Introduction – The Return of the Soul?
One of the most unusual phenomena in the past couple of decades has been the return of discourse about the soul in respectable psychological, and indeed theological, circles. In the 2012 new English translation of the missal, the soul returned to the penitent communicant before the reception of the Blessed Sacrament when the muttered words “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed” were replaced with: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” It was the use of the word “soul” that struck some commentators as somewhat old-fashioned and atavistic. Why start using the term “soul” again? Especially after it seemed to have been quietly forgotten for the past thirty years? As an unashamed observer of religious words and their usage I found this return of the soul fascinating.
Likewise, as theologians have returned to questions of the soul, so psychologists have, if anything, displayed an even great interest in the “return of the soul”. At the time of writing the largest school in the British Royal College of Psychiatrists is the spirituality section and the recent creation of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality has given many healthcare professionals in the UK the intellectual space to explore that which had previously been off-limits: “the spiritual” (see, inter alia, Cook, Powell and Sims, 2009 and Cook, 2013). For just as theologians in the second-half of the twentieth century had shied away from too much overt talk of the soul (especially when this might imply a dangerous neo-Platonic spiritualising of the self) so psychologists had equally forbidden their followers from introducing too much spirituality into psychological discourse.
Within the void left by the two spheres of psychoanalysis and theology a new form of “soul-language” has developed in the past few decades and it is to this that I want to pay particular attention in this article. Jungian psychology had always had an eye on the transcendent and Carl Jung himself was entirely comfortable in his own version of neo-gnostic spirituality. However it took his successor, James Hillman, to grasp the metaphor of soul by the horns and lead it into some new and surprising places. Considered at best maverick, at worst heretical by his fellow analysts, Hillman, in a colourful and varied career, was able to develop his own understanding of soul language. In one of his last interviews before his death in 2011 he stated that:
I am critical of the whole analytic discipline… It has become a kind of New Age substitute for life, on the one hand; a substitute for rigorous education in culture, philosophy and religion, on the other; and third, a ‘helping profession’…the whole thing has lost its way. Something is deeply missing.Footnote 1
Thus “soul” and “soul-language” for Hillman became a coded reference not only to that “which is deeply missing” in the helping professions, but in wider Western society as a whole, including the religions and churches. In a world whose increasing desire seemed to conquer, codify and classify the infinitely resourceful and unknown realms of the psyche, Hillman saw “soul-language” as a way of guarding the essential poetic ambiguity that lies close to the sources of human wonder and discovery. Although my own views differ in many respects from Hillman's (as I will demonstrate later), it is from this same place of wonder and poetic astonishment that my own anthropological perspective emerges.
The Battle for Freud's Soul
This “battle for the soul” is of course nothing new. Bettleheim, in his Freud and Man's Soul (Bettleheim 1982/2001), famously explored how the English translation of Freud's work had created a certain Anglo-Saxon tone that is somewhat alien to the thrust of the German original. As he stated, “the English translations of Freud's writings distort much of the essential humanism that permeates the originals” (Bettleheim 1982:4). He stressed that Freud himself wrote clearly and elegantly on his themes, and one of the sources of the later success of his work undoubtedly lay in his finely wrought German prose style. By the 1920s his fame had spread across Europe, as well as his notoriety, and in Britain there was the desire to have English versions of his writings available. The task of translating this work fell to a member of the Bloomsbury Group – James Strachey (1887-1967) – brother of the famous Bloomsbury aesthete Lytton Strachey, who had sought analysis himself with Freud in Vienna. Because of Freud's scandalous reputation (his writings on sexuality had earned him a certain notoriety in Vienna), Strachey felt it necessary to medicalise and impersonalise Freud's prose as much as possible to make it more acceptable to the scientific and medical communities in Britain.Footnote 2 Thus, whenever Strachey was faced with Freud's terms for the mind and the apparatus of psychoanalysis – and Freud would usually resort at this point to commonplace terms in ordinary language use – Strachey preferred to invent Greek or Latin equivalents that sounded a little more medical or specialised. That this went against Freud's own mind on the matter can be seen in his defence of the use of simple pronouns in his The Question of Lay Analysis:
You will probably protest at our having chosen simple pronouns to describe our two agencies or provinces (of the soul) instead of giving them sonorous Greek names.Footnote 3 In psycho-analysis, however, we like to keep in contact with the popular mode of thinking and prefer to make its concepts scientifically serviceable rather than to reject them. There is no merit in this; we are obliged to take this line; for our theories must be understood by our patients, who are often very intelligent, but not always learned. The impersonal ‘it’ is immediately connected with certain forms of expression used by normal people. One is apt to say, for example, ‘It came to me in a flash; there was something in me which, at that moment, was stronger than me.’
