Here's James Hillman's view:
"By 'psychology' I mean what the word says: the study or order (logos) of the soul (psyche). This implies that all psychology is by definition a depth psychology, because the soul, ever since Heraclitus, 2500 years ago, has been defined as immeasurably deep and unlocatable. I therefore see all psychologies as ultimately therapies by definition because of their involvement with soul." (from his essay, "A Psyche the Size of the Earth")
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It really is depth psychology if you could feel and see the stored memories within the human soul. The soul is measurable and locatable!
The human soul field spins and thus acts as a centrifuge, causing the earliest memories from conception, being in the womb, and birth to be stored the furthest from the physical body. (approximately 15 feet) The mother's imprint on the tabula rasa soul is also the strongest determination in personality formulation and perception programming. (a child in the womb cannot differentiate between their own experience and their mother’s experience) As the time line of life continues to store memories on the horizontal axis of the soul, they are layered, one after another in the sequence they were created at the frequency and perception utilized by the vertical operational consciousness at the original time the event occurred. This forms many rings or layers of consciousness patterns of memories. (Note: When a person dies and conscious awareness is no longer limited to the physical body, it expands outward through this field. That is the life review process people experience in NDE's and also as they are near death) also, (the eyes truly are the windows to the soul as the walls you see when you look into a person’s eyes are these same stored memories)
Depth psychology is the process of peeling back the layers of the onion from the inside outward in the reverse sequence of their occurrence until the entire field is "whole.". (This is why Jesus said, "You must be ("pure", my insertion) like a child to know thy Father.") Synchronicity is caused by the soul desiring to cleanse itself by creating situations and relationships where we have the opportunity to resolve the unhealthy original perception programming event. Problem is, most of these cleansing opportunities become reinforcement events! (most negative symptoms in the physical body are merely created by the defense mechanisms trying to block the retrieval of the low frequency stored emotional memories.)
If the original unhealthy perception programming event had an emotional level of 8 on an emotional intensity scale of 1-10 (based upon the limited perception of a young child), each of the reinforcement events create an exponential multiplication of the emotional intensity of the original event times the current event. This happens repetitively as life goes in circles and guides us to similar experiences.
I have found that reverse depth psychology works best. If you decrease the emotional intensity of the original event from 8 to "Zero," the intense emotion attached to all reinforcement events immediately becomes zero. (anything multiplied by zero results in a sum of zero.) Even the "chemistry of love attraction" in current relationships immediately changes as the soul is no longer attracted toward someone for resolution purposes. (this is why Imago Therapy works so well) In working with individuals who constantly are attracted addictively toward physically abusive relationships, they generally contact me a day later and ask “Is it normal that I no longer have any attraction at all toward my spouse?” All emotion attached to the reinforcement events just drops away even though we did not discuss current or previous relationships beyond the original programming event, usually in early childhood.
The process described is what I experience each time I work with a person. For some reason unknown to me, people’s memories of their life experiences are physical tangible objects to my perception. I just read them to help people. It’s like x-rays to bones. It's scientific. Pure cause and effect, measurable physical stimulus and measurable physical response, repeatable with the same results each time. I found Jung excellent as his writings best described what I was experiencing in reading souls. With this process it is possible to resolve inter-generational trauma, passed from mother to child in the womb, in a few minutes.
Bonnie,Bonnie...what a wonderful gem from Hillman...Thank you sooooo,, sooooo much for excavating this..Reading it gives being awake at four A.M., a deeper purpose...xo Judie
Interesting quote in that there are schools of "psychology" who would deny the existence of the soul (psyche). Should they take another name and have they been included incorrectly under the broader umbrella called psychology? Would cognitive-behaviorists, for example, be willing to give up their identity with psychology; should depth psychology state that CB theorists and practitioners not be called psychologists? It will be interesting to hear from others in different fields of psychology. I know that when I got my degree in MFT, the soul or the unconscious was never mentioned and learned patterns "underneath" awareness was the substituted concept.