War & Peace Quote by James Hillman

Hillman swerves the reader into agreement with a moral reflex - don’t scapegoat the people caught in history’s gears - then uses that momentum to smuggle in his real target: psychotherapy’s governing story. The Vietnam reference isn’t nostalgia or provocation for its own sake; it’s a ready-made cultural template for misdirected blame. “Grunts” evokes the disposable body, the person who executes decisions made far above his pay grade. By insisting “nobody who fought...was at fault,” Hillman separates agency from accountability, and in doing so, indicts systems that launder responsibility through hierarchy.

The pivot to therapy is the punchline and the trap. He wants you to feel the same ethical clarity about patients and clinicians that you might feel about soldiers: don’t moralize the individual experience when the framework itself is skewed. “Theory” is doing heavy lifting here. Hillman, a leading voice in archetypal psychology, spent a career arguing that modern psychotherapy often reduces the psyche to a technical problem to be fixed, managed, or normalized. His subtext: when therapy harms, it’s not primarily because a client “failed” treatment or a therapist made a personal mistake; it’s because the model quietly pathologizes suffering, narrows meaning, and treats soul as symptom.

He’s also inoculating himself against the easy rebuttal that he’s attacking therapists. Like antiwar critique that respects troops, Hillman wants a critique of psych culture that resists blaming the “grunt-level” practitioners while still calling the enterprise to account. The line stings because it reframes therapy as a campaign with doctrine, not a neutral service with tools.