6
ATTENDING TO THE VOICES
By implementing this type of reading style, Palmer (1969) believes a reader can be sensitive to the experience of understanding what is being written and experience the reading without translating from the shallow place of knowledge, but rather from a “loving union” between text and interpreter—partners in the hermeneutic dialogue (p. 244). Allowing the words to tell the reader something and assert their own truth is the goal of this type of reading experience, and this can only be achieved if readers are aware of their own bias. What is largely missing from a clinical approach to literature is a meaningful encounter with it—being seized by the words written.
Palmer (1969) asserts that “the text must be allowed to speak, the reader being open to it as a subject in its own right rather than as an object” (p. 197). Distin - guishing between opinion and truth in what is written is achieved through being aware of one’s bias and discarding prejudices.
According to Gadamer (1975), “this openness always includes our situating the other meaning in relation to the whole of our own meanings or ourselves in relation to it” (p. 271). An abundance of possibilities will flow from meaning. However, projection is problematic when reading the written word. As soon as a meaning for the written word emerges a projection can be made by the reader for the story as a whole. This is accomplished by the reader having a particular expectation for the story being read, which allows for the initial meaning to emerge. The task of understanding is accomplished through working out the reader’s projections.
Remaining open to the meaning of the following stories presented is the essential task placed before the reader. The key is to listen to its voice; a hearingunderstanding allows for meaning to be brought forth. What has been written must be given permission to speak. It should be heard by a great listener with no expectation, judgment, or prejudice.
Being able to read their life stories by honoring fluidity, seeking an understanding from the language of images, metaphors, myths, and symbols in the following chapter allows the voice of their stories to reveal itself. One can only achieve this by employing an imaginal perspective to read the following stories. Robert Romanyshyn (2002) stated in his book Ways of the Heart, “I am for better or worse a witness for what has been lost, forgotten, left behind, or otherwise marginalized and neglected, a witness for those lost things which still remain and haunt the outer margins of the experienced world” (p. 113). A witness begins without judgment about the truth or falsity of an experience and with an invitation, a spirit of loving wonderment and generosity. This allows the experience and things to be what they are—as they are (Romanyshyn, 2002, p. 116). It is paramount to experience the setting of a person who hoards from an open, non-judgmental perspective, with curiosity into the imaginal aspects of the objects collected and no need to diagnose or treat.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman (1975) distinguished between ego-based problems and fantasy when approaching a client’s problem: “Where problems call for will power, fantasies evoke the power of the imagination. Those who work professionally with imagination recognize the value of fantasies and resist having them turned into psychological problems to be analyzed.” (p. 135). Pathologizing
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is at work when symptomatic events are ignored and ritualized, creating odd behaviors, something symbolic beyond itself.
The psyche wants to find itself by seeing through; even more, it loves to be enlightened by seeing through itself, as if the very act of seeing-through clarified and made transparent—as if psychologizing with ideas were itself an archetypal therapy, enlightening, illuminating.
(Hillman, 1975, p. 123) When the soul is overwhelmed by events, it suffers. By implementing fantasy and evoking the power of imagination, problems are dissolved and not analyzed, and psychologizing can solve the matter at hand with visibility and light. Hillman (1975) stated, “Fantasy need not always be verbal, nor must there be a visual imagery” (p. 143). He believes that by entering into a more skilled way of doing things, one can translate an event into an experience through style, gesture, or ritual, allowing for psychologizing to break up the repetitiveness of clinical treatment and diagnosis. Soul is obstructed by the literalism, methods, and tools of psychology, and the more a psychology is backed by hard evidence, the less open soul becomes in releasing insight due to the production of a single definition instead of multiple ambiguities of meaning.
We must seek an ensouled language with the stories in the next chapter, including heartfelt images and symbols placed upon objects hoarded, increasing our conscious beliefs enough to encompass both subtle and explicit energies through recognition from dreams, visions, reverie, and the collective.
Too what is implied here is that we cannot solve the pathologies of our - selves or our patients, or our environmental problems, by the use of scientific terminology and theoretical formulations alone (such as have been developed in empirical epistemologies), for these, though easier, are inadequate to the task of transformation.
(Goodchild, 2001, p. 174) Changing from a discipline of psychology to a more activity-based psycho- therapy is imperative in releasing the dynamic energies of psyche (the unconscious) and soul (the embodied spirit), both different from each other. Fantasy and afflictions are expressed by psyche in the mode of symptoms; however, a distinct entity is produced with literal reality when symptoms are professionally named by psychology, creating protection and separation from this named entity. “By taking soul’s sickness fantasy at face values clinical pathology, the clinical approach creates what it then must treat” (Hillman, 1975, p. 74). Having room for the bizarre, decayed, and fantastic in the objects and settings of a hoarder allows for therapy to follow this peculiar disorder, letting it be our guide to the ways of psyche and finding soul. Returning to the understanding of the nosology of disorder as diagnosis to the material disorder of the soul hidden in the hoard is imperative
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to the research. It must stay connected to the poetics of hoarding, in the sense that the hoarder is in the process of making some meaning from and out of the mess—
open and porous to the images that gather in what their hoarding wants to say.
By abandoning the medical model, we can stay connected to the mess, allowing soul to lead therapists into the madness created by a hoarder’s imagination.
