Marxists/monotheistic materialists -monism. A connection of religion and science, without psyche. They stole the soul.
“My war – and I have yet to win a decisive battle – is with the modes of thought and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).”
― James Hillman
“Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who’ve been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.”
― James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World’s Getting Worse
Psyche is not a model, it is a forgotten perspective. Polytheistic reality is not a box, it is a map stolen by monotheistic culture. We must have a psychological map to talk about where is ego. There is a difference between simple rational archetypes and the psychological reality. For psyche, for polytheistic reality, psychosis is a proper language. And rationalism or fixation over ego control is a fallacy.
The problem is that, for monotheism, psyche perspective does not exist. That is why it is so important to write about James Hillman. His perspective, polytheistic one, is a proper perspective. We can’t talk about psyche without psyche. Theology, religion, spirituality, materialism, science and nature are not the psyche. Without psyche, each of these perspective is an anti psychological fundamentalism. It is so important to read about archetypal psychology. Psyche is psyche, the word belongs to pagan mythology, itself. Not to religion, medicine or materialism.
“As the ego does not represent the whole psyche, so the Western mind cannot speak for the whole world.”
― James Hillman, Philosophical Intimations
The problem with today thinking is that people can’t imagine talking about identity/psyche or illness, without using medical empiricism.
Medicine is not the owner of the psyche or even illness or pathology.
Depression, psychosis even headaches does not belong to medicine. This is psyche, psyche creates pathology, and psyche is not medical empiricism. Monotheistic science talks about psyche and illnesses, using medical language, and we should remember that this is a medical usurpation. The proper language of psyche/pathology was destroyed by science and its pretensions to mythical reality and also to the psychological reality of illness. Psyche was destroyed by science.Imagination was destroyed by science, the psychological meaning of illness was destroyed by materialism. Mythical reality is not science. Psyche is not medical empiricism or materialism, and never will be.
Psychological meaning of illness does not belong to medical empiricism. Every kind of pathology is an identity trait, at first. Not medicine. The nature of every illness is psychological , not medical.
We are being treated by medical empiricism like a soulless meat. We are being treated that way, because we live in barbaric reality of materialistic fascism.
People think that this is progress, to talk about psyche using medical empiricism. No, this is f. tragedy.
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James Hillman “Re-visioning psychology.”
They need courage and understanding of those beyond the suicide topic, not pity . James Hillman was the only one who wrote book about the proper attitude toward suicide, suicidal people. Believing in the power of death over ego, that’s all.
This culture should stop imposing ego heroism on suicidal people, because this is naive. In monotheistic culture there is no courage toward death…Because god saved us from death, and death just don’t exist. So there’s no death, no topic. And suicidal people are invisible enemies, so they are silenced and destroyed, as excluded by culture, pariahs.
Psychiatry protects status quo of naive normalcy and their theological assumptions, so they are privileged. People beyond normalcy are invisible, because their wound is incurable, so the are seen as weak. In ego heroism culture we have the right….to win all the time, with everything. But collective ego is no longer able to win with death.
This empty culture do not even have idea what psyche is, because psyche was wiped out by monotheistic religious roots. People are not even aware that they were robbed. This is tragedy. But not for those with power over unprivileged people. They will tell you to shut up and then they show you the nearest door.
What is psychiatry? This is a institution for illegal people excluded by culture, without the right to live.
Ego has power. Political and material, but not psychological.
Ego cannot win with death. Ego is dependent on the psyche and, consequently, death.
We all need someone who will believe us. Monotheistic psychiatry does not believe in death. And psyche belongs to polytheistic reality, which is condemned by our shallow barbaric culture. This is tragedy for psychological man. Death is in the center of the psyche. From psychological point of view – mental health (ego heroism) is a naive heresy. Rationalism is the most naive kind of perception, but we like to feel comfortable with our thoughts. Death is not our enemy, egoic barbarism and comfortable cowardice, is.
We must break free from the anti psychological monotheistic and spiritual chains. We need psychological perspective to cure our barbaric and materialistic point of view.
Comfortable thinking does not describe reality of the psyche. Comfortable thinking describe our safety needs.
I recommend James Hillman psychology to everyone. We need to cure our ideas, not psyche.
Great article about horrible world we are living in. Just great. Thank You, Sarah.
“I’m in favor of destruction, aggression, hating things. Not bearing things anymore. We think the breakdown comes because our life is in bad shape. But maybe the ideas cause the disorder. Something tries to break through and causes the disorder.”
The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.
The self divided is precisely where the self is authentically located. . . We all have identity crises because a single identity is a delusion of the monotheistic mind. . . Authenticity is in the illusion, playing it, seeing through it from within as we play it, like an actor who sees through his mask and can only see in this way.
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I don’t think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.
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“I’ve found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.”
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“My war – and I have yet to win a decisive battle – is with the modes of thought that and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).”
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JAMES HILLMAN
“When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behavior, and fantasies are wrong. […] The avenues of escape are blocked by the professional abuse of pathologizing. To refuse the mental health approach confirms one’s ‘sickness’. One needs ‘therapy’, […]
How can we take back therapy […] from a system which must find illness in order to promote health and which, in order to increase the range of its helping, is obliged to extend the area of sickness. Ever deeper pockets of pathology to be analyzed, ever earlier traumata: primal, prenatal, into my astral body; ever more people into the ritual: the family, the office force, community mental health, analysis for everyone. […]
Its practice may differ […] but the premise is the same. The work of making soul requires professional help. Soul-making has become restricted by therapy and to therapy. And psychopathology has become restricted to therapy’s negative definition of it, reduced to its role in the therapy game.”
“The healer is the illness, and the illness is the healer. But as this ancient psychological idea has become translated into modern secular therapy, the”who” is none other than the professional therapist.
By giving the pathologizing a clinical name, the professional therapist makes the first move in therapy game. The first move is not the pathologizing of the patient.
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His complaints and oddities are not clinical psychopathology until so named. (They are psychological, and they are needed, because our psyche needs it, even if we, our ego is unable to cope)
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On the one hand , I am protected from this “thing” by separation from it, it now has a name. But on the other hand, I now, have something…” Moreover the therapist has become the very god who by bringing the condition is the only one who can take it away.The patients tend to believe in his therapist: ” He alone can help me for only he knows really what is wrong.” What is “really” wrong means what is “literally” wrong, what has been literalized into wrongness by the professional therapy game.
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In this way the analyst and the patient become locked in a long -term therapy analysis, for the analyst is the one, the very God, who has seen into the patient incurable weak spot, his vulnerable heel, his ruinous secret. The analyst’s insight and the patient’s wound together embody the archetypal figure of Wounded -Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that illness and its healing are one and the same. But again in modern secular therapy the Wounded Healer has been divided down the middle: illness is all one the patient side and health all with the therapist. The archetype is split, and the two halves are bound together compellingly in what is called transference and countertransference.
Little wonder therapy speaks so much of “resistance” and that manuals are written explaining how to overcome or break through the patient’s “defense mechanism”.
“Therapeutic analysis has side effects no less lethal than drugs”
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For the wrong pathologizing of the therapy game is killing.—————————————————— Levi -Strauss has noted that asymmetrical games, such as those between the unequal partners of therapy, end in killing one opponent. The killing of psychotherapy takes place on a psychological level:the neurosis, the problem, is supposedly “got rid of”, whereas actually it is soul that is being killed – again through a wrong pathologizing, a wrong understanding of the soul in the symptom.
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Wrong pathologizing has spread well beyond the games of the consulting room and clinic, becoming a covert political instrument of the state.Political heretics may be declared mentally ill in order to banish them – and this procedure is smoothly justified with assurances that it is for the “patient’s” good. We may not draw comfort from supposing that this goes on only in the Soviet union.
James Hillman
Pathology of any kind is a proper language of the psyche, our psyche does not create health. Our pathology is always present, in one way or another. Psychological meaning of illness is something more important than empty definition of utopian health. Health is just an empty claim toward psyche, life. Health does not exists, I am afraid. We are highly pathological beings, form the beginning of our life. Health is meaningless to psychological reality. We want to see us as healthy beings, but health does not exists in reality. Our cells are dying even now. The death and its pathology keeps us alive. The problem is that materialistic monotheism likes the utopian vision of health. Psyche creates pathology all the time, but heroic ego wants to believe in everlasting health. Which is utopia.
I recommend archetypal psychology to everyone.Because it is not naive. We are born to die. We are here, because we wanted to live for a while. We will suffer, we will be ill, and then we die. Hey ho let’s go.
We need to revive the psychological meaning of pathology/suffering.
James Hillman “Re- visioning psychology”.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain.
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The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise….
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Apollonian ego fixation. This kind of humiliation is only a result. Just imagine that there is no psychiatry, only apollonian fascists and psyche, which is their slave. Apollo and Hades. Imagine that people only represent powers that are beyond them. Apollo (rationalism) is a Nazi, and he thinks he can control Hades (psychological/poetic imagination). Which is impossible, because Hades is the main power, main god of the all gods, all imagination.
Think in mythical way about imagination. Forget about persons, people with names and surnames, forget about – I am. Forget about ego. This is a war against imaginal reality, and we must abolish the materialistic fascism of egoic people, because they think they can control imaginal reality in which our ego only dwells. Still, ego is not the owner of the psyche.
Science is not something that will explain people the need of imaginal reality.Psyche is something more. Something more than material science.
Fight for the rights of the psyche in material reality, which completely forget about the roots.
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In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.
James Hillman
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The Envoy of Mr. Cogito
BY ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
TRANSLATED BY BOGDANA CARPENTER
Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize
go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust
you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony
be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important
and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten
let your sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards—they will win
they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography
and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn
beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I
beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you
be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star
repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand
and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap
go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes
This is an answer, it is not mine, it is from the victims of the psychiatry.
Thank You for this stirring article. Great words about the hidden slavery, about the hidden psychopathy of cold anti human semantics.
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“Words are like pillows: if put correctly they ease pain.”
― James Hillman
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James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain:
—————————————————————-
The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
———————————————————————————————————————
Thank You for that important article. I must add something really important, because it may help some people to understand the empirical fallacy of scientific era.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain:
—————————————————————————————————
The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. If environment means literally what’s around, it must also mean whatever is around. This because the unconscious psyche selects quite arbitrarily among the stuff encountered every day in the environment. Tiny and trivial bits of information may have huge subliminal psychic effects, as the days’ residues in dreams show. We do dream of the damnedest things! Much of each day is never noticed or recalled, but the psyche picks up the environmental flotsam and delivers it to the dream. The dream–a processing plant recycling the environment, finding soul values in junk. The dream–an artist, appropriating images from the environment for recollection in tranquility.
Because we walk about in fields of psychic realities that influences our lives, we have to broaden the notion of environment in terms of “deep ecology,” the hypothesis that the planet is a living, breathing, and self-regulating organism. Since anything around can nourish our souls by feeding imagination, there is soul stuff out there. So why not admit, as does deep ecology, that the environment itself is ensouled, animated, inextricably meshed with us and not fundamentally separate from us?
The ecological vision restores to environment also the classical idea of providentia–that the world provides for us, looks out for us, even looks after us. It wants us around, too. Predators, tornadoes, and blackflies in June are only pieces of the picture. Just think of all that’s delicious and sweet-smelling. Do birds sing but for each other? This breathable, edible, and pleasant planet, invisibly serviced and maintained, keeps us all by means of its life-support system. Such would be an idea of nurture that is truly nurturing.
“Environment,” then, would be imagined well beyond social and economic conditions, beyond the entire cultural setting, to include every item that takes care of us every day: our tires and coffee cups and door handles and the book you are holding in your hands. It becomes impossible to exclude this bit of environment as irrelevant in favor of that bit as significant, as if we could rank world phenomena in order of importance. Important for whom? Our understanding of importance itself has to change; instead of “important to me,” think of “important to other aspects of the environment.” Does this item nurture what else is around, not merely us who are around? Does it contribute to the intentions of the field of which we are only one short-lived part?
As notions of environment shift, we notice environment differently. It becomes more and more difficult to make a cut between psyche and world, subject and object, in here and out there. I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets, as I am in “music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/While the music lasts” (T.S. Eliot). Where does the environment stop and I begin, and can I begin at all without being in some place, deeply involved in, nurtured by the nature of the world?
“…Go with the wrong, deeper”
“Search out the meaning of the symptom…Find a new method rather than opposition.”
“Without metaphorical understanding, everything is only what it is and must be met on the simplest, most direct level. Everything then is a call to action and the hero is there to realize himself in a reality that serves his literal notion of it. A view of reality that does not recognize other views is of course delusional. In the heroic ego’s case, the delusion is self-divinization, the perspective of the human ego as the superior, indeed the only, actuality. The rest is not real. . . .
Without imaginal understanding, we may expect killing, as if our culture cannot ever take down the wild Western ego until it has restored the ancient sense of image and recovered the imaginal from the broken shards of reformational literalism.”
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (NY: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 115.
It is good to hear that, Sarah. Reading Hillman brings freedom.
I believe You. That does not mean that your mental illness, or whatever it is, is the property of the psychiatric system. Our pathology belongs to psyche, like our ego belongs to psyche.
I would like to add w very important issue about the real function of psychotherapy and relation between the patient, and the professional (slave – master union)
“When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behavior, and fantasies are wrong. […] The avenues of escape are blocked by the professional abuse of pathologizing. To refuse the mental health approach confirms one’s ‘sickness’. One needs ‘therapy’, […]
How can we take back therapy […] from a system which must find illness in order to promote health and which, in order to increase the range of its helping, is obliged to extend the area of sickness. Ever deeper pockets of pathology to be analyzed, ever earlier traumata: primal, prenatal, into my astral body; ever more people into the ritual: the family, the office force, community mental health, analysis for everyone. […]
Its practice may differ […] but the premise is the same. The work of making soul requires professional help. Soul-making has become restricted by therapy and to therapy. And psychopathology has become restricted to therapy’s negative definition of it, reduced to its role in the therapy game.”
“The healer is the illness, and the illness is the healer. But as this ancient psychological idea has become translated into modern secular therapy, the”who” is none other than the professional therapist.
By giving the pathologizing a clinical name, the professional therapist makes the first move in therapy game. The first move is not the pathologizing of the patient.
—————————————————————————————–
His complaints and oddities are not clinical psychopathology until so named. (They are psychological, and they are needed, because our psyche needs it, even if we, our ego is unable to cope)
——————————————————————————————
On the one hand , I am protected from this “thing” by separation from it, it now has a name. But on the other hand, I now, have something…” Moreover the therapist has become the very god who by bringing the condition is the only one who can take it away.The patients tend to believe in his therapist: ” He alone can help me for only he knows really what is wrong.” What is “really” wrong means what is “literally” wrong, what has been literalized into wrongness by the professional therapy game.
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In this way the analyst and the patient become locked in a long -term therapy analysis, for the analyst is the one, the very God, who has seen into the patient incurable weak spot, his vulnerable heel, his ruinous secret. The analyst’s insight and the patient’s wound together embody the archetypal figure of Wounded -Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that illness and its healing are one and the same. But again in modern secular therapy the Wounded Healer has been divided down the middle: illness is all one the patient side and health all with the therapist. The archetype is split, and the two halves are bound together compellingly in what is called transference and countertransference.
Little wonder therapy speaks so much of “resistance” and that manuals are written explaining how to overcome or break through the patient’s “defense mechanism”.
“Therapeutic analysis has side effects no less lethal than drugs”
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For the wrong pathologizing of the therapy game is killing. Levi -Strauss has noted that asymmetrical games, such as those between the unequal partners of therapy, end in killing one opponent. The killing of psychotherapy takes place on a psychological level:the neurosis, the problem, is supposedly “got rid of”, whereas actually it is soul that is being killed – again through a wrong pathologizing, a wrong understanding of the soul in the symptom.
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Wrong pathologizing has spread well beyond the games of the consulting room and clinic, becoming a covert political instrument of the state.Political heretics may be declared mentally ill in order to banish them – and this procedure is smoothly justified with assurances that it is for the “patient’s” good. We may not draw comfort from supposing that this goes on only in the Soviet union.
James Hillman
“Psychological” and “treatment” cannot be conjoined – unless we revise what we mean by treatment and see it as fantasy.
Psychotherapy, in accordance with the root meaning of the words, means to serve soul, not treat it. Serving soul implies letting it rule; it leads, we follow.
By carelessly turning over our symptoms to professional therapists, we have reinforced the grip of professionalism upon psychopathology.
James Hillman
Thank You for this story, Joe. I am sure it was not easy for You to write this. There are things worse than death itself. Like, for example, children in mental hospitals. Hideous crime of phony civilized people.
“We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, What’s wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up? ”
James Hillman
“The naturalistic fallacy is common because it requires least effort on the part of an interpreter.He need only to look around him at natural everyday events for his models. The easiness is itself a part of the fallacy -the inertia of following nature.
Naturalism soon declines into materialism, a view which regards the way things are in the perceptual world of things, facts and sense -realities to be the primary mode.It insist that material reality is first and psychic reality must conform with it: psyche must obey the laws of physis and imagination follow perception.”
“Like poetry psychic speech is condensed and distilled. This speech is on another level, raised from natural meaning to imaginative meaning.”
I found some quotes, which can help you:
“When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behaviour, and fantasies are wrong. […] The avenues of escape are blocked by the professional abuse of pathologizing. To refuse the mental health approach confirms one’s ‘sickness’. One needs ‘therapy’, […]
How can we take back therapy […] from a system which must find illness in order to promote health and which, in order to increase the range of its helping, is obliged to extend the area of sickness. Ever deeper pockets of pathology to be analyzed, ever earlier traumata: primal, prenatal, into my astral body; ever more people into the ritual: the family, the office force, community mental health, analysis for everyone. […]
Its practice may differ […] but the premise is the same. The work of making soul requires professional help. Soul-making has become restricted by therapy and to therapy. And psychopathology has become restricted to therapy’s negative definition of it, reduced to its role in the therapy game.”
“The healer is the illness, and the illness is the healer. But as this ancient psychological idea has become translated into modern secular therapy, the”who” is none other than the professional therapist.
By giving the pathologizing a clinical name, the professional therapist makes the first move in therapy game. The first move is not the pathologizing of the patient. His complaints and oddities are not clinical psychopathology until so named.
On the one hand , I am protected from this “thing” bu separation from it, it now has a name.But on the other hand, I now, have something…”Moreover the therapist has become the very god who by bringing the condition is the only one who can take it away.The patients tend to believe in his therapist: ” He alone can help me for only he knows really what is wrong.” What is “really” wrong means what is “literally” wrong, what has been literalized into wrongness by the professional therapy game.
In this way the analyst and the patient become locked in a long -term therapy analysis, for the analyst is the one, the very God, who has seen into the patient incurable weak spot, his vulnerable heel, his ruinous secret. The analyst’s insight and the patient’s wound together embody the archetypal figure of Wounded -Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that illness and its healing are one and the same. Bit again in modern secular therapy the Wounded Healer has been divided down the middle :illness is all one the patient side and health all with the therapist. The archetype is split, and the two halves are bound together compellingly in what is called transference and countertransference.
Little wonder therapy speaks so much of “resistance” and that manuals are written explaining how to overcome or break through the patient’s “defense mechanism”.
“Therapeutic analysis has side effects no less lethal than drugs”
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For the wrong pathologizing of the therapy game is killing. Levi Strauss has noted that asymmetrical games, such as those between the unequal partners of therapy, end in killing one opponent. The killing of psychoatherapy takes place on a psychological level:the neurosis, the problem, is supposedly “got rid of”, whereas actually it is soul that is being killed – again through a wrong pathologizing, a wrong understanding of the soul in the symptom.
Wrong pathologizing has spread well beyond the games of the consulting room and clinic, becoming a covert political instrument of the state.Political heretics may be declared mentally ill in order to banish them – and this procedure is smoothly justified with assurances that it is for the “patient’s” good. We may not draw comfort from suppoising that this goes on only in the Soviet union.
2.Psyche and naturalistic fallacy.
“Owing to the simplistic idea of nature used in therapy, the natural tend to be idealized. It becomes a natural without deformities, irrationalities and individual idiosyncracies. The ideal standard is used moralistically to find fault with dream and dreamers for what deviates from nature.
Ideals and norm provide means for seeing pathologizing but they are not to be taken as means for measuring pathologizing. From the psychological point of view neither the statistical norm nor the ideal norm can offer the least relevance regarding the inherent value of pathologized fantasy experience. My nightmares, compulsions, anxieties may be essential to my work, my life -style and may relations with others.
Norms are perceptual modes for seeing contrasts; they are staining methods which help us notice deviations more sharply. By realizing how strongly pathologized an event is, we we more immediately sense its importance. But psychological worth of what is going on is stated not by the norm or the deviation, but by affliction itself.
“Events of imagination do not occur in empirical nature”
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James Hillman Re -Visioning psychology
I mean ‘rationazism’. Sorry.
I think it is important to know how people think in “The Age of Reason”.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain :
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The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
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Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
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The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
You are a hero. Thank you for that, Mike. You have noticed many important things about normal people. Like, for example, their advanced and legal psychopathy and anger against psyche.
In other words – monotheistic point of view have buried and also stolen the great meaning of pathology and the right to pathology. This reality is banned in The age of reason, and many people have been killed by The age of reason. Psyche is banned, because of rationasism.
I realized that I must write something, because this article addresses too many of important concerns.
James Hillman about nominalism:
“The main attack upon the nosology and taxonomy of psychic pathology has been directed at the relation between the words used and the events they are supposed signify.These words, strictly speaking are empty nomina such as we saw in the first chapter.The have no intrinsic connection with the conditions, or any underlying reason for them, which the labels so carefully describe”.
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“The technical terms – which are now also often popular insults – stress accurate clinical sketches of symptoms, their onset and course, and their statistically expected outcome.Nothing further about the nature of the person exhibiting the syndrome or about the nature of the syndrome itself is necessary for applying one of the psychopathological labels. Schizophrenic behavior can be precisely described and atrributed to a person independent of whatever might be its results: genetic, semantic, toxic, psychodynamic, biochemical, social, familial…,The empirical nominalistic view calls for nothing more, nothing deeper than MASTERING A TECHNICAL VOCABULARY!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Psyche, refers to Pre-Christian point of view. Psychiatry exists, because monism have destroyed psyche. And monotheism sees psyche as its greatest enemy, because of the naturally pagan/polytheistic nature of the psyche. They are using monotheistic language to describe polytheistic nature of banned psyche. So nothing is right and this is only a false empiricism.
On polytheistic point of view –
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“The many contains the unity of the one without losing the possibilities of the many”.
“When the monotheism of consciousness is no longer able to deny the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems and no longer able to deal with our actual psychic state, then there arises the fantasy of returning to Greek polytheism”.
“The phenomena of dissociation – breaking away,splitting off, personification, multiplication,ambivalence – will always seem as illness to the ego as it has come to defined”
JUNG:
If tendencies towards dissociation were not inherent in the human psyche,fragmentary psychic system would never have bee split off; in other words, neither spirits nor gods would have ever come into existence. That is also the reason why our time has become so utterly godless and profane, we lack all the knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else.
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Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with fanatical denial of existence of fragmentary autonomous systems”
(Apollonian ego hegemony in The Age of Reason)
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I hope that Jung, James Hillman and his “Re -Visioning psychology” will help you understand, what “THEY” have done with the psyche and the language, James.
You are talking about legalizing the pathological identity in monotheistic (theological) state ruled by vulgar materialism. From materialistic, apollonic point of view, pathology is evil, because monotheistic man see only evil in his psychological life or, he cannot see it at all. Because he sees only materialistic needs.
That is why apollonian ego, rational, monotheistic man should never have a power over psyche. It leads only to materialistic psychopathy like – communism, capitalism, psychiatry. All apollonian ego wants, is power and money. For apollonian ego in the center of the psyche is….apollonian ego.
Psychological man needs real human identity, not diagnosis. And that identity was stolen by monotheistic man and by the age of reason. Psyche needs its stolen image. From psychological point of view, psyche is a value. For apollonian materialists psyche is an enemy and BS. Their identity is too empty, convenient and materialistic to see pathology from the proper angle.
Apollonians wants only to have convenient life, they do not need pathology, they cannot see its value and meaning. So we must give a power over psyche, to the real father of psychological life, to Hades. Psyche needs Copernicus not false empiricism. Psyche is not a property of medicine, biology. Materialistic, monotheistic man talks about polytheistic man in monotheistic language which is full of hatred. The 2nd dimension cannot see the value of 3rd dimension. They can see only the shadow.
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We must fight with monotheism. Because we know better what psyche is. We must restore the worth of polytheistic identity. Because monotheistic man won’t do it.
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James Hillman quotes-
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My practice tells me I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Moreover, it tells me that to place neurosis and psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced.
Psychoanalysis has to get out of the consulting room and analyze all kinds of things. You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that “normalcy” is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid.
The word “normal” comes from the Greek norma, which was a carpenter’s square, that right-angled tool for establishing straightness.
Expectations that are only statistical are no longer human.
As long as you’re going to create a castle, the psyche can only come in as an invader.
In my bones, I am afraid of Christian unconsciousness, because, unlike Buddhism, say, or even Judaism, Christianism lives myths deliberately, insisting they are not myths, and this has dreadful paranoid consequences.
Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast.
History is one way of making a gestalt: historical references, figures from the past release the foreground event from being stuck in only what it says it is.
In Freud’s time we felt oppressed in the family, in sexual situations, in our crazy hysterical conversion symptoms, and where we felt oppressed, there was the repressed. Where do we feel that thick kind of oppression today? In institutions–hospitals, universities, businesses; in public buildings, in filling out forms, in traffic…
Psychopathic behavior is a fundamentalist behavior: taking fantasies literally and also confusing the literal and the concrete. Now this is just what the Fundamentalist churches support: if your arm offend thee, cut it off. If your nose offend thee, get it straightened.
The whole world is sick….and you can’t put this right by having a good therapeutic dialogue or finding deeper meanings. It’s not about meaning anymore; it’s about survival.
Do you see the complete harmony between central dictatorship, fascism, political callousness, and the self-centeredness of the spiritual point of view?
A terrorist is the product of our education that says that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, a world that is dead. A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of wiping out the psyche.
There is a secret love hiding in each problem.
Hard to believe, but the hypochondrias are taking care of us, the depressions are slowing us down, obsessions are ways of polishing the image, paranoid suspicions are ways of trying to see through–all these moves of the pathological are ways we are being loved in the peculiar way the psyche works.
When Freud says, “Where Id was, there shall Ego be”–it is also an extraordinarily greedy statement. He wants to get every last stone out of the quarry. But what about the quarry?
The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm’s length because they are so full of love.
Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.
Our gods have become small, save one, and with the exception of a few last conventions of proper names, titles, and places, and the nonsense capitals of corporate abbreviations (nominalism is capitalism, letters as units of exchange), the one magnification persisting as a capital refers to the one person still remaining in a depersonified world: I. Only I and God, one to one, and some say God is dead.
To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real.
When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival.
By means of personifications my sense of person becomes more vivid for I carry with me at all times the protection of my daimones: the images of dead people who mattered to me, of ancestral figures of my stock, cultural and historical persons of renown and people of fable who provide exemplary images–a wealth of guardians. They guard my fate, guide it, probably are it. “Perhaps–who knows,” writes Jung, “these eternal images are what men mean by fate.” We need this help, for who can carry his fate alone?
The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.
There may well be more psychopathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing.
Symptoms, not therapists, led this century to soul.
The healer is the illness and the illness is the healer.
When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behavior, and fantasies are wrong.
Let us see pathologizing as a mode of speech.
If the fundamental principle of psychological life is differentiation, then no single perspective can embrace psychological life, and norms are the delusions that parts prescribe to one another.
Pathologizing forces the soul to a consciousness of itself as different from the ego and its life–a consciousness that obeys its own laws of metaphorical enactment in intimate relation with death.
The alchemists spoke of patience as a first quality of soul and considered soul-making the longest journey, a via longissima. The language is digestion, a vegetable love, depression into still waters.
Literalism prevents psychologizing by making psychology of it.
As truths are the fictions of the rational, so fictions are the truths of the imaginal.
Psychological awareness rises from errors, coincidences, indefiniteness, from the chaos deeper than intelligent control.
Knowledge makes us able to leave it behind, able to take off down the road of pitfalls in full foolishness, risking even greater windmills still further out, an old knight more and more bold, an old rogue more and more peculiar, ageing into the freedom of our pathology.
The horizon of the psyche these days is shrunk to the personal, and the new psychology of humanism fosters the little self-important man at the great sea’s edge, turning to himself to ask how he feels today, filling in his questionnaire, counting his personal inventory. He has abandoned intellect and interpreted his imagination in order to become with his “gut experiences” and “emotional problems”; his soul has become equated with these. His fantasy of redemption has shrunk to “ways of coping”; his stubborn pathology, that via regia to the soul’s depths, is cast forth in Janovian screams like swine before Perls, disclosed in a closed Gestalt of group closeness, or dropped in an abyss of regression during the clamber up to Maslovian peaks.
The psyche moves; but does psychology?
Now we are called defensive or resistant to the therapeutic process where once we might have been blamed for closing ourselves against God’s grace or turning from His will.
If our civilization suffers from hybris, from ego inflation and superbia, psychology has done its part. It has been looking at soul in th ego’s mirror, never seeing psyche, always seeing man. And this man has been monotheistic Reformational man, enemy of images.
Reflection in the mirror of the soul lets one see the madness of one’s spiritual drive, and the importance of this madness.
The spirit turned toward psyche, rather than deserting it for high places and cosmic love, finds ever further possibilities of seeing through the opacities and obfuscations in the valley. Sunlight enters the vale. The Word participates in gossip and chatter.
Cure the symptom and lose the God. Had Jacob not grappled with the Daemon he would indeed have not been hurt, and he would not have been Jacob either.
Economics is our contemporary theology, regardless of how we spend Sunday.
We now call the destruction of old ideas, politely, a “paradigm shift.” “Catastrophe theory” would be more appropriate. The vitality of a culture depends less on its hopes and its history than on its capacity to entertain willingly the divine and daimonic force of ideas.
Two insanely dangerous consequences result from raising efficiency to the level of an independent principle. First, it favors short-term thinking–no looking ahead, down the line; and it produces insensitive feeling–no looking around at the life values being lived so efficiently. Second, means become ends; that is, doing something becomes the full justification of doing regardless of what you do.
Inefficiency becomes a favorite mode of rebellion against the tyranny of efficiency: slowdown, work-to-rule, buck-passing, absenteeism, delayed responses, mislaid documents, unreturned phone calls.
Anyone who justifies decisions by referring to the bottom line has something to learn from Treblinka.
For a candidate for political office to campaign on a platform of efficiency in government suggests the infiltration of fascistic ideals. Mussolini made the trains run on time–but at what cost?
Today we need heroes of descent, not masters of denial, mentors of maturity who can carry sadness, who give love to aging, who show soul without irony or embarrassment.
Instead of adventuring forward to explore and research unknown territory, control fights a rearguard action, keeping inventory of what has already happened. It likes complete reports. Control, for all its self-assured position of command, relies on a defensive vision, and the traits enumerated–enforced loyalty, exactitude, suspicion of the hidden, watchfulness–are paranoid traits.
In any system, whether a corporation, a family or the inner arrangements of the human psyche, a vigorous “no” to the good of the whole may serve the good of the whole and increase its power even more than a complaint “yes.”
Besides policing weapons, we might search for methods of teaching that capture attention and evoke concentration–images, dramas, rituals, rhythms–thereby transferring power back from the weapon to the child’s mind.
The lead horse does not run because it is whipped.
Absolutism is not a ruthless ruler, but a ruthless rule–and this we don’t easily remember, for our minds fix upon the figures of czars and crime lords. These images serve to keep the danger of tyranny projected onto Stalin, Genghis Khan and Al Capone, protecting us from the absolutism that can rule the psyche in the guise of fundamentalism in religion, bottom-lineism in business and progress in the sciences.
Purists are deadly, and so they know all about deadly sins.
Something always has you in mind.
“Well, what can I do about the world? This thing’s bigger than me.” That’s the child archetype talking. “All I can do is go into myself, work on my growth, my development, find good parenting, support groups.” This is a disaster for our political world, for our democracy. Democracy depends on intensely active citizens, not children.
The ideal of growth makes us feel stunted; the ideal family makes us feel crazy.
We’re not allowed in the street. We have to be careful, pretty correct, not extreme or radical, and not mix it up with our clients and patients out in the world. And this slants our thinking toward white, middle-class psychology.
You can move to nirvana, but the Gods find out where you go.
Is there a reality that is not framed or formed? No. Reality is always coming through a pair of glasses, a point of view, a language–a fantasy.
I won’t accept these simple opposites–either individual self in control or a totalitarian, mindless mob. This kind of fantasy keeps us afraid of community. It locks us up inside our separate selves all alone and longing for connection. In fact, the idea of surrendering to the fascist mob is the result of the separated self. It’s the old Apollonian ego, aloof and clear, panicked by the Dionysian flow.
Sometimes, the genius seems to show only in symptoms and disorders, as a kind of preventive medicine, holding you back from a false route.
Picasso said, “I don’t develop; I am.” And the puzzle in therapy is not how did I get this way, but what does my angel want with me?
Let’s call them “troubles.” Can you imagine a blues singer going on about problems?
I challenge psychotherapy’s cool green consulting rooms, the soothing images and framed diplomas, because they are calming and cooling the valuable madness in our society so that psychology has become part of Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare, his phrase for the U.S.A.
Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies–the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding.
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 plebes. Coping simply equals compliance.
Now when therapy decides to cure the pathology, instead of seeing that the pathology is part of the crack or the broken window, and that something is trying to get in, then it seems to me it’s creating more pathology and keeping the Gods even further away. And then they break in through the whole fucking society.
The sexual fascination is the soul trying to get out and get into something other than itself.
If we could recover the imaginal we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy.
The heart in the beast is not your heart only: it is a microcosmic sun, a cosmos of all possible experiences that no one can own.
The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder.
The desert is not in Egypt; it is anywhere once we desert the heart.
Perhaps Konrad Lorenz is wrong, and the counselors wrong too, who seek to find a way beyond aggression. Is it “aggression,” or is it the lion roaring at the enraging desert? Has psychology not missed the native sulphur, neglected Mars who rides a lion, Mars, beloved of Aphrodite, demanding right. Splendor Solis. Sol invictus: Mithra of the heart.
I find today that patients are more sensitive than the worlds they live in.
The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality.
Let us imagine the anima mundi [world soul] neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form.
An analyst sitting in his chair all day long is more aware of the faintest flickers of arousal in the seat of his sexuality than of the massive discomfort in the same seat brought by the chair: its wrongly built back, its heat-retaining fabric, its resistant upholstery and formaldehyde glue. His animal sense has been trained to notice only one set of proprioceptions to the exclusion of the psychic reality of the chair. A cat knows better.
Recognition that the soul is also in the world may awaken us from the psychotherapeutic trance in which we pay a hundred dollars for an hour of subjectivism and no more than $19.95 for a beach chair in whose cold metallic arms and plastic lap reflection actually takes place, day after day.
By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim.
Each person enters the world called.
So long as the statistics of normalizing developmental psychology determine the standards against which the extraordinary complexities of a life are judged, deviations become deviants.
There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books.
Neglect of beauty neglects the Goddess, who then has to steal back into the departments as sexual harassment, into the laboratories as “research” experiments with sex and gender, and into the consulting rooms as seductive assignations.
Psychology has no self-help manual for its own affliction.
As civilization subsides into its own waste deposits, it doesn’t matter whether you are feminine or masculine or any composite of them. We all dissolve together.
To plant a foot firmly on earth–that is the ultimate achievement, and a far later stage of growth than anything begun in your head.
When your child becomes the reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here.
Do you really believe that humans invented the wheel out of their big brains alone, or fire, or baskets, or tools? Stones rolled downhill; bolts of fire shot from the sky and out of the earth; birds wove and probed and pounded, as did apes and elephants. The sciences that master nature were taught by nature how it could be mastered.
To what does the soul turn that has no therapists to visit? It takes its trouble to the trees, to the riverbank, to an animal companion, on an aimless walk through the city streets, a long watch of the night sky. Just stare out the window or boil water for a cup of tea. We breathe, expand, and let go, and something comes in from elsewhere. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased, preferring melancholy to desperation. It’s in touch.
The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much by order as by chaos, but–and this “but” is huge–these accidents may still intend something interesting.
Anyone who rises in a world that worships success should be suspect, for this is an age of psychopathy.
Academic psychology, in its eagerness to be as scientific as physics, has one-sidedly chosen the “outside,” so that the soul no longer finds a place in the only field dedicated by its very name to its study. Hence, depth psychology has been more or less kept out of the academics of official psychology….depth psychology is the stone the builders of the academy have rejected.
The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just “believe” in it.
It is the immature who are preoccupied with the search for maturity. And is it not typical of adolescence to see growth and creativity in protean images of “becoming”?
Loving in safety is the smaller part of loving.
…Psychoanalysis needs more dissidents, more even than Laing and the antipsychiatric movement; it needs its own “terrorists of soul” in the sense of a radical seeing through of its fixed investments in profession–its banks and insurance, its law courts, its palaces of bureaucracy–to return soul to the world.
Adler died right out in the street. What a powerful blessing.
Yes. I have a dream that the future will return a stolen identity to modern slaves, and persecutors will be punished with an eternal stigma of stupidity. Without the proper image of the psyche nothing can be done. I hope Hillman will help people to understand the meaning of the psyche, the stolen meaning and the role of our suffering. I hope one day we will become humans, not biological machines used by the state.I hope so.
School children should learn about the history of psychiatric abuse.
Thank you for this important article.
I think that Your mother was afraid of the Nazis, because they represented apollonian ego fundamentalism. Materialism in its worse version – Nazi fantasy about wiping out the psyche and pathology. Nazis fantasies about destroying the poetic basis of mind…..Apollonian ego imperialism.
We must remember that rationalism is just a one kind of perception, it belong’s to apollonian ego materialism. Apollonian ego can’t even built a proper image of the psychological reality. Apollo (rationalism, science) is not the father of human psyche.Zeus/Hades is. Hades represent psychological reality, and we live in the Apollonian ego era…..In the age of the hegemony of rational mind. Psyche is seen as its worst enemy…
We must see the worth of the psychosis. And rational mind is not able to see it. Psychological mind can. Psychological reality has been destroyed by monism theories (by the age of reason) long time ago. To understand psyche we must go back to romanticism, to the times before Christianity. Because monotheistic man is not able to describe the real nature of the psyche.He is talking about theology an rationalism, all the time.And this is tragedy.
I highly recommend Hillman’s archetypal psychology to everyone. We must have his knowledge about the long history of wiping out the psyche form human reality. Psychological mind in the age of reason is being destroyed.
We were born in the age of destruction of everything which is not rational. Our empty egoic culture has destroyed our psychological roots. Nazis represent apollonian ego, and psyche is in their trash bin. Psychiatry is on the same level of rational hatred.
We are talking about banned identities. We are talking about killing people in the name of rational fundamentalism. We are talking, all the time.
James Hillman “Re-Visioning psychology”.
Heil Psyche!
Hillman was an ideological polytheist. In polytheistic society we do not need psychiatry. Because psychiatry is only a form of control in monotheistic kind of society, in which, religion theology and so called rationalism is in the center of thinking. Apollonian ego and spiritualism have banned psyche. The whole Age of Enlightenment have mocked and condemned psyche.
In psychological hierarchy the real father of human psyche is Hades and Zeus, not Apollo, which means science, brain, ego in the center of the psyche, and we must remember that for apollonians psyche does not exists, because they are materialists and they see only brain and theories of fake illnesses. Hades is their enemy. They and their small rational thinking belongs also to Hades, to psychological reality.
I mean, psyche need Copernicus, not theology in medical disguise. We need to see the hierarchy in psychological reality, because now, we see only materialism or our thinking is highly theological even if we are atheists. Because monotheism do not need religion. Monotheism is a very simple kind of thinking, which we create for our own comfort, not for seeing the psyche.
Apollo,as a style of thinking, is too blind, and too psychopathic to rule the mythical imagination.
In fact, apollonian ego, destroyed the true image of the psyche. Those people are anti psychological fundamentalists and they either reject, or want to rule, the fantasy which is beyond ego control.
It is very hard to imagine how it would be, to accept our own pathology in society beyond monotheistic simple theories and religion that have rejected psyche long time ago. The word normal is used against human pathology, human psyche. Theology is also against psyche. Generally, people see in their pathology only evil and sin. Because hades ( the heart of psyche)was condemned by monotheistic religion. It is a hidden strategy of controlling people.
I called it Anneliese Michel paradox. Because psychiatry rejected psychological hades and sees the devil as a real, only because, devil is real for theology. The rest of mythic imagination is not real for monotheistic people.Psychiatry rejected human psyche, because theology rejected human psyche first.
Theological power or rational power, in medical disguise, have power to reject or regain the human identity. This is hideous crime and sick ideology.
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These are Hillman’s words about psychotherapy-
“Hillman: I’m not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. You don’t attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It’s the same thing with psychotherapy. It makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that’s not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. What I’m trying to say is that, if a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it’s also in the system, the society.
London: You can’t fix the person without fixing the society.
Hillman: I don’t think so. But I don’t think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person. We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, “What’s wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?” We can’t change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently. My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.”
the rest of interview -http://scott.london/interviews/hillman.html
In polytheistic society, it is impossible for psychiatry to survive.Psychiatry would be destroyed by humans for whom their pathology is a value. Now, in spiritual era of egoic psychopats we, as humans, do not even have a roots.
The problem with monotheistic society is that hey have no guts to deal with death and pathology. The want to believe that death does not exists or that death or illness is an enemy and that psyche and pathology is pure evil.
So we have an utopia of health ruled by good god which means everything, and on the other side we have evil psyche and somatic illnesses which belongs to satan and hell.
That is why we do not have a roots. Because we are against our true nature. We are too weak to deal with death and pathology. Society of materialists is a usually a very weak society, in which, power means money. Pathology and illnesses are the main part of life. We have to deal with it. This is real power. To accept death and pathology.And we want to get rid of this part of our nature because of the main need, which is convenient life without so called “problems”. Which are not even a problems to be solved.
This is Sparta.
No. This is psyche.
That is why monotheistic world will be destroyed. Because monotheism have destroyed humanity, first. Human psyche is not evil.Illness is not evil. They are necessities. We do not need health fundamentalism in the place of the truth.
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We do not need psychiatrists, we need courageous thinking and courageous people.
We do not need lame psychiatry in the lame monotheistic society. We need psyche in psychological society.
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We do not need the lame egoic pseudo scientific search for a victims of the psyche.
We do not need this.
Psychiatry is a rotten fruit of monotheistic hatred for psyche. For monotheistic culture of egoic or spiritual psychopaths,human psyche is evil or satan.
Monotheistic medicine/science is theological hatred in medical disguise. Theology, church and monotheistic culture of saint haters is against psyche.
James Hillman “Re -Visioning psychology”
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Monotheistic and dumb science means nothing compared to human psyche.
Rationalism? Forget about it.
It is pure religious hatred in medical disguise.
We use scientific language only to prove our own convenient thinking.Psyche has got nothing to do with -logy, science and scientific language. Our monotheistic dumb mind needs science. Psyche does not need science. Psyche, pathology is not a problem to solve.
Psyche, pathology, depression and schizophrenia needs a proper meaning not solutions.
Science.This type of simplification is unacceptable when it comes to describing the psyche.
PSYCHE IS NOT A PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED.
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“FINAL SOLUTION”. WE DO NOT NEED IT, BECAUSE WE ARE NOT NAZIS.
Monotheistic medicine/science is theology in medical disguise. And theology is against psyche.
Forget about family and biology. Let’s talk about psyche. Descartes era of biological scientific fanaticism will leave us with nothing else than rotten tissue.
We all are fooled. Science is just a wealthy garbage of the rich.
“Soul code” should be obligatory in school.
I have read something different –
“Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.”
James Hillman “Soul Code”
Plomin should have read Hillman’s books. But he is a scientist, and scientists know nothing about psyche.
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Without archetypal psychology scientist will remain small anti human butchers. Apollonian ego arrogance will destroy humanity.
Pathology and psyche is something great, but not in monotheistic eyes. They are so small, almost like coins.
They (the specialists) are talking about mental health fundamentalism all the time.People in hospitals (monotheistic prisons for polytheistic psyche) are those beyond naive mental health assumptions (Desecrates mind+ theology).
What about them? Why they do not have a right to their own identity?
Where are people who understand the great meaning, or language, of psychosis, depression ? Where are those who were suppossed to support human pathology? Because we have enough of Desecrates rationalism and christian theology in the place of PSYCHOlogy. They are anti psychological terrorists. Monotheism is the the greatest enemy of the psyche, because monotheistic psychiatry is a theological hatred against psyche.
Psychiatry sees only sins and shame in psychological reality.
Mental illness exists only for limited monotheistic mind. For polytheistic mind, pathology does not exists, because for polytheistic mind psyche is not a problem to solve.
What scares me the most, is the fact, that people who work in mental hospitals as murderers of children, have also their own.
They are talking about human psyche in medical manner, all the time. This is a disaster.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain.
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The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. If environment means literally what’s around, it must also mean whatever is around. This because the unconscious psyche selects quite arbitrarily among the stuff encountered every day in the environment. Tiny and trivial bits of information may have huge subliminal psychic effects, as the days’ residues in dreams show. We do dream of the damnedest things! Much of each day is never noticed or recalled, but the psyche picks up the environmental flotsam and delivers it to the dream. The dream–a processing plant recycling the environment, finding soul values in junk. The dream–an artist, appropriating images from the environment for recollection in tranquility.
Because we walk about in fields of psychic realities that influences our lives, we have to broaden the notion of environment in terms of “deep ecology,” the hypothesis that the planet is a living, breathing, and self-regulating organism. Since anything around can nourish our souls by feeding imagination, there is soul stuff out there. So why not admit, as does deep ecology, that the environment itself is ensouled, animated, inextricably meshed with us and not fundamentally separate from us?
The ecological vision restores to environment also the classical idea of providentia–that the world provides for us, looks out for us, even looks after us. It wants us around, too. Predators, tornadoes, and blackflies in June are only pieces of the picture. Just think of all that’s delicious and sweet-smelling. Do birds sing but for each other? This breathable, edible, and pleasant planet, invisibly serviced and maintained, keeps us all by means of its life-support system. Such would be an idea of nurture that is truly nurturing.
“Environment,” then, would be imagined well beyond social and economic conditions, beyond the entire cultural setting, to include every item that takes care of us every day: our tires and coffee cups and door handles and the book you are holding in your hands. It becomes impossible to exclude this bit of environment as irrelevant in favor of that bit as significant, as if we could rank world phenomena in order of importance. Important for whom? Our understanding of importance itself has to change; instead of “important to me,” think of “important to other aspects of the environment.” Does this item nurture what else is around, not merely us who are around? Does it contribute to the intentions of the field of which we are only one short-lived part?
As notions of environment shift, we notice environment differently. It becomes more and more difficult to make a cut between psyche and world, subject and object, in here and out there. I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets, as I am in “music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/While the music lasts” (T.S. Eliot). Where does the environment stop and I begin, and can I begin at all without being in some place, deeply involved in, nurtured by the nature of the world?
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Mental health is just a one point on the psychological map. If we want to forget about the important role of the rest of the psyche (pathology), we create apollonian ego (mental health) fundamentalism or maybe some kind of spiritual naive utopia ruled by theology. Because we also confuse theology with psychology.
Without the real image of the psyche,we will have only pseudo scientific BS.
We are not able to see the importance and the mechanism of human body or anything else, if we are talking about one finger all the time. This is psychiatry +theological hatred.Because this finger belongs to …satan.
Without phenomenology of the psyche, we will have theological condemnation (psychiatry) and materialistic (apollonian ego fixation) hatred. We do not deserve it. People deserve to have more important role than being a religious or psychiatric slaves. Psychiatry is materialism. Psychiatric nominalism is capitalism.
And Hillman writes about it, no one else ever did it. And we should be thankful for people like Hillman.
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Because James Hillman has taught us how to think, not what to think.
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Monotheistic culture have taught us how to condemn and hate each other.
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Without real image of the psyche we will remain blind. We will remain abandoned, like children in the fog.
Psyche is not a science, it is phenomenology. And we must notice the important role of pathology.This is the first step to homo psychologicus era. The important role of psychological pathology.
And this is the antichrist. We are.People with psychological awarness. Church does not like psyche very much. XD
O, and that “growth” model everywhere, we are not cabbage or mushrooms. Cancer is also a mode of growth.
“Eventually, the young man’s downward spiral resulted in him dousing himself with gasoline and lighting himself on fire, resulting in severe burns over 90% of his body. He lingered near death for six months in a hospital ward before he eventually died.”
Maybe god will forgive you.
We are ought to kill toxic psychiatry by reading James Hillman. His books are obligatory to everyone who want to defend psyche. Because he created the real image of the psyche.
Inquisitional killers. She was scared of the voices, so they told her that it was her fault, as always. And then she was tortured by drugs. Thank you, apollonian ego arrogants, bastards without humility toward psychological reality, which was banned by materialistic and blind psychiatry, without soul. You f. materialists. Are you happy, now? Are you satisfied enough,now?
Is she normal enough, for you, now?
James Hillman “Re -visioning psychology”.
Heil psyche.
Read “Suicide and the soul”. Without this book, you are placing death in the psychiatric hands. Our small ego does not control death or the whole of psychological reality.
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Death is not the property of your ego . Death is not the property of medicine. Death is not the property of theologians
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Death belongs to psychological reality. Death belongs to psychological reality which is beyond the control of small ego.
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We are not the owners of the psyche. Death does not need pity. Death and psyche need to be respected.
And spiritualists maniacs and materialistic maniacs has gone too far.
Psyche is the ruler here, not stupid psychiatric judges without brain.
Yes, it is religion. We live in society which learn about their psychology form people who hate it, form theologians in scientific disguise.
That is why I write here about James Hillman books. They are extremely important. Because psyche is not a psychiatric or scientific slave. Psyche is the owner of every kind of perception, of our little ego. Monotheistic religion belongs to monotheistic god. Psyche has nothing in common with monotheistic religion.But people sometimes confuse apollonian ego with Christian spirit.
Apollonian ego (rationalism, shallowness, unity) is also not a ruler of the psychological reality. Hades is. And Hades was condemned by christianity. Politheistic nature of our psyche was condemned by religious people. By spiritual fundamentalists.
We are talking about metaphors.
Our science is based on spiritual assumptions. Because spirit is shallow and easy. Psyche is complex, sometimes ruthless and demanding.We do not need psychiatrists and their fixation on spirituality or on apollonian ego hegemony. We need wisdom and courage.
I see mentally ill people as psychological titans, and what they are doing is psychological work. Apollonian ego perception is just too stupid and too simple to be a ruler of the psyche. We are talking about psychological reality, death. For monotheistic people, psyche is the main enemy, evil or hell.
And this is a disaster.
James Hillman “Re -Visioning psychology” and “Suicide and the soul”.
They want to control everything and they do not need wisdom to do it. All they need is power. Psychiatry is fearsome.
Psychiatric perception does not see any signs of beauty in psyche.So psychological awareness today is also ugly, because it is created by ugly eye of monotheistic man.And that man is a enemy of beauty, imagination and so on.
Radical psyche. Ego belongs to psyche, ego is not the owner or ruler of the psychological reality.
James Hillman “Re- Visioning psychology”.
We should talk abouts psyche in psychological language. Science is for scientists. Psychology is for psyche.
Monotheistic thinking is a danger for polytheistic psyche.
We are using pseudo scientific language to confirm the theological assumptions about psyche. This is a tragedy. Thanks for this article.
Biological thinking about psyche means nothing without seeing the individual image of psychological reality. Without seeing the individual patterns of thinking, individual psychological reality, biological theories are only a way of destruction, a way of control or a way of dehumanization.
James Hillman “Re- Visioning psychology”.
Great article about poetic imagination.
You are open-minded person with poetic consciousness, so I am obligated to recommend you James Hillman, “Re -Visioning psychology”.
I believe in psyche, not in drugs or psychiatry. Without the proper image of the psyche, people will think that psyche is some kind of brain illness. For monotheistic psychiatry, drugs are used, as a crucifix for a satan. The believe that psyche is some kind of demonic power. Psychiatry is Van Helsing and your psyche is a monster for them.
The problem is that psychiatry believes in drugs and mental health (apollonian ego fundamentalism). PSYCHiatry without psyche is a sin against humanity. Psychopathology is an enemy for their theological or rational believes. And psyche is not something which can be measured by science/ empiricism or theology. We should create the proper image of the psyche.
James Hillman ,”Re-Visioning psychology”
Mental health is just one of many kinds of perception.
We live in the monotheistic reality of one god and spiritualism, but psyche/soul is something which belongs to polytheistic reality. Psyche is a slave of monotheistic fundamentalists. Psyche has got no real image. So how can we have a voice? We don’t have a liberty, because we do not have a right to psychology beyond apollonian ego. Pathology, psychological pathology is an enemy of theological mind. Psyche is now a Satan. Psyche will be an antichrist. For psychiatry, the psyche is Satan. I know it is hard to believe, but even our science our philosophy, our psychology belongs to monotheistic god.
James Hillman “Re -Visioning psychology”.
We must be aware of the differences between theological and psychological mind. Spiritualism,materialism/brain is not a psychology.
Psychology is not a science, it is a form of polytheistic awareness. And our thinking is monotheistic, governed by theology. Psychiatry is a monotheistic fundamentalism, for which, polytheistic psyche is the enemy. Psychiatry is a religious hatred with scientific pretensions. We must know about facts that are hidden.
“awareness of injustice turned into a self-improvement project”. It is worth to remember this thought.
Suicide is not a choice, it is a psychological necessity.
“Death then is the cure and the salvation and not
just a last, worst stage of a disease. The cock-crow at dawn
also heralds resurrection of the light. But the victory over
disease and the new day begins only when the ambition
for it has been abandoned upon the altar. The disease
which ttte experience of death cures is the rage to live.
This disease is phrased best in the medical-statistical
term ‘life-expectancy’. Hoping, ‘expecting with desire’,
is justified statistically; one has the right to a certain
quantity of life. This hope tends to entangle physician
and patient in hoping for the wrong thing. They hope for
more of the life that is already known, that is, for the past.
Hope of this kind is hardly for salvation or even for new
beginnings. It is regressive because it prevents the challenge of death. It is egotistic because it asks for more of what one was. This is hardly the hope Paul describes
which is not seen and where ‘getting better’ would mean a
quality of being, not an approach to the normal. One is
led to believe that the desire to be free from illness means
in truth to return to what one was before the illness, to the
status quo ante. When the physician joins the patient in
hoping to restore or return him to health with a speedy recovery, they move against the flow of time, the process of ageing, and the reality of death. Their joint hope denies
the morbidity of all life. ”
Apollonian ego fundamentalism is the main sickness. Rationalism and theology/religion in medical disguise. Where is psychology? We need the real image of the psyche. Because we do not even know about what we are talking about.
We need “Re-Visioning psychology”,psyche is a mythic imagination. We need Jung and Hillman not false empiricism and biological model of psyche. Psychiatry is psychopathy.We do not control psyche.Our small ego participate in it. We are imagined by things we do not control, that is why we need phenomenology of the psyche, not science. We need to learn to accept psychological truths, and now all we have is theology (rationalism materialism) which condemned the real human psyche. And apollonian ego thinks that psyche is a mental illness, not psychological truth.
Psyche is a mythic imagination, not science/ false empiricism. That imagination is not a property of our small arrogant ego or science.
Psyche is a mythic imagination.Psychiatric imagination is apollonian ego fundamentalism (rationalism, theology) and psychiatry without psyche is a form of stubborn stupidity. We can’t have psychology on the left, and psychiatry without psychology on the right side.
We do not have psychology. We have egology. We think that psychological reality belongs to small apollonian ego.
We are wrong.
“The author did not say that LGBT+ and queer people are in conflict with psychiatric survivors.’
I wrote about this, they removed my post.
I recommend James Hillman “Re -Visioning psychology” to everyone, especially to victims of psychiatry, because they deserved to know the truth about psychology. We should understand what truths they robbed us of.
That’s a good point.
Removed for moderation
Well. Society which collaborates with psychiatry is useless form of egoic nation. No future, no past. Just technology money and nothing more. Where economy is the main power, psychiatry is a king and human being means nothing. Ivan Illich, Szasz writes about the sad fact that there is no escape from society, from ruthless norms, only through suicide.
So when , economy is enough for you, and you are a great member of apollonic tribe. World is yours. And you have psychiatry to kill your enemies. A great institution for killing real people.
For me, normal people are privileged people and they are those who never fight against biological psychiatry to defend others, because they are actually using psychiatry against the others…. They do not want to read Szasz, Hillman or listen to victims of the psychiatry. So.
They have already chosen their side.
I do not think that victims of the psychiatric dehumanization would like to socialize with their almost killers.They are like Frodo. They have enough, they are tired. So f. tired.
I was not aware that all we know about psyche is wrong, I have never believed in psychiatric diagnosis, either. And I was shocked. His books has changed my life forever. We all should be loyal to psyche, and we should fight for soul.
Hillman was not a victim of psychiatry ,but he was not also an escapist. He was a phenomenologist. Yes, I do agree he was not a fighter, however he had troubles with publishing his books.
