(NOTE: I have done some editing since first posting this.)
James Hillman, whose work I have long regarded as my principal intellectual inspiration, died Thursday, Oct. 27. The New York Times published his obituary with this opening paragraph:
James Hillman, a charismatic therapist and best-selling author whose theories about the psyche helped revive interest in the ideas of Carl Jung, animating the so-called men’s movement in the 1990s and stirring the pop-cultural air, died on Thursday at his home in Thompson, Conn. He was 85.
Thankfully, the obituary by a Times science writer doesn’t continue to depict Hillman in such a New-Agey way. Hillman called himself a “therapist of ideas” and I can see him recoiling and probably exploding on reading the opening graf of the Times obituary.
Hillman was cantankerous — something that made me nervous when I was around him. In fact, I wrote an essay, both admiring and critical, about him in 2002 that begins with an account of his eruption when he came to Atlanta on a book tour. You can read my essay here.
I first discovered Hillman and his “post-Jungian” Archetypal Psychology after taking a class in Jungian psychology during my MA program. I read his revolutionary book, Revisioning Psychology, which is a critique of the medicalized perspective that has come to dominate psychology.
The book is based on a series of lectures he gave at Yale in 1972 which, as I recall reading, outraged many because of its attempt to return to the conceptualization of psychology as soul-based. In the book, he writes about the multiplicity of the psyche, represented in the pantheon of the Greek gods. He advocates the abandonment of notions of cure. “The wound is the eye,” he would later say. Revisioning is one of 20-odd books Hillman wrote, along with countless journal essays.
Hillman at Pacifica
Because Hillman did his only teaching at Pacifica Graduate Institute outside Santa Barbara, where his papers were also stored, I decided to enroll in the doctoral program in depth psychology there. As I’ve recounted in many venues, I feel ambivalent about that decision now because, as it turned out, there was no real study of Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology offered. The one class supposedly about it turned out to be based on astrology (a fact that enraged me to a degree quite noticeable to my classmates and teacher).
Nonetheless, I did have freedom and encouragement to study Hillman’s work more deeply as part of my general coursework — something that I clearly would not have been allowed to do at other schools, where any Jungian thought is typically reviled. Further, Hillman’s thinking was central to my doctoral dissertation.
He did visit several classes I took and Pacifica hosted an annual weekend of lectures he gave. These opportunities allowed me to interact with him.
It was a huge disappointment to me to come to feel rejected by Hillman. It was not entirely my imagination. My classmates commented on it without prompting from me at one of his lectures.
I came up with two explanations. One, the more important, is that I was pretty challenging in my question at that lecture. Hillman was, of course, more than anything a severe critic of psychotherapy itself. He even co-authored (with Michael Ventura) a book entitled, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — and the World’s Getting Worse.
I asked him why, given his severe critique of psychotherapy, he didn’t advocate abandoning it altogether for a new approach to psychological change. (I should note that this lecture was attended mainly by psychotherapists.)
He balked and said, “I’m not ready to go that far.”
I replied, “Why not? We’ve put aside astrology for the most part, along with phrenology and magic.”
He looked at me, fell silent, and then said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
After that, he would not call on me to ask a single question.
I also felt that my being gay made him uncomfortable. I did see the men’s movement as considerably tinged by homophobia and sexism. This perception grew, especially during research on my dissertation. Hillman refused in any forum to discuss gender and sexuality (which made his involvement in the men’s movement strangely self-contradictory to me). I thought his dismissal of feminist and queer theory, given their importance in contemporary critical discourse, was a significant lacuna that Archetypal Psychology shared more generally with Jung’s thought.
My father complex
My dissertation was an attempted reconciliation of postmodern theory, especially queer theory, with Archetypal Psychology. (There remains among many the belief that postmodern discourses are altogether incompatible with Jung, Freud and Hillman.)
At one point early in my studies I was put in touch with one of Hillman’s former editors, then at HarperCollins, as I recall. He was interested in discussing my writing a biography of Hillman, even though, as I recall, he joked that it would be read by about six people. (This was before The Soul’s Code hit the best seller list.)
