Pathologizing and Soul

 

(Chapter 2 from Interviews by James Hillman, 1983)

 

L.P.  In most of your writings you have deliberately chosen the shadow aspects of the psyche: suicide, betrayal, masochism, masturbation, failure, depression, opportunism.  But you never wrote on other shadow aspects like aggressivity, violence, power, sadism. Don't you find your attitude inconsistent?

 

J.H.  I don't try to be consistent. I don't even think about it. It would get systematic, everything fitting neatly. If you are really going to be polytheistic, you are bound—not to some principle of consistency—you are bound by the immediate necessity you are in.  The psyche is very inconsistent—think of dreams. Consistency appears in dreams as insistency, a return to the same place or person or agony insistently . . . .

 

L.P. But why did you choose only passive, shadow aspects and leave out the active, aggressive ones?

 

J.H.  The things you mentioned—aggression, violence, power, sadism—aren't shadow at all; that's the whole Western ego! Go ahead, get ahead, do it. It's only when that breaks down, when depression comes in, and you can't get up and do it. When impotence happens and you can't get on with it. When you feel beaten, oppressed, knocked back . . . then something moves and you begin to feel yourself as a soul. You don't feel yourself as a soul when you're asking it and doing it. So I've been concerned all along with those parts of behavior which, in our culture, further the sense of soul. This is not to say there isn't a huge question about violence and power and domination. But I can't attack violence and power and domination directly.  I can go only where it begins to crumble, where the psyche itself undermines, and where fantasy begins to show.  When you're in the middle of domination, you don't feel yourself in a fantasy of domination. You are concerned with grabbing the object and getting what you want from it. But when you are suffering, when there's failure, dejection, and you are cast down, thrown back on yourself, left alone, wet, in one way or another‚then you begin to feel, Who am I? What is going on? Why can't I? WHy doesn't my will work? The Great Western Will—that I have been trained ever since I was a child to know what I want, to get it, and do it.  To be independent! It doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman here. You're taught to be independent, to stand on your own two feet, to take what you need, to know what you want, and to know where you're going.  Now all of that gets defeated by the syndromes or the symptoms I'm talking about, the pathologizing. Suicide is one. Betrayal is one. Masturbation is another one, extremely important, because of the fantasy and the sense of oneself and the complications. But now, masturbation has become industrialized and it's . . . 

 

L.P. It's just pornography . . . .

 

J.H. Well, not "just" pornography. I'm thinking of the equipment. It's a very large business. Even in upper-class department stores, there are "masturbation kits"—very clean, very plastic, well designed. Like home tools for your body. And the advertising for those machines—even if it doesn't use the word "masturbation"—talks about stress-relief, about relaxation, instead of excitement. Where's the secret, dirty excitement? Instead of surreptitiousness, we have workshops—probably about how to use the tools.  It's become an anesthesia, like a tranquilizer that goes with watching TV.  I think it once had fantasies in it:  guilt, inhibitions, romance, images of all sorts.  Strange images—postures and freakishness and longings and compulsive materials like Portnoy's liver. It was a rich psychological field that is now industrialized:  all the fantasy is in the plastic equipment.  It's the same way with depression. I think I said somewhere that the real revolution in our society begins with the person who can stand with his own depression.  Because then you say no to the whole manic situation of modern society:  overconsumption, overactivity, travel.

 

Here we sit in Zurich. You come up from Rome, I come over from Texas. We never saw each other before. We sit down and start talking. That's manic. That's madness. We haven't written long letters to each other to know who the other is and what we feel and how we can talk, if we can talk.  I haven't been on a boat for ten days crossing the ocean preparing. We assume we can at once talk, even talk significantly. That's manic! As if anyone can talk with anyone, which you can do on the telephone, of course, because there is no face, no eyes, no body there. The other is not taken into account on the telephone—just rude intrusions into someone's privacy. Manic.  Our actual conversations are now modeled on telephone talk. No pauses, because if there is a moment of reflection, a moment of silence, you wonder if the other person is still there. Manic. Keep talking, like I'm doing now.

