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Writing Down the Soul
Ginette Paris’ book should come with a warning on its cover:
Beware: This book is dangerous and difficult because it stirs the depths of the soul even before it touches the surface of the mind.
How does one translate the wisdom of the psyche into words that retain the depths of experience? This question is at the heart of Ginette Paris’ book. Reflecting on her brain injury and the long eight months of rehabilitation, she confesses her difficulties in trying to communicate the radically transformative effects of her trauma. “But knowing something from the heart,” she writes, “and finding the language to communicate the experience are two very different things.” (2007, 80)
Psychology has been quite poor in this regard opting as it does for a logic that is ill suited to the indirect ways of the psyche. Greg Mogenson makes this point when, reflecting on the early pioneers of depth psychology, he says, “coming from the fields of medicine and science, they developed a rather loveless language for the love with which they worked—words such as object-cathexis, transference neurosis, psychic energy, and projection.” Continuing, he says, “analytic writing can suffer from a lack of liberal flourish, imaginative execution, and narrative richness.” Rounding to a close, he asks,“Is the ‘borderline patient’, so ubiquitous in the literature today, an artifact of the analysts’ own dull prose—a jilted form of hysteria, a disintegrated from of the muse?” (2003, 192).
Susan Rowland makes a similar point. “Language,” she says, “is an intervention into psychology, not a neutral medium for it.” (2005, 79) Commenting on Jung’s work in this regard, Rowland says his writing “is an attempt to evoke in writing what cannot be entirely grasped: the fleeting momentary presence of something that forever mutates and reaches beyond the ego’s inadequate understanding” (2005, 3).
An attempt, she says. Does it succeed? I think by and large it does, but it also fails, especially when Jung’s writings become a school of psychology. And this, I believe, is where Ginette Paris’ marvelously disturbing book does succeed. In the final chapter of her book she writes with regard to the psychological wisdom stored in each of our psyches and in our psychological theories, “It was my intention in this book to contribute my little bit by translating that theoretical legacy into a language cleared of its jargon, my memo for the next generation, the basis of my thinking about the next incarnation of depth psychology.” (2007, 214).
Her book has realized that intention, admirably so. She has de-schooled depth psychology and in her work of clearing away the jargon she has bought the theories of depth psychology back home to the soul from which they have come. Damaging her brain she found a way to communicate through her heart what she came to know about the wisdom of the psyche.
This is a rare achievement in psychological writing. Her book is an exercise in homecoming. It is an exercise in anamnesis. It is work of un-forgetting, which is what makes her book disturbing and worthy of that injunction to beware. In a culture that is more or less deaf to what, in our frantic and manic pursuits of wealth, fame, security, comfort and pleasure, is left behind; in a culture that no longer knows how to honor hesitation and slowness as gateway to psyche’s depth (Stanton Marlan, 2005), each of us has to have a version of denting one’s thick skull if we are to remember what is too vital to forget: the gap that always exists between the languages of psychology and the reality of the psyche.
Before I go on with my review I have to pause here for a moment to address what I feel is the delicious irony of her book, and to address my point about de-schooling psychology. Her quote above about her intention appears in her final chapter, “Joy: The Antidote to Anxiety,” and my remark about denting one’s thick skull refers to the title of her first chapter, “ Denting my thick Skull.” The incongruity here between what might be expected after her brain injury and her encounter with death and what appears—her comprehensive re-visioning of depth psychology—is the ironic surprise in this book. What begins in trauma ends with a sense of joy that is as deep as it is wide in its extension.
This makes her book truly a work of love and that is what makes it believable and challenging, because love never survives in the sclerotic matrices of one’s life or one’s work. Love is the alchemy that undoes what a life or a theory would fix. It belongs to no school nor cannot it be learned at school. It is learned in the rough and tumble of life, in the mistakes and the diversions, in the falls we take when we do fall in love and when we fall into the depths where our loves are re-schooled.
And so when she adds an Appendix to her book entitled, “Schools of Thought are families, bibliographies their family tree,” she is about that work of re-imagining depth psychology, about that work of de-schooling it. Families are not schools. They are traditions and Ginette Paris has returned home to the family and tradition of depth psychology with a story about psyche’s wisdom, which psychology, including depth psychology, has too often forgotten.
Ginette Paris has transformed her wound into a work and in that transformation she recovers for us a specific aspect of what has been lost: that depth psychology is not a natural science. In the chapter entitled “Boundary Issues” she makes a strong case for how depth psychology’s attempt to imitate the hard sciences is an “intellectual waste,” which is “revelatory of a complex of inferiority toward hard science, cluttering the field of depth psychology with the wrong rhetoric.” Thus she writes, “I find it more fruitful to work toward an acceptance of the fact that depth psychology is not a natural science, never was, never will be. It was, is, and shall remain a part of the humanities”(85).
Her own rhetoric is at play here. Her voice is passionate and she makes no bones about her commitment to her position. Listen, for example, to the following passage. Indeed, it is best to read it aloud in order to be moved along by the rhythm, pace and tempo of the words. There is that fine art of persuasion in her writing, a rhetorical style that possesses the quality of an exhortation.
