The Snake in the Clinic: Psychotherapy's Role in Medicine and Healing by Guy Dargert

Author:Guy Dargert [Dargert, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: 2016-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

Growing down

The psychologist James Hillman offered us an alternative way to view psychological processes that takes account of the personal daimon. Psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy take a developmental view of the psyche. We imagine that we “grow up” psychologically. We suppose that we become the person that we are today as a result of our life's learning and experience. We look to early experiences to try to reach the source of psychological issues that we face as adults. For example our difficulties in forming intimate relationships in the present day may be thought to have their origins in our early developmental issues with the primary care giver.

Some therapies such as primal therapy and holotropic breath work look even earlier. They look to the birth process itself and even to life in the womb in order to account for the formation of our adult personalities. Useful and insightful though these approaches inarguably are, they contain an assumption that the personality is built from the ground up, that what we are is inherently dependent on our early experiences and learning.

But what if we considered an alternative possibility? Namely that we arrive in the world as complete people; with a character and a life task that we are here to fulfil. We then do not see to be the case that our lives are moulded by our experience, so much as it is that our experiences enable us to become the people that we already are. Hillman calls this the “acorn theory”. We are complete in ourselves from the start. An acorn is destined to become an oak and nothing else, whatever the environmental conditions that it encounters. Similarly each of us has a character and a calling. Early experience may help or hinder the process of self manifestation but the goal of a successfully lived life is predetermined.

He offers the story of the film director Martin Scorsese's early years as an example of how we might take this different view with regard to illness. He says of him that he was:

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