How Can the Archetypes at Work, Work for You?
Intro to Dr. Hillman’s Work
Dr. Laurence Hillman is an archetypal astrologer, coach, and speaker with over 45 years of experience. He is the co-creator of the Archetypes at Work™ model used for leadership development and organizational transformation. Hillman holds a PhD and travels the world teaching and consulting. He is passionate about helping people embrace their full potential by understanding and utilizing the power of archetypes. Hillman is the son of the late James Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology.
Check Out Dr. Hillman’s Site and the Archetypes at Work Here
Intro to Dr. Hillman’s Groundbreaking Work in Archetypal Astrology and Leadership
Dr. Laurence Hillman, a pioneer in archetypal astrology with over 45 years of experience, is transforming the world of leadership development and personal growth with his innovative Archetypes at Work™ model. As the co-creator of this powerful framework and the son of the legendary James Hillman, founder of archetypal psychology, Dr. Hillman is uniquely positioned to guide individuals and organizations to reach their full potential by harnessing the wisdom of archetypes.
Through his worldwide coaching, consulting, and teaching, Dr. Hillman empowers people to embrace their authentic selves and navigate the complexities of the modern world. By understanding the 10 core archetypes represented in his model, rooted in the ancient tradition of astrology, clients gain a profound universal language for decoding human behavior, motivation, and potential.
In this podcast conversation , Dr. Hillman shares how his Archetypes at Work™ model is revolutionizing fields like leadership development, team building, personal growth, and organizational transformation. As the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) places a premium on uniquely human capabilities, Dr. Hillman emphasizes the critical importance of developing right-brain skills like creativity, imagination, and symbolic thinking. Rather than offering a reductionistic “typology,” Archetypes at Work™ reveals how these universal patterns exist on a spectrum within each individual. By learning to recognize and optimally express these archetypes, people can tap into their fullest potential, bring their whole selves to their work and relationships, and lead with authenticity and impact.
Combining the profound insights of Jung with practical real-world applications, Dr. Hillman’s work is an invitation to a lifelong journey of self-discovery and growth. Whether you are a leader, a seeker, or simply a human being yearning to thrive in a rapidly shifting world, the wisdom of archetypes holds the key. Step into your full potential and learn to see yourself and others through this transformative lens.
Youtube Interview
Dr. Laurence Hillman: Archetypal Psychology in Business and Leadership
Introduction to Archetypal Thinking
Joel Blackstock: I’m here with Dr. Laurence Hillman and he’s done so much work – more than I’m probably going to be able to get to. We’ll try, and I have a lot of questions, but I kind of like to have more of a conversation and just see where things go. Something about the spontaneity seems to be a little bit more authentic and go a little bit deeper.
So I don’t want to introduce you too much, but one of my favorite things about your work is that whenever I’ve come across it – a lot of people who say “archetypal” or are talking about archetypal stuff, because I was familiar with your dad’s work with archetypal psychology too and a lot of the stuff that’s coming up at Pacifica in the past couple years – but a lot of the stuff gets kind of watered down when you encounter it to where people are really kind of talking about a cultural layer or their political bias, or you can just kind of see that what they’re talking about, it’s not really an archetypal energy. You’re really deep into timeless things and you sort of cut through the culture to find the stuff that is really perennial, really deep. A samurai and a knight look very different, but what is the thing that is similar in these energies? In a way that’s very honest and effective. I don’t see a ton of that. So I don’t know if you agree with that or not. I’ll leave it there and then hand it over to you.
Laurence Hillman: Thank you so much for having me Joel, and I do of course appreciate that compliment. Yeah, I think I’m very practical. I’m a hands-on kind of person and I do coaching and leadership development. This kind of work needs, for me, to be really practical – things that people can do to better their lives or to make more sense of the things that don’t make sense to them. And archetypes are just a really good tool. It’s a way of seeing.