His “Suicide and the soul” and “Re-visioning psychology, are the foundations of human psychology. Without these books, we remain blind to psyche, because our thinking about psychology is totally theological. We are not aware of that fact. I was not either.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain.
From The Soul’s Code by James Hillman, p. 150-154:
The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
James Hillman is the only one man alive who knows what lies beyond an empty psychiatric nominalism/jargon.
Read his revision of psychology, so you will know. It is worth to know the real meaning of depression, psychosis, all the psyche. The psychological, phenomenological meaning. We just do not know about this, because that knowledge is hidden. Psyche has been stolen form us.
It is all about the language that we are using. The better language we have, the better we are.
“Depression is still the Great Enemy. More personal energy is expended in manic defenses against, diversions from, and denials of it than goes into other supposed psychopathological threats to society: psychopathic criminality, schizoid breakdown, addictions. As long as we are caught in cycles of hoping against despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology.
Yet through depression we enter depths and in depth find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering through it till it turns, nor theologizing it — but discovering the consciousness and depths it wants. So begins the revolution on behalf of soul.”
Psychiatric jargon is useless and it is a weapon against psychology. DSM is just a form of demonization or condemntaion of the psychological reality.
I recommend Hillman’s thought to everyone here. I write his best quotes. Hillman was amazing, psyche is also great, but we do not know about it, because of psychiatric jargon. Psychiatry is so empty….
Thank You. Yes, Hillman was and still is one of the greatest thinker ever. He is the true voice of the psychological reality.
James Hillman on “biological psyche”-
“Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. If environment means literally what’s around, it must also mean whatever is around. This because the unconscious psyche selects quite arbitrarily among the stuff encountered every day in the environment. Tiny and trivial bits of information may have huge subliminal psychic effects, as the days’ residues in dreams show. We do dream of the damnedest things! Much of each day is never noticed or recalled, but the psyche picks up the environmental flotsam and delivers it to the dream. The dream–a processing plant recycling the environment, finding soul values in junk. The dream–an artist, appropriating images from the environment for recollection in tranquility.”
James Hillman
Psychiatry is a lethal theological power over psyche.
James Hillman, “Re- Visioning psychology”
Thomasz Szasz “Manufacture of madness”
Academic psychology, in its eagerness to be as scientific as physics, has one-sidedly chosen the “outside,” so that the soul no longer finds a place in the only field dedicated by its very name to its study. Hence, depth psychology has been more or less kept out of the academics of official psychology….depth psychology is the stone the builders of the academy have rejected.
There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books.
Now when therapy decides to cure the pathology, instead of seeing that the pathology is part of the crack or the broken window, and that something is trying to get in, then it seems to me it’s creating more pathology and keeping the Gods even further away. And then they break in through the whole fucking society.
So long as the statistics of normalizing developmental psychology determine the standards against which the extraordinary complexities of a life are judged, deviations become deviants.
Instead of adventuring forward to explore and research unknown territory, control fights a rearguard action, keeping inventory of what has already happened. It likes complete reports. Control, for all its self-assured position of command, relies on a defensive vision, and the traits enumerated–enforced loyalty, exactitude, suspicion of the hidden, watchfulness–are paranoid traits.
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James Hillman
I totally agree.
Without Hillman’s phenomenology, Szaszz critique means nothing. Szasz did not write about the nature of psyche. Szasz was a nihilist and Laing was a transcendentalist. Hillman created the proper image of the psychological reality and he is the only one who did it.
This is not psychiatry, this is apollonian ego fundamentalism. They do not even understand what psyche is.
James Hillman “Re-visioning psychology”
Thomas Szasz “Manufacture of madness”
Madness, mental health, mental illness, genius, talent. Those words are weapons in the mouth of apollonian idiot for whom ego in apollonian archetype and theology of the brain is in the center of the psychological world. They are using empty words without proper meaning in completely false context.
How can it be that someone like Plath was tortured by someone like psychiatrist?
Very high language was always attacked by psychiatric jargon and poets were attacked by apollonian fundamnetalists.
Psychiatric jargon is a cancer of the real human language. And only Hillman knew it.
Why psychiatry is attacking poets? Because psychiatry means apollonian ego fundamnetalism, and poets represent psyche, psychopathology. That is why.
BECAUSE POETS REPRESENT THE REALITY OF DEATH IN FAKE THEOLOGICAL NAIVE SOCIETY IN WHICH DEATH IS A SIN AGAINST GOD. And death is still a dangerous satan for theological psychiatry.
If you represent real human psyche in society of naive spiritual fundamentalists they will kill you in the name of health (theological naivety).
To recover means to resurrect. And resurrection is a spiritual claim.
And only James Hillman noticed it.
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Poets and their high language represent psyche, death, and psychiatric jargon represent impaired reality of apollonian fundamentalists, for whom death and psyche does not exists.
You must have extremely strong balls to lose with the state like victims of the psychiatry. Because there are no winners anyway, there are only obedient slaves who thinks they win.
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“In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.”
James Hillman
I’m in favor of destruction, aggression, hating things. Not bearing things anymore. We think the breakdown comes because our life is in bad shape. But maybe the ideas cause the disorder. Something tries to break through and causes the disorder.”
James Hillman
“Do you see the complete harmony between central dictatorship, fascism, political callousness, and the self-centeredness of the spiritual point of view?”
“The word “normal” comes from the Greek norma, which was a carpenter’s square, that right-angled tool for establishing straightness.”
“Psychoanalysis has to get out of the consulting room and analyze all kinds of things. You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that “normalcy” is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid.”
“My practice tells me I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Moreover, it tells me that to place neurosis and psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced.”
“Small, crafty, cowering, timorous little beast,
Oh, what a panic is in your breast!”
James Hillman “Re- Visioning psychology”.
What strikes me, is that he was so famous, and no one even have noticed that he was almost destroyed by psychiatry. Hemingway Plath and many others were also tortured by psychiatry. But for people who do not give shit about that fact, they were just poor bad luck people who apparently deserved it. Because of their “mental illness”.
I can’t stand the things that pro psychiatric people are thinking about human psyche. They are like psychopaths. And people who are aware of how dangerous psychiatry is, are so alone.
So brave and so alone. Because the truth does not have many friends.
The main goal of psychiatry was to build the proper image of the psyche, not to get rid of the psyche. Drugs were to help in dealing with psychosis, not to destroy the essence of psychosis.
Psychiatry is the biggest enemy of the psyche. They hate everything that is not material and does not involve making money. Because it is a calculating soulless child of lies and mammon. Psychiatry have destroyed the essence of the psyche.
They are not intrested in the reality of the psyche, they can’t see the need or psychological value of psychosis or depression. For them psyche is just pure evil. They just want to destroy it in the name of theological or materialistic negation.Sometimes when I think about differences between psyche and the coarse reality of apollonic/spiritual negation I wonder when this all will collapse. Because they have gone too far with destroying the proper image of psychological reality.
Why, you, authoritarians,hate psyche so much? Because of fear? Or because non material reality is still satan for you?
Thank You for this important article. Hemingway, Plath, especially poets, were terrorized by psychiatric monotheism. Because monotheistic anti human scientism have killed metaphor first. Nazis party and their anti human utopian ideology is the source of the greatest evil today.
The roots of psychiatric slavery = psychological monotheism. Monotheism is a form of a very destructive and limited thinking.
“This idealized unity requires for its earthly realization, an ideal man, the Hero, who can receive the (divine) commands and overcome in his own person and at large, the obstacles that stand in the way. These obstacles must also have a mythic dimension. Whether the story is retold in an Islamic, Christian, Jewish or Hindu setting, some dragon of dangerous strength must have its head chopped off, traitors everywhere must be sought out and eliminated since, ‘you are either with us, or against us’. The Marxists, therefore, require(d) the Capitalists, the Western Powers their Communist threat and more recently, Muslims, who in turn, require the Great Satan and their own heretics. In sum, the heroic requires problems and, by implication, Final Solutions.
Similarly, psychological monotheism tends to regard difference and diversity as irreconcilable opposites and reduces all psychological life to moral issues. Particularly in the light of the impossible-to-resolve ‘Problem of Evil’ in Christianism, this kind of moral reductionism and its fusion with the heroic archetype, provides the justification for all types of action and violence against whatever seems ‘outside,’ a prescribed idea of ‘unity’. Thus, Jung’s view of the West’s ‘monotheism of consciousness’ is directly related to the internalizing of a particular type of Christianity. As both he and Hillman reiterate, it does not matter if one is a Christian or not, ‘believer’ or atheist. Rather, it is a particularly narrow psychological attitude towards self, others, religion, knowledge, in short, life itself.
James Hillman “Re -Visioning psychology”
Thomas Szasz – “Manufacture of madness”
Everything should be clear after reading these books.
Psychopathology is a metaphor, the form of the highest psychological art. And authoritarians and their small brains are destroying people in the name of their lame materialistic and convenient fantasy about mental health – apollonian – hegemony.
The problem is the limited monotheistic psychology, not the human psyche.
Human Psyche should have authority, but psyche is illegal. Because we have illusions of spirituality in the place of psychology. That is why we should all read James Hillman. Because he have noticed it.
Without psychopathology life would be an illusion. Without illnesses, our health means nothing.
Yes, but authoritarian mind, apollonian mind is too stupid to use empathy or phenomenology, they want to use scientific BS for money and for expand apollonian ego over the rest of the psyche. Psychology never was, and never will be a science. And scientific approach to psyche is like scientific attitude to love. It is useless, it is non human. Biology depend on individual psyche, on the level. And we could see what is happening when ego lose contact with apollonian, rational easy level – for example Anneliese Michel. For psychiatry satan is real, but human psyche means nothing. And that are inquisitional roots.
And when we are using drugs or whatever to help ourselves, we must stay true to psychological truths behind our medication. We are using drugs, because depression is a real psychological hardship, not because we think it is a medical illness, or, because we want to condemn depression, because of theological negation and so on.
Psychiatry do not want to stay true to psyche, to depression or to suferring. The want to eradicate these states, because of theological spiritual illusions. Psychiatry is to undermine credibility of the human psyche, because of monotheistic claims.
THEY WANT TO “CURE” DEPRESSION, BECAUSE THEY HATE IT. AND BECAUSE OF THEOLOGICAL NEGATION.
PSYCHE IS SATAN FOR CHRISTIANS.
The language is the key. Psychiatric jargon is a dead language. Hillman’s language is alive.
“The insistence on psychological singularity is a kind of implicit ideology, supplying images and appropriate feelings about them, creating a fantasy of what it means to be ‘a people’. And this major archetype, of an essentially one dimensional ‘god’ brings with it its compatible and fellow archetypes. For instance, One Lord is accompanied by One faith (orthodoxy/modernism), One Law (shariah/WTO), One State (dar-ul-Islam/globalization), served by One body of the faithful (ummah/consumers). A beautiful evocation of the ideal totalitarian (and paranoid) society.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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“This idealized unity requires for its earthly realization, an ideal man, the Hero, who can receive the (divine) commands and overcome in his own person and at large, the obstacles that stand in the way. These obstacles must also have a mythic dimension. Whether the story is retold in an Islamic, Christian, Jewish or Hindu setting, some dragon of dangerous strength must have its head chopped off, traitors everywhere must be sought out and eliminated since, ‘you are either with us, or against us’. ”
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“I equate Christianism with moralistic fundamentalism … you have to face this level of Christianism because that is where its world conquering force lies. It’s not Christian love that’s conquered the world … not its sophisticated interpretations and theology. It’s successful because it mobilizes the will, and the will needs fundamentalism or it does not know what to do …[it is] utterly monotheistic … there is only one meaning, one reading of the text, for instance, the one meaning of Christ’s suffering.[2]”
James Hillman
“Similarly, psychological monotheism tends to regard difference and diversity as irreconcilable opposites and reduces all psychological life to moral issues. Particularly in the light of the impossible-to-resolve ‘Problem of Evil’ in Christianism, this kind of moral reductionism and its fusion with the heroic archetype, provides the justification for all types of action and violence against whatever seems ‘outside,’ a prescribed idea of ‘unity’. Thus, Jung’s view of the West’s ‘monotheism of consciousness’ is directly related to the internalizing of a particular type of Christianity. As both he and Hillman reiterate, it does not matter if one is a Christian or not, ‘believer’ or atheist. Rather, it is a particularly narrow psychological attitude towards self, others, religion, knowledge, in short, life itself.”
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“In contrast to the reality of a ‘polytheistic’ psyche, psychological monotheism refers to a literal attitude towards psychological, that is, symbolic events, in which, through a self-reflexive moral reductionism, one vision overwhelms all others, swallowing them in an attempt to extend itself and create ‘unity’. The tendency towards literalization and moral reductionism is peculiar to Christianism…”
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The lens of the psyche.
The lens of the polytheistic imagination.
Psyche is too complex, this is not spirit religion or Jungian theological fantasy about union. Psyche was destroyed by religion and materialism, by ideology of monotheism. Psychiatry uses pseudo science against psyche, to prove theological beliefs in medical disguise. We don’t have human psychology, we have religion and spirituality or economy and politics in the place of real psychology. Psyche needs Copernicus not medicine.
James Hillman. “Re – Visioning psychology”.
Biostitues = psychiatry. Biostitution.
No one represent psyche, only those called insane and this is sad. One of the greatest defender of psyche was James Hillman, and he also was rejected like those called mentally ill. He was one of them. We are rejected by stupid people, we should be proud.
Thank you for your wisdom, Mr. Hickey. You are a great thinker too, but they will reject you. They will reject you the same way, Tesla or Hillman were rejected by money makers.
Anti psychiatry is for wise people, not for convenient common minds.
Psychological polytheism is not a religion. It is a metaphorical description of our psychological reality.
Monotheism is religion and fixation also. Psychiatry is a form of monotheistic fundamentalism with pretensions to science, however roots of psychiatry are strictly theological. Psychiatry is a weapon of god against human psyche, which was confused with hell or satan and evil. Which is disaster for psychological man.
Ideological monotheism destroyed polytheistic psyche and sent psychological man to hell. (psychiatry symbolize that hell and condemnation)
Yes it is. Schizophrenia is a right for those who are privileged enough to destroy you. Schizophrenia should be a neutral description of the condition. Only a place on a psychological map. The problem is that language and the real image of the psychological reality does not exists. It was destroyed by spiritualists and materialists. The confuse religion or brain theories with psychological reality.
When ego is on apollonian shallow level of the psyche you are mentally health. You are convinced that control over psyche belongs to you, this is only illusion,… very practical illusion, indeed. When ego goes deeper into strict psychological reality, psyche takes over the control over ego, and then they will blame your brain for that, because it is seen as illegal… There supposed to be Hades, there. But, like I said, that reality does not exists, because Jesus “saves us from it” and christians have called it hell, and then people confused psyche with evil..
Thanks to Jesus and his spiritual utopia, schizophrenics now are living in closed illegal and sealed coffin.
Religion banned psychological polytheism and so on. Psyche and gods has nothing to do with religion or prayers, they were only symbols of non material reality. Hades/Zeus is the father of the psyche. But now we have apollonian hegemony of rationalism or rather rationazism, fixation of control, scientific BS, brain theories of mental illness.
The ship with apollo in control will sink, it is only question of time. Psychological forces are supplanted and stuffed in a small, tight prison box. They will explode and probably California will sink. Europe will sink in the ocean or something. Because of APA, because of apollonian ego fundamentalism.
I am pro panthers of any kind. Great site. Normal people should learn to think, because psychiatry is an evidence that normal people left thinking to those called mentally ill. Apollonian ego curse. James Hillman was a great thinker, he was trying to teach people how to think, not what to think about depression and so on.
We should focus on phenomenology of things rather than searching for fake solutions, because of false empiricism.We need truth and courage not cowardice or childish theological demonization of death, suicide, suffering. We need bravery and maturity not fake solutions from cowards.
Yes. You should watch the movie titled – “Glass”.
It shows the way in which monotheistic psychiatry destroys the truth about the polytheistic psyche.
Yes I am ironic. Wisdom means nothing today. Mental health is not equall to wisdom, psychiatry has nothing in common with wisdom. Because people are not interested in wisdom. They want power and money. That is why empaths or psychological men are losing with them. They are losing because they means more than matter. Generally speaking, this is main reason why psychological man is terrorized. He means more than people who believe in easy things. Because when you are easy or simple it means also you can survive, because you are enough blind to do it. Survival is so plain that only simple people can do it. Psychological man can’t. because he collides with the reality of death. And then he realizes that apollonians and normal are antipsychological idiots and they want to lock you up, because you are destroying their utopia.
Yes, that is why he is so famous now….
“Pathological bias”, chapter IX from Suicide and the soul. The greatest book about psyche ever. Yes, Hillman was great. “Re -Visioning psychology” should be compulsory lecture for people today. They lost their way.
Manufacture of madness written by Szasz is also a monolith. Psyche is like monolith among angry monkeys.
“The end of clinical treatment is cure. The process comes to a fruit and all medical measures are stages towards this fulfillment. Consciousness, however, as far as we can read the evidence, comes to no definite goal, no final fruition, but is is a continuous in-going process.
An analysts who has a notion of cure as a goal of his work is thinking medically. He has not grasped the nature of the complex, the basis of analythical process. There are no antidotes for complexes. The cannot be cured away because complexes are not causes, though they be the determinants of psychic life. A medical model tends to conceive them like a wounds or traumata. or as malignants growths and foreign bodies to be removed in the medical manner.
But if complexes are energetic centers, the cannot be “cured” without damaging the vitality of the patient.
Health requires death.
If lay means unprofessional, then lay means open.
IF THE PATIENT IS THE DISEASE, GETTING RID MEANS A DESTRUCTIVE REJECTION OF THE PATIENT.”
Marxists/monotheistic materialists -monism. A connection of religion and science, without psyche. They stole the soul.
“My war – and I have yet to win a decisive battle – is with the modes of thought and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).”
― James Hillman
“Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who’ve been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.”
― James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World’s Getting Worse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyyZHnpXp5g
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James Hillman “Re-visioning psychology”.
Psyche is not a model, it is a forgotten perspective. Polytheistic reality is not a box, it is a map stolen by monotheistic culture. We must have a psychological map to talk about where is ego. There is a difference between simple rational archetypes and the psychological reality. For psyche, for polytheistic reality, psychosis is a proper language. And rationalism or fixation over ego control is a fallacy.
The problem is that, for monotheism, psyche perspective does not exist. That is why it is so important to write about James Hillman. His perspective, polytheistic one, is a proper perspective. We can’t talk about psyche without psyche. Theology, religion, spirituality, materialism, science and nature are not the psyche. Without psyche, each of these perspective is an anti psychological fundamentalism. It is so important to read about archetypal psychology. Psyche is psyche, the word belongs to pagan mythology, itself. Not to religion, medicine or materialism.
“As the ego does not represent the whole psyche, so the Western mind cannot speak for the whole world.”
― James Hillman, Philosophical Intimations
The problem with today thinking is that people can’t imagine talking about identity/psyche or illness, without using medical empiricism.
Medicine is not the owner of the psyche or even illness or pathology.
