A Glossary of Hillmanian Thought

Part Two: World, Underworld, Myth and Calling

Introduction

The first ten entries established the foundations of archetypal psychology:

soul > poetic mind > image > imaginal > archetypal > personification > polytheism > pathologising > psychologising > soul-making

Those concepts describe how psyche presents itself and how psychological attention may respond.

Part Two follows the consequences.

If soul is not a private substance contained inside the individual, then psychology must recognise soul in places, objects, animals, institutions and the surrounding world. If perception is imaginal, then beauty and ugliness are not decorative additions to reality; they participate in how the world addresses the psyche. If soul deepens rather than ascends, dreams cannot be treated merely as messages intended to improve waking life. They belong to an underworld mode of experience in which memory, death, shadow and image operate according to different values.

From that underworld, the glossary returns through metaphor, analogy, amplification and myth: the forms through which psychological experience becomes intelligible without being reduced to literal explanation. It then turns towards Hillman’s later psychology of vocation – daimon, calling, character and fate – and ends with the paired figures of puer and senex, whose tension expresses the relationship between possibility and limitation, novelty and endurance, flight and gravity.

The sequence is therefore:

world > perception > beauty > descent > dream > metaphor > myth > calling > character > time

As before, cross-references identify similarities with neighbouring theories without treating them as exact equivalents.

Anima Mundi – The Soul of the World

Concise definition

Anima mundi is the proposition that psyche belongs to the world as well as to human beings.

Places, objects, animals, buildings and institutions may present expressive qualities rather than existing only as neutral matter interpreted by an interior mind.

Hillmanian meaning

The Latin phrase anima mundi means world soul or soul of the world. Hillman recovers it principally through Plato, Plotinus and the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino.

Modern psychology commonly locates psyche inside the individual. The person possesses thoughts, feelings, images and projections, while the world outside is treated as physical environment.

Hillman questions this division.

A city may appear:

• hurried;
• neglected;
• hostile;
• magnificent;
• exhausted;
• theatrical;
• soulless.

A room may feel accusing. A road may invite speed. A hospital corridor may communicate fear and impersonality before anyone speaks. A landscape may evoke grief not because the observer has projected a private problem onto it, but because something in the landscape has actually been injured.

The anima mundi proposes that such qualities are not psychologically irrelevant properties added by a subjective observer. The world appears through faces, forms, textures, arrangements and atmospheres that address the psyche.

Hillman’s 1982 essay “Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World” became one of the major statements of this position. It was later revised and published with “The Thought of the Heart.” Spring Publications describes the two essays as central texts in the movement to return psychic reality to the world.

Function within Hillman’s system

The anima mundi corrects the excessive inwardness of psychology.

If psyche exists only inside people, then psychological treatment naturally asks:

What is wrong within this person?

The world becomes background.

Hillman adds another question:

What kind of world is this person being required to inhabit?

Depression may involve personal history, biology and internal conflict. It may also respond to:

• humiliating work;
• isolation;
• ugly and inaccessible environments;
• institutional powerlessness;
• ecological destruction;
• the loss of meaningful public space.

The world is not merely a trigger acting upon the psyche. It participates in the psychological event.

This makes psychology civic and ecological. The city, institution or landscape may become the patient rather than only the individual adapting to it. Hillman’s concise account of archetypal psychology explicitly describes the later movement of the field towards the soul of the city and towards places where psychic imagination becomes actualised in the world.

Related ideas

Ecopsychology

Ecopsychology examines the psychological relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world. It similarly rejects the assumption that mental health can be understood independently of ecological belonging and environmental damage.

Hillman’s influence upon ecopsychology lies partly in his refusal to treat nature merely as a therapeutic resource for humans. The world possesses its own claims rather than existing only to improve individual wellbeing.

Phenomenology and the life-world

Phenomenology’s concept of the life-world concerns the meaningful world already inhabited before scientific abstraction divides it into neutral objects. Hillman’s world soul similarly begins from experienced qualities rather than from a supposedly value-free physical world.

Ecological psychology

Ecological approaches to perception investigate how organisms perceive meaningful possibilities within environments rather than reconstructing a neutral world exclusively inside the brain.

Hillman’s theory is more poetic and metaphysical, but both approaches resist a rigid separation between an inner perceiver and a meaningless exterior.

Indigenous and animist philosophies

Many animist traditions understand animals, places, weather systems and objects as relational presences rather than inert resources. The comparison is important, but Hillman’s anima mundi belongs primarily to Greek and Renaissance philosophical traditions and should not be treated as a substitute for culturally specific Indigenous philosophies.

Extended and enactive mind

Contemporary theories of extended or enactive cognition argue that mental activity can depend upon relations among brain, body, tools and environment. Hillman’s claim is broader and more aesthetic: the world does not merely assist cognition; it presents soul.

Important distinction

The anima mundi does not necessarily mean that:

• every physical object possesses a humanlike consciousness;
• all environments are benevolent;
• subjective projection does not exist;
• material facts can be replaced by poetic impressions;
• every sense of atmosphere is objectively shared by everyone.

It is a challenge to the assumption that psyche must be located entirely inside the skull.

Nor does world soul imply that human interpretation is infallible. A building may be experienced as threatening for personal reasons, while also possessing objectively intimidating architectural features. Both levels may matter.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Soul
• Imaginal
• Dehumanising
• The thought of the heart
• Beauty
• Soul-making

Dehumanising

Concise definition

Dehumanising is Hillman’s deliberately provocative term for releasing psychological reality from the assumption that humanity is the centre and measure of everything.

Hillmanian meaning

In ordinary ethical and political language, dehumanisation means denying people their humanity and thereby facilitating cruelty, exclusion or violence.

Hillman does not use the word in that sense.

His “dehumanising” is directed against anthropocentrism: the habit of translating every image, animal, object and worldly event into a statement about the human personality.

A dream fox becomes “my cunning.”

A river becomes “my emotional flow.”

A damaged tree becomes “my wounded self.”

The non-human figure is permitted to appear only after being converted into a human symbol.

Hillman asks psychology to resist this reflex.

A fox in a dream may first be approached as a fox:

• an animal;
• a nocturnal hunter;
• a creature with a habitat;
• a body with its own movement and senses;
• a presence carrying cultural and mythological histories.

The fox may eventually illuminate some aspect of the dreamer, but it should not be deprived immediately of its animal otherness.

“Dehumanising or Soul-Making” forms the fourth major division of Re-Visioning Psychology, following personifying, pathologising and psychologising. Hillman’s target is a psychology preoccupied with “Man” as its single overvalued idea.

Function within Hillman’s system

Dehumanising is the movement through which soul escapes confinement within the personal human subject.

It permits psychology to recognise:

• animals as animals;
• buildings as buildings;
• rivers as rivers;
• machines as machines;
• gods as gods;
• death as more than a stage in personal development.

This does not exclude human meaning. It prevents human meaning from becoming the only legitimate meaning.

Dehumanising also challenges the ego’s assumption that every dream has been produced for its benefit. A dream figure may not exist primarily to instruct, heal or complete the waking personality.

The term therefore prepares for Hillman’s underworld psychology, where the dream ego becomes one shade among others rather than the owner of the dream.

Related ideas

Posthumanism

Posthumanist philosophy challenges the idea of the autonomous human subject as the unquestioned centre of ethics, meaning and knowledge. It examines humanity’s entanglement with animals, technologies and environments.

Hillman’s approach shares the decentring movement but remains grounded in myth and soul rather than in contemporary technological or political analysis.

Deep ecology

Deep ecology rejects environmental ethics based only upon human usefulness. It attributes intrinsic value to non-human beings and ecological systems.

Hillman similarly objects when the natural world is valued solely as a setting for human development.

Object-oriented ontology

Object-oriented philosophies resist reducing objects to their usefulness for human beings or to human perceptions of them. Hillman’s world is also populated by things possessing appearances and claims that exceed personal projection.

Actor-network theory

Actor-network theory examines the agency exercised through networks of human and non-human actors. It differs from Hillman’s poetic psychology but similarly weakens the assumption that all meaningful action begins with an autonomous human subject.

Freud’s “decentring” of the ego

Freud’s proposition that the ego is not master in its own house decentralises conscious humanity internally. Hillman extends this decentring into the non-human world.

Important distinction

Hillman’s term should not be used carelessly in settings involving oppression, racism, disability or genocide, where dehumanisation retains its ordinary and serious meaning.

The two uses must be distinguished explicitly:

• ethical dehumanisation denies moral standing to people;
• Hillmanian dehumanising denies humans exclusive possession of soul.

The second must never become an excuse for the first.

Dehumanising also does not require indifference to human suffering. It asks that human concern coexist with recognition of a wider field of life and meaning.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Anima mundi
• Psychological polytheism
• The underworld
• Dream and dream ego
• Soul-making

The Thought of the Heart

Concise definition

The thought of the heart is a mode of perception that recognises the qualitative, imaginal and particular character of what appears.

The heart is not merely a container of emotion opposed to rational thought.

Hillmanian meaning

Modern Western language often divides reason and feeling:

• the head thinks;
• the heart feels.

Hillman challenges this division.

Drawing especially upon Henry Corbin and Renaissance traditions, he presents the heart as an organ of imaginative perception. It does not merely react emotionally after the intellect has identified an object. It perceives the object through qualities.

The analytical intellect may recognise:

a wooden chair manufactured in 1930.

The heart may perceive:

a severe, dark chair whose narrow arms demand uprightness and whose worn seat carries generations of waiting.

The second account is not necessarily more factually correct. It reveals a different order of knowledge: sensuous, relational and imaginal.

The heart recognises the particular face of a thing rather than reducing it to its class.

Hillman first published “The Thought of the Heart” through the Eranos tradition and later revised it for The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. His bibliography dates the Eranos paper to 1981 and records the subsequent expanded publication.

Function within Hillman’s system

The thought of the heart supplies the perceptual faculty required by the anima mundi.

If the world has soul, psychology needs a way of perceiving it.

Abstract classification alone cannot disclose:

• atmosphere;
• dignity;
• ugliness;
• charm;
• sorrow;
• invitation;
• estrangement.

The heart reads the world’s appearances aesthetically.

This does not mean abandoning conceptual thought. It means that a concept should not erase the presentation through which a thing becomes psychologically present.

The thought of the heart also checks the ego’s tendency to turn perception into ownership. To perceive something through the heart is to allow it to display its own qualities rather than asking immediately what it represents for “me.”

Related ideas

Aristotle’s nous and practical perception

Ancient philosophy sometimes distinguishes abstract calculation from forms of intelligence that grasp a situation as a meaningful whole. Hillman’s heart similarly recognises qualities not easily derived from general rules.

Pascal’s “reasons of the heart”

Blaise Pascal famously distinguishes forms of knowing available to the heart from those available to discursive reason. Hillman’s heart is less theological and more aesthetic, but both challenge the monopoly of analytical intellect.

Embodied cognition

Embodied cognition argues that thinking depends upon bodily systems and situated interaction rather than occurring entirely as abstract computation. Hillman’s account is not a neuroscientific theory, but it similarly refuses to separate thought from sensuous embodiment.

Aesthetic perception

Philosophical aesthetics investigates modes of attention through which formal, expressive and sensuous qualities become salient. Hillman enlarges aesthetic perception into a basic psychological faculty rather than restricting it to art.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional-intelligence theories treat emotions as sources of information rather than as irrational disturbances. Hillman goes further: the heart perceives the world imaginally, not merely one’s own emotional condition.

Simone Weil’s attention

Weil’s ethics of attention involves suspending self-centred appropriation so that another reality may be received. Hillman’s heart similarly permits the particular to appear without being forced immediately into the ego’s categories.

Important distinction

The thought of the heart is not:

• intuition treated as infallible;
• sentimentality;
• impulsive emotional decision-making;
• rejection of evidence;
• the assumption that whatever feels beautiful must be good.

The heart can also perceive horror, damage and ugliness.

Nor does Hillman claim that bodily feelings automatically reveal objective truth. A person may experience a place as threatening because of personal history. The heart’s perception is psychologically meaningful, but it remains open to interpretation and comparison with external evidence.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Anima mundi
• Image
• Imaginal
• Beauty
• Metaphorical reality

Beauty and Aesthetic Response

Concise definition

Beauty is the sensuous appearance through which the world becomes psychologically present, calls for attention and awakens care.

It is not limited to conventional prettiness.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman regarded psychology’s neglect of beauty as a serious theoretical and cultural failure.

Modern institutions often treat beauty as optional:

• a decoration added after function;
• an expensive luxury;
• a matter of personal taste;
• an irrelevant distraction from efficiency.

Hillman argues that appearance is psychologically primary. Human beings encounter the world through:

• form;
• colour;
• proportion;
• rhythm;
• material;
• smell;
• sound;
• surface;
• arrangement.

An ugly hospital, school or public housing system does not merely fail aesthetically after meeting its “real” functions. Its ugliness becomes part of its psychological action.

A neglected place communicates neglect.

A hostile building can train vigilance.

A beautiful public space can invite lingering, relationship and civic care.

Hillman connected beauty directly with anima mundi: the world soul shows itself through appearances. His writings on “The Repression of Beauty” and “The Practice of Beauty” became part of his wider civic psychology and are collected within the City and Soul material.

Function within Hillman’s system

Beauty is the bridge between the heart and the world.

The anima mundi would remain a philosophical proposition if the world did not manifest itself sensuously.

Aesthetic response is therefore not an optional refinement of psychology. It is one way the psyche recognises what matters.

Beauty arrests habitual use. It asks us to look again.

This interruption can create attachment:

What appears beautiful becomes more difficult to treat as disposable.

Hillman consequently treats aesthetics as politically significant. Societies that repress beauty may make environments efficient while rendering them psychologically uninhabitable.

Ugliness may also reveal truth. A scarred industrial landscape, ruined building or broken object may possess a terrible beauty because its appearance makes suffering perceptible rather than disguising it.

Related ideas

Philosophical aesthetics

The nature of beauty has remained contested throughout Western philosophy. Some theories locate beauty in proportion or form; others in subjective judgement, sensuous cognition, expression or relations between perceiver and world.

Hillman does not solve that philosophical dispute. He asks what psychology loses when aesthetic experience is relegated to preference.

Baumgarten’s aesthetics

Alexander Baumgarten conceived aesthetics as the cultivation of sensuous knowledge, rather than merely as a philosophy of fine art. This comes close to Hillman’s insistence that perception through qualities is a legitimate mode of knowing.

