Hillman talking on fantasy and the fantasy of opposites
'I was trying to make a distinction between the Jung that I go with so deeply and strongly and the Jung that I try to step aside from. The metaphysical, theological, systematic Jung.
And just to review again for a moment, the kind of Jung that I am so interested in. Let me read you some Jung. Nothing to do with opposites. This is from his definitions, about fantasy.
“Fantasy as imaginative activity, is in my view simply the direct expression of psychic life”.
Now that is terribly important. The direct expression of psychic life. That’s what the heck but it psyche does, directly. It fantasizes.
“Of psychic energy, that cannot appear in consciousness except in the form of images, or contents”.
“We could therefore say that fantasy, in the sense of a phantasm, is the definite sum of libido that cannot appear in consciousness in any other way than in the form of an image”.
“A phantasm is an ideé force”. It’s a French idea from the nineteenth century, that an idea is a ‘force unit’.
“The phantasm is an ideé force. Fantasy, as imaginative activity, is identical with the flow of psychic energy”.
This is the psyche. …It is fantasy and it is in your fantasies. It is the direct presentation you do not know what the next one will be or the way they are at work. And they are energetic. Energetic.
Just a little more Jung. “The psyche”, this is now still in Volume six ‘Psychological Types’. “The psyche creates reality every day, the only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy. Fantasy is as much feeling as thinking, as much intuition as sensation. There is no psychic function that through fantasy is inextricably bound up with the other psychic functions”.
So, the moment you say you’re a feeling type or a thinking type, that’s not true because you’re all the types because the fantasy is binding, connecting them all. See how important it is, how his own mind breaks down his own systems. But we love the systems because they offer more security.
“Sometimes it appears in primordial form, sometimes it is the ultimate and boldest product of all our faculties to combine. Fantasy seems to me to be the clearest expression of the specific activity of the psyche”.
What does the psyche do? It fantasizes. Produces dreams, it produces thoughts, it produces ideas, it produces impulses, projects, plans, words, music, everything. So, that’s what I try to stay with. That.
So when we say that somebody has this idea about this I say the opposites are a fantasy.
And combining the opposites becomes combining a program based on the fantasy that that’s how the world is set up. Opposites.
Doesn’t mean the world is set up in opposites, it means that we have a fantasy and by means of that fantasy we have an idea, and by means of that idea we can proceed in a certain direction. But it’s not necessarily true.
And then you have to see what that fantasy does for you.
Well, it sets up divisions and then you have male, female and then we have gender problems and then we have, you know, we could go on and on with it. And we can become embroiled in that particular fantasy called the theory of opposites.
I needed to do that, to show it’s not arbitrary the way I am trying to work and what I am tending to emphasise and tending to pay less, or disregard.
There was so much about larger metaphysical ideas. Wholeness, self… I felt that we would lose the basis that I think is essential. What Jung has really opened up for us. Because those ideas of self, of wholeness and individuation, integration, there are parallels in all types of spiritual disciplines.
There’s no parallel for this idea of fantasy. This is really an original, extraordinary contribution to psychology.
And that’s why it is also close to the arts. Because the arts also work with that spontaneous eruption of the unexpected.’
Hillman speaking in 'The Art, Practice and Philosophy of Psychotherapy'. Seminar at the Pacifica Graduate Institute held June July 2001.
Detail from "The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Agnieszka Nienartowicz
90 x 60 cm (35.4 x 23.6 inch), oil on canvas, 2017
after Hieronymus Bosch