oh so habituous

Thoughts on an idea from City and Soul, by James Hillman

The following excerpt comes from an essay a friend sent to me a few days ago. It is from the book City and Soul, by James Hillman, a psychotherapist and prolific author. The primary idea governing the chapter I was given seems to be a call for psychologists to overcome the distinction between a subjective, internal psyche, or soul, and a strictly material, external world, to be replaced by the understanding that the physical world is also psychical, or ensouled, so that it becomes entirely legitimate (and not merely figurative) to say, for instance, that "Our buildings are anorexic, our business paranoid... Our technology manic."

One part especially struck me (and Jessie when I read it to her), probably because it uses as its illustration the situation of marital disagreements leading toward divisive conflict. Jessie and I argue about stuff, of course, and quite often our arguments generate new ways of doing things, or new ways of thinking about things - recognizing the need to adjust something which is causing discomfort or annoyance, or realizing something about ourselves in a different way. But our conflicts are also sometimes caught in an uneasiness, and with being overwhelmed by things which elude us, and which we too quickly take upon ourselves (or push on the other) as a wrong which is ours (isn't it?) but which we are not able to quite get our hands on to do anything about. We are left feeling responsible (and guilty, weary, etc) for things which we do not even understand. The following from James Hillman was helpful yesterday in understanding this problem more clearly:

A decaying marriage [or any relationship, we could say: family, church, office, etc] can be analyzed to its intra- and inter-subjective roots, but until we have also considered the materials and design of the rooms in which the marriage is set, the language in which it is spoken, the clothing in which it is presented, the food and money that are shared, the drugs and cosmetics used, the sounds and smells and tastes that daily enter the heart of that marriage -- until psychology admits the world into the sphere of psychic reality -- there can be no amelioration, and, in fact, we are conspiring in the destruction of that marriage by loading onto the human relationship and the subjective sphere the repressed unconsciousness projecting from the world of things.

The inclusion of these matters into therapy...can have immediate practical effect. The married partners no longer focus only on themselves and their relationship. Together they turn their eyes to the indignities imposed on them by the world. Personal rage with each other turns to outrage, and even compassion... Those who were in couple therapy become the therapeutic couple whose patient is their world.

Hillman is employing standard psychological ideas (like "repressed unconsciousness"), but applying the term not to the subjects' internal world (i.e. repressed memories from childhood) but to actual presences exerting unconscious force and persuasive power in the material world. The objects in our world, if I understand him correctly, would be rightly understood as embodying certain psychological forces just as a human body displays and embodies (if that's the right way to put it) the soul in healthy and unhealthy ways. The idea might sound strange, but the impulse toward retreats or vacations (such as the one Jessie and I are going on next weekend) is testimony to the fact that our surroundings and daily routines are not satisfying our psychical or spiritual needs -- even that they are hostile in some sense (and so we call it a retreat).

My thinking about Hillman's ideas does not involve simply blaming the world for what before would have been considered my own personal problems. It needs to be put differently than that. For me it suggests that the sources of "my" problems do not need to be found inside of me, but in the particular environments I live in. Even if the problems are "mine" in some way, it is not that I need to go into therapy, necessarily, but instead that I need to recognize the fact that I am permeable and am influenced and shaped in even very subtle ways by the things of the world. And so it is part of my responsibility to help fix, or at least to be responsible for my participation in, the things of the world that themselves need a kind of therapy.

That is why the last phrase is the one that attracted me the most: "Those who were in couple therapy become the therapeutic couple." It is a movement away from obsession with personal guilt and personal absolution, and a movement toward recognition of the importance of the things that surround us, the very active role they play on our psyches - on our soul - and it is a movement toward re-crafting our lives and our things with this reality in mind.