Carl Jung and James Hillman compared

From Analytical Psychology to Archetypal Psychology

Introduction

James Hillman’s archetypal psychology arose from Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology, but it should not be understood merely as a later version of Jungian theory. Hillman retained some of Jung’s most radical propositions while questioning the conceptual structure Jung had built around them.

Both thinkers regarded psyche as more than conscious thought. Both treated dreams, fantasies, myths and symbolic images as psychologically real. Both resisted reducing mental life entirely to biology, childhood conditioning or conscious rationality. Both also believed that modern psychology had become estranged from older traditions of philosophy, religion, mythology and art.

Their principal disagreement concerned what psychology should do with the discoveries Jung had made.

Jung progressively organised his psychology around a dynamic relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, culminating in the Self and the developmental process of individuation. Hillman feared that this arrangement imposed unity, hierarchy and purpose upon a psyche whose actual nature was multiple, ambiguous and imaginal. He therefore shifted attention from psychic structures to psychological perspectives, from integration to plurality, from development to soul-making, and from interpretation of images to sustained attention to the images themselves.

Hillman explicitly acknowledged Jung as the “first immediate father” of archetypal psychology, while describing Jung as its source rather than its doctrine (Hillman, 1983/2004). Scholars consequently disagree about whether Hillman completed an undeveloped possibility within Jung or abandoned the foundations that made Jung’s psychology coherent. Michael Vannoy Adams and Glen Slater emphasise substantial continuity; David Tacey argues that Hillman discarded the Self, wholeness and development so thoroughly that archetypal psychology ceased to function as an adequate psychological model (Adams, 1997; Slater, 2012; Tacey, 2014a, 2014b). (Google Books)

This article examines that dispute through the major concepts shared – and contested – by Jung and Hillman.

The comparison at a glance

The following table describes differences of emphasis rather than absolute oppositions. Jung’s work is extensive and sometimes internally inconsistent, while Hillman could employ Jungian ideas even while criticising their conventional interpretation.

Question	Jung’s analytical psychology	Hillman’s archetypal psychology
What is psyche?	A dynamic totality containing conscious and unconscious systems	An imaginal field approached through multiple perspectives
What is an archetype?	An inherited or universal organising form, manifested through images	An image, event or perspective possessing archetypal depth
What organises the personality?	The Self as the greater totality surrounding the ego	No permanently sovereign centre; psyche is polycentric
What is psychological development?	Individuation through differentiation and integration	Soul-making through deepening, imagining and deliteralising
What is the ego?	The necessary centre of consciousness, but not the whole psyche	One imaginal perspective, often shaped by the heroic myth
What is a dream for?	Compensation, prospective guidance and communication with the unconscious	An autonomous underworld event not primarily serving waking life
What is a symptom?	A meaningful expression of imbalance or unconscious conflict	An instance of psyche’s inherent capacity for pathologising
What is therapy seeking?	Greater consciousness and a more adequate relation to the Self	More precise imagination, richer description and a changed relation to affliction
How should religion be approached?	As symbolic expression of archetypal psychic processes	Through psychological polytheism rather than a hierarchy culminating in unity
Where is psyche located?	Both individual and collective, with considerable attention to interior life	Also in environments, objects, cities, institutions and the anima mundi
What kind of knowledge is psychology?	Empirical observation combined with symbolic and historical interpretation	A poetic, phenomenological and rhetorical discipline of soul

The broad differences are well established in post-Jungian scholarship, although their interpretation remains disputed (Samuels, 1985; Adams, 1997; Slater, 2012). (Internet Archive)

The common foundation: the reality and autonomy of psyche

Hillman’s divergence from Jung can be understood only after recognising how much he retained.

Jung’s decisive break with reductionist psychology was his insistence that psychic events should be taken seriously in their own terms. A dream could not always be explained adequately as a disguised sexual wish. A religious image could not be dismissed simply as an intellectual error. Mythological patterns recurring across cultures suggested to him that individual consciousness rested upon inherited or universal structures of imagination.

Jung called the deeper, transpersonal dimension of psyche the collective unconscious. Its archetypes were not ordinarily encountered as abstract structures. They appeared through dreams, myths, fantasies, religious symbols, artistic creations and recurring human situations (Jung, 1959/1968).

Hillman accepted several elements of this position:

• Psyche is not identical with the conscious ego.
• Psychological images possess partial autonomy.
• Myth is a serious mode of psychological knowledge.
• Experience is shaped by patterns that exceed personal biography.
• A purely causal or material account does not exhaust psychological meaning.
• Psychic events must be understood through the manner in which they appear.

Hillman’s objection was not that Jung had gone too far into image, myth and psychic reality. It was that Jung had not gone far enough. He believed Jung’s most imaginative discoveries remained enclosed within conceptual structures inherited from nineteenth-century science, Christian theology and developmental psychology.

Glen Slater characterises Hillman’s position as that of an insider and outsider simultaneously. Hillman’s intellectual “foot” remained planted on Jungian ground even as he carried Jung’s ideas into philosophy, literature, architecture, ecology and cultural criticism (Slater, 2012). Hillman’s own account similarly identifies Jung as the primary source of archetypal psychology while bringing Henry Corbin, Plotinus, Ficino, Vico and poetic traditions into the field (Hillman, 1983/2004). (Life Artistry Centre)

The dispute between Jung and Hillman is therefore partly a dispute over the meaning of Jung’s own legacy.

From psychic structures to psychological perspectives

Jung often described psyche structurally and dynamically. His theoretical vocabulary included:

• ego;
• consciousness;
• personal unconscious;
• collective unconscious;
• complexes;
• persona;
• shadow;
• anima and animus;
• archetypes;
• Self.

These concepts allowed Jung to describe relations among different regions or agencies of psychic life. Contents might be repressed, projected, compensated, integrated or brought into consciousness. A dream could present material excluded from the conscious attitude. A complex could behave as a partially autonomous personality. The psyche could regulate itself through tensions between opposing tendencies.

Hillman increasingly moved away from this quasi-spatial map.

He was less interested in determining where an image originated than in discovering how it transformed perception. Instead of treating psyche as an object containing different structures, he treated the psychological as a way of seeing.

This is the basis of Hillman’s perspectivism. Anger, grief, erotic attraction, fear and nostalgia are not merely contents passing through a stable mind. Each establishes a temporary world. Anger makes certain offences and enemies visible. Grief transforms time, memory and place. Erotic desire intensifies beauty, proximity and absence. Fear reorganises the environment around possible threat.

The psychological question therefore changes.

A structural approach may ask:

Which complex produced this response?

A perspectival approach may ask:

Through what image or style of consciousness is the situation presently appearing?

Hillman did not necessarily deny complexes or unconscious processes. He attempted to prevent theoretical terms from becoming literal entities. “The ego,” “the unconscious” and “the Self” are themselves images produced within psychological discourse. They may be useful, but they should not be mistaken for objectively located organs of the mind.

Slater describes this as Hillman’s movement from a psychodynamic model towards a perspectival one: conceptual maps recede while myth, metaphor and the particular style of an experience become primary (Slater, 2012). Drob similarly interprets Hillman’s work as a deconstruction of psychological theory, especially theories that present their own metaphors as literal realities (Drob, 1999). (Life Artistry Centre)

Archetype and archetypal image

Jung’s archetype

Jung used the word archetype in several overlapping ways. At times he appeared to identify archetypes with recurring mythological images. Elsewhere he distinguished between:

• the archetype as such, an unconscious organising form; and
• the archetypal image, its particular representation in consciousness.

The archetype as such is not a fully formed inherited picture. It is more comparable to a predisposition to organise experience in characteristic ways. The particular content is supplied by personal history, culture and the circumstances in which it appears (Jung, 1959/1968).

Thus, an archetype associated with motherhood does not require every culture to produce an identical mother goddess. It may appear through different images of nourishment, protection, fertility, engulfment, origin, earth, home or bodily dependence.

Adams notes that Jung’s changing definitions created a long-standing difficulty within analytical psychology. Sometimes archetypes are described as images; elsewhere they are unknowable structures underlying images. (Cambridge Resolve)

Hillman’s revision

Hillman regarded the hypothetical structure behind the image as less important than the image available to experience.

Psychology never directly encounters an empty archetypal form. It encounters this snake, this abandoned child, this broken machine, this underground room or this accusing voice. To move immediately behind the image in search of an invisible cause may cause psychology to overlook the phenomenon it actually possesses.

Hillman therefore preferred archetypal as a qualifying adjective. An image becomes archetypal through its compelling depth, autonomy, emotional force, cultural resonance and ability to reorganise experience. The archetypal is not necessarily a hidden object producing the image; it is a dimension revealed through the manner in which the image is perceived.

This also means that archetypal psychology is not primarily a catalogue of gods and fixed meanings. A dream containing a king does not automatically instantiate “the king archetype.” A snake does not possess one universal translation. Mythology expands possible meanings, but should not become another diagnostic code.

Hillman described Jung as the origin of the proposition that psychic patterns are archetypal, while distinguishing archetypal psychology from Jung’s more Kantian account of unknowable forms. Hillman’s school treats the archetypal as phenomenal: present within the image and its effects rather than hidden permanently behind them (Hillman, 1983/2004). (Wasabi Technologies)

The practical difference

A Jungian analyst may amplify a dream image by connecting it to parallel motifs in mythology, religion, alchemy and folklore. The purpose may be to show that the image belongs to a larger collective pattern.

A Hillmanian analyst may also use amplification, but with greater caution. The purpose is not to extract the image from its particular form or to identify the archetype that supposedly caused it. The amplification should return the interpreter to the image with greater precision.

The difference is between using mythology to classify the image and using mythology to complicate it.

The Self: Jung’s central principle and Hillman’s central objection

The greatest conceptual difference concerns the Self.

Jung’s Self

For Jung, the ego is the centre of consciousness but not the centre of the whole psyche. The Self refers to the more comprehensive totality of conscious and unconscious life. It is both:

• a theoretical name for psychic totality; and
• an archetypal image of order and wholeness.

The Self may appear symbolically through mandalas, divine children, wise figures, stones, circular forms, sacred marriages or images reconciling opposing forces. It does not simply mean a socially successful or internally consistent personality. It represents a totality that exceeds the ego and may profoundly disrupt conscious intentions (Jung, 1951/1968; Jung, 1959/1968).

The relationship between ego and Self became central to later Jungian accounts of individuation. The ego must relinquish the belief that it is sovereign while assuming responsibility for relating consciously to a larger psychic reality. Jungian scholarship frequently describes individuation as requiring the ego to enter into the service of the Self rather than identifying itself with that totality (Schmidt, 2005). (Wiley Online Library)

Hillman’s criticism

Hillman believed the Self could become a disguised psychological monotheism.

Although Jung had discovered a psyche populated by autonomous complexes, mythic persons and contradictory forces, the Self appeared to gather them into one final ordering principle. Diversity was tolerated, but ultimately placed within a model of integration and totality.

Hillman saw theological assumptions beneath this structure. The movement from many psychic figures towards one Self resembled a movement from polytheism towards monotheism. Wholeness could become the psychological equivalent of salvation, while fragmentation and contradiction were treated as states awaiting integration.

Hillman consequently displaced the Self rather than making it the goal of psychology. The psyche was better represented as a city, theatre, parliament or polytheistic pantheon than as a circle governed by one central principle.

Slater summarises Hillman’s provocative historical interpretation: the heroic ego and the unifying Self carried cultural and theological assumptions that psychology needed to examine rather than accept as neutral discoveries (Slater, 2012). Tacey states the criticism more sharply: Hillman “tossed out” the Self and the ideal of wholeness on which classical Jungian psychology depended (Tacey, 2014a). (Life Artistry Centre)

Did Hillman deny all psychological organisation?

It would be misleading to conclude that Hillman imagined the psyche as random chaos.

His gods, myths and archetypal configurations provide forms of consistency. Anger shaped by Ares has a different style from anger shaped by a humiliated king or a punitive judge. Aphrodite, Hermes, Saturn and Dionysus name recognisable patterns of value, perception and behaviour.

Hillman’s objection was not to pattern but to the claim that all patterns must eventually submit to one superior centre. His psychology replaces a unified hierarchy with a differentiated ecology of perspectives.

The unresolved problem is responsibility. A plural psyche must still make decisions, sustain relationships and regulate destructive impulses. Critics argue that the Self provides a principle through which conflicting positions can be related without requiring the ego to dominate them. Hillman’s polytheism is more effective at protecting multiplicity than at explaining how a person should choose among incompatible demands.

Individuation and soul-making

Jung’s individuation

Individuation is the process through which a person becomes more fully the particular individual they are capable of becoming.

It involves differentiating the conscious personality from collective expectations while developing a more conscious relationship with neglected or unconscious dimensions of psyche. Encounters with persona, shadow, anima, animus and Self may all participate in the process.

Individuation is not simply individualism. Jung did not define it as pursuing private preference without responsibility to others. As unconscious projections are recognised and opposing tendencies are brought into relation, the person may become less controlled by collective conformity and unconscious compulsion.

Individuation is usually described as developmental and directional. It does not follow a single predetermined sequence, but it implies movement towards greater differentiation, consciousness and psychic integration (Jung, 1953/1966; Schmidt, 2005). (Internet Archive)

Hillman’s soul-making

Hillman replaced individuation’s emphasis on becoming a whole person with soul-making: the deepening of events into images, stories, memories and psychological significance.

Soul-making does not necessarily ask:

Who am I becoming?

It may instead ask:

What is this event becoming in imagination?

A failure, illness, encounter, place or object can acquire soul when it is released from a purely literal account and allowed to reveal metaphorical and emotional dimensions.

Hillman occasionally described soul-making as the “individuation of imaginal reality.” This is a significant qualification. It suggests that Hillman did not simply reject individuation; he transferred its subject. The primary concern is not the completion of the personal individual but the differentiation and animation of images themselves (Hillman, 1983/2004).

Slater argues that individuation and soul-making overlap in several respects. Both challenge egoic life; both involve sustained attention to what exceeds conscious intention; and both may reveal character, calling and fate. The difference is that individuation is often understood as a directed process of differentiation and integration, whereas soul-making remains more open-ended and extends imaginative attention into all aspects of life (Slater, 2012). (Life Artistry Centre)

Development versus deepening

The contrast can be expressed spatially.

Jung’s developmental language often suggests movement:

• becoming;
• integrating;
• differentiating;
• progressing through encounters;
• establishing a new relation to the Self.

Hillman’s language suggests deepening:

• descending;
• staying with;
• imagining;
• personifying;
• complicating;
• returning events to soul.

The danger within developmental psychology is that it can create a hierarchy in which one approved form of maturity judges every deviation as failure. The danger within Hillman’s deepening psychology is that it may provide no adequate criterion for recognising genuine growth, regression or increased capacity.

Ego and hero

Jung and Hillman both challenged ego supremacy, but they did so differently.

For Jung, the ego is indispensable. Without a sufficiently stable conscious standpoint, unconscious material may overwhelm rather than enrich the personality. The objective is not to abolish the ego but to correct its exaggerated claims and place it in relation to the larger psyche.

Hillman examined the ego itself as an archetypal construction. He associated the modern autonomous ego with the hero myth: the figure who separates from origins, defeats monsters, imposes order and claims authorship of events.

This heroic perspective has real value. It supports decision, endurance, boundary formation and purposeful action. The problem arises when it presents itself as the only form of psychological maturity.

The heroic ego may interpret:

• dependence as weakness;
• ambiguity as confusion;
• repetition as failure;
• passivity as moral deficiency;
• suffering as an obstacle;
• nature as material to conquer;
• other psychic voices as enemies to defeat.

Hillman sought to relativise the ego rather than simply weaken it. The ego becomes one figure among others. At some moments, heroic action is appropriate. At others, psychological intelligence may require waiting, mourning, receiving, submitting, remembering or becoming lost.

Drob identifies the deconstruction of the ego as one of Hillman’s foundational moves. Slater connects it to Hillman’s attempt to reveal the archetypal and historical assumptions embedded in psychological concepts themselves (Drob, 1999; Slater, 2012). (Sage Journals)

This move resembles Jung’s insistence that the ego is not master of the psyche, but Hillman applies Jung’s method reflexively: the Jungian ego and Self are also images requiring archetypal analysis.

Dreams: communication with the unconscious or descent into the underworld?

Dreams provide one of the clearest examples of continuity and divergence.

Jung’s approach to dreams

Jung treated dreams as spontaneous products of the unconscious. They could compensate for the one-sidedness of consciousness, reveal neglected attitudes, anticipate emerging psychological possibilities and contribute to individuation.

A consciously confident person might dream repeatedly of failure or exposure. A person trapped in passivity might dream of dangerous movement. The dream does not necessarily offer a simple opposite, but may restore complexity excluded from the waking position.

Jung rejected fixed dream dictionaries. A snake, house or death image could not be interpreted without considering:

• the dreamer’s associations;
• the emotional context;
• the wider dream series;
• cultural and mythological parallels;
• the current psychological situation.

Amplification placed the personal image beside related mythological, religious or artistic motifs. The purpose was not merely to decode the image but to perceive its wider psychological field.

Hillman’s underworld critique

Hillman believed Jungian dream interpretation often remained governed by the interests of waking consciousness.

If the dream is treated as compensation, guidance or a step towards individuation, it is still being asked to help the daytime personality. Its images become messages carried from the unconscious for the benefit of the ego’s development.

In The Dream and the Underworld, Hillman relocated dreams within the mythic realm of Hades. Dream figures belong first to their own underworld environment. They need not be translated into practical instructions, moral lessons or daytime actions.

The guiding question changes from:

What is the dream telling the dreamer?

to:

What kind of imaginal world has the dream entered?

A deceased person in a dream need not immediately be translated into a living part of the dreamer’s personality. The dream may be allowed to present the dead as dead. A shadow need not immediately be reintegrated into consciousness. It may belong to a realm in which shadows possess their own mode of existence.

Hillman thereby radicalised Jung’s respect for psychic images while rejecting the developmental and compensatory framework frequently placed around them. His book presents dreaming as an autonomous imaginal activity rather than an instrument of waking adaptation (Hillman, 1979). (Google Books)

The unresolved issue

Hillman protects dreams from utilitarian interpretation, but his position may become too categorical. Dreams can plausibly have several functions simultaneously:

• emotional processing;
• memory consolidation;
• threat simulation;
• symbolic dramatisation;
• compensation;
• repetition of trauma;
• creative recombination;
• imaginal deepening.

A dream need not exist exclusively for waking development, but neither must all relations between dreaming and waking life be denied. Hillman’s underworld is most persuasive as a corrective to interpretive conquest rather than a complete theory of dreaming.

Symbol and image

Jung frequently used the concept of the symbol. A genuine symbol points towards something not yet fully understood. It should not be confused with a sign possessing a fixed translation. The symbolic image may hold conscious and unconscious meanings together and mediate between opposing positions.

Hillman preferred the language of image.

He worried that symbolic interpretation could divide the phenomenon into two levels:

• the image that appears; and
• the supposedly deeper meaning for which it stands.

Once the interpreter asks what the image symbolises, attention may move away from the image towards an abstract explanation.

For Hillman, the image is not simply packaging around a hidden concept. Its psychological meaning lies in its precise form: its colour, voice, location, rhythm, emotional atmosphere and relations with other images.

Consider a dream in which a white horse stands silently in an abandoned railway station.

A symbolic approach might explore the horse as instinct, vitality, spirit or movement, and the station as transition or a journey that has failed to begin.

A Hillmanian approach would delay those translations. It would ask:

• Is the horse saddled?
• Is it looking at the dreamer?
• Is the station ruined or merely empty?
• Are there tracks?
• What time of day is it?
• Does the horse appear lost, waiting, imprisoned or entirely at home?
• What does its silence do to the scene?

Hillman’s instruction to remain with the image is not a refusal of meaning. It is a refusal to replace sensuous particularity with conceptual shorthand.

Slater warns that archetypal labels such as shadow, anima and Self can become intellectual baskets into which images are sorted prematurely. In that form, archetypal interpretation produces stereotypes rather than deeper perception (Slater, 2012). (Life Artistry Centre)

Pathology, symptom and healing

Both Jung and Hillman opposed the assumption that symptoms are entirely meaningless defects.

Jung: symptom as expression and compensation

Jung regarded neurosis as a meaningful psychological formation. A symptom might express a conflict between the conscious attitude and neglected demands of the psyche. Treatment therefore required more than suppression of symptoms. It involved discovering the psychological problem or unlived possibility represented through them.

This did not mean that Jung opposed relief from suffering. Rather, he believed symptom removal without understanding could leave the underlying conflict unchanged or cause it to reappear in another form.

Jungian therapy often attempts to transform involuntary suffering into a more conscious relation to conflict, limitation and meaning.

Hillman: pathologising as a capacity of psyche

Hillman went further. He used pathologising to describe psyche’s inherent production of disturbance, breakdown, fantasy and abnormality.

Depression, anxiety, obsession and fragmentation are not necessarily external contaminants invading an otherwise orderly mind. The psyche appears to generate abnormality as one of its characteristic activities.

Hillman’s point was not that suffering is desirable. It was that a psychology preoccupied with restoring normal functioning may fail to ask what its conception of normality excludes.

A symptom may:

• interrupt an unsustainable way of life;
• expose dependency or vulnerability;
• resist cultural expectations;
• personify an unrecognised conflict;
• force attention towards death, loss or limitation;
• disturb an identity that has become too narrow.

Hillman’s therapeutic principle might be summarised as attention before elimination.

His account of archetypal psychology expressly avoids prescribing individuation, wholeness, compensation or another fixed telos for symptoms and dreams. Purpose may be present, but it should not be detached from the particular image in which it appears (Hillman, 1983/2004). (Wasabi Technologies)

The clinical danger

Hillman’s position can humanise people whose experiences have been reduced to diagnostic labels. It can also become dangerous if metaphorical meaning is allowed to substitute for necessary care.

Severe depression, mania, psychosis, delirium, suicidal crisis and neurological illness may require medical investigation, safeguarding, practical support and treatment. A symptom can possess psychological meaning while also being medically urgent.

Meaning and causation should therefore be distinguished. Discovering that a symptom expresses a conflict does not demonstrate that the conflict is its sole cause. An archetypal interpretation should supplement rather than override medical, developmental and social evidence.

Monotheism and psychological polytheism

Hillman’s critique of the Self belongs to his wider contrast between monotheistic and polytheistic psychology.

Jung’s position

Jung’s psyche is already multiple. It contains complexes, archetypal figures, opposing functions and partially autonomous personalities. Jung frequently drew on pagan mythology, alchemy, Gnosticism, Eastern traditions and Christianity.

Nevertheless, Hillman believed Jung’s system ultimately ranked multiplicity beneath unity. The ego confronts shadow, anima or animus, but these encounters participate in individuation and the emergence of the Self. Many figures appear, but one image of totality possesses ultimate authority.

Hillman regarded this as a psychological reflection of monotheistic culture.

Hillman’s polytheism

Psychological polytheism does not require literal religious conversion to the worship of Greek gods. It treats the gods as personified styles of consciousness and value.

Aphrodite, Athena, Ares, Hermes, Hestia, Dionysus, Apollo and Saturn do not agree about what matters. Each establishes a different cosmos.

• Aphrodite perceives attraction, beauty and erotic relation.
• Athena values strategy, skill and civic intelligence.
• Ares recognises conflict, force and immediate confrontation.
• Hermes moves through ambiguity, exchange, language and boundary crossing.
• Hestia centres attention upon interiority and the hearth.
• Dionysus dissolves boundaries through ecstasy, suffering and collective possession.
• Apollo values clarity, proportion, distance and form.
• Saturn brings limitation, age, repetition, melancholy and time.

No single perspective is healthy in every context. Psychological intelligence consists partly in recognising which god is present, what it demands and where its rule becomes destructive.

Hillman insisted that this was both religious and non-religious. Archetypal psychology does not seek to revive an ancient faith literally. Its gods are imaginatively approached rather than accepted through creed and worship. Yet they are also more than convenient labels: they introduce claims, values and powers exceeding individual preference (Hillman, 1981; Hillman, 1983/2004). (Wasabi Technologies)

The strength and weakness of polytheism

Polytheism protects psychological diversity from premature unification. It offers a language for contradictory motives without deciding that only one represents the “real” person.

Its weakness is ethical. The fact that every god has a perspective does not mean every action is equally acceptable. Ares may explain violent possession without justifying violence. Hermes may illuminate deception without making dishonesty harmless.

A plural psychology still requires ethical, relational and political judgement. Mythological recognition cannot replace responsibility.

Soul and spirit

Hillman also revised Jung through a distinction between soul and spirit.

Spirit tends towards:

• height;
• light;
• purity;
• abstraction;
• transcendence;
• unity;
• timeless truth;
• liberation from limitation.

Soul tends towards:

• depth;
• darkness;
• particularity;
• embodiment;
• memory;
• entanglement;
• ambiguity;
• relation to death.

Hillman illustrated this through the contrast between peaks and vales. Spirit ascends the mountain towards panoramic vision. Soul descends into the valley, where experience is enclosed, local, shadowed and complicated.

This was partly a criticism of spiritual psychologies promising ascent beyond conflict. Hillman believed that suffering could be bypassed when every dark experience was interpreted as a temporary obstacle to higher consciousness.

Psychotherapy, from his perspective, belongs primarily to soul rather than spiritual transcendence. It stays with grief, repetition, bodily limitation, history and unresolved contradiction.

Jung’s psychology contains both movements. His work on alchemy, shadow and descent is deeply concerned with darkness, matter and psychological suffering. Yet his language of Self, wholeness and transformation can also be read as orienting the psyche towards a higher unity.

Hillman’s distinction clarifies these tendencies, but it may overstate their separation. Descent and ascent are not always opposites. Spiritual insight may deepen attachment to earthly life, while fascination with depth can itself become an escape from practical responsibility. Later scholarship has therefore examined Hillman’s soul–spirit distinction as both a productive clarification and a potentially artificial division (Hillman, 1975/1979; Slater, 2018). (faithinthejourney.com)

Development, maturity and the puer aeternus

The question of development became one of the most serious disputes surrounding Hillman.

Jungian psychology generally assumes that psychological capacities can develop. Consciousness can become more differentiated. Projections can be recognised. Relationships with unconscious figures can change. The person may acquire greater ability to tolerate conflict without being possessed by one side.

Hillman was suspicious of universal developmental hierarchies. Ideas of maturity may conceal cultural preferences:

• independence over dependence;
• productivity over contemplation;
• stability over imaginative mobility;
• heterosexual family formation over other forms of life;
• controlled rationality over emotional intensity;
• socially approved adulthood over continued experimentation.

This criticism is important. Developmental theories have frequently treated difference as deficiency and conformity as health.

Hillman’s critics argue, however, that his resistance went too far. David Tacey interpreted archetypal psychology through the figure of the puer aeternus, the eternal youth: imaginative, inspired and resistant to limitation, but also potentially unable to commit, endure ordinary time or accept responsibility. Tacey argued that Hillman’s rejection of integration and maturity reproduced the very developmental difficulty his psychology refused to acknowledge (Tacey, 2014b). (PubMed)

That psychobiographical argument was contested. Thomas Kapacinskas and other respondents questioned whether a thinker’s psychological character could legitimately be inferred from selected writings and then used to explain away an intellectual system. (PubMed)

The more defensible criticism is theoretical rather than biographical:

How does archetypal psychology distinguish respect for multiplicity from an inability to develop capacities needed for reality, relationship and ethical responsibility?

Hillman successfully exposed the mythology hidden within conventional accounts of maturity. He offered a less complete account of how people acquire the capacities through which plurality can be lived without disorganisation or harm.

Differences in therapeutic practice

Neither analytical psychology nor archetypal psychology can be reduced to a fixed protocol, but their characteristic clinical emphases differ.

A broadly Jungian treatment may emphasise

• the relationship between conscious and unconscious attitudes;
• complexes and projection;
• dream series;
• symbolic amplification;
• active imagination;
• transference and countertransference;
• the development of a stable ego – Self relationship;
• individuation across the life course.

An archetypal treatment may emphasise

• exact language and metaphor;
• the autonomous qualities of images;
• personification of moods and symptoms;
• differentiation among multiple voices;
• deliteralisation;
• mythology as amplification rather than classification;
• resistance to premature cure;
• the cultural and environmental world surrounding the patient.

Consider a person who repeatedly says, “Something inside me is sabotaging every opportunity.”

A Jungian inquiry might explore a shadow complex, unconscious opposition to the conscious ambition, or a compensatory movement preventing one-sided identification with success.

An archetypal inquiry might ask:

• What kind of saboteur is imagined?
• Is it a rebel, child, trickster, enemy agent or guardian?
• What does it destroy?
• What style of success does it oppose?
• Does “opportunity” appear as invitation, temptation, demand or capture?
• Which myth governs the conflict between advancement and refusal?

The approaches can be complementary. Jung offers a model of psychic conflict and development. Hillman intensifies attention to the form and rhetoric through which the conflict appears.

Slater argues that archetypal psychology’s clinical relevance has often been underestimated because Hillman resisted conventional therapeutic goals and wrote beyond institutional psychotherapy. His work nevertheless offers a distinct attitude towards affliction: the objective may be less the eradication of the primary condition than the alteration of the self-persecution and dissociation surrounding it (Slater, 2012). (Life Artistry Centre)

From the individual psyche to the anima mundi

Hillman’s most consequential extension of Jung concerns the location of psyche.

Jung did not regard the collective unconscious as a private container sealed inside the individual. His writings on synchronicity, alchemy, nature and collective symbolism repeatedly destabilised a simple division between inner and outer worlds. Slater notes that Jung sometimes described the objective psyche as surrounding the person on all sides rather than existing only within them (Slater, 2012).

Nevertheless, Jungian therapy was often practised through inward attention: dreams, projections, active imagination and unconscious complexes.

Hillman believed this inwardness could privatise suffering. The damaged world was interpreted as material projected by an individual psyche.

His idea of the anima mundi, or soul of the world, reverses the direction. Buildings, streets, technologies, institutions, animals and landscapes possess expressive qualities. They do not need to be converted immediately into symbols of the human personality.

A hostile city may actually be hostile in its design. A degrading workplace may produce despair. Environmental devastation may provoke grief because something in the world has been injured – not merely because the observer carries unresolved personal material.

Psychology must therefore ask both:

What is happening within this person?

and:

What is this person being required to inhabit?

Hillman described the recovery of anima mundi as a reversal of the psychic deadening of the world. Slater also finds a bridge back to Jung, noting Jung’s late recollections of feeling distributed through landscapes, trees, water, animals and seasons (Hillman, 1982/1992; Slater, 2012). (Life Artistry Centre)

Hillman’s difference is therefore partly one of emphasis. He transformed a suggestive strand within Jung into a principal psychological programme.

Religion: transformation or deliteralisation?

Jung regarded religion as a fundamental psychological fact. Religious images express archetypal processes and can mediate experiences exceeding ego consciousness.

He did not ask psychology to decide whether God exists metaphysically. The psychologist could study the God-image as a psychic reality with observable effects. Religious traditions provided symbolic containers through which encounters with the numinous might be understood.

Jung was deeply engaged with Christianity, but also criticised its historical one-sidedness. His studies of alchemy, Gnosticism and Eastern religion attempted to recover neglected dimensions such as matter, darkness, femininity and the union of opposites.

Hillman accepted the psychological reality of gods and religious images while objecting to the tendency to organise them within a single developmental hierarchy. Religion should not be interpreted as an imperfect anticipation of the Self, nor should polytheistic figures become preliminary stages on the way to monotheistic unity.

His method was deliteralisation. Gods are neither dismissed as false beings nor asserted as literal supernatural facts. They are approached imaginatively as powers, persons and styles of consciousness.

This creates an intentionally ambiguous position between psychology and theology. Hillman refused both the sceptical claim that gods are “nothing but” subjective inventions and the doctrinal claim that psychology must affirm their objective religious existence.

The ambiguity is productive because it protects the image from reduction. It is also difficult because readers may be uncertain whether Hillman is making a metaphorical, phenomenological or metaphysical claim.

Hillman acknowledged that psychology and religion become intertwined when soul is taken as psychology’s primary metaphor, but maintained a distinction between imagining gods psychologically and worshipping them religiously (Hillman, 1983/2004). (Wasabi Technologies)

Science and the nature of psychological knowledge

Jung repeatedly described himself as an empiricist. He drew on clinical observation, comparative mythology, religious history, anthropology, alchemy and accounts of dreams and fantasies.

His empiricism was not equivalent to modern experimental psychology. Jung’s evidence was usually interpretive, historical and clinical rather than statistical. His theories often arose from comparisons among case material, symbolic texts and cultural traditions. Scholars have consequently noted the tension between his scientific self-description and the literary or hermeneutic character of much of his work. (Cambridge University Press)

Hillman made that tension explicit. He did not attempt to remodel archetypal psychology as a predictive natural science. Psychology, in his view, was closer to poetry, rhetoric, philosophy and the arts because its primary subject was meaning expressed through images.

This has two consequences.

First, Hillman can reveal dimensions excluded by quantitative models:

• atmosphere;
• metaphor;
• narrative;
• beauty;
• cultural mythology;
• existential meaning;
• the felt qualities of places and institutions.

Second, archetypal interpretations are difficult to test. Two interpreters may produce incompatible mythological readings without an agreed method for deciding which is superior.

Archetypal psychology can therefore provide interpretive knowledge, but it should not claim to establish matters requiring other methods, such as:

• neurological causation;
• treatment effectiveness;
• medication safety;
• diagnostic reliability;
• prevalence;
• prognosis;
• relative risk.

Hillman’s legitimate challenge is that scientific explanation does not equal complete understanding. His illegitimate extension would be to treat poetic insight as though it had established empirical causation.

Does Hillman continue Jung or reject him?

There are three plausible answers.

Hillman as a Jungian continuation

This interpretation emphasises that Hillman retained:

• psychic reality;
• archetypal patterns;
• the autonomy of images;
• mythology;
• personification;
• dream life;
• criticism of ego sovereignty;
• the relation between psychology and religion;
• attention to culture and history.

On this reading, Hillman liberated Jung’s most radical insights from the theoretical compromises through which Jung attempted to present them as a science. Archetypal psychology develops the imaginal, mythic and polycentric implications already present in analytical psychology.

Slater’s account broadly supports this position. Although Hillman left parts of Jung behind, his psychology remained in conversation with Jung throughout his life and extended Jung’s vision beyond the clinic (Slater, 2012). (Life Artistry Centre)

Hillman as a post-Jungian revisionist

A second interpretation regards Hillman as neither faithful disciple nor complete opponent.

He takes Jung’s discoveries as raw material and subjects Jung’s own system to archetypal analysis:

• the ego is read as a heroic image;
• the Self as a monotheistic image;
• individuation as a developmental myth;
• integration as a cultural preference;
• interpretation as an attempt to master images;
• inwardness as a modern location assigned to psyche.

Hillman is Jungian in method but anti-Jungian in some conclusions. He applies Jung’s insight – that theories arise from archetypal assumptions to Jungian theory itself.

Hillman as the unmaking of Jungian psychology

Tacey’s critical interpretation argues that Hillman removed too much.

Without the Self, there is no principle connecting psychic plurality. Without individuation, there is no adequate account of development. Without integration, psychology may celebrate fragmentation. Without a stable therapeutic purpose, affliction can be aestheticised rather than transformed.

On this view, Hillman’s work is powerful as cultural criticism and poetic psychology but incomplete as a model of mental functioning or psychotherapy (Tacey, 2014a, 2014b). (PubMed)

The strongest conclusion is that Hillman’s psychology occupies all three positions. It continues Jung’s imaginal project, revises Jung’s conceptual system and rejects the privileged status of the Self and individuation.

A balanced assessment

Hillman identifies genuine risks within Jungian psychology.

The Self can be literalised into a superior inner authority. Individuation can become a heroic story of personal exceptionalism. Archetypes can become fixed labels. Amplification can become intellectual display. Integration can suppress legitimate contradiction. An inward focus can cause psychology to reinterpret political and environmental damage as personal projection.

Jung also provides necessary corrections to Hillman.

Images arise within biographies, bodies and relationships as well as mythic fields. Development cannot be dismissed merely because developmental theories have been misused. Some psychological capacities are genuinely acquired. A stable ego may be essential to surviving intense unconscious material. Conflict cannot always remain unresolved. Multiplicity requires coordination. Suffering sometimes needs to be relieved rather than deepened.

Jung is generally stronger on:

• psychic structure;
• development;
• compensation;
• integration;
• the relation between ego and unconscious;
• the need for a sufficiently stable conscious standpoint.

Hillman is generally stronger on:

• metaphor;
• the autonomy and precision of images;
• cultural criticism;
• the plurality of psychic perspectives;
• the aesthetics of psychological experience;
• the environmental and institutional location of suffering;
• exposing the mythology concealed within psychological theory.

Treating either thinker as complete would contradict what is most valuable in both. Jung warned against egoic possession by a single standpoint. Hillman warned against psychological monotheism. Their disagreement is itself best held pluralistically.

Conclusion

James Hillman did not simply abandon Jung. He took Jung’s discovery of an autonomous, image-producing psyche and redirected it against the organising architecture of analytical psychology.

Jung asked how consciousness could enter a more adequate relationship with the unconscious and the Self. Hillman asked what fantasies were already hidden in the words consciousness, unconscious, relationship and Self.

Jung regarded archetypal images as manifestations of underlying structures. Hillman returned attention to the images themselves.

Jung saw dreams as compensatory and potentially prospective. Hillman protected dreams from being made servants of waking development.

