James Hillman and Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse
(1992)
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Life Lived Backwards
Dear Michael,
There is a painting by Picasso done when he was ninety-one, the year before he died. It is titled Le jeune peintre (the young painter). ...
When I first saw this painting—and it is a big one, nearly a yard tall—I had that frisson André Malraux says leaps from one work of art to another via the human person. This haunting, simple image turned out to be the initiatory experience for my theory of life lived backwards. Here is the invisible Picasso Caught on the canvas, a self-portrait of the daimon that inhabited him all his life. At the end, it emerges and shows itself.
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"Here," it says, "this is who you are, Picasso, you are me, the ever-young painter. I am the clown, the innocent, fresh eye, the dark eye, the quick-moving Mercurius, the sentimental, bluish melancholy, the little boy. I am your ghost. Now you see who drives you, what has kept you fresh and eager, and now you can die."
It was as if Picasso had been realizing and actualizing and individuating this figure all his life, ever since he was an exceptionally talented, teenage painter—even before Paris and his youth of the blue and rose periods, when he was le jeune peintre. Here was a portrait of the acorn painted by the oak.
Picasso's image confirms Henry Corbin's theory that it is not my individuation but the individuation of the angel that is the main task: the materialization with paint, brush, and canvas of Picasso's daimon. This image also presents Corbin's basic premise about ta'wil, or the art of interpretative reading, how to read life itself: we must "read things back to their origins and principle, their archetype." "In ta'wil one must carry sensible forms back to imaginative forms and then rise to still higher meanings; to proceed in the opposite direction (to carry imaginative forms back to sensible forms . . . ) is to destroy the virtualities of the imagination." ...
How so? Because the primary activity of the psyche is imagining.
My point here is that we humans are primarily acts of imagination, images. ... Jung says: "When I speak of image . . . I do not mean the psychic reflections of an external object, but a concept derived from poetic usage, namely, a figure of fancy or fantasy image, which is related only indirectly to . . . an external object." Or, put it my way, what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is nothing but—get that demeaning nothing but—the poetic imagination going on day and night. ...
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If at the soul's core we are images, then we must define life as the actualization over time (for Keats twenty-six years, for Picasso ninety-two) of that originating seed image, what Michelangelo called the imagine del cuor, or the image in the heart, and that image—not the time that actualized it—is the primary determinant of your life.
Do you see what this means?
It means that our history is secondary or contingent, and that the image in the heart is primary and essential. If our history is contingent and not the primary determinant, then the things that befall us in the course of time (which we call development) are various actualizations of the image, manifestations of it, and not causes of who we are. I am not caused by my history—my parents, my childhood and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image.
Picasso says, "When I hear people talk of the development of the artist, it seems to me as if they were seeing the artist between two opposed mirrors which were endlessly reflecting his mirror image, and as if they saw the series of images in one mirror as his past and the images in the other mirror as his future. . . . They do not realize that all are the same images." ...
Do you notice here that when he speaks of who he is, he speaks of himself as an image? "I am an image," he says. That's what I mean by the acorn, and that's why I use artists like Picasso and Wallace Stevens instead of psychologists to say it for me. They realize that they are imagination before they are history. ...
In Picasso's case, le jeune peintre was always there, is always there. As the historical Picasso of the flesh falls away, the daimonic ghost stands forth. ...
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... The key to your life and my life, Michael, is not locked away in childhood to be recovered by remembering and analyzing; it is found in your death and who you are then—and the moment of death is any moment.
...we have to take care we don't take death too literally, as we take childhood. Time is not the primary factor; an image is not cumulative, and the late stages of life are not the fullest and finest presentation of one's seed . The oak tree is not any more itself after four hundred years and at the moment of its felling. It is always itself, like Picasso in the mirror. ...
The job of life becomes one of making its moments accord with the image, or what might once have been called "being guided by your genius" ([or daimon or angel]). The Catholics at the end want absolution, so that the free soul or death soul, one's essence, may be freed of those historical contingencies called sins, which impede the immortality of the soul, fastening it to its mortal errancy. Another way we can make life accord with the angel is when, each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver's seat. And another way we try to keep life essential, in accord with the seed, is by sensitive responses in the daily round. How well we do this, I think, doesn't matter so much as living life with this sense of image in mind. It gives one an aesthetic and ethical sensitivity about rightness and trueness, and it functions like a gyroscope, which doesn't mean that we are not for the most part lost in a fog or becalmed and drifting. The genius is pretty tricky; it keeps quiet often when you need it most!
