Wisdom of

the Psyche
D pth P ychology aft r c uro i n
Wisdom of the Psyche

``Emotionally personal, immediately useful, surprisingly original,

beautifully deep, this page-turning read also turns the page into a
new century of psychology. What an achievement.'' ± James
Hillman, former Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich

``Once again Ginette Paris demonstrates that she is quite simply

the most original and eloquent of all writers on contemporary
depth psychology. This book is a brilliant and beautiful account of
how a serious accident, a near-fatal brain injury, became not just a
trauma but a rare and wonderful opportunity. After the con-
cussion and coma, Paris did not just regain consciousness. She
experienced a life-altering transformation that led her to delve
below all the gray matter of the current, trendy fascination with
neuroscience to explore the ``deep psyche.'' In this book Paris
invents an entirely new genre of psychological writing, one that
combines intimately personal autobiography, humanely inspira-
tional stories from patients, and radically imaginative theoretical
proposals for the future of depth psychology.'' ± Michael Vannoy
Adams, Jungian Psychoanalyst

``Wisdom of the Psyche is the bright book of the future for every-
one involved with depth psychology and its creative transforma-
tion of the arts and sciences. Ginette Paris's stunning achievement
is to combine autobiography, history of ideas, clinical originality,
psychological theory and philosophical sophistication with the
arts of a poet and novelist. Her book is at once lucid, erudite, a
delightful companion. and a serious challenge to the academy and
the consulting room. Paris gently and powerfully embeds depth
psychology in the humanities, making Wisdom of the Psyche
essential reading for the twenty-®rst century. We are all the richer
for it.'' ± Susan Rowland, Reader in English and Jungian Studies,
University of Greenwich, UK

Ginette Paris uses cogent and passionate argument as well as

stories from patients to teach us to accept that the human psyche
seeks to destroy relationships and lives as well as to sustain them.
This is very hard to accept which is why, so often, the body has the
painful and dispiriting job of showing us what our psyche refuses
to see.

In jargon-free language, the author describes her own story of

taking a turn downwards and inwards in the search for a meta-
phorical personal ``death''. If this kind of mortality is not attended
to, then more literal bodily ailments and actual death itself can
result.

Paris engages with one of the main dilemmas of contemporary

psychology and psychotherapy: how to integrate ®ndings and
insights from neuroscience and medicine into an approach to
healing founded upon activation of the imagination. At present,
she demonstrates, what is happening is damaging to both science
and imagination.

Ginette Paris is a psychologist, therapist and writer. She teaches

Archetypal and Depth Psychology at Paci®ca Graduate Institute in
Santa Barbara, California. Her books include Pagan Meditations,
and Pagan Grace. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the
Foundation for Mythological Studies.
Wisdom of the Psyche

Depth Psychology after

Neuroscience

Ginette Paris
First published 2007 by Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Ø 2007 Ginette Paris

Typeset in Sabon by Gar®eld Morgan, Swansea, West Glamorgan

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow,
Cornwall
Paperback cover design by Lisa Dynan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

This publication has been produced with paper manufactured to strict

environmental standards and with pulp derived from sustainable forests.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Paris, Ginette, 1946-
Wisdom of the psyche : depth psychology after neuroscience /
Ginette Paris.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-43776-9 (hardback) ± ISBN 978-0-415-43777-6 (pbk.)
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Unconscious (Psychology) 3. Jungian psychology.
4. Neurosciences. 5. Wisdom. 6. Psyche. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Mind-Body Relations (Metaphysics) 2. Brain±physiology. 3.
Psychoanalytic Theory. 4. Unconscious (Psychology)
WL 103 P232w 2007]
BF175.P275 2007
150.19©5±dc22
2007007174

ISBN: 978-0-415-43776-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-43777-6 (pbk)
I dedicate this book to Lori Pye, Druscilla French and
Denise Bilodeau, from whom I learned that friendship
is as potent a medicine as love.
Page Intentionally Left Blank
Contents

Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvi

1 Denting my thick skull 1

2 A fable: Mom, Dad, and me, me, me 14

Wisdom can be learned 14
Casting 16

3 Therapy as cure: the medical model 23

No family is ever normal 32

4 Therapy as investment: the economic model 37

5 Therapy as plea: the legal model 48

6 Therapy as redemption 54
Life is absurdly, awesomely ugly and beautiful 59
Psychic monsters don't need redeeming 68
A monster can be contagious 71
Unredeemable Narcissus 74

7 Boundary issues: ``You, science. Me, humanities.'' 79

The confusing de®nition of depth psychology 83
Schools, labels, egos, copyrights, money 86
What is deep about the psyche? 88
viii Contents

8 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 92

Useful wounding 97

9 The archetype of Mother 114

The Great Mother: the cradle and the cage 115
Do I love you or do I need you? 116
Avoiding neurotic contracts 118
``Soft'' does not imply ``infantile'' 121
Get off the cross, we need the wood 123
Here is your mother: Thou Shall Not Devour
Her 125
Crying is active 131
The maternal quality of a country, a house, a
garden 132

10 The archetype of Father 140

Bad cop/good cop: not a literal reality 141
The Father principle in therapy 143
There is no absolute adult 147
The alchemy of psychic maturation 150
Therapy as alchemy 151
Sorry, Oedipus 153
A balanced approach to therapy 154
You love me at last? Too late! 157
Talking to children as a philosopher would 159

11 The invisibility of the psyche 162

Cynicism is not lucidity, criticism is not
contempt 169

12 The ultimate virtual reality game 174

Fictionalizing is inevitable 176
The fabrication of a myth, the dismantling of a
lie 179
The dramatic model of psychological life 181
A script is made of words, gestures, costume,
deÂcor 182
A myth is a metaphorical story 184
Who is telling the story? 186
 Contents ix

Bigotry offered as expertise 191

How is psychology a mythology? 193

13 Joy: the antidote to anxiety 197

Anxiety: the fear without image 198
Depression: a ¯attened imagination 207
I lost my cherry 209

Appendix: Schools of thought are families,

biographies their family tree 215
Bibliography 219
Notes 229
Index 235
Page Intentionally Left Blank
Preface

Only once are we born and once do we die. Psychologically,

however, we die a thousand deaths and are reborn at least that
many times. Moments of great suffering usually signal that the old
self needs to die and because it is painful, we are tempted to look
for quick solutions, buying into the common illusion that every
psychological ``problem'' calls for a positive ``solution.'' Yet, this
well-intentioned approach increases the suffering because it
ignores one of the great paradoxes of psychological wisdom: the
activation of the death principle has more power than anything
else in the psyche. The destructive impulse can be crucial if we are
to get rid of what oppresses us. In other words, as far as our inner
life is concerned, one could say that where there is death, there is
hope! As the old self dies, one can take up the task of birthing a
new self. But ®rst, there has to be a letting go of all positive ego
ideals.
Much has been written in psychology about interpersonal
con¯icts and how to resolve them. Many authors of popular
psychology books and most therapy centers offer advice on how to
save the marriage, improve communications, enhance self-esteem,
and achieve love and success. I am investigating the opposite: the
element in the psyche that wants to destroy relationships, to leave,
to die, to go down and stay low for as long as it takes for the old
identity to die. This turning inward and downward comes from an
unconscious sense that if the exhausted old ``me'' does not die, my
body will carry the death wish in a literal and terminal fashion.
What the psyche refuses to acknowledge, the body always mani-
fests. Whenever the body says ``no more,'' it is sending a message
that should get our attention; it may be inviting us to a voyage of
descent. Even when intolerably painful, such a voyage can be an
xii Preface

adventure all the same because it has the potential to reveal the
natural wisdom of the psyche. Normally, what excites us about
adventure is the aspect of surprise and great pain, be it physical or
psychological. Dangerous voyages, internal or external, seem to
open to us a treasure chest of endless surprises: the unconscious.
The word ``unconscious'' may sound too technical, too
Freudian. It can be replaced by the term used at the time of the
Renaissance: ``imagination.'' In our moments of depression and
anxiety, the imagination is paralyzed, cold, empty. Contrary to
advice offered in most self-help books of popular psychology, the
way out of such painful states does not start with an upward,
positive, willful effort of the ego. It begins with an opening of the
imagination, often producing dark, twisted, frightening images,
symbolizing what needs to die.
I am a frequent traveler and have visited many countries.
However, of all the trips I've taken in my life, the one that was the
most fascinating was my descent to the dark recesses of my psyche,
that place where we reside as if in a nightmare, a place that the
ancient Greeks called the Underworld and that we call the
unconscious. Watching the process of my own self-destruction was
captivating, like watching a cobra poised to strike. When the
unconscious opens, it disturbs every routine and life takes on a
surprising quality. Madam Death insists that surrender be absolute.
I came to live in California 14 years ago, moving from the cold
climate of the Atlantic coast. From my ®rst day on the Paci®c
coast, I failed to notice how so much light and energy can be
in¯ating. I gradually lost sight of what, in life, belongs to death ± a
sense of limitations, of exhaustion of old forms, of tiredness in
walking the same path, of my minuscule signi®cance in the uni-
verse. Santa Barbara's climate is close to perfection; the orien-
tation of the bay creates a microclimate as pleasant as that of
Provence, without the suffocating heat of a ProvencËal summer.
The city has a feminine charm: small, chic, gentle, lovely, safe.
More gardens than parking lots. Here is the ocean and here are the
mountains; here is nature and here is culture. Living with this kind
of beauty, I failed to notice that the darkness, silence and slowness
of cold winter days used to provide a rhythm that was essential to
me. I began working non-stop, tugging at life to yield what I had
decided to extract from it, shamefully abusing the animal gener-
osity of the unconscious, a good horse that will keep going until
exhausted.
 Preface xiii

I failed to understand a sequence of dreams that suggested: You

think you want a way out of the labyrinth? Wrong! Look for the
entrance. A series of psychological disasters and a nearly fatal
accident popped my shiny California bubble. Tumbling, literally,
into an empty pool and sustaining a cerebral hemorrhage was just
the right dose of death for equilibrium to return.
Psychology classi®es fears according to their depths. Between
the surface (for the sake of simplicity let's say ``ego conscious-
ness'') and the abyss (or the ``unconscious''), there is an abundance
of fears, big or little ®sh that can be caught in the net of psycho-
analysis. Prudence advises a slow descent with the guidance of an
analyst, but if one is in a hurry, a tragedy may accelerate the
process. At the bottom rests a single fear: death. Ah! Here you are,
Madam, my Death. Pleased to meet you. During the days follow-
ing my brain injury, my encounter with death taught me more
about the psyche than had many years of analysis. For a psychol-
ogist, this revelation is troubling, as it suggests that there is a very
direct route to the core of one's being. Analysis is a fascinating
zigzag path to consciousness, but there is also an expressway: a
face-to-face encounter with one's death. Unpleasant, risky, pain-
ful, but expedient. You don't choose this itinerary. It happens to
you as an encounter with something like the Greek goddess Fate.
All fears are fundamentally the fear of death, but they vary in
¯avor. In the intensive care unit, I was ®rst aware of my fear of
losing the ability to walk, a primitive, animal fear. The next hour
brought up the sentimental fear that I might die without telling my
children, their father and all my friends, how much I love them. It
was a fear of dying in exile, without saying my farewells to loved
ones, a possibility that, in the Middle Ages, was dreaded as much
as the fact of dying.
By the next day, experiencing how a damaged brain drastically
diminishes mental capacities, I was haunted by the eventuality of
the loss of my identity as teacher, therapist, and writer, a fear with
the distinctive taste of ego. From there I realized that death also
means the loss of an innumerable number of life's little delights ±
June cherries from the farmers' market, picnics on the beach,
reading a good novel, cooking with somebody, for somebody,
laughing and arguing with friends, swimming, dancing the tango.
The sum of all those mini-epiphanies, I realized, is immeasurable.
Up to then, when faced with a dif®cult situation, I would shift
into the heroic mode: don't tremble, thrust ahead. All-wheel drive,
xiv Preface

up the hill! Not this time. Mister Courage refused to appear on

cue, leaving the stage instead to Madam Death. She stepped
forward to remind me of my vulnerability, my brokenness. All I
could do was quiver. It was a great lesson. Many times in my life it
would have been much wiser for me to surrender, tremble and
suffer rather than posture heroically. I entered the darkest period
of my life and became as tormented as my most tormented
patients. Suffering renewed my sense of the compelling relevance
of depth psychology. I was in such darkness that there was no
denying that the psyche has incredible depth, and I was falling into
its abyss.
Paradoxically, as my commitment to my professional calling
was renewed, I lost faith in almost all psychological theories.
Thirty years of study turned to dust! Those brilliant theories, read,
annotated, regurgitated in courses and articles ± all now appeared
useless. Depth psychology had been the great intellectual passion
of my life. Now it felt like my hard drive had been erased, my
intellect emptied of all its ®les. With no more con®dence in
psychological theories, it felt a bit contradictory to feel, more than
at any other period of my life, the need for psychological insight. I
began investigating what exactly had changed for me, theoretically
as well as personally. I revisited everything I thought I knew about
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, about matters of the heart,
about growing up and being an adult, about human nature, and
human love.
This is why this book speaks with two voices. One is that of the
therapist writing a critique of my ®eld, observing the evolution
of my trade from a theoretical point of view. After 30 years of
teaching and practicing psychology from various approaches, I am
taking a personal inventory: which ideas still feel useful and which
feel dead? Given the takeover from neuroscience and pharmacol-
ogy what is the future of depth psychology? What is coming in the
next psychologies?
The other voice is not so detached. It is the much less assured
voice of an ordinary person telling an ordinary experience of
inferiority, brokenness, failure and pain. It comes from a need to
test all the theories against my own experience of suffering ± a
very different posture than the lofty position of professor and
therapist. It is a phenomenological stance and as such it excludes
the clinical interpretive terminology, moving away from the medi-
cal model, away from psychodynamics, and towards literature.
 Preface xv

Chapter 1 is an application of this phenomenological-literary-

imaginal approach to my own account of a plunge in the dark
river Styx. It is in writing in this imaginal ± rather than clinical ±
style that I ®rst felt the liberation that comes from abandoning the
usual jargon of the bible of the profession: the Diagnostic
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.1 It was so liberating that I
began questioning myself: what if, all through my career, I had
written my patients' case histories with the same literary attention
that I am now giving my own experience? What if I had given their
cases the same kind of mythopoetic license? What about dropping
the clinical taxonomy when writing case history, keeping only the
story and dropping the case? Throughout the book, the vignettes
show the result of my rewriting of some of my patient's insights
(with their permission).
To sustain life, the psyche requires pleasure, joy, and a fasci-
nation with the world. This seems impossible in the face of acute
pain. Yet, I believe the paradox can be sustained, if one is ready to
go through the suffering bearing the curiosity and respect of a
pilgrim traveling in the Underworld. I believe the next evolution of
psychology will be concerned less with pathology ± leaving it to
neuroscience ± and will become more like a philosophical training,
capable of preparing the person for the voyage in the country of
pain and joy ± depth psychology as the art of not wasting the joy
of life. The necessity of a descent into the Underworld is a core
idea of depth psychology, one that I wish to explore anew in
this book.
We all have a psychology because we all have an imagination.
Inner imagery needs periodic updating because the virtual realities
going on in the psyche need to change all the time. When the old
script offers no more surprises, no more room to move, one needs
a new identity. This is not something a trauma-focused clinical
approach can do because the exploration of our psyche's depth
de®nitely belongs to the humanities and the arts.
Acknowledgments

I owe a great deal to Druscilla French, for her exacting attitude in

the editing of my text as well as her generosity of assistance and
expertise with the English language. This book would not exist
without her help and support.
I feel a deep gratitude toward: Michael Vannoy Adams, Edie
Barrett, Joe Coppin, William Doty, Christine Downing, Mark
Kelly, Darcia Labrosse, Patrick Mahaffey, Gilles-Zenon Maheu,
Lune Maheu, David Miller, Maureen Murdock, Marquita Riel,
Murray Shugar, Dianne Skafte, Glen Slater, Dennis Slattery,
Margo Steurer, Bill and Joanna Drake and their compassionate
neighbours, Anne West. The generosity of their intellect, their
emotional support, their physical presences, demonstrated for me
how we are all part of all richly connected ecosystem of minds,
psyches and bodies.
I thank all the patients, students and friends who gave me
permission to use their stories to illustrate the theory.
I am grateful to my brother, Claude Paris, for the role he played
in the shaping of my intellect, at a time when I was a ``just a girl.''
I thank Lori Pye for convincing me, by her exemplary commit-
ment to the preservation of the natural world, that all depth
psychology is ultimately, also, an ecopsychology.
Finally, I am deeply indebted to James Hillman, teacher and
friend, whose thinking and writing inspired and guided me
throughout my life. Those who know his work will see how much
my perspective on depth psychology owes to his radical revision-
ing of the whole ®eld.
Chapter 1

Denting my thick skull

My fall into an empty cement pool and the subsequent dance with
death was not the only time I descended into a hole that year.
Several months before the near-fatal accident, I had come to the
end of a long marriage and was intensely depressed by that failure.
This union had not been a placid one. My husband and I were
often separated, living in different houses, cities, even countries.
We had fashioned a life that accommodated two diametrically
opposed natures, each willing to give the other freedom to follow
their calling. Most of the time the tension had been creative, but it
had become increasingly depleting, dangerous. With the end of the
parenting phase, the escalating stress became exhausting. I lacked
the courage to cut the knot. He had enough for both of us and
slashed the Gordian knot in one stroke: he bought his plane ticket
to go back East. Yes, I understood that with our children's
maturity the marriage had lost its necessity. Yes, I understood that
divorce or separation do not necessarily mean the end of love. Yes,
I could see that marriage itself was damaging love more surely
than separation. Yes, I understood that he had reached the stage of
life where he felt entitled to follow his true nature, which required
becoming a kind of recluse. Yes, I understood how badly he
wanted to ®nally get his ®ll of reading, meditation, silence, soli-
tude, peace. Yes, I understood all that. Yet, my whole being was
saying NO! Intellectual understanding does very little to ease the
impact of an emotional blow. No! No! No! Not you, not me,
not yet.
Through my work as a psychotherapist, I have often observed
one of the intriguing mysteries of human nature: the temptation
to stay in a destructive yet familiar relationship, a willingness to
grant others power over our lives, a denial of the possibility of
2 Depth psychology after neuroscience

freedom. Why are we so willing to ask husbands, wives, parents,

friends, children, bosses, gurus, associates, subordinates, to carry
the responsibility of our freedom? Experiencing abandonment, it
was now my turn to feel this unbearable desire to be dependent.
I tried suggesting that freedom might be okay, but not just yet. I
tried begging: why not stay in our charming prison just a bit
longer? He left as planned, taking only his books, leaving me with
all the remains and the remains of all. He returned to the family
home in the East and entered his longed for reclusion.
I thought I would ®nd relief in blackening the character of the
man who had left me. ``After all the things I have done for him!
What a monster!'' I didn't realize, at that time, that love can have
underground rami®cations that run so deep that when I tried to
pull these roots of love out of me, my heart came with it. I spent
months in denial, uprooted in every possible way, until I fell into
that cement hole and almost died.
This hole was no metaphorical hole, that great abyss of
depression where abandoned women dwell. I'm talking about a
literal hole, a small pool, actually, that served as the reservoir for a
fountain that had been emptied in order to cement the tiles. One of
the tiles on the very edge was unstable. I was one of the guests at
this beautiful wedding reception, walking around the empty pool
with my glass of champagne. My foot slipped (or desired to slip,
I'll never know for sure), my arms windmilled the air, my body
went tumbling backwards and my head shattered against the
cement ¯oor of the pool. Massive cerebral hemorrhage and a long
dive into that frigid, metaphorical river called Styx.
After a brief coma, I awoke in the intensive care ward of a
hospital in Santa Fe, where I was visiting at the time of the
accident. I felt no emotion, in the sense that psychology has
traditionally used the term. The physical pain was excruciating,
but I experienced it with that strange detachment that animals
seem to have, a patience under torture, the body busy doing its
thing. There was no ego left to ®lter the impact of pain. I had
returned to that point at which the dispersed particles of being
either fuse again or disintegrate forever. In this primal state, I
drifted like a mere collection of elements, ®ne drops of being
¯oating between the in®nite smallness of my person and the
in®nite vastness of the cosmos.
With a disintegrated ego, the experience of pain is direct,
animalistic, but so is the perception of the beauty of existence.
 Denting my thick skull 3

Everything is immediately terrible and immediately magni®cent.

Emotions are extreme, impossible, strange. I felt an incomprehen-
sible exaltation at the destruction of so much unnecessary clutter
in me, physical pain acting as an instrument with which to scrape
grievances, scratch out gripes, grind residues of resentment. This
dangerous clean-up operation, done under the supervision of
Madam Death herself, provoked unexpected surges of salty joy;
the garbage truck is here, I am ready to ®ll it with all my existen-
tial junk, and my used up, tired, broken self. Death is deliverance.
Welcome to you, Madam Death, come do your work.

Cracked head
Like a wounded bull collapsing in the ring, I feel myself
dying. It is just as well, for my heart is already dead. Soon
there will be no body to suffer the failure of love. Pain, all
modalities of pain, would all be over if I let this fragile bird
or butter¯y the Greeks called ``soul'' take ¯ight. I shut my
eyes and fall into a deep hypnagogic state where I seem to
hallucinate a diaphanous butter¯y hovering over my head
like a minuscule parachute that might be able to carry away
my soul. I am awake, yet this fantasy has the reality that
images have in dreams, as if dreams are oozing through my
injured brain. Whatever the brain pathology that creates that
vision, I am grateful for this butter¯y ¯uttering over my
head, its wings dusted with gold. ``Quick, butter¯y. Hurry.
Carry my soul; I'm open. This is a good time to leave. Let's
¯y off together.'' Like a bather poised on the edge of the
water, anticipating the cool pleasure of deep water of forget-
fulness, I am waiting, still and focused, ready for a plunge
into death.
Instead, a procession of my mistakes and sins against love
enters the room. I greet them. ``Yes, I made all those mis-
takes.'' I let them go with a facility I have never experienced
before. The color is drained out of my guilt; the passion
departs from my suffering. I am consumed, dust on the
butter¯y's wings, feeling the sublime lightness of dying,
4 Depth psychology after neuroscience

heartbroken, sorry, regretful, but not guilty. I did my best,

and it's over.
A male nurse in a white coat comes into my room pushing
a gurney. He starts unhooking the crisscross of tubes and
wires that cover my bed, explaining all the while that he is
going to lift me onto his wheeled stretcher and take me to the
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) room. He disturbs us
terribly, my butter¯y and me, especially when he starts lifting
the upper part of my body because I vomit, a volcanic erup-
tion, shooting lava past the foot of my bed. The young man
steps to the side, tells me not to worry, that projectile
vomiting is a normal effect of a brain injury. Nevertheless,
vomiting or not, he has to get me onto the gurney. This
young man is handsome (at least I can still see that) but the
explosion of vomit completely destroys the tranquility a
butter¯y needs to carry the soul. Too late! The moment is
past for our escape.
It takes a long time for the young man to carry out his
task, but he is skillful. He cleans and handles this heap of
living ¯esh with gentleness. He brings me to my bed after the
brain scan. I fall back into the trance. The butter¯y is gone;
instead there is a strong memory. At the age or 20, I saw El
Cordobes ®ght a bull in Madrid. I believed at the time that I
would never forget El Cordobes, his grace and elegance. In a
pink silk toreador costume embroidered with gold threads,
he was confronting a thousand-pound furious beast. But the
image that now comes back most vividly is not that of the
balletic toreador. It is that of the magni®cent wounded bull.
Hit by El Cordobes, the nape of his neck pierced by the
sword, blood spurts out of him, in rhythm, just like my
volcanic vomiting, yet the bleeding animal refuses to accept
defeat. The memory is very precise: I see the bull's front legs
buckle as he collapses, brought to his knees; he convulses, his
muscles trembling under the black luminous shiny coat; the
blood erupts from the wound, spurting with each heartbeat,
turning the sand of the ring red; the crowd is silent for a long
 Denting my thick skull 5

time and then, as if angry at death herself, the bull struggles

desperately and gets to his feet. He charges once more, with
surprising energy. El Cordobes dances a ballet of avoidance.
Finally, the bull collapses, dead, and the crowd applauds this
last glorious ®ght as much as the toreador's victory.
There is within me such a beast, one obsessed with sur-
vival. I feel the same desperate energy, my body a heavy
beast weighed down with pain. The butter¯y is not alone.
Instead of the lightness of sweet death, the bull that storms
out of my imagination commands me to get back in my
body, to charge once more, to accept pain and to ®ght
against death. The pain that grabs me is keeping me alive by
keeping me in my animal body. There is energy in pain; it is
the energy of that heavy, wounded black bull insisting on
life, while the butter¯y prefers ¯ight and light. Neither of
these images seems ready to give in. There is a battle of
internal images. A movie is playing in my psyche. I am
completely absorbed by the combat between bull and butter-
¯y. The imaginal activity keeps me alert, interested.
Chaos can be freeing. The chaos of physical pain is break-
ing me open, like cracks in the wall that let the light in.
Strapped to my bed, there is nothing I can do. I can only be. I
feel a sublime surrender to the bruising, cleansing process of
destruction. The person that I was, and could not tolerate
being, is being killed. I ®nd repose in this destruction.
At regular intervals, a nurse assaults me with a super-
bright light to see if my pupils' re¯exes are still functioning.
The brain hemorrhage seems to have intensi®ed, a worsening
of my condition since I was admitted to intensive care. Her
¯ashlight in my face feels like a scene out of an old detective
movie ± a dazzling light directed at the suspect's face, endless
interrogation without respite. This nurse is a severe matron
with the doggedness of a cop. She repeats the same questions
every hour or so: what is your name, the city of your birth,
your age, the day of the week? After four of these sessions of
interrogation, I suggest that maybe the conversation would
6 Depth psychology after neuroscience

be more lively if she would ask different questions and if I

could ask her some too. That is impossible, she says. These
are the questions she has been taught to ask to see whether
the brain is still functioning correctly. Such platitudes dis-
courage me. I feel utterly alone, an abandoned carcass, of no
interest to anybody. I call on the butter¯y. ``Let's go. Spread
your wings. Let me slip away. Farewell, one and all. I'm
®nally going to graduate and receive the supreme diploma
that will prove my autonomy: I shall die alone! The queen of
autonomy, dying without a fuss! Politely, I'll leave without
imposing, so proud of my wings.''
Every time I try to give the butter¯y the victory, the bull
rises in anger. ``Stop your nonsense!'' commands the bull.
``I'll make you puke up the very water you're drinking.''
Bang! The volcano bursts into activity, splashing again, not
only my pajamas and my sheets, but also the impeccable
white uniform of the strict humorless nurse who is again
checking my re¯exes with her ¯ashlight. She is offended by
the vomit on her white uniform, her face frowning in disgust.
I agree. I am a disgusting animal, and I apologize as best I
can, shame inspiring a stupid excuse: that I have never
vomited on anyone before and I am terribly sorry! She
abruptly leaves, and I remain in my smelly mess for the next
hour. I take it as punishment for my bad manners and feel
strangely, profoundly hurt, sinking into an ocean of self-pity.
This is so like my mother, impatient with me for being sick,
for giving her extra work, impatient even with the expression
of my clingy adoration for her. The professional persona
of nurse seems to ask for busyness, coldness, remoteness.
Mother was a nurse. All my complexes start having a party. I
am a helpless abandoned baby again.
The nurse, having changed her uniform, ®nally returns in
the company of an aide, a Mexican woman who does not
speak English, and whose task is to clean up the bed and the
body in it. This woman and I are left alone. She stares at me
for a time that seems very long. That stare is something I
 Denting my thick skull 7

have never seen; she looks through me, not at me. Her silent
stare is a seeing and a speaking at the same time. I see that she
is seeing that I am someone between life and death, undecided.
Her eyes are saying that she has no intention of in¯uencing
me, nor of scolding me; that there is no need for shame; that
she is not disgusted by bodies, dead or alive, or bodies in
between, like mine, spurting vomit and ¯irting with death.
She starts removing my soiled hospital gown; I let go of all
my rigidities. She holds my upper body in her arms, gentle
yet strong. I relax, cuddle, and she begins to hum a tune, in a
low, rich voice. It sounds like the Ave Maria, but not quite
that, although from what I understand of the words, they
seem to implore Mother Mary for my sake. I absorb every
note of the consoling song. Her voice penetrates me, as
profound a penetration as in lovemaking. A woman making
love to another woman with her voice? I snuggle up against
her heart, smell her skin, ®nd refuge in her goodness. The
more I receive of her compassion the more her voice opens,
receiving the entirety of my being in her song. For an instant,
I love that woman I don't even know, immediately, totally,
absolutely. I love her body, I love her soul; it is a visitation of
the Great Mother. It opens up a silent stream of tears of
in®nite gratitude that such human beings exist.
The strict nurse comes back and breaks the sweet spell. I
am saddened at the thought that the medical establishment
does not seem to understand the power of those rare and
precious individuals whose hands, voices, smiles, bodies,
eyes, smell, and heart have the power to give a transfusion of
life, from heart to heart. Their gift is immeasurable. The
strict nurse holds a form in her hand, a paper I am supposed
to sign, and she explains why. I can't understand her expla-
nations. I feel very stupid for making her repeat herself. It
occurs to me that the blood that is increasingly invading my
brain is turning me into an idiot; my mind is slowing down
by the hour. I understand very little of her long sentences full
of complex causal links, scienti®c information, legal issues. I
8 Depth psychology after neuroscience

can only ``get it'' if the sentence is short, followed by silence,

to give me time to process. I have been transformed over-
night into a simpleton with an education. My mind feels
closer to that of a cat than to the intellectual person I used to
be.1 Last night, when I was admitted to intensive care, I
could still remember my phone number. Not today. The
nurse explains a second time; she seems to get it that I am
somehow damaged goods. Finally, I get it. I am being asked
to sign a form giving the doctor permission to trepan me if
the internal hemorrhage doesn't stop before tomorrow
morning. Explanations. Explanations. Explanations. Finally,
the question: will you sign? The answer: okay! The feeling:
indifference. Do whatever you want with my body; I can't
stand it any more, it is garbage!
An hour after I have signed, the neurologist informs me
that trepanning might help me survive, but it is impossible to
foresee the damage that the ongoing hemorrhage might cause
between now and the decision to intervene. I call for the
nurse who'd brought me the form to tell her to tear it up.
The risk is too high, and I don't want to live like a green
cucumber strapped to a bed! This time there is agreement in
the menagerie. The bull and the butter¯y form a consensus.
Let's get out of this mess by all means. Why have a body that
might not be able to walk, eat, swim, make love, ride a
bicycle, or dig in the garden? So, we agree; we tear up that
paper and take off, the butter¯y on the bull's tail! I gesticu-
late, argue with the nurse, explain and beg her to tear up the
form I signed earlier, but I am confused, agitated, incoherent.
The words come out of my mouth unformed, like computer
garbage. The nurse doesn't understand. She thinks I am
agitated and delirious and boosts the dose of tranquilizer in
my IV. My inner screen grows fuzzy, and I return to the
night sky of half-consciousness for the rest of my second
night in intensive care.
The next day, I inspect the machines I am hooked up to
and the many screens by the bed that monitor them. From
 Denting my thick skull 9

what I can feel with my hands not ®nding any bandages

on my head, there was no trepanation. A room in intensive
care feels like being inside an airplane cockpit, a surrealist
environment, a sci-® set. I wonder which image will domi-
nate today, black bull or white butter¯y? A different nurse,
sitting at her computer at the central station, which I see
from the open door of my cell, hears an alarm and comes
running into my room at top speed. She too seems to have
scolding on her mind. ``You're not breathing the way you're
supposed to. This screen measures the amount of oxygen
going to your brain. You have to maintain a level of 80 to 95
percent, and you're not getting over 55 percent!'' For some-
one like me who has spent all her adult life in an academic
environment, a grade of 55 percent means I am a failure. At
least the capacity to speak with some coherence has returned.
``Well, in that case, I guess I ¯unk. You'd better get one of
those body bags. I'm ready to go.'' I happen to know the
statistic: 80 percent of patients who are admitted to the
intensive care unit and remain there past the ®rst 24 hours of
diagnosis come out as corpses. I have now been here more
than 24 hours, so my chance of getting out of here alive is 20
percent. I can hear the sound of the long zipper on the plastic
body bag and it doesn't frighten me at all.
The butter¯y is winning when on the fourth day an unex-
pected event happens, a surprise of the kind that sometimes
shows up when things reach their very worst. I would have
called it a miracle if the literalists hadn't spoiled the word for
the rest of us. Who wrote that the sense of the sacred is a step
in the evolution of consciousness? I no longer agree. The
sense of the sacred enters my room on that fourth day, as
simply as could be, in the person of my 30-year-old daughter,
a strong-minded young woman with an excellent sense of
organization. She is a scienti®cally minded young person, just
as the two registered nurses probably were before they
burned out and ®lled with vinegar. Tall and straight, she
appears in the doorway and lets me know, ``Here I am!
10 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Don't worry, Mom, I'm taking care of everything. I'll take

you back to your bed in Santa Barbara.'' As her eyes take in
the environment of the intensive care cell, I see her realize
what kind of butter¯y I am calling on, and I see her heart
break. Her back, so straight an instant ago, begins to bend,
and her lips begin to tremble like a little girl on the edge of
tears. She moves forward, lies upon my bed, her head against
my heart. She is my little girl again, a child who isn't at all
ready to lose her mom. I can feel it. I hadn't considered that
side of things until now.
The room slowly ®lls with golden light, absolute radiance.
Her love for me, and mine for her, makes me aware of the
blood moving through my veins, charging my cells with equal
parts of oxygen and love. I literally feel my heart and my
brain, even though we are not supposed to have the nervous
apparatus to feel those parts of the body, but it feels as if I do.
The strongest sentiment, the one that dominates, is the felt
sense that all human beings are related, the ones we love and
the ones we barely know, like the Mexican lady who sang to
me; the living and the departed; the matronly strict nurse and
my mom and my kid. All are part of the invisible rhizome
that binds us to the same root, that sends the current from
one pole to the other, that inverts pain and joy, love and
death, presence and absence, pain and deliverance, the living
and the dead, daughter and mother. I experience how the
poles can switch. My daughter is mothering me as I surrender
to my child's arms. I am her baby, and she the good breast.
That's my sense of the sacred ± that structure, that rhizome,
that bond of love that decides if I am to live or die.
For one perfect hour, both of us lying still on the bed, I feel
the physical warmth of that illumination. It is one of the
sweetest and strongest experiences I have ever known, along
with giving birth. I see my life scroll before me, like some kind
of last-minute conscience examination. I ask my daughter to
forgive me for my mistakes, which I now see so clearly. ``I
thought I was helping you, but now I see how it was a will to
 Denting my thick skull 11

control. I'm sorry. I prevented you from ®nding your way by

yourself.'' And more. Confessions! Some worded, others
silent and private. Mostly failures of love. Blind spots that
are suddenly revealed. All my defensive walls are silently
crashing down to reveal my sins. These sins have nothing to
do with the Christian God; they are all about human love in
all its forms, including love of work well done. Sorry, God,
you are not at the center of my attention, you never really
were, and still are not at this ultimate hour. Frankly, I am
glad my devotions were never really to you, because if they
had been, it would now feel like an unbearable waste,
bouquets of devotion sent to the wrong address. The regrets I
do feel now have nothing to do with how I rejected you,
transcendent Christian God, absolutely nothing to do with
my lack of faith in your line of religiosity. My fallenness is
not from your heaven. The examination of my conscience is
not about sins against your kind of god. It is all about actual
human beings to whom I might have been more generous,
more receiving, more giving, more devoted; all about tasks I
could have done better.
On my list of regrets, there is also one which is really
simple but persistent: I wish I had spent less time getting
things done, checking them off my to-do list, running toward
the next item, and more time actually enjoying doing
whatever it is I was doing. If I live, I vow to be somebody
different, ideally somebody able to feel absolute bliss at the
fact of having two good legs to walk with, eyes to read good
books with, and a body to feel the sensuousness of every
moment.
It is the very ®rst time I am honestly willing to confront my
shadow in its full dimension, wide and long. It comes again
with the grace I felt the ®rst day in intensive care: I see my
faults but not through guilt. I am being led to understand
that, try as we may to love well, we also do harm, even to,
especially to, those we love; having a shadow is part of the
world of the living. The grace is that the divinity of love
12 Depth psychology after neuroscience

seems ready to absolve me. I see my mistakes and I under-

stand they are human. I am limited, a mix of light and
opacity.
I have never seen anything as beautiful as the light that
¯ows from the bed on which my daughter and I lay, never
felt the bond of love with such simplicity, imperfection and
all. It is a miracle happening, a very simple and common one:
I have ceased to ®nd fault with the world, even if it is
delivering death to me. Tears ¯ow again, tears of joy. I
cannot tell if that hour of illumination is part of leaving the
world of the living or if it signals my return. I really don't
know, I am so completely joyfully exhausted. Am I coming
or going?
The butter¯y comes back to answer that question. It folds
its wings into a cocoon, and takes refuge in my heart, as if to
say: ``We shall meet again, but not just now.'' The image of
the bull also reappears. It has lost its ferocity; it is now a
tired old bull, resting, breathing heavy, as quiet as a sleeping
cat, calmed by in®nite grace, not yet dead, just old and
fatigued.
The next day, the neurologist pays me a visit. He is sur-
prised, perplexed. According to this morning's brain scan,
the hemorrhage has stopped and the blood is clearing out
from what he calls the brain's cisterns (the folds of the
brain). There is no sign of a clot forming. He has witnessed
this kind of rapid healing before, but only among children. In
the case of a woman my age, 55 years old, such an occur-
rence is highly improbable. He is smiling, talks about the
sometimes random goodness of life's lottery, declares me a
very lucky person. I would like to tell him that when I
was sheltered in my daughter's arms, I was a child again.
Through her arms, the Great Mother rocked me in a silence
®lled with the light shed by particles of love made visible.
``That is how your patient was healed, Doctor.'' But the
medical profession, in general, doesn't care for such leaps of
mysticism. I simply thank him for his skill as a neurologist
 Denting my thick skull 13

and demand that my legal rights be respected: I want a

release from the hospital, now, today. I'll come in daily for
routine checks but I want out this minute. Generous friends,
the ones at whose house I was visiting when the accident
occurred, have offered a place for me to stay with my
daughter until I can travel. She and I remain alone in a truly
magni®cent house, I the baby, she the mother, for two
perfect weeks. Then we ¯y home and try to resume our lives
and our roles.
Chapter 2

A fable
Mom, Dad, and me, me, me

Wisdom can be learned

When I returned from my journey of pain, I found I had only one

entry in my travel diary, one central idea scribbled on the envelope
containing the release form from the hospital. It was a kind of
memo to myself: wisdom can be learned. Life's ordeals offer an
opportunity to penetrate the outer shell of our persona and to
plunge deep into the core of our being, the place where our own
psychological intelligence is waiting our arrival. One discovers a
very simple truth: psychological health does not exist in the
absolute. We all have the possibility of wisdom of which there are
many forms: one of these is psychological wisdom. It does not
show up as wisdom in full bloom, but as a seed, ready to germin-
ate, that exists in every human being. Were our society attuned to
the potential and value of this kernel, we would nurture the
psyche's wisdom from a very early age. Wisdom is not a given, not
some thing. It is more like an orientation. Just as the seed that is
germinating grows toward the light, psychological wisdom is that
compass within each of us, pointing in what seems like the most
fruitful direction. Wisdom is a destination rather than a destiny, a
goal rather than a state.
All forms of wisdom and all schools of spiritual discipline agree
on one principle: we all start our journey as a needy, vulnerable,
impotent child. If the needs of the child are not addressed properly
the ®rst time, the adult must eventually go back and ®nally address
them. That is a basic task of psychotherapy: to go back and give
the inner child what he or she needs to grow up. Nevertheless, the
possibility of wisdom begins when one is ®nally able to leave the
 A fable: Mom, Dad, and me, me, me 15

developmental model. There is a junction where Buddhism most

obviously meets psychotherapy in proclaiming: yes, compassion
allows this child to stop whimpering. Yes, paying attention to the
inner child supports the life force that naturally grows toward
maturity. Prophets, healers, and sages all show aspects of the Great
Mother. They help us grow by feeding us the Great Mother's milk
of compassion.
As an adult, I have drunk of this sweet milk; without this gift, I
would now be dead. Nevertheless, the Great Mother also personi-
®es the vigilance of the mother who expects the child to grow up ±
otherwise the inner child turns into a tyrant, the adult remains
infantile, a puffed up, pompous tyrannical big baby in whom the
seed of wisdom is lost. A wise psychotherapist addresses not only
the unmet need for mothering, but also the unmet need for
separation. Re-mothering consists of giving both the nurturing and
the weaning.
Beginning with the basic cast of Mother±Father±Child, every
school of psychology has offered theoretical variations, some
bizarre and far-fetched, but all point at a core that is the same
through thousands of years of philosophical and spiritual teach-
ings. It is that core, that consensus, that basic archetypal story that
will be my starting point. I am asking here, in this chapter, what is
the basic plot, what is the nut in the shell? A consensus is often a
truth that all can agree on because of its simplicity. Nevertheless,
these ``simple truths'' are rare, and they are crucial because they
are at the roots of our collective values. When a discipline develops
as quickly and in as many directions as did psychology, there
comes a point where we lose sight of the basics; we can't see the
foundations of the huge theoretical building anymore; we forget to
examine the solid anchors that are the places of agreement. It may
be useful, from time to time, to remind ourselves that all humans
(not just the wise psychologists) have some perennial values,
archetypal principles, spiritual and theoretical cornerstones that
sustain the whole edi®ce.
The following fable is my attempt at summarizing this consen-
sus among philosophers, psychologists, gurus, sages and spiritual
leaders of different periods and places. Instead of the genre of
theory, I am presenting these ideas in the highly subjective genre of
the fable, and as an invitation to compare my imagining with your
own subjective version of the same story.
16 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Casting
The casting involves three characters: Archetypal Child; Great
Mother; Archetypal Father.

Archetypal Child
The Child represents the universal state of vulnerability and needi-
ness of the newborn baby. The Jungians, who like the sophisti-
cation of Latin, refer to this archetype as the Puer (puer ˆ child), or
Puer Aeternus (Eternal Child). This archetypal Child remains active
all our life and contains both the vulnerability and the vitality of
youth. We regress back to its vulnerability each time life wounds us.
We feel the joy of the Child each time we experience enthusiasm
to learn, discover, experiment. The archetype is activated when
the soldier can't sleep because of terrifying nightmares, when the
worker is professionally burned out and starts crying on the job,
when the lovesick person can't get out of bed to face the day's
work. Archetypal Child screams: ``Take care of me, I can't, I won't.
Love me, give me joy, otherwise I'll die.''

Great Mother
She is compassion personi®ed, a quality which is the essence of
mothering. Mothering and compassion are synonymous and can
be offered by a male or a female, a sister or an uncle, a friend,
lover, cellmate, or, if one has luck, one's own biological mother.
Sometimes, the biological father plays the role of Great Mother
rather than that of Father and that is why we need an archetypal
language to speak of it, not a literal designation. An archetypal
role is distinct from the social or biological function; what counts
is the experience of the archetype. One absolutely needs to have
been touched by the caressing hand of a Great Mother, to have
been held in a tender gaze that does not condemn us for our
weakness. By ``Great Mother'' I mean that experience of uncon-
ditional love, without which nothing small, nothing vulnerable,
nothing in its infancy can survive, not even the ``baby'' ideas, the
tentative impotent style of the ®rst sentences that were in the very
®rst draft of this book. No writer in his or her right mind would
risk showing a ®rst draft to a critical mind, not until the text
``grows up'' to stand on its own and sustain some measure of
 A fable: Mom, Dad, and me, me, me 17

criticism. Everything new, young, fragile ± even the ®rst shoot of

what will become a mighty oak tree ± ®rst appears as a vulnerable
sprout needing protection and nurturance; otherwise, it is crushed
and dies.
Great Mother has many appellations: the maternal principle; the
capacity for compassion; the tender-loving-care principle; or the
chicken-soup-healing factor. I prefer not to call it the feminine
principle, because that has led to many misunderstandings. To
think that the female gender is more gifted with maternal qualities
is a philosophical mistake ®lled with tragic consequences for both
genders. Compassion is a human quality and ``Mother'' symbol-
izes it. If mothers were not motherly, humanity would never have
survived because human babies are the most vulnerable creatures
in the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, the archetypal quality exists
in every one of us, with the same possibility of development or
non-development.
The Great Mother's message is essentially one of compassion: ``I
love you, little one, simply because you exist. Don't cry. I'm here. I
will take care of you, feed you, heal you, caress you, and give you
a taste of the nectar of tenderness.'' When Great Mother refuses to
give of herself (which means when the little mother is impatient
and says: ``Get out of my way and take care of yourself''), the
archetypal Child experiences pure panic, the very essence and
source of all panic.

Archetypal Father
This powerful Father, or Cosmic Father, or Great Father, or God
the Father, is the third and last character in our fable. This Father
informs the Child that there is such a thing as conditional love,
and that the principles of law and order, although they may vary
in their applications, are universal. The archetypal Father is repre-
sented in mythology with that thundering voice and authorita-
tively raised eyebrows that the Romans represented as Jupiter, the
Greeks as Zeus, and Christians as God the Father. These Father
divinities personify authority and responsibility. The Child draws
a sense of power and protection from a powerful father, expressed
by all kids when they boast ``My father is stronger than yours'' (or
richer, taller, braver, has a bigger car, bigger gun, bigger ®st or the
most powerful computer in the neighborhood). The projection is
carried over to any person who holds authority (king, general,
18 Depth psychology after neuroscience

president, boss, chief, captain, sheriff ). ``My president is more

powerful than yours and I follow as long as I feel I need the
protection he offers.''
The Father archetype is present in the teacher who ¯unks you at
the exam but also can help you prepare for it; he (or she) may be
the bank of®cer who informs you that you are overdrawn, but
who will also help you start your business with a loan; he is the
policeman who writes you a ticket, but also protects you from
thieves and thugs; he is the Inland Revenue Service agent who
disallows a tax deduction because he serves the principle of redis-
tribution of wealth; he is the referee who sends you to the bench,
thus keeping the game within the limits of fair play. The terrifying
news for Archetypal Child is that this ®gure of authority will
impose his rules and regulations, has strict codes of rewards and
punishments, and holds on to principles of order. Archetypal Child
rages: ``What are you telling me? I, the Little King of the House,
have to obey rules? If not, smack, whap? I really don't like it!''
Now that we have the cast of characters, let's look at the plot.

First Trial: born needy

Child: I am so small, Great Mother. I implore you to
take care of me. I just came into this world. I
don't even know how to distinguish between
hunger and cold, between hurt and fear. My
consciousness is undeveloped. I have no culture
and no language. All I have is this body, this
bundle of tyrannical needs. ``It'' feels pleasure or
pain. It is not ``I'' because I don't have an ``I'' yet.
To be honest, I don't have the slightest idea of
who ``I'' is, or who ``I'' can be. I beg you to put
sweet words in my ears to stir the desire to learn
language. And once you have given me the words,
I will want stories. I want them rich and
complicated. I want the stories to make me feel
the presence of a humanity that is dense, with
many protective layers made of all the generations
of wise humans. I need to feel a part of a large,
knowledgeable, extended tribe, compassionate
enough to contain my life and protect me from
harm. Most of all, Great Mother, I want you to
 A fable: Mom, Dad, and me, me, me 19

de®ne me. Look at me with eyes of adoration.

Become the mirror that reveals me as your Sun
King, the source of all light, the center of all joy in
your life.
Great Mother: Don't worry, little one. I'll give you all that. My
task is to convince you to incarnate, to take
pleasure in living in a body and for that you need
pleasure and joy.
Child: Caresses, songs, cuddling, cooing and kisses, will
you give me all those?
Great Mother: You need them as much as you need food,
warmth, language and a clan. Without joy, you
may not want to incarnate fully, you may fail to
thrive. So, you shall get the whole package. But
listen! You must begin right now to transform
and start maturing to become a full human being.
Child: What if I don't?
Great Mother: I'll drop you, baby! And if I drop you, you die.
Child: Okay, I get it! What do I have to do?
Great Mother: There are many trials, each one interesting and
dif®cult.
Child: If it's hard, I want you to do it for me.
Great Mother: If I do it for you, you will never be able to say
``I''. No ego, no competence; no ego, no freedom.
Child: I want an ego. I want freedom. I want the world
and I want it now. What's the ®rst trial? Bring it
on then.
Great Mother: Here's the ®rst trial: separate! Starting now, begin
differentiating the discomfort of hunger from the
discomfort of cold. Toilet train, because your shit
stinks, even for Mommy. Discover that ``you''
and ``I'' equal two, not one. Understand that I am
less and less at your beck and call. As you grow,
you'll have to abdicate the throne.
Child: I don't want to.
Great Mother: Of course you don't. Your resistance is precisely
the ®rst step in your education. I'll be careful not
to overwhelm you. I will administer the discom-
fort gradually. However, if you persist in your
dependency, all the people around you will
distance themselves from you. Here is your ®rst
20 Depth psychology after neuroscience

choice: either you detach, or you'll remain forever

without ego, without self, without a rudder,
without a compass, without identity.
Child: Well, in that case, I'll try. Is this ordeal as terrible
as I imagine?
Great Mother: It is. And many fail. It can also be exhilarating,
since it is the beginning of your freedom.
Child: I'm in. Test me.
Great Mother: You see the apple on the table? If you are hungry,
don't call for me. Grab it and bite into it with
your new teeth. Devour the apple, not your
mother. It's delicious. You'll feel free.

Second Trial: the matter of Matter

Child: I am ready for the second trial, Great Mother.
Great Mother: It takes place in my realm, but I am not the guide.
``Matter'' will be your teacher. Discover the
hardness of metal, the burn of ®re, the freshness
of morning dew, the softness of velvet, the beauty
of water, and the danger of water. Matter
sometimes resists and sometimes collaborates.
Matter is demanding. If you show contempt for
her, she extracts her revenge by polluting the very
matter of which you are made.
Child: Where, how will I meet Matter, Mother?
Great Mother: Just play. For now, all you have to do is play with
everything, to learn the multiple forms of matter.
Productivity comes later, in the realm of the
Father.
Child: I can do that: play!

Third Trial: meet the Father

Father: Your third trial is with me, your Father. Discover
that there are such things as war, competition,
and strife. Enter a world of buying and selling,
partnerships and takeovers, law and order, rules
and regulations, rewards and punishments.
Child: You mean I have to work? End of play?
 A fable: Mom, Dad, and me, me, me 21

Father: It can still feel like play, but it has to be pro-

ductive, to give something back. You can build,
create, discover, invent, write, preach, teach,
cook, carve, paint, produce wealth, administer it,
pass it along, multiply it, distribute it. Work for
yourself and work for others. Give your best, test
your limits, give, get, go, go, go.
Child: OK. Give me a job.
Father: No. Find it yourself.
Child: What if I screw up?
Father: If you fail, you will be one of those weaklings
who constantly complain that the system is rigged
anyway and why work if I can't win and Father is
asking too much of me and it's too hard and if I
can't beat the system, I quit!
Child: What if I fail at only one of the three trials?
Father: To reduce the humiliation of failure, you will
devalue everything that relates to the trial you just
failed. For example, if you fail to honor the
Mother principle, you will devalue desire. Why
have desire if Mother won't satisfy it? If you fail
to honor matter, you will be incapable of enjoy-
ing the sensuousness of the world because nature
is matter. If you fail to honor my principle, you
will end up homeless, incompetent, unreliable,
useless.
Child: And what if I fail all three?
Father: You will never feel truly alive. You will never ®nd
meaning. Events will happen to you, good and
bad. However, your focus will be on protection of
your self-esteem and you will reduce all events to
their concreteness, missing all the juice in life. No
conversations, only monologues. No relation-
ships, only manipulative tricks. No give and take,
only steal, hit and run.
Child: Wow! No glory, no money, no honey, lonely? I
think I know what you mean because I met a little
girl like that. I baked her a cake for her birthday,
a recipe from the Great Mother, a really sweet-
nutritional-bio-healthy-organic-wholesome-fabu-
lous cake. She saw only a cake, only food, not the
22 Depth psychology after neuroscience

love that I was manifesting with it. I think she has

failed all three trials.
Father: Exactly! Imagine this little girl when she grows
up: sex will be a token of exchange, marriage only
a contract, work only money, success only a
social obligation. If you fail all three initiations,
you will think: ``Is that all? Is that what life is
supposed to be? It is not very much!'' We have
many names for those who fail: narcissists, egot-
ists, egomaniacs, infantile adults who remain self-
serving, self-centered, self-obsessed as only babies
have a right to be. Sel®shness is a curse, it takes
you out of the rapport of exchange with the
world. You live in penury because you can't see
how life is a perpetual exchange of energy, a give
and take, a lovemaking with the world. Sel®sh-
ness is a state of damnation. What you want is
love for your self, for others, for the world. Your
Mother and I bless you Child. Alleluia.
Chapter 3

Therapy as cure
The medical model

It is tempting to believe that the soul can be healed of its suffering,

that analyzing one's emotions will ®x the problematic psyche.
``Please heal me doctor, I can't take it any more'' is an attitude that
characterizes the beginning of most psychotherapies. The pursuit
of ``cure'' has kept the business going, everybody trying all kinds of
®x-it approaches, some patients for the better part of their adult
lives. The sad paradox is that real bene®ts of an expansion of
consciousness cannot be obtained until one experiences the exis-
tential dead-end of believing in a cure. The pursuit of conscious-
ness, of wisdom ± even of happiness ± is the opposite of a
treatment. Human relations ± and the suffering they generate ±
have been analyzed by all kinds of social scientists, and their
®ndings fascinate, but the aspects of human relations that have
depth and complexity cannot be revealed by explanatory models
borrowed from science. Scienti®c modeling works beautifully for
scientists, but fails miserably when trying to ``explain'' the psyche
as one would explain the night sky with current ®ndings in
cosmology. Psychological constellations are unstable because they
are based on one's personal myth, which is always replaceable
by another myth. Here is an example of a situation where an
approach focused on healing the symptom completely missed the
deeper aspect of the problem. This young grandmother was my
student and she was proud of having stopped the following attempt
by the school psychologist to ``heal'' her grandson.
24 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Grandma, somebody killed my dog

My grandson's puppy dog was killed by a careless driver.
The child ± he is seven ± was so distressed that he developed
a nervous twitch in an eye. It worsened every day and at the
end of the month the school psychologist called the mother
(my daughter). The counselor insisted that the symptom was
pathological,1 that the child was not functioning, not inter-
acting normally ± withdrawn and sulky ± and would the
mother please suggest to the child to come to the of®ce of the
counselor on the next day for treatment. To this invitation,
my grandson reacted by refusing to go back to school ever
again. He felt he was being ``summoned'' to the counselor's
of®ce, an attack on his soul.
The school psychologist, I am convinced, would have done
her best to help my grandchild, who was obviously in need of
assistance, but I found the ``summoning'' very disturbing
without quite being able to put my ®nger on the problem. I
resented the idea of treating him as if it was ``sick'' to grieve a
whole month for the loss of a puppy. So I got into my car,
drove the 200 miles, stayed at my daughter's and kept my
grandson out of school for a week. We talked about life and
death, we discussed pressing philosophical questions: Do dogs
have souls? Why is there death? Are we all mortals? Even
Mom and Dad and you, Grandma? And why and how am I to
live in view of such evil? On our last day, we performed a
goodbye ceremony, burying ± in lieu of a body ± the pair of
slippers the puppy had last chewed. We framed a picture. We
discussed that spring might be a good time to get a new puppy
because spring is the season of new life and that, just like his
life continues the life I was given by generations of ancestors,
a new puppy will continue a long history of humans loving
the company of dogs. The twitch had disappeared on the third
day, naturally, and never came back.

