Excerpts from; The Soul's Code by James Hillman

Of all of psychology's sins, the most mortal is the neglect of beauty. There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books. Again, psychology fails what it studies. Neither social psychology, expermental psychology, not theraputic psychology find a placefor the aesthetic appreciation of a life story. Their tasks are investigation and explination, and should an aesthetic phenomenon pop up in any of their material (and not only in the aesthetically dedicated, like Jackson Pollock, Colette, or Monolete) it will be accounted for by a psychology that is without aesthetic seneitivity to begin with.

Each twist of fate may have its interpretation, but it also has its beauty. Just look at the image: Menuhin stomping away from the metal-stringed toy; Softy Stefansson sailing his boats in a tub; jug-eared and bony Gandhiji with all his fears. Life as images does not ask for family dynamics or genetic dispositions. Even before there are life stories, lives display themselves as images. They ask first to be seen. Even if each image is indeed pregnant with meanings and subject to dissecting analysis, should we jump to the meanings without appreciating the image, we have lost a pleasure that cannot be recovered by the very best of interpretations. We have also taken the pleasure out of the life we are regarding; the display of its beauty has become irrelevant to its meaning.

By psychology's "mortal" sin, I mean the sin of deadening, the dead feeling that comes over us when we read professional psychology, hear its language, the voice with which it drones, the bulk of its textbooks, the serious pretensions and bearded proclimations of new "findings" that could hardly be more banal, its soothing annodynes for self-help, its decor, its fashion, its departmental meetings, and its tranquilizing consulting rooms, those stagnant waters where the soul goes to be restored, a last refuge of white-bread culture, stale crustless, but ever spongy with rebounding hope.

Neglect of beauty neglects the Goddess, who then has to steal back into the departments as sexual harassment, into the laboratories as "research" experiments with sex and gender, and into the consulting rooms as seductive assignations. All the while psychology, without beauty, becomes victims of its own cognitive strictures, all passion spent in pushing for publication and position. Without beauty, there's little fun and less humor. Grand motivations are lost to psychology categories like grandiosity and inflation, while the adventure of ideas is cut to fit the experimental designs. Whatever romance might still be left appears in the desire to help sufering people by entering a "training program" for therapists. But if helping is the calling, then better to apprentice with Mother Teresa than to expect a psychology without a soul, beauty, or pleasure to train you to help the suffering. Psychology has no self-help manual for its own affliction.

As evidance of this book's attempt to exit the mortuary is the absence from these pages of the contemporary languange of psychology. Except where set apart in quotation marks to keep from contaminating a sentence with psychological morbidities, you will not find any of these infectious agents: performance, growth, creativity, thresholds, continuum, response levels, integration, identity, development, validation, boundaries, coping measures, operant conditioning, variance, subjectivity,adjustment, verifiable results, test results,emergence, hope. You will find few diagnostic labels and no acronyms. This is a psychology book without the word "problem." Little mention of "ego," of "consciousness," and none of "experience"!

I have also tried to prevent the most pernicious term of all, "self" from creeping into my paragraphs. This word has a big mouth. It could have swallowed into its capacious limitlessness such as "genius," "angel," "damion," and "fate". And finally, I boast this triumph: a book with a passionate psychological intent whose passion was not diverted into the indulgences of the gender war. As civilization subsides into its own waste deposits, it doesnt matter wheather you are feminine or masculine or any composite of them. We all dissolve together. Far more urgent matters than gender call out to the passion of psychology.

So this book wants to join psychology with beauty. Thought this redemptice move is a consummation devoutly to be wished, it becomes possible in general only when we make particular moves with our individual biographical images taking our life as an image into connection with beauty.