James Hillman and Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse
(1992)
Part I
The First
Dialogue:
A Cell of
Revolution
> > JAMES HILLMAN: We've had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. Maybe it's time to look at that. We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go inside to locate the psyche, you examine your feelings and your dreams, they belong to you. Or it's interrelations, interpsyche, between your psyche and mine. That's been extended a little bit into family systems and office groups—but the psyche, the soul, is still only within and between people. We're working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what's left out of that.
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What's left out is a deteriorating world.
So why hasn't therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on that "inside" soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the
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world, psychotherapy can't do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system's sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.
You know, the soul is always being rediscovered through pathology. In the nineteenth century people didn't talk about psyche, until Freud came along and discovered psychopathology. Now we're beginning to say, "The furniture has stuff in it that's poisoning us, the microwave gives off dangerous rays." The world has become toxic.
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MICHAEL VENTURA: That sea out there is diseased. We can't eat the fish.
HILLMAN: The world has become full of symptoms. Isn't that the beginning of recognizing what used to be called animism ?
The world's alive—my god! It's having effects on us. "I've got to get rid of those fluorocarbon cans." "I've got to get rid of the furniture because underneath it's formaldehyde." "I've got to watch out for this and that and that." So there's pathology in the world, and through that we're beginning to treat the world with more respect.
VENTURA: As though having denied the spirit in things, the spirit—offended—comes back as a threat. Having denied the soul in things , having said to things, with Descartes, "You don't have souls," things have turned around and said, "Just you watch what kind of a soul I have, muthafucka."
HILLMAN: "Just watch what I can do, man! You're gonna have that ugly lamp in your room, that lamp is going to make you suffer every single day you look at it. It's going to produce fluorescent light, and it's going to drive you slowly crazy sitting in your office. And then you're going to see a psychotherapist, and you're going to try to work it out in your relationships, but you don't know I'm really the one that's got you. It's that fluorescent tube over your head all day long, coming right
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down on your skull like a KGB man putting a light on you, straight down on you—shadowless, ruthless, cruel."
VENTURA: And yet we sense this in all we do and say now, all of us, but we're caught in a double bind: on the one hand this is "progress," a value that's been ingrained in us—and if you think it's not ingrained in you, take a drive down to Mexico and see if even poor Americans would want to live the way most of those people have to live (the life of the American poor seems rich to them, that's why they keep coming); but on the other hand, we know that the things of our lives are increasingly harmful, but we haven't got Idea One about what to do. Our sense of politics has atrophied into the sort of nonsense that goes on in presidential elections.
HILLMAN: There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to the real issues. Why are the intelligent people—at least among the white middle class—so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! They've been in therapy in the United States for thirty, forty years, and during that time there's been a tremendous political decline in this country.
VENTURA: How do you think that works?
HILLMAN: Every time we try to deal with our outrage over the freeway, our misery over the office and the lighting and the crappy furniture, the crime on the streets, whatever— every time we try to deal with that by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we're depriving the political world of something . And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world . Yet therapy goes on blindly believing that it's curing the outer world by making better people. We've had that for years and years and years: "If everybody went into therapy we'd have better buildings, we'd have better people, we'd have more consciousness." It's not the case.
VENTURA: I'm not sure it's causal , but it's definitely a pattern . Our inner knowledge has gotten more subtle while our
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ability to deal with the world around us has, well, deteriorated is almost not a strong enough word. Disintegrated is more like it.
HILLMAN: The vogue today, in psychotherapy, is the "inner child." That's the therapy thing—you go back to your childhood. But if you're looking backward, you're not looking around. This trip backward constellates what Jung called the "child archetype." Now, the child archetype is by nature apolitical and disempowered —it has no connection with the political world. And so the adult says, "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.
By emphasizing the child archetype, by making our therapeutic hours rituals of evoking childhood and reconstructing childhood, we're blocking ourselves from political life. Twenty or thirty years of therapy have removed the most sensitive and the most intelligent, and some of the most affluent people in our society into child cult worship. It's going on insidiously, all through therapy, all through the country. So of course our politics are in disarray and nobody's voting—we're disempowering ourselves through therapy.
Well...yeah, it's definitely a pattern . The causality of it all is always tougher to pinpoint.
Seems to me that the feelings of powerlessness probably came first, and they didn't really come from "politics" per se, though it is their ultimate destiny to be felt acutely in the political arena. We do not (and never did) vote on scale of growth or pace of technological change; and we vote on interconnectedness only at such great remove from the important decisions that it would be disingenuous to suggest it has ever had full consent.
Lasch: "If we consider the history of economic development as a whole, we might well conclude that it has everywhere been imposed from above." (ToH, 157)
Maybe this is how we lost power? And then we withdrew from politics and went to therapy?
(My mom was fond of saying something like, "Mexico is a place no one would ever leave if it wasn't dangerous to stay." So sure, they keep coming , hoping to "impose" some "economic development" on themselves, but that is not quite the bottom-up validation for the American Way of Life that many would like it to be.)
VENTURA: The assumption people are working out of is that inner growth translates into worldly power , and many don't realize that they go to therapy with that assumption.
HILLMAN: If personal growth did lead into the world, wouldn't our political situation be different today, considering all the especially intelligent people who have been in therapy? What you learn in therapy is mainly feeling skills, how to really remember, how to let fantasy come, how to find words for invisible things, how to go deep and face things—
VENTURA: Good stuff to know—
HILLMAN: Yes, but you don't learn political skills or find out anything about the way the world works. Personal
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growth doesn't automatically lead to political results. Look at Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Psychoanalysis was banned for decades, and look at the political changes that have come up and startled everybody. Not the result of therapy, their revolutions.
VENTURA: So you're making a kind of opposition between power, political power or political intelligence, and therapeutic intelligence. Many who are therapeutically sensitive are also dumb and fucked up politically; and if you look at the people who wield the most power in almost any sphere of life, they are often people whose inner growth has been severely stunted.
HILLMAN: You think people undertake therapy to grow?
VENTURA: Isn't growth a huge part of the project of therapy? Everybody uses the word, therapists and clients alike.
HILLMAN: But the very word grow is a word appropriate to children. After a certain age you do not grow . You don't grow teeth, you don't grow muscles. If you start growing after that age, it's cancer.
VENTURA: Aw, Jim, can't I grow inside all my life?
HILLMAN: Grow what? Corn? Tomatoes? New archetypes? What am I growing, what do you grow? The standard therapeutic answer is: you're growing yourself.
VENTURA: But the philosopher Kierkegaard would come back and say, "The deeper natures don't change, they become more and more themselves."
HILLMAN: Jung says individuation is becoming more and more oneself.
VENTURA: And becoming more and more oneself involves a lot of unpleasantness. As Jung also says, the most terrifying thing is to know yourself.
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HILLMAN: And becoming more and more oneself — the actual experience of it is a shrinking , in that very often it's a dehydration, a loss of inflations, a loss of illusions.
VENTURA: That doesn't sound like a good time. Why would anybody want to do it?
HILLMAN: Because shedding is a beautiful thing. It's of course not what consumerism tells you, but shedding feels good. It's a lightening up.
VENTURA: Shedding what?
HILLMAN: Shedding pseudoskins, crusted stuff that you've accumulated. Shedding dead wood. That's one of the big sheddings. Things that don't work anymore, things that don't keep you—keep you alive. Sets of ideas that you've had too long. People that you don't really like to be with, habits of thought, habits of sexuality. That's a very big one, 'cause if you keep on making love at forty the way you did at eighteen you're missing something, and if you make love at sixty the way you did at forty you're missing something. All that changes. The imagination changes.
Or put it another way: Growth is always loss .
Anytime you're gonna grow, you're gonna lose something. You're losing what you're hanging onto to keep safe. You're losing habits that you're comfortable with, you're losing familiarity. That's a big one, when you begin to move into the unfamiliar.
You know, in the organic world when anything begins to grow it's moving constantly into unfamiliar movements and unfamiliar things. Watch birds grow—they fall down, they can't quite do it. Their growing is all awkwardness. Watch a fourteen-year-old kid tripping over his own feet.
VENTURA: The fantasy of growth that you find in therapy, and also in New Age thought, doesn't include this awkwardness, which can be terrible and can go on for years. And when we look at people going through that, we usually don't say they re growing, we usually consider them out of it. And during such a time one certainly doesn't feel more powerful in the world.
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HILLMAN: The fantasy of growth is a romantic, harmonious fantasy of an ever-expanding, ever-developing, ever-creating, ever-larger person—and ever integrating, getting it all together.
VENTURA: And if you don't fulfill that fantasy you see yourself as failing.
HILLMAN: Absolutely.
VENTURA: So this idea of growth can put you into a constant state of failure !
HILLMAN: "I ought to be over that by now, I'm not together, I can't get it together, and if I were really growing I would have grown out of my mess long ago."
VENTURA: It sets you up to fail. That's really cute.
HILLMAN: It's an idealization that sets you up to fail.
VENTURA: Because you re constantly comparing yourself growth to the fantasy of where you should be on some ideal growth scale.
HILLMAN: It sets up something worse. It sets up not just failure but anomaly : "I'm peculiar." And it does this by showing no respect for sameness, for consistency, in a person. Sameness is a very important part of life —to be consistently the same in certain areas that don't change, don't grow.
You've been in therapy six years and you go back home on Thanksgiving and you open the front door and you see your family and you are right back where you were. You feel the same as you always did! Or you've been divorced for years, haven't seen the wife though there's been some communication on the phone, but you walk into the same room and within four minutes there's a flare-up, the same flare-up that was there long ago.
Some things stay the same. They're like rocks. There's rocks in the psyche. There are crystals, there's iron ore, there's a metallic level where some things don't change.
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VENTURA: And if those elements did change, could change, you would be so fluid that you would not, could not, be you. You would be dangerously fluid. Where would that thing that is you reside, if the psyche didn't depend on some things not changing? And this dependence on the changeless is far below the level of the ego's control or consent.
HILLMAN: This changeless aspect, if you go all the way back in philosophy even before Aristotle, was called Being. "Real Being doesn't change." That was one fantasy. Other people would say, "Real Being is always changing." I'm not arguing which one is right, I'm arguing that both are fundamental categories of life, of being. You can look at your life with the eye of sameness and say, "My god, nothing's really changed." Then you can look at it with the other eye: "My god, what a difference. Two years ago, nine years ago, I was thus and so, but now all that's gone, it's changed completely!"
This is one of the great riddles that Lao Tse talked about, the changing and the changeless. The job in therapy is, not to try and make the changeless change, but how to separate the two. If you try to work on what's called a character neurosis, if you try to take someone who is very deeply emotionally whatever-it-is, and try to change that person into something else, what are you doing? Because there are parts of the psyche that are changeless.
VENTURA: And that has to be respected.
HILLMAN: It has to be respected, because the psyche knows more why it resists change than you do. Every complex, every psychic figure in your dreams knows more about itself and what it's doing and what it's there for than you do. So you may as well respect it.
VENTURA: And if you, as a therapist, don't respect that, then you're not respecting that person.
HILLMAN: And it has nothing to do with wanting to change. Like the joke, "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?" "It only takes one, but the light bulb has
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to really want to change." This light bulb that really wants to change still can't change those areas of changelessness.
VENTURA: The fantasy of growth, the fantasy of the ever-expanding, ever-developing person—which is a very strong fantasy out there right now, especially among the educated, and among all those buyers of self-help books—doesn't take changelessness into account at all, doesn't set up a dialectic between change and changelessness. So (bringing this all back to the relation of therapy to politics) this fantasy, fed by many sorts of therapies, can't help but make people feel more like failures in the long run. Which, in turn, can't help but increase the general feeling of powerlessness. That's a pretty vicious circle.
HILLMAN: There's another thing therapy does that I think is vicious. It internalizes emotions.
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I'm outraged after having driven to my analyst on the freeway. The fucking trucks almost ran me off the road. I'm terrified, I'm in my little car, and I get to my therapist's and I'm shaking. My therapist says, "We've gotta talk about this."
So we begin to talk about it. And we discover that my father was a son-of-a-bitch brute and this whole truck thing reminds me of him. Or we discover that I've always felt frail and vulnerable, there've al ways been bigger guys with bigger dicks, so this car that I'm in is a typical example of my thin skin and my frailty and vulnerability. Or we talk about my power drive, that I really wish to be a truck driver. We convert my fear into anxiety—an inner state. We convert the present into the past, into a discussion of my father and my childhood. And we convert my outrage—at the pollution or the chaos or whatever my outrage is about—into rage and hostility. Again, an internal condition. Whereas it starts in outrage, an emotion. Emotions are mainly social. The word comes from the Latin ex movere, to move out. Emotions connect to the world. Therapy introverts the emotions, calls fear "anxiety." You take it back, and you work on it inside
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yourself. You don't work psychologically on what that outrage is telling you about potholes, about trucks, about Florida strawberries in Vermont in March, about burning up oil, about energy policies, nuclear waste, that homeless woman over there with the sores on her feet—the whole thing.
VENTURA: You're not saying that we don't need introspection, an introspective guy like you?
HILLMAN: Put this in italics so that nobody can just pass over it: This is not to deny that you do need to go inside—but we have to see what we're doing when we do that. By going inside we're maintaining the Cartesian view that the world out there is dead matter and the world inside is living.
VENTURA: A therapist told me that my grief at seeing a homeless man my age was really a feeling of sorrow for myself.
HILLMAN: And dealing with it means going home and working on it in reflection. That's what dealing with it has come to mean. And by that time you've walked past the homeless man in the street.
VENTURA: It's also, in part, a way to cut off what you would call Eros, the part of my heart that seeks to touch others. Theoretically this is something therapy tries to liberate, but here's a person on the street that I'm feeling for and I'm supposed to deal with that feeling as though it has nothing to do with another person.
HILLMAN: Could the thing that we all believe in most—that psychology is the one good thing left in a hypocritical world—be not true? Psychology, working with yourself, could that be part of the disease, not part of the cure? I think therapy has made a philosophical mistake, which is that cognition precedes conation—that knowing precedes doing or action. I don't think that's the case. I think reflection has always been after the event.
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HILLMAN: The thing that therapy pushes is relationship, yet work may matter just as much as relationship. You think you're going to die if you're not in a good relationship. You feel that not being in a significant, long-lasting, deep relationship is going to cripple you or that you're crazy or neurotic or something. You feel intense bouts of longing and loneliness. But those feelings are not only due to poor relationship; they come also because you're not in any kind of political community that makes sense, that matters. Therapy pushes the relationship issues, but what intensifies those issues is that we don't have (a) satisfactory work or (b), even more important perhaps, we don't have a satisfactory political community.
You just can't make up for the loss of passion and purpose in your daily work by intensifying your personal relationships. I think we talk so much about inner growth and development because we are so boxed in to petty, private concerns on our jobs.
VENTURA: In a world where most people do work that is not only unsatisfying but also, with its pressures, deeply unsettling; and in a world where there's nothing more rare than a place that feels like a community, we load all our needs onto a relationship or expect them to be met by our family. And then we wonder why our relationships and family crack under the load.
HILLMAN: It's extraordinary to see psychotherapy, that came out of those nuts from Vienna and Zurich, and out of the insane asylums of Europe, talking the same language today as the Republican right wing about the virtues of family. The government and therapy are in symbiotic, happy agreement on the propaganda that we had from Ronald Reagan for so many years about family. Yet family, we know sociologically, doesn't exist anymore. The statistics are astounding. And the actual patterns of family life, how people feel and act in the families that still exist, have changed radically. People don't live in families in the same way; people won't live in families. There are broken families, half-families, multiple families, all kinds of crazy families. The idea of family only exists in the bourgeois patient population that serves psychotherapy. In fact, the family is largely today a white therapist's fantasy.
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Why do we need this Norman Rockwell family, this make-believe ideal, that's so rampant now in politics and in therapy? I don't know what it's doing for the body politic, but I know what it's doing for therapy. For therapy, it is keeping an ideal in place so that we can show how dysfunctional we all are. It keeps the trade going; this would be Ivan Illich's view. We need clients.*
VENTURA: But even the Norman Rockwell ideal of the happy, self-sufficient family is a distortion of what families were for thousands, probably tens of thousands, of years. During that time, no family was self-sufficient . Each family was a working unit that was part of the larger working unit, which was the community —the tribe or the village. Tribes and villages were self-sufficient, not families. It's not only that everyone worked togther, everyone also played and prayed together, so that the burden of relationship, and of meaning, wasn't confined to the family, much less to a romantic relationship, but was spread out into the community. Until the Industrial Revolution, family always existed in that context.
HILLMAN: And family always existed in the context of one's ancestors. Our bones are not in this ground. Now our families don't carry the ancestors with them. First of all, we Americans left our homelands in order to come here, and we let go of the ancestors.
***nametags***
Second, we're all now first-name people. I was just at a psychotherapists' conference with seven thousand people, and everybody had on their name tags. Everybody's first name was in large caps and the last name was in small letters below it.VENTURA: And in the last name are the ancestors, the country, the residue of the past.
HILLMAN: It's all in the last name. The first name is fashion, social drift. One generation you have a lot of Tracys and
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*Illich is such a beautifully radical thinker! I love his idea that therapy is an industry that has to find new sources of ores to exploit. Ordinary neurotics won't fill the practices, so therapy has to find new "mines"—geriatric cases, corporate offices, little children, whole families.[15]
Kimberlys, Maxes and Sams, another generation you have Ediths and Doras, Michaels and Davids. You've got your ancestors with you in your psyche when you use your last name. You've got your brothers and sisters with you, they have the same name. When I'm called Jim, I'm just plain Jim, it has no characteristics.
To have only a first name is a sign of being a peasant, a slave, an oppressed person. Throughout history slaves had only first names. Now our entire nation has only first names. At this conference, the only people who had last names were the faculty—the twenty-five people that these other seven thousand had paid to see and hear. We had our last names in big letters and our first names in small letters. I asked about this and was told, "We don't want you people called James or Jim or Bob or Bill, we want you addressed as Mr. Hillman."
Therapy's no different here; it complies with the convention, too. The early cases of analysis, Freud's, Jung's, had only first names—Anna, Babette. It's supposed to show intimacy and equality—
VENTURA: —and anonymity—
HILLMAN: What it actually does is strip down your dignity, the roots of your individuality, because it covers over the ancestors, who are in the consulting room too. Worse, this way of talking concentrates all attention on me, Jim, my little apple, ignoring the whole complexity of my social bag, my racial roots. We ought to have three or four last names, all hyphenated, like in Switzerland or Spain, with my mother's family name in there too, and my wife's and my exwife's and so on and so on. No one is just plain Jim.
VENTURA: I'm too American for that, I like being able to leave some of that behind. Still, we should carry both our parents' names, at least—but not hyphenated.
You know, speaking of slaves: bosses and owners are almost always called Mister, but they have the freedom to address their employees by their first names. And among workers of equal or supposedly equal status, it's not unusual for a man to be called by his last name while women are almost always
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called by their first names unless they're really heavy-duty. So we're also dealing with power when we use names. We're reinforcing certain kinds of authority and inequality.
But I want to get back to something: that to tout the ideal family is a way of making ourselves dysfunctional, because that ideal makes anything outside it, by definition, not ideal, i.e., dysfunctional. Without that ideal, we're just who we are.
HILLMAN: The ideal of growth makes us feel stunted; the ideal family makes us feel crazy.
VENTURA: We have these idealizations that make us feel crazy, even though we don't see any of these ideals in life. I feel crazy that I can't be in one relationship all my life, even though I look around and where do I see anybody in one relationship all their lives?
HILLMAN: I know people who've been married fifty years and more.
VENTURA: So do I, and one partner's an alcoholic, or one's played around a lot or been away a lot, they haven't made love in decades (literally), or one is a closet gay. These aren't abstract examples, these are people I know. Most fifty-year wedding anniversaries would look very different if you knew what everybody's covering up. Yet we keep measuring ourselves against these ideals.
HILLMAN: And psychology idealizes family in another, perhaps even more destructive, way: psychology assumes that your personality and behavior are determined by your family relationships during childhood.
VENTURA: Well; people grow up somehow, some way, and how they grow up determines their life, doesn't it?
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HILLMAN: The principal content of American psychology is developmental psychology: what happened to you earlier is the cause of what happened to you later. That's the basic theory: our history is our causality. We don't even separate history as a story from history as cause. So you have to go back to childhood to get at why you are the way you are. And so when people are out of their minds or disturbed or fucked up or whatever, in our culture, in our psychotherapeutic world, we go back to our mothers and our fathers and our childhoods.
No other culture would do that. If you're out of your mind in another culture or quite disturbed or impotent or anorexic, you look at what you've been eating, who's been casting spells on you, what taboo you've crossed, what you haven't done right, when you last missed reverence to the Gods or didn't take part in the dance, broke some tribal custom. Whatever. It could be thousands of other things—the plants, the water, the curses, the demons, the Gods, being out of touch with the Great Spirit. It would never, never be what happened to you with your mother and your father forty years ago. Only our culture uses that model, that myth.
VENTURA (appalled and confused): Well, why wouldn't that be true? Because people will say . . . okay, I'll say, "That is why I am as I am."
HILLMAN: Because that's the myth you believe.
VENTURA: What other myth can there be? That's not a myth, that's what happened!
HILLMAN: "That's not a myth, that's what happened." The moment we say something is "what happened" we're announcing "This is the myth I no longer see as a myth. This is the myth that I can't see through." "That's not a myth, that's
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what happened" suggests that myths are the things we don't believe. The myths we believe and are in the middle of, we call them "fact," "reality," "science."
But let's say somebody looked at it differently. Let's say that what matters is that you have an acorn in you, you are a certain person, and that person begins to appear early in your life, but it's there all the way through your life. Winston Churchill, for example, when he was a schoolboy, had a lot of trouble with language and didn't speak well. He was put in what we would call the remedial reading class. He had problems about writing, speaking, and spelling. Of course he did! This little boy was a Nobel Prize winner in literature and had to save the Western world through his speech. Of course he had a speech defect, of course he couldn't speak easily when he was eleven or fourteen—it was too much to carry.
Or take Manolete who, when he was nine years old, was supposedly a very frightened little skinny boy who hung around his mother in the kitchen. So he becomes the greatest bullfighter of our age. Psychology will say, "Yes, he became a great bullfighter because he was such a puny little kid that he compensated by being a macho hero." That would be Adlerian psychology—you take your deficiency, your inferiority, and you convert it to superiority.
VENTURA: That notion has seeped in everywhere—feminism and the men's movement both depend on it more than they know.
HILLMAN: But suppose you take it the other way and read a person's life backwards . Then you say, Manolete was the greatest bullfighter, and he knew that. Inside, his psyche sensed at the age of nine that his fate was to meet thousand-pound black bulls with great horns. Of course he fucking well held onto his mother! Because he couldn't hold that capacity—at nine years old your fate is all there and you can't handle it. It's too big. It's not that he was inferior; he had a great destiny.
Now, suppose we look at all our patients that way. Suppose we look at the kids who are odd or stuttering or afraid, and instead of seeing these as developmental problems we see them as having some great thing inside them, some destiny that
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they're not yet able to handle. It's bigger than they are and their psyche knows that. So that's a way of reading your own life differently. Instead of reading your life today as the result of fuck-ups as a child, you read your childhood as a miniature example of your life, as a cameo of your life —and recognize that you don't really know your whole life until you're about eighty—and then you're too old to get it in focus, or even care to!
VENTURA: But that's crazy. How can a child know what's going to happen?
HILLMAN: Our children can't know what's going to happen, because our children are not imagined as being Platonic children who are born into this world knowing everything. "The soul knows who we are from the beginning," say other theories of childhood. We're locked in our own special theory of childhood. According to us, a baby comes into the world with a few innate mechanisms, but not a destiny.