Of course, this boy's face exhibiting a ``sudden, rapid, recurrent,

non-rhythmic, stereotyped motor movement''2 can rightly be
 Therapy as cure: the medical model 25

called a symptom, but a treatment approach to this kind of prob-

lem can also be deeply wrong. A symptom implies it should be
®xed. What exactly needs ®xing? The boy's instinct told him that
his soul needed no ®xing and he was right in resisting the
intrusion. The cure-it-®x-it model is absolutely ®ne with what
lends itself to ®xing. A broken bone needs ®xing, a rotten tooth
too. But this boy's symptom was covering a non-®xable issue: the
revelation of our mortality.
The attempt to ``®x a soul'' diminishes life, it harms the psyche,
it dries up the seed of wisdom. Children too are faced with deep
philosophical questions. The death of a puppy may bring up all the
big issues: mortality, the tragic sense of life, the suffering of the
innocents. At the age of seven, this huge discovery calls not for
treatment but for initiation, which is what the grandmother gave
him by having a week of talking philosophically with the child.
His initiation was the opposite of a ®xing. It started with the
wisdom of his grandmother and ended with him a wiser little boy,
aware that we are mortals and that evil things can happen to nice
beings. As for the ritual, it prepared him concretely for a new
puppy in the spring.
The clinical competence of a school psychologist can be a
crucial element in the community. No one denies that medical
research has resulted in a more and more targeted medication for
the treatment of mental disorders based on neurohormonal or
chemical imbalances. The example of bipolar disorders was one of
the ®rst obvious demonstrations of the value of a neurochemical
approach. No talking cure could ever pretend to compete with the
right medication for such physiologically driven problems. The
school clinician is asked to spot troubled kids and it is not an easy
task to differentiate between a psychiatric disorder that needs
clinical attention and a philosophical dilemma that calls for a
conversation with a wise adult. Nevertheless, that distinction is
crucial to the evolution or decadence of our culture.
For all its usefulness, the DSM remains organized around fuzzy
concepts such as ``mood disorders,'' ``anxiety disorders,'' and
``personality disorders'' even though nobody in the ®eld knows for
sure and with cultural and historical consistency what these basic
concepts really refer to. The introductory text of the DSM stipu-
lates: ``the term `mental disorder' unfortunately implies a distinc-
tion between mental disorders and physical disorders that is a
reductionistic anachronism of mind/body dualism. A compelling
26 Depth psychology after neuroscience

literature documents that there is much physical in mental dis-

orders and much mental in physical disorders. The problem raised
by the term `mental disorders' has been much clearer than its
solution, and, unfortunately, the term persists in the title of DSM-
IV because we have not found an appropriate substitute. More-
over, although this manual provides a classi®cation of mental
disorders, it must be admitted that no de®nition adequately speci-
®es precise boundaries for the concept of `mental disorder'.''3
History is ®lled with examples of people who had alarming
personality pro®les, enough to justify hospitalization and heavy
medication, yet were a gift to humanity: Virginia Woolf, Helen
Keller, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, Amadeus
Mozart, James Joyce, Henry Thoreau, Woody Allen. I personally
know a few crackpots, marginal, fanciful, maladapted individuals,
who score very poorly in terms of the categories of the DSM, yet
who possess human qualities that make them precious beings to
their friends and community. And a man like Adolph Eichmann
seems to have been, according to psychiatric examination,
absolutely normal.
The critique of psychology and psychiatry as a normalizing
power in the service of dominant values has been written over and
over again in the past 60 years. Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault,
Thomas Szasz, Ronald Laing, Daniel Cooper and many others
in¯uenced a whole generation of intellectuals who took on the task
of exposing the relativity of the norms by which mental health is
judged. Their insights are still relevant and brilliant, yet their
impact was primarily on university professors. Very little of their
critique seems to have reached the practitioners, the American
Psychological Association, the insurance companies, or the culture
as a whole. To take but one example: many powerful organiza-
tions in the US, in Europe, and in Canada still use personality tests
to screen applications and categorize their employees. Psycho-
technicians administer the tests and the results are presented as
objective. The calculations, for sure, are objective and the statis-
tical analysis can help detect psychological de®ciencies, or psycho-
social pathology, which is a negative ®nding. Yet, for these tests to
be able to do what they pretend to do (®nd the best person for the
job), we would need a de®nition of the normal personality. We
don't and can't have such a de®nition because as soon as we try to
de®ne mental health we enter a vast territory that cannot be put
into neat categories, for the simple reason that this territory is
 Therapy as cure: the medical model 27

never the same. Such testing confuses simple with simplistic,

limpid with formulaic. Simplistic thinking is fallacious when
dealing with psychological complexity.
If one had to choose one adjective that most quali®es the psyche,
it would be ``complex.'' This complexity is unavoidable in part
because each psyche is a world unto itself. Complexity is unavoid-
able for another reason: the psyche won't lie still, it is not a ®xed
object. It dances with history, evolves or regresses according to the
evolution of culture. For example, it would never have come to the
mind of a gynecologist practicing in Victorian England to question
sexual frigidity in a woman. Frigidity seemed perfectly normal to
the good doctor. The personality pro®le for the well-bred woman
of that time was described as naturally weak, naturally frigid,
naturally dependent. The portrait of normality made her immin-
ently vulnerable, with a weak libido, absolutely incapable of
appreciating expert lovemaking. A proper husband was not to
expect a strong sexual response from his wife. Unless a woman
was ready to appear like a nymphomaniac, a prostitute, or a
sexual degenerate, she had better not suggest that sexuality could
be intensely pleasurable. Couples who discovered by themselves
the possibility of reciprocal passion (there were plenty even in the
Victorian era) remained discreet about the torrid nature of their
discovery. They were content to escape between two sheets the
dryness of a period ruled by a monarch obsessed with prudery.
These ordinary people were ``seeing through'' the so-called per-
sonality pro®le for the normal woman, and in doing so augmented
their freedom.
In itself, the fact that normal identity cannot be de®ned with any
certainty is not a problem but a safeguard. The haziness of the
de®nitions allows us to correct our mistakes and to avoid
ideological corsets. The horrors of racism and sexism have at their
core a rigidifying of identities. Whites are like this and Blacks are
like that. Aryans are different from Jews. Men are from Mars and
women are from Venus. Women are more attuned to nature, body
and emotions and men to culture, spirit, and ideas. On and on,
right out of the can of clicheÂs. Rigid identities eventually burst at
the seams ± which is all the more convenient, since identity should
be like a comfortable garment, suf®ciently ample to allow for
movement and growth.
Maybe the best historical demonstration of the impossibility of
de®ning the normal personality is given by the history of the
28 Depth psychology after neuroscience

clinical judgment of homosexuality. Interpreting homosexuality as

a sickness remains one of the most famous blunders in the history
of psychology, one that was taken with a surprising lightness given
that it is such an exemplary demonstration of the unscienti®c
underpinning of the DSM. It is a fascinating story with a dramatic
conclusion. Prior to the 1968 edition of the DSM, homosexuality
(feminine and masculine) was considered to be a sickness. Psycho-
logists published a great many theories about the possible causes
for the ``sickness'' of homosexuality. A typical example was the
often reprinted work of Frank S. Caprio,4 which contained false
evidence, invented case histories and much hysteria about the
presumed danger of homosexuality for the morale of the com-
munity. The cause of homosexuality was often attributed to bad
parenting (especially by the mother). In the case of male homo-
sexuality, the mother was suspected of having been too seductive,
provoking incestuous panic in the son; or she may have been too
domineering, causing fear of castration. The mother of a lesbian
was suspected of having been emotionally cold, causing the
daughter to yearn for female affection, thus confusing the intimacy
of mothering with that of mature sexuality. Psychologists made
careers theorizing about the pathology of the homosexual person-
ality: incapacity to grow up and meet the requirement of the
traditional role of one's gender; unconscious fears of pregnancy
and childbirth; envy of male (if female), envy of female (if male);
wounded daughters of rejecting fathers; wounded sons of harsh
fathers; wounded lovers whose heterosexual encounters had been
traumatic; ugly ducklings desperate for affection; regressed
narcissists who could only love an image of themselves through
same-sex love.
The fact that homosexuality has always existed, in all cultures,
through all epochs, demonstrates how a phenomenon can be a
natural occurrence, even if not a statistical norm. Nature and
culture are often at odds, and psychologists, as participants in a
culture, have often taken their prejudices for granted. It took the
rebellion of gays and lesbians to stir the controversy. Many of
them were highly educated, professionally successful and tired of
the stereotypes. They found allies among authors such as Thomas
Szasz5 who challenged the status quo by af®rming that the fear of
homosexuality had the same intensity and the same root as the
fear of heresy. Szasz also suggested that the doctor, with his
fabricated de®nition of ``normality,'' had taken on the role of the
 Therapy as cure: the medical model 29

priest forcing the rebellious elements in society to ®t in with

the herd.
It was only in preparing the 1973 edition of the DSM (the actual
DSM-IV) that the so-called experts of the American Psychiatric
Association (APA) decided to vote on the issue. Thirteen out of
®fteen members were ready to rewrite the theory about
homosexuality and present it somehow differently.6 The following
year, in 1974, the vote was put to the 10,000 members of the APA,
and 58 percent con®rmed the position of their leaders. Voting:
what a curious way of ascertaining a scienti®c principle. How
surprising that they did not drink of their own medicine, which
should have been to diagnose themselves with a ``thinking dis-
order,'' i.e., an unconscious bias that makes psychologists medi-
calize behaviors they do not approve of. The strangeness of their
procedure (voting to de®ne mental health) not only discredits the
scienti®c pretensions of the DSM, but it brings back images of the
pseudo-scienti®c posturing of the Dark Age doctors. They too,
rather than following a rigorous experimental scheme, engaged in
oratory contests and played games of social in¯uence to determine
if the king needed bloodletting, purging, cups, or all three. They
talked, talked, talked, the large sleeves of their black robes
agitating the air. When tired of ¯uf®ng their feathers, they would
agree on a procedure. It was a safer strategy to agree than to risk
dissension in front of the king, especially if the king's symptoms
persisted.
Likewise, the members of the APA, prior to 1974, probably felt
that it was safer to treat homosexuals as sick personalities, since
they might otherwise risk being perceived by the ruling opinion as
defending their own kind. But after 1974, the risk was that of
being perceived as prejudiced against a powerful minority. The
good doctors voted accordingly.
Organizational psychologists who blindly follow so-called ``per-
sonality pro®les'' to decide who gets a job offer and who doesn't,
who is demoted and who promoted, work from a perspective
similar to the pseudo-scienti®c logic of the DSM. It may not
appear to be so because of the sophistication of the statistical
presentation of their prejudices. The multifactorial analysis that
allows the computer to correlate the 200 to 300 responses of a
given subject with that of a few thousand other subjects randomly
selected as being ``the norm'' is indeed a powerful, re®ned mathe-
matical tool. This mathematical process of statistical validation is
30 Depth psychology after neuroscience

quite impeccable. What cannot be validated is the model behind

the so-called ``normal personality.'' It is that undisclosed model
that allows for both the construction of the questionnaires and the
interpretation of the statistical results. To replace the non-existing
de®nition of a normal personality, these tests, like the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), use a statis-
tical median. In other words, the testers rely on an average portrait
to decide who is desirable and undesirable for the position. To
take the example of homosexuals again: they were, and still are,
``eccentric'' insofar as they, as a population, are not in the center
of the statistical curve. But that is only a statistical position, like
that of people who are color blind or those who have red hair.
When the statistical eccentricity of homosexuality was translated
into psychological abnormality, homosexuals were susceptible to
exclusion. Similarly, an employee with a personality pro®le that
does not quite ®t the statistical portrait faces the same problem
and may not be offered the position.
Insofar as we have a precise idea of what a test is trying to
measure, and as precise a way of naming what we are trying to
measure, testing is useful. If we know that the average secretary
can type X words per minute, we can devise a test to see if the new
applicant can do as well. We then know what we are measuring:
speed at the keyboard. Many things can be measured as long as
there is a standard of comparison on which we can agree: mathe-
matical abilities, vocabulary, erudition in a speci®c ®eld,
competence with a software program, precision in manipulating
a calibrated tool, capacity to follow a complex rhythm on a tam-
tam, ability to retain a long chain of steps in a choreography, or
the range and pitch of a voice, etc. Measuring can be as fair and
useful as the invention of scales for merchants. It is extremely
useful to know what constitutes one pound of potatoes, so that we
can then discuss the price per pound. The problem with the
``normal personality'' is that it cannot be weighed. It is insub-
stantial, ethereal, and subject to change.
Clinicians do have a relatively reliable set of standards for
judging an abnormal personality, because we have accepted
standards of development for the human person. If, for example, a
®ve-year-old child has less vocabulary than most two-year-olds,
we can estimate that the level of verbal performance of the ®ve-
year-old is below standard because we do have a standard. Like-
wise, if an adult cannot understand a simple set of instructions,
 Therapy as cure: the medical model 31

such as ``green light means go'' and ``red light means stop,'' the
common sense response is to refuse to give a driver's license to that
person. Some psychological handicaps have the same clarity: if a
person can't shake hands without going into a social panic, we can
see the abnormality of such a behavior. Information about the
abnormal is useful and relevant not only for potential employers
but for the community as a whole.
It is another matter entirely when one considers the standards for
the normal personality. The standards of normality have all been
elaborated just as the DSM was elaborated. One evening, if you are
a homosexual, you go to bed resigned to the fact that you are a sick
person. The next day, when you wake up, a vote by the members
of those who establish the DSM, following a change in social
values, makes you normal! Oops! We are sorry for our big mistake,
you may now get out of your closet. We apologize for the humili-
ation, the shunning and the suffering in¯icted upon you. Who's
next in the closet? To determine if homosexuality is normal (or if
women are naturally frigid, or if this group, this race, or this
gender is more likely to ®t the desired pro®le) we would ®rst need a
working de®nition of a normal, psychologically healthy, human
being. However, the de®nition of what constitutes a normal human
being has been, and still is, consistently inconsistent. This incon-
sistency is a matter not for statisticians but for philosophers, as it
involves the evolution of the whole planetary culture. It cannot,
and should not, be answered by any one corporation, church,
association, conglomeration, board, or committee of specialists.
The range from acceptable to unacceptable for a ``normal person-
ality'' is inextricably linked with history, belief, and cultural
evolution. It has little to do with clinical categories or abnormal
behaviors. De®ning abnormalities belong to the medical profession
and to neuroscience, whereas de®ning normality depends on the
power of one myth over another. Freud believed religion was a
cultural neurosis, a sickness that history might cure as humanity
grows more mature. Believers obviously don't think so and the
debate is still going on.
Practitioners of psychology are guilty of overstepping cultural
boundaries each time they answer the question of what is
``normal'' from within the medical model of ``abnormality.'' A lot
of nonsense of self-appointed psychological experts does not
appear like nonsense because of our belief that they possess a valid
model of normality ± and morality ± although that model is never
32 Depth psychology after neuroscience

made explicit. Moralizing can then pass for sound psychological

advice. When a talk show host declares on the radio: ``If your
®ance doesn't suggest marriage within a few months, he may have
a personality problem, he may be incapable of commitment, in
which case you should drop him!'' the moralizing, disguised as
psychology, is made invisible. Some of these pseudo-experts of the
soul have managed to convince the media that they are the
legitimate voice of the profession because their use of the language
of natural sciences seems able to explain inner life as one would
explain the life of a cell. They profess to know what is ``normal''
and, with that assumption, pretend to have the means to heal the
soul of most of life's suffering.
Some of them are simply well-intentioned, amiable impostors,
unaware that their attitude expresses in¯ation and condescension
rather than compassion. Their rhetoric is that of the Mother:
``Come to me, I am the Good Breast.'' Others, more authoritarian
in their approach, exhibit the rhetoric of the Father, clinging with
tooth and nail to their pseudo-scienti®c theories: ``You suffer
because. . . .'' Unlike politicians, who manipulate quite con-
sciously, using the rhetoric of truth and compassion to build an
image, most of our self-appointed experts of the soul are not really
conscious of the pseudo-scienti®c nature of their theories. In
politics, crooks are usually tolerated as long as they are successful.
In psychology the quacks are tolerated as long as they can impress
with their jargon which is also the language of insurance com-
panies and social services. Although political parties all have their
share of self-serving crooks, the average citizen has inherited, over
many generations, a healthy suspicion toward political promises.
We have a long experience in sorting out the political crooks from
the political geniuses, some of whom changed humanity for the
better. We are less alert in denouncing dictators of the psyche
because they hide behind the language of the natural sciences,
promising to ``heal'' souls.

No family is ever normal

We learn relationships in a family, where con¯icts are numerous,
intense, and often frenzied. We are asked to choose sides, to make
dif®cult, impossible, tragic choices. Should the money that this
family has put aside to build an addition to the family house now
go to offer grandma a better choice of hospices? This aging couple
 Therapy as cure: the medical model 33

has dreamt for years of a vacation in Italy, and now is the time,
but they also feel that they should stay home. Their pregnant
daughter is expected to give birth during the time they had
planned to be away. A rather soft-spoken wife ®nds herself
suddenly furious at the fact that for years she has answered her
mother-in-law's daily calls. This anger con¯icts with her
perception of herself as the epitome of family values. This father
loves his son but ®nds that his parental responsibility seems never
to end.
Despotism, tyranny, revolutions, fundamentalisms, heresies,
triangles, alliances, and betrayals: all the causes of war have their
parallel in family life where psychic combat is a daily occurrence.
A normal family does not exist, if normal means a family without
tension, truce, tears, without a little or a lot of drama, faults,
cracks, and psychic abysses. In that context, what kind of
nonsense is the psychological literature that brings our attention to
an ever-growing list of family dysfunctions, as if an ideal family
existed, a kind of aseptic paradise, no bugs, no shadow, no
neurosis? The psychiatric model can only work when there is a
standard of normality. We immediately know when a bone breaks
in our leg because we have a standard of normality of how it feels
to walk on a ``good'' leg. The sensation of having broken a bone
can be con®rmed by X-ray and it can be ®xed by the proper
medical procedure. To apply the medical model to the family
``system,'' we would need a standard of normality for family life,
which never existed.
The following account from one of my male patients illustrates
how what we call ``family'' is in fact the only psychic place where
we can feel that, as a Dolly Parton song goes, ``It's all wrong, but
it's all right!''

My chaos theory of family life

I left the United States ®fteen years ago, following a job offer
in Paris. Each summer, I come back home to the US for a
month. I visit my whole clan, family and friends, spending
two or three days in each house, in ®ve different states. Being
the one who left, and missing them more than they miss me, I
think I see more clearly than they do what family ties and old
34 Depth psychology after neuroscience

friendships have to offer. It is the realization that one is not

the only one struggling, suffering and failing. My cousin
Mary, forever on a diet, still has not lost weight. Neither
have I. My brother-in-law invested all his retirement money
in the farming of salmon only to discover that salmon require
a silent environment to reproduce. The ®sh all died and he
lost his shirt. I have made bad investments too. My sister is
convinced that her son is addicted to marijuana but she
herself can't stop smoking it. I had the same problem with
my daughter. My brother's wife died three years ago in a car
accident and my brother can't get ``over it'' because he feels
guilty to be alive. He was the one driving. I too feel guilty
and ashamed that I still can't ®gure out how to keep the love
of a woman.
My annual visits ®ll a psychic need: to feel that I am no
better, no worse than the rest of my friends and family. I
need to feel our chaotic selves, our tragi-comic dramas, our
successes that turn into failures and failures that are, after
all, a shortcut to where we were heading with the fantasy of
success. Our disordered life patterns ®nd themselves
relativized by a long, complex, intimate experience of each
other through ups and downs. I de®ne ``family'' as a chaotic
place where one won't be prosecuted because of being
imperfect, in other words, human. I include old friendships
in that category; spirit can be as thick as blood.

No therapy in the world can ``normalize'' a family and at the same

time keep it psychically alive. It is one place where the medical
model that pervades much of the self-help popular psychology
does more damage than good. The kind of attention that a
troubled family is in need of is not psychiatric; it is more of an
urgency to renew its myth about ``family'' to include the fact that
the family is ``naturally'' the original place where con¯icts are ®rst
experienced. Imagine a clinician who would look at a painting of a
cruci®xion and declare it pathological because it contains violence.
We would think that person is a bit lacking in culture. For the
same reason, one needs to turn to the humanities to understand the
 Therapy as cure: the medical model 35

images that come out of the suffering of the soul. They are not
to be looked at clinically. The failure to separate psychiatric
approaches from a deeper psychological perspective contributes to
the proliferation of incompetent therapists, who confuse trauma
with trouble, pathology with human frailty. Psychologists and
psychiatrists are schooled with less and less training in the
humanities, and more and more courses in nosology (nosos in
Greek means disease), pharmacology, legal and administrative
issues.
There is very little information about the fact that drug com-
panies fund research into the kind of medical diagnosis that later
appears in the DSM-IV, so that their medications can be targeted
accordingly. For example: Attention De®cit/Hyperactivity Dis-
order (ADHD) appears as a category in the DSM and ± surprise ±
there is also a new medication for the new symptom. The vested
interest of the pharmaceutical industry in the maintenance of cer-
tain diagnostic categories ± and not others ± and the money
poured into research for these ``mental disorders,'' shapes the
DSM and blurs the line between a symptom that is due to brain
pathology and the expression of the soul in distress.
The confusion between the territory of science and the territory
of the humanities exists not only among inexperienced therapists;
it exists as well in patients' mixed-up expectations. Almost all
patients start the quest for self-knowledge with the medical model
as their map. ``Am I crazy? Can you ®x me, doctor? I can't take
the stress anymore, is there a cure, a drug, a healing for me?'' Like
most of my colleagues, my ®rst re¯ex is to make sure I am not
dealing with a pathology that is based on a medical condition.
Then I try to be reassuring as any doctor can be, and suggest that
help is on the way. I also agree to discuss or recommend medi-
cation for acute states of anxiety or depression, as a temporary
support. However, to be true to a depth-psychological perspective,
both patient and analyst must sooner or later abandon the medical
model of the ``cure'' because the territory to be explored is one
where the suffering part of every human being transcends clinical
categories. The nosological sophistication of the DSM, and all the
taxonomical re®nements of psychiatry soon become steps in the
wrong direction when dealing with the part of the psyche that is
ineffable, deep, awesome, creative and of in®nite complexity. No
explanation can reveal the mystery of human consciousness, no
theory can ``explain'' the relationship with oneself and with others
36 Depth psychology after neuroscience

as no theory ever could explain love. No living person can fully

explain oneself to oneself, nor to another, any more than we can
explain why music moves us. Still, we can all develop an appreci-
ation of music and the arts. Similarly, an appreciation for the
richness and depth of the psyche can be developed, an immense
enrichment in the quality of life.
Because it follows a medical logic, the DSM has to de®ne
psychological symptoms in terms of their external characteristics,
so that the clinician can make a diagnosis, a prognosis, a treatment
plan. It is the only approach that insurance companies will pay for
and for good reason, since they too belong to the clinical model.
The logic of Medicare and DSM (reciprocally linked) excludes
psychodynamic approaches because of the DSM's reliance on
descriptive rather than etiologic (causal) criteria. The logic of the
DSM is a binary one, and works like a diagnosis software; it tells
the clinician how to code and branches out in a binary fashion
(yes±no) until a diagnosis is made. It transforms psychotherapy
into something that is increasingly technical: (a) the manual offers
a precise description and statistical characteristic of a mental dis-
order (b) with a coding system that leads to (c) a diagnosis (d) for
which the pharmaceutical industry offers a targeted medication (e)
that Medicare allows on the billing form.
There is no problem with this medical logic, as long as we are in
the presence of a medical problem. It must also be said that most
competent clinicians don't function in that robotic mode, at least
all those I know still use their ``nose'' to differentiate medical
pathology from the ordinary manifestation of existential crises.
Yet, the archetypal need to begin one's voyage into the uncon-
scious is often mistaken and experienced, by the patient as well as
by less experienced clinicians, as one form or another of ``mental
disorder,'' thus adding to the distress.
Chapter 4

Therapy as investment
The economic model

The expensive education that I was offered at the Convent of the

Sacred Heart was presented to me by the highly educated (and
rather snobbish) Dames of the Sacred Heart as a means to
maintain one's place in society; in other words, an investment to
acquire or preserve one's wealth and social position. To be told
that the purpose of education is to obtain wealth is to be told that
the main assets in life are ®nancial. What an error.
I am not denying the obvious ®nancial bene®ts of a good edu-
cation. Money is power. Who would say that he or she envies the
biblical Job scratching his boils sitting on a heap of manure? The
idea that poverty is a blessing sent by God to test our spiritual
strength is one I don't buy into. Nevertheless, to consider educa-
tion as primarily a means of social climbing reveals an inability to
see the real heritage given by a rich country to its citizens: the
possibility of educating oneself, a most magni®cent gift. The worth
of money is not in the object itself, but rather in the things and
comfort one can buy with it, whereas education has value in and
of itself, like life.
Considering the style of advertising campaigns they use to
attract applicants, it seems that currently universities themselves
``sell'' their programs by putting forward their market value. This
model, which makes money the supreme value, has permeated not
only education but also the milieu of psychotherapy. New patients
will often say they have decided to invest in a psychotherapy.
They present problems that are felt as problems mainly because
they are a hindrance to productivity. They want to get rid of the
irrational emotions that distract the working mind, or the love
affair that might break up the marriage and end up in a costly
divorce. They imagine therapy as a problem-solving process, a
38 Depth psychology after neuroscience

removal of the obstacles for the homo economicus to function

¯awlessly, a coaching in transforming oneself into a high per-
formance machine ± a reliable, tough, all-wheel drive that would
run on all-terrain without breaking down, until one reaches the
end of life. Done! In this fantasy, death seems like the end of the
``to-do'' list. I have heard many formulations of the same utili-
tarian model: therapy as a kind of lubrication of the interpersonal
mechanisms, as a means of improving comfort in human relations,
as a method to maximize libidinal investments, or as a kind of
diversi®cation of one's spiritual portfolio. It is only later into the
analysis ± and sometimes never ± that a patient is able to under-
stand that awareness and psychological sophistication ± just like
education, art, elegance, gastronomy, philosophy, love, ¯owers,
music ± have intrinsic value.
A depth-psychological analysis is an occasion to discover that
telling my ``life's story'' implies many degrees of re®nement; it can
be told with or without art, ®nesse, depth. The ®rst bene®ciary of
an elaborate, stylish, rich version of my life's story is myself, just
like the ®rst bene®ciary of a rich education is the person who is
given that opportunity. The complex subtlety of life stories is not
just the property of the well-read and highly educated. Anybody
who cares about the quality of inner life can develop the necessary
psychological talents. I resent the suggestion that developing self-
awareness is reserved for the elite who can afford therapy. Exer-
cises in self-awareness could very well be a part of the curriculum
of every school. I have worked with children, with poor college
students, with abused men and women, with patients who had
received minimal education, and I have experienced ®rst-hand how
one needs only to take seriously the ®rst gift that we all receive
from our culture: a structured, complex, and very magical tool
called language.
We can all learn some re®nement of language to help us tell our
stories more ef®ciently. This is where cognitive-behavioral
approaches to psychotherapy (based on learning of conscious
abilities) does overlap with a depth-psychological perspective
(uncovering the unconscious psychodynamics). I ®nd it annoying
that cognitive-behavioral approaches still ``sell'' themselves by
using the logic of the ®nancial ``bottom line'' because there is much
more to it. It is an obvious fact that, as short-term approaches,
cognitive-behavioral therapies do cost less. Cognitive-behavioral
therapies also do not look down on the need for ``adaptability'' in
 Therapy as investment: the economic model 39

the workplace, whereas depth psychology has historically appealed

more to those who were socially successful or competent but
needed to make room for or peace with the rebellious core of their
Self. Nevertheless, although arguments of pro®tability have helped
sell the cognitive approach, I believe it is an error to put ``cog-
nitive'' in opposition to ``depth.''
I have trained social workers who specialized in therapy for
men convicted of domestic violence. The men were sent to me by
court order; all, without exception, turned out to be suffering
from a poverty of language, an incapacity to translate their
frustration, anger, and disappointment into words. While there
are plenty of categories in the DSM to label their violent behavior,
the DSM does not have a category for ``poverty of language.''1
Yet this basic cultural lack remains at the very core of violence:
their cultural milieu has failed these men in the transmission of the
most important legacy from one generation of humans to the
other ± language.2 Along with the psychiatric diagnosis, I would
suggest a cultural de®nition: a violent man is one whose repressed
humanity, capable of so much more expressivity, is reduced to
shouting, grunting, grumbling, and hitting. In most of these cases,
a cognitive-behavioral approach does make sense, not only
because of the time and budgetary limitations, but more essen-
tially because the cognitive therapy implies an unlearning of the
usual problematic response (i.e., hitting) followed by cognitive
development of a new capacity to communicate: using words
rather than blows. A cognitive-behavioral therapy is a form of
education in human relations not at all incompatible with a desire
to visit the Underworld.
The fact that the cognitive approach does not explicitly deal
with the unconscious psychodynamics does not mean that they
are not present. All stories that grip us like a myth, all ideologies,
all cultural complexes hiding in the background, have extremely
deep roots. Learning communication and cognitive skills is a
worthy goal. Becoming aware of the immensity of the width and
depth of our repressed humanity is a different end, and as worthy.
Since life is a voyage, it is possible to visit both the place in us
that honors the cognitive abilities, as well as places of great
psychic depth. The following vignette reveals how the develop-
ment of cognitive and communication skills is sometimes the
necessary introduction to other more mysterious aspects of
psychic life.
40 Depth psychology after neuroscience

My first lesson in communication

It's not as if I had a choice. The judge made it clear: either
therapy or prison. At the ®rst session the therapist asked me
to replay word for word the scene that got me arrested. The
other men in the group were all offenders like myself and
they were clear about their intention of getting the story out
of me. Here is how I told the story. I come home after a long
day of work. I am tired, hungry and grumpy and my truck's
transmission is showing signs of stress. My wife is on the
phone, arguing with her mom, as usual. Dinner is not ready,
dirty dishes from breakfast still on the table. There is nothing
in the refrigerator, my wife doesn't even say hello. I shout,
``Why can't you cook a decent meal? Because you're a slut,
that's why!'' She looks at me with contempt and blows her
cigarette smoke in my face. I hit her on the cheek, and it
dislocates her jawbone. She calls 911 and I end up in court.
The therapist went to the blackboard. With the help of the
whole group, we analyzed my communications with my
wife, breaking it down as if analyzing a movie. The therapist
divided the huge blackboard into ®ve columns. In the ®rst
column he wrote only what a camera would show at the
beginning of a scene; in other words, the facts that establish
an atmosphere in which the story begins: (a) it's 7:00 pm (I
began my day at 7:00 am), and dinner is nowhere in sight;
(b) dishes are piled up; (c) the refrigerator is empty; and (d) I
just had transmission trouble with my truck.
To ®ll the second column, the therapist questioned me for
a while to discover what a putative actor would want to
know in order to play my part, which are the emotions, the
sensations and the feelings of the protagonist (me). The
therapist helped me discover the following: (a) I am hungry
and angry that dinner is not ready; (b) I ®nd the house
unkempt and dirty and it makes me feel like I am a failure
because I live in a dump; (c) I feel I am less important than
the endless list of people my wife spends her time with on the
 Therapy as investment: the economic model 41

phone; and (d) when she blows her cigarette smoke in my

face, I feel my wife has contempt for me and it enrages me. I
was really beginning to see the movie we were enacting.
The third column was for what, in a movie, would be the
``ideas and values'' communicated. This was much harder for
me to ®ll in because I had no idea what these were for me.
We began with a list of things I believed a wife ``should'' do
and should be. I made some interesting discoveries, things
that I didn't know I had believed; for example: (a) my wife
should do all the housekeeping and cooking because she
works only part time and I work full time ± if she doesn't,
she is a slut; (b) a wife should keep herself sexually attractive
and available for her husband without foreplay; (c) a man
should punish his wife, verbally if not physically, if she
doesn't live up to his expectations or agreements. I had no
idea that I had thought these thoughts.
The fourth column was easy. It was the list of actions of
the protagonist that began to de®ne the plot that had to
unfold as a consequence of the ®rst scene. My actions were:
(a) to shout; (b) to insult; and (c) to hit.
The ®fth column followed the plot in listing the conse-
quences of the previous behavior: (a) the court order; (b)
tension in the house; and (c) two therapy sessions a week.
This is where I was in my own personal movie.
I never imagined I could talk as much as I did in this group.
I learned to communicate. After three months of therapy, I
had another ®ght with my wife. This time, I was a com-
munication champion. Instead of hitting, I slowed down as
the therapist had showed me to do. I breathed deeply and it
slowed me down. I did my thinking before saying anything. I
analyzed the whole situation in terms of the ®ve columns.
When I was clear about it, I said: ``When I come home after a
long day of work, I am very hungry'' [sensation]. ``If there is
nothing ready for dinner'' [fact] ``and dirty dishes are piled
up'' [fact], ``I feel as if I don't count'' [feeling], ``that I have
no importance'' [feeling]. ``I don't feel very welcome in my
42 Depth psychology after neuroscience

home'' [feeling]. ``What I am going to do is go out to a

restaurant to have a nice dinner'' [action]. ``I'll be back when
I have eaten'' [action].
And bing! I left and went to a nice restaurant. I have now
used my new strategy a few times, and it is beginning to have
a powerful effect on her (which is a consequence). My new
behavior is shaking her, I can see, but in a way that does not
send me to prison.

I have used cognitive approaches to teach basic communication

skills, most of which are lacking in our educational system. The
term ``depth psychology'' is also often presented in opposition to a
behavioral-cognitive approach, which is mainly concerned with the
possibilities of modifying conscious behavior, thus completely
bypassing the notion of the unconscious. Cognitive-behavioral
therapists will hold the prejudice that the depth perspective calls
for too long an inner voyage, with the consequent danger of getting
lost in too vast a territory. Depth psychologists will hold the
reciprocal prejudice, depicting cognitive-behavioral therapies as a
®x-it-quick-and-get-back-to-work approach dictated by managed
care. Nonetheless, often these contrasting approaches are simply
different tools, not necessarily in competition, and not theoretically
incompatible, as in the example above. There is no incompatibility
between a behavioral-cognitive approach, focused on learning
some better adjusted behaviors, and an imaginal approach focused
on the inner voyage. Like the choice between two areas of study,
choosing between a behavioral-cognitive approach or an arche-
typal-imaginal approach depends on whether one wants to accom-
plish the long pilgrimage that is the search for a new self or to take
a course in communication to improve relationships.
Both the cognitive-behavioral approach as well as the depth-
psychological approach involve the learning of a sophisticated,
even sumptuous language. These two approaches coincide precisely
at the point of learning new linguistic patterns. They differ in the
choice of what needs to be accomplished. The cognitive-behavioral
approach is symptom oriented and presents itself as ``pro®table'' in
terms of behavior modi®cation, which is why it is so appealing to
the prevalent economic model of managed care as well as to the
 Therapy as investment: the economic model 43

judicial model. Yet it is not the whole story because the meaning
that develops with the learning of new words is one of the deepest,
most complex aspects of any culture. Any ideology that tries to
reduce words to their utilitarian or technical meaning turns out to
be a totalitarian one. Words have deep, deep roots. The man who
can learn about his sexist values and his limited grasp of language
can initiate a process of transformation that will last a lifetime. The
cognitive therapy that helps him learn a new behavior may be over,
but the opening of the psyche is just beginning.
One can learn a second or third language for utilitarian, pro-
fessional reasons, but many persons learn a new language for less
rational reasons: to discover another country or its literature, as an
intellectual exercise, or because it appeals to the soul. I have a
friend who is a judge in a criminal court, which means he spends
most of his days hearing stories of deception, meanness, and
perversity. At the age of 40 he felt an urge to learn Italian, to be
able to sing along with the operas that he loves on his CDs, in the
language in which they were written. It is perfectly useless; he has
no plan to travel to Italy, and he will never be a professional
singer. His pleasure is enough of a justi®cation. He is a different
person when he sings in Italian: his usual reserve disappears and
his whole being is infused with Mediterranean passion. His Italian
fantasy balances his life in a way that is very similar to the bene®ts
of an in-depth analysis. His singing is an expression of his soul. It
is an unproductive, frivolous waste of time if one follows the
economic model, yet it contributes to the quality of his life.
There are many metaphors that can move psychoanalysis away
from the economic model; one can imagine it as singing a duet
with one's soul, or as a dance between one's body and soul. In
many traditional societies, laborers, even when they do back-
breaking chores all week, are eager to go to the village dance on
weekends. Why? Dance is useless; it is a spending of precious
energy. The energetic waste of dance was one of the arguments
used by the Puritans to forbid dancing, along with the frivolity of
¯owers, lace, the indulgence of pastry, and lovemaking without
the goal of procreation, an unacceptable waste of sperm.
If one considers dance from an economic perspective, it is
indeed an expenditure of energy without compensation. Never-
theless, humans in all cultures throughout history seem to have
enjoyed dancing. Why? They also enjoy endlessly complicating the
intricate steps of the dance, a proof that complexity can be
44 Depth psychology after neuroscience

pleasurable. Consider the complexity of ¯amenco, the intricate

rhythms of tap dancing, the sensual intermingling of the tango, the
extra subtle grace of the minuet, the jovial tricky intermixing of
square dancing, the exhausting heat of rock and roll, the impetus
of the polka. All these styles re¯ect one form or other of the
complexity of the modalities of human relations. Yet, their com-
plexity is there to be enjoyed for itself; it serves no other purpose.
It is play, not work, a being, not a doing.
Human relations can be experienced as pleasurably complex,
®lled by the psyche's in®nite capacity to dance with life. That we
now do our ``workouts'' alone at the gym, with expensive mech-
anical apparatus, instead of dancing with a partner or a group,
says something about the predominance of the economic model. A
workout seems less frivolous, more ef®cient, and more easily
accommodated to our work schedules. It is a basically puritanical
attitude. A workout may be ®ne if the objective is to build muscle
mass or a persona that sells well on the personality market, but
when applied to relationships the let's-work-on-our-relationship
attitude is just the kind of workout that destroys the very thing it is
trying to save: pleasure. How important it is indeed to remember
that relationships are a dance, not a set of problems to ®gure out
and work through.
The glory of money in our culture is such that we are constantly
led to believe that if only we had enough of it, everything would
work out ®ne. Many things are in fact made easier with money,
but it is interesting to examine what happens psychologically when
one suddenly receives a lot of money, either by inheritance or
sudden ®nancial success. The magical feeling is felt in the ®rst few
months but it evaporates quickly. The intense jubilation of the
newly rich is not renewable; it is a once only experience, like
losing one's virginity, or seeing one's name in print in one's ®rst
published book. Why? Feelings of comfort, security, appreciation
for nice things may last, but not the magic. The psyche that bought
into the economic model is surprised to ®nd itself still hungry, and
frustrated to discover that the magic is not working as potently as
expected. As one client noted:

When I was poor and frustrated I knew what I desired ±

money, more money, encore money! Now that I have
 Therapy as investment: the economic model 45

reached this overrated peak I feel like I did after spending a

month climbing Kilimanjaro, only to discover that after a
few hours of looking at the absolutely gorgeous panorama, I
was bored, and wondered, ``What am I doing here?''

The prevailing ®nancial model of our culture suggests that money

is the only bottom line, the one magical power, the solid founda-
tion upon which rest work and love. There is, no doubt, a ®nancial
aspect to all relationships, even the most romantic. Early feminists
were absolutely right when they insisted that women become
®nancially independent because money is a basis that supports the
bullish reality of the market, an essential material foundation
indeed. Nevertheless, on top of that rock-solid foundation there is
another level, this one fragile, elusive, crystalline, made of dreams,
a house where the butter¯y dares challenge the god Money. ``OK!
Thou art a foundation. What shall I build on top of you?'' The
acquisition of wealth only feels like a mirage when one confuses
the hunger of having more with the hunger for being more. An
economical model can satisfy a strictly economic craving. It
cannot, however, satisfy an ontological craving.
Rich and healthy societies function at their best when they can
reconcile two opposite systems of values. On the one hand the
economic model is a system of pure competition, a war without
frontiers, a worldwide global competition that stimulates produc-
tion. It creates winners as well as losers, an inevitable outcome of
any kind of war and of progress. Yet, a truly af¯uent society also
considers the ecological system or model of limited growth, pro-
tection, preservation, conservation and, contrary to the economic
model, is attached to a sense of place and local communities.
The ecological model implies a refusal to bene®t ®nancially if
the exploitation of a collective resource represents a risk for its
preservation. Depth psychology de®nitely belongs to the ecological
model, and as such balances the cognitive-behavioral necessity for
short-term ef®ciency and economy of means.
The adventure of self-discovery never did, and never will, ®t
within the ®nancial model of managed care programs that allow 9
or 12 sessions to repair a psyche and ®t the person back into the
workplace or the family system. To be sure, we do need the best
possible repair shops for broken souls, more of them indeed, with
46 Depth psychology after neuroscience

the best theoretical ®x-it kits that even a beginning psychotherapist

can apply with con®dence and competence. Public funds used for
those programs is money well invested. Here, the economic model
is relevant. Yet, brief therapies and strictly cognitive-behavioral
approaches cannot replace and cannot compete with the winding
paths that call to inner adventure for no other immediate purpose
than to satisfy one's soul, much as a neophyte in antiquity went to
Eleusis, in order to be initiated into the mysteries. Depth psy-
chology offers an education in lucidity, a personalized program in
the humanities, an esthetic experience of dancing and singing
through the complexities of life. It may or may not ``®x'' one for
the workplace, but it does bring something immensely valuable to
those wounded by the grayness of their lives, to those lacking inner
adventure, deprived of sensual perception, concerned by the
absence of pathos in their drama. Some lives suffer from a tragic
poverty of imagination. When the imagination loses its vitality,
one loses the sense of meaning, the point of living. A ¯at, tired,
worn out, unimaginative myth kills one faster than work-related
stress.
The following young ``dot.com'' millionaire was shocked to
discover that retiring at 25 years old had unsuspected psycho-
logical drawbacks for which there was no ``®x.''

Having and being, and figuring out the

difference
I worked very hard for a year and a half and was quite lucky.
I made a fortune and retired at 25. Then I created a website,
thinking that all my friends, all those whom I had made rich,
would be interested in the progress of the building of my
mansion and its ecological garden ®lled with exotic, rare
plants. In three months, I had 20 hits. In my business I
usually had 100,000 or more a month. Those 20 hits were
from my mom, dad, brother and sister ± each a couple of
times, commenting on the photos from the family album that
were posted on my website. Then I understood. I understood
that I didn't understand a thing about money, that money is
only that ± money. Once you have it, even lots of it, you still
 Therapy as investment: the economic model 47

have to be. How am I supposed to do that? What should I do

to be? Where to begin with beingness? I only know how to
do. Doing is how I captured wealth and now I feel I have
become its captive. Naively, I married a woman who is the
consummate ``trophy wife.'' My lovely expensive doll
expects me to do the same trick again and again, to earn
fresh money, to leave the house every morning and be
de®ned by the addition of millions to our portfolio. This is
who I am to her ± a genius at making money, her pension
plan. When I try to ®nd other values, she says she doesn't
know me anymore. She doesn't understand why I am looking
elsewhere because I am so talented at doing what I do best,
and by that she means making money. I want to be a master,
but I am a servant. I need guidelines on how to be.

This young successful adult did not know that a ®nancial portfolio
can grow by addition, but this is not so for the psyche. He did not
understand how the psyche expands, lightens, darkens, unfolds,
dances, and falls; how it sings, shouts, moans, and laughs; how it
deepens through repeated experiences of joy and tears, pleasure
and pain, birth and death, connection and loss, abandonment and
mating. He had bought into the myth of ``psychological growth,''
one which reveals its association with an economic model.
Chapter 5

Therapy as plea
The legal model

The hostile adolescent who steals money from his or her father's
wallet, who refuses to apologize when he or she wrecks the
grandfather's car, or who has learned neither the art of love nor
the art of war, is not yet civilized. The Greeks would have said he
belonged to Artemis, not yet ripe for the life of a citizen, still wild,
unbroken to the bridle of adulthood. This adolescent is someone
who has not yet fully grasped the fact that there is no avoiding the
paternal principle. The adolescent mind has no comprehension of
how the multitudinous authorities of civilization can impact his
life once he leaves home. An adolescent has yet to learn to con®de
intimate feelings, knowing only how to growl, grunt, or furiously
pluck the strings of his or her electric guitar to express the
cacophony within himself or herself. To be able to communicate
deep con®dences, one needs not only words but also a culture that
is not cynical toward the need for sincerity, a sympathetic heart to
relate to, and a certain kind of psychological intimacy. Such
capacity for intimacy is not fostered by a trend in family therapy
that borrows the style of legal mediation. Many family therapists
talk about their work as being that of mediator, borrowing this
term from the judicial model. Members of the family speaking to
the ``mediator-therapist'' also adopt a style that resembles a legal
defense.
The basic technique of such psychological mediators seems fair
enough. Each member of the family is respectfully invited to give
his or her side of the story. What is less discussed is the therapist's
role as the judge of the authenticity of these disclosures and as
judge of who is hurting who. The therapist's judgments are not
handed down in any forthright manner but communicated through
the body language of the therapist. The problem with this
 Therapy as plea: the legal model 49

approach arises when the participants leave the therapy room and
start playing the same game but without the presence of the
therapist. Soon, the expression of an emotion, ``I hurt,'' appears as
an accusation: ``You are hurting me.'' The next step is even more
problematic: ``You hurt me, therefore you owe me.'' Family mem-
bers have learned a transactional game of victims and perpetrators
(the legal model) with no mediator in sight and the game can
become quite nasty.
A family's need for therapy usually indicates a lack of psycho-
logical intimacy but it is a mistake to think that any sort of
communication about emotions necessarily leads to familial
closeness. If the verbal exchanges have the slightest hint of a
game of victims and perpetrators, the therapy will never lead to
intimacy. Ordinary experiences of intimacy are frequently non-
verbal and happen in sharing the space in which our bodies
interact. Intimacy can be created in silent exchanges, while doing
all the things a family does together under one roof. The belief that
therapy happens mostly in verbal exchanges about what hurts
(modeling the legal offense) can deprive a family of much of its
natural psychological wisdom. Being ``psychological'' and ``inti-
mate'' does not necessarily imply the mediation of the therapist.
Here is an example of intimacy between friends which is at the
very opposite of the genre of the therapeutic disclosure, yet it is
intimacy of the kind that is often missing in a family in trouble.

Redefining intimacy
I visit a long-time colleague at his home to work on a text we
co-authored and that needs editing. At dinnertime, we are
still not ®nished. He invites me to stay and have a bite, so that
we can continue our work. I go into the kitchen to help him
®x dinner. We have been colleagues for many years, most of
the time allies, sometimes enemies in a few departmental
wars. Perhaps we should call ourselves friends, although,
somehow, we never share any intimate details about our
private lives. It is the ®rst time I have seen his house. Helping
®x dinner reveals to me his culinary style and preferences. We
are the same kind of cooks ± fast and messy ± using tongue
50 Depth psychology after neuroscience

and ®nger more often than recipes or measuring cup. We

whip up a very good dinner in no time! Now I understand
why collaborating with him on this project seems so easy;
our minds work in the same way.
With our dish cooking in the oven, he leaves the kitchen to
listen to his voicemail. I go back to the living room and
browse through his bookshelves. Given the importance of
books in both of our lives, this perusal represents quite a
high degree of intimacy. In actuality, I am not being indis-
creet since his books are openly displayed on the shelves. I
choose at random one of Jung's books and see that we have
highlighted some of the same passages. Next, I browse
through his CD collection, also on display. We have many of
the same oldies and many of the same classics. More sur-
prising is the CD on his player, an old recording of Nina
Simone with the song ``Consummation.'' I believe her voice
most perfectly expresses that love is joy. He is not in the
room, yet I have an immediate sense of connection.
Mostly, we exchange ideas and information. No con-
®dences or talking about ourselves. Yet, the world of his
books, of his CDs, the decor of his house, a certain sadness
that I read on his face, the absence of pictures of his ex-wife,
all this is as revealing as an exchange of secrets. In this
moment I feel closer to him than ever before in our years of
being colleagues. We are having ``physical contact'' ± not
through our bodies but within the body of the house; not
through telling secrets, but by reading the secrets of the mind
revealed through the books. The secrets of our souls are
revealed through the voice of the singer he savors as much as
me. Those secrets are there; one has only to have the desire
to read them.

Many sorts of intimate contact are wordless and without an

arbitrator who might determine their psychological validity. A
therapeutic context in¯uenced by the model of mediation has
popularized an approach that is like holding court in the family
 Therapy as plea: the legal model 51

living room, talking about you and me and us, each defending
their actions and reactions. All the talk about feelings can unfor-
tunately also take the place of having them. I am not denying that
the validating of everyone's feelings is important, but there are
other forms of communication between souls, equally expressive,
valid, and profound, even if less verbose and even if no one takes
on the role of mediator. Some elements of communication have no
intermediary; they cannot be interpreted by means of a theoretical
grid, and won't manifest if someone takes on the role of judge.
The creation of a story belongs to each person. In a family, we
each have our version of the same, yet different stories. The
temptation to use the tools of the therapist to rewrite the other's
story is often irresistible. Here is a typical case where a woman has
to ®ght against her husband in the battle of stories. His training in
psychology works against his desire for intimacy, because he takes
the position of judge. He has given himself the gavel and regularly
declares his wife guilty of perpetrating neurotic behaviors.

My husband, the psychologist: the battle of

stories
I am a cabinetmaker, an artist working with wood. I sculpt
the furniture I make with my own ¯owery designs. My
husband is a psychologist. Our marriage is at the breaking
point. I can no longer take his interpretations of me. We
make each other crazy ± he by pursuing me with his brilliant
insights, and I by erecting a wall of platitudes to avoid
hearing him. He feels I am cynical because I tell him his
insights are brilliant and then completely ignore them. I am
not making fun of him; I really think he is the most astute
psychologist I have ever known. He is right on target each
time he interprets my complexes.
What I cannot tolerate is the fact that he listens to me
through a theoretical ®lter. I feel as if I were talking into a
mike hooked into translating software. For example, he tries
to convince me to stop seeing my family, that they are not
good for me. He is absolutely right about that. My family
fabricates trauma as others make music together. My
52 Depth psychology after neuroscience

husband's theories are valid, but they seem to imply that my

family has victimized me. That is the part that I reject, and
why I go on seeing them. It is my form of resistance. As a
defense against my husband's brilliant interpretations, I
wrote him the following letter:

If the goal of therapy is to really help me evolve beyond

my earlier context, does it not also suggest that I have the
power to refuse the interpretations in which you wish to
imprison me? I don't want to be de®ned by my abusive
childhood. When you give all that importance to the
faults of my parents and siblings, you de®ne me by my
traumas, as if the traumas had the power to create the
person I am now. Why do you systematically downplay
the psychological in¯uence of the teacher who taught me
woodworking? He lived next to my parents, and he was
an admirable being, someone upon whom I have tried to
model myself. Your theory also does not account for my
horse. Yes, my horse. At the craziest period of my ado-
lescence I loved that animal more than I have ever loved
any person. He may have been only an animal; yet, he
was the living presence who really accompanied me
through my teens. My horse heard my troubles, felt my
sadness, carried my body and my psyche. In summer I
spent entire days on his back. He had the power to calm
me. He reassured me about the goodness of life. Since I
loved this horse more than I loved my father, why does
your psychology not allow me to say that I was parented
by a horse? When I visit home, I like the smell of the barn,
that particular barn, where my old saddle still hangs on a
hook. Why do you keep on analyzing the relationship
between you and me as if you-and-I-and-our-relationship
were the beginning and end of everything in life?
The most important relationship for me right now, I
am sorry to tell you, is not my relationship with you. It is
my relationship with wood! Were you ever curious about
 Therapy as plea: the legal model 53

my relationship with wood? Have we ever discussed the

beauty I feel in the golden re¯ection on freshly varnished
oak, the red veins of cherry wood, the pearly whiteness
of birch, the clean smell of cedar, or the indolent softness
of linden wood? The family of trees is the family with
whom I spend my days. You refuse to expand your
theory to include horse, teacher or wood in your de®-
nition of ``family history.'' You analyze me in order not
to hear me, to neutralize me. You interpret my life to
justify your theories. You are too lazy to examine your
thinking or consider new possibilities. Everything has to
go into your analytical funnel because your perspective
has become the wall you've erected to avoid the unset-
tling effect I have on you. You use theory to attempt to
convince yourself (and me) that you understand me
better than I do myself. You think you are a better judge
than I of what is trauma and what is healing, what is
valuable and what is not. I received a gift from my horse,
an instinct that tells me to avoid your interpretations.
They are not a good pasture for me.

In a family torn apart, who will be declared the number one

victim? The person who convinced the therapist/judge that he or
she was abused? What happens when one person begins asking for
psychological indemnity from the others? The temptation of many
inexperienced therapists is to deal with these problems in a very
expeditious manner, to award the prize of victimhood to the
person who had the best ``defense,'' or sometimes ± which is more
perverse ± to the person who is paying. The judicial model, when
imported into the psychological realm, can imprison a person in
the victim scenario forever.
Chapter 6

Therapy as redemption

Humanity redeemed! The myth of redemption is so pervasive that

it permeates global politics, education, ecology, feminism. Depth
psychology is not exempt. Ostensibly the analysand starts an
analysis in pursuit of consciousness, but covertly the process can
conceal a quest for redemption, masquerading as individuation,
actualization, psychological health, wholeness, centeredness, mind-
fulness, or whatever new jargon accommodates the old myth. The
smell of redemption is easily recognizable. It is the belief that
analyzing the unconscious will lead to a clean, pure, healthy psyche
and that one will evolve into a luminous, loving, digni®ed, paci®ed
soul. Having attained this level of enlightenment, this cleansed soul
wraps itself in a (metaphorical) white robe and awaits initiation
into the world of the resuscitated, the individuated, the Elysian
®elds of psychological saints. Such a utopian dream would be nice
were it not for the fact that it produces an odious, sanctimonious
persona. To break the trance, one needs to differentiate redemption
from individuation, salvation from wisdom. The following letter
from a friend, a former colleague, shows somebody who suddenly
understood that the time allotted for our life is ®nite, but the quest
for perfection is not. His ego-driven pursuit of perfection was
causing exhaustion. With his permission, I reproduce his letter.

Off with my halo

I have ®nally put an end to my years of pilgrimage en
route toward what I thought was individuation. There is
a subpersonality in ``me'' ± let's call it the missionary ±
 Therapy as redemption 55

that has always wanted to ``sanctify'' the immature me.

The missionary-in-me kept imposing noble goals such as
individuation, illumination, compassion, detachment
from ego, and the like. At the same time, this missionary
kept refusing me the medal of individuation, on the basis
that my relationships with my children, as well as my
relationships with women, are still pretty neurotic.
I have been trying to please this inner ®gure who
obviously refuses to be pleased. He doesn't understand
that the process of individuation is an endless process,
not a state of purity to which one can aspire. My inner
missionary was after redemption, perfection, and sanc-
tity. I am an exhausted pilgrim, out of spiritual wind
from the long ascension towards an apotheosis of indi-
viduation, which seems to be non-existent, as I have
never found it in myself or anyone else.
My missionary was impervious even to Jung's warn-
ings that individuation can never be complete, that one
can never be freed from the grip of the ego and the
internal demons. I have tried admonishing him: ``Shut
up! Don't you see that individuation is like any ideal ±
democracy, justice, freedom, or charity? Noble ideals, all
of them! We need them; we try to follow them, but no
one attains them completely. Stop your proselytizing!''
Maybe there is something inherent in Jungian theory
that invites such devotion to the principium individua-
tionis. As far as I am concerned, the result is pitiful. My
``illuminations'' are mostly sparks from the ego. Well, the
saint in me is resigning, and I am declaring spiritual
bankruptcy. End of quest for sanctity! I want my human-
ity back. I want to honor Dionysos, not Augustine.

