Relative State

An Amazing Hillman Quote

December 16th, 2005

I found a really amazing quote by James Hillman in his book Healing Fiction (1983):

The fuller, more philosophical implications of the dialogue between Mark and Sheba are better presented by our final excerpt, this time from an eclectic psychotherapist with wide experience who came to Zürich for some deeper Jungian training. Again our refrain:

He: What do you want?
“I want out,” says a voice he called variously “soul-voice,” “anima,” “chest-voice,” “my person.”
He: Out! That sounds like you are a prisoner.
Soul-Voice: I did not say that. I am not blaming you. You keep me, for better or for worse, inside. Protective. But I want out.
He: I do not understand [that same sentence!]. It has taken me so many years first to find you and get you inside, as a psychological factor as Jung says, so we can have dialogues like this, that to let you out means to start all those projections once more.
Soul-Voice: You are afraid to let me out, then you are keeping me for worse: not protecting me, but yourself. I am a prisoner.
He: Just wanting to keep you inside and psychological makes you a prisoner?
Soul-Voice: A prisoner in your psychology. You have imprisoned me in your psychological system, preventing me from appearing wherever I please.
He: It’s the way you say that, that makes me afraid: “wherever you please” means anima attractions, foolish business speculations again, wild goose chases. When you are ‘out’ I become a silly goose. I can’t afford it. I must protect myself.

…More than a week passed before he took it up again, although he had been struggling with her “wanting out” without resolution. In fact, he did not take it up again, for it happened to him after swimming in the lake. On coming out of the water, he experienced his body wrapped in space that was full of presence, and air that had a density. He heard her say distinctly, so aloud that it was as if an hallucination: “Now I am out. Now you are in.”

When he told me this I remarked about the coagulatio of the soul in alchemy, its becoming thickened, sensed as a presence. This had evidently happened like a chemical process. After long cooking, stirring, and containing, suddenly, as in making a sauce, a coagulation takes place. (Healing Fiction, pp. 121–123)

I like to think of it like a seed, growing a long time in silence before pushing its way out into the light. I’m not sure what to think about being compared to a sauce… :D

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