VENTURA: What you're saying rings a bell for me. There's a book of photographs called As They Were, of famous people when they were kids, and it's amazing how, at four or six or nine, Abbie Hoffman and J. Edgar Hoover and Franz Kafka and Joan Baez and Adolf Hitler looked just like—well, like their destinies.
HILLMAN: Why not? I mean, a tree is the same tree all the way through. A zebra is a zebra from the very first day.
VENTURA: Yeah, yeah, I like all that, I like it a lot, but—Hillman, how does a child know what's going to happen?
HILLMAN: Ventura—I don't think a child does know what's going to happen, I think that's far too literal. I think a child feels—
No, there are children who know what's going to happen. There was this great cellist, a woman who died recently—she was quite young. Jaqueline du Pré. I don't know what she
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died of, but she was one of the greatest cellists in the world. When she was five years old she heard a cello on the radio and said, "I want what makes noise like that," or "sounds like that." She knew. It was there. And that's sometimes the case in genius musicians. They often know.
VENTURA: Actually, now that I think of it, it's not that uncommon with artists. I'm no genius, but from the age of nine I knew I was going to be a writer and I never made the least effort to be anything else.
HILLMAN: But let's not use those examples, they're too clear. Most people don't have those feelings; at the age of twenty they're still groping. But I do believe there are inklings, like little nubs on the edge of a tree. As the tree is growing a young tree, let's say a little beech tree—it makes a little nub as it grows, and those nubs become branches, and eventually they become huge branches. I think a child has those little nubs. It doesn't know what it's going to be, but it has its inklings, it has its tendencies, it has its little pushes, its little obsessions.
VENTURA: And not only are these obsessions usually not honored, but many parents perceive them as frightening. "He should go out more, he's not seeing any friends." "She shouldn't be so serious." "How's he gonna earn a living if all he does is draw?" "That kid's not normal"—which usually means, "That kid's not easy."
I know a woman who barely went to any of her classes in high school, didn't deserve to graduate on marks, graduated purely on the force of her personality and because she was such an incredible leader and organizer. In her senior year she became head of the student council, organized practically everything that went on in the school. The first job she got after high school was a waitress in a restaurant. A year later she was the manager of that restaurant, a year after that the co-owner. By the time she was thirty she'd produced two movies and become an executive at one of the major film studios. The education being offered in high school was useless to her, but she got her own education there by exercising her business
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and political talents as a leader and organizer. So it's not only artists.
The more I consider it, this kind of thing happens a lot.
HILLMAN: Our culture doesn't see it because not only do we have no theories to see it with, but these phenomena (which, as you say, aren't uncommon) undermine the theories we do have—theories we've built a very profitable industry out of and are part of our religious faith in history.
VENTURA: The more I think of it, you do have an image of what your face will look like. You do feel other people in you, who are older, and they talk to you—they talk to me, at any rate. I have a much older man inside me who talks to me every day, quietly, usually kindly, tolerantly, sometimes sternly when I'm really fucking up, always with humor. I like him enormously; he seems very much the best part of me. I never thought about him in this light before.
... I know several men who are, like me, in their forties, and they're starting to feel middle-aged in the flesh, and they say, "My body is betraying me." They even dye their hair and lie about their age. And I know women the same age, not Beverly Hills housewives or movie stars but women whom I never thought would do this, getting breast implants, tucks, that kind of thing—and I'm afraid for them, because they are deeply insulting the older people in them. And those insults are weakening the older people in them.
So when they finally turn sixty-five, when it's their sixty-five-year-old's turn to be, that sixty-five-year-old has been so insulted and weakened that he or she may not be able to do the job.
HILLMAN: You're saying it's not just nubs, that there's a cast of characters given. I think so too. I saw a drawing of a woman—she was about forty-four. It was a pencil drawing,
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very touching. She didn't like it because it made her look too old. I said, "That drawing, that's the old woman who is waiting for you at the end of the corridor." They're there. Those figures are our companions, they're always around, and they need strengthening all the way down the line.
Michelangelo called that "the image in the heart."
I mean, how is it that we can become thirty-five when we are twenty-five? There has to be a form of being thirty-five that we put on.
VENTURA: So we are saying, "You don't know what's going to happen but you feel the people in you. That's how you're designed, if the culture or your family hasn't demolished that way of feeling when you're very young."
HILLMAN: The form of those people, the figures, are already there. You want to strengthen those figures as you go along.
...
There's a lot of fear that there's nobody there. I think that's one of the great fears behind dyeing your hair or removing the lines around your eyes. "When I hit fifty I'm going to be empty, there's nobody there." Because what is that sense of being empty? It's because there's nobody there.
VENTURA: And if we've insulted the older people in us sufficiently and attacked them every time we, say, cursed an older driver—
HILLMAN: —or the person in front of you in the supermarket who doesn't put her money away quickly enough—
VENTURA: Every time we've done that we've frightened and diminished the old ones in us, and those figures shrink until maybe there isn't anybody there.
HILLMAN: There's another way we do it. Every time you go, "I haven't got time for the pain," every time you cover up your illness. Your illnesses are partly ways of developing the
[23]
older people. They're the ways of developing the knowledge of your own body. The illnesses tell you tremendous things about what you can eat and when you can eat it, what goes on with your bowels, what goes on with your balls, what goes on with your skin. The illnesses are your teachers, especially about aging. Devaluing the illnesses and suppressing them removes you from these figures.
We insult the inner people by what we do with our own weaknesses.
VENTURA: And as we get older we turn that around and we dislike young people.
HILLMAN: Oh yeah.
VENTURA: And when we attack young people, in the same impatient way we've attacked old people, we weaken our young selves who are still in us, the way the older selves were in us when we were young.
HILLMAN: Absolutely. We attack the younger people in us. As you say, the young ones who give us urges, send us fantasies. And so we no longer allow ourselves to feel or to imagine sexuality, we no longer allow ourselves to imagine risk—the incredible risks that young people take! They just do it! We don't allow ourselves to risk in the sense of abandon, letting go.
The great old people that you know were once masters of letting go, tremendous courage—and some still are, fearless in crossing the street, in walking out at night.
VENTURA: We especially reject and attack adolescents, can't stand being around them, because our own adolescence is so painful.
HILLMAN: The falling in love, the romance, the suicidal fantasies of adolescence—
VENTURA: And all those dreams you didn't live up to. And you can't say anything worse to somebody than, You're being adolescent."
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HILLMAN: Try, "You're just getting old."
VENTURA: When you're in your forties and you hit what they call midlife crisis, when you're going through a kind of adolescence again, because you're breaking a bunch of crusts—that's belittled. "Whataya goin' through, a midlife crisis?"
HILLMAN: You hit another at sixty.
VENTURA: And if you turn around and say, "You're goddamn right I am, and you'd better stay out of its way," then you're seen as nuts: "Boy, Ventura's losin' it." But what you're really saying is, "I'm molting."
HILLMAN: "I'm molting, and I'm at the beginning of something, and when I'm at the beginning of something I am a fool ."
VENTURA: "The changeless thing in me is sitting quiet in the center of everything that's changing, and much is dropping away."
...
VENTURA: Okay, so developmental psychology, the idea that everything I am now was caused in my childhood, at the very least leaves out far too much and may be misleading altogether. Yeah, but what about all that time and money I spent in therapy about being sexually molested and all that? It seemed important at the time!
HILLMAN (laughs): Yes, it does seem important at the time. Well, what's all that about? If we're going to be vicious we'regoing to say, as Ivan Illich would say, it's a way of maintaining
[25]
the psychotherapy trade, which is a large business needing new raw material such as abuse, trauma, childhood molestation. And if you're a believer—which we are, unconsciously—in the myth of development rather than a believer in acorns and nubs, structure, or essence, then what happened back then must be overwhelmingly important. Now what about the fact that children have been abandoned, molested, and abused for centuries—and it wasn't considered important?
VENTURA: What about that? Weren't those cultures as advanced as ours?
HILLMAN: Come on, you don't believe that.
VENTURA: You're right, I don't. But a lot of folks do, and they go further to say that a significant part of the explanation for the socially, economically, and ecologically ravaged planet we inhabit is child abuse, hundreds of years of it. (Which doesn't wash historically, by the way. Forced sexual relationships have been with us since the dawn of time, if we can judge by ancient myths and fairy tales, and the ravaging of the planet has only been going on since the beginning of the Industrial Age two hundred years ago.)
HILLMAN: The fact that everybody is upset about the child is exactly the point I made before, that the archetype of the child dominates our culture's therapeutic thinking . Maintaining that abuse is the most important thing in our culture, that our nation is going to the dogs because of abuse, or that it's the root of why we exploit and victimize the earth, as some are saying, that is the viewpoint of the child.
VENTURA: And it's to be stuck in that viewpoint.
HILLMAN: I'm not saying that children aren't molested or abused. They are molested, and they are abused, and in many cases it's absolutely devastating. But therapy makes it even more devastating by the way it thinks about it. It isn't just the trauma that does the damage, it's remembering traumatically.
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VENTURA: Therapy, in effect, aggravates and profits from the abuse by the way it thinks about it. But what does that mean, "remembering traumatically"?
I'm neither a recipient nor a dispensor of therapy but it seems obvious enough that this has to do (also) with "mimetic desires," be that an impossible ideal of family bliss which is mostly unattainable or, more simply, the fear of being judged/seen as lesser by many prying eyes.
But let's see what these guys have to say...
HILLMAN: Well, let's say my father took the belt or the brush to me, or maybe he fucked me or beat the shit out of me again and again. Sometimes he was drunk when he did it, sometimes he just did it because he was a mean son of a bitch, sometimes he beat me because he didn't know who else to beat. And I go on remembering those violations. I remain a victim in my memory. My memory continues to make me a victim. Secondly, it continues to keep me in the position of the child, because my memory is locked into the child's view, and I haven't moved my memory. It isn't that the abuse didn't happen—I'm not denying that it happened or that I need to believe that it did concretely happen. But I may be able to think about the brutality—reframe it, as they say—as an initiatory experience. These wounds that he caused have done something to me to make me understand punishment, make me understand vengeance, make me understand submission, make me understand the depth of rage between fathers and sons, which is a universal theme—and I took part in that. I was in that. And so I've moved the memory, somehow, from just being a child victim of a mean father. I've entered fairy tales and I've entered myths, literature, movies. With my suffering I've entered an imaginal, not just a traumatic, world.
VENTURA: You've entered what tribal people might call the Dreamtime.
HILLMAN: Yes. Part of the Dreamtime.
VENTURA: That this happened to you not only in the day-to-day but in the Dreamtime, for all things that happen in one place happen in the other. "As above, so below," as the ancients taught. That this happened to you in the Dreamtime means: (a) that it's a mythological act, and (b) that it didn't happen twenty years ago; it's happening now, it always happened, it always will happen. Which isn't as depressing as it sounds.
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This means its significance can always change. It's a place where literal life and mythical life meet. That's what wounds are.
And then there's: (c) the abuse is in the Dreamtime context of many, many mythological acts, some brutal and some beautiful, instead of being just the major myth of your act. So there's a sense in which—
HILLMAN: It becomes more intense when it becomes less personal.
VENTURA: Right.
HILLMAN: More intense in the sense of how tremendously important it is. It's more important than me, in a strange way.
VENTURA: Because in the Dreamtime, in the mythological way of thought, it's joined with so many other events that are more important than me.
HILLMAN: Therapy tends to confuse the importance of the event with the importance of me.
VENTURA: I can hear a voice in me saying, "But this thing happened, it's not mythological, goddammit!" At the same time, as any journalist or cop can tell you, if you talk to several different people about an event they all witnessed or participated in, you'll have several different events. I know in my own family, if you ask me and my sister to describe our mother, you'll get two totally different mothers, and neither one of us is lying. Memory is a form of fiction, and we can't help that. So We are very much the creation of the stories we tell ourselves. And we don't know we're telling stories.
HILLMAN: We're not conscious we're telling stories. I think Freud was getting at that when he said, "It's how you remember, not what actually happened." That the memory is what really creates the trauma. And everybody's been attacking Freud recently, saying that Freud was covering up, that he
[28]
wasn't admitting these childhood abuses really happened. Whether they really happened or not, Freud's point, which is so tremendous, is that it's what memory does with them that's important.
We don't know we're telling stories. And that's part of the trouble in the training of psychotherapy, that psychotherapists don't learn enough literature, enough drama, or enough biography.
C'mon bro, let's not be like that. No one learns enough of anything, ever. What happened to reading life backwards ? More likely, psychotherapists (and most other people) just don't give a shit about these things, and you're not going to get them to care by forcing it on them in school. If it's such a deal-breaker, then you have to find literary people what also want to become psychotherapists...of which it seems to me we have never had any shortage, but what do I know?
[Hillman, cont.] The trainee learns cases and diagnostics—things that do not necessarily open the imagination . So the trainees don't realize that they're dealing in fictions . That's not to say that things aren't literally real too—
VENTURA: —but that what you get in the consulting room is, has to be, someone telling a story. The form is a story. You're right, it's weird that people whose work will largely consist of listening to stories aren't taught anything, from literature and from journalism and even from court records, about how people tell stories.
Okay, okay, I take it back. He's right. When you do study literature, are you told that "It's how you remember, not what actually happened" ? Or are you fed some pollyanna bunkum about a "lie that tells the truth?"
Maybe it's not that people don't study literature or biography, it's that they are fed a crock of bourgeois-idealist pap which is not merely incorrect but actually perfectly ass-backwards?
What's missing from the curriculum, then, is not literature but philosophy and psychology.
Eh?
HILLMAN: Regarding the abuse, the actual abuse in early childhood—what does the damage, besides the shock and the horror and all those other things, is that early abuse tends to literalize the imagination. It either literalizes the imagination or dissociates it into multiple personality, so that it's split off. And that is damage. But kids from thirteen to seventeen, say, seduced by their stepfathers (or who seduce them) that's a different quality of abuse, different from that of a three-year-old or two-year-old. There are different levels to this, but it's all been grouped into one thing, so that we get all sorts of people claiming themselves victims of molestation and identifying themselves as hurt children. Seduction in families, as you said, is a pretty old thing. It is not the same as brutally violating an infant. We have to keep some gradations distinct—
VENTURA: —because if we don't, we can't think well about it.
When those memories of sexual abuse started coming up for me—which happened like clockwork on my fortieth birthday—after about a month of car crashes and black holes, I went to a therapist. He was an old man, a Jungian. I was going on and
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on about the abuse and about my mother, and he sort of smiled and said, "You know, what happened to you, it forged your connection with the soul's mysteries, didn't it? And that's what you write about, isn't it? Would you rather have been writing about something else?"
I was absolutely stunned that he said that. It didn't lessen my anger or my fear about my mother, but it jolted me out of looking at the experience as a child. I had to look at it from the point of view of how I've lived my life as an adult. Not that I've finished dealing with the great anger that came up toward my mother or toward the other people of my childhood and adolescence who tried to do the same thing to me, but-
HILLMAN: When you say, "I haven't dealt with," there's an assumption that that anger toward your mother is supposed to go somewhere. And I'm not going to assume that.
VENTURA: Well, this is an enormous assumption in our culture now, that this anger and rage and heartbreak are supposed to be processed. A word I hate, by the way— processed psyche, like processed food .
HILLMAN: Yeah, nice thin slices of yellow cheese. Put it in a package and label it.
VENTURA: But what are you supposed to do with this stuff if not process it? How the fuck are you going to "individuate," or even grow up, if you don't process it?
HILLMAN: Well now, what did Jonathan Swift do? He wrote the most incredible satires. What did people do in the Elizabethan and Jacobean vengeance plays? I mean, this stuff is tremendously powerful. What did Joyce do with his feelings about Ireland? What did Faulkner do with his feelings about the South? This kind of processing is really hard. This is the stuff of art.
BARF!
Then wtf is "music" the stuff of ?
[Hillman, cont.] Rilke said about therapy, "I don't want the demons taken away because they're going to take my angels too." Wounds and scars are the stuff of character. The word character means, at root, "marked or etched with sharp lines," like initiation cuts.
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VENTURA: Hey, we can't all be artists . We are not all Joyce or Jonathan Swift. Most of us are just working stiffs of one sort or another. What are we supposed to do?
HILLMAN: It isn't to be literal about artists. It is that there's a way the imagination can work with these powerful things. Artists are simply models of people who turn to the imagination to work with things. That's why one needs to read the biographies of artists, because biographies show what they did with their traumas; they show what can be done—not what they did but what can be done—by the imagination
Hmm.
I'll stick with what they did , thank you.
with hatred, with resentment, with bitterness, with feelings of being useless and inferior and worthless. Artists found modes in the imagination to process it, if you like.
Second thing is, you assume again with your question that you can't carry around unprocessed ore. Suppose you see these lumps as ore.
VENTURA: There's rocks in the psyche—"I got rocks in my head."
HILLMAN: Ore, rocks, that make for character, for the peculiar idiosyncrasy that you are. Just as you have physical scars, so you have soul blemishes. And they're rocks. And they are what you are. It's peculiar in our culture to believe that this stuff all gets ironed out. Is it a melting pot fantasy? Do we all try to be nice? In the service of this fantasy we abuse our own raw material.
I mean, you go to another culture and the people who are suffering, they're suffering from the facts of their existence. And by "another culture" I mean our own street culture—African American, Latino, and the rural poor, and that woman on the grass over there.
VENTURA: Yes, if you're an artist you know that stuff is your ore—you know that, and that's why many artists steer clear of therapy. They don't want that ore processed in the wrong way.
HILLMAN: The obsession that prevents it from being val-
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ed as ore is the obsession with processing, the obsession with smoothing it out. It doesn't become as damaging unless you think it shouldn't be there. That's what I mean about the therapeutic attitude hurting the actual potential of people. Because, as Ivan Illich would say, therapy wants to ameliorate the suffering in the ore. And our culture accepts the proposition that it must be ameliorated.
VENTURA: So if we're saying this is what therapy cannot, or should not, do, what can therapy do?
HILLMAN: Make—those—things—be—felt.
That used to be called lifting repression and bringing to consciousness. I'd rather say, Make those things be felt.
I see it as a kind of building of doorways, opening conduits, and making channels, like a giant bypass operation, throwing in all kinds of new tubings so that things flow into each other. Memories, events, images, all become enlivened. And our feelings about this ore become more subtle. Learn to appreciate it. That's one thing therapy can do
VENTURA: So you're not saying to people, "Don't go to therapy."
HILLMAN: I'm saying to people, "If you go to therapy, watch out for the collusion between the therapist and the part of you that doesn't want to feel the ore! There are many ways to repress feeling the ore, one of which is processing it. The different schools of therapy have different processing systems, but all of them are fixers. From my angle, fixing what's wrong represses the ore.
VENTURA: "Processing" is often "repression" in disguise! That's really cute.
HILLMAN: "This hurts, goddammit, this hurts!" And the first move away from the hurt is, "What do I do about it? What do I take for it?"
VENTURA: "What clinical name can I call it?"
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HILLMAN: "What's the treatment?" Those are all ways of dealing with "This hurts." But until one has been in the hurt, explored the hurt, you don't know anything about it. You don't know why it's there. Why did the psyche put it there?
VENTURA: "Exploring the hurt" sounds suspiciously like processing. "Working through"—
HILLMAN: —is the term that processing usually goes by. That's not what I mean by exploring the hurt. The question to be asked is, "How does therapy really work?" I'm not sure that therapy itself—that is, insight, understanding, recollection, owning your part of it, how you brought it about, seeing patterns, abreacting—
VENTURA: What does that mean, abreacting in English?
HILLMAN: It means "getting it out"—I'm not sure that any of these working-through modes, which are supposed to be the modes of psychological processing, really do it. What I think does it is the six months, or six years, of grief. The mourning. The long ritual of therapy.
VENTURA: Ahhhhh.
HILLMAN: The dumb hours.
VENTURA: Going back and back and back, talking about this shit over and over, no matter what you happen to be saying or thinking, just going back and back to it.
HILLMAN: And one day it doesn't feel the same. The body has absorbed the punch. But I'm not sure that's because you processed it or got insights or understanding. I think that could happen also to the woman weeping in the church at the altar of Joseph.
VENTURA: Because you're sitting with it.
HILLMAN: Sitting in it.
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VENTURA: In it. And being in it, in whatever form, is the exploration.
HILLMAN: You're in it for a while, then you're with it for a while, and then you visit it.
VENTURA: And then it walks with you instead of on you.
HILLMAN: And it may even go its own way.
VENTURA: And why isn't that processing?
...
VENTURA: I'll tell you why it's not processing. Because you're not taking it and purifying it and making it into something else.
HILLMAN: You're not transforming.
VENTURA: Processing implies, "I can take this ore and make it into a plow. I can make it into a tool by which I can live more efficiently." And it implies that somehow, magically, if I do that then the ore isn't there anymore.
HILLMAN: "Either I can use it or I can get rid of it, but it's fucking inefficient to have it around where it's not usable but it's still there." This is what makes us, Americans, white Americans, psychological amateurs and innocents. We don't have enough stuff in the psyche, we keep getting rid of the ore! We're not psychologically sophisticated people.
I'd rather not say is it or isn't it processing. I'd rather say, "What happens if you call it processing?" And you described what happens, you either try to get rid of it or make it useful. So it's exploitative. The notion of transformation that dominates therapy: transform something useless into something useful.
VENTURA: A consumer's ideology. You're consuming your psyche, as both a consumer and as a carnivore.
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HILLMAN: And also as an industrialist: you're making a profit out of it.
VENTURA: And the psyche doesn't like that. So what it says is, "Okay! I'll make you boring."
HILLMAN (laughs): I was waiting for you to say something very different; I was waiting for you to say, "Okay, I'll send you another complaint!"
VENTURA: That's only if it still likes you—then the psyche gives you another chance with something new to deal with. If it's really disgusted with you it says, "I'll make you boring."
HILLMAN: So that you become processed cheese.
VENTURA: And you will be very well adjusted and even tempered, you won't "lose it," you won't have any extremes. And maybe you can even have a successful marriage with somebody as boring as you are.
HILLMAN: Usually, fortunately, that doesn't work, because the God of marriage doesn't allow that.
VENTURA: Right. The God of marriage is a very crazy God.
HILLMAN: The God of marriage wants a lot more.
VENTURA: And the psyche says to therapists especially, "I'll make you boring." That's what the therapists I know complain about.
HILLMAN: Oh, yes. The repressive atmosphere of therapy—
VENTURA: —repressive to the therapist—
HILLMAN: —that dictates psychology has to be respectable. This produces a terrible repression to the actual psychologist. We're not allowed in the street. We have to be careful,
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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. As one good friend of mine told me, "The trouble with getting old as a therapist is that I can't grow into my eccentricity." Because what's expected of a therapist is regular hours, being on time, being a kind of square, reasonable person. The therapist is unconsciously modeling the goal of therapy.
VENTURA: The therapist is unconsciously modeling the unconscious goal of therapy.
HILLMAN: Well, that isn't my goal. The goal of my therapy is eccentricity, which grows out of the Jungian notion of individuation. Jung says, "You become what you are." And nobody is square. We all have, as the Swiss say, a corner knocked off.
VENTURA: It's not processing and it's not growth, 'cause that's the same thing, that's a consumer attitude toward life. So what the fuck is it? joyfulacceptance, Lugitar, dencing , ete
HILLMAN: I think it's life. That's what it is. Meaning: going through life. Rousseau said, "The man among you is the most educated who can carry the joys and sorrows of life." Education meant the joys and sorrows of life. So do you want to call it education? That's pretty boring too.