Sometimes it is almost irresistible to consider depth psychology as

a new form of spiritual asceticism, a redemptive quest. The prose
in which both Freud and Jung wrote is lush and powerful enough
to open the door to that kind of fantasy. Just as the spiritual need
56 Depth psychology after neuroscience

is real, so is the danger of in¯ation. To avoid spiritual puf®ness, I

have found it useful to move away from imagining analysis as a
spiritual discipline, to entertain instead images of a conversation
between friends, like the exchange of letters with this particular
friend. Conversations between friends have been going on for
generations, discussing how to become more enlightened. The nice
thing about being with close friends is that the ego can take a rest
and humor is possible. The image of befriending the psyche can
inspire analysis. My psyche and I are going on an excursion into a
territory other than that of the ego, widening one's panorama and
nurturing a sense of humor about one's own foibles.
The character of mythology that most aptly suggests a humble
attitude toward ``individuation'' is Hermes (Mercurius for the
Romans), the endearing Greek god who has a nose for puffed up
egos. God of travelers and champion of paradoxical thinkers,
Hermes embodies the possibility of double, triple, and multiple
signi®cations. Analysis is such a mercurial adventure, a sojourn
into the land of paradoxical truths and multiple signi®cations.
When the ego has to travel, it prefers package deals and spiritual
organized tours, religious traditions and well-worn paths. But to
experience Hermes one has to outwit the ego and slip away like a
con artist evading the sheriff. Depth psychology is at a place in its
evolution where it can justi®ably call itself post-Freudian, post-
Jungian, post-Lacanian, post-modern ± post anything that
pretends to delimit the territory of inner life. For depth psychology
to emerge as a form of wisdom, a revivi®cation of the imagination,
it needs to escape from in¯ation about the quasi-divine principle of
the ``Self.''
Aren't we all seeking an escape from ego ®xations, including
theoretical ®xations upon the masters that have trained us?
Dei®cation of the masters is, in itself, a sign that the myth of
redemption is active. The masters who ask to be ``adored'' by their
disciples are usually in the business of selling redemption (``Think
like me and you'll be saved!''). For many adoring disciples there
comes a day when they notice that their idol has feet of clay. The
``master'' turns out to be not the omniscient redeemer but merely
human. Having placed him on a pedestal, the disciple now feels
that he must knock him off. The critique then becomes vicious,
fueled by a sense of betrayal and disillusionment. However, such
decanonization would not have been necessary had they not
dei®ed their master in the ®rst place.
 Therapy as redemption 57

One of my doctoral students, a brilliant woman of 40, had made

Jung her redeemer, and was convinced that another round of
analysis would ®nally resolve the con¯icts in her marriage. What
happened instead is that her husband asked for a divorce and she
was devastated. She shared with me the note he left on her pillow
the day he left.

Lost in a mandala
You have been in analysis for the past ten years. You
seem to be telling me, ``Wait, there is this little corner of
my mandala that I still have to explore. As soon as I
complete my puzzle-mandala, I should be able to have a
non-narcissistic relationship with you.'' Where do you
think you are going with this mandala trip? I think you
have already reached your destination and that is
nowhere! Your principle of individuation is like mad-
ness; you remind me of those saints intoxicated with
vanity about their performances of auto-¯agellation. I
have rejected the Church, why should I put up with your
kind of religiosity? I can put up with the cost of ten years
of analysis, but I can't bear the loneliness anymore. I
can't wait until all is clean and smooth in your inner
landscape. I prefer solitude, or the company of people
less ambitious in their spiritual goals.

The problem here is not the length of the analysis but the fact that
the wife was caught in the very Christian myth of a redemptive
ideal, a myth she did not recognize because it presented itself in the
language of psychological goals. She has lived the life of a deportee
from paradise. We all do, to a certain measure. Neither Voltaire,
nor Nietzsche, nor Freud, nor Jung, nor Sartre, nor any of the
modern philosophers of atheism are completely free of the redemp-
tion myth. God may have been declared dead, but the mourning is
not ®nished; it is too big a loss to be completed in just a few
generations. Jung's nostalgia for God resurfaces at times in his
theory about the Self (capital S). The woman who lost herself in her
fantasy of mandala ampli®ed that trend and believed in Jungian
58 Depth psychology after neuroscience

theory as one believes in a savior, because she too misses the

certainties of faith.
Until our mourning is done, the fantasy of redemption will grow
out of all sorts of grounds. I know for one that I am not immune.
For sure, like most intellectuals of my generation and of my milieu,
I endorsed the Nietzschean revolt against the religious traditions of
our culture. Disgusted by the shadow of faith, we felt that our
intellectual mission was to teach and write in such a way as to
reveal the insufferable racism and sexism and authoritarianism of
institutionalized religions. We fought against the very idea that
humans would conceive and then submit to divinities such as
Yahweh, Christ, Allah, tyrannical prima donnas who insisted on
being the one and only. We were morally shocked to discover the
viciousness of the wars between the three monotheisms, each
demanding of their devotees that they sacri®ce their lives in ugly
wars. Our rallying cry was Zarathustra's ``God is dead.'' This
intellectual revolt provided me with an enduring motivation to
practice psychotherapy: I felt then ± and still do today ± that a
world without God need not be a desperate world. The work of
psychotherapy is a daily battle against despair.
Nevertheless, the deconstruction of conventional religion does
not alleviate the need for a sense of the sacred; but where is it?
Surely, life is about more than the individual's journey from birth
to death? The myth of redemption resurfaces in every cause that is
dear to one's heart. Some feminists dream of a world redeemed by
matriarchy (when women rule, all will be ®ne.) I know many
ecologists who envision a world redeemed by nature (nature is
good and, left to herself, all should be ®ne). Others seek political
redemption (this party will change everything); ®nancial redemp-
tion (as soon as I have enough, I'll follow my bliss); romantic
redemption (one day my prince or princess will come); psycho-
logical redemption (one day I'll be individuated, one of the
illuminati). Each of these fantasies stems from the monotheistic
mythology. Even the ideal of Buddhist detachment can conceal a
typical Christian fantasy where the guru replaces God, and an all-
encompassing philosophical system serves as faith.
I like to tease one of my doctoral students, who is a Jungian
analyst, that his unshakeable faith in Jung makes him a Jungiodule
(adorer of Jung) instead of a Jungian. Who is immune to this kind
of temptation? The atheist thinks God does not exist, the agnostic
thinks there is no possible way to know, the faithful believes God
 Therapy as redemption 59

de®nitely exists; what we all have in common is the desire to ®nd

meaning in life, and for meaning to manifest, we all need to
imagine something beyond ego, something that transcends per-
sonal fate. Our life stories, if not inserted into a grander narrative
shared by a community, are too insigni®cant to register as conse-
quential. We crave art, literature, and music to give some ampli-
tude to the banality of our existences, to attach importance to the
ancestors who preceded us and to the progeny that shall continue
sprouting branches on one's family tree.
When a talented historian writes the stories of a people we call
that activity ``history'' and we derive a sense of tribal identity from
reading it. Wars, won or lost, are elevated to historic grandeur,
tragic but glorious battles fought in the name of some great value.
Similarly, to make sense of my small life, I need the ampli®cation
of my ordinary life journey into something I can call an odyssey. I
want the magni®cation of my battles at the of®ce into an Iliad; I
know my house is not a castle, but in a way it is. This aggrand-
izement of our story, which is not at all an aggrandizement of the
ego, is a valid protection against feelings of absurdity.
Lives sacri®ced in defense of a country, empires rising and
falling, populations swelling and diminishing ± all these stories,
once historicized, have a narrative logic, a kind of consistency in
the thematic structure. But in the lives of nations, as well as
individuals, in times of great dif®culty, the narrative logic breaks
down and the transformation of facts into history fails. One tries
to tell the events this way and that way, from this or that per-
spective, but the collection of facts remains absurd. The wars turn
out to be pointless ± so many dead, and for what? ± and the
trajectory of one's life seemingly random ± what was that all
about? The breakdown in the narrative capacity is often inter-
preted as a form of despair, like the despair of losing one's faith.
Yet it can also signal a very different kind of breakdown, that of
the redemptive myth, not the narrative capacity. Only then can the
loss of the redemptive hope appear as a necessary loss.

Life is absurdly, awesomely ugly and

beautiful
Having witnessed the disorientation of meaninglessness in so many
of my own patients, students, friends, I had my own turn at life as
an incomprehensible absurdity. In the months following my brain
60 Depth psychology after neuroscience

injury, every possible variation of my life's trajectory appeared to

be equally nonsensical, a pointless story ®lled with absurdist tropes
aÁ la Beckett, a sadistic play with neither tail nor head. I ®nally
understood why the existentialists linked that feeling of ``life as
absurd'' to the loss of God. It does not matter much if the loss of
faith is in God, in love, in the nation, in progress, in family, in
nature, or in psychology. Existential angst can happen with what-
ever value, theory, mission, ideal that has been elevated to an
absolute in order to generate meaning.
When I left intensive care, I was the recipient of a very generous
offer to stay in a magni®cent house in the desert of New Mexico.
It was a grand luxurious mansion, surrounded by cacti and many
newly planted miniature weeping birch trees whose gracious tiny
leaves seemed to caress the glass of the windows of the room
where I stayed for 10 days. The owners were generous strangers,
friends of friends, whom I have still never met. They were leaving
town and offered my daughter and me a place to stay until I was
®t to travel. From the day of my accident onwards, I had the
feeling that I had walked onstage of the Theater of the Absurd.
How is it that I am not dead? Why was I spared trepanation,
paralysis, death? What did I do to deserve a second chance? This
sense of unworthiness and unreality was intensi®ed by the act of
surprising generosity by the owners of the house, people I did not
know. Why are they so good to the stranger I am to them? They
are generous because they are generous which does not make
sense, but it does.
I also discovered that a total absorption in observing the beauty
of the tiny birch leaves catching the desert light and the desert
breeze could be in®nitely more potent than painkillers. The beauty
of these young fragile trees, seen through the six windows of my
room, was uncanny. Life itself felt like a coincidence. The fact that
the beauty of the surroundings was more analgesic than morphine
only added to the feeling that nothing made ``sense'' in the usual
way, especially being alive. The most interesting aspect of that
absurdist feeling was that my near-death experience was not at all
what some have described as a ``renewed sense of the meaning of
life.'' Not for me; logic escaped me more than ever. Instead of a
``renewed meaning'' I was experiencing an increased tolerance of
absurdity. Instead of existential angst, I felt an existential light-
ness, a sweet appreciation for the random mercy of survival, the
unsolicited generosity of strangers, the incomprehensible power of
 Therapy as redemption 61

beauty, the healing quality of a beautiful home (as compared to

the cockpit deÂcor of intensive care.) The realization that life is
fragile, short and chaotic ended my fantasy of redemption; life
does not require it. I was suddenly ®nished with the list of things
to do, to be, to get, to improve upon before I allow myself to
contemplate the beauty of everything that exists in the world.
There are already ± every day, every minute ± plenty of immediate
reasons for jubilation, and no need for the fantasies of redemption,
of paradise after death, of bliss the morning after the revolution.
``You are telling me, Madam Death, that it is not yet my time to
die? I can play a bit longer before night falls? Alleluia!'' Random,
absurd, incomprehensible, but delicious.
Christians come from a culture that has millennia of religious
indoctrination in which meaning was de®ned by hope of salvation
in the afterlife. Even with the combined efforts of ®ve or six
generations of non-believers, the task of dismantling that system
of beliefs has barely begun. Nietzsche and many others bulldozed
the ®eld, but the efforts of many more generations may be
necessary to dig up and demolish the deeper levels of those
foundations before we can start building an atheological tran-
scendent myth that should change not only our religious attitudes,
but our psychological makeup as well. We have only begun to
expose the racist, sexist, oppressive, violent, hypocritical, para-
sitic, exploitative cowardice present in the cement of all institu-
tionalized religions. Religion is not without merit, but the denial
of its shadow has resulted in distortions and atrocities in the
name of the spirit. Philosophers as well as depth psychologists
are exploring non-religious ways of transcending the ego; for
example, lives ®lled with devotion to justice, love, science, nature,
wisdom, beauty and truth . . . are lives ®lled with values that
transcend the ego.
The usual promises of human love ± ``I'll love you forever'' or
``I'll never abandon you'' ± may be sincere, but these promises are
absurd if one considers that mortality is an absolute limitation to
the in®nite depth of the experience of love. Nevertheless, this
limitation, with all the sweet lies around it, is not reason enough to
waste the spiritual value of love. We bring children into this world,
and we love them madly, even if we know they will suffer and die.
We love them with an intensity that is almost painful, even though
we know, despite all our efforts, that they, like ourselves, will
suffer and die. It doesn't make much sense, but not loving makes
62 Depth psychology after neuroscience

even less sense. The sense of the absurd, which is a consequence of

the loss of religious faith, may come to be experienced as some-
thing as natural as the limitations of human love, a reality that
simply is, like other realities that cannot be logically explicated.
Since my second chance at life began, the existential feeling of
the absurd has not left me. In the cramped space of the intensive
care unit, I prepared for the ®nal voyage, but my departure was
delayed. There I lay, with the baggage of my old values like so
many suitcases packed with stuff I no longer needed. To go back
to life felt like a silly return after a fake departure. For the ®rst
time I experienced the full meaning of what the early twentieth-
century existentialists considered so important with respect to the
experience of the absurd: a dissolution of all the meanings that had
been taken for granted. I had unquestioningly accepted that life is
good and death is bad. I now know the value of destruction and
death. I had taken for granted that love means ``being together.'' I
now see that there can be love in separation. I believed that a high
intelligence was preferable to good legs to walk with. No more. I
thought that nice looking legs were as important as legs that can
walk without pain. No more. I thought eyes were the mode of
perception of the world. I ®nd the faculty of imagination ``sees''
more deeply than eyes. A dose of death was needed to feel the
orgasmic experience of waves of pure life that wash over our body
with each breath. ``Absurd'' used to mean ``nonsensical.'' It now
means ``mysterious.''
Camus' sense of the absurd was in¯uenced as much by Kafka as
by the existentialist philosophers. He was a major literary in¯u-
ence on Beckett and Ionesco and others (like Pinter) who suggest
that the detour into absurdity may be a necessary one1. Camus'
interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus proposed a psychological
solution to meaninglessness, which was to imagine Sisyphus as a
happy man, regardless of the absurdity of his daily task. I don't
quite agree anymore and I am having this little chat with the ghost
of Albert Camus: ``Yes, Monsieur Camus, I get the picture. You
are suggesting that Sisyphus is the ordinary man faced with the
daily task of living, only to die in the end, very much like you and
me, and we should be ®ne with that. There are, however, other
myths, other images that are equally absurd yet less depressing.
Every day, when I do ®nd myself absurdly alive, I feel more like a
cat than Sisyphus, a cat presented with yet another delicious bowl
of cream to lick. I have no idea where this creÁme de la creÁme
 Therapy as redemption 63

comes from everyday, it seems to roll down the hill just like that,
but I won't waste it. Life is indeed absurdly generous.''
While Camus' loss of religious faith brought him acute distress,
which may have in¯uenced his image of life as a Sisyphean task,
Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophical take on the absurd was very
different. Re-reading Sartre now, I get a sense that his was a
futuristic style of consciousness, one belonging to the post-
mourning of God generation. I ®nd my interest in his intuitions
renewed. Regardless of the heaviness of his style, Sartre was clear
and simple about a few foundational concepts:

1 We humans create our own values.

2 We are each responsible for our decisions.
3 We cannot excuse ourselves from responsibility by blaming
the unconscious.2
4 We don't need a god to authenticate the highest values of
humankind. Holding on to values is what makes us human.
5 We are equally free to damn ourselves. We don't need satanic
dogma.
6 Hatred is the path to damnation. We are free to travel that
path. The ``Other'' becomes hell, because the Other lives in
my consciousness, is my consciousness. If I hate the Other
instead of loving him or her, I have created my own hell. Hell
is Others, just as bliss is Others.3
7 The relationship with myself becomes unbearable when I try
to deny my freedom. Placing the blame (or responsibility) on
others, proclaiming myself a victim, choosing to remain
trapped by narcissism, destroys my freedom and, therefore,
my life.
8 All ``faith'' is ``bad faith'' (mauvaise foi), a regressive abdi-
cation of reason. The problem with religious faith is not that it
is arational (like love or poetry), or irrational (like superstition
or defense mechanisms), but anti-rational, which is the most
destructive value to be held by any culture.

The task of psychoanalysis seems to be to attempt to answer

Sartre's question: What do you do with what was done to you?
Camus was aware that his angst was a consequence of his
mourning the death of God the Father. Sartre's psyche was differ-
ent. He wrote in Words how he never mourned the loss of his
personal father, who died when Sartre was still a young child.
64 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Sartre declared himself happy about his fatherless situation4 and

seemed to have had an easier time than his contemporaries with
mourning for the Cosmic Father. The loss of faith was torturous
for Camus. It was equally painful for Jung when he discovered
that the symbol of the village steeple had lost its power. It was
problematical for many in the generations of intellectuals after
Nietzsche. Camus conceived of the sadness of losing God the
Father as a part of the human condition, the price to pay for
lucidity. Some of my generation think it need not be so.5
The existential angst at the loss of faith in a redemptive god may
very well be simply a consequence of a very long domination by
the monotheistic God. Religious sentiment, like the sentiment of
love, has a history. Building cathedrals was a task carried on by
many generations; deconstructing the faith behind the stone
buildings will take at least that long. It can, however, be done ±
not stone by stone, but idea by idea, symbol by symbol. Like
Sartre, who was not so attached to the Father image, feminists
(male and female) may be more ready than most to give God the
Father his pink slip. The departure of a misogynous and racist
tyrant may come to feel like a formidable spring cleanup for the
psyche, a welcome death. Post-modernism, with its unrelenting
attack on single meanings, has acted as a sort of collective therapy.
It took us to a place in our consciousness where the loss of the
redemptive myth is simply equal to the major absurdity of most of
life's trajectories.
An acute sense of the death of God can stir up feelings as painful
as when experiencing the death of a child, or the loss of a loved
one in a stupid accident. It seems so absurd, so meaningless, the
anguish is so acute. The danger is then to invest all of one's psychic
energy in explaining the absurd. (Why? Why? Why?) We become
obsessed with a search for meaning to redeem the tragic, and
because there is no redemption that search itself becomes tragic.
This is where I ®nd that an archetypal approach can be of help,
because it moves away from explanations, starts in the territory of
the tragic, and goes from there into the deepest layers of the
imagination, where psychic regeneration can occur. The opening
of the deep layers of the psyche offers not redemption but a map of
the journey through psychic devastation. Instead of the usual
prescription, which is to head right back into traditional faith, the
psyche can provide other ways of experiencing the connection to
humanity ± rather than appeals to an absent god.
 Therapy as redemption 65

New Age spirituality, supposedly a post-Christian alternative to

spirituality, presents itself with the quali®er of ``new'' as a new
myth of God. I am all for renewal and renaissance because,
frankly, the traditional religious symbolism, with its inherent
racism (the chosen people) and sexism (the chosen gender), feels
beyond resuscitation to me. In all renovating projects, a contractor
friend of mine convinced me that there comes a point where it is
wiser to bring in the bulldozer than to attempt renovation. I agree,
and apply his wisdom to the examination of the edi®ce of
Christianity. I think it is beyond renovation. I prefer to take my
spiritual material from the cultural memory of the paganism of the
Greeks, mainly because it is a mythology and not a religion, one
that did not ask for belief in their gods.6 Although New Age
spirituality may look like a new and improved product, one has to
be vigilant. Much of what is presented as ``new'' is in fact a
recycling of a religious re¯ex worthy of Augustine. He asked
himself the age-old question that historians have in common with
depth psychologists: can one ®nd meaning in history? (And the
corollary: can I ®nd meaning in my story?) Augustine's answer
constituted dogma for a very long time. Yes, history has meaning,
says Augustine. It is the meaning given by faith. If one loses faith,
one also loses meaning. Problem solved.7 By remaining uncon-
scious of our Christianity we tend to apply that same logic and
replace one bible with another (for example, replacing a patri-
archal bible with an equally exclusive matriarchal bible), falling
right back into Augustinian dogma. As long as one is asked to
believe in some sort of godlike redemptive principle, it is the same
old Christian goods and services, only the packaging and market-
ing are New Age.
One of the current tasks of depth psychology, as I understand it,
involves dumping the last residue of that Augustinian style of
consciousness, based in faith. Not that there is a need to bring up
Augustine's case again. He has been tried and found guilty over
and over. Nevertheless, Augustinian debris is blocking new con-
struction. Depth psychology is experimenting with the next style of
consciousness, one that allows a person to endure the absurd, to
cope with the insufferable, to lose one's innocence and, instead of
turning to Augustinian redemption, to learn to swim in the Styx,
imagine life differently, making room for its tragic element. Depth
psychology suggests that you are free to jump off a bridge, if
suicide is what your soul ultimately wants, but before you literalize
66 Depth psychology after neuroscience

death into physical death of the body, try a metaphorical death.

Try an imaginal trip to the Underworld. Try a form of loving
through pain, living with loss, aging in character. Try imagining
another self, inventing another myth, writing another chapter in
your story. Travel ®rst, see the inner world, and then decide if it is
literal or metaphorical death you want.
I have a friend whose son became psychotic in late adolescence.
My friend was a devoted and competent father whose patience his
friends (and I) all admired. His son had an episode of psychotic
rage and killed my friend's wife, the love of his life. I knew her.
She was joy and compassion incarnate, a radiant human being.
The psychosis of the son destroyed that human masterpiece. It is
only now that I understand why my friend is so impatient with
acquaintances who try to ``make sense'' of his immense tragedy.
He cannot bear those trying to explain the tragedy in terms of
predestination, fate, or any other religiously or New Age inspired
consolation. What might have helped him, and what he did not
get, was a community with a sense of the tragic. In his milieu, a
person going through such tragedy is expected to complete the
mourning process according to the theory that says a one-year
cycle should be suf®cient. Beyond the so-called ``norm'' of 365
days it is renamed and on day 366 it should be coded as a clinical
symptom or self-indulgence. Not so for my friend. He had two
choices: either he killed himself in despair, or he learned to live
with this tragedy in his heart for the rest of his life. There is no
redeeming of what happened; it will remain tragic forever.
The desire to ®nd meaning is a human one, and is given
expression in the creation of a narrative, but there is often a
contamination with the belief in a redemptive principle, where bad
turns into good. ``My baby is dead, but she is now an angel in
God's paradise'' is a frequent defense against despair, a direct
consequence of not having completed the mourning for one
particular long-lived God. Nietzsche was justi®ably upset with the
many people around him trying to extract moral lessons from a
philosophy that did not contain them. The almost irresistible re¯ex
of turning everything into morality of good and evil belongs to
faith, belongs to a God that dictates right from wrong. The
adventure of a depth-psychological analysis is at the same time a
move away from this kind of religious conditioning. The need for
redemptive ideals is replaced by another style of consciousness ±
the capacity to value the awe-inspiring mysteries of the psyche. As
 Therapy as redemption 67

one opens up to the possibility of living a full and generous life, the
thirst for redemption diminishes and the need to be of service to
others, to culture, and to nature increases.
Since Nietzsche, the necessity for a God who dictates morality
has been partially replaced by a global recognition of the universal
principles of respect for the rights and dignity of the Other, by a
sense of responsibility for one's actions, of responsibility toward
the preservation of nature, as well as the preservation of the
cultural heritage. Nonetheless, each of us, individually, struggles to
answer the personal question ``Why should I live?'' As an agnostic,
I do not wish for a world devoid of spiritual values. Who would,
really? Rather, I wish for a world where the need for spirituality
would be de®nitively dissociated from the imposition of pre-®xed
meanings and pre-de®ned values. This is why the Jungian and
post-Jungian approach (particularly the work of James Hillman)
feels like an alternative to religion for me. It recognizes the human
need for something bigger than ego, but refuses to let religious
orthodoxies manipulate that need.
My generation is perhaps the ®rst in history to have been so
freely agnostic, without the risk of being shunned, condemned,
tortured, or burned at the stake. I am immensely grateful, for
example, that my academic milieu, although at times as con-
stricting as a tight girdle, has allowed me a long excursion to
rediscover the pre-Christian gods and goddesses. I ®nd in the study
of the classics a richness of imagination, a magic, an esthetic
sensibility that is deliciously contrary to that of the constrictions of
Christianity. A different spiritual posturing can be truly relaxing.
Be it the bison of Lascaux, the Greek Aphrodite, or the Amerindian
®gure of Coyote, all these non-Christian images of the divine serve
the spiritual need to see things ``big'' and to see ``differently.''
Human glory, health, and fortune do not suf®ce to ®ll the vast
inner space. We need to imagine a wider world, one of archetypal
dimension. All humans, once they take care of survival needs, feel
that there is a beyond-the-ego realm. Many still choose to call ``it''
God, or Goddess, or Love, or First Principle, or ``any other term
of your choice,'' as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, with
impressive success.
This God-image or God-principle, this beyond-the-ego realm of
the archetype is truly different from traditional religious faith. It
does not demand the kind of obedience that traditional religions
have tried (and are still trying) to impose. It is a radical move away
68 Depth psychology after neuroscience

from a posture of belief. It is an opening of the whole being that

allows one to serve one or the other of the archetypal values of
humanity. Those very human values ± justice, truth, love, com-
passion and so on ± don't need to be handed down from a priest, a
guru, or a preacher to have transcendental value. Transcendence,
which means a sense of value above, beyond and apart from the
material world, doesn't need to be packaged with religious dogma.
Monotheistic religions tend to place all good in God and most of
the bad in humans or in the devil. They have traditionally claimed
that transcendence comes from their God. Pagan religions were
considered inferior forms of worship, good for peasants, lacking in
sophistication. One of the interesting outcomes of the global-
ization of culture may very well be that Christianity's claim to
transcendence will be revealed for what it is ± an arti®cial
monopoly that needs to be dismantled. Depth psychology is part of
the demolition crew. It facilitates and accelerates the mourning
of God.
Rather than the relentless pursuit of an ideal of ¯awless
psychological health (which exists no more than God), I prefer the
via negativa, taking the road away from that which destroys. We
all have the option to develop an aversion to cruelty, a skillful
avoidance of narcissistic indulgences, the rejection of manipula-
tive, controlling, oppressive relationships. In other words, the
psyche can use a negative compass, one that points away from
forces that have the power to cripple. It is a reversal of the
Christian fantasy. Rather than gazing aloft at the sanctity of God,
the via negativa suggests a prudent tiptoeing away from the
nastiest human monsters.

Psychic monsters don't need redeeming

In order to travel the via negativa and move away from a
destructive force, one needs a clear vision of what is to be avoided.
We can draw inspiration from a literary or cinematographic
tradition and imagine those destructive forces as monsters,
demons, beasts, bug, viruses, alien subpersonalities ± whatever
seems appropriate as long as it is an image. What others call a
neurosis, let's call a ``monster.'' The difference between the concept
of neuroses and the image of a particular monster is a huge differ-
ence; it marks the boundary between science and the humanities.
Symbolic images develop into a story, whereas the concept of
 Therapy as redemption 69

neurosis is a dysfunction described in a medical lexicon. The

abstract concept of ``neurosis'' ¯attens the imagination and
requires a clinical cure. The challenge of a story with a monster
in it calls for a heroic adventure. We all have to meet our monsters,
mini or maxi, ordinary or extraordinary. A monster, in mythology
as in cinema, is de®ned as a malevolent creature that has a great
power of destruction and is a threat to the community. The
presence of a psychic monster calls forth a hero to battle or outwit
the monster until the community is safe again. In a family, for
example, the ®rst person who manages to break an old pattern of
destruction ± be it the serpent of addiction, the giant brute of
domestic violence, the wicked curse of self-absorption, or the
demon of hypochondria ± quali®es as a mythological hero.
All forms of psychoanalysis begin with a meeting with those
inner monsters. First, I become aware that this ``thing'', this
psychic virus, is in me, can destroy me, and us, and them. If the
monster reigns, the forces of destruction break loose. A time of
preparation is needed before one is ready for the heroic encounter
and that is one of the reasons why an analysis takes time. Joseph
Campbell8 has shown how the hero often at ®rst refuses the task
and wants to stay at home. The safety of home, however, is not
really an option; Dorothy and Toto are not in Kansas anymore.
The romantic poets, from whom Jung took inspiration,
imagined the psychological monsters as shadows, that part in us
that the light of reason does not seem to reach. Psychological
monsters dwell in the shadow because of their irrational nature.
They are the skeletons in the closet, the bugs in the programming,
the night of the living dead, the invasion of the aliens, the creepy
crawling things under the rock of unconscious repression. Our
monsters feed on cowardice and unwillingness to acknowledge
them but can never entirely be eliminated. The Christian strategy
of war and triumph over the devil is limited compared to the range
of possibilities offered to mythological heroes, whose strategies
include wit and wisdom, curiosity and intelligence.
The Christian attack and denial of the shadow is based on a
denial of the human body and desires. Such a tactic may have had
a powerful civilizing function when Christianity was converting
hordes of barbarians, but it soon turned into an inhuman fantasy
of the elimination of the monsters. It started with the demonizing
of the ®gure of Dionysus, who, before he was transformed by the
Christians into a devil, had been a god. The Greek Dionysus had
70 Depth psychology after neuroscience

been a troublesome character, dangerous, tragic, destructive, but

divine nonetheless. Dark as he was, he was an essential represen-
tation of the animal vitality of all life forms.9 Depth psychology
allies with paganism when af®rming the polytheistic nature of the
psyche, pointing out that God has never had ®nal victory over
Satan. The irrationality of the psyche is to the ego what Dionysus
is to Apollo; not an opposition between a devil and a god, but one
between two gods, two essential principles whose opposition is
part of a necessary equilibrium. Moreover, they are not the only
divinities either, they share the stages with many others.
The fantasy of one god triumphing over one devil has not only
created the huge shadow of Christianity but has also permeated
many of our psychological attitudes. A religion of love that is blind
to the fact that it is one of the most violent in history10 obviously
has a problem with the shadow. Similarly, a person who won't
face his or her shadow will burden others with it, insisting that
others carry those uncomfortable feelings that their image of a
perfect self cannot accommodate. Psychologically speaking, there
is another approach, one that does not suggest going to war with
one's monsters, nor seeking to purge and exorcize the demons.
Rather, it suggests a polytheistic strategy of balancing the energies,
balancing Dionysian irrationality with Apollonian self-discipline;
balancing authoritarian Zeus with witty Hermes; giving his due to
workaholic Hephaestos, to belligerent Ares, to strong Poseidon, to
dark Hades but also showing our respect for sexy Aphrodite,
nature lover Artemis, homey Hestia, wise Athena and regal Hera.
Those divinities (and many more) are all archetypal representa-
tions of aspects of life; when we don't pay attention to the
principle they personify, we maim ourselves and waste a fantastic
amount of psychic energy.
Just as we study a child with learning disabilities, we can study
our personal monsters and consider the problems we create for
them by wanting to ``redeem'' them. Psychic monsters resist both
demonization ± ``curse me all you like, it is like water off a duck's
back'' ± and they also resist redemption ± ``a halo won't ®t on my
horny self.'' Nevertheless, there is a way to reach them: monsters
want recognition, education, participation. It is as if these virtual
beings who live in our imagination want us to acknowledge them,
to give them a temple in our inner city, to include them in the
psychic community. Psychoanalysis is precisely that: an invitation
to gather in the analyst's of®ce, where even the wariest, wartiest,
 Therapy as redemption 71

sexiest, silliest parts of our self are welcome. It is an opening of the

closets to bring out the skeletons and the demons. The monsters
under the bed are dragged out and given a place at the table. We
get to meet them all, up close and personal. The psyche is vast
enough to host a multitude and the manner in which one hosts
them is what archetypal psychology calls the possibility of devel-
oping a psychological polytheism.

A monster can be contagious

By belonging to a family, a group, or even a couple, we necessarily
exist within a psychological network, a psychological environment
that has a psychic atmosphere. A heavy atmosphere is like a
psycho-dictatorship. A few powerful monsters impose their style
(paranoid, depressive, hostile, frigid, manipulative, mean, victi-
mizing) and make misery because psyches are much more con-
tagious than we like to believe. Throughout an analysis, we put a
lot of effort in establishing our ``psychological boundaries.'' (``This
feeling belongs to you, please don't project it on me. Would you
mind picking up your dirty socks that are all over the bedroom,
and while you're at it could you pick up your projections as
well?''). Nevertheless, hard as one may try to erect boundaries,
most feelings are highly contagious. There is no perfect ®lter. The
following vignette illustrates the fact that just as laughter, joy, and
love are contagious, so are hatred, fear, anxiety, depression, and
paranoia.

Psychological viruses
When my wife is angry with me, she says nothing. Her face is
blank. She goes about her daily chores with a subterranean
coldness, waging a silent, undeclared war. Looking at her,
one might think that she looks like someone watching TV, or
thinking about something. I know she is brooding, emitting
particles of hostility like those micro-bubbles of water from
the humidi®er. I breathe in each one of these particles of
resentment and they infect me. There is no wall, no door, no
headphones that will protect me against these moods. Sooner
72 Depth psychology after neuroscience

or later, I appear like the attacker, because I will bang a

door, snap at her, or become agitated, trying to release the
vice-like grip around my heart. I am the one who appears to
be hostile, but my feeling is that I am defending myself
against a coldness that is death-like, disproportionate, mon-
strous, and dangerous for me.

This man asked his wife, as a last resort, to go into couple therapy.
She agreed to a consultation and at the second session was willing
to invite her resenting monster to come center stage, to appear in
the room. She named it: ``I know you, brooding monster. You are
my silent anger.'' She had a question for the monster. ``Why do
you want to destroy my marriage?'' The conversation with the
monster was a revelation for her. Later on, the husband discovered
an interesting monster of his own. ``I know you, you big ¯attening
machine. You are my inferiority feeling. I know you are there in
the shadow, giving me angry prompts when I feel unseen.''
When I was an adolescent, every Christmas I would see one of
my cousins at the annual family gathering. This guy annoyed me
more than anyone on earth. He would pursue me, insisting on
talking about cars and money. He wanted to tell me how much he
had paid for his car's tune-up and wax job, or he would detail all
the bargains he had found in the last month of shopping. Not only
was he the most boring person I ever encountered but, for some
reason, his talkative, invasive, insisting persona distressed me. I
evaded him with all possible excuses, but he would catch up with
me. None of my evasion strategies ± bathroom, buffet, babble,
blurting, blushing ± ever worked. A monster is just like this cousin
± inescapable ± part of the family, unavoidable. Whatever you do,
wherever you go, he'll show up.
We can no more dodge a monster than silence the ego. The only
thing that ®nally worked with my cousin was to become curious.
Why, I ®nally wondered, is this guy so interested in small bargains
when he is loaded with money? What is a car to him? Why doesn't
he perceive that I don't give a ¯ip about the care of cars, or the
price of a wax? What in him and what in me makes his presence so
excruciatingly boring? Why is it excruciating for me to be so bored
by him? What do I ®nd so terrible about boredom? From then on,
 Therapy as redemption 73

his presence stopped being a problem; it became an interesting

psychological puzzle. When he died I was sorry, because I had
become interested in his particular way of being-in-the world, I
had developed a weird kind of affection for him, a familiar family
bugbear.
A similar strategy works pretty well with psychological
monsters because the possibility of educating the psyche begins
with curiosity. Curiosity makes a good detective, a good scientist,
a good student, a good analyst and a good analysand. To educate
the psyche, we have to become curious, psychological magni®er in
hand, looking very carefully for clues about the nature of a par-
ticular monster. The psyche will not learn if it is approached with
impatience, aggression, or contempt. Beating a child to teach him
a poem won't work. Our demons are just like that child. In the
following example, the technique of active imagination helped a
patient imagine a way to ``educate'' his monster, with the respect
and patience that one would use with a recalcitrant child.

My monster is an accountant with a

moralistic attitude
My inner torturer is an accountant who knows how to push
all my guilt buttons. He whispers to me, ``You've wasted the
family fortune . . . you've wasted the family fortune . . .
you've wasted the family fortune. . . . Look at your portfolio,
look at how little the money you inherited has grown, all
your investment strategies failed, you have a negative
growth. To be poor is to be nobody. Your brother invested
well and look how rich he is. To be poor is a shame. Shame
on you!''
I had a talk with this inner abuser. ``Do you realize that
you speak to me as if you were the voice of conscience? Do
you see that you ignore the fact that I am the only one in the
dynasty that has broken the pattern of alcoholism? Do you
really think it is wise to reduce everything to the growth of a
portfolio? Let me show you another kind of balance sheet.
You may like to learn a different approach to life. You may
like what I want to teach you.''
74 Depth psychology after neuroscience

To do active imagination with the subpersonalities one may

start by imagining their voice, their posturing, their habits, and
then to interrogate them ± not as if we were conducting an
inquisition, but rather like the curious questions of a traveler. A
tourist doesn't act like a detective interrogating a suspect, but asks
questions like: ``Why are the apartment buildings in Paris, Rome,
and Madrid turned inward, around a courtyard, while in New
York, Dallas and Chicago, the preference is for a high panoramic
view? Why is it polite here to burp after a good meal, whereas at
home it is considered vulgar? Just asking! Curiosity. Monster, tell
me: why are you upset when this guy talks about cars?''

Unredeemable Narcissus
Narcissus is one of those psychological monsters about whom
there is an abundance of literature. The myth of Narcissus is
extremely useful to illustrate how walking away from a negative
ideal can sometimes work better than aiming at a positive ideal.
Instead of asking oneself, ``How can I redeem Narcissus; how can I
be more altruistic?'' one starts with curiosity: ``Hey Narcissus,
how did you get into my psyche? Who put you in charge? What
tricky things are you up to now? How, when, with whom, and in
what kind of emotional context do you take hold of me?'' The
tragedy of letting Narcissus invade the psyche is most common
and the damage is always the same. Narcissism inevitably destroys
the possibility of joy because joy is always in relation to the Other,
even if that Other is a tree, the ocean, a puppy, or tulip bulbs
asking to be planted before they rot. To feel joy in any kind of
accomplishment there has to be some sort of connection with
whomever the accomplishment will bene®t. If I send my check to
an organization that helps heal the ocean, I will feel joy when I
read that the ocean's health is improving, because I previously felt
my connection with the ocean. Narcissus ®rst experiences joy
when he beholds himself in the mirror (the still water of the pond).
He thinks he is ®nally meeting that Other whom he can love. The
joy disappears with the realization that connection with this Other
is impossible. The narcissist is always trying to connect with his
own image of an idealized self, his own most wonderful, godlike
self-image. Half the time the narcissist is in love with himself and
for the other half he loathes himself, but it is still all about him.
 Therapy as redemption 75

What is godlike in ourselves gives joy only when shared. Even

the most reclusive scientist, the shyest artist working in seclusion,
can feel joy if love for science or art connects them to the world, to
an imaginary Other who will bene®t from their accomplishments.
As vitality and joy can only come from connection, the conse-
quence of letting Narcissus ± or any other monster ± rule is a
desiccation of the heart (the fate of Echo who falls in love with
him). Narcissus does not know that his self-absorption is lethal, to
himself and to Echo. He does not recognize that all his gazing into
the face of the beloved is only a re¯ection. In love with himself, he
can only suffer his tragic fate, which is to disappear into the
mirror. He never gets the message ± look buddy, there is nobody
but you in this game.
Lost in the mirror is a perfect image for the narcissist, but there
are a great variety of them. A patient of mine dreamt of a chrysalis
that never transformed.

My sealed cocoon
I spent years creating a cocoon supposedly to protect myself
from the Invaders, which meant everybody! I imprisoned
myself by spinning more and more layers of protection, the
®lament being incessant thoughts about me, me, me. I never
learned what joy is, or is not. I usually ``buy'' love in one
form or another of an emotional deal. I've had three mar-
riages that were all contractual arrangements. I do not trust
that I can reach out, grow wings, and ¯y. I don't believe I can
experience the reciprocity of love.

This narcissistic monster kept this man captive in a cocoon, not

letting anybody come close to him. Like a child kept in a closet,
Narcissus is in®rm in his capacity to connect. Narcissus is but
one ®gure, one myth. The variety of monsters and the brand of
narcissisms are as wide as the characters in mythology. The
beautiful Aphrodite can be pretty obsessed with the mirror and she
too can provide images of self-centeredness as well as Zeus,
Apollo, and all the others in the Greek pantheon. All quests for
wisdom initiate some form or other of that conversation with the
76 Depth psychology after neuroscience

weak, primitive, dangerous person in us. The fantasy of redemp-

tion is one of getting rid of monsters. Such an attack on the
inhabitants of our psyches would deprive us of a partner in the
inner conversation, one that we need for our development.
As I promised the patients who agreed to have their stories
included, I will disclose something about one of my familiar
monsters, whom I long ago baptized the ``Little Match Girl.'' This
imaginary character, with whom I have an ongoing dialogue, will
not go away. Yet, through the technique of active imagination, it
seems that she bene®ted from a sort of ``education.'' She used to
appear in moments of perfectly ®ne solitude, the kind of solitude a
writer absolutely needs to write and read; she would instill doubt
suggesting that I was not alone, but lonely, or maybe, even an
abandoned orphan. This monsterette now exerts less tyranny on
my psyche, thanks to analytical work. Here is an example of an
imaginary dialogue with her (LMG).

Educating Little Match Girl

Ginette: Is it you again, infantile girl-monster with your whining
voice?
LMG: Yes, I am your fear of being abandoned in boarding
school.
Ginette: I know your tactic: you paralyze me with panic, making
me think, feel, and act as if I were a poor lonely orphan,
the kid who remains in boarding school when all the
others have gone home for Christmas. Can you tell me
why you instill nostalgia in me whenever I decorate a
Christmas tree? It's odd. Where does this scene of the
perfect Christmas come from, this scene that evokes
such melancholy? This perfect Christmas never hap-
pened; how do you manage to create nostalgia with
something that is not in the memory?
LMG: Simple: I push the pathos far beyond the reality of what
is happening. For example, you are pleasantly alone in a
comfortable silent house, seated at your desk, ®ngers on
the keyboard, focused on writing, and I come in and put
you in a trance and from then on you feel as if you were
famished, lonely, abandoned, shivering with cold, on
Christmas Eve, with not even a match to hold on to the
fantasy of the banquet that is being served to those who,
 Therapy as redemption 77

unlike yourself, have perfect lives and plenty of good

company.
Ginette: You are indeed a poor little monsterette! I think it is you
whom I have abandoned! I can see why you want to
instill in me those sorrows, but really they belong to
you. I apologize for having been ashamed of you. I have
ignored and suppressed your voice for many decades
because you are so extravagant in your pathos.
LMG: Yes, you did abandon me. Your act of the ``queen of
autonomy'' was an insult to me. I want your attention. I
want you to help me grow up. I want you to educate
me. I am primitive, hungry, lonely, poorly dressed,
poorly fed. I have no social skills, I am shy and, most of
all, I am tired of my drama because there are much
more interesting things in this world than fantasies of
unreachable cakes in a shop window.
Ginette: Okay. Get ready for a change, sweetie, because I am
tired of our drama. I am de®nitely not an orphan but a
grown-up woman with a pension plan and an almost
paid-up mortgage. Famine and homelessness are
unlikely to happen at this point in my story. I may
not be the queen of autonomy but I am not the lonely
orphan either; I have friends, passions, a garden, and
lots of very good books to read.
LMG: You like books more than cakes?
Ginette: I do, and I have access to more books then I can ever
read in the time I have left on this earth.
LMG: What is your plan with me? Will you feed me or read to
me?
Ginette: I'm adopting you, Poor Little Match Girl. Come, take
up residence in my heart. My heart is your home.
Believe me, cakes and books and company you will
have, but stop the tyranny on my soul. Take a look
around. Life can be good, warm, and delicious, and you
are welcome to the banquet.

To be honest, I have others, much shadier characters in my psyche

than this monsterette, but she is real too and has taught me a thing
or two about the necessity to avoid the Christian ambush of
redemption. My psychological creativity comes from the respect I
now have for those unredeemable ®gures of my inferiority feelings.
78 Depth psychology after neuroscience

All monsters ask for a chance to evolve, an occasion to appear on

stage and react with disgust at fantasies of redemption. What they
are asking for is much simpler: to join the living. In exchange, they
will do some of the living for us; they love to participate, to play,
to write a few chapters in our life stories.
Chapter 7

Boundary issues
``You, science. Me, humanities.''

Economic models are entirely adequate for doing business. Legal

models represent centuries of re®ning processes for maintaining
law and order in the land. The medical model is effective for
healing illnesses. The model of religion makes sense as long as one
has faith in the redemptive power of the deity and trust in its
institutions. All of these models have in¯uenced the practice of
psychotherapy, but are not meant to address the passionate,
irrational, Dionysian aspect of psychological life, in its destructive
as well as constructive movement. The promise of healing (medical
model), the desire of multiplying one's psychological investments
(economic model), the negotiation of one's psychic territory
( judicial model), the hope of redemption (religious model), all play
a large role in every analysis, because they are signi®cant com-
ponents of lives and cultures. Nevertheless, if we limit ourselves to
a rational, non-Dionysian approach to psychological suffering, we
lose the sense of life as an adventure and replace it with life as a
series of medico-scienti®c problems to be solved.
When I was nine years old, one day my father and I were sitting
on a bridge stalled in traf®c. I saw a man, dressed in a black
cashmere overcoat, white silk scarf and a perfect felt hat, leaning
over the railing of the sidewalk of the bridge, looking down into
the waters of the mighty turbulent river below. I had the sharp
intuition, a certitude, that he would throw himself from the bridge
and said so to my father. Moments later he did; I saw him jump,
his hat still on, the white silk scarf unfolding in the air like soft
wings. The next day the paper told his story of heartbreak. To the
child that I was, this tragedy proved the reality of the soul. There
exists something in us, invisible and intangible, that distills suffer-
ing and joy. Loss of love, lack of love, failures of love can attack
80 Depth psychology after neuroscience

this invisible organ of feeling and we want to jump off a bridge. I

had found my vocation and a de®nition of the soul: that which is
invisible, yet experiences all feelings.
At 55 years old, after a brain injury and eight months of
rehabilitation, I felt the same certitude: the reality of the psyche is
invisible yet it quali®es all our experiences; it can turn pain into a
gift and a gift into a curse. But knowing something from the heart
and ®nding the language to communicate the experience are two
very different things. When the time came for me to get back
behind the podium and resume my work as professor of psy-
chology, the panic was intense because I had to relearn how to
teach, this time from a place of uncertainty. I had to leave behind
the gnostic stance, to stop posturing as the psychologist who
knows about the psyche, and to assume the position of the
agnostic, of one who does not know for sure. When I con®ded this
to a friend, himself a professor of literature, he gave me this
advice: ``I never know for sure the meaning of a poem. Still, I can
talk with my students about the poem's evocative power.'' That
was excellent advice and I followed it. The psyche really is like a
poem; it has evocative power and it can be trained to perform with
even more power. I ®nally understood the intellectual liberation
that comes with the idea that the entire ®eld of depth psychology
can now move back to the original goal, which is to evoke, a verb
which means: ``1. to bring to mind a memory or feeling, especially
from the past; 2. to provoke a particular reaction or feeling; 3. to
make beings appear who are normally invisible.''1 Symbols are
evocative, stories are evocative, art is evocative, literature is
evocative, myths are evocative.
The reality of the psyche is a virtual one, based on the psycho-
logical imagining or ``imaging'' we do daily because we need to
symbolize events that move us. The goal of an analysis is to
become aware of that evocative process, aware of the virtual script
we create every minute, aware of the ¯avor of today's ordinary
hypnotic trance, or ± to use Joseph Campbell's words ± to become
aware of the myths we live by. A myth is a powerful suggestion,
just like a post-hypnotic suggestion, and it is based on a ®ction. A
metaphor is a ®ction, a symbol is a ®ction, just as a sad movie is
just a ®ction but it can move us to shed real tears. As Jung
described it, a symbol is true inside and false outside. A movie
script is true inside (it can move me to tears), yet it is false outside
(an invented story). A poem that suggests my heart is a violin
 Boundary issues: ``You, science. Me, humanities.'' 81

playing its sad melody in minor mode is true inside and false
outside; a guided relaxation exercise (auto-hypnotic technique)
that helps me relax at the dentist by listening to a tape of the
sound of the ocean offers only a ®ctive ocean. All this imagery is
made up, but the evocative power of the images is as powerful as
the still incomprehensible magic of love.
A myth is never factual in the sense that a detective or journalist
needs a fact to be just a fact. A myth is a fantasy, a preferred lie, a
foundational story, a hypnotic trance, an identity game, a virtual
reality, one that can be either inspirational or despairing. It is a
story in which I cast myself, it is my inner cinema, the motion
picture of my inner reality ± one that moves all the time. No
diagnosis can ®x the myth, no cure can settle it, because our inner
life is precisely what, in us, will not lie still.
Our personal story is the product of our imagination, a faculty
that used to be synonymous with what we now call the uncon-
scious. Imagination is just as good a word as unconscious, which,
as Freud himself insisted, is and remains a hypothesis, as unproved
and unprovable as the concept of ``imagination.'' It is just a word
to point at our tendency to amplify stories and expand them into
myth. Myth contains no certainty, no sure knowledge; it is a
product of our imagination. Yet, we cannot live without myths,
any more than a culture can survive without literature, art, music,
poetry, storytelling, or the form that mythic imagination now
takes: cinema, songs, advertisements. It is crucial, however, to
know that a myth is only a myth; it presents itself as truth, but
knowing its ®ctive aspect gives one the power to edit the story.
Just as one has to be really naive to confuse an infomercial with
information, all the same we don't like those who insist on
presenting their organizing myth as the source of causality: ``You
want me to believe that if you beat your kids today, it's `because'
your dad was an alcoholic? Sorry! I am not buying into your
myth.'' Such oppressive myths can be deconstructed while useful
ones can be ampli®ed. Falling in love is an uplifting myth: ``You
want me to believe that you are a beautiful, creative, interesting,
generous, capable person? Yes, I can relate to you from that
script.'' Certain movies have the power to transform us and it does
not matter if we know they are invented stories, because we still
feel they are internally true. Their artistic and psychological truth
resonates with us; that is why we love the cinema. Nevertheless, as
rational beings, we also need a clear distinction between the
82 Depth psychology after neuroscience

categories of truth. Factual truth is not the same as artistic or

psychological truth, and the difference is crucial. The idea of a
reporter who, instead of reporting facts, would weave a plausible
®ction, is immensely troubling. A fact should, in principle, never
be confused with a ®ction, although, as all studies in communica-
tion have demonstrated, the confusion is more frequent than we
like to admit.
When a myth no longer serves, the ®rst move is usually to label
it just that, a myth. We declare something to be ``only a myth,''
when the ``lie'' in it (the metaphor) no longer works for us. The
invented story, the scenario, is then deconstructed. Feminism, anti-
racism, ecology, atheism have performed such spectacular ``decon-
structions.'' The oppressive myths were revealed as lies: black is
not ugly, female is not weak, natural resources are not in®nite,
religion, churches, priests, and obedience are not essential to
spirituality. This process has been called deconstruction, a fasci-
nating demolition derby to scrap oppressive myths. The joy of
myth debunking can be intense. The deconstructionists did not
invent the concept, just a refreshed theory for it. Deconstruction
can also be called the work of intelligence and rationality, as
opposed to belief and propaganda. It is a form of lucidity, a seeing
through ®ctions that pretend to be facts.
The ®rst step of myth debunking is usually to produce argu-
ments of reality as evidence of the falsity: ``You say that women
should not get pilots' licenses because their hormones make them
unstable? False! Take a look at the statistics!'' We are not yet in
myth debunking, just getting the facts right, a ®rst step, because
rationality is never enough to get rid of a negative myth. Only a
fresh, lively, charged new myth will carry enough magic to replace
the old, negative, tired, abusive, retrograde, ®nished, exhausted
myth. Facts are contradicted by facts, statistics by statistics, data
by data, and that is called the scienti®c approach. But a myth can
only be replaced by a myth, a virtual reality by another virtual
reality, a symbol by a symbol, a story by a story. Along with the
rational arguments aiming at the logical deconstruction, a fresh set
of images has to appear, exciting new stories, new interpretations,
new episodes in the collective script. The new myth reverses the
old values and suggests, for example, that black is beautiful ± or
female is beautiful, gay is beautiful, old is beautiful, fat is not
abject, atheism is virtuous ± and so on with each value that was
part of the old oppressive myth.
 Boundary issues: ``You, science. Me, humanities.'' 83

If one reads nineteenth-century novels, any plot involving a

woman who chose divorce had to suggest that the price of such
freedom might be more than she could bear.2 The cultural
programming of the time was such that the only virtual game a
woman was allowed to play when imagining her life was that of
sel¯ess wife, obedient nun, or sexless old maid devoted to church,
aging parents, cats, begonias, and goodwill. Divorce was legal but
the literature was undermining the legal gain. Every popular novel
involving a divorcee had to show her doomed, a pariah, destitute,
a lost soul. By comparison, a slew of movies appeared around
1960 exemplifying a very different script; they depicted women
who were not only surviving, but thriving and ± oh surprise ±
enjoying their freedom. The legal, factual option of divorce was
making its way through literature and movie scripts, some of it
written by women as they began expressing themselves as writers
and directors and some written by men attuned to the new myth.
Every collectivity is always updating its myths and if it ever stops
doing so there is stagnation.
The same process goes on in the personal psyche: it has to
constantly add, cut, paste, save, delete, and sometimes reformat
the whole psychic disk, or else it stagnates. A destructive myth
should be treated like a deadly enemy. The psychic space between
the new myth and the old myth often feels like a deadly zone. It is.
This is the zone for which depth psychology offers a map, one that
shows a completely different topography than the map used for a
medical diagnosis.

The confusing definition of depth

psychology
Depth psychology is a general term that remains confusing because
it de®nes all approaches that take into account the unconscious
dimension of the psyche. Depth psychology was ®rst presented as a
victory against the debilitating symptoms of neurosis. Freud's
initial positioning was that of a medical doctor looking for causes:
if the patient's arm is paralyzed because of a repressed desire to
slap somebody in the face, then the psychoanalytic talking cure, in
lifting the unconscious repression, would cure the paralysis. It was
crucial for Freud and Jung, and the immediate followers of depth
psychology, to ally themselves with the medical profession, in
order to break the Church's monopoly on the care of the soul. The
84 Depth psychology after neuroscience

insistence of the ®rst two generations of depth psychologists on

being ``doctors of the soul'' was a strategic necessity, a useful
alliance, a wise posturing. Only the medical model was legitimate
enough to allow them to talk about a topic such as sex or a
concept such as the unconscious. The title of medical doctor
offered the prestige needed to challenge the religious monopoly on
moral counseling. But today, many, but not all, depth psycho-
logists (including myself ) feel that the need for that strategic
alliance with the medical profession has passed. This split is
responsible for a real tension, and at times an incompatibility,
between approaches which, technically, belong in the category of
depth psychology, because they all consider the unconscious
dimension of the psyche, but take residence in different academic
houses. For example, such psychodynamic theories as those of
Kohut, Kernberg and Gunderson cling to a rhetoric of trauma and
treatment, a choice that situates them in direct opposition to many
Jungians, post-Jungians3 and archetypal psychologists such as
James Hillman, who is joined by theoreticians from religious
studies, philosophy, literary criticism and mythology4 ± all of
whom radically place themselves outside of the medical logic.
Throughout this book, I exclude psychodynamic approaches
whenever I refer to depth psychology because I believe their
trauma-treatment rhetoric places them with the nineteenth-century
perspectives. Although fascinating to read, I am arguing that they
belong to the history of depth psychology but not to its future,
because to do science one has to follow its method. Advances in
neurology and psychiatry invite a clear break with pseudo-
scienti®c theories about the unconscious psyche.
The deconstructive±reconstructive approach of archetypal psy-
chology5 examines the reasons for dropping the medical pretense
and the bene®ts of getting rid of the whole lot of useless, unprov-
able hypotheses by radically separating depth psychology from the
®eld of medicine. It was Freud who began the game of fabricating
one hypothesis after another, consistent with the medical persona
which was crucial to acceptance within the medical milieu that
was his. Yet at the beginning of his career Freud had been careful
to mention that the unconscious was only a kind of useful
hypothesis, still unproven, that the unconscious should never be
posited as ``real,'' that it was only a useful concept to start think-
ing about inner life. Freud also expressed that medical training
might be the worst possible preparation for being an analyst. He
 Boundary issues: ``You, science. Me, humanities.'' 85

argued in favor of lay analysis, pointing out that the best training
was a culture, especially a knowledge of literature, philosophy,
anthropology. He admitted that his case histories were more like
short stories than medical reports. He explicitly said that his
theories were not amenable to experimental con®rmation or
discon®rmation. It is regrettable that later psychoanalysts weren't
able to acknowledge this part of the Freudian legacy. They would
have felt more at ease with the fact that depth psychology is
mostly literature, but a vitally important and rich form of litera-
ture. Freud, after all, got the Goethe Prize for literature, not for
medicine.
The production of pseudo-scienti®c explanations about the
psyche ± adding to the impressive stack of unproven, unprovable
psychological hypotheses ± has slowed down in the last decade,
mainly because the development of neuropsychology is producing
research that is truly amenable to experimental con®rmation or
discon®rmation. Yet, every year, more of these pseudo-scienti®c
explanations are published, only to be later discarded as junk, as is
most of the theorizing about homosexuality, frigidity, hysteria,
depression, mood disorders, personality disorders, post-traumatic
disorders and most af¯ictions of the psyche that are not evidently
based on a general medical condition.
This intellectual waste is revelatory of a complex of inferiority
toward hard science, cluttering the ®eld of depth psychology with
the wrong rhetoric. I ®nd it more fruitful to work toward an
acceptance of the fact that depth psychology is not a natural
science, never was, never will be. It was, is, and shall remain a part
of the humanities. The mimesis of science, the language of hypo-
thesis, the obsolete conceptual abstractions, the fake complexity
(when the real one is that of the psyche), the battles between
schools (hiding a battle of egos), all of it is coming to a full stop as
depth psychologists begin to speak evocatively instead of
dogmatically. Theories that borrow the language of science but
without the rigor of the scienti®c approach are useless as science
and useless as literature.
After almost a century of trying to prove psychoanalytic theories
right or wrong, depth psychologists have no other choice than to
take into account the conclusion reached by their own community
of researchers. A former president of the American Psychiatric
Association, Alan Stone, professor of law and psychiatry in the
Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard, in his
86 Depth psychology after neuroscience

keynote address to the American Academy of Psychoanalysis in

1996,6 voiced the consensus: depth psychology belongs to the arts
and the humanities, not to science and not to the medical model.
He did not specify which of the arts, which of the disciplines of the
humanities, but he says this in his conclusion that ``psychoanalysis
will survive in popular culture as a narrative by which we under-
stand and re¯ect on the moral adventure of life.'' In other words,
he is saying, without using the word, that psychoanalysis will
survive as mythology. A mythology, to take his very words, is
precisely ``a narrative by which we understand and re¯ect on the
moral adventure of life.''
Depth psychologists, as well as their patients, can get back to
the task of becoming psychologically wiser, philosophically
brilliant, rhetorically inspired, and renew their alliance with the
arts. We can, at last, stop trying to cure what will not heal, and ®x
what will not lie still. We can ®nally afford to stop the pathetic
effort to surpass the Joneses (the scientists). Depth psychology has
a niche: the art of creating virtual reality. It does not need to lay its
eggs in somebody else's nest. Just as there is no denying the pro-
gress of medical research, there is also no denying that the richness
of a culture is grounded in the humanities, which nurture the
capacity to think deeply about things. Depth psychology, as a
theory, is just that: a deep thinking about the life of the psyche
and, as such, belongs to the arts and humanities.

