As James Hillman said in The Dream and the Underworld:
We work on dreams not to strengthen the ego but to make psychic reality, to make life matter through death, to make soul by coagulating and intensifying the imagination.
We make life matter too by keeping death near to us, something we are often uncomfortable with. Yet here, in Santa Maria Nuova near the Roman Forum, is the saint for whom the church is named, St. Francesca Romana, wrapped in her simple white habit.
Our denial of soul leads only to depression. Hillman again, in an NY Times article:
Depression is the secularization of melancholy. We’ve lost the gods. We’ve lost what once was behind it. That’s why it’s so depressing.