VENTURA: Then there are all the words that the New Agers have made unpalatable, like journey.
HILLMAN: I tell you what I feel about it. I feel it's service. I feel it's devotion.
VENTURA: To what?
HILLMAN: To the Gods. I feel that these things occur, and they are what the psyche wants or sends me. What the Gods send me. There's a lovely passage from Marcus Aurelius: "What I do I do always with the community in mind. What happens
[36]
to me, what befalls me, comes from the Gods." And befall is a very important word, because that's where the word case comes from: cadere, to fall. And in German the word for a case is fall. So what falls on you is what happens to you, is the origins of the Greek word pathos too—what drops on you, what wounds you, what happens to you, what falls on you, how you fall, the way the dice fall.
VENTURA: You know, we keep circling the basic premise of American life, which has infected therapy, namely, "Everything is supposed to be all right. If things are not all right, then they're very, very wrong."
HILLMAN: So what happens to the pathos, the pathology of our lives, "that which can't be accepted, can't be changed, and won't go away."
VENTURA: You live it out.
HILLMAN: That becomes a devotion. A service. What else can you do?
...
What else can you do?
And that's human limitation. That's what the Greeks mean by being mortal: it's to be tragic.
VENTURA: So we haven't got a word to stick in here in place of process, and maybe we don't want one!
..
HILLMAN: Right. That's much better. We have no word to replace process—
HILLMAN AND VENTURA: and we don't want one.
HILLMAN: This isn't about a process to do that.
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VENTURA: Because it's part of the concept of process to find a word to replace it, and to hell with that. And we have no word to replace growth, either, and maybe we don't want one.
We're talking about living it out.
HILLMAN: Taking it on, too.
VENTURA: Taking the weight.
HILLMAN: Wait. Taking the weight is not taking the weight of the Man. That's been a big mistake. "I did my time." I'm not talking about serving the Man. That's where rebellion and subversion are important. I'm talking about serving the Gods.
VENTURA: How do you tell the difference?
HILLMAN: You can quit the Man. You can tell the Man to stuff it.
VENTURA: But the Gods don't go away.
HILLMAN: You can move to nirvana, but the Gods find out where you go.
I don't know if the Gods love you as the Christians are told, or even if they are very interested in what you decide to do and worry about, but they sure don't let you off easy. In Italy, editors called one of my books The Vain Flight from the Gods. You see, they get to us through our pathology, and that's why pathology is so important. It's the window in the wall through which the demons and the angels come in .
VENTURA: They don't love you but they don't let you get away. Sounds a little like family.
HILLMAN: "Called or not, the Gods will be present." Jung had that saying in Latin over his front door. Carved in stone. So We may as well serve. Willingly. That's how I understand the human will, it just means to do the stuff you have to go through willingly.
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VENTURA: They don't love you but they keep on your case. Butch Hancock has a song where he sings, "She was a model of mercy, she never cut me no slack" If they love you, that's how they love you.
...
By "serving the Man" you mean that being reconciled to the system, to authority, is very different from what you call serving the Gods. You can't rebel against the Gods—or you can, but that's just another step in the dance; but you'd better rebel against authority.
At least, that's what I mean. What do you mean?
HILLMAN: Look. Our assumption, our fantasy, in psychoanalysis has been that we're going to process, we're going to grow, and we're going to level things out so that we don't have these very strong, disturbing emotions and events.
VENTURA: Which is probably not a human possibility.
HILLMAN: But could analysis have new fantasies of itself, so that the consulting room is a cell in which revolution is prepared?
VENTURA: What?
HILLMAN: Could—
VENTURA: —could the consulting room be a cell in which revolution is prepared? Jesus. Could it?
HILLMAN: By revolution I mean turning over. Not development or unfolding, but turning over the system that has made you go to analysis to begin with—the system being government by minority and conspiracy, official secrets, national security, corporate power, et cetera. Therapy might imagine itself investigating the immediate social causes, even while keeping its vocabulary of abuse and victimization—that we are
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abused and victimized less by our personal lives of the past than by a present system.
It's like, you want your father to love you. The desire to be loved by your father is enormously important. But you can't get that love fulfilled by your father. You don't want to get rid of the desire to be loved, but you want to stop asking your father; he's the wrong object. So we don't want to get rid of the feeling of being abused—maybe that's very important, the feeling of being abused, the feeling of being without power. But maybe we shouldn't imagine that we are abused by the past as much as we are by the actual situation of "my job," "my finances," "my government"—all the things that we live with. Then the consulting room becomes a cell of revolution, because we would be talking also about, "What is actually abusing me right now?" That would be a great venture, for therapy to talk that way.
VENTURA: Let's double back a second. You said, "Could analysis have new fantasies about itself?" What do you mean by fantasy? For most people that word's associated with "unreal."
HILLMAN: Oh, no, no. Fantasy is the natural activity of the mind. Jung says, "The primary activity of psychic life is the creation of fantasy." Fantasy is how you perceive something, how you think about it, react to it.
VENTURA: So any perception, in that sense, is fantasy.
HILLMAN: 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.
VENTURA: But if therapy is to take this new direction, have this new perception or fantasy about itself, it seems we need some basic redefinition of some basic concepts.
...
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...
HILLMAN: Maybe the idea of self has to be redefined.
VENTURA: That would be revolutionary. That would eventually change the entire culture, if it caught on.
HILLMAN: The idea of self has to be redefined. Therapy's definition comes from the Protestant and Oriental tradition: self is the interiorization of the invisible God beyond. The inner divine. Even if this inner divine is disguised as a self- steering, autonomous, homeostatic, balancing mechanism; or even if the divine is disguised as the integrating deeper intention of the whole personality, it's still a transcendent notion, with theological implications if not roots. I would rather define self as the interiorization of community. And if you make that little move, then you're going to feel very different about things. If the self were defined as the interiorization of community, then the boundaries between me and another would be much less sure. I would be with myself when I'm with others. I would not be with myself when I'm walking alone or meditating or in my room imagining or working on my dreams. In fact, I would be estranged from myself.
And "others" would not include just other people, because community, as I see it, is something more ecological, or at least animistic. A psychic field. And if I'm not in a psychic field with others—with people, buildings, animals, trees—I am not.
So it wouldn't be, "I am because I think" (Cogito ergo sum, as Descartes said.) It would be, as somebody said to me the other night, "I am because I party." Convivo ergo sum.
VENTURA: That's a redefinition of self, all right.
HILLMAN: Look, a great deal of our life is manic. I can watch thirty-four channels of TV, I can get on the fax and
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communicate With people anywhere, I can be everywhere at once, I can fly across the country, I've got call waiting, so I can take two calls at once. I live everywhere and nowhere. But I don't know who lives next door to me. Who's in the next flat? Who's in 14-B?
I don't know who they are, but, boy, I'm on the phone, car phone, toilet phone, plane phone, my mistress is in Chicago, the other woman I'm with is in D.C., my exwife is in Phoenix, my mother in Hawaii, and I have four children living all over the country. I have faxes coming in day and night, I can plug into all the world's stock prices, commodity exchanges, I am everywhere, man—but I don't know who's in 14-B.
You see, this hyper communication and information is part of what's keeping the soul at bay.
VENTURA: Oh yeah. Very much so. But—maybe it's because I'm a writer, maybe it's the way I've trained myself—but I feel most myself when I'm alone.
HILLMAN: It's not because you're a writer or because you've trained yourself. That training began two thousand years ago.
VENTURA: How?
HILLMAN: That training is the emphasis upon withdrawal, innerness—in Augustine's sense of confessions, in Jerome's sense of hiding out in the desert. This is the result of a long discipline to sever a person from the natural world of community. It's a monkish notion, A saintly notion.
And there's a second reason you are convinced that you're more yourself when you're alone: because it's more familiar . You are in a habitual, repetitious rut. "This is me, because I'm in the same pattern"; it's recognizable. When you're with another person you're out of yourself because the other person is flowing into you and you are flowing into them, there are surprises, you're a little out of control, and then you think you're not your real true self. The out of control—that's the community acting through you. It's the locus that you're in, acting through you.
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VENTURA: But if you let that go too much, then you're in Nuremburg Square with your arm up in the air. Or, closer to home, you're waving flags and yellow ribbons for reasons you don't even care about understanding. That's the community acting through you too. If the community acts through you too much, you don't exist. And when you don't exist, in this way, you open yourself up to possession by whatever force or idea or demagogue that seeks to possess you.
HILLMAN: Why do we use the image of the mob or of fascist conformity when we give up the self?
VENTURA: Because we've suffered so much in this century, and we're suffering now, from people giving up their individuality.
HILLMAN: That's true. Still, it's interesting that that's the only image we use. We don't use the image of a tribal society, where I still remain John-of-the-One-Leg.
VENTURA: That's true. It's an interesting, very significant detail that in the tribal societies, which we think have the least individuality, people have the most individual names . One-of-a-kind names that come from their dreams or their actions, which are rarely repeated or handed down because they're so individual. It's as though, because the community shares so much and because so much is handed down through the community, individuality is treated with more respect.
HILLMAN: In tribal life and religion there was often a place for people who were different—homosexuals, visionaries, hermits, people with special qualities or powers. This wasn't unknown in village life, either. Nor in the city life of the ancient Greeks. Not that these were perfect societies—
VENTURA: —since perfection is not a human possibility—
HILLMAN: but we do have examples of the self-as-
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community that aren't totalitarian and in which individuality is respected.
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.
We have to think about community as a different category altogether. It's not individuals coming together and connecting, and it's not a crowd. Community to me means simply the actual little system in which you are situated, sometimes in your office, sometimes at home with your furniture and your food and your cat, sometimes talking in the hall with the people in 14-B. In each case your self is a little different, and your true self is your actual self, just as it is in each situation, a self among, not a self apart.
VENTURA: And when you ask, "What about the person in 14-B?" are you or I respecting that person as part of the community or as an individual? Neither, if we choose to be totally cut off from them. And if they accept being cut off from us, they're not respecting us either, in any of our roles. We're talking about neighbors, after all. Yes, to ignore the fact that one is or has a neighbor is a profound form of disrespect, both to the other and to ourselves, and it's completely taken for granted now in our cities and suburbs. I take it for granted; I ignore my neighbors and I bet you do too.
HILLMAN: I think it's absolutely necessary for our spiritual life today to have community where we actually live. Of course, we have dear friends from thirty years ago who are living in Burma or Brazil now. And they're there for you when you're busted—in an emergency. But is that sufficient? For the maintenance of the world? It's definitely not. I think for the maintenance of the world that other kind of local community requires regular servicing. And that's a very unpleasant, hard thing to stay with, to realize how much service one needs to
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perform—not for an old, distant friend, but for the people in 14-B.
VENTURA: How can therapy possibly deal with that? I mean, nuts and bolts.
HILLMAN: Part of the treatment of these difficulties is to look at a person's schedule, his notebook, her calendar. Because your schedule is one of your biggest defenses.
VENTURA: Treat my schedule?
HILLMAN: Treat your schedule. And I'll tell you, I have had more resistance in trying to treat people's schedules and change their schedules than you can ever imagine.
VENTURA: You'd get a shitload of resistance out of me.
HILLMAN: Do you ever ask your soul questions when you make your schedule?
VENTURA (groaning): My soul just went, "He fucking-a doesn't!"
HILLMAN: The job then becomes how the soul finds accommodations within your day. Regarding dreams, regarding persons, regarding time off. Because the manic defense against depression is to keep extremely busy—and to be very irritated when interrupted. That's part of the sign of the manic condition.
VENTURA: Me and many of the people I know are often too busy to be anything but busy. Yes, it's manic, and we sort of know that. You're saying it's a defense against depression. If we go back to what we were talking about before and assume that the source of our depression is in the present rather than twenty or thirty years ago, then the question is, What chronic depression are we—as individuals, as a city, as a culture—trying to avoid by being so chronically manic?
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HILLMAN: The depression we're all trying to avoid could very well be a prolonged chronic reaction to what we've been doing to the world, a mourning and grieving for what we're doing to nature and to cities and to whole peoples—the destruction of a lot of our world. We may be depressed partly because this is the soul's reaction to the mourning and grieving that we're not consciously doing. The grief over neighborhoods destroyed where I grew up, the loss of agricultural land that I knew as a kid—
VENTURA: or the sense, in younger people, that those things are in the past, you've never known them and you're never going to—
HILLMAN: all those things that are lost and gone. Because that's what depression feels like.
We paint our national history rosy and white and paint our personal history gray. We're so willing to admit that we're trapped in our personal history, but we never hear that said of our national history.
VENTURA: Or our civilization's history. Which in a reverse way is an indication of how much we really believe in the self as interiorization-of-community, because there's so much denial about the importance and the darkness of our national and cultural history. We wouldn't need to deny it so much if it wasn't so incredibly important to us. The strength of that denial measures a tremendous fear and loss.
HILLMAN: I think we've also lost shame. We talk about our parents having shamed us when we were little, but we've lost our shame in relation to the world and to the oppressed, the shame of being wrong, of messing up the world. We've mutated this shame into personal guilt.
Perhaps the way to begin the revolution is to stand up for your depression.
VENTURA: That is depressing. And there's so much to revolt against. All that ugly, money-driven, bottom-line thinking
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that's the excuse for so much stupidity and cruelty. But you began by saying that things, objects, are not passive—that, through things, the world is fighting back. So?
HILLMAN: Look, any major change needs a breakdown. Chernobyl—it didn't seem to affect us in America, but in Europe people couldn't eat vegetables, couldn't drink milk; all the reindeer meat in Scandinavia was contaminated. This changes values immensely. Suddenly certain things are life giving and others are death giving. Money no longer matters to the same extent; there's no price tag on Chernobyl. So the change of financial bottom-line thinking comes about through symptoms. It comes about through poison. Valdez, Bhopal, Chernobyl have made everything there toxic, bad, poisonous—and it's beyond money. The threat of death gets us past the determination of value by finance. After catastrophes money no longer carries value. The nature or quality of soul of a thing would be the ultimate value. We would ask, Is this a good thing, is this a helpful thing, is this a beautiful thing? instead of, What's its price?
VENTURA: That would certainly be revolutionary. Changing the nature of that fundamental question—What's its price?—would change everything. And the consulting room could become a cell of revolution if therapy located our troubles more in the present and directed our attention to the world instead of only inside, because ultimately the question would have to be, What's its price? What's the real price we pay for how we live?
Ventura laughs suddenly.
HILLMAN: What?
VENTURA: Immediately my greedy little private self, the part that only cares about my relationships and would just as soon the people in 14-B mind their own damn business, that self leaps to the question: In this new revolutionary therapy, what about l-o-v-e?
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HILLMAN: You know, there's a feeling about a good day—it's slow, and very much like being with a lover. Having a good moment at breakfast, tasting something—it has to do with beauty, this matter of love. And I think all the "work" at personal relationships fucks that up . That "work" is not aesthetic and sensuous, which is really what love, for me, is about. Aesthetic and sensuous, and a kind of joy. Love doesn't result from working at something. So the therapeutic approach to love, of clearing up the relationship, may clear up communication disorders, expression inhibitions, insensitive habits, may even improve sex, but I don't think it releases love; I don't think love can be worked at.
VENTURA: That's a distinction that our culture seems to have been busy forgetting for the last several decades—the distinction between "the relationship" and "love." To apply the word aesthetic to "the relationship"—that would make a lot of us blink hard.
HILLMAN: That's what love is about—aesthetic and sensuous. And when that aspect isn't functioning, the other person becomes a little bit of a camel, carrying so much weight through the desert of the relationship—your baggage, the other person's baggage. No wonder camels spit.
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...
Life Lived Backwards
Dear Michael,
There is a painting by Picasso done when he was ninety-one, the year before he died. It is titled Le jeune peintre (the young painter). It is a freely drawn, broad-brushed sketch in oils—whites, grays, slate blues, and black—of a dark-, sharp-, and hollow-eyed, small, boyish face, a little impish, staring out at you under a wide floppy hat, a palette board and brush in hand. The white on white gives it the feeling of a ghost, of a clown, of an angel, and also of an innocent, though lively and intensely concentrated, observer, whose mercurial alertness has just been caught by the painter.
When I first saw this painting—and it is a big one, nearly a yard tall—I had that frisson André Malraux says leaps from one work of art to another via the human person. This haunting, simple image turned out to be the initiatory experience tor my theory of life lived backwards. Here is the invisible Picasso Caught on the canvas, a self-portrait of the daimon that inhabited him all his life. At the end, it emerges and shows itself.
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"Here," it says, "this is who you are, Picasso, you are me, the ever-young painter. I am the clown, the innocent, fresh eye, the dark eye, the quick-moving Mercurius, the sentimental, bluish melancholy, the little boy. I am your ghost. Now you see who drives you, what has kept you fresh and eager, and now you can die."
It was as if Picasso had been realizing and actualizing and individuating this figure all his life, ever since he was an exceptionally talented, teenage painter—even before Paris and his youth of the blue and rose periods, when he was le jeune peintre. Here was a portrait of the acorn painted by the oak.
Picasso's image confirms Henry Corbin's theory that it is not my individuation but the individuation of the angel that is the main task: the materialization with paint, brush, and canvas of Picasso's daimon. This image also presents Corbin's basic premise about ta'wil, or the art of interpretative reading, how to read life itself: we must "read things back to their origins and principle, their archetype." "In ta'wil one must carry sensible forms back to imaginative forms and then rise to still higher meanings; to proceed in the opposite direction (to carry imaginative forms back to sensible forms . . . ) is to destroy the virtualities of the imagination." This idea is applicable to how we read our lives: we must begin with the angel, the young painter, who is attempting to enter the sensible world and individuate through the life of Picasso.
How so? Because the primary activity of the psyche is imagining.
My point here is that we humans are primarily acts of imagination, images. Jung says, "The psyche consists essentially of images." And what is an image? Not only the depiction of something there on the canvas in oil paint. Jung says: "When I speak of image . . . I do not mean the psychic reflections of an external object, but a concept derived from poetic usage, namely, a figure of fancy or fantasy image, which is related only indirectly to . . . an external object." Or, put it my way, what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is nothing but—get that demeaning nothing but—the poetic imagination going on day and night. We really do live in dream time; we really are such stuff as dreams are made of.
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If at the soul's core we are images, then we must define life as the actualization over time (for Keats twenty-six years, for Picasso ninety-two) of that originating seed image, what Michelangelo called the imagine del cuor, or the image in the heart, and that image—not the time that actualized it—is the primary determinant of your life.
Do you see what this means?
It means that our history is secondary or contingent, and that the image in the heart is primary and essential. If our history is contingent and not the primary determinant, then the things that befall us in the course of time (which we call development) are various actualizations of the image, manifestations of it, and not causes of who we are. I am not caused by my history—my parents, my childhood and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image .
Picasso says, "When I hear people talk of the development of the artist, it seems to me as if they were seeing the artist between two opposed mirrors which were endlessly reflecting his mirror image, and as if they saw the series of images in one mirror as his past and the images in the other mirror as his future. . . . They do not realize that all are the same images." He goes on, "I am astounded over the way people let the word development be misused; I don't develop; I am."
Do you notice here that when he speaks of who he is, he speaks of himself as an image? "I am an image," he says. That's what I mean by the acorn, and that's why I use artists like Picasso and Wallace Stevens instead of psychologists to say it for me. They realize that they are imagination before they are history. In a poem called "The Plain Sense of Things," Stevens says we can't get beyond imagination: ". . . the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined." So your life is the ongoing operation of imagination; you imagine yourself into existence, or let's say, an image is continuing to shape itself into the oak tree you consider your reality.
In Picasso's case, le jeune peintre was always there, is always there. As the historical Picasso of the flesh falls away, the daimonic ghost stands forth. The white figure in the hat is like an image of the "free soul" also called "dream soul," "ghost soul," and "death soul." (I take these terms from writers on
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Native American Indians and on Inuits (Eskimos].) This usually hidden ghost in the machine is our angel, our underworld, our fateful image and seed that is our death. The key to your life and my life, Michael, is not locked away in childhood to be recovered by remembering and analyzing; it is found in your death and who you are then—and the moment of death is any moment.
I may die in a veterans' hospital with Alzheimer's or gasping with tubes and wires and oxygen or smashed and tangled against a tree in a car crash, or I may drop dead at a corporate board of directors meeting. These are not, however, literally any more revelations of my image than this moment now. In other words, we have to take care we don't take death too literally, as we take childhood. Time is not the primary factor; an image is not cumulative, and the late stages of life are not the fullest and finest presentation of one's seed . The oak tree is not any more itself after four hundred years and at the moment of its felling. It is always itself, like Picasso in the mirror. Camus's death against a tree on a French roadside fits his image of The Stranger, of the existentially absurd, of the acte gratuit, of his statement that suicide is the only truly serious question. Each of these events and thoughts and ideas mirrors his angel.
The job of life becomes one of making its moments accord with the image, or what might once have been called "being guided by your genius" ([or daimon or angel]). The Catholics at the end want absolution, so that the free soul or death soul, one's essence, may be freed of those historical contingencies called sins, which impede the immortality of the soul, fastening it to its mortal errancy. Another way we can make life accord with the angel is when, each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver's seat. And another way we try to keep life essential, in accord with the seed, is by sensitive responses in the daily round. How well we do this, I think, doesn't matter so much as living life with this sense of image in mind. It gives one an aesthetic and ethical sensitivity about rightness and trueness, and it functions like a gyroscope, which doesn't mean that we are not for the most part lost in a fog or becalmed and drifting. The genius is pretty tricky; it keeps quiet often when you need it most!
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Sometimes, the genius seems to show only in symptoms and disorders , as a kind of preventive medicine, holding you back from a false route. Do you know how many extraordinary people were runaways, school dropouts, hated school, could not fit in? My source for this data (Goertzel and Goertzel, Cradles of Eminence) lists Pearl Buck, Isadora Duncan, Willa Cather, Sigrid Undset, Susan B. Anthony—to name some of the women only. William Randolph Hearst, Paderewski, Brendan Behan, Stalin, William Osler, Sarah Bernhardt, and Orville Wright were all expelled from school. The power of the acorn does not allow compromises with standard norms—and remember, school for teachers was once called "normal" school, and the Goddess of school is the Roman Minerva, the great normalizer, the great weaver into the social fabric. Cezanne was rejected from the Beaux Arts academy. Grieg at age thirteen was completing his opus one ("Variations on a German Melody") in a school classroom; his teacher shook him to put a stop to it. Proust's teachers thought his compositions disorganized. Zola got a zero in literature at his high school and also failed rhetoric. Eugene O'Neill, Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all had failures in college. Edison says, "I was always at the foot of the class." And Einstein was considered dull by his teachers. As for Picasso, my data says he was taken out of school at age ten because "he stubbornly refused to do anything but paint."
I'm saying, among twenty other things, that we have to take a new look not only at childhood, but at psychopathology too. Did you know that when Lindbergh was a boy he had tremendous nightmares about falling from a high place, and he even tried to meet this fear by jumping from a tree? Did his interior imagination already know that he had to fly over the Atlantic alone? The Mexican social revolutionary painter Diego Rivera, at the age of six, mounted the pulpit in his local church and gave such a violent anticlerical speech that the priest fled and the congregation was frightened. Salvador Dali was a real weirdo child: he stomped a classmate's violin, kicked his sister's head as if it were a football, and—get this—bit into a rotting bat. By adolescence he was considered so strange that he was pelted with stones going to the movies. (All this good stuff from the Goertzels.) Isn't Dali's behavior "surrealism" in acorn?
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For another sort of kinkiness, take Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. At his school he was overeager, "ready to assume a father-role, to keep his fellow students amused, to be useful to his teachers," though his classmates thought him odd. He was in all the committees, too. Wasn't he already a Boy Scout before there were Boy Scouts?
