Pathologizing

Hillman’s archetypal psychology gives the symptom its most radical reading. Pathologizing names “the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience [life] through this deformed and afflicted perspective” (Hillman 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account). It is not a malfunction. It is one of the soul’s native modes of speaking.

The corollary is the refusal of cure as the basic therapeutic frame. “If we are consistent in our thinking there can be no such procedure as ‘psychological treatment.’ The two terms exclude each other: when we are psychological about pathologizing we are not treating it” (Hillman 1975, Re-Visioning Psychology). The directive is to stick to the image — to imagine into the symptom rather than translate it out of itself. Even Edinger’s move from symptom to underlying archetypal image risks, on this reading, the same flight that the broader therapeutic culture takes more crudely: relief instead of soul.

The classical resonance is Jung’s: “The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room” (CW 13, cited in Peaks and Vales). Pathologizing is how the gods enter modern life when the temples are gone. To cure the symptom is to lose the god. The Lineage commitment Hillman draws from this is severe: psychotherapy that does not pathologize is not depth psychology.

Relationships

Primary sources

hillman-revisioning-psychology (Hillman 1975)
hillman-archetypal-psychology-brief (Hillman 1983)
hillman-blue-fire (Hillman 1989)
peaks-and-vales (Hillman 1975)