Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
Interpretation
Depression can be understood as a natural response rather than merely a disorder, forcing individuals to confront their feelings and experiences.
The quote by James Hillman reframes the perception of depression from being viewed as solely a dysfunction to recognizing it as a functioning phenomenon that serves a purpose in our lives. It highlights that depression can lead to moments of stillness and introspection, often eliciting a profound discomfort but also encouraging personal reflection and growth.
In practice
In a support group discussing mental health, one might say, 'Remember, instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it's a functioning phenomenon that guides us.'
Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.
Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies - the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding.
Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem
Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.
My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought that and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).
You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy.
Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.
In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.
Authenticity is more than speaking; Authenticity is also about doing. Every decision we make says something about who we are.
Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.
If I got rid of my demons, Iβd lose my angels.
There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was an ending.
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