Care of the Soul

Care of the Soul is a work by Thomas Moore (1992).

Core claims

• Moore’s central intervention is not therapeutic but epistemological: he replaces the diagnostic gaze that reads symptoms as problems to solve with an observational stance that reads symptoms as communications from a depth the ego cannot author, thereby relocating psychological authority from clinician to soul itself.
• The book’s repeated invocation of Renaissance medicine and Ficino’s Book of Life is not decorative eclecticism but a deliberate genealogical claim that modern psychotherapy is a degraded fragment of a once-unified tradition in which cosmology, aesthetics, and healing were inseparable — making Moore’s project a restoration, not an innovation.
• By insisting that “soul is its own purpose and end,” Moore breaks decisively with both behavioral adaptation models and Jungian individuation teleology, proposing instead a non-progressive, aesthetic psychology in which depth is measured not by developmental achievement but by the richness of one’s relationship to one’s own opacity.

Related questions

• How does Moore’s refusal to treat depression as a problem to solve compare with James Hillman’s account of the “pathologizing” function in Re-Visioning Psychology, and where do the two diverge on whether symptoms require any intervention at all?
• Moore credits Ficino’s Book of Life as a predecessor to his therapeutic model: how does Ficino’s Renaissance cosmological medicine challenge or complement Jung’s concept of the unus mundus as described in Mysterium Coniunctionis?
• Moore insists that “soul is its own purpose and end” and resists developmental teleology — how does this stance conflict with Edward Edinger’s reading of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype, where individuation follows a definite trajectory toward conscious relationship with the Self?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/moore-care-of-the-soul/

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