Archetypes as Lenses for Seeing the World
Laurence Hillman: I think of archetypes as wearing a certain set of glasses. Maybe you remember in the movie National Treasure where Nick Cage is stealing the Declaration of Independence and he needs to find these glasses that Ben Franklin hid somewhere in a chimney, I think behind a brick. So these glasses have three lenses on each eye and when he flips them back and forth in a certain way and gets the right combination, then suddenly on the back of the Declaration of Independence, he sees this map. To me, archetypes are very similar. They’re always there, they’re always visible, but you can only see them if you put on a certain set of lenses. They’re not literal lenses like that, it’s a way of seeing, and that’s something you can learn. Once you learn that, life becomes pretty interesting.
So for instance, the chocolate mousse isn’t just a chocolate mousse, but is also then filled with the archetype of the lover or Venus or beauty or seduction or chocolate – all those things that belong in that same archetype. Like you said, it’s not just the samurai and the knight, but the warrior shows up in every person in some way, shape or form. It can be your drive, your passion, your sort of instinctual targeting, your ability to defend yourself – all these kinds of things. So we have to look much bigger than limiting an archetype to something that is literal, like “it’s my anger” or “it’s my inner warrior.” That’s much too small, even though we have to of course give them names. So we do call that part that you just mentioned “the warrior”, but it’s not limited to warrior. Warrior is a very wide concept. And so there’s always the limitation of language. Imagination plays a lot, and the idea is that the words trigger something in the imagination.
Archetypal Astrology and Its Application in Business
Joel Blackstock: When you’re talking about your archetypes at work, is that one that you use the most? You’ve got a couple different systems and publications?
Laurence Hillman: I’m an astrologer and have been for 47 years. That’s how I see the world. It’s archetypal astrology, which means that I see the archetypes that are also represented in the planets as sort of the formula through which I understand the world. Think of the 12 notes of a keyboard – five black and seven white – that make up an octave. With those, you can play pretty much any song. This is the same idea – that the planetary archetypes, those 10 that we tend to use as astrologers, are sort of the basis, the 10 digits with which you can grasp any situation, describe any piece of art, anything you want. It’s an archetypal way of seeing. Those are the lenses, if you want, or combinations of them.
My partner and I in 2016 started to work with this work, and so we translate the astrological language into an archetypal language that is more universal and doesn’t bump up against some of the pushback against astrology. Because it has a name, it’s a way of thinking – it’s not astrology that’s in the back of a magazine that tells you your sun sign. It’s definitely not sun sign astrology. What I do as a professional astrologer doesn’t do sun sign astrology. That would be like saying “I’m six foot tall” and there’s so much more that defines me than my height. Besides the Sun Sign, you have a Moon sign, a Mars sign, a Venus sign, etc. So the Archetypes at Work model is essentially the same model as the astrological model. It’s one way of seeing the world which is archetypal, but we use slightly different language and we focus it in its expression to business and to leadership development.
The Limitations of Pure Empiricism in Psychology
Joel Blackstock: I’m a therapist and one of the things that I’ve been really loud about for a long time is how much the reliance on pure empiricism – things that we can reduce totally down to something that is Cartesian and measurable in a number – which just don’t believe the psyche, I don’t believe the soul really can be reduced to a number. I love science, I do research and different things but I’ve kind of moved into the things that are more conventional wisdom and there’s something of you’re saying it’s a lens, it’s a mechanism of sorting this energy so that we can understand it and work with it, which that seems to me so inevitable in therapy, whether it’s the MBTI, whether it’s kind of Freudian or depth wisdom of we learn that you’re lovable from the parent of the opposite sex, but how to be in the world from the parent of the same sex. I mean, therapy has been doing that forever in ways that are not 100% right or not measurable or not testable but they’re still effective in helping us tease apart who we are and understand us. I’m sure you’ve had some pushback from people. I mean, a ton of the stuff I get if I say that I like Jung, that I’m using kind of a somatic archetypal thing to connect people to something. I have people say, “You must believe all this stuff that I don’t believe” and it’s like I didn’t say that. I said I was using somatic work or something. I don’t know. How do you make sense of that?
