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There’s an old James Hillman psych lecture where he says something like:
<<You come into analysis to talk about this dream, a massive black snake slithering into your kitchen.
<<You come into analysis to talk about this dream, a massive black snake slithering into your kitchen.
By the time the appointment is finished, you have all these concepts about your “sneaky, dark desires” or “shedding your old skins” or your mother’s “forked tongue” and so on…
You have all these concepts, but you’ve lost the snake.
You have all these concepts, but you’ve lost the snake.
You can in with a snake, and now it’s dissolved into a handful of concepts, evaporating away.
So the task of -good- analysis is to get out of the way of the image, to let the snake be a snake, and to let the snake do what it must>>
So the task of -good- analysis is to get out of the way of the image, to let the snake be a snake, and to let the snake do what it must>>
To me, there’s a whole world of learning about spiritual, meditative, magickal, inner work practices here.
If you treat the snake like it’s just a metaphor, something you can dissect and paste labels from a psychology text onto, it kills the snake. It deadens the work.
If you treat the snake like it’s just a metaphor, something you can dissect and paste labels from a psychology text onto, it kills the snake. It deadens the work.
But if you treat the snake like a snake (or treat the gods like gods, spirits like spirits, monsters like monsters, etc), it’s a way of allowing the ecology of your mind/soul/self to play out what it needs to play out.
It’s entirely possible to
A) know that this is maybe all in your head, that there is no (e.g.) deer who’s been stalking your dreams at the edges, waiting for a chance to talk to you and tell you something,
But to
B) treat the deer like a deer anyways. Like it has sth to show you
A) know that this is maybe all in your head, that there is no (e.g.) deer who’s been stalking your dreams at the edges, waiting for a chance to talk to you and tell you something,
But to
B) treat the deer like a deer anyways. Like it has sth to show you
If you make the deer disappear by turning it into concepts about your father, or the symbolism of antlers, or social anxiety—it will disappear. It won’t actually be around to show you what it wanted to show you.
And from firsthand experience, I can guarantee you: whatever that deer was going to show you was going to be a thousand times more enriching and valuable than another “oh, huh” conceptual realization about your social anxiety.