(GW: 14.219)Strachey's tendency to invent Greek or Latin equivalents for Freud's terms (such as replacing Freud's simple “it”/Es with the grander sounding “id”) created a whole new raft of technical language whilst at the same time introducing a new level of complexity masking the simplicity of Freud's approach. Thus Freud's “slip of the tongue” (Fehlleistung) becomes “the parapraxis”, and the “unknown thing” itself becomes the more familiar “unconscious”.
Nowhere is this shift more apparent, argues Bettleheim, than in the translations of Freud's terms for the self as a whole. For here Freud's preferred terms are das Seele, seelische and Seelenleben, literally, “the soul”, “soulish” and “soul-life”, all of which Strachey replaces with “the mind”, “mental” and “mental life”. The effect of this, argues Bettleheim, is to replace Freud's “direct and always deeply personal appeals to our common humanity” with an “abstract, highly theoretical, erudite and mechanized – in short, ‘scientific’ – statements about the strange and very complex workings of our mind” (Bettleheim 1982:5). Psychoanalysis, argues Bettleheim, thus becomes “a purely intellectual system – a clever, exciting game” rather than the invitation to explore the richness and darkness of the individual soul-life.Footnote 4 Freud's own vision for the future of the modality he had initiated was neither a profession in hock to the scientific-medical establishment (hence his defence of non-medically trained analysts in The Question of Lay-Analysis, 1926) nor a form of life dominated by the clergy and religious ways of thinking (hence the genesis of his The Future of an Illusion, 1927). As he wrote to Oscar Pfister in 1928:
I do not know whether you have guessed the hidden link between ‘Lay Analysis’ and ‘Illusion’. In the former I want to protect analysis from the doctors, and in the latter from the priests. I want to hand it over to a profession that does not yet exist, a profession of secular ministers of souls (weltlichen seelsorgern), who don't have to be doctors and must not be priests.
(Letter to Oskar Pfister 25.11.1928)Footnote 5Thus, the battle for Freud's soul – or more specifically his translation of Seele – can be seen in the wider context of the battle for the soul of analysis: whether it was to become a medically or clerically dominated profession or neither. As Freud wrote to Pfister in 1909: “In itself psychoanalysis is neither religious nor non-religious, but an impartial tool which both the spiritual and layman (der Geistliche wie der Laie) can use in the service of the sufferer” (Letter to Pfister 9.2.1909). Freud was particularly aware in this context of the American tendency to “turn psychoanalysis into a mere housemaid of psychiatry” (Bettleheim 1982:36).
The ambiguity in Freud's own terminology allowed two opposing interpretations to arise which, for analysts such as Bettleheim and Otto Rank, became enshrined in their fervent wish to retain the “soulish” element in Freud's work. For these two followers of Freud the retention of the word “soul” was not an irrelevance but went to the heart of their respective interpretations of his work and the damage done, as they perceived it, to his legacy by an unhealthy over-emphasis on the medico-scientific gloss on his work. For Bettleheim, there is no reason for the (mis-) translation of Freud's Seele by “mind” apart from “a wish to interpret psychoanalysis as a medical speciality” (1982:76). And his retention of the word “soul” in his interpretation of Freud preserves for him two facets of Freud's project lost by the overemphasis on “mind”: the need to emphasise the spiritual and emotional aspects of the analytic journey:
Freud uses Seele and seelisch rather than geistig because geistig refers mainly to the rational aspects of the mind, to that of which we are conscious. The idea of the soul, by contrast, definitely includes much of which we are not consciously aware.
