Finally, I am pleased to announce that after three years of waiting 'The Pursuit of the Soul' will be published on 25th February by T & T Clark. I want to thank all at T & T Clark and Bloomsbury for working so hard to make this happen. We shall be having an official book-launch on 6th September at St Mary's including a presentation from the renowned Australian analyst and critic, David Tacey. However, in the meantime, I shall be presenting a seminar at the Marylebone Centre for Health and Healing this Wednesday evening on some of the main themes of the book. Details of this are on an earlier post. By way of a taster here are some of the key elements of 'soul language' with which I conclude both my book and the talk on Wednesday...
1. A Way of Seeing
Following Wittgenstein, soul-work can be described as a ‘way of seeing’
that releases liberating perspectives in our day-to-day existence. In Hillman’s
words:
By soul, I mean, first of all, a perspective
rather than a substance, a viewpoint towards things rather than a thing itself.
(RVP:x)
What I learn from Wittgenstein is that our grammar suggests that ‘the
soul’ is an object, a little furry beast if you like, that we are all on the
hunt to get. Philosophy, he writes (PI 109) is ‘a battle against the
bewitchment of our understanding through the medium of our language’ (ein Kampf
gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache). Rather
than an entity soul is a perspective. Essentially a transcendental perspective
on our selves.
As well as his
critique of the ‘over-spiritualization’ of the self, Hillman, was an equally trenchant
critic of the over-scientism and reductionism within contemporary approaches to
the psyche. The past few decades,
since Hillman started his writing, have seen a marked reduction in the
significance of the spiritual and religious content of the psychological
therapies. The same cannot be said for the empirical and pseudo-scientific
approach. Indeed, in many respects, with the rise of quasi-neurological
‘explanations’ and ‘interpretations’ of the mind it seems as though this
approach may have reached its zenith in recent years. Along with Wittgenstein, Hillman
had a justifiable and deep-seated suspicion of the over-idolisation of
psychology as a ‘science of the mind’ and was every bit as trenchant as
Wittgenstein in challenging the unquestioning acceptance of this position. His
own approach was to advocate a ‘third path’ between reductionism and idealism,
theology and science, which gave him, he believed, the right to challenge
scientific and medical models of psychology, especially psycho-pathology, for:
The
science fantasy with its reliance upon objectivity, technology, verification,
measurement, and progress – in short, its necessary literalism – is less a
means for examining the psyche than for examining science. (RVP:169)
Thus the work of the analyst, pastor or care-worker, is to cultivate
the ‘third position’ of the soul/ From this alert ambiguity the soul-maker
helps us attune ourselves to the transcendent by drawing attention to our
responses to the immanent. Uniquely, the soul-maker recognises the human person
as the locus of intersection of the transcendent and immanent.
2. The Path of Unknowing
At the heart of the soul-project lies an essential unknowing. Hillman
termed the Freudian desire to replace ‘It’ with ‘I’ the ‘strip mining of the
psyche’ (IV:46) and his counter-move suggests an approach to the ‘unknown
thing’ that gives space for the unconscious to breathe. In this respect the
apophatic unknowing of the soul is simply letting the conscious know its place
while the unconscious figurations reassert themselves. ‘Maybe’, suggests
Hillman, ‘they know best what is relevant to the conscious personality, rather
than the conscious personality’ (IV:46). Therefore contemporary soul-making
will require as much ‘unknowing’ as it does ‘knowing’. This, of course, is
nothing new to the Christian mystical tradition which has always placed ‘unknowing’
at the centre of its search for the self.
Adopting a phrase of the
19th Century English poet, John Keats, some recent commentators in
the tradition of psychotherapy and counselling talk of this attribute as the
need for ‘negative capablility’ in our pastoral interactions with others. Keats
used the term to specify a key attribute of the poet which makes a person:
‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason.’ (Keats 1970:43).Robert French, a contemporary
commentator, writes:
‘Thus, Keats’s poet is ‘related’ to the therapist,
and indeed to many other ‘family members’: mother, teacher, priest, consultant,
manager – anyone, perhaps, whose role involves responsibility for others. What
links them is this ‘disposition of indifference’, which Pines called ‘aeolian’
after the aeolian harp: ‘ to show how the therapist’s mind can be stirred by
the communication of the patient, and how, unselfconsciously, the therapist
finds himself responding in depth to the patient’s hidden meanings’’ (French 2000:3)
This attitude of ‘unknowing’ opens up new possibilities in our
engagements with the people we care for. The British Object Relations analyst,
Wilfred Bion, was aware of Keats’s dictum and tried to put it into practice in
his interactions with clients saying:
‘Discard your memory; discard the future tense of
our desire; forget them both, both what you knew and what you want, to leave
space for a new idea.’ (Bion 1980:11)
He suggested we must have the courage and humility to step into this
‘space of unknowing’ when we engage with others. A place that requires us to
put aside our memories, our need to control, our need to define – all the
whirring chatter of the ‘monkey mind’ – and allow ourselves to be present for
the other before us:
‘When we are in the office with a patient we have
to dare to rest. It is difficult to see what is at all frightening about that,
but it is. It is difficult to remain quiet and let the patient have a chance to
say whatever he or she has to say. It is
frightening for the patient – and the patient hates it. We are under constant
pressure to say something, to admit that we are doctors or psychoanalysts or
social workers to supply some box into which we can be put complete with a
label.’ (Bion 1980:11)
As professional carers there is a pressure to be ‘the expert’ or the
‘wise one’ whereas often what is required is for us to have the humility to
divest ourselves of our power position. To do this may challenge our very
selves as well as our roles and make us question again why we do the work we do.
