Professionalism and Wrong Pathologizing
Excerpt James Hillman - Revisioning Psychology
By regarding our symptoms as the accidents that brought us into therapy rather than as the via regia into soul, we neglect their importance in soul-making. Instead, this importance is displaced onto therapy. By carelessly turning over our symptoms to professional therapists, we have reinforced the grip of professionalism upon psychopathology. Here the critics of psychotherapy have much on their side: they note well the dependency of the helping professions upon the fantasy of sickness. Because states of soul need professional help only when they can be found sick, a collusion develops between patient and therapist in regard to psychopathology. They both require it for the therapy game.
The therapy game enacts an archetypal pattern. It was said in antiquity that the same God who constellates an illness is the one who can take it away. The healer is the illness and the illness is the healer. It is therefore of first importance to find out “who,” which archetypal person, is involved in the psychopathology, a point discussed in the previous chapter. But as this ancient psychological idea has become translated into modern secular therapy, the “who” is none other than the professional therapist.
By giving the pathologizing a clinical name, the professional therapist makes the first move in this therapy game. The first move is not the pathologizing of the patient. His complaints and oddities are not clinical psychopathology until so named. Until then, symptoms are demonstrations of the psyche, a mode of its being and expression, part of its fantasy and its affliction. But as soon as the move is made of professional naming, a distinct entity is created, with literal reality. On the one hand I am protected from this “thing” by separation from it; it now has a name. But on the other hand, I now “have” something, or even “am” something: an alcoholic, an obsessive neurotic, a depressive. Moreover the therapist has become the very God who by bringing the condition is the only one who can take it away. The patient tends to believe in his therapist: “He alone can help me for only he knows really what is wrong.” What is “really” wrong means what is “literally” wrong, what has been literalized into wrongness by the professional therapy game.