The Seba library treats Sick Soul in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Stein, Murray, Jung, Carl Gustav, Nietzsche, Friedrich).
giving up his negative dominant ego-image and identity, ‘false self,’ and ‘sick soul’ to become a physician and healer of the poverty-stricken sick in Haiti.
Stein deploys ‘sick soul’ as a technical marker for the pre-transformative identity that must be surrendered before genuine selfhood and vocation can emerge in the second half of life.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis
Whoever wants to be a doctor of the soul sees people as being sick. He offends human dignity. It is presumptuous to say that man is sick.
Jung resists the medical framing that designates souls as sick, arguing that such a presumption violates human dignity and that the healer-role itself encodes a problematic power relation.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
one should count oneself as one of the sick and not as one of the overhealthy who seek to impart the work of redemption.
Jung reframes entry into redemptive work as belonging to those who honestly acknowledge their own sickness, warning against the inflation of the spiritually ‘overhealthy.’
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
how should such a courageous and richly endowed animal not also be the most imperiled, the most chronically and profoundly sick of all sick animals?
Nietzsche naturalizes the sick soul as the necessary consequence of human self-overcoming, making chronic psychic sickness inseparable from the very restlessness that constitutes human greatness.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887supporting
That the sick should not make the healthy sick — and this is what such an emasculation would involve — should surely be our supreme concern on earth.
Nietzsche introduces a social-hygienic imperative to segregate the sick soul’s contagious resentment from healthy life-affirmation, framing the sick soul as a vector of moral pathology.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887supporting
The disease which the experience of death cures is the rage to live. An analyst often finds himself purposely passing by the symptoms appearing in his practice.
Hillman inverts the medical model: the sick soul’s symptoms are not obstacles to cure but vehicles through which the soul enacts its own dying into deeper life.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
The prodigal son was sick of the husks the swine ate, and turned homeward. And while he was still a great way off, his father saw him and ran to meet him.
Cassian reads the soul’s sickness-of-husks as the initiating moral event of conversion, the first fragile self-turning that precedes and invites divine grace.
, Conferences, 426supporting
The play opens with the presenting complaints of a sick city. A priest of Zeus appeals to Oedip[us].
Hillman transposes the sick-soul motif from individual psychology to the collective register, reading the polis itself as the suffering body whose cure requires the king’s self-knowledge.
, Mythic Figures, 2007aside