👁For the Eskimos, when one falls ill, one takes on a new name, a new diseased personality. To get over a disease, one must quite literally “get over” it by transcending it, that is, by dying. The only
hope for cure lies in the death of the ill personality. Health requires death.
Perhaps this is what Socrates meant with his last obscure words about owing a sacrificial cock to Asklepiós. Once the cocky pride of
life that crows hopefully at each day’s dawning is sacrificed, the instinct for tomorrow is yielded. 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 the experience of
death cures is the rage to live. .
An analyst often finds himself purposely passing by the symptoms appearing in his practice. Rather than investigate these symptoms, he turns to the person’s life which has fostered the pathology.
His premise is that the disease has its meaning in the life of the patient and he tries to understand this meaning. He cannot hold out the usual hope for cure or even relief of symptoms. His analytical
experience says that the hope which the patient presents is part of the pathology itself. The patient’s hope arises as an essential part of the constellation of his suffering. It is frequently governed by impossible demands to be free of suffering itself. The same condition that constellated the symptoms is just the condition which these symptoms
are interrupting and killing- or curing. Therefore, an analyst does not hope for a return to that condition out of which the symptoms and the hope for relief arose. Because hope has this core of illusion it favors repression. By hoping for the status quo ante, we repress the present state of weakness and suffering and all it can bring. Postures of strength are
responsible for many major complaints today–ulcers, vascular and coronary conditions, high blood pressure, stress syndrome, alcoholism, highway and sport accidents, mental breakdown. The will to
fall ill, like the suicide impulse, leads patient and physician face to face with morbidity, which stubbornly returns in spite of all hope
to the contrary. One might ask if medical hope itself is not partly responsible for recurrent illness; since it never fully allows for weakness and suffering the death experience is not able to produce its
meaning. Experiences are cheated of their thorough effect by speedy recovery. Until the soul has got what it wants, it must fall ill again. And another iatrogenic vicious circle of recurrent illness begins.
👁
(James Hillman ,Suicide and the Soul)
archetypal meanings and less for their traumatic history. Soul history is recaptured by separating it from obfuscations in case history. The
immediate family, for instance, become the real people they are, undistorted by inner meanings which they had been forced to carry.
The rediscovery of soul history shows itself in the reawakening of emotion, fantasy, and dream, in a sense of mythological destiny penetrated by the transpersonal, and by spontaneous acausal time. It
reflects the “cure” from a chronic identification of the soul with outer events, places, and people. As this separation occurs, one is no longer a case but a person.
James Hillman
history, or, in other words, as one dies to the world as an arena of projection. Soul history is a living obituary, recording life from the point of view of death, giving the uniqueness of a person sub specie
acternitatis. As one builds one’s death, so one writes one’s own obituary in one’s soul history.
James Hillman
BlissNinja 