 

The culture expects one to be manic: hyperactive, spend and consume and waste, be very verbal, flow of ideas, don't stay too long with anything—the fear of being boring—and we lose the sense of sadness. For a good interview we have to move it.  It can't really get stuck, repetitive, go down, dry up, let it affect us to the point where a conversation could affect us.  The interview is supposed to be personal, but it's not supposed to enter the realm of depression. So the whole structure that you mentioned: aggressive, dominant, power, sadistic, we can also call manic. And that quality of the psyche is our ego development. It's so ego identified that we don't even see it as a syndrome! What we see as a syndrome is slowness, sadness, dryness, waiting.  That we call depression, and we have a gigantic pharmaceutical industry to deal with it.

 

L.P.  It is usually thought that depression is the contrary of happiness, as masochism is the reversal of sadism.  In your writings these nonactive phenomena become modes in their own right and are no longer the twisted mirror image of their contrary . . . 

 

J.H.  You've touched on a very important point. If I look at a poem, I can't say that poem is the opposite of another poem.  Or that this short story by Edgar Allen Poe is the opposite of a short story by D. H. Lawrence. It makes no sense.  I have to work with the D. H. Lawrence story as it is. In the arts you don't use opposites. You may say there are strong contrasts in a painting, between blue and red or between the upper part and the lower part or the form and the content, whatever.  But what's in front of the eyeballs, the image, isn't concerned with the question of opposites. I don't think about conscious versus unconscious or sadism versus masochism or activity versus passivity; I try to stick with what is presented.

 

There is another way I could go at this problem, which is through Christianity. The Christian view moves in on a situation immediately in terms of morality—good or bad; it starts off with a pair of opposites.  So you're trapped in judgments before you examine the phenomenon.  If you say activity is good, then passivity has to become negative and weak and neurotic.  If passivity gets the plus sign, then activity has to become aggressive. You're caught.  You can never deal with a thing as it is.  So why not try to understand a phenomenon, darkness, say, without referring to light, without contrasting it with light.  You can study the quality of the shadows, where they are, their thickness, their depth, whether these shadows are painted with purple or blue or umber or burnt umber or shades of gray, without any reference to light.

 

L.P.  But thinking in opposites seems unavoidable . . . 

 

J. H.  Yes, thinking; but feeling, perceiving, sensing, are not by means of opposites. Unfortunately, a lot of the thinking in psychology—either because it's Christian or because it's based on the law of contradiction or because it comes out of a certain kind of theoretical fascination with structure—is opposite.  Even Freud and Jung have become "opposites" when they could be seen as brothers or as father and son. 

 

I'm simply following the imagistic, the phenomenological way:  take a thing for what it is and let it talk.  And if we're talking about depression, let the depression show all the images of depression, whether it's saturnine depression or at the bottom of the sea with Dionysus or like Theseus sitting on a stone forever, heroic paralysis—so much to do he can't move.  Mars too has terrible depression:  bitter lonely frustration, like rust; or Hera, "the left one" as she was called—forsaken, all alone, who cares? So many styles of depression . . . In the Middle Ages, for example, they had three animals that depicted depression:  the pig, the dog, and the ass, I believe.  But there is also the camel that can take the desert and the moose, alone in the woods, big and gangly and trying to hide.  So, we had in the old lore of animals and of planets certain images of the depression.  We didn't have to contrast depression with activity or with manic conditions.  We don't have to see states as opposites.

 

L. P.  But then this is also true for masochism.  Masochism has a world of its own.  It is not only feminine, only passive, and the opposite of sadism: it is not only the passive response to an activity directed against it.  Masochism is also a sort of destruction from the inside, like irony: one accepts the partner's rules so literally that they become nonsensical, absurd.  One undermines them from the inside, in a sort of ironic mimicry.  It shows the ritualistic, the compulsory, the mechanical side of any behavior like in a parody.  In that sense masochism could be an ironic mode of reflection: and this is something that modern, contemporary theater shows very well.