These exceptional people reveal the thesis of looking at life backwards because exceptional people can't keep from letting it all show. I've picked peculiar behaviors rather than the usual examples of early talent—Mozart, Yehudi Menuhin, Marie Curie. Since the peculiar genius can appear in the guise of dysfunctional behavior, we have to pay attention and revise our thinking about children and their pathology in terms of the nascent possibilities exemplified in these biographies of eminence.
You see, we need biographies of the Great to understand the rest of us. Psychology starts the wrong way around. It plots statistical norms, and what deviates are deviants. I follow Corbin. I want to start from the top down , because to start the regular way, to extrapolate from the usual to the unusual, doesn't account for the remarkable determining force of the acorn. We cannot grasp Leonardo da Vinci by examining his distorted relationship with his mother, as Freud tried. Thousands of us, millions and millions of us, have had every sort of mother trouble, but there is only one Leonardo. And Leonardo's exceptionality may provide better images, a better, more interesting approach to my mother troubles than understanding mother troubles will help grasp Leonardo.
Edgar Wind has a little excursion on method in his incredible book, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, where he writes, "A method that fits the small work but not the great has obviously started at the wrong end. It seems to be a lesson of history that the commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but that the exceptional cannot be understood by amplifying the commonplace." No matter how much you blow up the symptom of timidity in the bullfighter Manolete or the explorer Stefansson, you never will reach their exceptional genius. You will never discover the angel. ...
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...
Letter Writing
Dear Michael,
Last night on the phone you asked me what my letter about letter writing had to do with the theme of this book—therapy.
I take pleasure in expanding.
Therapy began with Freud's "talking cure," as he called it, letting a patient lie down and freely associate, speaking out loud whatever comes into the mind. Then, mainly owing to Jung, therapy developed into a dialogue. Two armchairs, face to face and knee to knee, as I recall the few occasions I sat with Jung. Whether in couples or groups, therapy continues the oral approach. Writing seems to be mostly confined to transcripts of the oral sessions and to case reports digesting the session.(Also, many patients keep journals and dream notebooks for themselves.) Now these transcripts and case reports are intolerable to read. They are universally the same and utterly boring. Not that the hours themselves were boring, but the written records certainly are. Why boring? Because the language consists of dead words, clichés, rhythmless repetitions, generalized conventional terms without the luster or the lilt of the soul's songs of itself. Yes, even depression—or, as it should be called, melancholy and despair—has a cadence and a pitch and a vocabulary.
How rare it is to speak well about ourselves. Write well, we can do. Poems, short stories of childhood, biographical
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excursions, even descriptions of intense emotions—these all are the very stuff of writing. But the soul seems reluctant to speak eloquently of itself. When I try to tell you directly what I feel and what's going on inside, personally, there comes a jumble of circumlocutions, coagulated phrases, interrupted qualifications, "Undisciplined squads of emotion!" as T. S. Eliot said. Is this confused reluctance, perhaps, the very source of writing? As if the soul needs to find a way out of its own inarticulate morass by means of the hand's deft linear skill. Writing as the thread out of the labyrinth.
Anyway, some years ago along came a man in Japan—was it Morita?—who let his patients retreat into solitude, writing their "confessions" and handing these written pages to the therapist without much talk between them. The therapist then commented (like an editor or a composition teacher) on the "problems" in the written material. Therapy took place largely by means of written documents.
You need to see here a BIG contrast with most usual Western therapeutic methods, which do not trust reflection as much as immediacy. Blurted truth is more true, we believe, than burnished truth . In fact, we believe, burnishing tends to cover up so that the raw is better than the cooked. This distrust of articulate form betrays the Romantic roots of therapy and its distance from the carefulness of classicism. Therapy might find its literary antecedents in Rousseau, Whitman, and garrulous Eugene O'Neill, whose characters go on and on as if they were at an AA meeting.
Sure, no burnishing at all in any of that good old Romantic literature, eh?
But there's plenty of "burnishing" in face-to-face interaction too, so I can see the advantage to writing here.
An exception to Western therapy's usual distrust of written reflection for personal expression is orthodox Jungian method. At least, Jungian method used to be a reflective exception in the days when I trained and practiced in Zurich. I refer to Jungian method since, after all, this is the therapy I know most about, having myself had—or been had by—a classical Jungian analysis and having practiced it for over thirty years as Well. Jungians invite reflection by means of writing. Classical Jungians asked their patients, even required their patients, to write down their dreams and make drawings and paintings of their dream figures, feelings, scenes, and to write long interior dialogues called "active imaginations."
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I myself have spent the larger part of my analytical hours paying my money for my analyst's dumb silence while he read through my written material. And, when I transferred to the other chair, having become an analyst myself, I sat still long times, while being paid of course, reading through a client's material.
Immediacy was not the issue. Content analysis. Quiet. Reflection. Constellation of unexpected emotions through tension and mulling. Thematics. Style of expression. Emotion compacted into words, images, colors, scenes, phrases, diction, voices. Attempts at precision, finer and finer. The personal relation between the two people, analyst and patient, was carried on in a good part via the material. The nebulous, ephemeral psyche and its fluid swirling moods and laconic resistant rocks caught on paper, materialized as traces of the écrit, the mind's marks on paper.
A lot of this, I suppose old-fashioned, style has gone out the window. Was it too European, too reflective, too educated, too literary for the American therapist who is into immediate feelings and on-the-spot transference reactions?
If we place our American style against schools of painting, our therapy is expressionist, while the therapist's response is minimalist conceptualism. Curious that therapy expects the patient to open up and pour out more and more vibrant color while the therapist responds with judicious reserve and the pregnant silence of a blank canvas. If we let studio art be a metaphor for what goes on in a session of therapy, then how in the world can the two styles work together? Sooner or later a war must break out, which is less a personal war than a war of schools, of styles.
The Jungians too have yielded to expressionist immediacy. They too have begun to distrust written material. Writing has become a "defense." Instantaneity is now privileged. Dreams are to be recounted on the spot rather than turned into texts to be read, and the therapeutic process has come more and more to mean what goes on between people rather than the spontaneous unfolding within the psyche as presented in written dialogues and painted images. Talk rather than writing.
Now, my point here is that something of soul is gained by instantaneity , but something else is lost . We know what's been
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gained: the capacity to react immediately. Bring your suspicions and perceptions and irritations right up front: confront. Tell it like it is, as they said in the sixties. Feel where you are and be it.
But what was shoved aside? The meditative scribe, the persuasion of rhetoric, the fictional sense of living in a plot rather than in the confines of a first-person narrative , the play of poetic formulation. Language has been reduced to the spoken word.
This spoken word in our white therapeutic culture tends to be limited in vocabulary, piss poor in the power of its adjectives and adverbs—sentences begin with hopefully, personally, basically—wandering in syntax (think of Reagan, Bush, Eisenhower, Ford), flowing with run-on sentences that would take the Army Corps of Engineers to channel toward an intention, misplaced modifiers, uncertain referents (the universal it standing in for everything), loaded with "I means" and "you knows," and a sparse scattering of images and metaphors amid a vast, exhausted field of therapeutically approved abstractions for feelings. Right here, Michael, I'm going to quote something I said at Eranos back in 1976:
Go in fear of abstractions . . ." says Ezra Pound. "Use no adjective which does not reveal something . . ." F. S. Flint says, ". . .no word that does not contribute to presentation . . ." Our usual psychological language fails the precision of the image. What is revealed with such terms as "introvert" or "mother complex" [or adult child, addictive personality, avoidance behavior]? Moreover, these terms of typicality—unless imaged—bring further perceptions to a halt. Our language also fails the emotion. [T. E.] Hulme [Speculations] points out that emotions come in "stock types"—anger, sorrow, enthusiasm—words which convey only "that part of the emotion, which is common to all of us." Measurements of these emotions do not make the concepts or experiences more particular. Whereas art in images, defined by Hulme, as a "passionate desire for accuracy" presents each emotion precisely. Here image-speech takes precedence over emotion-speech. When we react to a dream image in terms of its emotions, or describe ourselves as "suicidal," "depressed," or "excited," we are again typifying, and moving away from the etching acid of the image.
[93]
Therapy's language makes all these mistakes. It talks in the general language of emotions and feeling, whereas written language tries to make precise the specifics. I'm claiming, Michael, that therapy's talking cure makes language sick and therefore the world worse.
Instead, I want to reach back a long way and recall what Confucius is said to have said: The reform of society begins in the reform of its language. I want to reach back to the Egyptians and their God Thoth, the primal baboon, God of written signs; and to the Ibis figure, the scribe; and to the sacred importance of the written, like the commandments of Moses cut into clay, like the cuneiform laws of Hammurabi.
One exception to this criticism of therapy's talk: I am focused on the white ghetto of psychological conceptual talk that passes for feeling, for insight, for communication. I am not taking into account the speech of the population outside the white psychological ghetto, the street talk that is often rich in rhythm, metaphor, image, phrasing, invention, and gesture. That talk might even cure our talk, maybe even help our writing.
I am insisting, however, on this: So long as therapy does not attend to language, which I contend it cannot do as long as it indulges in the spoken word at the expense of the written word, therapy cannot reform our society as it intends. In fact, therapy contributes to the decline of the civilization whose reform begins in the reform of language. So, if we are getting worse, we are getting worse partly because of therapy's linguistic callousness. Despite the emphasis upon the development of feeling, therapy actually invites the barbarians—a word that originally meant those who could not speak the language of culture, the Greek of the city. Feeling does not develop without the rhetorical and other arts, which give it differentiated expression.
...
James Hillman and Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse
(1992)
[124]
Substance Abuse and Soul in Things
Dear Michael,I want to lay out—practically!—the connection between soul and things. Then it will be clearer what it means to be a "psychological citizen."
It all begins with symptoms—the classical beginning in depth psychology. ...
Follow the symptoms. Pathology always leads into new unknowns. Our whole field of psychotherapy may simply be a reaction to symptoms. As they change from decade to decade—we don't see cases like Freud and Jung saw at the beginning of the century—therapy invents new ideas and new interpretations.
What are the symptoms now? Alar on your apples; asbestos around your heating pipes; lead in the paint on the schoolroom ceiling;...
... To live, I must be alert, constantly suspicious, on guard at the cave's mouth. But it's not a saber-toothed tiger that'll get me and my clan, it's the friendly family fridge ruining the ozone.
If I were of a different culture, we would say: spells have been cast, bad magic; we have fallen out of favor with the spirits; my vitality is being sapped by invisibles. By attributing death-dealing effects to things—microwave oven, asbestos, cigarette smoke, hot dog—I am saying that they have enough moxie to knock us out and do us in. The object has become animated by the symptom. It is an alien power to be wary of,
[125]
eradicate, or propitiate. "Don't stand too close to the microwave while it's on; keep the windows unsealed so that the air can circulate;...
You see what I am driving at: my suspicions and my precautionary rituals announce that I am living in an animated world. Things are no longer just dead materials, objects, stuff.
Take this one step further: perhaps the bad magic comes not only from the material cause of things, but also from their formal cause. (Aristotle explains that all events have a material cause like the stone or wood of a sculpture and a formal cause like its idea, design, shape.) Suppose we are being harmed as much by the form of things as by their material, where form means their aesthetic quality. ... The soul, which has classically been defined as the form of living bodies, could be affected by the form of other bodies (design, shape, color, innate idea or "image") in the same way as the matter of our bodies is affected by the matter of other bodies (pesticides, additives, preservatives).
Plotinus makes this clear (On Beauty I.6.2): "The things in this world are beautiful by participating in form. . . . A thing is ugly when it is not mastered by some shape" (form, morphe) You and I are psychologically in bad shape because our physical world is bent out of shape. And, Plotinus says in the same passage, this is because "when the soul meets with the ugly it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, out of tune, resenting it." Plotinus here describes the clinical condition of the psyche turning itself in for therapy: out of tune, withdrawn, resentful. The ugly makes us neurotic.
If it is the form of things that disturbs the soul, then the task of therapy becomes noticing noxious forms. Every citizen is already concerned with the material nature of things, their ecological value (recycling, protecting, conserving), but the special role of the psychological citizen is the awakening and refining of aesthetic sensitivity.
[126]
Why the psychological citizen? Because psychoanalysis teaches "seeing through," an intuition into what is invisibly going on, which particular forms are within and behind events—... This means that the job for therapy becomes one of supporting the citizens' formal perceptions , and these require civil courage, just like the personal courage required in personal relationships. Civil courage in an ecological age means not only demanding social justice, but also aesthetic justice and the will to make judgments of taste, to stand for beauty in the public arena and speak out about it.
Consciousness of form would make us feel how assaulted and insulted we are all day long by the thoughtless ideas in things: by pretentious buildings, noisy ventilation,... The aesthetic eye would require things to be thoughtfully designed. And this attention turned from self to things would begin nursing back to health the soul of the world. Aesthetic hygiene. ... Deep ecology begins in our aesthetic responses , and the citizen's reentry into political participation starts in his or her declarations of taste.
We would begin to revision substance abuse, perhaps for the first time recognizing that material substances into which we have concretized "abuse"—alcohol, drugs, caffeine, sugar—are acute concentrations of the chronic abuse we unwittingly tolerate and that comes from the abusive substance or form of things. ...it's very possible that we become addicted to material substances by getting into that an-aesthesia, or hyper-aesthesia called an altered state so as not to sense the aesthetic insults we are suffering.
All of a sudden there seems hardly any difference between depth psychology and design. Imagine that! People have been trying to dissolve depth psychology back into religion, saying you go to your analyst like a priest or confessor, and they have been dissolving analysis into Asian wisdom philosophy
[127]
(analyst as guru); into education... Here I am coming up with yet one more way of dissolving therapy into something else: interior decorator, architect, urban planner, product designer.
There's a difference , however. I think therapy and design part company at the point where design strives always for the good, that canon of pleasing unity and harmonious balance—"good" taste— whereas therapy as aesthetics would want mainly to sensitize imagination . Now, here's the rub: peeling away the skin and opening the imagination always invites the demonic, and that disrupts "good" design . It's not enough to be in a tastefully decorated room. White bread therapy has all along secured itself in well-appointed consulting rooms, with comfortable chairs and artistic ornamentation. "Good" design can lead to the mediocrity of normal adaptation rather than into the depths of soul .
Depth means death and demons and dirt and darkness and disorder and a lot of other industrial strength d words familiar to therapy, like dysfunctional, disease, defense, distortion, drives, drugs, and despair. So design that invites depth will indeed focus on form, but this focus will not exclude the pathological. The problem for the designer, like that for the therapist, is to coordinate the pathological within design, so that psyche's d's are neither excluded like a Disneyland mall nor running around loose like an urban sprawl. Therapy has to be sublime. Terror has to be included in its beauty . So too in design. It seems only our war equipment so far shows this sense of the sublime in design.
...
[128]
...
The movies tie landscape, architecture, furniture, light, human movement, and talk into a single shot of soul. The set presents the pathologies of the plot as much as do the dialogue and the action. And the citizens, just come from their therapy hours and now sitting in the audience, gain in the movie house deep psychological learning simply by participating in the aesthetic details displayed through the camera.
These are the models for thinking about therapy that I am looking for because they are rooted in the psyche of the world. As this century closes we have begun to think of the human mind less as a part of physical nature and historical culture , as in Freud's and Jung's day, and more as a participant in media images . Interiority is all in presentation. If design can form the faces of the world into receptacles for the soul's strange predilections, then therapy can notice the things and places where the plot of human lives... takes actual shape and can begin to care for, even heal, the soul out there.
If we keep pushing this parallel, if we keep revisioning therapy as an aesthetic activity, some surprising consequences emerge. ... Instead of the expressive arts people—dance, music, and arts staff—getting the least pay and respect, they would become more valued than the Ph.D's and M.D's. ...the dispenser of chemicals (psychiatrist) would drop down to the minor role of strait-jacket man brought in as last resort.
...
This little revolution that raises the aesthetic to top rung would help reimagine therapeutic work as a deanesthetizing, an awakening, lifting the "psychic numbing"...
[129]
... Each thing we notice springs to life: reanimation, reenchantment. The persons hidden in things as their forms speak up, speak out. The clinic becomes truly a madhouse, everything alive, and our concern turns from ourselves to its life. Door, how do you feel that nobody can close you right and you have to be slammed shut? Little plastic cup, do you like being thrown away? Wouldn't you rather be a real hard china mug touched by eager lips many, many times, washed out, kept on a shelf? ...
Shifting us into an aesthetic loop will run us into a host of prejudices backed by academic arguments . Such as: aesthetic taste is a subjective personal affair in the eye and tongue of the beholder and cannot provide empirical, sound theory for therapy. Such as: aesthetics is always secondary to the major therapeutic issues like healing, moral improvement, and societal cohesion. Such as: concern with aesthetic form and design is luxury compared with the real problems of material toxicity and the real economic problems that are harming the patient. Beauty never solved anything.
Unlike ancient Egypt and Greece or modern Bali or the bird-feathered, body-painted, masked "primitives" of Papua New Guinea, our culture just can't accept aesthetics as essential to the daily round. The prejudices against beauty expose our culture's actual preference for ugliness disguised as the useful, the practical, the moral, the new, and the quick. The reason for this repression of beauty, in therapy too... is nothing less than the taproot of all American culture: puritanism .
You see, taste, as the word itself says, awakens the senses and releases fantasies. Taste remembers beauty; it enjoys pleasure; it tends to refine itself toward more interesting joys. Puritanism would much rather focus on hard realities and moral choices that you have to suffer through and work for. But for me, the greatest moral choice we can make today, if we are
[130]
truly concerned with the oppressed and stressed lives of our clients' souls, is to sharpen their sense of beauty.
In one stroke we've made peace between the moralistic superego and the pleasure-driven id, ended that chronic war between guilt and greed, denial and lust, shame and appetite. It was a battle created by therapeutic theory, not by the psyche; a theory that says therapy fosters moral improvement (called developmental maturity) rather than the refinement of pleasure. No need for that war if we imagine the superego to be an aesthetic rather than a moral principle. Then the id would not be condemned for its desires or dissuaded from its pleasures, but would be encouraged from above to find for them more fertile fantasies and superior forms.
Otherwise, therapy remains Victorian, stuck in its nineteenth-century moral individualistic origins and its inherent contempt for the world, which ever seduces the id into acting out its pleasures. ... Remember this marvelous definition of beauty: "Beauty is pleasure objectified. Beauty is pleasure perceived as a quality of an object" (George Santayana). So the road to beauty follows the signposts of pleasure. And Mr. Clean stands in the way.
Puritanism is no joke. It's the structural fiber of America; it's in our wiring, our anatomy. And, if Freud's right that anatomy is destiny, then we all descend from the Mayflower. Then there is no hope for an aesthetic awakening. We can't overcome Lifton's "psychic numbing" because its ground is puritanism. We are supposed to be sensually numb. That is the fundamental nature of puritan goodness. ...
Yet we each know that nothing so moves the soul as an aesthetic leap of the heart at the sight of a fox in the forest, of
[131]
a lovely open face, the sound of a little melody. Sense, imagination, pleasure, beauty are what the soul longs for, knowing innately that these would be its cure.
Instead our motto is "just say no." And we pass laws to make everything "clean" and "safe"—childproof, tamperproof, fallproof, bugproof. Start each meal with preop prep—iced and chlorinated water to numb the tongue, lips, and palate. ... Laws for order, once the inherent cosmos (the Greek word for aesthetic order) of the world is no longer sensed. This is the promised land, and the laws are still coming down from the hill. Prohibition is the ultimate law of the land. ...
Maybe ranting is one of the last pleasures the mind in extremis can enjoy. So I shall not be stopped. Besides, aesthetics and a therapy of things is also eminently practical. Take our trade war with the Japanese. We believe we have lost out to them because they have better management techniques; because they plan farther ahead; they coordinate better among the bankers, researchers, industrialists, and government; because they work like slaves. These economic reasons don't cut it. There is also an aesthetic reason for their guaranteed quality, which our puritan mind simply cannot even imagine. The Japanese are trained aesthetically early on and live in a culture devoted as much to the chrysanthemum (beauty) as to the sword (efficiency)—to use their symbols.
Japanese people—ordinary people—have hobbies of calligraphy, flower arrangement, dance gesture, paper twisting and cutting. They live in a world of very small detail, which we call quality control. Their eye is trained to notice, their hand to tastefully touch. Watch the sushi chef. Even their language takes immense care. It's aesthetic training that gives them the economic edge, even if they get as drunk as we do and as tired.
Puritanism, not aesthetic pleasure, also runs our prisons, the major social disaster of today. At the Kinsey Library in Indiana, I saw piles of drawings, notebooks, and letters confiscated
[132]
from men in prisons because the material was redolent with erotic fantasies. The material must be taken away from the prisoners because sex in the mind or in art forms is just as bad as sex in action: so says the puritan mind . So instead of imaginative sex, we have buggery, rape,... Wouldn't it be wiser to bring in artists to direct men in elaborating great erotic murals on the walls of the penitentiary, and dancers brought in to form rituals of the body, if these aesthetic therapeutics reduced, by means of beauty, incidents of rape, jealous knifings, and sadistic pleasures in those same bodies behind those same walls?
Exhausted. The towel, the towel! If all this sounds punch-drunk and hardly an adequate replacement for one hundred years of psychotherapy, let it be. Let it stand. That's the point, isn't it—to break old bottles with new wine, strange as it may taste?
Jim
Puritanism ?
Sure. But that's a little too easy.
Here's the thing: total Puritanism and total desublimation both fail as worldviews.
In other words: Follow the symptoms , eh? Total abandon and total denial: both betoken madness.
There is a devil's-advocate quality to this dialogue which is, of course, at once its most valuable and most irritating quality. With not one but two brilliant authors shooting from the hip and pushing hard against received wisdom, we're often railroaded into a facile both-sidesism just to keep our bearings.
Against such a searing backdrop this feels like settling for less, but I think it is the correct response. A life without any hard realities or moral choices would not be any more worth living than a life devoid of beauty . People who have always gotten their way are as intolerable (and dangerous) as those who have been beaten and broken down into little more than caged animals. I have to think that these two gentlemen, of all people, must understand that side of the problem.
So yeah, Puritanism. Puritanism is the proper ism-matic response to certain conditions. As is desublimation to others. "Desublimation" is moving your hand towards the flame. "Puritanism" is the recoil. We're all trying to warm our hands at the same fire, but we don't have perfect control of our extremities, nor control over the assembled crowd, nor the crowd over itself. The crowd can wittingly or unwittingly toss us out into the cold or into the pyre at any moment. Sometimes we lurch to avoid falling in or falling out.
When so-called Puritans declared that sex in the mind or in art forms is just as bad as sex in action , they were not behind the times. Actually they were anticipating a whole lot of "phenomenology" and "cognitive science."
To wit,
if a dream or a delusion or a fixation
could be so overpowering
that
we "experience" (or suffer from) it
as if it were real
;
and/or
if the effects
of the "real" action
and of the "imagined" action
on our outward/observable behavior
are pragmatically indistinguishable
;
and/or
if memory is
slowly but constantly
working itself over
("burnishing"!!)
according to myriad self-serving biases
;
then
the "Puritans" among us
actually
are totally right about
the "..
just as
..." part.
If they go a little heavy on the "... bad ..." part, this certainly poses some vexed social and political questions for an ostensibly pluralistic society; but, contra Hillman above, it does not (or not by itself) disprove the premise at which he takes aim.
"According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward—represents or “intends”—things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean."
