We've Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy
  And The World's Getting Worse
   James Hillman and Michael Ventura
  1992 HarperSanFrancisco/HarperCollins NY USA
   ISBN: 0062504096


In this furious, trenchant & audacious series of interrelated dialogues & letters between two spirited people, we get searing insights into the legacy of psychotherapy & just about every aspect of contemporary life.

We found this book back in 1993 and finagled several of our friends into reading our copy. We encouraged them to write their comments & reactions, responses & ahhas! in the margins as we had, or underline portions that particularly rang true. Our volume of We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy is now rather well-worn.

Our experience of what James Hillman & Michael Ventura spoke & wrote changed our minds & the way we went about living & loving.

Ventura & Hillman have conversations throughout this book. One I particularly like was about family & family names:...

Ventura...even the Norman Rockwell ideal of the happy, self-sufficient family is a distortion of what families were for thousands, probably tens of thousands, of years. During that time, no family was self-sufficient. Each family was a working unit that was part of the larger working unit, which was the community - the tribe or the village. Tribes and villages were self-sufficient, not families. It's not only that everyone worked together, everyone also played and prayed together, so that the burden of relationship, and of meaning, wasn't confined to the family, much less to a romantic relationship, but was spread out into the community. Until the Industrial Revolution, family always existed in that context.

Hillman: And family always existed in the context of one's ancestors. Our bones are not in this ground. Now our families don't carry the ancestors with them. First of all, we Americans left our homelands in order to come here, and we let go of the ancestors. Second, we're all now first-name people. I was just at a psychotherapists' conference with seven thousand people and everybody had on their name tags. Everybody's first name was in large caps and the last name was in small letters below it.

Ventura: And in the last name are the ancestors, the country, the residue of the past.

Hillman: It's all in the last name. The first name is fashion, social drift. One generation you have a lot of Tracys and Kimberlys, Maxes and Sams, another ... you have Ediths and Doras, Michaels and Davids. You've got your ancestors with you in your psyche when you use your last name. You've got your brothers and sister with you, they have the same name. When I'm called Jim, I'm just plain Jim, it has no characteristics. To have only a first name is a sign of being a peasant, a slave, an oppressed person...therapy's no different...it complies with ...convention. The early cases of analysis, Freud's, Jung's, had only first names...it's supposed to show intimacy and equality -

Ventura: - and anonymity -

Hillman: What it actually does is strip down your dignity, the roots of your individuality, because it covers over the ancestors, who are in the consulting room too.

Ventura: I'm too American for that, I like being able to leave some of that behind...speaking of slaves: bosses and owners are always called Mister, but they have the freedom to address their employees by the first names. And among workers of equal or supposedly equal status, it's not unusual for a man to be called by his last name while women are almost always called by their first names unless they're really heavy-duty. So we're also dealing with power when we use names. We're reinforcing certain kinds of authority and inequality.'

To give you a glimpse of how these two minds flow & mingle around ideas. It was a breathless read, hard to put down each time I picked it up. Lots & lots of mind expanding conversations & very good fodder between spouses!

More by James Hillman: A Blue Fire; The Dream and the Underworld; Inter Views; Freud's Own Cookbook(with Charles Baer); Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion; Healing Fiction and much more.

More by Michael Ventura: Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A. and Night Time, Losing Time.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca