Tag Archives: spirit

Rejoining Soul and Symptom

    Many modern methods of psychotherapy want to retain the spirit of analysis but not its soul. They want to retain the methods and forms without the pathologizings. Then the doctor can become a master, and the patient is metamorphosed into a pupil, client, partner, disciple- anything but a patient. Analysis itself is called a dialogue or a trans-
action, for "therapy" smacks of pathology. The focus upon inwardness and the goal of integration of the interior person may remain, but disintegration tends to be excluded, without which such integration has
no significance. In their view, falling apart is never for the sake of the parts, the multiple persons who are the richness of psychic life; falling apart is but a phase preliminary to reconstituting a stronger ego.

    These approaches that would synthesize rather than analyse, integrate rather than differentiate, and keep the therapeutic rituals without the pathological contents, neglect one of the deepest insights resulting from the last century of psychotherapy. The psyche does not exist without pathologizing. Since the unconscious was discovered as an operative
factor in every soul, pathologizing has been recognized as an inherent aspect of the interior personality. Freud declared this succinctly: "We
can catch the unconscious only in pathological material." And after her last visit to Freud in 1913 Lou Salomé wrote:"... he put exceptionally strong emphasis on the necessity of maintaining the closest and most persistent contact with the pathological material. . .”

    Pathologizing is present not only at moments of special crisis but in the everyday lives of all of us. It is present most profoundly in the
individual’s sense of death, which he carries wherever he goes. It is present also in each person's inward feeling of his peculiar differentness which includes, and may be even based upon, his sense of individual “craziness". For we each have a private fantasy of mental illness; "crazy," "mad, “insane”-
all their substitutes, colloquialisms, and synonyms-
-form a regular part of our daily speech. As we cast our internal deviance from us with these exclamations about others, we are at the same time acknowledging that we each have a deviant, odd
second (or third) personality that provides another perspective to our regular life. Indeed, pathologizing supplies material out of which we build our regular lives. Their styles, their concerns, their loves, reflect
patterns that have pathologized strands woven all through them. The deeper we know ourselves and the other persons of our complexes, the more we recognize how well we, too, fit into the textbook sketches of abnormal psychology. Those case histories are also our own biographies. To put it in sociological language: nearly every individual in the
United States of America has been, now is, or will have been in the hands of professional soul care of one kind or another, for a shorter or longer period, for one reason or another.

    Discovery of the unconscious has meant the widespread and overwhelming recognition of the psyche's autonomous activity of pathologizing. That discovery and that recognition have led to one even more significant: the rediscovery of soul. But unfortunately and mistakenly we have confused these three interrelated discoveries: the unconscious,
pathologizing, and soul. We confusedly believe that everyone needs professional therapy as if that is where soul could be refound. But this is not so. For then we are confusing the rediscovery of soul during
the twentieth century with the place where it happened-- therapeutic analysis. But therapy or analysis was not the carrier of that discovery.
Psychopathology was. Symptoms, not therapists, led this century to soul. The persistent pathologizings in Freud and in Jung and in their patients- pathologizings that refused to be repressed, transformed, or cured, or even understood- led this century's main explorers of the psyche ever deeper. Their movement through pathology into soul is an
experience repeated in each of us. We owe them much, but we owe our pathologizing more. We owe our symptoms an immense debt. The soul can exist without its therapists but not without its afflictions.

   Analysis has merely given psychopathology a hearing outside the asylums, prisons, and church institutions where it had been kept; the new therapy provided the only place given secular sanction for a prolonged and intense involvement with pathologizing. Symptoms were the very point and focus of its attention. So analysis offered the vessel
into which our unconscious pathologizing could be poured and then cooked long enough for its significance to emerge, for it to make soul.
Out of psyché-pathos-logos came the meaning of suffering of the soul, or the soul's suffering of meaning.

   Again a confusion beset this experience: a special state of being- “being-in-therapy"- seemed required for this discovery of soul through pathologizing, and so for many people therapy became a religious ritual, even replacing religious ritual. One was “in" analysis, and analysis was “in."  There were the initiates: those who had been analysed. And there were the others: those who had never even been in therapy or had not been “properly” or "thoroughly" analysed. To
refind the sense of soul one had to "go through" analysis with its regular appointments, its techniques, and its stages of "beginning an analysis." "working through," and "terminating."  Inevitably and without knowing it, the ritual of analysis had produced a new cult of soul. Finally, some have taken this religious direction literally, declaring that actually this is what therapy is all about, an expression of the religious activity of the soul: the psychotherapeutic movement is correctly a religious movement; therapists are indeed a new kind of ministers to soul--gurus or priests.

  In this movement toward religion pathology now tends to be left behind. By shifting its ground from pathology to self-development, recent analysis no longer recognizes the primacy of affliction. One goes
to therapy to grow, not because one is afflicted-as if growth and affliction excluded each other. A gulf has developed between soul and symptom. On the one hand analysis regards itself as a professional contract for solving problems, a variety of medical science without soul, ritual, or mystery. On the other, it imitates the transcendental disciplines, foster-
ing ritual, community, and teachings. Pathologizing again foundered upon its old division, illness or sin, and a further division emerged. Now, to be in soul therapy for growth and realization of personality, symptoms are left out; to be in medical or behavioral therapy for relief of symptomatic afflictions, soul is left out. Soul and symptom have broken in
two.

  This chapter and this book want to mend that division. By retaining psychopathology as a descriptive language of the psyche which indeed
speaks to and of the soul, I would keep psyche and pathology close together. If I seem to be making the soul sick again by such stress on pathologizing, I am at the same time giving sickness soul again. By
returning symptoms to the soul, I am attempting to return soul to symptoms, restoring them to the central value in life that soul itself has.

~James Hillman , Re-Visioning Paychology pg 70-72