Depression, psychosis even headaches does not belong to medicine. This is psyche, psyche creates pathology, and psyche is not medical empiricism. Monotheistic science talks about psyche and illnesses, using medical language, and we should remember that this is a medical usurpation. The proper language of psyche/pathology was destroyed by science and its pretensions to mythical reality and also to the psychological reality of illness. Psyche was destroyed by science.Imagination was destroyed by science, the psychological meaning of illness was destroyed by materialism. Mythical reality is not science. Psyche is not medical empiricism or materialism, and never will be.
Psychological meaning of illness does not belong to medical empiricism. Every kind of pathology is an identity trait, at first. Not medicine. The nature of every illness is psychological , not medical.
We are being treated by medical empiricism like a soulless meat. We are being treated that way, because we live in barbaric reality of materialistic fascism.
People think that this is progress, to talk about psyche using medical empiricism. No, this is f. tragedy.
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James Hillman “Re-visioning psychology.”
They need courage and understanding of those beyond the suicide topic, not pity . James Hillman was the only one who wrote book about the proper attitude toward suicide, suicidal people. Believing in the power of death over ego, that’s all.
This culture should stop imposing ego heroism on suicidal people, because this is naive. In monotheistic culture there is no courage toward death…Because god saved us from death, and death just don’t exist. So there’s no death, no topic. And suicidal people are invisible enemies, so they are silenced and destroyed, as excluded by culture, pariahs.
Psychiatry protects status quo of naive normalcy and their theological assumptions, so they are privileged. People beyond normalcy are invisible, because their wound is incurable, so the are seen as weak. In ego heroism culture we have the right….to win all the time, with everything. But collective ego is no longer able to win with death.
This empty culture do not even have idea what psyche is, because psyche was wiped out by monotheistic religious roots. People are not even aware that they were robbed. This is tragedy. But not for those with power over unprivileged people. They will tell you to shut up and then they show you the nearest door.
What is psychiatry? This is a institution for illegal people excluded by culture, without the right to live.
Ego has power. Political and material, but not psychological.
Ego cannot win with death. Ego is dependent on the psyche and, consequently, death.
We all need someone who will believe us. Monotheistic psychiatry does not believe in death. And psyche belongs to polytheistic reality, which is condemned by our shallow barbaric culture. This is tragedy for psychological man. Death is in the center of the psyche. From psychological point of view – mental health (ego heroism) is a naive heresy. Rationalism is the most naive kind of perception, but we like to feel comfortable with our thoughts. Death is not our enemy, egoic barbarism and comfortable cowardice, is.
We must break free from the anti psychological monotheistic and spiritual chains. We need psychological perspective to cure our barbaric and materialistic point of view.
Comfortable thinking does not describe reality of the psyche. Comfortable thinking describe our safety needs.
I recommend James Hillman psychology to everyone. We need to cure our ideas, not psyche.
Great article about horrible world we are living in. Just great. Thank You, Sarah.
“I’m in favor of destruction, aggression, hating things. Not bearing things anymore. We think the breakdown comes because our life is in bad shape. But maybe the ideas cause the disorder. Something tries to break through and causes the disorder.”
The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.
The self divided is precisely where the self is authentically located. . . We all have identity crises because a single identity is a delusion of the monotheistic mind. . . Authenticity is in the illusion, playing it, seeing through it from within as we play it, like an actor who sees through his mask and can only see in this way.
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I don’t think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.
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“I’ve found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.”
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“My war – and I have yet to win a decisive battle – is with the modes of thought that and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).”
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JAMES HILLMAN
“When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behavior, and fantasies are wrong. […] The avenues of escape are blocked by the professional abuse of pathologizing. To refuse the mental health approach confirms one’s ‘sickness’. One needs ‘therapy’, […]
How can we take back therapy […] from a system which must find illness in order to promote health and which, in order to increase the range of its helping, is obliged to extend the area of sickness. Ever deeper pockets of pathology to be analyzed, ever earlier traumata: primal, prenatal, into my astral body; ever more people into the ritual: the family, the office force, community mental health, analysis for everyone. […]
Its practice may differ […] but the premise is the same. The work of making soul requires professional help. Soul-making has become restricted by therapy and to therapy. And psychopathology has become restricted to therapy’s negative definition of it, reduced to its role in the therapy game.”
“The healer is the illness, and the illness is the healer. But as this ancient psychological idea has become translated into modern secular therapy, the”who” is none other than the professional therapist.
By giving the pathologizing a clinical name, the professional therapist makes the first move in therapy game. The first move is not the pathologizing of the patient.
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His complaints and oddities are not clinical psychopathology until so named. (They are psychological, and they are needed, because our psyche needs it, even if we, our ego is unable to cope)
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On the one hand , I am protected from this “thing” by separation from it, it now has a name. But on the other hand, I now, have something…” Moreover the therapist has become the very god who by bringing the condition is the only one who can take it away.The patients tend to believe in his therapist: ” He alone can help me for only he knows really what is wrong.” What is “really” wrong means what is “literally” wrong, what has been literalized into wrongness by the professional therapy game.
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In this way the analyst and the patient become locked in a long -term therapy analysis, for the analyst is the one, the very God, who has seen into the patient incurable weak spot, his vulnerable heel, his ruinous secret. The analyst’s insight and the patient’s wound together embody the archetypal figure of Wounded -Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that illness and its healing are one and the same. But again in modern secular therapy the Wounded Healer has been divided down the middle: illness is all one the patient side and health all with the therapist. The archetype is split, and the two halves are bound together compellingly in what is called transference and countertransference.
Little wonder therapy speaks so much of “resistance” and that manuals are written explaining how to overcome or break through the patient’s “defense mechanism”.
“Therapeutic analysis has side effects no less lethal than drugs”
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For the wrong pathologizing of the therapy game is killing.—————————————————— Levi -Strauss has noted that asymmetrical games, such as those between the unequal partners of therapy, end in killing one opponent. The killing of psychotherapy takes place on a psychological level:the neurosis, the problem, is supposedly “got rid of”, whereas actually it is soul that is being killed – again through a wrong pathologizing, a wrong understanding of the soul in the symptom.
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Wrong pathologizing has spread well beyond the games of the consulting room and clinic, becoming a covert political instrument of the state.Political heretics may be declared mentally ill in order to banish them – and this procedure is smoothly justified with assurances that it is for the “patient’s” good. We may not draw comfort from supposing that this goes on only in the Soviet union.
James Hillman
Pathology of any kind is a proper language of the psyche, our psyche does not create health. Our pathology is always present, in one way or another. Psychological meaning of illness is something more important than empty definition of utopian health. Health is just an empty claim toward psyche, life. Health does not exists, I am afraid. We are highly pathological beings, form the beginning of our life. Health is meaningless to psychological reality. We want to see us as healthy beings, but health does not exists in reality. Our cells are dying even now. The death and its pathology keeps us alive. The problem is that materialistic monotheism likes the utopian vision of health. Psyche creates pathology all the time, but heroic ego wants to believe in everlasting health. Which is utopia.
I recommend archetypal psychology to everyone.Because it is not naive. We are born to die. We are here, because we wanted to live for a while. We will suffer, we will be ill, and then we die. Hey ho let’s go.
We need to revive the psychological meaning of pathology/suffering.
James Hillman “Re- visioning psychology”.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain.
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The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise….
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Apollonian ego fixation. This kind of humiliation is only a result. Just imagine that there is no psychiatry, only apollonian fascists and psyche, which is their slave. Apollo and Hades. Imagine that people only represent powers that are beyond them. Apollo (rationalism) is a Nazi, and he thinks he can control Hades (psychological/poetic imagination). Which is impossible, because Hades is the main power, main god of the all gods, all imagination.
Think in mythical way about imagination. Forget about persons, people with names and surnames, forget about – I am. Forget about ego. This is a war against imaginal reality, and we must abolish the materialistic fascism of egoic people, because they think they can control imaginal reality in which our ego only dwells. Still, ego is not the owner of the psyche.
Science is not something that will explain people the need of imaginal reality.Psyche is something more. Something more than material science.
Fight for the rights of the psyche in material reality, which completely forget about the roots.
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In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.
James Hillman
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The Envoy of Mr. Cogito
BY ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
TRANSLATED BY BOGDANA CARPENTER
Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize
go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust
you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony
be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important
and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten
let your sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards—they will win
they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography
and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn
beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I
beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you
be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star
repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand
and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap
go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes
Be faithful Go
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQEGoO67PUM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY-vp_YcnjY
James Hillman – “Re -visioning psychology”.
This is an answer, it is not mine, it is from the victims of the psychiatry.
Thank You for this stirring article. Great words about the hidden slavery, about the hidden psychopathy of cold anti human semantics.
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“Words are like pillows: if put correctly they ease pain.”
― James Hillman
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James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain:
—————————————————————-
The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
———————————————————————————————————————
Thank You for that important article. I must add something really important, because it may help some people to understand the empirical fallacy of scientific era.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain:
—————————————————————————————————
The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. If environment means literally what’s around, it must also mean whatever is around. This because the unconscious psyche selects quite arbitrarily among the stuff encountered every day in the environment. Tiny and trivial bits of information may have huge subliminal psychic effects, as the days’ residues in dreams show. We do dream of the damnedest things! Much of each day is never noticed or recalled, but the psyche picks up the environmental flotsam and delivers it to the dream. The dream–a processing plant recycling the environment, finding soul values in junk. The dream–an artist, appropriating images from the environment for recollection in tranquility.
Because we walk about in fields of psychic realities that influences our lives, we have to broaden the notion of environment in terms of “deep ecology,” the hypothesis that the planet is a living, breathing, and self-regulating organism. Since anything around can nourish our souls by feeding imagination, there is soul stuff out there. So why not admit, as does deep ecology, that the environment itself is ensouled, animated, inextricably meshed with us and not fundamentally separate from us?
The ecological vision restores to environment also the classical idea of providentia–that the world provides for us, looks out for us, even looks after us. It wants us around, too. Predators, tornadoes, and blackflies in June are only pieces of the picture. Just think of all that’s delicious and sweet-smelling. Do birds sing but for each other? This breathable, edible, and pleasant planet, invisibly serviced and maintained, keeps us all by means of its life-support system. Such would be an idea of nurture that is truly nurturing.
“Environment,” then, would be imagined well beyond social and economic conditions, beyond the entire cultural setting, to include every item that takes care of us every day: our tires and coffee cups and door handles and the book you are holding in your hands. It becomes impossible to exclude this bit of environment as irrelevant in favor of that bit as significant, as if we could rank world phenomena in order of importance. Important for whom? Our understanding of importance itself has to change; instead of “important to me,” think of “important to other aspects of the environment.” Does this item nurture what else is around, not merely us who are around? Does it contribute to the intentions of the field of which we are only one short-lived part?
As notions of environment shift, we notice environment differently. It becomes more and more difficult to make a cut between psyche and world, subject and object, in here and out there. I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets, as I am in “music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/While the music lasts” (T.S. Eliot). Where does the environment stop and I begin, and can I begin at all without being in some place, deeply involved in, nurtured by the nature of the world?
“…Go with the wrong, deeper”
“Search out the meaning of the symptom…Find a new method rather than opposition.”
James Hillman – Accentuate the Positive: Reclaiming the Country from the Nation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SovVxyNHJ9A
The roots of imagination –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuYg3QKj2K4&t=11s
This movie is a form of gloomy psychiatric propaganda.
We need something real –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElOEwtx7wjA
“Without metaphorical understanding, everything is only what it is and must be met on the simplest, most direct level. Everything then is a call to action and the hero is there to realize himself in a reality that serves his literal notion of it. A view of reality that does not recognize other views is of course delusional. In the heroic ego’s case, the delusion is self-divinization, the perspective of the human ego as the superior, indeed the only, actuality. The rest is not real. . . .
Without imaginal understanding, we may expect killing, as if our culture cannot ever take down the wild Western ego until it has restored the ancient sense of image and recovered the imaginal from the broken shards of reformational literalism.”
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (NY: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 115.
It is good to hear that, Sarah. Reading Hillman brings freedom.
We commit suicide not because of poverty, itself. First we must feel the urge to die, on psychological level.
I hope it will help you-
http://www.pnsja.com/documents/hillmansuicideandthesoul.pdf
Death may be the only cure for the soul.
I believe You. That does not mean that your mental illness, or whatever it is, is the property of the psychiatric system. Our pathology belongs to psyche, like our ego belongs to psyche.
I would like to add w very important issue about the real function of psychotherapy and relation between the patient, and the professional (slave – master union)
“When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behavior, and fantasies are wrong. […] The avenues of escape are blocked by the professional abuse of pathologizing. To refuse the mental health approach confirms one’s ‘sickness’. One needs ‘therapy’, […]
How can we take back therapy […] from a system which must find illness in order to promote health and which, in order to increase the range of its helping, is obliged to extend the area of sickness. Ever deeper pockets of pathology to be analyzed, ever earlier traumata: primal, prenatal, into my astral body; ever more people into the ritual: the family, the office force, community mental health, analysis for everyone. […]
Its practice may differ […] but the premise is the same. The work of making soul requires professional help. Soul-making has become restricted by therapy and to therapy. And psychopathology has become restricted to therapy’s negative definition of it, reduced to its role in the therapy game.”
“The healer is the illness, and the illness is the healer. But as this ancient psychological idea has become translated into modern secular therapy, the”who” is none other than the professional therapist.
By giving the pathologizing a clinical name, the professional therapist makes the first move in therapy game. The first move is not the pathologizing of the patient.
—————————————————————————————–
His complaints and oddities are not clinical psychopathology until so named. (They are psychological, and they are needed, because our psyche needs it, even if we, our ego is unable to cope)
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On the one hand , I am protected from this “thing” by separation from it, it now has a name. But on the other hand, I now, have something…” Moreover the therapist has become the very god who by bringing the condition is the only one who can take it away.The patients tend to believe in his therapist: ” He alone can help me for only he knows really what is wrong.” What is “really” wrong means what is “literally” wrong, what has been literalized into wrongness by the professional therapy game.
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In this way the analyst and the patient become locked in a long -term therapy analysis, for the analyst is the one, the very God, who has seen into the patient incurable weak spot, his vulnerable heel, his ruinous secret. The analyst’s insight and the patient’s wound together embody the archetypal figure of Wounded -Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that illness and its healing are one and the same. But again in modern secular therapy the Wounded Healer has been divided down the middle: illness is all one the patient side and health all with the therapist. The archetype is split, and the two halves are bound together compellingly in what is called transference and countertransference.
Little wonder therapy speaks so much of “resistance” and that manuals are written explaining how to overcome or break through the patient’s “defense mechanism”.
“Therapeutic analysis has side effects no less lethal than drugs”
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For the wrong pathologizing of the therapy game is killing. Levi -Strauss has noted that asymmetrical games, such as those between the unequal partners of therapy, end in killing one opponent. The killing of psychotherapy takes place on a psychological level:the neurosis, the problem, is supposedly “got rid of”, whereas actually it is soul that is being killed – again through a wrong pathologizing, a wrong understanding of the soul in the symptom.
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Wrong pathologizing has spread well beyond the games of the consulting room and clinic, becoming a covert political instrument of the state.Political heretics may be declared mentally ill in order to banish them – and this procedure is smoothly justified with assurances that it is for the “patient’s” good. We may not draw comfort from supposing that this goes on only in the Soviet union.
James Hillman
“Psychological” and “treatment” cannot be conjoined – unless we revise what we mean by treatment and see it as fantasy.
Psychotherapy, in accordance with the root meaning of the words, means to serve soul, not treat it. Serving soul implies letting it rule; it leads, we follow.
By carelessly turning over our symptoms to professional therapists, we have reinforced the grip of professionalism upon psychopathology.
James Hillman
Thank You for this story, Joe. I am sure it was not easy for You to write this. There are things worse than death itself. Like, for example, children in mental hospitals. Hideous crime of phony civilized people.
“We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, What’s wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up? ”
James Hillman
“The naturalistic fallacy is common because it requires least effort on the part of an interpreter.He need only to look around him at natural everyday events for his models. The easiness is itself a part of the fallacy -the inertia of following nature.
Naturalism soon declines into materialism, a view which regards the way things are in the perceptual world of things, facts and sense -realities to be the primary mode.It insist that material reality is first and psychic reality must conform with it: psyche must obey the laws of physis and imagination follow perception.”
“Like poetry psychic speech is condensed and distilled. This speech is on another level, raised from natural meaning to imaginative meaning.”
I found some quotes, which can help you:
“When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behaviour, and fantasies are wrong. […] The avenues of escape are blocked by the professional abuse of pathologizing. To refuse the mental health approach confirms one’s ‘sickness’. One needs ‘therapy’, […]
How can we take back therapy […] from a system which must find illness in order to promote health and which, in order to increase the range of its helping, is obliged to extend the area of sickness. Ever deeper pockets of pathology to be analyzed, ever earlier traumata: primal, prenatal, into my astral body; ever more people into the ritual: the family, the office force, community mental health, analysis for everyone. […]
Its practice may differ […] but the premise is the same. The work of making soul requires professional help. Soul-making has become restricted by therapy and to therapy. And psychopathology has become restricted to therapy’s negative definition of it, reduced to its role in the therapy game.”
“The healer is the illness, and the illness is the healer. But as this ancient psychological idea has become translated into modern secular therapy, the”who” is none other than the professional therapist.
By giving the pathologizing a clinical name, the professional therapist makes the first move in therapy game. The first move is not the pathologizing of the patient. His complaints and oddities are not clinical psychopathology until so named.
On the one hand , I am protected from this “thing” bu separation from it, it now has a name.But on the other hand, I now, have something…”Moreover the therapist has become the very god who by bringing the condition is the only one who can take it away.The patients tend to believe in his therapist: ” He alone can help me for only he knows really what is wrong.” What is “really” wrong means what is “literally” wrong, what has been literalized into wrongness by the professional therapy game.
In this way the analyst and the patient become locked in a long -term therapy analysis, for the analyst is the one, the very God, who has seen into the patient incurable weak spot, his vulnerable heel, his ruinous secret. The analyst’s insight and the patient’s wound together embody the archetypal figure of Wounded -Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that illness and its healing are one and the same. Bit again in modern secular therapy the Wounded Healer has been divided down the middle :illness is all one the patient side and health all with the therapist. The archetype is split, and the two halves are bound together compellingly in what is called transference and countertransference.
Little wonder therapy speaks so much of “resistance” and that manuals are written explaining how to overcome or break through the patient’s “defense mechanism”.
“Therapeutic analysis has side effects no less lethal than drugs”
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For the wrong pathologizing of the therapy game is killing. Levi Strauss has noted that asymmetrical games, such as those between the unequal partners of therapy, end in killing one opponent. The killing of psychoatherapy takes place on a psychological level:the neurosis, the problem, is supposedly “got rid of”, whereas actually it is soul that is being killed – again through a wrong pathologizing, a wrong understanding of the soul in the symptom.
Wrong pathologizing has spread well beyond the games of the consulting room and clinic, becoming a covert political instrument of the state.Political heretics may be declared mentally ill in order to banish them – and this procedure is smoothly justified with assurances that it is for the “patient’s” good. We may not draw comfort from suppoising that this goes on only in the Soviet union.
2.Psyche and naturalistic fallacy.
“Owing to the simplistic idea of nature used in therapy, the natural tend to be idealized. It becomes a natural without deformities, irrationalities and individual idiosyncracies. The ideal standard is used moralistically to find fault with dream and dreamers for what deviates from nature.
