Healing Estranged Sorrows Through Re-Visioning Soul-Work

Abstract

This article defines estranged sorrow as a category of trauma that cannot be grieved because it was never consciously experienced. As a domain of grief prevented from moving into conscious awareness, estranged sorrow becomes an underlying, chronic source of unspeakable sorrow that diminishes the ability to experience the full range of psychic reality or potentiality. Estranged sorrow encompasses not having developmental psychological needs met, the absence of community, the presence of structural injustice, and the dwindling access to the numinous. Accounting for estranged sorrow beneath a variety of pathologized symptoms shows how the absence of soul and imagination accounts for an addiction to numbing as well as the epidemic of loneliness through a loss of self and social modes of awareness—and thus relationality. I then look to the importance of imaginal revisioning, part of the methodology of archetypal psychology, to better understand and begin working through trauma unearthed by exploring estranged sorrow. The process of revisioning involves the soul-work of personifying the world, seeing through the literal ideas that limit our access to psychic reality, enduring the feelings that something is wrong, and returning to an expanded psychic reality. This article concludes by reflecting on this process in the light of myth.

1. Imagining Estranged Sorrows

This article argues that methodologically engaging the imagination provides a necessary path toward healing harms that fall into the category I call estranged sorrows—wounding absences that do not correlate with loss of a specific, definable object and thus remain largely unconscious. It also expands awareness that not all traumas are connected to specific events, such as those connected to diagnoses like PTSD. Imagining estranged sorrows offers a fresh way to consider the resources of depth psychology as important for working with trauma, separate from the pioneering work of Kalsched (2013). More importantly, the healing power of soul-work provides an effective alternative to despairing attempts to move forward in time despite being unable to move on in reality. Addressing the loss of relationality adds new potential to extant theories of grief that focus on the loss of particular relationships. Revisioning estranged sorrow—reflecting on it from a novel mirror—provides a glimpse of a vaster framework from which new and different forms of healing may emerge.

Depth psychology was founded to help those suffering from symptomatic expressions of grievous harms that otherwise resisted rising to the level of conscious awareness. Freud and Jung recognized that talk therapy allowed patients to envoice, rather than embody, what had happened. In part, this was enabled through the quality of relational presence that defined the psychotherapeutic relationship and allowed verbal expressions of what would have otherwise been unrepresentable accounts of past experiences. Models of the Unconscious account for how psychic injuries influence thoughts and behaviors, and also prevent the mourning work that would allow healing. Depth psychology, especially through its Jungian tradition, has foregrounded the importance of the imagination as key to understanding the Unconscious. I am particularly persuaded by Hillman’s archetypal emphasis on the imagination as central to an experiential knowledge of reality, as well as his emphasis on soul (rather than mind or spirit) as the primary ground of psychological experience.

Contemporary depth psychological work has shown that exploring imaginal realities can be an effective way to process grief occasioned by a discrete loss of relationship. Paris (2015) investigated the phenomenon of heartbreak as an archetypal experience, resulting from the end of a relationship. She tracked it through Bowlby’s four-stage model of grieving (a numbing phase, a yearning phase, a phase of disorganization, and a phase of reorganization) (p. 86), to its concluding reflection on how the world’s imperfections allow the creation of a sense of self (p. 166) through poeisis, “the organizing and faming of one’s experience…shaping your life’s drama into a series of evolving metaphors, and then into a story” (p. 61).

Romanyshyn (1999) wrote a memoir of loss that presents central archetypal images (including Orphan and Angel) to indicate how the process of grief and mourning “did expand the horizons of [his] life” (p. 70), integrating poetry, dream, and reverie. In other words, the mourning process encouraged a movement from a literal relationship to an imaginal one: an enlarged appreciation for and interaction with imaginal resources allowed him to both articulate and honor his loss in ways that ultimately required a reconceptualization of reality. One specific consequence of this that emerged in conversation with physics was becoming aware of how grief “adds something to the notion of nonlocality…that love is the magnet which draws and holds together moments and places otherwise separate in time and place,” allowing the process of mourning to culminate in an enlarged sense of self (p. 154).

Mogenson (1992) outlined the “imaginal dimension of the mourning process,” arguing how “psyche is created, in large measure, by the mourning process itself” (p. xi), including how inconsolable losses allow a transformation of love that expands psychological reality: “By becoming absent, an object becomes wholly psychological…It becomes a subtle body, an imaginal object, an image, an angel” (p. 18). Mogenson’s insight here is important: what we experience as a shattering absence at the conscious level becomes a vital presence at the psychological level. Within the Jungian framework, “psyche is the ‘death’ in life and the ‘life’ in death” because “long after the body is gone, soul carries on” (p. 27). This is why, traditionally, soul is thought of both as an animating force in living bodies and as that which allows for a continuation of personalities after embodied existence ends. Jungian psychology extends traditional religious insights in allowing for the ongoing existence of soul: rather than going to a specific heaven or afterlife, souls remain part of a psychic reality and thus are accessed by the imagination. Important here is understanding that “psychic images refer to the images which animate objects, not to the objects as they are defined by physical categories” (p. 31). In other words, the imaginal dimension opens a way to envision and relate to departed loves in ways that expand one’s sense of self and reality.

