soul

Your person is not a process or a development. You are that essential image that develops, if it does. As Picasso said, “I don’t develop; I am.”

As James Hillman has pointed out, soul offers an approach to life as sacred, an orientation toward depth. It brings a quality of awareness that is reflective, imaginative, and downward, engaged with the dailiness of things.

The concept of this individualized soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks. The study and therapy of the psyche in our society ignore this factor, which other cultures regard as the

To uncover the innate image we must set aside the psychological frames that are usually used, and mostly used up. They do not reveal enough. They trim a life to fit the frame: developmental growth, step by step, from infancy, through troubled youth, to midlife crisis and aging, to death. Plodding your way through an already planned map, you are on

In fact, the Buddha had begun the process of growing down early in his life, when he left his protected palace gardens to enter the street. There the sick, the dead, the poor, and the old drew his soul down into the question of how to live life in the world.

But we do not believe that the dissolution of the family and the concomitant lack of moral order we see around us stem primarily from an absence of moral order imposed from the outside. Instead, we suggest that in many homes the family soul has been sacrificed to maintain the illusion of the family persona. As a result, the family shadow erupts,