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Quote by James Hillman

“The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism.”

Quote by James Hillman

Author

James Hillman (April 12, 1926 - October 27, 2011) was an American psychologist and a prominent figure in the field of analytical psychology. His research focused on dream analysis, mythology, and the relationship between the human psyche and nature. Hillman's works have had a profound impact on psychology, literature, and the arts. more

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“I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.”

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“You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things.”

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“Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area.”

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“I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper.”

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“Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That's a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be.”

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“People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology.”

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“Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.”

“Art, for example, becomes "art therapy." When patients make music, it becomes "music therapy." When the arts are used for "therapy" in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.”

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“Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way - whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that.”

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“One strand of psychotherapy is certainly to help relieve suffering, which is a genuine medical concern. If someone is bleeding, you want to stop the bleeding. Another medical aspect is the treatment of chronic complaints that are disabling in some way. And many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. So there is a reasonable, sensible, medical side to psychotherapy.”

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