Genealogy

We need to improve our reading of the classical image in order to arrive at a genealogy more fitting for psychotherapy; to move away from the suffocation of concretized personal genealogy, and to refresh psychotherapy with a genealogy more suited to the psychological personality of the patient.

López-Pedraza argues that effective psychotherapy demands replacing biologically literal genealogy with an archetypal genealogy that identifies the gods and goddesses from whom the patient’s psyche descends.

López-Pedraza, Rafael, Hermes and His Children, 1977thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In his reinvention of ancient philosophy, Foucault accords genealogy a position analogous to the ancient spiritual exercises of ‘conversion’. Genealogy is Foucault’s spiritual exercise.

Sharpe and Ure argue that Foucault elevates genealogical research to the status of a spiritual practice, replicating the ancient philosophical aim of self-transformation through rigorous inquiry into history.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

It is genealogy, not a common content, that continues to justify classifying all these varied persons, groups, practices, and mythologies under the common rubric of Gnosticism—despite the fact that scholars have not produced a consensus on any specific genealogy.

King exposes how Irenaeus’s polemical use of genealogy as a classificatory device has persisted in modern scholarship, where lineage-tracing substitutes for substantive shared content in defining Gnosticism.

Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Friedrich Nietzsche’s discovery of ressentiment as the source of such value judgments is the most profound, even if his more specific claim that Christian morality and in particular Christian love are the finest ‘flower of ressentiment’ should turn out to be false.

This passage frames Nietzsche’s genealogical method as the excavation of ressentiment as the hidden origin of moral value judgments, establishing the critical-psychological core of the Genealogy of Morals.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

His impudent song is a γενεαλογία; as such it completes the mythology, and even substitutes for it. Mythology deals with origin(s) as basic reason for everything that exists in the present or will exist in the future.

Kerényi demonstrates that mythological genealogy (genealogia) in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes is not biographical record but ontological foundation — the declaration of origins that explains and legitimates present existence.

Kerényi, Karl, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The Genealogy is intended as a supplement and clarification of Beyond Good and Evil. And while that title suggests an attempt to rise above the slave morality that contrasts good and evil, it also signifies a very broad attack on ‘the faith in opposite values.’

Kaufmann’s editorial framing situates the Genealogy of Morals as Nietzsche’s sustained philosophical attack on the binary moral oppositions that underlie Western ethics.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

His other works, The Will to Power and The Genealogy of Morals, for instance, are chiefly criticisms of our civilization—of course always with a view to the dark shadow behind. So Nietzsche is really a modern psychologist.

Jung reads Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as a psychological document, a critique of civilization that anticipates depth psychology’s attention to shadow and unconscious motivation.

Jung, C.G., Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

From whose spiritual lines do you descend? As always, we look for authenticity in age, knowing rather than intellectual smartness, a religious devotion that is unshakable and imbedded in daily life.

Estés presents a living, initiatory conception of genealogy in the cantadora tradition, where spiritual lineage — not institutional credential — establishes the healer’s authenticity and authority.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The more I believe my nature comes from my parents, the less open I am to the ruling influences around me. The less the surrounding world is felt to be intimately important to my story.

Hillman argues that over-reliance on parental genealogy as the source of selfhood narrows psychological openness, severing the individual from the wider ecological and daimonic influences that co-author the soul.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Of the stories told on the islands we now know almost nothing but names and genealogies.

Kerényi notes that mythological genealogy is frequently the last surviving trace of cult and story, making it the primary archive through which the deep structure of Greek religious imagination must be reconstructed.

Kerényi, Karl, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The genealogy of Jesus in the Old Testament is mixed up with so many others that are irrelevant that it is indistinguishable. If Moses had recorded only the ancestors of Jesus it would have been too obvious.

Pascal uses the deliberate concealment of Jesus’s genealogy within a larger narrative as evidence of providential design, treating genealogical obscurity as a hermeneutic device that rewards close reading by the elect.

Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 1670supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

She finally concluded that these experiences must have been relivings of events from the life of one of her ancestors.

Grof documents a transpersonal LSD experience interpreted as ancestral memory, raising the question of whether genealogy operates not only socially but as a stratum of the unconscious accessible through non-ordinary states.

Grof, Stanislav, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

By way of compensation we are too much in the lap of the mother, in those familiar reductive and genetic, those comfortable materialistic accounts of ourselves and our work.

Hillman implicitly critiques genealogical reductionism in depth psychology, arguing that the discipline’s illegitimacy anxiety drives it toward genetic and materialistic self-explanation rather than genuine depth.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

It has an elaborate history and ancestry and a network of unpredictable personalities—grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Its stories tell of happy times and tragedies.

Moore treats genealogy as the narrative substrate of family soul, a living repository of ancestral story that forms the psychological ground from which individual identity grows.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →