Re-Visioning Psychology
Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) is James Hillman’s foundational text for archetypal psychology, a radical reimagining of depth psychology that places soul and image at the center. Hillman argues that psychology has lost its way by medicalizing the psyche and privileging literal, ego-based interpretations of experience. What is needed is a return to the imaginal, the poetic, and the mythopoetic — a psychology that honors the soul’s depth and multiplicity.
Central Argument
Hillman begins by rejecting the dominant frameworks of modern psychology — behaviorism, cognitive psychology, even much of Freudian and Jungian analysis — as reductive. Psychology, he argues, has become either a science of behavior or a therapy of adjustment, losing contact with what the word originally meant: logos of psyche, the study of soul.
The soul, for Hillman, is not a thing or a faculty but a perspective — a way of seeing experience as inherently imaginal, symbolic, and meaningful. To approach the psyche properly requires honoring images not as symptoms to be decoded but as realities in their own right. Dreams, fantasies, and myths are not secondary representations of something else (unconscious drives, cognitive schemas) but primary modes of soul’s expression.
Hillman draws heavily on Henry Corbin’s concept of the imaginal (mundus imaginalis) — the intermediate realm between matter and spirit where images have ontological reality. But where Corbin keeps the imaginal as a metaphysical domain, Hillman psychologizes it: the imaginal is the realm of soul, and psychology’s task is to learn to inhabit it.
Central to Hillman’s vision is the idea of polytheism of the psyche — the soul is not a unified self but a multiplicity of voices, figures, and archetypal patterns. The gods and goddesses of Greek mythology are not primitive superstitions but precise phenomenological descriptions of the soul’s structures. To engage with the psyche is to engage with Aphrodite, Ares, Hermes, Hades — each a distinct mode of experience, each demanding its own recognition.
Influence and Legacy
Re-Visioning Psychology launched archetypal psychology as a distinct school. It has influenced depth psychology, literary criticism, cultural studies, and anyone interested in myth, imagination, and the poetic dimensions of experience. Hillman’s work is both a critique of modern psychology’s reductionism and a call to recover the soul’s depth.
For practitioners of relational and imaginal work, Hillman offers permission to take images seriously, to honor the multiplicity of experience, and to resist the therapeutic impulse to “fix” or “integrate” what might need to remain complex and alive.
Key Concepts
- Soul — Not a thing but a perspective; the imaginal, symbolic, depth dimension of experience.
- The Imaginal — Hillman adapts Corbin’s concept for psychology; the realm where images are real.
- Archetypal psychology — Psychology that honors the soul’s archetypal structures and imaginal life.
- Polytheism of the psyche — The soul as multiplicity, not unity; many gods, not one self.
- Image as reality — Images are not symptoms or symbols but primary modes of soul’s expression.
- Pathologizing — The soul’s natural movement into wounding, depth, complexity; not a disorder but a process.
Connections
- James Hillman — Author.
- Henry Corbin — Source for the imaginal; Hillman adapts Corbin for psychology.
- Carl Jung — Hillman both extends and critiques Jung’s archetypal theory.
- The Imaginal — Central concept; Hillman makes it psychological.
- Active Imagination — Jungian practice Hillman reinterprets imaginally.
- The Daimonic — Related concept; the soul’s creative-destructive multiplicity.
- Neoplatonism — Philosophical background for Hillman’s vision.