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An Interview
with
Benjamin Sells
with
Benjamin Sells
by
Cecil Curtwright
by
Cecil Curtwright
| Cecil Asks: | Ben Replies: |
| Ben, what is "The Soul of the Law" all about? | |
| "The Soul of the Law" is a study in imagination. It explores how the legal imagination thinks, works, and imagines, and examines how the Law's mental habits and deep assumptions influence everyone who comes into contact with the Law. | |
| You invite the reader to imagine the Law coming into a therapist's office and having a conversation. As a practicing therapist specializing in counseling attorneys, do you imagine yourself counseling the "Law" in some sense when you are working with your clients? | |
| We cannot, and I do not, divorce people's individual experiences from the underlying currents of imagination that permeate and sustain our everyday lives. A person can complain about not being able to communicate with their spouse, for example, and that is a very particular and personal problem. But it also implicates eternal themes of relationship, intimacy, and love. So yes, when I work with someone who includes "lawyer" as part of their self-image, I imagine that we also are working with the Law as an enduring motif of psychological life. | |
| What kinds of issues do lawyers bring to you as a therapist? | |
| The thing that I hear most from lawyers is loneliness. They feel cut off, isolated, detached, cold. In many ways, it isn't that they hurt so much as that they don't feel much of anything at all. It's as if there is a pale of mediocrity over their lives. Now see, in tribal cultures we would identify that lifelessness as lack of soul; but nowadays we chalk it up to increased competition, define it away as "stress-related," or try to drug ourselves into a pretension of life, a virtual reality. But the real problem is that this deep loneliness and coldness signifies a loss of soul, a disconnection with one's defining essence. | |
| Along those same lines, you talk in your book about the problems that lawyers have with intimacy. Can you say a little bit about that? | |
| Lawyers are trained and expected to be strong-willed, independent, tough, suspicious, cautious, and inscrutable. There is simply little or no room in the legal imagination for things like openness, neediness, or vulnerability. So right there you have already eliminated some of the things that are essential to intimacy. But even worse, the legal imagination is suspicious of, and tries to eradicate, all attempts at metaphorical, poetic, or aesthetic expression. The Law wants everything down in black-and-white. And yet we all know that intimacy is based on intuition and sympathetic understanding more than any rational meeting of the minds. And we also know that intimacy is always communicated indirectly, imaginatively. The Law simply can't get this given the current restrained nature of its imaginative capabilities, and this inability is reflected in the problems that lawyers have with intimate relationships. | |
| In your book you also point to studies that suggest that attorneys are very susceptible to depression? Why do think that is so? | |
Depression is a lowering of the spirit. When we are depressed we lose interest in our transcendent plans, our flaming ambitions. What often is missed is that spiritual disciplines such as the Law require depression by the very steadfastness of their opposition to it. We must remember that depression brings fantasies of decline and death, realities that the legal mind typically tries to excise from its imagination. I sometimes wonder if the depression that lawyers feel really isn't a friend in disguise, a helping hand trying to reconnect lawyers with life down here below the clouds. | |
| Aren't lawyers also more susceptible to suicide than other professionals? | |
| As you might expect, it is hard to gather statistics on something like that, but there are studies that suggest that the rate of suicide is higher among lawyers. There also is some evidence that lawyers are more adept at actually carrying out the suicidal ideation. I suspect that this has something to do with the literal nature of the legal imagination, and its predilection to acting in accord with its well reasoned plans. It's as if lawyers arrive at the decision to commit suicide through a kind of distortion of the rational process. I remember a client of mine who came in and said that in his view he was trapped in his law practice. He said repeatedly that there was no way out, and that it seemed to him that the only thing that made sense, his words, was suicide. Now here is an example of how a symptom can adopt whatever rhetoric necessary to perpetuate itself. And yet when I asked this man to imagine his life five years down the road, he began to tell me this beautiful story of working at home and doing volunteer work at a homeless shelter. He imagined himself painting again, which is something he had done in college, and said that he was spending more time with his friends and family. You will note that the one thing that he did not imagine being the case five years from now was that he was dead. To me, this suggested that although his legally trained mind had adopted the suicide idea as the only way out, his imagination had an entirely other plan in mind. | |
| Is there a connection between legal education and training and the kind of psychological problems that lawyers exhibit? | |
I think so. In law school, students are taught how to "think like lawyers," and we tend to underestimate the extent and depth of this conversion of thought. At the same time, studies indicate that psychological distress elevates dramatically among law students during law school, and that these elevated rates then remain fairly constant throughout their legal careers. I take this correlation to be significant. In particular, I think that the objective, dispassionate, and highly abstract mindset that is emphasized in law school is at the heart of many of the lawyer's psychological concerns. It isn't that these legal perspectives are bad in some way, it's just that they create problems when the lawyer elevates them to superior status and attempts to rely on them alone. When this happens, the lawyer loses his or her visceral connection with daily experience. When I was in law school, for example, I remember being in a criminal law class, and studying the crime of rape. The professor was going through the elements of the crime, the prima facia case. Despite the sobriety of the moment, there was a kind of a graveyard humor to the discussion that betrayed a deeper sentiment. We were talking about the crime of rape in such highly abstract terms that questions like penetration became abstract issues to be debated. What was missing, though, at least in our overt discussions, was a realization of the horror and tragedy of the actual event. A steady stream of this kind of denatured reality eventually begins to erode the lawyer's sympathetic talents. | |
| If you could add something to the law school curriculum, what would it be? Is the problem that law school is too focused on the study of law as opposed to other things? | |
