About this deal
He realized after his falling out from Freud, that his own religious tradition and the available psychological framework was not enough to help him contain the raw and wuthering forces of his own unconscious that were assailing him at the time. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury…Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all one.
We have only an approximation through the context of their lives and their interpretation of Jung’s private diary. We see the foggy outlines of the ethics that these men hope will guide modern psychology but we are not quite able to see it as they see it. It is water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. In this book of dialogues, James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani reassess psychology, history, and creativity through the lens of Carl Jung’s Red Book. Retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut on October 27, 2011 from bone cancer.
For Hillman the dead are artists and storytellers, the scholars who inform his work on every page (his footnotes and "excurses" are one of the chief pleasures of his writing).
Hillman and Shamdasani’s thesis is partially a question about ethics and partially a question about cosmology. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do.Jung took the broad strokes of his psychology from the fundamentals of the brahman/atman and dharma/moksha dichotomies of Hinduism.