the discontents of the soul

"Our modern word unconscious has become a catch-all, collecting into one clouded resovoir all fantasies of the deep, the lower, the baser, the heavier (depressed), and the darker. We have buried in the same monolithic tomb called Unconscious the red and earthy body of the primeval Adam, the collective common man and woman, the shades, phantoms, and ancestors. We cannot distinguish a compulsion from a call, an instinct from an image, a desirous demand from a movement of imagination. Looking into the night from the white light of the dayworld (where the term unconscious was fashioned), we cannot tell the red from the black. So we read dreams for all sorts of messages at once -somatic, personal, psychic, mantic, ancestral, practical, confusing instinctual and emotional life with the realm of death.

The pronounced distinction between emotion and soul, between emotional man and psychological man, comes out in another of Heraclitus' fragments: "...whatever it [thymos] wishes it buys at the price of the soul." Thymos, the earlier Greek experience of emotional consciousness or moist soul, did not belong in the underworld. So, to consider the dream as an emotional wish costs soul; to mistake the chthonic as the natural loses psyche. we cannot claim to be psychological when we read dream images in terms of drives or desires. Whatever counsel an analyst gives about emotional life, supposing it drawn from dreams, refers to his own experience, which he reflects from the dreams. It is not in the dreams. He is "sup-posing" them, that is, he is "putting into" them what he knows about life.

What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. We are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it."

-James Hillman, from The Dream and the Underworld