Healing Fiction

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which

you know to be a fiction, there being nothing
else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a
fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
Wallace Stevens

I would like to introduce Healing Fiction with an incomplete

statement: to publish James Hillman in the context of literature and
art is an act of ______.
Many words might fill the blank. It will be healthier to leave
it open, which, among other things, relieves the reader of the
bother of speculating about Hillman's relationship to certain
writers also appearing in this context [Station Hill Press]; Hillman
is no one's theorist but his own. More important, openness is an
appropriate response to work that broadens, rather than closes off,
conceptual awareness, and Hillman's writing grants access to wide
territories indeed. The powerful and ambiguous relationship
between psychology and literature gains in both power and
ambiguity at Hillman’s behest, and at the same time that
connection takes on a further role: to reveal the poetic basis of
mind.
The book begins as two words, healing and fiction,i which
together form a complete notion that reads in two quite distinct
ways: fiction that is healing, and the act of healing fiction itself. The
double valence of the title expresses an underlying thematic
network, which might be variously stated: Our reality is created
through our fictions; to be conscious of these fictions is to gain

© 1983 George Quasha 1

creative access to, and participation in, the poetics or making of our
psyche or soul-life; the "sickness" of our lives has its source in our
fictions; our fictions can be "healed" through willing participation,
and, in this atmosphere of healing, they reclaim their intrinsic
therapeutic function. The status of fiction, so easily regarded as the
"lies" produced by the psychopathology of everyday life, is
returned to the level of poetics and to the basis of mind itself. That
this view of mind, of poetics, of healing, of fiction is itself fictional,
ceases to threaten its own authenticity and authority and instead
becomes a source, something between the willing suspension of
disbelief and the acceptance of life as it is. "Negative capability"
becomes a key to "soul-making," Hillmans central concern out of
Keats and Blake.
Healing Fiction extends Hillman's radical revision of the act
of therapy, conceived as an imaginative act, where imagination
embodies the faculty of transformation itself, a conception related
to a range of similar perspectives in Blake, Coleridge, Jung, Owen
Barfield, and Henry Corbin. The roots of this work are as much in
literature, especially visionary literature, as in psychology. By
choosing to speak of poetics in the context of psychology, creating
in effect a "psychopoesis" or soul-making, Hillman projects a two-
way connection between the psychological and the literary. The
impact of such fluid yoking is parapoetic, that is, it brings about
change in both domains, going beyond accepted definitions of
poetics and psychology, and extends the boundaries of either
discipline. It is this dwelling at the margins that gives to his
discourse a special cutting edge and lifts it to the level of the

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challenging poetics of our time. Hillman is like a poet not in giving
us a vision of language itself but in revisioning a path of psychic
discovery that runs only through language.
The altered perspective on therapy in light of the imaginal
and the fictional clears a way to a positive understanding of
Freud's late notion that therapy is interminable. If the psyche's dis-
ease is central to its mode of being in the world, then its
discomforts and loose ends last as long as life itself. The fantasy
that our pathologies can finally be cured Hillman has repeatedly
shown to be perverse, a misapplication of the medical model to
psychotherapy, whose true function is to sustain and guide our
conscious participation in the psychic world we (largely
unconsciously) generate in every moment of living. Healing is not
a procedure leading to a product, a concretized healthy person;
healing is a life process that begins with our acceptance of our
fictive realities and authorial roles within them, the acceptance, that
is, of myself as the arena I create for specific independently
originating psychic forces.
If the psyche's mode of operation is fiction, then psychic
texture is a text and the primary psychological issue is how to read
it. Hillman’s hermeneutic derives from Jung's emphasis on fantasy
and myth, although his method is in key ways heretical to the
Jungian enterprise. His is a hermeneutics of going with the story
rather than interpreting it. Every psychic/textual event is its own
opportunity for a correlation with story, for the creation of a
poetics on its own terms, a language-world open to its own images.
The psychological context of Hillman's work offers a permission to

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take one's own stories with the same authority assigned to great
fiction. One is "possessed by" properties of one's psychic texture,
which spreads wider than the focus of the heroic ego. "Depth
psychology" is reading deep, drawing deeply and widely from the
resources of text, the language-field in which one's psychic "logos”
or telling is embedded. Psychological freedom is compositional; the
private mind composes itself and inhabits an art-space. And
psychological understanding becomes a problematic of composing
in language, where each moment calls for its own poetics. So
psychic attunement in reading does not call for assigning
interpretive meanings to the text, which then reflect meanings back
to our lives; it is not a detective's hunt for the secret of the text but a
discovery, in Corbin's words, that "the text itself is the secret," a
knowing through the text that opens out into our lives.
Hillman's work has for years been a source for writers. The
rich and unconfining reading he has given to the great stories—
myths, tales of Gods and daimons, of humans, of their strange
interactions—grants space and energy, a deeply attractive charge,
to one's own stories. In Healing Fiction he extends that exegetical
resourcefulness to three historical figures, the fathers of modern
psychology, Freud, Jung and Adler. The first essay, "The Fiction of
Case History," finds a basis for these concerns in Freud, who
supposedly in his own words saw himself as "really by nature an
artist... a man of letters, though still in appearance a doctor"; and
this discovery leads to a view of psychoanalysis as a work of
imagination and a realm of disclosure in which the fictional mode
is always at play, albeit unconsciously. As psychology grows

© 1983 George Quasha 4

scientistic, art becomes its unconscious.
"The Pandaemonium of Images," the second essay, traces in
detail the manner in which Jung, pursuing the larger meaning of
"Know Thyself,” worked through his own visionary experience
and confrontation with fictional figures to a sense of inner voice as
daimon, the necessary angel who is the Self's messenger. We also
get a view here of the traditional resistance to this gnosis, which has
not ceased to be labeled "demonism" according to the exclusions of
monotheism and literalism and their veiling of psychic multiplicity.
The third essay, "What Does the Soul Want," looks anew at
Alfred Adler, a neglected father of modern psychology, and
discovers profundity in his sense of the fictional in therapy. Here
we get a play of fictive dialogues drawn from Hillman's own
practice, where images speak directly with patients in their process
of recomposing life into a new story. The importance of the
dialogical mode, in which the dualism of self/other and
subject/object breaks down, shows up in its challenge to the
rigidities of psychotherapy as indeed its presence in innovative
poetics challenges conventional literary values.
In psychology psyche comes before logos, before the word
and the telling, and this linguistic datum is suggestive in both the
temporal sense of "being previous"—awaiting manifestation in
what we can say—and in the spatial sense of "being in front' —
getting into the foreground where service to the sayable is possible.
What remains unsaid in us is forever angling to come into view, it
seeks its art. Psyche and logos, soul and speech, psychology and
poetics—Hillman wants us, the therapists and the poets (who once

© 1983 George Quasha 5

upon a time shared a single body), to see them as they are,
inseparable, reflexive, and interdependent, and so to end one more
hidden dualism that divides us from ourselves, our healing arts,
and our sources. Hillman's work encourages us in this
amphibolous enterprise, because he takes heart in both domains, he
has in his psychological breast, not the divided heart of the poet
manqué, but the second, virtual heart of the real poet, whose vistas,
as Robert Duncan has said of Norman O. Brown, lead only to other
vistas, not to certainties.
George Quasha
Barrytown, New York
1983

i
Hillman accepted the title I suggested for the three essays: Healing
Fiction, which embodied the “axiality” of working in two directions at
once.

© 1983 George Quasha 6