IN MEMORIAM

by Stanley

Our psychological community has lost two of its elders: Harry Cohen and James Hillman.

Harry was an old colleague of mine with whom I shared many supervision sessions along with Bridget Lee Nicoll. Working for many years for the Prison Service and in private practice, he was a psychotherapist of the old school. I remember him for one dogged piece of profound wisdom which he never tired of promulgating. Most psychological problems, he would tell us, derive from the early relationship with the mother and particularly with breast feeding.

Old hat, you might say. Well, maybe, but it is a hat we would do well to wear and remember. Why? Because breast feeding isn’t just about feeding, it's about love-making, it’s about our first experience of intimacy – or lack of it; it’s about all the anxieties, fears of dying, the exhilaration of living, and all the twisted fantasies that later haunt our intimate and sexual proclivities

What is transmitted to the infant in those first new experiences is the whole convoluted history of our culture’s attitudes to relationships, to sex and intimacy of which the hapless mother is the carrier and child is the wide open recipient. Thank you Harry for your tireless dedication to an important truth.

And then, James Hillman has departed too; not so local as Harry, for he never visited New Zealand, but his impact on us was nonetheless considerable. Hillman graduated in the school of C.G.Jung, eventually distilling the essence of Jung, founding what came to be known as archetypal psychology. Jung was always in the grip of Christianity, an obsession he never got over. Using mythological language Hillman rescued depth psychology from monotheistic spirituality, freeing depth psychology into the realm of pagan mythology which, as Hillman said, is much closer to the true nature of the soul. Hillman also rescued the term ‘soul’ from Abrahamic monotheism, giving it a polytheistic twist, showing us that there are as many places of the human soul as there were pagan gods before Constantine and his creation of institutionalized-state religion.

Hillman invented a whole style of language, combining scholarship with the vividness and imagination of the old classical writers who used mythology as a psychology without giving it that name. For that matter, they wouldn’t have known what ‘mythology’ was either. For them, as for Hillman, what we call ‘mythology’ was an accurate depiction of the human condition. The gods, with all their twisted excesses and blind passions, was human life writ large. It was all projected on the screen of immortality – for the gods were immortal – implying that our pathologies and theirs are unchanging and that we, as individuals, carry the whole conflicting circus within our breasts – each and every one of us.

It was this acceptance of the gods and ourselves as irredeemably pathological, the acceptance of our pathology as normal, that helped us be more tolerant of the way people are and to realise that the only desirable outcome of therapy is ‘congruence’.

Harry and James, thank you both for your unique and very different insights into the many mansions of psychology.