14

Variation II, 1924, Paul Klee

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Between Jung and Hillmani

Glen%Slater

ABSTRACT:
James Hillman’s role in the history of Jungian psychology is considered in the
context of Jung’s original vision for depth psychology and in terms of Hillman’s
international interdisciplinary influence. The bridge between Jung’s ideas and
those of Hillman is examined in light of Hillman’s perspectival approach to
the psyche, his notion of “soul-making” and its relation to individuation, and
his use of the term “archetypal.”
KEY WORDS:
archetypal, soul-making, imaginal, anima mundi, mythos

Since C. G. Jung’s death in 1961 few if any Jungian theorists have approached
the preeminence of James Hillman. For those who early on embraced Hillman’s
work, this assessment may well have been made at any point during the past three
to four decades. For others, Hillman’s approach has been considered too great a
departure from Jung’s main thrust, making such an assessment debatable at best.
In either case the recent death of this unquestionably innovative psychologist invites
us to look again at his contribution to our field, particularly at how his key
understandings relate to and diverge from those of Jung. In doing so we may find
ourselves inclined to revision the psychology of the man who dedicated his life
to revisioning psychology.

Glen Slater, Ph.D., teaches Jungian and archetypal psychology at Pacifica Grad-
uate Institute in Carpinteria, California and has contributed a number of articles to Jun-
gian journals and essay collections. He edited and introduced the third volume of James
Hillman’s Uniform Edition of writings, Senex and Puer, as well as Varieties of Mythic Expe-
rience: Essays on Religion, Psyche and Culture.
16

To Begin
There can be little question about James Hillman’s range. He authored
works on analysis, religion, emotion, suicide, dreaming, war, aging, and charac-
ter, power, fate and calling, to name but a few of the subjects he addressed. In ded-
icated essays he engaged a multitude of mythic figures and configurations: The
Great Mother, the Earth Mother, the Bad Mother, the Child, senex and puer,
Hermes, Hestia, Aphrodite, the Hero, Hades, Dionysus, Ananke among them.
Along the way he overlapped the concerns of psychology with interests in archi-
tecture, ecology, literature, and art, often imbedding these interests in commen-
taries on contemporary events. His twenty plus books have been translated into
just as many languages, and his ideas have had an even greater impact in far-flung
nations like Italy, Japan, and Brazil than here in the United States.
The scope of Hillman’s work mirrors the polytheistic emphasis that anchored
his critique of classical Jungian thought and became the basis of his archetypal
psychology, an outcome of conversations with a small circle of analysts in Zürich,
particularly Patricia Berry and Rafael Lopez-Pedraza. It also reflects the roam-
ing puer spirit he named within his calling and that stands in part behind his
method. Yet beneath these more apparent proclivities lies a largely overlooked
capacity that made such wide-ranging interests and dexterity of mind possible:
James Hillman was able to forge many different intellectual and psychological
alliances. He befriended many ideas, forming his psychology with input from other
disciplines. Both his critical eye and his fluid imagination grew out of this more
basic habit of intelligence.
Hillman pushed hard against some aspects of Jungian thought while pas-
sionately embracing others and eventually described Jung as archetypal psychology’s
“first immediate father” (2004, p. 14). However, quite unlike other innovative ren-
derings of the field—Fordham’s concern with early development and détente with
psychoanalysis, Neumann’s psychological phylogeny or von Franz’s extended under-
standing of fairytales, alchemy and physics—Hillman sought to put his under-
standing of the psyche on other footings, especially those with ties to the humanities.
Further, he omitted appeals to science and empiricism. In this manner he established
several points of orientation beyond the immediate Freud-Jung tradition. For
example, archetypal psychology leaned into the Neoplatonic tradition of Renais-
sance writers like Vico and Ficino and mostly dodged the Germanic influence of

quadrant XXXXII
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Kant, Schopenhauer, and Goethe. It also cultivated a primarily imaginal rather than
analytical or even symbolical orientation, drawing heavily upon the writings of Henri
Corbin, subsequently named the “second father” of the approach (ibid., p. 15). Even
more foundational to Hillman’s enterprise was the ancient Greek tradition—not
only its mythology but also its reflections on self-knowledge, which he would trace
back to Heraclitus. Thus, one foot may have landed in Zürich, but the other foot
moved around—from Dublin to Paris, Florence to Athens. Beyond being an
American who spent a quarter century in Europe, his mind managed to cross the
Swiss border in multiple directions.
Although Hillman’s weight would shift from time to time, his inside foot
remained planted on Jungian soil; the conversation with Jung’s ideas and with ana-
lytical psychology went on until the end. However, this insider-outsider position

. . . he took psychology beyond the consulting room

and recovered a sense of psyche in the world at large

combined with the mixed theoretical orientation and mercurial style has con-
founded observers and made assessments of Hillman’s contribution difficult.
To cut through this unsettling and contentious role in the history of Jungian
thought we need to draw out two pervasive lines of thought, which form some-
thing akin to the latitude and longitude of Hillman’s world: First, he emphasized
making conscious the archetypal roots and cultural-historical baggage of psy-
chological concepts and theories. Prominent examples of this are his view of the
ego as a recapitulation of the hero myth, the Self as a hangover of Christian the-
ology, and the grip of the mother complex on most psychologies. Second, he took
psychology beyond the consulting room and recovered a sense of psyche in the
world at large. He walked psychopathology out into the town square and took
inner life past its literal connotation into an interiorizing movement that revealed
the soul quality of events and things.
In putting psychology itself on the couch, Hillman (1972) spared neither his
Jungian training nor his own inclinations.ii He often referred to his work as a ther-
apy of ideas or as an application of “psychology to psychology” (p. 40). And yet
he did this therapy in a distinctively Jungian way, examining theories through
mythic and cultural patterns. He began his first major work, The Myth of Analy-

Between Jung and Hillman

18

sis (1972), by asking “what fathers psychology?” and proceeded to explore the myth
of Eros and Psyche as a vital source of field-orienting metaphors (p. 11ff ). Arche-
typal reflection on psychological perspectives could reveal unexamined assump-
tions as well as sources of renewal. If notions such as redeeming, ordering,
transcending, centering, normalizing, curing, diagnosis, or progress went unchecked,
psychology could be unconsciously caught in religious, medical, and utilitarian
back-stories, spinning its wheels in some cultural complex. He was thus constantly
questioning rarified, abstracted principles, pulling them back to into the frag-
menting and fictional character of the soul’s own ground. Moreover, as his Revi-
sioning Psychology (1975) made clear, he wanted to revitalize psychological
thought at a time when body, feeling, and experience had all but turned think-
ing into a dirty word. Indeed, nothing provoked him more than displays of lazy
thought, vast generalizations, or cliché-ridden formulations.
In looking beyond the therapy room, while appearing to go against the
grain, Hillman was running with a well established if largely neglected stream
of depth psychological inquiry. Both Freud and Jung commented at length on social
themes, which were also taken up by respective followers, especially Erich Fromm
on the psychoanalytic side and writers like Jaffé, Progoff, Neumann, and Whit-
mont on the Jungian side. For Hillman, even more primary than this application
of psychological insight to culture was the project of reversing the psychic dead-
ening of the world and recovering a sense of the anima mundi, which he couched
in terms of “that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself
through each thing in its visible form” (1982, p. 101). Whereas psychology in gen-
eral and Jungians in particular were giving almost exclusive emphasis to work-
ing on the psyche from inside out, Hillman often reversed the procedure,
attending to neurotic and psychopathic ingredients in society.
Archetypal psychology was establishing its own horizons. Yet within what
often appeared as an unraveling and remolding of Jung’s ideas one thing is clear,
and this forms the backbone of Hillman’s contribution to Jungian thought:
Between the old man of Zürich and this restless American “son” lay a commit-
ment to the archetypal basis of being; they both undertook a recollection of the
gods. Jung set off on his own distinctive path by placing Freudian theories of the
mother in the hands of the maternal archetype. He then went on to explore uni-
versal patterns of typology behind different theoretical leanings. He rooted his

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key findings in comparative religion and spent more than a decade planting psy-
chological concepts in the soil of medieval alchemy. At key points along the way
he affirmed and reaffirmed the psyche’s preference for a mythological way of think-
ing, and he spent most of his final years relating the modern search for meaning
to the breakdown of Christian myth. For both Jung and Hillman the human con-
dition revealed itself within a psychic reality that is grounded in divine drama,
and the differences that emerge between them can only be measured against this
most fertile common ground. While Jung may have referred to it as the collec-
tive unconscious or objective psyche and Hillman came to think of it as the arche-
typal imagination, both men understood the psyche as a mythic unfolding and
understood psychology as a logos that must reconstitute this mythos.

Finding a Baseline

James Hillman’s contribution to depth psychology is not so easily written into

the history of the field because it’s entwined with the problem of orthodoxy and
heterodoxy in Jungian thought. Jung’s famous aversion to Freud’s dogmatic style,
his admonitions about the unconscious remaining unknown, his statements
about his psychology being a working hypothesis, as well as his resistance to estab-
lishing training institutes, all provide his followers with cautionary tales. The very
notion of an “orthodox Jungian” opposes the attitude Jung tried to cultivate. In
spite of this, the essential tenets of Jung’s psychology and their application have
been matters of continual debate, and a half-century of Jungian history has been
dotted with institutional splits. What makes an analyst, a writer or a thinker “Jun-
gian” seems to be sandwiched somewhere between the open nature of the
founder’s thought and the too often closed character of institutional life.
Before his step into the spotlight translating Liber Novus (The Red Book), the
Jung historian Sonu Shamdasani, in his volume Jung and the Making of Modern
Psychology (2003), wrote that “Jung did not intend to form a particular school of
psychotherapy” but intended to develop a “general psychology,” of which “prac-
tical analysis” would be only a part. He says further:

The establishment of complex psychology ( Jung’s original term for his per-
spective) was to enable the reformation of the humanities and revitalize con-
temporary religions. The history of Jungian psychology has in part consisted
in a radical and unacknowledged diminution of Jung’s goal. (p. 15)

Between Jung and Hillman

20

Establishing this baseline is important in situating Hillman’s work in the his-

tory of Jungian thought. Beyond Jung’s ongoing concern with cultural phenom-
ena and his constant attempt to tie psychology to the wisdom of the past,
Shamdasani forces us to acknowledge that psychotherapy was neither the sole nor
primary focus of his psychology. Along such lines, Hillman’s project to move psy-
chology beyond the bounds of the consulting room and root it in the humani-

a major rationale for putting Hillman’s

perspective aside has been either its critique of psychotherapy or its
perceived lack of clinical relevance.

ties rather than the sciences resonates with Jung’s original intention for the
field. Yet among many Jungians—in marked contrast to this understanding—a
major rationale for putting Hillman’s perspective aside has been either its critique
of psychotherapy or its perceived lack of clinical relevance.
Overviews of Jungian psychology reflect this situation. In his 1985 book, Jung
and the Post-Jungians, Andrew Samuels produced the now well-known rubric that
separated Jungian psychology into three main schools: classical, developmental, and
archetypal. He then placed various analysts and writers in theoretical clusters, sug-
gesting something of a spectrum, without placing hard boundaries between these
schools. However, in 1998, Samuels revised this assessment, dropping Hillman’s arche-
typal psychology from his schema, stating it has “either been integrated or elimi-
nated as a clinical entity—perhaps a bit of both” (1998, p. 21, italics mine). Samuels
then proceeded to add two wings to the remaining duo, suggesting that the London
developmental Jungians now have a decidedly psychoanalytic (Freudian) wing,
while the Zürich classical school has developed a fundamentalist wing. But in this
new schema archetypal psychology no longer warranted its own standing. A further
example of this tendency is Thomas Kirsch’s The Jungians: A Comparative and His-
torical Perspective (2000), wherein the author indicates his intention at the start to
forego the movement’s “intellectual history” and focus on “social and political
developments” (p. xii). His outlook mirrors that of Samuels and provides a metic-
ulously researched history of Jungian training organizations. Alongside a dozen other
key analysts, Hillman is given a dedicated couple of paragraphs, focusing on his early
and somewhat controversial history before leaving Zürich.

quadrant XXXXII
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Such assessments of trends in Jungian psychology, emphasizing clinical

work and training institute politics, are distorted on two counts: They not only
tend to absent Jung’s overall outlook and application of his own psychology, they
don’t account for the way Jungian perspectives are disseminated or engaged in
other settings, such as academia. They may describe the direction of Jung insti-
tutes very well, but they don’t accurately portray the broader world of Jungian
thought. To cut to the chase: In most overviews of the field, archetypal psychology’s
international, interdisciplinary following and Hillman’s broader contribution to
psychological and cultural discourse have been overlooked. His prominence has
been shrouded, and the relation of Hillman’s work to the spirit and substance of
Jung’s vision has been obscured.
By vivid contrast, outside the confines of Jungian institutional life another pic-
ture is apparent. Organizations for scholarship such as the International Associa-
tion of Jungian Studies and centers of learning like Pacifica Graduate Institute and
The Dallas Institute of the Humanities hold Hillman’s work as a primary source
of discussion and reference. In dedicated monographs his work has been placed along-
side that of Heidegger, Whitehead, Freud, and of course, Jung.iii Through the teach-
ing and writing of Edward Casey (Yale and Stony Brook Universities), David Miller
(Syracuse University), Hayao Kawai (Kyoto International Research Center for Japan-
ese Studies), Ginette Paris (University of Quebec and Pacifica Graduate Institute),
David Tacey (La Trobe University, Melbourne), Roberts Avens (Iona College) and
David Rosen (Texas A & M University) to name a few, Hillman’s ideas have been
channeled into several other disciplines. Few Jungian writers have come close to
finding this kind of traction in the academic world, nor created a substantive or orig-
inal enough body of work to do so.
The wider cultural reception for Hillman’s writings has been equally impres-
sive: After Jung, Hillman has been the only Jungian to give the prestigious Terry
Lectures at Yale, and his resulting work, Revisioning Psychology (1975), was nom-
inated for a Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the Medal of the Presidency in Italy
and named among the Utne Reader’s 100 most important thinkers in America.
Hillman’s work with the Men’s Movement and his New York Times best selling
work, The Soul’s Code (1996a) brought his ideas into the national spotlight. After
publishing an anthology of Hillman’s writings, A Blue Fire (1989), Thomas
Moore went on to widely disseminate archetypal perspective with his own best

Between Jung and Hillman

22

seller, Care of the Soul (1992). Later in his life, Hillman appeared in a number of
documentaries, including several BBC productions and the theatrical release, The
11th Hour. At either the scholarly or cultural level, no other Jungian has been as
widely read or made such inroads into disciplines beyond depth psychology.

Perspective and Structure

When Jungian psychology is not confined by institutional and clinical def-

initions, Hillman’s preeminence becomes hard to dispute. Nonetheless, a stum-
bling block for arriving at this assessment is the matter of how far archetypal
psychology departs from classical Jungian concepts. Whereas there can be little
question Hillman left parts of Jung’s understanding behind, misunderstandings
of his approach and terminology may be responsible for exacerbating this divide.
And at the very heart of these misunderstandings is his shift from a psychody-
namic to a perspectival approach to the psyche.
When the psyche is perceived through the separation of conscious and
unconscious, special conditions, techniques and tools are needed to get from one
side to the other. Psychic material arises from the unconscious or sinks down into
the unconscious and a whole psychodynamic apparatus is required to track the
movement. This mode of perception reflects the starting point of depth psychology.
Freud and Jung came into a world that had reduced the psyche to the rational
mind and had underestimated or dismissed emotion and instinct. While psy-
choanalysis opened the door to what had been split off, Jung came to realize that
a loss of symbolic thinking compounded the situation. For without a conscious
faculty for symbols and images the deeper reaches of the unconscious remain for-
eign and unruly, generating never-ending battles between a reasonable ego and
an untamable id. Beyond the solution of sublimation, Jung heralded the trans-
formative power of symbolic experience. He revived awareness of the in-between
realm where myth, religion, and art had always bridged the upper and lower reaches
of the psyche. In the end, Freud and Jung parted ways over the nature of this psy-
chic borderland. Wrapped up with Jung’s major insight into the archetypal basis
of psychic life was the equally vital understanding that symbols could overcome
psychic splits and redirect human instinct. And he began to glean a deeper intel-
ligence at work in this process.
Hillman doubled down on this territory in between conscious and uncon-

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scious, recognizing it as the realm of Platonic metaxy, the place where soul was
made. As his work developed, the conceptual landmarks and mapping of the psyche
began to matter less than the sensibilities and attitudes he detected at the base
of Jung’s work. Structure and concept receded just as metaphor and myth
expanded to fill the resulting space. By the time of Revisioning Psychology Hill-
man was peeling the scientific Jung away from the mythopoetic Jung and aug-
menting the latter with a series of new terms and cultural-historical amplifications.
To be sure, Jung (1965) had already tilted his psychology in this direction:

For Hillman, the resultant aim was not to map

or even describe the psyche, but to explore psychological thought
and vision while staying close to the psyche’s native tongue.

“Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious

and conscious cognition” (p. 311); “no science will ever replace myth, and a myth
cannot be made out of any science” (ibid., p. 340). For Hillman, the resultant aim
was not to map or even describe the psyche, but to explore psychological thought
and vision while staying close to the psyche’s native tongue.
The core of this project was a sustained attack on literalism and positivism as
well as an attempt to overcome the Cartesian divisions that Jung’s psychology had
sought to transcend even while such divisions haunted its formulations. Hillman’s
move beyond psychotherapy must be placed in this context: Rather than a disin-
terest in what came into the consulting room he had a profound interest in what
was being left out as medicine and science prolonged the divisions of inner/outer,
mind/body, and psyche/world. Indeed he continued to insist upon the primacy of
psychopathology, without which psychology succumbs to paradigms of human poten-
tial, spirituality and self-help style ego empowerment. When things go wrong or
“fall apart,” as he says, we’re drawn into the psychic depths. So depth psychology
in particular must stay close to the appearance of pathos, which cannot be separated
from soul. Yet, he argued, it need not bind psychopathology to the clinical vision,
for the metaxy extended beyond this: Rotten politics and ruined estuaries can
depress us right alongside a midlife crisis. Town centers can be manic, buildings
paranoid or schizoid, and institutions may display a range of character disorders.
Corporations can dissociate and landscapes can be raped and traumatized. We don’t

Between Jung and Hillman

24

need to take “inner” literally; we can also look outside with an interiorizing vision.
Psyche appears in these places too. Overcoming the split between inner and outer
in this way was a pivot point for Hillman’s psychology of perspective.
By describing soul as that which lives “between us and events, between the doer
and the deed” (p. xvi), Hillman (1975) didn’t leave behind instincts, emotions and
complexes; he just underscored how these dimensions inhabit the psychic field in
which all things stand in relation to one another. Cultivating this middle realm left
a swinging door between conscious and unconscious, so that known and unknown,

We don’t need to take “inner” literally;

we can also look outside with an interiorizing vision.

upper and lower, light and shadow remained in constant contact. Applying a ther-
apeutic eye to the pathologized world also alleviated or at least nursed the acute
psychic pain of the personal realm. Here it is important for Jungians to realize that
Jung’s individual versus collective trope was aimed at avoiding the numbing, some-
times inflating impact of collectivization not at the expense of community and cer-
tainly not at the sense of connection to one’s surroundings.
The notion of a psychology of psychology already implies an emphasis on the
approach taken rather than on the thing considered. Our habit is to describe the
psyche as something we observe—dreams enter consciousness, emotions are
released, projections are recollected, and so on. For Jung, such descriptions of psy-
chic contents and their movements aimed to correct the widespread undervaluing
of inner life and give substance to the reality of the psyche. Repeated observations
result in descriptions of the salient features of an inner realm, just as an explorer
charts an unknown region or an archeologist uncovers buried artifacts. Both these
spatial metaphors pervaded the early history of the field. But Jung also understood
that what we perceive is inextricably bound up with the way we look.
Hillman’s work highlighted this manner in which perception and knowledge
betray psychological patterns, showing how stances are determined by images and
their associated fantasies. More than anything else, he addressed the way psy-
chological understanding depends on different modes of imagination. A depres-
sion may be imagined medically, poetically, mythically, or spiritually and will seem
like a different phenomenon in each case. The idea of an inner landscape can either

quadrant XXXXII
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be translated into abstract terrain like ego, persona and shadow or it can invite
further images—fathomless oceans, dry deserts, enchanted forests. One of Hill-
man’s (2005) pivotal essays approached the difference between spirit and soul in
terms of “peaks and vales” (pp. 71ff.), allowing images of bright mountaintops and
shadowy ravines to convey the psychological contrast. The pure, rarified air of spir-
itual practice, he argued, was a vastly different pursuit compared to trekking
through the lowlands of soul. In such a manner, whether psychological life was
approached spiritually or soulfully made a great deal of difference.
For Hillman it always came back to working with the fantasies and images
that shape our perceptions. It is here that we can put our hands on the very way
we imagine life into being. What occurs between us and events is where he
glimpses soul, taking his cue from Jung (1971): “The psyche creates reality every-
day. The only expression I can say for this activity is fantasy” (p. 52, par. 78). Spliced
with Jung’s (1967) equation, “image is psyche” (p. 50, par. 75), Hillman’s version
of making the unconscious conscious is to become aware of the way our psychic
glasses create reality. At times, even seasoned Jungians are tripped up by this empha-
sis because they retreat to the visual connotation of the term “image.” But, as Hill-
man has reiterated and a careful reading of Jung confirms, “image” describes the
most primary and irreducible psychological form and may exhibit an emotional,
auditory, sensate, or ideational character.iv So-called raw emotions or bodily sen-
sations become images as soon as they are psychically registered. Feelings become
images as soon as any significant awareness of them occurs. A feeling of sadness
or loneliness becomes an image as soon as recognition or reflection takes place and
the kind of sadness or loneliness and the context of its arising is apparent. An image
is, essentially, a piece of imagining. Once consciously held and considered, the fan-
tasy that surrounds and connects images is also revealed. A careful consideration
of images leads us more deeply into an appreciation of Edward Casey’s insight that
“an image is not what one sees but the way in which one sees” (Hillman, 2004, pp.
18-19). Hillman’s approach becomes a work on those images—with, on, and
through the imagination. He wrote, “the aim of therapy is the development of a
sense of soul, the middle ground of psychic realities, and the method of therapy
is the cultivation of the imagination” (ibid., p. 15). Such cultivation may well take
place in analysis, but it’s roots and implications extend far beyond the business of
individual psychotherapy. Soul, metaxy, is recovered as the realm of imagining.

