The Homeric DSM / A Corrective Historical Experience 1 Steven Goldman, Ph.D. Introduction The question I am exploring with you today is how to become one soul. My theme is the soul and I'm focusing on that small part of existential psychoanalysis that concerns not analysis or existence but psyche or soul. I will trace some of the history of the idea of the soul -- and of psychological unity -- whose trajectory runs from ancient times to the present. The point I am trying to make today is that when we understand the history that precedes existentialism and makes it possible, we are in a stronger position to take charge of our lives -- and thus to do some good. In my remarks today I am claiming that history is too important. We need it to be less important so that we can be free for creative responsiveness to life. The crux of the issue is that history becomes too important when we become trapped in a single, obsessional vision of the past. Thinking historically helps to liberate us from the tyranny of one idea above all others -- this helps us get oriented in our thinking about contributions from thinkers like Binswanger, Jaspers, Heidegger, Medard Boss, Rollo May and Irvin Yalom -- some of the founders of the therapies we are exploring in this conference -- all of them thinkers who envision a new kind of freedom. Freud, working with Sรกndor Ferenczi and Franz Alexander, envisioned something like a corrective emotional experience -- a way of talking about what is therapeutic in analysis. My addition here is on behalf of the same ambition to free ourselves from the past. But I am arguing for a corrective historical experience, to liberate us from the strictures of a narrow and disempowering conception of history -- thus a way of talking about what is therapeutic in studying history. I am reaching for a way of reclaiming the past from blank facticity, to serve the cause of creative self-determination. I am claiming that what we are able to do in thinking runs parallel with what we are able to do in life -- we cannot jump ahead of ourselves into the future, but at the same time we have to fight against the inertia of the past. So I'm discussing existential psychoanalysis, which I define in Yalom's terms as a dynamic approach to therapy which focuses on concerns that a human being faces just by being alive 2 -- and my point of view emerges from thinking about the history of philosophy. Jaspers -- an important contributor to existential thinking and a physician credited with inaugurating the "biographical method" in psychiatry -- i.e., taking extensive background histories and noting how patients themselves feel about their symptoms -- held that psychotherapy is not grounded in medicine but in philosophy, which is why it demands to be examined
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A version of this essay was delivered at the 2013 conference of the Existential Psychoanalysis Institute and Society (EPIS), held at the University of Montana, Missoula, Montana, August 3, 2013. I would like to thank my friends Kevin Boileau, Ph.D. and Eric Springsted, Ph.D. for reading drafts of the essay and providing helpful criticism. 2 Irwin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 5
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