Schools, labels, egos, copyrights, money

Another factor of confusion when de®ning ``depth psychology''
comes from the fact that, over the past decades, the theoretical
boundaries between the many depth-psychological schools follow-
ing Freud, Jung, Adler, Reich, Rank, Lacan, Hillman, Klein, Bion,
Winnicott, Bowlby and Kohut have broken down under the in¯u-
ence of the eclectic range of practitioners who are all interested in
the unconscious dimension of the psyche, but reject the theoretical
strictness of the founding fathers. Training institutes, in opening
their doors to social workers, educators, philosophers, have fos-
tered a climate of openness. As these new practitioners are trained
in more than one approach, the traditional distinction between the
concept of psychotherapy and that of psychoanalysis has also
softened. Many practitioners are reluctant to label their approach
because they want to avoid cultish overtones of schools based
 Boundary issues: ``You, science. Me, humanities.'' 87

upon one founding father (are you Freudian or Jungian?) or one

founding mother (are you Kleinian?).
Following that deconstructive mode, psychotherapy from a
depth-psychological approach appears under many names: psycho-
analytic psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, psychological analysis,
analytical psychology. For the sake of simplicity, when in need of
exploring differences between schools (such as that between the
strictly Jungian approach as compared to the post-Jungian arche-
typal approach) I prefer to insist on the theoretical nuances in the
thinking, rather than differences in the labeling of the approach.
This vagueness around the label of ``depth psychology'' echoes
the vagueness around the word ``psychology.'' First-year students
in psychology are invariably confused by the fact that the word
``psychology'' can be af®xed to almost any trend, any problem, any
discipline: take the word ``neuro'' and af®x the word ``psychology''
and you have ``neuropsychology'' which clearly belongs to science;
but then you can also take the word ``sport,'' or ``music,'' or
``parenting,'' or ``aging'' and af®x the word ``psychology'' and you
have four more psychologies: psychology of sport, psychology of
music; psychology of parenting, psychology of aging. For some of
these ``psychologies'' it is easy to see how they clearly belong to
science: neuropsychology and neuropsychological assessment of
memory disorders (such as amnesia, aphasia, apraxia); cognitive
neuropsychology and assessment of speech and language disorders;
neuropsychological rehabilitation; psychology of learning dis-
abilities (such as dyslexia); psychology of motor development;
experimental research in clinical and social psychology; clinical
assessment and treatment; developmental psychopathology and
gerontology; statistical research in mental health disorders.
It is also quite easy to identify the psychologies that belong in
the mixed category of ``social sciences'': behavioral and cognitive
development; social psychology (intergroup behavior, group
dynamics, action research, participatory research, attitudes and
persuasion, gender identity, sex roles, delinquency, prejudices,
styles of leadership, social psychology of organizations, verbal and
non-verbal communication, self and social identity); develop-
mental psychology of early attachment (childhood, adolescence,
adulthood, lifespan development, transitions, aging); comparative
and intercultural psychology; psychology of moral development;
psychology of animal behavior; economic psychology; political
psychology, sport psychology.
88 Depth psychology after neuroscience

And last, there are the psychologies that read like essays in the
tradition of the humanities, although many of its authors still cling
to a rhetoric redolent of social science: environmental psychology,
feminist psychology, evolutionary psychology, psychology of reli-
gion, psychology of music, transpersonal psychology, ecopsychol-
ogy, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian and
post-Jungian analytical psychology, imaginal psychology, arche-
typal psychology.
New ``psychologies'' are added every week, some of them little
more than the product of ego-in¯ated authors trying to sell their
copyrighted brand of psychology, others showing real innovation
and answering the need to better understand the psyche±soma
connection. Publishers' catalogues come up every year with more
classi®cations to organize the genres in which their authors are
writing. Students drink it all in and later make their own menu
from all those approaches.7
This proliferation and specialization can be interpreted as a
byproduct of the growing psychology industry but it may also
signal a turning point in the history of psychology. I believe that
the next psychologies will present themselves with clearer identi-
ties: on one side the psychologies that belong to science, and on the
other side the psychologies that belong to the humanities and are
concerned with becoming wiser humans. The richness of any
culture is so obviously grounded in scienti®c progress that we have
been inclined to take for granted other kinds of progress. Never-
theless, history is a demonstration of how advances in the humani-
ties are determining of the quality of our existence because they
bring a capacity to think deeply about things. Depth psychology, as
a theory, is just that: a deep thinking about the psyche.

What is deep about the psyche?

The power of depth psychology lies in: (a) an idea, (b) a technique,
and (c) a quality of presence. The idea is simple: if I, the patient,
refuse to examine the myths that organize my perceptions, I lead
my life on automatic pilot, unaware even of a personal destina-
tion. As a result, I may end up in a disappointing land. An analysis
may help me become aware of my navigational programming. The
technique is also quite simple, although it takes some serious
practicing. The therapist/analyst listens attentively, respectfully
and in a non-judgmental manner. When he or she speaks, it should
 Boundary issues: ``You, science. Me, humanities.'' 89

not raise the patient's resistances. There are other techniques, such
as active imagination and dream analysis, but they only work
when the listening and the speaking are just right.
The third element, the quality of presence, is not as simple as the
®rst two. It is the one invisible and absolutely essential quality,
almost impossible to de®ne, and dif®cult to teach. The quality of
presence differentiates a talented therapist from a mediocre one.
That elusive quality is part of what makes therapy an art, the art
of seeing through to the interior cinema projected upon the psyche.
This art involves a nose for the lies that patients are telling them-
selves, an ear to detect a quaver in the voice, an intuition for what
is unknown, even to the patient, a heart to host the suffering, and
an intelligence to perceive the leitmotifs of the dramas being
enacted. Needless to say, the analyst must have learned to identify
just such factors in her or his own life.
The analyst brings to therapy some ideas, some techniques, and
a quality of presence. The patient arrives at the ®rst session with a
similar set. He or she holds ideas, has developed survival tech-
niques, and exhibits a quality of presence. The ideas that are
usually discussed in therapy are the invalid inferences that make
the patient's life so painful. For example, in most advanced
societies, sexism and racism are now considered philosophical and
moral errors and have been replaced by more equalitarian
attitudes. Nevertheless, they linger in the psyche like toxic waste.
The violent husband who lives in an antiquated mind set rages
because his pay check does not buy him control over other human
beings. The idea of equality between the sexes does not ®t his
beliefs. He does not see the advantage of such an ideological shift.
Even if he gets past his resistance, he does not know how to
``think'' or ``imagine'' an equalitarian, reciprocal relationship
between a man and a woman. It is his ideas that need therapy.
His ideas are sick, but sick ideas are not listed in the DSM, so
the clinical label is attached to the person instead ± one that
locates the sickness in him and creates another problem. Most
likely, the wife of that man is also trapped in rancid ideas, thinking
that her submission precludes her taking responsibility for herself.
If he beats the children, she may settle into the role of victim. Her
thinking does not go far enough for her to conclude that she is a
coward for letting him beat the kids. Sick ideas need therapy,
which translates as enlightenment of the emotions, the intellect,
the imagination. We are all sometimes unaware of the rotten
90 Depth psychology after neuroscience

ideas we have been fed. Regularly, we have to vomit them up. It

might be healthy to think for a while not of glorious and happy
things but to squeeze our eyes and catalogue all behaviors we are
most terri®ed by, what psychic shadows hide in our uppermost
attic closets.
The patient also has his or her set of coping techniques, a
psychic survival kit that contains healthy as well as neurotic tech-
niques of self-defense. All defense mechanisms are ``techniques'' to
avoid psychic destruction. The problem is that the techniques are
often outdated and have become too costly to perform, like a triple
heart bypass to treat the arrhythmia of a panic attack. The
patient's quality of presence to himself or herself as well as to
others has usually deteriorated into a state of abuse and internal
violence. One of the immediate bene®ts of psychoanalysis is that
the patient comes to understand that this relationship to himself or
herself can be improved, and that it is the basis for the relationship
with others. The analyst educates the soul by showing, in practice,
how presence can have a different quality. Analysis is not so much
a cure as it is an education, like learning a new language, a philo-
sophical adventure in self-discovery, an art of living more lucidly
and intensely.
Psychological wisdom is the goal of an analysis. If wisdom is
replaced by formulaic diagnoses and in¯exible treatment plans, the
quality of presence is lost. There is among young psychologists
fresh out of school an optimism, an innocence, a naivety, and an
in¯ation that is one of the results of an overly technical training.
They are led to ``believe'' in their theories. They are taught to
approach psychological suffering through all sorts of theoretical
grids, processing all human emotions and life's complications as
``problems'' that this or that theory can solve. All the stories they
hear go into a theoretical blender and come out in the form of a
slush of ``should'' and ``should not.'' Just as we have the techno-
optimists, who believe that new technologies will bring the planet
together, we have the psycho-optimists who believe that loss,
angst, heartbreak, love triangles, fear of pleasure, fear of freedom,
fear of life's adventure are all wounds that can be healed with the
proper techniques.
The growing insistence on the code of professional rules of
conduct (such as: no physical contact with the patient, no social-
izing, an of®ce with two doors, not giving the patient information
about your personal life, etc.) receives a lot of attention from
 Boundary issues: ``You, science. Me, humanities.'' 91

students of psychotherapy. However, the more profound ethical

issues of analysis are barely discussed. Rules are useful, but, more
often than not, they are a set of legal guidelines to protect the
therapist from litigation. The professional code of conduct pro-
vides a model that maintains a minimal kind of order. A model
does not, however, ensure a positive result. Just as good table
manners don't reveal anything about someone's ethical judgment,
the ethics code of the American Psychological Association (APA)
primarily re¯ects the technical, legal, and economic concerns of
a corporate body. But a model that persists in ignoring the
Dionysian aspect of the psyche cannot go very deep toward
understanding the fury, anger, jealousy, betrayal, playfulness,
tragedy, and complexity that are part of psychological life. As
much as we may need more and more ``®x-it'' techniques in the
service of productivity and mental health, a rich culture will also
want to develop the art of dancing in sync with the psyche.
Chapter 8

Brother philosophy, sister

psychology

Philosophy, rather than psychology, ®rst had the reputation of

being able to teach us how to grow up and live wisely. Psychology
stole that role from philosophers. Brother philosophy and sister
psychology might bene®t from a good talk about their mission in
the world. Since my own brother, Claude, is a philosopher, I am
starting with my own personal effort at territorial reuni®cation.
I am not one of those intellectuals who has read everything.
Before reading Freud and Jung, I did not, as my brother Claude
recommended, read the authors who had inspired them: Plato,
Aristotle, Goethe, Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger. Claude is the
philosopher of the family. Two years my senior, he was my ®rst
intellectual hero and a true brother. I saw him only on weekends
and during summers, since I was in boarding school from age 7 to
20, but his in¯uence was formative. The reciprocal in¯uence of
siblings has received very little attention in psychological litera-
ture, as compared to the study of the parental in¯uence. That
oversight is part of my motivation in exploring how my brother
and I shaped each other's minds and psyches. It is also my way of
expressing the necessity for philosophy and psychology to recon-
nect, as brother and sister can do. If he, a typical philosopher, and
I, a typical psychologist, can talk and understand each other, so
can our disciplines.
Claude read very systematically, with a logical progression and
an impeccable discipline. He read the chapters in the order they
were presented, noting quotations on cards, with full reference and
a summary of the main ideas. I read right and left, here and there,
this and that, with a voracious appetite and no logic. My brother
intensely disapproved: ``You read like a cat that follows the smell of
spilled sardine oil on the kitchen ¯oor!'' I accepted his judgment on
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 93

the inferiority of my method. I also accepted the metaphor of cat.

Having interiorized the notion that I was a bit animalistic and of an
inferior mind, I went on following my nose and read with feline
pleasure, because I was truly incapable of his disciplined approach.
Psychology felt like a better choice because there was more chaos in
the theory and I could hide my own intellectual disorder.
Thus I read Jung before Freud, Proust at the same time as
Bachelard, Lacan and his groupies at the same time as Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, humanistic psychology mixed in
with existential psychology, Fritz Perls and his hippy friends at
Esalen at the same time as English anti-psychiatry (Ronald Laing
and David Cooper).
To get licensed and start a practice, I learned the coding systems
and the dry language of the DSM. I initially liked the logic of such
a neat system of ``categorical classi®cation that divides mental
disorders into types based on criteria sets by de®ning features.''1 It
certainly gives any young practitioner a sense of order and com-
petence in being able to put a tag on human frailties, although
when my classmates and I discovered that we all had many of the
traits that were supposedly pathological, we began to question the
status of the DSM as ``the bible.'' From then on, most of us took it
for what it is: a sometimes useful taxonomy to develop an eye for
severe clinical pathology, an educational tool, an elaborate
statistical survey of mental disorders with a huge caveat because
``there is much physical in mental disorders and much mental in
physical disorders.''2 Yes, indeed.
To wash down the dryness of the DSM approach, I read a lot of
mystical teaching from all kinds of esoteric traditions and tried
everything (chemical, intellectual, mystical) that could open the
doors of perception. These turbulent years were like having a
room with a view on that border between the mental and the
physical. I also read a lot of pop psychology, because I earned
good money writing articles for two different women's magazines.
I earned even more money writing term papers for af¯uent
students. I delivered papers on command: Szasz, Foucault, and the
``post'' (post-Freudians, post-Marxists, post-Lacanians), transper-
sonal psychology, Gestalt psychology, Rogerian psychology, trans-
actional analysis. With the money I bought books and kept myself
satiated, gobbling one sardine after the other.
Because I am a woman, I wasn't sure I had the right to have my
own thoughts like a philosopher does. But as a psychologist, I
94 Depth psychology after neuroscience

could specialize in feelings. When depressed, I would buy lacy

underwear as a reassurance that, at least if my brain wasn't good
enough to philosophize, I had a good enough female body. Lacy
underwear was never as helpful as reading liberating ideas.
Reading was truly the source of the numinous for me. My gurus
were all paper gurus ± and still are. I met all my ``masters,'' not in
a temple or monastery, but in the library. The ideas found in
books were more valuable to me, as a woman, than diamonds;
they gave me permission to be fully human. Since my brother (who
was always reading) was the one who pointed me in the direction
of those brilliant thinkers, his in¯uence was greater than I realized
at the time. If Freud had been a woman, with such an interesting
brother as mine, and as much in need of intellectual training as I
was, maybe he would have balanced his theory about the in¯uence
of parents with a theory about the in¯uence of siblings.
My brother's disapproval of my intellectual methods (and of my
whole intellect in general) was a wounding that turned out to be a
useful initiation. It prepared me for the critical reception of my
colleagues in a department of communication at a state university
in Montreal, Canada. Here I was, a 30-something tenured pro-
fessor (with the face of an 18-year-old, and female), teaching ± oh
anathema! ± some of Jung's ideas, in a course I had created on
symbolic communication. My defense was that symbols are, after
all, the only universal form of communication. A symbol does
communicate, doesn't it? For example, the image of a tree laden
with ripe fruits is consistently interpreted as meaning fertility,
hope, joy, and never as death and decadence. Even when the
symbolism is reversed (for example, a fairy tale with a poisonous
apple tree that attracts innocent children) the effect of horror
works because it reverses the customary meaning.
It is undeniable that Jung's exploration of symbolism contains
many ideas extremely relevant to theories of communication, but
the word in my milieu was that Jung was a mystic who did not
belong in academia, and could at best attract a young faculty such
as myself. It was admissible to teach Freud, as an in¯uential
historical ®gure ± the founding father of depth psychology ± but
even with Freud the intellectual dogma was that soon ``all that'' (the
depth psychological perspective) would be replaced by cognitive-
behavioral therapies and neuroscience. I began teaching just the
opposite: depth psychology is not in competition with neuro-
sciences, any more than literature is in competition with dentistry.
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 95

The separation from the neurosciences is just now giving depth

psychology its ®rst chance at being itself. There is excellent neuro-
science, and there is excellent experimental psychology, and there is
our cultural history of the psyche and there is the crucial art of
listening to the voice of the soul. All avenues have value if we
differentiate them properly.
As for Jung's exploration of the spiritual aspect of inner life, it
does belong in academia because it presents a rational argument
for a psychological alternative to faith. Isn't academia the house of
rationality? Jung's God is the Self, with a capital S and a useful
reminder that there are realities bigger than the ego. For sure,
Jung's language is often ambiguous. An atheist browsing through
his work randomly may take his outpouring of religious emotions
as the nostalgia of an ex-believer, or as a strategy to repackage the
same old faith (God) in psychological wrapping (Self ). One may
agree (as I do) with much of the critique of Jung's mysticism, and
still appreciate how his approach does offer an alternative to faith.
Instead of prayer, active imagination; instead of redemption,
individuation; instead of belief, the archetypal images of gods and
goddesses ± images, that's all! Instead of kneeling in adoration of
an image, lie down on the couch, re-imagining all images that
structure the experience of life. Instead of submission, analysis,
lucidity, negotiation with the persistent desire to believe in the
illusion of a powerful Daddy in the Sky.
Academia's vehement rejection of Jung has intensi®ed over the
years in curious ways, with numerous academics who have gone
out of their way to demonize him and discredit the work of those
who dare to ®nd reading Jung inspiring. Negative reviews of
Jung's work have consistently shown a suspicious intensity of rage
at his inexplicable and enduring in¯uence on millions of highly
educated readers (clinicians, artists, scholars in the social sciences
and the humanities, ®lm-makers, novelists, architects, environ-
mentalists, educators, and organizational developers). Jung's sig-
ni®cant impact on the culture at large, as opposed to a specialized
in¯uence on a narrowly de®ned academic ®eld, seems to be insult-
ing to some academics.
The shunning of Jung is very similar to that of the mythologist
Joseph Campbell, whose in¯uence on the culture was immense
despite its being ignored by the academics. There are many doc-
toral dissertations analyzing the cultural importance of the Star
Wars mythology created by George Lucas, but anyone trying to
96 Depth psychology after neuroscience

write a dissertation on the author who, according to Lucas him-

self, was the intellectual inspiration for it, will be met with a list of
unexamined reasons for the shunning. Campbell had the mentality
and courage of a pioneer. A pioneer opening a new territory has to
put up with rudimentary accommodations. Many of the theor-
etical critiques of Campbell are quite valid. Nevertheless, there is
also some unexamined snobbery in a critique that says: what
rudimentary theory! Maybe, but isn't this the case for all pioneers?
The deceptively easy suggestion to ``follow your bliss'' was just the
kind of formula that academia was only too happy to turn into a
clicheÂ, while it ignored the rest of his work. The fact that
Campbell taught in a college (worse, a girl's college) instead of a
major university is also part of what raised eyebrows.
To be able to teach some of Jung's ± and some of Campbell's ±
ideas at the beginning of my career in academia, I found the
following to be necessary: (1) a tenured position and relatively good
evaluations by students; (2) a naivety regarding academic freedom;
(3) a department that was so divided that no one cared or paid any
attention to what anyone else was doing; (4) a ®eld ± com-
munication studies ± on which nobody has been able to impose a
de®nition, because nobody really knows with certainty what
``communication'' or ``communicating'' means; (5) the advantage
of unimportance; (6) the natural laziness of many academics who
won't take the trouble of actually reading Jung ± or Campbell ±
before expressing their opinion, which is usually the current
intellectual party line.
Thus, I was at liberty to express, in polite academic words and
with the good manners I had learned at the Convent of the Sacred
Heart, the equivalent of: ``Why don't you shut up? You haven't
even read the author you are talking about.'' My tactic of
intimidation worked well with the ignoramus; it did not work as
well with a colleague who was one of the cognoscenti of Jung.
This professor had spent years reading Jung, only to reject him at
every occasion, his face ¯ushed red from his outbursts of outrage
at Jung's enduring success among the best of our mature students.
This colleague was an interesting example of an emotional com-
plex presenting itself as a logical demonstration. He inspired my
canary test for academic air which consists in mentioning how
much the work of Jung (or that of Campbell, depending on the
context) means for me and my students, and then to examine the
psychodynamic at work in the other's response.
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 97

If my interlocutor begins to choke at the very mention of those

two names, I know I am dealing with an intellectual bigot. I am
not saying their arguments are wrong, only that when the ®rst
reaction of an intellectual is an irrational outrage or a scandalized
refusal to discuss, it signals a psychological complex, a notion ®rst
de®ned by Jung, and now part of everyday vocabulary. I don't
even need a cage for this canary; it follows me, and it can even
signal a lack of air in my own mind.

Useful wounding
The academic milieu is indeed a mine®eld. The training I received
as my brother's intellectual proteÂgeÂe was both wounding and
helpful, another example of the paradoxical aspect of psychic
reality. Claude's continual attacks on my lack of intellectual
discipline were the best preparation I could have had to survive the
rari®ed air of academia. Following the pecking order imposed on
institutions of lower standing by those of higher standing, my
milieu was dismissive of depth psychology in the same manner that
my brother had been dismissive of my intellectual methods. Con-
sequently I used the same tactics of survival and persisted in
reading Jung for the abundance of tasty sardines. The company of
millions of educated readers felt good enough for me.
My brother's criticism started in my adolescence, at the vulner-
able age when I was terribly afraid that being ``just a girl'' implied
that I might not possess a brain capable of serious thinking. Ever
since Aristotle, women have been suspected of being closer to
animals than to the rational citizen-philosophers of Plato's ideal
city. I remember an acute attack of inferiority, at 15, when I asked
Claude to give me feedback on a paper I had written with the title
``The Symbols of the Night.'' He recommended that I change the
title to ``Nyctomorph Iconography,'' since it meant the same thing
but looked more scholarly. I refused, ®nding it pretentious for one
such as myself (after all, only a girl) to be talking in that style. He
then predicted a life of dif®culties for me. You will never be
respected as an intellectual if you refuse to play the academic
game. His prediction sent me into a state of panic, because, more
than anything else in the world, I wanted to become an intel-
lectual, as it meant for me somebody who has the ability to do his
or her own thinking. It meant the world. It meant the triple motto
of the French revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity (I did not
98 Depth psychology after neuroscience

know the term ``sorority'' then). It was not at all a desire to erase
my animality, something Claude was fond of pointing out to me. It
was a love of ideas that even the hormonally challenged mind of
an adolescent girl can sometimes feel. One thing adolescents have
in plenty is instinct. I was experiencing an instinctual refusal to be
deprived of the human dimension of thinking. Nevertheless, when
Claude insisted that becoming an intellectual meant playing the
kind of ``game'' he was suggesting, I lost con®dence, I wasn't sure I
belonged. I refused to budge or to change the title of my paper,
exhibiting what he then called a mule complex, because mules
refuse to budge even if you beat them until they bleed. From cat to
mule did not feel like a promotion, but at least a mule is capable of
kicking back.
Five years later, the mule complex reasserted itself. This was the
moment of Claude's greatest in¯uence on my life. I was 20, and
Claude declared that it was time I read Kant. To prepare myself, I
found a book on Kant's correspondence, thinking it might be an
easy introduction. By the end of the week, I felt as beaten as I had
been at 15. I transcribed in my diary a passage from Kant's
philosophical correspondence:

In my judgment everything comes to this: that, since in the

empirical concept of the composite, the composition is not
given by means of the mere intuition and its apprehension but
can only be represented through the self-active connection of
the manifold in intuition and indeed in a consciousness in
general (which is not empirical), this connection and the
function thereof must stand under a priori rules in the mind,
which constitute the pure thought of an object in general.
(C II; 376)

The three girls who were my friends in boarding school were right:
I should capitalize on my looks, not my brains. When I saw
Claude a few days later, I showed him the passage from Kant, and
told him that there was no way I could ever become an intel-
lectual, and that ®nally, at 20, I was coming to my senses and
giving up that ambition. We then had a crucial conversation:

Claude: What discouraged you?

Ginette: Kant is too obscure.
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 99

Claude: Not so! Kant is dif®cult, but not obscure. Hegel is

obscure, but not Kant.
Ginette: Dif®cult or obscure, what difference does it make?
Claude: The proof of the clarity of Kant's thinking lies in the
fact that his commentators can agree on what he means.
Such a thing is impossible when a thought is obscure, as
opposed to simply dif®cult, or complex. The only
obstacle here is your laziness.
Ginette: Not so! It is not so much the dif®culty that discourages
me. I like complicated games. What really gets me is not
the dif®culty, it is the fact that Kant writes like this in a
letter! Can you imagine? That kind of heavy thinking,
that kind of style in a letter! A letter, not a lecture! Kant
was writing these ideas to a disciple.3 When I write a
letter, I talk about the weather, my boyfriends, my new
haircut, school anecdotes, silly gossip, perhaps dirty
jokes. I end with lots of kisses and hugs and love love
love XXX. My epistolary style seems to demonstrate
that I am de®nitely not an intellectual.

Claude listened attentively. He was, at that time, developing a

persona that I called King Solomon, because he was fascinated by
Solomon's legendary wisdom and muni®cence, a splendid example
of the wise philosopher. Claude's persona was still incomplete, like
a website under construction today, but his budding wisdom had a
determining impact on the rest of my life:

Claude: Your letters are like all girls' letters! That is all there is
to it. Girls are like that! Frills and kisses and silly
giggling. That just is. No big deal. Wisdom starts with
the acceptation of who, what, how, you are. You are a
girl. Here is your homework: you are going to read,
starting today, all of Simone de Beauvoir, and you will
get it, once and for all, that a person can be a girl, and
may care for dresses, cats, romantic movies, write letters
with hugs and kisses, and still have a brain, still be able
to THINK! To be a girl should never be an obstacle.
Don't give me this excuse.

It was the admiration I had for the way Claude was using
philosophy to think through psychological problems (especially
100 Depth psychology after neuroscience

mine) that convinced me not to renounce my intellectual goals. To

be sure, Claude continued to use the vast repertoire of all my fears,
but it worked out ®ne. Knowing how much I liked our intellectual
games and how I craved access to his books, he would refuse
conversation until I had done my homework. We were operating
from an unconscious agreement that had been established very
early in our childhoods.
As a child, Claude had been allergic to cats, dogs, hamsters, and
many plants. He was not allergic to me, his little sister. I became
his pet, to whom he taught intellectual tricks. I had to play by his
rules. I was to look intelligent, ask relevant questions, to allow him
to develop his ideas further, all attitudes that proved extremely
useful to my survival later, as a woman, in an academic milieu. He
was practicing his future role as a teacher of philosophy while I,
the talking hamster, was learning to pass exams. We both became
professors. His in¯uence on me was de®nitely as determining as
the parental in¯uence.
I am grateful to him, as I am grateful to all my paper gurus, for
orienting me toward the ideas that were crucial in enabling me to
live my life on major chords, as I had imagined it. As Claude and I
grew ready to go our separate roads, we had one last summer
together. He was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, and I too
was in Paris, smoking Gitanes and drinking gallons of espresso
coffee, going from the Cafe de Flore, to the Deux Magots, to La
Coupole, to Brasserie Lipp. Like so many other admiring students,
we waited for our intellectual divinities to appear: Jean-Paul
Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their court. Alas, they had long
abandoned the temple of our puppy-like devotion. Henry Miller,
Beckett, Ionesco, Koestler, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, and Sydney
Bechet were nowhere to be seen either.
That summer, Claude and I discussed Sartre's existential philo-
sophy, page by page, ingesting, with the black coffee and the house
wine that was then very cheap and very good, ideas by which we
lived for the rest of our lives. That period crystallized into one
enduring principle: to be free, one must be responsible for oneself.
This one gem of wisdom is all that I really understood about
Sartre, about de Beauvoir, about existentialism, and about femin-
ism. Very little, but enough. At the age of 20, we are not as dumb
as some insecure professors try to make us feel by hiding their
ordinariness in esoteric fog. Youth is a time of ignorance. The
raging hormonal battles and intense sexuality at times blur the
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 101

mind, but also sharpen it because of the vital need for new ideas.
Precisely because it is such a crucial time, youth also means that
one is capable of ingurgitating, at a fantastic speed, really big and
meaty ideas. Personally, I needed them as much as food, drink,
and sex.
Later that year, like the unfolding of the ®rst principle (one is
responsible for oneself ), I added to my personal manifesto three
other big ideas from Sartre: (1) the ego is a construction, and
hence can be deconstructed; (2) the existence of the unconscious
does not contradict our basic freedom, because one can see
through one's bad faith;4 (3) love is not the desire to possess the
other ± it is a wish to see the other gain a maximum of freedom
and a deep desire to contribute, participate, support, accept, share
the freedom.
De Beauvoir's feminism was soon ampli®ed by American
feminists who were presenting these liberating ideas for women of
the world and translating them into political activism. Their
writing style was accessible and vivid, thus helping millions of
women to rethink their values. I was so completely seduced by this
typically American style that there and then I vowed to serve this
ideal in my teaching and writing. Later on, other ideas came to
contradict, deconstruct, or replace early existentialist in¯uences.
De Beauvoir's feminism was criticized by American as well as
European feminists, who, like Luce Irigaray, believed it denied
women their otherness (alterity).
Some of the best women ®lm-makers (like Agnes Varda) took an
anti-de Beauvoir view in their ®lms, showing how being in a
woman's body is determining, insisting on the sensual, bodily
experience of being female. Post-de Beauvoir feminism was a time
to claim the difference of femininity. Female students de®antly
began doing things like knitting while listening to the teacher's
lecture, ¯aunting their femininity like a symbol of identity. This
insistence on otherness added a layer to feminist thinking and
convinced me of the need for a pluralistic approach to feminism.
De Beauvoir's feminism insists on our shared humanity (and all the
issues of equal pay for equal work), while Irigaray's feminism
explores identity, which needs the contrasts of alterity.
I now think a pluralistic approach to feminism reveals not only
two opposing feminisms, but as many feminisms as the minds of
men and women care to think of, as they are all modalities of
freedom. One can imagine, for example, one feminism for each
102 Depth psychology after neuroscience

goddess of the Greek Pantheon, or one feminism per philosophy

(de Beauvoir imagined an existentialist feminism, Irigaray a
psychoanalytic feminism), or one feminism per culture.
Polemic and contradiction will accompany these intellectual
constructions, but polemic and contradiction are part of what
makes the life of the mind like the never-ending renovation of a
magni®cent grand mansion. Take that wall down. Add a window.
Frame that door. Elevate that roof, open the view here, close it
there, and then start all over again because the house of ideas that
was ®xed years ago is now crumbling and needs another round of
renovation. Ideational structures need renovation all the time
because the ideas and even more the vocabulary of which they
are made ages as fast as a wood ¯oor gets scratched and plaster
joints crack.
Before leaving the family cocoon for good, Claude and I split the
world in two. On one side, there would be the philosophers,
whose task was to dust off the dry messes of contradictory ideas
that battle against each other. On the other side, there would be
the psychologists, whose task was to mop up the liquid messes of
human tears about those same contradictions. It seemed obvious
that philosophy belongs to the animus and psychology to the
anima, which meant that I would become a psychologist, and he a
philosopher. This parting of the world was as senseless as saying
that women don't have ideas and men don't have emotions, but
we did not see the problem at the time. Sometimes, at 20, one may
have stupid arguments to justify a not so bad choice, one that
instinctively makes sense. For the wrong reasons, we made the
right choices and spent the next 30 years feeling respectively at
ease in our ®elds.
However, since cracking my head and feeling all disjointed, I
feel a renewed need for philosophy. Consequently, I have recon-
nected with Claude. We continue, via the internet, the conversa-
tion that was interrupted by the business of our growing up.

Dear Brother: what is on your list?

Dear Brother,
You always insisted that the task of philosophy was not to
answer questions but to re®ne them, to examine as many
aspects of a question as our minds can possibly hold, to
expand the intellect. I found this Bertrand Russell quotation in
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 103

a card you sent me for my sixteenth birthday: ``Philosophy is

to be studied, not for the sake of any de®nite answers to its
questions, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves;
because these questions enlarge our conception of what is
possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the
dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation;
but above all because, through the greatness of the universe,
which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered
great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe
which constitutes its highest good.'' The card on which those
words were written is half rotten because of the dampness in
my basement. Yet, the words are still ®lled with the same
freshness as when I ®rst read them because my mind is now
pondering anew some of those big philosophical questions.
I would very much appreciate it if you would give me a list
of the most recurrent philosophical questions, those that are
unanswerable but always reformulated. I would like to
compare your philosopher's list with the list of questions that
seem to arise for every person undergoing psychoanalysis.
Your favorite (because only) Sister

Dear Sister: a list of deep questions

Dear Sister,
Here is my formulation of the ``biggies.'' These fundamental
questions are at the core of every philosophy. The list is
potentially in®nite, and each question has in®nite depth, just
like the unconscious. Let's start with one traditional set of:
what, when, where, how, why.

1 What is a good life? What is the best balance, for me, of

the quest for truth, love, justice, beauty? What are the
values that are most likely to make me appreciate my
humanity?
2 When should I strive toward ``having'' more, and when
should I strive toward ``being'' more?
3 Where does my freedom begin and where does it infringe
on the freedom of others?
4 How does one behave when there is a con¯ict between
your freedom and mine?
104 Depth psychology after neuroscience

5 Why is there something rather than nothing? This question

is on everybody's list.
Your Brother

Dear Brother: surprise!

Dear Brother,
Will you be surprised to hear that patients arrive in therapy
with a very similar list? Of course, I have never heard anybody
say, ``Doctor, I am experiencing a philosophical dilemma. I
don't know where my freedom begins to infringe on the
freedom of another.'' No! I am much more likely to hear
something like this: ``I feel trapped in my marriage. My wife is
smothering me to the point of psychic strangulation. I want a
divorce, but I know it will hurt her profoundly. I wonder if I
can bear the guilt of wounding anybody that deeply.''
Nor have I ever heard a patient declare: ``I have come to you
to for guidance in the resolution of con¯ict between two
individual freedoms.'' The same con¯ict was formulated by a
woman who asked if she had a right not to tolerate it that her
husband checked the mileage on her car every morning, to
make sure that she was not going anywhere else but from
home to work and back.
It seems that your profession and mine deal with the same
list of problems. I am sure it will come as no surprise to you,
because philosophers (in competition with clergy) used to be
the counselors of souls. Although I am glad that Freud and
company broke the monopoly of priests, pastors, and rabbis, I
®nd it a pity that philosophers and psychotherapists don't talk
shop anymore. Brother! You and I face the same problems,
your gang and mine!
Your Sister

Dear Sister: you want global talk?

Dear Sister,
Not only is there a lack of communication between philo-
sophers and psychotherapists, there is also a lack of
conversation between the different ``sects'' of philosophers;
there are tribal wars in all philosophy departments, in all
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 105

university campuses. Where, with whom, how do you think

you can have that global conversation?
Your Brother

Dear Brother: the globalization of psyches

Dear Brother,
Global is the right adjective for the conversation I yearn for.
Or maybe I yearn for a war of words, not one of guns and
blood. I am angry that the incessant discussion about global-
ization is only about money and things. What is more
``global'' than the need for a conversation about the big
questions, about inner life, and about human relations? Tears
are tears, joy is joy, anger is anger, love is love, oppression is
oppression, freedom is freedom, and the psychology around
these emotions is similar whether you live in the U.S., France,
Japan, Brazil, Argentina, India, Africa, Canada, or Australia.
Why would it be different when asking the big philosophical
questions? A global exchange of psychological and philoso-
phical insights is as much needed as the exchange of goods.
Everywhere, all the time, with everyone on the planet, there is
a constant need for the examination of values, of philosophies
and of psychologies.
The next psychologies will have to be ``global'' and inclu-
sive of all cultures for the same reason that software capability
needs to be upgraded constantly for global business to work.
The actual need for assessment of psycho-cultural assumptions
is as crucial as assessing global capabilities for business. Just as
we all, regardless of our circumstances, have to come up with
a budget (even the very rich), a schedule (even kids and retired
persons), we also all have to come up with a value system, in
other words, a philosophy that orients our choices on this
planet.
If the language of both our trades wasn't so heavy, maybe
philosophers and psychologists could have their own kind of
globalization summit. The kind of philosophical jargon that
professional philosophers favor is extremely localized,
clannish, esoteric, making me feel I am back to square one
with having to say ``nyctomorph iconography'' instead of
``images of the night.''
106 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Let me tell you a moment of great unease I experienced in

my recent effort to refresh my meager philosophical educa-
tion. Last month, your old friend ± whom you nicknamed Yep
because of his way of pronouncing Yes as Yep ± was lecturing
at the University of Los Angeles and I drove from Santa
Barbara to hear his talk. He was introduced with great
fanfare, as a philosopher of great signi®cance to our time, and
the audience applauded enthusiastically even before he opened
his mouth to talk.
He lectured magni®cently on Schopenhauer and Spinoza,
his specialty, but I am afraid that only a few people in the
room understood what he was talking about. I could not grasp
even one idea. It was a waste of my time, a waste of gasoline,
a waste of a chance to educate myself. I don't object to the fact
that, being a professor of philosophy, he needs to demonstrate
his mastery of a complex conceptual apparatus. I don't really
object that Yep requires his disciples to spend years learning
his ultra-specialized vocabulary as such discipline forms the
mind. I do understand that each specialty develops its own
jargon and sometimes it is necessary. I do ®nd it sad, however,
that Yep, like so many philosophers, chose to speak exclu-
sively to the linguistically initiated.
Are you aware that this kind of intellectual elitism is exactly
what made it so easy for us, psychologists, to steal most of
your devotees? The intellectually curious, who used to gather
around the philosophers, as you and I gathered around our
existentialist wise men and women, have been coming toward
psychology because they can readily follow our conversation
about the soul.
Your friend's intellectual haughtiness is such that it contra-
dicts one of your dearest theories ± that philosophy ultimately
leads to intellectual humility and wisdom. Let me tell you,
such is not the case with Yep! Following his talk, there was a
banquet for all the presenters, the ®nale of that international
conference. Yep was unaccompanied and he invited me to join
him, for old time's sake, and because he wanted to hear all
about you. We sat at one of those large round tables that are
typical of hotel ballrooms. A woman that I happen to know
and admire joined our table. She is a formidable woman who
represents for me all that I like about Americans: she has great
intellectual courage, boldness, honesty, strength and generos-
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 107

ity. At one point, she turned toward Yep and said she was glad
to have a philosopher at the table, because she had recently
read about the concept of ``nothingness,'' and found it a really
rich concept for her own work as a psychiatrist.
She began explaining her understanding of it, and how it
helps her think about things that are ``not things'' (like love
and fear). I listened closely, because, as you know, this
concept was and remained one of those concepts that fasci-
nates me. The difference is that I would never have the guts to
engage in a discussion on the concept of ``nothingness'' with a
professional philosopher, armed only with the vocabulary of
the laity, after two glasses of wine! She had no problem with
it, however, and went on explaining why she found it such a
great concept!
I was ashamed of your friend's attitude! He had that
condescending smile, that barely concealed contempt, that
medical doctors often use when patients attempt to use proper
medical terms to discuss their diagnosis. Daddy used to call
that ``the smile of the political boss,'' elaborately friendly and
warm when encountered at the charity fundraiser, civil on the
street corner or at Sunday services, but someone who would
not hesitate to destroy your reputation, bankrupt your
business, burn your house, waste your car, if you ever reveal
his Ma®oso tactics.
Your friend's contempt was palpable under the politeness.
His coldness seemed to suggest, ``Hey little lady, you are in
over your head. I'll be polite, but don't try to play on my
turf.'' He mowed her down with heavy jargon. Her jaw
dropped and she remained silent for the rest of the meal. I
think she lost her interest in the concept of ``nothingness,'' and
I lost respect for Yep.
Why is it that everyone feels free to invent his or her own
homemade brand of psychology, but not so with philosophy?
It is quite acceptable to do dream interpretation over morning
coffee, to discuss the ``defensive reaction'' of a colleague, or to
explore the ``unconscious dynamic'' of a relationship. Every-
one has her own ideas and theories about what is therapeutic
and what is not. Being an amateur psychologist, a ``bricoleur,''
a jack-of-all-trades ®xing all kinds of psychological leaks, does
not seem to pose a problem. The guy I consult when I have
computer problems is the father of two little boys, identical
108 Depth psychology after neuroscience

twins. He has his own original psychological theory to explain

why his toddlers are slow in developing language skills. He
says, ``Their psyches communicate like two computers
working in parallel. Why would they be in any hurry to
develop language skills?'' His theory makes sense to him. His
metaphor is, in fact, quite good, given what is known about
the psychological development of identical twins. Why, then,
are we so intimidated when we attempt to develop our own,
homemade brand of philosophy?
Why should it be acceptable to interpret a dream but
shameful to be an amateur philosopher, interested in the
concept of ``nothingness?'' Faced with the experience of being
human, aren't we all amateurs ± the philosopher as much as
any other? I am not suggesting that the ordinary person knows
as much as the specialist educated in the history of philo-
sophical concepts. It takes years of dedication to understand
all the subtleties and nuances of concepts that have a long
history. Rather, I am suggesting that we all share in the big
philosophical questions. The dif®cult experience of having
children and raising them with limited success was, for me, a
reminder that we are born novices in all things. I knew
nothing about parenting when I was required to begin it. I had
no other choice than to start, even with my very limited skills.
Despite the fact that parenting is one of the most important
responsibilities of life, most of us are completely unprepared
when we begin. We face birth, as well as death, as beginners,
without bene®t of rehearsal.
I heard a child trying to use the word ``discombobulated.''
With great earnestness, it came out like this: ``I feel dis-clum-
blow-blu-tilated today.'' Those present smiled affectionately,
but none were tempted to use the sharp knife of ridicule. Why,
then, the facile contempt of so many philosophers for a mind
that is just being introduced to a new concept? Isn't it normal
that the ®rst time one tries to understand ``nothingness,'' one
is a bit disclummed, blowblued and tilated by the novelty of it?
I thought philosophy was supposed to help us get wiser by
discussing the biggies, the questions that come back every
generation. Met with ridicule, the big questions recede in
silence and it is a terrible loss for the soul. Most of us, when
articulating our homegrown version of our philosophy of life,
are doing a kind of intellectual bricolage that can be naively
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 109

idealistic, somewhat incomplete and ®lled with contradictions.

However, it allows for a vital exchange with others.
Truly, Claude, I cherish my half-baked philosophy, made up
from all the leftovers of those readings and exchanges between
us in our youthful days. Despite my lack of expertise, it still
feels better than having no philosophy at all. Sometimes,
nothing more than a wreck of a car, if it still works, can get
one to a nice location. My philosophy is of that kind. It is all
patched up, but it works. Having put it together myself, I
know how to ®x it when it breaks. I know it inside out, and I
feel I could discuss ``my philosophy of life'' with anybody on
this planet given a minimal shared vocabulary. Isn't that a step
we all have to take for globalization to mean something
grand? I wish you and your esteemed colleagues would cease
judging ``personal philosophies'' by the same standards that
scholars apply to their equals in the academy. Philosophy is so
much more than a head-trip. Even a little bit of it can appease
the heart's longings.
Your Sister

Dear Sister: same to you

Dear Sister,
I am sorry to hear that Yep seems to have turned into a snob,
betraying his ideal of Wise Old Man, but he is not dead yet,
and maybe he'll come around when glory fails him. Some-
times, the past tense of the ``has been'' balances the future
tense of the ``wannabe'' and, at last, one lives in the present.
Time will tell.
I agree with your critique of ``us'' that is to say, the pro-
fessionals of philosophy. I have the exact same problem with
``you,'' the professionals of the psyche! Your ®eld, as much
as mine, has fallen prey to the esotericism of academic
specialization. To appreciate a jargon, one needs, ®rst, to want
to ``belong,'' and second, to know which intellectual clan
one wants to belong to ± both of which are contrary to
globalization.
Allow me to consider, as an example, a concept dear to
your clan: transference. There is an oppressive amount of
theoretical elaboration about transfer and transference. Tell
me if my basic understanding is still valid. I understood
110 Depth psychology after neuroscience

transference to mean childhood feelings that continue to be

felt even after the disappearance of the person who incited
them, even when faced with the evidence that the circum-
stances have completely changed. You were the one who
pointed to the passage in Freud where he explains that
transference is a ``false relationship,'' since the patient is not
talking to the person of the analyst, but to the person of his or
her fantasy, a person who is no longer there, the ghost of
parents.
The theme of false relationships happens to be a major
philosophical theme because philosophical wisdom is expected
to teach one to be fully present to the reality of the other
person. The textbooks in psychology discuss this challenge as
a problem of transference, but in a language that is not
exportable, not globalizable because each clan develops its
own coded jargon to defend its theoretical turf.
You analyzed your disappointment with the kind of
philosophy that Yep represents for you. Let me tell you of
my disappointment with the ®rst psychoanalysis that I did,
which lasted three years. The relationship to my analyst was
so contaminated by the romantic infatuation with our
transference that it took me a long time to become aware of
my annoyance, because I was busy reading everything I could
®nd about the phenomenon of ``transference,'' as if it was
some new discovery that would give me the key to my family
drama. The relationship to mother had been, as you very well
know, my main motivation to undertake analysis. The
analyst's hypothesis was that the analysis of a transference
would lead to my discovery of how I project mother's coldness
on to others, beginning with him, the analyst. It took me three
years to realize that the analysis of the transference was just as
sterile and just as boring as when my ®rst girlfriend insisted
that we talk about you-and-me-and-our-relationship all the
time. We ± the analyst and I ± were talking about ``us'' most
of the time, all the while giving ourselves permission to
disregard all those real women that I wanted to be able to
make love to, had I been done with that damn transference!
Who's responsible for the failure? Certainly I am, but what
if the analyst was also incompetent? Another possibility is that
the concept of transference itself is a dangerous one, one that
caused confusion for both of us. His insistence on transference
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 111

gave me the illusion that he had a secret knowledge of the

mysterious ways of the soul. How am I to know if he is
competent, and not a self-centered person who uses trans-
ference to ®gure out who he is in the world?
So many in your profession seem to suggest that they know
the map of the whole unconscious territory, it is seductive.
After three years, I came to a point where I felt nauseated by
the whole romance of transference and counter-transference
and let the analyst ®gure it out for himself! I started over with
another analyst, one who intuitively felt much more
competent. He was not one to insinuate that he knew the
cartography of the unconscious. He seemed to be ``in service''
to the psyche, like a faithful butler whose dignity is equal to
that of the master. One cannot imagine the butler saying: ``Sir,
I have a transference problem with you,'' because the butler
knows he is in service to something bigger than himself: not
only a family and a house, but also a tradition, a culture. The
master of the house, the house, and the butler are one and the
same piece in a complex story. The new analyst was truly a
servant of psyche, and so was I, and it was a much more
interesting adventure. Very soon I was able to get closer to
women I am attracted to. Fear of love receded. My heart
expanded. Like yoga, whose bene®t is to be had most of all in
old age, analysis helped me put in place some interesting
liberation strategies to avoid what happened to our mother as
she aged. You remember how, toward the end of her life, she,
who had been a sociable person, retreated into the insipid
routine of her luxurious retirement home and did not perceive
how the pampered arti®cial environment accentuated her
natural tendency toward self-absorption. This growing ego-
centrism, and not her old age, was cutting her off from the
world. She had always refused to be ``psychological,'' always
fearing to look inside, and now having emotions became
increasingly unsettling to her. She did not care to put a name
to her feelings, afraid of getting close to them. Even positive
emotions, holidays, birthday parties or the celebration we
organized in her honor all felt tiring to her, too much of a risk
to feel something.
Maybe having been such a beautiful woman was a
handicap. Her great physical beauty allowed her to remain
unconscious. Our father was the one who worked at becoming
112 Depth psychology after neuroscience

conscious. When Dad died, she felt deprived of his devotion,

and her heart did not have the strength to reach out to others.
She resisted all our attempts to enrich her life. It was too late
for psychological yoga. When I look at myself in the mirror,
and see traces of that same stiffness in my facial expression, I
am glad that I still trust the process of psychoanalysis; it is my
psychological yoga. We all need a means of sustaining a
supple psyche, one that remains capable of being interested in
others.
I truly believe that we all have deep wounds that are
deliverers of wisdom, if only we stop beating ourselves on our
heads and instead try to ®nd words, all kinds of words, from
all kinds of disciplines and cultures. That is the gift of
education: words. Like a teacher who initiates one into the
beauty of language, the depth of psychological suffering can
initiate one into the beauty of the psyche. Believe it or not, I
am convinced that depth psychology can be as much a path to
wisdom as philosophy. I am not suggesting that psychologists
reject wisdom. I am sure you all worship it, but I am
convinced that ``wisdom'' is not a word that you heard during
your training, or that you use in the therapy room. There is no
educational preparation for passing on to the next generation
the hard-won collective experience formulated by wise human
beings through the ages. The technical training of students
in psychology has no room for a notion as impractical as
``wisdom.'' It produces therapists who confront each new
cultural issue as something novel, as if psychic suffering is a
challenge now encountered by society for the ®rst time. If only
you could formulate for me, in a nutshell, what you think
might constitute psychological wisdom, I would be grateful.
Your Brother

Dear Brother: what is a good life?

Dear Brother,
Here it is in a nutshell: I think that psychological wisdom
starts, just like philosophy, with asking questions. Psychol-
ogists have been in conversation for a hundred years now and
you will ®nd it interesting that the questions being asked are
similar to the philosophical inquiry about what constitutes a
``good life.'' We are asking: what does it mean to ``grow up,''
 Brother philosophy, sister psychology 113

to be a Mother, a Father, a Child, an Adult, a Man, a

Woman? We don't agree on the answers, and that is where the
conversation becomes interesting. Let me start with the
conversation about the meaning of ``mother.''
Your Sister
Chapter 9

The archetype of Mother

A whole generation of therapists has favored the model of the

developing child as the road map for the evolution of the per-
sonality. The language of ``personal growth'' belongs to this
developmental model. The idea that we ``grow,'' as a child grows
(or as the economy grows), has come to replace what used to be
imagined as the deepening of experience and the lifelong quest for
wisdom. Approaches based on the monomyth of the inner child
have let the wounds, the needs, the vulnerabilities of the inner
child create a tyrannical divinity, the exact replica of a repressive
monotheism. ``God the Father,'' the jealous and omnipotent
patriarchal deity, has been replaced by ``God-the-Child,'' equally
possessive and omnipotent. A whole generation of young adults
won't grow up, caught betwixt and between the Child and the
Adult, and the consequences of their failure is tragic for them as
for the rest of society. This proliferation of infantile adults is
unprecedented in history and typical of af¯uent societies. Good
kids, intelligent, educated, competent in many areas, just won't
leave adolescence. The problem has been analyzed from the
perspective of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and economy,
and the general conclusion seems to be that it is a byproduct of the
unprecedented wealth of rich nations. Moreover, failure to mature
is not limited to contemporary adolescents; it involves adults as
well and is felt as a problem of civilization.
Developmental psychology, by placing the child at the center of
our theories about the psyche, starts with a basic truth: our needy
inner child needs our attention; otherwise, it won't grow up.
Agreed! The archetypal Child personi®es not only a fundamental
vulnerability that remains in all of us, but also carries the principle
of joy, of play, of spontaneity. However, it does not imply that we
 The archetype of Mother 115

should make of the Child the center of psychological conscious-

ness. Self-proclaimed victims are invariably infantile adults not
wanting to take responsibility. Victimhood is a model for very real
infantile impotence and rage; in an adult, it is a waste, a dis-
empowering road map.
The generalized failure to grow up indicates a breakdown in our
mythology. Our myth of mom, dad and the kids seems to call for
more deconstruction before we can have reconstruction. Let's take
another look at the myth of mother, since it is the ®rst one we
experience when growing up.

The Great Mother: the cradle and the cage

Mothering offers an experience of pure power, a power women
often deny because they want to see only their love for the child.
Whether one describes this power positively ± I give you life ± or
negatively ± without me you die ± it remains power. In those ®rst
months of life, the child's dependency gives to the mother the
ultimate power of life and death, a heady elixir for anybody. One
would expect that women who dedicate themselves exclusively to
their kids would be relieved when the kids grow up; but many
experience just the opposite. The end of mothering can also signal
the end of their power trip and they resent it.
As the child matures, he or she moves out of the Great Mother's
realm and the little mother is dismissed for a job well done. For
the super-mom, the end of the Great Mother's sovereignty elicits
such a deep identity crisis that she may misinterpret her resistance
to leave the throne as a proof of her un¯inching devotion. For the
child, mom's tiresome maternal performance can turn into a
psychological tragedy as it does invariably when an archetypal
elixir has been drunk to the dregs and the partner forces more
down your throat. The gift of maternal love can turn into a curse
when her unconditional love becomes an albatross around the
neck of the child, preventing growth. The cradle becomes a cage.
We come into the world with our mother, but we die alone.
Between these two events, the infantile illusion of safety must thin
out until the child is strong enough to bear the responsibility of his
or her decisions.
The mother whose role is over has a similar learning to do, that
of empowering herself from a different source. It is also a service
to the cause of bringing forth a more egalitarian society. Although
116 Depth psychology after neuroscience

patriarchy has been dominant throughout history, every man has

had the early experience of being dominated by one woman: his
mother. The more sexist the society, the more chances are that
maternity is the only outlet for feminine power, thus underlying
the mother's sentiments of maternal love with a huge power
complex. The consequence is a vicious circle of reinforcement of
male chauvinism, one which could explain why patriarchy has had
such a long history. The grown-up sons, offered the reins of
power, cannot resist the temptation to ®nally control women, to
protect themselves from the original fear of mother, a fear that is
generalized into a fear of the intensity of female emotions and
power.