(1982:77)By not providing us with a precise definition of “soul”, argues Bettleheim, Freud is deliberately reflecting the ambiguous nature of the psyche itself. Thus Bettleheim's “soul” is a cipher for all that is ambiguous and indecipherable in the psyche. It is, as I have stated elsewhere, a call to the “unknowing” that lies at the heart of the psyche and psychological life. Yet Bettleheim's definition or rendering of “soul” remains somewhat crude. Decrying any Platonic notion of immortality, his “soul” is still very much an “it”’, though “intangible”, “it is deeply hidden, hardly accessible even to careful investigation…but it nevertheless exercises a powerful influence on our lives” (1982:77/78). What this “it” is, Bettleheim demurs from explaining.
Hillman's “Soul”
As the Freudians and neo-Freudians battled with soul language, so too Jung and his followers realised that the slippery term concealed a whole hinterland of potential. As already stated one of the foremost contemporary interpreters of this soul-language was the maverick American analyst James Hillman.
From the late 1960s onwards Hillman's avowed aim was to restore psyche or soul to psychology. His fons et origo for this pursuit lay in early Greek philosophy, in particular in the work of Plato. As he stated in the 1992 Preface to the revised edition of Revisioning Psychology, his aim would be:
To restore the mythical perspective to depth psychology by recognising the soul's intrinsic affinity with, nay love for, the Gods… Or, as the Greeks may have said, to reaffirm the tragic connection between the mortal and the immortal, that natural plight of the soul that lies at the base of any psychology claiming to speak of psyche.
(RVP: xi)He characterises this “return to the Gods” as “soul-making” which, for him, must lie at the heart of psychology. Not only psychology but academia too, he argued, have stolen the “soul” from “psychology”:
When psychology becomes a specialism and the psyche is set forth in an academic textbook, the soul disappears. When the soul is taken over by the university in the secular spirit of enlightenment, it loses all actuality, all substance, and all relevance for life. Thus academic psychology has been a psychology without soul from the beginning.
(MA:130)Indeed, he suggests, the true history of the soul cannot take place in universities and college-centred psychology courses. Only on the wild frontier of analysis can soul-making really happen. Thus as the scientific secular investigation of the psyche advanced so the true nature of soul became more hidden, for “the Age of Reason had reached its last borders: the borders of reason itself, the mind and its own darkness” (MA:137). That which reason could not comprehend, Hillman suggests, would be classified as the “unconscious”, the “insane”, the “irrational” (“One might have called Uranus or Neptune ‘non-Saturn’ or Australia ‘un-Asia’” MA:138). The symbolic, imaginative and mythic had, for Hillman, been consigned by the early fathers of psychology (such as W. Griesinger, E. Kraepelin and H. Maudsley) to the negative or shadow side of the rational conscious with the concomitant “un-” and “in-” prefixes. Drawing on Yates’ 1966 The Art of Memory, Hillman connects his programme of “re-ensouling” the self to the Renaissance development of memory by creating “an inner temple of fantasy” in which stood “statues of mythical figures” (MA:178) where ‘the principles of the imagination used as universals for this system were mainly the Gods and heroes and themes of classical mythology, the pagan pantheon, sometimes expressed as zodiacal constellations.’
Thus, early on, Hillman recognises that “soul-language” has an ambiguity that, in particular, can present a challenge to the scientific/rational way of approaching psychology whilst also having a “religious character”. As he put it a few years later in Insearch: “Soul makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love and has a religious concern” (I:42). To those of a religious bent this can all initially sound encouraging – and in fact Insearch is the result of one of the few instances where Hillman explicitly addressed a group of Christian ministers. However, as with his mentor Jung, such an open heart towards “religion” can sometimes be a two-edged sword.Footnote 6
Hillman begins his fullest account of what he means by “soul” in “Re-Visioning Psychology” (1975) by suggesting that he understands the pitfalls of essentialism when it comes to soul/psyche-talk. For he states that:
By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing in itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment – and soul-making means differentiating this middle-ground.
