Psyberspace » Psyche

Hermes: Guide of Souls — Karl Kerényi

Walter — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:14:55 +0000

Hermes: Guide of Souls — Karl Kerényi

This is, short, dense, with epiphanies built in. I have just stumbled on it in this better edition than I’ve had, as I’m editing my essay Archetypes of Cyberspace for Kindle!!

Dr. James Hillman Live at Mythic Journeys

Walter — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:50:58 +0000

Dr. James Hillman Live at Mythic Journeys Part 1

Dr. James Hillman Live at Mythic Journeys Part 2

Part 3 of 3

Psychodrama Training for Couple Therapists

Walter — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 08:53:55 +0000

The workshop I will be running for counsellors and therapists this year has gone up on the CITP website. It is run under the auspices of the Psychodrama training institute, and I’m pleased that this workshop I ran for the first time in Blenheim in November has a niche in the psychodrama setting.

I will also be doing a 3 hr workshop at the Brisbane ANZPA Psychodrama Conference this month.

Details of the July Christchurch workshop follow:

Psychodrama Training for Couple Therapists

Institute: Christchurch Institute for Training in Psychodrama

Year: 2012

"… an active form of psychotherapy in which the personal and interpersonal problems … are treated at the same time."

J.L. Moreno, Psychodrama vol 1 p233

At the heart of the family is the couple. Being in the couple relationship is often the most fulfilling and difficult aspect of a person’s life. Deepening your awareness of couple dynamics and learning specific processes will assist you to help people as they grapple with their lives.

This training workshop is for counsellors and psychotherapists. To the fore will be the work developed by J.L. Moreno in encounter, role dynamics and working with the interpsyche. You will develop your ability to:

- be more effective in your work with couples;

- include couple work in your practice if you don’t do that already; and

- strengthen your relational perspective in one-to-one work

What we will cover

Psychodramatic techniques such as doubling, mirroring, role reversal will be taught in such a way they can be used with all couples. We will explore in action the co-conscious and co-unconscious of couples we are currently working with to develop assessment skills.

We will work with what is of interest to members. You can expect to practice, experiment and learn new processes with generous coaching. The following topics will give you an idea of the scope of this workshop.

• Encounter – the relational perspective

• Assessing and using role dynamics in relationships.

• Using action methods with couples

• Structured conscious dialogue

• Your relationship with the relationship

• Transform criticism blaming and shaming

• Going deeper – the relationship as therapy

• Affairs and crisis – creating hope

Training approach

• Brief teaching and hand-outs

• Demonstrations

• Practice and coaching using role play

• Supervision of case work – in action

Hours from this workshop are accredited by the Australian and New Zealand Psychodrama Association, Inc., ANZPA and count towards practitioner certification by that body. Further information may be found on the web site http://www.anzpa.org

Dates: 19 July, 2012 – 21 July, 2012

Training Hours: 18

Leader: Walter Logeman

Location: Christchurch

Venue: Campbell Centre, 44 Bealey Avenue, Christchurch

Times: Thursday 6.30 to 9.00, Friday 9.00 to 5.00, Saturday 9.00 4.00

Workshop Code: CITP-2012E

Fee: $330.00* Enrol by 1 July 2012 * A discount of $50.00 is available to trainees enrolled in Psychodrama Training.

via Psychodrama Training for Couple Therapists | Australian and New Zealand Psychodrama Association Inc.

John Gottman – Science of Trust

Walter — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 21:54:23 +0000

Amazon

Amazon Kindle Edition

Enjoying this book because it is packed with little gems, and because I’m devouring anything to do with relationships as I translate it all into psychodrama language and enrich my psychodramatic approach to couples.

Some snippets follow, managing to cut and paste them via sharing with Twitter – I hate that I can’t cut and past from Kindle.

â€œHoney, this isnâ€™t a big deal, but I was upset about the conversation at dinner. I need you to ask me about my day.â€ Her response might then be, â€œSorry, how was your day?â€

This is from John Gottman’s the Science of Trust. Note: Gottman’s example, good, but I prefer “want” there rather than need, following Marshall Rosenberg (see my post)

Regrettable incidents in interaction are simply par for the course. The goal is to be able to heal the emotional wounds created by those incidents.

