Re-Visioning Psychology at 50 - James Hillman and the Return of Soul
Updated: Aug 18
Hillman’s vital contribution to depth psychology
Published in 1975, Re-Visioning Psychology challenged many established assumptions within psychology, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Hillman felt that modern psychology had become a psychology without Psyche, and his mission was to create a psychology with soul.
One of the most appealing aspects of Hillman’s writing is that, although he is often critical and quite prepared to put psychotherapy itself “on the couch”, his work rarely feels curmudgeonly. There is a vitality to his thinking that I have found deeply inspiring since well before I entered training as a psychotherapist some fifteen years ago.
I first discovered Hillman while I was an art student and beginning to immerse myself in Carl Jung and the wider depth psychology tradition. Their writing seemed capable of deepening creative engagement rather than explaining it away. Hillman appealed particularly because of his assertion that the primary mode of psyche is image, and his insistence that we stay with the image rather than immediately translating it into something else.
Hillman’s early life and formation
Born in New Jersey in 1926, James Hillman studied English Literature in Paris before gaining a degree in Mental and Moral Science in Dublin. In 1953 he moved to Switzerland, where he encountered Carl Jung’s work directly, and by 1959 had completed both a doctorate at the University of Zurich and training at the C.G. Jung Institute.
Hillman is generally described as a post-Jungian, although he went on to develop archetypal psychology as his own distinctive expression. He always seemed more comfortable with an intellectual relationship to Jung than with the role of devotee, disciple or heir.
Re-Visioning Psychology as a cornerstone
Re-Visioning Psychology is perhaps Hillman’s central work, but it sits within a remarkable body of writing that includes The Dream and the Underworld, Suicide and the Soul, Alchemical Psychology and The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World.
The Soul’s Code reached a much wider readership and became a bestseller, although it has never been one of my personal favourites. For me, Hillman is at his most compelling when the writing is slightly more provocative and imaginal.
A reluctant founder of a school
Hillman was never comfortable with institutions and resisted the idea that archetypal psychology should become a formal training or school. His influence has therefore tended to spread through people inspired directly by the work rather than through a tightly regulated method.
At times he was openly disillusioned with aspects of Jungian training. Characteristically, he even questioned the language of training itself, describing it as an “athletic fantasy”, typical of a culture preoccupied with strength and improvement.
Despite Hillman’s reluctance to formalise it, archetypal psychology became recognised as one of the principal developments within Analytical Psychology. Andrew Samuels famously distinguished between classical, developmental and archetypal approaches to the Jungian tradition.
The classical school remained closer to Jung’s original emphasis on individuation, dreams, archetypes and the collective unconscious. Jung himself exerted an extraordinary gravitational force, although his work also developed through the contribution of gifted collaborators such as Marie-Louise von Franz, and others who are only now receiving more of the credit they are due, such as Toni Wolff, and his wife Emma.
The developmental school emerged particularly strongly in Britain through figures such as Michael Fordham and was influenced by object relations and Melanie Klein. It placed greater emphasis on early relationships, transference and clinical development than on mythology and the collective unconscious.
Hillman’s trickster spirit
A Hillman quote that springs to mind at this moment goes something like this...
"We can only have the ideas that our ideas allow us to have. So what we need are new ideas."
I could quite easily look this up and discover that he never said anything of the kind. But perhaps that is beside the point. Did he say it, didn’t he? Who knows, who cares, it’s the idea! Regardless of its accuracy, the line has always seemed characteristic of Hillman to me.
He is often described as mercurial or trickster-like, prone to saying one thing here and something slightly contradictory elsewhere. I once spoke with someone who had been a friend of Hillman’s, and he remembered this quality with affection rather than exasperation. It kept people on their toes and discouraged the habit of simply believing what they were told.
Imaginal psychology and Hillman’s distinctive vision
The imaginal realm, or mundus imaginalis, is a term Hillman drew from the work of philosopher Henry Corbin. For Corbin, writing in relation to Sufi philosophy, the imaginal referred to an intermediate reality between the purely spiritual and the physical.
Hillman developed the idea in his own direction. Images are not simply representations of supposedly more real events, but fundamental data of psyche possessing a reality of their own. The imaginal therefore differs considerably from the everyday notion of imagination as something fabricated by the mind. Images may make themselves known to us rather than simply being “made up”. This primacy of image became fundamental to archetypal psychology.
