A Glossary of Hillmanian Thought

Part One: The First Ten Principles

Introduction: How to read this glossary

James Hillman’s language can appear familiar while meaning something substantially different from ordinary psychological usage.

Words such as soul, image, archetype, person and pathology were not invented by Hillman. Each possesses a long history in philosophy, religion, psychology and literature. Hillman’s distinctive contribution was to rearrange these words into a psychology that begins with imagination rather than with behaviour, biology, cognition or a unified personal subject.

This glossary is therefore not arranged alphabetically. It unfolds conceptually.

The sequence begins with soul, the perspective from which Hillman believes psychology should proceed. It then moves through the poetic and imaginal character of mind, the archetypal depth of images, the psyche’s tendency to personify itself, and the resulting polytheistic model of personality. The final entries introduce the characteristic activities through which this psyche deepens experience: pathologising, psychologising and soul-making.

Each entry contains four elements:

Hillmanian meaning explains how Hillman uses the term.

Function within the system shows why the term is necessary to the wider structure of archetypal psychology.

Related ideas identifies concepts in other theories that perform a similar function.

Important distinction explains why those neighbouring concepts should not be treated as identical.

The cross-references are therefore comparisons of family resemblance, not claims that different thinkers were describing precisely the same thing.

Psyche or Soul

Concise definition

Soul is the perspective through which events become experiences carrying depth, feeling, imagination and significance.

It is not necessarily an immortal substance residing inside the body.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman begins with the Greek word psyche, conventionally translated as soul. Psychology, in its literal construction, is the logos or intelligible account of psyche.

Modern psychology has often avoided the word because it appears theological, metaphysical or scientifically unverifiable. Hillman deliberately restores it, but he does not define soul as an invisible object possessed by the individual.

He calls soul a perspective rather than a substance.

Soul is the manner of seeing through which an occurrence gains depth. An external event becomes a psychological experience when it gathers:

• emotional resonance;
• associations;
• memories;
• fantasies;
• ambiguities;
• metaphors;
• relations with love and death.

A railway delay can remain merely a factual inconvenience. It becomes a soul-event when it evokes abandonment, suspended journeys, lost opportunities, anger at time, or the feeling that one’s life has no departure schedule.

Soul is therefore not simply another word for consciousness or emotion. It is what permits events to become meaningful without requiring that meaning to be stated literally.

Hillman also resists placing soul solely inside the human individual. The person is situated within psyche, rather than psyche being enclosed inside the person. This prepares the way for his later account of the anima mundi, or soul of the world. Buildings, landscapes, objects and institutions can participate in psychological life rather than remaining dead material onto which humans project private feelings.

Function within Hillman’s system

Soul establishes the viewpoint from which every later term must be understood.

If psychology begins with the isolated rational individual, images become products generated inside that individual. Symptoms become malfunctions belonging to them. The world becomes an external environment to which they must adapt.

If psychology begins with soul, the central questions change:

What depth has this event acquired?

What image is taking shape?

What perspective is speaking?

What kind of world is being revealed?

Soul does not tell us what caused an event. It tells psychology what sort of attention the event requires.

Related ideas

Phenomenology

Phenomenology studies experience as it is lived and presented from a first-person standpoint. It attends to perception, embodiment, temporality, meaning and the surrounding life-world rather than beginning only with causal explanation. This resembles Hillman’s refusal to remove psychological phenomena from the form in which they appear.

Jung’s psychic reality

Jung’s idea of psychic reality similarly maintains that dreams, fantasies and religious images can have genuine psychological effects whether or not they correspond to external physical objects.

Existential psychology

Existential approaches also ask how events acquire personal meaning through freedom, limitation, relationship, mortality and responsibility.

Humanistic psychology

Humanistic psychology shares Hillman’s concern with meaning, value and lived experience, although Hillman criticised its tendency to centre the autonomous, developing human subject. Drob argues that Hillman’s psychology is nevertheless more closely related to humanistic thought than Hillman himself admitted.

Important distinction

Hillman’s soul is not simply:

• a religious immortal essence;
• personal identity;
• consciousness;
• emotion;
• personality;
• a hidden true self.

Nor is “soul” an empirical explanation. Saying that an event has soul does not identify its neurological or social cause.

Soul names the depth-perspective from which the event is approached.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Poetic basis of mind
• Image
• Personifying
• Soul-making
• Future entry: Anima mundi

The Poetic Basis of Mind

Concise definition

The psyche does not first receive neutral facts and later decorate them with imagination; experience is imaginative and metaphorical from the beginning.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman’s claim that mind has a poetic basis is one of the founding propositions of archetypal psychology.

