What makes soul-centered therapy different?
I consider Thomas Moore’s classic 1992 book ‘Care of the Soul’ still the best translation of post-Jungian archetypal psychologist James Hillman’s ideas into everyday language that is relatable and practical for ordinary people looking for help with their suffering and cultivating a more meaningful and satisfying way of living. These excerpts from the original introduction do a great job of highlighting some of the fundamental differences between a soul-centred therapy and more mainstream approaches that focus on symptom reduction and behaviour modification.
The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is “loss of soul.”
When soul is neglected, it doesn’t just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning. Our temptation is to isolate these symptoms or to try to eradicate them one by one; but the root problem is that we have lost our wisdom about the soul, even our interest in it.
We have today few specialists of the soul to advise us when we succumb to moods and emotional pain, or when as a nation we find ourselves confronting a host of threatening evils.
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Tradition teaches that soul lies midway between understanding and unconsciousness, and that its instrument is neither the mind nor the body, but imagination.
I understand therapy as nothing more than bringing imagination to areas that are devoid of it, which then must express themselves by becoming symptomatic. Fulfilling work, rewarding relationships, personal power, and relief from symptoms are all gifts of the soul. They are particularly elusive in our time because we don’t believe in the soul and therefore give it no place in our hierarchy of values.
We have come to know soul only in its complaints: when it stirs, disturbed by neglect and abuse, and causes us to feel its pain. It is commonplace for writers to point out that we live in a time of deep division, in which mind is separated from body and spirituality is at odds with materialism. But how do we get out of this split? We can’t just “think” ourselves through it, because thinking itself is part of the problem. What we need is a way out of dualistic attitudes. We need a third possibility, and that third is soul.
“Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life; quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be. ”
The emotional complaints of our time, complaints we therapists hear every day in our practice, include:
emptiness
meaninglessness
vague depression
disillusionment about marriage, family, and relationship
a loss of values
yearning for personal fulfillment
a hunger for spirituality
All of these symptoms reflect a loss of soul and let us know what the soul craves.
We yearn excessively for entertainment, power, intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and material things, and we think we can find these things if we discover the right relationship or job, the right church or therapy. But without soul, whatever we find will be unsatisfying, for what we truly long for is the soul in each of these areas.
Lacking that soulfulness, we attempt to gather these alluring satisfactions to us in great masses, thinking apparently that quantity will make up for lack of quality.
Care of the soul speaks to the longings we feel and to the symptoms that drive us crazy, but it is not a path away from shadow or death. A soulful personality is complicated, multifaceted, and shaped by both pain and pleasure, success and failure.
Life lived soulfully is not without its moments of darkness and periods of foolishness. Dropping the salvational fantasy frees us up to the possibility of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, which are the very foundation of soul.
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The later Roman writer Apuleius said, “Everyone should know that you can’t live in any other way than by cultivating the soul.”
Care can also mean cultivation, watching, and participating as the seed of soul unfolds into the vast creation we call character or per-sonality, with a history, a community, a language, and a unique mythology. Cultivation of the soul implies a lifelong husbanding of raw materials. Farmers cultivate their fields, all of us cultivate our souls.
The aim of soul work, therefore, is not adjustment to accepted norms or to an image of the statistically healthy individual. Rather, the goal is a richly elaborated life, connected to society and nature, woven into the culture of family, nation, and globe. The idea is not to be superficially adjusted, but to be profoundly connected in the heart to ancestors and to living brothers and sisters in all the many communities that claim our hearts.
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Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life; quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.
If you feel this kind of approach would suit your therapy needs, you can book a free consultation with me using this link:
