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.

“Hermes represents the power to use language and images skillfully, to probe multiple levels of meaning, and to value surprise and synchronicity. A Hermes-inspired therapist or helping friend looks for unexpected discoveries and revelations. He is on the sidelines and between the cracks. He spots hardly noticeable remarks and gestures and pays attention to style as well as substance. He has a special eye for shadow qualities, and can sympathize with them, and knows that he can’t hide behind his professionalism and satisfied life or the healthy image his clients project onto him.

All this complexity and all the signifying layers don’t have to be a problem. They account for life’s richness. The trouble is, we are usually under the illusion that the world we encounter is a factual one having only one layer we call reality. If you follow the archetypal, essentially Platonic view, there is no reality, absolutely none, that is not colored every day by the living imagination. The therapist does not have the luxury to live and work under the illusion things are as they appear to be.

Pedraza suggested that the therapist in this case be in touch with his own freakishness and then stay in tune with the patient’s way of speaking, echoing it if possible. The idea is to enter into whatever complex has gotten hold of the patient through his style of language, his rhetoric.

The psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, in his endlessly inspiring book The Psychoanalytic Mystic, came at this mysterious undercurrent from another direction. Rather than leading with anything like loving awareness, he focused on the underworld.