James Hillman, A Blue Fire
FAMILY
We are born into a family and, at the last, we rejoin its full extension when gathered to the ancestors. . . . Our names are family names, our physiognomies bear family traits, and our dreams never let us depart from home -- father and mother, brother and sister -- from those faces and those rooms. Even alone and only ourselves, we are also always part of them, partly them. . . .
Where does family fit in the modern myth of individual independence? That myth says home is what you leave behind. . . . Marriages and family foundings . . . are more and more countered by separations, living apart, single-parent households, divorces. Generations divided: children in day care; elders in Arizona. . . . Is it too much to assert that the most devastating effect of Western psychology is neither the reductive sexualization of the mind nor the pseudoreligion of self-centeredness, but rather its deliberate rupture of the great chain of generations, which it has accomplished by means of its myth of individual development toward independence? Not honor your father and mother, but blame them and you will come out strong. . . . The overwrought, exhausting difficulties that consume family life indicate that something important is going on. . . . Let's see what we can recover from . . . typically emotional moments in family life. . . . Relatives and in-laws
Most lives are spent among likes . . . The people whom we choose to be with do not truly force us beyond our usual psychological boundaries. In the family, however, just where you might expect to be with those most like you, you encounter instead a collection of the strangest folk! At any large family gathering there come together the most extraordinary behaviors and most incompatible opinions, yet all this is in the same clan. Voltaire supposedly said, "Nothing human is alien to me."
Relatives and in-laws provide the opportunity of extending our human understanding to what strikes us as alien, indeed. Where else, how else would one ever spend an evening with a man from Orange County who pays dues to the Klan, or with a math professor who interprets signals from outer space, or a junkyard dealer who did time in the state penitentiary. And the manners, the clothes, the bodies! This is more than "alien," Voltaire. This is downright outlandish, freakish.
Here we realize that large family affairs, rather than being scenes of convention, are actually performances of high comedy, outrageously funny, which also serve to encourage one's own peculiarities. After all, as an in-law and relative yourself, you too appear, and are, rather freakish to the others. . . . Family seems to evoke a profound curiosity in each of its members about the others . . . Shadows come rushing out of the closet and join the party without moral opprobrium.
A large family reception receives, in magnificentia et gloria, all shadows; all events, whether good news or bad, associated with family members, are magnified and glorified, thereby extending the size of the family's heart. The measure of a family's magnanimity is not what it gives to charity but rather its capacity to shelter the shadows of its members.
Charity begins at home. We each feel this heart extending when, for instance, a little pride arises over the naming as "best insurance salesman in the county" a seemingly unremarkable young man who is, nonetheless, married to your great niece. . . . There follows a delicious section on "Family Meals" -- "tension is always on the menu" -- which I will reluctantly skip, in favor of this, which I defy anyone not to recognize:
Going back home
Whether from prison camp after a war or just taking the bus home for Thanksgiving, homecoming is fraught with dreadful anticipation. Opening the front door releases overwhelming emotions -- and also the counterforce of repression against those emotions that so often characterizes the stifled atmosphere of returning. . . .
[G]oing home is always going back home. Returning is essentially a regressive act in keeping with an essential function of family: to provide shelter for the regressive needs of the soul. Everyone needs a place to crawl and lick his wounds, a place to hide and be twelve years old, inept and needy. The bar, the bed, the boardroom and the buddies do not meet the gamut of needs, which always limp along behind the myth of independent individuality. . . . Going back may mean sleeping till two in the afternoon, or taking refuge in the bathroom, crying with mom in the kitchen, or just complaining as do the grandparents who fall ill during every visit.
Going home, at whatever age, offers going back, regression. And the fight against family during these return trips is therefore a displacement of the fight against regression. . . . We don't want to admit that we have not "grown up," and so blame the family both for bringing out our worst and then for not indulging it enough. Meanwhile: that strange sense of consciousness ebbing away, going down the family drain. The debilitating energy loss strikes everyone alike as if a communal power outage. Everyone caught in repeating, and resisting, old patterns. Nothing changed, after all these years!
No one can get out even for a walk to break the spell, the whole family sinking deeper into the upholstery. . . . No one is at fault, no one is kicked out, and no one can be helped. In the paralysis lies the profoundest source of acceptance. . . . Everyone goes down the drain because family love allows family pathology, an immense tolerance for the hopeless shadow in each, the shadow that we each carry as permanent part of our baggage and that we unpack when we go back home.
Hillman goes on to talk about the deep psychic importance of the house and its contents, of servants, and of the family pet, "considered often a familiar." Of Odysseus' homecoming: "His family, by the way, included his old nurse and his old dog. Again, that emphasis upon ties beyond blood, and upon animals and things. . . . " and on "family service."
Finally:
One also serves an invisible family, as if an archetypal force. With the passing of time a sense of its power grows within one's psyche, like the movements of its skeleton inside one's flesh, which keeps one in servitude to patterns entombed in our closest attitudes and habits. From this interior family we are never free. This service keeps us bonded to the ancestors. . . .
I have been attempting to present family as supreme metaphor for our life on earth because it presents that force of human attachment to a dwelling place, of domestication of the savage and the nomad, of honoring the invisible, the demonic and the dead, of making intimate and familiar and "owned" the persons, animals and things of this world, taking them home to the hearth, ourselves as long-term caretakers in bondage to our fate on earth, playing out the comedy of human continuity.
