You can't fix the person without fixing the society

[Maricel Evasco]

More and more people here in the USA are being diagnosed with some degree of mental illness. I think it goes beyond just labeling. Ours is a culture that breeds ambivalence. I don't think the prevalence of mental illness will diminish unless  we go about "fixing society" first.

 

James Hillman is not exactly an establishment figure in the world of psychology. If anything, he is 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, a school of thought aimed at "revisioning" or "reimagining" psychology, Hillman believes that the therapy business needs to evolve beyond reductionist "nature" and "nurture" theories of human development.

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James Hillman: 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 — or that it doesn't do enough.

London: 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: 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: you 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: You can't fix the person without fixing the society.

Hillman: 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: You've said that you usually write out of "hatred, dislike, and destruction."

Hillman: 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. But me? I'm an accident — a result — and therefore a victim.

London: A victim?

Hillman: 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: 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?

 

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

[Snagg]

...Is this guy a psychologist or an existentialist?

 

I've never thought that it's psychology's job to give our lives meaning. Nor is it it's job to hold our hand and coo sweet nothings in our ears when things don't go our way. Psychology is meant to help somebody who's lost it on a hard curve to get back on their feet, dust themselves off and get back in the game. Mental medicine when and where it's needed, not a philosophy of life.

[CWO3ROBBIE]

To me there is a big difference between psychology and psychotherapy.

Psychology is the study of what makes humans the way they are.

Psychotherapy is trying to use that knowledge to help people overcome behavioral problems.