Dewey’s aesthetic experience

John Dewey treated aesthetic experience as a concentrated form of relations already present in ordinary life rather than as an isolated elite domain. Hillman similarly returns beauty to streets, buildings, tools and civic life.

Gestalt theory

Gestalt psychology examines how organised forms and relations shape perception. Hillman adds affective, mythic and moral significance to those perceptual configurations.

Environmental aesthetics

Environmental aesthetics studies the appreciation of landscapes, built environments and ecological processes rather than restricting aesthetics to artworks.

Biophilic design

Biophilic approaches to architecture investigate how forms, light, vegetation and natural materials affect human wellbeing. Hillman’s account is less instrumental: beauty should not be valued only because it improves productivity or reduces stress.

Important distinction

Beauty is not identical with:

• social attractiveness;
• symmetry;
• luxury;
• conformity;
• moral goodness;
• pleasantness.

Something beautiful may be dangerous. Something morally good may be aesthetically unremarkable. Propaganda can be visually powerful while serving destructive purposes.

Hillman’s psychology should therefore not replace ethical or political judgement with taste.

Nor should “beauty” become an elitist standard imposed by one class or culture. What counts as beautiful is historically and culturally contested. The key Hillmanian question is not simply, “Is this beautiful?” but:

What mode of attention and relationship does this appearance call forth?

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Anima mundi
• The thought of the heart
• Image
• Aphrodite – future specialist entry
• Soul-making

Soul and Spirit

Concise definition

Soul deepens into particularity, ambiguity, embodiment and relationship with death; spirit rises towards unity, clarity, abstraction and transcendence.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman does not treat soul and spirit as interchangeable words.

He imagines them as contrasting movements.

Spirit tends towards:

• ascent;
• light;
• purity;
• universal truth;
• liberation;
• clarity;
• unity;
• transcendence.

Soul tends towards:

• descent;
• darkness;
• memory;
• embodiment;
• particularity;
• ambiguity;
• entanglement;
• mortality.

A spiritual approach may ask:

How can I rise above this conflict?

A soul approach may ask:

What kind of conflict is this, and what becomes visible by remaining within it?

A spiritual approach may seek one truth behind appearances.

A soul approach remains among multiple images.

Neither movement is automatically good or bad. Hillman’s concern is that Western religious and psychological traditions have repeatedly privileged spirit while treating soul’s darkness, repetition and ambiguity as failures to transcend.

His essay “Peaks and Vales” formalised the soul–spirit distinction and connected it to differences between psychotherapy and spiritual discipline. OPUS records its publication history from a 1976 collection through later reprints.

Function within Hillman’s system

The distinction protects archetypal psychology from becoming a disguised spiritual path.

Psychotherapy may be pressured to promise:

• liberation from symptoms;
• higher consciousness;
• inner purity;
• final integration;
• permanent peace.

Hillman regards these as spiritual ideals that can become hostile to soul.

Soul may require:

• grief that cannot be transcended;
• loyalty to particular people and places;
• acceptance of bodily limitation;
• recognition of contradiction;
• remembrance of the dead;
• descent into uncertainty.

The soul–spirit distinction also explains Hillman’s disagreement with Jung. Jung’s concepts of Self and individuation can appear to organise diversity towards a greater unity. Hillman suspects that this movement lifts psyche from polytheistic soul towards monotheistic spirit.

Related ideas

Nietzsche’s contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian

Nietzsche distinguishes Apollonian form, distance and clarity from Dionysian dissolution, suffering and embodied intensity. The comparison is not exact, but both models recognise conflicting modes of existence rather than one universal ideal.

Horizontal and vertical transcendence

Some existential and theological thinkers distinguish ascent towards a higher reality from transcendence through deeper engagement with earthly relation. Hillman’s soul remains downward and worldly.

Buddhist non-attachment

Buddhist traditions often seek freedom from compulsive attachment, but they vary greatly in their treatment of embodiment and worldly involvement. Hillman’s “soul” should not be casually equated with Buddhist attachment, nor “spirit” with Buddhist liberation.

Maslow’s peak experiences

Maslow used “peak experience” for exceptional states of unity, wonder or self-transcendence. Hillman’s peaks-and-vales contrast deliberately questions whether peak experience should provide the governing image of psychological health.

Depth psychotherapy

The language of psychological “depth” used across psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology shares Hillman’s downward spatial metaphor, although not necessarily his rejection of spiritual integration.

Important distinction

Hillman is not simply advising:

soul good; spirit bad.

Spirit contributes:

• clarity;
• principle;
• aspiration;
• liberation from suffocating circumstances;
• the ability to perceive wider patterns.

Soul contributes:

• complexity;
• relationship;
• embodiment;
• attention to particular suffering;
• resistance to abstract purity.

The problem arises when either claims complete jurisdiction.

A spiritual ideal without soul can become rigid, dissociated or contemptuous of ordinary life.

Soul without spirit can become trapped in repetition, obscurity or endless complication.

The distinction is therefore diagnostic: it helps identify which movement is dominating and which has been neglected.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Soul
• Psychological polytheism
• Peaks and vales
• The underworld
• Puer and senex

Peaks and Vales

Concise definition

Peaks and vales are Hillman’s spatial images for spirit and soul: the peak seeks overview and transcendence; the vale deepens into locality, enclosure and particular life.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman makes the soul–spirit distinction vivid through geography.

The peak offers:

• distance;
• clarity;
• panorama;
• thin air;
• separation;
• singular vision;
• proximity to heaven.

The vale offers:

• enclosure;
• shadow;
• vegetation;
• habitation;
• water;
• multiplicity;
• limited perspectives;
• life among other beings.

From the peak, the world becomes one landscape.

Within the vale, the traveller cannot see everything at once. They must move among paths, obstacles, settlements and changing weather.

Spirit prefers the peak because height permits unity and overview.

Soul belongs to the vale because depth requires locality, relation and incomplete knowledge.

Hillman’s essay title describes the soul–spirit distinction as a basis for differentiating psychotherapy from spiritual discipline. The metaphor was first published in 1976 and subsequently included in collections of archetypal psychology.

Function within Hillman’s system

Peaks and vales make abstract differences experientially visible.

A peak-oriented psychology may prioritise:

• insight;
• breakthrough;
• awakening;
• mastery;
• detachment;
• the discovery of one organising meaning.

A vale-oriented psychology may prioritise:

• staying with symptoms;
• remembering detail;
• inhabiting ambiguity;
• accepting recurring patterns;
• listening to many voices;
• recognising the local ecology of a life.

The metaphor also reveals why the same experience may be judged differently.

Confusion appears negative from a peak because it prevents overview.

In the vale, uncertainty may be appropriate because the path is genuinely hidden.

Repetition appears like failure from a developmental summit.

In the vale, returning to the same place may reveal seasonal and relational differences invisible during the first encounter.

Related ideas

Maslow’s peak experience

Maslow’s peak experiences describe exceptional states of fulfilment and unity. Hillman’s word “peak” engages that psychological valuation while restoring the neglected vale of ordinary, embodied soul.

Via negativa

Negative theological traditions approach the divine by surrendering claims to conceptual mastery. Although usually spiritual, their willingness to remain with unknowing may resemble soul’s vale more than triumphant ascent.

Heidegger’s dwelling

Heidegger’s concern with dwelling, place and situated existence parallels Hillman’s resistance to abstract, placeless consciousness.