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Sometimes, the genius seems to show only in symptoms and disorders, as a kind of preventive medicine, holding you back from a false route. Do you know how many extraordinary people were runaways, school dropouts, hated school, could not fit in? ... The power of the acorn does not allow compromises with standard norms—and remember, school for teachers was once called "normal" school,... Cezanne was rejected from the Beaux Arts academy. Grieg at age thirteen was completing his opus one ("Variations on a German Melody") in a school classroom; his teacher shook him to put a stop to it. Proust's teachers thought his compositions disorganized. Zola got a zero in literature at his high school and also failed rhetoric. Eugene O'Neill, Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all had failures in college. Edison says, "I was always at the foot of the class." And Einstein was considered dull by his teachers. As for Picasso, my data says he was taken out of school at age ten because "he stubbornly refused to do anything but paint."
I'm saying, among twenty other things, that we have to take a new look not only at childhood, but at psychopathology too. Did you know that when Lindbergh was a boy he had tremendous nightmares about falling from a high place, and he even tried to meet this fear by jumping from a tree? Did his interior imagination already know that he had to fly over the Atlantic alone? The Mexican social revolutionary painter Diego Rivera, at the age of six, mounted the pulpit in his local church and gave such a violent anticlerical speech that the priest fled and the congregation was frightened. Salvador Dali was a real weirdo child: he stomped a classmate's violin, kicked his sister's head as if it were a football, and—get this—bit into a rotting bat. By adolescence he was considered so strange that he was pelted with stones going to the movies. ...
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These exceptional people reveal the thesis of looking at life backwards because exceptional people can't keep from letting it all show. I've picked peculiar behaviors rather than the usual examples of early talent—Mozart, Yehudi Menuhin, Marie Curie. Since the peculiar genius can appear in the guise of dysfunctional behavior, we have to pay attention and revise our thinking about children and their pathology in terms of the nascent possibilities exemplified in these biographies of eminence.
You see, we need biographies of the Great to understand the rest of us. Psychology starts the wrong way around. It plots statistical norms, and what deviates are deviants. I follow Corbin. I want to start from the top down, because to start the regular way, to extrapolate from the usual to the unusual, doesn't account for the remarkable determining force of the acorn. We cannot grasp Leonardo da Vinci by examining his distorted relationship with his mother, as Freud tried. Thousands of us, millions and millions of us, have had every sort of mother trouble, but there is only one Leonardo. And Leonardo's exceptionality may provide better images, a better, more interesting approach to my mother troubles than understanding mother troubles will help grasp Leonardo.
Edgar Wind has a little excursion on method in his incredible book, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, where he writes, "A method that fits the small work but not the great has obviously started at the wrong end. It seems to be a lesson of history that the commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but that the exceptional cannot be understood by amplifying the commonplace." No matter how much you blow up the symptom of timidity in the bullfighter Manolete or the explorer Stefansson, you never will reach their exceptional genius. You will never discover the angel. ...
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Letter Writing
Dear Michael,
Last night on the phone you asked me what my letter about letter writing had to do with the theme of this book—therapy.
I take pleasure in expanding.
Therapy began with Freud's "talking cure," as he called it, letting a patient lie down and freely associate, speaking out loud whatever comes into the mind. Then, mainly owing to Jung, therapy developed into a dialogue. Two armchairs, face to face and knee to knee, as I recall the few occasions I sat with Jung. Whether in couples or groups, therapy continues the oral approach. Writing seems to be mostly confined to transcripts of the oral sessions and to case reports digesting the session. (Also, many patients keep journals and dream notebooks for themselves.) Now these transcripts and case reports are intolerable to read. They are universally the same and utterly boring. Not that the hours themselves were boring, but the written records certainly are. Why boring? Because the language consists of dead words, clichés, rhythmless repetitions, generalized conventional terms without the luster or the lilt of the soul's songs of itself. Yes, even depression—or, as it should be called, melancholy and despair—has a cadence and a pitch and a vocabulary.
How rare it is to speak well about ourselves. Write well, we can do. Poems, short stories of childhood, biographical
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excursions, even descriptions of intense emotions—these all are the very stuff of writing. But the soul seems reluctant to speak eloquently of itself. When I try to tell you directly what I feel and what's going on inside, personally, there comes a jumble of circumlocutions, coagulated phrases, interrupted qualifications, "Undisciplined squads of emotion!" as T. S. Eliot said. Is this confused reluctance, perhaps, the very source of writing? As if the soul needs to find a way out of its own inarticulate morass by means of the hand's deft linear skill. Writing as the thread out of the labyrinth.
Anyway, some years ago along came a man in Japan—was it Morita?—who let his patients retreat into solitude, writing their "confessions" and handing these written pages to the therapist without much talk between them. The therapist then commented (like an editor or a composition teacher) on the "problems" in the written material. Therapy took place largely by means of written documents.