 

J.H. You need a certain masochism, a masochistic touch, for deepening—it is a mode of deepening into one's pain which is almost mystical.  Which doesn't mean necessarily that one is in some way sadistic, or that there is a sadistic partner in it, and so on and so forth.  How can you "undergo" or "submit"—those basic words for the process of psychological development—if you can't "suffer"?  Awareness itself hurts.  It isn't only a joy—there are joys when you suddenly see something or realize something—but there is also a painful aspect of going through analysis, whether you go actually into analysis or whether you just simply realize something.  There is a feeling of pain involved in it.  It hurts—that thought, that realization, that awareness. And that hurting is the same as becoming more sensitive.  In English, "smart" means clever, intelligent, and it means sting, pain, hurt.  Why does the psyche hurt us? Why does it have to hurt to realize something, to recognize something? Now, for me, that's a masochistic experience.  There's a joy in that hurting because a layer of your skin's been peeled: you're that much more sensitive.  Because the insight hurts and makes you more sensitive.  You've got to be masochistic to become aware.

 

L. P.  So awareness is always connected with pain . . . 

 

J.H.  Maybe that's why symptoms are so useful.  And maybe, too, that's why I don't give much for the body therapies—getting out all the kinks and tensions, relax, symptom-free.  I feel masochism goes with consciousness . . .  not get rid of the pain—after all, the psyche sends it, doesn't it?—but enjoy it, like a masochist.  That's irony, though not quite what you meant by it, I guess.

 

L. P.  Your psychology is certainly not one of hedonism, of pleasure and joy.

 

J. H.  Let's not separate pleasure from pain in that abstract way, as if a serious depressive psychology didn't have its joy or its pleasures—for example, pleasures of the senses, pleasures of dwelling long and slow with things, pleasures of darkness.  You see, for me, that's another aspect of the masochism of consciousness, it enjoys becoming conscious through pain.  In the story of Eros and Psyche, Psyche suffers terrible torments and at the same time has a child in her belly called Voluptas and she works for Venus.  Pleasure and pain are very complicated and very intertwined and psychology has pulled them apart into opposites. So we fear everything painful, missing the beauty and pleasure inside the very pain.

 

L.P.  But still you don't start from the joyous side; you seem always to begin where it hurts.

 

J. H. I suppose I have a penchant for those conditions of failure, weakness, abandonment . . . But I think I can justify it theoretically. I mean we need to place this weakness, these pathologies into the theoretical fantasy of the Body, the Soul, and the Spirit.  The soul is the middle ground in the traditions of Plato and Plotinus and Jung, too. The soul always seems to be weaker than or more "feminine" than or more receptive than the spirit.  If you look at the language of the spirit, its descriptions, its images—it is always ultimate, absolute, high, the tops of the mountains; the soul is in the alley.  In a piece I wrote called "Peaks and Vales,"  I touch on literature, religious texts, and common language, different places to contrast the phenomenology of the soul and the phenomenology of the spirit.  The soul is experienced as something inferior.  There's a necessary inferiority when you're in psychic reality.  One of the problems of this interview at the very beginning was how to do it, how do you stay psychological and yet be on top of everything—be on top—right there with the word, the logos. Logos, when working beautifully, leaves the soul out—if you bring the soul in, you start to stutter or you'll go around in circles or you'll be unable to elocute it in a way that does justice to it—you will be in half-darkness.  My point is that soul means inferiority—something sensitive, something . . . well . . . pathologized.  Soul makes the ego feel uncomfortable, uncertain, lost.  And that lostness is a sign of soul. You couldn't have soul or be a soul if you couldn't feel that you have lost it.  The person in the strong ego, as it's called, doesn't feel he's lost anything.  That's one reason I question the psychiatric procedure of developing a strong ego.  That seems to me a monstrous goal for psychotherapy because it attempts to overcome the sense of soul which appears as weakness, a weakness that seems almost to require symptoms.  So these syndromes, these passive syndromes that you raised this question about, bring with them that feeling of inferiority.  Violence or power or sadism or domination keep us from sensing soul, and until they crack from inside, don't work anymore, fall apart, as I have called it, we can't work with them.  We have to concentrate on making soul out of the lost and inferior conditions.

 

L.P.  We need to stop for a moment here. To an Italian audience, to an Italian subject, the very word "soul," anima, is repulsive, either because of the quality of inferiority inherent to the word, or because of the various layers of historical meanings deposited in it.  To me it is strange to hear this word "anima" spoken by someone who is not a priest.  It creates suspicion, resistances. "Psyche" is different: although the meaning is the same, it sounds more objective, it is not superstitious.  The most common meaning of the word "anima" in Italian is a ghost . . . 

