Customer Reviews

We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In this stream-of-conciousness assay of modern psychotherapy, James Hillman and Michael Ventura pull no punches in their thoughful and provacative conversations and letters. The interplay of Ventura's relentless questioning and Hillman's ascerbic and, at times, seemingly heretical replies strip the clothes off the emperor of modern psychotherapy. The synergy created in the authors' conversations and exchange of letters in worth the price of admission alone. This book is essential reading for those willing to question the value and values of modern psychotherapy and its grip and the psyche of Western culture.

This is unquestionably one of the best books I've ever read-and it is much more than a critique of the legacy of psycotherapy. Hillman and Ventura improvise their way through a series of dialogues, rants, ruminations that question and turn upside down many of the most dearly beloved tenets of our current culture-the importance we attach to "personal growth" being just one example. The book is very opinionated (thank goodness), gutsy and provocative. It's also very deep-but not in a self conscious or pretentious manner-it just helps to reveal the depth that's there in the everyday world. The best thing about it is that after you've read it you'll want to live your life with the same critical intensity. Really great book.

In this intense, incisive & barefaced series of dialogues & letters between two spirited people, we get searing insights into the legacy of psychotherapy & just about every aspect of contemporary life. After we found this book we finagled several of our friends into reading it. Our experience of what James Hillman & Michael Ventura spoke & wrote changed our minds & the way we went about living & loving. Fascinating!

Reading this book I thought of another, somewhat similar text that blew me away one day when I was about 14 years old. It was called "The Savage and Beautiful Country" by a therapist named Alan McGlashan. The book description reads "a sensitive view of the modern world and of time, of our memories and forgetfulness, joys and sorrows. He takes the reader on a safari into regions that are strange and yet familiar - into the savage and beautiful country of the mind. No "cures" are offered, but we are provoked to reflect on our roles and attitudes in the contemporary world..."

I thought it was profound. I thought it was deep. I was hooked. I'd found my copy in a library, but in this time before the Internet or the ability to order any out-of-print book easily I moved heaven and earth to find a copy. Eventually I did.

Years later I found the book in a drawer and reread it. And I wondered why my fourteen- or fifteen-year-old self ever thought this title was so damned profound. Well, I knew, really. When you're 14 and your world-view is fairly narrow, you're deeply impressed by all the "insights" and "observations." After you're older and you've lived life, had jobs, been promoted, demoted, fired, loved, hated, dated, rated, flattered, pattered and smattered, annoyed, buoyed, and overjoyed, you find yourself reading these profound "insights" and muttering, "They *pay* you to come up with that?"

Then you begin to regret you never took the schooling that would allow you to get on the gravy train.

That's a lot of my reaction to this book, wherein two navel-gazers who remind me of college philosophy majors who spend too much time sitting in coffee houses pondering whether they are sitting in coffee houses or just believe they are sitting in coffee houses, and can one really know the difference and does it matter if one can or cannot know the difference and....You just want to yell "Shaddup" and beat them with a large sock filled with manure, as Woody Allen says in Annie Hall.

It's not that I'm against navel-gazing--I do it myself--and it's not that I disagree with the book's title and overall conceit, which is what prompted me to pick it up in the first place. But these two eggheads ramble on and on, tediously and repetitiously (the book could have been half its length) beating dead horses and knocking down straw men. We get the standard "We're-All-So-Alienated-In-This-Society-Because-of-Technology" line. One of them talks about how he knows people all over the world and can talk to them at a moment's notice, but doesn't know the name of the guy who lives in the flat next door. What would have been a more interesting book is if they'd have explored whether or not not knowing the guy next door truly makes you "alienated." Why do we *assume* that it does? (I've known most of my neighbors in life and I can't say I'm a better person for it.) What's more important for a fulfilling life, friends of intellectual proximity or friends of physical proximity? That could have been an interesting examination, but these two guys rarely make it past clichés. Then we get the standard line about technology making us cold, autocratic machines. I wonder what Leonardo Da Vinci's take on that would have been. We hear about how half of all marriages end in divorce nowadays, but they gaze into their navels so hard they don't even consider that perhaps there are more divorces now not because people are less happy, but because years ago the option for splitting wasn't as viable, and that changes in technology, the women's movement, the internal combustion engine, et many a cetra, are reasons that deserve examination, rather than "We're all miserable now!" (Of course, they offer mounds of proof everyone was so happy then.)

They talk about jazz musicians and draw analogies to our hurried modern lives in ways that show they know little about both hurried modern lives and jazz. (And the claim by one of them that musicians, after they've played together a very long time, begin to merge their styles till they become hard to tell apart--aside from the "Who cares?" factor--is simply untrue. Some do, some don't, and some grow even more distinct in an attempt to differentiate themselves. It's more a matter of how they are wired when they meet than it is their being together. They also don't understand how bebop operates very well.)

I do think psychotherapy has many problems, and while not expecting the final word, I was hoping for some insight as to why. Instead I got the usual, worn out clichés about all the pressures of modern life, which have been uttered since at least the time of Montaigne, and probably since cavemen sat around a fire. I get the usual suspects, and even worse, the usual suggested cures. There are a few interesting ideas here, mostly for me an early one about how perhaps rather than our early experiences shaping us for the future, we determine our future experiences by what we bring into it--sort of a restatement of the nature/nurture conundrum. I was particularly struck by their example of Hitler, who indeed looked intimidating even as a five-year-old if you've ever seen the early photographs. But even here, rather than explore this further, they just toss it in the air, don't really support it or challenge it, and then move on. Mostly I get a vibe of "Aren't we clever for talking about all this fancy stuff in the first place?" and the shrink world is already filled with enough martini-guzzling, "clever" people. You're not an "intellectual" just because you subscribe to The New Yorker and have Mozart recordings on your stereo. You're intellectual if you come up with insightful, well-backed original ideas, and put them through their paces in efforts to get deeper inside them. These guys flunk the test.

....and its habit of cloistering itself in the consulting room. Hillman and Ventura make their rambling, imaginative, caustic, and wonderfully spontaneous case for the inefficiency of a psychology establishment that pretends to change the world one person at a time...in effect robbing them of the very symptoms that might prompt some effective action, political and otherwise. Be sure to look for Hillman's wonderful offhand joke about why camels spit.

I read this book back in 1996, when I was much further to the left politically than I am now. Hillman and Ventura come up with some striking insights, especially that of how the spread of Christianity shifted people's focus from their tribes to their individual selves. (Others may have made this observation first; I'm not well-read enough on the subject to verify this.)

But amid all the authors' "progressive" concerns (primarily environmental ones) is an appalling lack of empathy for women who have suffered from physical or sexual violence. Hillman kvetches about how rape, incest and pedophilia are "seizing" our attention "when there are so many other cruelties and injustices around." He attributes memories of incest (and not necessarily repressed ones) to unresolved Electra-complex issues. He seems to consider date rape and sexual harassment just elements adding to the thrill of the chase. And he suspects that battered women are closet masochists.

I wrote a long, passionate, and articulate letter to Hillman to protest these characterizations. He sent me a flippant, scrawled postcard basically accusing me of being the stereotype of a humorless, angry feminist. After I tore it up and mailed it back to him with a note expressing what I thought of his reply, he sent me another postcard very similar in tone and accusation. I declined to reply.

Obviously, the reviewer who characterized the book as "self-indulgent" and "whiny" was picking up on something I'd missed the first time around. As far as the political import of sexual assault goes, go Google the news for "Catholic pedophile priests" and see for yourself how far off the mark Hillman is.

The better part of a decade later, as I look over some of Hillman and Ventura's comments that I'd copied down for a quotation collection, they strike me as way off the mark in a lot of other ways. Start with the book title. The world has NOT gotten worse, for Pete's sake. Life spans everywhere are longer than they've ever been in human history; and in wealthier countries, "poverty" is a state of existence that medieval kings might have envied. While human nature has not changed and evil still stalks the globe, we've raised the standard for human rights, all but wiped Communism off the face of the planet, and -- as yesterday's killings of Uday and Qusay Hussein show -- upheld our commitment to bring the murderous and tyrannical to justice.

There's much communitarian/Luddite moaning in this book about how "isolated" humanity has become thanks to our technologies -- the moon landing, 24-hour ATMs, suburbia, even electric lighting. Had the Internet been as widely used when the book was written as it is now, I'm sure it would have come in for lambasting, too.

It's all a crock, of course. It may appall America's self-appointed social directors that not everyone wants to have bake sales, softball games, and movie nights with other people whom we happen to live next door to, but quite a few of us view technology as having *freed* us from dealing with people with whom we have little in common. What's more, the 'net has brought millions of us into new communities of friends, lovers, and allies -- not just online, but often in real life. And even when "only" online, such communities can wield real-world power, as we've seen in the last few years: right-of-center webloggers have been pivotal in exposing the mendacity of such mainstream-media icons as the New York Times, the BBC, gun-control fraud Michael Bellesiles, and many others.

And, to get back to that other negative review, yes, Hillman and Ventura take a decidedly positive view of obnoxious behavior. Hillman mocks the concept of being "out of control" and "liv[ing] the straight and narrow like I'm supposed to." Love is defined as "a madness" (which might have something to do with Hillman's belief that domestic violence is no big deal). "Dysfunction" is described as the opposite of "mediocrity." And so on.

Of course, commerce, capitalism, and people who go about their work quietly without turning into drama kings and queens come in for a lot of snide remarks, both explicit and implicit. Like most leftists, the authors don't seem to grasp that such folks and forces are what have created the structure of liberal democracy that have allowed them to write this book, one that has something in it to offend you, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum.

Again, because there are some insights I hadn't seen before, and some interesting turns of phrase and wordplay, I felt I had to bump the book up to two stars. But don't read it expecting anything more serious or analytical. Like any too-long conversation between a couple of friends, it's more about the participants' own prejudices and peeves than anything else.

The concept is good the presentation is terrible.

Certainly questioning psychotherapy is reasonable. But here we are witnessing a brainstorming session before the crapola is clipped, resulting in a pseudo-intellectual, pompous assortment of oversaturated negative dialectic or in Hillman's own words, "empty protest."

Yes, there are some intriguing thoughts and ideas but the complexity is ignored in favor of a shallow critical approach often given in a condescending manner.

The recent death of James Hillman made me re-read the book that first introduced me to his work, this sometimes dazzling, sometimes infuriating, always fascinating collaboration with Michael Ventura. While nearly 20 years have passed since its publication, it remains as thought-provoking as ever, the sort of conversation that demands you join in.

Yes, it is rather like an extended BS session, as some reviewers complain -- but that's what makes it so compelling, because the two men talking late into the night are intelligent, insightful, and don't fit into any convenient, socially approved pigeonholes. The official topic is psychotherapy, but this is really a discussion about & dissection of the damaged soul of the American consumer-industrial state, the shallow colossus that dominates us all & reduces all that is human & complex to the lowest common denominator as much as possible. And if some of the specific details of life have changed in two decades, the essence of the argument has only become stronger in that time.

You won't agree with everything they say -- I certainly didn't! -- and you'll experience occasional frustration when the conversation veers off on a completely different tangent, just when you were really getting into it. But if you're ready to question a great deal of received & accepted "wisdom" in hopes of understanding the world you live in a little better, then dive into these pages. Whatever else may happen, I don't think you'll be bored.

Highly recommended!

I read this years ago when it first came out. Wrote a negative review for my club newsletter. I was very cynical about the recommendation that people simply turn off their TVs, get out of their cars, and take an interest in the people next door. I hadn't found that mere proximity led to having anything to say to people, much less to the restoration of community.

What I have learned since is that Michael Ventura had a brother, Aldo, who spent pretty much his entire adult life "insane...between tumultuous instability and flat-out madness," as Michael put it in his moving 2004 obituary after Aldo's death at 54. In a real community, in the kind of world where people take care of each other just because they are physically nearby, Aldo, who was clearly brilliant and gifted as well as crazy, might have made a contribution, certainly would not have suffered what he suffered as a madman from a poor family in New York City in the late 20th century. This is the background for Michael Ventura's perspective that our materialistic workaholic culture with its permissive social mobility, which allows those of us who are strong, healthy, clear-headed and socially presentable to abandon the rest of us, has thereby damaged the human soul by excluding the nonrational from our day-to-day experience. As a person who values said social mobility, which also allows abuse victims to get away from their abusers, I'm not entirely in agreement with him, but I find great value in the reminder that there are other facets to this jewel called freedom and some of 'em ain't so pretty.

I looked forward to reading "We've Had a Hundred..." with anticipation. It is the first work by James Hillman I had chanced to read and I had been encouraged by comments about the author. As I got into the book, the anticipation quickly diminished. It became a chore to finish the work. Yet I forced myself to read on and finally completed it. I held onto slight hope that something useful and profound might be sprinkled toward the end. My hopes were for naught. There were a couple points of interest throughout the book, but nothing groundbreaking or "framework" altering in my experience.

