Interior Topography

James Hillman's IN
Spring Journal 63: 1998

James Hillman reminds us of what we already know: “‘In’ is no doubt the soul word.” The word connotates an “interior topography,” a literal defined “place into which we go—the unconscious, the body; or a definite time in the past” (11).

This literalization makes us forget what the master said: not the psyche is in me, but I am in the psyche. We forget and literalize the soul inside the skin, the mind inside the skull, the dream, the emotion, the memory inside the “me” to the neglect of the collective psyche, the anima mundi in which we live our lives all day long. (11)

Any dictionary will explain that the preposition “in” means within the limits of space, time, condition, situation, circumstance (12). Once deliteralized and liberated from “Cartesian conundrums that catch it up in personal subjectivity versus the objective world, or mind versus matter, we can at last realize that anything anywhere offers its interiority and can deepen inward continually” (12). Hillman insists that the archetypal realm of interior topography belongs to the goddess Hestia, the “Goddess of the ‘inner’” (15-21). He defines her image and embodiment as a “glowing warmth-emitting hearth” and that the word “hearth” in Latin means focus translated as “the centering attention that warms to life all that comes within its radius” (15). Hestia is “not an object seen but an enlivening, enlightening focus, the soul essence that inhabits anything” (15), a “sacred space giving focus to psychic contents” (17). Like a cave, Hestia provides, what Ginette Paris describes in Pagan Meditations as, a “sacred asylum where one could take refuge” (qtd, 17).