These three approaches work well when one is forced to confront the shattering of soul and world that comes through an unanticipated event of heartbreak. All three begin with a concrete relationship from lived experience and understand how the work of mourning involves a process of de-literalizing the relationship from one constrained by bodies and time to one contained within the expanses of psyche. This opens what Kierkegaard (1998) recognized as a work of love that is given freely without any compulsion: “One who is dead is no actual object. If love then continues, this love is the most faithful” (p. 355). Although recollecting the departed brings no material reward, in addition to experiences of communing with the soul one continues to love, the imaginal gain provides an expanded awareness of the depths of reality through the psyche. In short, although the occasion of grief arises through the experience of loss, incorporating the imagination allows the work of mourning to become an important experience that deepens and expands one’s lived, psychic reality. The imaginal process of grief allows a reconstruction of the sense both of self and of the world.

My focus here, however, is on a slightly different phenomenon—the kind of loss that remains in the Unconscious, unknown and thus ungrieved, in a category I call estranged sorrow. It is undetected by causal explorations attached to scientific understandings of relationship predicated on discrete objects. This is because estranged sorrow is a general symptom of unavailable modes of relation rather than a particular mode of relating to an unavailable object. The idea of estranged sorrow occurs through the predominance of widespread social symptoms that align with those struggling with the grieving process, but whose sense of memory or history assigns no specific cause to this feeling. Its symptomatic kinship with grief allows it to share a root: the negative prefix names a separate category. Estranged sorrow names a wound that opens awareness to a persistently present nonexistence so that while one could truthfully claim that “nothing is wrong”, that exact, wrong nothingness and its confusing presence takes up an increasing amount of psychological space. It references a basic, tangible loss of connection based, often, on the lack of being touched (Montagu 1986). It is a nameless sorrow, a profound, silent agony that dwells unremembered at the heart of modern society. I will next offer a more detailed definition of estranged sorrow, and then draw on the work of James Hillman to describe how archetypal psychology accesses imaginal resources, enabling grief to allow an enlarged vision of one’s self and one’s situation.

2. Defining Estranged Sorrow

Estranged sorrow becomes conceivable when combining symptoms of dissociation and loss and the global effects of ambiguous loss. Boss (1999) is one of the few researchers who have written about these complex situations, focused primarily on a common but generally overlooked disruption of the grieving process: ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss occurs when external factors (not knowing whether someone is dead or alive, or having a loved one remain physically present but psychologically absent due to substance abuse or other mental health issues) complicate the more clear-cut cases of grieving that remains the focus of most literature (p. 8). She found that the ongoing lack of resolution has consequences similar to PTSD (depression, anxiety, psychic numbing, distressing dreams, and guilt), but differs in that trauma caused by ambiguity “continues to exist in the present. It is not post anything. Ambiguous loss is typically a long term situation that traumatizes and immobilizes, not a single event that later has flashback effects” (p. 24). In other words, the ongoing lack of resolution requires not only that people endure frozen or unresolved grief and an inability to know whether or not to grieve a relationship, but that the very fact of ambiguity and irresolution becomes an omnipresent part of life not restricted to a concrete event.

Although Boss (2022) recently wrote about collective sources of ambiguous loss and the absence of certainty—touching on topics like environmental damage, the pandemic, and racism—her approach still looks to take a known ambiguous loss as something grievable. Boss’s work helped me conceive of estranged sorrow, involving symptoms consistent with the traumatizing long-term situations that occur with ambiguous loss, and also unresolved grief occurring with structural and systemic injustice. Because most people are born into situations defined by structural and systemic injustice, there often is no specific loss to identify, much less grieve. Nonetheless, even when the loss remains in the Unconscious, it would manifest in some of the symptoms Boss described. If in no other way, estranged sorrows are like ambiguous loss in its combination of confusion, grief, and lack of inciting event.

To be clear, then, ambiguous loss is not identical to estranged sorrows. For Boss, the loss is ambiguous while the object is clear; on the other hand, estranged sorrows relate to the absence of an object that was needed but never known. In other words, much of the work with ambiguous losses deals with a known figure or event, including environment loss or increased symptoms of systemic injustice within one’s lifetime, while estranged sorrows primarily involve the “loss” of what was innately anticipated but never experienced—a healthy environment, a just society, a loving family (Boscaljon, forthcoming). Where some overlap with ambiguous loss occurs is with her recent extensions beyond personal family issues. A key difference here is that ambiguous loss is still appropriate when a specific object feels “lost”, while estranged sorrows point to a grief concerning a deprivation of what one never had, which can thus not be lost.

The notion of ambiguous loss is easily understood at the archetypal level of depth psychology. Depth psychologists who emerge from a Jungian background recognize a profound and important relationship connecting a certain kind of common occasions as archetypal. Jung ([1947] 1969) related these universal occurrences with corresponding a priori instincts that “provide the occasion and the pattern for his activities” (p. 201). What happens in a situation of ambiguous loss is that an instinct becomes activated at an archetypal level without the necessary elements in place that would allow this instinctual need to become realized. The occasion is present, the instinct is activated, but the experience is lacking. For example, the absence of a father or a mother figure often interrupts the maturation process as certain vital relational experiences do not occur. The absence is experienced at an archetypal level (as the non-occurrence of a necessary step in psychological development) but not known as a loss at the conscious level. An instinct longs for a situation to allow itself to be fulfilled, but circumstances prevent this nascent desire from coming to completion. It leads to a state of nameless longing or yearning, and the experience of a kind of unfulfillment that is neither named nor known. The sorrow, estranged from awareness, remains ungrievable.

