Becoming a Writer, Teacher and Therapist, by James Hollis

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What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life is a kind of summing up, reflecting not only aspects of my personal journey, but some of the stories I have seen and witnessed as an analyst for many years. Analytic work is most humbling for a number of reasons. First, we cannot “fix” any other, solve their problem, cure them. We cannot even fix ourselves. And the human condition is not a disease, despite one ancient who said that life is a disease, the cure for which is death. Second, it is a privilege to attend the unfolding story of another human being, and to learn that for all our limitations, something healing generally arises out of these most intimate conversations. Third, as both analyst and analysand share the same condition, albeit with different journeys, we are mutually humbled by the powers of the invisible world to guide, shape, wound, and govern for good or ill, the visible world. Perhaps my life journey could best be summarized as a well-intended bumbling in the world on a daily basis, yet a consistent, life-long desire to discern the invisible world through the lineaments of the visible.

Joseph Campbell once said that myth is the invisible world which supports the visible world. So what then in the myth which supports us?

Jung asked this question of himself ninety some years ago during his own mid-life transition and he concluded that he did not know his myth. He only knew that that which sustained his parents no longer spoke to him. As a result of his subsequent work and the insights arising from that work, he evolved the idea of “individuation” as the myth for our time, namely, the return of the meaning process from received tribal images to the soul of the individual who is now charged with responsibility for sorting through the plethora of images, testing and discerning which still move him or her, and which do not.

By developing a method of dialogue with the inner world, Jung and others opened for all of us a process whereby the invisible world is once again accessible through the analytic interpretation of our history, through “reading” the autonomous corrective efforts of our symptomotology, and through dream work, active imagination, and a disciplined dialogue to a larger life, the recovery of personal authority, and to the luminous threads which lead us through the dark woods in which we so frequently find ourselves.

When I reflect analytically on why I evolved into the professions of teaching, writing, and therapy, and the particular subject matter of my thirteen books, I found not surprisingly, a strong impetus deriving from the family of origin. My parents were good souls, well meaning in all regards, yet were overwhelmed by the lack of economic and educational opportunity, and perforce lived constricted lives. When the great Depression arrived, my Father was literally summoned in the middle of eighth grade and told to go to work to support his family. He dutifully worked the rest of his life on the assembly line of a factory. While I worked on that same assembly line in summers, I could leave for college when autumn arrived. For him autumn never arrived. When the company was bought out years later, he was cast away by the Big Shots, along with many of his coevals, with the most miserable pension. So much for practicing medicine, a vocation to which he aspired. My Mother experienced her childhood as shaming. She lived on welfare; her seamstress mother made her clothing from potato sacks; and her most recurrent childhood memories were of rats running over her legs in the dark. Is it any wonder that I spent my professional life, whether in teaching, writing, or in therapy, trying to provide people with insights, tools, ideas, an expanded imagination of the possible—the very saving possibilities I could not provide my own parents?

Jung described this sort of history as producing “the wounded healer” and believed that such wounds might either quicken consciousness and provide empathy and insight, or immobilize the person in an unresolved swampland. Some days I find I am serving the former, and some days the latter, outcome. But, either way, it is a fascinating, perplexing, humbling, and always interesting way to spend one’s life.

James Hollis, What Matters Most, Gotham Books, Penguin Books