Dog-paddling a little further into the waters of archetypal psyhchology #2

Dog paddling a little further into “spirit v soul” as conceived by archetypal psychology

This process of swimming in the waters of a new approach to a deeply embedded approach to psychology (empirical, ego-centred, “reality driven, and expecting fundamental transformation) , while slow and plodding, like the dog-paddle,  is awkward and inelegant also like the dog-paddle, and also somewhat tiring as well as trying.

Here is another of Hillman’s thoughts from “Archetypal Psychology,  A Brief Account, that flips much conventional thought and perception on its ear:

“For archetypal psychology, ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ change places and values. First, they are no longer opposed. Second, fantasy in never merely mentally subjective but is always being enacted and embodied…..Third, whatever is physically or literally ‘real’ is always also a fantasy image. Thus the world of so-called hard factual reality is always also the display of a specifically shaped fantasy, as if to say, along with Wallace Stevens, the American philosopher-poet of imagination on who(m) archetypal psychology often draws, there is always ‘a poem at the heart of things….Jung stated the same idea: ‘The psyche creates reality everyday. The only expression I can say for this activity is fantasy. And he takes the word ‘fantasy’ from poetic usage. (p. 23)

Before we move to consider “soul” and “spirit”, let’s pause with the above quote. While we are all sentient beings (able to perceive or feel things) and based on the MBTI (Myers Briggs) test with all of its critics, some 73% of all people score as primarily “sensate” humans, (perceiving of and perceived by the senses), generally we all live in, and conduct our affairs on the bases of what our senses are “telling” us. We learn about ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ when, at two years, we discover the temperature at or near the stove, or the fireplace, or perhaps the bonfire at the campsite. Our eyes, ears, fingers, nerves, nose are all ‘naturally’ receiving information about the situations we are in, and almost simultaneously, we are ‘making sense’ of those perceptions. What we do not talk about, (and many would likely deny or resist any move to open those discussions) are those things behind, below, above, outside of, the images that travel in and through our physical senses and are thereby somewhat ethereal and abstract and ill-defined, as compared with those images of what we call “reality”. It is these 'images' that dance in and through our fantasy, to borrow Jung's word.

At the same time, we live in a culture that strives to discern (and also apparently to resist) the difference between what we call facts and what we call lies. And in that process, those things that we regard as lies are usually relegated to words like ‘fantasy’. This word, fantasy, is also used in discussions about visions of space, of pre-historic monsters, and then it morphs into words and concepts like ‘demonic, satanic, the underworld, purgatory, Hades, horror movies, Hell, and similar concepts from literature, and the world of the bizarre, the unnatural, the unbelievable, the inconceivable, the imposter, the impossible etc.

We have seemed, certainly over the last few years in North America, (especially the U.S.A.), to have struggled with whom and what to believe. And, of course, we have all made choices that have deposited specific names in each column: liars and truth-tellers. At the same time, we all know that such a binary dichotomy, applied to individual human beings, is both incomplete and foggy at best and we all, perhaps secretly, wonder why that is.

Hillman addresses this conundrum:

Human awareness fails in its comprehension not because of original sin or personal neurosis or because of the obstinacy of the objective world to which we are supposedly opposed. Human awareness fails, according to the psychology based on soul, because the soul’s metaphorical nature has a suicidal necessity, an underworld affiliation, a morbism, a destiny different from dayworld claims—which makes the psyche fundamentally unable to submit to the hubris of an egocentric notion of subjectivity as achievement, defined as cognition, connation, intention, perception and so forth. (Hillman, op. cit. p.21-22)

For many months, I have held a secret ‘notion’ that the former president of the United States has a deep, unconscious, and incorrigible death-wish, in psychology named, “Thanatos, the death drive”. Freud conceived that people typically channel this death drive outward as aggression toward others. Some, similarly, can direct the drive inward resulting in self-harm or suicide. Hillman seems to be discerning a  different path, not an either/or of inward or outward direction of this death drive, but rather embedding it in the “soul” ‘as metaphor, “describing how the soul acts…transposing meaning and releasing interior buried significance. Whatever is heard with the ear of soul reverberates with under-and-overtones. The perspective darkens with a deeper light. But this metaphorical perspective also kills; it brings about the death of naïve realism, naturalism, and literal understanding. The relation of soul to death-a theme running all thought archetypal psychology- is thus a function of the psyche’s metaphorical activity. The metaphorical mode does not speak in declarative statements or explain in clear contrasts. It delivers all things in their shadows. So, its perspective defeats any heroic attempt to gain a firm grip on phenomena; instead, the metaphorical mode of soul is ‘elusive, allusive, illusive’ undermining the very definition of consciousness and intentionality and is history as development. (Ibid, p.21)

Naturally, these “over-or-under-tones” are emerging, erupting, flowing, like underground springs from the imagination and Hillman is attempting to render what seems like a universal process and experience as a psychological perspective that stretches the elastic/rubber/declarative theories of both Freud and Jung. And in the process, Hillman (et al) are also building bridges both between the senses and  the images, the present and the past and the future, the higher and better angels and the darker instincts of our human complexities. There is a marked distinction and challenge to what has become the ubiquitous psycho-pathologizing in our contemporary world, (e.g. my projection of a Thanatos onto the former president, as compared with the narcissism, egomania, Napoleonic complex etc. labels that have come from various other observers) and how archetypal psychology might consider the previous administration.

The notion of seeming to be in control of events, situations, developments, and the stories and issues embedded in those scenarios, is directly challenged by archetypal psychology. And it is the challenge to the hubris (as well as the inevitable psychology and trauma of failure) that seems cogent to the arguments for archetypal psychology.

“Thus, this sense of weakness, inferiority, mortification, masochism, darkness and failure is inherent to the mode of metaphor itself which defeats conscious understanding as a control over phenomena. Metaphor, as the soul’s mode of logos (in Jungian psychology the principle of reason adn judgement), ultimately results in  that abandonment to the given which approximates mysticism….As Freud and Jung both attempted to discover the fundamental ‘mistake’ in Western culture was to resolve the misery of man trapped in the decline of the West, so archetypal psychology specifies this mistake as loss of soul which further identifies will loss of images and the imaginal sense. The result has been the intensification of subjectivity, showing both in the self-enclosed egocentricity and the hyperactivism, of life-fanatacism, of Western consciousness which has lost its relation with death and the underworld…..As the metaphorical perspective gives new animation to soul, so too it re-vitalizes areas that had been assumed not ensouled and not psychological; the events of the body and medicine, the ecolgical world, the man-made phenomena of architecture and transportation, education, food, bureaucratic language and systems….The metaphorical perspective which revisions worldly phenomena as images can find ‘sense and passion’ where the Cartesian mind sees the mere extension of de-souled insensate objects .In this way, the poetic basis of mind takes psychology out of the confines of laboratory and consulting room, and even beyond the personal subjectivity of the human person, into a psychology of things as objectification of images with interiority, things as the display of fantasy. (Ibid. 22-23)

Imagine a perspective that helps to dissipate that ego-driven obsession with success and its concomitant, the trauma of failing to achieve that brass ring, as the final judgement of our personal timelines, to be supplemented by the fullness of the interiority of each thing and each experience, seen from the perspective of a universe in which various myths and gods and goddesses are inherent to our lives.

And that inheritance is neither necessarily willed, nor programmed, nor can it be. Nor can whatever happens ever be surgically excised from its mythic echoes, those over-and-undertones that can only be mined in and through the imagination. And those previously “enshackelling” and absolute judgements of others, based on their own literalisms, symptom-adherence, and perhaps even the unconscious lack of awareness of the poetic mind’s capacity to see a fuller and more life-giving picture, paradoxically because it refuses to deny, or to eliminate, or to rule out the question of how the image relates to one’s own mortality.

Unconsciously, I have always felt more comfortable in preparing for and conducting those liturgies that honoured the lives of the deceased. For a long time, I considered my own comfort level somewhat grotesque and morose, perhaps even a little too close to death, morbid even. And yet, I never considered that I was being seduced by the fear or the finality of our fatenor did I consider myself burdened with a death wish. And being raised in a church in which the judgement day was imaged as the sword of Damocles when we would all be divided into those “permitted” into heaven or “sentenced” to Hell, I have to confess that the absoluteness of that histrionic “act of God” never sat well in either my mind or my conscience or my soul.

There has also always been a kind of scepticism in my attitude about the “correctness” (not merely politically but also professionally, parentally, medically, legally and even theologically and  scientifically) that attends the “rhetoric of order, number, knowledge permanency, and self-efensive logic” all of which Hillman lays at the feet of the word and concept “spirit”, as compared with the soul. The monotheism, orthodoxy, ultimacy and heroism that attends “spirit” as “superior” and thereby worthy of each and every  student that ever passed through my classroom, and daughter who is/was part of my family, seemed always only a part of the whole of something less easily contained by the language and the perspective and the perceptions of our persons adn our senses and logic and rationality.

Hillman further elucidates: “The distinction between soul and spirit further guards against psychological therapy  becoming confused  with spiritual discipline—whether Eastern of Western—and gives yet another reason for archetypal psychology to eschew (deliberately avoid, abstain from) borrowings from meditative techniques and/or operant conditioning, both of which conceptualize psychic events in spiritual terms. (Ibid p 25-26)

Much of what passes as pastoral care in contemporary churches, at least in North America, attempts to find an intellectual, as well as a spiritual congruity with those terms of meditation and operant conditioning, as a way of ‘shining light’ into the darkness of many parishioners’ ‘dark nights of the soul’…as the tradition has it.

When discussing the death of a clergy by suicide at the altar, in Lent, with a parish two years into its grieving process, who had not had opportunity to grieve either formally or informally, I noted that the word betrayal was central to their shared experience, as one of the significant complications of the death. That image of betrayal, however, could not be restricted to the single act of one man; it had to be evoked as part of the way to ‘see’ and to be seen from that image. And from that perspective, each of us now had opportunity to consider “our own betrayer” as part of the path forward. This seems to be one of the ways in which 'being seen by and held by the image of betrayal' might become evident, from an archetypal psychology perspective.

Immediately upon learning of the content of our discussion, the presiding bishop raged, calling the conversation “evil” and declaring that it must be discontinued. Was his 'spirit/ unsettled by the 'soul' of the conversation? It was only after two-plus years, that he perceived the conversation, never an act of therapy, to have had a salutary impact on those attending, and on the parish itself. 

Perhaps, our death-denying, often death-defying, notion of how life is to be lived in North America, would benefit from a somewhat radical notion of seeing “things” with soul from the ‘eyes’ of both soul and soul-making….

D’ya think?....just perhaps, but not absolutely….eh? 

Editor's note: please accept my apoligies for the plethora of typo's in the first edition. I hope the copy is more easily read and reflected upon now.