(Phenomenology, Stanford EoP)
In short, Puritans aren't entertained by narrative or theatrical fiction. They're just sitting there stone-faced while everyone else is cracking up or crying or getting a boner. That makes them annoying, but it also makes them useful. In theory at least, this kind of person should notice all kinds of things that beauty-struck normies are blind to. Kind of like how gay and straight people can sometimes see each other's relationship issues more clearly than their own. Kind of like how the very old, the very young, and the "neurodivergent" of all ages might just blurt out the unfortunate truth at the worst possible time.
We need to put Mencken's (in)famous definition to bed. Perhaps the Puritans were and are our great noticers, as Neil Postman described the soft-Puritan Lewis Mumford.
How about:
Puritan: "a person who doesn't just have a boner the whole time and doesn't have a compromising "creative class" side-hustle, and therefore is better able to notice how plays, novels and movies affect people and is willing to say what it is."
With this in mind, let's flip back a few pages to Ventura's letter on acting styles...
[107]
...
The Edges of Behavior
Dear Jim,
Norman Mailer once wrote that psychology wouldn't come into its own until it could explain the psyche of the actor. I think he had something there. ...
Maybe the difference between humans and animals is not that humans speak but that humans act . ... as though to act (as in action) is
[108]
also to act (as in acting). And then there's that psychological catchphrase that's become part of the common tongue: acting out, meaning, to follow through on emotions and thoughts that disrupt your life or someone else's. Acting out is an extraordinary phrase, really: it puts a negative spin on doing anything that involves the more molten parts of your psyche, while implying that such behavior isn't quite real. This implies, in turn, that to be authentic your behavior must be calm and considered. What a fear of disruption lurks in that phrase! ...
Where was I?
The phenomenon of acting as it relates to the phenomenon of psychology. Through varying degrees of effort and mistake we partly discover , partly invent not who but how we are—our roles. Then we play that part, some days poorly and some days well, for all it's worth and for as long as we can get away with it, until we're forced to change. "Getting your act together" is so central to our being that it's possible to dispense with psychological jargon and describe the crises of our lives purely in theatrical terms. The role doesn't work anymore, our timing's off, we can't say the old lines or even remember them, or they don't fit the scene anymore. We're too young or too old to play this part, too fat or too wasted. ... A woman is sick of being typecast as a mother, a man can't act out his vulnerability. ... We expect from each other a certain level and consistency of acting. Rewrites and improvisations are not often welcome. Reject your lines totally: "catatonia." Put in wildly different dialogue: "schizophrenia." No one, least of all yourself, takes the part that you play lightly.
[109]
So if the art of acting in a culture changes drastically—if, that is, there's a fundamental change in the behavior we use to portray behavior—wouldn't that be an event of enormous psychological significance, with all sorts of ramifications for the practice of psychotherapy? That's what happened in America in the late 1940s, though deep thinkers in psychology and elsewhere didn't take much note at the time.
To comment on the changes at that time we have to make some distinctions among acting styles. Acting takes three basic forms, the most common of which is shtick. ... Most TV and film, and all the commercials, display a kind of puppetry: no matter what the stimuli, schtick actors get by with two or three smiles, one expression of chagrin, one of sadness, and a grab bag of grimaces. It looks and feels like nothing, and it's supposed to. Such acting is meant to be absolutely nonthreatening: enter, charm, sell, exit. ... Shtick acting is just a party mask. The fact that people choose to watch so much of it now is something for psychotherapy to ponder, but the style itself can't tell us much.
I'll call the second form of acting concrete or outer acting. This was the dominant form of acting in England and America for the first half of this century, and it remains so in England (as on "Masterpiece Theater"). It is the acting that made the old Hollywood star system great, and it is still done with mastery here by a few artists... These are people who mastered an enormous repertoire of behavior and could produce the most delicate shadings on cue. ... Even people acting in this style who, like John Wayne, didn't have a large range, still had total mastery of the gradations within their range, so that (like Wayne in Rio Bravo or The Searchers) they worked marvelous subtleties into their characters.
[110]
The third form I'll call abstract or inner acting. (As I said in another letter, this took hold in America when painting and jazz were moving in the same direction.) If the concrete actor is like the classical musician, the abstract actor is like the jazz player. The technical demands are just as great, but the technique is used differently. To see the difference starkly, rent yourself double features of Laurence Olivier and Montgomery Clift, Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando, Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn and Gena Rowlands. They perform equally well, but with different objectives. An Olivier or a Hepburn will project their roles at you as precisely as a laser, focusing on a moment's absolute center; Clift or Rowlands will play the same moment at its edge. Olivier or Hepburn will play the moment where it's most itself, where it is that moment and no other; Clift or Rowlands will play the moment at the border, where it's begun to change into something else.
Each style, the concrete and the abstract, embodies an entirely different experience of personality. The older, concrete style expresses fixity: no matter how much characters may change in a movie like Gone with the Wind, it's their behavior rather than their essential psychology that's at stake. Their relation to the story changes, but they don't, not really. While characters played in the abstract style... sometimes seem to be registering major changes every minute . At any given time in the story their characters seem able to go off in many directions; they seem to include several, often contradictory, motivations in the same line of dialogue. Such a performance gives ambiguity to even a very concrete story ...
It's a style that tells nothing yet reveals all. It tells nothing, in that its interest is in the ambiguity and paradoxes of human behavior. Yet it reveals all, in that the character seems to leap from one area of the psyche to another in the same scene, often in the same line. ...
[111]
...
So our culture shifted , in its serious acting ( the behavior we use to portray behavior ), from the style of James Cagney and Katharine Hepburn to the style of Marlon Brando and Gena Rowlands; from fixity to flux ; from clarity to paradox . Cagney could summarize his style brilliantly and simply, as he did: "You walk in, plant yourself, look the other fellow in the eye, and tell the truth." Compare that to what Ellen Barkin (who does a fine, earthy rendition of the inner style) said of Marion Brando: "When he's up there he's telling a secret about himself that's not for sale." Cagney tells the truth, Brando tells a secret.
As psychotherapists would be the first to observe, there's all the difference in the world between truths and secrets . Something claiming to be a truth is taking a definite stance in relation to a shared reality ; but a secret may not be "true" in any sense of the word , a secret may be a lie or wish or a dream. And the stance of a secret toward shared reality is clear: secrets don't trust it. As I said in an earlier letter, a stance of suspicion toward the outer world is taken for granted in the Actors Studio style. Where Bette Davis and Clark Gable walk into a room as though they're expecting to take it over, Paul Newman and Warren Beatty (even in roles that call for great authority) walk into a room as though they're expecting to have to leave, and very soon too.
Date the shift from Brando's 1947 performance in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, under the direction of Elia Kazan (though the styles of Brando and Clift were already formed by then). The next year Kazan and Lee Strasberg founded the Actors Studio, where the new style flourished. Is
[112]
it enough to say that this generation of actors was the first to grow up wholly in the technological world that followed the Great War, the world of movies, radio, telephones, airplanes, and cars? And that they hit their adolescence during the Depression and came of age during World War Two? Perhaps. But perhaps, too, the effect isn't so much causal (developmental) as simultaneous .
Consider, Jim: it usually goes unnoticed that technology is an expression before it's a cause . All these inventions began as human expressions, just as poems and songs and psychological theories are human expressions. The inventions of technology emerged from the human psyche before they affected the human psyche. So we don't really know if the fragmented experience of personality expressed by these actors was caused by a technological environment or if technology itself was one symptom of a change in the collective psyche that was experienced individually as fragmentation.
Take this a little further:
We can say with some certainty that the popularity of the Actors Studio style (method was always too rigid a word) should have taught therapists something. America began identifying enthusiastically, and in large numbers, with a sense of personality that had no center and with portrayals that could easily be diagnosed as neurotic, narcissistic, schizophrenic, and psychotic—in the late forties and early fifties! In other words, before there was a television in every home, before the dominance of Madison Avenue ads, before rock 'n' roll, before the civil rights movement, before permissive childrearing, before the sixties, before Vietnam, before feminism, before the collapse of American manufacturing, before everything that gets blamed for our ills. What the art of acting tells us is that our sense of psychological fragmentation didn't follow these developments, it preceded them .
...
What exactly
precededthis
neurotic, narcissistic, schizophrenic, and psychoticturn
if it was not
in fact
preceded bytelevisionor
feminismbut rather
followed by them
?
What preceded was the "long nineteenth century."
Hillman, later in the book:
you can't use your therapist as solace and as retreat. And your therapist can't use you. The three big diagnostic terms that you hear thrown around now are codependency, addiction, and narcissism. We know from the new literary criticism, deconstruction, that any descriptions you use are always descriptions of the reader, not of the text. They are readers' self-descriptions. In the same way, those diagnostic terms are analysts talking about their conditions: that they are codependent, in therapy; that they are addicted and can't stop; and that they are involved in a narcissistic activity, which is called countertransference—they keep examining themselves about how they're feeling about their patients.
(p. 220)
A similar line with less of an axe to grind:
"Many propose that we need more public conversations about mental health and are urging individuals to prioritize and advocate for their own well-being. Though such guidance is well intentioned, asking Americans to spend more time thinking and talking about their mental health may actually be part of the problem. ... We need a different approach, one that encourages more outward-focused action and less inward-focused talk.
...
"Outward action focused on other people is likely the most powerful tool individuals can use to improve their own mental health. ... Meeting the need to belong requires outward action, engaging in activities that positively affect the lives of other people."
Outward Action Is Good for Your Brain:
We can help solve our mental health crisis
by getting out of our own heads
CLAY ROUTLEDGE
AUG 16, 2023
The nineteenth century (even the long one) didn't have cinema or television, but all the same its literary productions certainly were thought to traffic in la vie interieure.
Similarly Mauceri, in what may be the only useful insight in his entire polemic, argues that
"movies can be seen as an expression
of what music was already doing
in people's minds."
(The War On Music, p. 112)
Of course I am chasing something very clever but highly irresponsible here: a cosmic-scale takeaway from some eclectic cherrypicking. I have always been trapped a bit too far inside my own head to be fit for either full social adjustment or "responsible" scholarship. But anyway, what I want to suggest is that, indeed, technology and psychology may simply be both carrot and stick vis-a-vis each other; BUT readerly projection-upon-text and in-your-own-head-ism are essential and timeless. Technology did not give us something new but rather gave us too much of something we previously had not enough of. The endemic metabolic risk was once starvation; now it is obesity. Similarly, the external environment upon which the "reader" projects self-descriptions once consisted of that which they could make with their own hands and that which the Earth could provide in the cursory run of things; whereas now we are veritably surrounded by graven images of everything ever to exist or be imagined.
The Puritan mistake, then, is once again not quite the mistake it seems to be, and it is a forgivable mistake which leaves the deeper insight untouched. Namely, the Puritan theory of Media Effects is too "strong." It is too facile and one-to-one. But it is not too facile in equating "sex in the mind" with "sex in action." To the contrary, it is us thoroughgoing materialists who have been forced to deny this mind-action parallelism unless and until a materialistic basis was found for it; and so now, being presented with precisely this basis, the ground shifts beneath our feet.
Perhaps not merely sex but just about anything fraught in the mind or in art forms really is just as bad (so to speak!) as the real action specifically when we are too far inside our own heads, when we have too much dead time to work it over in will and memory. Of course it may not really be "bad" at all in and of itself; but the question becomes, given the chance to churn it over in memory, what cannot turn bad this way? And what better to set off a cascade of "inward-focused talk" than a pungent literary or cinematic image?
Indeed, to hear some artists and critics tell it, that is the whole point of the literary and representational arts. If that is so, then these arts truly are drugs; and at that, "death drugs" as against the "life drugs" of various "musics": the aural of course, but also the visual and the kinesthetic. Now, I have endorsed Mauceri's view that people just plain put stories to music, come what will. I have no choice; I can't confirm that I know personally a single other person besides myself who doesn't do this. The manner and content of projection can take many forms, reflecting (one would think) just about anything and everything else that might be going on in the world. The death-spiral of inwardness is never inevitable but it is a constant danger.
Just remember Hillman's ultrathin gloss on deconstruction:
any descriptions you use
are always descriptions of the reader,
not of the text
.
Honestly I wouldn't even know if any name-brand "deconstructionist" ever said that or anything like it; but it certainly comports with just about everything else I have been reading and thinking about over the past several years.
Puritanism would much rather focus on
hard realities and moral choices
that you have to suffer through and work for.
Yep, sounds terrible. But N.B., hard realities betokens a decisive "turning outward."
Reality imposes itself from without. It is not a choice. That is why everyone needs some of it; hopefully the right amount, and hopefully not only this. But without any of it we become unbalanced, and not only in the highly visible manner of people who always get their way; perhaps we also become unbalanced because we have too much of the wrong kind of inner life, continuously churning over experience without any externally-imposed reality checks to keep us from becoming "narcissistic." Again, I am merely describing in a skeptical tone what is often rendered quite joyfully by literary types.
But I have also said that Puritan media theory is too facile. Certainly I would venture that very few, even among the severely distrurbed, end up believing that the events in a novel or a movie actually happened. It was never my point to suggest a breakdown of the boundary between reality and fantasy. That is a bit of sideshow, if it is relevant at all.
If you are just mildly "puritanical" in temperament as I am, perhaps you have also had the thought that cosplayers, e.g., have got nothing on the supposedly hardheaded academics who will unflinchingly cite a literary character or scenario to cinch the crux of their whole hardheaded argument when any mundane piece of social science would have sufficed. That is a clinical-level boundary-breakdown as far as I'm concerned, but because it is mutually supported and validated by a vast "community" safety net of fellow academics, critics, artists, and audiences, it rarely has any severe psychological consequences. It keeps the litterateur straight, actually, to bask in the warmth of likemindedness, just so long as "reality" doesn't intercede. It keeps everyone around the fire together, just close enough to stay toasty warm. Rank, if he could put his own literariness aside, might say that this literary epistemology is "true" but not "real." Becker might say that any party to this communal delusion is "as good as dead" if they should lose either the community or the illusion. I can't imagine it happens very much, and I'm not wishing it would happen more, but I think it will happen a lot more in the coming decades barring some drastic change of technological course. Keep your eyes peeled.
A facile example that I've heard a lot about (though of course I haven't seen the show!) is the furore over HBO's portrayal of Jerry West.
"West's lawyers said HBO's disclaimer
that the series is a dramatization
does not insulate the network from liability."
For normies, these sorts of dustups are all about precedent. This kind of artistic license is, unfortunately, a proxy for all free speech issues, at which point there's not much to be done about it. It's a cowardly and immoral use of a fundamental right. It's difficult to take aim at the coward without jeopardizing the right.
For latent puritans there is a more interesting (and actionable) side to this, and perhaps some schadenfreude. Mozart cannot dispute his depiction in Amadeus because he is too long dead. Only academics can do this on his behalf, and they tend to be too corpselike themselves to convince much of anyone even in spite of very good evidence. But Jerry West and "his family" are every bit as alive as his self-appointed "dramatizers." This hastens the sort of intercession of "reality" that can very quickly and rudely un-dissociate the dissocitators. Under crushing internal and external pressure to be topical at all times and in all things, Entertainment is flying ever closer to the sun in this respect. I expect an increase in meltage.
Definitionally, fiction is not "real." We don't need to relitigate this definition of terms. Rather, we must notice that when questions of real-ism or of natural-ism become the focus, we most likely have slipped back into discussing texts rather than audiences. Audiences are not mere dupes of the text, but they are having a "real" experience when they enter the Dream Factory. Perhaps this is so obvious as to be meaningless. I'm not sure it is so obvious right now to anyone who doesn't read a lot of heady nonfiction.
The point is that what I have variously called projection, churning, working over, this does happen to all our memories of aesthetic experience as well as to our memories of lived experience. The output is less "real" than the input; it becomes less and less real the more we burnish it; and yes, I do have to wonder if the literary and cinematic content does not in fact become ever more seemlessly blended in with the lived content as time passes.
It seems fair to speculate, also, that what technology has done, in media as in pharmacology, is given us ever more concentrated, powerful, multifarious drugs. It has given us a lot to think about that we not only didn't think about before but couldn't even imagine at all. That means more churning; it means a stronger guilt-induced illusion that we are describing the "text" rather than ourselves; and it is not hard to imagine, if what I'm saying is anywhere in the ballpark, that this cannot help but converge upon a "narcissistic" feedback loop.
Vytautas Kavolis
Artistic Expression: A Sociological Analysis
(1968)
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...it is suggested that the branch of the Christian tradition which has most strongly emphasized orientations toward individualistic universalism and activism—namely, Puritanism—has produced motivations particularly favorable to the emergence of a style with the characteristics of abstract expressionism.
The radical elimination (going beyond the Judaic prohibition of graven images) of all visible nature as the subject matter of artistic expression is congruent with the Puritan "repudiation of all idolatry of the flesh." A reconciliation of this moral principle—which has been thought to be "absolutely opposed" to artistic expression—with an emergent aesthetic interest requires either an "uglification" of the flesh in its various forms or its rejection as subject matter. Both courses have been taken in American art; the first tendency appears to be stronger in literature, and the second in painting. Although tendencies toward ugliness have been discerned in the form and color preferences of leading abstract expressionists, the abolition of content has made it possible not only to reconcile an underlying moral attitude with an emergent artistic interest, but also to do this without obvious distortion of tangible reality—namely, by renouncing the latter.
A renunciation of tangible reality, rather than its "uglification" is, in fact, more consistent with the Puritan campaign against "the dependence on external things." Protest art—and paintings in the tradition of figurative expressionism may be included here—is still dependent, although negatively, on "external things," against the falsity or futility of which it protests. But abstract art, which has achieved
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independence from "external things," is in this respect characterized by a more radical adherence to the very abstract moral principle of Puritanism. It is important that not only human subject matter is excluded—which could be accounted for by a neutral conception of human nature—but all tangible subject matter as well.
... Weber's paraphrase of Washington Irving, to the effect that Puritanism, precisely because of its ascetic restraint, "evinces less play of fancy, but more power of the imagination," applies well to the painters of the abstract expressionist school. ...
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...
Finally, the analogy may be stressed between the Puritan revolt against established tradition and "the Abstract Expressionists' renunciation of traditional authority": abstract expressionism is a "form of painting which is motivated by a spirit of revolt, ... a style whose most profound commitment is to remain disaffected . . . from style itself." "Expressionism," in general, "is the art of the individual and of his protest against the restraints of society"—a protest also represented by the original Reformation.
The Protestant idea that everyone can worship God directly is congruent with the assumption (which became attached to abstract expressionism as a socioartistic movement) that everyone can paint, without art-school training, for self-expression.
Thus, within the general framework of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Puritanism has emphasized certain elements which, even though they may not have been its immediate inspiration, are congruent with some of the most significant features of abstract expressionism. It is notable that abstract expressionism was developed in the one advanced industrial society which was probably most influenced by Puritanism.
While the romantic tradition intervened to modify the impact of the secularized value orientations of Puritanism on
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abstract expressionist art (and may be responsible for its more sensuous features), enough evidence has been presented to support the hypothesis that, in one of its sociological aspects, abstract expressionism can be seen as a phase of the working-out of the effects of Puritanism on Western civilization.
I conceive of abstract expressionism as an art style supplied with much of its motivation by a secularized Puritan tradition that has been reconciled with a growing artistic interest and reactivated by a new, but nonspecific and non-denominational, religious urgency.
It may be suggested that it is because of the congruence of some of the basic value orientations forged by Puritanism and abstract expressionism that the latter became the first domestically produced art style which both generated intense and widespread interest in the American society and brought forth the first internationally significant artistic expression of American society. It also contributed to a reconciliation of the still largely puritan, although secularized, dominant stream of American culture with art. It was a creative achievement, of the first order, not only as a form of artistic expression, but also as a focus of sociocultural integration.
Mark Reybrouck
"Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach"
the motor theory of perception, which means that motor ‘intention’ rather than manifest motor behaviour, is thought to be a largely endogenous phenomenon which is localised in the ‘central’ nervous system. As such, it has been shown that there is a motor aspect in perception and that the same areas in the brain are activated during imagined and executed actions
GEORGE LAKOFF
"What Orwell Didn't Know About the Brain, the Mind, and Language"
Thought is physical. Learning requires a physical brain change:... Brains change as you use them—even unconsciously. It's as if your car changed as you drove it, say from a stick shift gradually to an automatic.
Thought is physical in another way. It uses the brain's sensory-motor system. Imagining moving uses the same regions of the brain as moving; imagining seeing uses the same regions of the brain as seeing. Meaning is mental simulation,... Mental simulation, like most thought, is mostly unconscious.
Gilbert Rose
Between Couch and Piano
(2004)
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... Like poetry, the affective power of music most likely has its origins in the infant's earliest vocal experience of the mother. Not that vocal experience can ever be simply vocal: the attributes of mother's voice are indistinguishable from her touch and movement; all become fixed in the rhythm of the baby's body and comprise a rich medley of sensorimotor and affectomotor components, linking mother and infant prior to the latter's differentiation.
The sensorimotor and affectomotor components of music are likewise indistinguishable. The affectomotor response to music comprises many physical concomitants of affects or preverbal affect precursors — tactile, kinesthetic, rhythmic, respiratory. ...
Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould and other instrumentalists were famous for being hardly able to restrain their singing accompaniment to the music they were performing; they seemed merged with it. It is possible that for them, explicitly, as for others in the audience of music, less overt and more implicitly, the interaction with the music becomes itself internalized as a more or less silent and perhaps enduring affective presence.
... A review article on developments in neuroscience cites the
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prevailing consensus that current perception requires comparisons with the past:
The separate features of the environment stimulate particular patterns of neuronal activity in the brain. The brain does not perceive the external environment, nor the separate stimulus features. Rather, the brain recognises the patterns of neuronal activation within the brain itself. For perception to occur, the brain searches for a match between the current pattern of neuronal activation and patterns stored in memory from prior experience . . . . The brain . . . makes a quick assessment of just enough details to find a "good enough match." When a "good enough" match is found, perception occurs. (Pally, 1997: 1025)How well this "matches" Freud's repeated assertions (in the 1895 "Project" (pp. 327-330) and the "Dream Book" (1900-1901: 565-567)), foreshadowing the following:
All presentations originate from perceptions and are repetitions of them. The antithesis between subjective and objective . . . . only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there. The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object. The reproduction of a perception as a presentation is not always a faithful one; it may be modified by omissions, or changed by the merging of various elements . . . . A precondition for the setting up of reality-testing is that objects shall have been lost which once brought real satisfaction.(Freud, 1925a: 237-238)
As we have repeatedly discussed, the "good enough" match between the virtual tension and release dynamic of art (music) on the one hand and affect on the other, recalls early affective attunements and stimulates affective resonance; the underlying concordance between art and affect may be so close that it leads to a preconscious illusion that one's emotional responsiveness to art is mutual and
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reciprocated, that is, that music itself is a witnessing presence. This facilitates further affectomotor responsiveness.
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...
Recovery
Dear Michael,
It will be charged that what we are saying is wacky. Any more wacky than what now goes on in therapy?
Item: A man reports in a letter to a male journal (Wingspan, circulation 120,000) that he raped his girlfriend and that he is now a "recovering rapist," attending an Incest Survivors Twelve-Step program. The girlfriend (now an ex-) is in a "support group for women who have been raped, slowly healing from the betrayal of trust and respect. . . ." What actually happened? "She was passed out asleep on the couch after we'd been drinking. I woke up in the middle of the night horny, so I fucked her. She didn't wake up. . . . I told her about it in the morning. She was furious. 'You raped me!' she said. She called the rape crisis center. . . ."