(RVP:xvi)I state that he “suggests the pitfalls of essentialism” because although he uses quasi-Wittgensteinian language of perspective,Footnote 7 this quote does reveal the inherent problem within Hillman's soul-position. For despite his avowed revolutionary hermeneutic, or rather non-dualism, his very first construct of “soul-making” introduces dualism between “us” and “events”, “the doer” and “the deed”. Hillman may want to advocate an undifferentiated hermeneutic, or “reflective moment” but rather his construct has unintentionally imported a dualistic perspective from the very beginning. David Tacey in a perceptive essay recognises this problem in Hillman, critiquing him from a Jungian perspective rather than a Wittgensteinian one. He states:
While Hillman criticises Jung for being a dualist, it is James Hillman who, in the last analysis, is the ultimate dualist, because he can never reconcile inner and outer, psyche and society, ego and underworld, therapy and activism…. Hillman's inability to grasp paradox leads to the disastrous outbreak of overt contradiction.
(Tacey 1998:230)Tacey criticises Hillman for not “holding the contradiction of opposites”. Using a Wittgensteinian perspective I would rather criticise Hillman for holding a somewhat illusory and probably indefensible, notion of “inner” and “outer”, “us” and “them” (whether “they” are daimones, Gods or other people) that cannot be reconciled within the system that he is proposing.
This error is borne out by a passage from Re-visioning Psychology where Hillman returns to the traditional understanding of soul as an “inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence – that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego and consciousness go into eclipse” (RVP:xvi). What is, we may ask, this “inner place”? A super-self? A deeper-self? An over-self? Hillman describes it later in Revisioning Psychology as:
Moving from outside in, it is a process of interiorizing; moving from the surface of visibilities to the less visible, it is a process of deepening.
(RVP:140, the italics are Hillman's own)As commentators such as Tacey note, despite the high-flown postmodern rhetoric, Hillman's soul-language remains resolutely dualist, exporting categories of self into the world whilst maintaining the barrier between them.
To bridge this gulf between his (super-) self and the world, which opens up with alarming rapidity in his work, Hillman must call on the polytheistic Greek deities to come to his aid: Hermes, Hera, Aphrodite and Zeus are all invoked as necessary components of the polymorphous, polytheistic soul. Some commentators saw this move and asked: “But does Hillman really believe in these ‘gods’?” Hillman calls this invocation of “the Gods” (usually upper-case) as part of his psychotherapeutic call to a return to ‘an inner Greece of the mind’ (RVP:29). For “we discover the Gods in the unconscious psyche – and because of this unconsciousness we are unable to distinguish the Gods from archetypes, or archetypes from heroes and daemons” (RVP:36). At some times, he suggests, we must speak of “the Gods” and “daimones” metaphorically and allegorically (RVP:36) at other times he seems to take them more literally. Following Tacey, we have to ask – is this a rhetorical device (remember that Hillman began his academic career as a literary scholar in Dublin studying James Joyce), or is he suggesting that we take belief in “the Gods” and “daimones” seriously?
As psychology is based on the soul, psychology is intrinsically religious for Hillman (RVP:167), but not the monotheistic religion of Christianity (or the West). It must be a polytheistic religion – a sort of revival of the ancient Greek pantheon. Psychology is a “religious” act for Hillman but it is not religion as we know it, for it is religion without the transcendent. Thus we can look at Hillman's use of the term “religion” and “Gods” much as commentators a generation before looked at Jung's pronouncements on the Christian God and asked similarly, “Yes but does he really believe in this God?” (See Tyler 2015). In Hillman's The Myth of Analysis, the Gods are presented as mythic archetypes that will form organising principles in the psyche:
Classical mythology as it comes down to us gives us one insight that will be essential for grasping the sufferings of the soul. Classical mythology is a collection of highly interrelated families of tales with much precise detail but without schematic system either in individual tales or among the tales as a group.
