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Dear Jim and Michael
It's a good idea to publish your dialogues and letters to each other as a way of making an amusing and informal book about what psychotherapy has not achieved and how much more politically influential it could usefully be. You aim for spontaneity and, although there are some ponderous flippancies which show this reader anyway that Americans and English do not necessarily laugh at the same things, the method does make a book which can be read by practitioners and public. I would have it as a book to be dipped into because you avoid being ‘linear’ and sequential, and there is much knowledge, wordly awareness and ideas about mythology and cultural trends in the various letters and bits of dialogue.
There is a main basis for the discussion, the focus you might say, reminding us that focus is the Latin for hearth, where Hestia is the goddess, paired with Hermes the communicator, the messenger. My association, in the sort of apparent non-sequitur way characteristic of your book, was to Jung's autobiographical description in Memories, Dreams, Reflections of the building of The tower which represented his self - at the centre he built ‘the maternal hearth’. Jung the communicator was experiencing the maternal hearth as his centre, giving him a focus. In fact, this bit of linking is not really unconnected and is rather what you are, I believe, doing - pointing out to your readers that in the world of psychotherapy - or rather, therapy, as you say most of the time - we conceptualise linking in too narrow a framework, missing the age-long archetypcal experiences which inform the unconscious and thus our behaviour.
So, your main focus is that if therapists stick too rigidly to ‘the dogma of interiorisation’ they contribute to social fragmentation: individualisation has gone too far, it is necessary to understand collective needs and to relate individual to social group. This is a theme and a process which we, in Europe, are now plunged into again. Our own godde