Soul-Speech

All modern therapies which claim that action is more curative than words (Moreno) and which seek techniques other than talk (rather than in addition to it) are repressing the most human of all faculties-the
telling of the tales of our souls. These therapies may be curative of the child in us who has not learned to speak or the animal who cannot, or a spirit-daimon that is beyond words because it is beyond soul. But only continued attempts at accurate soul-speech can cure our speech of its chatter and restore it to its first function, the communication of soul.

Soul of bulk and substance can be evoked by words and expressed in words; for myth and poetry, so altogether verbal and "fleshless," nonetheless resonate with the deepest intimacies of organic existence. A mark of imaginal man is the speech of his soul, and the range of this speech, its self-generative spontaneity, its precise subtlety and ambiguous suggestion, its capacity, as Hegel said,
"to receive and reproduce every modification of our ideational faculty, “ can be supplanted neither by the technology of communication media, by contemplative spiritual silence, nor by physical gestures and signs. The more we hold back from the risk of speaking because of the semantic anxiety that
keeps the soul in secret incommunicado, private and personal, the greater grows the credibility gap between what we are and what we say, splitting psyche and logos. The more we become tied by linguistic self-consciousness, the more we abdicate the ruling principle of psychological existence. That we then turn to the rats of Skinner and the dogs
of Pavlov, the geese and wolves of Lorenz--tune into dolphins or consider man a naked ape-in order to find prototypes for human behavior, indicates to what extent we are losing our speech and with it our sense of a distinctly human nature. It is not animal prototypes we need for discovering our original patterns, but personified archetypes, each of whom speaks, has a name, 'I' and has its existence in the language world of myth. Without speech we lose soul, and human being assumes the fantasy being of animals. But man is half-angel because he can
speak. The more we distrust speech in therapy or the capacity of speech to be therapeutic, the closer we are to an absorption into the fantasy of the archetypal subhuman, and the sooner the archetypal barbarian
strides into the communication ruins of a culture that refused eloquence as a mirror of its soul.

James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology