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John Haule presents a ‘Jungian’ re-interpretation of the states of mind of a patient treated by Pierre Janet over eighty years ago to illustrate the differences of philosophy and approach between ‘soul-making’ and ‘soul-stripping’. In explaining these terms of James Hillman, Haule says that symptoms are manifestations of soul, not to be thoughtlessly healed or cured into oblivion. Soul is the link between body and spirit, the locus of experience, whereby to feel ‘bone-tired’, to use Haule's example, is an expression of the experience of the body through soul, and to entertain ‘transcendent hopes’ is to experience spirit through soul.
According to the philosophy of the alchemist, Gerard Dorn, quoted by Jung, the ordinary soul never knows about spirit because it is overwhelmed by the body and its needs, to which it thereby becomes a slave. To free the soul, an individual must first undergo a symbolic death in which soul leaves body and unites with spirit (unio mentalis). Then unio mentalis must rejoin the body so that soul becomes the link between a spirit and body whole. ‘Soul-making’ is thus completed. ‘Soul-stripping’, according to Hillman, is the reduction of soul phenomena to the norm or to body biochemistry.
In the prelude to a vivid biography of the patient, Madeleine, Haule suggests that both the saint and the madman overvalue spirit; the schizophrenic loses his soul in spirit, but the mystic finds it there.
Janet treated Madeleine for over six years, with a sixteen-year follow-up, mostly by requiring her to write to him, daily at first, then twice-weekly until she died. His ‘soul-stripping’ analysis of her was that she was psychasthenic, not having sufficient psychic tension to plan and carry out realistic courses of behaviour. In childhood she suffered a ‘neurosis of the scruples’, and when adult, impoverished her body. Madeleine exhibited five states of consciousness, named by her as ecstasy, temptation, dryness, torture and equilibrium. All these states Janet