Jung described individuation as a process through which the personality differentiates and enters a relationship with its greater totality. Hillman replaced this with soul-making: the imaginative deepening of events, persons and the world.

Jung relativised the ego through the Self. Hillman relativised both ego and Self through psychological polytheism.

Jung rediscovered the soul within the modern individual. Hillman attempted to return soul to the world.

The central difference can therefore be expressed as a question of psychological authority.

Jung asks:

How may the many parts of psyche enter a more conscious relation to the whole?

Hillman asks:

Why must the many be governed by an image of the whole at all?

Neither question cancels the other. Together, they establish one of the most productive disputes in post-Jungian psychology: whether psychological life is best served through integration into a greater totality or through the careful differentiation of an irreducible plurality.

Reading guide

Primary works by Jung

Jung, C.G., The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.
The Internet Archive provides a controlled-borrowing edition of the Princeton University Press volume, including Jung’s essays on archetypes, the collective unconscious, rebirth, the mother archetype and individuation. (Internet Archive)

Jung, C.G., Two Essays on Analytical Psychology.
A searchable historical edition is available through the Internet Archive. This is a central source for Jung’s account of the ego, unconscious, persona and individuation. (Internet Archive)

Online Books Page: works by C.G. Jung.
The University of Pennsylvania catalogue links to legally available early English editions, including Analytical Psychology and Psychological Types. (Online Books Page)

Primary works by Hillman

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account.
Google Books provides bibliographical information and a description of its discussions of Jung, Corbin, polytheism, imagination, psychopathology and the soul–spirit distinction. (Google Books)

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology.
Google Books provides a searchable preview and chapter contents covering personifying, pathologising, psychologising and dehumanising. (Google Books)

Hillman, James, The Dream and the Underworld.
Google Books and the Internet Archive provide publication information and controlled access to editions of Hillman’s major revision of Jungian dream theory. (Google Books)

The James Hillman Bibliography.
OPUS Archives provides a freely accessible list of Hillman’s books, articles, lectures and collected writings. (OPUS Archives and Research Center)

Comparative and critical scholarship

Adams, Michael Vannoy, “The Archetypal School.”
Cambridge University Press provides an accessible chapter summary and, in some regions, the chapter PDF. It is particularly useful for the distinction between Jungian archetypes and archetypal images. (Cambridge Resolve)

Slater, Glen, “Between Jung and Hillman.”
The complete article is freely available as a PDF. It gives one of the clearest balanced accounts of Hillman’s continuity with and divergence from Jung. (Life Artistry Centre)

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians.
A controlled-borrowing edition is available through the Internet Archive. Samuels maps the classical, developmental and archetypal schools and compares their theoretical and clinical priorities. (Internet Archive)

Drob, Sanford L., “The Depth of the Soul: James Hillman’s Vision of Psychology.”
The abstract and bibliographical record are accessible through Journal of Humanistic Psychology. The article discusses image, myth, psychopathology, polytheism, ego and world soul. (Sage Journals)

Tacey, David, “James Hillman: The Unmaking of a Psychologist,” Parts One and Two.
PubMed provides abstracts and complete publication details. These articles present a forceful Jungian criticism of Hillman’s rejection of Self, wholeness and development. (PubMed)

Responses to Tacey.
PubMed indexes several published responses questioning Tacey’s psychobiographical method and interpretation of Hillman. (PubMed)

Formal bibliography

Primary sources

Hillman, J. (1975) Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row.

Hillman, J. (1979) The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper & Row.

Hillman, J. (1981) ‘Psychology: monotheistic or polytheistic?’, in Miller, D.L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

Hillman, J. (1983) Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

Hillman, J. (1985) Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

Hillman, J. (1992) The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

Hillman, J. (2004) Archetypal Psychology. 3rd revised edn. Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 1. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications.

Jung, C.G. (1951/1968) Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. 2nd edn. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C.G. (1953/1966) Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. 2nd edn. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Collected Works, Vol. 7. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C.G. (1958/1969) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. 2nd edn. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Collected Works, Vol. 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C.G. (1959/1968) The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. 2nd edn. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C.G. (1961/1989) Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by A. Jaffé. Translated by R. and C. Winston. New York: Vintage.

Secondary and critical sources

Adams, M.V. (1997) ‘The archetypal school’, in Young-Eisendrath, P. and Dawson, T. (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Jung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 101–118.

Drob, S.L. (1999) ‘The depth of the soul: James Hillman’s vision of psychology’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 39(3), pp. 56–72.

Griffin, D.R. (ed.) (1989) Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Kapacinskas, T.J. (2014) ‘Turning the screw on psychobiography: a response to David Tacey’s “James Hillman: the unmaking of a psychologist”’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 59(4), pp. 503–518.

Samuels, A. (1985) Jung and the Post-Jungians. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Samuels, A., Shorter, B. and Plaut, F. (1986) A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Schmidt, M. (2005) ‘Individuation: finding oneself in analysis – taking risks and making sacrifices’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 50(5), pp. 595–616.

Slater, G. (2012) ‘Between Jung and Hillman’, Quadrant: The Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation, 42(2), pp. 14–37.

Tacey, D. (2014a) ‘James Hillman: the unmaking of a psychologist. Part one: his legacy’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 59(4), pp. 467–485.

Tacey, D. (2014b) ‘James Hillman: the unmaking of a psychologist. Part two: the problem of the puer’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 59(4), pp. 486–502.

Young-Eisendrath, P. and Dawson, T. (eds) (1997) The Cambridge Companion to Jung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.