? What must be heard? Witnessing this bear, to what is the woman bearing witness?

And now a fourth dream of a polar bear, this time from a man:

I am hunting a white polar bear in very cold wilderness, making every effort to kill it. After several vain attempts, the white polar bear and I become friendly. It should be noted that although the atmosphere was a pure, clear cold, I was not wearing heavy clothing. Suddenly, I am drowning in the middle of a lake as my brother and the polar bear watch from the shore. Somehow, the white bear swims out and saves my life.

Not the brother swims out and saves my life but the white bear, paired with my brother and, perhaps, more than a brother, at least in the capacity of saving his life. The bear he has been trying to kill by making every effort (for so is how he tries to kill the bear: by making every effort) saves his life. The vanity of attempting to kill the bear, yet the pursuit of it, has brought him into friendly affinity of hunter with the hunted. And it should be noted that this dreamer is not wearing protective clothing. He has his own inner heat now that he and the bear are friendly. Yet again: who, what is the bear that saves my life?

These four dreamers are modern Americans. They have no empirical relations with polar bears: they are not hunters, explorers, zoologists, Eskimos. I am rather certain they have not read the Kalevala, been to the Drachenloch (Dragons Lair), or studied shamanism. Nor do I believe they know about the holy nature of the white animal in folklore. I strongly doubt that the woman in whose dream the white bear howled for its mate and child has read Thomas Bewicks illustrated eighteenth-century A General History of Quadrupeds where it states that among polar bears fondness for offspring is so great that they embrace their cubs to the last and bemoan them with the most piteous cries.

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