You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken, but to get what’s broken blessed.
—James Hillman
We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—and the World’s Getting Worse (1992) is a provocative, conversational critique of modern psychotherapy by Jungian American psychologist James Hillman and writer Michael Ventura.
In brief, the book argues that after a century of therapy focused on the inner self, people may be more psychologically aware—but society itself has not improved, and may even be deteriorating.
Hillman argues that psychotherapy has become too inward-looking, encouraging people to interpret their problems in terms of personal history, childhood wounds, and private emotions, while ignoring the social, political, and environmental conditions that also shape suffering.
Instead, he calls for a reorientation of psychology toward the “soul of the world”—meaning culture, community, and imagination. He argues that distress is not just inside individuals but also embedded in the world around them.
It’s a provocative yet insightful book that’ll spark a rethinking about the many issues we face today in an era of obvious decline. Below are a few passages from the book that shed light on a culture obsessed with self-analysis that has lost sight of the deeper task: engaging with and healing the world itself.
I hope you enjoy it.
We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse.
Maybe it’s time to look at that. We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go inside to locate the psyche, you examine your feelings and your dreams, they belong to you. Or it’s interrelations, interpsyche, between your psyche and mine.