02/10/2025
Look forward to this book.
'The city as psyche': Jungian psychologist James Hillman's compelling argument that we should not only locate the psyche within the body, but also the body within the environment. Dissociating and disconnecting the inner and outer worlds, he suggests, has lead to a depletion and drastic deterioration of both:
"We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. Maybe it’s time to look at that. We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go ‘inside’ to locate the psyche, you examine ‘your’ feelings and ‘your’ dreams, they belong to you. Or it’s interrelations, interpsyche, between your psyche and mine. That’s been extended a little bit into family systems and office groups—but the psyche, the soul, is still only ‘within’ and ‘between’ people. We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that.
What’s left out is a deteriorating world.
So why hasn’t therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on that 'inside' soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out There.
You know, the soul is always being rediscovered through pathology. In the nineteenth century people didn’t talk about psyche, until Freud came along and discovered psychopathology. Now we’re beginning to say, 'The furniture has stuff in it that’s poisoning us, the microwave gives off dangerous rays.' The world has become toxic.
The world has become full of symptoms. Isn’t that the beginning of recognizing what used to be called animism? The world’s alive—my god! It’s having effects on us. 'I’ve got to get rid of those fluorocarbon cans.' 'I’ve got to get rid of the furniture because underneath it’s formaldehyde.' 'I’ve got to watch out for this and that and that.' So there’s pathology in the world, and through that we’re beginning to treat the world with more respect.
Why are the intelligent people—at least among the white middle class—so passive now? Why?
Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! They’ve been in therapy in the United States for thirty, forty years, and during that time there’s been a tremendous political decline in this country.
Every time we try to deal with our outrage over the freeway, our misery over the office and the lighting and the crappy furniture, the crime on the streets, whatever—every time we try to deal with that by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we’re depriving the political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world. Yet therapy goes on blindly believing that it’s curing the outer world by making people better.
We’ve had this for years and years and years: 'If everybody went into therapy we’d have better buildings, we’d have better people, we’d have more consciousness.' It’s not the case.
It took the last several decades for therapy to learn that body is psyche, that what the body does, how it moves, what it senses is psyche. More recently, therapy is learning that the psyche exists wholly in relational systems. It’s not a free radical, a monad, self-determined. The next step is to realize that the city, where the body lives and moves, and where the relational network is woven, is also psyche. City strongly affects psyche. Better said: city ‘is’ psyche.
What goes on in the city is not merely politics or economics or architecture. It’s not even 'environment'; it’s psychology. Everything 'out there' is you.
The collective unconscious, as Jung said, is the world, and—also as he said—the psyche is not in you, you are in the psyche. The collective unconscious extends beyond the great symbols of your dreams, beyond the repercussions of ancestral history. It includes the ground swells that ebb and flow through the city, the fashions, language, biases, choreographies that rule your waking soul as much as the images ruling your soul.
This issue goes to the roots of the political role of therapy. If I am right that a major task of therapy is to work with the pathological ferment in the body politic, then compliance with normalization subverts its political task. If therapy imagines its task to be that of helping people cope (and not protest), to adapt (and not rebel), to normalize their oddity, and to accept themselves 'and work within your situation; make it work for you' (rather than refuse the unacceptable), then therapy is collaborating with what the state wants: docile plebs.
But could analysis have new fantasies of itself, so that the consulting room is a cell in which revolution is prepared?
By ‘revolution’ I mean turning over. Not development or unfolding, but turning over the system that has made you go to analysis to begin with—the system being government by minority and conspiracy, official secrets, national security, corporate power, et cetera. Therapy might imagine itself investigating the immediate social causes, even while keeping its vocabulary of abuse and victimization—that we are abused and victimized less by our personal lives of the past than by a present system.
Then the consulting room becomes a cell of revolution, because we would be talking also about, 'What is actually abusing me right now?' That would be a great venture, for therapy to talk that way."
This is an except from his terrific chapter 'We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World's Getting Worse', in 'The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness' (Routledge, 2017). To find more about the book click here: https://www.karnacbooks.com/product/the-political-self-understanding-the-social-context-for-mental-illness/38036/
