Care of the soul: On lineage, psychotherapy, and the oldest work there is

The topic of “lineage” recently came up in conversation—what a lineage is, and what it means to be rooted in one. Though there is much more that could be chewed over about it, I tend to think of lineage as a kind of cultural organism—something that can be transmitted and continue to reproduce through new hosts.

And, of course, I wonder whether the strange and variegated work I do in this world (as a licensed, multi-trained psychotherapist, writer, and artist) might be said to sprout from any particular home lineage.

The most satisfying conclusion I can find is that my soul belongs to a lineage much older than the profession of “psychotherapy,” or any other modern, delineating professional category. The artery that has always thrummed beneath my work seems to be the lineage of care for the soul.

To bring this into fuller color, here is a diary fragment from 2023 which made the final cut in my lyric memoir, debuting in the coming months:

In Plato’s moving apologies for his teacher, Socrates (written around the time of Socrates’ execution), he shares his teacher’s declaration that the most important thing in life is care for the soul—before care for personal property, or anything else.

My first truly independent adult act in this world was to study Philosophy in Ireland. I studied Philosophy as the Love of Wisdom, in the lineage for which these men were among the great progenitors. My soul already knew this was her purpose: to be one who stands for care of the soul before any material concern. I wanted to be the kind of person who discovers what this means and gives it away like the sea.

Much more recently, I awoke from the kind of dream that tattoos its themes onto the imaginal body—the kind of dream that will likely continue to yield meaning for a lifetime.

In the dream, I witnessed an exploitative relationship within which an innocent was bidden to kill a small silver fish straight out of the ocean and offer it to a campfire in a private cove.

Then I saw Socrates carrying a very young Plato on his shoulders as they happily traversed the dusty byways of ancient Athens, like a father and son.

They arrived at a cottage on a seaside cliff as if visiting friends, and as soon as the door opened, Socrates was shot through the torso with two arrows.

(His “execution,” I suppose.)

The young Plato screamed.

And just then, a great whale breached near the coastline, exhaling sharply through its blowhole in a way that sounded like a whispered scream—an echo of Plato’s scream.

The wail of grief at the birth of philosophy. An insistence that philosophy is born from the human, embodied experience of grief and bewilderment—not from abstraction.

And also: a poignant image of interrupted transmission. A young student able to carry his lost teacher’s ideas like a living thing—but just barely.

And this points to the lineage my roots ultimately grow from in all of my work—whether that work is a poem, an essay, a painting, a piece of music, or the humble work of holding vigil with someone grieving, or someone dying.

It is not a school, modality, or identity.

It is an ethical-spiritual inheritance.

It is the lineage of so many poets, philosophers, mystics, and healers.

It is the lineage of those who believe that care of the soul matters more than comfort, compliance, or status.

And those who practice care as devotion, not technique.

I think, sometimes, psychotherapy has forgotten that this is its heritage.

Insurance companies will only reimburse for “evidence-based” interventions wherein “medical necessity” is present, and our documentation must reflect this. When your work has to live within a specific episteme, it begins to seep into your thinking. As long as we accept insurance, we have to be fluent in that language. And when you spend enough time romping through the spores of any cultural organism, you inevitably carry some of them home to your own garden.

But the etymological roots of psychotherapy are psyche and therapeia—meaning “soul” and “care of.” Psychotherapy literally means care of the soul.

While I was trained to practice psychotherapy—and to speak fluent insurance-ese—I learned, along the way, to listen for something much older moving beneath it.

The deeper roots I have always reached for belong to a tradition that insists the soul has its own needs, its own timing, its own dangers. That the soul perhaps begins as something magical, silvery, otherworldly—ever vulnerable to being exploited, demolished, lost or consumed.

But if the soul is cared for and protected, it becomes vast, oceanic, and musical—a carrier of transpersonal resonances of grief and joy.

And what I mean by that is: something that can feel—and transmit, on its very breath—the timeless, embodied grief and joy that give rise to philosophy, art, and psychotherapy.

I would like to be a happy host for that cultural organism, first and foremost. In other words, the timeless tradition of care for the soul is my lineage.

May it always be the focal plant of my anarchic cottage garden.

And may my garden always be open to the public—seeds and spores, for free.