Status Updates From Myth of Analysis: Three Ess...

here he gets around to doing a hatchet job on Perennial Traditionalism in particular Eliade and Jung, pointing out major differences between tribal religious initation rituals Eliade reads as analogous as well as between Indo-European pagan deities whom Jung categorises as the same archetype (eg Odin and Dionysus, Frigg and Ariadne)

I find it interesting that Hillman might have started as an "integral traditionalist" but later abandoned that in favour of intense focus on neo-classicism right down to setting out to reconstruct pre-Socratic Ancient Greek psychology and using the exact same definitions of the psyche and the soul

Hillman is incredibly sharp in his hatchet job on not just Freud and other modern Westerners' misappropriation of Greco-Roman mythology but also all the questionable ideological baggage that went into the formation of modern psychology... and his writing style is extremely elegant and exciting to read as well, I am kinda surprised Hillman is not better known today!

this might be one of the best hatchet jobs on Sigmund Freud that I have ever read, specifically on Freud's interpretation of Greek mythology to explain the psychosexual neuroses of modern Westerners - Hillman explains out point-by-point, blow-by-blow that in Greco-Roman myth it is sexual awakening that functions as a metaphor for spiritual initiation and NOT the opposite way around like Freud presents it

Here Hillman points out how C. G. Jung does not break with the materialistic worldview as much as he appears to, accepting some very specific premises about human psychology being reducible to survival instincts. Curious to see where Hillman goes from here, since he hinted at this in "Insearch" but this being a longer book he has more space to explore his ideas.

no idea why GoodReads lists this book's first publication as 1983 not 1972 like the printing I have does, in any case this already has much interesting information about the development of modern psychology and the very specific metaphysical premises about the human self that have shaped it - something Hillman sets out to criticise