Comparing Naming's Definition Of Personifying And Hillman

In literary terms, to personify is to give objects human-like qualities, such as “the sun is happy”, or “the mountain is brave”, and James Hillman’s definition of personifying is similar. According to him, personifying means the act of ensouling through naming. Naming turns a noun into a pronoun to give it consciousness, such that, “to give subjectivity and intentionality to a noun means more than moving into a special kind of language game; it means that we actually enter into another psychological dimension. The noun takes on consciousness, it becomes personified” (1). Through naming and creating consciousness, personifying reveals the inner nature of the named object. This revealing of inner nature connects to the knowing of the invisible,

While many psychologists disregard personification, they at best “regard personifying as a fanciful figure of speech, as a game, or as a therapeutic tool by means of which the ego may learn about its fears and desires” (2). However, Hillman disagrees by stating that “personifying is a way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences that touch us, move us, appeal to us” (13). He explains that by personifying, humans are protecting themselves from the overwhelming feelings of being human. To separate themselves from this, they create a multiplicity of different selves through personifying that helps them to maintain their ego: “by actively imagining the psyche into multiple persons, we prevent the ego from identifying with each and every figure in a dream and fantasy, each and every impulse and voice” (31). Thus, personifying and multiplicity are an attempt to maintain sanity, and “the soul’s answer to egocentricity” (32). Personification is used as a therapeutic tool to help the self recognize the ego, and connect to the soul in a tangible

Personifying connects to religion because “personification is a psychologism. It implies a human being who creates Gods in human likeness much as an author creates characters out of his own personality” (12). Gods created in the likeness of humans aid in the human understanding of the world. These Gods give people the ability to rationalize events in religious terms to make sense of events in life because it creates the sense that God or Gods understand the human condition. For example, Hillman explains that it helps us because “we do not believe that the imaginary persons could possibly be as they present themselves, as valid psychological subjects with wills and feeling like ours but nor reducible to ours” (2). In other terms, personifying creates a name for the spirit or sacred to give it human qualities that mirror the common persons yet maintain the divine omnipresence of the spirit. Personifying’s connection to religion stems from the Greek polycentrism, because as personifying helps create psychological archetypes, it helps to create personified archetypes of Gods which “present themselves each as a guiding spirit with ethical positions, instinctual reactions, modes of thought and speech and claims upon feeling” (35). The presentation of the archetypal God(s) connects to the human desire to unite with the spiritual through the creation of a way to relate to it. Furthermore, the archetypal Gods