What is the purpose of the Greeting the Muse Workshop?
Originally, I conceived it as a means of developing a therapoeisis, a therapeutic system based on the use of the imagination — a poetics for the ailing soul. It irritated me that Hillman and Moore, for all their brilliant writing, had not developed a very articulate praxis. My own background in humanistic and transpersonal psychology, with long experience in 12-step recovery, had left me adrift. None went deep enough. I rediscovered the depth psychology of Freud and Jung. Then I found Hillman and archetypal psychology, which takes classic depth psychology deeper. Or, I should say it adds breadth as well as depth by enlarging psychology’s concern to the public sphere. Through the figure of the daimon, a personification of destiny and the soul, we are brought into direct contact with our symptoms, our defenses, and our path to healing. But we find this path in the world, not just in the therapy room. Hillman, of course, is a Jungian but he has freed Jung’s psychology from a lot of its d
