James Hillman: Against The Myth of Development

“I don’t develop; I am.
—Pablo Picasso”

Look, there has to be something you hate, you know, and you have to have a straw man that you can attack all the time so that you can make your points. And as Ortega says, if you’re not going to exaggerate, you may as well keep silent. But I hate the myth of development because it is the dominant myth of psychology in our culture, and the myth of development suits the child archetype.

“The three goals of developmental psychology are to describe, explain, and optimize development.” (Baltes, Reese, & Lipsitt, 1980)

It’s a product of the child. It’s an expression of the child archetype. And I feel that the child archetype has got us by the balls or got us by, I don’t know what in, in our culture. And Alice Miller is part of that worship of the child, this sort of innocent child who was creative and wonderful and terrible things happened to it.

And this new hysterical moralism about how many people in the culture now regarding themselves as abused and the use of the word abuse and victim and survivor, words that belong really to people who were either in Vietnam or in the Holocaust, are now used about family life. There’s something desperate going on and to me, this is part of the developmental hangup of psychology.

And there’s something more to it because the archetypal child not only always needs therapy because it’s always growing and always feels abandoned, but also the child by definition is apolitical.

And I think therapy is guilty of something. I’m not talking about individual therapists. That’s something else. This is the model of thought that we’ve all been in, the whole culture has been in. For the last 20 or 30 years, the most sensitive and intelligent people have been in therapy. They’ve not been in politics, they’ve been engaged with finding, growing their child outta their childhood all the rest of the child stuff.

You say, “what can I do?” That’s a sentence from the child. “What can I do? This thing is bigger than I am.” That’s a sentence of the child. And then we bitch, we become passive aggressive. We bitch about the administration or Milken or somebody. We don’t regard ourselves as citizens. We regard ourselves as selves — growing selves.

And you know, one of Aristotle’s definitions of the human being is “man is by nature a political animal”, not man is by nature a self-developing creature, or an individuating person, “man is by nature, a political animal.” It’s instinctual. Be in the polis, in the community.

Which would lead to another definition of self. From self defined as the interiorization of God or the divine spark, to the interiorization of community. And I could never find myself unless I were in community. It’s a very different notion, and I think that’s very important.

So that’s why I fight this child thing so much, because of the developmental psychology. It takes us always backwards. What happened then?”

From Myths of the Family, a lecture available for free at https://www.betterlisten.com/products/myths-of-the-family-by-james-hillman

Brian James is a registered therapeutic counsellor and archetypal men’s coach who works with men all over the world through 1-on-1 counselling and a 6-week men’s program based on the model for mature masculinity presented in the book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert L. Moore and Douglas Gillette.

Find out more at http://brianjames.ca