I was particularly interested in the period when Hillman created the Dallas Institute, where many thinkers in the field, like Thomas Moore, emerged. I was also interested in making clear how Henri Corbin’s studies of esoteric Islam heavily influenced Hillman’s thinking. Ditto for Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, whose famous dictum, “Stick to the Image,” was borrowed by Hillman. (The friction between Lopez-Pedraza and Hillman was described in Pat Berry’s lecture about Hillman during the infamous celebration of Hillman’s work at Notre Dame in 1992.)
I actually discussed the book proposal briefly with Hillman, before my experience at the lecture described above. He was encouraging and said he’d cooperate. I told him I questioned whether I should move in such a radical direction in my life. He told me that maybe I needed to.
Honestly, my decision not to pursue the project further had a lot to do with not wanting to deal with his temperament. I had access, by pure coincidence, to some of his little known personal history and I imagined he would be unhappy, to say the least, if I brought it up to him. I don’t really regret not pursuing the project and someone else does have a biography underway now.
At the same time, Hillman’s impatient intellect was, really, something I liked about him (as long as his outbursts were directed at other people and he didn’t go out of control!). I remember in one of my classes that he visited, one of the other students protested Hillman’s opposition to literalization of even central concepts like the “soul.” The student went on about knowing the soul was “a living thing” inside him. Hillman, exasperated, finally asked testily, “Exactly where in your body is the soul? Could you point it out to us?” My classmate fell into humiliated silence. (He soon dropped out of the program, I think because he found the curriculum less spiritual than he expected.)
My idealizations of Hillman resulted in a father complex that turned negative as I realized how adamant he was about not discussing gender and sexuality. I don’t mean that I recognized my father complex per se. I remember reading a paper in New Orleans at Enrique Pardo’s Myth and Theatre Festival, of which Hillman was a principal inspiration. After I read the paper, Pat Berry, author of the incomparable Echo’s Subtle Body, pulled me aside and told me I needed to get over my father complex. I was offended but by the time the conference was over, I was giving her comment some thought. Soon, I was reading Lacan and Freud.
A few years later, I mentioned to Chris Downing, my dissertation advisor, that I thought my dissertation might have become part of working through my father complex. Her response amounted to “Duh! No kidding.”
In actuality, I did work through my complex, as the essay linked above indicates, I think. I never did let go of my goal to put his ideas — particularly the role of the imagination — into use as psychological praxis. (You can read an interview about that here.) I continue to think of my work as outside psychotherapy and inspired by Hillman.
My disappointment in Hillman blocked me in all kinds of ways. But the agonizing process of writing my dissertation did indeed bring me back to a place of huge appreciation for Hillman’s work while acknowledging that, like the work of Jung that inspired him, Archetypal Psychology needs to go farther. (It was no coincidence, I think, to discover in my research that Jung and Freud wrote about their shared homosexual feelings and father complex.)
I could write much more, but I’ve said enough for now. My condolences to Hillman’s family and his many followers.
Jöns Hellsing, a member of the Swedish group Dildorado, came across a link via Project Q Atlanta to my post a few days ago about my romance with Ronald McDonald. This is the video for Dildorado’s tune “I’m lovin’ it,” a lovely fantasy of a men’s room encounter with Ronald.
The group’s Facebook page describes itself this way: “Dildorado Entertainment Group is a Swedish pop/disco-trio exploring the fields of human pleasure.” Perhaps they will soon produce a work canonizing Anthony Weiner, the latest sacrifice to American puritanism.
Recently, a large group of health care activists wrote Jim Skinner, CEO of McDonald’s, to suggest that the company discontinue use of its signature marketing character, Ronald McDonald. The request was prompted by concern over the epidemic of childhood obesity that is fueled by McDonald’s and other fast-food chains.
Not surprisingly, the gigantic company’s shareholders rejected the request. Skinner announced: “Ronald McDonald is an ambassador to McDonald’s and he is an ambassador for good. Ronald McDonald is going nowhere.”
