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Artmaking Is Soulmaking
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
–George Orwell, “Why I Write,” 1946
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Neither relationships, nor feeling, nor any of the human context in which the psyche finds itself should be mistaken for the soul-making opus. When we make this mistake, we focus upon the instruments and means and not upon the end. Improving relationships and making connections with feeling is not at all what is meant by psychological creativity. The soul may still lie sterile if it is limited to the human circle, which can never replace the Gods. Yet this human circle is necessary for psychological creativity: there seems to be a necessity for a close and personal world — family, tutelary figures, a friendly society, a beloved, personal enemies. The world and its humanity is the vale of our soul-making. — James Hillman
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“I’ve been straining for decades to push psychology over into art, to recognize psychology as an art form rather than a science or a medicine or an education, because the soul is inherently imaginative.” ~James Hillman
