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hillman_10

Page history last edited by SkyRon 11 years, 6 months ago

Working

 

(Chapter 10 from Interviews by James Hillman, 1983)

 

L.P.  Let's talk about therapy from the point of view of work.

 

J.H.  We'll have to start then from what therapy is all about. Therapy is not about consciousness; it is not even about self-development and, of course, it's not a medical treatment. What is it then? Is it basically to promote what the Jungians call "individuation"? I think not—or at least not as individuation is usually conceived.  That idea needs to be rethought, not so much a process toward self-realization, like the completion of a destiny; individuation seems to me to be a necessary fantasy to carry one's hopes so that one can live one's oddity, realize one's individuality as wholly, as completely as possible at any moment. Now, that would mean that therapy is about being able to live, love, eat, think, do, respond—and work. So that therapy aims at bringing a person back to an unreflected way of working, an instinctual way of working. It's a crazy thing because the whole procedure is insight and reflection and conversation in an armchair, yet the intention is unreflected responsiveness, just plain old working—the mind working, the body working, the heart working, all by themselves without neurotic encumbrances. You know Freud said the whole business of therapy was to bring a person to love and to work. It seems to me we have forgotten half of what he said. Work. We have been talking of what goes wrong with love for eighty years. But what about what goes wrong with work? Where has that ever been discussed?

 

L.P.  But the notion of adaptive therapy, reeducation . . .

 

J.H.  Of course, these things have been taken into account, but let's not pretend they have been dealt with. You don't adapt people to the work: you adapt work to the people. I realize I am touching a delicate spot here. Work as the problem of human life is what Marxism has always been concerned with, but I'm not trying that kind of approach, because I question it. I question the Marxist economic idea of work, though they are right in insisting that work is primary.  Work is what most of the people on this planet do: get up in the morning and go to work. Where do we learn to work, how do we learn to get the neurosis out of work, so that it works by itself, and what is the work instinct? We talk about the sex instinct, we talk about the eating instinct, or the aggressive instinct: what is the work instinct?  I think there is a work instinct; it's what developed human civilization, and I think that this instinct in itself can be disturbed, affected, pathologized. . . . Like love and sex, work can have its pathologies.

 

L.P. You mean that work no longer corresponds to money or that people do not work enough or that they don't know why they work and that work alienates people . . .

 

J.H. I do not mean pathologies in the economic sense. These things are all there, but this is not what I am trying to say. Let's take my kind of work, desk work. I sit down, and I am not working immediately with my hands when I stop and reflect: what shall I do? and what to do now? and what's going on? But when I pick something up, I start working: when I separate this paper from that paper, I move that book over there, I turn to the red pencil on the table that I am looking for, then I am working.

 

L.P. This has rather dangerous implications. First it implies that whn you are questioning "what to do now" you are not working, and second it implies that mental activities are not work, that only physical actions are work. Then, also, it implies that physical actions are "clean"—simple, good and not neurotic—but that questioning yourself is neurotic.

 

J.H. Questioning in the right time and the right way is, of course, working. But questioning instead of letting your hands begin is not what your body sat you down at the table for. If you are at the work table, then you are where work happens. It's not fitting to question there as a defense against the hands. If questioning is the actual work now, then go take a walk or lie down and mull.

 

L.P.  There is something wrong here: the example of you at your table implies that only physical actions of the hands are work.

 

J.H.  The fault here, the problem here, is imagining the hands as mindless, as only physical. That's where the whole problem of work begins: right there in undervaluing and misapprehending the hands. Then work has to become an "ethic": you have to tell yourself to work, discipline children to work,  reward people for their work.  We moralize work and make it a problem, forgetting that the hands love to work and that in the hands is the mind. That "work ethic" idea does more to impede working . . . it makes it a duty instead of a pleasure. We need to talk of the work instinct, not the work ethic, and instead of putting work with the superego we need to imagine it as an id activity. like a fermentation, something going on instinctively, autonomously,  like beer works, like bread works.  Of course, that's ideal, as any instinct-theory tends to have Rousseau in it.  Because right in the middle of working, I can lose my concentration. I am under attack. I can't do it or it seems boring, and I think, This is trivial, what I'm doing, this isn't important. I should be doing something much more important than this—that's one of the thoughts I have.  What saves me right at this point is feeling that everything is important. 

 

I have a fantasy, for example, that I have a farm, and it doesn't matter whether I'm correcting proofs or writing footnotes or reading some tiresome paper or other or editing somebody else's work . . . whatever I am doing, it's like a farm, and I have to feed the chickens and hoe the potatoes and chop the wood and do the accounts and pull the weeds. And every one of those jobs is necessary, and none is more important than the other one. So the new white page, the important new thought you are developing is not more important than the many little things that happen to be in your way or along your way.  But they also happen to be the way itself. I don't have a mono centric image of work as if each person had one special task. If I ask myself, What's your task in life? I'm going to get a single answer. Questions like this come out of the ego so they only can have one answer—or a choice among single answers. Ego questions are set-ups—you can never answer them psychologically, with a polytheistic answer. So there isn't just one special taks, like a calling or  vocation. Vocation is a very inflating spiritual idea. One to one. God to me. Notice how our idea of Renaissance man is a polytheistic fantasy. He does all kinds of things. But vocation addresses the ego and makes it a specialist—then you "believe in yourself"—and that's another trap of that Devil, Belief—because who is believing in whom? I am believing in myself—all ego, and then I have a mission. Now that fantasy of the farm is polytheistic, and who is to say what is the important thing on a farm: the man who buys eggs from me would like more eggs and sees the time I spend chopping wood a waste. "Have a secretary do it. You have the best eggs around. Produce more, and even better ones."

 

 

 

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