That’s no surprise, of course. Ronald is literally as recognizable to children as Santa Claus. Like Santa, he even gives the kids toys — not for being good, but for nagging their parents into feeding them monstrously unhealthy crap.
I’ve never found the food at McDonald’s anything but sickening — even as a child. But, weirdly enough, I’ve had a few personal encounters with Ronald that I think make me special.
The first — and my memory is fuzzy — was long ago in my late 20s. During that time in Atlanta, a lot of gay men frequented so-called adult bookstores to find partners for quick sex. One popular such place was on Cypress Street, which was also well known as a hustling district (and still is to some extent).
I stopped by on my way home from a night at Backstreet. I immediately met a guy who asked me to go back to his apartment rather than play on the premises. That — intimacy — always seemed to miss the point of going to a bookstore, but his building was within walking distance a few blocks away. So, sure, I’ve had 7 cocktails and it’s probably not a good idea to try to drive home now, so, okay, sure.
We fell into bed immediately. The next thing I knew I woke up about noon to the smell of bacon frying. The idea of eating was not attractive. In fact, laying eyes on the guy was not attractive. I had utterly no memory of what he looked like. I wanted to go.
I got up to use the bathroom. He heard me and came into the bedroom, smiling. “I’m making us some breakfast,” he said. He was actually quite handsome and I’m sure I looked like death.
“That’s very nice of you,” I said.
“There’s an extra robe in the closet, if you want to wear something,” he said, looking me up and down. He headed back to the kitchen.
I walked to the closet. The terrycloth robe was front and center. As I took it off the hanger, I noticed something brilliantly orange on the shelf above. A big wig! In fact, there were two or three more such wigs. Then I noticed something like yellow overalls.
“Holy shit,” I thought. “It’s Ronald McDonald’s costume.”
Of course, I didn’t think he was seriously Ronald McDonald. I thought maybe it was a Halloween costume. But, then, why would anyone need three such costumes? Maybe it was a sexual fetish. Had he dressed up like Ronald the night before? Did he try to get me to? There was no lipstick on me.
He came back in the room, with eggs and bacon on a tray. “I hope you enjoy this,” he said.
I couldn’t speak. Finally, I blurted, “Are you Ronald McDonald?”
“Of course not,” he said, patting me.
“Oh, okay,” I said. In those years, when I still drank (a lot), I was wonderfully able to suspend rationality without a pause. How I miss booze now and then.
We exchanged phone numbers. A few days later, he called and we planned to get together for dinner, but then he called and said he had to cancel. I was kind of relieved, being haunted by the image of a naked man in lipstick and an orange Afro wig in my bed.
He explained that he had to fill in for a co-worker at a special event.
“Special,” I repeated.
“Just another store opening,” he said. “I just wave and smile and have my picture taken. Kinda like a beauty queen.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you saying that you really are Ronald McDonald?”
“No,” he said. “There are many Ronald McDonalds. I am but one of many.”
I was amazed. I asked myself, as I often did, where this remarkable talent to attract freaks came from. Perhaps, it was because, being a queer living in a house completely decorated with religious kitsch, Florida souvenirs and funeral art, I was a freak myself. Take away his burgers and Ronald McDonald was just another clown with many clones. But I was one of a kind! (Yes, it’s “Sunset Boulevard” redux.)
We had a few sexless dates after that. He would never discuss his working life. He took being an emblem of dreadful food very seriously and his contract required that he not reveal his identity. “Imagine,” he told me once, “if everyone found out I’m gay. I’d be immediately branded a burger-peddling pedophile.”
He later told me that he hoped to break into the porn industry. Being Ronald was just to tide him over until he became famous without facial makeup and lipstick. In fact, he said that he was at the dirty bookstore the night we met because he was doing research of sorts. “I wish I remembered our sex better,” I said.
We drifted away soon and I forgot him for about 15 years until fate dealt me another encounter. (To be continued.)
I was recently referred by a client to a year-old New York Times article about images and the Internet. The article, “Policing the Web’s Lurid Precincts” by Brad Stone, specifically deals with how “depraved” images affect the people that sites like Facebook hire to constantly review their content.
