In antiquity the physician healed through his own suffering, as Christ healed through his. The wound that would not heal was the well of cures. The purpose of training analysis is not merely to heal the personality of the analyst, but to open his wounds from which his compassion will flow. But the physician ne longer works emotionally, because his predilection for scientific pathology tends to remove him from the understanding of suffering in favour of the explanation of disease. He no longer applies the ancient maxim: physician, cure thyself. {Physicians are notoriously bad patients, perhaps becauseé-they have lost the ability to be wounded. The idea of health has been so falsified that the physician cannot cure himself by beginning with his own psychic infections, wounds, and dreads.) The logos of suffering cannot be described by a pathology textbook which uses clinical terms for soul experiences; it belongs 132 f also to the fields of religion, philosophy, and psychology. As pain and suffering differ, so harming and wounding are not the same. When the analyst keeps alive his own wounds he is not harming himself. When the soul history returns again and again to basic painful wounds, the fundamental complexes, it is to draw new meanings from them. Each return reopens them and starts their weeping afresh, yet this in no way conflicts with the maxim primum nihil nocere. Should an analyst thinksoand try to suture the wounds in himself or patient and say that this or that is a closed chapter, he is again acting medically. The wrong cure, or the right cure at the wrong time, does more harm than the open wound. The wound, as poetry often tells us, is a mouth and the therapist need only listen.
— James Hillman
Hillman is reversing the entire therapeutic assumption here — the assumption that the analyst's task is to have arrived somewhere, to have processed enough, healed enough, resolved enough that the wounds no longer bleed. The training analysis, on that model, is a kind of inoculation: go down once, come back immunized. What Hillman insists on instead is that the compassion — the word carries *pati*, to suffer, inside it — has nowhere to come from except the place that still hurts. Seal it and you seal the source.
The physician who no longer works emotionally is not a failure of character; he is the inheritor of a tradition that separated the explanation of disease from the experience of suffering. That separation was practical, productive, genuinely life-saving — and it costs exactly what Hillman names: the logos of suffering, the speech that arises not from the textbook but from the open place. A wound, he says, is a mouth. The therapist's job is to keep that mouth from being sutured shut in himself — not to perform his wounds, not to collapse into them, but to leave them available, recognizable, still capable of being reopened when the patient's material requires it. The wrong cure at the wrong time, he reminds us, does more damage than the wound left speaking. Closing a chapter is a medical act. Listening to what the wound is still saying is something else.
James Hillman·Suicide and the Soul·1964