Just a quote and some food for thought….with next to no commentary.
From the Austin Chronicle Michael Ventura quoting James Hillman, the Jungian analyst:
“We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. Maybe it’s time to look at that. We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go inside to locate the psyche, you examine your feelings and your dreams, they belong to you. Or it’s interrrelations, interpsyche, between your psyche and mine. That’s been extended a little bit into family systems and office groups – but the psyche, the soul, is still only within and between people. We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that.
“What’s left out is a deteriorating world.
“So why hasn’t therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on that ‘inside’ soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets – the sickness is out there. … The world has become toxic. … There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to the real issues. Why are the intelligent people – at least among the white middle class – so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! They’ve been in therapy in the United States for thirty, forty years, and during that time there’s been a tremendous political decline in this country. … Every time we try to deal with our outrage … by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we’re depriving the political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world.” read the rest
Makes me think of one of my favorite quotes by Krishnamurti:
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Bruce Levine speaks of this too, how mental health professionals help maintain the status quo. Right now the status quo is a dangerous reality. We are killing the planet and ourselves. Below are some article in which this idea is mentioned.
● 400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use: Americans Are Disempowered
● How the Occupy Movement Helped Americans Move Beyond Denial and Depression to Action
● Why do some of us become dissident mental health professionals?
Books by James Hillman:
● The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character
and Calling
Everything Matters 
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