The fantasy of growth
Excerpt from James Hillman and Michael Ventura's “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse”
HILLMAN: You think people undertake therapy to grow?
VENTURA: Isn’t growth a huge part of the project of therapy? Everybody uses the word, therapists and clients alike.
HILLMAN: But the very word "grow" is a word appropriate to children. After a certain age you do not grow. You don’t grow teeth, you don’t grow muscles. If you start growing after that age, it’s cancer.
VENTURA: Aw, Jim, can’t I grow inside all my life?
HILLMAN: Grow what? Corn? Tomatoes? New archetypes? What am I growing, what do you grow? The standard therapeutic answer is: you’re growing yourself.
VENTURA: But the philosopher Kierkegaard would come back and say, “The deeper natures don’t change, they become more and more themselves.”
HILLMAN: Jung says individuation is becoming more and more oneself.
VENTURA: And becoming more and more oneself involves a lot of unpleasantness. As Jung also says, the most terrifying thing is to know yourself.
HILLMAN: And becoming more and more oneself—the actual experience of it is a shrinking, in that very often it’s a dehydration, a loss of inflations, a loss of illusions.
VENTURA: That doesn’t sound like a good time. Why would anybody want to do it?
HILLMAN: Because shedding is a beautiful thing. It’s of course not what consumerism tells you, but shedding feels good. It’s a lightening up.
VENTURA: Shedding what?
HILLMAN: Shedding pseudoskins, crusted stuff that you’ve accumulated. Shedding dead wood. That’s one of the big sheddings. Things that don’t work anymore, things that don’t keep you—keep you alive. Sets of ideas that you’ve had too long. People that you don’t really like to be with, habits of thought, habits of sexuality. That’s a very big one, ’cause if you keep on making love at forty the way you did at eighteen you’re missing something, and if you make love at sixty the way you did at forty you’re missing something. All that changes. The imagination changes.
Or put it another way: Growth is always loss. Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity. That’s a big one, when you begin to move into the unfamiliar.
You know, in the organic world when anything begins to grow it’s moving constantly into unfamiliar movements and unfamiliar things. Watch birds grow—they fall down, they can’t quite do it. Their growing is all awkwardness. Watch a fourteen-year-old kid tripping over his own feet.
VENTURA: The fantasy of growth that you find in therapy, and also in New Age thought, doesn’t include this awkwardness, which can be terrible and can go on for years. And when we look at people going through that, we usually don’t say they’re growing, we usually consider them out of it. And during such a time one certainly doesn’t feel more powerful in the world.
HILLMAN: The fantasy of growth is a romantic, harmonious fantasy of an ever-expanding, ever-developing, ever-creating, ever-larger person—and ever integrating, getting it all together.
VENTURA: And if you don’t fulfill that fantasy you see yourself as failing.
HILLMAN: Absolutely.
VENTURA: So this idea of growth can put you into a constant state of failure!
HILLMAN: “I ought to be over that by now, I’m not together, I can’t get it together, and if I were really growing I would have grown out of my mess long ago.”
VENTURA: It sets you up to fail. That’s really cute.
HILLMAN: It’s an idealization that sets you up to fail.
VENTURA: Because you’re constantly comparing yourself to the fantasy of where you should be on some ideal growth scale.
HILLMAN: It sets up something worse. It sets up not just failure but anomaly: “I’m peculiar.” And it does this by showing no respect for sameness, for consistency, in a person. Sameness is a very important part of life—to be consistently the same in certain areas that don’t change, don’t grow.
[...]Some things stay the same. They’re like rocks. There’s rocks in the psyche. There are crystals, there’s iron ore, there’s a metallic level where some things don’t change.
VENTURA: And if those elements did change, could change, you would be so fluid that you would not, could not, be you. You would be dangerously fluid. Where would that thing that is you reside, if the psyche didn’t depend on some things not changing? And this dependence on the changeless is far below the level of the ego’s control or consent.
HILLMAN: This changeless aspect, if you go all the way back in philosophy even before Aristotle, was called Being. “Real Being doesn’t change.” That was one fantasy. Other people would say, “Real Being is always changing.” I’m not arguing which one is right, I’m arguing that both are fundamental categories of life, of being. You can look at your life with the eye of sameness and say, “My god, nothing’s really changed.” Then you can look at it with the other eye: “My god, what a difference. Two years ago, nine years ago, I was thus and so, but now all that’s gone, it’s changed completely!”
This is one of the great riddles that Lao Tse talked about, the changing and the changeless. The job in therapy is, not to try and make the changeless change, but how to separate the two. If you try to work on what’s called a character neurosis, if you try to take someone who is very deeply emotionally whatever-it-is, and try to change that person into something else, what are you doing? Because there are parts of the psyche that are changeless.
VENTURA: And that has to be respected.
HILLMAN: It has to be respected, because the psyche knows more why it resists change than you do. Every complex, every psychic figure in your dreams knows more about itself and what it’s doing and what it’s there for than you do. So you may as well respect it.
VENTURA: And if you, as a therapist, don’t respect that, then you’re not respecting that person.
HILLMAN: And it has nothing to do with wanting to change. Like the joke, “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?” “It only takes one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.” This light bulb that really wants to change still can’t change those areas of changelessness.
VENTURA: The fantasy of growth, the fantasy of the ever-expanding, ever-developing person—which is a very strong fantasy out there right now, especially among the educated, and among all those buyers of self-help books—doesn’t take changelessness into account at all, doesn’t set up a dialectic between change and changelessness.
So (bringing this all back to the relation of therapy to politics) this fantasy, fed by many sorts of therapies, can’t help but make people feel more like failures in the long run. Which, in turn, can’t help but increase the general feeling of powerlessness. That’s a pretty vicious circle.
HILLMAN: There’s another thing therapy does that I think is vicious. It internalizes emotions.
...Hillman looks down at the Pacific Coast Highway packed with cars going as fast as they can bumper to bumper....
Excerpted from: James Hillman and Michael Ventura, “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse”
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