 

J.H.  What is the word in Italian for "self"?

 

L.P.  "Sè."

 

J.H.  "Sè." All right. And what is it in any other sense?

 

L.P.  "Sè." is a reflexive pronoun.

 

J.H.  Reflexive.  So you have the "Io" for "I" and the  "Sè," and "anima" for "soul."

 

L.P. But  "Sè" doesn't convey the same meaning as "self" in the Jungian sense.

 

J.H.   "Sè"  doesn't have substance to it.

 

L.P.  No.

 

J.H.  I don't like those words "Io" and "Sè"—ego and self.  They are subjectivist. Abstractions. Yet they seduce you into feeling they are real substantial entities.  If only we could see them as personifications, as ghosts, as masks, as underworld entities.  Now, "anima" does give that sense of soul beyond "me" as an ego and a self, beyond that subjective reflecting and subjective willing.  When you use the word "anima" you know you are talking about a half-presence, a ghost kind of body.

 

As to the second part of your objection to the soul word, "anima"—I can't help.  I can't help it if the Italians are still suffering from their Christian overload.  It's partly your responsibility—if you didn't invent Christianity, at least you've kept it going a long time.  Just because Christianity has ruined the word "anima" doesn't mean that it still can't evoke an ancient reality.  Christianity took over a great deal of the old Latin language and theologized it.  And it's the job of a psychological person today to reclaim psychology from theology where it has been trapped.  The fact that theology made dogmas about the soul—about its immortality about its nature, about the catechism, that the soul is divided into three parts, because Saint Augustine did this and this and this—doesn't necessarily mean that the individual today has to continue in that theological tradition.  So soul-making—fare anima in Italian—is taking the soul out of jail. Anima in carcere. Taking the soul from the prison of theological concepts, the structures of consciousness which have oppressed the soul. Opening up that conceptual jailhouse—that's an Italian's job.  The French have another job, and the Americans another job. The soul isn't given, it has to be made.  And it has to be made out of the tradition you're in.  And one way or another, you're going to have to fight or struggle or peel away the wrappings in which it's been culturally trapped.  Even though an Italian hears the word "anima" through a deformation théologique, this doesn't mean we shouldn't use that word. The word "anima" and implications of it are far richer than what happened to it through theological oppression.

 

You said something else about why one doesn't like the word:  it evokes weakness, inferiority? Is that it? Well, that's exactly what it's supposed to do! It's supposed to evoke weakness. I use "anima" to evoke something different than "Io."  And the image of the Io, the ego, is strength; it should be strong, healthy and active, firm—you know, all those robust muscle things. But "anima" has that sense of weakness—what is so threatening about that?

 

L.P.  Lameness. Harmlessness . . . .

 

J.H.  Harmlessness.  Weakness.  Hopelessness.  Dependency?  The descriptions that you are using—that language—is exactly the experience.  Moodiness, too, perhaps.  Well, that's exactly how Jung describes anima as a psychic component.  Anima makes a person sensitive, moody, bitchy, a little bit helpless, a little bit uncertain.  And when you work with those conditions you become psychological: you discover interiority, you become reflective, you notice your own atmosphere. So the resistance to the anima is also a resistance to the psychological.  It's a resistance on the part of an omnipotence-fantasy ego . . . to crafting or shaping or working with those conditions of softness, uncertainty.  Imagination is in that.  The Renaissance writers—and I think now of Letters by Petrarch, Letters by Ficino, Letters by Michelangelo—are filled with anima:  depression, weakness, sickness, complaint, love of different kinds, helplessness.  They aren't able to do what they want to do.  Of course, these men were extremely active: Ficino never stopped his work despite all his complaints about being paralyzed and being unable to do anything anymore.  Michelangelo thought he was old when he was forty and then he went on living beyond eighty.  The soul builds its endurance, its "stamina" as Rafael Lopez calls it, through hopelessness and depression.  I think the Italians have an enormous sense of anima, just because they know immediately what its moods feel like. It's only that you needn't take all those moods and all those weaknesses and helplessnesses and so on as literal.  One thing you do learn in therapy is how, when you have a depression, it belongs to you, but you don't identify with the mood.  You live your life in the depression.  You work with the depression. It doesn't completely stop you.  It only stops you if you're manic.  Depression is worst when we try to climb out of it, get on top of it.

 

L.P. You are suggesting that all the syndromes you mentioned are not depressive or pathological . . .

 

J.H.  No, no. I don't deny syndromes, I don't whitewash pathology. But we have to look at psychopathology from the psyche's viewpoint. Syndromes simply manifest the pathologizing process—the soul does this to us, and we have to start with that fact and not with our ego illusions about how we "ought" to be.  Syndromes make our ideas very, very real. We talk about love, say, but when we get jealous, paranoidly, impossibly jealous, then the syndrome brings love home to us in a very powerful way.

 

Say you have an idea like "festina lente" [hasten slowly], or Petrarch's idea of "looking backward in order to see forward." It is an ideal, a piece of wisdom, or a motto to inscribe on a personal book marker. I saw "festina lente" carved in stone on a building at Yale. It becomes an objectified idea: "Hey, wouldn't it be wonderful to move forward by looking backward; to move quickly slowly, to make haste slowly." So, then I put the idea into practice: I tell myself, "Take it easy, don't move so fast." Or when I'm just wasting time, I tell myself, "That's all right, I can be moving slowly, slowly." The objectified idea has become a prescription, a piece of cheap wisdom or a superego command.  They become programs. Moralisms. But to take these Renaissance maxims psychologically would be to recognize that the psyche itself works according to these dictums. Festina lente is then experienced like a symptom, it's going on in your actual behavior when you find yourself moving forward quickly in a conversation and losing the thread, forgetting what you wanted to say, which is happening now in this interview. That is already festina lente working; stopping our forward movement and yet hastening it too. The psyche itself double binds us. These Renaissance maxims weren't preached from the pulpit of the ego—they were digestives, they were regurgitations . . . epitomes of how the psyche actually behaves.

 

L.P.  I am still thinking about weakness, that the soul makes us weak. You said you can feel weak without having to be weak. That would be staying with the soul's mood without taking it into the ego, the Io as an identification.

 

J.H.  That's one of the first things you learn in therapy, isn't it?

 

L.P.  No. I think you first learn to feel what you feel, thoroughly.

 

J.H.  To feel something thoroughly does not mean to be it thoroughly. It is a mistake, a big bad mistake, to take feelings utterly literally. Psychotherapy has got itself caught in the worship of feelings. If we took ideas that literally, we would say a person was paranoid, but we take feelings as if they were the truth of who and what we are. Look, when you get depressed, it belongs to you and you can't help but feel it thoroughly (unless you take pills or go into a manic defense), but you don't have to be identified with the mood. You can live your day in a depressed style. Things slow down, there is a lot of sadness. You can't see over the horizon. But you can notice all this, recognize it, and go on—my God, thousands of people live like this, regularly or in periods. You can find ways of talking from it, seeing the world through it, connecting to people without covering it. It's amazing how others can respond to your depression if you don't identify with it: a sigh immediately produces a sigh in the other person. Did you ever think what a relief to be with someone who knows how to live in the depression without being it. That's a master to learn from, like old people sometimes can be. Depression lets you live down at the bottom. And to live down at the bottom means giving up the Christian thing about resurrection and coming out of it; "light at the end of the tunnel." No light fantasy; and then the depression at once becomes less dark. No hope, no despair. That message of hope only makes hopelessness darker. It's the greatest instigator of the pharma industry ever!

 

Notice how often, when we work on something, anything, we have to go back. Or a thought comes up later on, afterward. You have to go all the way back to something that happened a few days ago and look back on that thought in order to move forward in that thought. Now those slow rings are psychological behaviors that happen automatically. What we think are—what ego would think are—symptoms, losing the thread, repeating, regressing, reiterating, going back, esprit d'escalier, all of those things are actually modes in which this peculiar behavior of the psyche works.

 

L.P. It is the same as the meter, rhythm, and rhyme in poetry: the same pattern returning all the time, like a rhythm, that gives the poem its particular, individual time and keeps the sequence or words and meaning going. It also determines the meaning: it is a shape, a form that helps—not only helps but contains . . . 

 

J.H.  Exactly. It helps and contains. And all the art forms have those abstract cultural modes for both containing and preventing a direct, one-sided linear motion. That's what keeps, I would guess, the art forms psychological; they speak to the soul, when I say psychological.

