The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Entertaining Ideas

Entertain has three definitions: to amuse or interest an audience, to offer hospitality, and to consider something. In the latter sense, to entertain means to "hold in between" (thanks to James Hillman for pointing that out). We can best see what is meant by "entertaining ideas" if we call to mind the familiar phrase used in rhetoric: "On the one hand, this ... and on the other hand, that ...." To entertain an idea suggests holding a thought in such a way that you can look first at one angle and then another, turn the thought, gaze into its depths, blow on it to stir up its fire, open it up with images, test it for sense and resonance.

Among the images we have on this page, there is Rodin's The Thinker, hand supporting head, imagined to be the location of thought. (A Pueblo Indian of the American Southwest once told C. G. Jung that white people must be crazy to imagine thinking with the head instead of the heart. How much there is left for all of us to learn!) In the human figure's primate counterparts, the hand is similarly positioned, and we can see more clearly that the fingers are in close proximity to the mouth, suggesting that thought is also held in between hand and tongue, both organs of expression.

In this chamber of our salon, we offer food for thought that we hope will entertain you in all three ways.

Charles Knott: Is Psychotherapy a Fiction?

I am reading James Hillman's Healing Fiction again as if for the first time. Although I used this book extensively in my doctoral dissertation on archetypal theory as a basis for drama therapy and wrote up transcripts of six drama therapy group meetings involving the reenactment of the myth of Psyche and Eros for clinical purposes, I still did not really comprehend this book, nor do I fully understand why Jim Hillman believed that the myth of Psyche and Eros is the predominant myth of psychotherapy. So I'm looking forward to reading about the myth once I finish rereading Healing Fiction. I can see that what happens to us is factual but that our recollection of it is fictional, our recounting of it is fictional, our dreaming about it is fictional, and our recounting of our dreams is fictional. Hillman uses his substantial literary talents to analyze psychotherapy in fictional terms, or to analyze psychotherapeutic fiction using the vocabulary of literary criticism. My hope and intention is to reread this book until I understand it thoroughly and become thoroughly conversant in the ideas and vocabulary that Hillman has put together in his unique, highly original, brilliantly insightful manner.

Pursuing this plan is apparently an idea approved of by my psyche because night before last I had a dream in which I was being assaulted by my verbally abusive father when I was about six years old. In the dream Hillman rescued me from my father's assault simply by appearing and taking over the monologue my father was producing. In the dream my father was talking some kind of gibberish that I could not understand, but it was obvious he was mimicking me and ridiculing my manner of talking when I attempt to understand ideas. Hillman linked up his own monologue to my father's monologue and suddenly the Hillmanian style of writing and thinking usurped my father's garbage and was replaced by a beautiful intellectual monologue which, in the dream, I found to be consoling and comforting because it introduced intellectual clarity and an attitude of respect and appreciation for me as a person. Hillman's arrival was like an antibody absorbing a germ, or like a towel sopping up a mess on the floor, and then proceeding to communicate with good-humored affection towards me.

One part of this image I can relate back to real life is from a movie entitled The 13th Warrior starring Antonio Banderas. In the movie Banderas falls in with a group of people who are talking a dialect he cannot understand, and they let him know that he is not one of them and they have no respect for him. The movie shows Banderas suddenly starting to understand a word or two from the unknown dialect the bandits are speaking, and then, gradually, he understands groups of words and finally sentences and then becomes generally fluent. He learns to speak the language. That is portrayed in the movie by having the dialect gradually become the English language so that we can all understand it and, in so doing, share the learning experience.

Analogously, in the dream, my father was talking unintelligible gibberish. Hillman began talking over it and assimilating it into English, but he also changed the content so that it overpowered the ridicule from my father simply by introducing the voice of reason and an attitude of affection and respect for me as a six-year-old child. The dream suggests that Hillman and I have adopted each other psychically, and that he has become my positive father with an immediate healing influence. For me, this is a very good thing!

Although I met Hillman and spoke with him several times in the 1980s and 1990s, we were hardly intimate friends; nevertheless, he has become a mentor through his speaking and writing. I also never met C.G. Jung, but he, too, has been an invaluable mentor. I feel similarly about many dead poets and philosophers.

One of the profound statements from Healing Fiction is that the way we tell our life story determines the way we live our actual lives. If this is true, our lives have a fictional basis created by ourselves. I have been trying to think of the genre I've been using to tell my life story. What kind of character was I, and what literary genre did I pick?

Obviously, I tell my story as a highly self-absorbed hero. My story is about a young boy who takes in the world too rapidly and is injured by what he sees. This reminds me of the story of "The Fisher King," in which an extremely hungry young man comes upon a temporarily abandoned campfire where a fish is cooking on a spit. Unable to control his hunger, he grabs the fish and attempts to eat it without letting it cool. He is badly burned, and his wound will not heal. That suggests a metaphor for premature individuation. It describes one who sees too much too soon and then goes through life unable to protect against his woundedness and is partially debilitated by it. Of necessity, he develops self-protective weapons as best he can, but the wound came too early and childhood lasted too long. The rest is a story of survival despite major disadvantages; namely, that his woundedness compromises his natural abilities and he is often at the mercy of the world. Many adventures, good and bad, ensue, and the rest of the story is about attempting to expand and realize the self around the wound which never heals. Literature, psychology, social work, business experience, theater, marriage, fatherhood, teaching are all attempted with eventual competence while meeting helpful and hurtful people and influences along the way.

What actually happens to us is not so important. The important part is what we tell ourselves about it. The telling we give, the fiction we create and believe, and the way we feel toward that fiction all determine the way we live our lives. The good news is that, theoretically, we can recast our stories, retell them, collaborate and share our stories with others, let them "try on" (as in a clinical drama therapy setting) our life situations and thus show dramatically how we would approach them. In general, our fictions can be worked and reworked until we tell our life stories in a way that helps us instead of crushing us. Putting new heroes into our own fictional life situations and watching their techniques for solving our problems is very highly therapeutic.

One of the discoveries that has delighted me the most is that Freud's famous "talking cure" enables one to heal simply by telling one's stories and retelling and telling again until one actually becomes bored with the stories. In fact, this could be one definition of psychotherapy's healing effect. When we are bored with our stories, our stories no longer upset us. The emotion is talked out of them, and we are freed from the tyranny of their influence. On the other hand, new solutions to the problems posed in the various plots of our fictions give us fresh approaches to living our extraordinary lives. Drama therapy is particularly effective at this last action. Casting therapy group members in one's own fictional dilemmas and observing their often very efficient ways of cutting knots and walking through walls enables one's stagnant imagination to achieve a catharsis and begin a new life through the re-visioning and healing of a tyrannical old story now rendered impotent and obsolete. One's back had been against the wall for decades, but then a new door opens and an invitation to a much needed new life is offered. It is a statement worth remembering: The way we tell our story is the way we live our life.

Conversation in Quotations: On Becoming Your Authentic Self

Soul as an Agent of Yearning

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