Gottman reinforces the idea that it is not good communication we need so much as good ways of repair. Fits with psychodrama as a method, it is on the stage, separate from life. Social atom repair. Dialogues are like that – a means to repair.

Repetition compulsion

Walter — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:24:43 +0000

It is the core of the psyche, and psychodynamic psychotherapy and I’m impressed how well Freud nailed this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion

Sigmund Freud’s use of the concept was ‘articulated…for the first time, in the article of 1914, Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten (‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.’[2] Here he noted how ‘the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, he acts it out, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it….For instance, the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical toward his parents’ authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor’.[3]

I don’t think it is just bad things though. it is something about themes of any kind, patterns repeat. So often what we talk about unconsciously refers to the process of the conversation. Its in the nature of the universe.

My psychodrama thesis is essentially about the broader application of this phenomena. Group and the protagonist.

James Hillman – interview Scott London

Walter — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:43:32 +0000

On Soul, Character and Calling:
A Conversation with James Hillman
By Scott London

http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/hillman.html

On Soul, Character and Calling:
A Conversation with James Hillman

By Scott London

James Hillman studied with the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in the 1950s and later became the first director of studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich. After returning to the United States in 1980, he taught at Yale, Syracuse and the universities of Chicago and Dallas. He also became editor of Spring Publications, a small Texas publisher devoted to the work of contemporary psychologists. And he wrote some twenty books of his own.

James Hillman

In spite of these achievements, Hillman was hardly an establishment figure in the world of psychology. If anything, he was looked upon by many in the profession as a profoundly subversive thinker, a thorn in the side of respectable psychologists.

As the founder of archetypal psychology â€” a school of thought aimed at “revisioning” or “reimagining” psychology â€” Hillman argued that the therapy business needs to evolve beyond reductionist “nature” and “nurture” theories of human development.

Over a period of almost five decades â€” until his death in October 2011 â€” he wrote, taught and lectured about the need to get therapy out of the consulting room and into the real world. Conventional psychology has lost touch with what he called “the soul’s code.” Overrun with “psychological seminars on how to clean closets or withhold orgasms,” psychology has become reduced to “a trivialized, banal, egocentric pursuit, rather than an exploration of the mysteries of human nature,” he wrote.

One of the greatest of these mysteries, Hillman believed, is the question of character and destiny. In his bestsellerÂ The Soul’s Code, he proposed that our calling in life is inborn and that it’s our mission in life to realize its imperatives. He called it the “acorn theory” â€” the idea that our lives are formed by a particular image, just as the oak’s destiny is contained in the tiny acorn.

In this interview, which first appeared in the March 1998 issue ofÂ The SunÂ magazine, we explore the idea of character and calling. Hillman never liked to give interviews and was a notoriously prickly conversationalist. He told me he harbored a deep mistrust of journalists and interviewers. “People have a terrible desire to talk about themselves,” he said. “They call itÂ sharing, but it’s really chewing out someone else’s ear. Well, I don’t have that desire.”

So why consent to an interview with me? “Because I’m a nice guy,” he said with a mischievous grin. Ideas are like children, he added, “and you should try to get your children into the world if possible, to defend them and help them along. I don’t think it’s enough just to write and throw it out into the world. I think it’s useful to have to put yourself out there a little bit for what you believe.”

Scott London:Â You’ve been writing and lecturing about the need to overhaul psychotherapy since the early 1960s. Now all of a sudden the public seems receptive to your ideas: you’re on the bestseller lists and TV talk shows. Why do you think your work has suddenly struck a chord?

James Hillman:Â I think there is a paradigm shift going on in the culture. The old psychology just doesn’t work anymore. Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn’t do anything â€” or that it doesn’t do enough.

London:Â You’re not a very popular figure with the therapy establishment.

People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture, a sense that there is some purpose that has come with them into the world.

Hillman:Â I’m not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. You don’t attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It’s the same thing with psychotherapy. It makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that’s not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you:Â youÂ are the one who is wrong. What I’m trying to say is that, if a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it’s also in the system, the society.

London:Â You can’t fix the person without fixing the society.