Patricia Laperal, a psychologist, interviewed members of the little known occupation. The Times reports the result of her research:
Ms. Laperal… reached some unsettling conclusions in her interviews with content moderators. She said they were likely to become depressed or angry, have trouble forming relationships and suffer from decreased sexual appetites. Small percentages said they had reacted to unpleasant images by vomiting or crying.
“The images interfere with their thinking processes. It messes up the way you react to your partner,” Ms. Laperal said. “If you work with garbage, you will get dirty.”
I find it intriguing that we virtually take for granted that graphic, taboo images can negatively affect a person. We do this to the sometimes absurd extent that the simplest erotic imagery is regarded as dangerous or immoral by many in our culture.
But, if we assert that images can have negative impact, why are so many of us disinclined to acknowledge that images can also have very positive, even therapeutic, effects? Even those most personal images, our dreams, have been dismissed by many scientists as meaningless. (Happily, though, neuroscience is overruling that “modern” view. Yes, Freud was right.)
Meanwhile, financially crippled public schools eliminate their arts and music classes before all others. And, of course, Republicans have repeatedly tried, with considerable success, to discontinue funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Failing that, they at least censor what the NEA can fund.
This isn’t accidental. The effort to control imagery is a hallmark of the totalitarian-minded. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin all built huge buildings that recalled the classical style of imperial Rome and Greece. The effective impact of such buildings was to render the individual’s status secondary to the state’s. All three dictators turned art into propaganda. Perhaps most infamous is the exquisite but terrifying propaganda film, “Triumph of the Will” that Hitler commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to make.
One of the very positive aspects of the Internet in my view is that it is comprised of images above all. As such, it echoes Jung’s view that image and psyche are one. There’s little doubt that some of the images drifting in cyberspace produce the effect of nightmares and trauma. These belong to the negative shadow. I frankly doubt they can be eliminated to any great extent. (Those who try, apparently, are overwhelmed.)
But cyberspace is also a remarkable expression of the entire personal and cultural psyche. When my clients interact with it — by creating images, collecting others’ images, writing about them — often startling information emerges.
This happens in a much broader way, too. As we have repeatedly seen recently, cultures are bridged via the Internet, as they are with conventional art. The face of misery is revealed, revolution is stoked. Think Goya online.
Thus authoritarian governments attempt to control access to the Web as insistently as they have long tried to regulate conventionally produced art. But the very nature of cyberspace — continually expanding like an exploding star — will overcome every effort to contain it.
Maybe eventually our own culture will come to see — as “primitive” ones long have — that the nurture and production of images is essential to human existence. The effort to suppress those images guarantees that they will assert themselves in ever more disturbing form.
My main work in the psychology field has been working with blocked artists of all kinds. It’s difficult work, not least because the block is so painful.
By the time most get to me, they have developed an elaborate system to avoid the pain — like drinking, having lots of sex and innumerable other compulsive activities.
A recent article in the New Yorker describes the work of a Jungian psychotherapist with blocked Hollywood people. The most interesting aspect of Barry Michels’ work to me is with the Shadow. I am always stressing to my own clients that nothing is going to change much if they don’t “embrace” the Shadow.
Of course, this is precisely the point at which many clients stop coming to sessions. This is so predictable that I try to bring clients to awareness of the Shadow slowly. It’s very difficult to convince anyone that by accepting their discomfort and pain, it becomes much more tolerable, even useful.
Here’s an excerpt from the article about nearly every writer’s problem:
By far the most common problem afflicting the writers in Michels’s practice is procrastination, which he understands in terms of Jung’s Father archetype. “They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write,” he says. “Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he’s answerable to, but it’s not human. It’s Time itself that’s passing inexorably. That’s why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you’re defying this authority figure.” Procrastination, he says, is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. “You say, ‘I’m surrendering myself to the archetypal Father, Chronos,’ ” he says. ‘I’m surrendering to him because he has hegemony over me.’ That submission activates something inside someone. In the simplest terms, it gets people to get their ass in the chair.” For the truly unproductive, he sets the initial period at ten minutes—“an amount of time it would sort of embarrass them not to be able to do.”
