The Pathologizing Concept – James Hillman – Part 2

Text Continuation – The Pathologizing Concept – Part 1

Hillman puts us that the specific terms of psychology such as neuroses, complexes, repressions, refer to highly differentiated awareness of the conditions that the soul has presented through observation and psychological reflection in the last three centuries.

Drawing our attention to the difficulty we have in dealing with everything that is different, strange, that deviates from what we consider to be the “normal” of human beings, Hillman (2010, p. 143) argues that “the boundary between madness and sanity, which created the field of psychopathology by placing some events here and others there, is a positivist fiction and not an existential reality – so say existential nihilists”.

In this way, he places diagnostic classifications as a denial of pathologization. This denial takes place in a Nominalist way, that is, its focus is to name psychic complaints, using diagnostic classifications and frameworks to lock up the problem as something “wrong” and “separate” from us.

Hillman tells us that during the 18th and 19th centuries, it was “fashionable” for psychiatry to isolate specific disorders by inventing proper names, such as autism, catatonia, exhibitionism, schizophrenia, etc. And from there, classify the world of the psyche as others did with the animal and plant world, dividing them into categories and subclasses of gender, species and color, that is, typical thinking that came with the Enlightenment ideas that until today dominate the way we conceive the world.

A disease, therefore, is only seen as such from the moment someone compares it to another situation and labels it as something wrong.

Exposing the use of labels, the author criticizes labels such as “psychopath” or “manic-depressive”, because despite bringing intellectual clarity to the problem, they also seal the content of what they name in closed vessels, and the person thus named is relegated to the shelf of the “psychopathology of abnormality” (HILLMAN 2010, p. 141)

For Hillman (2010, p.168) “By giving pathologizing a clinical name, the professional therapist makes the first move in this therapy game. The first movement is not to pathologize the patient. Their complaints and oddities are not clinical psychopathology until they are named as such.🇧🇷

In this bold proposal by Hillman, the medical and religious models of psychology create two fantasies; the first is a rupture of concepts, generating an illusion that there is something that is “normal”, and another that is “pathological”, and thus stamps a manifestation that would be natural as wrong, unhealthy, or sinful.

By professionally naming the movements of the psyche, one creates a distinct entity with a literal reality, namely, “On the one hand, I am protected from this “thing” by separating myself from it; now it has a name. But on the other hand, now I “have” something, or even “am” something: an alcoholic, an obsessive neurotic, a depressive”. (HILLMAN 2010, p.168)

The second is a fantasy in which there is a figure of a doctor or therapist. He explains this question by putting us an equation; since something is classified as a disease, then there has to be a treatment for this disease, therefore, a doctor is needed to treat it.

But if we consider the proposed point of view, of the pathologizing concept, the disease would be part of the human being, the treatment would eliminate the pathologizing, and in this way, would amputate a part that is inherent to the structure of the psyche. He then invalidates the current clinical model of psychology, saying that things like: treatment, illness and cure are impossible. Of course, with this, he does not mean that there is no way of acting, but that the way psychology has done it is incorrect.

Hillman places falling ill as an archetypal fantasy, defending the idea that, just as there are fantasies of health, growth, being saved and going home, there are also similar but opposite fantasies in the unconscious, such as fantasies of falling ill, of being hurt or going crazy.

Therefore, illness is just a polarity like health, not something that needs to be removed from the individual. “Since the fantasy of illness is fantasy (and not illness) in the first place, then treating fantasy requires therapy that focuses on fantasy (not illness). Pathologizing must find imaginal thinking, not clinical thinking” (HILLMAN 2010, p. 173)

He exposes the need to suspend criticism from the point of view of ideas already conceived, to suspend the unilateral point of view of the ego so that it is possible to look at it from the point of view of the unconscious.

If this attitude is reached, we will be able to stop considering the images in a sick notion, or as something that should not exist and that needs an action to correct it, or even medicate it, because it represents a diagnosis of danger.

If there really is a danger, this is due to the fantasy that man himself puts on pathologizing, that is, the way we treat pathologization, our attitudes can transform it into our own demons that frighten us. Our attitude towards this event can be more destructive than pathologizing itself.

With these pertinent observations, we can think to what extent Hillman does not try to rescue the human being as something much greater than a diagnosis, the human being as a “Being”, as a “soul”.

What at first appears to be a drastic break with the ideas of CG Jung himself, on the other hand, seems to be an attempt to maintain the initial proposal of the old master, who, upon entering the Psychiatric Hospital, took care of new premises and a unique way of seeing patients: “The problem that was at the forefront of my interest and my research was the following: what goes on in the mind of the mentally ill person?” (JUNG 2006, page 141)

Finally, Hillman offers us this quote:

“If we can abandon the primary delusion of rational subjective overvaluation – the supposedly normal perspective of normal ego psychology – and its addiction to meaning in relation to subjectivity, we begin to find ourselves living routinely, daily in the mercurial, spontaneous irrationality of strangeness; the whole world as religious, the revelation so continuous, and the occult so present, that these terms become redundant” (HILLMAN 2009, p. 74)

Finally, we can only reflect on the phenomena of the psyche, as it is extremely difficult and complex to establish a line that separates health and illness, if indeed there is such a separation as exemplified by Hillman. To what extent what we believe to be pathological and wrong, would it not in fact be a pure, profound and true manifestation of our being as a totality, as a pure, simply human soul?

It is intriguing the power that Hillman has to give us uncomfortable and even absurd, however, pertinent reflections. Reflections that awaken our demons and stir the foundations of our ideas and values.

As a psychologist, I believe that it makes perfect sense to look at this perspective proposed by him, but I still can’t be clear about the inability of not having what to do with the people who come to me in pain. If I managed to understand Hillman’s statements correctly, it is not about not “treating” patients, but the way in which the treatment is carried out that should change, and perhaps, through the new way proposed by him called the “cultivation of the soul”. ”, which for me is still unclear.

By taking away our ground, he has given us nothing to stand on. I believe that this can be a bit risky, because from the moment he encourages the destruction of our bases, and soon after, he doesn’t offer us anything to rebuild, we are faced with two options; either we go back to the old attitudes, or we have to look for a new way to start talking about psychology by ourselves.

Whatever the attitude we take from now on, I find it very difficult that the themes worked on here do not keep echoing around our minds, maybe this is his real proposal.

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