You ask yourself: What is the underlying plot in my client’s story? What is the main emotion? Where is she trying to take me in understanding her? What is her preoccupation? The questions you ask yourself grow darker. How does she unconsciously interfere with the therapy? Is she leaving out important parts of the story? What is her bias? These questions make your listening suitably complex and sophisticated. A good listener is not just someone who hears everything but someone who hears what is not spoken or what has been suppressed or mangled. The therapist is a detective sometimes, knowing that the client, although wanting to be open and honest, won’t tell you the whole story. You don’t let this situation make you cynical. You can still love and admire your client. You simply know that human nature is complicated and the deep stories are slow to emerge. Resistance is not usually intentional but rather an expression of the neurosis.

Through his knowledge of mythology Jung was able to see meaning in the apparent gibberish of people being treated in a psychiatric hospital. He (1973) said that a story is more important than a diagnosis: “Clinical diagnoses are important, since they give the doctor a certain orientation, but they do not help the patient. The crucial thing is the story. For it alone shows the human background and the human suffering, and only at that point can the doctor’s therapy begin to operate” (p. 124). Diagnosis can take away the individuality and complexity of a client’s experience. It puts a client into a box. It serves the therapist more than the client. It can be demeaning. It places the therapist above the client. A diagnosis can be full of shadow, even if it might please the client to have a name for what he’s going through. That, too, is an illusion. Now we know how to treat the syndrome, and we don’t have to face it as a unique invitation to become an individual. The diagnosis puts you in a pen with other people who have given up their individuality, as well. Your story is individual. Remember Hillman’s warning to keep your images, your stories, exactly as they present themselves. Don’t adjust them so they fit into a box of syndromes and disorders. Each time you tell a story it is different—different nuances and tones. You call up a story from the past and you tell it in the present with the full impetus of who you are right now.

I want to hear those voices, too, when I listen to a client narrate a life story or a recent troubling episode. I want to hear the voices of the inner critic and the influential parents, the voices of conscience and inspiration. I want to hear the mythic narrative that hums in the background of more immediate tales of woe.

From the first moment, I’m aware that therapy is a space separate from ordinary conversation. I listen more acutely than usual. I’m tuned in to levels of communication. I listen for the appearance and sound of the soul rather than the intended communication of my client. I hear overtones and reverberations. It’s not like listening at ordinary times in life. It’s not just focused listening, it’s listening for past voices and spirits and angels, to speak metaphorically.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.