Situated knowledge

Feminist epistemologies emphasise that knowledge arises from embodied and historically situated positions rather than from an impossible view from nowhere. The vale likewise denies total panoramic objectivity.

Rhizomatic thought

Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the rhizome resists hierarchical, tree-like organisation. Hillman’s vale also supports lateral, plural relations, though his framework remains mythological rather than post-structuralist.

Important distinction

The peak is not simply “thinking” and the vale “feeling.”

Nor is physical mountain experience inherently spiritual or valley life inherently psychological.

These are imaginal directions.

A person may take a soul attitude on a mountain by attending to weather, stones, fear and locality. They may take a spirit attitude in a basement by reducing experience to one abstract principle.

The danger of the metaphor is that it can become another rigid binary. Hillman’s own psychology generally values tensions and reversals: peaks cast shadows, and vales contain openings towards sky.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Soul and spirit
• The underworld
• Psychological polytheism
• Puer and senex
• Future specialist entry: Verticality

The Underworld and Hades

Concise definition

The underworld is the imaginal realm in which events are stripped of ordinary daylight purposes and encountered through death, memory, shade and psychic depth.

Hades is both the realm and the mythic principle governing that mode of existence.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman’s underworld is derived from Greek mythology, but it is not simply the modern concept of the unconscious.

The underworld of Hades is:

• below the daylight world;
• populated by shades;
• governed by death;
• without ordinary biological growth;
• resistant to heroic action;
• remote from the values of productivity and progress.

In The Dream and the Underworld, Hillman argues that dreams belong to this realm. When waking psychology translates them immediately into advice, development or practical meaning, it drags underworld figures back into daylight and asks them to serve the ego.

The underworld perspective does not ask:

What can I do with this image?

It asks:

What happens when the image is allowed to remain among death, memory and shade?

The book grew from Hillman’s Eranos work and was published in 1979. OPUS identifies it as a major expansion of his earlier underworld essay.

Function within Hillman’s system

The underworld provides the geography of soul.

It prevents “depth” from becoming merely a metaphor for hidden causal mechanisms.

To go downward is to enter another order of values.

In daylight, a tree may represent:

• growth;
• life;
• productivity;
• rooted development.

In the underworld, the tree may become:

• a memory;
• a shade;
• a dead image;
• a presence without biological future.

Hillman rejects the assumption that every descent must lead to rebirth. The underworld is not necessarily a temporary tunnel between two stages of development.

Some losses remain losses.

Some dead figures should not be converted into new growth.

Some dreams may deepen the relation to death rather than helping the waking person become more successful.

Hades therefore resists the optimistic developmental myth in which darkness is justified only by the transformation that follows.

Related ideas

Freud’s unconscious

Freud’s unconscious contains repressed wishes, conflicts and processes inaccessible to ordinary awareness. Hillman’s underworld is less a causal mechanism than an imaginal landscape.

Jung’s collective unconscious

Jung’s unconscious includes autonomous images and mythological patterns, making it closer to Hillman’s realm. Yet Jung frequently interprets unconscious material in relation to compensation and individuation, which Hillman considers a return to daylight purpose.

The depressive position

Melancholic and depressive experience can involve slowing, heaviness, death-awareness and withdrawal from ordinary value. Hillman often gives these experiences underworld significance, though clinical depression must not be reduced to mythology.

Katabasis

Katabasis is the mythic descent to the dead found in stories of Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas, Inanna and others. Hillman’s underworld belongs to this broad family of descent narratives while resisting the heroic assumption that the visitor’s return is the only important event.

Derrida’s hauntology

Hauntology concerns the persistence of absent or dead possibilities within the present. Hillman’s shades similarly disturb simple boundaries between what is gone and what remains psychologically active.

Mourning theory

Mourning involves maintaining and transforming relations with the dead or absent. Hillman’s underworld offers a space where the dead are not merely replaced by new investments.

Important distinction

The underworld is not identical with:

• evil;
• hell;
• punishment;
• mental illness;
• trauma;
• biological death;
• a hidden location inside the brain.

Nor should serious depression or suicidal crisis be romanticised as a necessary underworld journey.

Mythological language may help describe an experience. It does not determine its cause or eliminate the need for care and protection.

Hades also should not be reduced to “the dark side.” His realm has order, law, distance and exactness. It is not merely chaos.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Soul and spirit
• Peaks and vales
• Dream and dream ego
• Pathologising
• Myth

Dream and Dream Ego

Concise definition

A dream is an autonomous imaginal event belonging first to its own world.

The dream ego is the figure who appears as “I” within that world, not necessarily its author, director or owner.

Hillmanian meaning

Most people say:

“I had a dream.”

The grammar implies ownership. The waking “I” appears to possess an event produced for its benefit.

Hillman reverses the relation.

The dream belongs to psyche. The figure representing “me” inside it is one character among others.

The dream ego may:

• misunderstand what is happening;
• feel fear unknown to the waking person;
• act foolishly;
• disappear;
• change form;
• be observed from elsewhere.

It is therefore not identical with the waking ego.

Hillman objects when dreams are treated primarily as:

• disguised wishes;
• compensatory messages;
• instructions;
• warnings;
• rehearsals for waking development.

Any of these may sometimes illuminate a dream, but they make daylight consciousness the purpose of the nocturnal event.

The underworld approach instead asks the dreamer to become familiar with the dream’s own logic, atmosphere and population. Secondary summaries of Hillman’s method emphasise his claim that the dream ego is only one role within the psyche’s theatre.

Function within Hillman’s system

The distinction between waking ego and dream ego radicalises psychological polytheism.

Even “I” is not one permanent being.

The waking self may value:

• competence;
• continuity;
• practical consequence.

The dream ego may inhabit:

• impossibility;
• contradiction;
• simultaneous places;
• relations with the dead;
• transformations of identity.

The dream should not be normalised to waking standards.

This changes interpretation.

A conventional approach might ask:

What does the black dog represent in my life?

Hillman first asks:

How does the dream ego relate to this dog within the dream world?

The dog may ignore, follow, judge or precede the dream ego. Those relations belong to the image before the dog is translated into a personal trait.

Related ideas

Jungian dream analysis

Jung also treats dream figures as autonomous and rejects fixed symbol dictionaries. He examines personal associations, mythic parallels and dream series.

Hillman’s major departure is his suspicion of compensation and individuation as overarching purposes.

Lucid-dream research

Lucid dreaming demonstrates that the dreamer can sometimes recognise the dream state and exercise limited influence. This does not prove that the waking ego authored the dream; it shows that differing degrees of reflective awareness can occur within it.

Narrative identity

Dreams can disrupt the continuity of the waking self by presenting alternative identities and viewpoints.

Theatre and dramaturgical theories

Hillman’s dream resembles a theatre in which the “I” performs without controlling the script. Dramaturgical models of social life similarly distinguish the actor from the entire scene, though Hillman’s theatre is imaginal rather than sociological.

Predictive-processing theories of dreams

Contemporary cognitive theories investigate dreaming through brain function, memory and prediction. These may explain mechanisms without exhausting the dream’s lived or imaginal meaning.

Important distinction

The autonomy of a dream does not mean:

• it predicts the future;
• every figure is an independent external being;
• neurological research is irrelevant;
• the dreamer should obey it;
• all interpretations are equally valid.

Nor does refusing practical translation mean that dreams can never influence waking decisions.

Hillman’s priority is sequence:

first encounter the dream as dream; only later consider its relations with waking life.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Image
• Imaginal
• The underworld
• Personifying
• Analogy
• Amplification

Metaphor and Metaphorical Reality

Concise definition

Metaphor is not merely decorative comparison; it is a primary means through which psyche forms reality.

Metaphorical reality is the psychological reality created when one thing is experienced through the qualities of another.

Hillmanian meaning

A person says:

“My marriage is a prison.”

A literal response may object:

“It is not actually a prison.”

But the metaphor already organises the experience:

• there are walls;
• restricted movement;
• surveillance;
• punishment;
• a desire for escape;
• perhaps guilt about leaving others behind.

The metaphor is not factually identical with imprisonment, but it creates a psychologically consequential world.

Hillman therefore rejects the phrase “only metaphor.”

Metaphor does not conceal a simpler literal statement waiting to replace it. It may reveal relations that abstract language cannot preserve.

Hillman’s concise account of archetypal psychology treats myths themselves as metaphors and uses this fact to prevent mythic language from being taken historically, physically or literally.

Metaphor both deepens and protects.

It deepens by connecting fields of experience.

It protects by preventing the image from being treated as an external fact.

Function within Hillman’s system

Metaphor is the linguistic form of psychological seeing-through.

It allows a statement to remain:

• specific;
• plural;
• relational;
• open to further analogies.

Without metaphor, archetypal psychology would collapse into one of two extremes:

• literal supernaturalism, in which gods and inner figures become external facts;
• reductive abstraction, in which every image becomes a concept.

Metaphorical reality occupies the imaginal middle.

A god can be psychologically real without being established as a physically external agent.

A voice can be experienced as a persecuting judge without proving that an actual judge is speaking.

Related ideas

Conceptual metaphor theory

Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphor structures ordinary thought and action, not merely poetic language. Concepts such as argument, time and relationship are regularly organised through spatial and bodily metaphors.

Hillman shares the anti-decorative view but gives metaphor greater psychological and mythic autonomy.

Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor

Paul Ricoeur treats living metaphor as a productive re-description of reality rather than a substitutable ornament. New meaning emerges through tension between unlike terms.

Philosophy of language

Philosophical theories disagree about whether metaphor works through comparison, semantic shift, pragmatic inference or imaginative make-believe. Most agree that powerful metaphor cannot always be replaced without loss.

Cognitive defusion

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people experience thoughts as thoughts rather than as literal facts. Hillman likewise deliteralises, but often by making the metaphor richer rather than stepping away from its content.

Symbolic interactionism

Symbolic interactionism examines how shared meanings shape social reality. Hillman’s metaphorical reality can be both personal and cultural.

Important distinction

Metaphorical reality does not mean:

everything is merely metaphor.

Physical, historical and legal facts remain important.

“My employer is a prison guard” may describe a relation of control. It does not prove that the employer has legal powers of incarceration.

A metaphor can illuminate and mislead.

Its value must be tested by asking:

• What does it reveal?
• What does it exclude?
• Which actions does it encourage?
• Does it remain flexible?
• Has it become a literal prison of interpretation?

Internal cross-references

See also:

• The poetic basis of mind
• Image
• Imaginal
• Psychologising
• Analogy
• Myth

Analogy

Concise definition

Analogy asks what an image is like, creating multiple relationships without collapsing it into one final explanation.

Hillmanian meaning

Hillman distinguishes analogy from reductive interpretation.

Suppose a person dreams of a stalled red bus.

A symbolic interpretation may say:

The bus represents blocked collective progress.

An analogical inquiry asks:

What is this stalled bus like?

The dreamer might respond:

• like my research group;
• like waiting for a family decision;
• like a body that cannot move;
• like public promises without fuel;
• like being responsible for passengers I cannot carry.

Each analogy returns to the bus.

None is declared to be its final hidden meaning.

In “An Inquiry into Image,” Hillman demonstrates this process by allowing one dream image to resonate with many areas of life. The point is not unlimited free association but an enlarging pattern in which each comparison preserves the original image.

Function within Hillman’s system

Analogy allows movement without reduction.

The image must neither remain isolated nor be translated out of existence.

Analogy creates a field:

this is like that, but not identical with it.

The difference is as important as the similarity.

A stalled bus may resemble a stalled career, but the bus also contains:

• passengers;
• a route;
• public infrastructure;
• a driver;
• a timetable.

Those features may disclose aspects of the career comparison that were previously invisible.

Analogy therefore makes the image generative.

It is also polytheistic because it permits several relations to coexist.

Related ideas

Analogical reasoning

Philosophy and science use analogy to transfer possible relations from a familiar case to a less familiar one. Analogy can generate hypotheses without proving them.

Case-based reasoning

Law and practical reasoning compare new cases with earlier precedents. The comparison depends upon deciding which similarities and differences are relevant.

Family resemblance

Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance describes categories whose members share overlapping similarities without possessing one defining essence. Hillman’s analogical field may operate similarly.

Comparative mythology

Comparative mythology places stories beside one another to identify recurring motifs and transformations. Hillman welcomes comparison when it deepens the particular image rather than using a universal pattern to erase difference.

Poetic simile

A simile explicitly states that one thing is like another. Hillman’s analogy is less an ornamental device than a method of psychological inquiry.

Important distinction

Analogy is not evidence of identity or cause.

Because a dream figure resembles a mythological figure, it does not follow that:

• the myth caused the dream;
• the dream has the same meaning;
• the person is “an example” of the myth;
• a literal god is present.

Analogy can also become uncontrolled. An image can be linked to almost anything if the standard of relevance is weak.

Useful analogies:

• return attention to concrete features;
• reveal previously unnoticed relations;
• resonate with the dreamer’s experience;
• remain open to correction.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Image
• Metaphorical reality
• Amplification
• Myth
• Archetypal

Amplification

Concise definition

Amplification places an image beside related material from mythology, religion, literature, art and cultural history so that its possible field of meaning becomes wider.

Hillmanian meaning

Amplification is inherited from Jungian analytical psychology.

A dream image of a labyrinth might be placed beside:

• the Cretan labyrinth;
• pilgrimage mazes;
• medieval cathedral designs;
• literary labyrinths;
• local architectural memories;
• the dreamer’s experiences of getting lost.

The purpose is to release the image from an exclusively personal explanation.

The dreamer is not the first person to encounter a labyrinth. Culture has imagined labyrinthine experience across centuries.

Hillman nevertheless became wary of amplification when it turned into symbolic cataloguing.

An interpreter may isolate:

• fox;
• water;
• number three;
• blue;
• doorway;

and then research each symbol independently.

The result may be learned but no longer resemble the dream.

In “An Inquiry into Image,” Hillman explicitly criticises the habit of extracting symbols and assigning them to established archetypal locations, gods or complexes. He argues that archetypal psychology needs metaphorical humour in the foreground as well as mythic structures in the background.

Function within Hillman’s system

Amplification connects the personal image with cultural imagination.

It can:

• reduce shame by showing that an experience has precedents;
• reveal neglected details;
• provide language where the dreamer has none;
• connect private suffering with historical forms;
• prevent the ego from claiming sole authorship of the image.

But amplification must serve the image rather than the interpreter’s authority.

The best test is:

Does the mythic or literary material make the particular image more vivid when we return to it?

If not, it has become distraction.