 

L.P. But this repetitive mode is also the mode of compulsions and obsessions . . .

 

J.H. I guess the difference there with the "ossessione," the obsessional part, is if that repetition, that rhythm doesn't deepen by return, if it doesn't turn by return, if it doesn't revision, or echo, then there is something merely obsessional. But the obsession is an attempt to get to that deepening. To rework it again. If you watch anyone doing handwork, it's all obsessional. You can't make lace without an obsession. You can't turn a pot. Art has that constant fussing with the same little place. Now that's exactly what we all do with a symptom. We keep going back and fussing with it. You are jealous, and you go back fussing and fussing over a little suspicion, working it over a thousand times. The obsessive jealous thought can also be seen as a way of making something happen. It isn't just "working it through" as the psychoanalysts say: actually, you may be making something out of it, making something up, making a fiction, an imagination, and the fussing in jealousy can be polishing the image, so to speak.  Let's say your wife or your lover gives you a suspicion that these is another person . . . and you begin to ask every possible sort of question, trying to get all sorts of details, sexual details. Your mind is utterly obsessed with getting the image of the other person, the scene, rubbing it, polishing it, getting a fantasy going. It's a kind of imaginational voyeurism. Here's where you need Balzac or Proust or Stendahl—where you need some background to this pathologizing, so you can see what force for imagination these jealousy events have. This doesn't mean you will write novels. It doesn't even mean that the pathologizing is going to stop when it is fully talked out and "understood." I have yet to "understand" jealousy, except as I am now talking about it. I am trying to follow what the psyche itself does with these paranoid obsessive questions. A demand for details, precision. To get the image precise by worrying it, by going over it a thousand times. It's extraordinary what a fever pitch of imagining starts. You would think you wouldn't want to know the details. And yet the psyche constructs, like a jeweler, a watchmaker, in this obsessional way. It's making an image of the event.

 

L.P. Then, when does the pathology come in?

 

J.H.  It doesn't come in, it's there all the time! The pathology is the place that keeps the person in the soul, that torment, that twist that you can't simply be naive, you can't simply go along in a natural way, that there's something broken, twisted, hurting, that forces constant reflection—and work, in Bachelard's sense. There's a work going on all the time, a fire burning, there's something elemental happening. The analyst coming at therapy with a medical background sees the pathologies within a medical framework and has to deal with them as medical problems to be cured or healed or treated. If you come at the pathology from a psychological perspective, then you're dealing with pathology in terms of the soul's way of working on itself. Then the pathology, I think, is necessary to that working of imagination.

 

L.P. Do you think it necessary to be insane in order to become psychological? An approach to psyche through madness?

 

J.H. No. That doesn't mean that a person should be so pathologized that he can do nothing except his compulsions or so pathologized that he can do nothing but be in a paranoid delusion, psychotically pathological, chronically pathological, so it becomes utterly determining and nothing else can happen. That part of the pathology is always a mystery, no one has the answer to why the human being gets stuck this way. The Buddha didn't know, and psychiatry doesn't know, and we don't know what madness is. But we do know that in a usual person who comes to therapy there is a torment of some kind, a pathology of some kind. And the first move is to affirm it—not fight it or even analyze it. Give the pathology shelter. Let it sit down in the chair. 

 

L.P. In some of your works you used the word "pathology" to qualify psychotic situations, and you used these situations as enactments of some myth. So, this way myth comes into the therapeutic scenario. On the other hand, when you talk about pathology in your therapeutic practice it seems to be obvious that you are talking about what is usually called neurotic symptoms . . . . How can you work out this contradiction or do you think it is a contradiction?

 

J.H. First of all psychosis and myth don't necessarily go together, even though you find that idea in Jung. It's not my idea that you see myth best in psychosis. I think mythological behavior is going on all the time. The doctor is in a myth, too, even if differently than the patient. Mythological behavior doesn't mean that you walk around like a God; mythological behavior means that you are behaving with the rhetoric of a certain style, whether you are in Apollonic consciousness or you're in Saturnian consciousness or you're acting the Great Mother or whatever. You can be a perfect "normal," a normal married woman with three bambini and doing everything right, driving your minicar . . .  dressing for every occasion . . . .never missing a Mass, and you can be in Hera consciousness. The myth is going on right there. It isn't a matter of being crazy to be mythical. That is a romantic perversion! So I don't mean that at all about psychosis and myth, to begin with. 

