To move with the heart toward the world shifts psychotherapy from conceiving itself as a science to imagining itself more like an aesthetic activity. If unconsciousness can be redefined as insensitivity and the unconscious as the anesthetic, then training for psychotherapy requires sophistication of perception.
Training will be based in the imagining, sensing heart: call it forth and educate it. Psychotherapy will study in its training programs the embodiments of the anima mundi, whether in language, in arts, or rituals, attempting to train the eye and ear, nose and hand to sense truly, to make right moves, right reflexive acts, to craft well. The invisible work of making soul will find its analogies in the visibility of well-made things.
The cognitive task will shift from the understanding of meaning to a sensualization to particulars, the appreciation of the inherent intelligibility given in the qualitative patterns of events. We will recognize health of soul by its aesthetic response in which judgment always inheres, rather than separating out the judgments into moral (good and bad), medical (ill and well, progress and regress), or logical (true and false) assessments.
Humanistic education as conceived in Florence becomes a necessity again: differentiated language, fine arts, handworks, biography, criticism, history, cultural anthropology, manners and customs, life among things of the world. And our questions will be addressed to what things are, and where, and who, and in which precise way they are as they are, rather than why, how come, and what for.
— Anima Mundi, The Return of the Soul to the World, Aisthesis