Because our society often neglects the importance of imaginal and psychological reality in favor of literal presentations, it produces an impoverishing framework of experience. That which cannot be referenced as a conceptual or physical object is denied reality, an assumed state of nonexistence. It ignores what is well-known about pain, which Scarry (1987) described as coming “unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed”, and because pain “ensures this unshareability through its resistance to language” (p. 4), it becomes something experienced as simultaneously intimate and isolating. Lacking the psychological tools to give image—and voice—to pain, incapable of proving its existence to others or disregarding it ourselves, many people end up severing the connection to the estranged sorrows that nonetheless maintains an ongoing influence. At some basic level, preceding any conscious awareness or choice, it is better to have a sense of connection with others than to retain this primordial connection with ourselves. In this way, the willed ignorance toward the profound pains that touch us most deeply induces a psychological amputation of the grief whose origin remains unknown or unknowable. This process parallels what Gilligan (2002) described as the separation of knowing and feeling. We lose touch both with the pain we carry and with the ability to feel our own feelings. Given estranged sorrow, we experience only numbness.

People are increasingly familiar with some basics of trauma responses—especially fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—that can be triggered when a present situation psychically resembles the particularities of a traumatic event from the past. These responses generally mimic some of the original strategies meant to protect against harm through what is often called repetition compulsion. Because estranged sorrows are induced by omnipresent environmental conditions, rather than connected to particular events, they are not triggered by anything in particular. That said, the lack of emotional availability caused by estranged sorrows—when one’s psychological resources are disconnected from one’s conscious awareness—diminishes resilience and may tend to amplify the harmful effect of tragic events in ways that make traditionally understood forms of event-based trauma more likely.

Symptomatically, one way that estranged sorrows might reveal themselves is through voluntary numbing. It is plausible that the many recreational activities that induce numbness are caused by an unconscious impulse to understand the inner lack of feeling or emotional life. In other words, the feeling of disconnection produced by technological or pharmacological means becomes a way to explain the inner state, whose actual provenance rests with estranged sorrow. The purported effect actually precedes its ostensible cause. This is perhaps one reason why, despite the greater awareness of mental health symptoms and pharmaceutical remedies that have allowed anxiety and depression to become increasingly common diagnoses, the condition of psychic numbing seems both more pervasive and difficult to measure. Slater (2008) argued that a numbed mental state retains distance from psyche, creating situations where people are “less inwardly conflicted and more outwardly disoriented, distracted, dazed, and not much aware of any soul state” (p. 352). Numbing creates situations where psyche remains unconscious. It is “the absence of feeling response in the face of suffering, trauma, or general discontent. Its underlying process…is dissociation… present today as a more pervasive means of managing incompatible emotions and perceptions” (p. 353). Rather than merely an individual problem, the pattern of dissociating tendencies is arguably at the foundation of American culture; in other words, numbing forms part of the baseline givens of our cultural life (p. 354). It not only enables “the postmodern, modular, multi-tasking personality…overwhelmed by our discontent” (p. 356); it also allows “the concealment of pathology behind a facade of normality” (p. 359). Numbing occurs with screens that keep attention focused on scrolling through a flux of content at a remove from people’s physical and psychological awareness. The global epidemic of loneliness indicates that online communities offer distraction, not connection. We are numbed from knowing our loss, including the fact that we have lost touch with an ability to recognize a profound disconnection from our inner reality.

3. Forms of the Estranged Sorrow

Estranged sorrow names the presence of a loss that was not acknowledged, named, or known. If grief expresses the experience of loss, estranged sorrow is an inexpressible sense of the absence of an instinctually expected experience. It often entails the loss of a sensitivity to what is missing or a disconnection from the resources that would offer it. The work of psychological amputation that substitutes the absence of feeling (numbness) for the feeling of absence (estranged sorrow) also severs connections to potentially healing resources whose potential remains dormant. What was initially motivated by a desire to remain connected at a social level results in a profound and terrifying sense of disconnection at an existential level. These converge into four major structural losses that themselves remain estranged sorrows.

At a numinous level, estranged sorrows occur with the loss of what Dourley (1981) named the symbolic sense; in the aftermath, we lose “the capacity to appreciate and to respond to the way [the sacred] is expressed through the symbol,” resulting in “the pathology of literalism” (p. 31). In other words, without an inner prompting that remaining present with what appears will invite the expression of an expansive depth, which unlocks a deeper resonance within the self, reality reduces to a singular sense of what appears. Further, merely literal language loses its luster: speaking from its impoverishment, it cannot voice its loss. The inability to express meaningfully is tied to the unavailability of meaningful experiences. What remains is an emptied, undeveloped capacity for finding harmony and connection, meaning and purpose, and authenticity and belonging. Without an inner sensitivity to a numinous potentiality, the ability to connect in profound and vital ways is never given. This loss is ungrievable.

Similar losses occur in the wake. Bennett (2020) described how structural and systemic injustices, spread over centuries and continents, caused a common sense to vanish. No longer attuned to or in touch with a sense of what is shared, we no longer feel interconnected or integrated into our environments. The absence of presence creates a sense of anxiety, which becomes an insistence on control. The resulting experience—one of isolation and loneliness—becomes transformed into a virtue of rugged individualism and a desire for control that attempts to eliminate all vulnerability. The absence of an attuned, connected belonging among the persons and places nearby, not experienced, is unimaginable. Its absence is ungrievable.

Another instance of estranged sorrow occurs in the loss of cultural communities. Homans (2000) described how communities that once carried culture now convey clutter. What remains are names without power to conjure more than sound: what is lost is “sociohistorical, cognitive, and collective…a symbol, or rather a system of symbols and not a person” (p. 20). This also involves rituals once that meaningfully marked the passage of time and supported individuals through the process of mourning: the passage of childhood into adulthood, or life to death. Absent the context of community, grief no longer simply lacks the right words for loss: it now entails a loss of right words. What would have been tragic, then, is simply normal, now.

A final example of estranged sorrow emerges through the experiences of relational trauma, a consequence of the ambiguous loss described above. Children whose caretakers are physically present and psychologically absent grow up bereft of loving presence. When early environments fail to offer this supportive connection, children misinterpret the lack of joyful resonance as an inner flaw. What is innately authentic becomes a source of shame rather than providing a sense of worth. A desire to know one’s self—or others—is sacrificed before the consciousness of another alternative exists. This lack of inner connection amplifies the losses at the other levels, creating a cycle where estranged sorrow becomes an increasingly potent force in everyday life.

Because the origin of estranged sorrow occurs outside of conscious awareness and relates to almost omnipresent conditions of loss, it is at best identified indirectly. Sometimes naming that which is absent can kindle a response or awaken a desire—for example, God, community, or belonging. Problematically, unless these have been experienced, such words become sounds signaling an empty concept, heralding nothing. Perhaps the basic, underlying form of estranged sorrow relates to the category Kierkegaard (1980) named despair, the sickness unto death. Kierkegaard argued that the condition of despair is universal, but often hidden such that even those suffering from despair would not recognize this about themselves (p. 27). Kierkegaard’s despair is a diagnosis of an ontological condition, created in a culture where Christianity was an assumed part of the framework of daily life. Although much that Kierkegaard describes as despair would find comorbidities with estranged sorrows, the latter term names an ontic problem created by the absence of important psychological and spiritual experiences of connection. Estranged sorrow names the consequence of never having felt connected to the numinous, the natural, the communal, or the familial. That said, being prevented from becoming aware of or gaining access to unknown grief that we carry throughout our live, which either causes or results from a sense of disconnection from valuable resources that enable a feeling of belonging, can create hopelessness—or despair.

4. Re-Visioning Estranged Sorrow

Thus far, this article has focused on the phenomenon of estranged sorrows as a way to communicate the psychological implication of being born into a situation lacking in some vital quality required for a flourishing life. The absence of a loving parent, supportive community, connection to nature, or relationship with the divine is traumatic—just as it is recognized as grievous when it follows a loss, so also is it grievous when it simply never exists. The difference is that its ongoing absence leaves the sorrow unrecognizable, unconscious, and estranged. Rather than becoming actualized in communally supported grieving rituals that would make the absence meaningful, the absence instead creates an ongoing conscious awareness of disconnection, alienation, or loneliness that cannot recognize the need to grieve, because the “loss” was never experienced as present. When this feeling of disconnection reaches a point of hopelessness, it comes closer to the realm of a religious psychology. The etiology of estranged sorrow provides a psychological entrance to what becomes something that can be recognized as a religious problem—despair. In our secular context, especially one disconnected from traditional sources and symbols of meaning, the Christian answer of having “faith in God” is senseless. For this reason, I turn instead to James Hillman’s approach to depth psychology, which provides a way to discuss soul-work in a way that resists traditional theistic answers to spiritual problems. Soul-working, here, encourages moving into the depths—and thus offers a way to reconnect with the sorrows that have been estranged.

Hillman (1975) wrote Re-Visioning Psychology on the basis of what he presented for Yale University’s Terry Lectures in Religion and Psychology in 1972. In these lectures and the book that reproduced them, Hillman opened a way of imagining psychology as soul-work through the intervention of four styles of engaging with psyche—each of which is consistent with the assumption that the soul is real, and that the movement of soul-work entails engaging with images as immanently meaningful and inherently connective psychic elements. The goal of soul-work is to develop a “psychological faith”, which “shows us faith in the reality of the soul” (p. 50). A psychological faith in this way allows a path toward reintegrating estranged sorrows and reconnecting with a meaningful life, a contemporary parallel to the kind of faith Kierkegaard advocated in the Sickness Unto Death. Hillman’s four styles of soul-work do not form a step-by-step process: each style provides a distinct point of emphasis that leads to the interconnected sense of soul beneath. Understanding Hillman’s work provides a way of connecting the notion of soul with the issue of estranged sorrow described above. An in-depth exploration of Hillman’s foundational ideas will provide important context for understanding how soul-work helps to relieve estranged sorrows. My goal in presenting Hillman’s ideas is thus to innovate a way of alleviating the widespread problem of estranged sorrows.

The four styles of engaging with psyche as soul-work are personifying, psychologizing, pathologizing, and dehumanizing. First, personifying is a willingness to reanimate the world by attending caringly with any and every thing. Second, psychologizing entails becoming aware of the ideas as the basis of any given perspective. Third, pathologizing requires forgoing control, awakening an awareness of suffering and sensing toward the heart of what symptoms occur. Finally, dehumanizing enables a way toward withdrawing the sense of familiarity that covers over reality as a way to relearn a sense of its strangeness. Personifying allows a point of connectedness with the world, psychologizing glimpses beneath or behind the blanket of numbing, pathologizing provides a path toward actually engaging with estranged sorrows as a part of one’s life, and dehumanizing allows for a new-found embrace of a re-enchanted cosmos.

The choice of the word “soul” as a way to emphasize the psyche of psychology was intentional. Hillman (2005) described how Christianity departed from an initial triune anthropology (body, soul, spirit) to affirm a simplified, dualistic split between mind and matter in which the latter was disparaged. At a religious level, the reintroduction and reintegration of soul provides a way to experience an ensouled reality equivalent to the kind of total presence prophesized by radical theologians like Altizer (1980). The absence of soul is what precludes our access to the sorrows held in our bodies despite being inconceivable to our minds and against the soaring logic of spirit. Thus, even when undertaken psychologically, soul-work possess importance for religious life.

4.1. Personifying

Hillman (1975) provided a very familiar foundation for his work of revisioning, locating soul where we frequently engage with fantasy figures and psychic images: dreams. By taking dreams as representing a reality of psyche, we imagine “the psyche’s basic structure to be an inscape of personified images” where it “operates freely without words, and is constituted of multiple personalities. We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, non spatial images” (p. 34). The figures and places we dream are all vaguely recognizable and identifiable, even though they exist without regard for our waking preference for discrete, distinct entities. A conscious mode of personifying psychic images comes through the work of memory. Memory’s importance occurs as a familiar “form imagination can borrow in order to make its personified images feel utterly real. Because we experience these events in the ‘past,’ we believe they really happened as facts” (p. 17). We personify figures and events when recollecting opens a dynamic portal to the past.

Personifying takes the kinds of images given in dreams and summoned by memories and opens the potential for engaging similarly in our waking, conscious life. This basic premise of personifying is that something innately and intuitively true emerges when we name animals, toys, vehicles, towns, or neighborhoods. This truth is similar to the sense of innate familiarity that conveys a sense of home or belonging when engaging with an often-used coffee mug, the well-traveled route to the grocery store, or a life-changing book. A deep, meaningful engagement with familiar things, as if each were also a psychic image, recognizes the soul in such moments. To think of soul in this way means leaving behind a sense of soul that is strictly owned by or bound to particular bodies—and to experience life as though it functioned more in accordance with a dream logic. To foreground the importance of this habit of personifying moves toward accomplishing the three goals of the process, Hillman (1975) identified “revivifying our relations with the world around us…meeting our individual fragmentation, our many rooms and many voices, and… furthering the imagination to show all its bright forms” (p. 2). Recognizing soul potential in things and events activates the world and awakens the imagination. To experience the world “as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences that touch us, move us, appeal to us” (p. 11) allows us to feel the tug and pull of mood and emotion accompanying angry cars, excited dogs, sleepy trees, or embarrassed storefronts. We, in this way, more deeply engage with our environments—and with ourselves. To engage in personifying is to become sensitive to the everyday manifestation of the world of soul as an embracing container of the richer, deeper lives we long to live.

This moves into another important aspect of personifying: myth. Myth, which presents constellations of typical potentials for human perspectives and experiences, is an important foundation for archetypal psychology. Hillman (1975) argued that “to enter myth we must personify; to personify carries us into myth” (p. 16), which shows how the identification of soul potential activates the mythopoetic awareness that repopulates the cosmos with a polytheistic host of potential divinities—each of which has different gifts and opens distinct opportunities. This mythic consciousness is a way of honoring the diverse ways of being and living opened by trees, streams, buildings, relationships, and events.

By attending to the psyche’s ability to fabricate important images and becoming willing to actively co-create important figures or persons, we avoid what Hillman (1975) described as a common and destructive practice. This occurs when other people in our lives “become invested with [my] repressed images so that they grow in importance, become idealized, idolized”, and we end up “stuck to these concrete individuals” (p. 46). Imagine how estranged sorrow might cause an adult to cling to a new boss as capable of erasing the unfelt lovelessness carried since childhood, or to see a new group of friends as able to constitute the kind of community that would unlock meaningful expression, or to expect a new lover to provide access to the numinous depths of reality that are glimpsed in the dreams that disappear on awakening. Instead of unconsciously demanding that others play these mythic roles, personifying provides a way of reconnecting with the vivid livingness of environments and things near us, but also ways of remembering toward events that seem to echo with the emotional fingerprint of estranged sorrow. Entering into myth, as personifying allows, enables a way of directly engaging with the psychic images that will provide a sense of true memory, connection, healing, and relief.

4.2. Psychologizing

Psychologizing provides a way to identify the false, limited ideas that make personifying more difficult. It sees through the overly literal ideas that would justify grief only as the basis of a discrete, single event where one other person can be blamed as having done wrong. Impositions of wrong ideas—that alienate us from our psychic reality and displace more life-enhancing images—outline another way to consider estranged sorrow. Furthermore, the soul-work of psychologizing provides an antidote against the danger of literal idolatry—the unquestioned acceptance of merely human ideas that eliminate the potential for truly divine communion (Boscaljon 2022).