Laurence Hillman: Look, this is great what you’re saying. I agree with you. So look, we all believe a certain way and see the world in a certain way. What my father used to say is, “It doesn’t matter what you believe, just be aware what tree you’re sitting in when you’re believing.” And I think that’s a lovely metaphor because as long as we’re aware that when we say “I don’t believe in what I can’t measure” that we are operating from a left brain perspective. This idea that it has to be rational and measurable to be real, that’s a perspective. That’s a certain tree to sit in. It’s not wrong, but it’s not the only way to see and it’s just as valid as any other way to see. It’s just that since the Enlightenment, that way of seeing has trumped and has made everything the right way to see and everything else is weird or different.
Left Brain vs. Right Brain in Modern Leadership
Laurence Hillman: But here’s what’s happening. This is what’s interesting. What’s happening in the world right now? We have an absolute dominance of brain capacity and that’s what everybody needs to do. That’s how you get along. That’s how you win. That’s how you’re data-driven, evidence-based. More data is better and measure everything and if you just get enough facts you can make the right decision. That in a complicated world – complicated by my definition is a car, for instance, is complicated. It has a bunch of simple systems like the windshield wiper system has a couple of wipers and the button and a little reservoir and some hoses in there you go and a pump. If something breaks in that simple system, you can just replace the part and it works again. And so all of those together makes a complicated car.
And leadership in a complicated world works being data-driven to some extent. That’s what’s worked pretty well for the last several hundred years since the industrialization and so on. However, today we’re no longer in a complicated world. We’re living in a complex world and the difference is emergence. Things happen overnight to change everybody’s playing field. For instance, COVID or the wars because we’re so global and everything is so connected – supply chains, etc. Everything interacts with everything else. It is a different playing field and complexity is what we call complexity capability to deal with the things that are not linear and aren’t predictable in that sense that if this happens then that’s going to happen or these are the seven possibilities we’re going to pick one and so forth.
So complexity capability and the cool thing is a right brain capability that belongs in the realm of those things that aren’t measurable – imagination, creativity, dreaming, sitting still and waiting for something to pop into your mind, listening, reflecting, those kinds of things. That’s right. Those are right brain capabilities and I know this is not literal, it’s not that the right brain does one thing but this way of thinking is very commonly understood what a left brain and a right brain capability is.
So the unmeasurable world is actually suddenly incredibly important. The second thing that has happened is about 18 months ago AI popped up on the scene and leaders are now suddenly dealing with AI that can do left brain gazillion times faster than any leader in the world. And therefore a lot of the left brain skills, like being able to take massive amounts of data and analyze it and then come up with a solution out of that can be done way faster by a computer now. And so that’s another reason why leaders need to activate their right brain. In other words, if you look at Harvard Business Review and what are people talking about in leadership, everyone is now saying we need to activate our right brain. Gallup just did a thing on this. Everyone is talking about this. We need to activate our right brains.
The Value of Whole-Brain Thinking
Laurence Hillman: Because we want to operate with a full brain. So when someone comes to you and says “What, you believe in all that stuff that I don’t believe in?” basically, you can just tell them “I believe in a whole brain and it sounds like you only believe in using half of your brain.” That’s all. That’s the argument. It’s not that one’s right or one’s wrong. It’s how are you preferencing what you’re looking at? So yes, certain things that you and I believe in, if you want to call it that, the importance of dreams or imagination or fantasy or these kinds of things where creativity takes place. By the way, all of this is not measurable and it is just as real. I’ll give you something in business that is not measurable that is incredibly real. It’s called trust. Any business leader, my God, if I really have to impress people who don’t trust me, I’m not going to have a business. I’m not going to have employees who stay and so on. So trust isn’t measurable, but it’s very tangible in that sense. That’s a right brain capability.
So these kinds of things – so all we’re advocating for is to develop people’s right brain capabilities. I’m also very much in favor of a lot of left brain. I love that we have science and that we have engineering degrees that we can have clean water and do good surgery. That’s all wonderful of course, but it’s not enough. It’s only half of reality and in this complex world, we have to use our whole brain and we need to learn a language to do right brain development. And guess what? That’s exactly what Archetypes at Work does. It is a language that develops people’s right brains and gives them access to their creativity through the imagination by understanding these inner patterns that are what guide us through life.