That he felt "sleazy," as he writes, and learned from this event, and that it brought back the violence perpetrated on him as a little boy is not here at issue. Nor that she was badly used as a soulless object—or did he hope she would wake up? What I question is the infiltration of therapeutic morality into
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their affair, which had existed for eighteen months previous and was sexual. Is this wacky, or am I out of touch? That she was entered without verbal consent is utterly clear, but was there bodily consent? Had there been pain, it did not awaken her. The new morality and legality declares rape took place according to his testimony, even though, in my particular mind, rape means genital contact on command by force and terror.
He is now a "rapist" and identifies himself as such; she is now "slowly" healing from something she did not experience, was only told about. Their love together is over. She finds love in her support group, he in his. And they have new identities: "recoverers."
For more on this new field called date rape (on college campuses) see the piece by Phillip Weiss, Harper's Magazine, April 1991, where it becomes clear how puritanism , in order to protect women against male violence—a most worthy aim—has substituted the rule of law for the rule of eros. Where once passivity on the part of either partner was read as acceptance, now it is read as refusal. For there to be any sexual approach at all, there must first be a contract, a verbal agreement of consent. How does one dance the dance, flirt, seduce, parry and thrust, turn away, turn toward, turn on, and move into that awkward entrancing ambivalence that heightens arousal and is necessary for sexual acts, at least among many animals, as long as the rule of law obtains—a law that follows the slogan against drugs, but in reverse: "You must say yes"?
I am accusing therapy of this new puritanism, rather than blaming radical feminists, because the issue turns on feelings of injury rather than on acts , witnesses, testimony —and it is settled by recovery, separately, rather than between the parties, together. If a party feels "raped," even if unaware of it, as in the case above, and even if a three-minute pawing, perhaps mutual, is brought to public light three years later (see Weiss), this is rape. My personal feelings determine the definition, yet my personal feelings are subject to the ideational influence of the therapists in the rape crisis center and the college counseling office. They have theory, influence, authority. Frankly, I see littie difference in the long run between this creeping therapeutic invasion of private relations and the statist propaganda that persuaded children to denounce their parents and lovers to
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denounce each other in Europe in the thirties. When my personal feelings, which are subject to collective TV morality, mass hysteria, and therapeutic intervention, determine the definition of an event to the neglect of the actions —their motivation, the circumstances, the past history, the tone of verbal exchanges, the moods of the persons— then we have a simplified legal formula : if I feel raped, then I was raped. We are no longer in the realm of real human life; we have entered the wacky world of therapy.
Of course the rape issue has been complicated by power struggles between genders. Always it is discussed as happening between strong males and weaker females. As Weiss says, "[If] all sexual relations took place within the context of potential violence against women. . . [then] it follows that the individal man is always responsible for the general problem." But recast the scene. Let it be played out by two lesbians or two gays; then it's not a gender issue at all, but one of who initiates, and all responsibility falls on the initiator. Result: don't initiate, make no sexual advances, for any move can be felt as rape, even if it is not actually felt. Puritanism wins again , achieving its aim of controlling the sexual impulse through internal fears.
Michael, when I say that therapeutic puritanism has substituted the rule of law for the rule of eros, I don't mean that all these ugly social miseries aren't real. Child molesting, incest, overeating, domestic violence, and all the true addictions to drink, drugs, and sex of course need attention. So too date rape. But the spirit informing these diagnoses, and therefore the treatment of these conditions, has the effect of repressing eros in favor of bureaucratic institutions like crisis centers and legalistic solutions . Logos represses eros, Apollo represses Dionysius, yet all these phenomena—domestic violence, child molestation, sexual harassment, incest, overindulgences, date rape—are strongly, passionately, if not basically erotic Dionysian disorders.
Where does eros go if repressed by logos solutions? I think it appears in the recovery programs, in that deep affection for and blind defense of the group for the good it's doing. That's why recovery works, it's erotic, as far as it goes.
Item: The New Mexican, 11 April 1991: Data listed under "Santa Fe Today: These groups will all be meeting: Debtors
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Anonymous; Incest Survivors Anonymous; Adult Children of Alcoholics; Survivors of Suicide; Narcotics Anonymous; Co-Ed Incest Therapy Group; Manic-Depressive and Mood Disorder Support Group; Illness, Loss, Grief, Personal Growth Support Group; Arts Anonymous (artists recovering through the Twelve-Step Support Group); Support Group for Persons with Environmental Illness; Bereavement Support Group; La Nueva Vida (group therapy meetings for parents of adolescents who are using drugs/alcohol." These are the listings. A few others, very few, having to do with civil affairs are also listed—a meeting on a proposed interstate highway project; Kiwanis Club; Disabled Veterans; Citizens Environmental Task Force—but clearly the main thrust is recovery and support. Citizen as patient.
Item: Letter to the Dallas Observer. "As a survivor of Delta 1141 plane crash, I entered therapy the day after the crash to help with my fear of flying. . . . I am still in therapy for one simple reason: it has changed my life—so much that I am starting a master's program to become a psychotherapist myself. Most of my friends are now in therapy, and I prefer to date men who have had at least some counseling or are willing to go. . . . I love mental health and hope that more people can discover that therapy is where inner peace begins."
Is this the language of insight or conversion, of psyche or spirit, of therapy or religion? Does "recovery" know a difference? Notice the moralism, the exclusivity in her dating preferences. Eros trapped in the new church. Let's move this in time warp back to Rome, the year 300 or 400: Most of my friends are in the new sect of Christians, and I prefer to be with men who are in the community or at least willing to attend our meetings. I am studying to be a minister of souls myself.
I am not unfair in this comparison with religion; besides, why shouldn't therapy release the soul's native religious concerns? It does and should, only it ought to bring insight into shadow as well, so as not to move simply from one style of unconsciousness to another, one that happens to feel better.
Item: More on the language of therapy. Descriptive phrases about courses for professionals held at the Cape Cod Sumer Symposia (1991): "Personologic Assessment and Diagnosis; Therapeutic Stances—Circular Questions and Comments, Structural Assumptions and Interventions; The Construction of
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Realities in Systematic Practice; Abnormal Grief Reactions/Grief Goes Wrong; The Concept of the Selfobject and its Developmental Significance; Direct View of Multifoci Core Neurotic Structure; Has an Ambient Process Been Established?; Designing Effective Home Token Economies; Addressing Issues of Treatment Adherence, Nonadherence, Client Resistance?"
This last (client resistance) is no minor matter. "At general psychiatric clinics, 20%-50% of the patients drop out after the first session" (Newsletter, Sterling Institute, Stamford, Connecticut, 1990). Michael, do you wonder why? Unfair again? The random selection of language from any specialized field, including a list of course descriptions I myself have given on Jungian thought—myths and dreams, for instance—would sound wacky too. Still, I always tried to keep in touch with soul using words of feelings, figures, and images rather than a specialist language that separates and alienates. Why can't therapist and patient speak the same tongue, not only in the consulting room, but about it?
This is, as you implied, more than a difference in rhetorical styles, the poetic versus the theoretical. It reflects the very reason why therapy can't make it over into the world. It talks to itself, a self-isolating, abstracting language much like minimalist nonfigurative painting. Shall we call it, to use that language, iatrogenic narcissism or grandiosity, a narcissism that begins not in the patient but in therapy's grandiosity, to which the patient must adhere and within which the patient shall conform? Patients are patients and not citizens, first because they are trapped in transference, then because they are trapped in doctrinal compliance that reduces them to childhood, and, not least, because they are trapped in therapeutic language. Their speaking about themselves has replaced their speaking from themselves. For further advice, see Woody Allen and read Thomas Szasz and Ronald Laing. Or, to put it another way: is there recovery from therapeutic language? Am I, Michael, by means of the tough talk, the street talk, the rhetorical style We've chosen for this book, beginning my own recovery program? Am I a recovering psychotherapist, you, my sponsor, my mentor back into the city?
Item: The Boston Globe (29 April 1990) reports that "each week, 200 types of 12-step recovery groups such as Alcoholics
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Anonymous or Overeaters Anonymous draw 15 million Americans to 500,000 meetings across the nation." In Boston, there is a national self-help clearinghouse for finding the network to meet your therapeutic needs, your kind of recovery.
Meanwhile, where are the small political meetings, the ward heelers of yesteryear? Where are the Irish, the Italian, the Polish groups—the little ethnic and neighborhood groups—who met about city power (yes, graft and nepotism too), but who came together to push politics? There was a common cause as well as self-advancement and protection (support).
Before I go on, I must say why recovery groups have been, and still are, necessary. Someone, somewhere must pick up the pieces. The world is getting worse; ask the animals, ask the trees, ask the wind—but also ask the citizens declared mentally ill. "Not since the 1820s have so many mentally ill individuals lived untreated in public shelters, on the streets, and in jails" (1989 report of the Public Citizen Health Research Group and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, a report called "laudable" by the American Psychiatric Association, despite the report's hefty attack on psychiatric care in the United States). "There is near total breakdown in public psychiatric service in the United States," writes the psychiatrist who is lead author of the report.
Item: We are back to the 1820s because criminality and psychic breakdown are now confused: the poor, the misfits, the backward, the ill, the crazy, and the criminal are again held in the same compounds, like the hospices in the Middle Ages, even if these compounds are now the streets. For example, in Idaho the mentally ill are regularly brought to jail first and fingerprinted before seeing an "examiner." In Boston, the Pine Street Shelter houses half a thousand mentally ill people each night, making it the state's largest mental institution. The largest de facto mental hospital in the United States is the Los Angeles County jail, 3,600 of whose inmates are mentally ill. All this is intensified beyond your or my imaginational powers by racism. Michael, what would it be like today to be a seventeen-year-old, or even twenty-seven-year-old African American man, with a few quirks like us? If we were alive at all, we'd be in jail, criminal and crazy both.
Of course the trickle-down, rip-off, national security gang that has been running (spelled: ruining) the nation for the
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past decades would question the diagnosis "mentally ill," so that with one sweep the problem disappears and the people formerly so classified (and felt for) are no longer a concern of the citizen but a burden on the taxpayer, labeled as welfare cases or homeless, people who didn't make the dream, like we literate suburbanites who read about them in reports.
But it's not all bad. Recovery groups do lift men and women out of their sofas and away from the tube to meet regularly, faithfully, with deep emotions. In today's language, bonding is going on. And, nomadic as we are (20 percent of the populace moves each year; in five years every statistical citizen has changed address, all 250 million of us), recovery groups will take us to heart wherever we go in this land.
There's plenty for a recovery group to give their love to besides one another; there is the world.
During Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, recovery meant dealing with one-third of a nation, which he said were ill fed, ill clothed, and ill housed. He invented the NRA, the National Recovery Act. With a little spin and a little shove, all the 500,000 recovery meetings going on each week all across the U.S.A could turn from individualism to the body politic, recovering some of the political concern for the plight of the nation that necessitated recovery groups in the first place. As I see it, we cannot recover alone or even in support groups. We need communal recovery, recovery of communal feeling, and each group provides the nucleus of that feeling.
"Communal feeling" (Gemeinschaftsgefuhl) is what Alfred Adler, one of the therapeutic pioneers besides Freud and Jung, regarded as the final goal of all therapy. Today, communal feeling is arising from the common sense of victimization. The groups gather because they feel individually disempowered, abused, victimized. Yes, we group according to our symptoms, but we group as well around shared compassion as victims of brutality, of compulsion, of disease like AIDS. We have come to feel ourselves as survivors, which means that behind the support group, at its root and soul, is death. In the group is a subliminal recognition of a dying civilization. We are each marginal, liminal, being carried along by what we do not comprehend, and a kind of group love is being born at the fringes, among the victims of an abusive system. We gather (huddle) in
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the boxcar, hoping for empowerment, taking one day at a time, because we smell the gas ovens if we think too far ahead. But where are the guards, who are they? Would we not do better to look outward at what is railroading us rather than at one another for comfort and courage if the train's destination, despite what we do and say, is death?
Only this apocalyptic vision gives justification for the ubiquitous use of the words victim and survivor in recovery groups. Otherwise, to use these terms is a travesty of the Holocaust and the victims and survivors of the political genocide destructions, the death camps, massacres, and species extinctions that have marked our century.
We huddle because we still believe we die alone and ask for protection from the group to keep this basic belief of our culture from coming too close. Our imagination of death is Jesus alone in the garden denied, on the cross forsaken. Fundamental to the doctrine of individualism is that you die alone. We believe that each of us makes his or her own death. Even if comfortable, clutching at the coverlet, loved ones present to ease the parting and to remember the last words, we still believe we meet death alone.
Ours is a religion of individual death. Maybe individualism begins in our idea of death, an ego's idea of death, which is also to say that the separated ego and the idea of an individal self are representatives of death and therefore destructive. Perhaps for this reason people in recovery so often attest to the group having saved their lives from death. They have been saved by communal feeling from individuality.
Death has become a substitute word in our philosophy (existentialists, Heidegger, Unamuno, Spinoza, Socrates) for aloneness. Yet, as I move more and more toward communal feeling, death occupies me less and less, and the meditation on self calls with ever-weakening voice. For the meditation of self on self is but another name for the meditation on death. I guess that's really why I once rudely called meditation "obscene."
That we die alone is an idea of the individualistic self, is part of its dread and part also of an individuality that believes its life is its own and so too must be its death. A person owns it all and death will take it all away. As Jesus said, you can't die rich and famous. But we do die rich if we shift the images to a
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Mediterranean village funeral procession, the slow march, the trumpets, the casket through the streets, everyone somber and celebrating. Or a Protestant burgher's Festmahl (funeral feast) in a Baltic city, with food and drink and flowers, with anecdotes and memories. Or an Irish wake. These are the ultimate recovery groups flamboyantly demonstrating that we do not die alone, that the passed away are passing over and through the communal body.
We do not die alone. We join ancestors and all the little people, the multiple souls who inhabit our night world of dreams, the complexes we speak with, the invisible guests who pass through our lives, bringing us the gifts of urges and terrors, tender sighs, sudden ideas. They are with us all along, those angels, those demons. Evenings when I go to sleep, fourteen angels guard my keep. The freak companions—they are indestructible.
Once individualism dissolves its notion of self, and self relaxes into a communal feeling beyond bonding (tying, tightening, gluing, adhering, obligating), you can't possibly die alone, because there is no alone. We are simply a repository of Gemeinschaftsgefuhl. Not compassion, or altruism or empathy, and not the Other, for these are all constructs and commandments of the I, that first person singular. Rather and simply, existence is multiple and does not cease with your cessation. The chord, the flow, the herd, the hive dances on. By this I do not mean a New Age unity of all things. No, I mean that support is always there because the very ground is everywhere else. I am never only myself, always out of myself, out of control. And I can never recover.
Jim
On Being Practical
Michael,
"How?" you ask. How to analyze the world and discover soul in things? How to do therapy with ashtrays and toasters? How to turn analysis into a cell in which the revolution is prepared? How is the soul made in a practical context? You want
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some practical examples. What do I mean practically? I will try to answer, but there is something major to clear up first.
We have to address the idea of the practical before we can begin to be practical. What do we mean by practical; why do we separate thought and practicality; why are ideas merely ideas and not practical?
Critics of the American style of mind from de Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century on down have said this is not a land of ideas. We are superb at implementing, at making useful (practical?) inventions, but we are not philosophers. Europeans think and Americans apply. The major psychological ideas with which we practice come from Europe. This is the case whether in introspective psychology, laboratory psychology, child psychology, or, of course, depth psychology. Only Harry Stack Sullivan, B. F. Skinner, and Carl Rogers of the classics are truly natives, and certainly their strength is not in their ideas. Just look at the "furriners" in the ranks of therapy: Laing, Bateson, Erikson, Frankl, Minuchin, Alice Miller, Kübler-Ross, Watzlawick, Gendlin, Szasz, Lacan, Piaget, Bion, Kohut, Perls (to say nothing of the first generation: Freud, Jung, Reich, Reik, Rank, Rorschach, Stekel, Horney, Adolf Meyer). William James is probably the one great exception, yet he spent many years in Europe, as did, I believe, Henry Murray. (One of my own great difficulties is due to the many years I spent in Switzerland, so that I've never quite made a comfortable connection with the American way of psychology.) I have never offered a testable hypothesis, applied for a research grant, produced a program, found a gadget or a procedure that could be named after me, invented a "practical" test, elaborated an experimental model, or examined a particular population. I work mainly in a chair thinking, on my feet talking, in a library reading; it all goes on in my head while my body lives life. In this way, my work can be accused of being a head trip and not practical, because we believe, in America, that the head's activities—this head so full of blood and flushed with excitements of spirit—is not practical. But it's not the mind that's impractical or heady; it's the burned-out, ashen, conceptual language of academia and television that we have all been taught is the correct expression of thinking. It's this neutral, flatland language that is heady, not the impassioned head, popping ideas like grasshoppers.
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My idea about ideas in America is that we burn them up too quickly. We get rid of them by immediately putting them into practice. We only know one thing to do with an idea: apply it; convert it into something usable. And it dies right there in the conversion. It loses its generative power. The Greeks spoke of a logos spermatikos, the generating word or seminal thought. As these are put into practice, concretized, they no longer generate further ideas in the realm of ideas. This sterilizing of ideas happens often when I give a talk. Someone in the audience asks, "How does that work?" "Can you give an example?" These are questions from what's classically called the Practical Intellect, whereas my talk was ideational, another aspect of reason altogether. In classic philosophy you don't mix kinds of thinking without destroying discourse altogether.
Besides, when a speaker puts out an idea and then answers a question about how it works, he or she is depriving the listener of the full impact of the idea and where it might carry the listener if pondered. My answer tends to channel the thought in only one direction, generally my direction. Recently I gave a long, complex paper on the colors white and black, of course intending implications for racism. But if I explain directly what my thought means for the race problem, I narrow the impact of the ideas into social politics only. Explain means to lay out flat.
Not only narrowed/flattened—my answering means I'm doing the thinking for the questioner, whose job it is to start thinking, not asking. That's why she or he came to the talk in the first place. Again, it's that latent child in the American head who believes himself, herself, unknowing (innocent), who asks questions and expects someone else to carry the work of thinking. That's why the interview in L.A. Weekly went so well. We were thinking along together, pushing out idea after idea, having fun with them, and feeling their implications along the way. Had you been questioning me, aiming at practicality, the flow would have stopped. Let me insert a passage here:
Our society offers places where you can let your feelings out. You may go to group therapy or to sensitivity training, and no matter how silly or strange the feelings, they are received. There[143]
are also places where you can improve your will: the gym or spa to work out, willing yourself to lift that contraption another twenty times, or to an EST meeting to develop your self-control and willful determination.But where do you go to play with ideas? There is Church, where an idea may be presented to you in a sermon—more likely, though, it's a judgment, not an idea. There is TV; on "60 Minutes" there may be three ideas, presented as pros and cons, as if the point of an idea were to force you into a choice. Newspaper editorials urge ideas on you. But you aren't shown how to play with them. Where can we go to imagine an idea and move it further? In none of these places—Church, TV, Newspaper—do you let the idea swim way out and reel it back in again. You don't just relish the delight of the idea in itself.
One of the great difficulties in our American life is that we don't have places for entertaining ideas. And that is precisely what we're supposed to do with an idea: entertain it. This means having respect for ideas themselves: letting them come and go without demanding too much from them at first, like their origins (who said that first), their popularity (what if everybody thought that), their logic (but that doesn't fit with what you just said). Why can't they be a little crazy? We admit our feelings are crazy. We all have crazy feelings that might want to do this or say that. But maybe our ideas have arms and legs, too, and are crazy and want to get out and meet other ideas, air themselves, spend time with each other in public. The ideas themselves, not the people in whom they occur, just the ideas wanting to appear and be received, welcomed, entertained for a while.
What we usually do with an idea is put it into practice. Someone says "Oh, that's a good idea!" and he means: "Oh boy, I can save four bucks this way!" or "Smart. I can do something now that I couldn't have done before because I had a bright idea. I can hang the strap like this instead of like that."
That's what makes a "good idea" in our society. A good idea means useful, practical, immediately applicable. Isn't it a shame that we can value ideas only when we have them in a harness. I think it breaks their spirit. We don't let them run loose, to see where they might take us if we just fed them with a little attention and trusted their autonomy.
If you watch one of the more intelligent interviewers on TV, Dick Cavett, say, even he, when an idea breaks in, often says: "Well, it's just an idea I had." They move away from it. There is
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a little anxiety that the idea might get out of hand. "What will I do with that!" There is no skill in handling it, no way to dribble round the floor with it.
The media do not really favor ideas. They mix them with opinions. We have plenty of opinions on most everything—but opinions are personal. We get pugnacious. They involve belief. Ideas are much easier to live with; they don't ask to be believed in, and an idea doesn't belong to you even when you "have" one. You can become friends with an idea, and after a while it will show you more of itself, or you and it may get tired of each other and separate.
One thing is sure: ideas don't belong to academics. You don't have to have academic knowledge to have ideas. Knowledge might help work with the idea, enrich it, discriminate it more finely, or recognize its history—that it's not the first time that idea ever moved through someone's mind. So knowledge may save you the embarrassment of inflation and help you pick up some skills about polishing ideas. But knowledge is not necessary. You can distinguish things you have learned from ideas you have. Keeping these distinct—knowledge and ideas— ought to help you to feel that you can ideate without an academic degree. When an idea comes to mind, it asks first of all to be listened to and that you attempt to understand it. If knowledge helps do this, then fine. But first entertain your visitor.
That word "entertain" means to hold in between. What you do with an idea is hold it between–between your two hands. On the one hand, acting or applying it in the world and on the other hand, forgetting it, judging it, ignoring it, etc. So when these crazy things come in on you unannounced the best you can do for them is think them, holding them, turning them over, wondering awhile. Not rushing into practice. Not rushing into associations. This reminds of that: this is just like that. Off we go, away from the strange idea to things we already know. Not judging. Rather than judging them as good and bad, true or false, we might first spend a little time with them.
As I said, a "good idea" is a bad idea! I mean a good idea tends to imply a better mousetrap, ingenuity. "Genius"—which is your own guiding spirit, a daimon or angel, and who may be the transmitter of the ideas that come into your head—has now become "ingenuity," being clever, solving a problem. We lose the genius in ingenuity. Putting the idea in practice stops the play of ideas, the entertainment from going on. We put them
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into practice, however, in order to test them. In America we don't seem to know other ways of testing except by practice.
How else could we evaluate an idea? Is the idea fertile, fecund? Does it make you think? Is it surprising, shocking? Does it stop you up from habits and bring a spark of reflection? Is it delightful to think it? Does it seem deep? Important? Needing to be told? Does it wear out quickly? Especially: What does the idea itself want from you, why in the world did it decide to light in your mind?
This requires that you ponder it, which means weigh it, feel its weight, that it is substantial and has some gravity. Pondering is an action of its own and keeps you holding the idea, from letting it go into other kinds of action before it is fully appreciated. Meanwhile, you get a better feel of the idea.
The word idea supposedly originates in the Greek word eidos, which means both something seen like a form and a way of seeing like an eye, a perspective. So, ideas are not only things you can pick up and ponder. They also give you eyes, new ways of seeing things. Ideas are already operating in our perspectives, the way we look at things. We take our usual ideas for granted, and so, ideas have us rather than we have them.
Does this piece explain a little more why I am cautious about "being practical"? I worry lest I cage the birds and harness the horses to my own uses. Too soon, too soon. I want to think what comes into my mind asking that it be thought about. You know, to have an idea and thinking about the idea are two different things, and being practical often means skipping over the hard thinking part.