 

Psychosis is mostly boring, narrow. It's not that rich, wild field people tend to believe it is; it's actually more of an impoverishment, and rigid, too. Even a florid manic phase hasn't the wealth of contents you might suppose. The firecrackers aren't that dazzling. What makes a psychotic condition interesting isn't the psychosis it's who has the psychosis; what is the nature, the character of that particular psyche. Maybe, though, I just haven't the ability with psychosis that some analysts may have. Maybe I'm too defended against psychosis to be good at working with it. I have nothing "against it," you know, it's that I'm more concerned with the normal sort of craziness—and the craziness called "normality." I'm interested in the fear of it you have and I have and the expressions of it in daily life where it is disguised or acceptable or how we find ways of handling it in religion or addiction or sexuality or business or traveling or eating. Politics, too. I mean craziness is all around us—not merely as it is narrowed and literalized in the "crazy population" in asylums, in the drugged patients and statistically reported patients and sociologically analyzed.

 

L.P. So you are trying to break down the classification between psychotic and neurotic?

 

J.H. And normal. I don't find the terms that useful. I am as afraid of normal people as I am of psychotics. More even of "normals"—because of the repression. It's the neurotics, as we tend to call them, I am most at home with. And then, you left out another group: psychopaths—are they normals? I tend to think so—at least in our culture . . . . But we are going off the track.

 

L.P.  Are there certain mythical patterns or specific Gods who are more healthy, let us say, for our lives and other Gods who are more pathological? Your own writings seem to have favored Dionysus, Hermes, and Pan and Hades, while you have been attacking Apollo, especially, as far back as Suicide and the Soul.

 

J.H. Apollo certainly presents a pattern that is disastrous, destructive for psychological life, cut off from everything that has to do with feminine ways, whether Cassandra or Creusa or Daphne—whomever he touches goes wrong—so that you have the feeling that Apollo simply doesn't belong where there is psyche. But then, another moment comes along where the Apollonic is utterly essential, for example, when you need form, when you need distance, when you need an ideal image for orientation. Sometimes the soul needs discipline and wants sunshine, clear and distinct ideas. If you resist Apollo completely consistently, then he can't come in and there is no sense of form, no clarity, no prophetic deeper insight. You are always confusing everybody and keeping things emotional. There's no detachment, not even from the waiter in the restaurant, from the car in front of you—it's all involvement all day long. Or, Apollo gets you from behind: you become pure and rigid about your involvements: become Apollonic principles, ideals.

 

L.P. If all the gods have their styles of pathologizing, then the only possible path of psychological health is to be aware of all of them. Isn't that too much to expect?

 

J.H. It's not a matter of trying to make a place for all the Gods like a circus manager with three rings, a place for them all at once, the Twins on the high-wire, Hercules lifting weights, and Dionysus among the panthers. You aren't a manager anyway—even Zeus can't really manage the Gods. It's more a matter of realizing appropriateness, what Plato called fittingness, a sense of what is happening now and how it fits in, and which God, just now, has been neglected, and in which way neglected. Psychological health, if you like, doesn't start with a principle. It is a sensitivity. A recognition.

 

L.P.  Still, you use the image of the circus manager, and even if you say one isn't the manager, don't you imply nevertheless, that you, the human person, do invite in or exclude this or that God and by doing so, invite in or exclude this or that style or pathologizing?

 

J.H. We are entangled in their myths—we can't exclude them. The soul lives mythically: it may be inside us, but it is also inside the Gods—and that's the more significant way to imagine the soul: as being entangled in myths, as being inside the Gods. So, we are always going to get into their styles of destructiveness—cheating like Hermes and tricking. Think of what Dionysus did to Pentheus! Think of sweet beautiful golden Venus and what she did to Hippolytus and Phaedra or the whole Trojan war. There's no way out. And that sense, that feeling of being bound by their necessity, turns us toward them. I don't see how we can ever realize the soul as real, and that mythical things really are happening to us, except through pathologies.