2 February 2022
This blog continues to outline a set of assumptions I believe underlie successful psychotherapy. We can begin with the roots of that word: psyche comes from the Greek, psuche, or soul; and therapeuein to therapeia to therapia (ancient Greek, Greek, and Latin, respectively) meaning to minister medically, or to heal (Google: Definitions from Oxford Languages). In short, psychotherapy is the healing of the soul.
In the list of Aristotle’s virtues (Nicomachean Ethics, 2.7) an implied sense of full health is transparent in his inclusion of megalopsuchia or greatness of soul meaning that the greater the breadth and depth of the soul, the fuller the person.
The preceding blog looked at the constancy of the soul through a human life; today we look at further insights into the unfolding of the soul that Aristotle, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers regarded as requiring self-actualization through growth. What does that mean?
Per Hillman (1996) it means that we see through a glass darkly (Corinthians, I, 13:12) or that images, dreams, intuitions, and our innate vision of self will appear and reappear naked and disguised throughout our lifetimes. If this sounds biblically mysterious, it is. But it is also as obvious as the nose on your face.
What are Rembrandt’s 80 self-portraits about? They are about the quest to understand self. Rembrandt’s self-portraits span his lifetime as an artist, and I will wager, look into self as a reflection of understanding life and the relationship between life and self. What this means is that the self, while mysterious and only partially self-visible, is utterly immersed and affected by the life in which it exists. But, per Jung, Hillman, and the more broadly interpretive schools of therapeutic thought, the life in which we exist is much larger than we may imagine.
For example, I was as deeply affected by King Lear and Heathcliff, as I was (and am) by the transformation of Michael Corleone (The Godfather, 1972), Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, 1974), alone at night on his breakwall, and the American Judge, Dan Hayward meeting Frau Bertholt, with her former serving staff in her former kitchen (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961). Those characters, those images, those times waft through me at unpredictable, unscheduled moments, the same way those who have deeply affected you move through your life.
I do not want readers to find this too mystical but nor should the sense of soul be without aspects of mystery. I think of the manifestations of soul—the instances in which soul becomes fleetingly visible—as very much like what we used to see, as kids, in kaleidoscopes. My (probably flawed) memory is that you never saw the same constellation of colours and shapes twice, yet there was similarity between each set of apparitions. That’s how I think of the soul described by Hillman.
“But while philosophers and psychologists from Plato to Jung emphasized the fundamental essence of our individuality, our modern culture refuses to accept that a unique, formed soul is within us from birth, shaping as much as it is shaped.”
—James Hillman (1996), The Soul’s Code
James Hillman (1926-2011) was an American Jungian psychologist. There is anger in The Soul’s Code (1996) and that anger is directed at the predominant schools of 20th-century psychology (and philosophy et al.) whose mission was (too often) the reductively precise description and measurement of all aspects of the human creature. I think, given my kaleidoscopic sense of the soul, such a mapping is impossible.
My internal life had its largest quantum leap during my first and last high school years. In the first year, one English teacher, Brian Penman, introduced a small group of us to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Through his shepherding of our group of canonic neophytes, Mr. Penman allowed us to see that old man as representative of humanity and the ocean’s mighty marlin as representative of much more. Four years later, Peter Skilleter, resumed Penman’s work with Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Emily Bronte. I remember asking Mr. Skilleter, as he then was, if he actually believed there was truth in stories, especially the ancient Greek stories. Of course, he did.
And it is those truths, for there was never just one, which are the real subject of psychotherapy. And if there is never just one explanation, one line of behaviour, emotion, thought, or action, it is because human beings are not static devices reducible to the right blueprint; they are ensouled and embodied selves moving through their own time in their own way.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
References
Bartlett, R. C. & Collins, S. D. (2011). Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: A New Translation. The University of Chicago Press.
Hillman, J. (1996). The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. Grand Central Publishing.
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