Category Archives: Psychology

The Hour of the Wolf

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On Tuesday night, while I was watching the episode of Ken Burns’ Country Music that featured Hank Williams, my friend Randolph sent a text message about people who are up at 3 am – “writers, painters, poets, over thinkers, silent seekers and creative people.” He wondered if I was among them.

The answer is not very often, at least since the end of my misspent youth, but we can all feel that dark, haunted hour viscerally in the music of Hank Williams. I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, for instance, has the feel of a shabby little room, lit by a bare lightbulb, at 3:00 am, reeking of stale cigarette smoke, when the whisky is gone and the liquor stores won’t reopen for a few more hours:

“I’ve never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by
The moon just went behind the clouds
To hide its face and cry.”

Those times when I’m up and sleepless at 3:00 am I have always called “the hour of the wolf.” Google on the phrase and you mostly get reviews and analysis of Ingmar Bergman’s film of that name – not one of the best from his surrealist phase, IMO, but the trailer offers a good definition of Hour of the Wolf: “The hours between night and dawn. The hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fears, when ghost and demons are most powerful, the hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.”

In searching on the phrase, I discovered an earlier Hour of the Wolf post on this site, uploaded in July, 2012. In it, I quoted another good definition from the 1996 “Hour of the Wolf” episode of Babylon 5:

“Have you ever heard of the hour of the wolf? … It’s the time between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. You can’t sleep, and all you can see is the troubles and the problems and the ways that your life should’ve gone but didn’t. All you can hear is the sound of your own heart.”  – Michael J. Straczynski, writer, Babylonian Productions.

Any time I think of the Hour of the Wolf or 3:00 am, I think of Michael Ventura, a brilliant journalist, versed in Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, who co-wrote, with James Hillman, We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse.

I was fortunate enough to encounter Ventura over the course of a weekend when he was a visiting lecturer when I was studying psychology. My thoroughly worn copy of his book, Shadow Dancing in the USA contains a number of early essays from the series, “Letters at 3am” that he wrote over several decades, first for the LA Weekly, which he cofounded, and later for the Austin Chronicle.

Ventura is nothing short of a visionary. In 1986, when he published Shadow Dancing, a time that many recall as one of the “good old days” eras of this country, Ventura saw something darker, more tumultuous in the shadows. The title of the introduction to Shadow Dancing, It’s 3 a.m. Twenty-Four Hours a Day, refers to the malaise that everyone has come to feel clearly in the 33 years since the book was published:

“…what you are doing – standing in the dark, full of conflicting emotions – isn’t that what the whole world is doing now?

…the world’s clock is at about 3 a.m. of the new day, the new civilization. For the new day doesn’t start at midnight. The new day starts in darkness. Right now it’s 3 a.m. in whatever we will call that period of human history that comes after A.D.

When your clock reads 3 a.m. it’s a time of separateness, of loneliness, of restlessness. Nothing on television, nothing in the newspaper, nothing much anywhere that suggests that our restlessness, felt so privately, is part of something huge, something alive all over the world…”

I find that to be a very powerful thought – at 3 a.m., the Hour of the Wolf, it isn’t really that personal anymore…

Cycles, Gyres, and Yugas, Part 3: Soul in a Dark Time

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Edvard Munch, “The Lonely Ones,” woodcut, 1899

“the darkness around us is deep.” – William Stafford, 1960

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.” – Theodore Roethke, 1963

“There’s a darkness at the edge of town.” – Bruce Springsteen, 1978

In a recent post I quoted Sri Daya Mata (Faye Wright), successor to Paramahansa Yogananda as president of Self-Realization Fellowship, describing a vision she had on a pilgrimage to the Himalayas in 1963:

“A huge black cloud suddenly swept over me, trying to engulf me. As it did so, I cried out to God…Through the practice of meditation, the all-knowing power of intuition develops in each one of us. I had intuitively understood what the Divine was telling me though this symbolic experience. It foretold a serious illness I was soon to undergo; and it also indicated that all mankind would face a very dark time during which the evil force would seek to engulf the world.

Daya Mata’s vision came to mind during the 2nd Democratic debate on July 30, when Marianne Williamson, a candidate I had initially dismissed as a lightweight, made the most pertinent observation of the evening:

“If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in the country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.”

Both the concept of world ages and that of dark forces are pertinent metaphors for something we sense – and most cultures have explicitly believed – there are forces greater than what we can see behind and within what unfolds in the visible world.

An especially important image for me, is Soul as James Hillman used the word, (as when we say someone or something “has soul”), and the parallel image of soul loss. This metaphor has grown in importance for me as I’ve recently read both Hillman’s and his colleague, Michael Meade’s speculations on what loss of soul can mean for an individual or culture: Continue reading →

James Hillman on “The Soulless Society”

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I often wonder what James Hillman (1926-2011), the most widely known post-Jungian thinker and someone whose work continues to inspire me, would make of our current times.

Yesterday I found a clear indication in this excerpt from an interview, published on youTube four months before he died of bone cancer. To me, this brief conversation ( just over seven minutes) is far more important to consider than any other message I’ve seen on the eve of our nation’s birthday. In it, Hillman says:

“Where are we now? What’s psychology worth now? I mean look at the world, look at the USA. Look at all the people who have taken psychology courses and look at the lack of psychology in our government and in our attitudes. I mean we haven’t a clue!

We go around the world as if there was no such thing as a psyche, no such thing as a soul. I mean we bomb and exploit and take and kill as if this had no effect on the soul of our own people, let alone other people…I’m worried about the soul of our country from the effects of what we do.” Remember – this was said in 2011.

Hillman’s was never a “comfortable” psychology, for he always aimed to help us “see through” our comfortable illusions, ever deeper into the often uncomfortable dynamics that underly what is visible on the surface of personal and national life.

