I guess it is no surprise that the birth of psychiatry was co-incidental with the darkest moments of materialism this planet has known. It would have to be no surprise that most of the responsibility of a shrink these days is to prescribe medications. Does this reduce the whole human soul and spirit to chemicals? I think of people who have have died on the table and seen the tunnel of light and had a life review and then returned to the land of the living to be told that it was just moment of lack of oxygen to the brain or some other physical manifestation.
How can we say we are intent on therapeutic work and then reduce probably the most revealing moment of a person's experience to a petri dish reaction? The soul wants to be honored. The spirit is eternal. If we could get all the chemicals perfect would we all be radiantly happy? Maybe. Maybe not. One of my bones to pick is that when Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung started they were working with profoundly ill patients. Now, a twenty two year old junior writer at a magazine designed to sell furniture can give advice about the how to make your life better and millions of people will read it and probably expect it to work. What are we thinking?
In The Soul's Code, James Hillman talks about the acorn that we are born with which will find a way to become the oak tree that we are meant to be. He sites case after case where people entirely change what would logically be their destiny in order to blossom. His terrific work as a post-Jungian psychiatrist, in my mind, makes a great argument for spending more time exploring the reality of karma, rather than whether we got what we needed from our parents when we were kids. I am going to think about this more. It seems to me that if nature and nurture form us, we need to think more about what 'nature' really means and how we find ourselves in the 'nurture' situations we do.
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