On the Ideal Person

As I mentioned before, I’ve been teaching (my version of) Hillman’s psychology to a group of Jungians in Taiwan, and it’s been lots of fun to explicate him slowly and with care, as is necessary when your translator has to work in real time. (Our translator is miraculous). Here’s a little gem the importance of which I had missed. It rather surprised me to find it. It’s an uncharacteristically unambiguous affirmation of his Ideal Personality. Jung has one explicitly in his model of the balanced psyche with the Self at the center, and Freud has the defended ego, and it seems to me that every healer of souls should have one—or if they don’t, they should know that they don’t and why.

This paragraph is from Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account:

The healthy or mature or ideal personality will thus show cognizance of its dramatically masked and ambiguous situation. Irony, humor, and compassion will be its hallmarks, since these traits bespeak an awareness of the multiplicity of meanings and fates and the multiplicity of intentions embodied by any subject at any moment. The “healthy personality” is imagined less upon a model of natural, primitive, or ancient man with its nostalgia, or upon social-political man with its mission, or bourgeois rational man with its moralism, but instead against the background of artistic man for whom imagining is a style of living and whose reactions are reflexive, animal, immediate. This model is, of course, not meant literally or singly. It serves to stress certain values of personality to which archetypal psychology gives importance: sophistication, complexity, and impersonal profundity; an animal flow with life disregarding concepts of will, choice, and decision; morality as dedication to crafting the soul (soul-making); sensitivity to traditional continuities; the significance of pathologizing and living at the “borders”; aesthetic responsiveness.

It’s fairly inclusive it seems to me, and I personally can’t find anything “wrong” with it, but then I’ve been reading his stuff enthusiastically for a long time. I suppose I’m slightly concerned about the “profundity” thing, but I know what he means. That he puts irony, humor and compassion at the top makes me happy. And an appreciation for ambiguity. We should imagine ourselves against the background of “artistic humanity.” [come on James, not “man”, please! I hate having to do this so much] It’s rather “zen” really, in what I take to be the American meaning of the term. It reminds me of what I am hoping to hear about when I read Zhuangzu or Dōgen or Pema Chödrön or Norman Fischer. That kind of person… that’s what I’d like to be, on a good day. It’s something to try for anyway. And I think it’s totally irrelevant whether Hillman achieved it or not—and he didn’t. He didn’t see himself as a role model, thankfully. And that's fine.

When I realized what I was reading the other day before my lecture, I thought, well damn! here’s as good a summary of archetypal psychology in the most personal and immediate terms as we’re likely to get. And it goads each of us to consider our own ultimate goals.

Image: Guanyin, the female bodhisattva of compassion.