Against Psychological Hygiene

Anni Albers, “Knot 2” (1947), “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957,”
at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

I found this book by Thomas ("Care of the Soul") Moore at the train station called original self.  It's 8x8 format, has woodcuts, and lots of white space.  Having short, 3-page chapters with short, Tweet-like chapter titles ("The small world of our daily affairs is the cosmos in Miniature," "It's alright to be sad.") it's like Care of the Soul for the bathroom.  

This section has stayed with me.  I sent it to Henry.

I especially like the push-back against "psychological hygiene," which he identifies as the "common sense" today.  He identifies the normal way of dealing with psychological stuff is to deal with it immediately so that we have a frictionless life.  Instead, he feels like our "mistakes and failures" (our "neuroses") as not necessarily things to be fixed, but "raw material out of which an interesting personality may be crafted."  

This paragraph:

Not wallowing in our limitations but creatively dealing with them as resources for a vital life -- the prima materia of the alchemists - we arrive not at a shallow self-acceptance but at profound love of the soul, with its rich mixture of the good and the bad, is the starting point of a creative life.

To be modern is to worship at the altar of health. We look forward to the day when we will be fully balanced and adjusted. We believe we will have arrived there when trouble vanishes and we feel chronically carefree.

This reasonable assumption compels many to read self-help books and to trust in psychotherapy. It accounts for our enshrinement of medicine and for the therapeutic philosophy that characterizes the modern mind. We are hell bent on being healthy and on fixing anything and everything that appears bro ken, including a broken life.

Behind this attitude lies a salvational fantasy, the hope that we may be saved from those aspects of human life that seem unfortunate and remain an obsta cle to the carefree existence we see in our daydreams. The trouble with this attitude is that the healthier we feel, the less reflective we become, the more our sense of reality zooms into the ether and our humanity recedes. When I look back on my life, I see a long train of mistakes and failures.

 Remembering them is painful, and I hope I don't have to endure many more of them. Yet I can also see how each of those failures helped to shape me and my life, such as it is. Later pleasures required earlier pain, and the creative, happy elements in my life now would not exist without the grace of former failures.

I don't mean to criticize the desire for happiness, but only to point out that it has a companion-the necessity of suffering. Put these two together and we have a complete view of life, one carved out of blissful desires and painful fail ures. I don't look for a midpoint where all is in order. Such a delicate balance would be flat and pallid. I don't expect the pleasures to offset the sorrows. Each independently, in unequal measure, offers vitality.

Patricia Berry's specific contribution is to help us see that our symptoms point toward the future and promise a transformation of failure into form. I have always been shy and reserved-an embarrassing weakness I try to cover up. I have been criticized for it, and all my life people have encouraged me to be different. Indeed, in recent years strangers have offered many suggestions for my improvement. But although I would enjoy a cure for this malady, I am attached to it. It helps me work. I seem able to absorb failures and have no need to provide answers for the many questions that appear before me. Some may take this application of my personal shyness as a fault, but I see some positive outcomes.

I remember once in a group discussion James Hillman was celebrating the soul's pathologies. I supported his stance by saying how important it is to safe guard our symptoms. A man in the group came up to me afterward and said, "Did I hear you right? Did you speak in favor of preserving our symptoms? How could a therapist, of all people, make such an odd remark?"

Our neuroses are the raw material out of which an interesting personality may be crafted. They are sometimes dangerous and debilitating but nonethe

less valuable. They are the basic stuff of the soul in need of lifelong refinement. Working this annoying and embarrassing material for a lifetime is a realistic work compared with the search for psychological hygiene-ridding ourselves of failure and confusion.

Not wallowing in our limitations but creatively dealing with them as re sources for a vital life-the prima materia of the alchemists-we arrive not at shallow self-acceptance but at profound love of the soul, which, with its rich mixture of the good and the bad, is the starting point of a creative life.