Well, let's take that therapeutically. What can a therapist ever bring to a situation? It seems to me it's always a little thing. Socrates used to talk about having a voice that would tell him what not to do. That voice was his tutelary spirit, his guide. I find that the only thing the soul really asks for is just a little attention and respect, like Socrates listening to his little voice. Maybe this move toward soul can be as simple as a quiet moment of reflection, a rumination of things. My friend, Tom Moore, likes to talk about the soul wanting to go back over things again and again. What is missing in law school are the very faculties that would enhance a student's ability to discern these subtle movements of the soul. I'll give you a perfect example of this. I was in a trial advocacy class in law school learning how to make arguments in front of juries and the instructor told the class that when we got up to make our oral arguments that we should always remember to talk to the jury as if they were a group of ordinary people. Well what struck me about this comment was its assumption that we would ever think of them as anything else but a group of ordinary people. The comment seemed to imply that we were somehow extraordinary. Now there was a moment that was ripe for soulful reflection, but it was missed. If we could have somehow recognized at that moment that one of the things that happens when you become a lawyer is that you begin to imagine yourself as separate from other people then we would have grasped an important insight. But we have allowed law school to become reduced to its technical basis. Not that the technical parts aren't necessary -- every artist must practice his or her scales -- but there are other things that also must be considered. | |
| It seems that everyone is turning to the "Law" or "Psychology" these days to solve their personal problems. Is there a relationship between the two? | |
| In many ways, they both serve the same Gods of social order, stability, and control. The Law's great enemy, at least in its own mind, is anarchy. Law fears anarchy more than anything else, and believes that without the Law's presence things would quickly break down. Modern psychology believes exactly the same thing, and both are dedicated to preserving the status quo. Both are committed to keeping things calm, and therefore both have problems with the soul's irrepressibility. The problem for both law and psychology is that their ideas have become too restricted, and it's this restriction of imagination that ultimately leads to increased breakdown. See, that's the point. The more you insist on law and order, the more you necessitate breakdown. | |
| What can non-lawyers learn from your book? | |
First of all, the Law is an unavoidable presence, not only in society but in each of our souls. I think that it is important that we become more aware of what we are doing in our on-going relationship with the Law, because as things stand right now they aren't looking so good. The breakdown of Law in our society, and the sense of impending anarchy that so many people feel inside, are problems of the first order. Secondly, "The Soul of the Law" describes a psychological reality that exists everywhere and in all of us. I believe that our everyday actions have deep psychological significance. It is inconceivable to me that our jobs do not have a powerful influence on our souls, whatever our walk of life. This influence is especially strong when we begin to identify ourselves by our daily work, as for example when someone "becomes" a lawyer. And so, when we define ourselves as a lawyer, or a recovering addict, or a Democrat, or a Greek-American, or a Catholic, or a victim of some kind, or whatever, we are then destined to live the life of those images, including their unconscious life. We will mimic their party lines, rely on their unquestioned assumptions, and impose their prejudices on those around us. That's the dark side, of course, but you get the idea. | |
| Are you suggesting that we are unconscious of doing all of these various things? | |
| We are always unconscious, and the place that we are most unconscious is the place that we think that we aren't. Myth teaches us that most of what the gods do is unseen by us. | |
| Having finished your book Ben, I sense that you really "care" about the law and the professionals that practice it. Do you love the law? | |
| Yes. I spent four years in law school studying it, worked at it for another six years, wrote a book about it, and now spend a great deal of my time talking about it. So yes, I have an intimate connection with law. But the more important question, or at least the one that I wonder about, is does the Law love us? Or have we so isolated the Law from its home here with us that it no longer has an erotic connection with us? I'm afraid that's how it feels to me. I feel as if the problems that I hear from lawyers, and the problems that we see in the Law's institutions come about in part because we have somehow hurt the Law. I think we need to reconsider whether we are approaching the Law in an appropriate manner, whether we are respecting and loving the Law as we should, such that it might feel more comfortable coming to us in return. We need to listen to the Law's concerns, and see if there aren't ways that we can share some of its burden. | |
| Ben we've talked about what this book is about, but why was it important for you to write it? | |
It was important for me in one sense as a practical effort. I said at the start that "The Soul of the Law" is a study in imagination, and that really was how I looked at it, as if it were a kind of case study. My primary therapeutic effort was simply to describe the current state of the legal imagination, just that. I wasn't interested in understanding so much as just trying to give an accurate description of this incredibly complex and beautiful movement of the soul. For me, the Law is just one way that the soul actualizes itself in the world, and as a former practicing lawyer I suppose I felt like I had the advantage of actual experience to bring to bear on the subject. No doubt that Carl Jung was correct when he said that every psychology is a personal confession. Another reason I wanted to write the book was as a professional contribution. Before I went to law school, I went to graduate school at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where I met Tom Moore and James Hillman and became heavily involved in archetypal and imaginal psychology. From the very beginning of my work in imaginal psychology, I have been especially interested in paying close, precise attention to the ways of the soul as they are revealed in everyday life. For me, the greater part of care of the soul lies out there, beyond the shell of introspection, in the world of shared life. And so it felt natural to me to bring an imaginal approach to a so-called "real life" situation like the Law. | |
| Thanks for talking with us about "The Soul of the Law." | |
| You're welcome, it was my pleasure. | |
This interview first appeared in Body+Mind+Spirit (a publication of Transition Bookplace), Chicago, IL (August 1994). It is reprinted here by permission of author.