Therapy, or analysis, is not only something that analysts do to patients; it is a process that goes
on intermittently in our individual soul-searching, our attempts at understanding our complexities,
the critical attacks, prescriptions, and encouragements we give ourselves. We are all in therapy
all the time insofar as we are involved in soul-making."
- James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology
James Hillman's Archetypal Psychology is inspired by Carl Jung, yet Hillman, in the spirit of Jung
himself, moves beyond
him to develop a rich, complex, and poetic basis for a psychology of psyche as "soul." Hillman's
writings are of the most innovative, provocative and insightful of any psychologist this century,
including Freud himself. What makes Hillman's work so important is its emphasis on psychology
as a way of seeing, a way of imaging, a way of envisioning being human. His work is truly
originary and involves a radical "re-visioning" of psychology as a human science. Hillman's roots
are mostly classical, but in the service of retrieving what has been lost to psychology and, thus, in
the service of psychology's future disclosure of "psyche" or "soul." The power of Hillman's
thought, however, has more to do with how he approaches phenomena rather than what he has
to say about it. Soul-making is a method, a way of seeing, and this cannot be forgotten. Hillman's
roots include Renaissance Humanism, the early Greeks, existentialism and phenomenology. His
thought is rhetorical in the best sense of the word; thus, imaginative, literary, poetic, metaphorical,
ingenius, and persuasive. If nothing else, one cannot read Hillman without being moved.
Hillman's work is "soul-making" and, in this sense, psychological (the "logos" of the "psyche") in
the truest sense of
the word. Hillman listens to the saying of the soul, and it speaks in his writing through him. Of
Hillman's use of the
term "soul," Thomas Moore writes:
"Hillman likes the word for a number of reasons. It eludes reductionistic definition: it expresses
the mystery of
human life; and it connects psychology to religion, love, death, and destiny. It suggests depth,
and Hillman sees
himself directly in the line of depth psychology, going all the way back to Heraclitus, who
observed that one could
never discover the extent of the soul, no matter how many paths one traveled, so profound in its
nature. Whenever
Hillman uses the forms psychology, psychologizing, and psychological, he intends a reference to
depth and mystery."
For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to
the night-world
of dreams where the lines across the phenomenal field are not so clearly drawn. Soul
pathologizes: "it gets us into
trouble," as Moore writes, "it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to
understand, and it
seems to make relationships impossible." While spirit seeks unity and harmony, soul is in the
vales, the depths.
In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul":
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things
rather than a thing itself.
This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and
everything that
happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -and soul-making
means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or
deeper person or
ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness
go into eclipse. Soul
appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot
identify soul with anything
else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a
flowing mirror, or like
the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening
variable gives on the
sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest
importance in hierarchies
of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown
component which makes
meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious
concern. These four
qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually
interchangeably with
psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications.
First, soul refers to the
deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul makes possible, whether
in love or in religious
concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative
possibility in our
natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode
which recognizes all
realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."
