The following is a slightly edited quotation from a book
called
"We've had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world
isn't getting better" by James Hillman, the Jungian Analyst
and Author.
But let's say somebody looked at it
differently. Let's say that what matters is that you have
an acorn in you, you are a certain person, and that person
begins to appear early in your life, but it's there all the
way through your life. Winston Churchill, for example, when
he was a schoolboy, had a lot of trouble with language and
didn't speak well. He was put in what we would call the
remedial reading class. He had problems about writing,
speaking and spelling. Of course he did! This little boy
was a Nobel Prize winner in literature and had to save the
Western world through his speech. Of course he had a speech
defect, of course he couldn't speak easily when he was
eleven or fourteen - it was too much to carry.
Or take Manolete who, when he was nine years old , was
supposedly a very frightened skinny little boy who hung
around his mother in the kitchen. So he becomes the
greatest bullfighter our our age. Psychology will say,
"Yes, he became a great bullfighter because he was such a
puny little kid and he compensated by being a macho hero".
That would be Adlerian psychology - you take your
deficiency, your inferiority and convert it to superiority.
But suppose you take it the other way and read a person's
life backwards. Then you say, Manolete was the greatest
bullfighter and he knew that. Inside, his psyche
sensed at the age of nine that his fate was to meet
thousand-pound black bulls with great horns. Of course he
fucking well held onto his mother! Because he couldn't hold
that capacity - at nine years old your fate is all there
and you can't handle it. It's too big. It's
not that he was inferior; he had a great
destiny.