The Practice of Therapy
It would be difficult to imagine a better or more succinct explanation of the structure and intent of depth psychotherapy than the one that Hillman offers:
‘Classical analysis has been defined as “a course of treatment in an atmosphere of sympathy and confidence of one person by another person for a fee, which treatment may be conceived as educative in various senses or therapeutic in various senses and which proceeds principally through the joint interpretative exploration of habitual behaviours and of classes of mental events that have been traditionally called fantasies, feelings, memories, dreams and ideas, and where the exploration follows a coherent set of methods, concepts and beliefs stemming mainly from Freud and from Jung, where focus is preferably upon the unanticipated and affectively charged, and whose goal is the improvement (subjectively and/or objectively determined) of the analysand and the termination of treatment”.’ James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, UE1. Spring Publications, 1983, 2004. Pg 54.
Note also that the teaching and therapeutic practices of the Tamboo community exceed these definitions, in keeping with the deconstruction of analysis, the re-evaluation of the transference and the revisioning of therapy as challenged by Hillman in The Myth of Analysis. Tamboo therapists incorporate the insights and applied teachings of several other lineages into the practice of traditional psychotherapy. The most significant of these are the Kabbalah, Shamanism, Kadeisha, Alchemy and the Dionysian tradition. For some sense of this, see the essay Issues in Therapy on this website.