No Mommy, Daddy, Me

Ever since hearing James Hillman mention in one of his talks that when he did therapy he always tried to make sure his patients talked about their grandparents instead of their parents, I have been fascinated. He said one thing that this did is help move the patient's mind away from so-called concrete events and into fantasy and imagination which is basically all it is anyway. In other words, what I'm hearing him say is our behaviors, habits, and emotions are fantasy based. Here is what he has to say in the Lament of the Dead. If I understand it right this was the final project he was working on before he died.

J.H:"When I was doing therapy, back in another period of history, I always tried to escape the parents, which was the story that the person always wanted to tell me--what their mother did and what their father did. You notice Jung hasn't a lot to say about them anywhere in the Red Book."

Sonu Shamdasani: "There's no 'Mommy, Daddy, me,' as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would put it."

J.H: "But to go and ask people about their grandparents and their great-grandparents and imagining all their great-grandparents sitting down at a table. That would be eight people. Could they eat the same food? Could they talk the same language? Could they even sit with each other? But the ancestors in the book--see the reason being that it shows the enormous complexities in human nature and the incompatibilities in human nature. And the fact that your actual parents whom you think cause everything are actually the result of those tremendous incompatibilities themselves. It frees them up too." --Pg. 3, Lament of the Dead