Psyche requests the psychologist to remember his calling. Psychological remembrance is given by the kind of speech that carries remembrance within it. This language is both of culture and uncultured, is both of art and artless. It is a mythic, metaphoric language, a speech of ambiguities that is evocative and detailed, yet not definitive, not productive of dictionaries, textbooks, or even abstract descriptions.
Rather, it is a speech that leads to participation, in the Platonic sense, in and with the thing spoken of, a speech of stories and insights which evoke, in the other who listens, new stories and new insights, the way one poem and one tune ignite another verse and another song.
It is conversation, letters, tales, in which we reveal our dreams and fantasies—and our psychopathology. It evokes, calls forth, and creates psyche as it speaks. It speaks of mood: of “sadness” and “despair” before “depression”; of “rage” before “ageression”; of “fear,” “panic,” and “anguish” before “anxiety attacks.”
This speech is “not fashioned in schools,” and it will be “simple and rude,” as Tertullian said. It will have “corporeal similitudes,” that is, body images, speaking from and reaching to the imaginal body in order to provoke the soul’s movements. It must be speech that works as an “imaginative agent,” stirring fantasy. Such speech has impact because it carries body in it; it is speech alive, the word itself alive, not a description about a psychic state by a psychologist, not carefully defined, but freely imagined.
— The Myth of Analysis, Part Two: On Psychological Language