Ideals and norm provide means for seeing pathologizing but they are not to be taken as means for measuring pathologizing. From the psychological point of view neither the statistical norm nor the ideal norm can offer the least relevance regarding the inherent value of pathologized fantasy experience. My nightmares, compulsions, anxieties may be essential to my work, my life -style and may relations with others.
Norms are perceptual modes for seeing contrasts; they are staining methods which help us notice deviations more sharply. By realizing how strongly pathologized an event is, we we more immediately sense its importance. But psychological worth of what is going on is stated not by the norm or the deviation, but by affliction itself.
“Events of imagination do not occur in empirical nature”
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James Hillman Re -Visioning psychology
I mean ‘rationazism’. Sorry.
I think it is important to know how people think in “The Age of Reason”.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain :
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The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
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Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
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The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
You are a hero. Thank you for that, Mike. You have noticed many important things about normal people. Like, for example, their advanced and legal psychopathy and anger against psyche.
In other words – monotheistic point of view have buried and also stolen the great meaning of pathology and the right to pathology. This reality is banned in The age of reason, and many people have been killed by The age of reason. Psyche is banned, because of rationasism.
I realized that I must write something, because this article addresses too many of important concerns.
James Hillman about nominalism:
“The main attack upon the nosology and taxonomy of psychic pathology has been directed at the relation between the words used and the events they are supposed signify.These words, strictly speaking are empty nomina such as we saw in the first chapter.The have no intrinsic connection with the conditions, or any underlying reason for them, which the labels so carefully describe”.
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“The technical terms – which are now also often popular insults – stress accurate clinical sketches of symptoms, their onset and course, and their statistically expected outcome.Nothing further about the nature of the person exhibiting the syndrome or about the nature of the syndrome itself is necessary for applying one of the psychopathological labels. Schizophrenic behavior can be precisely described and atrributed to a person independent of whatever might be its results: genetic, semantic, toxic, psychodynamic, biochemical, social, familial…,The empirical nominalistic view calls for nothing more, nothing deeper than MASTERING A TECHNICAL VOCABULARY!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Psyche, refers to Pre-Christian point of view. Psychiatry exists, because monism have destroyed psyche. And monotheism sees psyche as its greatest enemy, because of the naturally pagan/polytheistic nature of the psyche. They are using monotheistic language to describe polytheistic nature of banned psyche. So nothing is right and this is only a false empiricism.
On polytheistic point of view –
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“The many contains the unity of the one without losing the possibilities of the many”.
“When the monotheism of consciousness is no longer able to deny the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems and no longer able to deal with our actual psychic state, then there arises the fantasy of returning to Greek polytheism”.
“The phenomena of dissociation – breaking away,splitting off, personification, multiplication,ambivalence – will always seem as illness to the ego as it has come to defined”
JUNG:
If tendencies towards dissociation were not inherent in the human psyche,fragmentary psychic system would never have bee split off; in other words, neither spirits nor gods would have ever come into existence. That is also the reason why our time has become so utterly godless and profane, we lack all the knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else.
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Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with fanatical denial of existence of fragmentary autonomous systems”
(Apollonian ego hegemony in The Age of Reason)
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I hope that Jung, James Hillman and his “Re -Visioning psychology” will help you understand, what “THEY” have done with the psyche and the language, James.
You are talking about legalizing the pathological identity in monotheistic (theological) state ruled by vulgar materialism. From materialistic, apollonic point of view, pathology is evil, because monotheistic man see only evil in his psychological life or, he cannot see it at all. Because he sees only materialistic needs.
That is why apollonian ego, rational, monotheistic man should never have a power over psyche. It leads only to materialistic psychopathy like – communism, capitalism, psychiatry. All apollonian ego wants, is power and money. For apollonian ego in the center of the psyche is….apollonian ego.
Psychological man needs real human identity, not diagnosis. And that identity was stolen by monotheistic man and by the age of reason. Psyche needs its stolen image. From psychological point of view, psyche is a value. For apollonian materialists psyche is an enemy and BS. Their identity is too empty, convenient and materialistic to see pathology from the proper angle.
Apollonians wants only to have convenient life, they do not need pathology, they cannot see its value and meaning. So we must give a power over psyche, to the real father of psychological life, to Hades. Psyche needs Copernicus not false empiricism. Psyche is not a property of medicine, biology. Materialistic, monotheistic man talks about polytheistic man in monotheistic language which is full of hatred. The 2nd dimension cannot see the value of 3rd dimension. They can see only the shadow.
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We must fight with monotheism. Because we know better what psyche is. We must restore the worth of polytheistic identity. Because monotheistic man won’t do it.
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James Hillman quotes-
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My practice tells me I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Moreover, it tells me that to place neurosis and psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced.
Psychoanalysis has to get out of the consulting room and analyze all kinds of things. You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that “normalcy” is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid.
The word “normal” comes from the Greek norma, which was a carpenter’s square, that right-angled tool for establishing straightness.
Expectations that are only statistical are no longer human.
As long as you’re going to create a castle, the psyche can only come in as an invader.
In my bones, I am afraid of Christian unconsciousness, because, unlike Buddhism, say, or even Judaism, Christianism lives myths deliberately, insisting they are not myths, and this has dreadful paranoid consequences.
Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast.
History is one way of making a gestalt: historical references, figures from the past release the foreground event from being stuck in only what it says it is.
In Freud’s time we felt oppressed in the family, in sexual situations, in our crazy hysterical conversion symptoms, and where we felt oppressed, there was the repressed. Where do we feel that thick kind of oppression today? In institutions–hospitals, universities, businesses; in public buildings, in filling out forms, in traffic…
Psychopathic behavior is a fundamentalist behavior: taking fantasies literally and also confusing the literal and the concrete. Now this is just what the Fundamentalist churches support: if your arm offend thee, cut it off. If your nose offend thee, get it straightened.
The whole world is sick….and you can’t put this right by having a good therapeutic dialogue or finding deeper meanings. It’s not about meaning anymore; it’s about survival.
Do you see the complete harmony between central dictatorship, fascism, political callousness, and the self-centeredness of the spiritual point of view?
A terrorist is the product of our education that says that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, a world that is dead. A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of wiping out the psyche.
There is a secret love hiding in each problem.
Hard to believe, but the hypochondrias are taking care of us, the depressions are slowing us down, obsessions are ways of polishing the image, paranoid suspicions are ways of trying to see through–all these moves of the pathological are ways we are being loved in the peculiar way the psyche works.
When Freud says, “Where Id was, there shall Ego be”–it is also an extraordinarily greedy statement. He wants to get every last stone out of the quarry. But what about the quarry?
The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm’s length because they are so full of love.
Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.
Our gods have become small, save one, and with the exception of a few last conventions of proper names, titles, and places, and the nonsense capitals of corporate abbreviations (nominalism is capitalism, letters as units of exchange), the one magnification persisting as a capital refers to the one person still remaining in a depersonified world: I. Only I and God, one to one, and some say God is dead.
To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real.
When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival.
By means of personifications my sense of person becomes more vivid for I carry with me at all times the protection of my daimones: the images of dead people who mattered to me, of ancestral figures of my stock, cultural and historical persons of renown and people of fable who provide exemplary images–a wealth of guardians. They guard my fate, guide it, probably are it. “Perhaps–who knows,” writes Jung, “these eternal images are what men mean by fate.” We need this help, for who can carry his fate alone?
The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.
There may well be more psychopathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing.
Symptoms, not therapists, led this century to soul.
The healer is the illness and the illness is the healer.
When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behavior, and fantasies are wrong.
Let us see pathologizing as a mode of speech.
If the fundamental principle of psychological life is differentiation, then no single perspective can embrace psychological life, and norms are the delusions that parts prescribe to one another.
Pathologizing forces the soul to a consciousness of itself as different from the ego and its life–a consciousness that obeys its own laws of metaphorical enactment in intimate relation with death.
The alchemists spoke of patience as a first quality of soul and considered soul-making the longest journey, a via longissima. The language is digestion, a vegetable love, depression into still waters.
Literalism prevents psychologizing by making psychology of it.
As truths are the fictions of the rational, so fictions are the truths of the imaginal.
Psychological awareness rises from errors, coincidences, indefiniteness, from the chaos deeper than intelligent control.
Knowledge makes us able to leave it behind, able to take off down the road of pitfalls in full foolishness, risking even greater windmills still further out, an old knight more and more bold, an old rogue more and more peculiar, ageing into the freedom of our pathology.
The horizon of the psyche these days is shrunk to the personal, and the new psychology of humanism fosters the little self-important man at the great sea’s edge, turning to himself to ask how he feels today, filling in his questionnaire, counting his personal inventory. He has abandoned intellect and interpreted his imagination in order to become with his “gut experiences” and “emotional problems”; his soul has become equated with these. His fantasy of redemption has shrunk to “ways of coping”; his stubborn pathology, that via regia to the soul’s depths, is cast forth in Janovian screams like swine before Perls, disclosed in a closed Gestalt of group closeness, or dropped in an abyss of regression during the clamber up to Maslovian peaks.
The psyche moves; but does psychology?
Now we are called defensive or resistant to the therapeutic process where once we might have been blamed for closing ourselves against God’s grace or turning from His will.
If our civilization suffers from hybris, from ego inflation and superbia, psychology has done its part. It has been looking at soul in th ego’s mirror, never seeing psyche, always seeing man. And this man has been monotheistic Reformational man, enemy of images.
Reflection in the mirror of the soul lets one see the madness of one’s spiritual drive, and the importance of this madness.
The spirit turned toward psyche, rather than deserting it for high places and cosmic love, finds ever further possibilities of seeing through the opacities and obfuscations in the valley. Sunlight enters the vale. The Word participates in gossip and chatter.
Cure the symptom and lose the God. Had Jacob not grappled with the Daemon he would indeed have not been hurt, and he would not have been Jacob either.
Economics is our contemporary theology, regardless of how we spend Sunday.
We now call the destruction of old ideas, politely, a “paradigm shift.” “Catastrophe theory” would be more appropriate. The vitality of a culture depends less on its hopes and its history than on its capacity to entertain willingly the divine and daimonic force of ideas.
Two insanely dangerous consequences result from raising efficiency to the level of an independent principle. First, it favors short-term thinking–no looking ahead, down the line; and it produces insensitive feeling–no looking around at the life values being lived so efficiently. Second, means become ends; that is, doing something becomes the full justification of doing regardless of what you do.
Inefficiency becomes a favorite mode of rebellion against the tyranny of efficiency: slowdown, work-to-rule, buck-passing, absenteeism, delayed responses, mislaid documents, unreturned phone calls.
Anyone who justifies decisions by referring to the bottom line has something to learn from Treblinka.
For a candidate for political office to campaign on a platform of efficiency in government suggests the infiltration of fascistic ideals. Mussolini made the trains run on time–but at what cost?
Today we need heroes of descent, not masters of denial, mentors of maturity who can carry sadness, who give love to aging, who show soul without irony or embarrassment.
Instead of adventuring forward to explore and research unknown territory, control fights a rearguard action, keeping inventory of what has already happened. It likes complete reports. Control, for all its self-assured position of command, relies on a defensive vision, and the traits enumerated–enforced loyalty, exactitude, suspicion of the hidden, watchfulness–are paranoid traits.
In any system, whether a corporation, a family or the inner arrangements of the human psyche, a vigorous “no” to the good of the whole may serve the good of the whole and increase its power even more than a complaint “yes.”
Besides policing weapons, we might search for methods of teaching that capture attention and evoke concentration–images, dramas, rituals, rhythms–thereby transferring power back from the weapon to the child’s mind.
The lead horse does not run because it is whipped.
Absolutism is not a ruthless ruler, but a ruthless rule–and this we don’t easily remember, for our minds fix upon the figures of czars and crime lords. These images serve to keep the danger of tyranny projected onto Stalin, Genghis Khan and Al Capone, protecting us from the absolutism that can rule the psyche in the guise of fundamentalism in religion, bottom-lineism in business and progress in the sciences.
Purists are deadly, and so they know all about deadly sins.
Something always has you in mind.
“Well, what can I do about the world? This thing’s bigger than me.” That’s the child archetype talking. “All I can do is go into myself, work on my growth, my development, find good parenting, support groups.” This is a disaster for our political world, for our democracy. Democracy depends on intensely active citizens, not children.
The ideal of growth makes us feel stunted; the ideal family makes us feel crazy.
We’re not allowed in the street. We have to be careful, pretty correct, not extreme or radical, and not mix it up with our clients and patients out in the world. And this slants our thinking toward white, middle-class psychology.
You can move to nirvana, but the Gods find out where you go.
Is there a reality that is not framed or formed? No. Reality is always coming through a pair of glasses, a point of view, a language–a fantasy.
I won’t accept these simple opposites–either individual self in control or a totalitarian, mindless mob. This kind of fantasy keeps us afraid of community. It locks us up inside our separate selves all alone and longing for connection. In fact, the idea of surrendering to the fascist mob is the result of the separated self. It’s the old Apollonian ego, aloof and clear, panicked by the Dionysian flow.
Sometimes, the genius seems to show only in symptoms and disorders, as a kind of preventive medicine, holding you back from a false route.
Picasso said, “I don’t develop; I am.” And the puzzle in therapy is not how did I get this way, but what does my angel want with me?
Let’s call them “troubles.” Can you imagine a blues singer going on about problems?
I challenge psychotherapy’s cool green consulting rooms, the soothing images and framed diplomas, because they are calming and cooling the valuable madness in our society so that psychology has become part of Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare, his phrase for the U.S.A.
Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies–the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding.
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 plebes. Coping simply equals compliance.
Now when therapy decides to cure the pathology, instead of seeing that the pathology is part of the crack or the broken window, and that something is trying to get in, then it seems to me it’s creating more pathology and keeping the Gods even further away. And then they break in through the whole fucking society.
The sexual fascination is the soul trying to get out and get into something other than itself.
If we could recover the imaginal we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy.
The heart in the beast is not your heart only: it is a microcosmic sun, a cosmos of all possible experiences that no one can own.
The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder.
The desert is not in Egypt; it is anywhere once we desert the heart.
Perhaps Konrad Lorenz is wrong, and the counselors wrong too, who seek to find a way beyond aggression. Is it “aggression,” or is it the lion roaring at the enraging desert? Has psychology not missed the native sulphur, neglected Mars who rides a lion, Mars, beloved of Aphrodite, demanding right. Splendor Solis. Sol invictus: Mithra of the heart.
I find today that patients are more sensitive than the worlds they live in.
The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality.
Let us imagine the anima mundi [world soul] neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form.
An analyst sitting in his chair all day long is more aware of the faintest flickers of arousal in the seat of his sexuality than of the massive discomfort in the same seat brought by the chair: its wrongly built back, its heat-retaining fabric, its resistant upholstery and formaldehyde glue. His animal sense has been trained to notice only one set of proprioceptions to the exclusion of the psychic reality of the chair. A cat knows better.
Recognition that the soul is also in the world may awaken us from the psychotherapeutic trance in which we pay a hundred dollars for an hour of subjectivism and no more than $19.95 for a beach chair in whose cold metallic arms and plastic lap reflection actually takes place, day after day.
By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim.
Each person enters the world called.
So long as the statistics of normalizing developmental psychology determine the standards against which the extraordinary complexities of a life are judged, deviations become deviants.
There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books.
Neglect of beauty neglects the Goddess, who then has to steal back into the departments as sexual harassment, into the laboratories as “research” experiments with sex and gender, and into the consulting rooms as seductive assignations.
Psychology has no self-help manual for its own affliction.
As civilization subsides into its own waste deposits, it doesn’t matter whether you are feminine or masculine or any composite of them. We all dissolve together.
To plant a foot firmly on earth–that is the ultimate achievement, and a far later stage of growth than anything begun in your head.
When your child becomes the reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here.
Do you really believe that humans invented the wheel out of their big brains alone, or fire, or baskets, or tools? Stones rolled downhill; bolts of fire shot from the sky and out of the earth; birds wove and probed and pounded, as did apes and elephants. The sciences that master nature were taught by nature how it could be mastered.
To what does the soul turn that has no therapists to visit? It takes its trouble to the trees, to the riverbank, to an animal companion, on an aimless walk through the city streets, a long watch of the night sky. Just stare out the window or boil water for a cup of tea. We breathe, expand, and let go, and something comes in from elsewhere. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased, preferring melancholy to desperation. It’s in touch.
The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much by order as by chaos, but–and this “but” is huge–these accidents may still intend something interesting.
Anyone who rises in a world that worships success should be suspect, for this is an age of psychopathy.
Academic psychology, in its eagerness to be as scientific as physics, has one-sidedly chosen the “outside,” so that the soul no longer finds a place in the only field dedicated by its very name to its study. Hence, depth psychology has been more or less kept out of the academics of official psychology….depth psychology is the stone the builders of the academy have rejected.
The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just “believe” in it.
It is the immature who are preoccupied with the search for maturity. And is it not typical of adolescence to see growth and creativity in protean images of “becoming”?
Loving in safety is the smaller part of loving.
…Psychoanalysis needs more dissidents, more even than Laing and the antipsychiatric movement; it needs its own “terrorists of soul” in the sense of a radical seeing through of its fixed investments in profession–its banks and insurance, its law courts, its palaces of bureaucracy–to return soul to the world.
Adler died right out in the street. What a powerful blessing.
Yes. I have a dream that the future will return a stolen identity to modern slaves, and persecutors will be punished with an eternal stigma of stupidity. Without the proper image of the psyche nothing can be done. I hope Hillman will help people to understand the meaning of the psyche, the stolen meaning and the role of our suffering. I hope one day we will become humans, not biological machines used by the state.I hope so.
School children should learn about the history of psychiatric abuse.
Thank you for this important article.
I think that Your mother was afraid of the Nazis, because they represented apollonian ego fundamentalism. Materialism in its worse version – Nazi fantasy about wiping out the psyche and pathology. Nazis fantasies about destroying the poetic basis of mind…..Apollonian ego imperialism.
We must remember that rationalism is just a one kind of perception, it belong’s to apollonian ego materialism. Apollonian ego can’t even built a proper image of the psychological reality. Apollo (rationalism, science) is not the father of human psyche.Zeus/Hades is. Hades represent psychological reality, and we live in the Apollonian ego era…..In the age of the hegemony of rational mind. Psyche is seen as its worst enemy…
We must see the worth of the psychosis. And rational mind is not able to see it. Psychological mind can. Psychological reality has been destroyed by monism theories (by the age of reason) long time ago. To understand psyche we must go back to romanticism, to the times before Christianity. Because monotheistic man is not able to describe the real nature of the psyche.He is talking about theology an rationalism, all the time.And this is tragedy.
I highly recommend Hillman’s archetypal psychology to everyone. We must have his knowledge about the long history of wiping out the psyche form human reality. Psychological mind in the age of reason is being destroyed.
We were born in the age of destruction of everything which is not rational. Our empty egoic culture has destroyed our psychological roots. Nazis represent apollonian ego, and psyche is in their trash bin. Psychiatry is on the same level of rational hatred.
We are talking about banned identities. We are talking about killing people in the name of rational fundamentalism. We are talking, all the time.
We should fight.
