Years ago I worked in an office where my desk was temporarily situated in an area with no windows. All day I sat under fluorescent lights and felt I was slowly losing my mind.
Actually, there was a window nearby, but it overlooked a neighboring department that had an open office layout. I would wryly ponder which was worse: feeling exposed all day long without any privacy, or the soul-withering effects of sitting in a corner with no natural light?
I complained regularly about the desk and asked to move, although sometimes I wondered if I was overreacting.
James Hillman talked about exactly this. In 1985 he told a reporter, “Notice the world, sense it, react to it…Don’t fall prey to the therapist’s fantasy that the problem is always in you, when you’re suffering because of the room. Do what you can to change it… work in a room with fluorescent lighting and change it” (The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume III: Soul in the World).
This is why Hillman proposed a depth psychology of extraversion. Extraversion in classical typology is about energy flow, but Hillman treats it as attention to the soul of the world. Hillman’s psychology of extraversion says we should turn to the world—its images, places, and political life—as if they are expressions of soul.
“Hillman does not call for treatment plans and cures, or solutions, but for aesthetic responses—simply noticing the wrongness or expressing outrage or anguish” (Ipek S. Burnett, Re-Visioning the American Psyche).
That includes outrage at things like fluorescent lights, prices at the grocery store, uncomfortable furniture, the state of our roads.
“Or, in a larger realm, get involved with what happens in the city, in the environment. Shop with more discretion. There are thousands of ways you can change things once you pay as much attention to the world as to how it makes you feel” (Hillman, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume III: Soul in the World).
The recent Full Moon in Cancer opposed by Mars in Capricorn was a reminder that Cancer reflects our desire to feel safe and nurtured but Mars in Capricorn has other plans—it demands action, structure, and engagement with hard realities. There was no hiding from it. The transit didn’t ask for permission; it made things be felt.
“Make—these—things—be—felt.” That phrase comes from James Hillman, who became sharply critical of therapy in his later years and stopped seeing clients. “But Hillman never really abandoned the idea of therapy. He just came to see it very differently, as an exercise in ‘making things be felt.’ In a response to Ventura’s question of “What can therapy do?,” Hillman spelled out: “Make—these—things—be—felt.”
So what do we do with what we feel? The wrongness of the fluorescent lights, the rage at the pothole, the grief of watching the world suffer? We don’t have to fix everything. We can’t. But we can start with what’s within reach.
“Imagine it is our work to reach out to repair the part of the world soul that is within our reach – the edge that belongs to self and the corresponding part that belongs to the world… So we ask ourselves, ‘What is within my reach?’ I am! I am within my own reach” (Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy: Perspectives From Analytical Psychology).
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