You need to see here a BIG contrast with most usual Western therapeutic methods, which do not trust reflection as much as immediacy. Blurted truth is more true, we believe, than burnished truth . In fact, we believe, burnishing tends to cover up so that the raw is better than the cooked. This distrust of articulate form betrays the Romantic roots of therapy and its distance from the carefulness of classicism. Therapy might find its literary antecedents in Rousseau, Whitman, and garrulous Eugene O'Neill, whose characters go on and on as if they were at an AA meeting.
Sure, no burnishing at all in any of that good ol' Romantic literature, eh?
But there's plenty of "burnishing" in face-to-face interaction too, so I can see the advantage to writing here.
An exception to Western therapy's usual distrust of written reflection for personal expression is orthodox Jungian method. At least, Jungian method used to be a reflective exception in the days when I trained and practiced in Zurich. ... Classical Jungians asked their patients, even required their patients, to write down their dreams and make drawings and paintings of their dream figures, feelings, scenes, and to write long interior dialogues called "active imaginations."
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I myself have spent the larger part of my analytical hours paying my money for my analyst's dumb silence while he read through my written material. And, when I transferred to the other chair, having become an analyst myself, I sat still long times, while being paid of course, reading through a client's material.
Immediacy was not the issue. Content analysis. Quiet. Reflection. Constellation of unexpected emotions through tension and mulling. Thematics. Style of expression. Emotion compacted into words, images, colors, scenes, phrases, diction, voices. Attempts at precision, finer and finer. The personal relation between the two people, analyst and patient, was carried on in a good part via the material. The nebulous, ephemeral psyche and its fluid swirling moods and laconic resistant rocks caught on paper, materialized as traces of the écrit, the mind's marks on paper.
A lot of this, I suppose old-fashioned, style has gone out the window. Was it too European, too reflective, too educated, too literary for the American therapist who is into immediate feelings and on-the-spot transference reactions?
If we place our American style against schools of painting, our therapy is expressionist, while the therapist's response is minimalist conceptualism. Curious that therapy expects the patient to open up and pour out more and more vibrant color while the therapist responds with judicious reserve and the pregnant silence of a blank canvas. If we let studio art be a metaphor for what goes on in a session of therapy, then how in the world can the two styles work together? Sooner or later a war must break out, which is less a personal war than a war of schools, of styles.
The Jungians too have yielded to expressionist immediacy. They too have begun to distrust written material. Writing has become a "defense." Instantaneity is now privileged. Dreams are to be recounted on the spot rather than turned into texts to be read, and the therapeutic process has come more and more to mean what goes on between people rather than the spontaneous unfolding within the psyche as presented in written dialogues and painted images. Talk rather than writing.
Now, my point here is that something of soul is gained by instantaneity , but something else is lost . We know what's been
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gained: the capacity to react immediately. Bring your suspicions and perceptions and irritations right up front: confront. Tell it like it is, as they said in the sixties. Feel where you are and be it.
But what was shoved aside? The meditative scribe, the persuasion of rhetoric, the fictional sense of living in a plot rather than in the confines of a first-person narrative , the play of poetic formulation. Language has been reduced to the spoken word.
This spoken word in our white therapeutic culture tends to be limited in vocabulary, piss poor in the power of its adjectives and adverbs—sentences begin with hopefully, personally, basically—wandering in syntax... , flowing with run-on sentences that would take the Army Corps of Engineers to channel toward an intention,...
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Therapy's language makes all these mistakes. It talks in the general language of emotions and feeling, whereas written language tries to make precise the specifics. I'm claiming, Michael, that therapy's talking cure makes language sick and therefore the world worse.
Instead, I want to reach back a long way and recall what Confucius is said to have said: The reform of society begins in the reform of its language. I want to reach back to the Egyptians and their God Thoth, the primal baboon, God of written signs; and to the Ibis figure, the scribe; and to the sacred importance of the written, like the commandments of Moses cut into clay, like the cuneiform laws of Hammurabi.
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So long as therapy does not attend to language, which I contend it cannot do as long as it indulges in the spoken word at the expense of the written word, therapy cannot reform our society as it intends. In fact, therapy contributes to the decline of the civilization whose reform begins in the reform of language. So, if we are getting worse, we are getting worse partly because of therapy's linguistic callousness. Despite the emphasis upon the development of feeling, therapy actually invites the barbarians—a word that originally meant those who could not speak the language of culture, the Greek of the city. Feeling does not develop without the rhetorical and other arts, which give it differentiated expression.
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