Reviving the Dead Language of Psychotherapy

An excerpt from James Hillman's lecture series "The Art, Practice & Philosophy of Psychotherapy"

One of the ways of knowing you’re in the wrong place in therapy, that is, in the wrong training system or the wrong school, is when it’s dull.

I’d like to quote Saul Bellow on this. He’s talking about literature in 1963:

“A book which is lacking in power, cannot be moral. Dullness is worse than obscenity. A dull book is wicked. It may intend to be as good as gold, as nice as pie, as sweet as can be, but if it is banal and boring, it is evil.”

Now think of the books you have read in psychotherapy. (Audience laughs) And we laugh at that, but my God, that is an enormously important point and it follows up on your question about beauty.

If the rhetoric is dead, the thing is dead. The language of psychotherapy is dead. The DSM…no pictures! (Audience laughs) I say that with seriousness because the old psychology books used to have pictures of crazy people in it, and handwriting by crazy people so you could see how they wrote (well, no one has handwriting anymore so that’s out). But at least they would have text and they would have descriptions and they would have images, pictures.

Instead of talking about ego strength (which is a very popular term still I believe) listen to this description from Elia Kazan called The Actor’s Vow:

I will take my rightful place on the stage
and I will be myself.

(Wow, just that!)

I am not a cosmic orphan.
I have no reason to be timid.
I will respond as I feel;
awkwardly, vulgarly, but respond.

I will have my throat open,
I will have my heart open,
I will be vulnerable.

I may have anything or everything
the world has to offer, but the thing I need most,
and want most, is to be myself.

I will admit rejection, admit pain, admit frustration,
admit even pettiness, admit shame, admit outrage,
admit anything and everything that happens to me.

(See? It all belongs.)

The best and most human parts of me are those
that I have inhabited and hidden from the world.

I will work on it.
I will raise my voice.
I will be heard.

That’s quite a beautiful statement. No psychological language and yet filled with it…my heart open, shame, the other things he will admit. But no conceptual language at all. No talk about healing, integration, individuation. See, our profession is caught in these words.

So the job of working through psychotherapy is to get rid of the dull, boring language that Saul Bellow says is evil. It’s obscene and evil. And that’s what’s taught. So we read those books instead of reading novels. Instead of reading say, DH Lawrence or reading 18th century novels. I think you get my point. No need to belabor it.

Q: Do you think that it would be possible to have a psychotherapy or psycho-educational training or study program which was based entirely on reading literature. Could you teach people to be psychotherapists purely by teaching literature?

JH: I think it’s worth a try! Certainly worth a try. Yes. In fact, where did people get their psychological insights previously? Where did they get them before 1890? Reading novels like crazy. Reading Russion novels, French novels, English novels, even American novels. You might actually get some real psychology out of Moby Dick about the American psyche. There are some people doing that now.

I’m not sure the psyche is taught by psychology.

The ‘ology’ has captured the psyche. The logos has captured the psyche and it’s become a system. Jung writes about that frequently, saying that the psyche is not psychology. So he kept going outside psychology to write his psychology.

He went to alchemy, he went to mythology, he went to all kinds of places, without using systematic language. Of course, he still had that 19th century attempt to be scientific and positivistic. And so you do have the types and certain moments of that kind of thinking. But that’s not where his real Number Two was pushing.

From The Art, Practice & Philosophy of Psychotherapy with James Hillman