Exploring James Hillman‘s Perspective
Joel Blackstock: It’s interesting the quote about trees that you mentioned. I think, and obviously, you know your father better than I do. So, please correct me if this intuition is wrong here, but I came to Jung by all of these tapes. It was this digitized thing of tapes that were once analog from the 70s and 80s and 90s of all these talks different people gave and some of them were where James Hillman, your dad’s, and the quote. I feel like sometimes he was thinking about trees without even mentioning it because he knew a lot of languages and he knew a lot of methods of philosophy and epistemology that he kind of saw as branching off and there’s one time where it came up where he was kind of reassuring – he was reassuring someone who was telling him that his presentation was bullshit. Basically, it was kind of a cognitive therapist in the 90s recording who was like, “I don’t know why I’m getting a therapy CE for this and I don’t understand what this has to do with patients” or something and he was saying all epistemology often branches off and a ton of the reason why we experience these things is just to say “I like Spinoza. I don’t understand Plato” and this is the way that I think and to find our way of thinking.
Laurence Hillman: Exactly. Yeah, that’s the same thing.
Joel Blackstock: So I’m so glad that you found your way of thinking of something and…
Laurence Hillman: That’s a beautiful example and a great story. Exactly. It’s not – we have to stop thinking that our way of thinking is the right way. That’s where it gets tricky, or that the other person’s way of thinking is the wrong way. That’s where it gets tricky. They’re just in a different tree.
It is important to recognize consequences of our thinking though. And so if my way of thinking thinks that everything that is right brain is wrong, then I am consciously and actively excluding it. I could also say I’m not comfortable with it, I don’t know much about it or I’d like to know more about it. That to me is more interesting. And somebody who’s all in the right brain and knows absolutely nothing left brain, that’s rare. But you do find those people. They’re pretty weird too. They’re probably sitting on Goa smoking pot on the beach in India, so maybe that’s not fully functioning either. But a fully developed brain, operating with all of it, with both sides is really what is necessary. And that means getting into those mysterious and dark and moist places that a lot of people don’t want to go to that are not rational, not measurable, not so easily explainable, but just as real and just as true.
Critiques of Jungian Psychology and Balance
Joel Blackstock: Yeah, and I think you do see the people who hide in the metaphorical mystical side of the brain, probably around Jungian things. I mean, that’s one of the big criticisms of a lot of the applied Jungianism was that they feel like they ignore the material reality. That in the 70s, they said we’re gonna change feminism in the world and manifest these things and they did a drum circle and the Reagan Revolution still happened. That’s something that a lot of kind of left people criticize the Jungians for and I would kind of agree. I mean, I’m in that Edward Edinger camp of we’ve got two parts of our brain. They don’t really want to be in the same head and we’re gonna hide in the one that we’re good at because we don’t want to deal with the one that we’re bad at. Is that related to what you’re saying?
Laurence Hillman: Yeah, but that has a cost. People don’t like costs. There’s a huge cost if you avoid your right brain and think that’s what I do in my private life and at work. I just do my life and that’s incredibly split and really doesn’t make for a full human being and you’re not showing up fully anywhere.
And in my practice I’ve seen that kind of behavior many times and that’s not fulfilling for people and then there’s always something missing. Either they feel like they’re a robot at work, which is mechanic and “I’m just here to make a paycheck and get in to get out” and then “I go home and have my feelings.” They are so completely wishy-washy in their feelings when they’re at home that they have absolutely no structure on them at all and are completely subject to someone else’s whims or stuff like that – codependency, you name it, those kinds of things because there’s no way of rationally engaging with their behavior at home. So if that’s the case, that’s not a life I would like to live. I don’t want to leave half of myself at the door when I go to work.
