James Hillman: The Myth of Therapy
On family, the archetypal child, developmental psychology & the therapy industry
“The job is not working on the family, it’s working on the developmental psychology model: that I am the result of my childhood, and my disorders are the result of my childhood.
In any other culture if you lose your mind, get sick, have troubles, marriage troubles or whatever the troubles are, you look for the witch, you look for the shaman, you try to find out who put a curse on you, what taboo you broke, what you ate that you shouldn’t have eaten, what tree you cut down that you shouldn’t have cut down, who put a pin in a doll, what kind of fire was lit the wrong way … you look for a hundred things. You never think that it’s because your mother or your father did something to you forty years ago.
It’s only in our culture that we attribute what’s wrong with us — our diseases, our psychological makeup and our breakdowns — to something that happened in our childhood. That is our fundamental myth, and it’s the myth that sustains therapy.
Even if there isn’t a mom and dad it’ll be somebody else, but it’ll have this childhood focus. And it keeps the archetypal child alive, and the archetypal child is always growing, always needing, always feels abandoned. That’s part of the myth of the archetypal child, so it keeps therapy going.”
Why in my wide acceptance of myth do I find it necessary to deny the myth of development? Look, there has to be something you hate, you know.
And you have to have a straw man that you can attack all the time, so that you can make your points. And as Ortega says, if you're not going to exaggerate you may as well keep silent. But I hate the myth of development because it is the dominant myth of psychology in our culture. And the myth of development suits the child archetype.
It's a product of the child. It's an expression of the child archetype. And I feel that the child archetype has got us by the balls, or got us by I don't know what, in our culture. And Alice Miller is part of that worship of the child, this sort of innocent child to whom creative and wonderful and terrible things happen to it.
And this new hysterical moralism about how many people in the culture are now regarding themselves as abused and the use of the word abuse and victim and survivor, words that belong really to people who were either in Vietnam or in the Holocaust, are now used about family life. There's something desperate going on and to me, this is part of the developmental hang up of psychology.
And there's something more to it. Because the archetypal child not only always needs therapy because it's always growing, and always feels abandoned, but also the child by definition is apolitical. And I think therapy is guilty of something. Therapy. I'm not talking about individual therapists, that's something else.
This is the model of thought that we've all been in. The whole, the culture has been in. But for the last 20 or 30 years, the most sensitive and intelligent people have been in therapy. They've not been in politics. And they've been engaged with finding, growing their child, out of their childhood, or growing and all the rest of the child stuff.
And the child keeps you from acting, you say, “What can I do?” That's a sentence from the child, “What can I do? This thing is bigger than I am.” That's a sentence of the child.
And then we bitch, we become passive aggressive, we bitch about the administration or Milken or somebody. We don't regard ourselves as citizens, we regard ourselves as selves, growing selves.
And, you know, Aristotle defined human being, one of his definitions is, “Man is by nature a political animal.”
Not man is by nature a self developing creature, or an individuating person, man is by nature a political animal. It's instinctual to be in the polis. In the community.
Which would lead to another definition of self. From self defined as the interiorization of God or the divine spark, to (self as) the interiorization of community. And I could never find myself unless I were in community. It's a very different notion and I think that's very important. So that's why I fight this child thing so much.
Transcribed from the excellent audio recording, “Myths of the Family” available for download from BetterListen: https://www.betterlisten.com/products/myths-of-the-family-by-james-hillman or streaming on Spotify:
I didn’t survive the Holocaust, but I did survive near death. Trauma does apply to me. And I do agree with what you talk about. The obsession with trauma as a cultural zeitgeist is exhausting. I’m just in a process of deprogramming from therapy after years of this bullshit.
Social media just reproduces more and more of this through memes. We’ve got “Your Trauma Therapist” and all kinds of ‘trauma experts’ here on Substack. No way to kill the machine. It’s self perpetuating. Gotta have a brand. Gotta have a gimmick. Gotta have a captive audience of desperate people with their pain and suffering to support the platform itself whether it be Twitter or Substack or TikTok.
I wish there was a way to break it. I want to stop using the word, Trauma, entirely. I want to banish it from my vocabulary because it’s become meaningless as a word through its constant repetition. But, hey, it’s my brand. You’re suppose to sell what you know. I’ve got a childhood trauma story to sell. Who wants to read another memoir?
Let’s shift the conversation. Let’s talk about grief and despair. Maybe that’ll be the trend word of 2025. Grief might be better on as part of a meme or a T-shirt slogan as a few people might shed a tear or two. Maybe the use of the word Trauma is a convenient way not to show genuine compassion for others. Maybe it does nothing but create more apathy. We don’t need to ‘act’. We can just talk about this thing called ‘trauma’. It’s not a call to action. It’s a call to lying on the couch or taking a nap.