Related ideas

Intertextuality

Intertextual theory examines how texts acquire meaning through relations with other texts. Amplification similarly treats images as participating in cultural networks.

Comparative method

Anthropology and religious studies compare practices and symbols across societies. Such comparison requires caution because superficial similarity can conceal different cultural meanings.

Iconography

Art history studies recurring images, attributes and visual conventions. Amplification may use iconographic knowledge to distinguish how a figure has appeared historically.

Free association

Freud’s free association follows the patient’s personal chains of thought. Amplification adds collective and cultural parallels.

Hermeneutic circle

Interpretation moves between part and whole. Amplification moves outward to cultural material and back inward to the specific image.

Important distinction

Amplification is not:

• a dictionary lookup;
• proof of universal symbolism;
• permission to impose myths unfamiliar to the person;
• evidence that similar images mean the same thing across cultures;
• a substitute for personal association.

It carries a risk of cultural colonisation when Greek, Christian or European myths are treated as universal keys.

The person’s own stories, films, music, religious traditions, family narratives and local folklore may provide more accurate amplification.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Analogy
• Myth
• Image
• Archetypal
• Dream and dream ego

Myth

Concise definition

Myth is a living pattern of imagination through which experience is organised, dramatised and made psychologically intelligible.

It is not merely an ancient false explanation.

Hillmanian meaning

In ordinary language, “myth” often means an untrue belief:

the myth that humans use only ten per cent of the brain.

Hillman uses the word differently.

A myth is a narrative configuration involving:

• persons;
• powers;
• conflicts;
• values;
• transformations;
• characteristic outcomes.

Myth provides a psychological language for patterns too complex to be reduced to concepts.

The myth of Narcissus does not mean only “self-love.”

It contains:

• an image;
• reflection;
• failed recognition;
• beauty;
• distance;
• desire;
• water;
• death;
• transformation.

The myth of Persephone is not simply “a young woman grows up.”

It contains abduction, divided worlds, seasonal time, maternal grief, marriage and underworld sovereignty.

Hillman locates archetypal psychology within a tradition of mythical thinking extending through Romanticism, Vico and Plato. He describes myth as a primary rhetoric of psychology while insisting that myth itself must remain metaphorical rather than being taken as literal history.

Function within Hillman’s system

Myth protects psychological multiplicity.

A concept tends to isolate one meaning.

A myth holds many meanings in relation.

Myth also prevents the individual from imagining that every psychological drama began personally. Jealousy, betrayal, mourning, rivalry and ambition belong to cultural and ancestral imagination as well as private biography.

This can be liberating:

The person is not uniquely defective; they are participating in an old human pattern.

But myth also increases responsibility. The question becomes:

Which role am I enacting, and what does this story usually exclude or destroy?

Hillman’s use of myth is less concerned with identifying one universal “hero’s journey” than with preserving a plural pantheon of incompatible stories.

Related ideas

Plato’s philosophical myths

Plato used myths alongside arguments to dramatise ideas that abstract reasoning alone could not fully communicate. Scholarship increasingly treats myth and philosophy in Plato as intertwined rather than simply opposed.

Lévi-Strauss and structural mythology

Structural anthropology examines transformations and oppositions recurring across myths. Hillman shares interest in recurring patterns but concentrates on psychological image and divine persons.

Campbell’s monomyth

Joseph Campbell identifies a recurring heroic pattern of departure, initiation and return. Hillman is more suspicious of the hero as universal model and favours polytheistic diversity.

Narrative psychology

Narrative psychology examines how stories organise identity and experience. Myth is a culturally elaborated and archetypally charged form of narrative.

Ideology

Political ideologies can function mythically by presenting heroes, enemies, origins and destinies. Psychologising reveals these narrative structures inside apparently factual political claims.

Personal mythology

The idea of personal mythology concerns the organising stories through which individuals interpret their lives. Hillman would caution that a person’s myth is not entirely personal: it belongs to wider cultural images.

Important distinction

Myth does not mean:

• historical fact;
• universal genetic memory;
• one correct interpretation;
• destiny that must be obeyed;
• proof of supernatural events.

Nor should myth replace material analysis.

Calling a workplace conflict “the battle between Ares and Athena” may illuminate differing values. It does not explain salary structures, employment law or institutional incentives.

Myth enriches explanation; it does not monopolise it.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Archetypal
• Psychological polytheism
• Metaphorical reality
• Analogy
• Amplification
• Daimon

Daimon and the Acorn Theory

Concise definition

The daimon is the imaginal bearer of a person’s particular calling.

The acorn theory proposes that a life contains a formative image of its distinctive possibilities, as an acorn contains the pattern of an oak.

Hillmanian meaning

In The Soul’s Code, Hillman argues that human lives cannot be explained completely by the familiar combination of:

• heredity;
• parenting;
• environment.

He proposes a third mode of understanding: each life bears a particular image or calling that presses towards expression.

Hillman connects this image with the Greek daimon, Roman genius and later traditions of guardian spirit.

The daimon is not the conscious ego deciding what career it prefers. It may appear through:

• persistent fascination;
• unusual childhood behaviour;
• resistance to expected roles;
• repeated images;
• apparent defects that later become capacities;
• a sense of necessity.

The acorn is Hillman’s governing metaphor.

An acorn does not contain a miniature visible oak. It carries a formative pattern whose realisation depends upon soil, weather, damage and circumstance.

Similarly, a person’s calling is not a complete predetermined biography. It is a particular demand upon the life.

An accessible excerpt from The Soul’s Code summarises the theory as the proposition that each person bears a uniqueness already present before it can be fully lived.

Function within Hillman’s system

The daimon restores vocation and uniqueness to psychology.

Developmental theories can explain a person as the result of:

• genes;
• parents;
• trauma;
• reinforcement;
• social structure.

These are indispensable explanations, but they can make the person appear entirely produced by the past.

The daimon introduces a prospective dimension:

What is this life trying to become?

It also reframes some childhood “problems.” A child’s obsession, solitude, theatricality or refusal may express an early and undeveloped relation to a later calling.

This does not mean every difficulty is evidence of genius. It asks that explanation not erase possibility.

Related ideas

Aristotle’s entelechy

Entelechy concerns the actualisation of an inherent form or potential. The acorn and oak are classic images of developmental form.

Hillman’s daimon is more imaginal and personal than a general biological principle.

Jung’s individuation

Individuation concerns becoming the particular individual one is capable of being. Hillman’s calling resembles individuation but is less centred upon integration with the Self.

Existential vocation

Existential and religious traditions describe a calling that imposes responsibility rather than merely offering personal fulfilment.

Self-actualisation

Humanistic psychology’s self-actualisation concerns the development of capacities and authentic life. Hillman objects when this becomes a universal hierarchy of growth rather than a highly particular fate.

Narrative identity

The daimon gives biography a prospective organising image. However, it is not merely a story consciously written after events.

Genetic and developmental potential

Biology recognises inherited dispositions and developmental constraints. Hillman’s acorn should not be treated as a scientific genetic model; it is a mythic account of uniqueness.

Important distinction

The acorn theory is not established empirical psychology.

It does not demonstrate that:

• each person possesses one fixed occupation;
• childhood behaviour reliably predicts destiny;
• social conditions are unimportant;
• trauma is secretly chosen;
• failure to realise a calling is a moral defect;
• an inner voice possesses infallible knowledge.

