Jungian analyst James Hillman: "We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. Maybe it’s time to look at that.
We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go 'inside' to locate the psyche, you examine 'your' feelings and 'your' dreams, they belong to you. Or it’s interrelations, interpsyche, between your psyche and mine. That’s been extended a little bit into family systems and office groups—but the psyche, the soul, is still only 'within' and 'between' people. We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that."
Hillman makes a wide gesture that includes the oil tanker on the horizon, the gang graffiti on a park sign, and the fat homeless woman with swollen ankles and cracked skin asleep on the grass about fifteen yards away.
Hillman: "What’s left out is a deteriorating world. So why hasn’t therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on that 'inside' soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is Out There.
You know, the soul is always being rediscovered through pathology. In the nineteenth century people didn’t talk about psyche, until Freud came along and discovered psychopathology. Now we’re beginning to say, 'The furniture has stuff in it that’s poisoning us, the microwave gives off dangerous rays.' The world has become toxic. That sea out there is diseased. We can’t eat the fish.
The world has become full of symptoms. Isn’t that the beginning of recognizing what used to be called animism? The world’s alive—my god! It’s having effects on us. 'I’ve got to get rid of those fluorocarbon cans.' 'I’ve got to get rid of the furniture because underneath it’s formaldehyde.' 'I’ve got to watch out for this and that and that.' So there’s pathology in the world, and through that we’re beginning to treat the world with more respect.
As though having denied the spirit in things, the spirit—offended comes back as a threat. Having denied the soul in things, having said to things, with Descartes, 'You don’t have souls,' things have turned around and said, 'Just you watch what kind of soul I have, muthafucka.'
Every time we try to deal with our outrage over the freeway, our misery over the office and the lighting and the crappy furniture, the crime on the streets, whatever—every time we try to deal with that by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we’re depriving the political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world.
Yet therapy goes on blindly believing that it’s curing the outer world by making people better. We’ve had this for years and years and years: 'If everybody went into therapy we’d have better buildings, we’d have better people, we’d have more consciousness.' It’s not the case.
This issue goes to the roots of the political role of therapy. If I am right that a major task of therapy is to work with the pathological ferment in the body politic, then compliance with normalization subverts its political task. If therapy imagines its task to be that of helping people cope (and not protest), to adapt (and not rebel), to normalize their oddity, and to accept themselves 'and work within your situation; make it work for you' (rather than refuse the unacceptable), then therapy is collaborating with what the state wants: docile plebs.
There’s another thing therapy does that I think is vicious. It internalizes emotions."
Hillman looks down at the Pacific Coast Highway packed with cars going as fast as they can bumper to bumper.
Hillman: "I’m outraged after having driven to my analyst on the freeway. The fucking trucks almost ran me off the road. I’m terrified. I’m in my little car, and I get to my therapist’s and I’m shaking. My therapist says, 'We’ve gotta talk about this.' So we begin to talk about it. And we discover that my father was a son-of-a-bitch brute and this whole truck thing reminds me of him. Or we discover that I’ve always felt frail and vulnerable, there’ve always been bigger guys with bigger dicks, so this car that I’m in is a typical example of my thin skin and my frailty and vulnerability. Or we talk about my power drive, that I really wish to be a truck driver.
We convert my fear into anxiety—an inner state. We convert the present into the past, into a discussion of my father and my childhood. And we convert my outrage—into rage and hostility. Again, an internal condition, whereas it starts in 'out'-rage, an emotion. Emotions are mainly social. The word comes from the Latin 'ex movere', to move out. Emotions connect to the world.
Therapy introverts the emotions, calls fear 'anxiety.' You take it back, and you work on it inside yourself. You don’t work psychologically on what that outrage is telling you about potholes, about trucks, about Florida strawberries in Vermont in March, about burning up oil, about energy policies, nuclear waste, that homeless woman over there with the sores on her feet—the whole thing.
By going inside we’re maintaining the Cartesian view that the world out there is a dead matter and the world inside is living. Psychology, working with yourself, could that be part of the disease, not part of the cure?"
This is an excerpt from James Hillman's chapter in 'The Political Self'. To read more about it click here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Political-Self-Understanding-Context-Illness/dp/1782204091
Peter Brouwer