Between Jung and Hillman

26

In considering the key role of Hermes in psychological modes of thought,

we get a glimpse of this understanding at work. Jung had earlier invited this con-
nection. In a revealing passage where he emphasizes the point that we don’t invent
the gods, but “the gods came first,” and that we “must derive our psychic condi-
tions from these figures,” Jung (1967) also wrote: “From this standpoint Christ
appears as the archetype of consciousness and Mercurius as the archetype of the uncon-
scious” (p. 247, paras. 298-299, italics added). The unconscious is apprehended
through Hermes-Mercurius, the god of communication, interpretation, borders
and thresholds. Any understanding or perspective that makes room for Hermes
will remain fluid and keep the unconscious close at hand. And so, fittingly, read-
ing Hillman is often accompanied by the feeling of quicksilver running through
one’s fingers. In Revisioning Psychology (1975) he deliberately supplies no exam-
ples of what he’s talking about. Historical and mythological amplifications of ideas
abound, but no clinical examples and no descriptions of technique are given. His
writings as well as his method wander all over the map, borrowing a little from
here and a little from there in the same way Hermes builds his lyre to charm Apollo.
Hillman essentially argued: If the realms of psychic life may only be traversed
by the unpredictable and hard-to-catch Hermes, then perhaps one’s overall
approach to psychology should follow his rhythm. Then one might catch that fleet-
ing intuition, bad omen or other communication “from the unconscious” and grow
more comfortable in the liminal spaces and borderlands over which this god pre-
sides. In his paper, “Notes on Opportunism,” (2005), he wrote:

The mercurial opportunist, having no fixed position, no sense of being at

the center, keeps his eye on the door, the thresholds where transiencies pass
over from statement to implication, from fact to supposition, from report
to fantasy. Mercurius is messenger of the Gods, so he must be able to hear
their messages in what ever is said. (p. 101)

Following the mercurial path, Hillman’s psychology aims to cultivate a thor-

oughly imaginal way of knowing, from the start attuning our awareness to the
language of the deep psyche. When writing on the cusp of his traditional train-
ing and his new approach, in a short section of The Myth of Analysis (1972) called
“Toward an Imaginal Ego,” he set out this aim, situating it in the context of what
Jungian analysis ultimately attempts to do:

quadrant XXXXII
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The idea of an imaginal ego gives conceptual form to what actually hap-
pens in Jungian psychotherapy, where adaptation to the unconscious, or
memoria, is reflected in the changed ego personality of the analyzed
person. His adaptation is primarily to “psychic reality” ( Jung), to the
“imaginal world” (Corbin). (p. 185)

Realizing that one’s orientation and attitude determine the relationship

with the rest of the psyche, Hillman constantly asked: What is the most fitting
perspective? What is the best way to see the gods at work within the complexes
and callings of psychological life?

Individuation and Soul-making

Jung’s notion of individuation takes depth psychology’s basic imperative to

make the unconscious conscious and reveals how individual purpose and mean-
ing grow out of the process. This incremental revelation of personal calling and
character expands comprehension of one’s unique place in the universal drama
of humanity. So the process continually engages the question of how one’s par-
ticular situation relates to larger archetypal patterns of existence. Jung often
wrote of this as a natural process, but he equally understood it is constantly
thwarted by practical demands and social imperatives. For most, it requires spe-
cial conditions and directed effort, which his psychology aimed to describe. In
this way his method of supporting this process has become wrapped up in our
understanding of it; working with dreams, sorting through complexes, wrestling
with fantasy life and withdrawing projections are activities that pave the path of
individuation.
In bridging into Hillman’s notion of soul-making we can begin by noting
that although Jung relied on such introspective methods, he came to describe the
objective psyche—to which we must eventually forge a relation—as something
that surrounds us on all sides—inner and outer. In Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious (1946) he writes:

No, the collective unconscious is anything but an incapsulated personal

system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world.
There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordi-
nary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object.
There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget
all too easily who I really am. “Lost in oneself ” is a good way of describ-

Between Jung and Hillman

28

ing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see
it. That is why we must know who we are. (p. 22, para. 46)
The phrase “if only consciousness could see it” is the key one. Together with
the reflection, “I am the object of every subject,” we’re ushered into the terrain
Hillman attempted to revivify. The term “soul-making” is taken from Keats,
who wrote, “Call the world if you please, ‘The Vale of Soul-making.’ Then you
will find the use of the world.” (Hillman, 2004, p. 38). For Hillman, as for Keats,
the world offers soul, if only we have the eyes to see. This is the basis of his descrip-
tion of soul as “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things
rather than a thing itself ” (1975, p. xvi)—a viewpoint that depends above all else
on the capacity to deliteralize.
Jung’s own work moved carefully yet pointedly in the direction of under-
standing and recovering this soul-world relationship. The dedicated exploration
of alchemy, dialogues with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, studies of synchronicity, and
the concern with spirit and matter are all geared in this direction. Jung also, by
temperament, conveyed a highly developed sense of the animated world: con-
versations with the rock he sat on as a boy; addressing misbehaving pots and pans
at his Bollingen retreat; releasing figures through stone-carving. He wrote about
the modern world with an acute awareness of this inner-outer overlap: “Dragons
are in our day great machines, cars, big guns, these are archetypes now, simply new
terms for old things” ( Jung, 2002, p. 147), and elsewhere: “Our fearsome gods have
only changed their names: they now rhyme with –ism” ( Jung, 1966, p. 204, para.
326). Meredith Sabini’s remarkable anthology of Jung’s nature writings ( Jung,
2002) leaves us with little doubt that he understood psyche and nature to be inex-
tricably woven. For Jung then, the psyche is not just found “within.” However,
the psychodynamic approach and Cartesian character of his scientific inclinations
often obscured this understanding.
Soul-making picks up the thread of Jung’s more expansive perceptions of psy-
chic reality. It occurs with the appearance of metaphoric possibility, which deep-
ens and opens to meaning. This can certainly be in art or journaling or active
imagination, just as Jung described. However, it might just as well take place in
cooking, making a garden, in a heartfelt conversation, or working on a tennis stroke.
Rituals of all types invite it, and it may be as embodied and gestural as it is mind-
ful. While opportunities for it are pervasive, it is not indiscriminate. We are drawn