Each person has some talent. It's rare to have more than one. Mine is ideation, not practical, useful invention. I am a generator, elaborator, and scathing critic of ideas. I fall in love With them. I can't pretend otherwise, as if I knew what to do with the ideas. All I know is what not to do with them. Whether the ideas that have come to me and that I have fostered and pruned are viable or will bear fruit, I can't tell, but I refuse to pretend that their fruit is determined only by the one test of applicability to problem solving. (I even question the effort to solve problems, preferring to see them, sometimes, as permanent emblems under which the psyche struggles for
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more and more clarity. Let's call them "troubles." Can you imagine a blues singer going on about problems?)
For ideas to be therapeutic, that is, beneficial to the soul and body politic, they must gather in to themselves, garnering force, building strength, like great movers of the mind's furniture, so that the space we inhabit is rearranged. Your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories have to move around in new ways, because the furniture has been moved. A long-lasting idea, like a good poem or a strong character in a movie or a novel, continues to affect your practical life without ever having been put there. Ideas that live, live in us and through us into the world. Viable ideas have their own innate heat, their own vitality. They are living things too. But first they have to move your furniture, else it is the same old you, with your same old habits, trying to apply a new idea in the same old way. Then, nothing happens at all except the loss of the idea as "impractical" because of your haste to make it "practical."
Best to you,
Jim
...
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HILLMAN: Ohhhhhhhh.
You think you're bringing a lot of sacrifices to it, but the sacrifice demanded, the ultimate sacrifice, is the sacrifice of love itself. All your notions of love—that's what's given up, Your idea of love, what you've thought of love, what you expect from love, what you cling to as love- this is what you give up.
In that sense the real lovers, to my mind, are the burned-out lovers.
VENTURA: The burned-out lovers, eh? I've been thinking lately that you're never really married until you're divorced. Because at the moment of divorce, what's been done with the marriage has been done. Then it lives like a novel or movie in your mind, a memory you go back to and back to and back to, but you can't change what happened. And at that point you are really in the marriage, because there's no escaping it. You can leave a wife, but you can't leave an exwife.
So, "marriage in the mind is just as [ADJECTIVE] as marriage in reality"?
...
...
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I've done it again, I've gone off—where the devil were we? You were going somewhere with madness.
HILLMAN: I think in order to protect yourself against insanity, you must every day propitiate madness. You must take your steps toward madness, you must open the door toward the mania, let it in. That Would account in my mind for a great many forms of what we call addiction. These are ways of trying to open the door and to let the madness in. Whether it's getting drunk on a Saturday night or sitting for hours drinking alone in a melancholy to let Saturn in, whatever—these are modes of letting the madness in. And in a sense they keep us from going insane, and we don't know that distinction
VENTURA (singing): "I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane." That's a Waylon Jennings song.
HILLMAN: Crazy means "cracked," the cracks that let things in. It's not smooth, it's not safe. So what do you do, then, to let the madness in? What do you do to keep from going insane?
VENTURA: What do I do?
HILLMAN: Yeah, what do you do?
VENTURA: You mean other than hard whiskey, fast women, and loud music? Or is it fast cars and loud women? Hard women and straight whiskey? Could you repeat the question?
HILLMAN: I think you do one more thing, and I think I do too, and I think that's part of what this book is about—that we try to go out on a limb.
VENTURA: Oh yes.
HILLMAN: We try to go to unsafe places. We risk. With our minds, we risk.
VENTURA: With our work. In our work. Whether that work ultimately stinks or not is for others to judge, but it's risky, that's a fact.
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HILLMAN: So we go toward madness; it doesn't have to just break in .
VENTURA: True. I am not happy unless I'm risking on that level.
HILLMAN: It makes me most happy when I can go the farthest out. Or as one writer said to me, it is not enough to go out on a limb, you've got to be willing to saw it off.
Now, could you connect how you let the madness in with keeping from going insane, in your life?
VENTURA: Every day I fear going insane. I've never had a day in my life when I haven't felt that.
HILLMAN: So letting the madness in becomes for you how you ban the Gods by giving to them. You keep them from possessing you by giving something to them.
VENTURA: Yes, but it's a dangerous game.
HILLMAN: Isn't it a dangerous game to close the door and sit on the sofa and depend on the locks to keep the madness out?
VENTURA: Much more dangerous. Because the madness is a lot stronger than the locks .
HILLMAN: I think the way of letting it in to most of our lives is pathology. The symptoms come—the marriage fights, the crazy child, the overspending, the drinking, the piling up of debt.
VENTURA: The dependence on TV, the compulsive schedules that eat your life, the endlessly repetitive family feuds.
HILLMAN: What goes on in the house is the pathology. Now, when therapy tries to cure the pathology, instead of seeing
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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.
VENTURA: If we don't let the madness in, then collectively the society goes mad for us, and that's called "history." So in the long run there are enormous collective consequences for all these private evasions.
Speaking of the whole fucking society, when we saw the Kevin Costner film Dances with Wolves, I remember how struck you were at that scene—you know, the white soldier and the white girl who's been raised as a Sioux, they're getting it on, and the Sioux shaman is concerned about it so he asks his wife, "What are the people saying?"
HILLMAN: That's terribly important, "What are the people saying?"
VENTURA: Which is something you ask yourself when you get into a relationship, but you feel ashamed for asking. "What are the people saying? Do my friends like her, can they talk to her? Does she like them? Does my family like her—or, if I'm trying to break with my family, do they not like her? If we're thinking of children, do I really want something of her father in my son? How do I feel when I walk down a street with her? What are the people saying?"
HILLMAN: There's a communal aspect to love. Love does not simply exist as a private tryst or trust between two people in a personal relationship; it's a communal event.
VENTURA: When you bust up a marriage you find that out, because almost all your friends are pissed. Even the most understanding have the air of being a little disappointed in you. And some never get over it, some friendships are never the same afterward. Not just that you tend to lose the friends who came to you from the other side of the marriage; it's that, at least for a time, people don't talk to you the same.
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HILLMAN: Why is "What are the people saying?" so important? After all, if this woman is your woman simply because she is this particular woman and no other, as Ortega says, what difference does it make what the people are saying?
VENTURA: The difference is, it's the context of the love. Your love is going to be lived, at least in part, in the medium, the environment, of "What are the people saying?"
HILLMAN: Is one of the people the therapist?
VENTURA: Oh yes. The therapist is part of that community. The therapists of everyone in that circle or community are part of that community, though they usually won't admit it.
HILLMAN: So she goes to her therapist and you go to your therapist.
VENTURA: And your therapist thinks you have a good marriage and need to save it, and her therapist thinks the marriage is worth saving. If you don't think so, then you're not up against one person, you're up against three. And by "up against" I mean you're standing up for your feelings against three other very important people, and that's not easy.
HILLMAN: So the question "What are the people saying?" locates the relationship in a context. The world is the context of the love. The sentence also is saying that love doesn't belong to the two people alone. What two people do with each other is very important for other people. And if you think that love is romantic and can lead "out of this world"—that's not it.
VENTURA: Or that's not all of it.
HILLMAN: I think the people are saying, "Is this good for us all?" And this is different from "Is it good for you?" They ask, "Is this good for us? Is this going to bring fruit and benefit to us? Or is this going to bring new disturbances to us?"
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VENTURA: Yes. That's very strong. And we usually label that, or feel it, negatively, at least in this culture. We think, "Shit on them, what right have they got to an opinion about who I love?" And yet they do have some rights; they're going to be affected.
At the same time, if the madness wants you to say, "Damn you all to hell, we love each other and we're going to be together no matter what!"—if the madness wants that, you'll do it, and if you don't do it you'll never forgive yourself. From the ancient myths to Romeo and Juliet to West Side Story or Lorca's gypsy ballads, people never tire of telling such tales, which says to me that the collective in a funny way respects being violated by love, the way it respects other kinds of outlaws.
HILLMAN: "What are the people saying?" also says you've got a lot of inner voices, psychological voices, and within you you're being told, "Look, she's not good enough for you, she's lower class, uneducated. Look, she's had two broken marriages already, what are you doing getting involved in her patterns. Look, she's an exsomething—she used to drink, so did her father, it runs in the family."
VENTURA: You're famous, and that's what she wants. She's gonna work out her father stuff on you, that's what she wants." While she's thinking, "Do I remind him of his mother, is that why he loves me?"
HILLMAN: And you've got to know all these things. There are a lot of voices going on, there are a lot of people in you saying a lot of things. Are these "the people" that we're talking about?
VENTURA: Inner voices, outer voices, both are "the people"
HILLMAN: What are your ancestors saying? What is your dead mentor saying? You're a woman and the only one who understood you as a child was your mother's sister, who's dead—what is she saying? What are the Gods saying?
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VENTURA: You get along incredibly well, but her apartment is furnished and decorated so utterly different from yours, the furniture and wall hangings aren't compatible at all! What are your apartments saying? What are the walls saying?
You like to take walks on crowded streets, she likes to walk by the sea. What is the sea saying?
HILLMAN: Will our love be beneficial for the group, for the society, for the world?
VENTURA: Hold on, that's a lot to saddle two trembling people with.
HILLMAN: But in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire that was the whole point: they will dance and sing in the square because a man and a woman are in love with each other. And that was an old idea, that everybody comes to the wedding and everybody dances and sings at the wedding. Why is that? They are certainly not celebrating the "relationship" or a successful therapeutic outcome of couple's counseling! It's the joining of family, it's the joining of ancestors, it's the possibility of descendants, it's a whole lot of things being joined, including Heaven and Earth—more, even, than the world. It's not just you and me in a deep psychological relationship.
So "What are the people saying?" says, "This marriage, this union, this love affair, belongs to us, the people, that wide context called the world. It belongs to that street down there, it's going into the world of the sirens. And we, the people, are not concerned with whether it's good for you, Michael; We want to know if it's good for us."
VENTURA: "And we have a right to know. We have a right to want it to be good for us. You are even being irresponsible if it's not good for us" Though, I must add, I personally reserve the right to tell all of you to go to hell.
HILLMAN: I don't know whether therapy realizes this point, because therapy's exclusively concerned with whether it's good for you, the private patient. Whether it will work for
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you. But does therapy ever consider the family, the neighbors, the colleagues, and, even more, the furniture, the sea, the effect on the world? See, the therapist isn't supposed to be involved in all that in any way. The basic frame of therapy is to withdraw from all of that, not to have "dual relationships." That is, the involving feelings of friendship shouldn't come in, so the therapist's concern is solely with whether it's good for you, not even with whether it's good for her.
That means therapy is not even talking about love any longer! If you can have a conversation with somebody about whether this, my love, is good for ME, beneficial, making me more conscious, making me more happy, making me more satisfied, making me more creative, all these words, without considering whether it's going to be good for her, that's not love. So that's not a real conversation about a relationship.
VENTURA: First Western culture invented the "romantic relationship," which cuts you off from community; now therapy deals with that relationship in such a way as to help cut you off from each other!
HILLMAN: Somehow we've got to see that "personal relationship" is a symptom of our culture. Read what the Muslims feel, what tribal societies feel, what we know of antique cultures, of Chinese culture today: they weren't hung up on romantic love, as we are, expecting all our sexual fantasies, and other fantasies, to be fulfilled by the person we sleep with. Why are we in our Western American culture of the nineties, in the therapeutic culture of the white bread world, so hung up on the significant other for fulfillment?
VENTURA: You tell me, Doc. 'Cause we're just like everybody else, you and I, full of longing to have our fantasies fulfilled—or at least serviced.
HILLMAN: All right, I will tell you! My obsessive sexual fantasies, and yours, come straight from Descartes. Because Descartes, the good Jesuit-trained Christian that he was, declared to Western civilization that only human persons have
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souls. No soul anywhere else. And, since love always seeks soul, you've got to have a "significant other," as psychology calls it. That's why we have all those images on billboards, in the movies, on the tube, of hungry mouths kissing, the divinely perfect man and divinely perfect woman with lost soft eyes and luscious washed hair, flying into each other's arms, getting it on. Notice these couples are always isolated. On an empty beach, a sailboat, a private bathtub. No other voices. Just us. They never ask or hear, "What are the people saying?"
VENTURA: They might as well be in a cemetery or in outer space. They are in outer space, encapsulated.
HILLMAN: That's Descartes. The world of trees and furniture and alley cats is soulless, only dead matter. There's nowhere for love to go but to another person. So the magnetic pull that therapy calls "sex addiction" or "loving too much" is nothing other than the end-station of our isolated individualism. The sexual fascination is the soul trying to get out and get into something other than itself.
Our genitals are right. Our hungry mouths aching to kiss are right. If we don't fall obsessively in love, we are all alone in a cemetery of Cartesian litter. What goes on between the legs in the muladhara cakra—
VENTURA: Mula-what?
HILLMAN: That's the psychic center at the base of the spine, in the perineum, at the bottom of where your cock rises. Muladhara means supporting the ground of community, family, the earth of one's place in this world. You see what I'm saying: the sexual desire that never lets go—
VENTURA: Ikkyu, that great Zen poet, says it never lets go. Even in late old age he wrote things like:
"sick all I can think of is love and fucking the love song / hums
in my groin listen my hair's white wild grasses uncut on / my
meadow"[179]
And I might as well add his:
"don't hesitate get laid that's wisdom
sitting around chanting what crap"HILLMAN: That's the kind of Zen I like. Enough macrobiotics, sitting, and sword shit.
What I'm saying is that this desire that never lets go is the drive in the human, not only for union with a significant other, which makes it too personal and Christian, but for communion with something wider. With the community itself, the soul. We've identified communion with private intimacy. Our word for the muladhara region is privates.
VENTURA: Our love life is private, secret. It lets us out of the world, which can be wonderful, but the shadow of that wonder is that it reinforces our isolation.
HILLMAN: But let's get this straight. We are not isolated selves. It's individualism that makes us feel we're all alone
VENTURA: And we're set up to feel that way by a long history of thinking. So when somebody says, "I trust my feelings," they don't know that what they're trusting isn't really all theirs , isn't their own invention or possession, but is instead part of a collective history, part of how they've been conditioned to respond by forces way out of their control that go a long way back.
HILLMAN: You bet, and that's why trusting your feelings without thinking about them can never work . They have a background. In fact, just trusting your feelings leads further into the trap of individual aloneness. My feelings, inside myself, about me, me, me, deep down. But those feelings come out of a whole nexus of ideas and influences. They're conditioned by history.
VENTURA: Therapy stops that history with the parents. It doesn't go back far enough.
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HILLMAN: It still pushes the religious idea of private salvation, and we feel this when we are in the grip of passionate love. We feel love offers salvation of the privates from their cut-off isolation "down there," redemption of the repressed, fusion, ecstatic union, "coming" home.
VENTURA: So falling in love won't save me?
HILLMAN: You know why? Because as soon as two people pair off, they leave the party . They go elsewhere, his place, her place, for private salvation. Everyone else is left out. They don't ask, "What are the people saying?" Intimacy means anticommunity . And if the self means, as I defined it, the interiorization of community, then finding the one and only, the significant other, only reinforces individualism. And all those passionate images on the billboards and the tube are just more propaganda for private salvation. They are saying stay indoors, off the streets, out of the party. They are false because they are reinforcing the false self of individualism. They are pushing private enterprise. They keep our sexual desire, our Eros, harnessed to private salvation. Just fall in love and you'll be saved.
VENTURA: Getting it on doesn't even mean passion anymore, it means not being alone. "Let's just snuggle," she says, "we don't have to have sex." Statistics say that's what women want most. "I don't want joy, I just don't want to feel alone." We are deluded to feel that the only way out of individualism is private salvation, which is both bad sex and bad community.
HILLMAN: That's probably why the Church always said, "Outside the Church, our community, no salvation." So the Church and the old Bolshevists, and the Chinese Communists today too try so hard to regulate love. They see that falling in love is another kind of individualism. They don't want lovers to "leave the party" for private salvation.
VENTURA: You don't really want to come out agreeing with the Church, the Leninists who sold out the Russian Revolution, and the old men who ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre, do you, Hillman?
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HILLMAN: Is that what I'm doing?
VENTURA: You just came awfully close. We don't want to confuse intensely private states of being with what passes for individualism in America.
HILLMAN: No, and we don't want to forget that in a true community there would necessarily be (as there is in the old tales, or in Wings of Desire and Dances with Wolves) a dialectic between intense states of privacy and the larger community. They pull to and fro in a dance of their own. "What are the people saying?" is part of that dance.
VENTURA: And when there is that to-and-fro between the lovers and the community, each questions the other, helps keep the other honest; the lovers and the community each give to the other what can't be gotten otherwise.
HILLMAN: But that only happens if we realize we're not isolated selves.
VENTURA: Exactly. Without that realization, the wonder that two people find together increases an isolation that in the end can only make them more desperate, and that desperation will eat and kill their love in the long run.
HILLMAN: A vicious circle. As long as the world around us is just dead matter, Eros is trapped in personal relationships. And transference, by the way, just confirms that, hour after therapeutic hour. It reenacts the problem not of my childhood and my love for Mommy, but the culture's hangup on an ideal significant other and salvation through tortuous love. I want you—that's our deepest cultural cry. And you have to be divine, since all the divinities, the ancestors, the souls of things, are dead.
VENTURA: I'm thinking of the one thing I love, have true passion for, I mean the one thing that isn't human, which is—
HILLMAN: —your car.
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VENTURA: Of course. And, as you and my other friends know, I really love my car. And it loves me; I feel that.
HILLMAN: Right! And that saves you, Michael. I never saw that before, but your love for that car keeps you sane.
VENTURA: Hey, it's not just "that car"; it's a silky green '69 Chevy Malibu, and it's the only car I've ever owned and it's never let me down, and I've never let it down.
HILLMAN: To everyone else it seems insane that you take better care of that car than of any woman or child or yourself and stay loyal to it, but you are right, because your love of your car is the answer to personalized humanism.
No, don't stop me, I've got more to say.
A woman I know in Paris came back from Bahia in Brazil where everyone touches everyone all the time, either caressing and friendly or thieving, of course, but she saw a man make love to a banana tree. For us, that's perverse. The Church would say you can only put it in a person, and only in one place in that person, and only for one reason, procreation, and only if the Church marries you. But she saw a man making love to a banana tree.
VENTURA: And since it's a perversion, it's prohibited, and so we have to keep our erotic attractions to all the things around, like my car, hidden—I mean hidden from ourselves, from ever coming into consciousness.
HILLMAN: We cut the world out of our erotic feelings. But a "pervert" gets a hard-on from a nylon shower curtain or a piece of rubber. See, the perversion is already saying, "Look, you can make love to material things, dead things"— dead, that is, according to Descartes .
VENTURA: The pervert is then our leader out of the Cartesian dead, or rather deadened, world.
HILLMAN: Right, all those case studies in Krafft-Ebing's work—the fetishist, the sodomist, the coprophiliac who likes the smell and taste of shit—these are saying, "Look, the world
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has immense possibilities for desire. Go for it, even if Descartes says it is dead." See, Descartes makes our love for the world into a perversion: it's necrophilia because the world is just a dead body.
Hmm.
The banana tree is actually alive, whereas the shower curtain isn't. But neither can reciprocate. Isn't that the important distinction?
(Isn't that also what's important about Emotional Support Animals? People can provide each other "emotional support" better than any other creature, but to be that good it has to be reciprocal. It's not that only the animal can provide support, it's that only the animal makes so few demands in return. Classically this one-sidedness is considered a paradigm "narcissistic" trait, no?)
Anyway...
VENTURA: To love the world, the planet, is necrophilia—because to the Cartesian and scientific way of thinking anything not human is dead. This helps explain the real disgust some people on the far right have for ecologists and ecological issues—they're disgusted by our love of the planet because unconsciously they feel it's necrophilia!
HILLMAN: And what about this? Romantic love keeps the world dead. It insists, "Only you, only you, only you—you are my heart's desire. Forsaking all others." And here the "others" doesn't mean just other people, it means all others. No significant others can be had anywhere. Your car is out.
VENTURA: If romantic love keeps the world dead, then romantic love is an ecology problem?
HILLMAN: Right. It never asks, "What are the people saying?"—and by "the people" I don't mean just the tribe, I mean the banana tree and your Chevy and the sea. They will get jealous, and you know you can die from jealousy. Jealousy plots revenge. The world is taking revenge. Or maybe the world is dying from jealousy, jealous that humans with their huge heart capacity for love and their genital juices only give this to each other. How insanely selfish.
VENTURA: And what about this? Technological man treats the earth kind of like a wife beater or rapist treats women: his Eros is so twisted that the only physical relationship he can have with the planet is violence. That would go a long way toward explaining his insistence on violating the planet.
But you were about to say—
HILLMAN: If romantic love is an ecology problem, it's also a political problem. It's antisocial. It doesn't let my love into the community.
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VENTURA: Are we now promoting free love, like the communes of the sixties or the old free sects and religions?
HILLMAN: No, I'm not setting out rules for a new practice. I'm not saying, "Let's construct a new society based on loving old cars and banana trees. Follow your fetish!"
VENTURA: I don't know—in the context of all this, "Follow your fetish" might not be the worst thing in the world to say.
HILLMAN: I'm still being a psychologist, I'm still saying, "Look at your personal love feelings, your romantic hang-up, your obsessive desire, not as something particularly wrong with you —or as something right with you either that shows what a powerful child of Eros you are—but look at it as a function of a Cartesian society. There will never be a solution to your pangs by just setting up a commune or preaching free love. The only solution can come when the world is reanimated , when we recognize how alive everything is, and how desirable.
Maybe that's what consumerism and advertising are really all about, unconsciously, compulsively: a way to rekindle our desire for the world.
VENTURA: "Rekindle our desire for the world" I like those words very much.
HILLMAN: Yes, rekindle our desire for the world.
VENTURA: Though the spiritual guru teachers would say that this world we're talking about is the thing that chains you to the flesh and to misery and to the cycle of unhappy rebirths.
HILLMAN: Maybe they're unhappy in the flesh, but I'm not. Do you think the man able to make love to a banana tree is unhappy? I think he's a Zen master, a fucking saint.
...
[188]VENTURA: The goal of psychology, then, has become safety.
PASSY: Healing, help.
VENTURA: But healing as in "How can I be safe? How can I be well?"
HILLMAN: Well-fare.
VENTURA: Then we forget what Jung said, which is that the most terrifying thing in the world is to know yourself. That's very different from healing the inner child. And when you forget that difference you get the obsession with incest and abuse.
And don't tell me obsession isn't a fair word. A woman "working in child abuse," as she put it, told me not only seriously but earnestly that for a parent to favor one child over another—which is a human condition that can't be helped—constitutes child abuse. That's to equate fundamental conditions of life with abuse. The equation being: suffering equals abuse . Which is a weird, inside-out version of the worst Pollyanna fantasy, because what "suffering equals abuse" really means is, " Life equals , or is supposed to equal, happiness and perfection , and anything that is not happiness and perfection is unnatural and abusive ."
That woman's no doubt on the extreme end, but the fundamental attitude that suffering equals abuse is pervasive, and it's infecting therapy on many levels.
PASSY: Hades, the underworld of the imagination, is now the wounded child of the imagination. That's the substitution. The realm of Hades has become the realm of childhood.
HILLMAN: The attention to child abuse in the culture is serving the culture's puritanism. You can't give candies to a child, you can't cuddle with children in the morning in bed, you can't feel erotic joy, physical erotic joy at their presence. Any kind of spanking is regarded already as a kind of reentry into perversion. Nudity, bathing. You've got a whole set of
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extraordinary trepidations about the relation to children. So the children grow up in a kind of new fear of their own. It protects the American notion of innocence and virginity. It serves that, and the repression of sexuality.
PASSY: This is all part of the way therapy thinks about it, which seems to be damaging, deeply damaging.
HILLMAN: We did a book at Spring Publications called The Cult of Childhood. It shows how this fantasy about childhood, this worship of the child that we were talking about, goes back prior to Freudian theory and developmental psychology, back to the Romantics and Rousseau, to German education, which set up kindergartens, and so on. Then the idea infected the arts : artists produce wonderful things because the artist becomes like a child filled with spontaneity and creativity.
