While other nineteenth-century investigators were polluting the
archaic, natural and mythic in the outer world, psychology was
doing much the same to the archaic, natural and mythic within.
Therapeutic depth psychology shares this blame, since it shares
nineteenth-century attitudes. It gave names with a pathological
bias to the animals of the imagination. We invented
psychopathology and thereby labeled the memoria a madhouse. We
invented the diagnoses with which we declared ourselves insane.
After subtly poisoning our own imaginal potency with this
language, we complain of a cultural wasteland and loss of soul.
The poison spreads: words continually fall "mentally ill" and are
usurped by psychopathology, so that we can hardly use them without
their new and polluted connotations: immature, dissociation,
rigid, withdrawn, passive, transference, fixation, sublimation,
projection (the last three notably different in alchemy),
resistance, deviate, stress, dependence, inhibition, compulsion,
illusion, split, tranquilized, driven, compensation, inferiority,
derange, suppression, depression, repression, confusion
- these words have been psychologized and pathologized in the
past 150 years.
So Psyche requests the psychologist to remember his calling.
Psychological remembrance is given by the kind of speech that
carries remembrance within it. This language is both of culture
and uncultured, is both of art and artless. It is a mythic,
metaphoric language, a speech of ambiguities that is evocative and
detailed, yet not definitive, not productive of dictionaries,
textbooks, or even abstract descriptions. Rather, it is a speech
that leads to participation, in the Platonic sence, in and with
the thing spoken of, a speech of stories and insights which evoke,
in the other who listens, new stories and new insights, the way
one poem and one tune ignite another verse and another song.