Archetypes at Work: A Practical Application
Laurence Hillman: So I think showing up fully and the number one thing we get when we use this Archetypes at Work model with large corporations and people working in them is the people say “I’ve never been seen this way. I’ve never been talked to in this full way. I’ve never been sort of recognized for my fullness. I’ve always been seen for my skills or for my technical abilities or for my job description, but never as a human being.” And in today’s world where I think the last Gallup poll – 60 or 70, so incredible number of people would like to change their jobs within the next six months. This was last October if I remember correctly, but don’t quote me on this, but it was in those ranges. And imagine for a hiring manager or for any kind of a leader the costs of that kind of a turnover. It’s unbelievable. So and that was when the market was really good for jobs and so on. Now it’s gone down again, a little bit harder to get jobs. The point is that people aren’t happy at work because they’re not being fully seen and they’re just doing a job and so people want to change and they’re in the hopes they’re going to be more seen and we’re rethinking what work is about completely, mostly because of AI right now.
Depth Psychology and Parts-Based Approaches
Joel Blackstock: What energy – I think that’s one of the real beauties and benefits of depth psychology and any kind of parts-based psychology is that you’re able to really reach in and somebody wants to come into the room and talk to you as the logistician or their logical faculty or they want to talk as the CEO or the warrior or whatever and you say no, no, I want to talk to this part of you and you start to talk to this part that they’re not used to conversing and all of a sudden you’ve exposed and made room for something that you’re helping them understand. Not every kind of therapy can do that and the risk I think of some of the post-Jungian things where they systematize too much like – I don’t hate IFS, I mean, I think it’s better than CBT or something but you’re not respecting these things.
Laurence Hillman: I’m so happy to hear this from a therapist. I have the same thing.
Joel Blackstock: It’s just energy and so you’re starting to have to judge them.
Laurence Hillman: I think Internal Family Systems has the idea – great that we have multiple inner voices and they speak to each other. That’s great. But the actual labels that they use are very very difficult for me as well because they are judgmental.
Joel Blackstock: I hate the term protective part, it’s just a part of you. Yeah.
Laurence Hillman: That’s quite brilliant Joel. I’ve never heard somebody explain it to me that well.
Joel Blackstock: I can’t think of a bigger waste of time than trying to get somebody to tease apart the energy that they’re feeling right now that we could talk about…
Laurence Hillman: I always knew there was something weird with it with the labeling that I didn’t like…
Joel Blackstock: But is it a firefighter or is it a protect- stop. That’s the wrong part of the head. Don’t put them there, they’re thinking about it now.
Inner Multiplicity and the Critique of Singular Identity
Laurence Hillman: But let’s also give it credit because it is a system of inter-multiplicity. It is a system of talking to parts of yourself. It is a system that understands complexity and this whole thing about having more than one voice inside. Developmental psychology typically says you’re this, first you crawl then you walk then you run. That’s pretty much the model of most developmental psychologies.
Joel Blackstock: Mm-hmm.
Laurence Hillman: And then behaviorism just comes in there and that’s all about how are you behaving in a particular one of these phases? But all of these models have one thing in common: they think of a human as being singular inside. “I am this.”
And the whole thing of identity – then you can get into identity politics and all these things but this whole thing that “I am” – that’s what gives me strength, my ego. From an archetypal perspective, that’s a bunch of baloney. Because there is no such thing as an “I”. There are “I”s, there are multiple parts in us. And by the way, you can easily show this to someone who’s a big believer in that interior “I”, the singular “I”. Have you ever had a conversation with yourself? Of course I did this morning. I was wondering “Should I have this cereal or that cereal?” But of course that’s kind of a joke. But if you’re like “Should I stay with this person? Should I leave this person? Should I keep this job or what about that? I could take this job, but I have all these options.”
Those conversations weighing the pros and the cons – you can’t do that if you’re a singular identity. You can only do that when you step away from yourself, whatever that self is. So to me, you’re stepping from one inner character to another inner character and they’re having a conversation. And if you can identify who these characters are, that’s very useful because then you know how they make decisions. Is it the dreamer and the storyteller? One’s going to tell the other one a great story and the other one’s going to go into dreams and maybe not be so practical. These are useful things to have as you recognize how we actually feel ourselves. We are people inside, we are not singular inside.