Hillman (1975) named the problem in this way, an analogue of the psychological amputation mentioned above, and one that echoes Kierkegaard’s depiction of despair: “We have not only lost soul; we have lost even the idea of soul”. Without the idea of soul, we organize how we experience reality using borrowed ideas, “alien perspectives, regarding ourselves as consumers, computers, or apes” that initiate a process in which “the soul, having no adequate idea of itself, loses touch with itself” (p. 119). When we see ourselves in terms of our properties and possessions (psychic or material), as processors of information and experiences, or as primates without will, we become forgetful of the deeper reality of soul. Disregarding the soul’s reality disallows any knowledge of how to tend the soul, feed the soul, or know its longings.

The three alternative models (consumers, computers, apes) Hillman (1975) offered tend to feed the contemporary cultural fascination with current events that produces a steady diet that can be consumed or processed—the events fill us without affecting us. They provide a numbing shield that prevents the kind of experience that would awaken us to the reality of soul. Transforming events into an experience requires a “deep idea” (p. 122), the kind of concept that generates an emotional charge. Feeling this charge can awaken a new experience of a resonant inwardness that invites a moment of reflection; suddenly, “psyche appears where it had not been noticed” (p. 127). The appearance of psyche, which attends the work of soul-making, was demonstrated in the descriptions of imaginal grieving processes introduced above. To reflect and notice psyche provides a mirror for seeing and opens a way of experiencing the world through a fundamental, innate framework. It is through this mirror that we regain access to the ideologies and cultural beliefs of the past, an ability to relate to and engage with them that honors the beliefs and ideas held within them. To do so is to restore a connection with the numinous through a direct encounter with traditional understandings whose power and potency provide sorely needed vitality. Such perspectives, which prioritize and promote heartfelt understanding above mental knowing, awaken soul. This deep level of participation renews a sense of symbolic meaning: ideas and concepts are mirrored and materialized within things from a deeper perspective to which they once provided access. This enhances the ability to participate in the religious dimension through traditional symbols and opens the opportunity for pursuing less conventionalized ways of relating to the divine.

Hillman (1975) provided a process for how to see through an idea that would provide another portal for potentially finding a soulful gaze. Each part of this process helps to reject the kind of alienating, “objective” viewpoint most Westerners are socialized into believing is real. The first step is to interiorize a situation, by attending to a mood that makes visible an inner element not apparent to an objective perspective. Second, Hillman provided a self-justifying appeal to suspect (look beneath) what appears, to find an ultimate, hidden value. Third is taking a present event or something that appears, sensing its character, and finding the story or plot that animates its choices. Last is recalling that tools are the soul’s ideas—keeping in view the fact that “idea implies the tool by which we see and the thing we see” (p. 140). This process of seeing through (psychologizing) returns to a mythic perspective, which enables a mode of mythic living that immediately engages life—rather than offering instructions. Myths “give the invisible background which starts us imagining, questioning, going deeper. The very act of questioning is a step away from practical life, deviating from its highroad of continuity, seeing it from another perspective…” (p. 142). This other perspective, larger than mere pragmatic modes, is open to more wild and strange potentials. Becoming open to witnessing these potentials provides a way of relating to one’s life—including the strange ways that estranged sorrows interrupt the present—with a sudden capacity and from a perspective that enables a recognition of the massive grief, heartache, and suffering that has remained ongoing in the inner reality of your own sense of life story. Witnessing these events from a perspective able to fully and deeply honor the newly apparent losses arises in a position from which such valued treasures of authentic worth, genuine belonging, or vocational purpose remain ready to be rediscovered.

Grief, especially grieving one’s own life, requires a doubled perspective. The danger is to translate suffering into a way of owning or possessing past difficulties that conform to distorted ideas of the self (grief as self-pity) or confirm a justified sense of anger (grief as grievance). These repeat the dance of shame (self as deserving of mistreatment) and blame (the other now deserves mistreatment) that allow us to shift from suffering in the past to directing the fantasies of despising oneself or punishing one’s enemy. True grief converts past events into an experience that has deepened into a wiser place of understanding the situation in a way that can accept that the past, now present in the images of memory, occurred. Rather than allowing the meaning of the event to activate familiar fantasies of judgment, the meaningfulness returns to a different and more complex of inner wronging. Rather than imposed from the outside, especially in ways that could not be amended or healed, this appreciates the sense of inner suffering as one that requires giving up the illusion of control, of invulnerability, and of superiority in a deep act of reverent surrender—both to what has been and to what is happening now.

4.3. Pathologizing

This kind of grieving work aligns with what Hillman (1975) termed pathologizing. Pathologizing allows a new-forged way to appreciate the immanence of inner forces as discrete entities, neither identifying with them nor seeing them as outer causes. Feeling worthless ceases to be how someone else made me feel and no longer reflects myself as wholly broken; instead, “feeling worthless” is an image that invites curiosity about its sense of feeling unloveable. This distance from an inner perspective provides a way to practice psychologizing—becoming used to seeing through, rather than identifying with, a perspective. Like a rose blooming, this unbinding of the self as a whole, single, concrete entity into an opening of layers reveals fresh interiors and ways of engaging with the self. “Our falling apart is an imaginal process [to] twist and shock the ‘I’ out of its integrative identity, out of its innocence and its idealization of human being, opening it to the underworld of psychic being” (p. 109). When our learned effort to cope with life through hard will results in having integrated false ideas of the self into a shell the “I” can neither afford to leave behind nor bear to keep, an unraveling becomes necessary. What emerges from falling apart is a new mirror, one cleansed of its distorting filters, that can reflect a healthy and accurate sense of soulful reality—into the imaginal, beyond the literal levels we otherwise occupy; or as Hillman says, “Falling apart makes possible a new style of reflection…Truth is the mirror, not what’s in it or behind it, but the very mirroring process itself: psychological reflections” (p. 109).