quadrant XXXXII
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If in individuation the method is to attend to

what comes to us from the unconscious, in soul-making the method
is extended beyond the special circumstances of self-reflection,
dreaming and active imagination into all aspects of life that
generate imaginative sparks of a certain magnitude.

into soul-making when the imagination glimpses something knocking at the door.
Then the door must be opened and the visitor greeted with curiosity and regard.
So it implies a certain level of engagement, musing, and nursing the moment along.
It is not mere daydreaming or idle fantasy, but a crafting. If in individuation the
method is to attend to what comes to us from the unconscious, in soul-making
the method is extended beyond the special circumstances of self-reflection,
dreaming and active imagination into all aspects of life that generate imagina-
tive sparks of a certain magnitude.
Conjoining this awakening to psychic reality, Jung and Hillman both embraced
an unfolding of the personality and a slow revelation of deep character within which
one discerns a calling, even a sense of fate, especially looking at life in retrospect.
Amor fati is certainly one place where individuation and soul-making dovetail. Yet
whereas soul-making sounds very open ended, individuation is often presented in
a more directed, goal-oriented way, especially when joined to notions of unifying
and wholeness. No doubt people do, on occasion, have numinous experiences and
dreams that indicate a deeper center or a central archetype. But the intimation, even
preconception of an ordering factor can often overshadow the particularities and
context of these events. Love of one’s fate comes down to how well one embraces
specific events, and the question Hillman asks is what modes of perception are best
suited to nurse along this moment-to-moment unfolding?
In discussing such matters he was apt to use the analogy of a pearl necklace, where
the focus is on the pearls, not the string. As he saw it, the problem with orienting
psychology to the string—the direction and destination of the process—is the risk
of overlooking the pearls. “Strings” attract the heroic ego, which loves to know where
it’s going and likes to navigate by the will, above and beyond life’s specific gifts and
challenges and their own archetypal backgrounds. Soul-making aims to forget the
string and stay with the pearls. It stays with what captures the imagination and trusts

Between Jung and Hillman

30

that overall purposeful will reveal and take care of itself. The need for overarching
meaning or conception thus fades into the background; the string becomes a sec-
ondary consideration in light of life’s multiple spheres of concern.
We position ourselves in the soul-making process by becoming artisans of
the imagination, refining the craft of psychically hosting the circumstances and
events that come our way. The masterwork lies within the crafting itself, not the
overall outcome. By attending to moments when soul appears—“care of the
soul” as Thomas Moore (1992) suggested—each detail gains significance and offers
more fecundity and depth. A sense of continuity or cohesion is a by-product of
the moment-to-moment faith in the psyche, without need of a psychological blue-
print or image of the whole. This idea is not at all alien to other notions of what
actually feeds the psyche. In practical psychotherapy it is often advised to forget
the patient’s history, diagnosis, and distant goals in order to focus on the creation
of experience and insight in each session, understanding that “the whole” will
inevitably be implicated in the area of immediate concern. Soul-making extends
this principle into all aspects of existence.
In simple terms, the overall canvas of life may depend far more upon our com-
mitment and presence to each brush stroke than on our envisioning of the big
picture or our own hand at work. So, from Corbin, Hillman takes the idea that
what actually individuates is not “us,” but our passions, talents, and places of wound-
ing. Our complexes need to shake off their infantile associations and find their
deeper, more mature role in our character. If we turn our attention to what is going
on in these particularities and peculiarities, then it’s the parts that undergo
change, and the personality becomes a rich, multidimensional canvas. It is in this
spirit that Hillman (1975) uses the provocative term “dehumanizing” as a synonym
for soul-making (pp. 165ff), radically countering the egocentric and humanistic
reduction apparent in much psychological discourse.
Though the accents are different, both individuation and soul-making share
the goal of overcoming egoic ways of life. Individuation emphasizes the process
of becoming through the differentiation and integration of the parts of our
psyche, largely discerned through introspective processes. It has overtones of a
spiritual quest, promising to shift our conception of life from personal pursuit to
transpersonal purpose. Soul-making emphasizes engagement with whatever
takes on psychic significance, building the instinctive religiosity of the psyche into

quadrant XXXXII
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the ebb and flow of existence. On the other side of literal reality, through the
metaphoric and mythopoetic potential in perception, it discerns the play of the
gods in all things and our points of entry into that divine drama.