Hillman:Â I don’t think so. But I don’t think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person. We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, “What’s wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?” We can’t change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently. My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.

London:Â You’ve said that you usually write out of “hatred, dislike, and destruction.”

Hillman:Â I’ve found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness. In the cosmology that’s behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything. We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. ButÂ me? I’m an accident â€” a result â€” and therefore a victim.

London:Â A victim?

Hillman:Â Well, if I’m only a result of past causes, then I’m a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here. Or, if you look at it from the sociological perspective, I’m the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I’m a victim again. A result.

London:Â What about the idea that we are self-made, that since life is an accident we have the freedom to make ourselves into anything we want?

Hillman:Â Yes, we worship the idea of the “self-made man” â€” otherwise we’d go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea. We vote for Perot. We think he’s a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It’s unbelievable, yet it’s part of that worship of individuality.

But the culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world? All of this anxiety and depression casts doubt on whether I can make it as a heroic John Wayne-style individual.

London:Â InÂ The Soul’s Code, you talk about something called the “acorn theory.” What is that?

Hillman:Â Well, it’s more of a myth than a theory. It’s Plato’s myth that you come into the world with a destiny, although he uses the wordÂ paradigma, or paradigm, instead ofÂ destiny. The acorn theory says that there is an individual image that belongs to your soul.

The same myth can be found in the kabbalah. The Mormons have it. The West Africans have it. The Hindus and the Buddhists have it in different ways â€” they tie it more to reincarnation and karma, but you still come into the world with a particular destiny. Native Americans have it very strongly. So all these cultures all over the world have this basic understanding of human existence. Only American psychologydoesn’tÂ have it.

London:Â In our culture we tend to think of calling in terms of “vocation” or “career.”

Hillman:Â Yes, but calling can refer not only to ways ofÂ doingÂ â€” meaning work â€” but also to ways ofÂ being. Take being a friend. Goethe said that his friend Eckermann was born for friendship. Aristotle made friendship one of the great virtues. In his book on ethics, three or four chapters are on friendship. In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it’s hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it’s not a vocation.

London:Â Motherhood is another example that comes to mind. Mothers are still expected to have a vocation above and beyond being a mother.

Hillman:Â Right, it’s not enough just to be a mother. It’s not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them. It’s a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood â€” the sense that motherhood isn’t itself a calling â€” also arises from economic pressure.

London:Â What implications do your ideas have for parents?

Hillman:Â I think what I’m saying should relieve them hugely and make them want to pay more attention to their child, this peculiar stranger who has landed in their midst. Instead of saying, “This is my child,” they must ask, “Who is this child who happens to be mine?” Then they will gain a lot more respect for the child and try to keep an eye open for instances where the kid’s destiny might show itself â€” like in a resistance to school, for example, or a strange set of symptoms one year, or an obsession with one thing or another. Maybe something very important is going on there that the parents didn’t see before.

London:Â Symptoms are so often seen as weaknesses.

Hillman:Â Right, so they set up some sort of medical or psychotherapeutic program to get rid of them, when the symptoms may be the most crucial part of the kid. There are many stories in my book that illustrate this.

London:Â How much resistance do you encounter to your idea that we chose our parents?

Hillman:Â Well, it annoys a lot of people who hate their parents, or whose parents were cruel and deserted them or abused them. But it’s amazing how, when you ponder that idea for a little bit, it can free you of a lot of blame and resentment and fixation on your parents.

London:Â I got into a lengthy discussion about your book with a friend of mine who is the mother of a six-year-old. While she subscribes to your idea that her daughter has a unique potential, perhaps even a “code,” she is wary of what that means in practice. She fears that it might saddle the child with a lot of expectations.

Hillman:Â That’s a very intelligent mother. I think the worst atmosphere for a six-year-old is one in which there are no expectations whatsoever. That is, it’s worse for the child to grow up in a vacuum where “whatever you do is alright, I’m sure you’ll succeed.” That is a statement of disinterest. It says, “I really have no fantasies for you at all.”

A mother should have some fantasy about her child’s future. It will increase her interest in the child, for one thing. To turn the fantasy into a program to make the child fly an airplane across the country, for example, isn’t the point. That’s the fulfillment of the parent’s own dreams. That’s different. Having a fantasy â€” which the child will either seek to fulfill or rebel against furiously â€” at least gives a child some expectation to meet or reject.