The theory can become dangerous if it romanticises suffering or blames people for circumstances that prevent opportunity.

It is strongest as a counter-myth to total environmental or developmental determination.

The daimon may also conflict with itself, culture and necessity. Calling is not the same as guaranteed success.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Archetypal
• Myth
• Soul-making
• Character, calling and fate
• Puer and senex
• Series cross-reference: Absolute Democracy of the Psyche

Character, Calling and Fate

Concise definition

Character is the distinctive style through which a life repeatedly reveals itself.

Calling is the demand of the life’s particular image.

Fate is the interplay between that image and the necessities, limits and circumstances through which it must be lived.

Hillmanian meaning

Contemporary psychology often distinguishes personality traits, behaviour, environment and life history.

Hillman uses character more dramatically.

Character is not simply a score on a trait measure. It is the recognisable style a life acquires through:

• choices;
• habits;
• gestures;
• failures;
• loyalties;
• recurring images;
• the manner of meeting necessity.

A life becomes legible as character over time.

Calling is what draws the life towards certain forms of expression.

Fate is not merely an externally imposed script. It includes the constraints through which calling must become actual:

• body;
• family;
• place;
• historical period;
• opportunity;
• accident;
• mortality.

Hillman’s later works The Soul’s Code and The Force of Character develop these themes. Descriptions of the books emphasise the daimon as a guiding image and character as something more particular than genetic or environmental explanation alone can capture.

Function within Hillman’s system

Character turns psychology from causal reconstruction towards biographical reading.

Causal explanation asks:

What made this person behave this way?

Character asks:

What style of life is repeatedly displaying itself here?

The difference resembles the difference between explaining a novel’s paper and ink and interpreting its form.

Both are legitimate; neither replaces the other.

Character also preserves moral ambiguity.

A trait may contribute both to achievement and suffering:

• stubbornness becomes endurance and rigidity;
• sensitivity becomes perception and vulnerability;
• suspicion becomes discernment and isolation;
• theatricality becomes communication and exaggeration.

Hillman resists psychological models that divide traits too easily into healthy and unhealthy versions.

Fate places character within necessity. The daimon does not act in an empty world. It must negotiate the given circumstances of existence.

Related ideas

Virtue ethics

Aristotelian virtue ethics concerns the formation of character through repeated practice and practical judgement.

Hillman’s character is less a consciously cultivated moral excellence and more the distinctive style already pressing through the life.

Existential facticity

Existentialism distinguishes freedom from facticity: the body, history and circumstances not freely chosen. Hillman’s fate similarly involves the meeting between calling and necessity.

Narrative identity

Paul Ricoeur and other narrative theorists examine how identity emerges through the interpretation of a life across time. Hillman gives this narrative a daimonic and imaginal depth.

Personality psychology

Trait psychology measures relatively stable behavioural tendencies. It can describe patterns that Hillman might call character, but it does not necessarily address calling, meaning or fate.

Nietzsche’s amor fati

Nietzsche’s “love of fate” concerns affirmation of the life one has, including necessity. Hillman similarly resists fantasies of unlimited self-invention.

Weber’s vocation

Max Weber examines vocation as a calling that organises disciplined worldly activity. Hillman’s calling is more individual, imaginal and potentially resistant to social occupations.

Important distinction

Character is not destiny in the sense that every action was predetermined.

Calling does not absolve responsibility:

“My daimon required me to do it.”

A person must still consider the effects of their actions upon others.

Fate also does not justify social inequality or prevent political change. Poverty, discrimination and violence should not be romanticised as necessary conditions chosen by the soul.

The concept is best used to ask what a life repeatedly seeks and how it responds to limits – not to declare that every event was meant to happen.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Daimon and the acorn theory
• Soul-making
• Pathologising
• Puer and senex
• Future specialist entry: Necessity – Ananke

Puer and Senex

Concise definition

Puer and senex are interdependent archetypal principles of youthful possibility and aged structure.

The puer flies, begins and imagines; the senex limits, orders, preserves and endures.

Hillmanian meaning

The Latin terms mean:

• puer – boy or youth;
• senex – old man.

In archetypal psychology, they are not restricted to biological age or sex.

The puer tends towards:

• possibility;
• inspiration;
• speed;
• height;
• novelty;
• idealism;
• immediacy;
• escape from limitation.

The senex tends towards:

• structure;
• time;
• law;
• repetition;
• endurance;
• authority;
• history;
• limitation.

In their negative forms:

The puer may become:

• uncommitted;
• rootless;
• inflated;
• impatient;
• unable to endure ordinary time.

The senex may become:

• rigid;
• bitter;
• controlling;
• sterile;
• suspicious of novelty.

Hillman’s decisive move is to treat them as one paired configuration rather than as immature youth who must simply grow into mature age.

The puer needs senex to give form and duration to inspiration.

The senex needs puer to prevent structure becoming lifeless.

Hillman first presented “Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present” at Eranos in the late 1960s. The later Uniform Edition gathers his continuing engagement with this paired archetype.

Function within Hillman’s system

The pair provides a final model of psychological tension.

Many theories organise development linearly:

childhood > maturity > old age.

The puer–senex model instead suggests that youth and age remain active principles throughout life.

A young person can be dominated by senex:

• anxious about rules;
• over-responsible;
• prematurely fixed.

An old person can embody puer:

• inventive;
• restless;
• unwilling to accept limitation.

The question is not:

Which stage should replace the other?

It is:

What relation exists between possibility and duration?

Creative work illustrates the pair.

The puer produces the surprising idea.

The senex returns to the desk, revises it, maintains the archive and completes the work.

Without puer, there is no new beginning.

Without senex, there is no enduring form.

Related ideas

Freud’s pleasure and reality principles

The pleasure principle seeks immediate satisfaction, while the reality principle accommodates delay and external constraint.

The comparison is limited: puer is not merely impulsive pleasure, and senex is not merely rational adaptation.

Erikson’s developmental stages

Erikson treats psychological life through age-related developmental conflicts. Hillman’s archetypal pair cuts across chronological stages.

Winnicott’s play and holding environment

Creative play requires a sufficiently reliable containing environment. Puer resembles play and novelty; senex resembles the structure that allows play to continue.

Exploration and exploitation

Decision theory and organisational research distinguish exploration of new possibilities from exploitation of established knowledge. Healthy systems require both.

The analogy is strong functionally, but Hillman’s pair carries mythic, emotional and temporal depth beyond optimisation theory.

Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian

Apollo’s form and Dionysus’s excess partly resemble senex and puer, but the correspondences are not exact.

Tradition and innovation

Political and cultural systems continually negotiate between preserving inherited structures and opening space for novelty.

Important distinction

Puer does not mean:

• childish;
• male;
• irresponsible by definition;
• creative genius.

Senex does not mean:

• wise;
• male;
• biologically old;
• oppressive by definition.

The terms become stereotypes when attached permanently to people:

“She is a puer.”

A Hillmanian reading should ask when and how the pattern appears.

The pair should also not excuse harm. Calling someone “possessed by negative senex” may describe their style, but it does not replace ethical or practical judgement.

Hillman’s own treatment of puer became controversial because critics argued that his resistance to development risked idealising youthful refusal of commitment. The most productive use of the pair is therefore relational: each principle reveals the other’s necessity and excess.

