Pathologizing

[Triton]

Pathologizing



"In order to approach the psychology of pathology afresh, I am
introducing the term pathologizing to mean the psyche's autonomous
ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and
suffering in any aspect of its behaviour and to experience and imagine
life through this deformed and afflicted persective.

We need a fresh start. We have been confined so long by medical and
religious analogies that psychology has been unable to approach what
are essentially psychological phenomena from a perspective of its own.
Possibly pathologized events would not be so wrong were they viewed
less from positions borrowed from material medicine and spiritual
religion."


[J. Hillman: 'Re-visioning Psychology' p.57]



"Imagination works by deforming and forming at one and the same
moment. Bachelard has spoken of the deformative activity of the
imagination, as if the formal cause at work in the imagination is the
principle of deformation, or "pathologizing" the image. The
pathologized or deformed image is fundamental to alchemy and to the
art of memory, both of which present complex methods of soul
making….Analysis is the scrutiny of these twists and turns in our
nature, which we call complexes, and it aims towards a lysis, a way
out. We suppose the pathologizings brought by our complexes to come
from historical forces, but why not from character itself, the nature
we are born with? Is not the natural person from the beginning a
complexity? And are not the Gods who clothe themselves in our
complexes and speak through them also from the beginning complicated
figures of extreme inner tension? …..through the shock of deformation,
which restores to an image its capacity to peturb the soul to excess
that, by bringing an image close to death, currently makes it alive
again.<o:p></o:p>



[J. Hillman - 'Dream and the Underworld' p. 128-30]