Healing Fiction Book

A foundational book for Archetypal Psychology. In exploring the question "What does the soul want?", Hillman demonstrates that it wants fictions as therapy. Fantasies heal.

Especially interesting is Hillman's examination of the psychologies of Freud, Jung, and Adler -- their fictions. Even the "case history", that bastion of objective account, is a genre of writing, complete with its own tropes. It is a form of detective story, which we literalize as completely factual.

Using Adler's thought, Hillman gets to the heart of our need to literalize what is best kept metaphorical, "as if." The tension of "as if" is too much for us (the ego) to bear and it needs either/or logic to relieve this tension. It must dogmatize to escape anxiety.

This brings to mind Robert Anton Wilson's Maybe Logic (if we added "maybe" to every statement, we might not be so dogmatic), and the quantum condition of Shroedinger's Cat: existing in the indeterminate state of being both alive and dead (both/and logic) before our observation forces it into one state or the other. These speculations on physics are mine, not Hillman's, but it's where my thought went upon reading this excellent book.