Hillman is tantalizing, provocative, always the iconoclast who will not allow the dust to settle and peace reign. Instead of promoting the growing up paradigm of humanistic psychology he says we grow down. Instead of a developmental model he points us to calling as transtemporal. Like that first century Jewish rabbi Hillman plows right through the orthodoxy of both religion and psychology. And in so doing courts crucifixion by both sides. Hillman will not allow any stagnation and polarization of perspective. He piques and peeves without let that we may not die in the tranquility of the status quo. Forever the gadfly nothing is sacred to him--no idea, no theology, no science--except the stirrings of the soul.
Hillman's courage to challenge academic psychology will earn him the ire and derision of today's priests of the mind and soul. But his works pave the way for the return of the soul and its gods as proper and crucial subjects of psychology.
I can't quite reconcile Hillman's notion of a destiny (which seems psychologically monotheistic) with his image of the polytheistic personality, which I understand to be one of the bedrock assumptions of archetypal physchology. If the human psyche contains many persons, it would seem that the pursuit of a destiny would require repression of the many selves and inflation.
I enjoyed Hillman's challenges to psychotherapy, which I believe has a huge power shadow. I agree that the fantasy that parenting is the source of all adult misery should be rejected. I believe, however, that Hillman may have misrepresented family system therapy as promoting this view. In my experience, the goal of family system therapy is to establish an adult to adult relationship that includes the capacity to know one's parents in their complexity. Parental wounds become only one element in a much larger and more paradoxical story. I also found it interesting that Hillman seems to disagree with his friend and colleague Robert Bly by questioning the notion that the "absent father" is a fundamental source of male woundedness. One last point: I thought the section entitled Loneliness and Exile (p. 53) was particularly profound and moving.
My favorite passage from the book:
...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived." (p.259)