Ambiguity: the condition of admitting of two or more meanings, of being understood in more than one way, or of referring to two or more things at the same time
There is a way to move in the world that honors the invisible inside of things: the immaterial reality that haunts the matrix of matter. Modern language does not facilitate this enigmatic approach to life. But a thoughtful study of the evolution of language reveals that until relatively recently, human consciousness was anything but literal. It would not allow our ancestors to see the material and immaterial as separate phenomena, and so they danced with an animate earth whose every form was filled with spirit.
This is significant for the field of psychology as well as environmental studies, considering that “When we study long-term changes in consciousness, we are studying changes in the world itself” Efforts to tend to the health of the planet and the individual psychologies that exist within it might benefit from a brief foray into the evolution of language as it displays a gradual shift from engagement with outer phenomena to fixation on the inner phenomenon of thoughts, emotions and concepts.
The natural philosophy of alchemy is an interesting case study of the interaction between language, material and psychology as they interact and transform one another. The writings of the early alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1541) are notoriously dense and difficult to interpret. True to the alchemical mode of imagining the world, his texts are “constructed to reveal as many depths of meaning as possible—their words are intended to reverberate in the imagination with meanings.” His intelligent use of language had the ability to bring the material to life, just as a master poet can today. The early experiments of Paracelsus paved the way for some of the modern methods and ideas in science and psychotherapy. He founded the field of toxicology, pioneered the use of chemicals and minerals in medicine, and is said to have made the first clinical mention of the “unconscious” as it relates to the disease process.
C.G. Jung, following Paracelsus, fundamentally altered the field of psychology when he discovered the astounding parallels between unconscious psychological processes and the quest for the alchemical opus. Here a connection was re-established between substance and psyche; human and nature. It is as if psyche went out in search of nature, and discovered it in the hidden realm of the unconscious.
Depth psychologist James Hillman (1926-2011) drew deeply from Jung’s work to develop and re-envision Archetypal Psychology. Hillman wished to revivify what he saw as the deflated modern therapeutic practice through work in imagination, fantasy, myth and metaphor. He was concerned particularly with the insubstantiality of modern therapeutic language as it reflects a growing cultural neurosis: a one-sidedness of thinking that shows up in a way of communicating that is alarmingly abstract and deeply literalized.
In Alchemical Psychology, Hillman writes, “Conceptual language…is the chronic locus of our collective neurosis as it appears in language.” This claim is directed in particular at a Western culture that seems to be at the forefront of conceptual imperialism, and at a profession that is concerned primarily with healing the human mind. To heal is to make whole, which is a difficult task to achieve when the instrument being used (language, in the case of therapy) is already fractured.
Hillman defines literalism as “that one-sidedness of mind that experiences only singleness of language.” It is that same unilateral literalism that can make it difficult for the western mind to wade through an alchemical text or poetry, and which can cause the devout to read a single truth into their holy book, or bow to science as their only God. But even the faithful are not truly served by this habit of thinking, for their symbols which were once sacred images in the human imagination (known to be conduits for the holy, and not the holy itself) have sunk to be mere things, or “idols,” as Barfield c