3. Ambiguity and Paradox
The contemporary soul-maker must live in the realm of ambiguity that is
the soul’s true home. Whether with a client, facing a dream or working on the
self, the demands of the soul require an openness to the ambiguity that lies at
the heart of the human personality. Imagination, for Hillman, becomes the place
where we uniquely play with the self in its efforts to overcome the
straightjacket of the post-Cartesian ‘I’. For him, the world of Cartesian
dualism allows ‘no space for the intermediate, ambiguous and metaphorical’ (RVP:xii).
Rather it is the place inhabited by living subjects and dead objects. All
affect is removed from the world around us. In Hillman’s writing, following as
we have seen Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, this place of ambiguity will
become populated by the world of ‘archetype’ and ‘daemones’. For Christian writers such as Stein (following Augustine
and Aquinas) the ambiguity of the self is held in the tension of the Trinity, where
Christ becomes the unity of apperception for the individual believer. The
paradox of the Trinitarian vision thus reflects the paradox that lies at the
heart of human personhood.
4. The Symbolic, Creative and Artistic
With Rank we saw that
creativity must play a decisive role in any future ‘soul-psychology’. Likewise,
with Hillman we see the importance he attached, as a post-Jungian, to the role
of imagination and the symbolic. As he puts it in Revisioning Psychology:
Psychological
faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of
persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections and imaginations... (the ego’s)
trust is in the imagination as the only uncontrovertible reality, directly
presented, immediately felt. (RVP:50)
For analysis goes on
in the soul’s imagination and not just in the clinic for we let imagination
speak for itself without interpretation. Or as my training analyst, Hymie Wyse,
used to put it, in analysis the analyst must pray: ‘Lead us not into
interpretation!’ The soul/psyche for Hillman is at root imaginal and myth is in
the natural discourse of the soul. In an earlier work (Tyler 2013a) I stressed
the links between the postmodern Jungian view of the symbolic with the
premodern medieval understanding of the symbol. As a great medievalist/renaissance
man, Hillman, like his mentor Jung, recognises the symbolic nature of the psyche and how the psyche really lives in the realm of the symbolic and mythic, for
‘the imaginal does not explain, myths are not explanations’. As such the
symbolic utterings of the soul ‘are bound to ritual happenings; they are
stories, as our fantasies are, which project us into participation with the
phenomena they tell about so that the need for explanation falls away’ (MA:202).
Hillman is here, I believe, pointing out an essential quality of
‘soul-language’ – that is, that it is a ‘performative’ rather than an
‘informative’ language (Tyler 2011).
For Hillman the symbolic is indicative of that mode of consciousness
that ‘recognises all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical’
experienced through ‘reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy’ (RVP:x).
The symbolic sources of the soul thus lie very close to the sources of creative
and artistic endeavour and thus the pursuit of the soul will often manifest
itself through these means.
5. The Relational and Libidinal
Soul-making is at heart a relational process. In Rank’s words, analysis
is ‘an art of love’ and the relationship between the
soul-seeker and soul-maker is at the heart of the matter. The Platonic
tradition always emphasised the role of eros
in this relationship. In contrast to Hillman, who sees the Christian
tradition as suppressing the role of eros,
I would rather argue that thinkers as diverse as Merton, Stein and Wittgenstein
present an embodied Christian view of the self that maintains the transcendent
through relationship with the bodily and libidinal. The soul is found not in
flight from the body but in the very embrace of its ambiguity and libido. This
is not surprising. For, despite Augustine’s famous suspicion of
‘concupiscence’, there were sufficient alternative (neo-Platonic) strands of
early Christian anthropology in writers such as Evagrius and Origen to preserve
alternative narratives of the soul in the Christian tradition. As I have
demonstrated elsewhere (Tyler 2011), the medieval traditions of the theologia mystica with their Dionysian
emphasis were sufficient to keep this tradition alive. Despite Hillman’s
caricature of Christianity as a life-denying and anti-libidinal locus (and he
is of course not alone here) I would argue that this is far from the case and
there are sufficient traces of this alternative relational and libidinal
anthropology in the Christian tradition to allow a future Christian
anthropology, open to the possibilities of the libidinal, to flourish. The
future of the soul lies in the libidinal and relational.
