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The Soul’s Code: In Search of
Character and Calling |
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The Self-Help Classics |
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The Soul’s Code: In Search of
Character and Calling |
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Is there a code to our souls, a DNA of destiny? The question compelled Hillman to trawl through the lives of Judy Garland, Charles Darwin, Henry Ford, Kurt Cobain, Tina Turner and many others, searching for the ‘something’ that drove them on and made them live how they did. His premise is, just as the giant and majestic oak is embedded in the acorn, so a person carries inside them an active kernel of truth, or an image, waiting to be lived. The idea is not a new one - the Greeks had the word ‘daimon’ to describe the invisible guiding force in our lives, the Romans the ‘genius’. Hillman says that the way we see our lives dulls them. We love romance and fiction, but don’t apply enough romantic ideals or stories to ourselves. We cease to be a creation, more a result, in which life is reduced to the interplay between genetics and environment. He is brilliant in exposition of what he calls the ‘parental fallacy’, the belief that we the way we are is because of how they are. Childhood, The Soul’s Code argues, is best understood in terms of the image we are born with coming into contact with the environment we find ourselves in. The tantrums and strange obsessions of the child should be seen in this context, rather than trying to ‘correct’ them in therapy. Yehudi Menuhin was given a toy violin for his fourth birthday, which he promptly dashed to the ground. Even at this age, it was an insult to the great violinist-in-waiting. We treat children as if they are a blank slate, without their own authenticity, and the child is therefore denied the possibility that they may have an agenda for their life, guided by their genius. The Soul’s Code shows how the daimon will assert itself in love, giving rise to obsessions and torments of romantic agony which defy the logic of evolutionary biology. When Michelangelo sculpted portraits of gods or of his contemporaries, he tried to see what he called the immagine del cuor, the heart’s image. Hillman says the same heart’s image lies within each person. When we fall in love, we feel super-important because we are able to reveal who we truly are, giving a glimpse of our soul’s genius. The meeting between lovers is a meeting of images, an exchange of imaginations. You are in love because your imagination is on fire. By freeing imagination, even identical twins are freed of their sameness. The Soul’s Code is also engrossing when it comes to love’s opposite, the ‘bad seed’. We live in a culture of innocence that despises darkness, and American popular culture in particular, with its Disneylands and Sesame Street, cannot accept seeds that are not sugar-coated. But innocence actually attracts evil, Hillman says, and ‘Natural Born Killers are the secret companions of Forrest Gumps’. Picasso said: ‘I don’t develop; I am.’ Life is not about becoming something, but about making real the image already there. We are obsessed with personal growth, reaching towards some imaginary heaven, but instead of trying to transcend human existence, it makes more sense to ‘grow down’ into the world and our place in it. Hillman is not surprised that the people we call ‘stars’ often find life so difficult and painful. The self-image that the public gives them is an illusion, and inevitably leads to tragic falls to earth. Who wants to be famous? This wonderful book combines
psychology, philosophy and biography into a seamless,
colourful whole that will probably be unlike anything you
have read. It may make sense of the life you have lived
thus far that no prescriptive self-help book can match.
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