There’s this lovely quote. I have it in the beginning of one of my books. This wonderful quote by Charles Simic. He was the poet laureate in the United States a couple of years ago. He wrote: “We do not live most of the time in exalted states. The content of our stream of consciousness is usually not so lofty. Our psychic life is more like a squabbling theatrical company trying to rehearse a play.” We don’t know – that’s really how it feels. There’s this inner mess. Most of us can immediately relate to that.
Now when I wrote my dissertation I found – you always have to find the counter voice – and I found a bunch of psychiatrists who were very very afraid of this rule. “Don’t talk about multiplicity. That means split personality.” Did you know this is dissociative identity disorder? That’s a completely different thing. That is an illness and has nothing to do with the way of speaking that we speak now. And to equate one with the other is incredibly naive. Inner multiplicity is how human beings have thought about themselves for eons, if it was inner gods or multiple gods outside and then reflected inside. If it was these – the gift of depth psychology has been to bring us this inner multiplicity. That’s really been the greatest gift. And then you gave them names and call them archetypes by looking at them globally.
But this is the big thing and now I just met a psychiatrist the other day who wrote an article and I connected with her because I’ve been writing about inner multiplicity leadership and she wrote one about – from a psychiatrist perspective – that maybe inner multiplicity doesn’t mean dissociative identity disorder. It could really mean a richer way of thinking. I’m very interested in this sort of movement that’s starting now and it’s been going on for a while. But now it’s getting some traction that inner multiplicity is – there is a language for it. In our case, we use archetypes based on the planets. To me, that’s a very solid foundation – 5,000 years of data, if you want to use left brain just to quantify that, of what the planets mean for a person. And so it’s a tool.
Perennial Patterns and Empirical Evidence
Joel Blackstock: You mean that perennial patterns that we can go back and look at these things popping up. I mean, because that’s my argument when people say it’s not empirical to look at mythology. It’s not empirical for you to look at these gurus and mystics that you’re writing about on your blog, why you’re writing about Martin Buber or why are you writing about Meister Eckhart and I’m saying because when somebody invents Buddhism in the middle of medieval Germany, that means that there is some part of the brain that produces this because Meister Eckhart didn’t go study in Japan or he didn’t go study in Thailand and so that means that this is a description, people are universally arriving at these places because of archetypes or some kind of inborn thing and I don’t care where you think it comes from. You can have a woo spiritual metaphysics. You can have a biological deterministic metaphysics. I’m just pointing out the pattern, and if you can’t see the pattern, that seems more empirical to me than people want it to be.
Laurence Hillman: But isn’t that a strange question to ask you? Why would you study Eckhart? Which is in other words to me, here is a colleague who, as a psychologist, thinking person, you would ask yourself: What is that person so afraid of? Why are thoughts dangerous? Thoughts are dangerous because they might actually open up a part of myself that I’m terrified of.
I said, some of what Jung said is scratching fingernails across the blackboard. I get it. It’s like “I’m never gonna fall in love. Damn, I just fell in love.” It’s these things people are so afraid of. In right brain capabilities and understanding of that, the anima is limited to the man and animus to the woman, these kinds of things. It’s pretty limited but it doesn’t mean throw out the baby with the bathwater. It doesn’t mean that what Jung said wasn’t absolutely brilliant and mind-blowing and trailblazing. That’s the key.
The other thing is that most people who criticize, for instance, astrology – I’ve heard so much criticism about astrology – have absolutely no idea what they’re criticizing. And so for me, it’s like, Newton had a famous story where some other scientist said to him that astrology is nothing and he said “Sir, I have studied it and you have not.” That’s all he said.
And so it’s like to me, I have no problems with analyzing data on massive amounts of data and finding truth in there. Is someone going to say that every kind of qualitative research, which is what the human sciences use, is invalid? And with somebody who really knows astrology to say “It’s invalid” – only but to offhandedly say “It can’t be a connection between the planets and us, it’s just not possible” or “Give me some scientific proof” – it’s two minds that don’t meet but they’re talking about different things with reason because they’re different sides of the brain and two different sides of perceiving reality. And meanwhile, there is, what is it called, the gravity forces from Pluto that fit in the room.