Definitely read the article if you have problems with creative blocks. I certainly did in my early 30s, when I was given an advance to write a book I never finished. It was precisely exposure of my shadow that inhibited me.
As I’ve explained many times, I don’t watch TV, so the Charlie Sheen brouhaha didn’t enter my awareness until a few days ago when I came across the above video. Then I Googled and found a zillion articles and video clips in which every mental health professional on the planet, like Dr. Drew, proffers an explanation of Sheen’s behavior.
Whatever the etiology of his behavior — drugs, bipolar disorder, hypomania — Sheen embodies in Jungian terms the “puer aeternus” (“the eternal youth”). It’s not really my intention here to join the diagnostic frenzy, but here’s an excerpt from Dr. Peter Milhado’s description of the puer complex:
The Puer’s main pursuit in life is ecstasy, many times at the expense of everything else. This can be externalized in a highly symbolic fashion in fascination with flying or climbing mountains. Many Puers hang out on ski slopes and racetracks. Many are drawn to drinking, gambling, pornography and drugs to get that rush.
The classic mythic example of the puer is Icarus, flying too high and crashing to his death when the sun’s heat melted the wax that bonded his wings. And if anything is predictable, it’s that Charlie Sheen will crash, but hopefully not to his literal death.
There’s a lot that can be said about the attention Sheen’s crackup has gotten. There’s nothing new, certainly, about the way people love freak shows. Those mysterious theaters of performance art long ago left the sideshow tents of carnivals for TV. In the beginning there were confessional programs like Oprah and Jerry Springer and those evolved into the nonstop weirdness of “reality programming.”
The attraction of freak shows is about glimpsing our own shadows at a safe distance. That means an episode that particularly captures the culture’s mass attention, as Sheen has, is probably reflective of our collective shadow.
Sheen certainly reflects the out-of-control material values that have come to define us collectively. There’s a predisposition for such in any capitalist society, but we have seen in the last few years that there are very few limits, literally, on corporate behavior.
“Winning” matters most, regardless of who is hurt. The mania of productivity matters most throughout the culture. The dispiriting thing is that the average American is suspicious of regulation to impose limits because he has the fantasy that one day he’ll also be rich, that he’ll realize the American Dream. (See Joe the Plumber.)
And then there is the value of appearance — exhibitionism to a narcissistic state. Read Twitter and Facebook for a few days if you question this. And it’s no coincidence whatsoever that when Sheen logged onto Twitter, he gained a record number of “followers” in very little time. His whole schtick, it seems, is moving online to that world — the cyber world — where superficiality and the truth matter little if hyperbole and lies are sufficiently entertaining. (Actually, TV has become much like that too. But the average person does not have access to it as a personal platform.)
Of eeriest correlation with the culture’s direction is Sheen’s high-flying mania, like the frantic consumerism that defined our lives until two years ago. It ended in a recession, a crash — a depression. Psychologically, that is completely predictable in the case of mania, as I said above. But depression has overtaken our culture to the degree that 20 percent of us are depressed at any given time, according to some estimates.
So Sheen’s drama is almost mythic in its depiction of the shattering of the American dream. The danger to the country, like Sheen’s personal danger, is that we will collapse altogether. America itself, with its dying fantasy of exceptionalism and upward mobility, is something of a puer itself, compared to the older nations of Europe. It’s time to come down to reality and face our own limitations.
Not entirely, but the Saturday edition of the New York Times featured an article entitled “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy.” This is very old news to anyone in the mental health field — as a patient or practitioner. But it’s good to see that The Times has noticed.
Here’s the heart of the story:
Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression, but fewer than half of depressed patients now get such therapy compared with the vast majority 20 years ago. Insurance company reimbursement rates and policies that discourage talk therapy are part of the reason. A psychiatrist can earn $150 for three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy session.
Competition from psychologists and social workers — who unlike psychiatrists do not attend medical school, so they can often afford to charge less — is the reason that talk therapy is priced at a lower rate. There is no evidence that psychiatrists provide higher quality talk therapy than psychologists or social workers.