Do I love you or do I need you?

The goal of self-suf®ciency is an ideal and, as such, it remains
unattainable. No mother can ever repudiate the sentiment of
maternal love for her adult child; and no adult is ever over the
need for mothering, as the mourning for our mothers shows,
without regard to the age when it happens. The accumulated
experience of mothers and fathers, educators, clergymen, rabbis
and therapists con®rms that nobody ever completely becomes an
adult. The greatest spiritual leaders admit that the frightened
needy child still lives in their psyche. Through our ordeals, it is
human to yearn for some compassionate being to hold our hand,
lend a hand, rally round and offer maternal affection and support.
What de®nes an adult psyche is not the independence from a need
for compassion and protection but a basic orientation toward
achieving responsibility. In contrast, the psyche of unweaned
adults is increasingly oriented toward manipulation to transform
everyone around them into a Great Mother. The basic appeal is:
``Please do it for me, it is too hard!''
Manipulative behaviors have at their source a perversion of the
®gure of the healthy child. A child is needy, vulnerable and
dependent, but if the relationship with the adult is healthy, the
child wants nothing more than to get stronger, let go of that
helping hand, walk by herself, live his own life. The impulse to
leave the cozy cradle to explore uncharted territory is the most
fundamental expression of libido; it is a love of life, a love for
the world that makes one want to reach out and experiment.
Moments of regression, of wanting to touch home base and to
 The archetype of Mother 117

reach for cover will happen each time we feel vulnerable, but the
mature adult knows that permanent security is an illusion, and
a trap.
Our myth of maternity suffers from a lack of differentiation
between very different kinds of love. The child who says, ``I love
you, mommy,'' is expressing a feeling that has very little to do
with love as we de®ne it since the Greeks: a choice by two free
individuals. The child ± or any person ± who cannot survive
without the caregiver, cannot engage in what our tradition means
by love. The toddler's hugs and kisses are, no doubt, totally
endearing. One has to have a desiccated heart to remain cold at a
child's eruptions of joy at being alive and loved. But deep down,
we also know that the child is not really expressing love but need:
``Please, mother, love me, feed me, protect me. Don't ever leave me
and I'll be sweet and cuddly forever.'' As many an absentee parent
has experienced, a baby will forget you much more quickly than
your old dog, if the maternal substitute is good enough. The hugs
and kisses will go to the new caregiver.
Unlike the ancients, we use only one word for all kinds of love.
The Greeks had three:

1 Agape is love between brothers/sisters/friends; it can also be

interpreted as a kind of devotion to the world, for humanity,
or ± as the Christians interpreted it ± a command to love thy
neighbor as thyself.
2 Eros is a passionate form of love that usually implies sexual
attraction, attachment and a great intensity of feelings.
3 Philia means any kind of liking for something: I love music,
birds, chocolate, books, cooking, hiking. Having only one
word, we use ``love'' to say, ``I love my dog and my dog loves
me in return.''

That the same word love is used for a spectrum of very different
emotions creates a problem that is more than semantic because we
spend the ®rst part of our life differentiating all those extremely
different emotions, all touched by the name of love. If one main-
tains that the feeling of the child for the mother is love, one is
faced with a strange paradox. One would have to conclude that
the teenager is incapable of love because of a furious need for
independence and separation. The paradox here is that the teen-
ager, in spite of obvious narcissism, is progressively getting closer
118 Depth psychology after neuroscience

to the philosophical ideal of freedom from need that is a pre-

requisite for love. Nobody ever reaches the philosophical ideal
and, as a consequence, the ``inner child'' and ``inner adolescent'' in
us continue to struggle with ®nding a balance between the need for
independence and the need for connection.

Avoiding neurotic contracts

The kind of autonomy that the average psyche can hope for can be
described not only as a positive ± an ideal of freedom ± but as a
negative ± a capacity for avoidance of what is not love. It is
another instance where the via negativa might be the only road.
Just as it is impossible to de®ne, in absolute terms, what a normal
psyche looks like, we don't have a stable de®nition of love. We
know with more certainty what it is not, which indicates a
direction. It is not nowhere land; it is a way (via) where one knows
only what to say no to (negativa). It is a path where you sense
where the traps are, which is already a lot. Somebody on the via
negativa is able to smell the destructiveness of worn-out psycho-
logical patterns. Avoidance can take many forms. Pitfalls, preci-
pices, poisonous waters, and hidden traps are extremely useful
indications on a map; they tell one where not to go. Feminism, for
example, is such a map. The traditional patriarchal pact was
originally ± and still can be, under the right circumstances ± a fair
deal, based on a notion of love between man and woman that has
a long history. One party takes care of the kids/the house/the
familial and social circle, while the other earns the money. This
deal may be as equitable as any other contract if both genders feel
the freedom to engage in it as they wish. The inequality of power
between partners is what spoils it. If the wife won't, or can't, grow
up (because of restrictions imposed by law, tradition, or religion),
the relationship turns into a parent/child one. In exchange for
being taken care of, the woman is expected to submit to the
authority of her husband (or brother, uncle, son, father-in-law).
The husband is tied to his role as provider, not only for the
children, but for the adult wife as well. His love feels like a
responsibility, whereas the submissive wife's love feels like obedi-
ence. This we can recognize as not love.
Even in post-feminist cultures, there is no lack of candidates
who will sign up for what they think is a good traditional deal
between a man and a woman who believe they love each other.
 The archetype of Mother 119

The problem is not necessarily with the deal but with the wife's
unconscious need for dependence (not love) when it ®nds its
opposite in the husband's unconscious need to control (not love).
A neurotic partnership may look like this: I'll be your daddy and
pay the bills. In exchange, I'll maintain absolute control of the
relationship. Romantic literature has consistently obscured the
reality of neurotic choices with sweet lies. The handsome hero will
convince the beautiful, fragile, childlike woman that she needs to
let him take care of her ®nancially, socially, psychologically,
intellectually and spiritually. I'll take such good care of you that
you won't need your own money. Man is the container and
woman the contained. You'll do the feeling, I'll do the thinking;
for example, I think one God is enough and he should be male.
Women and men who traveled the via negativa will smell the
trap but younger couples may not. The post-feminist generation
inherited a big capital of freedom from the feminist investments of
their foremothers. What young woman needs an analysis of
``patriarchal oppression'' when she is traveling the via positiva of
wanting it all: the security of a rich husband and the autonomy of
a single girl with a profession? Most daughters of feminists (my
darling adult daughter included) have very little historical sense of
what the feminist war of liberation was all about. I have met high
school girls who think it was about not wanting to wear girdles
and bras. This ignorance keeps them in a naive positive dream of
having simultaneously both the autonomy won by feminists and
the security of the old patriarchal deal. In this girlish dream there
is no contradiction between developing their own strong identity
and, at the same time, keeping themselves safe and secure through
a ®nancially advantageous marriage. They have not yet traveled
the via negativa. They believe they know what love is. The sweet
illusion is as much a trap for young men, sons of feminists, who
may long for the pre-feminist agreement. They romanticize the old
contract and sign on cheerfully. I'll be your hero, provider,
protector, and you'll be the Queen of the House, the Mother I can
®nally control. What neither of the partners are prepared for is the
Hegelian power game of master/slave, whose complications sooner
or later cause the deal to go sour. The education their generation
has received is so unpsychological and so unphilosophical that few
have any idea of the emotional cost of a love that hides a mutual
agreement to remain unconscious. On the side of the woman, it
implies that she remain a child. I belong to you as long as you
120 Depth psychology after neuroscience

provide for me, and my emancipation is out of the question. On

the side of the man, it implies that he will have to sustain a heroic
posture for a lifetime, often at the cost of his health.
Regression to dependency is a natural defense against the
suffering that comes from discovering ourselves to be separate
individuals. However, to develop psychological wisdom we must
learn, early on, that even the most loving relationship cannot spare
us the solitude of human destiny. There exists a psychological
necessity to spread our wings, or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it most
succinctly for the bene®t of my generation: we are condemned to
freedom.
The idyllic illusion of an invincible parental fortress against all
evil accompanies a good start in life. Mommy and Daddy provide
a home where Baby is protected from dangers both within and
without. The psychological gains are, however, positive only as
long as the dependency is of an essential nature, due to the fragility
of the human infant, or to sickness. But the romantic girl who
dreams of rebuilding the fortress by marrying the hero, or her
husband who believes he can buy himself a mother whom he can
control, are victims of an unexamined myth that keeps them
infantile. An adult who fails to mature is one whose energies are
spent trying to re-create the situation where much is received and
little is given in return. Chances are that such people will also raise
children who grow up to be infantile adults.
The compassion with which a community deals with its sick and
its disenfranchised has always been, and remains, an infallible
criterion by which the level of civilization can be measured.
All advanced cultures ± some more than others ± offer support
systems for those really broken. Nevertheless, these same systems
are susceptible to corruption and constantly need revision. In order
to sustain a safety net (or safety nest) designed to provide com-
passionate recourse for the truly needy, it is crucial to stop the
abuses by unweaned manipulative adults. The kind of develop-
mental psychology that places our inner wounded child in the
center of our consciousness has not helped them at all. Quite the
opposite, it has given them words and means to pervert one of the
most essential qualities for a community: the natural sense of
compassion of most humans. The concept of ``sustainable devel-
opment'' starts with the capacity to differentiate between the
manipulations of infantile adults and the appeal for help, justice
and fairness.
 The archetype of Mother 121

``Soft'' does not imply ``infantile''

Roland Barthes, in his lectures at the College de France,1 insisted

that softness of manners, gentleness, lightness of touch were
absolutely crucial to create community. Feminism also made him
aware that valuing these qualities, which are considered maternal
and feminine, would be turned against him, devaluing his intellect,
through an indirect attack on his homosexuality. His prediction
was correct. The problem is not so much with the dichotomy
between soft and hard, as these two archetypal qualities both have
their time and their space; soft belongs to the mother, hard belongs
to the warrior. Yet, if one pole is systematically devalued, the
collective psychic balance is lost, and that was Barthes's point.
Vulnerability always accompanies an open heart, it is an essential
companion of compassion. It is that vulnerability that one may
come to reject, for fear of being perceived as feeble, frail, puny,
indulgent, manipulable, penetrable: in other words, as showing a
weakness typical of children, women, and ± Barthes was right ± of
homosexuals. When hard means virile power and soft means
feminine weakness, who would want to identify with the devalued
pole? The essential yin/yang balance is then lost and the conse-
quence for the psyche is catastrophic.
``Home'' connotes a place that contains all that humans have
invented to prevent the distress of the body. In our daily battle to
survive, we humans need a base camp that provides protection,
food, shelter, and warmth. Just as the body needs warmth, nour-
ishment, and protection, the psyche needs an atmosphere where
the heart ®nds its niche, its nest, its rest. This is usually called
``tenderness.'' Without the capacity of humans to provide tender
care to each other, the human race would have become extinct.
Our culture has fewer and fewer psychic homes, places and
moments, persons and situations where one can take off the
armor, put down the defenses. A culture that separates people into
``winners'' and ``losers'' generates the kind of acute anxiety that is
a rising phenomenon in all advanced cultures.
Psychology has often bought into the sexist bias that values the
hard at the expense of the soft, a tragic confusion between ``soft''
and ``infantile.'' For example, more value has been put on sexual
potency (an expression of virility) while tenderness (a typically
female form of connection) has been systematically undervalued or
simply ignored. There are many experiments that demonstrate the
122 Depth psychology after neuroscience

crucial role of cuddles, hugs, smooches, affectionate nicknames,

gentle manners, and playful affection for the development of lan-
guage and intelligence, but, still, it is considered as part of a child's
development. A popular stereotype is that tenderness is mostly
something that a man (coming from Mars) doesn't really need but
women do (because we come from Venus).
For sure, feminine personalities (which do not necessarily equate
with women) give love, care, and tenderness because they crave it.
It is a frequent psychological attitude to give what we most need
ourselves, in hope of reciprocation. Unfortunately, because it has
been for so long all that women had to offer, it has spoiled the
value of the gift. Women opened their hearts because it was all
they had to give: a gift of the powerless, a beggar's gift. It may be
that it is only when a person experiences the effect of a radical
disappearance of all sources of tenderness that the value of it is
revealed. It took a near-death experience for me to realize that
even if I am a woman and a feminist, I carried the unconscious
sexist bias of my milieu and valued strength and intelligence over
the capacity for compassion and gentleness. Not anymore. How-
ever, I still think that as long as women are de®cient in the realm
of power, tenderness and compassion will remain low on the scale
of social values. In that context of devalued market, expression of
gentleness and kindness is still risky. Whenever the balance of
power is tipped, gestures of compassion can be misinterpreted as
the animal gesture of submission ± the offering of one's throat ±
and easily mistaken for a sign of weakness.
Only when I was a broken body, alone in an ER (Emergency
Room) unit waiting for death and radically deprived of the honey
of tenderness, did I begin to appreciate the extraordinary value of
the song that the caretaker sang while I was letting go in her arms.
Her voice, her gestures, her smell, her touch, her gentle soul
expressed an invisible quality that was truly magical for me. As
long as an unconscious attitude of sexism endures, her kindness is
like a packet of sugar at the coffee shop: an inconsequential con-
diment, gratuitous and taken for granted. If we were to imagine a
situation where sugar, honey and chocolate became a rarity, we
would see the price of it going up. Considering that an ounce of
pepper was once worth more than its weight in gold, one might
imagine how quickly a cube of sugar, an ounce of chocolate, a
drop of honey, could become a precious commodity, if all sweets
became a rarity. As long as mothers are powerless, taken for
 The archetype of Mother 123

granted, they are the packets of sugar offered at no extra cost. As

both genders become increasingly free to develop both eros and
power, the value of tenderness will inevitably go up in the libidinal
economy of relationships.
If ever tenderness makes a comeback in psychological theories,
it will certainly be given a jargon word, psychologists being fond
of new terms they can commandeer; something along the line of
the ``immunological enhancement of positive relationships,'' or
other variations on the ``chicken soup effect.'' Neurobiologists
may have to ®nd a neurotransmitter that thrives on tenderness
before psychological theories dare call it by its name and recon-
sider its value. Tenderness has at its root the maternal instinct of
protection for life at its young, fragile, and needy stage. All
humans, when wounded, depressed, lonely, fragmented, need that
loving care. As sexism recedes, maternal qualities are considered
``human'' rather than only maternal, and the maternal archetype
goes through a process of ``degenderization,'' a true relief from the
romanticizing of the mother role, so typical of a certain set of
traditional family values.

Get off the cross, we need the wood

If the ®rst mistake of traditional psychology is an unnecessary
genderization of the mother archetype, the second mistake is in
de®ning the mother's role as sacri®cial and servile. Behind that
subtly slavish and sacri®cial de®nition of the mother's role is what
we might call a big lie: it is not the child who needs an enslaved
mother, but an infantile or insecure husband. Culture has tolerated
for so long that men who need to make sure their women are tied
to the house 24 hours a day ± if not barefoot and pregnant, at least
busy and overwhelmed ± that psychology has developed theories
to accommodate their neurosis. Tolerance for such a paranoid
attitude has been excused by theories about men's anxiety over
paternity, or to their ``natural'' desire for sexual control and
ownership of the offspring, or to womb envy, or to male genes, but
rarely to backward traditions that allow objecti®cation of the wife.
Psychology is still contaminated by centuries of sexism that mis-
appropriate maternity in favor of the insecure adult male and
makes this a model of normality. Our traditional mommy myth is
so powerful and ingrained that women themselves ± as well as
women psychologists ± have bought into the myth of sacri®cial
124 Depth psychology after neuroscience

motherhood and tie themselves up. The grim aspect of that

mistake is that the child's needs are not met even by the sacri®ce of
the mother because it harms the identi®cation process. What child
would want to identify with a slave? It is no surprise that in very
sexist cultures it is a curse to be born female. What these same
sexist cultures still refuse to consider is the curse of being the son
of a slave, the husband of a slave, and the father of worthless
daughters. These men are crippled, deprived of the possibility of
identifying with half their heredity.
With any kind of religious fundamentalism ± Christian, Muslim,
Jewish or otherwise ± we have a good demonstration of what the
rejection of feminism entails for the psychology of human rela-
tions. The status of the wife in some fundamentalist environments
today is actually inferior to the status of a household slave in
Rome at the time of Emperor Hadrian. Tradition, customs and
laws gave more protection to domestic slaves in Ancient Greece
than is given today to women in some very oppressive patriarchal
systems. The Emperor Hadrian is said to have condemned a well-
born lady to exile because she was mean to her slaves. When
thinking about ``slaves'' in antiquity, we tend to confuse the status
of slaves taken as prisoners of war, who were worked to death in
the mines, with the domestic slave, a completely different reality.
The domestic slave could set aside savings and buy back his or her
freedom. The status of a domestic slave under Hadrian was in
every way better than that of a wife in many fundamentalist sects
today. The consequences of patriarchal regimes on women are
obvious and have been abundantly documented, but less emphasis
was put upon the weakening of the male psyche when men control
women. A powerless queen suggests an impotent or feeble king;
oppressed women produce immature sons; the weakness and
unexamined fear of women deprives sexist men of experience of
the deepest aspect of love. There can be no love between master
and slave, as Hegel masterfully argued.
The self-effacing model of motherhood is still around in our
supposedly post-feminist culture, because it has been internalized
and made invisible. Schools of psychology are not exempt from the
bias, and many fail to see that a mother can be too attentive, too
giving, too self-sacri®cing in an alienating way. I am not talking
here about the kind of sacri®ce that is a conscious choice, a
decision to forgo or renounce something in order to serve a cause,
raise a family, stay with the kids while they are young. A conscious
 The archetype of Mother 125

choice is not the same thing as an unconscious alienation to a

cultural model that costs a woman her identity, her libido, her
sense of being fully alive.
Whereas previous generations of women felt and saw the
limitations put upon their gender, young women of post-feminist
cultures perceive their choice of motherhood as something that
comes from their hearts, and, as such, as a personal rather than
cultural choice. That is how a myth working in the background
becomes invisible: one thinks it is a personal choice. Myth is always
cultural, but always felt as personal, something that is felt in the
heart. Many young women today can't see that feminism is far
from passeÂ, as some want them to believe. Such a profound change
as equality of gender takes more than one generation, more than
one culture, more than one appellation, more than one gender,
more than one shot at it. It is an intergenerational, transgender,
transcultural, global task that still needs to be carried on, by
women as well as men, by psychologists as well as by politicians.

Here is your mother: Thou Shall Not

Devour Her
A decadent mother myth, where mother is servant to the child,
derives its power from a basically sound psychological principle.
At the beginning and end of life, humans are such a bundle of
needs that of course they require service and devotion. In tradi-
tional sexist societies, the care of the young, the old, and the sick is
considered a base position; unpaid, largely invisible, it is delegated
to women. Gratitude not required. As a bonus, women are some-
times afforded Madonna status but most of the time they are
demeaned. Traditional thinking also equates the biological mother
and the archetypal Great Mother, which forces every woman who
bears children into the archetypal role, whether or not she is gifted
or motivated for motherhood. The ®rst step in deconstructing a
dysfunctional mother myth consists in degenderizing the maternal
function.
I know a retired engineer who is in®nitely better at mothering
his three grandchildren than is his daughter. The kids are happier,
more secure, better fed, better educated in their grandfather's large
and comfortable house than in their mother's noisy, chaotic
apartment. They spend weekdays under their grandfather's con-
scientious care and weekends with their mother. She is a very busy
126 Depth psychology after neuroscience

woman, productive, young, socially and sexually active. Her father

is a gentle, homey man with a no-nonsense style of education. This
child-rearing arrangement is entirely satisfactory. Yet the mother
now feels guilty because she was told by her therapist and by the
school counselor and by her women friends that her kids are
probably ± even if they don't express it ± missing their mother.
Wrong: her kids would get much less mothering if they were to stay
with their biological mother rather than with their grandfather.
Confusing the archetype with the biological function can be very
costly for a community, especially in a culture like ours, where the
shortage of maternal competence is acute and the cost to provide it
is steadily rising. Tying the archetypal role too closely to biology
creates waste, lack, and unnecessary guilt. We easily forget that
the archetype of mother (as with any archetype) is independent of
gender. When, in a relationship, archetypes are confused with
gender identities, it becomes dif®cult to even talk about the
dynamic. How does one express: my mother is really a father, and
my father more like a mother? The same is true with couples. The
dynamic can be obscured when we take for granted that the
archetype will follow the stereotype, as was the case in the
following example.

You don't really want a lover, you want a

mother
My girlfriend is always asking for some sort of help: prac-
tical, ®nancial, emotional, intellectual. She says she wants a
man to be strong, because she herself wants to be feminine.
The trouble with that story is that I don't feel she wants a
strong male at all, I feel she wants me to be like a mommy, to
cajole her and give her all she wants. At ®rst I thought I had
been trapped into a kind sugar daddy role. It's worse: she
wants a sugar mommy! Our love-making does not feel like
love-making. It is mommy/baby-cuddling.

The psychological deal between a sugar daddy and his girlfriend is

based on money. It is an old contract in which both parties usually
know exactly what is being bought and sold. The deal between a
sugar mommy and her child-lover has received less attention
 The archetype of Mother 127

because it is a psychological deal rather than a ®nancial one: let me

remain infantile, I'll give you control, and nobody has to know. It
works as long as there are players for the game and as long as
``Mother'' is not recognized as an archetypal role, independent of
gender.
At her ®rst therapy session, I ask a young, exhausted and
depressed mother of three the following question: Do you feel it is
your family who insists on putting you in a servile role, or do you
sense that you may be contributing to staging it so? I was surprised
by the lucidity of her answer, which was: ``My children seem to be
aware of a weakness in me. They know I will take on the task.
What is more, I think they feel ± and I do too ± that I need to take
it on, to appear to have a purpose in life.'' She went on to say she
had no idea where this weakness came from, that as a girl she had
been autonomous and strong. She only knows when it began: with
motherhood. She feels the love for her children and for her
husband is now being eroded.
The next example is from the perspective of an adult son, one
who wishes his mother had not been caught in such a servile
model of mothering.

Mother stole my libido

I am the son of a woman who is a living contradiction. On
the one hand, she is an accomplished professional. She is an
accountant and she does very well. Ideologically, she thinks
of herself as a feminist. On the other hand, she is a sacri®cial
lamb on the altar of motherhood. One evening, we had a
rather tough piece of meat. I saw her take my father's plate
and cut his meat into small morsels, as one would do for a
child. I could literally see my dad lose interest in his food,
and detach from the scene of family dinner.
On another occasion, I heard my 20-year-old sister give
my mother an order, ``I am tired, draw me a bath.'' I did not
understand why my mother ± so professional at the of®ce ±
behaves like a servant in her home. She assumes respon-
sibility for every situation, shows no passion for anything
other than family and home. She has done something to her
128 Depth psychology after neuroscience

kids that is dif®cult to put into words. It feels as if she has

deprived us of our ability to feel desire. Our house was like
the claim counter in a department store and mother was
customer service. We were taught to bring every little frus-
tration of the day to her, as if she could make everything
right and compensate for life's dif®culties.
After leaving home, I began to experience pleasures of
which I had been unaware ± creating a comfortable house,
cooking a meal, receiving the care and affection of my wife.
When these things were given to me by my overly generous
mother, I did not experience them as pleasurable. Rather,
they were like prerequisites before starting to enjoy life. We
got all the prerequisites: comfort, security, good food, a good
house, good clothes, plenty of stuff, but we never got to the
part where you actually enjoy whatever is there to be
enjoyed. To ®nd the will to live, I had to learn to do things
for myself, and to take pleasure in doing them. Until I left
home, my personality was formed around the only
experience my mother would allow us: needing her.
As kids, my two sisters and I were the ®rst at school to
own cell phones. They were to call mother in case we needed
something. She would answer all our calls, exhausting herself
in our service. Both my sisters are incapable of keeping a
boyfriend for more than a month; both are friendless; both
are depressed. My elder sister seems to think that love
consists in imitating the slavishness of our mother. As soon
as my sister is attracted to a man, she offers herself as his
domestic slave. She can attract some really nice guys, but
they are soon repulsed by her idea of love. She has followed
the model my mother gave her.
My other sister, the youngest, went in the opposite direc-
tion, but it is just as bad. She is entirely driven by the desire
not to become like Mom. The typical counter-dependent
reaction. She thinks she can protect herself against slavish-
ness by refusing to give anything to a man, except sex,
which, for her, is mainly a bargaining power. She offers her
 The archetype of Mother 129

body, but what she is really looking for in a man is not a

lover, but somebody like mother, who will serve her. ``Draw
me a bath, buy me this, do this, do that, come here, go there,
go away, come back.'' Love for her means a slave with a cell
phone, someone she can call whenever she ``needs'' some-
thing.
As for myself, after two suicide attempts, I have been
compelled to go into analysis. That's what gave me the
courage to escape from the rotten paradise of our overly
generous mother. I did not want to follow in the footsteps of
my sisters, nor of my father. He lived his life as a prisoner,
caught between two fears: that of losing my mother, on
whom he was miserably dependent, and that of being
married to her, because it con®rmed his dependency.
Now that I have gained some measure of freedom, I see
another trap: thinking that I can be the liberating hero of the
family, that I might set free my mother, my father, my sisters.
I know this is not something I can do. I am vigilant not to fall
for a heroic myth, to replace the sacri®cial myth of my
mother. Wish me luck! Wish me strength!

Paradoxically, to avoid creating a ``rotten paradise'' of smothering

maternal love, a mother needs a strong libido. She needs her own
secret, or not-so-secret, garden. She needs another goal in life
besides creating paradise on earth for her children; she needs
plenty of moments when her children are not the priority, times
when something in her life supersedes the demand for milk and
cookies, attention and care. These instances communicate a rich
message: there is not only a mother in my body, there is also a
woman with a life of her own. I am a lover, a friend, a worker, an
artist, a wife, a cook and a former girl who still enjoys dancing
and swimming. Life is generous, it gives you one body but many
selves.
The following woman had such a mother, and at 60, she tells
how the non-sacri®cial style of her mother remains the most
crucial lesson her mother taught her.
130 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Go eat a strawberry
My mother had few choices. She worked her whole life
because she was widowed with four daughters to care for.
She brought us up on a single income, and one clear prin-
ciple: you make your own choices. The summer of my eighth
year, I skinned my knee. She dressed the wound, but I did
not stop wailing and she gave me this advice: ``Go pick a
nice, ripe, red strawberry from the garden. Savor it for a long
time, until it dissolves in your mouth, and think what a
miracle of deliciousness a strawberry is. Then come back and
tell me which of the two won, pain or pleasure.'' She called
this her ``tricks to shrink sorrows.'' It worked every time
with me.
Given that I was a rather contemplative child, she would
often send me to meditate on a cloud, to entrust my trouble
to it and let the cloud carry my worry away. By insisting on
self-reliance, my mother opened the vastness of the world:
the ¯avor of strawberries, the ¯ow of clouds, streams and
rain, the purr of cats, the song of the wind, the lace of the
ferns. She unglued us from herself, did not participate in our
emotional dramas. In a house with four girls, there was
always plenty of girlish whining, hormonal over¯ow, tor-
rents of tears, and sentimental drama of every kind. Mom
would give us a handkerchief and tell us in a very gentle
voice, ``Cry, cry, darling. You'll pee less!'' I never felt she
was being sarcastic or vulgar. To me, it meant that crying is
simply to ``pass water,'' a natural function which provides
needed relief.
When we grew up and our heartaches were more serious,
she offered a more complex ritual. She led us to the living
room, a space that she had claimed as her study. She was a
teacher, and her desk and her books were there. The discon-
solate girl was invited to recline on our magni®cent dark
Victorian couch with a mahogany back, sculpted with roses,
upholstered in burgundy velvet, stuffed like a big red whale ±
 The archetype of Mother 131

the only good piece of furniture in the whole house. Draped

across the couch was a woolen cashmere shawl, blue and
ochre with silk fringe ± a splendid gift she had received at her
wedding. This shawl had a name: ``the crying shawl.'' We
had extraordinary permission to wrap ourselves in it when
sorrow of the heart made us cold. She wrapped it around me
for my ®rst heartbreak. I was 14 and the boy I wanted to kiss
refused. When I told my mom the story, she listened in
silence, nodding. I reclined on the sofa, crying and crying for
at least an hour. My mother read and sipped tea. I was
``passing water.''
When mother died, and the time came to distribute her
things amongst her daughters, the most coveted item was the
crying shawl. We threw the dice and it was I who got it. Two
years ago, I gave it to my sister's daughter, who was going
through a very dif®cult time. That shawl was like receiving
comfort from her deceased grandmother. The crying shawl is
still serving its role of practical poem, an object that carries
the power of poetry, and the protection of a great ancestor.

Crying is active
Crying is active. The body is in motion. The breathing accelerates.
Emotions whirl. A movement stirs the heart and tears surge like
water from a spring. The ¯ow of tears cools the soul, water joining
water. By contrast, in most forms of what the DSM-IV classi®es as
``Mood Disorders,'' ``Anxiety Disorders'' and ``Somatoform Dis-
orders.''2 the psyche is paralyzed by the stagnant mud of emo-
tional chaos; there is no psychic movement; the cold molasses of
thick sticky emotions doesn't ¯ow. If and when there is movement
(as in agitated states of depression) it is more likely to be manic
agitation rather than ef®cient action. The one unfailing sign of a
depressive state is an absence of progression in the narrative; the
inner cinema plays the same basic plot over and over again, the
story is stuck, the motion in the picture is gone. When a depression
has at its root an unconscious choice not to grow up, to stay a
needy child, usually there is someone in the environment who is
132 Depth psychology after neuroscience

willing ± or forced ± to play the role of Great Mother. This makes

the slope of depression even more slippery because the patient can
surrender, leaving all the action to the caretaker. The cost of such
passivity is a life spent waiting: waiting for the depression to lift,
waiting for whoever will volunteer to deal with the world. Having
surrendered, there is no reason to move.
The Great Mother's role was, and still is, in many traditional
cultures, the primary ± often the only ± role for women. Until
recently, life was shorter, children more numerous, domestic tasks
extremely demanding and choices limited. It made sense to spend
one's entire life taking care of the young, the old, the sick, the
house, the garden, and the chicken coop. Not anymore, and that is
why the mother myth needs to be re-examined in depth, over and
over again. Psychological theory is just now beginning the post-
feminist revision of the mother myth, and in this task, I believe the
Jungians and post-Jungians have a head start because of their
archetypal perspective.
I know six men who brought up their children by themselves.
Circumstances put them in the role of the Great Mother. All
seemed to have a better sense of the balance between home and
work, between their own needs, the needs of the culture, and those
of their children; they were better at interpreting the role than any
woman I know, including myself. All showed their kids at a very
young age how to work the washing machine, cook spaghetti
sauce and hamburger steak with onions, to make their lunch with
the leftovers, and to be safe when alone by themselves in the
house. All six of them limited TV time and imposed mandatory
earphones. All resisted being indoctrinated into the maternal ideo-
logy of sacri®ce. All had a good sense of humor and were angry at
the failures of schools and communities in regard to children.
None made their kids the absolute center of their life. None asked
for canonization because they were acting as mother. These friends
taught me a great deal about unnecessary sacri®ces. They were
Great Mother models.

The maternal quality of a country, a house,

a garden
Psychology's obsession with the biological mother, concomitant
with the maternalization of therapy, has made us tolerant of the
silliest of theories about mothering. A patient of mine had been
 The archetype of Mother 133

told that the source of his neurosis lay in the fact that his mother
had chapped nipples. When nursing he had felt rejected! Hard to
believe but there is even a theory that claims that a mother's
rectum, if too tight, can make a child neurotic. Do we need this
kind of theoretical blah-blah to know that it is preferable to have a
relaxed mom, ecstatic with her new baby, a content, sexually
ful®lled woman, a generous breast giving unpolluted milk, a body
emanating the sweet smell of motherly love rather than the sour
perspiration of an exhausted, anxious, disappointed woman with a
constricted life, a mean psyche and a tight rectum? Do we need a
social science approach to test the hypothesis that some mothers
are such that they repel the tiny mouth at their breast? Any farmer
knows this much just by observing his livestock. One really
wonders what sort of intellectual de®ciency compels so many
psychological researchers to spend their time ± and our grant
money ± knocking down an open door.
Such a focus on the biological mother is a displacement of the
cultural de®ciency of our collective maternal complex. Develop-
mental psychology has been so busy pointing an accusatory ®nger
toward little mothers (stay-at-home moms, single moms, working
moms) that it remains blind to the problem of the Collective
Mother. Maternal qualities, or the lack of them, show up not
only in mother±child interactions, but start with the decency or
decadence of the mother archetype in the culture as a whole, in
its organizations, architecture, laws, manners, styles of living. A
maternal atmosphere manifests, or fails to manifest, in each of our
cultural, political, educational choices; in each micro-decision that
makes a country, city, school, family, or workplace, safe or
threatening, supportive or punitive, easy on the body or assaultive
to the senses and the soul. As a result of its obsession with the
human mother, developmental psychology has diverted attention
from our Grand Maternal Failure.
I would like to start with a very small, mundane and minuscule
example, but one that reveals our blindness to the deterioration of
the maternal archetype, a banalization of our maternal failure.
Let's compare the atmosphere between two airports. I start most
of my air travels departing from the tiny, pleasant, very maternal
city of Santa Barbara, California, where the local airport has
connections to some major cities. I park my car under a palm tree
and walk into a terminal that looks like a Spanish villa. There are
no blaring speakers, no interminable lines, no paranoid civil
134 Depth psychology after neuroscience

servants. I have never seen a passenger in a ®t of frustration and

rage, and all the agents show a gentleness and courtesy that does
not seem faked. They don't seem to be overworked; most did not
spend two hours in gridlock before arriving at their workplace; the
doors and windows open to let air and sun in; the airport is small
and most people working there know each other. The maternal
quality of the atmosphere in this airport can be summarized in a
few words: the senses are not under attack. At security check, I
almost expect to be given a kiss on the cheek and handed my
lunchbox. The ambiance at the airport re¯ects the ambiance of the
city: tiny Santa Barbara has a sweet quality of life, and that is why
those who have lived there have dif®culty relocating.
By contrast, the next segment of my trip is usually the enormous
hub of the Los Angeles airport, where one feels like a tin can being
kicked down the sidewalk. The whole ritual has a paranoid
quality. The boarding procedure adheres to a militaristic ritual ±
an absurdity considering the mounting evidence of its uselessness.
Of course, it is not fair to compare a tiny domestic airport to a
huge international hub. Nevertheless, those who make the deci-
sions about air traf®c regulations fail to consider the sensual
experience of the body. It is the body that has to stand in one line
after the other, endure the noise pollution of incessant, irrelevant
messages from loudspeakers, wait for hours at the gate, occupy a
noisy, aggressively lit room. One airport treats you with gentle-
ness, while the other assails you with interminable inconveniences
and a military scenario that is the result of a political strategy, not
really a concern for the safety of passengers.
Psychologists will undoubtedly come up with new categories for
the DSM-IV: airport rage, ¯ight rage, queue rage. In the parable,
one more straw is added to the burden and it breaks the camel's
back. I am usually a nice, well-mannered camel myself. I don't bite
or spew my coffee at airport agents; I am docile and diligent in
demonstrating that I have no murderous intentions. Yet, I do feel
something close to rage at the increasing burden of air travel. Do
we really need a new theory about ¯ight rage to understand the
frustration of passengers who know they are being manipulated?
For example, more and more passengers know that the ®fth time
the airline agent announces the plane will be delayed another hour,
the cause may not be weather conditions, as the agent tells you, but
airline pro®tability as well as political laziness at addressing the
growing gridlock of air traf®c. As an exhausted camel waiting at
 The archetype of Mother 135

the boarding gate, I had better repress any expression of anger

otherwise I become a camel with a ``personality disorder.'' In other
words, clinical psychology has inverted the meaning of the parable.
The parable's wisdom points at the poor judgment of the camel
driver who puts an excessive load on the camel's back. The clinical
labeling doesn't examine the poor judgment of those who increase
burdens; it puts a tag on the camel: camel with hostile tendencies.
Not false, but not the whole story either.
The growing sense of harassment in air travel is only an example
± as good as any ± to reveal a blindness to the collapse of the
maternal archetype. My hometown of Santa Barbara has one of
the highest scores in the nation in evaluations of quality of living ±
which is the sociologist's way of saying a city with maternal
qualities. The shadow of Santa Barbara is the mounting cost of
such a sweet quality: houses are so expensive that many retired
people have to sell their houses and leave. It is expensive in part
because of the scarcity of towns that have such a sweet quality.
The scarcity comes from the collective neurosis toward the mater-
nal archetype, creating an unnecessary paucity, an arti®cial short-
age, an ecological imbalance in archetypal energies.
Air travel stress I can tolerate, as millions do every year. I ®nd it
less tolerable to witness the collective maternal failure in education
and health care. Who seems to notice that schools and colleges are
built like barracks, furnished like prisons, with steel furniture
screwed to cement ¯oors, and dormitories like high-rise human ®le
cabinets? Who examines the effect of enervating school schedules,
never allowing for long periods of focused attention, no silence, no
solitude, no beauty? Anybody spending a day in a public high
school might think that the educators themselves suffer from
Attention De®cit Disorder and wish to clone themselves. The style
of communication between teachers and students is often shrill,
tense, distrustful because both teachers and students are under
increasing stress. Thousands of children, as well as teachers, are
subjected to humiliation, rejection, ridicule, aggression, theft, and
rape. Competitive sports are often brutal to the point of abuse.
The noise, traf®c, and atmosphere in public schools is harsh, tense,
paranoid, socially competitive. In this toxic context, psychology's
obsession with the biological parents seems like a scam to conceal
the maternal neurosis of the collective.
Regarding the epidemic of child obesity, diabetes, Attention
De®cit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and the increasing list of
136 Depth psychology after neuroscience

clinical disturbances in the adolescent population, a lot of good

research has been available for more than a decade. It demon-
strates the devastating impact of a diet saturated with the wrong
kind of sugar and the wrong kinds of fat. One would think that
the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would have taken
effective steps to avoid such situations. Feeding and protecting are
the two basic principles at the very core of the mother archetype
and feeding and protecting is supposed to be the mission of the
FDA. All evolved nations have organizations whose mission relates
to the maternal function of feeding and protecting the citizens.
France has a law de®ning the contents of the baguette; Norway
and Canada have outlawed transfat; and India has kept its tradi-
tional cuisine. In the US, the FDA has betrayed its maternal
mission as has happened in no other evolved countries. Not only
has there been no challenge of school authorities whose idea of
``feeding the kids'' is to invite fast food monsters to set up their
stands in schools, it is now coming to the collective awareness that
the FDA's allegiance is not to the citizens, but rather to the
pharmaceutical companies and to the national economy. The
federal law that prohibits the FDA from hiring experts with
®nancial ties to pharmaceutical lobbies is one of those laws ± like
insider trading ± that experts take pride in circumventing. It is so
easy to hide the tracks and so much fun. The FDA serves, not the
Mother Goddess, as it should, but the Money God.
Neither does the FDA seem to serve Apollo, the god of science.
It is scary to read the details of some of the so-called scienti®c
research undertaken to legitimize a new drug. The experimental
schemes are so de®cient, the number of subjects often ridiculously
small, the duration inappropriately short, that one is not surprised
when it is later revealed that, again, the scientists ± as well as some
FDA agents ± were on the payroll of the pharmaceutical company
owning the patent. It is as disturbing to read the legal arguments
that the FDA uses against natural remedies that compete with
prescription drugs. Why are they not as zealous when it comes to
prosecuting doctors, nurses and schools who receive kickbacks for
putting kids on Ritalin, Prozac, or sleeping pills? Why is the FDA
so slow at reacting to the growing evidence that antidepressants
may contribute to an increase of suicide among adolescents? Why
did they not react 10 years ago to all the research showing the
danger of a diet high in re®ned sugar and transfats? Why aren't
they attentive to theories that show that ADHD might simply be
 The archetype of Mother 137

the result of a multifactorial, psycho-ecological imbalance (the diet

plus the frantic schedules plus the frenzied consumerism plus
media overload plus a frenetic culture)? The FDA is comfortable
with medicalizing ADHD and putting the children on a variety of
drugs. Ritalin alone is a multibillion-dollar industry.
Our collective Mother markets junk food to her children and then
puts them on drugs that harm them. When they get fat, have liver
problems, attention de®cit, panic attacks, social phobias, insomnia,
suicidal impulses, early-onset diabetes, there are drugs for all of
those ``conditions.'' Could there be a more gruesome fairy tale than
one where the mother invites the wolf into the nursery? My point
here is not a political one but a psychological one. We suffer from a
lack in our collective consciousness that makes us blind to all sorts
of wolves in grandma's bonnet. Citizens need protection and
nourishment, both of which are part of the archetype of Mother. A
culture's failure in the maternal realm cannot be overcome if we
don't ®rst perceive it in all its ®ne rami®cations. Psychological
literature is ¯ooded with theories linking almost all kinds of
psychological disorders to parental failure. If a boy is having
problems in school while both parents are at work to pay the rent,
there are plenty of theories that might suggest it is the parents'
absence from home that is the cause. It doesn't take into con-
sideration that the boy's middle school is a terrible Mother, a place
where the boy is regularly abused, ignored, ridiculed. A school
should be both a good Mother and a strong Father. When the school
system fails in both these archetypal qualities, it feels indecent to
consider the child's failure as only mom and dad's failure.
When a ®rst lady takes her role seriously, as Mother of the
Nation, you will ®nd an Eleanor Roosevelt in the coalmines of
West Virginia; a Queen Mum surveying the streets of London after
the war; a Princess Diana insisting on the removal of landmines; a
Hillary Clinton passing laws to protect children and writing It
Takes a Village. Nevertheless, a culture with a distorted maternal
complex will attempt to put these women in their place by all
means ± like commenting obsessively on their out®ts and hairdos
but ignoring their ideas. They will be denied a role as mother of
the nation, and we'll have a First Lady who concerns herself with
the of®cial china, lighting the Christmas tree, standing by her man
in a designer dress, smiling at her own emptiness.
What would be suf®cient for us to turn a critical eye toward the
Collective Mother? Guns and knives are hidden in lockers; there is
138 Depth psychology after neuroscience

an unprecedented increase in adolescent suicides, psychotic break-

downs, self-mutilations, depressions, and a host of ever-increasing
psychological and psychosomatic symptoms. When did we start
ignoring the collective maternal responsibility and begin blaming it
all on the individual parents? Everything the Collective Mother
does not provide, moms and dads are expected to compensate for.
Public transportation is dangerous and inadequate, so parents
become chauffeurs. Kids are addicted to fast food and reject the
healthy meals cooked at home, and then the parents are expected
to pay for medication and therapy. The greater the indolence of
the Collective Mother, the heavier the burden on the individual
parent and the greater the medicalization and infantilization of the
population. Nobody would deny that incompetent parenting
results in nasty psychological consequences, but what is the use of
such drearily evident theories if we never consider the decadence
of the Collective Mother? Atmosphere, deÂcor, attitude, manners,
style, architecture, sound, smell, taste, timing, pace, space, rhythm,
textures, rituals: all have a direct consequence on the psyche. Who
would Mozart have been without the beauty of Salzburg? Vivaldi
without Venice? Da Vinci without Florence? Baudelaire or
Gertrude Stein without Paris? Walt Whitman without New York
and Chicago? Virginia Woolf without London? Poe without
Boston and Thoreau without his Walden Pond?
Psychology has largely ignored the obvious fact that social and
cultural factors can coalesce to support or hinder the psyche,
putting an unfair burden on caregivers. Compassion fatigue of
caregivers is inevitable when a culture is unwilling to develop
maternal qualities. The excessive rate of burn-out and consequent
demise of caretakers is the result of a vicious circle: the more a
culture is a Bad Mother, the more it produces individuals who
remain infantile, needing care and themselves producing another
generation of violently frustrated infantile adults needing even
more care. An environment that offers too little beauty, too little
joy, pleasure, sensuality, wastes its little Mozarts and burns out its
mothers. It is one of the surest signs of decadence because as much
as a culture can show resilience when faced with economic
setback, the very source of resilience is lost when the social fabric
disintegrates.
One of depth psychology's tasks is to reverse the cultural trend
that persists in de®ning the mother's breast in a literal and
personalistic way and to start looking at the maternal function in a
 The archetype of Mother 139

symbolic and collective way. ``Mother'' is an archetype and as

such it is always present in one way or another in the life of
individuals as well as in the life of nations. Thanks to George
Orwell, our imagination about the possibility of a nasty tyrannical
Father Figure ± presenting himself as Big Brother ± is quite
sophisticated. I know of no such recent widely read work of ®ction
that would have sharpened our awareness that Mother can turn
into Big Mother, her tits delivering plenty of the wrong kind of
charity, the wrong kind of care, wrong kind of food, medicine,
support, given in a way that invites her citizens to remain infantile
and passive.3 That collective Big Mother needs to get on the couch
and receive psychoanalytic attention. Our actual welfare system
hides a vicious refusal to let the children grow. It says: cash the
check, shut up, don't ask for more, remain infantile, I don't care to
educate you.
A revisioning of the maternal myth implies a revolution in
values, manners, education, esthetic sensitivity, city planning,
welfare programs. It asks for new ideas about human relations,
communities, hard and soft, yin and yang. It asks for a parallel
revalorization and rede®nition of the myth of the Father. The
symbols of Mother of the country and Father of the country are
always linked. If one is neurotic, the other is too. Both archetypes
are in need of a new deal.
Chapter 10

The archetype of Father

The philosopher Blaise Pascal pointed out that ``justice without

force is powerless.'' Likewise, maternal compassion without pater-
nal strength is powerless. Ecologists know the problem: the poli-
tician's tactic to neutralize them is to make sentimental speeches
about Mother Nature and to pass generous laws for its protection,
but laws with no teeth. No matter how devoted the activists in
ecology, how ambitious their mission statements, if the laws for the
protection of the environment are not enforced, it remains ``justice
without force.'' The mother who begs her husband to stop abusing
the children but doesn't back it up with the threat of divorce, the
good-hearted school teacher who meditates every day on peace in
the world but can't control the class bully, the politician who is
devoted to the good cause but has no power in the party ± all are
worthless good intentions. Again, Pascal: ``Those who are unable to
empower the just, end up justifying the powerful.''
The previous chapter explored the need for compassion, gentle-
ness and a healthy collective Mother archetype. The Father arche-
type, however, is just as crucial, as it personi®es the will to win. The
goal of attaining a better quality of living for all, a world with less
stress and less violence, can only be reached if we collectively revisit
both principles and their connection. A strong Father balanced by
an affectionate Mother has been ± and still is ± interpreted literally
by traditionalists; their discourses suggest that all would be well in
the Kingdom of God if dads would only carry the patriarchal
authority and moms do the nurturing. Traditionalists translate the
archetypal necessity into socio-biological roles, a division of roles
that may have worked in the past but obviously fails us now
because the old myth of the family is going, going, gone. Nostalgia
for what is gone is always a costly psychological mistake.
 The archetype of Father 141

Bad cop/good cop: not a literal reality

The most naive observer understands that the classic dynamic of

good cop/bad cop is not to be interpreted literally. We all under-
stand that the ``good cop'' is not necessarily, in reality, a guy with
all the compassion (maternal archetype) while the other guy is
powerful and merciless (paternal archetype). Why can't the tradi-
tionalists comprehend that the family dynamic is such a coupling?
Good teams are all made by combining different archetypes. It is
never required of the role players in the human drama to identify
literally, biologically, with the archetypal role they are called
to play.
Another example of that archetypal coupling was given to me by
a student who was raised in an African-American community
in Los Angeles. In her life, the biological fathers, in hers and most
of her friends' homes, were absent. The grandmother would take
on the maternal role, while the biological mother would take on
the paternal role: it was she who earned the money, owned the car,
dealt with grades, pocket money and school authorities. My
student put it simply: ``My mom is my dad, and grandma is my
mom.'' She is expressing a simple psychological truth: as long as
both archetypes are balanced, the psychological needs of the
family are met, regardless of biological identities. Conversely, a
family may have all the outside appearances of a balanced family,
with a stay-at-home mom and a dad bringing home his salary, no
abuse and no irregularities, yet there might be no deep mothering
and no deep fathering taking place. Archetypal energies may be
invisibly present or invisibly absent, and they are not necessarily
de®ned by biological gender. Same-sex couples whose households
provide all the complex mothering and fathering that kids need in
order to grow up are a good demonstration of a non-literal inter-
pretation of mom and dad. One does not need a degree in psy-
chology to see that a lack of yang corrupts the yin; a lack of yin
disempowers the yang. Psychology has ``lacked the balls'' to go
after the obvious fallacies in the traditional family construct,
where appearances hide all kinds of archetypal absences.
Knowing how to discriminate when a situation requires more
yang and when it calls for more yin is one of the most important
discriminatory functions that apply equally to individuals, families,
institutions, and nations. Be it the ®ght of the serfs against
feudalism, slaves against racism, or women against patriarchy, a
142 Depth psychology after neuroscience

lasting victory is always the result of a balance of yin and yang

strategies. Yin strategies include educating, pleading, convincing,
appealing to the highest values, and gaining the people's vote.
Yang strategies are warlike: prepare the attack, ®ght the battle,
win. Any imbalance and the yin ®nds itself powerless or the yang
begins to self-destruct. If we look at our own life stories, even the
most loving and positive relationships have periods that belong to a
psychology of love and others that belong to a psychology of war
and every psyche needs to be equipped for both. Couples ®ght
about space, values, money, time, chores; they confront their
versions of past events, their visions of the present and of the
future. A maternal psychology teaches a rhetoric of love, under-
standing, communication, sharing, openness, compromise, and
compassion. A paternal approach focuses on the balance of power
in the relationship: one does what one has the power to do. Both
approaches are necessary. The Greeks personi®ed authority by the
character of Zeus, their God the Father, holding thunderbolts in his
raised ®sts. He was represented with authoritative furrowed brows
and an eagle-like vision that could see everything happening on
Earth. He was authority personi®ed, a symbol of the power to
establish the laws, implement them, and punish those who broke
them. Zeus was the idea that power and responsibility are insepar-
able, as it should be in a father ®gure.
The Father archetype has many names: chief, king, leader, cap-
tain, general, president. All of them have in common the fatherly
responsibility of those under his authority. That is why the captain
goes down with his ship, why Truman said ``the buck stops here''
and why it is the president of the US, as father of the country, who
has the red telephone and carries the moral responsibility of
declaring war, sending sons and daughters to war.
This archetype is activated in all our relationships with ®gures of
authority. We fear the Zeus ®gures or admire and trust them; we
loathe them or we long for their protection; we are ®ercely loyal or
we want to dethrone them. Any person (man or woman) in a
position of authority constellates the Father archetype for the
others; not only kings, presidents and generals, but also the boss,
the policeman, the teacher, and anyone who has power over us.
When a woman ®nds herself in the position of the Father arche-
type, like the Egyptian queen wearing a fake beard to signify the
authority of the Pharaoh, she sends signals that she is not to be
mistaken for the Mother archetype. The power suit, the corner
 The archetype of Father 143

of®ce, the expensive desk, the reserved parking place, they all will
say that what lives here is yang. Conversely, a man in the role of
Great Mother, who uses symbols similar to that of the ancient
goddesses (the Pope's ¯owing white robe, his gesture of open arms
that suggests ``Come to me, little children'') will say: what lives
here is yin (or, as in the case of the Pope, wants you to believe so).
In the psyche, an activation of the Father archetype signals an
initiation into a warrior psychology. One develops a fascination
for strategy and tactics, a willingness to face con¯ict, a love of
victory, a budding of ambition, a desire for power, and a capacity
to take risks.

The Father principle in therapy

Frequently, at the start of family therapy, the stress can be so
intense that the ®rst task of the therapist is to work on the atmo-
sphere, to make it more gentle, more supportive, safer, maternal.
Nevertheless, if the goal is not later revisited, the therapist's
unconscious preference for a maternal psychology may bring
further imbalance because it suggests an impossible ideal for the
family: that of a permanent nest, a haven from all external
con¯icts. The family cannot be only a haven because it is also the
place where one learns life, and life is full of stress and distress. It
is in the nature of human groups to generate tensions and con¯icts;
it is even one of the principal factors of evolution. A non-romantic,
non-sentimental, non-Disney®ed psychological view of the family
teaches us both the maternal capacity to protect what is fragile or
broken (the newborn, the young, the sick, the old), and also the
paternal wisdom to consider the family as the ®rst battleground,
training ground, our ®rst psychic boot camp. The maternal utopia
so prevalent today in some developmental approaches is dystopic
when it prevents the paternal principle from reaching the children.
Boys as well as girls absolutely need to learn the basics of war
which are to remain cool, alert, focused in the face of threats.
Forms of therapy that refuse the yang principle are sentimental
lies. By offering only one end of the psychic spectrum, they
perpetuate the model of the powerless Mother dealing with a
violent Father: Please Society, don't beat the children; it hurts
them. Please Society, invest in education, in health care. Please,
absent fathers, come back and pay your due. It is a psychology of
beggars that has little to offer to those who need a revolution.
144 Depth psychology after neuroscience

The construction of identity is paradigmatic of the necessity of a

psychic balance between yin and yang. Identity is built in part
through what we love and identify with. It is as much built
through what we exclude: I am not you, I refuse what you want
for me, I resist your in¯uence, I won't surrender. Civilizations, just
like our individual psyches, de®ne their identity mostly by rejecting
what is happening on the other side of the border. Here, at home,
we do not eat frogs, or dogs, or snakes; we do not drink that stuff
or take that drug; we do not kill like that, we do not have this law,
this belief, this God, this custom. Identities are built not only
through shared values but also through common ideas about what
is being rejected. An ``enemy'' can be anything or anyone that has
the power to destroy what we are or hope to become. Teenagers
are especially keen at de®ning themselves around common ideas of
what they reject in adults. They need this oppositional attitude,
which is one of the reasons why they absolutely need a strong,
stable, father ®gure. To cut one's teeth, one has to bite into
something that offers resistance. Too harsh or too soft an auth-
ority can equally damage the capacity of teenagers to do the
necessary sorting, and create apathy, anomie, delinquency.
Feminist anger against patriarchy has been wrongly interpreted
as anger at the paternal principle. No. It does not make sense to
get angry at an archetype. It's like getting angry at the wind
instead of adjusting one's sails, or like getting angry at the fact that
we need red lights to regulate traf®c, or that we might need a
budget, a schedule, laws, rules and regulations for society to
function. The feminist revolution was not a rejection of the
paternal archetype, nor was it an empowerment of the maternal
principle. It was, at least in my understanding, a revolt against a
decadent monarchy: the ruling of one gender by another. No
guillotine was required. It was not a case of ``off with their heads''
nor was it ``off with their balls.'' What needed to be guillotined
was an idea: the idea that ``having balls'' meant something literal,
a biological apparatus, instead of an archetypal quality. The
feminist revolt was followed by a feminist revolution and has been
one of the richest examples of deconstruction in post-modern
intellectual history. It deconstructed the patriarchal literalist de®-
nition of masculine power. It deconstructed literalism.
Zeus, as an archetypal principle, is eternal, but his name can
mean man or woman, young or old. To call this archetype by the
name of a Greek divinity is simply a cultural convention, a way of
 The archetype of Father 145

honoring our pre-Christian heritage and the wisdom it contains.

