Pornography as Symptom: James Hillman on Imagination, Eros, and the Starved Soul

While Hillman was actually promoting a type of beauty-filled pornography — which I don't necessarily agree with or think is possible — his speech is compelling because it brings the notions of Eros and archetypes into the equation.

Essentially, what he's asking is: What kind of culture creates this kind of hunger for these kinds of images?

He's talking about a crisis of imagination in late twentieth-century Western culture. Hillman argues that we've become psychologically starved. We've lost myth, we've lost beauty, we've lost ritual — and essentially, we've lost eroticism.

Our imaginations are undernourished.

If desire doesn't disappear, it gets redirected. Hillman argues that pornography happens when the imagination is reduced to stimulation.

Another powerful distinction he makes is how we treat sexuality as this great obscenity while accepting violence, exploitation, environmental destruction, and dehumanization as normal.

Why are we more disturbed by a naked body than by a culture saturated with cruelty?

Purity culture did a lot of damage in this regard.

His solution isn't censorship, shame, or pretending that desire doesn't exist. His answer is beauty: creating richer images, better stories, deeper relationships, and art that awakens the soul instead of simply triggering the nervous system.

Because when our imaginations expand, our desires can expand with them.

If pornography is filling a void, what have we lost that people are really searching for?

I think it's this: displaced spirituality, displaced longing, displaced imagination.

A culture that is hungry for beauty reaches for stimulation.

For Hillman, Eros is about getting back into communion with people. It's about healing through community, not isolation. It's the idea that our souls do not only live within us, but between us.

For most of human history, people have found meaning through shared rituals — festivals, storytelling, music, dance, worship, and the belonging that comes through communal activities.

Today, many of those communal spaces have been displaced or disappeared, and we are left with screens, algorithms, and this endless pursuit of self-improvement.

When community disappears, loneliness grows. When loneliness grows, people don't stop longing for connection — they begin looking for substitutes.

Pornography replaces participation with consumption. It replaces belonging with performance. It replaces intimacy with stimulation.

Hillman essentially believed that imagination is communal, and we become more fully ourselves not by turning inward, but by participating in something larger than ourselves.

And this is what eroticism is about.