Of course, there are thousands of psychiatrists who still offer talk therapy to all their patients, but they care mostly for the worried wealthy who pay in cash. In New York City, for instance, a select group of psychiatrists charge $600 or more per hour to treat investment bankers, and top child psychiatrists charge $2,000 and more for initial evaluations.
The truth is that psychotherapy of any type has become unaffordable to the average American without insurance. Of course, this is true of all health care now, but the insurance companies, through “managed care,” have become particularly stingy about psychological services, whether delivered by an MD, an MSW or a PhD.
The Times article focuses on Dr. Donald Levin, a 68-year-old psychiatrist. He was trained in psychotherapy but says that he and his colleagues had to give it up when the insurance companies slashed reimbursement for it. He and the others limited their practices to diagnosis and drug prescription:
“At first, all of us held steadfast, saying we spent years learning the craft of psychotherapy and weren’t relinquishing it because of parsimonious policies by managed care,” Dr. Levin said. “But one by one, we accepted that that craft was no longer economically viable. Most of us had kids in college. And to have your income reduced that dramatically was a shock to all of us. It took me at least five years to emotionally accept that I was never going back to doing what I did before and what I loved.”
He could have accepted less money and could have provided time to patients even when insurers did not pay, but, he said, “I want to retire with the lifestyle that my wife and I have been living for the last 40 years.”
“Nobody wants to go backwards, moneywise, in their career,” he said. “Would you?”
Dr. Levin would not reveal his income….
Kudos to Dr. Levin for his honesty. I think his frustration about feeling “unable” to practice therapy is real. But — hello — he suffered emotionally for five years while he raked in so much money he won’t disclose the amount, all the while wistfully looking back?
The bottom line here, once again, is money and the expectation that a doctor should have a lavish income. (And I’m not ignoring the reality that psychiatrists often make less money than other specialists.)
In a reasonable system, doctors would be paid well but people would not be excluded from help because of capitalist motives. (That’s one reason Freud favored training of “lay analysts.”)
Those greedy motives are ubiquitous. There has, for example, been a quite reasonable move afoot for some time to authorize clinical psychologists to prescribe psychotropic drugs as well as provide therapy. Of course, the psychiatrists go crazy at the suggestion — just as the psychologists go crazy when social workers attempt to invade their turf. It’s all about the money.
Meanwhile, unless you are a member of the “worried wealthy,” be glad you don’t require psychotherapy and drugs. Feeling slightly suicidal? Go ahead and splurge — have a face lift and a brain transplant or some other comparatively inexpensive feel-good treatment.
There is a new, wonderful video by Krista Tippett for TED. She is host of the NPR show “On Being.” I especially like the way she compares tolerance and compassion. Many people inappropriately conflate the two.
Followers of James Hillman’s work will be interested to hear that Krista associates compassion with beauty and notes that her Muslim radio guests often describe beauty as a moral value. That’s quite consistent with Sufism in particular. (Check out Ibn Arabi’s Alone with the Alone.)
London: You write that one of the most stultifying things about modern psychology is that it’s lost its sense of beauty.
Hillman: Yes, if it ever had one. Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.
London: And this has trickled down to therapists today?
Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way — whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that.
Hillman: Yes. Art, for example, becomes “art therapy.” When patients make music, it becomes “music therapy.” When the arts are used for “therapy” in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.
It’s also cool that the subject of Krista’s talk, compassion, is probably the main goal of Buddhist mindfulness practices. I’m not a good meditator but try to remind myself of the value frequently.
Several things come to mind reading this. One is Jung’s notion of compensation, with the dominant super-rational style constellating its opposite. Another, of course, is the way a totem or ritual focuses energy or serves as an object for the displacement of anxiety. The extreme example of the latter is obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Although I specialize in creative types, probably the largest percentage of my clients has been lawyers. Apologies to any happy lawyers out there, but I’ve had many friends who gave up the occupation after a few years. In fact, when I was editing one of the nation’s largest alternative newspapers here, several of the editorial staff were former lawyers.
