Posted: Friday, January 16, 2015 3:00 am
The Daily News of Newburyport
Depth psychology, like art, has its problems today.
Both are unrecognized and unappreciated for what they truly are. The word psychology originally meant “logos of the soul,” i.e., a deeper mind pursuit of self-knowledge and a well-lived life. But not today. Today, psychology is defined inelegantly as the “science of predicting, understanding and controlling behavior.”
Materialistic science has colonized psychology and driven the art out of it. Science’s marriage to commerce and its tendency to position psychology as a commodity make things even worse. Psychology needs to return to the Imagination and so regain its soul.
Science is good. Science is one of our species’ greatest achievements. Science has protected us from much falsehood and delusion. Science is a method and a view that is of great value within the scope of its capacity to know. But it has limits begging for recognition and acknowledgement.
Science can’t see the deeper dance of life, let alone hear the music that drives it.
Whereas the science-based vision of psychology takes things apart from ego’s conceptual search for “facts” about behavior, depth psychology has another vision. Its vision is toward self-knowledge, it’s to unveil what’s hidden from the view of ordinary mind. And in doing so, to open the way to experiential knowledge. All this in the service of making the journey into the deep interior, into “who we truly are.”
In the West during the 1500s, the church was considered to be the embodiment of the One True Way. Its divine-right authority was absolute because masses of people shared the belief that the church’s view of life was God-given. To not believe in the church’s view was to be seen as ignorant, or worse. Many accused of heresy were burned to death.
Today, the priests of scientism wag a similar “holier than thou” finger at views other than their own. Although relatively small numbers of people today understand science and the scientific method responsible for its views, many millions of people accept the science-based view that material reality is the One True Reality. Even most “religious” people subscribe to the materialistic view.
The social consciousness is infected with this idea. Exactly like those living 500 years ago were infected with the idea that the church’s views were the Truth, beyond any question. Since the 19th century, the high priests of science have converted more people into the materialistic view of life than all the religions in all time. Scientism scoffs at people who question materialism, including many innovative scientists who respect science and yet recognize its limitations.
Max Planck, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and a father of quantum physics, gave us an insight into how inflexible and authoritarian science can be. He noted that truly innovative ideas only take root in science when those in power holding the old inflexible ideas die off.
Depth psychology regards inner life, wisdom and meaning as the rightful domain of psychology and of therapy. The core idea is that for psychology and therapy to have any real value, they must help awaken people to who they deeply are, beyond their limited mind’s conditioning.
This is neither a science view nor an unscientific view. It’s a beyond-science view, a view that is part of deeper mind reality — where the Imagination, inner knowledge and wisdom prevail. It’s a view that honors soul.
James Hillman (1926-2011) tells us more about this vision. Hillman was widely regarded as being among the greatest of psychologists to ever live. Here, he’s riffing on the ideas of Heraclitus, whom Hillman viewed as the first depth psychologist: “... the depth dimension is the only one that can penetrate to what is hidden; and since only what is hidden is the true nature of all things, then only the way of the soul can lead to true insight.”
We have to heed the call to the deep interior of life. If we are to connect to what’s most real within ourselves, we need to do two things that depend on our Imagination: 1. Liberate ourselves from our conditioned surface identity and its ordinary-mind hypnotic trance. 2. Connect to and live from our innermost core.
Therapy often fails to understand the necessity of this task. Many therapists don’t recognize the calls of the soul, because they have not been taught or trained to do so. They often work without Imagination and in the wrong direction. This wrong direction uses tactics, techniques and even drugs in efforts to relieve our pain and make our conditioned surface identity satisfied or “normal.”
But, in truth, the soul often calls to us through confusion and negative states of mind. On a deep psychological level, these painful states of mind can be Images loaded with meaning, not symptoms we should be trying get rid of.
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Dr. Jim Manganiello is a clinical psychologist and diplomate-level medical psychotherapist based in Groveland and West Boxford. He is also an author and teacher focusing on stress, personal growth, meditation and “inner fitness.” His book “Unshakable Certainty” is available on Amazon. Email him at drmanganiello@comcast.net or visit www.drjimmanganiello.com.
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Friday, January 16, 2015 3:00 am.