While other nineteenth-century investigators were polluting the archaic, natural, and mythic in the outer world, psychology was doing much the same to the archaic, natural, and mythic within. Therapeutic depth psychology shares this blame, since it shares nineteenth-century attitudes. It gave names with a pathological bias tothe animals of the imagination. We invented psychopathology and thereby labeled the memoria a madhouse. We invented the diagnoses with which we declared ourselves insane. After subtly poisoning our own imaginal potency with this language, we complain of a cultural wasteland and loss of soul. The poison spreads; words continually fall "mentally ill" and are usurped by psychopathology, so that we can hardly use them without their new and polluted connotations: immature, dissociation, rigid, withdrawn, passive, transference, fixation, sublimation, projection (the last three notably different in alchemy), resistance, deviate, stress, dependence, inhibition, compulsion, illusion, split, tranquilized, driven, compensation, inferiority, derange, suppression, depression, repression, confusion-these words have been psychologized and pathologized in the past 150 years.
© 2024 jon wilson
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