Psychotherapy and Soul
“You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken, but to get what’s broken blessed.” - James Hillman
The word “Psychotherapy” is derived from the two Greek words: "psyche or psūkhḗ," meaning soul and “therapeia” meaning “serve” or “attend to”. Psychotherapy therefore literally means; “to serve, or attend to, the soul”.
When there has been a traumatic injury to the self, we may experience what in many traditional cultures is called “soul loss”.
Francis Weller writes that “soul loss is experienced as a depletion in our vital essence, leading to a decreased sense of potency and power. In mythological imagery, we have entered the wasteland. Psychologically we call this depression, but to the indigenous soul, depression is the symptom, not the illness. The illness is soul loss…and to heal from our traumas, from soul loss, we must restore the conditions which offer something alluring and compelling to coax the soul back home.”
Thomas Moore shares these sentiments, writing, “the great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is loss of soul. When soul is neglected, it doesn’t just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning. Our temptation is to isolate these symptoms, or to try and eradicate them one by one; but the root problem is that we have lost our wisdom about the soul, even our interest in it.”
Psychotherapy, when practiced in accordance with these principles, may be seen as the art of “coaxing the soul back home”.
It is an opportunity to make contact with the lost and fragmented aspects of our self that may have become split off through distressing experiences. By “serving and attending to” our wounds, so too we create the conditions to contact deeper resources within ourselves.
Thus, the therapeutic journey cannot simply be reduced to ‘fixing symptoms’, but rather, the practice of continually coming home to the depths of our soul.
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