The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling [Paperback]

However, the execution was attrocious. Whenever I knew anything about the studies that Hillman was quoting, I found them to be twisted out of context. I showed the section on beauty to a friend who is writing a dissertation on aesthetics, and he (my friend) pointed out a number of mistakes. (For instance, Hillman quotes Thomas Aquinas saying that beauty arrests motion. What Aquinas actually says is that it is impossible to see true beauty in the world. He says that pure beauty is only present in God, the unmoved mover. So, while to see God would be to see a lack of motion, Hillman is really stretching Aquinas's words to use this philosphy to say that taking time for beautiful things would slow down our fast-paced lives and bring us inner peace.)

Also, I wanted more detail for some of his ideas. He never really tells us how to grow down or "feed" our individual daimon. In the final analysis, I would have liked better research, more focus on how to implement his principles, and perhaps less sarcasm about any other theory that doesn't agree with his.

But maintaining this theory is a bit of a magic act, requiring some sleights-of -hand and diversions to keep the audience from picking up on those telling signs that something else is going on. Hillman tries to come up with a grand theory that can explain genius, but contradicts himself on some points along the way. The biggest one I found, or the one that bothered me the most, anyway, explained violent and destructive acts.

In Chapter 10, "The Bad Seed, " he uses as examples both Adolf Hitler and a woman named Mary Bell, who, at 10 years of age, strangled to death two boys, aged four and three, in two separate incidents. In both of these people, says Hillman, a lifetime of indicators showed that these were evil acorns leading to evil oaks. Hmm, interesting, except that in every other example and anecdote he related in the preceding chapters, people would become violent when their true talents were not allowed to take shape. In the very first chapter he uses the example of Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1981, and his confrontation at age five with his slightly older cousin, who was learning to read and write. When she teases him and refuses to let him see her notebooks, holding them above her head and out of his reach: "All at once, I left her there and walked the long way around the house to the kitchen yard, to get the Armenian's ax and kill her with it...I raised the ax high and...marched back over the long path into the courtyard with a murderous chant on my lips, repeating incessantly: ...'Now I'm going to kill Laurica! Now I'm going to kill Laurica!'" How cute! Hillman's response? "They seem to have no other choice. Canetti had to have letters and words; how else could he ever be a writer?" That's all?

One is left with the old conundrum: What if Hitler had been a better painter? It seems flippant and facetious, but with everything Hillman has written to this point, it seems a valid question. What if Hitler, Mary Bell, and any other evil individual in history were encouraged to develop their talents, to tend to their acorns? Hillman dismisses such thoughts. Hitler was inherently evil, and he goes to great lengths to try and prove this. Only a person who was born evil and had talents only for evil deeds could do what he did and what Mary Bell did. While Elias Canetti may run around, swinging an ax at his cousin to get her notebooks -- a disproportionate response to the situation if ever there was one -- that's just the passion of his latent talent exercising a kind of survival instinct. Hitler's "cold stare" as a child, however, proved that he would grow up to be a genocidal maniac. Huh?

The book's reach exceeds its grasp, though, and the whole thing starts crumbling from that point on. It had taken an effort from the beginning to make the whole theory hold together in my mind, but once the doubt seeped in, it was difficult to resist finding an example of my own for every one he used, easily poking holes in his reasoning. While "The Soul's Code" makes for an interesting launching point for a bull session, it doesn't work as a grand psychological theory.