From Extending the Family: From Entrapment to Embrace
©1985 James Hillman
Excerpted in A Blue Fire
FAMILY
We are born into a family and, at the last, we rejoin its full extension when gathered to the ancestors. . . . Our names are family names, our physiognomies bear family traits, and our dreams never let us depart from home -- father and mother, brother and sister -- from those faces and those rooms. Even alone and only ourselves, we are also always part of them, partly them. . . .
Where does family fit in the modern myth of individual independence? That myth says home is what you leave behind. . . . Marriages and family foundings . . . are more and more countered by separations, living apart, single-parent households, divorces. Generations divided: children in day care; elders in Arizona. . . . Is it too much to assert that the most devastating effect of Western psychology is neither the reductive sexualization of the mind nor the pseudoreligion of self-centeredness, but rather its deliberate rupture of the great chain of generations, which it has accomplished by means of its myth of individual development toward independence? Not honor your father and mother, but blame them and you will come out strong. . . . The overwrought, exhausting difficulties that consume family life indicate that something important is going on. . . . Let's see what we can recover from . . . typically emotional moments in family life. . . . Relatives and in-laws
Most lives are spent among likes . . . The people whom we choose to be with do not truly force us beyond our usual psychological boundaries. In the family, however, just where you might expect to be with those most like you, you encounter instead a collection of the strangest folk! At any large family gathering there come together the most extraordinary behaviors and most incompatible opinions, yet all this is in the same clan. Voltaire supposedly said, "Nothing human is alien to me."
Relatives and in-laws provide the opportunity of extending our human understanding to what strikes us as alien, indeed. Where else, how else would one ever spend an evening with a man from Orange County who pays dues to the Klan, or with a math professor who interprets signals from outer space, or a junkyard dealer who did time in the state penitentiary. And the manners, the clothes, the bodies! This is more than "alien," Voltaire. This is downright outlandish, freakish.
Here we realize that large family affairs, rather than being scenes of convention, are actually performances of high comedy, outrageously funny, which also serve to encourage one's own peculiarities. After all, as an in-law and relative yourself, you too appear, and are, rather freakish to the others. . . . Family seems to evoke a profound curiosity in each of its members about the others . . . Shadows come rushing out of the closet and join the party without moral opprobrium.
A large family reception receives, in magnificentia et gloria, all shadows; all events, whether good news or bad, associated with family members, are magnified and glorified, thereby extending the size of the family's heart. The measure of a family's magnanimity is not what it gives to charity but rather its capacity to shelter the shadows of its members.
Charity begins at home. We each feel this heart extending when, for instance, a little pride arises over the naming as "best insurance salesman in the county" a seemingly unremarkable young man who is, nonetheless, married to your great niece. . . . There follows a delicious section on "Family Meals" -- "tension is always on the menu" -- which I will reluctantly skip, in favor of this, which I defy anyone not to recognize:
Going back home
Whether from prison camp after a war or just taking the bus home for Thanksgiving, homecoming is fraught with dreadful anticipation. Opening the front door releases overwhelming emotions -- and also the counterforce of repression against those emotions that so often characterizes the stifled atmosphere of returning. . . .
[G]oing home is always going back home. Returning is essentially a regressive act in keeping with an essential function of family: to provide shelter for the regressive needs of the soul. Everyone needs a place to crawl and lick his wounds, a place to hide and be twelve years old, inept and needy. The bar, the bed, the boardroom and the buddies do not meet the gamut of needs, which always limp along behind the myth of independent individuality. . . . Going back may mean sleeping till two in the afternoon, or taking refuge in the bathroom, crying with mom in the kitchen, or just complaining as do the grandparents who fall ill during every visit.
Going home, at whatever age, offers going back, regression. And the fight against family during these return trips is therefore a displacement of the fight against regression. . . . We don't want to admit that we have not "grown up," and so blame the family both for bringing out our worst and then for not indulging it enough. Meanwhile: that strange sense of consciousness ebbing away, going down the family drain. The debilitating energy loss strikes everyone alike as if a communal power outage. Everyone caught in repeating, and resisting, old patterns. Nothing changed, after all these years!
No one can get out even for a walk to break the spell, the whole family sinking deeper into the upholstery. . . . No one is at fault, no one is kicked out, and no one can be helped. In the paralysis lies the profoundest source of acceptance. . . . Everyone goes down the drain because family love allows family pathology, an immense tolerance for the hopeless shadow in each, the shadow that we each carry as permanent part of our baggage and that we unpack when we go back home.
Hillman goes on to talk about the deep psychic importance of the house and its contents, of servants, and of the family pet, "considered often a familiar." Of Odysseus' homecoming: "His family, by the way, included his old nurse and his old dog. Again, that emphasis upon ties beyond blood, and upon animals and things. . . . " and on "family service."
Finally:
One also serves an invisible family, as if an archetypal force. With the passing of time a sense of its power grows within one's psyche, like the movements of its skeleton inside one's flesh, which keeps one in servitude to patterns entombed in our closest attitudes and habits. From this interior family we are never free. This service keeps us bonded to the ancestors. . . .
I have been attempting to present family as supreme metaphor for our life on earth because it presents that force of human attachment to a dwelling place, of domestication of the savage and the nomad, of honoring the invisible, the demonic and the dead, of making intimate and familiar and "owned" the persons, animals and things of this world, taking them home to the hearth, ourselves as long-term caretakers in bondage to our fate on earth, playing out the comedy of human continuity.
From Extending the Family: From Entrapment to Embrace
©1985 James Hillman
Excerpted in A Blue Fire