Discovering Your Soul

What does it mean to truly live? What is a meaningful life? For some, like psychologist Abraham Maslow, life is first about meeting basic needs. Once those needs are met, we give our life meaning by striving to reach our highest potential. Certainly there is value to this notion. But James Hillman, a heretical psychologist following in Jung’s footsteps, asserts that we give our life meaning by discovering and developing our true soul. Let’s dive in and take a look at the history of spirit creation, from the Greeks and Romans to Keats to Hillman.

Keats’ System Of Spirit Creation

The celebrated romantic poet John Keats left quite a mark on the world, despite dying at only 25. Keats celebrated the beauty of the world in his odes, but he was no stranger to the ugly side of life. His mother and brother died of consumptive fever. Having attended both of them, Keats also worked as a fever doctor during an epidemic, and died of tuberculosis. He concerned himself with beauty and truth, but he saw the value of pain. Keats rejected belief in an afterlife. He felt the notion of religious salvation devalued suffering. For Keats, suffering was the means to what he called “Spirit-creation.”

In 1819, two years before his death, we wrote a letter to his brother George elaborating on his notion of spirit creation. “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!” For Keats, a person’s raw intelligence was not really a soul until the heart had a chance to struggle through pain. Through this process a person could perceive and assert beauty and truth in the face of pain. This theme was explored a millenium before by the Greeks and Romans in their versions of the myth of Eros and Psyche, in which Psyche must wander and learn through suffering before experiencing true love.

Hillman Takes Up the Cause of the Soul

Over a century later, post-Jungian rebel psychologist James Hillman took up the banner of the soul. Somewhat of a heretic, Hillman rejected the humanistic focus on self-actualization of Maslow and his followers, who posit a hierarchy of needs that culminates in striving to become ‘your best self.’ Hillman instead wanted us to discover and honestly recognize our most authentic selves, viewing the project of creating a ‘best self’ as dishonest and misguided. For Hillman, it was important to experience the chaos and complexity of the soul and its relation to the world. Hillman believed that by overcoming our externally imposed fixed patterns of thought, we can access genuine creativity, a divine spark that can penetrate routine thinking.

Our true soul, for Hillman, is hidden behind our routines and received beliefs. To find it, we must be shocked, dislodged from our comfortable moorings. In pathology, in pain, in chaos, in these moments of struggle when our secure beliefs are challenged and begin to disintegrate — this is when we can discover our true soul. The mythic figure of Christ perhaps came closest to true-self knowledge in the Garden of Gethsemane when he asks “Father, why have you forsaken me?” At this moment, the figure of Christ is forced to deal with the wickedness of man with his own heart. No longer protected by his father, his suffering allows him to learn to forgive.

For Hillman, it is the soul that turns a mechanical sequence of events into something meaningful. Sanford Drob summarizes: The soul “(1) makes all meaning possible, (2) turns events into experiences, (3) involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death.” Death negates infinity, and in the process, creates possibility by creating impossibility. When we know we will not live forever, we realize that we can choose among possible things to achieve in our finite time. This knowledge of death gives urgency to our lives and meaning to our choices.

Hillman posits a different goal for psychoanalysis. He does not seek to cure pathology, nor does he seek to help us improve ourselves or “self-actualize.” For Hillman, our “true potential” is a different sort of thing altogether. The goal for which we should strive, he believes, is honest self-knowledge, a nobler goal than self-improvement. We should focus on our primary human task — imbuing experience with meaning and significance.

Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane — Asking Questions

The Question and The Answer

Questions such as “what it is to be truly human, how to love, why to live, and what is emotion, value, justice, change, body, God, soul and madness in our lives”, and more practical problems of daily life around money, family, health etc “to provide the base of soul-making” ultimately do not have a single definite solution. Rather, these problems are themselves a solution to the problem “how can I discover who I really am?”

The answer, for Hillman, is that we are not one single integrated identity and we cannot ever be. Our soul is a complex of multiple personalities. By learning to recognize and understand the true, full complexity of our soul in all its good and bad aspects, we can access our divine spark and our own unique individual creativity. Which ultimately begins to sound a little like self-actualization, doesn’t it? It is a recognition that at our best, we can be a glorified mess, but Hillman seems to posit a best: knowing and expressing the full complexity of your true selves.

Join Us On Our Journey To The Good Life

Please join us as we continue on our conceptual journey to the heart of the art of the good life. You can follow our articles here on Medium if you have an account, or simply bookmark our Medium page or follow us on Facebook.

We’ll tell you how to escape the Consumer Treadmill and tip you off to the most popular course in the history of Yale, Psychology and the Good Life, and how you can take it for free. Find out how you can add years to your life in our article on the benefits of yoga and let us tell you about what meditation can do to make you more productive and less stressed. Consider our musings on the Midas myth and the common themes of behavioral economist Tibor Scitovsky and the myth of Eros and Psyche. Want to get inspired? We’ve got an article on defining your life project. For insight into the struggle between happiness and perfection, check out our article on satisficers vs maximizers and Bruce Lee’s theory of the top dog and the underdog. We also consider some more abstract topics, like John Maynard Keynes thoughts on the art of life, or non-being and its place at the root of luxury, or the conceptual art color the blackest black, Vantablack. If you are a gourmet, you might want to check out these fine dining restaurants in Bali that could be contenders for a Michelin star. Enjoy!

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