James Hillman, the Larger Room, and My Work With Film and Soul

Image disclosure: AI-generated abstract editorial illustration. No real person, photograph, institutional mark, or archival material is depicted.

On April 16, 2010, during my doctoral training at Pacifica Graduate Institute, I presented clinical material to James Hillman in group practicum supervision. I later documented that encounter in a chapter I coauthored with Penelope P. Orr for my first book, Video and Filmmaking as Psychotherapy: Research and Practice, published by Routledge in 2015.

I presented clinical material in the presence of colleagues and faculty. The encounter continued to shape how I think about imagery, editing, and meaning.

Why James Hillman mattered in that room

Hillman was an internationally recognized psychologist, author, and lecturer who founded archetypal psychology and served as director of studies at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Penguin Random House describes his international standing and identifies him as the author of more than twenty books. His work brought psychology into conversation with mythology, imagination, art, and culture.

His influence also reached a broad public audience. The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling became a number-one New York Times bestseller, and Courtland Milloy’s 1997 Washington Post reporting linked its sales success to Oprah Winfrey’s television endorsement.

His earlier book, Re-Visioning Psychology, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, according to the October 2011 New York Times death notice archive.

Timing

There is another reason the timing of my supervision matters. An online transcription attributes the sentence "Hillman stopped practicing analysis in 1987" to Dick Russell's The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, Volume II, p. 519.

My April 16, 2010 supervision took place many years later, and that timing has remained part of how I understand the encounter and its place in my later writing.

The larger room

What stayed with me was Hillman’s attention to an image. In the account Penelope P. Orr and I published, breathing became associated with the feeling that a room had become larger. Hillman explored whether that larger imagined room could make space for difficult feelings and experiences without requiring a person to compromise deeply held beliefs.

Image disclosure: AI-generated abstract editorial illustration. No real person, photograph, clinical setting, or institutional mark is depicted.

In the chapter’s published wording, his response ends:

“It’s all done within the realm of the image.”

—James Hillman, quoted in Cohen and Orr (2015), pp. 38–39.

Film editing, imagery, and story

For me, that exchange connects directly to filmmaking. Editing requires attention to images, relationships, timing, and the story that emerges when pieces are brought together. Our chapter explores the relationship between that creative process and depth psychology’s attention to imagination. An image can give experience a form that someone can recognize, revisit, and begin to understand.

The chapter, “Film/Video-Based Therapy and Editing as Process From a Depth Psychological Perspective”, appears on pages 29–42 of Video and Filmmaking as Psychotherapy: Research and Practice. Its “Case Study: Breathing” section, on pages 38–39, discusses Hillman’s supervision, and the reference on page 41 dates the session. This published account is the basis for the story I am sharing here.

The full citation is:

Cohen, J. L., & Orr, P. P. (2015). Film/Video-Based Therapy and Editing as Process From a Depth Psychological Perspective. In J. L. Cohen, J. Lauren Johnson, & P. P. Orr (Eds.), Video and Filmmaking as Psychotherapy: Research and Practice (pp. 29–42). Routledge.

From film and soul to later authorship

My dissertation, Film and Soul: A Theoretical Exploration of the Use of Video and Other Film-Based Therapy to Help Transform Identity in Therapeutic Practice, and this later chapter explore related questions about filmmaking, identity, and meaning.

Hillman’s questions became part of my published work because they helped me think about what a story can hold. The larger room offered an image of psychological space: room for complexity, difficult feelings, and possibilities that had previously seemed unavailable.

That is the thread I continue to follow in film and storytelling. How do we give experience a form? How do we attend to an image without exhausting its meaning? And how can the stories we create make more room for the people who live them?

Readers who want broader context for how these questions developed across my authorship can also review my Routledge trilogy on film, trauma, and storytelling.

About this account

This article reflects on historical doctoral training and published scholarship. My current work through Your Digital Storytelling Project is consulting and education.