There are tons and tons and tons and tons of very valid research done with quality from a qualitative perspective. So I don’t get engaged in a confrontational argument with somebody who just hasn’t looked into the language at all. I think it’s a waste of time. It’s like “Stay in your tree. This is limited left brain thinking and that’s fine. Just beware that you’re in a tree.” It comes from a whole lot of fear. I don’t have a problem with that.
Integrating Philosophy, Anthropology, and Psychology
Joel Blackstock: Yeah, the two schools of thought – you know, the academy and I think when you look at the relationship that we have, one of the things that’s scary about what you’re doing or what Jung‘s doing or any kind of depth work is you’re telling people that philosophy and anthropology and psychology have to be the same discipline in a way. Where people who are afraid of a part of themselves are gonna say “No you can’t bring that into it.” But in the same way that you can get a philosopher who’s overly logical to tell on themselves, you can do that with psychology. You can look in a model of therapy and say “What are you afraid of?” based on how they define the self. And then something like you do, it’s very open-ended. You’re not pretending to know the person is engaging with the self. You’re not in control of something. Like CBT is limiting the self down to cognition and behavior which to me is something that – and they would say that if you follow it, it goes down to belief, but look at those beliefs, they’re not terribly deep. That’s a step in the wrong direction. But something like ABA that says you’re only other people’s ability to perceive your behavior. That is terrifying.
Laurence Hillman: Exactly. I would like to know what this person is so afraid of. Why is it such a threat to your thinking that somebody thinks differently? Or why is it such a threat to your thinking – not trying to convince them that the way you and I think is better, but just why is it such a threat that things that aren’t measurable are real to some people? Why is that so difficult? The same thing with religion – for some people religion is incredibly, incredibly real. So why should we tell them that they’re wrong or that it’s a belief system? It’s a way of thinking, it’s a way of seeing the world. Just because it’s not measurable doesn’t make it real. To someone who’s religious, religion is very, very real and everything is infused by it in the way they see everything. It’s a way of seeing. It’s perfectly okay with me and there’s lots of different ways. But to claim that it’s the only way I’ve seen and that every other way of seeing, including other religions, is wrong – that’s where the problem is because that’s not recognizing that you’re in a tree. But that becomes absolutism. Anybody who has the truth, be the truth be CBT or be the truth be a religion – sorry, but nobody holds the key to truth. There’s no such thing. And it doesn’t mean everything is relative. It means that there are objective ways to distinguish that what different people believe has its own place. That’s all. And the differences – different trees are different mindsets. I mean, it goes all the way back to Aristotle and Plato, to those conversations between left brain and right brain. It goes right there and having to pick a side I think is a mistake. What if we could have both in our brain? Wouldn’t that be way cooler? And that’s totally possible because we’re all wired that way.
Joel Blackstock: You’re weeding out everybody who isn’t beneficial to the market by applying that kind of reductivism to psychology.
The Future of Psychology and Leadership Development
Laurence Hillman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and there’s a lot – the problem is that right now I think things are going to shift and the fastest growing school of psychology that you can’t even get into right now, I’ve been told, is Internal Family Systems – a multiple model. That’s very hot right now. So these things come and go. Right now, the behaviorists and CBT have pretty much dominated the insurance industry and what people get paid for and what is real and what is acceptable and what is therapy.
That’s fine. There’s always going to be those of us who aren’t in that model. And that number is growing. There’s now other things like ecopsychology and embodied psychology and all these kinds of things. And of course archetypal psychology has become huge. There’s a whole new way of thinking that as the world changes and the values change in the world and that left brain thinking just isn’t enough anymore, the need for something more is going to come really quickly.
And so, I have a classic psych 101 book, that’s inch and a half thick. It has a quarter page of Jung and Freud as a side note, as sort of a mistake. “Yeah, these guys existed too. They believe in this deep stuff and things like dreams. I mean, can you believe it?” Kind of like that. I mean I find that sad. And my nephew has a classic degree from somewhere and he doesn’t practice it in any way, but I remember when he was in school when he was telling me what he was doing. I just thought it was sad. It’s so left brain, it’s all biology based and it’s fun to do that. It’s science. Don’t call it psychology. It’s biology.