“The mimesis of science, the language of hypothesis, the obsolete conceptual abstractions, the fake complexity(when the real one is that of the psyche), the battles between schools(hiding a battle of egos), all of it is coming to a full stop as depth psychologists begin to speak evocatively instead of dogmatically” (85).
In this passage and many others like it I am reminded of the writing style of James Hillman, and indeed in many ways this book might be compared to Hillman’s ground breaking book, Re-visioning Psychology. Published thirty-five years ago it took depth psychology south to Florence to the heart of the Renaissance and its neo Platonic roots, and to the humanities as the heart of the soul. Ginette Paris belongs especially to this branch of the family of depth psychology, and her book renews that journey.
Although I agree with Ginette Paris’ point about depth psychology and the humanities, I am not sure we would agree about the place psychology as a hard science has in the economy of the soul. In the Preface to her book, she makes it clear that depth psychology and psychology as a hard science part company, and the subtitle of her chapter, “Boundary Issues: “You, Science. Me, Humanities” reinforces that divorce.
In this parting of the ways, she surrenders psychology as a hard science and its correlate of the medical model in the depth tradition to the neurosciences. “I believe,” she writes, “the next evolution of psychology will be concerned less with pathology--leaving it to neuroscience—and will become more like a philosophical training capable of preparing the person for the voyage in the country of pain and joy—depth psychology as the art of not wasting the joy of life” (xv).
Given the exquisite way she has traveled through her trauma into the underworld of its images, and the phenomenologically descriptive moments that she provides of that passage, it is difficult to make a case for the place and role of neuroscience in the family of psychology. But maybe it is less about leaving psychology as a hard science to neuroscience and more about recovering and remembering how neuro-psychology both reveals and conceals something about the depths and mysteries of the soul. Maybe it is less about “Them, Science. Us, Humanities” and more about welcoming those who speak in a different tongue, who use different metaphors for translating the invisible and subtle reality of soul into visibility. It can be done. One has only to listen for the hidden and forgotten metaphors in the language that psychology as a hard science uses to speak of soul. (Romanyshyn, 1982/2001, 2007).
The scientific psychologists might be distant cousins, whose rhetoric, like that of a batty uncle, grates on the ear, but they belong to the family of psychology and deserve a place at the table. What Ginette Paris is quite good at indicating is their need for better manners, for an open heart, which would allow them to listen to depth psychology on its terms without insisting that its insights, for example, about the unconscious or the dream, be translated into their terms and methods. Too often the tradition of psychology as a hard science seems to lack that generosity.
In the end, Ginette Paris’ book is a discourse that works on two different but related rhetorical levels. As she notes in her Preface, her book, “speaks with two voices,” because after her injury “Thirty years of study turned to dust” and “Those brilliant theories, read, annotated, regurgitated in courses and articles—all now appeared useless” (xiv). There is the scholarly voice of the critic whose insights about the different models of psychotherapy presented in chapters 3 through 7 are spoken with that same style of exhortation noted above. One reads these chapters and is made aware of the deleterious effects of the unconscious myths that linger in the art and practice of psychotherapy. The same voice is present in her chapters on the archetype of the mother and the father and one comes away from reading them with an appreciation of how she takes depth psychology into the world where it belongs by showing the presence of these archetypes in cultural forms of pathology.
In the chapter “The Archetype of the Father” she is especially insightful about the injurious effects of the maternalization of therapy. She is quite correct when she notes, “The tendency toward maternalization of therapy is a logical consequence of a psychological culture that is dominated by the mythology of the child.” (153)
The other voice in her book is that of the one who, with compassion and sympathy, as two virtues of the heart and its ways of knowing, bears witness to suffering and invites the reader into a shared space of intimacy. These moments are marked off in the text in gray boxes and they function as oases where the reader can pause for a moment to linger with the stories the author tells.
For some the two voices might feel like two books, but in the end I prefer to think of the two voices as opening two different landscapes for the reader. The scholarly voice in the text invites one into the study where one has conversations with companions. The voice of the heart invites one out doors into the sunshine, into life and its wild enthusiasms to celebrate in joy the soul of the world and perhaps to rest in reverie. Read the book in both places, or maybe read it twice. In both landscapes I learned much from this book. Its insights are sound, simple, sober and within the context of psychology a welcome surprise. Ginette Paris’ book is a good companion, which in both voices continuously speaks the wisdom of the psyche.
Bibliography
Marlan, Stanton. 2005. “Hesitation and Slowness: Gateway to
Psyche’s Depth.” The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol.24, no 1, 17-27.
Mogenson, Greg. 2003. The Dove in the Consulting Room, New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Rowland, Susan. 2005. Jung as a Writer, New York: Routledge.
Romanyshyn, Robert. 2001. Mirror and Metaphor: Images and Stories of Psychological Life. Pittsburgh: Trivium
Review of Ginette Paris’ Wisdom of the Psyche:Depth Psychology after Neuroscience.
(London and New York: Routledge, 2007)
Review by Robert D. Romanyshyn, Ph.D.
Robert D. Romanyshyn, Ph.D., a core faculty member of Pacifica Graduate Institute and an Affiliate member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, is the author of six books the most recent of which is The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind. Correspondence: Pacifica Graduate Institute, 249 Lambert Road, Carpinteria CA. 93013, U.S.A. E-mail: romany@pacifica.edu
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