(MA:194)Like psycho-pathologies, the mythic emanations of the deities blend one into another to produce a miasmic effect on the soul. Unlike modern psychotherapy, Hillman's mythic analysis will have flexibility to deal with the boundlessness that is the soul's way. The soul, for Hillman, is constantly in a state of flux and can never be pinned down into one category – just like Hillman's prose, which also constantly defies categorisation (a bit like trying to pin down an eel!):
Just as psychological diagnoses can change and vary, so too mythology lets things stay in flux or in process. A myth is a description of a process; it is itself a process. It unfolds, moves, and at its different joints leads off into various possibilities…its structure is dramatic.
(MA:195)Thus Hillman states that “the behaviour of the psyche reflects the acts of the Gods because we are created in the Gods’ images and can therefore do nothing that they have not already made possible in their behaviour” (MA:195). “The Gods” he resolves, “are the ground of our fantasies”.Footnote 8
So, the answer to the question: “Does Hillman really believe in these ‘Gods’?” becomes largely irrelevant (even though I think the answer must be “No”).Footnote 9 For believe in them or not, to maintain the position of soul as ‘perspective’ without a concomitant resolution of the inner/outer divide (such as Wittgenstein, or indeed Kant, attempts) will, I suggest, be doomed to failure without the invention of intervening entities. Such a move is very similar to Hillman's own beloved Neo-Platonists, who had to create the necessary expository positions of intervening worlds, planetary spheres, demiurges and daimones in order to hold together the inner/outer implied within the Platonic corpus.
The Trinitarian Perspective of Edith Stein
To summarise, so far we have seen in Bettleheim and Hillman exemplars of contemporary thinkers who have sought to revitalize language of the self by reclaiming the language of the soul. In the case of Bettleheim, we noticed how he spotted Freud's ambiguity with regard to the Seele but sadly failed to carry off his prize by a weak or too essentialist view of the self. Hillman, on the other hand, whilst equally spotting the transcendental void in much of twentieth century psychology in his attempt to re-spiritualise the self goes too far in the other direction by populating the self with unnecessary and rather vapid “gods” and entities such as the daimones, taking his cue from his neo-Platonic sources. To conclude I would like to suggest a “third way” that neither over-spiritualises or essentialises the self. Here I will draw on the work of another great twentieth century writer and philosopher – Edith Stein – whose Trinitarian perspective offers, I believe, a solution to the problems posed by Bettleheim and Hillman.
Like Rank, Wittgenstein and Hillman, Stein was increasingly unhappy with a “psychology without soul” (Psychologie ohne Seele) (WP:63) that had been growing in popularity in the German-speaking lands of the mid-twentieth century. The empiricist reductionism of the self was for Stein a grave element that threatened to destroy the unity of the self. In contrast to this movement, Stein recognized a “Life-way” (Lebewesen) at the heart of the human self (WP: 65) that sought expression through what Rank and Bettleheim would have called “the soulish” (seelische). Only the person with a “hot heart” (heisse Herz) who had seized the world, could, she suggests (clearly in autobiographical terms but also reflecting Saints Augustine and Teresa), really appreciate the Lebewesen that lies at the heart of the self. Thus, she concludes, the soul “is a personal-spiritual picture within which is expressed the innermost and most actual, the essence, from which the person's strengths and ability to change arises. Not then an unknown X that we seek to clarify through experienced facts, but something which enlightens us and can be felt whilst always remaining mysterious.”Footnote 10
At this point Stein makes the same move as St Augustine in his “On the Trinity” – that is, to see in the inner contradiction and mysterious tension of the soul a reflection of the Trinity itself. Thus, Stein's solution to the problem of the soul in postmodern context is essentially that envisaged by Augustine in De Trinitate and places her writing firmly in the Augustinian rather than the neo-Platonic tradition of, for example, a writer like Hillman. For her, the multiplicity of perspective of the soul is held in the unity of apperception that is Christ. Christ is the unity of perception that holds together all the contradictions of the psyche. In Endliches und Ewiges Sein she again characterizes the “human being” (menschliche Sein) as being a composite of “body, soul and spirit” (leiblich-seelisch-geistig) (EE: 336, 7.3.1). The “Menschengeist” is determined “from above” (von obern) and “from below” (von unten) (c.f. Freud and Jung's conscious and unconscious). Thus the soul for Stein consists of a choreography of spirit (Geist) and body (Leib): “the spiritual life of the human person rises from a dark ground. It rises like a candle-flame that illumines itself nourished by non-luminous matter”. The “non-luminous matter” of the human body is to be distinguished (in true phenomenological fashion) from the matter that we perceive in the world around us. For, in contrast, our matter is matter that is felt, experienced and innerly sensed. This, for Stein, constitutes an essential layer and part of self – which is why she refers to it as Leib rather than Körper (p.338), as she says “What distinguishes the body from a corpse is that the body is an ensouled corpse” (Was den Leib von einem blossen Körper unterscheidet ist, dass es ein beseelter Körper ist). Thus, the human self, as a composite of matter and spirit, is what for Edith is determining of the term “soul” and reflects the Trinitarian nature of God (7.9.1): “Therefore the human soul is not a mean between spirit and matter but a spiritual creature – not only a formed structure of the spirit but a forming spirit” (Die Menschenseele ist nicht nur ein Mittleres zwischen Geist und Stoff, sondern ein geistiges Geschöpf, nicht nur Gebilde des Geistes, sonder bildender Geist) (EE:7.9.1, my translation).
