“Every turn of fate has its interpretation, but it also has its beauty…
Even before the story of a life takes shape, life manifests itself as an image. These images wish, first and foremost, to be seen. Even if each of them is indeed laden with meaning and open to analytical dissection, should we rush to search for meaning without first appreciating the image? In doing so, we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that not even the best explanation can provide. We strip the observed life of pleasure—the manifestation of its beauty loses its connection to its meaning…
Of all the sins of psychology, the most fateful is the neglect of beauty. Ultimately, there is something quite beautiful in life. Yet one would hardly suspect this when reading works of psychology… By a ‘mortal’ sin of psychology I mean the sin of killing— the sense of lifelessness that overcomes us when we read professional psychology, listen to its language, its monotonous voice… all that stagnant water in which the soul seeks to become itself again, the last refuge of white-bread culture—somewhat dried out, stripped of its aroma, yet still puffed up with tireless hopes.”
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, pp. 55–56
I fear that the way I myself sometimes express things here, on this site, may also be part of this sin. It often bears the marks of a dry and restrained tone that offers me a fragile guarantee that I will not become entangled in the endlessly complex knot of contradictory thoughts and feelings called human life. In his book, Hillman states that he will not use words such as growth, creativity, boundaries, consciousness, ego, Self, experience… Yet these are precisely the words I use and will continue to use. For me personally, they have helped—and continue to help—in understanding the most essential things about myself and other people.
It is not difficult for me to find grounds on which to accuse Hillman of one-sidedness and bias, but in truth I understand him and even appreciate the pathos with which he writes. Dry academic discourse (which I know well from my former work as a research fellow at an institute), or the impersonal statistical approach in psychology, represent another such extreme—one that also calls for balance. The value of science lies in the objectivity and impartiality of knowledge, and this requires distance. But what happens when the subject of study and the object of study are one and the same person—the human being with their consciousness, emotions, personal traits, and desires? Then things become very difficult.
That is why I value the dry, differentiating, analytical language of psychological science, yet to the same extent I understand the need for beauty of which Hillman speaks. I cherish the deep Neptunian waters of creative imagination, from which emerge images that heal, inspire, and console. And no less valuable is the restrained and often tedious Saturnian ground, where statistical data, dry arguments, and scientific facts provide support. As usual, the coin has two sides that are equally important, and it is up to us to choose between them: mapping the terrain or painting the landscape.
In her book The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption, Liz Greene writes that “Neptunian suffering is healed through imagination.” But what does “Neptunian suffering” mean? It is the suffering of Judy Garland, longing and singing of the place beyond the rainbow. It is the torment born of a sense of incompleteness, inner emptiness, and chronic dissatisfaction. It is the striving for impossible wholeness and the yearning for fusion. Here too are the various forms of escape from the pain, coarseness, and imperfection of this world through illness, alcohol, or drugs. To such people—those suffering Neptunian pain—Liz Greene recommends healing through finding “a creative solution to their inner conflicts.” This solution lies in discovering the beauty of their fate, in their personal biographical image.
The phrase “Beauty will save the world,” from Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, would not have become so popular had it not found confirmation of its truth in human souls. Beauty heals through the primal power of images that reach layers of our souls inaccessible to words. Myth-making in the modern world occurs precisely through art—the primary means by which myth continues to reach us today, helping us come to terms with the dark and painful side of Life (see the first function of myth—Joseph Campbell).
The greatest works of art are not saccharine stories of cloudless happiness from the time of the Garden of Eden. They are vivid testimonies to the battle within the human soul, torn by inner conflicts, impossible longings, and incurable griefs. As an alchemical medium, art succeeds in transforming the feelings of inferiority produced by psychiatric diagnoses into wonder at the miracle of having both a soul and a body.
This is also what Hillman writes about: the living language of art, rather than the psychiatric language of diagnoses and classifications, can help us reclaim our dignity. To see our fate not as that of a neurotic, hysterical, manic, depressed, alcoholic individual failing to adapt to the social consensus of normality—of which scientific theories are also a part—but as that of a Hero who has dared to enter the darkest corner of the Dark Forest in order to follow the call of Destiny. One who is lost not because they are foolish, but because they walk untrodden paths. One who is desperate not because they are weak, but because the Forest they must cross is too dark and vast. One who is afraid not because they are small and pitiful, but because more than one demon attacks them from behind, more than one dragon must be fought. One who feels different, misunderstood, and alone—not because they are mad or inadequate, but because they are extraordinary and unique.
Beauty can heal because it gives rise to a particular kind of feeling within us—the aesthetic feeling. And the aesthetic feeling is an alchemical feeling; it has the power to transform. As we know from psychology, feelings are our primary responses by which we evaluate life as dangerous or not, pleasant or not, swinging us between the poles of attraction and repulsion. When a feeling succeeds in becoming aesthetic, it transforms the primal emotions of rejection, fear, rage, jealousy, and pain into acceptance, assent, and peace.
When we fail in our efforts to accept the unacceptable, there is always one more thing we can do—to see it through the eyes of beauty.
For me, the healing power of images appropriate to our inner Hero is beyond doubt. I have experienced their power more than once. The right image can accomplish what even the most complete and well-argued scientific theory cannot—to bring consolation and hope for a way forward. Because this is the symbolic language of the unconscious, the answers that come through its images carry meaning beyond words, within experience itself. Moreover, the aesthetic feeling brings pleasure, and pleasure is the best way to connect with the Earth. If we succeed in doing this, we will succeed in continuing our “descent downward,” discovering the beauty of the place “under the rainbow.”
In an adapted version of Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs, aesthetic needs are placed higher than cognitive needs for knowledge, meaning, and self-awareness, and below the needs for self-actualization and transcendence. I see in this an acknowledgment of their special place among the driving forces of the Spirit.
The value of this diagram lies in the fact that it helps us perceive structure and clarity by arranging the thoughts in our minds. But the other part of the truth is that these things cannot, in fact, be arranged. Their roots belong to the realm of the unknowable—a cosmic mystery that science gradually uncovers in fragments and that will never be fully known. Amid the chaos of our inner disharmony, the only solution at times is not to organize it, classify it, or diagnose it, but to perceive its beauty.
This is also where Hillman sees the redemption of psychology’s mortal sin—‘through undertaking certain aesthetic actions with our individual biographical images, to accept our lives as images bound to beauty.’
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
