Quote of the Day (6/1/09) (James Hillman Week)

The act of turning to imagination is not an act of introspection: it is a negative capability, a willful suspension of disbelief in the [daimones] and of belief in oneself as their author. The relativization of the author—who is making up whom, who is writing whom—goes along with the fictional mode; in the course of active imagination one waivers between losing control and putting words in their mouths. But introspection will not solve even this problem, only the act of fictioning further. Introspection simply returns one to the literalism of subjectivity. We have taken the notion of subjectivity so literally that we now believe in an imaginary subject at the beginning of each sentence who does the work, a subject pre-fixing each verb. But the work is done by the verbs themselves; they are fictioning, actively imagining, not I. The action is in the plot, inaccessible to introspection, and only the characters know what's going on. As Philemon taught Jung: you are not the author of the play of the psyche.
--James Hillman, Healing Fiction