This human choreography of Leib and Geist held together in the embrace of Seele is, for Stein, the reflection in the human person of the Triune God of Christianity: “the threefold formative power of the soul must be regarded as a tri-unity, and the same is true of the end product of its forming activity: body-soul-spirit” (EE: 6.9.10) Thus “if we attempt to relate this tri-unity to the divine trinity, we shall discover in the soul…the image of the Father; in the body…the image of the Eternal Word; and in the spiritual life the image of the Divine Spirit” (EE: 6.9.10). If therefore, the person can see this when “it then opens itself in its innermost being to the influx of divine life, the soul (and through it the body) is formed into an image of the Son of God” (EE:6.9.10).
As she would later put it in Kreuzeswissenschaft, the last (uncompleted) work she began in 1941 as a commentary on St John of the Cross for the 400th anniversary of his birth:
Human beings are called upon to live in their inmost region and to have themselves as much in hand as possible only from that centre-point…. It is God's mystery, which God alone can reveal to the degree that pleases him…. God himself has chosen it as his dwelling
(KW: II.3b).Conclusion
By rooting the discourse of the self in the essential movement of the Christian Trinity, Edith Stein, like other Christian thinkers before her such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Teresa of Avila (all of whom contributed to her work) is able to preserve the integrity of the self/psyche whilst also allowing it sub specie aeterni to keep its window on the transcendent. In this alternative picture of the soul, presented first by Augustine, intervening deities, demiurges and daimones are contingent rather than necessary.
The “window on the transcendent” is probably what most threatens Hillman's position. His psyche is indeed active, and very full of the imaginative, but what it lacks is the necessary window on the transcendent that Augustine saw as essential if the inner/outer divide of dualism was to dissolve. Sadly, despite his invocation of the daimones and deities, Hillman's system is unable to sustain the weight of the dualism that he seeks to escape.
Unlike Wittgenstein, Hillman is unable to see that he has subsumed the transcendent into the psychological, hence his annoyance, even anger, at the Catholic Church's pronouncements on “spirit”. For “spirit” cannot exist in Hillman's system as a separate entity. It must ultimately dissolve in the dualism of ‘us’ and the “world event”:
The merging of psychology and religion is less the confluence of two different streams than the result of their single source – the soul.
(RVP: 167)Under the cloak of eradicating Cartesian dualism, Hillman sadly preserves it by removing the transcendental apperception. The transcendent function is replaced in Hillman's system by imagination and aesthetic (much as in Rank's system it had been replaced by the creative ethic) and, like Rank's interpretation, it is equally unsatisfactory.
From the Christian point of view the multiplicity of perspectives is held in the unity of apperception that is Christ. Christ is the unity of perception that holds together all the contradictions of the psyche (primarily through his transcendent/immanent life in the Trinity). Thus, by viewing the polyvalent from one position we have already maintained the unity of the soul – Hillman's polyvalent perspective is therefore an illusion.
