A therapist has to be clever. She has to understand that something in people, usually not intended, wants to block the therapy. Therapists sometimes refer to this blockage as resistance, but that’s an ego word. It might be better to think archetypally. Could it be that the client has a long-standing fear about facing some past event or relationship? Or maybe the client is simply a private person who does not like to say much about herself. Later, we’ll consider the myth of Daphne and appreciate that people have an inherent need, which is not neurotic resistance, to protect their privacy and integrity. Their omissions may not be resistance but reluctance.

The Hermes-type therapist, said Rafael López-Pedraza, one of the founders of archetypal psychology, does not hide in his dignity but gets down into the muck of human struggle and ignorance. A therapist inspired by Hermes is not above his patient, healthy and knowing, but is in touch with his own human frailty. He does not use his rational mind as much as his empathic heart and pays attention to physical details that a more conventional therapist might overlook. He is also sometimes crafty and subtle and not always straightforward.

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.

If the therapist cultivates a life of serenity and neutrality, she stands a chance against the wild beasts that are let loose in a psyche that has not yet found its fenced pasture. In medieval Europe stories were told of the unicorn, a beautiful animal that could cause widespread damage and yet was the very symbol of health. The image of the unicorn at its most useful showed him in a small pasture surrounded by a wooden fence. The psyche needs some containment, a fence or a vessel, to keep its wildness contained.

“You have developed a skill for immediately going deeper and hearing the metaphors. Where others may see facts, you see images, a bigger story and figures that are not personal and human. You feel the presence of the spirits and deities described in spiritual literature. They are not just symbols, nor do they represent parts of the self. They have their own reality in an imaginal realm, not a literal one. You are in tune with that realm. You can live in the dreamworld even in daytime.