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James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain.
https://footnotes2plato.com/2010/12/14/james-hillman-on-the-folly-of-reducing-mind-to-brain/
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You and Your mother are heroines.
James Hillman “Re-Visioning psychology”.
Heil Psyche!
Hillman was an ideological polytheist. In polytheistic society we do not need psychiatry. Because psychiatry is only a form of control in monotheistic kind of society, in which, religion theology and so called rationalism is in the center of thinking. Apollonian ego and spiritualism have banned psyche. The whole Age of Enlightenment have mocked and condemned psyche.
In psychological hierarchy the real father of human psyche is Hades and Zeus, not Apollo, which means science, brain, ego in the center of the psyche, and we must remember that for apollonians psyche does not exists, because they are materialists and they see only brain and theories of fake illnesses. Hades is their enemy. They and their small rational thinking belongs also to Hades, to psychological reality.
I mean, psyche need Copernicus, not theology in medical disguise. We need to see the hierarchy in psychological reality, because now, we see only materialism or our thinking is highly theological even if we are atheists. Because monotheism do not need religion. Monotheism is a very simple kind of thinking, which we create for our own comfort, not for seeing the psyche.
Apollo,as a style of thinking, is too blind, and too psychopathic to rule the mythical imagination.
In fact, apollonian ego, destroyed the true image of the psyche. Those people are anti psychological fundamentalists and they either reject, or want to rule, the fantasy which is beyond ego control.
It is very hard to imagine how it would be, to accept our own pathology in society beyond monotheistic simple theories and religion that have rejected psyche long time ago. The word normal is used against human pathology, human psyche. Theology is also against psyche. Generally, people see in their pathology only evil and sin. Because hades ( the heart of psyche)was condemned by monotheistic religion. It is a hidden strategy of controlling people.
I called it Anneliese Michel paradox. Because psychiatry rejected psychological hades and sees the devil as a real, only because, devil is real for theology. The rest of mythic imagination is not real for monotheistic people.Psychiatry rejected human psyche, because theology rejected human psyche first.
Theological power or rational power, in medical disguise, have power to reject or regain the human identity. This is hideous crime and sick ideology.
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These are Hillman’s words about psychotherapy-
“Hillman: I’m not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. You don’t attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It’s the same thing with psychotherapy. It makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that’s not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. What I’m trying to say is that, if a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it’s also in the system, the society.
London: You can’t fix the person without fixing the society.
Hillman: I don’t think so. But I don’t think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person. We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, “What’s wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?” We can’t change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently. My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.”
the rest of interview -http://scott.london/interviews/hillman.html
In polytheistic society, it is impossible for psychiatry to survive.Psychiatry would be destroyed by humans for whom their pathology is a value. Now, in spiritual era of egoic psychopats we, as humans, do not even have a roots.
The problem with monotheistic society is that hey have no guts to deal with death and pathology. The want to believe that death does not exists or that death or illness is an enemy and that psyche and pathology is pure evil.
So we have an utopia of health ruled by good god which means everything, and on the other side we have evil psyche and somatic illnesses which belongs to satan and hell.
That is why we do not have a roots. Because we are against our true nature. We are too weak to deal with death and pathology. Society of materialists is a usually a very weak society, in which, power means money. Pathology and illnesses are the main part of life. We have to deal with it. This is real power. To accept death and pathology.And we want to get rid of this part of our nature because of the main need, which is convenient life without so called “problems”. Which are not even a problems to be solved.
This is Sparta.
No. This is psyche.
That is why monotheistic world will be destroyed. Because monotheism have destroyed humanity, first. Human psyche is not evil.Illness is not evil. They are necessities. We do not need health fundamentalism in the place of the truth.
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We do not need psychiatrists, we need courageous thinking and courageous people.
We do not need lame psychiatry in the lame monotheistic society. We need psyche in psychological society.
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We do not need the lame egoic pseudo scientific search for a victims of the psyche.
We do not need this.
Psychiatry is a rotten fruit of monotheistic hatred for psyche. For monotheistic culture of egoic or spiritual psychopaths,human psyche is evil or satan.
Monotheistic medicine/science is theological hatred in medical disguise. Theology, church and monotheistic culture of saint haters is against psyche.
James Hillman “Re -Visioning psychology”
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Monotheistic and dumb science means nothing compared to human psyche.
Rationalism? Forget about it.
It is pure religious hatred in medical disguise.
We use scientific language only to prove our own convenient thinking.Psyche has got nothing to do with -logy, science and scientific language. Our monotheistic dumb mind needs science. Psyche does not need science. Psyche, pathology is not a problem to solve.
Psyche, pathology, depression and schizophrenia needs a proper meaning not solutions.
Science.This type of simplification is unacceptable when it comes to describing the psyche.
PSYCHE IS NOT A PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED.
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“FINAL SOLUTION”. WE DO NOT NEED IT, BECAUSE WE ARE NOT NAZIS.
Monotheistic medicine/science is theology in medical disguise. And theology is against psyche.
Forget about family and biology. Let’s talk about psyche. Descartes era of biological scientific fanaticism will leave us with nothing else than rotten tissue.
We all are fooled. Science is just a wealthy garbage of the rich.
“Soul code” should be obligatory in school.
I have read something different –
“Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.”
James Hillman “Soul Code”
Plomin should have read Hillman’s books. But he is a scientist, and scientists know nothing about psyche.
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Without archetypal psychology scientist will remain small anti human butchers. Apollonian ego arrogance will destroy humanity.
Pathology and psyche is something great, but not in monotheistic eyes. They are so small, almost like coins.
They (the specialists) are talking about mental health fundamentalism all the time.People in hospitals (monotheistic prisons for polytheistic psyche) are those beyond naive mental health assumptions (Desecrates mind+ theology).
What about them? Why they do not have a right to their own identity?
Where are people who understand the great meaning, or language, of psychosis, depression ? Where are those who were suppossed to support human pathology? Because we have enough of Desecrates rationalism and christian theology in the place of PSYCHOlogy. They are anti psychological terrorists. Monotheism is the the greatest enemy of the psyche, because monotheistic psychiatry is a theological hatred against psyche.
Psychiatry sees only sins and shame in psychological reality.
Mental illness exists only for limited monotheistic mind. For polytheistic mind, pathology does not exists, because for polytheistic mind psyche is not a problem to solve.
What scares me the most, is the fact, that people who work in mental hospitals as murderers of children, have also their own.
They are talking about human psyche in medical manner, all the time. This is a disaster.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain.
——————————————————————————————————————–
The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. If environment means literally what’s around, it must also mean whatever is around. This because the unconscious psyche selects quite arbitrarily among the stuff encountered every day in the environment. Tiny and trivial bits of information may have huge subliminal psychic effects, as the days’ residues in dreams show. We do dream of the damnedest things! Much of each day is never noticed or recalled, but the psyche picks up the environmental flotsam and delivers it to the dream. The dream–a processing plant recycling the environment, finding soul values in junk. The dream–an artist, appropriating images from the environment for recollection in tranquility.
Because we walk about in fields of psychic realities that influences our lives, we have to broaden the notion of environment in terms of “deep ecology,” the hypothesis that the planet is a living, breathing, and self-regulating organism. Since anything around can nourish our souls by feeding imagination, there is soul stuff out there. So why not admit, as does deep ecology, that the environment itself is ensouled, animated, inextricably meshed with us and not fundamentally separate from us?
The ecological vision restores to environment also the classical idea of providentia–that the world provides for us, looks out for us, even looks after us. It wants us around, too. Predators, tornadoes, and blackflies in June are only pieces of the picture. Just think of all that’s delicious and sweet-smelling. Do birds sing but for each other? This breathable, edible, and pleasant planet, invisibly serviced and maintained, keeps us all by means of its life-support system. Such would be an idea of nurture that is truly nurturing.
“Environment,” then, would be imagined well beyond social and economic conditions, beyond the entire cultural setting, to include every item that takes care of us every day: our tires and coffee cups and door handles and the book you are holding in your hands. It becomes impossible to exclude this bit of environment as irrelevant in favor of that bit as significant, as if we could rank world phenomena in order of importance. Important for whom? Our understanding of importance itself has to change; instead of “important to me,” think of “important to other aspects of the environment.” Does this item nurture what else is around, not merely us who are around? Does it contribute to the intentions of the field of which we are only one short-lived part?
As notions of environment shift, we notice environment differently. It becomes more and more difficult to make a cut between psyche and world, subject and object, in here and out there. I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets, as I am in “music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/While the music lasts” (T.S. Eliot). Where does the environment stop and I begin, and can I begin at all without being in some place, deeply involved in, nurtured by the nature of the world?
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https://footnotes2plato.com/2010/12/14/james-hillman-on-the-folly-of-reducing-mind-to-brain/
Mental health is just a one point on the psychological map. If we want to forget about the important role of the rest of the psyche (pathology), we create apollonian ego (mental health) fundamentalism or maybe some kind of spiritual naive utopia ruled by theology. Because we also confuse theology with psychology.
Without the real image of the psyche,we will have only pseudo scientific BS.
We are not able to see the importance and the mechanism of human body or anything else, if we are talking about one finger all the time. This is psychiatry +theological hatred.Because this finger belongs to …satan.
Without phenomenology of the psyche, we will have theological condemnation (psychiatry) and materialistic (apollonian ego fixation) hatred. We do not deserve it. People deserve to have more important role than being a religious or psychiatric slaves. Psychiatry is materialism. Psychiatric nominalism is capitalism.
And Hillman writes about it, no one else ever did it. And we should be thankful for people like Hillman.
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Because James Hillman has taught us how to think, not what to think.
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Monotheistic culture have taught us how to condemn and hate each other.
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Without real image of the psyche we will remain blind. We will remain abandoned, like children in the fog.
Psyche is not a science, it is phenomenology. And we must notice the important role of pathology.This is the first step to homo psychologicus era. The important role of psychological pathology.
And this is the antichrist. We are.People with psychological awarness. Church does not like psyche very much. XD
O, and that “growth” model everywhere, we are not cabbage or mushrooms. Cancer is also a mode of growth.
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https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/487/em-from-em-br-we-ve-had-a-hundred-years-of-psychotherapy-and-the-world-s-getting-worse
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Re-visioning of psyche is already made. Monotheism must die.
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“Re- Visioning psychology” James Hillman.This is our new bible.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eng4OTDqtoM
Special dedication to psychiatry -11:02
HEIL PSYCHE.
Thank you for reading my comments.
“Eventually, the young man’s downward spiral resulted in him dousing himself with gasoline and lighting himself on fire, resulting in severe burns over 90% of his body. He lingered near death for six months in a hospital ward before he eventually died.”
Maybe god will forgive you.
We are ought to kill toxic psychiatry by reading James Hillman. His books are obligatory to everyone who want to defend psyche. Because he created the real image of the psyche.
Inquisitional killers. She was scared of the voices, so they told her that it was her fault, as always. And then she was tortured by drugs. Thank you, apollonian ego arrogants, bastards without humility toward psychological reality, which was banned by materialistic and blind psychiatry, without soul. You f. materialists. Are you happy, now? Are you satisfied enough,now?
Is she normal enough, for you, now?
James Hillman “Re -visioning psychology”.
Heil psyche.
Read “Suicide and the soul”. Without this book, you are placing death in the psychiatric hands. Our small ego does not control death or the whole of psychological reality.
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Death is not the property of your ego . Death is not the property of medicine. Death is not the property of theologians
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Death belongs to psychological reality. Death belongs to psychological reality which is beyond the control of small ego.
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We are not the owners of the psyche. Death does not need pity. Death and psyche need to be respected.
And spiritualists maniacs and materialistic maniacs has gone too far.
Psyche is the ruler here, not stupid psychiatric judges without brain.
Yes, it is religion. We live in society which learn about their psychology form people who hate it, form theologians in scientific disguise.
That is why I write here about James Hillman books. They are extremely important. Because psyche is not a psychiatric or scientific slave. Psyche is the owner of every kind of perception, of our little ego. Monotheistic religion belongs to monotheistic god. Psyche has nothing in common with monotheistic religion.But people sometimes confuse apollonian ego with Christian spirit.
Apollonian ego (rationalism, shallowness, unity) is also not a ruler of the psychological reality. Hades is. And Hades was condemned by christianity. Politheistic nature of our psyche was condemned by religious people. By spiritual fundamentalists.
We are talking about metaphors.
Our science is based on spiritual assumptions. Because spirit is shallow and easy. Psyche is complex, sometimes ruthless and demanding.We do not need psychiatrists and their fixation on spirituality or on apollonian ego hegemony. We need wisdom and courage.
I see mentally ill people as psychological titans, and what they are doing is psychological work. Apollonian ego perception is just too stupid and too simple to be a ruler of the psyche. We are talking about psychological reality, death. For monotheistic people, psyche is the main enemy, evil or hell.
And this is a disaster.
James Hillman “Re -Visioning psychology” and “Suicide and the soul”.
They want to control everything and they do not need wisdom to do it. All they need is power. Psychiatry is fearsome.
Psychiatric perception does not see any signs of beauty in psyche.So psychological awareness today is also ugly, because it is created by ugly eye of monotheistic man.And that man is a enemy of beauty, imagination and so on.
James Hillman – “Kinds of Power”-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSw9djJ177I
Radical psyche. Ego belongs to psyche, ego is not the owner or ruler of the psychological reality.
James Hillman “Re- Visioning psychology”.
We should talk abouts psyche in psychological language. Science is for scientists. Psychology is for psyche.
Monotheistic thinking is a danger for polytheistic psyche.
We are using pseudo scientific language to confirm the theological assumptions about psyche. This is a tragedy. Thanks for this article.
Biological thinking about psyche means nothing without seeing the individual image of psychological reality. Without seeing the individual patterns of thinking, individual psychological reality, biological theories are only a way of destruction, a way of control or a way of dehumanization.
James Hillman “Re- Visioning psychology”.
Great article about poetic imagination.
You are open-minded person with poetic consciousness, so I am obligated to recommend you James Hillman, “Re -Visioning psychology”.
I believe in psyche, not in drugs or psychiatry. Without the proper image of the psyche, people will think that psyche is some kind of brain illness. For monotheistic psychiatry, drugs are used, as a crucifix for a satan. The believe that psyche is some kind of demonic power. Psychiatry is Van Helsing and your psyche is a monster for them.
The problem is that psychiatry believes in drugs and mental health (apollonian ego fundamentalism). PSYCHiatry without psyche is a sin against humanity. Psychopathology is an enemy for their theological or rational believes. And psyche is not something which can be measured by science/ empiricism or theology. We should create the proper image of the psyche.
James Hillman ,”Re-Visioning psychology”
Mental health is just one of many kinds of perception.
We live in the monotheistic reality of one god and spiritualism, but psyche/soul is something which belongs to polytheistic reality. Psyche is a slave of monotheistic fundamentalists. Psyche has got no real image. So how can we have a voice? We don’t have a liberty, because we do not have a right to psychology beyond apollonian ego. Pathology, psychological pathology is an enemy of theological mind. Psyche is now a Satan. Psyche will be an antichrist. For psychiatry, the psyche is Satan. I know it is hard to believe, but even our science our philosophy, our psychology belongs to monotheistic god.
James Hillman “Re -Visioning psychology”.
We must be aware of the differences between theological and psychological mind. Spiritualism,materialism/brain is not a psychology.
Psychology is not a science, it is a form of polytheistic awareness. And our thinking is monotheistic, governed by theology. Psychiatry is a monotheistic fundamentalism, for which, polytheistic psyche is the enemy. Psychiatry is a religious hatred with scientific pretensions. We must know about facts that are hidden.
“awareness of injustice turned into a self-improvement project”. It is worth to remember this thought.
Suicide is not a choice, it is a psychological necessity.
“Death then is the cure and the salvation and not
just a last, worst stage of a disease. The cock-crow at dawn
also heralds resurrection of the light. But the victory over
disease and the new day begins only when the ambition
for it has been abandoned upon the altar. The disease
which ttte experience of death cures is the rage to live.
This disease is phrased best in the medical-statistical
term ‘life-expectancy’. Hoping, ‘expecting with desire’,
is justified statistically; one has the right to a certain
quantity of life. This hope tends to entangle physician
and patient in hoping for the wrong thing. They hope for
more of the life that is already known, that is, for the past.
Hope of this kind is hardly for salvation or even for new
beginnings. It is regressive because it prevents the challenge of death. It is egotistic because it asks for more of what one was. This is hardly the hope Paul describes
which is not seen and where ‘getting better’ would mean a
quality of being, not an approach to the normal. One is
led to believe that the desire to be free from illness means
in truth to return to what one was before the illness, to the
status quo ante. When the physician joins the patient in
hoping to restore or return him to health with a speedy recovery, they move against the flow of time, the process of ageing, and the reality of death. Their joint hope denies
the morbidity of all life. ”
http://www.pnsja.com/documents/hillmansuicideandthesoul.pdf
Apollonian ego fundamentalism is the main sickness. Rationalism and theology/religion in medical disguise. Where is psychology? We need the real image of the psyche. Because we do not even know about what we are talking about.
We need “Re-Visioning psychology”,psyche is a mythic imagination. We need Jung and Hillman not false empiricism and biological model of psyche. Psychiatry is psychopathy.We do not control psyche.Our small ego participate in it. We are imagined by things we do not control, that is why we need phenomenology of the psyche, not science. We need to learn to accept psychological truths, and now all we have is theology (rationalism materialism) which condemned the real human psyche. And apollonian ego thinks that psyche is a mental illness, not psychological truth.
Psyche is a mythic imagination, not science/ false empiricism. That imagination is not a property of our small arrogant ego or science.
Psyche is a mythic imagination.Psychiatric imagination is apollonian ego fundamentalism (rationalism, theology) and psychiatry without psyche is a form of stubborn stupidity. We can’t have psychology on the left, and psychiatry without psychology on the right side.
We do not have psychology. We have egology. We think that psychological reality belongs to small apollonian ego.
We are wrong.
“The author did not say that LGBT+ and queer people are in conflict with psychiatric survivors.’
I wrote about this, they removed my post.
I recommend James Hillman “Re -Visioning psychology” to everyone, especially to victims of psychiatry, because they deserved to know the truth about psychology. We should understand what truths they robbed us of.
That’s a good point.
Removed for moderation
Well. Society which collaborates with psychiatry is useless form of egoic nation. No future, no past. Just technology money and nothing more. Where economy is the main power, psychiatry is a king and human being means nothing. Ivan Illich, Szasz writes about the sad fact that there is no escape from society, from ruthless norms, only through suicide.
So when , economy is enough for you, and you are a great member of apollonic tribe. World is yours. And you have psychiatry to kill your enemies. A great institution for killing real people.
For me, normal people are privileged people and they are those who never fight against biological psychiatry to defend others, because they are actually using psychiatry against the others…. They do not want to read Szasz, Hillman or listen to victims of the psychiatry. So.
They have already chosen their side.
I do not think that victims of the psychiatric dehumanization would like to socialize with their almost killers.They are like Frodo. They have enough, they are tired. So f. tired.
