“Just as many medicines exact a severe price in effecting their cures… so too do certain forms of psychological ‘medicine”. The problem is not in their efficacies, for without access to them we would indeed perhaps be poorer. No, the danger is their semblance of authority. Once we encounter the explanations of psychology, we begin too quickly to consider them true, authoritative, or… at least… an efficacious explanation. Yet they are none of these things.

You see, we are trained to seek explanations, and are rather easily compelled by them, even if we have been warned to maintain a vaster open ground for understanding and learning. The problem with psychological perspectives and explanations is that, having little or nothing else of equivalent explanatory power, we become converted, and begin to see and think according to the implications of the schemas we are exposed to. Or diagnosed with. Or learn to see in the speech and behavior of others. And ourselves.

To have any chance at all of actual understanding of our minds and natures, we might need no less than five equivalently powerful explanatory frames. And then know them all as incomplete, non-authoritative, instrumental, and figurative.

Suppose then, that there are no archetypes. That Jung and Freud were wildly confused by the concepts and explanations they acquired and invented. That the unconscious is a model of something we know nearly nothing about, and isn’t like that model… however useful or convincing it may appear. That what is meant by psyche is something like an angel, and nothing like a theory.

That the mind is a cloud until it is a knife. But once it is a knife, every cut will have the same shape. Particularly if there’s only one knife, or a single kind of cloud. In language and description…”

— infraheard