James Hillman is the master gadfly and re-visionary of modern psychology. Convinced that his science is really an art, and in love with the great dream images of the Jungian tradition to which he belongs, Hillman writes and speaks against the reduction of the protean human psyche to a mere artifact for analysis. In eloquent books, including The Myth of Analysis and The Dream of the Underworld, he outlines a psychology in which men and women can savor the beauty, the drama, and even the pain of soul-life.

'I have a dark eye, a twisted perception,' laughs James Hillman, and the casually spoken words carry weight. After all, the eye that the 69-year-old Hillman casts on psychology, therapy, and the human condition in books like The Myth of Analysis (1972) and The Dream and the Underworld (1979) is 'dark,' in more ways than one.

There's his dark view of the medical model under whose banner psychotherapy aims to 'improve,' to 'cure' the 'sick' psyche. For Hillman, all the psyche's phases and faces--and especially its 'dark' ones--are poetic, trustworthy, revelatory; to follow and learn from them (even if the learning is painful) is to do psychology without impoverishing vision.

He translates psyche as 'soul'--its Greek meaning--and plumbs that great ancient word to its darkest and most radiant depths. 'Other words long associated with the word soul,' he writes in Suicide and the Soul (1964), 'amplify it further: mind, spirit, heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality...purpose, emotion, quality, virtue, morality, sin, wisdom, death, God.'

This expansive, passionate view of the soul, nourished by Hillman's love of the Renaissance and its vivid Neoplatonic theories of mind, leads him to twist received psychological wisdom into 'new' forms that often echo antiquity. Against the therapeutic prejudice that the healthy mind is a barracks brought to order under the rule of the ego, Hillman offers 'polytheistic psychology,' which accepts and even celebrates self-division and '...obliges consciousness to circulate among a field of powers. Each god has its due as each complex deserves its respect in its own right....Polytheistic psychology can give sacred differentiation to our psychic turmoil.'