s” 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 calls them. The presence behind, or inside, of the material has been forgotten.
The apparent opposite to the literal use of language is figurative, in which words are used in ways that deviate from singular interpretations to represent more fully the reality they attempt to describe. Metaphors are one example of figurative language. The first definition of metaphor that pops up in an online search is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.” This definition succinctly reflects the popular approach to language, in which metaphors are ideas that exist in the mind, to be analyzed and interpreted but never to be experienced. To allow metaphor to push us outside of thought and into perception would be to rehydrate its desiccated meaning.
For oral indigenous peoples (who had not yet been exposed to the written word) metaphor was not a concept. It was the culture’s living reality, woven in to their layered understanding of the nature of things. We will soon see that if the history of human consciousness is traced back far enough through language we reach a point where perception is completely figurative, and thought takes a back-seat to direct experience. This type of consciousness cannot perceive matter without also perceiving the immaterial reality which it contains. We have traded the sweetness of substance for the safety of assurance, and now the dark, hidden, mysterious and unknowable things are vanishing, like a bright flame squished between two fingers, one after another.
While linguistic analysts and academic abstractions may attempt to create a language that would make misunderstanding impossible and meaning singular by demythologizing and disinfecting language, they would certainly fail. Language, like consciousness, is a living organism which is dead once it is petrified.” The etymology of language reaches back to a time when words were used to describe physical processes; a time when gods and goddesses pervaded all natural phenome