One of the things the psyche most needs is psychology. It needs good ideas from which it can “deepen and intensify experience”. (Hillman, 1975, p. xviii) Ideas are vessels in which we work. In which the opus can take shape. Through which our raw experience can pass. And a fundamental re-visioning of psychology requires first and foremost a re-visioning of its vessels.
However, the psychological ideas of Jung’s and Freud’s and Hillman’s have not spoken for us. They have spoken only for themselves. Hillman’s ideas are Hillman’s vessels. Not mine. Not yours. We may glean many things from them, but they can’t do the work for us. “Freud and Jung are masters, not so that we may follow them in becoming Freudian and Jungian, but that we may follow them in becoming psychological.” (Hillman, 1975, p. xviii) Hillman also believed deeply in negative learning: the idea that you learned more by disagreeing then by casual assent.
So before us we have inspiration.
Vessels to honor and vessels to smash.
It is our job to work out our own salvation (up to – and including – dropping the idea of salvation itself). To pick our own way through the dense and shrouded vale.
Because we are each one of us in therapy always as it relates to making soul and we are each therapists of our own souls as well. Our pilgrimage through the valley is a sacred rite given each of us in their turn. “…it is a process that goes on intermittently in our individual soul-searching, our attempts at understanding our complexities, the critical attacks, prescriptions, and encouragements that we give ourselves.” (Hillman, 1975, p. viii) We each exemplify the wounded healer.
Patient and therapist, lying on the same sweat-soaked sheets.