Monotheistic psychology sees only evil, not the real psyche. It is because of the fixation over the utopia of wholeness. Schizophrenia is when your ego is beyond rational simple level. Brain cannot cope with that reality, it is too much for the mind and the brain. We have no control over the psyche, our ego is being controlled by psyche. We need the phenomenology of the psyche, not psychiatric ego fixation.
https://books.google.pl/books?id=GWHfAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT49&lpg=PT49&dq=schizophrenia+james+hillman&source=bl&ots=mrJiGS4IJp&sig=ACfU3U0DcQ-JHJFmPf0am9gFh95WzrWQEg&hl=pl&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_vYvCtfriAhWE2aQKHfjdAwc4ChDoATAJegQICBAB#v=onepage&q=schizophrenia%20james%20hillman&f=false
I was not aware that all we know about psyche is wrong, I have never believed in psychiatric diagnosis, either. And I was shocked. His books has changed my life forever. We all should be loyal to psyche, and we should fight for soul.
Hillman was not a victim of psychiatry ,but he was not also an escapist. He was a phenomenologist. Yes, I do agree he was not a fighter, however he had troubles with publishing his books.
His “Suicide and the soul” and “Re-visioning psychology, are the foundations of human psychology. Without these books, we remain blind to psyche, because our thinking about psychology is totally theological. We are not aware of that fact. I was not either.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain.
From The Soul’s Code by James Hillman, p. 150-154:
The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
https://footnotes2plato.com/2010/12/14/james-hillman-on-the-folly-of-reducing-mind-to-brain/
James Hillman is the only one man alive who knows what lies beyond an empty psychiatric nominalism/jargon.
Read his revision of psychology, so you will know. It is worth to know the real meaning of depression, psychosis, all the psyche. The psychological, phenomenological meaning. We just do not know about this, because that knowledge is hidden. Psyche has been stolen form us.
It is all about the language that we are using. The better language we have, the better we are.
“Depression is still the Great Enemy. More personal energy is expended in manic defenses against, diversions from, and denials of it than goes into other supposed psychopathological threats to society: psychopathic criminality, schizoid breakdown, addictions. As long as we are caught in cycles of hoping against despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology.
Yet through depression we enter depths and in depth find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering through it till it turns, nor theologizing it — but discovering the consciousness and depths it wants. So begins the revolution on behalf of soul.”
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/18521.James_Hillman
James Hillman
Psychiatric jargon is useless and it is a weapon against psychology. DSM is just a form of demonization or condemntaion of the psychological reality.
I recommend Hillman’s thought to everyone here. I write his best quotes. Hillman was amazing, psyche is also great, but we do not know about it, because of psychiatric jargon. Psychiatry is so empty….
Thank You. Yes, Hillman was and still is one of the greatest thinker ever. He is the true voice of the psychological reality.
James Hillman on “biological psyche”-
“Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. If environment means literally what’s around, it must also mean whatever is around. This because the unconscious psyche selects quite arbitrarily among the stuff encountered every day in the environment. Tiny and trivial bits of information may have huge subliminal psychic effects, as the days’ residues in dreams show. We do dream of the damnedest things! Much of each day is never noticed or recalled, but the psyche picks up the environmental flotsam and delivers it to the dream. The dream–a processing plant recycling the environment, finding soul values in junk. The dream–an artist, appropriating images from the environment for recollection in tranquility.”
James Hillman
Psychiatry is a lethal theological power over psyche.
James Hillman, “Re- Visioning psychology”
Thomasz Szasz “Manufacture of madness”
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain.-
https://footnotes2plato.com/2010/12/14/james-hillman-on-the-folly-of-reducing-mind-to-brain/
Academic psychology, in its eagerness to be as scientific as physics, has one-sidedly chosen the “outside,” so that the soul no longer finds a place in the only field dedicated by its very name to its study. Hence, depth psychology has been more or less kept out of the academics of official psychology….depth psychology is the stone the builders of the academy have rejected.
There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books.
Now when therapy decides to cure the pathology, instead of seeing that the pathology is part of the crack or the broken window, and that something is trying to get in, then it seems to me it’s creating more pathology and keeping the Gods even further away. And then they break in through the whole fucking society.
So long as the statistics of normalizing developmental psychology determine the standards against which the extraordinary complexities of a life are judged, deviations become deviants.
Instead of adventuring forward to explore and research unknown territory, control fights a rearguard action, keeping inventory of what has already happened. It likes complete reports. Control, for all its self-assured position of command, relies on a defensive vision, and the traits enumerated–enforced loyalty, exactitude, suspicion of the hidden, watchfulness–are paranoid traits.
————————————————————————————————————
James Hillman
I totally agree.
Without Hillman’s phenomenology, Szaszz critique means nothing. Szasz did not write about the nature of psyche. Szasz was a nihilist and Laing was a transcendentalist. Hillman created the proper image of the psychological reality and he is the only one who did it.
This is not psychiatry, this is apollonian ego fundamentalism. They do not even understand what psyche is.
James Hillman “Re-visioning psychology”
Thomas Szasz “Manufacture of madness”
Madness, mental health, mental illness, genius, talent. Those words are weapons in the mouth of apollonian idiot for whom ego in apollonian archetype and theology of the brain is in the center of the psychological world. They are using empty words without proper meaning in completely false context.
How can it be that someone like Plath was tortured by someone like psychiatrist?
Very high language was always attacked by psychiatric jargon and poets were attacked by apollonian fundamnetalists.
Psychiatric jargon is a cancer of the real human language. And only Hillman knew it.
Why psychiatry is attacking poets? Because psychiatry means apollonian ego fundamnetalism, and poets represent psyche, psychopathology. That is why.
BECAUSE POETS REPRESENT THE REALITY OF DEATH IN FAKE THEOLOGICAL NAIVE SOCIETY IN WHICH DEATH IS A SIN AGAINST GOD. And death is still a dangerous satan for theological psychiatry.
If you represent real human psyche in society of naive spiritual fundamentalists they will kill you in the name of health (theological naivety).
To recover means to resurrect. And resurrection is a spiritual claim.
And only James Hillman noticed it.
————————————————————————————————————————-
Poets and their high language represent psyche, death, and psychiatric jargon represent impaired reality of apollonian fundamentalists, for whom death and psyche does not exists.
You must have extremely strong balls to lose with the state like victims of the psychiatry. Because there are no winners anyway, there are only obedient slaves who thinks they win.
———————————————————————————————————————–
“In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.”
James Hillman
I’m in favor of destruction, aggression, hating things. Not bearing things anymore. We think the breakdown comes because our life is in bad shape. But maybe the ideas cause the disorder. Something tries to break through and causes the disorder.”
James Hillman
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/james_hillman
I feel disgust.
“Do you see the complete harmony between central dictatorship, fascism, political callousness, and the self-centeredness of the spiritual point of view?”
“The word “normal” comes from the Greek norma, which was a carpenter’s square, that right-angled tool for establishing straightness.”
“Psychoanalysis has to get out of the consulting room and analyze all kinds of things. You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that “normalcy” is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid.”
“My practice tells me I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Moreover, it tells me that to place neurosis and psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced.”
James Hillman
http://www.terrapsych.com/hillman.html
The society of mice must be terrified.
“Small, crafty, cowering, timorous little beast,
Oh, what a panic is in your breast!”
James Hillman “Re- Visioning psychology”.
What strikes me, is that he was so famous, and no one even have noticed that he was almost destroyed by psychiatry. Hemingway Plath and many others were also tortured by psychiatry. But for people who do not give shit about that fact, they were just poor bad luck people who apparently deserved it. Because of their “mental illness”.
I can’t stand the things that pro psychiatric people are thinking about human psyche. They are like psychopaths. And people who are aware of how dangerous psychiatry is, are so alone.
So brave and so alone. Because the truth does not have many friends.
The main goal of psychiatry was to build the proper image of the psyche, not to get rid of the psyche. Drugs were to help in dealing with psychosis, not to destroy the essence of psychosis.
Psychiatry is the biggest enemy of the psyche. They hate everything that is not material and does not involve making money. Because it is a calculating soulless child of lies and mammon. Psychiatry have destroyed the essence of the psyche.
They are not intrested in the reality of the psyche, they can’t see the need or psychological value of psychosis or depression. For them psyche is just pure evil. They just want to destroy it in the name of theological or materialistic negation.Sometimes when I think about differences between psyche and the coarse reality of apollonic/spiritual negation I wonder when this all will collapse. Because they have gone too far with destroying the proper image of psychological reality.
Why, you, authoritarians,hate psyche so much? Because of fear? Or because non material reality is still satan for you?
Thank You for this important article. Hemingway, Plath, especially poets, were terrorized by psychiatric monotheism. Because monotheistic anti human scientism have killed metaphor first. Nazis party and their anti human utopian ideology is the source of the greatest evil today.
The roots of psychiatric slavery = psychological monotheism. Monotheism is a form of a very destructive and limited thinking.
https://medium.com/re-visioning-religion/the-literalization-of-monotheism-3ec380425033
“This idealized unity requires for its earthly realization, an ideal man, the Hero, who can receive the (divine) commands and overcome in his own person and at large, the obstacles that stand in the way. These obstacles must also have a mythic dimension. Whether the story is retold in an Islamic, Christian, Jewish or Hindu setting, some dragon of dangerous strength must have its head chopped off, traitors everywhere must be sought out and eliminated since, ‘you are either with us, or against us’. The Marxists, therefore, require(d) the Capitalists, the Western Powers their Communist threat and more recently, Muslims, who in turn, require the Great Satan and their own heretics. In sum, the heroic requires problems and, by implication, Final Solutions.
Similarly, psychological monotheism tends to regard difference and diversity as irreconcilable opposites and reduces all psychological life to moral issues. Particularly in the light of the impossible-to-resolve ‘Problem of Evil’ in Christianism, this kind of moral reductionism and its fusion with the heroic archetype, provides the justification for all types of action and violence against whatever seems ‘outside,’ a prescribed idea of ‘unity’. Thus, Jung’s view of the West’s ‘monotheism of consciousness’ is directly related to the internalizing of a particular type of Christianity. As both he and Hillman reiterate, it does not matter if one is a Christian or not, ‘believer’ or atheist. Rather, it is a particularly narrow psychological attitude towards self, others, religion, knowledge, in short, life itself.
James Hillman “Re -Visioning psychology”
Thomas Szasz – “Manufacture of madness”
Everything should be clear after reading these books.
Psychopathology is a metaphor, the form of the highest psychological art. And authoritarians and their small brains are destroying people in the name of their lame materialistic and convenient fantasy about mental health – apollonian – hegemony.
The problem is the limited monotheistic psychology, not the human psyche.
Human Psyche should have authority, but psyche is illegal. Because we have illusions of spirituality in the place of psychology. That is why we should all read James Hillman. Because he have noticed it.
Without psychopathology life would be an illusion. Without illnesses, our health means nothing.
Yes, but authoritarian mind, apollonian mind is too stupid to use empathy or phenomenology, they want to use scientific BS for money and for expand apollonian ego over the rest of the psyche. Psychology never was, and never will be a science. And scientific approach to psyche is like scientific attitude to love. It is useless, it is non human. Biology depend on individual psyche, on the level. And we could see what is happening when ego lose contact with apollonian, rational easy level – for example Anneliese Michel. For psychiatry satan is real, but human psyche means nothing. And that are inquisitional roots.
And when we are using drugs or whatever to help ourselves, we must stay true to psychological truths behind our medication. We are using drugs, because depression is a real psychological hardship, not because we think it is a medical illness, or, because we want to condemn depression, because of theological negation and so on.
Psychiatry do not want to stay true to psyche, to depression or to suferring. The want to eradicate these states, because of theological spiritual illusions. Psychiatry is to undermine credibility of the human psyche, because of monotheistic claims.
THEY WANT TO “CURE” DEPRESSION, BECAUSE THEY HATE IT. AND BECAUSE OF THEOLOGICAL NEGATION.
PSYCHE IS SATAN FOR CHRISTIANS.
The language is the key. Psychiatric jargon is a dead language. Hillman’s language is alive.
“The insistence on psychological singularity is a kind of implicit ideology, supplying images and appropriate feelings about them, creating a fantasy of what it means to be ‘a people’. And this major archetype, of an essentially one dimensional ‘god’ brings with it its compatible and fellow archetypes. For instance, One Lord is accompanied by One faith (orthodoxy/modernism), One Law (shariah/WTO), One State (dar-ul-Islam/globalization), served by One body of the faithful (ummah/consumers). A beautiful evocation of the ideal totalitarian (and paranoid) society.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
———————————————-
“This idealized unity requires for its earthly realization, an ideal man, the Hero, who can receive the (divine) commands and overcome in his own person and at large, the obstacles that stand in the way. These obstacles must also have a mythic dimension. Whether the story is retold in an Islamic, Christian, Jewish or Hindu setting, some dragon of dangerous strength must have its head chopped off, traitors everywhere must be sought out and eliminated since, ‘you are either with us, or against us’. ”
———————————————-
Anti psychological monotheism.
———————————————————————————————————————-
https://medium.com/re-visioning-religion/the-literalization-of-monotheism-3ec380425033
“I equate Christianism with moralistic fundamentalism … you have to face this level of Christianism because that is where its world conquering force lies. It’s not Christian love that’s conquered the world … not its sophisticated interpretations and theology. It’s successful because it mobilizes the will, and the will needs fundamentalism or it does not know what to do …[it is] utterly monotheistic … there is only one meaning, one reading of the text, for instance, the one meaning of Christ’s suffering.[2]”
James Hillman
“Similarly, psychological monotheism tends to regard difference and diversity as irreconcilable opposites and reduces all psychological life to moral issues. Particularly in the light of the impossible-to-resolve ‘Problem of Evil’ in Christianism, this kind of moral reductionism and its fusion with the heroic archetype, provides the justification for all types of action and violence against whatever seems ‘outside,’ a prescribed idea of ‘unity’. Thus, Jung’s view of the West’s ‘monotheism of consciousness’ is directly related to the internalizing of a particular type of Christianity. As both he and Hillman reiterate, it does not matter if one is a Christian or not, ‘believer’ or atheist. Rather, it is a particularly narrow psychological attitude towards self, others, religion, knowledge, in short, life itself.”
——————————————————
“In contrast to the reality of a ‘polytheistic’ psyche, psychological monotheism refers to a literal attitude towards psychological, that is, symbolic events, in which, through a self-reflexive moral reductionism, one vision overwhelms all others, swallowing them in an attempt to extend itself and create ‘unity’. The tendency towards literalization and moral reductionism is peculiar to Christianism…”
—————————————————
The lens of the psyche.
The lens of the polytheistic imagination.
Psyche is too complex, this is not spirit religion or Jungian theological fantasy about union. Psyche was destroyed by religion and materialism, by ideology of monotheism. Psychiatry uses pseudo science against psyche, to prove theological beliefs in medical disguise. We don’t have human psychology, we have religion and spirituality or economy and politics in the place of real psychology. Psyche needs Copernicus not medicine.
James Hillman. “Re – Visioning psychology”.
Biostitues = psychiatry. Biostitution.
No one represent psyche, only those called insane and this is sad. One of the greatest defender of psyche was James Hillman, and he also was rejected like those called mentally ill. He was one of them. We are rejected by stupid people, we should be proud.
Thank you for your wisdom, Mr. Hickey. You are a great thinker too, but they will reject you. They will reject you the same way, Tesla or Hillman were rejected by money makers.
Anti psychiatry is for wise people, not for convenient common minds.
Psychological polytheism is not a religion. It is a metaphorical description of our psychological reality.
Monotheism is religion and fixation also. Psychiatry is a form of monotheistic fundamentalism with pretensions to science, however roots of psychiatry are strictly theological. Psychiatry is a weapon of god against human psyche, which was confused with hell or satan and evil. Which is disaster for psychological man.
Ideological monotheism destroyed polytheistic psyche and sent psychological man to hell. (psychiatry symbolize that hell and condemnation)
Yes it is. Schizophrenia is a right for those who are privileged enough to destroy you. Schizophrenia should be a neutral description of the condition. Only a place on a psychological map. The problem is that language and the real image of the psychological reality does not exists. It was destroyed by spiritualists and materialists. The confuse religion or brain theories with psychological reality.
When ego is on apollonian shallow level of the psyche you are mentally health. You are convinced that control over psyche belongs to you, this is only illusion,… very practical illusion, indeed. When ego goes deeper into strict psychological reality, psyche takes over the control over ego, and then they will blame your brain for that, because it is seen as illegal… There supposed to be Hades, there. But, like I said, that reality does not exists, because Jesus “saves us from it” and christians have called it hell, and then people confused psyche with evil..
Thanks to Jesus and his spiritual utopia, schizophrenics now are living in closed illegal and sealed coffin.
Religion banned psychological polytheism and so on. Psyche and gods has nothing to do with religion or prayers, they were only symbols of non material reality. Hades/Zeus is the father of the psyche. But now we have apollonian hegemony of rationalism or rather rationazism, fixation of control, scientific BS, brain theories of mental illness.
The ship with apollo in control will sink, it is only question of time. Psychological forces are supplanted and stuffed in a small, tight prison box. They will explode and probably California will sink. Europe will sink in the ocean or something. Because of APA, because of apollonian ego fundamentalism.
I am pro panthers of any kind. Great site. Normal people should learn to think, because psychiatry is an evidence that normal people left thinking to those called mentally ill. Apollonian ego curse. James Hillman was a great thinker, he was trying to teach people how to think, not what to think about depression and so on.
We should focus on phenomenology of things rather than searching for fake solutions, because of false empiricism.We need truth and courage not cowardice or childish theological demonization of death, suicide, suffering. We need bravery and maturity not fake solutions from cowards.
Yes. You should watch the movie titled – “Glass”.
It shows the way in which monotheistic psychiatry destroys the truth about the polytheistic psyche.
Yes I am ironic. Wisdom means nothing today. Mental health is not equall to wisdom, psychiatry has nothing in common with wisdom. Because people are not interested in wisdom. They want power and money. That is why empaths or psychological men are losing with them. They are losing because they means more than matter. Generally speaking, this is main reason why psychological man is terrorized. He means more than people who believe in easy things. Because when you are easy or simple it means also you can survive, because you are enough blind to do it. Survival is so plain that only simple people can do it. Psychological man can’t. because he collides with the reality of death. And then he realizes that apollonians and normal are antipsychological idiots and they want to lock you up, because you are destroying their utopia.
Yes, that is why he is so famous now….
“Pathological bias”, chapter IX from Suicide and the soul. The greatest book about psyche ever. Yes, Hillman was great. “Re -Visioning psychology” should be compulsory lecture for people today. They lost their way.
Manufacture of madness written by Szasz is also a monolith. Psyche is like monolith among angry monkeys.
“The end of clinical treatment is cure. The process comes to a fruit and all medical measures are stages towards this fulfillment. Consciousness, however, as far as we can read the evidence, comes to no definite goal, no final fruition, but is is a continuous in-going process.
An analysts who has a notion of cure as a goal of his work is thinking medically. He has not grasped the nature of the complex, the basis of analythical process. There are no antidotes for complexes. The cannot be cured away because complexes are not causes, though they be the determinants of psychic life. A medical model tends to conceive them like a wounds or traumata. or as malignants growths and foreign bodies to be removed in the medical manner.
But if complexes are energetic centers, the cannot be “cured” without damaging the vitality of the patient.
Health requires death.
If lay means unprofessional, then lay means open.
IF THE PATIENT IS THE DISEASE, GETTING RID MEANS A DESTRUCTIVE REJECTION OF THE PATIENT.”
JAMES HILLMAN