Some of the comfortable illusions I would like to believe but cannot include ideas like:

  • Our problems began in 2016.
  • One man (or) one party is responsible.
  • We are better than this.

This last one I find to be the most harmful illusion of all, for it suggests there may be (relatively) straightforward fixes, as if we simply got off on the wrong freeway exit.

If we were better than this, it wouldn’t be happening!

And if we aspire to be better than this, Hillman would likely suggest we take a clear eyed a look at where we are, and how we got here, and what we can do now in service to Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World.

James Hillman on Educating the Imagination

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It’s no surprise to discover that the roots of our current national tribulations have deep roots. James Hillman died in 2011. I am unable to find a date for this talk, but he references the administration of George W. Bush, so I’m guessing at least a decade.

It is just as true or more so today. Please listen – it will be a most valuable half hour!

A Buddhist Statement on the Separation of Families

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“Whatever the legal status of those attempting to enter the US, separating children from their parents is a contravention of basic human rights. Parents seeking asylum make long, dangerous and arduous journeys in an attempt to find safety and well-being for their precious children. Ripping these vulnerable children from their parents is cruel, inhumane, and against the principles of compassion and mercy espoused by all religious traditions…

Separating children from their parents and holding them in detention inflicts terrible and needless trauma and stress on young children that hampers and damages their development, causing long-term damage. This policy being employed on United States soil is morally unconscionable. That such egregious actions be employed as a deterrent for families seeking entry and/or asylum in the U.S. – using the sacred bond between innocent youth and their parents – is unjustifiable on any level.”

A Statement on the Separation of Families.

A change coming

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Sir Galahad, the Quest for the Holy Grail, by Arthur Hughes, 1870, public domain.

I’ve been enjoying the recording of a discussion at a conference with James Hillman and Michael Meade on literal, psychological, and mythological modes of understanding.

Hillman, a former director of the Jung Institute in Switzerland, has been the most prolific and influential of post-Jungian thinkers. He spent his life as champion of psyche, soul, and imagination in a world that has too few such champions. Hillman took particular aim at literalism, which he called “an idol that forgets it is an image and believes itself a God, taking itself metaphysically, seriously, damned to fulfill its task of coagulating the many into singleness of meaning which we call facts, data, problems, realities.” (Revisioning Psychology).

When I think of literalism, I recall the last lines of a poem a brilliant young poet I knew wrote about his high school principal:

His triple-breasted chin, arranged in folds upon his chest,
He blunts my life with a technicality.

Hillman also takes aim at much psychological thinking in books like The Soul’s Code. In this conference, he points to the 20th c. understanding that “The Gods now live in the psyche,” as a core statement of one of our greatest collective problems: the world and nature have lost their connection to the divine, and as such, are ripe for exploitation by greedy men who have traded their souls for profit. If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all,” Ronald Reagan famously said when he was California’s governor.

Michael Meade noted that one of the hallmarks of myth is a sense of abundance. The current miasma of scarcity thinking – that there isn’t enough to go around, so you better get yours while you can – is a clear indication, if we need it, that we have no myth, no shared stories of who we are as a people. Continue reading →

The White Snake – An Enigmatic Tale from the Brothers Grimm

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Illustration for “The White Snake” by Walter Crane, ca. 1886, Public Domain

I once had a professor who made an extensive study of world folklore and said the greatest predictor of success for a fairytale hero is winning the help of an animal guide. Most often, the helpful animals are mammals, like Puss-in-Boots or talking horses.

“The White Snake,” a story from the Brothers Grimm, alters this pattern in startling ways. The helpful creatures are far more primitive, and the hero actually kills his horse – yet things come out right. The story has stayed with me since I first encountered it, as a wisdom tale centered on the theme of knowing the right thing to do at the right time, even when it violates norms and expectations.

Commentary on myth and folktales is a recent tradition that arose after the old ways of absorbing these stories, around hearth and campfire, disappeared. We can imagine earlier listeners holding the stories in imagination, letting the magic sink in over time, as we do with favorite novels and movies. This is a great way to experience a story, and we’re fortunate to have a good eight minute recording of The White Snake, accompanied by the text from the Brothers Grimm.

I suggest you read and listen to the story if you don’t know it, for the rest of this post will simply be my reflections on a few of the key questions The White Snake raises. Continue reading →

What would James Hillman say about all this?

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James Hillman (1926-2011)

James Hillman, a genius in the field of psychology, is largely unknown to the general public. Only one of his many books, The Soul’s Code (1997), is widely known, and only because Oprah featured it. Hillman’s long time friend and editor, Thomas Moore, wrote a tribute and summary of his life after his death in October, 2011. Moore said, “Jame’s books and essays, in my view, represent the best and most original thought of our times. I expect that it will take many decades before he is truly discovered and appreciated.”

Hillman, who was, for a time, director of the Jung Institute in Zurich, founded “Archetypal Psychology,” an extension of Jung’s thought, centered on the poetic, imaginal basis of psyche or soul: “Every notion in our minds, each perception of the world and sensation in ourselves must go through a psychic organization in order to ‘happen’ at all. Every single feeling or observation occurs as a psychic event by first forming a fantasy-image.”

He criticized most 20th century psychologies as materialistic and literal, giving no space to soul. With journalist, Michael Ventura, he co-authored We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse (1992). He was vehement in his condemnation of the exclusive “inward” bent of most psychotherapies, which deprive the world of our outrage and our energy. He gave the example of a man who works eight or ten hours a day at a meaningless job, at an ugly, uncomfortable desk, under flickering florescent lights. When he goes to a therapist for relief from depression, he’s likely to be asked how he got along with his mother… Continue reading →