One does not even need the fancy word of ``archetype'' although I
®nd it simple and practical and it is now part of the common
language. One could refer to it simply as the authority principle.
Zeus is the basic emotion of: Oops! I'd better slow down or I'll get
a speeding ticket.
The father archetype is corrupted whenever there is a dis-
sociation between power and responsibility. Anybody who wants
privileges without responsibilities always risks some form of the
guillotine (off with the king, off with the lord, off with patriarchy).
Feminists collectively declared that if women share the burden of
responsibility, they should as well share the power and the glory.
In that, feminists were revolutionaries and the impact of this
revolution has only begun. Although psychologists have made
crucial contributions to gender studies, their main impact seems to
have been in thinking anew the male/female relationship. Yet, this
rich area of studies has had less weight rethinking theories about
the family, many of which seem immune to the insights of
feminism, as if psychologists could pay lip service to feminism and
then go on with the same old theories about family dynamics and
child development.
I have supervised students in training, when they view taped
sessions by experts on ``family systems'' to learn basic intervention
techniques. The trainees also videotape their own beginnings as
psychotherapists and receive feedback from their supervisors.
These taped sessions are an interesting sample of current values
being taught in courses on family therapy. I do not wish to name
any particular school, as it is not always a problem with the
theory, but rather a pervasive attitude that pre-exists in the mind
of the student as well as in the mind of the expert who shares his
or her practical experience through tapes and videos.
Here is a typical scene that I have seen repeated with minor
variations. The video shows an aggressive teenager insulting his
mother, talking as if she were not in the room. My mother is a
whore! If she stays with my father, it is only for the money! The
angry father springs up and imposes his authority: I forbid you to
speak like that about your mother! The psychotherapist then turns
to the father. Politely castrating, the psychotherapist invites him to
cool down, to sit down, while ``we'' explore the emotion your son
is expressing. The father frowns, sits down and broods. He has just
received a humbling lesson in empathy from an expert. The
146 Depth psychology after neuroscience

psychotherapist has imposed his or her little theory: behind the

hostility there is a wound. We are here to offer compassion and
heal it. The theory is ®ne. Yes, there is a wound behind the
hostility. Nevertheless the manner in which the session is con-
ducted proposes a false egalitarianism by which the teenager's
discourse is considered equal to that of the parent. It is a mistake,
not because the teenager's opinion has less value than that of his
father's, but because the father's authority is being transferred on
to a psychotherapist who distorts it by acting like a compassion-
ate, patient Great Mother.
The fallacy here is not the theory that behind an aggressive
teenager is a hurt teenager, an idea that should not even need the
support of a theory. The problem resides in the naivety of the
psychotherapist who might not perceive that: (a) the therapist
in¯icts humiliation upon the father by giving him a lesson in
parenting in front of his child; (b) the therapist is appropriating the
paternal authority by posturing as the expert about the family; and
(c) the therapist conceals this transfer of power by wearing the
disguise of the supportive, gentle Great Mother. It is as if the
psychotherapist were saying: ``You are an incompetent father.
Don't you see the wound behind the hostility? Now, watch how
competent I am when talking to your son. How could a parent
compete?''
The psychotherapist is invested with the authority of the
specialist, bathed in the aura of the paid expert. Apparently, the
aim of the intervention is to help the father communicate better
and get closer to his son. In actuality there is another lesson that is
communicated to the son, a lesson that is not as nice: You are
excused for insulting your mother because you are expressing
emotions (i.e., hostility) and Great Mother understands and sup-
ports the expression of emotions.
The paternal principle has a different agenda. Life in a group ±
and a family is a group ± requires not only the expression but also
the control of emotions. Families have to exercise the same self-
control as do nations. Con¯icts lead either to war or negotiations.
A divorce, for example, is a war between two parties and if divorce
is to remain civil and not destroy the children, it has to abide by
certain rules, just as treaties are negotiated following a cease-®re.
We have often heard the oversimpli®cation that Asians have
dif®culty expressing their emotions or that the English have a stiff
upper lip that is the result of repression. There may be some truth
 The archetype of Father 147

in these ethnological observations, but it becomes a denial of some

of their highest values when we confuse repression, which creates
suffering, with self-control, which is the foundation for civilized
behavior. A psychology that favors a maternal perspective, that
makes the expression of one's emotions the primary value, is guilty
of confusing repression with self-control. The adolescent who
insults his mother needs to learn not one but two crucial lessons.
The ®rst is a lesson of consciousness ± when he feels hurt, he needs
to know that he tends to become hostile. The second is that there
is no honor in insulting your mother, or anyone else. The ado-
lescent needs to learn that to become a grown-up requires self-
discipline, even when experiencing a legitimate emotion of anger.
This self-restraint is a lesson that only an adult carrying the Father
archetype can teach a child. The critique of the unfair, oppressive
authoritarianism of the harsh severe patriarch ± whose rule is to
bene®t himself ± does not imply that the archetypal qualities of
Father are less needed.

There is no absolute adult

Nobody ever completely reaches the status of ``adult.'' We all have
our moments of regressive behavior. We yearn for the Great
Mother each time we suffer and as we all suffer quite a lot, we all
have a need for consolation from a little mother, a delegate of the
Great Mother. Our narcissistic child never completely disappears
as even the most individuated, illuminated beings have testi®ed.
Those who pretend to be ``beyond'' these regressive moments
either lie, or they are unconscious. Nevertheless, it is within the
means of the adult in us to educate that inner child, to control ±
yes, control ± that potentially monstrous inner tyrant. The longer
the inner child remains uneducated, the more severe the projec-
tions, the manipulations, the destruction, like a child breaking his
toys. It makes one even more self-centered and thus feeds the
vicious circle of abandonment.

Confession of an immature adult

I am a 60-year-old woman and have been practicing law for
30 years. I lost my professional zeal a long time ago. At the
148 Depth psychology after neuroscience

start of my career, I wanted to champion teenagers and I

specialized in defending troubled youths. This ideal was, in
my case, the result of my refusal to grow up. Ironically, I did
not serve my young clients' causes as much as I served my
own neurosis. As an attorney, my style of defense never
deviated and can be summarized in one sentence: basically,
the delinquent is a good kid who has been abused by parents/
society/the system and, consequently, the guilty party is that
same collection of villains. This defense worked sometimes,
but not all the time, as my strategy became increasingly
predictable. What is worse is that the dogma of the inno-
cence of the wounded failed me completely when it came to
educating my own daughter. Her adolescent rebellion should
have opened my eyes, but I did not want to see the ¯aw in
my own logic. My only child, she had been at the center of
my love and attention since her birth. I treated her as if she
was a paragon of perfection. When she started resisting my
affection, at 13, I was crushed. I could not hear what she
meant when she said that I had turned her into a doll. I had
certainly never insisted that she wear frilly dresses or any of
that. She became insolent and accused me of having driven
her father away. She even resented the fact that I never
brought home a boyfriend, misinterpreting my restraint as
evidence that I knew nothing of men or of love. She became
manipulative, demanding, and spoiled. What is more, she
scolded me for tolerating her lies and her schemes. We lived
in a hell of our creation. Today she is 40, and we are only
beginning to appreciate each other.
Last week, she reminded me of an episode that was a
turning point for her. At 12, just before her rebellion began,
she insisted on meeting her father. He was delighted. Up to
that point I had rejected his involvement and I had paid for
everything in order to bring up my daughter without his
interference. She wanted to spend a summer with him, and
they went to Spain. He was happy to ®nd himself the father
of such a beautiful, intelligent daughter. They had a great
 The archetype of Father 149

time. He is a photographer, and he taught her how to use his

cameras and lenses. She came back with many photos of
their trip. The ®rst evening of her return, she wanted to show
me her pictures and tell me about her extraordinary trip. I
don't remember this episode, but it seems that I told her that
it was too late in the evening and that the pictures could very
well wait until another time. She felt as if I were telling her
she had cheated on me by loving her father, that her good
time with him was a betrayal of me. She felt a crushing sense
of guilt and never showed me the pictures. It seems I never
asked.
Now she is 40 and has had years of analysis. She is a much
more conscious person, and we are able to talk about all this.
As a teenager she had neither the words nor the lucidity to
express what precipitated her hostility. After the trip to
Spain, she felt as if it had to be either my love and not her
father's love, or his love and not mine. When she became
rebellious and began rejecting my affection, my biggest
mistake was to conclude that her father was the cause of her
adolescent hostility, that she was the victim of his manipu-
lations to turn her against me. My preconceptions blinded
me to reality. I attempted to protect my daughter from her
father, certain that he was guilty of having wounded my
angel of perfection. But what I did was to deprive her of a
father. My daughter and I spent the next 20 years in a
psychological mess. She suffered under the delusion that I
was presenting her with an irreconcilable con¯ict. Either she
could remain mine, my little doll, my only love, or choose to
love her father and lose my affection entirely.
There was some truth to this. I wanted her all for myself.
From the day of her birth, it would be her and me against the
whole world, an unbreakable, symbiotic bond that no man
could ever penetrate. She would be my great cause, my
reason for living. I now know that my total devotion had
very little to do with love. It was all about my own internal
reality. I was the child; I was the wounded teenager needing
150 Depth psychology after neuroscience

protection against an abusive and indifferent father; I was

the one with an unresolved father complex; I was the one
who needed a champion in a court of law; I was the one who
needed a symbiotic love with my daughter, excluding the
Father, because I had no inner image of what Father means. I
paid dearly for my immaturity, tears of loneliness and regret.

The alchemy of psychic maturation

Ancient alchemists may have been lousy chemists, but they were
unequalled at suggesting metaphors for the invisible processes of
the psyche. For example, they saw that any maturation process
demands an impeccable sense of: (a) the right substance (for
example, the right ingredients for a particular recipe); (b) the right
timing (for example, the time when a fruit is ripe, or the order in
which the ingredients have to be poured in the recipe);1 and (c) the
right intensity (for example, some ingredients cook at very low
heat while others call for the intense ¯ame of a grill).
Becoming adult is one such process of maturation: (a) the basic
substances are mother-love and father-love, love being the very
essence in any recipe for the education of the young; (b) mother-
love comes ®rst and father-love comes second, each having a
different timing; and (c) the intensity or heat of the mother
complex and the heat of the father complex have to be turned up
or down as the maturation process cooks up. The child feels the
heat at all times but sometimes it is a simmering and sometimes it
is a grilling. The combination of the variations in substance,
duration, and intensity is responsible for the in®nite complexity of
the maturation process. Just like a sauce, the growing-up process
can cook well, the juices of childhood going through all sorts of
transformations (the alchemists used words like reduction,
evaporation, crystallization), ending up in a subtle distillation of
puer energy that will perdure in the adult psyche as a youthful
form of vitality and a capacity for joy.
When the maturation process goes wrong, one can use those
alchemical metaphors to imagine what ingredient is missing in the
mix (where is mommy? who is my daddy?), or what, in the timing,
was offered too soon or too late (where were you when I was a
 The archetype of Father 151

kid?), or what went wrong with the intensity of heat that either
burned the soul or didn't cook it at all. An aromatic sauce,
carefully composed of all the right ingredients, will taste delicious.
Cooked at too low a temperature, it doesn't take, doesn't thicken,
doesn't coagulate to use the alchemical word, but cooked at too
high a temperature, it turns to carbon, a complete failure of the
whole process. Jungians are fond of using alchemical metaphors to
describe the aspect of therapy that recapitulates (and corrects) the
maturation process. They are strong images and can help us
understand how a therapist's refusal to wean the patient is a recipe
for a very sour brew.

Therapy as alchemy
Compassion, gentleness, and caring are essential qualities in a
therapeutic environment. No psychotherapist can manage without
these maternal qualities ± playing the role of Great Mother ± for
those patients whose ``little mother'' failed more or less tragically.
The theory of transference is based on this capacity to push
``replay'' and ``edit.'' Unfortunately, no one ± no therapist, parent,
spouse, or friend ± can ever adequately ful®ll the archetypal role of
Mother or Father for the simple reason that, being archetypal,
these roles are, as such, inhuman, bigger than the individual
person, loaded with the millions of years of evolution of our
mammalian species.
Perfection in parenting, in educating, in therapy, is impossible.
We may do our very best, trying to give our patients ± our children,
our students ± as much as we possibly can of the accumulated
wisdom that de®nes each archetype. Nevertheless, being fallible
persons, and not the divinities that we are expected to be, we also
fail them, one way or the other. Either a parent is too good and
impossible to emulate, or not good enough and de®cient, or just
good enough but somehow uninteresting and unimpressive. In
cases of severe incompetence, the archetypal symbol of Mother or
Father can be altogether missing in the psyche of the child. The
body ages but the soul remains that of a child waiting for the Great
Mother's embrace because the little mother never provided it.
Enter the therapist, good breast ready for transference of earlier
unsatis®ed primary needs for mothering. Young or untrained
psychotherapists are especially eager to pour the honey of trans-
ferential maternal love into the therapeutic elixir. They are also
152 Depth psychology after neuroscience

more likely to keep that one substance on the front burner for too
long, never yielding to the Father Principle. The hyperglycemia of
too much sweet attention and support brings on the equivalent
of a hypoglycemic reaction ± it breeds an intense neediness that is
at the core of egotism and takes the patient even further from
feeling the generosity of what is given with life itself. Because it is
not reciprocal, the indulgence of a maternal therapist can delude
patients into believing that the privileged attention of the therapist
(for which they pay) is a model for relationships. It sets a patient
up for rejection by others who are asked to do it for free. The
demand ± if you love me, you will listen with the same uncon-
ditional attention as my therapist gives me ± is eventually met with
rejection: bye-bye, take care of yourself, baby!
The apprentice's mistake is not the nurturing per se. It is the
most natural response to nurture people we love when they are in
need. Rather than an error of substance, it is an error of duration
(timing). Some patients are incredibly skillful and subtly mani-
pulative at taking advantage of the maternal qualities of their
therapist ± and of every generous breast in their environment.
They want to remain at the breast forever. What makes a therapist
vulnerable to manipulation by these personalities can be a
de®ciency in the training, or an unconscious problem with the
Mother archetype, which results in a failure to differentiate com-
passion from weakness. Tolerance can hide passivity and failure of
leadership in the Father's realm.
The mother who fears thorny topics around the dinner table,
and, at all costs, forces everybody to fake a loving atmosphere in
the family is not expressing sensitivity but her own fears. As a
maternal ideal, peace around the table is part of good manners,
something that everybody can appreciate, but when agreement is
paramount and dissension intolerable, relationships are stripped of
their complexity, conversations simpli®ed to the extreme ± like
voting for good against evil. Everybody is nice, courteous, and
respectful, politely wasting time. As productive dissension is
eliminated, the family's ability to function synergistically evapor-
ates. Something is missing in the mix: the paternal principle.
The realm of the Great Mother is one of tranquility ± peaceful,
profoundly restful. The good breast. The safe nest. The com-
passionate listener. This serenity of the soul is one of the most
beautiful gifts one can give or receive from relationships. It
belongs to the Great Mother and it is an absolute rule around a
 The archetype of Father 153

baby's cradle. Babies who are treated harshly either die or become
sick, or carry a psychic wound that will not heal until they get to
taste what the old cliche calls ``the milk of human kindness.'' A
competent therapist provides a tranferential nurturing breast that
helps compensate for the earlier deprivation. A suffering soul
wants peace. The realm of the Great Mother offers that kind of
peace each time we ®nd refuge in the arms of loved ones. This
transferential love ± if we take the theory of transference seriously
± also implies that there is a time for weaning. Some patients come
in expecting ± and often getting ± a weekly dose of psychological
cuddling. They gorge on the therapist's attentions, wallow in their
psychological dramas, uninterrupted by a non-judgmental, sym-
pathetic listener. Nevertheless, if this goes on too long, the thera-
peutic effect is nulli®ed and there is a risk of carbonization of the
sweet milk.

Sorry, Oedipus
The tendency toward maternalization of therapy is a logical
consequence of a psychological culture that is dominated by the
mythology of the child. It is unfortunate that the best lesson from
Freud ± maybe the primary one, the one that has passed the test
of time ± does not receive more attention in psychology classes.
Freud argues that the child has to be frustrated, that a child's
victory over his rival for the mother's affection is dangerous, both
for the child and for society. The critique of Freud often focuses on
the fact that the desire of the child to possess the mother may not
be as sexual as Freud imagined it. However, the basic postulate
that a child needs to be ``frustrated of a victory'' in order to face
the reality principle is still valid. Developmental psychology's
propagation of the myth of the child as victim has resulted in a
hesitancy by parents to set limits. It has also contributed to the
proliferation of maternal therapists who are sweet and supportive
but fail to help their patient overcome the natural narcissism of
childhood.
The contractor who is putting a new roof on my house is a kind
and sensible man. Knowing that I am a psychologist, he asks me
how he should behave with his 14-year-old son. He wants to tell
the boy that respect is a two-way gift, that it is too easy to be, at
the same time, comfortably dependent and excessively demanding;
that love is not a license to abuse; that the noise from his audio
154 Depth psychology after neuroscience

system, his belongings scattered all over the house, his exorbitant
telephone bills, all of that is just too much. The father does not
want to appear rigid and authoritarian as his own father had been,
and consequently he is not sure if it is acceptable to express his
frustration to his son. Why such doubt about his own need for
respect? It points to a cultural failure, not only his personal failure.
His instincts are good, but he cannot ®nd the right attitude in the
collective repertoire because children have been allowed to ascend
to the family throne.
If not overcome in childhood, the rage of losing the status of
little monarch only ampli®es; it produces frustrated and mean
individuals because they resent the loss of a power they used to
have. Their psychological intelligence is spent mostly on manipu-
lations to get that power back. They are always trying to receive
the maximum, contribute the minimum, never realizing that this is
a game that sooner or later ends with the feeling of being a deposed
potentate. They want the privileges of childhood (security, support,
innocence, angelic irresponsibility), but also ± why not? ± those of
adulthood (money, sex, power, and nobody to tell them what to
do). Their neurosis is fed by a consumerist culture that advertises
self-indulgence as a virtue, to anybody with money: Indulge! You
are worth it. It is a fact that adolescents in rich countries do have a
frightening amount of economic power that contributes to the
illusion of their independence. The tragedy of the unweaned adult
is that no amount of success (or money) will ever compensate for
the ®rst loss, because a doubt remains as to the necessity of that
loss. As the years go by and the fantasy of the restoration to the
throne dims, the dominant feeling becomes the despair and the
narcissistic rage that is characteristic of infantile adults. Those who
love them feel sorrow for what might have been.

A balanced approach to therapy

Rather than approaches specializing in the maternal attitude (the
nurturing breast) and others in the paternal one (tough love), the
training of therapists should encourage an alchemical ®nesse, and
develop in them an awareness of what substance is needed, when
(timing) and with what force (intensity). The psyche has periods
when it needs a cradle in which to experience rebirth; it also has
periods when it needs warrior training. One needs courage and
ferocity to combat the monsters inhabiting the psyche. The art of
 The archetype of Father 155

psychological warfare calls for the Father archetype. Buddhism

and Hinduism are good examples of spiritual disciplines of peace
and love, but with a martial component in the mix. The novice is
taught to battle with negative thinking, to wage war against the
agitated ego, a monkey that should be controlled. In the same
fashion, a competent therapist knows when to leave the Great
Mother and migrate to the Father, with his warlike psychology.
The famous analyst Marie-Louise von Franz was well known
for her confrontational, fatherly style. She lacked patience for
clients in love with their wounds. She would simply dismiss a
patient if she perceived a lack of courage. She seemed to be saying:
Come back when you are battle-ready. I won't waste my time with
crybabies. Her therapeutic manners aroused criticism ± likewise
her rigid and somewhat odd personality. Perhaps her intuition was
correct, however. There are times when the therapist should
follow in the footsteps of the martial arts teacher. The soft inner
child needs a teacher who will turn him into the karate kid. If
therapy offers primarily emotional support and comfort, it can add
to the experience of neediness. To end the infantile illusion, the
patient must want something beyond the loving, tender gaze of the
mother.
The regularity with which I have seen apprentice therapists
incapable of weaning their patients indicates a collective problem
with both the Mother and the Father archetype. It is accompanied
by the illusion that if only a psyche could be ``cured'' of its
neurosis, it would bring about a kind of maternal paradise of
harmonious relationships, functional families, good communica-
tions, emotional comfort. In this fantasy of maternal bliss, what is
missing is the awareness of the necessity of being removed from
maternal affection. The compulsory maternalism that acts as a
dogma oversees the fact that the child needs not only a competent
caretaker, but also needs for that person to walk away as soon as
the child can accept the world as Cosmic Mother and start
walking on his own.
Psychological maternalism has perverse consequences similar to
those of political correctness ± increased hypocrisy and accentua-
tion of the shadow. Who has not heard of a therapist who acts
nice and unconditionally supportive, not because the patient is in
the process of repairing the maternal image, and not because that
therapist is a great compassionate being, but because the
unweaned client subtly lets the therapist know that this is what
156 Depth psychology after neuroscience

is being paid for. The patient ends up more desperate than before,
but the therapist ends up with more ``clients.'' An authentic calling
to become a psychotherapist, like any vocational choice, implies a
willingness to take risks. All matters of love also entail risk taking;
therapy as well as education are harmed if concerns about money
or reputation take precedence. The task requires sincere devotion.
Otherwise, it is only a job and not a calling.

A little mother's resignation

My son is 35 years old, a talented artist. He works hard and
so do I. My life is as full as his, even though he doesn't think
so. Because I live alone and I have always welcomed his
visits, I think he believes I have nothing better to do! The
truth is that I cherish the time we spend together. This last
year, every time we scheduled a dinner he ended up canceling
it. Last week he sent me an email, ``Hi, Mom. I'll come by
this Wednesday. Can we have dinner at your place? I could
be there around six. I'll bring wine.'' That day, I left my
of®ce early and bought what I needed to cook the dish he
likes best. l was really looking forward to this, and I poured
myself a glass of wine while cooking and waiting for him. He
cancelled!
Once again, he had a perfect excuse. Until now, I have
reacted like an understanding mother: ``Don't worry, honey.
We'll have another shot at it.'' In that moment, I became a
woman who is ®nished with child-rearing. I felt a completely
different personality rising to the surface ± not the mother,
but the woman! I said to him, ``From now on, if you want to
come for dinner, you know my address. If I am home, we'll
order a pizza. No more appointments.'' I said it without
harshness but with ®nality.
The following Friday evening, he dropped by my of®ce
unannounced. We went out to dinner and had a great time. I
feel that my resigning as a mother is bene®cial not only to me
but to him as well. A son who expects women to be eternally
patient needs to be enlightened by his own mother. The rules
 The archetype of Father 157

of relationship between a man and a woman are not at all

the same as the one between a mother and son.

You love me at last? Too late!

One of life's paradoxes is that love is often offered precisely at the
moment when one ®nally gives up because the price of love seems
too high. I'm through begging for tenderness, for sexual pleasure,
for respect, for help, for support. No more humiliation in
exchange for devotion. No more psychological hemorrhaging. It is
also a frequent side effect of therapy that, at the moment when the
patient begins to feel detachment, the partner opens up and starts
giving what had been withheld. It is no coincidence. As long as the
patient sings the tune of ``Don't leave me or I'll die,'' the partner
cannot but resent the emotional blackmail, and reciprocity is
impossible. When a sense of self-worth and independence is re-
established, it brings either the possibility of mutuality or the end
of the relationship based on a neurotic symbiosis.
A symbiotic state can be quite comfortable because it is a radical
shortcut: to alleviate the existential anguish of freedom, it abol-
ishes freedom altogether. As Jung remarked, a therapist can
seldom help a patient who has just fallen in love and is in a state of
sexual bliss. The honeymoon is maybe the only time when
symbiosis is positive, because sexuality is symbiotic in nature. The
honeymoon is a time when it feels as if love is the solution to all of
life's problems. We and us are the most used pronouns during a
honeymoon. We are going to solve everything. We are one.
United, we are strong. Our love is invincible. The world revolves
around us. A honeymoon that does not fuse, bond, mix the juices
and melt the lovers into a common orgasmic explosion of joy is
simply a failure. Unfortunately, the sexual embrace is ephemeral
and each partner has to get back into his or her own skin, until the
next embrace. For love to endure, the illusion of oneness must end
and the paternal principle be honored. If the maternal dream of
symbiosis persists, the individuals begin to disintegrate psycholo-
gically. Couples choose each other according to an unconscious
plan that makes allowances not only for the development of their
full potential of strength but also for the full potential of their
neuroses. In the attraction that the other exerts upon us, there is
158 Depth psychology after neuroscience

sometimes a desire to match our weaknesses in such a way that we

shall, sooner or later, be forced to evolve beyond them.

I married a bomb detonator

I chose a wife whose personality pushed all my buttons, all
the time. We were perpetually angry about something. My
unresolved Mother complex was brought to the forefront, as
if I married her so that she could put her ®nger in my wound;
she did in a rather harsh way, repeatedly. I did the same to
her. I think I married her because I needed to get away, once
and for all, from the devouring mother. Our union was such
hell that either we died of it or we learned from it. I learned.
I stopped expecting to be taken care of and began breathing
on my own. I don't know about her.
His unconscious strategy had been in choosing a partner
who was even more unconscious than himself, a woman who
absolutely refused to leave the neurotic pact. She would not
budge from the contention that if only he. . . . Their rela-
tionship felt reassuring at ®rst, because it allowed for mutual
passivity. As soon as he began the work of self-analysis, he
couldn't bear the relationship any more and broke it off. His
partner's refusal to evolve provided him with two crucial
lessons: (1) how not to be like the partner; and: (2) the
insight that psychological stagnation was not a viable option
for him.

In the next example, the wife's refusal of the paternal principle

®rst appeared as an attractive aspect of her femininity, the kind of
attraction that a very feminine and unconscious woman can exert
on a man whose own anima is undeveloped.

My pretty woman is only a mirror

My wife is like a package wrapped in very pretty paper, tied
with a lovely, elaborate, fancy bow and nothing inside.
 The archetype of Father 159

``Nothing?'' one asks. And the pretty box would answer,

``No! I don't have an inside. I am all wrapping. I am empty;
that is why you fell in love with me. You can project what
you wish; you can decide what goes inside the pretty box.
Deposit your talent and I will give it an aura of glory. Put in
your chaos, your weaknesses, your secrets, and I, the pretty
box, will conceal your mess even from your own eyes. I can
be either your hiding place or a showcase. Hear me well; that
is all I intend to give you. Anything more is too hard.''
She caught me in her mirroring game until I started feeling
that I was utterly alone. She was a slave to appearances, a
slave to a cultural de®nition of femininity, only a mirror. I
remember a dreadful week that she spent shopping for the
right kind of shoes to go with a green out®t she had bought
the week before. After searching ®ve days in a row for just
the right color shoes to go with the color of the out®t, she
®nally found the right hue of green and asked me if I thought
it matched. I was indifferent to her concern and answered
absent-mindedly. She concluded from my lack of enthusiasm
that her shoes did not really match. She searched for another
dress that would perhaps ®t with the shoes! That's when I
started to cheat on her with a woman at the of®ce. The other
woman is a sensual, funny, easy-going woman whose clothes
are totally lacking in style. Although I don't think my wife
knows about my affair, or is pretending not to know, she has
recently started drinking in the afternoon. I have given up
trying to ®ll her soul, it is so empty, a cold abyss; I want out.
What I see in the mirror is me: my fear, my cowardice, the
emptiness in me that attracted me to the emptiness in her.

Talking to children as a philosopher would

I believe it is possible to talk to children as a philosopher would
and by this I mean to radically relate to the child as an agent
instead of a subject. It is the surest way out of the maternal
cocoon, and the strategy is valid for anyone afraid of spreading his
160 Depth psychology after neuroscience

or her wings. Provided one does not confuse this philosophical

attitude with telling the child he is free to do as he pleases ± a
failure in parenting ± one can go far with this philosophical mode.
An agent, by de®nition, is somebody who wants to assume
responsibility, whereas a subject is under the authority of someone
else, a parent, a monarch, an indulgent therapist.
From the start, every child, by the very fact of coming into this
world, can be considered a participant in the as yet unconscious
decision to live or to die. The process of teaching a child to assume
responsibility need not be presented in an overpowering way; it is
simply a way of talking that allows for choices to be made. One of
my patients, who was rearing her son by herself, wanted to work
on just that kind of a formulation. We worked together on her
little speech. The following summarizes the tone of the
conversation she ®nally had with her ®ve-year-old son about the
psychological choices available to him.

You have choices

Your biological father did not want to be a father. He said he
knew deep down that he would not be a very good one and
so he disappeared before you were born, never to be seen
again. It seems that you really wanted to be born anyway, so
here you are. At ®ve, you have already learned how to be a
strong and healthy kid. Now you can learn something else:
that a child can be fathered by many different people. It
doesn't need to be the person who contributed the tiny
sperm. Many kids are born without ever knowing where that
little starting cell came from. In some cases a doctor gives it
to the mother in a little bottle, to fertilize the egg. The person
who contributes the sperm is only a part of what a father is,
and that part you received.
Grandpa, when he teaches you to use the electric drill, is
giving you something a father might have given you. In some
ways, it is even better, because you know that Grandpa
knows a lot more about tools then anybody I know. Your
swimming teacher, whom you like very much, teaches you to
swim, just like a dad might teach you. My brother, who
 The archetype of Father 161

invites you every summer to his cabin on the lake, loves you
as much as any father could. You can appreciate that. My
sister, who is a real tomboy, teaches you how to tie a rope in
fancy knots. She shows you how to kick up your legs, kung-
fu fashion. Even though she is a girl, she can give you the
kinds of things a dad might give his son. If you decide to, you
can learn from each of them all the tricks a father might have
taught you. Later, you may discover that having received all
that good fathering prepared you better than most to become
a great dad yourself.

This mother is only minimally speaking in the voice of a mother to

a child, using instead the rhetoric of a companion on the road. She
is not insisting on the fact that he is her responsibility; instead she
points at possibilities that are there for him, if he decides to take
what is offered. Whenever somebody expresses a need, a lack, a
wound, it is tempting to cast ourselves in the role of Great Mother
and give the support that seems to be lacking. The maternal re¯ex
is a natural one with loved ones. Nevertheless, a competent
psychotherapist also sees the shadow side of it and can sense that
the timing for the Mother is over. The come to me poor little thing
also communicates: I have a power that you don't have; I take care
of you, but watch out, I am the one with the remote control of
happiness. By contrast, talking to children in a philosophical mode
is a training in becoming responsible for oneself, an initiation into
the paternal principle.
Chapter 11

The invisibility of the psyche

Who do you want to be in this game? Many video games begin by

giving the player a choice of identities. A depth-psychological
analysis begins with similar questions. To feel like a player in the
game of life, one asks, what is the name of the game? What is the
nature of the obstacles? Who threatens whom? Who are my
enemies, my allies? What are my tools, my means, my possi-
bilities? What de®nes winning, and when is the game really over?
For the greater part of human history, the game was one of
physical survival, but nowadays the hordes of af¯icted people are
more likely to be suffering from depression, anxiety, suicidal
feelings, and psychosomatic illnesses. Still, the heroic game is one
where ®nding and ®ghting the enemy is crucial.
As long as misery was de®ned as hunger, cold, cruelty, and an
abbreviated life expectancy, there was little attention paid to
psychosomatic illnesses. In Europe during the Middle Ages, one
child out of three was expected to die. An epidemic could suddenly
kill two-thirds of a village. Infected wounds regularly turned
gangrenous, rotting one alive. It was common to lose all one's
teeth, to die of puerperal fever or to be crippled by rheumatism, all
before the age of 30. These af¯ictions were as normal as lice in the
beard, vermin in the bed, and carrion for dinner. Physical and
biological calamities, as well as widespread poverty, were facts of
life, seldom discussed. It is dif®cult to understand what historians
mean when they point out that in pre-modern societies, poverty,
famine, and epidemics were not considered social or collective
problems. It was not widely believed that these problems could
or should be addressed ± an attitude unthinkable today in any
advanced society. In fact, even the poor did not seem to make a
big deal of their poverty. Certainly they felt hunger, bodily
 The invisibility of the psyche 163

suffering, and the pains of injustice and cruelty, but they were
part of a culture that did not see ``poverty'' as a social problem.
Physical misery was not discussed, just as sexuality was not
discussed in Victorian parlors. Hunger and cold remained private
experiences of the body, often accompanied by shame. The body
always knows what threatens it, yet, all through the Middle Ages,
the culture remained blind to the physical hardship of the poor and
destitute because it seemed ``normal'' for those bodies to suffer.
The one ritual that was provided by the culture was a place of
worship to offer one's laments to God. Miserere, Miserere ± God
have pity.1 Misery was not a subject for art, not a platform for
politicians, not a good cause for heroes to show their capacity for
rescue. Life was expected to be a vale of tears. The good life was
something that the poor hoped for in the hereafter, in paradise.
This attitude persisted as late as the nineteenth century and still
does in certain places.
When Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens wrote their novels, they
were both doing something revolutionary. They did not start out
by preaching for compassion and reform because as artists they
knew that didactic and moralistic tales do not sell, and these two
authors were tremendously popular with all social classes. It was
through artistic genius, not moral sermons, that they were able to
bring poverty out into the collective consciousness. Their revo-
lutionary act was to render images of poverty, to imagine it. Their
®ction gave poverty new images and new stories, different from
those the Church had imposed upon them. They created a mythol-
ogy that shone a spotlight upon the tragedy of exploitation.
Everyone began to see what was happening, not only to the poor
and destitute, but also to the very fabric of their culture. Crowds
were incredibly moved by the novels of Hugo and Dickens.
Individuals were touched, transformed, and converted to a new
idea of what poverty is. Poverty was ®nally imaged ± put into
images ± made visible, given life through stories that then started
to appear in songs, plays, paintings, jokes about the rich and
greedy, and speeches to advance political agendas.
The function of literature, art, and also, to speak for my pro-
fession, depth psychology, is to search for the images that open the
heart and make us see what is right there in our psychological
reality. Dickens with his poor Oliver Twist, Hugo with darling
little Cossette and his admirable Jean Valjean, condemned to
prison for life for the theft of a loaf of bread, opened all hearts.
164 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Their suffering, as it became literature, made visible the archetypal

reality that had not been seen, named, or addressed. Their misery,
and that of all who suffered from poverty, incarceration, abandon-
ment, was elevated from shame. Their pain took on the nobility of
human tragedy. The task of depth psychology is to do something
similar for the imprisoned, oppressed, hungry, cold and lonely
psyches. Without artistic transmutation, it is impossible to have a
change of myth.
The psychological distress of a heartbreak may be the one
exception that has always received the attention of artists. Love-
sickness is a sentiment that has inspired more songs than human-
kind's preoccupation with God. Humanity enjoys a long and
beautiful history in the art of expressing the sorrows of a broken
heart in poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and music in minor and
major keys and on all possible instruments. The beautiful song of
lament that is the fado, still sung in some villages in Portugal, is
one among many lay traditions, as is the American tradition of the
blues and country music, which both express the universal grief of
a heavy aching heart. The words change, the feeling remains the
same: I'm lonely. I miss you. Won't you come back? I yearn, I cry, I
hurt. You're breaking my heart. Without you, life has no meaning.
Just as poverty was obvious yet remained psychologically
invisible, we now have a culture that is going through an obvious
outbreak of depression, addiction, and psychosomatic ailments.
There is, right under our noses, a generalized bankruptcy of the
libidinal economy, touching millions of individuals. The statistics
are easy to gather for anyone interested, as they follow the rapid
rise of income of pharmaceutical companies, showing an unpre-
cedented situation of generalized psychological distress. Yet the
epidemic nature of psychological distress remains mostly unseen,
as if it is normal for those psyches to suffer. How many of those
who regularly feel too exhausted to make love are aware of their
psychological castration? How many of those who work too many
hours, eat too fast, sleep too little, are caught in too many traf®c
jams, deal with unbearable bosses and impossible kids, are aware
that the stress is killing them? How many violent children, going
to impossible schools, living with stressed out parents, are con-
scious that they are ``adapting'' by getting used to feelings of
loneliness, worthlessness and dispensability?
Depression is the form misery ± to use an old word instead of a
psychological concept ± takes in af¯uent societies. Our psychic
 The invisibility of the psyche 165

pain is solitary, mostly unconscious, psychologically invisible, and

cannot be expressed as poignantly as the physical distress of past
generations. Even when the apartment is safe, there is no risk of
famine, the retirement plan is generous, the income covers the
basics and more, still, the pain is felt, and what makes it worse is
that the dramas are not of the kind that inspired beautiful hymns
of Miserere. Rather, the nature of contemporary psychological
misery sneaks in like the cold, keeping whole populations wrapped
up in front of the TV,2 immobilized while the heart freezes.3 The
popularity of songs of lament seems to have disappeared at the
same period as the lullaby.
Today's unhappy souls suffer from what one could call emo-
tional hypothermia as psychic death is in fact a process very similar
to a deadly hypothermia with the same tranquil surrender to a fatal
sleepiness, no energy left to ®ght. Cold penetrates the soul as it does
the body ± the deadly process is slow, sneaky, progressive and
silent. It is the form that misery takes in our af¯uent milieus, its
images the opposite of the ®ery inferno. Hell is now a psychological
place, a frozen state of the psyche, not the roaring furnace imagined
by medieval Christianity. One is alone and lost in this icy hell; there
is not even a community of sinners. The prevalent feeling is not a
longing for God, but that of having been abandoned by all, God
included, and nobody caring. Emotional hypothermia does not lend
itself to song; there are no laments and no poignant lyrics. Gone are
the Miserere sung in cathedrals with vaulted ceilings, clouds of
incense, great organs, church choirs ± all of which rituals used to
heighten the experience and the expression of one's personal
misery. To be honest, I don't miss any of these traditional religious
rituals because the peripheral belief system attached to them is
more than I am willing to accept. Nevertheless, equivalent,
alternative rituals have not been invented.
What are our rituals for suffering in style and in good company?
Today's iced-up souls are asked to suffer without passion ± silently
and politely. The pathos in their pathology is sedated. Gone are the
words, the songs, the falling on one's knees with imploring hands
raised up. The Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens of psychological
misery are novelists, ®lm-makers, theater directors, poets, song-
writers. Yet, something is missing: an alliance between two worlds
kept separate, because artists and clinicians snub each other.
It is not for a lack of clinical evidence that we remain blind to
emotional hypothermia. The research is abundant, but it appears
166 Depth psychology after neuroscience

that we are not moved by the data, or at least not motivated to

take action. For example, the famous Spitz4 study on war orphans
concluded that children will die if deprived of cuddling and love.
That an experimental demonstration is needed to remind us of
such common sense is in itself an indication of a loss of instinct. A
century before Spitz, Jane Addams, who included maternal care
and education as part of the mission of Chicago's Hull House
(which she opened in 1889), knew what every parent should know
when she wrote: ``We are told that the `will to live' is aroused in
each baby by his mother's irresistible love for him, the physio-
logical value of joy that a child is born, and that the high death
rate in institutions is increased by the `discontented babies' whom
no one `persuades into living.'''5
This failure to thrive was tragically demonstrated again with the
children in Ceausescu's orphanages.6 None of these children's
physiological needs went unmet, but they were deprived of the
intangible necessities of kisses, hugs, caresses and the essential
frivolity of peek-a-boo, tickling games, laughter, and the daily
drama of complex interactions. Their surroundings were clinically
competent but emotionally cold, without passion, without sus-
pense, without even tears. These infants seldom cried, but died
nonetheless, from what was then termed ``hospitalism,'' Spitz's
term for what I call emotional hypothermia and others calls emo-
tional deprivation, lack of social stimulation, lack of mirroring,
low self-esteem, absence of self-image ± and what poets call
sadness, blues, broken heart, loneliness.
Half a century after Spitz's research we are barely beginning to
question if perhaps all lonely, abandoned persons ± not just babies
± might not also suffer from a similar vulnerability. One epi-
demiological study after the other shows that, of course, they do,
and that a broken heart can cause the immune system to break
down too. Thirty years of research in sociology, psychology,
psychosomatic medicine, show, without the shadow of a doubt,
that the elderly and adolescents are the most vulnerable to emo-
tional deprivation. Still our culture remains in denial like medieval
kings witnessing a famine in their kingdom, or a Marie Antoinette
and her feeble-minded king entertaining themselves to death while
the country starved.
It took two years of analysis for one of my patients, an edu-
cated, well-adapted person, to ``see'' how dramatically his parents'
divorce had affected him, 20 years after the fact.
 The invisibility of the psyche 167

My psyche was their battlefield

I was a 12-year-old adolescent when I became the spoils of
an undeclared war between my mom and dad. My body, and
the legal custody of it, became quite literally a battle®eld. I
lacked the awareness, and certainly the capacity to express
the violence that I was experiencing. There were no physical
blows. In fact, I was a pretty spoiled kid, with all the pocket
money anyone can ask for. The tragedy for me was that the
raging war was invisible even to my own eyes. It happened
inwardly, psychologically. I had no way of seeing it or
expressing anything. I was in an emotional prison, with
invisible bars, invisible beatings, invisible enemies.

A blind spot in a culture is like the blind spot in a driver's vision:

dangerous. One of the primary tasks of psychotherapy is to help the
patient ®nd the words to make visible the invisible suffering of the
soul. The warmth of a dialogue with another human being is often
all that separates one from psychic death. As kids, we all learn from
our parents to look both ways before crossing a street, not to run
with scissors, to avoid poison ivy, snakes, scorpions, rabid dogs,
and speeding cars. Because the danger of physical death is omni-
present, every culture, since the beginning of time, inculcates
survival techniques in its children. Nevertheless, psychic danger is
something we are just beginning to name, and as a consequence,
contemporary af¯uent societies still adhere to a survival myth that
belongs to the Middle Ages while ignoring other invisible wounds
equally fatal. We continue to consider the growing statistics on
depression, suicide, burn-out, and psychosomatic illness as clinical
problems, and therefore individual problems, as if these were
viruses that attack this speci®c person but not the rest of us. They
are rarely recognized for what they are: problems of epidemic
proportions, a collective suffering, something the whole culture has
to see and address. If we took the research in our ®eld seriously, we
would have to consider that a psychological malaise that reaches
epidemic proportions needs a different kind of attention. We would
have to ask ourselves what, in our culture, makes the human psyche
so vulnerable?
168 Depth psychology after neuroscience

I had a patient who came in for a consultation, straight from his

of®ce, who was the most extreme example of psychological blind-
ness I had ever seen. I had never met him before and when he
arrived, his breathing was shallow, his eyes were wild, pupils
dilated in terror like someone emerging in shock from a car wreck.

Wounded to the core, and nothing shows

I just learned, by email, that my wife does not love me
anymore. She won't be home tonight; she packed and left for
good. Last week, we were talking of buying a bigger house to
start a family. There was never any domestic violence, never
any real threat to our marriage. She simply loves another
man. She broke up with me, just like that ± twelve lines in an
email. In conclusion, she wrote, ``Have a good life.'' Period.

He does not see the violence in this break-up. He does not see the
murderous sweetness in her ®nal dismissal. He does not see the
story he is in and the shock it is causing him. His body language
screams of a terrible suffering but he is like a deaf person shouting.
If he had come out of a wrecked car with broken bones and a
bleeding wound, the ambulance would have been called. Everyone
around would have been eager to assist him. This man read his
wife's email at 9.30am but stayed in his of®ce until 5 pm. Finally
he con®ded in his secretary and it was she who convinced him to
consult a ``doctor of the soul.'' Because his suffering is
psychological, and therefore not as ``real'' as a broken bone, he
feels the need to start our session by apologizing because his voice
is unsteady, his hands are trembling, and he has dif®culty
breathing. He ®nally weeps and it is a relief, but he is terribly
ashamed of this show of ``weakness.''
His blindness is ordinary, widespread; it occurs all the time. To
take another common example, we all know that there are
millions of young girls obsessively browsing through fashion
magazines, trying to model themselves on Adobe PhotoShop
bodies that do not actually exist as such. These magazines and
their impossible ideals keep these girls buying, dieting, obsessing,
and buying some more. The mythology of their culture does not
help them understand the effect of having a beauty standard for
 The invisibility of the psyche 169

girls that is basically the image of a prepubescent boy, the real

object of desire of many fashion designers. Media analysts under-
stand this; feminists write about it; but who teaches the girls about
academic research? And when they do read about it, what in their
adolescent culture makes them impermeable to it? Even the most
beloved princesses are obsessed with fashion, looks, and their
®gures, just as are the stars of the American movie industry. When
even royalty ± supposedly not victims of the adolescent subculture
± buy into the emaciated style, how can we expect a 13-year-old
girl to deconstruct, on her own, an unattainable beauty myth?
Who will initiate her into a different reality? Who will educate the
little princesses of this world into a reality that the culture largely
ignores?

Cynicism is not lucidity, criticism is not

contempt
There is no shortage of anecdotes and gossip about the cynicism
that is the trademark of the milieu of the ®lm industry in Holly-
wood. Rudeness, lies, disrespect, contempt, and abuse poison not
only the professional milieu but also the very capacity of people to
relate to one another in their private lives. Just to work there can
scar one for life, and I am not talking about drug use; rather, it is
the psychology of the milieu. All seems ®ne as long as one is a
winner, a rising star, a glamorous persona, an independently rich or
in¯uential player in the power game. But one soon discovers how
losers (a fading star, a not-so-talented-but well-connected-aspiring-
star, a not-so-young-and-yet-to-be-discovered-talent, a young-
talented-yet-not-well-connected-artist) will be discarded like
human garbage. Hollywood is a big thermometer for our culture
because it presents a blown-up picture of how it feels when the cold
draft of cynicism blows on human relations. Wherever an abysmal
gap separates winners from losers, men from women, rich from
poor, young from old, or one subculture from another, the tension
of living in such a community increases for everybody.
A friend who works in Paris describes his milieu of an adver-
tising agency, and it is not much different from the milieu of the
®lm industry in Hollywood, and not so different from some
academic milieus I have experienced, and not so different from
families who worship only success. I asked my friend to describe
his experience of what he calls ``management by contempt.''
170 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Management by contempt
Our management style is touted as being direct and virile, but
is, in fact, abusive and decadent. There used to be a line
between the expression of criticism and that of contempt. Not
anymore! Last week, I presented a draft for an ad campaign, a
project on which I had worked all week. I had been asked to
``think young'' for a perfume ad. At 55, I am not ``young.'' I
wonder why I was put on that project, and why it should be
oriented toward youth, when women in my age category ± 50
to 60 ± primarily buy this perfume. My supervisor, whose
name is FrancËois, but likes to be called Frankie, is 20 years
younger than I. Frankie is the epitome of a BOBO.7 He was
hired when our organization bought into the youth culture,
following everybody else. Of course, he thinks only ``youth''
has value. He thinks naming a perfume ``Poison'' was the
most brilliant labeling in the history of advertisement. That is
about all the history he knows. He wants to be called Frankie
because what he appreciates about American culture is
extreme sports (which to me seems like the opposite of the
idea of sport), and free ®ghts (a glori®cation of viciousness).
The kind of things I appreciate about American culture are,
for example, that the percentage given by individuals to
charities and non-pro®t organizations is the highest on the
planet. He cannot see the value of that. He thinks even the
Red Cross is a gimmick. We were born in the same city, from
a similar milieu, yet don't live in the same world. The age
barrier is the new iron curtain.
Here are the words with which Frankie rejected my draft:
``This is absolute shit! Tell me you have just been lazy. Don't
tell me you believe this actually looks young?'' I know he
does not think he has bad manners, because in his mindset he
thinks his rudeness translates as strength, the sharp bite of
the young wolf. For me, it is something else: verbal abuse, an
adolescent lack of manners and organizational stupidity.
Each time I deal with him, my stomach knots up.
 The invisibility of the psyche 171

I am a well-paid employee. I have seniority. I have some

®nancial security. I may even beat him at the BOBO game,
because I can retire now if I want to, and be the bohemian he
is just mimicking. I know my work is ®ne because my ads
sell, but this kind of atmosphere makes me sick, physically
sick ± diarrhea, nausea, lack of appetite. I will have to take
early retirement, to stay alive. At 55, I truly am a ``has been''
because this culture of cynicism is not something I can work
with. Whereas, for the young generation, cynicism is a value.
I think it is their defense mechanism. They have seen so much
corruption and manipulation; they think of themselves as
more lucid, and I can appreciate that; it is true that we were
somehow naive. And perhaps they are the generation whose
task is to reveal that ours is a culture of death. I am no
innocent and I do know how much gimmickry there is in any
organization, even the Red Cross. I know how a charity can
be a front. Yet, I cannot live in Frankie's cynical world and I
am glad I can afford to retire. If, as my life expectancy
predicts, I'm going to die at 85, it means I'll be around
another 30 years and I'm interested in watching how such a
culture of cynicism will age. How can somebody such as
Frankie survive with contempt for all that brings happiness?
I'll be following his story.

In countries where violence is expressed through torture, hasty

executions, punitive amputations, cliterectomies and in®bulations,
the abuse is evident. One does not need to invent a new concept to
describe the suffering of the little girl who is tied down while an
ignorant woman mutilates her sexual organs, calling this a ``ritual
of initiation into womanhood.'' There is no need for new words
to describe the agony of a boy having his right foot amputated
for having stolen a bicycle, in front of a barbaric audience who
calls this justice. Their conditions don't need to be interpreted to
signify torture and death. The cowards who hide behind political
correctness to accept such practices have forgotten what the term
``civilized'' means.
172 Depth psychology after neuroscience

However, it is easier for us to see the barbarian aspect of such

customs than to look at the abusive nature of some of our own
practices. A teacher repeatedly shows contempt for the ignorance
of a student, and later that student commits suicide. There is a
hostile and dangerous atmosphere in the school and the authorities
say there is nothing they can do about it because they are them-
selves overwhelmed, understaffed and living in fear. An organiza-
tion repeatedly burns out its employees and ®res them when they
can't cope anymore. An IRS agent conducts an audit sadistically
and treats the recently widowed woman as if her late husband had
been a crook because his papers were not in order when he died,
adding to her despair. A frivolous but legal lawsuit entangles you
for three full years and the stress breaks your relationships with
your partner. One's pension fund is bankrupted through corporate
greed and corruption and you are told that is the way it is, get over
it. You teach in a school where swindling students who resent your
rigorous grading slash your tires and attack your daughter in the
park. Your spouse regularly demeans you in front of family and
friends until you come to loathe yourself. Your kids steal from
your wallet to buy drugs. Your grandchildren imply that it is time
for you to die so they can inherit. Your adult children come to visit
only when they need a fat check and they think you don't see
through their slender ruse. Your daughter doesn't want to grow up,
lives with you on your small pension, and complains every day that
it is your fault she is such a failure because you did not give her
enough love. It is your last day at work, after 30 years, and nobody
seems to notice, the management is new and you are part of the
leftovers from the old gang. The impact of such violence accumu-
lates in the psyche and destroys possibilities of joy as surely as does
the repressive dictatorship of a priest, pope, imam, or rabbi.
With half the population on some kind of medication for psy-
chological or psychosomatic problems, the fact that most schools
of clinical psychology translate all collective misery into a personal
problem requiring personal treatment, contributes to the invisi-
bility of the epidemic. The pre-modern attitude toward the poor
suggested that poverty was God's will, or bad luck, or fate, or the
lot of your caste. This same attitude seems to have been recast as
the tough luck of bad parenting, poor genes, poor tolerance for
stress, a weak ego, or a neurotic heritage from one's family. If you
had been poor a few centuries ago, a rich person might have
offered you a lump of bread to get you through the day, but the
 The invisibility of the psyche 173

problem was still not addressed collectively. Today, psychiatry

does the same when it reaches out with an open hand to give you
enough tranquilizers to get you through the month. It sure may
help and it is better than nothing, but the blindness is still there.
The suffering of the psyche is an invisible one. To address it, we all
need to develop a night vision.
Chapter 12

The ultimate virtual reality

game

Imagine two cameras: one captures the reality that is going on

around your head; the other captures the reality that is going on in
your head. The two cameras produce two very different ®lms,
showing two realities, outer and inner, each with their own style of
realism. The outer reality of facts, in itself, has no meaning what-
soever; no story is possible with only that ®lm. For meaning to
happen, the events have to be somehow connected to the second,
inner reality. Only then do we have a story.
A depth-psychological analysis draws from both tapes, cutting,
editing, and mixing all the sequences from both cameras to create
a meaningful narration, a new myth. A good metaphor for the
process of an analysis is to imagine the patient sitting in the chair
of the director, calling the shots, while the analyst runs around
busily, with the triple task of script girl (last year in your dream
you had a different out®t), audience (I am listening, I get the
picture, I am following you), assistant director (this tone of voice
sounds like whining to me), and critique (yes, I hear you say you
love that person, but I am not convinced; I also hear some anger
about the event).
The story about my mother not being maternal enough for poor
little, needy, infantile me is not based on any new facts. The
images recorded on camera number one are still valid, objectively
true to my mother's behaviors and attitudes. The things she did,
she did. The things she did not do, she did not do. Nevertheless,
the story combining both the objective and the subjective realities
is a relatively new story to me because camera number two,
following my regression to a child's perspective due to physical
pain, came up with a surprising ®lm, done from the angle of
looking backwards at my life. The feeling of having had a rather
 The ultimate virtual reality game 175

cold-not-very-maternal-mother is a new inner reality for me, who,

all my life, believed that a competent, no-nonsense mother was
supposed to be cold, just like mine was, unconcerned with the wild
weeds that kids are. This is news to me, because when I was eight
years old, the attitudes of my mother ± like those of the nuns, like
the isolation of a boarding school ± all felt completely natural. The
psyche being an ecological system, it adapts to its milieu so that
even what is painful feels as natural as the weather, sometimes
sunny, sometimes cloudy, sometimes stormy, on a continuum from
cold to hot.
The story I arrived with in boarding school was a story made by
others, one in which the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, because of
their rigorous style, were considered the best educators in town.
The fact that, just like my mom, they also lacked what I now
interpret as maternal qualities was not perceived on my radar.
How can a child of eight translate their abrupt manners, their
contempt for tears, their snobbism, as being ``non-maternal?'' I do
now, decades later, and this is called an ``interpretation,'' one
which has meaning for me, at least for this decade of my life. As
all interpretations are subjective, it also implies that this chapter in
my story may change again. Maybe I'll come to think of the Ladies
of the Sacred Heart as a most inspiring model of militaristic
discipline and will be grateful for it. After all, Mother Superior
may not have been motherly, but she was a formidable General-in-
chief.
In most of the adult relationships I had, following these child-
hood experiences, I expected the same kind of rational, competent,
non-abusive but rather cold atmosphere, and of course I got it,
creating the emotional climate I was used to. As long as I remained
as unconscious as I had been of my need as a child, I did not ask of
my relationships a maternal quality of affect. I did not know the
taste of what I yearned for. It wasn't in my psychic programming,
as my computer guy would say. Consequently, I suffered the same
lack four times: (1) with mother; (2) with the nuns; (3) with many
of my intimate relationships; and (4) in the academic milieu that I
chose, partly because its coldness felt natural. Even with four
repetitions of the experience, it still took me half a lifetime to ®nd
the words to tell myself that story.
For sure, I am slow to edit my tapes, but there are aspects of our
psyche that move at a turtle's pace and others that jump like
gazelles. Turtle though I may have been in this instance, a knock
176 Depth psychology after neuroscience

on the head ®nally brought a new narrative that changed my

whole psychic con®guration. With this new edition of my life's
story, I know what I am looking for in relationships. Knowing
what I yearn for, I ®nd it. I have discovered a world ®lled with
kindness, compassionate beings, possibilities for friendship, gentle-
ness, affection, and love (all kinds of love). Feeling my thirst after
crossing a desert, I search for streams of affection and drink of
them. I associate with persons whose strength does not exclude
kindness and I go out of my way to avoid harshness, rudeness,
snobbism, meanness. Having seen the importance of tenderness for
survival, I ®nd that the world can be Good Mother. And, to my
surprise, I see that men are as talented as women in expressing
gentleness; it was I who was blocking it. In my new myth, Nature
really has become Mother. The roses that consent to grow in my
garden, aren't they sweet to respond to my regular applications of
fertilizer? I feel loved by their glorious blooming. I take it per-
sonally. When I think of my life's trajectory, there is now a whole
new virtual panorama. I see the presence or absence of the Great
Mother in all situations, in all relationships.
I am intellectually aware that hatred is as omnipresent as love.
The possibilities of war exist in every community, in every heart,
all the time, everywhere. Nevertheless, perception being a function
of the myth that organizes the psyche, I want to see less of war, for
the time being. Ten years ago, had I been asked ``What is your
life's story?'' it never would have occurred to me to talk about my
childhood as having been solitary, a winter of the heart. My new
myth has a vernal quality: the thaw of my psyche. This is my
excuse for focusing on honey rather than vinegar, for the time
being. No version of one's story is ever ®nal. The eternal themes of
war, love, beginnings, and endings are forever revisited and the
seasons of the heart follow their own rhythm.

