The following is an excerpt from Mary Watkins’ 2008 essay Breaking the Vessels: Archetypal Psychology and the Restoration of Culture, Community, and Ecology, which not only offers one of the best introductions to the key themes of James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology, but provides real world examples of the ways in which her students have put into practice the “application of depth psychological theories and approaches to community and ecological issues, paying attention to the interfaces between individual psychological suffering and cultural pathology in their efforts to restore liveliness and depth of insight.”

On Sunday, Aug 24th from 10-11:30 am Pacific I’ll be hosting an intimate online study group where artists, activists, therapists and community organizers can gather to discuss the ideas in Mary’s essay. If there’s enough interest, I plan on making this a regular offering over on the Howl in the Wilderness Patreon. The group is open to HITW community members at the $10 and $20 support level. Follow this link to register: https://www.patreon.com/posts/lone-wolf-club-135901878

— Brian

Hillman, like Sufi mystical poets before him, describes the heart’s characteristic action not as feeling, but as sight. He says, “individuating begins with noticing, paying attention to the specifics of what is actually there so that it can become fully what it is.”

All cultural and ecological work needs to be continually grounded in what Hillman calls “notitia.” Noticing involves a gift of careful attention that is sustained, patient, subtly attuned to images and metaphors, tracking both hidden meanings and surface presentations. The practice of noticing addresses our “deprivation of intimacy with the immediate environment,” which Hillman diagnosed in 1982. Depth engagement begins with careful noticing: a “being-with” that is a form of doing that allows intimacy with a situation to develop.

The dwelling and participating with that careful noticing requires opens pathways to the depths of a phenomenon. Like a lover’s careful noticing of the beloved, such attention finds ways of caring that are not superimposed, but arise from the ground of relationship spawned by careful attention. For Hillman, the activity of noticing is a countercultural one, resisting the mania of hyperactivity and overarousal that the dominant culture encourages.

Paradoxically, the first step in archetypal activism is to stop. Only then do we discover ourselves already within a world that we can notice more deeply. This noticing is akin to Freud’s basic method of free association, in which the analyst resists an overfocus and a premature directedness that issues from the ego. Instead, the analyst is encouraged to enjoy a widening of awareness and an evenly hovering attention so that new perceptions can emerge. In American culture, slowing down is necessary not only to noticing, but also to the essential work of mourning, to which we will soon turn.

Because we have associated a turn to the world with a turn toward the public and toward action, it is difficult initially to discover a way of being with an area of concern in the world that is slow, observant, and participatory, and that invites reverie, image, and insight. We are used to going into a situation with something we are going to share or impose, some aim clearly in mind. This ego orientation makes it difficult to see and understand the place we have arrived at. We have dragged our agenda and presuppositions with us.

Depth psychological engagement with the soul of the world begins differently, more as an apprenticeship, an openness to being tutored. It requires the vulnerability of coming without a plan or of knowing that the plan we arrive with will soon dissolve as we find the ideas we have come with inadequate to the situation we find ourselves in.

Many of us are starved for this mode of engagement in the world. We are exhausted by wrestling with situations in the world through our work and other commitments and we take solace in a remove from the world. We have not learned how to be present to the interiority of each situation we enter, resting in a whole-hearted attentiveness. This takes time. When we learn how to make this shift, work in the world is no longer pitted against individual soul work. The two flow together, each a source of both challenge and restoration.

Noticing requires a de-centering from the heroic ego, an activation of what Hillman has called the imaginal ego. We need to step aside, but not to the distance of an objective observer. The stepping aside is an interior move away from premature intentions forged in isolation. Contrary to the dictates of natural science, it clears the way for greater intimacy and opens up the possibilities of collaboration.

“Aesthetic response fuels protest.”

But the deepest evil in the totalitarian system is precisely that which makes it work: its programmed, single-minded monotonous efficiency; bureaucratic formalism, the dulling daily service, standard, boring, letter-perfect, generalities, uniform. No thought and no responsiveness. Eichmann .... So, the question of evil, like the question of ugliness, refers primarily to the anaesthetized heart, the heart that has no reaction to what it faces, thereby turning the variegated sensuous face of the world into monotony, sameness, oneness. The desert of modernity.

—James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World

Hillman describes “noticing” as the basis of classical depth psychology; the noticing of dream images, of bodily feelings, memories, omissions, and slips of tongue. This noticing contributes to an awakening. This same noticing must, he says, be extended to the world from which we have withdrawn our attention. We need, he says, a “depth psychology of extraversion,” through which depth can be found “in the objects, in the images presented by the world.” When we begin to notice the world, we are struck by both ugliness and beauty. Hillman, unlike Jung, links this aesthetic response with the ethical. It “does not replace the ethical,” but it gives “sensate images that direct our longings toward ideals,” visions that we can “become seduced by.” Hillman argues that we have repressed our aesthetic involvement with the world, numbing our perception of both beauty and ugliness. Once awakened, aesthetic response—be it “naïve recoil or desirous advance”— pulls us into relationship with the polis and with politics. We awake from conformity, says Hillman, and can no longer think that our miseries are wholly occasioned by our personal relationships. “Beauty evokes love,” says Hillman. Aesthetic response fuels protest.

— From Breaking the Vessels: Archetypal Psychology and the Restoration of Culture, Community, and Ecology available for download here

Mary Watkins is chair of the Depth Psychology Program, Co-Chair of the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco- Psychologies Specialization (CLIE), and Coordinator of Community and Ecological Fieldwork and Research in CLIE. She was trained as a clinical and developmental psychologist and was an early member of the archetypal/imaginal psychology movement. She has worked in a wide variety of clinical settings and with groups on issues of peace, diversity, social justice, reconciliation, immigration, and the envisioning of community and cultural transformation. She is the author of Waking Dreams, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues, Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons, co-author of Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Talking with Young Children about Adoption, and Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border, and co-editor of Psychology and the Promotion of Peace.