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Biographies Massage
Therapists Energy
Bodyworkers Counselors |
Bradley Olson, Ph.D.
What
is mythology, and what is its connection to psychotherapy?
Myth as metaphors for cosmology, psychology, or ideology, for
instance, is mythology just as much as is the study of ancient texts and
stories. Myth tells us how to cope with the suffering of life; what
Hamlet calls the “heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that
flesh is heir to.” These are the losses of possessions, of loved ones, physical
illnesses, and the injustice of life.
Aeschylus tells us that, “we suffer into truth,” and Simone
Weil suggests even more specifically how we do so: “Misfortunes leave
wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little
they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself.
Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being; and
only suffering teaches him this.” Myths give us a map of sorts to the Underworld, and give us some “local knowledge” so that we needn’t panic or give up hope when we are confronted with “the dark night of the soul.” Psychotherapy is like the Midrash story of the argument between love and truth. To break the tie, God hurled truth to the ground, smashing it to pieces. From then on truth was splintered all over in fragments, like a jigsaw puzzle, and while a person might find a piece, it had very little meaning until he could find others who had different pieces of the puzzle, and thus slowly they could fit their pieces of truth together to make some sense of things. That’s what we do in therapy; we fit our puzzle pieces together and make sense of our lives. |
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Copyright © 2007-2010 Mountain Waves Healing Arts, Inc. All Rights Reserved Updated: February 24, 2010 |
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Bradley
is a psychotherapist in private practice with an office at Mountain
Waves Healing Arts.