“Archetypes” and “Archetypal”

There are several areas of Jung’s work with archetypes that help illuminate Hill-
man’s style of archetypal discourse. In the first instance, archetypes announce their
presence with a certain ambience, not only with universal content or form. This ambi-
ence may or may not relate to overt mythic or religious motifs or to other cultur-
ally significant and recurring iconography. Although much attention is paid to the
history of symbolic patterns in establishing the archetypal pedigree of dream
images and artistic expressions, detecting the presence of an archetype in no way
depends on making these connections. The most direct and undeniable indication
of an archetype is its psychic import, often accompanied by a felt sense or intuition
of universal or transpersonal significance. To this qualitative dimension of arche-
typal events we can add another more specific way in which Jung (1960) described
archetypes—as “typical modes of apprehension” (p. 137, para. 280). Archetypes shape
what we encounter by shaping our perception of that encounter. This notion
returns us to Hillman’s emphasis on perspective. We may see gods and monsters
in our dreams but we also see via these inner figures—perceiving beauty via
Aphrodite, strife via Ares, mishap via Coyote. When looking at the world through
Medusa’s eyes, life petrifies. Among the Australian aboriginals, the Dreaming and
the landscape are indivisible. Landscape is known and navigated via myth, which
is a consciously cultivated mode of apprehension. In adding together these two under-
standings, the qualitative and the apprehensive, we can do no better than Jung (1960),
who wrote and himself highlighted the following: “Wherever we meet with uniform
and regularly occurring modes of apprehension we are dealing with an archetype, no matter
whether its mythological character is recognized or not.” (pp. 137-138, para. 280).
Hillman wanted to track the psychic intensities and archetypal patterns in
our perspectives—our modes of apprehending inner and outer life. Running with
Jung’s core insight that archetypes structure experience from the ground up,
Hillman took the archetypal shaping of the imagination as axiomatic. If, as Jung
described, the objective psyche is “as wide as the world and open to all the
world,” then archetypal patterns are also pervasive, present as something akin to

Between Jung and Hillman

32

energy fields, bending and molding all psychic realities.

Hillman’s more expansive use of the term “archetypal” is confusing to many Jun-
gians, who often want to preserve it for experiences that have a quasi-spiritual qual-
ity. Jung used Otto’s term “numinous”—the encounter with the mysterium
tremendum—to describe those moments when something archetypal comes crash-
ing into awareness. The intense charge and profound otherness of these experiences
certainly conveys the divine nature and sacred quality of archetypal forms. But it
also tends to harden the idea of archetypes residing in the basement of the psyche
or dropping from heaven rather than pervading and constantly shaping existence.
If, as Jung put forth, archetypes shape our complexes and the dynamics of psychic
life, then they’re always running in the background. So we are always enacting mythic
dramas and continually being caught in age-old conflicts—if only we have the eyes
to see. So for Hillman, taking the express elevator to the collective unconscious wasn’t
the only way to meet the gods. Scratch the surface of anything that really matters,
that really holds psychological significance, and you’ll find some piece of the uni-
versal story. You know it by the feel, by the emotional gravity, which is given with
how events sit in the imagination.
On the flip side of this archetypal sensibility, which smells the animal
instinct or soul person in everyday images, is the formulaic reversion to well-known
archetypes, which may come with a busload of religious iconography and mythic
motifs but have no psychic gravity. Forgetting Jung’s insight that the archetype
per se was unknowable, archetypes are labeled, categorized, and turned into
stereotypes. In this way the very question of whether something is or isn’t an arche-
type can be a trap, just as the hasty sorting of dream images into familiar baskets
like shadow, anima /animus, and the Self can become a mere intellectual exercise.
When, as Jung said, there are as many archetypes as there are typical situations
in life, the naming and labeling of archetypes can lead us right out of their
archetypal potential and into a system of staid symbols. Just like the Buddha, if
you see an “archetype” on the road, its demise may be indicated.
An important departure point for archetypal psychology, especially in
approaching suffering, is Jung’s (1967) statement: “The Gods have become dis-
eases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces
curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room” (p. 37, para. 54). For Hillman
(1975), sufferings may be understood as “a series of nutshells, one inside the other:

quadrant XXXXII
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within the affliction is a complex, within the complex an archetype, which in turn
refers to a God. Afflictions point to Gods” (p. 104). We can discover the god within
the disease by working on personal complexes until the universal core of the prob-
lem becomes apparent. Or we can, from the start, build this archetypal idea into

. . . the whole attitude to the problem begins

with a mythic-archetypal premise—an opening to the divine
gift and healing potential within the affliction.

our perspective and host our wounds as if a hidden god resides there. Then the
whole attitude to the problem begins with a mythic-archetypal premise—an open-
ing to the divine gift and healing potential within the affliction. When there’s a
god in what ails us, we imagine into it very differently.
Hillman took the collective unconscious as an unconsciousness of the collec-
tivity (universality) within all occurrences that beg for attention. Jung broke ground
on this insight by exploring the character of the archetypal mother, and showing
how she stands right behind one’s actual mother, arranging our emotional responses
according to universal patterns. He went on to realize that healing and meaning
arise when the personal and the archetypal are connected, which often adds a miss-
ing element to the situation and also alleviates the acutely personal nature of the
problem. But Hillman essentially asked, why wait for the Great Mother to show
up in a big dream? Why not work the personal in terms of the archetypal from the
start, seeing mothering from the Great Mother’s standpoint, seeing through our
personal yearnings and smotherings to her endless bounty and terrifying appetite?
When the personal is apprehended through the archetypal our expanded
vision becomes a more robust psychic container. If the downturns, obsessions, anx-
ieties, and other ailments are woven into the nature of soul, if our sufferings are
recollections of the gods, and healing has to do with their recognition, the ther-
apeutic question becomes how to bleed on the appropriate altar (Hillman, 1975)
or perform the fitting ritual. Such notions are conversant with Jung’s idea of con-
verting neurotic suffering into conscious, meaningful suffering. Very often psy-
chotherapy struggles mightily to alleviate primary afflictions, which seem to come
and go of their own accord—fatefully. Instead, the work turns to altering the sec-
ondary overlay of self-persecution and dissociation that accompanies the prob-

Between Jung and Hillman

34

lem, such as overcoming the naïve view of a life devoid of wounding or the search
for creativity divorced from emotional trial. Or it turns to the question of hidden
intent, which only surfaces when the hero learns to face the underworld. The focus
moves to the story in which the suffering is cast and the story then moves the
focus within the suffering. Psychic discord is an invitation for a deeper story—
a “healing fiction,” as Hillman (1983a) called it. Such fictions heal by rendering
circumstantial peculiarity into archetypal significance, bringing dignity, depth and
mystery to the otherwise default cult of mechanistic personalism.

In the End

There are many Jungians, including analysts, writers and academics, who have
little trouble strolling across the bridge connecting Jung and Hillman. Others have
either deliberately dismissed Hillman’s work or simply put it aside, thinking it
too intellectual or, as discussed here, lacking in overt clinical application. In a few
cases, following some encounter with his fierce and critical style, a more personal
barrier has been erected. Many simply can’t fathom the deconstruction of the ego,
the disregard for the Self, or the assault on dream interpretation, all of which may
seem central to Jung’s view. However, Hillman’s work need not be assessed on these
grounds. It can be approached in terms of its own aim to make soul and open up
imaginative possibilities. Most specifically it might be considered in terms of the
most basic goal of Jung’s thought—expanding an awareness of psychic reality and
one’s particular place in that reality.
In the final pages of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung (1965) talks about
the inner certainties and uncertainties of his life, putting a surprising empha-
sis on the latter. He describes himself as a man who “once dipped a hatful of
water from a stream” (p. 355) and goes on to express a multitude of mixed feel-
ings. But he qualifies it all by saying, “the more uncertain I have felt about myself,
the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things” (ibid.,
p. 359). Earlier in the book, describing being “in the midst of my true life” at
Bollingen, he wrote:

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things,
and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds
and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. (ibid.,
pp. 225-226)

quadrant XXXXII
 35

Putting aside the carefully explored corridors of interiority, Jung wanted to

rest his retrospection on the vivid feeling of anima mundi—the soulful bonding
with his surroundings. In that final chapter he also talks about the “daimon” at
length, but leaves all conceptual ideas, especially the ultimate orientation point
of his own psychology, the Self, aside. His preferred mode of discourse, in what
he knew to be his final word on his own life, is poetic and metaphorical; it is arche-
typal rather than analytical.
Hillman believed psychology should appeal to the need for beauty just as much
as the quest for understanding, arguing persuasively in the piece “Thought of the
Heart” (1982) that psychological ideas must address aesthetic and sensual dimen-

Not everyone can follow Hillman head f irst

into the underworld, a place where day world conceptions are
constantly given back to the imagination.

sions too. He was a son who didn’t just follow in the father’s footsteps. Rather,
he entered the father’s vision then extended and reimagined it while staying close
to his own Ares-fueled, puer-inspired daimon. He attacked whatever was pushed
too far one way and then stood on the side of the dismissed with the same over-
correcting force as the returning repressed. For those lounging in the recliner of
psychological thought, he came along and kicked the back of the chair. He
refused to be cool-headed. His work honors Jung’s resistance to discipleship and
Jungianism and embraces the imperative that each person follow his or her own
way. Not everyone employing Jung’s ideas is called to rework the concepts or extend
the perspective, but a critical approach to his thought and a capacity to place phe-
nomenon before theory are fitting goals for all Jungians. Not everyone can
follow Hillman head first into the underworld, a place where day world conceptions
are constantly given back to the imagination, but every step of his dance is not
necessary to appreciate the vitality of his movement and add flexibility to the psy-
chological routine.
Hillman was iconoclastic, sensitive to mind grooves, intolerant of dogma and
reactive to clichés—which he could smell a mile away. He understood the soul loves
insight and loathes codification. Avoiding repeated recipes, he marinated psychol-
ogy in rich metaphorical and poetic amplifications and nourished the soul by

Between Jung and Hillman

36

attracting and opening the imagination. In radically underscoring Jung’s distinctive

attitude toward the psyche, in working with the shadow even as it appears within
Jungian theory, and in extending the vision of psychology and psychopathology out
onto the sidewalk, Hillman’s work has both deepened and sharpened the leading edge
of Jungian ideas. He kept the conversation lively. As he said in the book Inter
Views (1983b), his approach “twists” the theory, and “twisting may be a way to be
both a Jungian and an individual thinker. At least that’s how I imagine what I do”
(p. 27). Although we may debate different pathways to soul-making or individua-
tion, it’s hard to argue with Jung (1959) when he says, “Were it not for the leaping
and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion—idleness . . .
to have soul is the whole venture of life . . .” (p. 27, para. 56). This is Hillman’s Jung.

Notes
i
An earlier version of this paper was first delivered to the C. G. Jung Society of Seattle,
February 12, 2010. Following James Hillman’s death, October 27, 2011, it has been
amended and extended for publication here.
ii
Hillman wrote at length on his affinity with the puer (2005), discussed his anger and
martial traits (1983, pp. 146-147), the influence of his Jewish heritage (1992), and
his calling to polytheistic perspectives (1996b).
iii
See Roberts Avens, The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman and Angels; David Ray Grif-
fin (Ed.), Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung and Hillman; Robert
H. Davis, Freud, Jung and Hillman: Three Depth Psychologies in Context.
iv
See CW Vol. 8, p. 322 [para. 607ff.]. Here and in other places, Jung makes clear he uses
the term “image” to indicate a general representation of psychic contents.

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Between Jung and Hillman