Metaphor is the language of the soul; soul has no language and therefore speaks in imagery. Romanyshyn (2002) accentuates this statement further by stating, “We live in dark times because we have largely lost our capacity for an imaginal way of knowing and being and have largely forgotten how to appreciate the imaginal depths of the world” (p. 116). Soul communicates eternal truths to beings both eternal and temporal, a metaphorical language that current psychology ignores. What is life if not lived through imagination and imagery? According to Woodman and Dickson (1996), without this connection to soul, shorter and fewer workdays, unemployment, and boredom can trap exiled souls in the demonic version of an archetypal madman or madwoman who promises superhuman light on one side, superhuman sex on the other, with no room for human life in the middle (p. 186).
Culture, dreams, symptoms, and religion become meaningless. Life becomes one- dimensional, flat, boring, and intolerable. Metaphors act as guides and imagination moves ahead, beneath, around, and through the action. By this I mean that soul needs to dance with imagination.
As Romanyshyn (2002) so eloquently stated, “a mode of being in the world that is responsive to the luminosity in each moment, the shining radiance of the invisible that subtends the visible” (p. 165). Romanyshyn echoed Hillman (1981):
“imagination begins in a heart aware that there is both true and false imagining and that these are not contradictories, but rather correlatives, even co-terminous”
(p. 73). The sophistication of its imaginings begins with the heart’s illusions. If we engage the heart, we can move into imagination. “For when the brain is considered to be the seat of consciousness we search for literal locations, whereas we cannot take the heart with the same physiological literalism” (Hillman, 1981, p. 109).
Leading with heart allows for a loving presence amid the clutter while it leaves judgment at the front door.
Science was founded by a claim of legitimacy through objectivity; however, today it seems more like a fallacy than truth. The credibility of objectivity is an issue, allowing projections to enter the therapeutic experience where we are left with subjectivity.
Science today cannot but acknowledge that objectivity, the most cherished of its ideals, is unattainable. The experimenter cannot detach herself from her experiments; the thinker cannot separate himself from his thoughts. The observer is as much a participant in an event as the observed. (Woodman & Dickson, 1996, p. 217)
While reading the following chapter, nothing should be taken literally or at face value; a deeper kind of inquiry needs to be at work. “Imagination is the key to the work, to the inner garden, to the intermediate realm of symbol that moves and changes us and our lives as it shows how to unite the opposites” (Wikman,
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2004, p. 224). Being conscious of our standpoint (biases, vulnerabilities, and ways of connecting and dialoguing with psyche) is paramount to imagination and the process of incarnating the latent self. Hillman (1983b) eloquently stated that it is the imagination that allows us to see events as imagesby giving them distance and dignity (p. 45). By allowing for objects, settings, and individuals to be seen through their symptoms, symbols, dreams, and fantasies, the reader can be open to other alternative meanings, not just diagnostically. Seeing through a lens of inquiry illuminates respect for and attention to the true complexity of an experience adding depth and mystery to their stories. “One must remain continually aware of unawareness, keeping an eye and an ear for the opposite, the other thing” (Von Franz, 1980, p. 144).
Activating soul, spirit, and psyche are fundamental in understanding the condition of hoarding from a depth psychological perspective. “A depth psychol - ogist functions, in part, like a naturalist, appreciating and investigating the vast wilderness of being and not co-opting the terrain or manipulating it with too much theory or fixed thought forms” (Wikman, 2004, p. 125). By offering this type of approach to the stories presented in the next chapter it allows for soul to be engaged and a willingness to invite the imaginal in while viewing the landscape of a hoarder’s home—a way of deepening the event into an experience.
Proceeding into the following chapter, it is important not to link one individual’s imagery experience of an object with all individuals who hoard that particular object.
It is imperative not to create a bias toward an individual story based on a highlighted dramatic experience or link it to others who have suffered the same type of experiences, thereby creating a fixed set of images for objects. We as readers need to allow each individual’s stories and objects hoarded to speak for themselves. When individuals verbalize emotional, psychological, physical, and social difficulties, their experiences should not be viewed as collective experiences for all hoarders. Coppin and Nelson (2005) solidify this ethical consideration: “It is essential to inquire of any event, person, dream, emotion, image, mood, thought, insight or fascination”
and repeat the important idea that “all things, every object and every action, take on significance to soul” (p. 91). It is essential when reading the next chapter to allow soul to speak for itself, without bias, judgment, or criticism, and to be heard by all ears willing to listen with an openness to and respect for the imaginal.
What follows is a summary of each person’s demographic profile and an overview of their family lineage, as well as a detailed description of each person’s hoarding setting and objects hoarded. The most notably recognized hoarders in history were chosen for the study, including a mother and daughter, two brothers, an individual woman, and another individual man. These individuals were selected due to the considerable amount of biological background information available and the descriptions of their hoarding settings and objects hoarded. Being able to assess a person’s disorder depends on gathering all available information in order to provide a meaningful evaluation; for this reason, some individuals were not chosen due to their limited historical data or an incomplete profile of their hoarding setting.
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The material was gathered from a position of not knowing. The participants were not chosen all at once, but one at a time, engaging actively with one figure in order to be fully present with their experience as much as possible. There was no road map on where their stories or experience would lead, but with hope that their stories would reveal commonalities in the extensive background material received on each historical figure. By seeking fluidity and openness, space was made for the unknown, allowing metaphors and images to speak and uncovering what was embedded and hidden in the clutter. These are their stories.