London:Â What about the idea of giving children tests to find out their aptitudes?

Hillman:Â Aptitude can show calling, but it isn’t the only indicator. Ineptitude or dysfunction may reveal calling more than talent, curiously enough. Or there can be a very slow formation of character.

London:Â What is the first step toward understanding one’s calling?

Hillman:Â It’s important to ask yourself, “How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?” That may very well reveal what you are here for.

Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too. When you look into the archetypal nature of taxation, you realize that all civilizations have had taxation of one sort or another. Some of the earliest Egyptian writing is about tax collecting â€” the scribe recording what was paid and what wasn’t paid.

So when you consider the archetypal, historical, and cultural background of whatever you do, it gives you a sense that your occupation can be a calling and not just a job.

London: What do you think of traditional techniques for revealing the soul’s code, such as the wise woman who reads palms, or the village elders whose job it is to look at a child and see that child’s destiny? Would it be helpful to revive these traditions?

Hillman: First of all, I don’t think you can revive traditions on purpose. Second of all, I think those traditions are going on underground. Many people will tell you about some astrologer who said this or that to them, or some teacher. So it’s very widespread in the subculture.

What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child’s destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child. It’s almost an erotic thing, like the filmmaker Elia Kazan’s stories of how his teacher “took to him.” She said to him, “When you were only twelve, you stood near my desk one morning and the light from the window fell across your head and features and illuminated the expression on your face. The thought came to me of the great possibilities there in your development.” She saw his beauty. Now that, you see, is something different from just going to the wise woman.

London: InÂ The Soul’s Code, you tell a similar story about Truman Capote.

Hillman: In Capote’s case, his teacher responded to his crazy fantasies. He was a difficult boy who threw temper tantrums in which he would lie on the floor and kick, who refused to go to class, who combed his hair all the time â€” an impossible kid. She responded to his absurdities with equal absurdities. She took to him. Teachers today can’t take to a child. It will be called manipulation, or seduction, or pedophilia.

London: Or preferential treatment.

Hillman: Right. James Baldwin is another example. He attended a little Harlem schoolhouse of fifty kids. Conditions were appalling. His teacher was a Midwestern white woman. And yet they clicked.

You see, we don’t need to get back to the wise woman in the village. We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child’s beauty and singling that child out. That’s how the mentor system works â€” you’re caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.

London: Of all the historical figures you studied while researchingÂ The Soul’s Code, who fascinated you the most?

Hillman: They all did. All these little stories fascinated me. Take Martin Scorcese, another filmmaker, for example. He was a very short kid and had terrible asthma. He couldn’t go out into the streets of Little Italy in Manhattan and play with the other kids. So he would sit up in his room and look out the window at what was going on and make little drawings â€” cartoons, with numerous frames â€” of the scene. In effect, he was making movies at nine years old.

London: What about someone like Adolf Hitler, the prototypical “bad seed”? Is he an example of a destiny gone awry, or perhaps the fulfillment of some sort of twisted destiny?

Hillman: It’s a puzzle. How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don’t think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it’s a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation â€” like Charles Manson. Jeffrey Dahmer had a wonderful father. His father even wrote a book saying that it was his fault that Jeffrey was the way he was. His father had strange dreams in his youth that were very similar to some of the crimes that Dahmer committed. So the father took responsibility. But he was not a bad father at all. When Jeffrey was four, they were carving pumpkins for Halloween, and Jeffrey screamed, “Make a mean face!” He would not let his father put a smile on the pumpkin’s face. “I want a mean face!” he screamed. He was in a fury.

So I think there is such a thing as a bad seed that comes to flower in certain people. The danger with that theory is that we begin to look for those “troublemakers” early on and try to weed them out. That’s very dangerous, because it could work against kids who are just routine troublemakers. But then you look at a child like Mary Bell in England, who was ten when she strangled two little boys â€” one three and one five. Yes, there were extenuating circumstances. She had a “bad” mother, so to speak. But to think that she would note have “flowered” if her mother had been in therapy, or that (as psychologist Alice Miller thinks) there would have been no Adolf Hitler if Hitler’s family had been treated â€” that’s just naive.

London: You’ve written that “the great task of any culture is to keep the invisibles attached.” What do you mean by that?

Hillman: It’s a difficult idea to present without leaving psychology and getting into religion. I don’t talk about who the invisibles are or where they live or what they want. There is no real theology in it. But it’s the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.

London: God?

Hillman: Yes, but it doesn’t have to be that lofty.

London: Our calling?

Hillman:Â I think the first step is the realization that each of us has such a thing. And then we must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of high-level magic that the new age hopes to press on us. It’s more a sensitivity, such as a person living in a tribal culture would have: the concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential way of living.

London: When you talk in those terms, it seems to me that the boundary between psychology and theology gets a little blurry. Psychology deals with the will, and religion deals with fate. Yet this is not clearly not one or the other, but a bit of both.

Hillman: You’re right. It isn’t such an easy thing as the old argument of free will versus predestination. The Greek idea of fate isÂ moira, which means “portion.” Fate rules aÂ portionÂ of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it’s not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don’t have to do anything. That’s fatalism.

London: What is the danger for a child who grows up never understanding his or her destiny?

Hillman: I think our entire civilization exemplifies that danger. People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world.

London: Is it possible never to discover that “something else” â€” to turn your back on it, or to resist it and therefore “waste” your life?

Hillman: I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not. You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determinesÂ howÂ you live through those things.

London: It seems to me that illness and divorce an prompt you to explore some themes in life more thoroughly than others.

Hillman: Certainly. I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom thatÂ preventedÂ him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper. Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area.

Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That’s a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be. People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That’s a very important change in our collective psychology.

London: You write that one of the most stultifying things about modern psychology is that it’s lost its sense of beauty.

Hillman: Yes, if it ever had one. Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.

London: And this has trickled down to therapists today?

Hillman: Yes. Art, for example, becomes “art therapy.” When patients make music, it becomes “music therapy.” When the arts are used for “therapy” in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.

Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way â€” whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that.

London: But doesn’t psychology have more in common with medicine than the arts?

Hillman: Well, one strand of psychotherapy is certainly to help relieve suffering, which is a genuine medical concern. If someone is bleeding, you want to stop the bleeding. Another medical aspect is the treatment of chronic complaints that are disabling in some way. And many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. So there is a reasonable, sensible, medical side to psychotherapy.

But when the medical becomesÂ scientistic; when it becomes analytical, diagnostic, statistical, and remedial; when it comes under the influence of pharmacology and HMOs â€” limiting patients to six conversations and those kinds of things â€” then we’ve lost the art altogether, and we’re just doing business: industrial, corporate business.

London: Doesn’t this have to do with the fact that, at a certain point in its development, psychology adopted the reductive method in order to gain the respectability of science?

Hillman: I think you’re absolutely correct. But as the popular trust in science fades â€” and many sociologists say that’s happening today â€” people will develop a distrust of purely “scientific” psychology. Researchers in the universities haven’t picked up on this; they’re more interested in genetics and computer models of thinking than ever. But, in general, there is a huge distrust of the scientific establishment now.

London: As people rebel against the scientific approach, they often wind up at the other extreme. We’re seeing many new forms of self-help and personal-growth therapies based on non-rational beliefs.

Hillman: The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it’s also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don’t see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that’s been there all along.

London:Â In some respects, you are a critic of the new age. Yet I noticed that a couple of reviewers ofÂ The Soul’s CodeÂ have placed you in the new age category. How do you feel about that?

Hillman:Â Well, some reviewers have a scientistic ax to grind. To them, my book had to be either science or new age mush. It’s very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: “Now we’re going to hear the opposing view.” There is never a third view.

My book is about a third view. It says, yes, there’s genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there’s biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. So if you come at my book from the side of science, you see it as “new age.” If you come at the book from the side of the new age, you say it doesn’t go far enough â€” it’s too rational.

London:Â I remember a public talk you gave a while back. People wanted to ask you all sorts of questions about your view of the soul, and you were a bit testy with them.