Fictionalizing is inevitable
A fact is a fact. Immutable. If someone says, ``Due to a car acci-
dent ten years ago, I had a leg amputated'' there are no two
versions of the objective fact of amputation. There is no subse-
quent version in which the lost leg grows back or the collision is
averted. Historically, the amputation is complete. Nevertheless, as
a person starts telling not just the facts but a story of the accident,
the incident becomes infused with emotions and interpretations. In
 The ultimate virtual reality game 177

the act of editing and mixing both fact and affect, our existential
freedom as well as our identity is created. The greater the level of
consciousness, the freer one is to choose one interpretation over
another. Our psychic identity derives from a ®ctionalization of
facts which complicates the events into a story. In other words, it
forms a myth.
The process of ®ctionalization is similar to the work of an
historian who, although he or she is aware that the facts won't
change, is nonetheless still motivated to contribute yet another
interpretation of history, to add one's personal riff on the same
events. Every autobiography ± like every history book ± contains
an objective basis (the facts) and a subjective interpretation (the
story, myth.) History written by the winners of con¯icts and wars,
and whose ideas dominate a culture, never has the same ¯avor as
history rendered by the defeated. That ¯avor can be called an
archetypal perspective. Flavor is essential in the mixing of the plot
of events into a coherent dish. To continue with the example of the
car accident that caused the person to lose a limb, one can tell the
story from the archetypal position of victim: See how unlucky I
am? Somebody hit me and I lost a leg. Oh, pity me! The same
person may, however, at a later time, move into the hero archetype
and, in that stance, using the same facts, tell a story of courage and
hope: Let me tell you how I surmounted my handicap; see how
proud I am of my accomplishments; I have discovered strength in
myself that I did not know I had. The archetypal lens of victim is
passive (bad things just happen to me), whereas the heroic lens is
active (let me tell you how I surmounted my handicap.) Both
reside in a story, but with very different plot outcomes.
The archetype of hero is similar to Jean-Paul Sartre's idea of
freedom. He begins with the question: ``What do I do with what
was done to me?'' What he called one's situation is the sum of
the objective facts (gender, class, amputation, or the bars in the
window of the prison). Freedom begins with how one interprets the
situation, creates a version of the story, shapes the plot with a
certain archetypal in¯ection. From his prison cell, Sartre began his
treatise about freedom. Being imprisoned by the Germans was his
lived and inescapable situation and what he did with it (write
philosophy) was the expression of his freedom, the mythical ampli-
®cation that gave his life meaning. Rather than equating his life
with his situation, he ampli®ed it in the form of a treatise on what ±
from the outside viewer's viewpoint ± he did not have: freedom.
178 Depth psychology after neuroscience

A very old friend of mine had a stellar career very early in his
youth. From age 20 to 50 his myth was that of the family prodigy.
He was labeled as the one with the talent, the glory, the money,
and the honey. When he turned 50, the myth that had supported
him so well suddenly collapsed. He grew resentful of all members
of his extended family, feeling certain they were exploiting him by
burdening him with the ®nancial responsibilities for the whole
clan. He began perceiving himself as their ``cash cow'' instead of
their hero. The myth of the star/prodigy/hero recoiled into its
opposite: the gullible fool, the beast of burden that carries every-
body's baggage. He began dreaming of empty wells, blood hemor-
rhage, exhausted workhorses, starving to death, losing all his
medals, feeling the pangs of famine in a rich country, and falling
from the roof.
Jung called this kind of reversal an enantiodromia, a reversal of
the myth into its opposite. The story that had been felt as glori-
fying was now felt as humiliating. He had become, mythically, his
inverted double. He stayed in the victim's story for ®ve years. Now
that he is 55, when he recounts his life, the myth in which he
situates himself has the same sequence of events, but the role in
which he casts himself is neither that of hero, nor that of victim,
but of somebody older and wiser, somebody who feels pride at
having seen through the myth of both hero and victim.
Even if we were to apply ourselves to write a poly-biography by
adding as many perspectives as we can conjure into awareness
(e.g., my life as victim, hero, orphan, anima, animus, puer, senex,
angel, devil, saint, martyr, soldier, general, mother, workhorse,
fool, clown, lazy turtle and speedy coyote), there would still exist
enough room left over for interpretation and change. Interpreta-
tions never become hermetically sealed, airtight, unexposed to
change. Our human condition, by its very nature, makes any
de®nitive version impossible; revision is our constant companion.
Fictionalization is unavoidable and constantly at work, working
our life events into revised narratives. We inevitably ®ctionalize
when we talk as well as when we write. In the writing of this
book, I cannot help but ®ctionalize a conversation with students,
former patients, colleagues, family, friends, and, that most elusive
of all characters; the unknown reader.
The goal of a depth-psychological analysis, in a nutshell, is to
become minimally aware of the reigning myth that shapes us, that
expands or contorts our being. The post-Jungian approach that
 The ultimate virtual reality game 179

calls itself Archetypal Psychology is, more explicitly than others,

an exercise in awareness of what is implied by a change of myth.
The ideas of Archetypal Psychology1 are rich and complex but the
method is simple. It starts by replacing ``why'' with ``who,''
``what,'' ``when'' and ``how.'' Who (which archetype, which sub-
personality, which cultural or personal myth) is organizing my
perceptions? Who is this person in front of me? A little princess,
lonely and loveless, expecting me to play the part of the generous
heroic prince? Or a queen, suggesting an alliance? Is this guy a big
bad wolf? Has he just lost a shoe or devoured a young girl? Is this
Narcissus-in-me having a ®t because I wasn't introduced with a
fanfare? Who is this person offering me love: the Great Mother's
breast or the hungry mouth of an unweaned baby? Who surfaced
in my consciousness when I woke up this morning? How do I
behave when I most feel that I am an American? A Californian?
An immigrant? What makes me feel like a woman? What needs to
happen for my professional persona to show up, on time, and
properly dressed? Who am I as a lover? A friend? A parent? What
in that movie made me feel uncomfortable? When am I most
furious? What is it that most bothers me in this situation? What
brings out the puppy-in-me, one that wants to play when I should
be grading papers? ± a puppy aeternus complex!

The fabrication of a myth, the dismantling

of a lie
A myth occurs when the objective reality merges with the sub-
jective reality in a kind of montage, and montages can lie ± but
they can inspire as well. A myth can support either revolution or
the status quo; it can provoke enthusiasm, energy, action, or
repression, depression, oppression. To see how a myth is fabri-
cated, one might look at how it is deconstructed, undone, deleted.
To break free, one needs not only the construction of a new myth
but the deconstruction of the old one. Otherwise, the worn-out
myth remains active but hidden, and because hidden, destructive.
For example, for us to even begin to see the ridiculousness of an
identity de®ned by the color of one's skin, we must ®rst become
conscious of a lousy, narrow-minded and damaging cultural myth
called racism. Something hurts, and it has a name: racism.
Every orthodoxy struggles to enclose individuals in the domin-
ant myth, by limiting the possibilities of escaping traditional
180 Depth psychology after neuroscience

boundaries and by minimizing changes. Naming the oppressive

myth allows the beginning of a dismantling, forces it into the open
for scrutiny and disassembling. One of the many tricks orthodoxy
implements to maintain the status quo is to minimize the task of
dismantling the old myth (for example, thinking that a new law is
enough to get rid of racism) and to declare ± too soon ± the old
myth gone, obsolete, antiquated. Political correctness will hide the
fact that the new myth has not quite settled into place. ``Racism,
sexism, ageism. Where? Who? Not us! Not here! We have zero
tolerance for it. How dare you!''
Like bacteria that grows back because the antibiotics were not
given enough time to penetrate deeply into the vermin, an old
powerful myth does not die without a ®ght. A young black actor
who carries the hope of a post-racist society one day smells the old
wounding: you are offering me the role of Othello simply because
my skin is black. The role I am interested in is King Lear. The
deconstruction was not yet complete, and although that young
actor may have felt ®ne with his white friends, suddenly the
old myth begins hurting again because it is not quite dead. The
insistent bacteria still alive begin to infect the entire organism,
both individual and collective.
Another example is that of the feminist revolution; it has been
declared ®nished, a relic now of the recent past. Many young
female intellectuals will gladly take a stand to declare feminism a
cause for frustrated angry old radicals. Then, one day, a young
woman at the university is shocked to discover that the professor
she so admires, although having made a pass at her, is not really
pleased by her intellectual admiration for his work and she is hurt
to discover that he is embarrassed by female disciples. The
admired professor would rather have male followers because he
believes male disciples carry more weight. She can almost hear the
sexist professor's thought: if women begin liking my work, I must
be doing something wrong.2 The more the culture sees through the
still active sexist myth, the more successfully the young woman
will be able to track how it still permeates her own consciousness
as well as that of her professor. Only through the grit of conscious
suffering can one reveal a lousy and outmoded myth that affects
language, thought and behavior.
Gender identities, racial identities, professional identities, body
images, self-ideals, all are always, all the time, between an old
and a new myth. Like a Dionysian mask, an identity can be worn
 The ultimate virtual reality game 181

with more or less cynicism or enthusiasm. Only when a given

identity begins to pinch, however, is one provoked to peer more
closely at what its foundation is. Only then begins the task of
dismemberment, deconstruction, destruction, and murder of the
old myth. All so-called ``personality traits'' (of Blacks, Jews,
Latinos, men, and women), all of which are culturally based, are
revealed as unsustainable beliefs; the myth fractures, the dramatic
story collapses, the unbearable orthodoxies explode and new
identities emerge.
We all play our role in the vast social drama: we strut and fret;
perform with brilliance or shyness; dress a certain way; act in a
particular style; adapt our persona to the current trends; memorize
the right lines, and hopefully become competent in a particular
role. Social psychologists specialize in looking at the various forms
and variations in which role playing is essential to life in society.
Nevertheless, by remaining aware that it is only a role, we keep in
our awareness the fact that the script can be modi®ed if it becomes
a source of oppression. Oppression comes from the tendency of
any ruling orthodoxy to interpret what is unchangeable (color
of skin, gender, age, national identity) as having a predetermined
meaning, one that supports the dominant myth to the exclusion of
any other stories. That is why myth debunking is a perennial and
ongoing task. So is myth making: unending creation and destruc-
tion, which is the way of the created order in its own cycles of
birth and death. Such is the vitality of life's recurring cycles.

The dramatic model of psychological life

The Jungian and Hillmanian models of psychological life invite us
to think about the psyche as a stage where the different stories are
enacted, in their grand archetypal dimension. It is a metaphor that
suggests, as does social psychology, that role playing is just that:
playing at a role, an identity game. We all have a measure of
freedom in how we play our identity games, but the game has
rules, the script has a text, and the stakes for playing well ± or not
playing well ± are usually very high. A supple persona implies an
equilibrium between two equally pathological postures. On one
side there is the pathology of the social actor who believes he plays
no role, and is always authentic, when in fact that person has only
one role and adheres to it rigidly. It is a closed mythology, a
182 Depth psychology after neuroscience

monomyth, a kind of sociological fundamentalism that precludes

change, play (and) movement.
At the other end of that same continuum is the pathology of the
person who does not take roles seriously enough, who plays a role
inconsistently, claiming it is all a game anyway. That person is
simply exhibiting a carelessness that has its root in irresponsibility,
cynicism, or a development of the personality that stopped in
adolescence. The partners in the game (i.e., the other social actors)
don't know how to relate to such a person because there is no
consistency, no constancy, no reliability. Our unease when faced
with that kind of pathology is similar to that of suffering through a
bad performance by an actor. Our discomfort has nothing to do
with the fact that the actor is playing a ®ctive role ± we know that
± and everything to do with the poor interpretation of it. We
tolerate such wobbling in adolescents, because their identity is still
an unstable gel; they don't yet know which role or which game
they ®t into. That kind of volatility in an adult persona is dis-
turbing. A professor who consistently refuses the authority of his
position and hides behind students' presentations (this seminar
will be whatever you make of it); a chef who can't keep his toque
on his head; a conductor who won't wear a jacket; a bride who
wants to wear jeans and ¯ip-¯op shoes for her wedding3 ± all may
be felt as disgraceful by those who follow the current script. An
incapacity to remain in a position long enough for the others to
®nd their lines in the script is as problematic as the incapacity to
budge from an obsessively rigid persona.

A script is made of words, gestures,

costume, de cor
Psychological wisdom involves a regular editing of our scripted
roles. An analyst can offer assistance in the task of revising our
roles, suggesting the right words and editing our lines in the
collective drama so that our persona becomes more chiseled and
adapted to our talents. That is why analysis appears to many as an
adventure of a literary, poetic, philosophical, mythological nature
± even an intense metamorphosis through words, by words, and
with words. If Jacques Lacan had had the talent, or the generosity,
to express himself with more simplicity, his suggestion that ``the
unconscious is structured like a language'' might not have ended
 The ultimate virtual reality game 183

up as one more fading faddish cliche and a larger number of

practitioners would have bene®ted from his insights. Instead of a
clutter of Lacanian buzzwords, we would have been able to con-
sider his idea that, although we need it to become a person, the
language game is always a betrayer. Words serve more than one
master. Words are not faithful; their betrayal is obvious in the
roles we have to play as social actors. (Lacan himself was a major
player at creating confusion with words, in service of building his
own glorious persona.) It is mostly with language that one plays
one's role, constructs one's myth and, by resting on language so
heavily, such an enterprise is always a most unstable creation.
Even when we are delighted at having found just the right words
to express our persona and tell our story, there is no guarantee
that a reality abides behind the ®ction. Moreover, words reveal
their treachery in the analytic situation because it is essentially a
word game.
Jacques Derrida was another word twister. Because of his thick
and often inaccessible jargon, he reached primarily an academic
audience. Few practitioners effectively or competently answered his
invitation to consider the unconscious as a text and analysis as a
deconstruction of that same text. Text, in Derrida's personal
dictionary, is everything and anything that can be interpreted or
deconstructed. Patriarchy is a text; feminism is a deconstruction of
it. Your mother is a text for you and in therapy you attempt, with
able assistance if you are fortunate, to interpret that puzzling text.
Your house, your deÂcor, the meal that you are serving: all are texts
that your guests, with assumed or authentic pleasantness, struggle
to read. Serving them chestnut-fennel creÁme soup as an appetizer
may lead to a few interpretations, both welcome and unpleasant.
Culture is a text. You yourself are a text to be interpreted by
yourself. The responsibility of the patient in analysis is to read the
text ®rst and then to deconstruct its ®xed meaning. As meaning can
escape even the author of the text, analysis is a lesson in humility
and can never pretend to uncover all meaning. The best one can
hope for is to raise one's awareness of what is being said by the text,
the context, the subtext; to develop an ear for what is being
communicated; to intuit what is not being said and can nonetheless
be felt. The text remains, at least in part, silent, inscrutable, always
deserving of another run at it. Telling one's story does not take one
to Truth with a capital ``T.'' Truth remains elusive because it is
based on facts that, like a text, can be interpreted in multiple ways.
184 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Instead of looking for Truth, depth psychology ± post-modern

in its own original way ± invites us to pay attention to the distance
or the proximity between the stories we tell ourselves about
ourselves as well as the stories others relate about us or to us.
There exists a signi®cant distance between the old script that kept
my friend going for years (I am the prodigy, the success story of
the family) and the newer one in which he envisions himself as
having been used (I was naive and did not see I was just a cash
cow for the whole clan). It is primarily through words that this
distance is felt, offering an interpretation that opens one to change
by shifting the myths one lives within. In the case of my friend, it
saved his life because he was exhausted to the core by his heroic
posture. His new myth, even if more painful than previous
instances (it is not so pleasant to be going from ``genius'' to ``cash
cow''), nonetheless revealed crucial insights.
This form of psychological creativity eventually leads to what
the Ancients called amor fati (love of one's fate), a concept I ®nd
most beautiful. To love one's fate does not imply a fatalistic atti-
tude, nor a passive compliance with one's circumstances. Rather, it
means a love of one's story, a comprehensive understanding that
whatever happens is happening to me, a participant in the creation
of my drama. Even my messes are my own; they are the turns I
took in my story, and because my story is mine, I embrace and
love it. My friend did not go from hero to victim, but from less
wisdom to more wisdom, able to feel: This is me. This is my life.
Amor fati. Friedrich Nietzsche4 used this same notion of amor fati
to signify the acceptance of what is and the love of what is
becoming. He saw this disposition as the crowning achievement of
the Dionysian attitude, a desire to know the speci®c form in which
one's destiny unfolds.

A myth is a metaphorical story

Another way to explore how words betray is to examine the
inherent vagueness of any metaphor, a characteristic that makes
metaphors the enemy of precision and objectivity, so critical for
scienti®c rationality. It is for this reason that scientists have to
adhere to a technical non-metaphorical language ± except maybe
when looking for a catchy title for their books. However, since
human emotions are not objective events, technical language ±
 The ultimate virtual reality game 185

such as the clinical nomenclature of the DSM ± fails to com-

municate the subjective meaning, which is best expressed in a style
with symbolic resonance. When I tell my story, my style is
necessarily different from, say, that of a biologist reporting on the
speed of multiplication of a bacteria observed through the micro-
scope for a given time. Like the biologist, I may begin with the
facts. However, as soon as I use adjectives and adverbs, make
interpretations and connections, I reveal my imaginal inner world
± my mythology, my psychology. Subjectivity cannot be expressed
without resorting to metaphor. I'll say for example: this relation-
ship is choking me (metaphor); she is a vampire (metaphor); my
boss is a slave-driver (metaphor); teenagers are tyrannical (meta-
phor); politics are rotten (metaphor); the economy is paranoid
(metaphor).
Psychological analysis gained many invaluable insights from the
structuralist approach of LeÂvi-Strauss by discerning the hidden
ideological strength and abuse that language inevitably carries. For
example, structures of opposition (night/day,5 sky/earth, male/
female, raw/cooked,6 sacred/profane7) reveal the whole system of
values that gives metaphors their power. While Lacan applied
structuralist ideas to expose the structure of the unconscious, other
depth psychologists, especially C.G. Jung and some of the post-
Jungians, chose a very different road by focusing on the content of
metaphors and myths, instead of their structure. James Hillman is
probably the most radically post of the post-Jungians. Therefore,
instead of asking, for example: ``Does the story present a structure
of opposition between night and day, or earth and sky?'' Jungians
and post-Jungians ask: ``What emotion, what archetypal quality is
personi®ed by these characters, what kind of symbolism are we
presented with here, which archetypes are constellated?'' Of course,
one could ± and many do ± argue that archetypes are structures,
although the word structure (like paradigm, grid, pattern, or code)
has different meanings for different authors.8 But depth psychology
does not focuse exclusively on the structures.
Jung never achieved the academic recognition that the struc-
turalists commanded and that failure may be, in part, because an
archetypal quality ± as opposed to a structure ± cannot be trans-
lated into neat, quasi-mathematical schema such as those the
structuralists were so fond of. The analysis of archetypes is much
like reviewing a ®lm: it is always a battle of interpretations. There
is no mathematical modeling, no putting in a formula one's
186 Depth psychology after neuroscience

archetypal perspective. It exists beyond quanti®cation, but exists

nonetheless.
Let's take the example of reporting on the quality of a wine. The
grower, like the scientist, can objectively report the year, the
location, and even the chemical composition. The oenophile can
certainly use that information, but that is not the key to his
reputation. Like an archetypalist, the lover of wine has a rich
vocabulary of metaphors to communicate to others the aroma, the
color, the texture, and the taste. He might say, for instance,
``cherry with a touch of blueberry,'' a ``pepper ®nish,'' ``a hint of
tobacco,'' ``an amazing leg,'' none of which literally appear or
exist in the bottle. There is no blueberry, tobacco, or pepper in
wine, and wine certainly has no legs. The magic of metaphorical
language is that others tasting the same wine understand perfectly
and so feel the metaphorical ingredient. The vocabulary that
comes with developing a taste for wine, although metaphorical, is
precise, constant, and relatively reliable. Taste buds get it.
By contrast, a technical description of the chemical structure is
much more stable, but if one day a law were passed prohibiting
the use of metaphorical language to describe the qualities of wine,
it would be like robbing Dionysus to pay Apollo ± a big pagan sin.
It would be like the imposition of a totalitarian dictatorship on
words. Inner life is just like wine; we need a metaphorical voca-
bulary to communicate the quality of our emotions. Feelings, like
aromas, are spontaneously expressed by using rich imaginal lan-
guage. For this reason among others, depth psychology is de®nitely
in the camp of the humanities because our inner cinema is not so
concerned with objective reality and logical structures; it belongs
to other terrains of experience. Inner life is a virtual production
whose truth is of the kind we call ``artistic truth.'' Just as someone
who has a nose for wine, a good depth psychologist can ``smell''
the archetype lending ¯avor to the mix: a strong taste of whining
baby mixed with a touch of sadism; a strong warrior color, with
an undercurrent of love kitten; immediate sweetness followed by a
sour aftertaste of resentful matron; an untamed shrew covering a
lovely queen ± Shakespeare got that one.

Who is telling the story?

Given that identity is not only expressed but fabricated through a
narrative, it is crucial to teach analysts in training how to remain
 The ultimate virtual reality game 187

centered on the imagination of the patient. The in¯uence of the

therapist on the creation of the new myth is inevitable to a certain
point, but it should be like playing the piano with four hands, with
the analyst remaining on the left side of the piano. If the analyst
exerts too much of an in¯uence, the patient ends up with a story
that re¯ects someone else's imagination, or someone else's theor-
etical orientation. Repeated experiments have shown that the
patients of a Freudian psychoanalyst will ®nd themselves in a
narrative with some measure of Oedipal struggling. The patients
of a Jungian analyst will have mandalas and shadow ®gures
appearing in their dreams. The patients of a specialist on co-
dependency might all be convinced that not liking to travel alone is
a sign of co-dependency. We have also heard one story or another
of false recovered memories and deranged psychotherapists who
convinced almost all their patients that they had been victims of
sexual abuse. They are the modern equivalent of Procrustes, the
mythological character who cuts off the head or feet of his guests
to accommodate the size of the bed. Usually healthy common
sense, combined with experience, convinces most psychotherapists
that if the theory does not ®t, discard it.
The art of therapy implies the capacity to put one's intellect at
the service of the patient, not just one's own ears and heart.
Unfortunately schooling in psychology ± under the in¯uence of
professional corporations such as the American Psychological
Association (APA), whose means of control are those of a ma®a or
a monopoly9 ± involves less and less training of a critical mind and
more and more technical learning and theoretical indoctrination.
Students tend to believe in the superiority of one school over the
others, buying into whatever the current theory happens to be
about any given pathology, but will rarely discuss the fact that
none of these theories have been reliably predictive of who will
heal and who won't. The capacity to predict is supposed to be the
validating principle of a scienti®c approach; for example, there are
sexually abused kids who become compassionate human beings
while others repeat the horror they have experienced. AnaõÈs Nin
experienced incestuous relations with her father and went on to
become a great writer. Why? Others were crushed by one lightly
incestuous conversation. Where does complexity ®t in a simplistic
theory? Nobody is suggesting that abusive relationships can have
positive effects, but rather that some theories may not consider
enough the basic existential freedom of the victim. Simplistic
188 Depth psychology after neuroscience

theories create simplistic equations and incompetent therapists.

``You have been abused'' has been heard by many patients as a
curse: ``You are wounded for life, a diminished person.''
Many psychotherapists, whose minds were insuf®ciently trained,
have been attracted to theories about sexual abuse mainly because
it supported their fear of sexuality. Their theoretical premise is
undeniable: incest between parents and children is the strongest
taboo humans have and breaking this taboo invites tragedy.
Nevertheless, the ideologically rigid therapist, who ``believes'' in
his or her theory as one believes in God, will not hear the particular
case of the patient with all its idiosyncratic qualities.
I have heard many stories of incest, from ``light'' cases to the
most tragic. Most students, when they begin studying cases of
incest, will automatically link the trauma to the abnormal sexual-
ization of the relationship. When one listens to the narrative more
closely, it often appears that the traumatic emotion is not neces-
sarily of a sexual nature. For one particular woman, the trauma
she wants to talk about is the betrayal of the mother who refused
to hear her. You are such a slut, to invent such a lie. For another
woman, the pain that lingers in her psyche is the loss of the
grandmother's affection. While washing off the blood of the rape
by the adolescent brother, the grandmother said, ``He ruined you.
There is no washing off that kind of ®lth.'' This little girl felt
cursed. Another wants to speak about her fear; not her fear of the
abnormal sexualization of the relationship, but her fear of the
father's violence and death threats. If you ever dare reveal our little
secret, I'll kill you.
The impact of religious values that have remained unconscious
goes undiscussed in most therapeutic milieus. The separation of
Church and State still has a lot of ``separating'' to do in training
institutes. Unconscious Judaism and Christianism still shape our
psychological theories. Each time psychology attempts to de®ne
what a healthy relationship should be, one should watch for the
old religious code lingering in the background. The deconstruction
± and reconstruction ± of spiritual values is part of every analysis,
but for it to happen the analyst has to have examined his or her
own religious values. This entails much more than an examination
of past religious beliefs or practices. It involves all the residual
deposits of two thousand years of Christian mythology, with its
deep hatred of the body and of sexuality, of all that belongs to
``the carnal world.''
 The ultimate virtual reality game 189

The number of psychotherapists who are unaware of their

residual Christianity seems to be growing, rather than declining,
due to a resurgence of a largely undifferentiated spiritual need.
Freud's argument was that religion is a tragic illusion that a
collective neurosis forces us to endorse.10 Given his historical
in¯uence, it is disappointing to see how easily psychotherapists in
training will make moral judgments based on old religious values,
thinking they re¯ect a ``new'' spirituality. Many don't even see
how retrograde is the discourse of most of the media's pseudo-
experts who inevitably ®nd fault with all sorts of sexual affairs.
The kind of psychology that one hears on the radio or reads in
newspaper columns regularly distills the old religious code. For
example, an unwillingness to get married will be interpreted as a
sign of immature behavior ± fear of commitment ± when it could
be an authentic rejection of the values behind the marriage con-
tract. Adultery is often equated with abuse of the partner. A
teacher's attraction to a student becomes ``harassment.'' Such
judgments, disguised as ``clinical,'' are almost always based on
Christian marriage as a standard of normality.
Psychological theories that ignore the history of mores generate
dogmas that are as alienating as those of traditional religions. To
take a particularly problematic example, how can somebody with
a degree in psychology lack the knowledge that in Ancient Greece,
pederasty was part of the education of young men? What kind of
ignorance makes a psychologist theorize that the sexual attention
of an adult for an adolescent is inevitably, irremediably, essentially
and without exception, destructive of the fragile psyche of ado-
lescents? The sexual initiation of a boy, around age 12, was
overseen by a 30-something adult, who was, at the same time, his
teacher (pedagogue). The fact of giving sexual grati®cations to
one's teacher did not seem to create any kind of trauma, because
pederasty was, in that culture, considered ``normal.'' It was
accompanied by a complex and rigorous code of manners meant
to minimize the potentially destructive effects on the younger
partner, and to initiate the young into the sexual realm as well as
sociopolitical ®nesse. One certainly cannot say as much of the
Christian Church. There never was any kind of ``code of manners''
to prevent the rape, on their wedding night, of young virgin brides
who were often given, at 15, to rich old men, the age of the girls'
grandfathers. The Church was ready to turn a blind eye. The girls
were not free to say ``no'' to such arrangements; the ritual of being
190 Depth psychology after neuroscience

asked to say ``yes'' was one more hypocritical gesture of a Church

unconcerned by legal rape. The priests were not interested in
providing a gentle initiation in the art of lovemaking, for girls or
for boys.
One can ask: which is more traumatic ± a milieu where it is
``normal'' that the person who teaches you grammar in the
morning also initiates you sexually in the evening, or a religion
which gives a husband exclusive and total control over his wife's
body? A Christian wife could not refuse her husband sexual
service. Even if the man was brutal, even if repeated pregnancies
threatened her survival, she could not say no. The old virgin men
who ruled the Vatican, with no experience of sexual love, child-
bearing or family obligations, gave their blessings to arranged
rapes for centuries. They might have learned a thing or two had
they been schooled in Ancient Greece. They might have learned
that a sexual relation should be based on free will. The pupil could
refuse sexual contact with the pedagogue, a privilege the Church
still does not grant women. Second, they might have learned that
the ``art of love'' is an important art form, an aesthetic experience
that has to be taught and learned, for sexuality to be a pleasure
and not an act of violence. Uninitiated sexist priests generated
immense sexual misery. Yet, with all this history in the back-
ground, many psychologists quickly judge all that seems to them
like illicit sex ± or sex with even a slightly incestuous tonality ± as
``dangerous.''
A father tells his daughter, a gorgeous, sensuous 18-year-old, ``If
I were 18 years old today, I sure would ®nd you sexually
attractive.'' This necessary con®rmation of a daughter's feminine
power by a loving father was brought into one of my classes by a
student who saw this as an example of ``incestuous overtones in
the father±daughter relationship.'' The father simply wasn't a
castrated male and had eyes to see what everybody around him
could see as well: that his daughter was feminine and sexy and he
did not deny it. In a culture that was not afraid of sex, this
interaction would be understood as validation, a gift from the
father. But half the class were convinced that it ``might'' be of an
incestuous nature and a victimizing of the daughter.
Incest has traditionally been de®ned as sex between the parent
and the child, or between siblings. The taboo against parent±child
incest is shared by all humans, though, as LeÂvi-Strauss showed,
de®ned quite differently in different cultures. Everywhere, at all
 The ultimate virtual reality game 191

times, in all cultures, incest hints at tragedy and for good reasons.
Nevertheless, there are myths that relativize the taboo. I won't
take my examples from Greek mythology, where stories of incest
(Myrrh, Biblis, Phaedra) are a kind of literary device to show
imaginal ®liations. I'll take instead a biblical example: the incest
between Lot and his two daughters. Here are two young virgins
who believe they are, along with their father, the sole survivors of
humanity. The girls deliberate on their options: Should we remain
pure and virginal, at the cost of the end of humanity, or should we
get dad intoxicated and steal his sperm? The Bible suggests that, in
this case, incest is the moral choice.
All human values contain their opposites. When psychologists
too easily equate trauma with precocious or illicit sexuality, they
ignore the relativity of human values. This posturing as moral
experts has become the new expression of a puritanical obsession.
In cases of sexual harassment, the point is forgotten again and
again that sexual harassment is a problem of unequal power, not a
problem with sexuality. The sexual encounter becomes abuse
when one partner has power over the other. That power relation-
ship is at the core of the feminist analysis of patriarchy. It reveals
how patriarchal law requiring the wife's submission to her
husband actually poisons love and destroys desire. In the same
fashion, a psychotherapist who uses the authority of the profession
to hide his or her fear of sexuality will project it on to patients and
it is a form of abuse. The following story shows how this bigotry
might appear.

Bigotry offered as expertise

My ®rst therapist tried to convince me that my frigidity was the
result of sexual abuse in childhood. She questioned me about my
®rst sexual arousal, and I told her about how my sisters and I used
to tease an uncle who was a drunken, lewd, old reprobate. I was
brought up in a huge, Irish-American clan with a great variety
of crackpots and eccentric personalities, including myself. The
inappropriateness of my uncle's sexual behavior was dealt with in
a fashion that the therapist absolutely could not comprehend. His
wife knew that every Christmas holiday her husband not only got
really drunk, but also exhibited inappropriate behaviors. He did
this with all ``skirts'' regardless of their age, as long as they had
breasts. He himself did not have daughters, only three sons.
192 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Our holiday celebrations lasted for two or three days at our

grandparent's farmhouse. They were big gatherings with lots of
food and drink, and high emotion ± very Irish. My aunt once
called a family meeting of all the women and their daughters.
Grandma was presiding. My aunt said to us girls, ``If he lets the
birdie out of the cage in front of you girls, here is what you do.
You come near it and you give it a slap. Nothing to harm the little
beast, but enough to get it back in the cage. Never forget the rule:
you don't go anywhere alone with him, and you stay together.
Don't let this wolf or any other wolf get you girls. You're the one
in charge of your cherry.''
We were never scared, never disgusted, only curious about the
``little beast.'' The truth about this episode ± a truth that the
therapist was not ready to hear ± was that we actually loved to
provoke him. These games were de®nitely not traumatic, just an
expression of our puberty. The last time we saw him, I was 15 and
I suggested to my sisters and cousins that we lift our skirts
together, and pull down our panties to show him our butts. The
plan was to take a close look at what an erection looked like. We
did this, but he said, ``Sorry girls, the birdie doesn't ¯y any more.''
He had tears. He died a few weeks later of liver failure. He may
have been a pitiful, sad character, but he was not a sadist. The
therapist's attempt to convince me that this uncle had been the
cause of my trauma I consider intellectual abuse. My adult
frigidity had nothing to do with that event.
The explanation was simpler than that: my husband was an
incompetent, boring, crude lover. He comes like other men sneeze.
Wham. Bam. Atchoo. Over. Now that I have divorced him, and
know what a good lover is, I know that the therapist made two
major mistakes. The ®rst was to consider my past (the uncle) as
overriding my present (my husband). The second was to consider
my uncle as a kind of psychopath, a child abuser, when in fact, he
was just a pitiful old satyr. For him, a girl of 15 with fully grown
breasts was not a child anymore. His Catholic mother had given
birth to him when she was 16, and then produced nine more kids,
and died at 36 of too many pregnancies. My aunt later told me
that my uncle believed himself to be respectful of us girls, as he
would never have risked impregnating any of us.
Strangely enough, that ®rst therapy with such an incompetent
therapist helped me a lot. I so wanted to disprove her silly theory
that I took a lover just to prove her wrong, as an experiment to see
 The ultimate virtual reality game 193

if I really was frigid. I discovered that I was not and ®led for
divorce. Too bad for the therapist. She had not suf®ciently worked
on her counter-transference, and it showed.

How is psychology a mythology?

The biographical facts of our lives do not change. My patient's
uncle and his exhibitionist behaviors, her aunt's intervention, her
vocabulary, the presence of the matriarch, the size of the family
farmhouse and the length of their holiday celebrations, all are in
the records as facts. In principle, a fact is something objective and
veri®able, as Holmes would point out to his anima, his dear
faithful Watson. On the other hand, our interpretation of the facts
is essentially subjective, an unstable process that changes all the
time shaped by a personal and cultural imagination. The analysis
of the content of the psyche is not so much an examination of facts
(which usually don't take much time to establish), but of how one
imagines their meaning to be shaped, distorted (and) recon®gured.
A patient appears at the ®rst session and tells me his story. One
can extract from it a collection of facts, the summary of which
looks like this.

Five facts
1 My wife and I have been married for 12 years.
2 We have three kids.
3 Our house is a new construction, with three bedrooms
and two garages.
4 My wife and I both work full time.
5 I ®led for divorce.

These are the ®ve facts established at the ®rst session. Although this
man was one of the most rational and ``factual'' persons I had ever
met, his ``facts'' were not related in a way that would satisfy a
detective. Inevitably, a narrator adds adjectives and adverbs, judg-
ments, feelings, analogies and metaphors to ®ll out the facts with a
®ction. In other words, he had a perspective on, and an interpreta-
tion of, the facts. The full narrative from that ®rst session, once the
subjective perspective is added to the facts, looked more like this.
194 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Five facts + perspective

1 After 12 years of marriage, there is not much passion left,
only a boring, domestic routine and an equally boring
sexual routine.
2 My wife had wanted to have three kids and we did. I had
wanted only two. Three young kids is a heavy respon-
sibility and I resent it.
3 Our new house is badly designed: with two garages there
is more space for our cars than for our kids.
4 We are both workaholics, working more and more hours
every year.
5 When I asked for a divorce, I was expecting her to try to
save our marriage, but she did not even argue. I want to
®x the marriage. It feels like a failure. I want her back.

The narrative continued to evolve, even if the fact of the divorce

happens just as announced at the ®rst therapy session. A year into
the therapy, the story has new layers of complexity and further
plot twists.

Facts + perspective + time

6
The most dif®cult thing for me now is to sleep by
myself, and to be deprived of sex. I had no idea how
much I would miss her body.
7 I have responsibility for the kids every other week and I
feel totally exhausted and angry.
8 She opted out of the house. She took an apartment in
town with the money from the settlement. I kept the
house, but I regret it. I feel trapped in suburbia.
9 I feel I have been abandoned.
10 I still hope she'll rethink that divorce and come back
home.
 The ultimate virtual reality game 195

With the work of time and therapy, the house that felt too
small, ill-conceived, too suburban, slowly wears a different
valence. I took over the space of the two-car garage, made it
into my private space, and I love it. I retreat there, the kids
respect my territorial boundaries and I respect theirs.

The new meanings that emerge change even his memories. At the
beginning of his therapy, what seemed most dif®cult for him was
to sleep by himself and be deprived of sexual pleasure. Two years
into the therapy, he says: the most dif®cult challenge for me, since
the beginning, has been to learn to be a good father to my kids.
The perception he now has of his past emotions has shifted under
the in¯uence of the emotions of today. The present always colors
the past. He now feels as a joy what was then an ordeal. Two
years ago, the responsibility of fathering was a negative experience
but today it is a positive one. Even the story of the divorce is no
longer a story of failure. Divorce brought me much closer to my
children; I am a better person today. The following years saw the
complete disappearance of his wish for his ex-wife to return home;
his notion of a happy ending ceased to involve the return of his
wife. Instead, he created a different story of the past which sig-
ni®cantly de®ned his future.
The facts of a life follow a trajectory similar to a binary pro-
gram in which only two possibilities exist: either an event hap-
pened (value of 1) or it did not happen (value of 0). By contrast, a
narrative involves in®nite possibilities of interpretation and has the
capacity to travel in any direction, more like a hypertext than a
linear line on a page. The task of imagination, then, is to carry that
hypertext, upgrade it daily to the links that constitute our identity.
One can, and must, come up with fresh interpretations that feel
right, new links that feel meaningful, a process going on all the
time, which is why the development of imagination plays such a
crucial role in the quality of inner life.
Sartre was radical in af®rming this creative process as the basis of
human freedom. At all times, we are free to interpret our situation,
choosing to be either coward or hero. Others followed with differ-
ent formulations. Sartre's schoolfriend, Paul Ricoeur,11 examined
with phenomenological precision and academic language the
196 Depth psychology after neuroscience

dimension of time in the structure of one's narrative. First I have a

vague sense of who I want to be, anticipating my identity (Ricoeur's
pre®guration), then I play the role according to the persona I've
created (con®guration). Then, each time I explain who I am, I
interpret anew each of these temporal elements (re®guration).
Marcel Proust, in his Remembrance of Things Past, expressed the
same insights, adding to the dimension of time, the dimension of
place. His characters (for example, Swann) do not appear to be the
same in the little village of Combray as in Parisian society. Proust
reveals how our persona varies according to the location. Changing
place is not only a movement in space, it is as well a change in our
being, as we are a different person according to the place we are in.
Similarly, the dimension of time inevitably modi®es our perception
of stories gone by. Time does not therefore simply pass; it trans-
forms what it passes.
Facts acquire meaning when they are made an essential part of a
narrative, one which will keep evolving until our last breath. The
shimmering effect of the multitude of meanings comprises the
nature of psychological vitality. That same vitality is lost when
the narrative is forced into a genre (like that of the clinical case
history, or the judicial deposition, or the one-size-®ts-all narrative
of redemption in the afterlife). Such forcing of the narrative
demeans its subtlety.
A richness of imagination is the best cure against despair.
Perhaps the most important question for the survival of the psyche
is: Who shall I be, until I die? I have to imagine something, an
interesting myth of some sort.
Chapter 13

Joy
The antidote to anxiety

One of the most frequent mistakes of trainees in psychotherapy is

to presume that the life of the patient would ®nally become
meaningful if only the neurosis received treatment, the psychic
bugs extracted, like a rotten tooth. This kind of naivety, which, in
theory, ought to abate as the young therapist accumulates experi-
ence, is unfortunately found in many an experienced therapist
because of the habit of considering all ``ordinary'' neurosis ± the
kind we all suffer from ± as a medical condition instead of an
existential problem. Most neurotic behaviors are more like an
unfortunate addiction to a joyless life than a rotten tooth. Being
neurotic is like a bad habit that wastes what life has to offer ± this
instant, this body, this love, this destiny. The ordinary neurotic
personality is like somebody who possesses a colossal fortune and
worries every day when the Dow Jones index goes down a few
points. Lives that externally appear rich and adapted in every
aspect can hide a neurotic misery that turns out to be a poverty of
the imagination. The atrophy of the capacity to ``imagine'' is the
breeding ground for all self-in¯icted misery. Inner work, as it
reveals the interpreting program running in the background, can
modify my life's trajectory. Even a slight variation in the inter-
pretation brings about a psychic shift that can make life more
interesting (or more distressing). For the process of interpreting my
story, I need words (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs); I need
symbols and metaphors; in other words, I need the complete kit of
what is usually referred to as literature or mythology.
Depth psychology, especially the Freudian school, has favored
the conceptual approach, inventing theory after theory, against the
``imaginal'' approach.1 This choice of concept over image may
explain the humbling failure of psychology in treating the two
198 Depth psychology after neuroscience

most widespread contemporary malaises: anxiety and depression.

Both are characterized by a poverty of images, and the corre-
sponding paralysis of the capacity to feel joy.

Anxiety: the fear without image

The Latin term angustia, formed from angustius, means a tight-
ness, a closing of the throat that accompanies the perception of a
danger for which one feels powerless, because the danger is not
identi®able. The child afraid of darkness suffers from anxiety, not
fear. Lost in the forest at night, one suffers from anxiety: what if I
step on a venomous snake; what if a lion appears; am I going to
die of thirst or hunger? By contrast, fear is always fear of some-
thing precise ± a bear appears in front of me and I know what I am
afraid of: the bear. Fight or ¯ight, the two basic instincts of
survival, are triggered by fear, not by anxiety.
Called by many names (angst, free-¯oating anxiety, anxiety
neurosis, panic attack, phobia, insecure personality, excessive
nervousness, social incompetence, fear of intimacy), anxiety has
been the object of many de®nitions, theories, explanations and
medications. It has also been made into the symbol of modernity.
The clinical symptoms of it are quite obvious, as are the physio-
logical effects of panic attacks. Dif®culty arises when one tries to
discover what the person is panicking about. Anxiety does not
allow one to name what is feared. Not knowing what one is afraid
of, action is repressed. One of the earliest de®nitions of anxiety, at
the beginning of the twentieth century, was that of Pierre Janet:

Chronic anxiety is a characteristic feeling of melancholic

states. It is experienced as a vague pain, or rather a vague fear,
a feeling that used to be called ``moral fear,'' to indicate that it
is a fear without an object. In reality it is something precise:
the subject is afraid of his own action and suffers at the idea of
it. This fear stops the possibility of acting, not in a momentary
way, as when stopping to take a respite, but in a permanent
way. This blockage of action can show up as a phobia, or as
anxiety. When it spreads to many areas of activity, the person
begins to look like a cornered animal that tries all possibilities
of evading and ®nds itself trapped. The person freezes; no
form of action seems adequate. There is no wish, not even a
 Joy: the antidote to anxiety 199

dream of any kind of action. Living is impossible; life is

unbearable. Acute anxiety leads to suicidal thoughts and ten-
dencies. The basic feeling is always the same: the urgency of
action, combined with the sense of the inadequacy or atrocity
of any form of action.2

Janet's concept of anxiety as a ``fear without an object'' has been

considered from many angles. For example, Gregory Bateson's
concept of ``double bind'' describes a situation where the feeling of
being trapped is conscious, but combined with an unconscious
injunction that forbids you to become aware of the trap. Bateson's
analysis of neurotic relationships insisted on the fact that it is not
the contradictions ± I love you and also I hate you ± that create
the neurosis; contradictory feelings are inherent in all relationships
and we all live with those tensions. What creates madness is the
injunction against becoming aware of the contradictions. The
person feels something oppressive is going on but also feels that it
should not be named, should not be mentioned. I will abuse you,
treat you as less than human, but don't you dare notice it or
mention it. There is a bear in the path, but the milieu acts as if
there is none. The emperor is naked, but one is asked to perceive
him as having clothes on. The person is thus incapable of ®ghting
or ¯eeing, a paralysis that is the basic experience of anxiety.
Generally speaking, words like fear, terror, horror, shock and
panic, belong to the register of fear, whereas words like dread,
dismay and apprehension are associated with the experience of
anxiety. In the nineteenth century, the word ``spleen'' meant a
dark mood with a hint of anxiety. Each generation has fresh
appellations for its malaise. Having the ``metaphysical blues'' was
how my existentialist friends and I would have expressed our
intellectual angst, a malaise of the soul without any physiological
cause ± apart from the overconsumption of espresso coffee,
Gitanes cigarettes and sleepless nights. The other day, I heard an
adolescent express his discontent by saying that his hard disk was
bugged down, by analogy with a computer bug and the paralysis it
causes to the program running the computer (his whole psyche).
His ``bug'' came from having heard his parents announce their
divorce. He was distressed about it, not knowing what would
come of this new, unde®ned situation. This is anxiety.
By contrast, fear is a fundamental impulse that moves one into
action. The research on animal fear, begun by Konrad Lorenz, has
200 Depth psychology after neuroscience

repeatedly shown that fear is a constant of animal life, a wisdom

of the body that warns us of immediate danger. Physiologically,
fear provokes an intense excitation of the neurovegetative system,
a discharge of neurohormones that boosts the capacity for ®ght or
¯ight, whereas anxiety does not allow for the discharge of the
excitation, and when prolonged, results in psychosomatic damage.
The term ``excitation'' includes all forms of enthusiasm, any
impulse to create, to try, to taste, to do, or to ®ght and ¯ight.
Anxiety is a vicious circle: inhibition of action produces anxiety
and anxiety inhibits action in a kind of retroactive loop. Dreams of
walking, yet staying put, or shouting with no sound coming out,
or hitting which feels like hitting water, are typical anxiety
dreams. We share fear with animals, but anxiety is reserved for
humans. For Kierkegaard (and Sartre) anxiety is the result of our
freedom to create ourselves. We are anxious as the result of the
awareness that every day we intervene in our own destiny, every
day we choose one path over the other.
The word anxiety and the word modernism often appear in the
same sentence, just as post-modernism seems to call for the word
irony, revealing the historicity of emotions. The historian Jean
Delumeau, writing a detailed history of fear in the western world,
shows how fear used to be more prevalent than anxiety, con-
®rming that anxiety is a modern malaise. For example, in Middle
Age Europe, people experienced intense fear of ghosts and spirits,
the devil and his hell, sorceresses as well as inquisitors, the tax
collector and the king's prisons, the evil eye, and bats. They feared
outbreaks of leprosy, typhus (and) cholera, and were also afraid of
doctors. They seemed to die with less anxiety and less fuss than we
do, but they were terribly afraid of dying a sudden death, or
without the last rites of Christianity, or in a strange land, or alone
with nobody to receive their last words.
Delumeau also examines how the emotion of loneliness, so
common today, was something that Romans positively dreaded.
The typical Roman was almost never alone: he worked, ate, slept
and bathed with company. Even urinating and defecating ± at least
in the public toilets built by Emperor Vespasian, the best latrines
in the history of the city of Rome ± were not a cause for isolation.
There were no walls between the toilet seats, and the latrines even
had artwork on the walls. The kind of forced solitude that is today
the lot of the kid with the key to the apartment around his neck,
the widower with nobody to talk to, the immigrant alone in a city,
 Joy: the antidote to anxiety 201

would have been felt in that earlier age like a psychological torture
similar to the solitary con®nement of prisoners. One of the
Romans' exemplary punishments was exile. Being banished to an
uncivilized island, with nobody to sleep with, nobody to share
dinner and conversation with, seems to have been almost equi-
valent to a death penalty.
The history of fear also shows moments of brusque reversal.
Novelty and change, for example, were feared for generations,
until the valence was suddenly reversed. Goethe and the German
Romantics began the trend, and ®nally in the twentieth century
change became something that was generally experienced as
positive, a factor of progress, evolution, youth. By contrast, many
people today fear stability because they interpret it as boredom
and stagnation, just as our ancestors feared change because they
interpreted it as disorder, destruction, and anomie. The intense
resistance of oral cultures to the changes brought about by literacy
expressed their fear of change. It takes a colossal research, like that
of Delumeau, to fully describe and demonstrate how incredibly
intense was the fear of literacy, the fear of women, the fear of
Jews, and fear of the In®del. What is even more surprising is the
regularity with which all sorts of tensions (political or psycho-
logical) were ± until the rise of modernism ± translated into fear
by imagining an object of fear that explained the tension. When
the object is a person, it is called ``scapegoating.''
The fear may have been absurd, unreal, with no reasonable
basis, unfounded, contrary to common sense; still, it seemed as if
anything were better than the vagueness of anxiety. Nobody knew
for sure the cause of the plague, for example. Rather than suffering
the anxiety of an unknown causality, medieval doctors were eager
to ®nd the object to be feared. Some said the plague was caused by
a negative conjunction of the planets, and others by putrid
emanations coming from the depth of the earth. Priests also
pointed their ®ngers at sinners, who had surely offended God. The
intensity of suffering was for the Church a great occasion to
convince their ¯ock that they were now experiencing God's anger
in the form of the plague.3 The priests offered a very precise image
to go with their threat: the putrid wounds in the ¯esh were God's
arrows, sent from the sky to punish the immorality of humans.
Even when their explanation for the plague was incorrect, they
nevertheless had an object of fear: the planets, putrid fog, God's
wrath, anything to remain in the register of fear, not that of
202 Depth psychology after neuroscience

anxiety. Accordingly, their behavior was not one of a population

paralyzed by anxiety, but extraordinarily active, in fact frenetic, in
its attempt to leave the putrid city, or feverishly ¯agellating
themselves to appease the wrath of God.
By contrast, our reaction to threats such as heart attack, AIDS,
cancer, automobile accidents, pollution, terrorism and political
corruption, creates an emotional environment of ``anxiety,'' not of
fear. Car accidents have killed or maimed more people than all of
history's murderous tyrants put together. On every long weekend,
more people die in car accidents than in any kind of terrorist
attacks anywhere on the planet. Car accidents are one of the
leading causes of death among adolescents. Yet, we don't have a
clear picture of that monstrous aspect of modern life. Not only
does it rarely appear in statistics, there are no cartoons, no nick-
names for the car as killer, no movies revealing this Minotaur
living in our basement, feeding on youth. There are almost no
stories about car-as-monster, but many about car-as-friend; no
imagination of that costly aspect of our adherence to a myth of
modernity and individuality. There has been no real discussion of
alternatives to transportation partly because the car is still a
symbol of the self and that symbolism is still mostly unconscious.
The imagination of car as monster is blocked by the imagination
of ``I am my car.'' As long as the car remains a status symbol, and
unconsciously so, there can be no fear of that destructive aspect of
our culture.
There is anxiety about increasing traf®c and noise, parents'
insecurity, old people not wanting to go out, people worrying
about not having medical coverage (what if I get in a car acci-
dent?). One may or may not ever be victim of a car accident,
cancer, unemployment, poverty, homelessness, physical aggres-
sion, rape, or theft, yet there is an omnipresent background of
anxiety in the modern psyche. We all know for sure that car
accidents are a major cause of death, but until it happens to me
or a loved one, it remains a statistical reality, an abstract concept,
something like a hypothetical wolf or snake that inhabits the
forest and can jump on me anytime. How can I defend myself
against an aspect of civilization that can victimize me anytime?
No more than the citizen of plague-ridden London in the Middle
Ages can I know, for sure, and without ambiguity, the con-
junction of factors that will put me at risk of dying of this or that
disease, even with all the precision of research by scienti®c
 Joy: the antidote to anxiety 203

laboratories. There do not seem to be proper courses of action.

But the difference from the medieval sense of danger is that I
don't have an image either.
Information about pollution of air, water, and food does not
provoke fear, but anxiety; the enemy is everywhere, and nowhere
for sure. Who to believe? Who to trust? ``It'' is everywhere, yet
nowhere obvious enough to take action. Where is there a body of
water polluted to the point of mobilizing a population as against a
terrorist attack? Worse, how does one ®ght the effect of constant
alarm created by well-intentioned conservationists whose main
strategy consists in creating anxiety without a clear course of
action, thus adding to the general paralysis?
The success of the genre of horror movies stems from the fact
that ± there at last ± the monster has an image, a face, even if only
a greenish blob. The hero alternately ®ghts and ¯ees, always in
action, never doubting. Popular horror movies are action movies.
By contrast, Hitchcock and Polanski were masters of a genre that
was new when they began exploiting it. By hiding the object of
fear, by suggesting rather than showing, they created an atmo-
sphere of intense anxiety. They built up anxiety until the very end,
when we are ®nally allowed to see the object of the terror. The
resolution is near. Anxiety is created by hiding the object, fear by
showing it. The sequence is often: (1) Anxiety; (2) Fear; (3) Flight;
(4) Fight; (5) Victory, the End, game over! As Deleuze4 pointed
out, to create an atmosphere of angst, the director relies on out-of-
®eld camera shots, a technique that reproduces the psychological
condition of anxiety ± hiding the object of fear, while hinting at
imminent danger.
The elaborate mythology of the Ancient Greeks, ®lled with rich
imagery of monsters of all kinds, played a role similar to today's
cinema. It fed the psyche with images of what was to be feared.
The variety and subtleties of monstrous images in Greek myth-
ology are quite fascinating. A crushing monster (like Charybdis)
does not terrify in quite the same way as Scylla, a monster that
will drown you in a deadly whirlpool. Toxic relationships are
®lled with those kinds of subtleties. A relationship that crushes
my ego is not at all like a relationship that drags me into the
vortex of a depression. Every god, every goddess, represents a
strength, a perfection, and each one also offers images of the
destructive side of that same ®gure. These dual-sided constructs
are like the automobile which offers fantastic speed, superb
204 Depth psychology after neuroscience

autonomy ± a liberating invention, and at the same time a killer,

cause for devastation and mutilation.
Equally true, we need both images. Even the loveliest of all
goddesses ± beautiful Aphrodite ± brings up the image of the
arrow that pierces the heart, the thorn on the rosebush, the tor-
tures of unrequited love, the tears of abandonment, and the curse
of frigidity, all part of her myth. The god Pan, from whom is
derived the word ``panic,'' personi®es the terror of nightmare.
Artemis, an image of the beauty of Nature, also shows the equi-
librium of terror in animal life ± eat or be eaten. Dionysus, symbol
of vitality (zoe) and intensity, offers images of addiction, dis-
memberment, and madness. Zeus, a principle of authority, justice,
and order, translates at times as tyranny and oppression.
Some of the nuances in the vocabulary of fear and anxiety are
nuances not of meaning but of degree. For example, fear and terror
are in the same family of emotion, because the difference between
fear and terror is mostly one of degree. There is the same kind of
similarity between mourning and melancholia; both have a similar
emotional quality. There is no such similitude between anxiety and
fear; the difference between these two emotions is not one of
degree but one of kind. Fear has an object; anxiety does not.
Kierkegaard interprets the historical increase of anxiety as a
consequence of the progress of rationality and lucidity. It is as if the
gain from debunking old irrational fears was lost to an increase of
angst. This phenomenon may be, as Kierkegaard suggests, an
unavoidable consequence of the necessity of getting rid of literal
beliefs in fairies, devils, ghosts, hell, gods, and all other carriers of
irrational fears. Depth psychology adds another explanation:
anxiety comes with the loss of images. This idea does not contra-
dict Kierkegaard; quite the opposite. Rather, it suggests a look at
the psychological consequences of not having images for what we
most fear, now, today, in a culture where images have been
replaced by concepts and fear with anxiety. One way of getting rid
of oppressive mythologies from traditional religions was to move
to a rational, conceptual mode of thinking. Fine! Done! Never-
theless, we threw out the baby (imagination) with the bath water
(oppressive myths). Instead of getting rid of oppressive mytholo-
gies, we got rid of the imagination that had created them. To get
rid of fairies, we stopped imagining nature. To get rid of the devil,
we stopped imagining evil. To get rid of God, we stopped imagin-
ing what is greater than ourselves.
 Joy: the antidote to anxiety 205

When old mythologies are corrupt and dysfunctional, one solu-

tion is to replace the ideas they symbolized by demonstrating their
falseness, using the rationality of science. Nevertheless, for the
psyche, the weakening of imagination is a trauma, because what is
lost in the imaginal realm can only be replaced by new images, not
by abstract concepts. There is no need to regress to a superstitious,
pre-Homeric, magical, irrational sense of self to revive the images
in the psyche. The re-mythologization of the world can be done
without the return to religion. What is most repressed in contem-
porary culture is not God, who is still very much all over the place,
it is imagination.
By re-imagining the object of my fear, the bear appears on the
footpath. I can then ®nd the proper action: run from it, ®ght with
it, take it to the zoo, tame it, or avoid the path that crosses its lair.

