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.

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.

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.

As always, the purpose is not to defeat the complex but to slowly transform it into a valuable quality. In the case of jealousy, the good part might be effective dependency that does not hurt you. But it could take a long time to transform raw jealousy into gracious vulnerability. And the complex may never go away completely but rather remain as a source of further deepening. A young man recently told me about his helping complex. He lives in San Francisco and walks the streets almost every day. If he has money in his pocket, he can’t help giving it all away to people on the street begging. Sometimes, to avoid the problem, he does not bring money with him. The man has a helping complex that arrives when he encounters someone in need. He can’t not help, even though he’s giving away money he needs. This complex is especially difficult because his action looks like a good deed. As is always the case, a therapist has to be careful not to get caught in the apparent virtuousness of the behavior. Is it not always good to give money to the poor? What should his therapist do? Don’t tell the man he has to take care of himself and ignore people who want money from him. Trying to will the complex away only makes matters worse. Suppressing the complex often looks benign, but it’s really a heroic attack on this fragment of psyche. Anyway, plain willpower is no match for it. A complex may have roots that dig deep into the psyche. You can’t just extract it. Instead, you could see this “problem” as an opportunity for this man’s life to expand. You might ask him to tell you in detail what happens when he feels compelled to give away his money. Just to describe the problem in general terms is not enough. You need a narrative, images, details. When you hear the full story, you may notice certain subthemes worth pointing out and discussing. The clue to a complex may be something small and easily overlooked. That’s why you have to be sharp and catch tiny clues hidden to an ordinary eye. Suppose you were to ask this man what happens when a street person approaches him. He says, “I feel like I’m privileged and don’t deserve to have money in my pocket.” You ask where that idea came from. “From the nuns at school. They taught me that it’s good to be poor and bad to have money.” You say, “But you don’t have much money.” “It makes no difference. Compared to the man on the street, I’m wealthy.” So here we have material for conversation, and the therapist can take this material deeper by deftly steering the discussion. For one thing, childhood is in play. He mentioned the nuns at school. And we just discussed the child archetype in some depth. Maybe this man has to develop a more adult attitude toward money and replace his childhood story with a more mature one. Religion also plays a role with its moral demands. They can last a lifetime. He may also need some spiritual maturing, an assessment of values he picked up from nuns when he was a child. This could be a project in itself. So we have rich material for opening up this person’s money complex and his need to help. There is no single-statement solution, but the narratives that could emerge, added to a dream or two, should be enough to make progress with the symptom. A complex does not puff up and blow away, it unravels, showing what is inside it and giving you material to work with.

A therapist might have to relax in ways that have more substance than the mindless escapes people often use. When I suggest good movies and books and the study of art history, I am putting together the pleasure of images and the weight of real study. Of course there is time for ultramindlessness, but in general a therapist who is always “on” needs pleasures that themselves are deep and character building.