Hillman (1975) defines pathologizing as embracing the “psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective” (p. 56). This is a valuable perspective because it is often one of the most pressing and insistent ways that our soul is able to grab our attention. In refusing to reject the work of pathologizing, we are offered an alternative perspective so as to continue seeing through how the ideas of mental health occlude the reality of soul—which also means avoiding a professional diagnosis that disguises a morality of conventionally desired health and illness (p. 77). Allowing space for true suffering—the work of surrender that relinquishes a claim to control—allows room to grieve the loss of the heroic sense of the ego ideal and the conception of a self as an indestructible, separate individual. Because heroes believe “a wound either kills or mends, but it does not remain perpetually open” (p. 81), the work of heroic undoing allows an end to the false myth of closure and makes imaginable what otherwise would seem an impossibly vulnerable openness.

The resulting openness also accomplishes an aim of what Hillman (1975) called pathologizing’s soul-work—to expand awareness of the dimensions of soul, extend psychological space. “The soul has shrunk because its imagination has withered, and so we have little psychological space for fantasying, for holding things and mulling, for letting be”, which means that “the contents of our minds are largely without psychological significance, input without digestion” (p. 93). The underworld journey enabled by pathologizing thus makes space for more fully embracing the ramifications of estranged sorrow without becoming entangled in the kill-or-be-killed ideology of the heroic ego. Being willing to surrender, to become undone, allows a deeply integrating sense of the soul’s interiority. This sense of deepening experiences and encouraging a new belonging within the inner world begins a work of refamiliarization parallel to the process of personifying in the outer world—making more connections, opening more space, identifying more images with whom it is now possible to relate—rather than repress or become.

The psychological work of pathologizing is something consistently affirmed within religious traditions. Whether satori, fana, or kenosis, the openness to risking an underworld experience of nothingness is seen as the precursor of atonement or enlightenment. Understanding the importance of pathologizing as soul-work provides a non-theistic way of encountering the numinous beyond the particular, contingent contexts of revealed religious traditions.

4.4. Dehumanizing

The final movement is one that Hillman (1975) calls dehumanizing: this approach allows the restoration of a sacred community. This restoration means approaching soul from its own terms—engaging with it from an imaginal perspective. On the one hand, this means that the soul is not divine: it is the perspective from which we can imagine the divinity of the gods, which are “formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of experience and as numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates” (p. 169). On the other hand, the soul is also not human—it remains importantly strange, different, and other. “Human does not enter into all of soul, nor is everything psychological human. …The soul has inhuman reaches,” and experiencing soul “as my ‘own’ and ‘within’ refers to the privacy and interiority of psychic life” (p. 173). From this beginning perspective, we are able to become distant from the need to possess or identify with other inner experiences, including psychological afflictions and emotions (p. 175). From this perspective, we are able to regain our common sense, realizing that “we share in emotions and hold them in common; they transcend history and locality” (p. 176). As a reflection in soul’s mirror, emotions become “a gift that comes by surprise, a mythic statement rather than a human property”, which “announces a movement in soul, a statement of the process going on in a myth which we may perceive in the fantasy images that emotion accompanies” (p. 177). Once emotion deepens into an invitation for experience that requires my surrender to unfold, I can become attuned to the mythic undercurrents alive in the situation around me. This allows a form of participation that is both less personal (about “me” in the sense of my heroic ego) and more engaged. It opens a mode of soul-work that is capable of being enacted in solitude, in harmony with the surrounding environment, healing and being healed in relationship.

In other words, dehumanizing means that when I experience what I have learned to personify as estranged sorrow, I can do so in a way that allows me to bear witness to an overwhelming situation around me without needing to relate it to my personal biography or experience. I can relate from my soul to my estranged sorrow, reflecting on the situation that allows me to remain present with the suffering of those around me, without it requiring that I become sorrowful or personally grieved. In fact, estranged sorrows may be held by the trees, rocks, or parking lots near me. One virtue of dehumanization is that it entails “less risk of taking possession of what may ultimately not belong to human nature at all” (p. 178). Becoming aware of non-human perspectives on situations helps me appreciate the small and limited scale of moral judgments often imposed. From a dehumanized perspective, supported by all that is more than human around me, I am empowered to resolve my sense of estrangement from the world and to embrace the world as stranger instead. Freeing the psyche from the limits of a merely human soul enables it to reflect deeper meanings (p. 190). This freedom allows a capacity for simply letting all things be as they are, without needing to judge, alter, or defend against them. “For as the soul becomes a vivified reality of its own…life becomes relieved of having to be a vast defensive engagement against psychic realities” (p. 208). Imagining estranged sorrows may mean personifying an Unconscious loss to allow a relation with it, psychologizing a limited idea of the soul to see things otherwise, pathologizing the actual sense of loss, or expanding beyond the human. Each of these processes can provide a sense of mythic living and greater loving.

