Carl Jung & James Hillman on Soul Loss
Excerpts from Soul Recovery: Depth Psychological Perspectives on Psychedelic and Shamanic Healing (edited by Brian James, 2022)
Both depth psychotherapy and shamanism are largely concerned with the same task: to restore the soul to its inherent health and wholeness. When we experience trauma brought on by childhood neglect, abuse, surgery, accident, war or any other violent shock, the soul may leave the body to escape. This produces the phenomenon that p
sychologists call dissociation and shamans call soul loss. It can be seen as a survival mechanism. When you can’t take any more pain, you either “go away” or “lock it away” in order to make it through.
Loss of soul leads to symptoms such as depression, anxiety, addiction, chronic fatigue and existential angst or despair. It’s safe to say that most people in modern industrialized cultures experience varying degrees of soul loss, and that soul loss is
the root cause of what Charles Taylor called the “Malaise of Modernity.” The first step toward recovering soul is to get a sense of what it feels like when soul loss occurs and how that fracturing or wounding shapes our experience.
Despite the elaborate and moneyed systems of medical research and the advertisements of the health and recreation industries to prove that the real is the physical and that loss of heart and loss of soul are only in the mind, I believe the “primitive” and the woman in the hospital: we can and do lose our souls. I believe with Jung that each of us is “modern man in search of a soul.” — James Hillman
Carl Jung: Loss of Soul
An example of the alteration of personality in the sense of diminution is furnished by what is known in primitive psychology as “loss of soul.”
The peculiar condition covered by this term is accounted for in the mind of the primitive by the supposition that a soul has gone off, just like a dog that runs away from his master overnight. It is then the task of the medicine-man to fetch the fugitive back. Often the loss occurs suddenly and manifests itself in a general malaise.
Occasionally something similar can happen to civilized man, only he does not describe it as “loss of soul” but as an abaissement du niveau mental, [early 20th century French philosopher turned doctor and psychologist Pierre] Janet’s apt term for this phenomenon.
It is a slackening of the tensity of consciousness, which might be compared to a low barometric reading, presaging bad weather. The tonus has given way, and this is felt subjectively as listlessness, moroseness, and depression. One no longer has any wish or courage to face the tasks of the day. One feels like lead, because no part of one’s body seems willing to move, and this is due to the fact that one no longer has any disposable energy. This well-known phenomenon corresponds to the primitive’s loss of soul.
The listlessness and paralysis of will can go so far that the whole personality falls apart, so to speak, and consciousness loses its unity; the individual parts of the personality make themselves independent and thus escape from the control of the conscious mind, as in the case of anaesthetic areas or systematic amnesias. The latter are well known as hysterical “loss of function” phenomena. This medical term is analo- gous to the primitive loss of soul.
Abaissement du niveau mental (literally, the lowering of mental level — ed.) can be the result of physical and mental fatigue, bodily illness, violent emotions, and shock, of which the last has a particularly deleterious effect on one’s self-as- surance. The abaissement always has a restrictive influence on the personality as a whole. It reduces one’s self-confidence and the spirit of enterprise, and, as a result of increasing ego-centricity, narrows the mental horizon.
(Carl Jung, Collected Works 9)
James Hillman: Losing Our Sense of Belonging
Anthropologists describe a condition among “primitive” peoples called “loss of soul.”
In this condition a man is out of himself, unable to find either the outer connection between humans or the inner connection to himself. He is unable to take part in his society, its rituals, and traditions. They are dead to him, he to them. His connection to family, totem, nature, is gone. Until he regains his soul he is not a true human. He is “not there.”
It is as if he had never been initiated, been given a name, come into real being. His soul may not only be lost; it may also be possessed, bewitched, ill, transposed into an object, animal, place, or another person. Without this soul, he has lost the sense of belonging and the sense of being in communion with the powers and the gods. They no longer reach him; he cannot pray, nor sacrifice, nor dance. His personal myth and his connection to the larger myth of his people, as raison d’être, is lost. Yet he is not sick with disease, nor is he out of his mind. He has simply lost his soul. He may even die. We become lonely.
Other relevant parallels with ourselves today need not be spelled out.
One day in Burghölzli, the famous institute in Zurich where the words schizophrenia and complex were born, I watched a woman being interviewed. She sat in a wheel- chair because she was elderly and feeble. She said that she was dead for she had lost her heart. The psychiatrist asked her to place her hand over her breast to feel her heart beat- ing: it must still be there if she could feel its beat. “That,” she said, “is not my real heart.” She and the psychiatrist looked at each other. There was nothing more to say. Like the primitive who has lost his soul, she had lost the loving courageous connection to life—and that is the real heart, not the ticker which can as well pulsate isolated in a glass bottle.
This is a different view of reality from the usual one. It is so radically different that it forms part of the syndrome of insanity. But one can have as much understanding for the woman in her psychotic depersonalization as for the view of reality of the man attempting to convince her that her heart was indeed still there. Despite the elaborate and moneyed systems of medical research and the advertisements of the health and recreation industries to prove that the real is the physical and that loss of heart and loss of soul are only in the mind, I believe the “primitive” and the woman in the hospital: we can and do lose our souls. I believe with Jung that each of us is “modern man in search of a soul.”
(James Hillman, Insearch, 43–44, 55–56)
Excerpted from my free eBook Soul Recovery: Depth Psychological Perspectives on Psychedelic and Shamanic Healing available here.