Thus, if we seek a conclusion, the conception of the Trinitarian nature of self held in the unity of Christ that is espoused by Stein (and ultimately Augustine) seems to come closest to the symbolic sense of self that, I would like to suggest, lies at the heart of the contemporary return of soul-discourse. Of course, we can never discount the neo-Platonic or Gnostic counter-current in Western thought. However, as I argued in my review of Hillman's work, I think there are perhaps sufficient deficits in this account to make it of questionable application in the contemporary world.
As Rank suggests Plato also knew: the mythic is the proper discourse for the soul. For, a key element of psychology does not deal with facts, but with the interpretation of facts. This is no better shown than in the dream interpretation:
In the dream we ourselves interpret physical and psychical states (facts), but this ‘interpretation’ is as little ‘analysis’ of ‘facts’ as is our analytic ‘interpretation’, which represents only another kind of symbolization and rationalization.
(WT:230)Yet despite his neo-Platonic leanings Hillman would, I suspect, also agree with the thrust of my argument in this paper that an overly scientistic psychologisation of the soul misses the gossamer-light warp and woof of a performative soul-language that by its nature moves from the transcendent to the immanent and back again. As Hillman himself wrote in 1967:
Because the soul is lost – or at least temporarily mislaid or bewildered – ministers have been forced, upon meeting a pastoral problem, to go upstairs to its neighbour, the next closest thing to soul: the mind. So the churches turn to academic and clinical psychology, to psychodynamics and psychopathology and psychiatry, in attempts to understand the mind and its workings. This has led ministers to regard troubles of the soul as mental breakdowns and cure of soul as psychotherapy. But the realm of the mind – perception, memory, mental diseases – is a realm of its own, another flat belonging to another owner who can tell us very little about the person whom the minister really wants to know, the soul.
(I:44)And again later in 1975:
The soul cannot be understood through psychology alone, our vision even leaves the field of psychology as it is usually thought of, and moves widely through history, philosophy and religion.
(RVP:ix)Finally, I would like to suggest that the contemporary ‘return of the soul’ to theology and psychology alike is an inevitable consequence after a century-long attempt to banish the transcendental perspective from human anthropology. The return of soul-language, allowing us to gaze at both the transcendental and the physical simultaneously has, I would like to conclude, only just begun.
Bibliography
Edith Stein (Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce)
EEEndliches und Ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufsteigs zum Sinn des Seins. Freiburg: Herder. 1986
Finite and Eternal Being. Trans. K. Reinhardt. Washington: ICS. 2002
KWKreuzeswissenschaft. Freiburg: Herder. 1950
The Science of the Cross. Trans. J. Koeppel. Washington: ICS. 2002
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GWGesammelte Werke in Achtzehn Bänden mit einem Nachtragsband. Ed A. Freud, E. Bibring, W. Hoffer, E. Kris and O. Isakower. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. 1960-1968
The Penguin Freud Library.Trans. J. Strachey, London: Penguin.1991
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I Insearch: Psychology and Religion. Woodstock: Spring Publications.1967/1994
Other Works Cited
Bettleheim, B. (1982/2001) Freud and Man's Soul. London: Pimlico
Cook, C. (2013) Spirituality, Theology and Mental Health. London: SCM
Cook,C., A. Powell, A. Sims (2009) Spirituality and Psychiatry. London: RCPsych Publications
Rank, Otto (WT) Will Therapy and Truth and Reality, Trans. J. Taft. New York: Alfred Knopf. 1950 - Originally Vols 2 and 3 (1936): Technik der Psychoanalyse (Vol 2: Die Analytische Reaktion in Ihren Konstruktiven Elementen, Vol 3: Die Analyse des Analytikers u seiner Rolle in der Gesamtsituation)
Tacey, D. (1998) ‘Twisting and Turning with James Hillman: From Anima to World Soul, from Academia to Pop’ in Post-Jungians Today, Ed A. Casement. London: Routledge
Tyler, P.M. (2015) ‘Carl Jung: Friend or Foe of Christianity?’ in Vinayasadhana: Dharmaram Journal of Psycho-Spiritual Formation. Vol VI, No. 1, January 2015
Yates, F. (1966) The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