I really do not get what they thought they were accomplishing. I suppose they did challenge the status quo of therapy. But I did not see the clear alternative they were offering in its stead. I did not see any value in any of their criticisms and saw even less value in their proposed paradigm shifts. I saw no practical value in their ideas - of course, Hillman may bristle at such an accusation preferring "idea" over practical considerations (see page 140). But what is the reader to do with what has been given him by Ventura and Hillman? Precious little is likely.

I was put off somewhat by the casual conversational tone of the work. The book is organized into three parts: two parts dialogue and one part letter compilation. The authors' interaction is oft times irreverent and sprinkled with profanity. Vulgar language isn't a big deal in common vernacular, but learned men throwing the words out is a little off putting in the context (probably just my puritanical leanings, they might suggest). The framework of the book is also a little odd considering that one of Hillman's letters emphasized the need for writing as opposed to spoken word (pages 89ff, 94ff) - this in a book that is two parts spoken word and one part written. He actually contends that spoken word is deficient for psyche searching. Hmm...

I wondered as I read what Michael Ventura's credentials were. Why should I take his commentary on the state of psychology and the world seriously? He seems to have wrestled with this question himself because he seeks to answer it in one of his letters (page 54). The answer? He has been in personal counseling for 10 years and seems to be "synchronistically" surrounded by psychologists. Heck, it appears everyone he knows soon becomes a "shrink". Certainly these things make one qualified to usher the world into a new era of psychology and therapy! Well, on second thought, maybe not. Much of his writing (unlike Hillman's) has an air of self-importance. It was his sentiment I borrowed from for the heading above, "You know the changes we want are so radical; we are scratching at the beginnings of a huge new conceptual framework" (page 208). He also wrote in a letter, "What we're tuned into, what's coming through us, is, at least in part, the beginning of the articulation of a new theoretical framework that would extend psychotherapy in particular and Western thought in general into the realms of the collective" (page 60). And it goes on. Pretty heady stuff. I was reminded of conversations with college mates where we thought we would change the world. Somehow we alone had tapped into the hidden mysteries of existence. How simple and misguided those that have gone before us (or so we must have thought)! Such letter writing and conversations always seem to happen late at night. They probably should not see the light of day (at least not in a publication such as this).

Following is a list of a few of their trailblazing ideas. 1) Perhaps a child's experiences and characteristics or traits are caused by his future destiny rather than vice versa (i.e., that the experiences in childhood instead create one's destiny). Life is lived backward so to speak. Psychology starts off with an upside down premise by attributing who the person becomes to his childhood experiences (pages 16ff, 52ff, 68ff). 2) Individuation is not to be centered in the self but rather must take on a communal or world view. One's psyche is linked to the world and one of the great ills is Western man's preoccupation with the individual and isolation (page 52). The authors' premises are very societal - hence the title's emphasis on the "world" getting worse. The world, animate and otherwise, is part of the psyche and must be embraced and respected. One sees ecological and environmental implications throughout. 3) Pains and hurts are not to be processed. They should instead be kept and cherished. They give you your uniqueness and are your psyche's landscape. They are the source and wellspring of art and creativity. They are not sources of psychosis (page 29ff). Embrace your "madness." By embracing it, it will not overtake you. Dabble in drinking, drugs, sex, spending, eating, fornicating with banana trees (page 182), etc., because these represent your true psyche. To repress such urges is wrong and detrimental. Legalize drugs, institute brothels, etc. A recurring theme is the awful ramification of the West's Puritanism - maybe our greatest evil. It is demonized for its conformity and is referred to as "white bread" society. 4) Psychology is art, not science (page 150). Its root is poetic and found in images. This creative psychology encourages our being rather than represses it.

Certainly more ideas are hinted at and dropped. I am not sure that any are really fully fleshed out or explored, however. They do not offer us a comprehensive worldview to contend with what we currently have. I could glean no new theoretical or conceptual framework from the book. We are just given a view or glimpse of the ramblings of a couple of men who ponder on the deep things of the psyche.

All in all, what's the point? After reading this work I felt like saying, "Ho hum." What difference will this book make in my life or my (or "the") world? I think none. My time is better spent living life forward and processing my experiences and demons. Thanks anyway.