Conclusion and Invitation to Explore Archetypal Work
Joel Blackstock: That’s beautiful. I don’t want to be disrespectful of your time. We’ll definitely link to your website and where people can reach out and get more information on either being trained or receiving help. If they are a leader, if they do have one of these companies, are there any books or other services you want to point people to? What’s a good thing to check out?
Laurence Hillman: And psychology has the word psyche in it, which means soul. There’s not a lot of soul in most CBT. In fact, there’s none. So it’s not for me. It worked for some people, great, for certain things. If I have OCD, probably CBT is pretty useful. However, I’ve had some pretty good results working with OCD people as well by understanding the archetypal pattern and finding a different way to do it. Wow, what a revolutionary thought that actually works.
So to me in the end, the only thing that matters is how things work. To me, I like to see usefulness. Again, we’re back where we started – if it’s not practical, if it’s not useful, if it’s just based on theory, I don’t care about it. But I’ve had more people tell me that one hour of getting an astrological reading has changed their life, and they’ve been in therapy for 30 years and they never got to the same depth. I’ve had people tell me that many times, probably literally hundreds of times. So then I think there’s some value to what I’m doing. I’m not saying therapy is wrong. I’m not a therapist, but what I do is sort of the X-ray and then work with the therapist. I think I have 19 psychiatrists in my clients. I checked that the other day for something else. So people who are therapists – and I can’t think about how many therapists I have as clients.
So people who understand the value of getting insights and then working with them. And so I think what astrology can do is give the insights to the therapist like you said, and then the therapist does the therapy work. There’s nothing wrong with that, but those insights can shave six months off of therapy and you can see in the past – you don’t need to know the history with a person when you have an astrology chart, you can see all of it right there and it’s a very powerful tool. It’s just a tool, but it’s a useful tool to me.
If you’re a medical doctor and someone walks in with a broken arm, you’re a country doctor and you say “Yeah, I think I can set it pretty well” and then we’ll put a cast on and it’ll grow back straight. Yeah, that’s probably pretty good. But imagine how much better you would do with an X-ray. So we provide the X-rays as astrologers. The therapist still then has a much better way of setting the arm and setting it straight.
So yeah, I think that’s a gift to understanding people’s place and it’s not disrespecting people who think differently. I think that’s the main message from today – just because someone does something you don’t understand or think is weird or think is difficult or think doesn’t match your model of reality doesn’t make it wrong. And tolerance is a nice thing, just to say “I’m curious, tell me more about it. Then I’ll make a decision once I’ve actually studied it.” I’ve studied it, you’ve not – kind of a thing like Newton said. That’s powerful.
Joel Blackstock: I hope that this connects you with some people who want to learn more about those things so we can leave it there
Laurence Hillman: All of that is on the websites, and so I don’t want to have a website where people – to me this kind of work is very personal. So yeah, a lot of information is on the websites and that’s lovely, but to me if someone really wants to talk deeper about something or really talk about a problem they’re having at work, let’s talk. Let’s have a conversation and then I can show them how the archetypal model could help them solve some of these very common issues that they’re not the only ones who have.
But it’s a novel approach that is, to me, much more efficient and effective and people love it because it is so fun. It’s like “Wow, I’ve been seen. I’ve been looked at properly. Somebody cares about me enough to do this assessment with me.” And now look at how my relationship has changed. I know tons of stories of people who didn’t talk for years in a company and now they do because they have this archetypal language. There’s so many different ways you can apply this. It’s a really useful tool. It’s just a tool, but it is a very useful tool. It’s like one of those multi-tools that has everything on it.
Joel Blackstock: That’s beautiful. That’s a wonderful intro to your work and I hope that this connects you with some people who want to learn more about those things. So we can leave it there and I will link to all of these things below.
Laurence Hillman: Thank you so much Joel, I really enjoyed our conversation.
Joel Blackstock: Thank you, it was great talking with you.
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