'We've had a century of therapy and things are getting worse' - James Hillman's animist eco-psychology

James Hillman

 ‘We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy – and the world is getting worse’ is one of the more interesting books I’ve read this year. It came out a long time ago – 1992 – but still feels remarkably fresh and ahead of its time. It’s a transcript of three conversations between Jungian psychologist James Hillman and journalist Michael Ventura. Hillman rails against the legacy of psychotherapy, which he feels has excessively encouraged us to turn inwards – in this, he is railing against his master, Carl Jung, who described western man as ‘in search of a soul’. Instead of turning inward, Hillman suggests we turn outwards, re-situating our sense of self in the community, and re-connecting to the ‘soul of things’ – he suggests an interesting fusion of environmental psychology and animism. Here are some quotes that give a flavor of his provocative and polemical ideas:

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.

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 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…

The world has become full of symptoms…there’s pathology in the world, and through that we’re beginning to treat the world with more respect.

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

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!

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.

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…

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. Emotions connect to the world. Therapy introverts the emotions calls fear “anxiety.” You take it back, and you work on it inside yourself.

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…. Ivan Illich would say, it’s a way of maintaining the psychotherapy trade, which is a large business needing new raw material such as abuse, trauma, childhood molestation.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

[how our fantasies construct reality:]

we humans are primarily acts of imagination, images. Jung says, “The psyche consists essentially of images…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.

[so in that sense, we need to wake up to the myths, the fantasies, that rule our activities – including therapy. Not that we can ever entirely abandon fantasy…but we can try to fantasize more consciously at least]

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

[…]

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.”

It’s not just your parents, your childhood, or marriage. There’s a dysfunction in society…So how is settling things with my wife going to repair the dysfunction of the general situation? That’s a Romantic delusion…because you still live in this crazy world of dysfunction that impinges on you 24 hours a day…You can’t make a separate peace.

[…]

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.

Maybe 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.

[…]

We used to believe, and studies “showed,” that stress came from inside the patient’s psychic field of personal relations: death of a loved one, moving to another house, divorce or breakup, bankruptcy, failure, or being fired. These were said to be the shocks that the soul and body couldn’t easily take and caused “stress” reactions.

But now new studies “show” stress arises largely from “the irritations of daily life,” which I take to mean again the aesthetic disorders of the environment, such as racism, noise, crowding, traffic, air quality, crime fears, police cars, violence fears, legal threats, hypercommunication (too much info, keeping up), breakdowns and frustrations in the school systems, taxpaying, bureaucracy, hospitals, and making ends meet. You see, Michael, at last therapy is going to have to go out the door with the client, maybe even make home visits, or at least walk down the street.

We awaken daily in fear of the things we live with, eat, drink, and breathe. “I am slowly being poisoned.” The closest environment has become hostile. 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.

I 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…my suspicions and my precautionary rituals announce that I am living in an animated world, Things are no longer just dead materials, objects, stuff.

[…]

Suppose we entertain the idea that the world is in extremis, suffering an acute perhaps fatal disorder at the edge of extinction. Then I would claim that what the world needs most is radical and original extremes of feeling and thinking in order for its crisis to be met with equal intensity. The supportive and tolerant understanding of psychotherapy is hardly up to this task. Instead it produces counterphobic attitudes to chaos, marginality, extremes. Therapy as sedation: benumbing, an-aesthesia so that we calm down, relieve stress, relax, find acceptance, balance, support, empathy. The middle ground. Mediocrity.

for me the job of psychotherapy is to open up and deal with—no, not deal with, encourage, maybe even inflame —the rich and crazy mind, that wonderful aviary (the image is from Plato) of wild flying thoughts, the sex-charged fantasies, the incredible longings, bloody wounds, and the museums of archaic shards that constitute the psyche

instead of imagining that I am dysfunctional, my family is dysfunctional, you realize what R. D. Laing said long ago and Freud, of course, too: it is the civilization that is dysfunctional. The society is dysfunctional. The political process is dysfunctional. And we have to work on cures that are beyond my cure. That’s revolution. That’s realizing that things out there are dysfunctional. That’s the therapeutic task. It’s not to tell a person how to fight or where to fight, but the awareness of dysfunction in society, in the outer world..

Collectively we’re sharing the experience of the end of Western civilization—a great and tragic moment. It’s tragic not because Western civilization is better than other civilizations, but because there’s a ground note of tragedy when anything passes from the world forever. And this is a great thing, an incredible event, the death of Western civilization—an epic moment in the life of the human race. And, like the Sioux, we should savor and sing the beauty of this death.

…we are living in a Dark Age. And we are not going to see the end of it, nor are our children, nor probably our children’s children. And our job, every single one of us, is to cherish whatever in the human heritage we love and to feed it and keep it going and pass it on, because this Dark Age isn’t going to go on forever, and when it stops those people are gonna need the pieces that we pass on. They’re not going to be able to build a new world without us passing on whatever we can—ideas, art, knowledge, skills, or just plain old fragile love, how we treat people, how we help people: that’s something to be passed on.