Many of Hillman’s ideas were, of course, developments of material already present in Jung, Corbin and elsewhere. He has sometimes been criticised for altering Jungian concepts while retaining familiar terminology.
Peter Kingsley discusses one particularly interesting example in Catafalque. Drawing partly on the testimony of Corbin’s wife Stella, Kingsley documents a considerable distance between Corbin’s understanding of the imaginal and Hillman’s later use of the term. It has sometimes been suggested that imaginal psychology might have been a more accurate name for Hillman’s approach, although Kingsley’s account makes clear that even this description would carry complications.
Perhaps this is characteristic of Hillman. Soul, imaginal, archetype, self and ego all acquire particular meanings in his writing, sometimes quite distinct from familiar Jungian usage. This helped keep his psychology alive and creative, even if it occasionally muddied the waters.
Hillman also told a story connected with Jung’s death in which he experienced a strong sense that he must go his own way rather than become a follower. Whether understood literally or symbolically, it fits him very well.
Hillman's critique of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis
Hillman was trained within the Jungian tradition and became one of its most spirited critics. His critique of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in general was less a rejection of depth or soul than a challenge to assumptions that had solidified around clinical practice.
He questioned the idea that the purpose of therapy was simply to fix, correct or improve the individual, arguing that such a model remained too close to medical thinking. Treating psyche as something primarily in need of repair risks reducing its complexity and capacity.
Symptoms, fantasies and disturbances could instead be approached as expressions of soul. Hillman resisted the tendency to assume that pathology should always be eliminated or normalised, asking what it might reveal when approached imaginally.
He also challenged the intensely personal focus of much psychotherapy. Psyche does not end at the boundary of individual biography but extends into culture, art, relationship and the wider world. Therapy therefore cannot concern itself only with making the individual function more successfully within the society that surrounds them. This is of course a more commonly held critique of much counselling and psychotherapy, to which Hillman brought his own distinctive approach to 'the world', utilising his incisive eye for pathological understanding as an enlivening and creative act.
This remains one of Hillman’s most provocative contributions. A psychology of soul has to be spacious enough to listen to what the world itself may be asking of us.
Some key themes in James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology
Images
We sin against the imagination whenever we ask an image for its meaning, requiring that images be translated into concepts.....interpretations forget too that they are themselves fantasies induced by the image, no more meaningful than the image itself.
Re-Visioning Psychology
For Hillman, psyche speaks foremost in images rather than concepts, diagnoses or purely personal narratives. Image is a mode of experiencing and a way of knowing that can draw us beyond individual biography. In archetypal psychology, images are not there simply to be interpreted away or translated into fixed meanings. They are followed, tended and allowed to reveal their depth.
Hillman’s familiar example is the snake in a dream. A conventional interpretation may immediately turn the snake into a symbol for something else, perhaps sexuality according to the preferred theory of the therapist. In doing so, the snake disappears.
Hillman asks us instead to witness the snake. What does it look like? What is it doing? Where is it going? What might it want? Allow the image to lead.
This is a working method I often adopt in therapy. The meaning of an image is not necessarily fixed, or even present in the form of a single “meaning”, but may emerge gradually through exploration within the relational setting. It remains a common misconception that an Art Psychotherapist’s role is to tell someone what their image means.
We learn from the alchemical psychologists to let the images work upon the experimenter; we learn to become the object of the work—even an object, or objectified image, of the imagination. It is therefore less a matter of program than of attitude, of giving over to the images and cultivating them for their sake.
Re-Visioning Psychology
Soul
Thomas Moore, in his commentary on Hillman collected in A Blue Fire, offers a useful way into Hillman’s understanding of soul. For anyone unfamiliar with Hillman, these selected writings remain one of the places I would recommend beginning.
Hillman was often sharply critical of forms of spirituality that seek to escape or transcend ordinary earthly life. His distinction between spirit and soul is therefore important. Where spirit tends upwards, towards transcendence, Hillman repeatedly draws soul down into the world. He reinstates something close to the Neoplatonic idea of soul as an intermediary, keeping mind in contact with body and matter in contact with spirit.
Hillman famously insisted that psychology must return to soul. He did not generally mean soul as a theological proposition, but as a poetic and relational quality of being.
My own view differs slightly here. In how I understand therapy as an act of soul-making, soul may refer both to a distinct spiritual reality and to qualities of depth, relatedness and presence within ordinary life.
