The Dream and the Underworld

Death is the fundamental dear of the profession, actively working as its fundamental metaphor. The contemporary growth cult of optimistic therapies that focus on peaks, freedom, cures and creativity is a manic defense against psychotherapy's own ground, an acting-out promulgated as therapy. To be a psychotherapist and work in depth, one must in some way or another cooperate with Hades.

Death is the fundamental dear of the profession, actively working as its fundamental metaphor. The contemporary growth cult of optimistic th...

We moderns have no mythology, properly speaking, but we have psychological systems, the speculative theories about humans in relation with more-than-human forces and images, today called fields, instincts, drives, complexes.

We moderns have no mythology, properly speaking, but we have psychological systems, the speculative theories about humans in relation with m...

The intervention of Hades turns the world upside down. The point of view of life ceases. Now phenomena are seen not only through the eyes of Eros and human life and love, but also through Thanatos, their cold unmoving depths unconnected to life. By turning matters upside down in this way, we participate in Hades' rape, which is, let us remember, not just psychopathy, but a central initiatory mystery in the Eleusis myths. This rape threatens the intact psychological system that takes its strength from life, holding to human relationships and the natural ways of Demether's daughter. Rape moves the Persephone soul from the being of Demeter's daughter to the being of Hades' wife, from the natural being of generation, what is given to a daughter by mothering life, to the psychic being of marriage with what is alien, different, and is not given. The experience of the underworld is overwhelming and must be made.
This style of the underworld experience is overwhelming, it comes as violation, dragging one out of life and into the Kingdom of the Orphic Hymn to Pluto describes as "void of day". So it often says on Greek epitaphs that entering Hades is "leaving the sweet sunlight".

The intervention of Hades turns the world upside down. The point of view of life ceases. Now phenomena are seen not only through the eyes of...