Episode 68: On James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 16:00:00 -0400

In 1979, the American psychologist James Hillman published The Dream and the Underworld, a polemical meditation on the nature of dreams. Rejecting the orthodoxies of both Freud and Jung, Hillman argued that the the "nightworld" of dream should not play second fiddle to the "dayworld" of waking life, because in the soul as on earth, day and night are equally essential, and equally real. To reduce a dream to a message or interpretation is to fail the dream. In order for dreams to do their work on us, says Hillman, we must cease to regard them as hallucinations, mere metaphors, epiphenomena, or illusions, and instead see them as the imaginal other life we all must live. Every night, for Hillman, each of us descends into the underworld to encounter those forces that shape us and our surroundings. The way down is the way up.

REFERENCES

James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
George Steiner, Real Presences
Hakim Bey, Orgies of the Hemp Eaters: Cuisine, Slang, Literature and Ritual of Cannabis Culture
Erik Davis, High Strangeness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
Brad Warner on drugs and Buddhism
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Christopher Nolan (dir.), Inception
Jorge Luis Borges, "Nightmares" in Seven Nights
Henri Bergson, Dreams

Episode 25: David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 10:00:00 -0400

JF and Phil head for Interzone in an attempt to solve the enigma of Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg's 1991 screen adaptation of William S. Burroughs' infamous 1959 novel. A treatise on addiction, a diagnosis of modern ills, a lucid portrait of the artist as cosmic transgressor, and like the book, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork," Naked Lunch is here framed in the light Cronenberg's recent speech making the case for the crime of art.

Image by Melancholie, Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

David Foster Wallace, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," from Girl With Curious Hair
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, and "How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?" in A Thousand Plateaus
David Cronenberg (writer-director), Naked Lunch (the film)
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (the novel)
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium-Eater
Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia: Power Plants, Poisons and Herbcraft
"David Cronenberg: I would like to make the case for the crime of art," Globe and Mail June 22 2018
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Derek Bailey (director), On the Edge: Improvisation in Music
Phil Ford, "Good Prose is Written By People Who Are Not Frightened"
Geroge Orwell, "Inside the Whale"

Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Drugs”

Episode 68: On James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld'

Episode 25: David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch'