"Jung's radical view of mental illness, specifically schizophrenia, as primarily psychogenic, had the important clinical application of viewing psychological symptoms not just as evidence of pathology to be cured (as Freud thought), but as meaningful personal communications, potentially capable of being understood through psychotherapy, and of being accepted and integrated, thus ridding the symptoms of their numinous power. This view surely underpins the Jungian analytic goal of individuation. It is also very seriously at risk in mainstream psychiatry today, with its increasingly genetic or biochemically-based view of the aetiology of mental illness, its emphasis on drug treatments as 'cure' and its demand for brief models of therapy, again judged by swiftness of symptom relief. While post-Jungian medical research has established that there are undoubtedly biochemical and genetic contributing factors to much psychopathology... again I would argue that this is only a partial, incomplete way of understanding the workings of the psyche." --Metaphor, mysticism and madness