“The True Psychiatrist is a Meta-Psychiatrist”
Photograph by John Diamond, M.D.
“Modern psychological science dispenses altogether with the soul. … The new psychologists have ceased to think nobly of the soul, and even speak of it as a complete superfluity.”
William Osler[1]
And Fritz Mauthner (1906) wrote that, even then, we had “a psychology without the psyche”[2] – soul-less.
And even more so over a hundred years on when psychiatry, soul-denying even then, has become merely Prozacatry!
A psychiatrist, a true psychiatrist, must be more than his medical colleagues, he was – and still is an alienist to them. He must be not merely a physician, but a meta-physician.
And more than that: not merely a psychiatrist, but a meta-psychiatrist. Concerned not merely with the mind, nor even the (usual) unconscious of admixed love and fear, but beyond that – meta – to the Deep Unconscious, to the Soul ever-yearning to be manifested into the world.
To be truly holistic is to be soulistic.
[1] Quoted in Otto Rank, Psychology and the Soul, trans. Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. xvii.
[2] Ibid., p. xxii.