My mother is a combination of two monsters

Thanks to analysis, I have learned to live with my extreme
introversion. I am a land surveyor, and as such I don't have
to spend too much energy dealing with people. People
exhaust me, but I now have a good life because I love the
neatness of my work. I love music. I love my cat. I love
swimming. I love books, and I have a few friends who are
very much like me. The only thing that I really dread is
having to interact with hysterical types, like my mother.
Before analysis, I kind of knew that she was a hysterical case
and a typical narcissist, but could not avoid getting sucked
into her hysterical emotional vortex, or crushed by her harsh,
cold remarks about me and how much of a social failure I
am. At the beginning of my analysis, I had the most powerful
dream of my life: I am enjoying summer, rowing my little
boat on a lake where there are two cliffs on each side of a
narrow strait in the lake. The cliffs are so high their summit
is invisible. In the middle of one of these cliffs is a cave. I
understand, with terror, that this is where my mother dwells.
I hear barking and know she is coming out. A horrible,
bitchy creature appears with many heads poised upon a long
206 Depth psychology after neuroscience

neck. She thrusts her heads out of the cave and searches for
me. Her many mouths are ®lled with rows and rows of sharp
teeth. Not ®nding me in my rowboat, she retreats into her
stony cave and morphs into the hard rock of the cliff. I row
away from it, but I am caught in a whirlpool and my
rowboat spins like a devil.
I wake up in a sweat. When I tell the dream to my analyst,
she mentions the similarity of my dream to the mythological
®gures of Charybdis and Scylla, two female sea monsters
that were said to infest the Straits of Messina. Scylla was
represented with six heads, each with a mouth containing
triple rows of teeth, and twelve feet. She made her lair in a
cave opposite the other female monster, a whirlpool called
Charybdis. When sailors (including Odysseus) ventured
through the straits, they risked a double danger. Either they
would be sucked into the whirlpool that was Charybdis and
drown, or they might be crushed between two hard rocks that
were the body of Scylla.
This myth is such a perfect description of my dream that it
is strangely calming. My mother is sometimes Scylla, some-
times Charybdis. Now I really ``see,'' imaginally ``see,'' the
danger I experience each time I interact with her. Having the
image of these two mythological monsters changed my whole
attitude. I know what I am afraid of ± either being crushed
or being sucked in! Of course I always knew I had a ``mother
complex.'' But somehow, the abstraction of ``mother
complex'' did not bring home the actual scene played in
my psyche; it stayed abstract as concepts are. By contrast,
imagining myself in the presence of these two monsters
suggested a mode of action. I am now an expert in avoidance
strategies, just like the hero Odysseus, who was, by the way,
following Circe's advice in the art of avoidance.

For this man, a psychic relief occurred when anxiety was retran-
slated back into fear, which created a new possibility of action.
 Joy: the antidote to anxiety 207

Depression: a flattened imagination

Freud wrote about the ``death wish,'' but one could as easily view
depression as a ``sleep wish,'' a desire to stay numb, to feel little, to
keep the inner monsters sedated, quiet, unseen, unheard as ``good''
women were once expected to be. The lethargy of the imagination
often hides a frustrated desire for dependence, an envy of the fate
of Sleeping Beauty, a longing for a childhood paradise in which the
world takes care of me instead of me taking care of the world.
Depression's opposite is not happiness; it is rather a state where
imagination comes alive. Once activated, imagination stirs up all
the psychic monsters who were put to sleep by depression. Anxiety
retranslates back into fear, allowing action. When imagination
wakes up, it pours the salt of tears on every wound and signals the
return of fear and terror. It intensi®es pathos and drama, intro-
duces a whole cast of cinematic characters, every one of which
asks for clari®cation about the part each plays in the psyche.
A citizen of Ancient Greece, when caught in a drama, might
have asked: ``Which divinity have I offended? How and to whom
can I make amends?'' In psychological language it is just like
asking: ``In what kind of drama am I ensnared? In what plot, what
genre, what period, what cast, what set, and in what kind of
production am I playing my part? Am I in a victim's poor little me
story or rather in a heroic save-the-family-business-nation-planet
episode? Do I feel like an exhausted hero, tired of ®ghting one
ordeal after another, or do I feel like a desiccated old virgin whose
whole life was spent waiting for perfect love and never ®nding it?
Do I lean more on the side of the big baby refusing to grow up, or
am I inclined to play the part of the ever-generous breast to be
devoured by all oversized babies that populate every milieu? Or I
am the prodigal son who comes back home and ± surprise! ±
nobody's home; they are all out playing golf and don't care about
me anymore. Perhaps I am the star of the family, a winner, a
success story, a champion, and sick to death that everyone in my
environment relates to the persona, and nobody, including myself,
knows who I am anymore.''
The repertoire of stories is potentially in®nite. Mythology has
contributed a very long and incredibly rich list of the recurring
motifs in the lives of human beings. The number of variations on
each motif is also in®nite, like variations on a musical theme.
Given all the possibilities, it takes a healthy imagination to work
208 Depth psychology after neuroscience

out the best script for one's particular situation. Only the imagi-
nation can come up with an artistic compromise between the
fantasy world of inner life and the objective reality outside. This
adjustment is what Jung called the process of individuation. He
saw it as a progressive integration of the shadow (in other words,
making the acquaintance of my monsters) and a constant balanc-
ing of the requirements of the ego with the orientation of the Self,
establishing a friendship between the conscious and the uncon-
scious. Individuation is another word for what the Greeks called
the lifelong quest for harmony, or what others called being at
peace with the divinities. A post-Jungian author, such as James
Hillman, goes back and forth between Jung and the Greeks,
showing the constant effort of humans to ``get the picture'' of
what is going on inside.
Most psychotherapists, but not all, agree that a patient who has
no more desire for life may ®nd a welcome relief in a targeted
medication. Most clinicians, but not all, can hear the silent moan
expressed by the symptom. Thousands of medical prescriptions are
written every day to relieve depression, stress and anxiety. If a
medication can relieve psychological suffering, why not use it? But
the adventure of exploring the unconscious is not a trip to the
pharmacy, but a lifelong quest to augment consciousness, a desire
to add to our humanity. Many, but not all, of the symptoms
classi®ed in the DSM can be considered as forms of communica-
tion, as signs, as the symbolic language of the suffering soul.
Refusing to eat because the nurturing person just died is a
symbolic behavior. Depth psychology points at the tremendous
risk of treating that kind of manifestation as only a symptom.
Imagine someone who would consider sleepiness, delicious sensa-
tion in itself, as only a symptom of tiredness that a night's rest can
cure. This person would then lose the ageless poetry of the night as
well as the profound meaning of rest. It would reduce the human
being to a machine that needs maintenance if it is not plugged into
the socket of sleep eight hours out of twenty-four. Night does not
care for the clinical model. For any culture to survive, it needs its
artists to do their kind of work and we, depth psychologists,
specialize in the art of hearing the whispered song of the soul, in
keeping alive the psychological meaning of such words as rest,
night, love, joy, death.
Symptoms are strikingly similar to an artistic production. Like
all forms of art, symptoms draw their meaning from the emotions
 Joy: the antidote to anxiety 209

they evoke. One of the things that a symptom will do is to slow

down our daily habits of perception, or rather, the symptom is the
slowing down, just as night is a slowing down, winter is a slowing
down. The psyche has a seasonal slowing down, a time to feel
broken, the ego defeated and letting go. The artistry is to facilitate
that slowing down in order to ®nd the nugget of wisdom that lies
there along a winding road that ®rst feels like an impossible
detour. What is analysis if not a series of deviations, diversions
that lengthen the experience and add meaning to it? What makes a
good lover, a gourmet, an aesthete, if not someone who takes his
or her time in pleasure, who turns inward, to experience, in slow
motion, the pleasure of being? Psychological art is in creating,
transforming, enjoying inner imagery, an activity that enriches
time and brings slowness. The alternative is going through life like
a hurried tourist, visiting the Louvre on roller skates, to get it over
with. As one stops racing forward, one sees that slowing down in
pleasure makes it absolutely possible to renew one's sensitivity.
Aphrodite, the Greek goddess who personi®ed beauty and
sensuality, had the divine ability to re-virgin herself each spring by
taking a ritual bath in a river. That is what a successful analysis
does: it is a long, ritualistic, slow, relaxed, sensual bath in the deep
waters of the unconscious, a bathing that has the power to re-virgin
oneself. This re-virgining cannot occur if the psychological
suffering is considered only as a symptom and not also as a
symbol. When a cure is needed, it should happen as fast as possible:
here is my broken bone, my clogged artery. Start treatment now,
get it done, ®x it quick, please. But the unconscious ± call it
imagination ± is interested, challenged, awakened by problems,
puzzles, complexities, ordeals, quests and questions. In matters of
the heart, all symptoms are, at the same time, crucial symbolic
messages, letters that want to be read. A cure that chemically
eradicates a symptom may also eradicate the symbol, leaving one
with a soul that has been ``equalized'' like equalized background
music (musak).

I lost my cherry
To explain the Jungian concept of Self, teachers often draw on the
blackboard a sphere, on the surface of which there is a dot (the
ego). In the center of the sphere, something like a core, a nucleus,
which represents the Self, where conscious and unconscious meet.
210 Depth psychology after neuroscience

In the illustration used by Marie-Louise von Franz in 1964 to

explain the concept of the Self, the Self is at once the nucleus and
also the whole sphere. She writes:

The organizing center from which the regulatory effect stems

seems to be a sort of ``nuclear atom'' in our psychic system.
One could also call it the inventor, organizer, and source of
dream images. Jung called this center the ``Self'' and described
it as the totality of the whole psyche, in order to distinguish it
from the ``ego'' which constitutes only a small part of the
psyche.5

Von Franz's atomic metaphor never quite seduced me. Instead of

the nucleus of an atom, her text and even more her illustration
seemed to evoke a cherry rather than an atom. Around the pit, like
the pulpy ¯esh of the cherry, is the conscious personality of the
ego, contained in its skin but interacting with others. The pit,
although it constitutes the core of the cherry, is of a radically
different nature than the edible part of the fruit. The normal
development for a cherry shows a process where pit, pulp and skin
all collaborate naturally to produce the deliciousness of a cherry.
This summarizes, for me, the process of individuation.
I appreciate Jung's magisterial description of the process of
individuation. It is such good literature, it makes one want the
parts of oneself to hold together like a rich, red, round, individu-
ated cherry, with pit working in unity with pulp and skin elegantly
holding all together. When I really feel good, I am that cherry.
Jung's juicy writing creates the desire to believe in the mythology
of self and individuation.6 Nevertheless, it is a mythology. Jung
wrote this to Miguel Serrano: ``So far I have found no stable or
de®nite center in the unconscious, and I don't believe such a center
exists. I believe that the thing I call the self is an ideal center . . . a
dream of totality.''
When I cracked my head on the cement at the bottom of the
pool in Santa Fe, the nucleus, the Self, completely lost its centri-
petal capacity. At the place where the core used to be, there was a
cyclone that swallowed all consciousness, abandoning my psyche
like a person rendered homeless. My Self was gone on a trip, the
cherry evaporated into cherry molecules ¯oating in the atmosphere
around my hospital bed. Pitted, de-cherried, I was disoriented,
dispossessed, yet there was an interesting aspect to that experience.
 Joy: the antidote to anxiety 211

I was discovering that along with the loss of center, loss of a core,
the depression that I had felt before the accident was also gone. I
had no sense of Self, but no feelings of depression either.
The depression had been replaced, overnight, by an impersonal
fascination with the strange psychic landscape, one where all the
landmarks had disappeared. To survive such ¯uidity of being, my
only option was to swim in the Styx. I stopped expecting to
experience life from the center. I existed with no unity, no holding
center. ``I'' was a bunch of algae ¯oating in the vast, expansive,
centrifugal reality of psychic waters. It was scary, but not depress-
ing. In my previous depressed state, I had thought that I was
empty, a void, a big nothing, while in fact I had been a solid block
of congealed negativity. It was only after meeting my death that I
really became ``nothing,'' a frightening yet freeing Nothing. There
is no room for depression when nothing plus nothing equals
nothing.
Before meeting Madame Death, I experienced my ego as the
landlord of my psychic estate. The ``Other'' was a visitor that I
would occasionally admit. Hello and bye-bye. Please don't waste
my time. I have lots to manage. My estate is so large. My ego
image is now completely reversed. I am the visitor, a grateful,
humble guest, and the world is the host. As a guest, I don't dare
criticize the schedule of events; I don't get to make the agenda. No
more the Princess and the pea. Being conscious of my transitional
status keeps me polite and grateful toward the world. I am not to
claim the place as mine. I am provoked by the host into efforts of
comprehension and assistance with the task of living in com-
munity. Dreams remind me every night that a guest may be
tempted to dictate to the house servants (other egos), but a guest
has no power over them. As a result of that humbling demotion, I
am more comfortable than ever with archetypal psychology's
iconoclastic warning. The psychological life is always lived in a
liminal space, always on edges, thresholds, crossings, always
betwixt and between. Yes. Now I am content with this state of
affairs. The loss of my ``cherry'' was the end of my virginal psyche.
The multitude of identities left their mark: butter¯y, bull, Little
Match Girl, child of the Great Mother, failed student, organic
garbage, creature of light saved by transcendent ®lial human love.
Each of these identities, or subpersonalities, has remained as a
mode of being, a form of consciousness that visits me from time
to time.
212 Depth psychology after neuroscience

As my brain healed, I felt the return of the capacity to organize

words in sentences, paragraphs, chapters ± an extraordinary gift.
Literacy is one of the greatest gifts a culture can give its members;
it is only in thinking I had lost it that I found its immense value.
The words are back, but their meaning is not quite the same. They
too seem to come from a place of liminality. There are more and
more moments where I don't feel like a participant in life's drama,
but an observer of life's chaotic and fascinating activity. I go, with
delight instead of judgment, in that slow mode that is almost
a pre-re¯exive consciousness ± a cat-like consciousness, really.
Liminality is a vast country that I have come to enjoy ± being on
the borders; edging instead of centering.
I have learned how the possibility of joy scares the ego as much
as the possibility of love. I have tried to show in this book how the
medical approach, which pleases the ego and works so beautifully
when the problem is medical, can deprive one of the joy of the
inner voyage. The medical model is inadequate to make sense of
the agony and the ecstasy of inner life because the tragic, comic,
epic, and lyric genres are inherent in the human narrative. Artists,
not doctors, give us the words and images to become conscious of
where, and how we suffer, where and how we rejoice. Every
generation, every city, every college, every family, every couple,
every person needs to ®nd the right words, the right music, the
right images and the right ideas, to express what are the painful
things and what are the good things in life.
Art's purpose is never to give a picture of reality. It is not a
statistic in image. It is not a news bulletin. Its task is to present
reality in such a way that consciousness will deign to consider it
anew. Art propels us to enter another form of reality, an imagined
reality, where we discover the scope of possibilities waiting to
be experienced. Depth psychology is a way out of a kind of
psychology that will only consider what is, what the feelings are,
instead of looking at what they could be. The next forms of
depth psychology will depart more and more from the medical
model. I like to imagine the practice of it as a celebration of
psychological life, even when the examination of the psyche's
content is painful. The essential task of depth psychology is to ®nd
the images that reveal emotional truth. In doing so, the imagi-
nation is revived.
Freud's de®nition of depression has the immense advantage of
being simple: depression is the loss of the capacity to love. If one
 Joy: the antidote to anxiety 213

considers the corollary, it means that the goal of therapy is to

heighten the capacity to love. An analysis is indeed a long con-
versation about love. It starts with love of ourselves, which is
essential to the love of others. It includes love of things, all those
things that were neglected because we stopped loving them, and
expands to the love of the world, often in the form of pleasure
derived from meaningful work. The medical approach is rightly
concerned with ways to alleviate the depression, on the model of a
medication that lessens fever, nausea, pain. The future of depth
psychology is concerned with something else: to raise the fever of
imagination, to amplify the loving connection that binds us to
the world.
The conclusion I draw from the practice of the art of depth
psychotherapy is that the more one has a choice of images, myths,
narratives, scenarios, stories, paradigms, virtual scripts ± call them
what you like ± to live by, the richer the life. To get to that
multiplicity of possibilities, one needs to murder our identi®cation
with a lot of old, tired myths. One of the most wearisome is our
fantasy of romantic love, a script based on dependence: I need that
person and that person needs me. This poverty of imagination
generates much suffering. Revising this kind of script is a skill
worth acquiring, and it is the kind of education that depth psy-
chology offers. How we relate to others and to ourselves depends
on how we perceive the world, on what we imagine as possible, on
how we remember the past and construct our version of what
happened that caused me to be who I am. Nothing determines our
quality of life in the future more than the myths in which we place
the events of our lives. The more we can appreciate how a myth is
an imaginal construction, the less the dif®culties and tragedies of
our lives appear insurmountable.
Our days are ®lled with complexities that did not exist a few
generations ago, especially the complexities of ®nding one's
identity, but this need not be a problem. Greater complexity means
that one has more choices of contexts in which to deconstruct old
myths and reconstruct fresh ones. The opening of the imagination
reveals gaps in the fences that the imprisoned soul had not spotted,
clues that the heart had missed. The ®rst time my friend said ``no''
to somebody whose demands on this friend's time had been
abusive, it felt to her like a revolution. It was indeed a revolution,
because saying no, I won't do that for you, had never been
``imagined'' by her before.
214 Depth psychology after neuroscience

Getting rid of monarchy had never been imagined before the

Revolution, either. Too limited an idea of the possibilities acts like
bars on a window, creating an inner prison. Some of the world's
psychological wisdom is stored in each of our psyches and it is also
stored in theories of psychology. It was my intention in this book
to contribute my little bit by translating that theoretical legacy into
a language cleared of its jargon, my memo for the next generation,
the basis of my thinking about the next incarnation of depth
psychology. The psyche is cultural and cultures evolve, just like
medicine and computers evolve. To track the changes and set
priorities, psychology can offer new images of what is to come.
I do not pretend to know what the next psychologies will be. I
just know that for myself what is dead are the approaches that ask
for an intellectual, rigid belief in a given theory about the psyche ±
however interesting that theory may be, including the ones I prefer
or profess. Religions all claim they help build strong communities
around shared values; yet, religion has always separated humans
more than it has united them. The intellectual witch hunts, moral
inquisitions, and social condemnations also exist among theore-
ticians of psychology whenever a theory is presented as absolute.
Depth psychology doesn't need all those certitudes,7 because the
most important values for our psychic survival don't ask for the
certitudes of belief. Instead, it asks for an acceleration of con-
sciousness. This form of hyperconsciousness is based on values that
we easily share, because they de®ne us as humans. The tragedy and
comedy, failures and victories, are not about problem solving for
the living; they are life. They are tales of existence, tales about
®nding joy in the midst of struggle. Joy is a better teacher than
pain, always.
Appendix

Schools of thought are

families, bibliographies their
family tree

Each author writing in the ®eld of depth psychology presents a

different picture of inner life, sometimes concordant, sometimes
discordant. Depth psychologists constitute an intellectual family,
with a family tree starting with Freud and a few other revered
ancestors. The many dissensions, divorces, and rebellions are part
of the family saga, like structural tension on the frame of an old
ancestral house, which requires our attention and repair. In most
families, discord leads to tension, not murder; to divorce, not
deadly shunning. At Christmas or Thanksgiving, a ``good enough''
family is still able to share a meal together, in spite of internal
battles and tensions. Intellectual families have the same range of
possibilities, and allow the young disciples to build their identities
through two different processes.
The ®rst is a polemical approach ± the confrontation of ideas ±
which strengthens one's capacity to eventually ®ght with any idea.
An oral defense, as the word ``defense'' suggests, is a testing of a
newcomer's capacity to defend ideas and serve them as a good
soldier defends the country. This mode exists because hatred and
wars do happen in the world of ideas, as much as in the world of
families and nations. Intellectual wars exist because of a basic
philosophical dilemma that no ®nessing will dissolve: how tolerant
can one be with intolerance? Theories in psychology are not
immune to those tensions and territorial wars.
Tolerance is easy when the others' values don't threaten my
sense of survival; it is not so easy for a girl discovering that her
homosexuality is interpreted as being caused by sickness and sin.
To survive psychically, the girl will have to ®ght the theory, engage
in a war against family values. Many of the students studying at
the institute where I teach needed to deconstruct oppressive myths
216 Appendix

like they needed air to breathe. The history of ideas is full of

fascinating wars of ideas, where those who refused to go to war
for their ideas ended victimized. My guns are always ready against
the sexism and racism of the three great monotheisms and I try to
be a brave little soldier when it is time to attack. Ideas are
intellectual territories; left undefended, they will be colonized.
The second approach that is necessary to build an intellectual
community is a Dionysian one. It involves regularly falling in love
with ideas offered by other members of the clan. One then wants
to incorporate these ideas, digest them, become a living symbol of
them. It begins with an attraction, a desire to melt into that par-
ticular cultural pot, a hunger for the delicious new recipes for
thinking. I like the way this group thinks, I want to join them,
study with them, become one of them. I felt that kind of appetite
when I ®rst read Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology. With this
massive oeuvre to satisfy my need, I was busy feeding myself for
quite a while. I felt like a cat let loose in a creamery, a Dionysian
orgy of ideas that I craved.
The Dionysian mode also has its own way of becoming destruc-
tive, when the strongly held enthusiasms are short-lived, following
one charismatic star after another, rendering any real training of
the mind impossible. Instead of a group, there is a master and his
groupies. The group may have fun, a great sense of belonging, but
the thinking becomes shallower and shallower. Everybody gets an
A, let's hold hands in a circle and not discuss anything that may
spoil the fun!
The polemical, war-like mode becomes self-destructive when a
school of thought rigidi®es in its position, like a scorpion turning
its poison against itself. The symptoms of that form of decadence
are the same everywhere: a tendency to consolidate group identity
through exclusion, shunning, condemnation, contempt, issuing one
intellectual fatwa after another, against anyone who strays away
from the orthodoxy or dares to contradict the Master. An intel-
lectual fatwa happens each time a clique controls teaching posi-
tions and tenure, research grants, scholarships, media. An example
of fatwa can be found in Professor Alan Dundes's public contempt
for Joseph Campbell's work, especially around Campbell's broad
de®nition of the word ``myth.'' None of Dundes's students, if they
wanted to survive academically, could admit to having been inter-
ested in or delighted by Campbell. Discovering at a conference that
the bookstore had put all of folklore and mythology books under a
 Appendix 217

sign that read ``Joseph Campbell,'' Professor Dundes writes: ``I

remember being almost relieved that at least none of my books
were to be found in that section'' (Folkloristics in the Twenty-First
Century. American Folklore Society Invited Presidential Plenary
Address, 2004. Published in the Journal of American Folklore, 118
(470): 385±408, 2005). Dundes's critique of Campbell is informed,
intelligent, and articulate, yet it is so contaminated with contempt
and even rage that one feels there is some complex at work. That
kind of intellectual milieu self-destructs because academics sooner
or later will migrate elsewhere to avoid the intellectual dictator-
ship. Academic freedom is supposed to stage confrontation, not
give a show of hysterical contempt and shunning.
In order to have a balance, one should feel the freedom to
diverge, but with enough group libido that there is a certain
pleasure in confronting ideas. Some milieus won't allow real con-
versation. Over the years, I had my share of having to learn empty
technical terms, the meaning of which is, too often, to keep others
at a distance and erect theoretical boundaries. I have to answer,
every semester in my classes, what is archetypal psychology and
how is it different from the other depth-psychological perspec-
tives? How can one interested in the unconscious dimensions of
the psyche answer those questions simply? Most of my kind
(professors/practitioners) have professional identities that are like
a minestrone, which is a soup made of whatever vegetables happen
to be in season (or in the refrigerator). My vocation being to teach
and not to preach, I have mostly refused to belong to ``a'' school,
which does not mean that I refused to follow a disciplinary track,
or a master, as far as I could go, because that is how one learns
something. There is also such a thing as intellectual politeness:
listening to one's teacher or master until the argument is fully
expressed, trying to keep under control the tendency to interrupt
with too many instances of ``yes, but I myself think.''
I will now show my ID papers. Here is my family tree, my list of
the authors that have shaped my vision of inner life, beginning with
Freud and the post-Freudians, Jung and the post-Jungians. In that
latter category, I must single out the work of James Hillman, who
offers a radical reinterpretation of the theories of Jung. His work
offers a large panorama, with a view of the history of psychology,
its philosophy, its roots in Ancient Greece, and its future as a
renaissance of psychological imagination. His approach has for me
the supplementary advantage of being acceptable in academic
218 Appendix

milieus that are still very critical of Jung. Jung via Hillman is a
strategy that has worked with the most critical minds. Hillman's
take on Jung (which takes some and leaves some) travels through
the Jungian country and then continues the voyage beyond.
Although Hillman's oeuvre is now mostly behind him, it belongs to
the next incarnation of depth psychology. His approach is that of
someone who has consistently called for a renaissance of
psychology, a call that his own work is answering. He represents
the part of depth psychology that is opening up to an ecological
thinking, reaching for the future and establishing itself back in the
humanities and into the ¯ow of the rising eco-revolution. For his
many deliciously dense books, I am a grateful cat.
Some of the authors in the following bibliography are friends,
colleagues or allies. I came to know their work through personal
interactions, discussions, emails, exchange of references, and sitting
down in a cafe at a conference gathering. Others are cherished dead
paper gurus of my youth, such as Nietzsche, Jung, Sartre, de
Beauvoir. There are also some obligatory references in my ®eld and
some surprises due to serendipity. My hope is that this long list of
ingredients in my minestrone will somehow re¯ect not only my
personal garden but the variety of in¯uences that have shaped the
evolution of depth psychology.
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Notes

Preface
1 The ®rst edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM) was published in 1952 by the American Psychiatric
Association. It is now at its fourth edition (DSM IV).

1 Denting my thick skull

1 I know a cat who might object to the comparison but she can't read, so
I am safe.

3 Therapy as cure: the medical model

1 She was correct in her diagnosis: the DSM-IV de®nes a Transient
Simple Motor Tic Disorder (code 307.21, pp. 108±116 of DSM-IV) as
one that ``occurs many times a day, nearly every day for at least 4
weeks, but for no longer than 12 consecutive months'' (otherwise, it
becomes a Chronic Tic Disorder).
2 DSM-IV, p. 108.
3 DSM-IV, p. xxx.
4 Female Homosexuality, New York: Evergreen Black, 1969.
5 The Manufacture of Madness, New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
6 The emphasis on homosexuality as a ``sickness'' was replaced by an
elaborate and convoluted set of de®nitions of the problems that may
arise when one experiences feelings of discomfort with one's assigned
sex. Gender Identity Disorders are now de®ned as: ``strong and
persistent cross gender identi®cation accompanied by persistent dis-
comfort with one's assigned sex.'' In other words, if the person is
comfortable with his or her homosexuality, the DSM won't categorize
homosexuality per se as a pathology. DSM-IV, p. 535.
230 Notes

4 Therapy as investment: the economic

model
1 Appendix I of the DSM-IV (p. 898) is an attempt to assess ``culture-
bound syndromes.'' The clinician is invited to take into account ``how
cultural considerations speci®cally in¯uence comprehensive diagnosis
and care,'' but the application of such concern in the coding system is
another matter.
2 Luce Irigaray made a similar point when examining the theories about
female hysteria, a crucial concept in the history of psychoanalysis. She
argues that hysteria is mostly a failure to speak with words, so the body
takes charge of communicating the emotions. The hysterical woman is
caught in an impossible choice: either she remains silent or she uses the
language of the father that can only further repress her because of its
essentially patriarchal nature. The hysteric's body is all that is left for
her as a means by which to communicate.

6 Therapy as redemption
1 Vaclav Havel, who went from being a political prisoner to the president
of his country, had an acute sense of the necessity of a healthy sense of
the absurd, especially in the political arena, to avoid totalitarian
ideologies. Havel's Theater of the Absurd acts as an antidote to all
forms of ``isms.'' See David Barton, Vaclav Havel, unpublished
dissertation. Paci®ca Graduate Institute, 2006.
2 The one critique that I have most often heard about Sartre's existential
psychology is that, by denying the unconscious, his psychology ends
giving too much importance to the ego. Contrary to that clicheÂ, my
understanding of Sartre is that his notions of freedom, consciousness
and lucidity all involve a readiness to look at what one would rather
keep hidden. Although he does not favor the term ``unconscious,'' his
notion of ``bad faith'' is akin to a refusal to examine one's deeper
motivations and cover the truth with rationalizations and defense
mechanisms. Sartre does not give too much importance to the ego but
rather insists on the importance of lucidity to keep the ego in check.
Rollo May's book Man's Search for Himself (New York: Norton,
1953), which was read by a whole generation of psychologists, also
contained some of the usual clicheÂs about Sartre's philosophy. Rollo
May wrote: ``One wonders what will happen to Sartre's existentialims
at it gets farther away from the French resistance movement. Some
astute critics have stated it may go authoritarian: Tillich believes it may
go into Catholicism, and Marcel predict it will go Marxist.'' None of
this happened, rather the opposite. Bernard Henry LeÂvy, revisiting the
philosophical and literary legacy of Sartre considers it one of the major
contributions in the twentieth century. LeÂvy's book is titled Le sieÁcle de
Sartre: enqueÃte philosphique (Paris: Grasset, 2000). Sartre: the
philosopher of the twentieth century (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004).
3 Sartre's idea that ``hell is Others'', which one could as well translate as
 Notes 231

``bliss is Others'', was suggesting a rapport with other humans and with
the world that is very similar to the basic intuition of eco-psychology. It
suggests that since there is no tight boundary between me and others,
me and the world, we all suffer the destruction of the environment in a
very personal manner.
4 Marguerite Yourcenar, the ®rst woman ever to be admitted at the
French Academy, seemed absolutely ®ne with the fact of having had no
mother.
5 Such as Sam Harris, Luc Ferry, Andre Comte-Sponville, and Michel
Onfray.
6 James Hillman, through his body of work, analyses in depth the
problem of literal thinking in the ®eld of psychology.
7 ``Deux amours ont baÃti deux citeÂs. L'amour de soi, jusqu'au meÂpris de
Dieu, la cite terrestre, l'amour de Dieu, jusqu"au meÂpris de soi, la citeÂ
ceÂleste.'' Augustin, La Cite de Dieu, livre XIV.
8 Especially in his Heroe with a thousand faces.
9 The word ``zoeÈ'' from which we derive zoology described that essential
quality of Dionysus.
10 Another example of a huge shadow is with Muslim religion; it presents
itself as egalitarian, yet it is one of the most sexist on earth and one in
which the gap between the poor and the rich is an abyss.

7 Boundary issues: ``You, science. Me,

humanities.''
1 Encarta Encyclopedia.
2 One fascinating demonstration of the power of myth is in Carolyn
Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life (New York: Norton, 1988). This
classic literary study from the famous Columbia professor has been a
required reading for all students of psychology sitting in my classes. She
shows, through her analysis of the literature of a period, how the legal
rights (for example, the right for a woman to divorce) have little
meaning unless the cultural myth also changes. She demonstrates how a
women's psyche (her perception of herself, her psychology) is tied to the
cultural myth about female identity.
3 Such as Adams, Samuels, Stein, Lopez-Pedraza, GuggenbuÈhl-Craig,
GuggenbuÈhl, Hall, Watkins, Zoja, Cobb.
4 Such as Casey, Avens, Downing, Miller, Slattery.
5 See Bibliography for works by James Hillman.
6 Published in Harvard Magazine, January±February 1997.
7 One should also mention the proliferation of approaches that use the
word ``therapy'' (such as: marriage and couples therapy, family
therapy, sex therapy, art therapy, dance therapy, drama therapy, music
therapy, play therapy, hypnotherapy, grief therapy); or the word
``counseling'' (such as: career and life-style counseling, pastoral coun-
seling, schools and youth counseling, cross-cultural counseling).
232 Notes

8 Brother philosophy, sister psychology

1 Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition
(DSM IV) (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000),
p xxxi.
2 DSM IV, p. xxx.
3 The letter was to J.S. Beck, sent on October 1792 and is published in
Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, 1759±99, A. Zweig, Trans.
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1967).
4 James Hillman de®nes the capacity to ``see through'' as the basis of
psychological intelligence, a capacity to read, to see through to the
myth or archetype being enacted in any situation. Hillman does not
borrow any of Sartre's heavy conceptual baggage, but ends up in a
territory that feels familiar to existentialists.

9 The archetype of Mother

1 Roland Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble: Cours et seÂminaires au
ColleÁge de France 1976±1977, texte eÂtabli, annote et preÂsente par
Claude Costes. Et: 1977±1978. Texte eÂtabli, annote et preÂsente par
Thomas Clerc, Le Seuil/Imec.
2 The category of Mood Disorders in the DSM-IV includes most forms of
depressive disorders as well as bipolar disorders. The category of
Anxiety Disorders includes Panic Attack, Phobias, Obsessive-
Compulsive Disorder, Post-Traumatic and Acute Stress Disorder, and
the different forms of Anxiety Disorders. The category of Somatoform
Disorders includes most of what is generally understood as psycho-
somatic and is de®ned by ``the presence of physical symptoms that
suggest a general medical condition and are not explained by a general
medical condition, by the direct effect of a substance, or by another
mental disorder.''
3 Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers, a book that Jung admired, was a
severe critique of the ``Big Mothers'' (New York: Farrar and Rinehart,
1942).

10 The archetype of Father

1 The Greeks had the word ``kaõÃros,'' which meant anything that was
done or said at just the right moment, not too soon, not too late, just
precisely when it would have its full effect. (See Plato, Ethics to
Nicomaque, II, 1104.1.9.)

11 The invisibility of the psyche

1 ``And what is God's excuse for not responding?'' (Woody Allen)
2 An average of three and a half hours a day (Time Magazine, November
2006).
 Notes 233

3 On average, one minute a day of physical contact with another human

being, which includes hugs, caresses, love-making. (Time Magazine,
November 2006).
4 Rene Spitz did most of this research during and after World War II, but
continued to study the effect of emotional deprivation on infants. A
good summary can be found in: Rene Spitz and Godfrey Cobliner First
Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Devel-
opment of Object Relations (New York: International Universities
Press, 1966).
5 Jane Bethke Elshtain, Jane Adams and the Dream of American
Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 83.
6 See, for example, the report of Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity:
Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1998).
7 BOBO: Bohemian Bourgeois.

12 The ultimate virtual reality game

1 Especially the work of James Hillman.
2 It is an old story, and still happening! For example, Carl Jung could no
more escape the sexism of his time than his contemporaries. He too
would have preferred male followers and the appreciation of male
colleagues. He candidly expressed his disappointment in attracting
mostly women disciples, even when they devoted their whole intellect
to helping him with his work. See D. Bair Jung: A Biography (1st ed.)
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2003).
3 If the ¯ip-¯ops are in themselves a fashion statement, or if the jeans are
a way of saying ``I don't believe in marriage,'' it becomes a line in the
unfolding of a story of rebellion. It is when the refusal to dress up
expresses a laziness, a carelessness, that it becomes a refusal to play in
the social game.
4 Nietzsche used the notion of Amor Fati in his Zarathustra, and also in
Will to Power (tome II, Intro., p. 14).
5 G. Durand, The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (M.
Sankey and J. Hatten, Trans.). (Brisbane: Boombana Publications,
1999).
6 C. LeÂvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (J. and D. Weightman,
Trans.). (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).
7 M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New
York: Harcourt, 1959).
8 The post-Jungian author, Michael Vannoy Adams, in his The Fantasy
Principle (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004) argues that in
classical, conventional Jungian analysis, archetypes are de®ned as
structures, whereas he ®nds it more accurate, from a post-structuralist
perspective, to consider archetypes like constructs.
9 To be ``accredited'' (licensed) as a clinician, one has to study in an
``accredited'' school, pass an exam on the ``accredited'' theories and
behave within the ``accredited'' code of ethics.
234 Notes

10 The argument is similar to that of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach,

the author of The Essence of Christianism. He considered religion to be
an alienation which has at its core a reversal of values. The person
alienates his or her desires, hopes, values in favor of a god symbol that
then carries all the essential and best attributes of human values (com-
passion, justice, power). The role of the philosopher is then to liberate
humanity from this theological oppression, through a systematic
deconstruction of the mysti®cation of religion. Feuerbach's analysis is a
core in¯uence in the work of Freud as much as that of Karl Marx.
11 P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer,
Trans.). (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

13 Joy: the antidote to anxiety

1 Michael Vannoy Adams writes a convincing demonstration of how
psychology has consistently moved away from what he calls the
Fantasy Principle and how this constitutes an impoverishment of
culture.
2 Pierre Janet De l 'Angoisse aÁ l 'Extase (1926). My translation:
``L'angoisse chronique est un sentiment caracteÂristique des eÂtats
meÂlancoliques; il se preÂsente aÁ la conscience comme une douleur et
surtout comme une peur vague, que l'on a souvent appeleÂes des
douleurs et des peurs morales, pour indiquer qu'il s'agit d'une douleur
mal preÂciseÂe, et d'une peur sans objet. En reÂalite il s'agit d'une chose
fort preÂcise: le sujet a peur de sa propre action, et souffre aÁ la penseÂe de
l'exeÂcuter. Cette peur arreÃte l'action d'une manieÁre de®nitive, et non
d'une manieÁre momentaneÂe, comme dans la halte, ou le sentiment de la
fatigue. Cet arreÃt de l'action et cette angoisse peuvent eÃtre localiseÂs,
dans les phobies; quand ils sont eÂtendus aÁ un grand nombre d'actions,
l'homme ressemble aÁ une beÃte traqueÂe qui essaie successivement toutes
les issues et n'en trouve aucune: il ne peut plus faire aucun acte, ni en
deÂsirer, ni en reÃver aucun; il ne peut plus vivre, ni toleÂrer sa propre vie.
L'angoisse aigue ameÁne l'ideÂe de la mort et les tentatives de suicide. Le
sentiment, qui reste au fond toujours le meÃme, est celui de l'urgence de
l'action, et en meÃme temps, du caracteÁre deÂfectueux et abominable de
toute action.'')
3 They are still trying the trick: hurricanes, earthquakes, (and) AIDS are
often presented by fundamentalists of all creeds as divine retribution.
4 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema: The Movement Image, Vol. 1. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
5 Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols (London: Aldus Books, 1964), p. 161.
6 Miguel Serrano, C.G. Jung and Herman Hesse: A Record of Two
Friendships (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), p. 50. In David Miller
(1995) ``Nothing almost sees miracles!'', Journal of Psychology of
Religion, 4±5, 1±25.
7 ``It is not incertitude that creates madness, it is certitude'' (Nietzsche).
Index

abuse: physical versus psychological 202; as symbol of post-modernity

171±2 198±202; vicious circle of 200; ways
abused men and women 38 of naming fear 198±9
academia: as house of rationality 95 anxiety disorders 25, 131
academic milieu: survival of women in Aphrodite 67, 70, 75, 204, 209
94±6, 100 Apollo 70, 75, 136, 186
Addams, J. 166 archetypal approach: as aesthetic
Adler, A. 86 experience 46; becoming aware of
adult psyche: as orientation towards one's myth 178; developing
achieving responsibility 116; as psychological polytheism 70±1;
somebody capable of assuming editing of life's scripts 174±8, 181±2,
responsibility 160 185, 213±14; as education in lucidity
alchemy: images of psychic maturation 46, 90; as existing beyond
150±3 quanti®cation 185±6; as inner voyage
Allen, W. 26 42; as map through psychic
American Academy of Psychoanalysis 86 devastation 64±6; as meaning given to
American Psychiatric Association 85 events 177, 185±6; victim versus hero
American Psychological Association 177
(APA) 26, 29, 91, 187 archetypal father and mother: in African-
amor fati: as love of one's fate, of one's American community 141; family's
story 184 need of balance 141±3; good cop/bad
analysis: by acknowledging monsters cop 141; yin versus yang strategies
68±78; 141±2, 144
as adventure 56; as conversation between archetypal reality: the invisible made
friends 56; as heroic encounter with visible 164±7
inner monsters 69; as metamorphosis Archetype of Child 16±17; fed by
through words 182±3; as raising consumerist society 154; God-the-
capacity for love and imagination 213; Child as replacement for God-the-
as re-virgining of oneself 209; as Father 114; infantile adult 15; infantile
singing or dancing with one's soul 43, citizens and cultural values 138; inner
91, 208 child 14±15; the inner child
anima: psychology belonging to 102 monomyth approach 114, 153; and
animus: philosophy belonging to 102 manipulation to transform everyone
anti-psychiatry: English, 93 into a Great Mother 116, 147; Puer
anxiety: de®ned as fear without an object Aeternus (Eternal Child) as 16; as self-
202±4; de®nition of fear 198±204; as proclaimed victim 115
incapacity to feel Archetype of Father: 17±18, 152; as
joy 197±8, 204; as the ``metaphysical balance between power and
blues'' 199; and post-modern psyche responsibility 142, 145; God the
236 Index

Father as 17; hardness as a paternal Bion, W.R. 86

quality in 121; as law and order 17; as bipolar disorders 25
manifested in the psyche 143; blindness: collective psychological
president of country as 139, 142; as 167±8, 172±3
principle of responsibility 161; Bowlby, J. 86
professions and social roles linked with Buddhism 15, 155
17±18, 142; projection of 17; as
teacher of self-control 146±7; Campbell, J. 69, 80; ignored by
traditionalists' de®nition of 140; will academics despite cultural in¯uence
to win as 140 95±7
Archetype of Mother 15±17, 147, 176, Camus, A. 62±4, 100
179; archetypal role versus Caprio, F. S. 28
biological 125±6, 131±2; as caregivers: burnout as result of
collective failure and cultural society's lack of maternal qualities
de®ciency 132±9; as compassion, as 138
opposed to powerlessness and castrating attitudes of the therapist: in
weakness 140; gradual social family therapy 145
``degendarization'' of 123, 125±6, Ceausescu: orphanages 166
132; as Mother of the Nation 137, Charybdis 203
139; and the necessity of protection chemical imbalances: validation of the
and tenderness 122±3, 132; as medical model 25
nurturing 15; and perverse Christianity: as destructive monopoly on
consequence of illusion of oneness values 68
157; the pope using symbolism of cognitive-behavioral approaches:
143; Princess Diana as 137; economical value of 38±9, 42±6; as
psychology's excessive genderization education in human relations 39,
of 123; Queen Mum in England as 42±3; overlap with depth-psychology
137; and role in depression 131±2; 38±9, 42
Roosevelt, E., as 137; and security as compassion: as measure of the level of a
illusion 117; and separation 15; civilization 120; misinterpretation of,
smothering, as creator of a ``rotten as animal signal of submission 122; as
paradise'' 129; softness judged as part of the collective mother complex
infantile and feminine, 121±3; 17
therapist's need to wean the patient complexes: cultural 39
of 146, 151±6 complexity: of human psyche 27, 35±6,
Ares 70 213; as pleasurable 43±4, 47
Aristotle 92, 97 consciousness: expansion of 23
Artemis 48, 70, 204 Cooper, D. 26, 93
arts and humanities: 36, depth crying: as psychic movement 131
psychology as part of 86 cultural values: relativity and in¯uence on
Athena 70 psychology of 189±93; religious
attention de®cit/hyperactivity disorder in¯uences in therapeutic milieus
35, 135 188±92
Augustine 65 culture: denial of emotional deprivation
in 166±7; and homosexuality 28±9;
Bachelard, G. 93 impact on psyche of 25, 27, 214;
Barthes, R. 121 language re®nement as part of
Bateson, G. 199 38±9; resilience versus decadence
Baudelaire, C. 138 138; social values about normality
beauty myth: and teenagers 168±9 30±2
Beauvoir, S. de 93, 99±102 cure: pursuit of psychological 23, 25, 42,
Bechet, S. 100 46, 91
Beckett, S. 60, 62, 100 curiosity: as educating tool for psyche
Bible 191 73±4
Biblis 191 cynicism: as cold draft on human
Big Brother: as Father Figure 139 relations 169
 Index 237

Da Vinci, L. 26, 138 existential angst: and feelings of dead-end

deconstructive-reconstructive 23; as linked with level of
approach: in archetypal consciousness 177; as a loss of faith
psychology 82±4, 179±81, 188, 60, 63±4;
213; in intellectual constructs:
101±2, 144 facts: versus emotions and interpretations
Deleuze, G. 203 174±7
Delumeau, J. 200±1 family: archetypes versus socio-biological
depth psychology: as an ecological model roles in 140±1; needs of psychological
45, 175; theoretical nuances in schools intimacy in 49; normality in 32±4, 84;
of 86±7 story or myth of 34, 48, 51
depression 85; as emotional family therapy: as inspired by legal model
hypothermia 165; as frustrated 48±51, 53; limits of the mediator
desire for dependence 207; as approach in 50±1, 53
paralysis of the psyche 131; as fear: cultural and historical
poverty of imagination and interpretations of 200±2; object of,
incapacity to feel joy 197±8, 207, scapegoat to explain fears 201;
213; as sedation of inner monsters vocabulary related to 199
207; as unconscious choice to remain feminism: critique of neurotic contracts
childish 131±2 in 118; as a pluralistic approach
Derrida, J. 183 101±2; as rejection of patriarchy and
developmental model 15 not of paternal principle 144
Dickens, C. 163, 165 feminists: early 45; European 101;
Dionysian approach: to psychological life political activism of American 101;
79 post-de Beauvoir 101; revolutionary
Dionysus 69, 186, 204 movement of 180
discipline : spiritual 14 ®ctionalization: as inevitable 178, 194±6
DSM / DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Food and Drug Administration (FDA):
Statistical Manual of Mental betrayal of collective maternal
Disorders) 25±6, 35±6, 131; as the function 136±7; links with
``Bible'' 93; binary logic in 36; and a pharmaceutical lobbies 136±7
case of thinking disorder 29; cultural Foucault, M. 26, 93
de®ciencies in 134±5; and historical Franz, M.-L von: concept of the self 210;
blunder about homosexuality confrontational style of 155
27±31; as a labeling of persons 89; freedom from need: as a prerequisite for
lack of symbolic resonance in 185; the ability to love 118
limitation of language of 39; Freud, S. 55, 57, 81, 83±6, 92±4, 104,
pseudo-scienti®c logic of 29±31; 110, 153, 189, 212; post-Freudians 93;
mood disorders in 25, 85, 131; religion as neurosis 31
risks of only treating symptoms with frigidity 27, 85
208
genderization: as philosophical problem
Echo (nymph) 75 17
economical model: money as supreme globalization of psyches: 105±13
value 37±9, 42±7 God: incomplete mourning of 57±68
education: value of 37 God complex and inner life: as alternative
Eichmann, A. 26 to faith in Jung 95; as artistic truth
Einstein, A. 26 186, 212
Eleusis: mysteries celebrated at 46 God-principle: as beyond-the-ego realm
emotions 23 of the archetype 67
Emperor Hadrian: and de®nition of Goethe 92, 201
slavery 124 Greek mythology: and analogy with
enantiodromia 178 cinema 203±5
enemy: de®ning of, cultural differences Gunderson, J.G. 84
162±6, 172±3 gurus: and mentors and masters, through
evocative power: of psyche 80, 85 reading 94
238 Index

Hades 70 Kafka, F. 62
Harvard 85 Kant, E 92, 98±9
healing 23 Keller, H. 26
Hegel, G.W.F. 99, 124 Kernberg, O. 84
Heidegger, M. 92 Kierkegaard, S. 92, 200, 204
Hell: as frozen state of the psyche 165 King Solomon: as persona 99
Hephaestos 70 Klein, M. 86
Hera 70 Koestler, A. 100
Hermes 56, 70 Kohut, H. 84, 86
Hestia 70
Hillman, J. 67, 84, 86, 185, 208 labels: and identities 87±8
Hinduism 155 Lacan, J. 86, 93, 182, 185; post-
Hitchcock, A. 203 Lacanians 93
Hollywood: as thermometer for our Laing, R. 26, 93
culture 168±9 language: as tool of transformation 42±3
home: as locations, persons, situations, LeÂvi-Strauss, C. 185, 190
atmospheres, where one can put down libidinal economy: society's bankruptcy
one's defenses 121 of 164
homosexuality 27±31, 85; false libido 27; expression of, as love of life
theorizing about causes of 28; 116; in a mothers' life 125, 129
theorized as sickness 28 life's story: as connexion between
Hugo, V. 163, 165 objective and subjective reality 174±7,
hysteria 85 193±6; stylistic concerns in 38, 207
literalism 144
ideas: as toxic when based on invalid Lorenz, K. 199
inferences 89±90 Lot 191
identity: as expressed and fabricated love 36; as avoidance of neurotic patterns
through a narrative 186±7, 195; 118±20, 123±4, 126±7, 157; as cage
evolution of personal and social 115; conditional 17; inequality
180±1; gender versus archetype in between partners as in parent/child
125±6; identity games and social relationships 118±20, 123±4, 126±7,
pathologies 181±2; rigidifying of 27 157; kinds of 117
identi®cation process: as harmed by lovemaking 27
sacri®cial style of mothering 124, 144 Lucas, G. 95±6
Iliad 59
imagination: as cure against despair 196; male psyche: weakening of, in oppressive
and formation of identity 195, 208; patriarchal systems 124
poverty of, as cause of losing vitality manic agitation 131
46; as re-mythologization 204±5 master: omniscient Savior versus human
incest 190±1 being 56
insomnia 137 maternalization of therapy: consequences
Ionesco, E. 62, 100 of 151±6; and loving versus needing in
Irigaray, L. 101±2 maternity myth 117;
psychology's obsessive focus on the
Janet, P. 198±9 biological mother's role 132±3, 143,
jargon: as way to defend theoretical turf 151±6
106±11 medical model: in the family 34; and
joy: as better teacher than pain 214 Medicare: link with DSM 36;
Joyce, J. 26 medication 25; and mental disorders
Jung, C. G. 55, 57, 64, 69, 80, 83, 86, versus physical disorders 25±6; as
92±6, 157, 178, 185, 210; cultural opposed to inner voyage 212
impact of, insult to some academics medical treatment 23; versus initiation 25
95±7; Jungians 16, 84, 132, 185; post- Mercurius 56
Jungians 84, 132; spiritual aspect of Merleau-Ponty, M. 100
inner life in 95 metaphor: as expression of subjective
Jupiter 17 meaning 184±6
 Index 239

Miller, H. 100 Orwell, G. 139

Minautor: as symbol of one feeding on Other: the philosophical 67, 74±5,
youth 202 211
mind/body dualism 25
misery: as invisible if psychological Pan 204
162±5, 172; as sedated pathos 165 panic attacks 137
mother role: First Lady as Mother of the paradox 23
Nation 137; in¯ating power of 115; as Pascal, B. 140
sacri®cial, servile, romanticized in perception: as function of myth that
traditional values 122±5; self-effacing organizes psyche 176
mother in post-feminist culture Perls, F. 93
124±5 persona 14, 207; in¯uence of location
Mozart, A. 26, 138 and time on 196; rigid 181±2; supple
music 36 181
Myrrh 191 personality: de®nition of normal 26±32;
myth 39; in arts and depth disorders 25, 85; pro®les 26±7, 29±30;
psychology163±5; traits, as unsustainable beliefs when
cultural and psychological updating of culturally based 181
81±3; deconstructing as seeing Phaedra 191
through 81±2; as a dismantling of lies Pharaoh: beard as symbol of father for
179±81; as ®ction 81±2; in 142
foundational story 81; in process of pharmaceutical industry: and funding of
®ctionalization 176±7; in sense of self DSM research 35±6
23 philosophical approach: with children
159±61
narcissism: narcissistic monster 74±5; philosophy: as re®ning questions 102; as
teenage 117±8 having same fundamental questions as
Narcissus 74±5, 179 in psychology 103±5, 108;
neurohormonal imbalances 25 to think through psychological problems
neuroscience 31; and humanities 35±6; 99; versus psychiatry 25
overlaps and splits with psychology Pinter, H. 62
through time 79, 83±5, 87 Plato 92, 97
neurosis : medical concept versus Poe, E. A. 138
symbolic approach 68±9 Polanski, R. 203
neurotic behaviors : as addiction to a political correctness: hypocrisy and
joyless life 197 accentuation of the shadow by 155,
New Age spirituality : recycling of 180
religious re¯exes in 65 Poseidon 70
Nietzsche, F. 57, 61, 64, 66±7, 184 post-modernism: as collective therapy
normality: fabricated de®nition of 28; 64
normalizing power of psychology post-traumatic disorders 85
26 prostitute 27
norms: relativity of 26; as statistical Prozac 136
de®nition 29±31 Proust, M. 93, 196
nymphomaniac 27 psychic death: 167
psychic hunger: to have or to be 45
objecti®cation of the wife: in pre-feminist psychic suffering: as invisible epidemic,
traditions 123±4 seen as individual cases by medicine
odyssey: as ampli®cation of life story to and psychology 167±8, 172±3
give it meaning 59 psychology: as art, 14; as intelligence 14;
Oedipus 153; oedipal struggling in as love and destiny 120, 157; as
Freudian analysis 187 wisdom 14
organizational psychologists 29 psychotechnicians: and testing 26
orthodoxies: as struggling to enclose
individuals in dominant myth racism 27, 58, 65, 179±81
179±81 Rank, O. 86
240 Index

reciprocation: hope of, as psychological symptoms 23±5; as artistic production

attitude to give what we most need 208; as language of the soul 208±9; as
ourselves 122 a slowing down 209
redemption: versus individuation 54±78, Szasz, T. 26, 28, 93
95
regression: to dependency 120; as part of tenderness: as maternal archetype 121±3;
all adult life 147 as niche, rest for the psyche 121±3
Reich, W. 86 tests: personality 26
religion: versus archetypal values as theological: versus a-theological
transcendence 68; denial of the transcendent myth 61
shadow of 61, 69±70; and the sense of theoretical grids: limits of 90±1
the sacred, as resurfacing in social therapist: and in¯uence on creation of
causes 58, 60; and spiritual values patient's new myth 187±91
66±8 therapy: as art of seeing through one's
Ricoeur, P. 195±6 cinema 89; maternalization of 143±7,
Ritalin 136±7 151±6
ritual 25 Thoreau, H. 26, 138
Russell, B. 102 training in psychotherapy: theoretical
indoctrination in 187±8
Sartre, J.-P. 26, 57, 63±4, 93, 100±1, truth: factual versus artistic or
120, 177, 195, 200 psychological 81±2
Schopenhauer, A. 106
Scylla 203 unconscious: bypassing the notion of
Self 39, 57, 209±10; cherry metaphor of 42
210±1; as Jung's God 95 Underworld 39, 66
Serrano, M. 210 University of Los Angeles 106
sexism 27, 58, 65, 123, 180; and
judgment on sexual normalcy 27; Varda, A. 101
sexist bias in psychology 121±3; sexist Vatican 190
societies: vicious circle of maternal via negativa: as avoiding destructive
power and male chauvinism 116, realities, versus pursuing redemption
123±5 68
shadow: destructive force of 68±9; Victorian England 27
psychic 90 virtual reality: depth psychology as
siblings: reciprocal in¯uence 92 creating of 86
Sisyphus 62 Vivaldi, A. 138
social phobias 137 Voltaire 57
social scientists 23
social support systems: and the maternal weaning 15
collective complex 120±39 Whitman, W. 138
somatoform disorders 131 Wilde, O. 26
Sorbonne 100 Winnicott, D.W. 86
soul 23 wisdom 14, 23; in archetypal roles 151;
Spinoza, B. 106 as compass 14; as destination 14
Spitz, R.A. 166 Woolf, V. 26, 138
Stein, G. 138 words, betrayal of 183±4
Stone, A. 85
Styx 65 yin/yang balance: as psychic need in
suicidal impulses 137 families and societies 70±1, 121,
sustainable development: as necessity to 139
avoid a culture of infantile adults
120 Zarathustra 58
symbols: as universal form of Zeus 17, 70, 75, 204; as authority of
communication 94 father ®gure 142, 144±5