Part of this is counter-transference of course. My parents always told me I should be a lawyer because of my highly argumentative style. Instead of going to law school, I ended up doing a lot of critical writing — movies early on, then popular culture and politics and, even now, dining. So, I think my public persona probably attracted lawyers. (Too bad writing doesn’t pay like lawyering!)
But there are deeper connections between creativity and the lawyer’s occupation in my experience. Most of my lawyer clients and friends love stories. Their cases are narratives. They are also often attracted to offbeat characters. And they love words. So, a good lawyer often seems to me at depth quite creative, often a frustrated writer. Typically, they don’t recognize this about themselves or they are specializing in work that doesn’t provide much satisfaction of their creative urges.
The rituals and totems are not new to me, either. I had one client years ago whose undergrad major was philosophy. Feeling compelled to make a living, he went to law school and had just been employed by the most prestigious firm in town, making a gigantic salary. He had installed a “zen” fountain and virtual rock garden in his office both to signify his difference from his colleagues and to provide an object of contemplation.
An acquaintance went to law school to satisfy his parents. But he was obsessed with food and before graduating was already writing a very funny blog, The Amateur Gourmet. On graduating, he immediately enrolled in a graduate writing program and his blog became one of the foodie world’s favorite. As far as I know, he has never practiced law.
I confess I’ve often said that the only lawyers I like are unhappy ones. But I also recognize that the most effective among those I’ve had to hire were pit bulls. It’s no surprise to me at all that lawyers, often deeply conflicted, engage in rituals and carry totems.
What’s striking about… the article… is the idea, articulated most forcefully since the mid nineteenth century, that our social forms have evolved imperfectly to fit our biological and evolutionary needs. That principle certainly is not news. The problem is that much of Brooks’s article repeats it as if it were.
He goes on to observe:
“A core finding of this work” on brain science, Brooks writes, as if to a drumroll, “is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways.”
That’s new? Perhaps if one hasn’t read much Freud it may appear so. Yet Brooks, in the article, grapples with an age-old misfit between culture and biology that Freud pinpointed in the late nineteenth century, then helped greatly to assuage, including through the “talking cure,” a concept still very much with us today.
Any student of depth psychology will feel inspired to high-five Lane for this observation. Like him, I’ve repeatedly read during the last few years about neuroscience’s “surprising” revelation of unconscious processes. Occasionally, they note that, in this, contemporary science is validating Freud’s basic observations. But usually, like Brooks, they do not.
Freud has been mindlessly demonized for years. He’s only survived in the academic world in literature departments, with the few exceptions of schools that offer study in depth psychology. (Jung has been banished altogether for the most part.)
A few years ago, a friend who was a student at one of the schools of professional psychology (and a “closet Jungian”) told me her program didn’t include more than a few days’ study of the unconscious. It, and Freud’s other theories, were regarded as historical artifacts with no use in clinical practice today.
Online, I recently ended up in a debate with a psychology student who dismissed Freud with a litany of utter falsehoods. Of course, he turned out not to have read Freud and to be parroting his professors.
It does bear mention that the psychoanalytical community itself misrepresented Freud in some respects. It clung to Freud’s early explanation of homosexuality’s origin as over-identification with the mother, for example. Freud in fact recanted this, admitting that, for all he knew, the cause was over-identification with the father. In any case, he wrote to the mother of a gay man, there was nothing wrong with being gay. So, he was actually quite ahead of his time in that respect too.
It’s fascinating to watch arguably the most influential thinker of the 20th century fall into disrepute and oblivion for observations that now re-emerge without any acknowledgment of their history. It’s an example of the short-sightedness of contemporary psychology — but that’s another post. In fact, it’s a dissertation.
(NOTE: I have done some editing since first posting this.)
I also felt that my being gay made him uncomfortable. I did see the men’s movement as considerably tinged by homophobia and sexism. This perception grew, especially during research on my dissertation. Hillman refused in any forum to discuss gender and sexuality (which made his involvement in the men’s movement strangely self-contradictory to me). I thought his dismissal of feminist and queer theory, given their importance in contemporary critical discourse, was a significant lacuna that Archetypal Psychology shared more generally with Jung’s thought.