VENTURA: That's such bullshit. Art is hard work. Van Gogh said, "An artist is a man with his work to do."
HILLMAN: So even our theory, the commonly accepted theory, of art is affected by our fantasy of the child. I think the worship of the child and the cult of childhood are substitutes for really worshiping the imagination. That's what we really want, but it's been misplaced.
VENTURA: And worship isn't love.
HILLMAN: Actually, I don't think Americans love their children, particularly.
VENTURA: America has systematized the abuse of children now—it doesn't educate them. Which is an enormous abuse.
PASSY: It poisons them with bad food—potato chips, soda pop.
VENTURA: Hypnotizes them with an electronic substitute for activity.
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HILLMAN: And a substitute for their own access to imagination.
PASSY: The government finds any excuse it can to cut off aid to them, and much of our business is for products and services that are bad and dangerous for them.
VENTURA: And so the American system is child abusive. Could it be that the country's obsession with child abuse is a projection, the shadow of America not taking care of its children?
HILLMAN: The obsession, as you call it, is saying, "The child in America is abused." And, as we inevitably do in a Christian culture, we locate the abuse always in a sexual place. When we're talking about anything in a Christian culture, the shadow is always sexual in one way or another. So it immediately gets focused on the sexual aspect, which isn't where the basic American abuse of the child is going on, according to you.
Yes, the American abuse of the child is going on in education, and in the deeper question of, "What do you want to have a child for? What is a child for?"
VENTURA: What is a child for?
HILLMAN: "Do you know what a child costs nowadays? Do you know what it costs me to educate you? Do you know what it costs me to keep giving you all that crap you want?" The anger about what children cost is amazing. And then comes the teenager, and the child is just a constant worry, an agony around the house. The anger, the deep feeling of, "What do I want this child for unless it's going to do just what I want it to do like a mini me?"
VENTURA: Then there's the type of professional who decides to have a child and right away goes back to being an executive or whatever, and the actual time spent with the child is very little. Really minimal.
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HILLMAN: "She's an amazing woman, a consummate professional, and she has a child!" See, what does that have to do with the child? This is the child as achievement—
VENTURA: —as something one should be doing with one's life, something on one's cosmic résumé—
HILLMAN: —rather than the child as the community, as the future of our ritual, the future of our religion, the future of our culture. And as the carrier of joy and pleasure. The child is joy. Now if joy and pleasure are not desirables, if a child's joy and pleasure are not really beautiful and psychologically valuable—which they're not in a puritan world—that's going to be hated in the child because you don't have it in your world.
VENTURA: In tribal culture, which is the culture of the shamans after all, children are cared for deeply but they're not taken so seriously, not until they're old enough to become adults. That initiation is taken very seriously, but the child as child is just kind of an enjoyable nuisance. As you've said before, Jim, tribal people don't search out the problems of adults in their childhood.
HILLMAN: And as you've said, incest isn't new. Fairy tales and myths show us it's been going on forever, which doesn't excuse or justify it. Still, that incest and violence to children are mythical, archetypal, does suggest that these things belong to human heritage, and so are profoundly significant. Just getting panicked and morally shocked or legalistic are not the right responses. We have to think about it deeply. We have to ask why has this particular syndrome, when there are so many other cruelties and injustices around, seized our white bread American culture just now at the end of the millennium?
VENTURA: So why in our time do we need this attention, this focus, on real and/or imagined incest and abuse?
PASSY: I'll tell you who needs it: the Christian imagination.
HILLMAN: Oh, yes.
...
[196]
literalism—on the language level. That's why you have to kill the son, because the son is the second interpretation, he generates it further, so you've gotta kill that, if you're a literalist, a "fundy."
VENTURA: So when God says to Abraham, "You don't have to kill the son after all," he's saying: "Hey—don't take me so literally!"
HILLMAN: He's also showing that the compelling insistence to kill has its own inhibition.
VENTURA: At the same time there's the demand: "I'm not going to tell you 'Don't take me literally' until you've traveled three days with this intent and you're on the mountain and you're holding the knife." You have to live with this intent for as long as Jesus was in the tomb , you have to really know what it means to take God literally, before he turns around and says, "Don't take me so literally."
Jesus never turned around and said, "Don't take me so literally." The mistake Jesus made as a teacher was saying take it even more literally. "If you think you're committing adultery, you're committing it." That destroys the imagination. That's what's made Christian culture terrified of its own imagination for two thousand years.
...
...
[203]
VENTURA: Many people would disagree with you. And most therapists would disagree with you, not in theory but in practice. Now, most therapists would argue, "They're troubled when they come in, you've got to get them into a position to cope before you can do the rest." And that's where therapists start to sound like the Defense Department and the White House talking about national security. "Once we handle national security we'll have time for the real life, the psyche, of the nation." But in therapy and in government, everything goes into coping and/or national security, and the real life of the psyche or the nation is barely addressed. Regardless of their theories, many therapists don't see one inch beyond getting their clients functional.
HILLMAN: Functional defined as "in control." "You are out of control," "I am out of control," are big sentences now in this culture. And the important thing is to be able to control your behavior, get your shit together. I think control is one of the most dangerous words we've got right now in our vocabulary. First of all, it's a word that belongs with Honeywell, it's a "control systems" idea—that the controls (not the psyche or the Gods) are what run everything, run the ship, run the air conditioner, run the factory. Second of all, it's a word that belongs in the police world. So it's a combination of technological and bureaucratic or oligarchic or fascist. And it's become an ideal of therapy!
VENTURA: And yet when your life is out of control—
HILLMAN: When is your life out of control? Tell me about it.
VENTURA: When you're falling in love your life's out of control. And when you're falling out of love.
HILLMAN: Your life is very out of control! Out of control.
VENTURA: You get fired or let go or have an accident, your life's out of control.
[204]
HILLMAN: When you have a breakdown of any kind―bankruptcy, a death, a big illness—your life's out of control.
Do you realize the conditions we've just described are the great dramatic moments of life?
VENTURA: Which we're supposedly living for!
HILLMAN: That's what we're living for. Falling in love, being heartbroken by love—
VENTURA: —revelations that turn you inside out—
HILLMAN: —mourning and grief—
VENTURA: —victory, defeat—because when you get a big victory you're often as out of control as when you're badly defeated—
HILLMAN: —losing it, finding it—
What is all that emphasis on control? Isn't that what they call secular humanism, to ban the Gods?
VENTURA: We're banning the Gods—
HILLMAN: —with that control system
VENTURA: We want to control all those things you supposedly live for—all those things that, if you get to be an old person, and you have not had them, you go, "What was my life about?"
HILLMAN: All the times you drove through the storm, all the times that bastard broke your heart.
VENTURA: And the old-timers smile and cry when they tell the stories. So on one level what you want is to be out of control, and on another level you're fighting that. That's your dialectic.
That's called, being around on the planet.
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HILLMAN (laughing): That's called being around on the planet.
VENTURA: But a therapy that forgets the dialectic and weighs in so heavily, in practice if not in theory, on coping and control—
HILLMAN: Then in that sense therapy becomes a servant of the state. I've said that for a long time, and so have Ivan Illich, Ronnie Laing, Tom Szasz, and others. But what the republic—as opposed to the state—requires is not coping, adjustive functionaries ; the republic requires active citizens . Individually thinking citizens—and loyal to, or part of, their community.
Maybe therapy hasn't been able to distinguish enough between the adjusted coper and the intelligent, sensitive citizen. 'Cause the sensitive citizen, if the society is dysfunctional, will not be able to cope.
VENTURA: You can't lead a sane life in an insane society. Function is going to clash with dysfunction. There can be no "successful conclusion" to a therapy that ignores this.
But what happens to the poor bastards who, for the best of reasons, cannot cope?
HILLMAN: Well, they go back to another therapist is what tends to happen.
VENTURA: They also get eaten alive, is what tends to happen
HILLMAN: That's also what happens. You lose economic position, you lose status, you lose it. You don't get appointed to the academic chairs, you don't get the perks, you get low fees, and all the rest, because you're an outsider. You become marginalized.
VENTURA: And those dues can be pretty heavy. That's very real. I'm marginalized, you're marginalized. We've been very lucky, but it's the luck of the outer margins, outer-fucking-
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space as far as this society is concerned. I mean, there's the society, out this window and eight stories down. It's a dangerous place at best and a really dangerous place to be marginal in. A lot of people don't wanna pay those dues, take those risks, and you can hardly blame 'em.
But I do blame them.
I mean, really, what's being said here, what we're really saying, is an invitation to the hard life on the margins.
HILLMAN: I don't believe the hard life on the margins is worse, in many different ways, than coping in the middle.
VENTURA: I wouldn't take the life of coping in the middle for even a minute! I'd ten times rather have life on the margins than the impossible life of coping. Because coping in the middle—the psyche doesn't go away, the contradictions don't go away, the conscience doesn't go away. The lost dreams haunt. Coping in the middle every day drains a little more of your spirit until—until not only aren't you happy, 'cause coping is an impossibility—
HILLMAN: Coping with the dysfunctional suggests that you become more and more dysfunctional as you become more and more adjusted.
VENTURA: Not only does that happen, but the one thing that didn't have to happen has also happened: you've betrayed yourself. There are all these parts of you that you thought, once, were important, and that you don't pay any attention to any longer, because with coping in the middle you can't.
HILLMAN: I presented something like that at a meeting in Washington and a woman stood up and said from the floor, "I agree with what you say and this has been my life and my philosophy. And I have now an M.A."—maybe it was even a Ph.D., but the point is, she had been so marginalized that she was down to earning $4.50 an hour putting cloth into some machine on a production line. She'd had an endless number of jobs, was constantly going down scale. Okay, we can say she was at fault. Her point was, "Yes, I'm fucked up, yes I am hysterical, neurotic,
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I've had a lot of troubles, but there is no way I can live in the society truly following the beliefs I have." The beliefs we've been talking about.
VENTURA: Right. Unless you're very, very lucky, there isn't.
HILLMAN: Then you agree with her.
VENTURA: Absolutely. You and I have been lucky.
HILLMAN: I'll say we have, my goodness! But also, I've compromised, you've compromised. I wouldn't use either of us as an example of the heroic marginal person. I don't think I am.
VENTURA: It's not a question of "heroic marginal." Now we're getting puritan: "If you're on the margin, you have to be heroic." No. But there's a difference between compromising and selling out. Sometimes you're gonna maneuver, you're gonna give a little, you're gonna dance, you're gonna duck, to stay alive; you don't wanna be a dead or even penniless hero without a very good reason. But selling out means accepting the goals and the tactics of the society as your own, as a way of life, when privately you don't agree with that way of life at all. Going along with stuff that you know contributes to the greater dysfunction. Living off the dysfunction. That's selling out.
If you share the commercial, "me first" values of this society, survival's hard enough. If you don't, survival with your values is a great deal harder, because the society doesn't support any of it. Any of it.
I wonder how many therapists deal with their clients' relationship to this issue. And I don't see how the consulting room can become a cell of revolution if this issue isn't discussed in the consulting room.
...
[208]
...
VENTURA: You know, the changes we want are so radical; we are scratching at the beginnings of a huge new conceptual framework. For therapy to be a cell of revolution—
HILLMAN: I've been lecturing about one direction for the revolution: let's begin with support and recovery groups. "Monday night I'm at an AA meeting, and Wednesday night I'm with the fat people, and Thursday night I'm with the child-abused and abusers, Friday night I'm with sex addicts, and over the weekend I'm recovering from another catastrophe. Hell, I don't even have time to go to the movies, there's just so much going on in my psychic life."
Now these support groups are symptomatic of therapy today. They're all over the country. Millions of people are meeting every night of the week in the United States. The people in each support group are all joined by a single symptom. They become very much like single-issue politics. Instead of joining to be pro- Or antiabortion or to take on schoolbook censorship, they're focused on the fact that I'm overweight, that I drink too much or smoke too much.
Now, what's wrong with them and why I call them symptoms
VENTURA: You're calling the support groups symptoms?
HILLMAN: I'm calling the support groups a symptom of our time because they further the individualism .
VENTURA: How do they do that? Isn't each group a kind of community?
HILLMAN: It isn't community. I'm there, everybody is there, in order to support me. "I have a terrible time with my smoking. And you do, too. And each of us is there to deal with my smoking problem. And I'll help you with your smoking problem—"
[209]
VENTURA: "—my drinking problem, my abuse problems, my problem that my parents drank—"
HILLMAN: "Tm an exhibitionist, that's my problem, and the court has sent me into this group, and I meet every Friday night with other exhibitionists, and we're trying to work, each of us, on my problem."
Now, a possibility of community does arise. The loyalty to that group is a very strong thing. People are really, as they say, bonded. People don't miss their groups. They stay in them. There is a deep affection. But the focus of this "community" is still not on any communal activity .
My point is—let's use food as an example. Instead of being there because I'm part of an eating disorder, let's say I'm there because of a food disorder.
VENTURA: Eating is something you do, but food is an issue out there in the world. I like the distinction. So you have "food disorder" and?
HILLMAN: And in my group from now on we must talk not only about my personal habits but also about agribusiness, fertilizers, pesticides, packaging, advertising, school lunches, fast foods, diets. We have to talk about the entire thing, because an obese person, a person with an eating disorder, is already in the food business. So there's a conversion of the group from being me-focused to being food-focused. And that leads you into the world. Political awareness. Political action.
That could be done for the alcohol people. That could be done for the wife batterers.
VENTURA: How?
HILLMAN: Let's take battered women. "What we need to do here is not only talk about why I submit and I can't let go of this guy. I've been hit by him four times now, he threatens me and I'm terrified, and that reminds me of the fact that my father used to do that and I was always trying to make up with my father to keep him calm and peaceful. And I really love this
[210]
guy. Besides, maybe I get certain kicks out of being beaten. Maybe. I don't want to admit that, but hell, we're all in this group together—" and so forth.
Now, suppose we move that conversation a little bit, to violence on TV. And further, to the ultimate way of discipline: the final step of discipline in our culture is to hit someone. Hit the kid. The hitting is kind of a crude form of keeping something in order. The breakdown of language, of communication.
VENTURA: Hitting as communication. Hitting as the only way to touch, because of the roles and pressures put on males at all levels of this society. "I can't fuck you, I can't get it up, I can't talk to you, I can hit you, I love you. After I hit you I can break down and say I love you, I can't do it before then."
HILLMAN: "And my weeping, and being excused, is terribly important to me. Because I'm never excused, I walk around with such a load of guilt you can't imagine—"
VENTURA: "I need to be forgiven so bad that I'll do this so you can forgive me for it, and I'll keep hitting you so you can keep on forgiving me, because I need forgiveness over and over—
HILLMAN: Okay, but we're still into "you and me." I want to get this into the society. It's got to be political. " Why is it that I'm unable to be forgiven, to get forgiveness? Why do I carry such a load of guilt? Why can't I break down and cry? I know what the group leader says, I even have a therapist and I know what he says and we've investigated my family background, and it doesn't seem to change this tremendous load, why do I feel so bad and need to be forgiven so?"
...
...
[220]
HILLMAN: And you can't use your therapist as solace and as retreat.
And your therapist can't use you. The three big diagnostic terms that you hear thrown around now are codependency, addiction, and narcissism. We know from the new literary criticism, deconstruction, that any descriptions you use are always descriptions of the reader, not of the text. They are readers' self-descriptions. In the same way, those diagnostic terms are analysts talking about their conditions: that they are codependent, in therapy; that they are addicted and can't stop; and that they are involved in a narcissistic activity, which is called countertransference—they keep examining themselves about how they're feeling about their patients.
...
...
[230]
HILLMAN: You don't depend on the culture, the culture will not carry you.
VENTURA: Right. But the story will, the story of the fall and rise of civilizations. That story's larger than the culture. It's about the culture, so it's outside the culture.
HILLMAN: Some people would say the story is a product of the culture, that only a declining culture would create a story that says it is a declining culture.
VENTURA: And other people would say the story begins outside the culture with, "Once upon a time, there was a culture." A story told, perhaps, by the Gods.
HILLMAN: The role of therapy, then, is to awaken the patient to the fact that, not only is the society dysfunctional, but—
VENTURA: —it's going through an absolutely fundamental change. The concept "dysfunctional society" itself may be palliative, because it assumes something else is possible during a change like this. What is clearly not possible is to find your own little psychologically safe and stable place.
But bringing in the community, the Gods, the history of the country, and the end of civilization as we know it—
HILLMAN (laughing): The poor client!
VENTURA: The poor bastard's groaning, "All you're gonna tell me about is one more fucked thing. And I've heard all the fucked things I want to hear. I can't do nuthin' about the fucked things I already know about, and you're bringing all this shit in."
Why isn't that depressing beyond belief?
HILLMAN: It's only depressing if you are in the posture of the child and feeling powerless and then there's still another big thing out there to blame and you can't do anything about it. But for me it doesn't feel depressing, it feels relieving,
[231]
immensely relieving to know that it's not me that's at fault and I don't have to own and be the cause of all my misery. There's something fundamentally wrong in the society and this relieves me of the blame, first of all; and second of all, it relieves me of the guilt; and third, it excites me, draws my attention outside to more than myself. That's not depressing.
Depression tends to make you focus on yourself. The very focus on oneself that we do in therapy is, per se, a depressive move. Therapy could be causing depression as much as curing it, because the classic symptoms of depression are remorse, a concentration on oneself, repetition— "What's wrong with me? How did it get this way? I shouldn't have done that." Feeling poor and broke and without energy—in other words, a withdrawal of libido from the world. The moment you're focusing back on the world as dysfunctional, you're drawing attention to the world. That's not depressing.
VENTURA: But it could be incredibly overwhelming. "What can I do about the collapse of a civilization, f'crissake?!"
HILLMAN: That's why it's so important to focus on pieces. Now this is where you and I don't agree. I'm a Ralph Naderite: let's get this little thing fixed, then this, then this—this ridiculously small fixing of the social order. Your vision is, it's an avalanche, it's an entire mindset, it's inexorable, you can't really do anything about it—
VENTURA: —and anything you try to do, no matter how well motivated, will only speed the avalanche along a little. (Which, in my view, isn't a bad thing.)
HILLMAN: So I could be very stupid with my Ralph Naderism.
VENTURA: But I could be very stupid with my avalanche, I could be draining myself and others of power. But all this dysfunction doesn't personally depress me because it gives me a lot of room to maneuver in, an awful lot of room to maneuver in.
[232]
HILLMAN: Right. It says, off the bat, "I'm not neurotic." That's a huge relief.
VENTURA: "I'm not neurotic, this is not my fault, and it's not my family's fault either."
HILLMAN: "The world-soul's sickness is announcing its despair through me.'
VENTURA: "But I'm not a victim , because this is the sweep of history and I'm a participant ."
HILLMAN: Which also means, "I'm also not the healer."
VENTURA: "Putting it all right is not my job"—which is another lightening of the weight, more room to manuever in.
HILLMAN: That also came up in regard to feminism and the mens' movement. "I am not responsible for two thousand years of what you call patriarchy. I'm responsible for the fact that I've left all the dishes on the counter, and I've done that night after night and I've not cleaned up after myself, but don't tell me about the patriarchy cause I'm not responsible for two thousand years of what happened."
So the dysfunction around you—is it possible to deal with things piecemeal?
VENTURA: I.e., if putting it all right is not your job, what is your job? Well, it's obviously possible to deal with some things piecemeal. You and your community in Thompson, Connecticut, have kept your village from turning into a 7-11. That's a big thing.
HILLMAN: And to fight over trees as Gary Snyder does.
VENTURA: So it's definitely possible, there are definite things you can accomplish.
HILLMAN: People who've fought for the dolphins, so that there are now labels on tuna cans—I think those things are
[233]
important! I'm still a therapist. As the ship goes down, you do the little jobs of caulking and trying to keep the plumbing running, even if the whole ship is going down. Do you stand there and keep the hot water system going in a shipwreck?
It's a great question, a lovely question.
VENTURA: I think you do, and you know why? Because we don't know anything. In spite of all the evidence of decline and catastrophe, we don't know anything. Remember what I said before about the fundamental wildness of the universe? Life is beyond anyone's power to predict or control. As Laing said, "Who are we to decide that it is hopeless?"
It's not like the negative, destructive forces have all the power. They don't.
HILLMAN: Look at the Berlin wall. Look at Eastern Europe.
VENTURA: Something I've thought for a long time is that this negativity, the official negativity, if you like, the destructive acts that just seem to pour out of Washington, D.C., and the corporate decisions—they enlist such enormous power. The things I am for and love have virtually no obvious power, so how strong must they be, to be able to do what they have done! How innately strong must, if you like, beauty be to do what it has done and save what it has managed to save with no power and resources against a destructive system that has immense power and resources.
HILLMAN: My friends talk about decency. Isn't it extraordinary how the world goes on working with decency, in spite of it all? Somebody falls, somebody tries to help them. There's just an immense reservoir of human decency around. It's a great power in the world, for keeping things going, in spite of all the corruption.
Therefore we can't predict, we can't say the world is going to hell in a basket, it's too easy. You run the risk of being caught in an archetypal fantasy.
VENTURA: That's the danger I always run into.
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Supreme Court, the government, and most of the population—if we say that's the end of the American republic, clearly it is. But it isn't.
HILLMAN: How isn't it?
VENTURA: Because the idea "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights" is larger than America and larger than Western civilization. The statement that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth" transcends America.
HILLMAN: Regardless of how hard some Americans are trying to make it disappear from the earth.
VENTURA: The idea is larger than America. It's an idea America gave the world, but our republic being finished doesn't mean the idea is finished.
HILLMAN: Yes. If you are for the American republic, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, if you are for these things you are against the American empire. The task of the consulting room is in part to keep the pores open to what goes on in the empire. The job of psychotherapy is to keep one suffering the decline of the republic.
By suffering I mean acutely aware of the pain of this loss. That you are afraid, politically afraid. That you and the patient are unconsciously making little moves that adjust and adapt you to the new empire. That you are using sports as the Romans used gladiators . That you are watching victory parades as the Romans watched Triumphs. Again, as I've said, the job of therapy, in part, becomes one of keeping you acutely conscious of the dysfunctional society.
VENTURA: Because when you keep the pain of the loss of the republic alive, when you keep the pain of the death of the civilization alive, then you keep possibility alive.
HILLMAN: What do you mean by possibility?
[234]
HILLMAN: Any one of the archetypal fantasies, whether it's "the world is getting better" or "the world is going to hell in a basket"—these are myths that seize us and are comforting, because any single one you get into is comforting.
VENTURA: Whoa, how is "it's all going to hell in a basket" comforting?
HILLMAN: If your nature is dark, you may find the darker fantasy comforting. Another friend of mine's fantasy that comforts him is that everything is senseless and all our systems are attempts to make sense of what is essentially senseless. Therefore you're always in a valley, you can never get out of the valley, no matter which system you set up. I find that a despairing notion, but for him it's a mythological fantasy that gives comfort and safety. And when you say to him, "Look, you're just hiding in that one," he says, "No, don't you see how despairing it is, there's no safety?" But he's safe inside a fantasy of no safety.
VENTURA: If you say it's all beyond prediction or control—that in fact your fantasies don't fulfill themselves in the long run, they contradict themselves in the long run—then you can't control it with your systems, because life is beyond what we can think about it. Life is going to fool us all.
HILLMAN: Life is beyond what you can think about it. We need, nonetheless, to think about it.
VENTURA: We have to, because that's how human beings are made.
HILLMAN: That's part of life, to think about it.
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