"War demands a leap of imagination as extraordinary and fantastic as the phenomenon itself," psychologist James Hillman writes in the first pages of his demanding and daring new book, "A Terrible Love of War." What blocks our ability to comprehend war, in Hillman's perspective, is "our endemic national disease: the addiction to innocence."
War has always been with us. "During the five thousand six hundred years of written history," Hillman painfully reminds us, "fourteen thousand six hundred wars have been recorded." Beyond the recorded wars are the "centuries of nameless bodies in unheralded fields." The Greek philosopher Heraclitus says that "war is the father of us all." To understand the enduring nature of war, Hillman writes, we must understand "the myths, philosophy, and theology of war's deepest mind." We must acquaint ourselves with the god of war -- Mars -- the divinity who "rages, strikes death, stirs panic, driving individual humans mad and collective societies blind."
To speak of peace or disarmament, to hope of ever preventing war, we must understand "the madness of its love," the force that held Gen. George S. Patton in its thrall when, surveying the havoc of the battlefield, he proclaimed, "I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life."
Hillman, 78, has written more than 20 books, including the bestselling "The Soul's Code," "The Force of Character," and (with Michael Ventura) "We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse." Trained as a psychoanalyst in Zurich, where he studied with Jung, Hillman is an innovator in depth psychology.
The primary tool of depth psychology is penetration, digging below conventional constructs into the layer of the mind which is poetic, mythic. "War," he writes, "asks for this kind of penetration, else its horrors remain unintelligible and abnormal."
Writing "A Terrible Love of War" was "as hard as anything I've tried to do," Hillman says quietly, sitting in a lush hotel garden in Century City. "I more or less collapsed toward the end, and I couldn't finish it." His book warns of its intent: "This book seeks to do what war itself achieves: destabilize, desubjectivize, destroy. The writer comes out of the book a casualty, and the reader too, or at least all shook up."
"A Terrible Love of War" -- a book Hillman suggests might be his last -- is also his most personal. "Mars is the god of engagement, and you can't write about Mars unless you are directly engaged," he says. He looks back on himself as that "puny kid (with glasses)" growing up in Atlantic City, N.J., playing with tin soldiers, listening to boxing matches on the radio, "already in training for this book on combat."
The most significant piece of biography to color "A Terrible Love of War" was Hillman's experience, beginning in 1944, when -- at age 18 -- he was drafted into the Navy. As a pharmacist mate second class, he was first assigned to a ward of the war-deafened, did night duty with amputees and worked for more than a year as "special assistant to the war-blinded." "What I knew of battle," he writes with elegant precision, "was only its remnants."
A series of paradoxes
Hillman takes care with words. He will not abide the casual use of the word "wounded." His indignation ignites: "We have no idea what we've created in Iraq! The death numbers ... only on page I-don't-know-what of the third section of the newspaper do we get the wounded numbers. And 'wounded' is a word that is so easy to use and it actually means 'maiming, disfigurement ... unbelievable burns ... blinding ...' How much of America is reshaping their bodies to look like magazine ads? These people are being blasted apart!"
"A Terrible Love of War" is a dense, tightly constructed work. One chews through it slowly as it segues from scholarly treatise to psychoanalytic session, from poetic essay to philosophical proof.
He assumes a writing style to accommodate his subject. "Abrupt. Disturbing." He acknowledges his tone as "offensive," his method "an assault on entrenched thought." He notes that "readers may find themselves joining an underground resistance, looking for weak spots and exposed positions. It will seem as if the book is written less to cajole the reader than to knock him out flat."
He structures the book as a series of paradoxes: The first chapter is titled "War Is Normal." The second is "War Is Inhuman." How can something be inhuman if it's normal? Unsettling? That's the point. "War Is Sublime," the third chapter, explores the beauty inside the horror of war, the fusion of death and loveliness.
