As Jungian analyst James Hillman remarked, “Psychotherapy is only working on that ‘inside’ soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognising that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets - the sickness is out there.

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.

A passage from the poet Wallace Stevens (1989) has guided me for many years in my understanding of both religion and depth psychology: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly” (p. 189). These words are not as radical as they may sound at first. You just have to accept that everything we say is colored by the limits of our understanding, our emotional biases, and our hopes and wishes. Imagination shapes everything we say and think. Whenever we tell the stories of our lives, we are all novelists. In his book Healing Fiction, Hillman (1983) went further. He said that therapy offers the opportunity to opt into a better fiction, tell a more advanced story about your life.

“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.

Professional men and women have their own parallel dark night. They may spend their days and hours making a living, keeping the needs of their family in mind. Then they, too, find that this is simply not enough to make their lives worth living. They, too, have to discover a deeper dimension, their own underworld. Unfortunately, they may collapse into alcohol, affairs, or excessive work—underworlds that are too literal and concrete. Instead of completing the myth by finding first the void and then some purpose in themselves, they fall into various symptomatic states that disrupt their lives.