A ghost, I have written, is not a person; in fact, the term doesn’t designate any empirically discernible thing at all: rather it is a kind of placeholder notion which refers to something in a narrative, specifically, something that appears personified in that narrative. And even that cannot serve as a criterion (i.e., we cannot make out, say, narratological conditions, singling out ghosts from...
The notion that ghosts cannot be identified with persons, and consequently, that the haunting effect of Vertigo is not tied to any character and their concrete attributes or actions in the plot of the film, is not particularly original. In fact, the makers of the movie themselves were conscious that Vertigo is in essence about a psychological pattern. Samuel Taylor, the writer who produced the...
When I left off this line of thought in my previous post, I concluded that ghosts are a different sort of thing than persons. They are better seen as psychological patterns, appearing in a narrative around a personification. 3. Now all this talk about psychological “patterns” may sound a little vague. Patterns are forms or dynamics that occur repeatedly (and recognizably so). But whether we see a...
What exactly was it that did the haunting in "Vertigo"? Who was the ghost?
When I was in my late teens, I became haunted by a ghost. The experience was sudden and hit me unexpectedly. After a while, it faded away. But then it popped up again irregularly over the course of several years: whenever that happened, it was suddenly entirely present in bright, nuanced images and invariably gave me shudders of a peculiar and very intense quality. To this day, I’m not entirely...
A little while ago, I dug into a question Hillman poses about dream characters: “why don’t the shades and Gods come in their own shapes; why do they bother with the dream incarnations, my family and friends and odd strangers?” (DU 99); and I don’t think I got really clear about what the answer to that question is supposed to be (according to Hillman). Hillman thinks that, if the “shades and...
In my previous post, I have contrasted interactions that run in the person-world direction (actions and behavior) with those that run in the world-person direction (perceptions); and I have noted that interactions of both kinds can be taken over by unconscious forces: behavior can be disrupted or hijacked, and similarly (though perhaps more rarely) so can perceptions. Synchronicities can be seen...
In a given synchronistic experience, the subject perceives a coincidence in the external world; attached to this experience is an impression of meaningfulness, even a “numinous” feeling. To undergo an experience like that is not deliberate: the subject has not consciously chosen to be aware of the coincidental events, nor of the accompanying feeling of meaningfulness. Such an episode is then an...
In various places, Hillman traces a development through Jung’s work away from “conceptal rationalism” towards an imagistic and metaphorical style of thinking; the former is associated with Psychological Types, the latter with Jung’s later writings on alchemy. Hillman, of course, thinks that this development is for the better.
I have started to sketch one of Hillman’s most original lines of thought: that archetypal psychology, as he views it, is akin to ancient eudaimonistic philosophy — an approach to how we should live our lives —, and that the role of the telos — that which we aim at in living our lives this way — is played by the production of soul. Generating more soul is what we are here for: it’s what gives...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.