James Hillman's Last Image

Lecture: James Hillman's Last Image

Lecturer: Silvia Ronchey (Roma Tre University)

Date: Friday, November 20, 2026, 6:30 p.m.

Place: Monte Verità (Ascona), Auditorium

Cycle: Eranos-Jung Lectures 20265 - Guided by the Daimon. James Hillman's (1926-2011) Legacy on the Hundredth Anniversary of his Birth

Language: Italian

Moderator: Fabio Merlini (Eranos Foundation, Ascona / SUFFP, Lugano)

Followed by discussion with the audience and aperitif

The video recording of the conference will be viewable on the official YouTube channel of the Eranos Foundation.

Lecture Presentation

“Dying is the essence of life,” said James Hillman at that moment between his living and his dying, when “time stands still, the hands of the clock point to the ultimate essence”: that standstill of life that is described in greater detail in L'ultima immagine (The Last Image), the book-testament published on the tenth anniversary of his death (2021) and now, on the anniversary of his birth, in English. This recollection of the last days of Hillman's life bears witness to the work of self-analysis and introspection that he carried out with strenuous lucidity on the threshold between being and non-being: a work on the image and with the image. Because the journey from one state to the other and its inner exploration can only be made up of images, since the psyche itself is made up of them. A profound reflection on soul-making as image-making is the ultimate legacy of Hillman's thought, captured in the blue region of the transition between the individual soul and the soul of the world.

Lecturer' Bio-bibliography

Silvia Ronchey is a full professor of Byzantine Civilization at Roma Tre University. In addition to numerous specialist essays and translations from Byzantine Greek, such as that of Michael Psellos' Chronography (Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1984), she has written widely read books, including L'aristocrazia bizantina (with Alexander Kazhdan, 1998; 1999), Lo stato bizantino (2002; 2019), L'enigma di Piero (2006), Il guscio della tartaruga (2009), Il romanzo di Costantinopoli (with Tommaso Braccini, 2010), Ipazia. La vera storia (2010, an expanded and updated paperback edition of which was published in 2023, in both Italian and English), Storia di Barlaam e Ioasaf. La vita bizantina del Buddha (2012), the critical edition of Eustathius of Thessalonica's commentary on the iambic canon on Pentecost (2014), and La cattedrale sommersa. Alla ricerca del sacro perduto (2017). She has been writing for the cultural pages of Italian newspapers since 1989. For more than twenty years, she has been a regular contributor to the newspaper La Stampa and its supplement "Tuttolibri"; she also contributes regularly to the newspaper La Repubblica and its supplement "Robinson." She has written and presented television programs for the Italian Television RAI, including "L'altra edicola" (RaiDue, 1994-1999) and "Fino alla fine del mondo" (RaiDue, 1999). She has interviewed witnesses of the century, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Hillman, Ernst Jünger, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Elémire Zolla. Her meeting with James Hillman, in particular, gave rise to a lasting collaboration that was expressed not only in television interviews but also in two dialogue books, L'anima del mondo (The Soul of the World) (1999) and Il piacere di pensare (The Pleasure of Thinking) (2001), continuing until Hillman's death: their last dialogue book, L'ultima immagine (The Last Image, 2021), was published posthumously on the tenth anniversary of his death. Her radio programs include a series on the fall of Constantinople in "Alle 8 della Sera" (RadioRaiDue), a series on ancient, medieval, and Byzantine melodrama in "Di tanti palpiti" (RadioRaiTre), and the series "Contaminazioni del sacro," “Il buddhismo e l'occidente,” and “Queste anime viventi: animali, anima, mondo” (RadioRaiTre).

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In 2026, the Eranos Foundation intends to honor a figure who has brought prestige to the history of its meetings. This figure is the American psychologist James Hillman (1926-2011), whose 100th birthday is being celebrated this year. A highly regarded speaker at the famous Eranos Tagungen on several occasions, his innovative and courageous thinking contributed to the cultural renewal of analytical psychology, developing Jung's intuition of archetypes in unexpected directions and decisively returning the psyche to its imaginal role—more than a terrain to be interpreted, a horizon to be recognized and inhabited. This year, as we did last year with Carl Gustav Jung on the 150th anniversary of his birth, we do not intend to study Hillman analytically, but rather to be inspired by some of his most disruptive perspectives, allowing them to interact with the issues that concern us most today. The result will therefore be a very free and open dialogue with relevant aspects of his thinking, with the aim of shedding light on the current situation. Each speaker will thus be inspired as they see fit by a style of thinking that has taken psychology beyond the strictly clinical dimension, making it a heuristic tool for better understanding society and individuals. This is the lesson we will try to take advantage of.