Categories: uncategorized
Date: 06 December 2007 19:03:34
As you might be able to tell, I've been reading again.
It was (post-?) Jungian analytical psychotherapist and one time head honcho of the Jung Institute in Zurich, James Hillman, in his book
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hundred-Years-Psychotherapy-Worlds-Getting/dp/0062506617/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196967586&sr=1-1
">We've had 100 Years of Therapy and the World's Still Getting Worse who reminded me of my undergrad studies about causality from Aristotle and Nietzsche. Simplifying to the extreme, Aristotle wrote that the cause of an event need not necesarily happen before that event, but could happen after it. Hillman gives the example of Winston Churchill. When Churchill was a kid he didn't speak much, hardly at all in fact. Usually teachers, psychotherapists, analysts, child/educational psychologists (basically, the improvers of mankind) interpret this quietness as an effect of an earlier trauma. Hillman suggests that it might just be the other way round, that of course Churchill as a kid wasn't very articulate because his subconscious knew that sometime in the future the weight of his words would be needed to help overcome the threat of the Nazi regime. With that hanging over you of course you're not going to be too talkative as a kid.
I've been thinking about this in relation to psychoanalysis/therapy. The question I'm trying to answer is something like this: by seeking to heal pathology, is psychoanalysis/therapy unwittingly destroying the very thing which is trying to teach us how to inculcate and use the most powerful creative forces within us? At the moment I think it is but it sure is nice to discover a thin strand of hope in James Hillman, however much I disagree with other aspects of his thought.