"We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently"
About this Quote
Progress doesn’t start with policy or willpower in James Hillman’s world; it starts with perception. “We can’t change anything” lands like a provocation, because it flips the modern self-help reflex on its head. We’re trained to treat change as a matter of effort: set goals, optimize habits, muscle through. Hillman, a psychologist best known for pushing “archetypal” and imaginal approaches against clinical literalism, insists that the engine of transformation is not force but vision. Fresh ideas aren’t decorations on top of reality; they’re the lenses that decide what reality even is.
The subtext is a critique of the culture’s obsession with fixing. If you “see things differently,” the very object you thought you needed to repair may dissolve, or at least rearrange itself. Symptoms become signals. Personal crises become stories with characters and motives. Social problems become failures of imagination as much as failures of management. Hillman is quietly arguing that the psyche doesn’t respond well to being treated like a machine with replaceable parts. It responds to meaning.
Context matters here: Hillman wrote in the late-20th-century moment when psychology was becoming increasingly medicalized and outcome-driven, with diagnosis and treatment plans crowding out myth, metaphor, and the interior life. His line reads like resistance to that flattening. It’s also a warning: without new ways of seeing, “change” is often just repetition wearing a new outfit. Fresh ideas aren’t optional. They’re the prerequisite for any change that isn’t cosmetic.
The subtext is a critique of the culture’s obsession with fixing. If you “see things differently,” the very object you thought you needed to repair may dissolve, or at least rearrange itself. Symptoms become signals. Personal crises become stories with characters and motives. Social problems become failures of imagination as much as failures of management. Hillman is quietly arguing that the psyche doesn’t respond well to being treated like a machine with replaceable parts. It responds to meaning.
Context matters here: Hillman wrote in the late-20th-century moment when psychology was becoming increasingly medicalized and outcome-driven, with diagnosis and treatment plans crowding out myth, metaphor, and the interior life. His line reads like resistance to that flattening. It’s also a warning: without new ways of seeing, “change” is often just repetition wearing a new outfit. Fresh ideas aren’t optional. They’re the prerequisite for any change that isn’t cosmetic.
Quote Details
| Topic | Change |
|---|
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