Hillman:Â I’ve been wrestling with these questions for thirty-five years. I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think,Â Oh God, I can’t go back over that again. I can’t put that into a two-word answer. I can’t.Â Wherever I go, people say, “Can I ask you a quick question?” It’s always, “a quick question.” Well, my answers areÂ slow. [Laughs]

London:Â You mentioned Goethe earlier. He remarked that our greatest happiness lies in practicing a talent that we were meant to use. Are we so miserable, as a culture, because we’re dissociated from our inborn talents, our soul’s code.

Hillman:Â I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.

Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don’t think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today â€” happiness as one’s well-being on earth.

London:Â It’s hard to pursue happiness. It seems to creep up on you.

Hillman:Â Ikkyu, the crazy Japanese monk, has a poem:

You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy

What he is saying is: Stop all that nonsense. You’re really happy. Just stop for a minute and you’ll realize you’re happy just being. I think it’s theÂ pursuitÂ that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it’s right here.

This Q&A was adapted from the public radio series “Insight & Outlook.” It is also available inÂ SpanishÂ (translated by Enrique Eskenazi) andÂ ItalianÂ (translated by Rinaldo Lampis). An expanded version of the interview â€” with a few additional questions contributed by journalist Russ Spencer â€” appeared in the March 1998 issue ofÂ The SunÂ magazine under the title, “From Little Acorns: A Radical New Psychology.”

Social and cultural atom

Walter — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 22:39:52 +0000

The pattern of role relations around an individual as their focus is called his cultural atom. Every individual, just as he has a set of friends and a set of enemies, – a social atom â€“ also has a range of roles facing a range of counter-roles.
Psychodrama v. 1 p. 84

The interpsyche occurs then when the role cluster of a couple is particularly intertwined. Love. Upon investigation I imagine there would be a particular quality to the role relationships. The tele would be strong at least in some areas. The tele with the roles passed though the original social atom of each party would be strong. The mutual and positive/negative matches would outweigh the neutral?

This is a psychodramatic look at what Harville Hendrix calls the Imago. Sociometrically it can be explored in great depth.

More moreno quotes follow on the cultural atom

The use here of the word â€œatomâ€ can be justified if we consider a cultural atom as the smallest functional unit within a cultural pattern. The adjective â€œculturalâ€ can be justified when we consider roles and relationships between roles as the most significant development within any specific culture (regardless of what definition is given to culture by any school of thought). Psychodrama v. 1 p. 345

The focal pattern of role-relations around an individual is called his cultural atom. We are here coining a new term, â€œcultural atomâ€, since we know of no other which expressed this peculiar phenomenon of role relationships. Obviously, the term is selected as an analogue to the term â€œsocial atomâ€. The use of
the word â€œatomâ€ here can be justified if we consider a cultural atom as the smallest functional unit within a cultural pattern. The adjective â€œculturalâ€ can be justified when we consider roles and relationships between roles as the most significant development within any specific culture. The socio-atomic organization of a group cannot be separated from its cultural-atomic organization. The social and cultural atoms are manifestations of the same social reality.
Who Shall Survive? p. 70

The following quote sheds some light on how strong the cultural aspect is in the cultural atp

The auxiliary egos are actors who represent absentee persons as they appear in the private world of the patient. The best auxiliary egos are former patients, who have made at least a temporary recovery and professional therapeutic egos who come from a sociocultural environment similar to the patientâ€™s. if there is a choice, â€œnativeâ€ auxiliary egos are preferable to professional egos, however, well trained the latter may be.
Psychodrama v. 1 p. xvii Introduction to 4th edition

Sociodrama is introducing a new approach to anthropological and cultural problems, methods of deep action and of experimental verification. The concept underlying this approach is the recognition that man is a role-player, that every individual is characterized by a certain range of roles which dominate his behavior, and that every culture is characterized by a certain set of roles which it imposes with a varying degree o success upon its membership.
Psychodrama v. 1 pp. 354-355

Earthquake as Medusa

Walter — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 11:12:16 +0000

I’ve been linking the earthquake with Medusa. For some she is so frightening with her head of snakes that they turn to stone if they look.

Like this one by Jonathan Ewart

INTERPSYCHE – Relationship Therapy for Couples

Walter — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:48:14 +0000

Two notes from a search on “marriage” on my Moreno texts. There is a new clarity I’m getting about the principles of working with couples psychodramatically. Thes two snippets reinforce that. Interpsyche is very close to the notion of an imago in IRT.

