11

Psychopathology

 

THE point of departure for the re-visioning of psychopathology is a statement from Jung (CW 13: 54): “The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room …”

The link between gods and diseases is double: on the one hand, giving the dignity of archetypal significance and divine reflection to every symptom whatsoever, and on the other hand, suggesting that myth and its figures may be examined for patterns of pathology. Hillman (1974a) has called this pathology in mythical figures the infirmitas of the archetype, by which is meant both the essential “infirmity” of all archetypal forms – that they are not perfect, not transcendent, not idealizations – and that they therefore provide “nursing” to human conditions; they are the embracing backgrounds within which our personal sufferings can find support and be cared for.

The double link – that pathology is mythologized and mythology is pathologized – had already been adumbrated by Freud’s presentation of the Oedipus myth as the key to the pathology of neurosis and even of the civilization as a whole. Before Freud, the link between mythos and pathos can be discovered in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and in the scholarly research of the great German classicist and encyclopedist W. H. Roscher, whose Ephialtes (1900), a monograph on Pan and the nightmare, was subtitled “A Mythopathological Study” (cf. Hillman 1972a).

The relations between myths and psychopathology are elaborated in a series of studies: López-Pedraza (1977) on Hermes and (1982) on the Titans; Berry (1975) on Demeter/Persephone and (1979b) on Echo; Moore (1979a) on Artemis; Micklem (1979) on Medusa; Hillman (1970a, 1975d) on Saturn, (1974a) on Athene and Ananke, (1972c) on Eros and Dionysus, (1972a) on Pan, and (1967b) on the puer eternus or divinely youthful figure in various mythologies; M. Stein (1973) on Hephaistos and (1977) on Hera. In these studies, the myth is examined for its pathological implications. The hermeneutic begins with myths and mythical figures (not with a case), reading them downward for psychological understanding of the fantasies going on in behavior.

Archetypal psychology thereby follows the epistrophic (reversion) method of Corbin, returning to the higher principle in order to find place for and understand the lesser – the images before their examples. Imagination becomes a method for investigating and comprehending psychopathology. This hermeneutic method is also essentially Neoplatonic; it is the preferred way for deciphering the grotesque and pathologized configurations of Renaissance psychology. As Wind says in his “Observation on Method” (1967): “The commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but the exceptional cannot be understood by amplifying the commonplace. Both logically and causally the exceptional is crucial, because it introduces … the more comprehensive category.”

Precisely because myth presents the exceptional, the outlandish, and more-than-human dimension, it offers background to the sufferings of souls in extremis, i. e., what nineteenth-century medicine calls “psychopathology.” The double movement between pathology and mythology moreover implies that the pathological is always going on in human life inasmuch as life enacts mythical fantasies. Archetypal psychology further claims that it is mainly through the wounds in human life that the gods enter (rather than through pronouncedly sacred or mystical events), because pathology is the most palpable manner of bearing witness to the powers beyond ego control and the insufficiency of the ego perspective.

This perpetually recurring “pathologizing” is defined as “the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective” (Hillman 1975a). There is no cure of pathologizing; there is, instead, a re-evaluation.

That pathologizing is also a “deformed perspective” accounts for its place in the work of imagination that, according to Gaston Bachelard (b. 1884; d. 1962) – another major source of the archetypal tradition – must proceed by “deforming the images offered by perception” (Bachelard 1943). It is this pathologized eye that, like that of the artist and the psychoanalyst, prevents the phenomena of the soul from being naively understood as merely natural. Following Jung (and his research into alchemy), psychological work is an opus contra naturam. This idea Hillman (1975a) follows further by attacking the “naturalistic fallacy,” which dominates most normative psychologies.

Another direction of the mythos/pathos connection starts with one specific form of pathology, searching it for its mythical possibilities, as if to uncover “the God in the disease.” Examples are: Lockhart (1977), cancer; Moore (1979b), asthma; Leveranz (1979), epilepsy; Hawkins (1979), migraine; Severson (1979), skin disorders; Kugelmann, glaucoma; Sipiora (1981), tuberculosis.

There are also more general reflections upon pathology revisioned within an archetypal hermeneutic: R. Stein (1974) on psychosexual disorders; Guggenbühl-Craig (1971) on the archetypal power problem in medical attitudes; Ziegler (1980) on archetypal medicine; Sardello (1980a) on medicine, disease, and the body. These works look at the body, pathology, and its treatment altogether free from the positivism of the clinical and empirical traditions that have come down to the twentieth century from nineteenth-century scientistic, materialistic medicine, its views of health, disease, and the power-hero role of the physician.

In one respect, the position here is close to the anti-psychiatry of Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing. Each regards “abnormal” conditions as existentially human and hence fundamentally normal. They become psychiatric conditions when looked at psychiatrically. Archetypal psychology, however, makes three further moves beyond anti-psychiatry. First, it examines the normalizing perspective itself in order to show its “abnormalities” and pathologizing propensities. Second, unlike Szasz and Laing, archetypal psychology maintains the real existence of psychopathology as such, as inherent to psychic reality. It neither denies psychopathology nor attempts to find cause for it outside the soul in politics, professional power, or social convention (Foucault). Third, because pathologizing is inherent to psyche, it is also necessary. The necessity of pathologizing derives, on the one hand, from the gods who show patterns of psychopathology and, on the other hand, from the soul, which becomes aware of its destiny in death mainly through the psyche’s indefatigable and amazingly inventive capacity to pathologize.

As Freud’s paradigm of psychopathology was hysteria (and paranoia) and Jung’s was schizophrenia, archetypal psychology has so far spoken mainly about depression (Hillman 1972c, 1975a, c, and d, 1979a; Vitale 1973; Berry 1975, 1978b; Guggenbühl-Craig 1979; Miller 1981b; Simmer 1981) and mood disorder (Sardello 1980b). Depression has also provided a focus for Kulturkritik, an attack upon social and medical conventions that do not allow the vertical depth of depressions.

For a society that does not allow its individuals “to go down” cannot find its depth and must remain permanently inflated in a manic mood disorder disguised as “growth.” Hillman (1975a) links the Western horror of depression with the tradition of the heroic ego and Christian salvation through upward resurrection: “Depression is still the Great Enemy … Yet through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution (in behalf of soul) begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression.”