“Poetic” does not mean that every person writes poetry or that factual reasoning is impossible. It means that psyche naturally organises experience through:

• images;
• contrasts;
• stories;
• metaphors;
• personifications;
• analogies;
• dramatic tensions;
• styles of expression.

A person does not merely register an employment problem and then choose a picturesque description for it. They may already experience the workplace as a prison, battlefield, family, schoolroom or sinking ship.

The metaphor is not added afterward. It participates in shaping what can be perceived, felt and done.

Hillman therefore resists accounts in which consciousness is understood as a late rational achievement built upon a fundamentally non-imaginative biological mechanism. Archetypal psychology begins with imagination as an original activity of psyche. Its preferred sources are consequently not limited to experiments and clinical classifications; it also turns to poetry, mythology, visual art, architecture and literature, where images have been most fully elaborated.

Function within Hillman’s system

The poetic basis of mind explains why psychology cannot adequately translate every image into abstract concepts.

Suppose a person says:

“My future has become a boarded-up house.”

A reductive psychology may translate this into:

“The person feels pessimistic.”

That statement may be accurate, but it loses:

• the house;
• its history;
• its closure;
• the missing inhabitants;
• the boards;
• the possibility of entry;
• the distinction between abandonment and protection.

Hillman’s psychology assumes that the image knows more than the abstract summary.

The poetic basis of mind therefore justifies a poetic psychology: a psychology whose language remains responsive to metaphor, tone, image and ambiguity.

Related ideas

Narrative psychology

Narrative psychology examines how stories organise memory, present identity and anticipated futures. It shares Hillman’s conviction that experience is not merely stored as disconnected facts but organised through meaningful forms.

Hillman goes further, however. Psyche is not only narrative. A mood, colour, object, isolated phrase or dream scene may possess psychological depth without forming a complete story.

Cognitive metaphor theory

Theories of conceptual metaphor similarly argue that metaphors structure thought rather than serving merely as ornamental language. Hillman’s concern is less linguistic and more imaginal: the metaphor can become a whole psychological world populated by persons, moods and values.

Romantic imagination

The Romantic tradition – particularly Keats, Coleridge, Shelley and Blake – treated imagination as a mode of knowledge rather than an escape from reality. Hillman deliberately places himself in this lineage.

Vico’s poetic wisdom

Giambattista Vico argued that early human thought expressed itself through imaginative universals and personified forms. Hillman’s account of archetypal images explicitly draws upon Vico’s universali fantastici.

Important distinction

The poetic basis of mind does not mean:

• factual claims need not be tested;
• imagination is always truthful;
• every metaphor reveals a hidden objective reality;
• science is only another poem;
• an appealing story is evidence that the story is historically correct.

Poetic truth and empirical truth answer different questions.

A metaphor may describe an experience accurately while remaining factually false if interpreted literally.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Soul
• Image
• Imaginal
• Psychologising
• Soul-making

Image

Concise definition

An image is a psychologically meaningful presentation with its own particular context, mood, relationships and qualities.

It is not limited to a visual picture.

Hillmanian meaning

Image is the primary datum of archetypal psychology.

An image may be:

• a dream scene;
• an internal voice;
• a remembered gesture;
• a metaphor;
• a bodily impression;
• a recurring fantasy;
• a fictional character;
• an atmosphere;
• an imagined conversation.

Hillman distinguishes an image from a general symbol.

Consider the difference between:

a bird

and:

a wet rook with one damaged wing standing on the kitchen table.

“Bird” is a category. It may easily be associated with freedom, spirit or transcendence.

The rook is an image. Its species, wetness, injury, location and posture belong together. Removing one element changes the presentation.

Hillman therefore asks the interpreter to stick to the image. A dream should not immediately be broken apart into separate symbols and decoded. The whole scene, including its vagueness, mood and apparently incidental details, must first be preserved.

In “An Inquiry into Image,” Hillman argues that general symbolic interpretation often gains universality by sacrificing precision. The swan, cave, arrows and dreamer’s movement belong to one interrelated scene; once removed and interpreted separately, they are no longer the dream that was presented.

Function within Hillman’s system

Image provides a practical object of attention without requiring psychology to posit an invisible structure behind it.

Instead of asking:

Which hidden archetype caused this dream?

Hillman asks:

What happens when this particular image is described more accurately?

This shift places interpretation after observation.

The image can be elaborated through restatement, analogy and attention to language. Meaning emerges as the image acquires form; it need not be extracted as a separate conceptual message.

Related ideas

Phenomenological description

Phenomenology similarly suspends premature causal explanation in order to describe experience as it presents itself. Both approaches value first-person precision and the relation between focal details and the surrounding experiential horizon.

Gestalt psychology

Gestalt approaches emphasise that a whole configuration cannot always be understood by analysing isolated elements. Hillman’s image likewise possesses internal relations: the parts mean what they do partly because of their position within the whole scene.

Close reading

Literary close reading attends to exact diction, rhythm, context and relations within a text rather than treating a work merely as evidence for a theory. Hillman’s image-work often resembles close reading of a dream or symptom.

Ecological perception

Ecological psychology argues that perception concerns meaningful relations between an organism and its environment, including perceived possibilities for action. Hillman’s work is not a theory of direct perception, but both resist reducing the perceived world to neutral sensory particles reconstructed entirely inside the mind.

Important distinction: image is not symbol

A symbol is commonly treated as something standing for something else:

the house represents the self.

An image need not stand for a hidden second object. Its meaning may exist in its own pattern:

this particular house, with its locked nursery and illuminated cellar, is already the psychological event.

This does not prohibit symbolism. It prevents symbolic translation from destroying the original presentation.

Important distinction: image is not necessarily visible

An image may be auditory, verbal, tactile, spatial or atmospheric.

The expression “I am carrying a weight” is imaginal even if no weight is visually pictured.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Poetic basis of mind
• Imaginal
• Archetypal
• Personifying
• Future entry: Sticking with the image

Imaginal

Concise definition

Imaginal describes the domain and mode in which images possess psychological reality without being reduced either to physical objects or to unreal inventions.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman adopted the word imaginal principally from the French scholar Henry Corbin.

Modern usage often treats imaginary as equivalent to false, fabricated or non-existent. Corbin introduced imaginal to name a mode of reality accessed through imaginative perception. In the Islamic philosophical traditions he studied, the mundus imaginalis was conceived as an intermediate world between sensory matter and abstract intellect, possessing forms and dimensions appropriate to imaginative perception.

Hillman adapts this distinction psychologically.

A dream figure is not physically present in the room. It is also not therefore meaningless or simply unreal. It can affect emotion, conduct, identity and relationship. It may arrive without conscious invention and resist deliberate control.

The imaginal names the field in which such figures can be encountered according to their own mode of appearance.

This does not require every reader to accept Corbin’s metaphysics. Psychologically, the term allows one to say:

The image is real as an imaginal event without deciding prematurely what sort of being it possesses outside the experience.

Function within Hillman’s system

The imaginal protects images from two opposing reductions.

Material reduction

The image is explained entirely as a by-product of brain activity, conditioning or sensory error.

Literal metaphysical inflation

The image is treated as proof that a corresponding external supernatural being objectively exists.

Hillman’s imaginal approach remains between those extremes. It preserves the image’s autonomy and significance while withholding final ontological certainty.

This intermediate position is essential to archetypal psychology. Without it, the gods must either be dismissed as unreal fantasies or asserted as literal external entities.

Related ideas

Jung’s psychic reality

Jung’s psychic reality similarly grants dreams and fantasies genuine psychological status without requiring that their contents exist physically.

Winnicott’s potential space

Donald Winnicott’s potential space is the intermediate domain of play, creativity and culture that cannot be reduced simply to inner fantasy or outer material fact. It resembles the imaginal in protecting an “in-between” area where meaning is created and encountered.

Winnicott’s concept is developmental and relational, arising from the infant’s negotiation between subjective creation and shared reality. Corbin’s and Hillman’s imaginal is more explicitly mythic and ontological.

Transitional phenomena

A transitional object is neither experienced simply as part of the infant nor merely as an ordinary external object. It participates in a field where imagination and reality meet. This resembles, but does not duplicate, Hillman’s imaginal understanding.

Active imagination

Jung’s active imagination intentionally enters into relationship with spontaneous images while preserving their relative autonomy.

Important distinction

Imaginal does not mean:

• imaginary in the sense of false;
• physical;
• necessarily supernatural;
• historically factual;
• an uncontrolled hallucination;
• whatever a person chooses to invent.

An imaginal experience may be psychologically compelling while its interpretation remains uncertain.

The strength of an image is evidence of its importance to the person – not automatic proof of the image’s claims about external reality.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Image
• Archetypal
• Personifying
• Soul-making
• Future entry: Psychic reality

Archetypal

Concise definition

Archetypal names the depth, richness, generativity and transpersonal resonance that an image can acquire.

Hillman increasingly prefers archetypal as an adjective rather than archetype as a fixed psychological object.

Hillmanian meaning

Jung used archetype in more than one way.

Sometimes the archetype appears to be a recurring primordial image. Elsewhere Jung distinguishes:

• the archetype as such, an unknowable organising form;
• the archetypal image, the particular form through which that structure appears in consciousness.

This ambiguity became one of the central theoretical problems inherited by post-Jungian psychology.

