Interview with Cliff Bostock

Cliff Bostock, MA, is a doctoral student in depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and a practitioner of soulwork, a post-Jungian modality of personal growth which is based on the archetypal psychology of James Hillman. His work has been featured in Common Boundary Magazine. He lives in Atlanta where he also authors a weekly dining column and a psychology column. For more information about him consult his website, Soulwork.

Tammie: "How do you describe "Soulwork?"

Cliff: It's a facilitated process of learning to live from a place of deep imagination, in a fully embodied way. It is an aesthetic psychology in which images are treated as autonomous expressions of soul. To follow the image, to use the phrase employed by James Hillman, is to discover the "telos," direction of the soul's path, its destiny. This telos is also clearly illuminated in the body, which is also a metaphorical field.

Tammie: What led you to soulwork?

Cliff: My destiny, basically. As a kid, I couldn't decide whether to be a writer or a doctor. I chose to be a writer, an artist. Then, during my recovery from addictions, I became very interested in transpersonal psychology. I went back to school and got an MA in psychology and trained at the nation's only residential center for transpersonal treatment. Thus, I began to move toward the coalescence of my two childhood impulses --as writer and healer. After a few years of supervised practice as a psychotherapist, I began to feel completely disenchanted with transpersonal and humanistic psychology. They either spiritualized all issues or reduced them to family systems outcomes. I then discovered the soul-based archetypal psychology of James Hillman. My effort, since then, has been to develop a praxis based on his work but one that includes more attention to body and spirit.

Tammie: You maintain that inhibitions and blocks to personal growth are more than personal symptoms but are symptoms of the world in which we live. Will you elaborate on that?

Cliff: I mean that what we call pathology is a global or community disorder borne by the individual. Hillman uses the example of eating disorders, I think. They are really "food" disorders. We live in a world in which food is distributed inequitably, in which people are needlessly starving. So-called "eating disorders" to my mind are expressions of that. If you send a compulsive overeater as part of his treatment to do volunteer work in a soup kitchen, the person makes a radical transformation.

The apparent increase of violence among children is, I think, an expression of the way children are hated in this culture. Isn't it bizarre that members of the middle class fill therapy offices to work on the "inner child" while child abuse rages? If you want to work on your "inner child," go do some work with real children. The idealization of the inner child is a kind of reaction formation to anger about the reality of childhood -- which is NOT a state of innocence, which is NOT a time when we usually get what we need. Another example: ADD is an expression of the mania culture requires to sustain capitalism. Also: Borderline disorder, where the self is completely projected outward, is a symptom of the profound relatavizing of postmodern culture.

Tammie: What is deep imagination?

Cliff: This is really an expression of depth psychology -- penetration of the psyche's depths to the archetypal field. In the depths of the psyche, images live autonomously, awaiting personification. When they remain unconscious, they tend to make themselves known as symptoms. The gods are archetypal processes of the imagination in its depths. When they were banished, as Jung said, they became diseases, or symptoms, what we call pathology.

Tammie: You've bravely shared (and received a great deal of angry protests from therapists) that you're disenchanted with psychotherapy. Why is that?

Cliff: This would take a book. Modern psychotherapy -- the praxis developed 100 years ago -- contained two conflicting impulses. One was scientific and the other was aesthetic. Freud was a scientist (as was Jung) but he regarded the narratives of his patients as "healing fictions". Freud recognized the symbolizing and metaphorizing character of the psyche and Jung extended this even further as his career proceeded.

In the time since then, psychology as a healing practice, has fallen increasingly under the influence of science, medicine. Thus, what was recognized by Freud and Jung as metaphorical -- such as unlikely tales of satanic cult abuse, etc. -- has become increasingly literalized in modern practice. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," said Gaston Bachelard. Conversely, the more symptoms are treated as literal, the more soul, psyche, is driven into materialism and compulsion (and the more it has to be medicated). The tragedy of modern psychological praxis is this loss of imagination, the understanding that the psyche by its nature fictionalizes through the exercise of the fantasy we call memory.

My experience with clients, and as a client, has been that psychotherapy reduces symptoms to predictable causes. This is in the "air," so to speak, no matter how much you try to avoid it. Clients come in with their own diagnoses -- from ADD to PTSD and "low self esteem" to "sexual addiction." I am sure that these diagnoses and their prescribed treatment have some merit, but quite honestly I just haven't seen people who tell themselves the narratives of these disorders making much progress.

When I began working with people in my Greeting the Muse workshops for blocked writers and artists, I saw them making rapid progress through the active engagement of the imagination. In these, pathology is viewed as the natural expression of the soul -- the way into the soul. There is no "healing" in the traditional sense, just deepening of awareness, experience, appreciation. The best metaphor is probably alchemy -- where a "conjunction" of opposites is sought, not a displacement of the symptom with something. Jung spoke of the transcendent function, where two opposites are held and transcended. There is no sacrifice of the original quality of the "wound," but its transcendence holds it differently.

I made a personal decision to stop calling myself a psychotherapist because of this experience. On the other hand, I have learned that my work is NOT for everyone. People with dissociative disorders, for example, do not do well in work that uses a lot of active imagination. Nor do I mean to suggest, in the least, that medications aren't of value for many people. But I do MY best work outside the paradigm of medical science. I even regard medication as alchemy.