Reviews About Pan and the Nightmare: Two Essays (Paperback)

The review about this product

This is one of the best of Hillman's books I have ever read. "Pan and the Nightmare" was first recommended to me while I was taking a psychology course at the New School for Social Research's distance learning program. The book was out of print, so I had to secure it through inter-library loan. I have developed an appreciation of the writings of James A. Hillman of all of the Jungian psychologists. He has helped me to develop an insight into some areas of archetypal analysis that had seemed so difficult when I read the writings of other authors. Although the readings of Carl G. Jung are the classics of analytical psychology, for me it took a writer of the stature of Hillman to make sense of many of the concepts and psychological constructs of Jungian psychology.
Technically speaking, this is a series of essays expounding on Wilhelm Heinrich Rocher's (1900) monograph "Ephialtes: A Pathological-Mythological Treatise on the Nightmare in Classical Antiquity," a treatise on Pan and the demons of the night. I have learned in reading other works of James A. Hillman that it is very important to read the Preface. In this case, there is no preface as such, but I feel that the tone of the whole work is encapsulated in the first chapter "The Psyche's Return to Greece." This is a return to Greece in an imaginal or archetypal sense, returning to the archetypes of Greek mythology that our "Hebrewism" or Christianity [monotheistic tradition] enjoins us to ignore. The Hellenism about which Hillman writes embodies an archetypal framework for working with the images, feelings, and moralities we live with on a daily basis. It is through the return to Greece that we rediscover the archetypes of our psyche and culture - it is a personal revelation.
The third chapter, "Pan, the Goat God of Nature" goes further to outline the archetypal theme of much of what we are not willing to accept in our nightmares and in our own unconsciousness. As civilized people, we concentrate on the "civilized" often ignoring, repressing, and disowning the "instinctual" nature of our psyches and souls. Yet, even as we ignore and repress that part of our being, it comes back to us in our dreams and nightmares. Hillman further develops this theme in discussing matters such as nightmare panic, masturbation, rape, instinct, and synchronicity.
The quality of the scholarship shown by Hillman is extraordinary. He makes full use of his credentials as a classical scholar, neo-Platonist philosopher, and leading Jungian psychologist. I was pleased that Rocher's 1900 monograph was included with "Pan and the Nightmare," and I feel that it is of particular interest to scholars to be able to make use of Rocher's text in developing a more complete understanding of Hillman's work. I would recommend this book for students of Jungian psychology, as well as for those students studying both psychopathology and history and systems of psychology.