Internal cross-references

See also:

• Soul and spirit
• Peaks and vales
• Daimon and the acorn theory
• Character, calling and fate
• Psychological polytheism
• Series cross-reference: Absolute Democracy of the Psyche

The Complete Conceptual Sequence

The twenty-five terms now form a continuous movement.

Part One: The formation of psychological depth

1. Psyche or soul
Experience acquires depth, resonance and relationship with death.

2. The poetic basis of mind
Psyche organises experience imaginatively rather than receiving neutral facts first.

3. Image
The psyche presents itself through particular scenes, voices, metaphors and atmospheres.

4. Imaginal
Images possess psychological reality without being reduced either to physical objects or unreal inventions.

5. Archetypal
An image gains transpersonal depth and generative cultural resonance.

6. Personifying
Psychological powers acquire faces, voices and relative autonomy.

7. Psychological polytheism
Those persons inhabit a plural psyche without one naturally supreme ruler.

8. Pathologising
Affliction, distortion and breakdown belong to the psyche’s modes of expression.

9. Psychologising and deliteralising
The psyche sees through fixed explanations to their metaphors and hidden assumptions.

10. Soul-making
Attention deepens events and allows images to become more differentiated.

Part Two: The movement into world, underworld and fate

11. Anima mundi
Soul returns from private interiority to the world.

12. Dehumanising
Non-human beings and things are released from compulsory reduction to human symbols.

13. The thought of the heart
The psyche perceives the qualitative faces of things.

14. Beauty
The world addresses psyche through sensuous appearance.

15. Soul and spirit
Psychological deepening is distinguished from spiritual ascent.

16. Peaks and vales
The spatial imagination of height and depth makes that distinction visible.

17. The underworld and Hades
Soul descends into death, memory and imaginal shade.

18. Dream and dream ego
The waking “I” becomes one figure within a world it does not own.

19. Metaphorical reality
Psychological meaning forms through non-literal relations.

20. Analogy
Images connect with other experiences without being reduced to them.

21. Amplification
Cultural and mythological parallels enlarge the image’s field.

22. Myth
Images enter enduring narrative configurations of persons, values and conflict.

23. Daimon and the acorn theory
The life’s particular formative image appears as calling.

24. Character, calling and fate
The life acquires a recognisable style through its encounter with necessity.

25. Puer and senex
Calling must negotiate the permanent tension between possibility and form, beginning and duration, flight and gravity.

The whole glossary can therefore be condensed into one unfolding statement:

Soul experiences poetically through images. Images deepen archetypally and personify into a plural psyche. That psyche suffers, sees through literalism and makes soul. Soul then recognises itself in the world through heart and beauty, descends through dream into the underworld, returns through metaphor and myth, and appears in life as calling, character and the tension between possibility and limitation.

---

Reading Guide

World soul, heart and beauty

Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World.
This volume joins Hillman’s essays on imaginal perception and anima mundi. Spring Publications describes them as foundational texts in the recovery of soul in the world.

Hillman, James, “Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World.”
OPUS Archives provides the essay’s original publication history and later collections.

Hillman, James, “The Practice of Beauty” or “The Repression of Beauty.”
OPUS records the title changes, lecture origins and later publication history.

The Uniform Edition, Volume 2: City and Soul.
Spring’s Uniform Edition overview identifies anima mundi, beauty, ugliness, city and community as recurring themes within Hillman’s civic psychology.

Soul, spirit and the underworld

Hillman, James, “Peaks and Vales.”
OPUS provides the essay’s complete title and its history from the 1976 collection On the Way to Self-Knowledge to later archetypal-psychology editions.

Hillman, James, The Dream and the Underworld.
OPUS records the 1979 book and its origin in Hillman’s earlier Eranos essay.

Avens, Roberts, “James Hillman: Toward a Poetic Psychology.”
The PubMed record summarises Hillman’s dream theory as an initiation into an imaginal underworld of death rather than a daylight system of literal interpretation.

Image, metaphor, analogy and amplification

Hillman, James, “An Inquiry into Image.”
The complete essay is freely available from Spring Publications. It provides the clearest primary account of analogy, amplification, image precision and the risks of symbolic classification.

“Metaphor,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
This gives an accessible overview of comparison, semantic and pragmatic theories of metaphor and the difficulty of paraphrasing poetic meaning without loss.

“Analogy and Analogical Reasoning,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
This explains analogy as a heuristic and inferential practice while distinguishing resemblance from proof.

Myth, daimon and character

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account.
The accessible edition discusses myth as psychological language and warns that myth should remain metaphorical rather than literal.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code.
Google Books and Penguin Random House provide descriptions and an accessible excerpt outlining the acorn theory, daimon, uniqueness and calling.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life.
Google Books provides bibliographical information and a summary of the relation among daimon, character and aging.

“Plato’s Myths,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
This provides a useful philosophical comparison, explaining how myth, image and analogy can communicate ideas that abstract argument does not fully dramatise.

Puer and senex

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer.
The Internet Archive catalogues a controlled-borrowing edition of Volume 3 of the Uniform Edition.

“Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present.”
An accessible PDF preserves Hillman’s foundational paper, originally presented at Eranos and later collected in Puer Papers.

OPUS Archives bibliography.
OPUS records the original Eranos publication and the 2005 Uniform Edition collecting Hillman’s work on the paired archetype.

Formal Bibliography

Primary Works by James Hillman

Hillman, J. (1968) ‘Senex and puer: An aspect of the historical and psychological present’, Eranos Jahrbuch, 36.

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

Hillman, J. (1976) ‘Peaks and vales: The soul/spirit distinction as basis for the differences between psychotherapy and spiritual discipline’, in Needleman, J. and Lewis, D. (eds) On the Way to Self-Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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. (ed.) (1979) Puer Papers. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

Hillman, J. (1982) ‘Anima mundi: The return of the soul to the world’, Spring.

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

Hillman, J. (1984) The Thought of the Heart. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

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

Hillman, J. (1996) The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. New York: Random House.

Hillman, J. (1998) ‘The practice of beauty’, in Beckley, B. and Shapiro, D. (eds) Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics. New York: Allworth Press.

Hillman, J. (1999) The Force of Character and the Lasting Life. New York: Random House.

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

Hillman, J. (2005) Senex & Puer. Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 3. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications.

Hillman, J. (2006) City & Soul. Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 2. 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.

Avens, R. (1980) ‘James Hillman: Toward a poetic psychology’, Journal of Religion and Health, 19(3), pp. 186–202.

Berry, P. (1982) Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

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.

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

Philosophy, Aesthetics and the World

Baumgarten, A.G. (1750/2007) Aesthetics. Translated selections.

Dewey, J. (1934) Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Company.

Ficino, M. (1989) Three Books on Life. Translated by C.V. Kaske and J.R. Clark. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies.

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

Plotinus (1991) The Enneads. Abridged edn. Translated by S. MacKenna. London: Penguin.

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

Metaphor, Analogy and Myth

Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon.

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

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955) ‘The structural study of myth’, Journal of American Folklore, 68(270), pp. 428–444.

Ricoeur, P. (1977) The Rule of Metaphor. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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

Character, Calling and Development

Aristotle (2009) The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by D. Ross, revised by L. Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Erikson, E.H. (1950) Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton.

Maslow, A.H. (1964) Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1882/2001) The Gay Science. Edited by B. Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weber, M. (1919/1946) ‘Science as a vocation’, in Gerth, H.H. and Mills, C.W. (eds) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.