Relative to the religious dimension, dehumanizing provides a way to avoid what Klemm and Schweiker (2008) described as the twin perils facing our time: hypertheism and overhumanization. On the one hand, appreciating that the soul—which expands and deepens as we work with it—is other than divine expands the sense of the holy and thus dilutes the exaggeration of the divine that leads to radical fundamentalisms. On the other hand, respecting the strangeness of the more-than-human aspects of the world provides an innate limit to the problematic tendency to assert human dominion over all else—including what once may have been regarded as holy. Dehumanizing also restores awareness to the natural portion of the more-than-human world—seeing it as possessed of soul and worthy of the respect and deference that permeates earlier forms of many religious traditions.

5. A Mythic Reflection

Within the tradition of archetypal psychology, myths become mirrors that reflect archetypal situations that seem to attend human cultures and civilizations throughout time. These situations are not outgrown but are part of the basic patterns that activate our most basic, instinctual responses. To regard myth with a motive of revisioning a current situation requires a different mode of reading—rather than identifying with the mythic figures personally, as one would a protagonist in an airport thriller, it is important to see the scene as a whole. Reading in this way allows a practice of psychologizing, seeing through an idea that is offered rather than identifying with it. Myth also engages in the work of personifying, looking at the living potentialities of concepts that otherwise might seem only to be emptied names.

In The Golden Ass, Apuleius (Apuleius and Graves 2009) related the myth of Psyche and Eros—soul and love. It provides a framework that articulates the basic, innate movements of soul. It also presents the basic, ongoing condition of estranged sorrow, indicating that the struggle for soul to grasp love and connection is no recent problem—even if technological innovations make this problem less easy to grasp. In the myth, the mortal soul (Psyche) was born with a beauty that was said to rival Aphrodite, a gift that provoked jealousy and isolation rather than joy. Soul was taken from its family of origin, where it was valued for what it offered, not for what it was—and sacrificed to a god. Each fact of soul’s story presupposes estranged sorrow: not being recognized as innately worthy by the family she was born into, feeling isolated and punished because of its innate beauty, and discarded from what was familiar without any explanation or understanding.

The god took soul into a place of isolation where the god would come and go but refused to be seen. When soul saw the god—love—the punishment was separation. The first glimpse of love was followed by leaving the soul at a loss. This too is estranged sorrow: both the presence of an absent lover and the dismissal when the lover’s true self was seen. The god’s mother, beauty, sentenced her to a series of tasks to show her worth. Each task seemed so overwhelming as to make death attractive: but helpers appear, each time, to allow soul to succeed despite impossible odds. Nonetheless, the loveless soul focused on the difficulty of the tasks rather than the constant availability of helpers, overlooking abundant connections due to a fixated focus on what was experienced as lost: even the faintest rumor of an intangible love was better than none at all.

The fourth and final task forces soul to move from a desire for a literal death: soul is bidden to descend into the Underworld and ask its Queen for her beauty secrets. This movement is akin to pathologizing, the need to die to what is literally true (rather than simply embracing a literal death). The Underworld is one of soul’s intimate domains, the home of image and imagination, the place where dreams originate and passions emerge. This descent provides a way to envision how to reforge a connection with those unspeakable absences and denials that caused such pain that numbness and a superficial forgetting proved preferable. The soul succeeds: the box of beauty is bestowed. After ascending from the Underworld, the curious soul opens the box and finds new matter for soul: a cloud of darkness that causes a deepening slumber. This occasions a conscious re-enactment of the mythic journey made before.

There is a happy ending to this story: the soul is awakened with a kiss from love. A marriage feast is offered—in heaven, not on earth—a process of dehumanizing whereby soul is introduced as part of a sacred community. This second family provides a sense of belonging. The marriage of soul and love—Psyche and Eros—results in an offspring: Hedonia. The birth of pleasure involves both the finite sensitivity of her mother and the sense of participatory joy from her father. Each step of the way involves soul-making: enduring unjust sorrow, accomplishing impossible tasks, descending to the Underworld, and finding immortal belonging. Ultimately, the myth reveals that the path of soul moves from estranged sorrow toward pleasure, from loneliness to love.

6. Conclusions

Imagining estranged sorrow provides a way of revisioning trauma caused by the absence of connection (to the numinous, to nature, to community, or to family) in a way that includes ambiguous losses and impersonal despair. Such revisioning, following Hillman’s approach, expands the domain of what remains difficult to name and to feel, but whose symptoms seem increasingly prevalent in modern life. To become aware of the soul-making potential allowed by revisioning the trauma of estranged sorrow empowers people toward imagining a new way of working through the grieving process despite the absence of a particular loss. This work of soul-making enables a way to make sense of one’s life with an expanded foundation capable of handling such monumental horrors as generational trauma, systematic injustice, environmental devastation, and the death of God and loss of the numinous in contemporary culture. The category of “estranged sorrow” provides a way of naming and thus knowing these losses as traumatic, even if these are not preceded by a specific, literal, or personal event. In addition to providing a way of feeling into the depths of estranged sorrows and in this way embracing and embodying a fullness of self, expanding the psychological work of soul-making into a way of imagining the restoration of soul into a religious worldview provides an important way to become more deeply familiar with the immanent God prophesied in radical theological traditions.