INTERPSYCHE … Marriage and family therapy for instance, has to be so conducted that the â€œâ€¦â€ of the entire group is re-enacted so that all their tele-relations, their co-conscious and co-unconscious states are brought to life. Psychodrama v. 1 p. vii Introduction to 3rd edition

RESISTANCE TO DRAMATIZE … The two partners are on the stage, for instance, but refuse to enact any of the crucial situations which they have disclosed during the interviews. The director tries to get them started by shifting their attention rapidly from one plot to another. This may put their minds at comparative ease and make them willing to work. If this brings no result, he will suggest that they can pick any subject at random, or anything which they would like to tell one another at the moment. If this also is without effect, the director may suggest that they project upon the stage any of the more pleasant situations in which they may have found themselves in the past (when they were first in love), or any situation which would express how they would have wished their marriage to develop (perhaps having a baby or a large family), or a situation in the future which would express any change they might like to have in their life-situation. If these do not bring any results, there still remains the choice of symbolic situations and symbolic roles for which they may have affinity or which might be constructed for them. If all this does not have the effect of an actual start, the director does not plead or insist too strongly, but sends the subjects back to their seats. Psychodrama v. 1 pp. 338-339

Lift – Achieve anything.

Walter — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:08:42 +0000

We don’t know much about this app. One thing I know is that the name and subtitle are fantastic. Getting these things right is such an art. The image of a rocket on the site works well with the slogan. If it is a flop it might be that it will be hard to live up to the promise of the name. Think how well titles like GTD and Getting the Love You Want work. Lift is good.

I find it inspiring. Trying to name a couple of personal & professional development groups at the moment. I’d like to have this team look at my ideas.

http://lift.do/

A quote from helium follows:

Twitter’s founders have taken the decision to fund a new project, to the excitement of many fans of the wildly popular micro-blogging platform. The new project, called Lift, is still very much shrouded in secrecy, but the funding was reported by CNN in a recent article by John D Sutter. News of the app has prompted a flurry of excited coverage all over the internet, even though no one really yet knows much about it other than the name (the app is still in alpha testing at the time of writing).

Evan Williams and Biz Stone, co-founders of Twitter, set up their Obvious Corporation in early 2011 with the laudable aim of developing “systems that help people work together to improve the world.” Lift is the corporation’s first investment, and so industry interest has been at fever pitch.

Hidden in the new website’s code is the slogan “Lift. Achieve anything.” The app is thought to be broadly similar to Twitter in the way that it works, but with more structure, and until a few weeks ago was called Mibbles. Mibbles was been described by readwriteweb.com‘s Marshall Kirkpatrick as “a very simple tracking and encouragement tool”. This description chimes with another, more high flown summary from the app’s backers, who describe Lift as “an interesting new application for unlocking human potential through positive reinforcement.”

It is fairly clear that Lift will be offering some kind of new spin on social networking, which is something about which Williams and Stone know a great deal, with Twitter recently surpassing professional networking site LinkedIn in monthly traffic. Jon Crosby and Tony Stubblebine are the app’s creators, and they are names in the tech and software development world in their own right.

When the site was called Mibbles, its purpose was clear enough. Users would flock together to join groups based on a goal they hoped to achieve (the readwriteweb article uses the example of ‘I want to keep my dog happy’), and then give themselves awards when they made significant experience towards that goal. These updates of progress towards a goal would then be shared in their friends’ timelines, with the idea that people with a common aim would then cheer each other on and offer encouragement and support.

Psyberspace » Psyche

Hermes: Guide of Souls — Karl Kerényi

Dr. James Hillman Live at Mythic Journeys

Psychodrama Training for Couple Therapists

John Gottman – Science of Trust

Repetition compulsion

James Hillman – interview Scott London

On Soul, Character and Calling: A Conversation with James Hillman

By Scott London

Social and cultural atom

Earthquake as Medusa

INTERPSYCHE – Relationship Therapy for Couples

Lift – Achieve anything.

On Soul, Character and Calling:
A Conversation with James Hillman