ABSTRACT
Contemporary psychotherapy provides people with a well-charted method of exploration. The reflective image of oneself is, in some native cultures, of great symbolic value. In many pretechnological cultures, photographs are thought to steal the soul. Words, most of all, are the medium of psychotherapy. The use of words for the purpose of healing comes from the Greeks. Psychology, or its clinical application of psychotherapy, the therapeutics of the soul, leads us to the freedom and beauty that the butterfly represents. Modern science has demonstrated, in fact, that the state of consciousness that the analytic patient most closely resembles is the dream state. The first major work of psychoanalysis, of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, was on words. Freud’s first interest was in aphasia, a breakdown in the use of words due to a lesion in the brain.