Hillman moves attention away from the hypothetical invisible structure and back towards the image.

Rather than asking:

What is the archetype behind this image?

he asks:

What makes this image archetypal?

In “An Inquiry into Image,” Hillman proposes that an image becomes archetypal through the richness released by close attention. Archetypal depth is revealed through:

• precise portrayal;
• metaphorical hearing;
• internal necessity;
• analogical richness;
• generative power;
• the sense that an individual image bears more-than-personal importance.

“Archetypal” therefore becomes a word of valuation. It points towards the widest and deepest significance an image can sustain rather than merely classifying it as an example of a predetermined universal type.

Function within Hillman’s system

The term connects the highly particular with the widely human.

A dream about a broken mug can remain completely personal. But as its relations deepen – to hospitality, domestic labour, rupture, memory, inheritance, fragility and the impossibility of returning to an earlier wholeness – it can acquire archetypal significance.

The image does not become archetypal because “mug” appears in an official catalogue of universal symbols.

It becomes archetypal because the particular image opens into a field of collective importance without ceasing to be this particular broken mug.

Related ideas

Jung’s archetypes

Hillman’s term remains indebted to Jung’s theory of inherited or collective patterns of psychic organisation. The difference lies in emphasis: Jung often theorises the structure underlying images, while Hillman concentrates upon the archetypal quality emerging through images.

Vico’s imaginative universals

Vico’s universali fantastici are personified imaginative forms through which human cultures organise experience. Hillman treats them as important predecessors to archetypal psychology.

Pattern recognition

Many contemporary theories identify recurring cognitive, developmental or cultural patterns. An archetypal pattern, however, is not merely a statistical regularity. It carries emotional, imaginal and value-laden force.

Mythic motifs

Comparative mythology identifies recurring motifs such as descent, exile, sacrifice, return and transformation. Hillman uses such parallels to deepen images, but resists turning them into a universal decoding system.

Important distinction

Archetypal does not mean stereotypical.

A stereotype reduces difference by forcing individuals into a fixed category.

An archetypal approach should deepen the particular until its wider resonance becomes perceptible.

Nor does archetypal necessarily mean:

• ancient;
• universally identical;
• biologically encoded as a completed image;
• supernatural;
• grand or dramatic.

Hillman argues that an apparently ordinary image can acquire archetypal depth when its internal richness is allowed to unfold.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Image
• Imaginal
• Personifying
• Psychological polytheism
• Future entry: Myth

Personifying or Personification

Concise definition

Personifying is the psyche’s tendency to present powers, moods, functions and conflicts as persons or relatively autonomous figures.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman does not treat personification merely as a childish mistake in which impersonal processes are mistakenly imagined to possess personality.

For him, personification is a fundamental activity of psyche.

Anxiety may appear as:

• a watchman;
• a persecutor;
• an abandoned child;
• a messenger;
• an interrogator.

Conscience may appear as:

• a judge;
• a parent;
• a priest;
• a civil servant;
• a witness.

Each personification provides a more differentiated account than the abstract term alone.

Personifying changes:

“I am anxious”

into:

“A sleepless guard is watching every doorway.”

The anxiety is no longer identical with the whole person. It possesses a position, task, manner and possible history.

Hillman extends Jung’s personified figures – shadow, anima, animus, trickster, child, wise elder and great mother – into a general theory of psychological multiplicity. Rather than treating non-ego persons as signs of failed integration, archetypal psychology brings them into fuller awareness and allows them to relativise the ego’s claim to be the personality’s only legitimate centre.

Function within Hillman’s system

Personification makes psychological plurality perceptible.

Without personification, a person may experience only:

• pressure;
• confusion;
• contradiction;
• inexplicable moods;
• unwanted impulses.

Once a function acquires a face and voice, a relationship becomes possible.

One can ask:

• Who is speaking?
• What does this figure value?
• What does it fear?
• What domain does it represent?
• What style of world appears through it?
• How does it relate to other figures?

This is the point at which Hillman comes closest to later parts-working approaches.

Related ideas

Jung’s autonomous complexes

Jung observed that complexes can behave like relatively independent personalities. They possess their own memories, feelings and intentions and can temporarily disturb the ego’s control.

Internal Family Systems

IFS treats the mind as naturally multiple and works directly with parts possessing feelings, beliefs, intentions and protective roles.

Hillman and IFS share a respect for multiplicity, but IFS usually places parts within a structured system ultimately led by Self. Hillman resists installing one permanent sovereign above the figures.

Dialogical Self Theory

Dialogical Self Theory describes the self as a dynamic multiplicity of “I-positions” capable of acquiring distinct voices and entering into dialogue. It draws partly upon Bakhtin’s model of polyphony, in which no single voice necessarily exhausts the meaning of the whole.

Psychosynthesis and subpersonalities

Roberto Assagioli’s psychosynthesis works with subpersonalities as distinguishable organisations within the personality.

Narrative externalisation

Narrative therapy may externalise a problem so that the person is no longer identical with it:

The person is not the depression; the person has a relationship with depression.

Important distinction

Personification does not establish that the figure:

• exists as a physically separate being;
• possesses infallible knowledge;
• corresponds to a literal god;
• records an exact historical memory;
• must be obeyed.

It is a psychological mode of differentiation.

Calling an experience “a guard” should make its character more precise, not settle its ontology.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Image
• Archetypal
• Psychological polytheism
• Pathologising
• Series cross-reference: Absolute Democracy of the Psyche

Psychological Polytheism

Concise definition

Psychological polytheism understands psyche as a plurality of centres, values and styles of consciousness that cannot legitimately be reduced to one ruling principle.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman uses polytheism both religiously and metaphorically.

He does not merely propose replacing Christianity with literal worship of Greek gods. The gods provide a precise language for psychological differentiation.

Aphrodite, Athena, Ares, Hermes, Dionysus, Hestia, Apollo and Saturn do not value the same world.

• Aphrodite perceives attraction and beauty.
• Athena perceives strategy and crafted intelligence.
• Ares perceives conflict and violated boundaries.
• Hermes perceives exchange, ambiguity and crossings.
• Dionysus perceives dissolution, ecstasy and possession.
• Hestia perceives centre, stillness and interiority.
• Apollo perceives clarity, form and distance.
• Saturn perceives age, limitation, repetition and consequence.

No one perspective is appropriate in every domain.

Hillman argues that the soul’s multiplicity requires a correspondingly differentiated psychological theology. A single-centred ego or supreme integrating Self risks reproducing monotheism psychologically: one privileged authority absorbs or judges every other mode of experience.

Function within Hillman’s system

Polytheism gives personification a wider constitutional structure.

It explains that inner figures do not merely differ in content. They may inhabit different orders of value.

A cautious part and an adventurous part may not simply possess different information. They may disagree about what makes life worth living.

The task is therefore not always to discover which is correct. It may be to establish:

• which perspective is present;
• where its authority belongs;
• what it reveals;
• where it exceeds its proper domain;
• which other gods or perspectives it excludes.

Psychological health becomes less a final state of unity than an ability to recognise and negotiate plurality.

Related ideas

William James’s pluralistic universe

William James opposed monistic philosophies that reduce reality to one final substance or explanatory principle. His pluralism permits multiple centres and unfinished relations. Hillman explicitly invokes James’s “pluralistic universe” when describing the need for psychological polytheism.

Dialogical Self Theory

Dialogical Self Theory understands the mind as a society of voices and positions rather than a single unchanging centre.

Parts-working models

IFS, ego-state therapy and psychosynthesis all recognise psychological multiplicity. Most parts models, however, retain some coordinating or integrating centre.

Value pluralism

Philosophical value pluralism holds that genuine goods may conflict without being reducible to one universal measure. Freedom, security, justice, loyalty and creativity may all matter, yet pull in incompatible directions.

Polyphony

Bakhtin’s literary concept of polyphony describes a work containing multiple voices that are not reduced to mouthpieces for a single authorial conclusion.

Important distinction

Psychological polytheism is not:

• the claim that every impulse is equally wise;
• moral relativism;
• an absence of responsibility;
• literal possession by external gods;
• chaos;
• a prohibition against coordination.

It rejects permanent sovereignty, not necessarily organisation.

Hillman’s unresolved difficulty is explaining how a polytheistic psyche can reach unified action without reinstating a ruling Self. The absolute-democratic model developed later in this series proposes unanimity rather than hierarchy as one possible solution.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Personifying
• Archetypal
• Pathologising
• Psychologising
• Series cross-reference: Absolute Democracy of the Psyche

Pathologising

Concise definition

Pathologising is the psyche’s capacity to produce disturbance, affliction, abnormality and distorted perspectives.

Hillman treats this capacity as psychologically meaningful rather than merely as an accidental defect.

Hillmanian meaning

Modern clinical language commonly treats pathology as a deviation from healthy functioning.

Hillman changes the noun pathology into the activity pathologising.

The shift matters.

Pathologising is something psyche does:

• it becomes anxious;
• fragments;
• obsesses;
• repeats;
• imagines catastrophe;
• falls into melancholy;
• generates disturbing figures;
• experiences itself through distorted perspectives.

Hillman argues that psychology itself was founded through attention to such disturbances. Freud and Jung did not discover psyche by studying only efficient, contented and socially adapted people. Symptoms, dreams, hysteria, compulsions and extreme states forced psychology to recognise that conscious ego-life was not the whole mind.

Pathologising may therefore reveal what normal consciousness excludes.

Hillman does not propose a final “cure” for the psyche’s capacity to pathologise. He proposes a re-evaluation of its meaning and its relation to individuality. Archetypal psychology regards psychopathology as inherent to psychic reality rather than explaining it entirely through external social classification or treating it as foreign material that could ideally be eliminated.

Function within Hillman’s system

Pathologising prevents soul from becoming an ideal of peaceful depth, spiritual beauty or harmonious imagination.

Soul is also encountered through:

• failure;
• breakdown;
• shame;
• obsession;
• contradiction;
• fear;
• mortality.

A psychology that accepts images only when they are beautiful or healing remains governed by a spiritual ideal of purification.

Pathologising keeps psychology close to difficulty, limitation and death.

It asks:

What becomes visible from the afflicted perspective?

This is not the same as asking:

How is this affliction secretly good?

The image may accuse, distort, expose, interrupt or deepen. It need not conceal a simple benevolent purpose.

Related ideas

Freud’s meaningful symptom

Psychoanalysis treats symptoms as compromise formations with histories and functions rather than as meaningless defects.

Jungian compensation

Jung proposed that dreams and symptoms may compensate for one-sided conscious attitudes, bringing excluded material into psychological life.

IFS and “no bad parts”

IFS assumes that apparently destructive parts generally possess protective intentions. This resembles Hillman’s refusal to condemn the pathological figure.

The difference is important. Hillman does not necessarily interpret every pathology as protection. The symptom may disrupt or reveal rather than defend.

Anti-psychiatry

R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz challenged conventional definitions of abnormality and the power exercised through psychiatric classification. Hillman shares some suspicion of normalisation but does not simply deny that psychopathology exists. He regards it as a real dimension of psyche.

Neurodiversity

Neurodiversity frameworks similarly challenge the assumption that all cognitive difference should be measured solely against one model of normality. Hillman’s concern is broader and more imaginal, encompassing suffering and symbolic meaning rather than primarily neurological variation.

Important distinction

Honouring pathologising does not mean:

• refusing treatment;
• denying biological illness;
• regarding every symptom as profound;
• celebrating suffering;
• abandoning safeguarding;
• claiming that severe distress should simply be endured;
• interpreting medical emergencies only as symbols.

Meaning, cause and treatment are separate questions.

A symptom can possess psychological significance while also requiring medical, social or practical intervention.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Soul
• Personifying
• Psychological polytheism
• Soul-making
• Future entry: Soul and spirit

Psychologising, Seeing Through and Deliteralising

Concise definition

Psychologising is the practice of seeing through a statement, event or theory to the fantasies, metaphors and assumptions operating within it.

Deliteralising loosens the belief that the first or most obvious account is the only possible reality.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman’s psychologising does not mean reducing every problem to private mental causes.

It means examining the psychology concealed inside apparently neutral language.

Consider the statement:

“A mature adult should be completely independent.”

Psychologising asks:

• What image of adulthood is being presented?
• Which forms of dependence are hidden?
• Is the ideal figure a solitary hero?
• What forms of care become shameful?
• Which economic or cultural arrangements benefit from this definition?

The statement is no longer treated merely as true or false. It becomes a psychological document expressing values, fears and mythic assumptions.

Hillman describes psychologising as seeing through. Every statement contains implications and suppositions not fully acknowledged by the speaker. The method examines what is folded inside the statement rather than accepting its literal surface as complete.

Deliteralising performs a similar movement within personal experience.

“I am worthless”

can become:

“A punitive judge is presently declaring me worthless.”

The emotional force remains, but the judgement is no longer identical with reality or with the whole person.

Function within Hillman’s system

Psychologising applies archetypal psychology to psychology itself.

Terms such as:

• normal;
• mature;
• healthy;
• productive;
• rational;
• integrated;
• disordered;

are not transparent scientific windows. They contain images of the desirable human being.

Psychologising therefore prevents psychological theories from treating their own metaphors as literal facts.

The ego can be seen as a heroic image.

The Self can be seen as a monotheistic image.

Development can be seen as an upward journey.

Healing can be seen as repair, purification, integration or return.

Once those images are recognised, alternatives become possible.

Related ideas

Phenomenological bracketing

Phenomenology attempts to suspend taken-for-granted assumptions in order to examine how a phenomenon is actually given in experience. Hillman’s method similarly interrupts habitual explanations, though it uses metaphorical and mythological reflection rather than Husserl’s formal method.

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics examines interpretation, historical context and the assumptions through which understanding occurs. Psychologising is a distinctly imaginal form of hermeneutic suspicion.

Ideology critique

Marxist, feminist and postcolonial criticism ask which interests and power relations are concealed within apparently universal claims. Hillman’s method can support this inquiry, although mythological language cannot replace material analysis.

Cognitive defusion in ACT

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy uses cognitive defusion, also called deliteralisation, to help people experience thoughts as events rather than automatically accepting what those thoughts say as literal truth.

For example:

“I am a failure”

becomes:

“I am having the thought that I am a failure.”

This resembles Hillman’s effort to loosen literal identification. ACT generally aims at psychological flexibility and valued action; Hillman aims at imaginal depth and metaphorical differentiation.

Narrative deconstruction

Narrative therapy examines dominant stories and the assumptions sustaining them, allowing alternative accounts of identity and experience to emerge.

Important distinction

Deliteralising does not mean denying material facts.

If a worker says:

“My employer watches everything I do,”

the statement may contain an image of an all-seeing authority.

The employer may also literally use surveillance software.

Psychologising should reveal the meanings surrounding a fact, not replace factual investigation.

Nor does “seeing through” mean that the interpreter has discovered the final hidden truth. Every new interpretation also carries its own assumptions and can itself be psychologised.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Poetic basis of mind
• Image
• Personifying
• Psychological polytheism
• Soul-making

Soul-Making

Concise definition

Soul-making is the process through which events, images and relationships acquire greater psychological depth, differentiation and imaginal reality.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman takes the phrase soul-making particularly from John Keats, who described the world as a “vale of Soul-making.”

Soul-making is not the construction of an immortal entity. Nor is it the discovery of a completely formed true self hidden beneath social conditioning.

It is the continuing activity through which life becomes psyche.

An event becomes soul-bearing when it is:

• imagined;
• reflected upon;
• personified;
• connected through analogy;
• released from one literal interpretation;
• placed within mythic, aesthetic and historical relations.

Hillman describes soul-making as the crafting or individuation of images. The primary concern is not only the development of the human ego but the fuller realisation of the imaginal figures themselves.

A dream figure becomes more individuated as its exact appearance, voice, relationships and domain are allowed to develop.

A symptom becomes more differentiated as it ceases to be merely “anxiety” and becomes a recognisable watchman, fugitive, alarm or tribunal.

A place becomes more ensouled as its atmosphere, history and demands are perceived.

For Hillman, soul-making is inseparable from the world. It can occur through art, craft, relationships, religion, reflection and social action. The division between private soul and public world begins to dissolve when every worldly event can also become a site of psychological depth.

Function within Hillman’s system

Soul-making gathers the previous nine principles into one activity.

It begins with soul as the perspective of depth.

It assumes the poetic basis of mind.

It works through the image.

It respects the image as imaginally real.

It permits the image to acquire archetypal depth.

It allows powers to appear through personification.

It preserves their plurality through psychological polytheism.

It does not exclude affliction, because pathologising also belongs to soul.

It deepens events by psychologising and deliteralising them.

Soul-making is therefore not one additional technique. It is the overall movement produced when the other principles work together.

Related ideas

Jungian individuation

Jungian individuation concerns the development of a more conscious relationship between ego, unconscious life and the wider Self.

Hillman retains the language of individuation but shifts its object. Soul-making can be understood as the individuation of imaginal reality: the images, rather than only the conscious person, become more fully themselves.

Keats’s negative capability

Keats’s negative capability values the capacity to remain with uncertainty, mystery and partial knowledge without forcing premature resolution. This resembles Hillman’s willingness to remain with an image rather than converting it quickly into a clear explanatory statement.

Narrative identity

Narrative psychology explores how people form meaningful continuity by placing events within stories. Soul-making may also transform events through story, although it resists making every image serve one coherent personal biography.

Artistic creation

Art-making gives form to images without requiring that they first be translated into abstract explanation. Hillman repeatedly treats artistic craft as a model for psychological work.

Process philosophy

Process philosophies understand reality through becoming, relation and creative development rather than through static substances. Soul-making similarly treats psyche as an activity rather than a completed thing.

Active imagination

Active imagination develops a sustained relationship with spontaneous images, allowing them to acquire form, voice and differentiation.

Parts work

Parts-working approaches may help an initially vague feeling develop into a recognisable inner figure with a history, role and relationship to other parts.

The Hillmanian emphasis differs: the purpose is not necessarily to heal or reorganise the figure into a harmonious internal system. Its own imaginal development may be valuable even when conflict remains.

Important distinction

Soul-making is not necessarily:

• self-improvement;
• symptom removal;
• spiritual purification;
• personal success;
• ego development;
• increasing happiness;
• integrating every conflict into harmony;
• inventing an attractive interpretation.

An experience may gain soul while becoming more difficult, ambiguous or morally demanding.

Nor does soul-making imply that every event must be endlessly interpreted. Sometimes precision, craft, mourning or sustained attention may deepen an event more effectively than explanation.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• all preceding entries;
• Future entry: Anima mundi
• Future entry: The thought of the heart
• Future entry: Soul and spirit
• Future entry: The underworld
• Series cross-reference: Absolute Democracy of the Psyche

The conceptual sequence in summary

The first ten terms create the following movement:

Psyche or soul establishes the perspective of depth.

The poetic basis of mind explains why this perspective naturally speaks through metaphor and imagination.

Image names the particular form in which psyche presents itself.

Imaginal protects that presentation from being dismissed as unreal or inflated into literal external fact.

Archetypal names the greater depth and collective resonance an image can acquire.

Personifying allows images and functions to appear as differentiated psychological persons.

Psychological polytheism provides a plural framework within which those persons can retain distinct values and domains.

Pathologising ensures that affliction and distortion are not excluded from the legitimate life of psyche.

Psychologising and deliteralising reveal the hidden images within statements and loosen the authority of one literal account.

Soul-making is the continuing process through which all of these movements deepen life into psychological experience.

The system can be condensed into one sequence:

Life becomes experience through soul; soul speaks poetically through images; images deepen archetypally, personify into a plural psyche, suffer through pathology, see through literalism, and thereby continue making soul.

Reading guide

Primary Hillman texts

Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account

This is the most efficient primary source for the glossary. It contains sections on image, soul, soul-making, psychological polytheism, pathologising, personifying and psychologising. A searchable digital edition is accessible online.

“An Inquiry into Image”

This freely accessible essay offers Hillman’s clearest practical distinction between image and symbol. It develops “sticking with the image,” analogy, precision and the process through which an image gains archetypal depth.

Re-Visioning Psychology

This is Hillman’s major theoretical work and the principal source for personifying, pathologising, psychologising and soul-making. The OPUS bibliography provides its publication history and places it within Hillman’s wider body of work.

The Dream and the Underworld

This book develops Hillman’s refusal to translate images immediately into practical messages for waking life. It will become particularly important in later glossary entries on the underworld, Hades, death and dream.

Related traditions

Henry Corbin, “Mundus Imaginalis”

The Association des amis de Henry et Stella Corbin provides the complete essay explaining Corbin’s distinction between imaginary fabrication and the imaginal world perceived through active imagination.

Michael Vannoy Adams, “The Archetypal School”

This Cambridge chapter explains the definitional tension between Jung’s archetype-as-such and the archetypal image and situates Hillman’s revision within the post-Jungian field.

Sanford Drob, “The Depth of the Soul”

Drob provides a concise critical overview of Hillman’s major ideas, including deepening, personification, image, myth, psychopathology, polytheism and world soul.

Dialogical Self Theory

Oxford, Cambridge and Wiley summaries describe the self as a dynamic multiplicity of voiced positions, providing one of the closest independently developed parallels to Hillman’s polycentric personality.

Cognitive defusion

The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science provides an accessible account of cognitive defusion or deliteralisation in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Formal bibliography

Primary Hillman sources

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

Hillman, J. (1977) ‘An inquiry into image’, Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, pp. 62–88.

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

Hillman, J. (1983) Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. 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.

Jungian and post-Jungian 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.

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

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

Imagination, phenomenology and the imaginal

Corbin, H. (1972) ‘Mundus imaginalis, or the imaginary and the imaginal’, Spring.

Smith, D.W. (2023) ‘Phenomenology’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Winnicott, D.W. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

Multiplicity and dialogical theories

Hermans, H.J.M. (2001) ‘The dialogical self: Toward a theory of personal and cultural positioning’, Culture & Psychology, 7(3), pp. 243–281.

Hermans, H.J.M. and Hermans-Konopka, A. (2010) Dialogical Self Theory: Positioning and Counter-Positioning in a Globalizing Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schwartz, R.C. and Sweezy, M. (2020) Internal Family Systems Therapy. 2nd edn. New York: Guilford Press.

Narrative, metaphor and deliteralisation

Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hayes, S.C., Strosahl, K.D. and Wilson, K.G. (2012) Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change. 2nd edn. New York: Guilford Press.

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

White, M. and Epston, D. (1990) Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York: W.W. Norton.

Poetic and philosophical sources

James, W. (1909) A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longmans, Green and Co.

Keats, J. (1819) Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February–3 May.

Vico, G. (1744/1984) The New Science. Translated by T.G. Bergin and M.H. Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.