"This refusal to meet the challenge of emotion, this mauvaise foi of consciousness is fundamental to our “age of anxiety”. It is characteristic of – even instrumental in – what has been called “the contemporary failure of nerve”. We do not face emotion in honesty and live it consciously. Instead emotion hangs a negative background shadowing our age with anxiety and erupting in violence. A “therapy” of this condition depends altogether upon a change in the attitude of consciousness toward emotion – a change for which this work attempts to provide a ground. If there is anything novel in this synthesis of final causes it is this: emotion is always to be valued more highly than the conscious system alone. This tends to run counter to the mainstream of thinking about emotion in the psychology, philosophy and therapy of today.(…)

Behind the difficulty of affirmation lies the healthy, natural tendency to avoid the numinous and demonic, that dark unruly horse of the Phaedrus myth, violent yet harnessed to the chariot in which we sit and we try to manage. What to do about this horse has occupied the great philosophers and religious teachers for thousands of years. Many alternatives have been formulated. The ancients spoke of mediopatheia, apatheia, ataraxis and catharsis. Some church fathers suggested governing, while sectarians have offered on the one hand a radical, disciplined annihilation of the horse, or on the other, an enthusiastic loss of identity in favour of the animal in Dionysian orgy. More recently, methods of “abreaction”, “acting out”, or mechanical and chemical therapy have been put forward. All of these we have refused in favour of the notion of development. But by development we do not mean a progressive climb away from the dark beast so as to escape it. Nor do we mean a dropping of the reins in favour of the whip such as the charioteer does in a scene of such blood and cruelty (Phaedrus, 254), that it serves to indicate how subtly the dark horse can creep under the human skin of the charioteer who believes himself superior. No, this is not the way; but Plato himself gives us another image – the reins. We are reined to the horse, it to us. This is emotional existence, driving and being driven, the true image of homo patiens. Here we come close to the image of the centaur which Benoit proposes as the Zen image for solving emotional states. These passionate mythological monsters, one of whom was the wise instructor of such culture heroes as Achilles, Hercules and Aesculapius, represent a humanization of emotional driving power. Centaurs were said to be able to capture wild bulls which expresses the idea that wilder emotion can be tamed by conscious emotion, or as was said above, “only through emotion can emotion be cured”. And it was a centaur, mythology tells us, who taught mankind something of the arts of music and medicine – as if to say the origins of healing our emotional malaise are to be found in the union of mind with flesh, of wisdom with passion.”

“Emotion”, James Hillman