Hillman’s soul is found in longing, difficulty, beauty and the particular texture of a life. Soul is cared for rather than perfected, and soul-making becomes an ongoing way of being in the world, as well as the core work of psychotherapy.
His image of spirit ascending the mountain while soul remains in the valley is particularly memorable. Hillman’s writing can nevertheless feel deeply spiritual, which perhaps demonstrates the usefulness of the distinction: by refusing to collapse soul and spirit into one another, he may ultimately do a service to both.
Hillman adopted Keats’s famous phrase as a psychological motto:
Call the world, if you please, the vale of soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world. —
John Keats, quoted in James Hillman, A Blue Fire
Elsewhere Hillman suggested that we already possess an intuitive understanding of soul through phrases such as soul food or soul music. We may similarly describe an artwork, building or institution as possessing soul, or recognise immediately when something feels conspicuously soulless.
Dream
Dreaming for Hillman was a primary expression of psyche rather than a secondary activity requiring translation into something supposedly more real. In The Dream and the Underworld, he makes an important distinction between the nightworld of dream and the dayworld of waking consciousness.
The temptation is to drag a dream into the dayworld and immediately ask what it means for our waking life. Hillman instead asks us to meet it where it belongs, within the nightworld, attending to its figures, atmosphere and peculiar logic before turning it into explanation.
This is closely related to his insistence on staying with the image. The dream is allowed to remain strange and to possess some autonomy, rather than being converted too quickly into a message about ourselves.
In psychotherapy, this can slow the impulse to decode and leave room for the dream to continue working upon us.
Nature and environment
Hillman repeatedly argued that psyche is not confined to what happens inside the individual. Psyche is also in the world.
Rivers, forests, mountains, weather and animals participate in psychic life, and to speak of soul therefore also means speaking of an ensouled world. Hillman held a deep appreciation of animals, particularly valuing animal presences in dreams.
From this perspective, ecological crisis is also a psychic crisis. When the world is flattened, exploited or stripped of significance, something happens to inner life as well. Hillman called for a psychology capable of recognising the soul of the world rather than attending only to the soul of the individual.
I have also found considerable value in his writing on urban environments. This is one example of what he meant by pathologising: looking at the human-made world and asking where the sickness might actually reside. Perhaps it is not always me that is crazy. The buildings, street layout or lighting may themselves nourish psychic life or work directly against it.
Beauty
Beauty was never merely an aesthetic afterthought for Hillman. It belonged to the way psyche discloses itself.
He argued that psychology had neglected aesthetic perception in favour of explanation, measurement and diagnosis. Beauty offers another way of knowing, drawing us into attention and restoring value to qualities that an efficiency-driven culture may overlook.
For Hillman, this was also part of the anima mundi, the soul of the world. To take beauty seriously was therefore not to retreat into decoration, but to recover a psychological relationship with the sensuous world.
Culture and society
Hillman challenged the idea that psychology should restrict itself to the private individual. Much of what troubles us may belong partly to the culture that surrounds us.
Economics, architecture, education and technology help shape the conditions in which psychological life unfolds. Archetypal psychology therefore turns its attention outward as well as inward, asking what imaginal patterns are operating in institutions and collective life.
This aspect of Hillman’s cultural critique remains remarkably relevant fifty years after Re-Visioning Psychology first appeared.
Ageing with grace, wisdom, and a healthy dose of mischief
In many of the recorded interviews I have encountered, Hillman is in especially fine form. Whether one agrees with him or not, he expressed himself with a verve and vigour that is refreshing to witness and too seldom encountered among psychologists, therapists and academics.
He was clearly someone very much alive, and as he aged it sometimes seemed as though his energy increased.
Ageing itself was one of the many subjects about which he had interesting ideas. A life genuinely lived could bring character and wisdom into the world rather than simply represent diminishment. His criticism was directed towards a processed culture of vanity that attempts to remove whatever is difficult, irregular or inconvenient about life.
I recall him using the term white bread for this tendency in mainstream Western culture: processing out the very elements that might have made life most nourishing.
Hillman continues to matter to me partly because his psychology remains difficult to reduce to a method. It returns repeatedly to image, soul and the world itself, while resisting the temptation to make psyche the servant of a too orderly and standardised psychology.
Fifty years after Re-Visioning Psychology, that still feels like a vital intervention.
