it eludes reductionistic definition; it expresses the mystery of human life; and it connects psychology to religion, love, death, and destiny;
depth psychology, going all the way back to Heraclitus, who observed that one could never discover the extent of the soul, no matter how many paths one traveled
Jung’s radical idea that psyche is image, that there’s nothing that is not imagistic, not poetic; “imaginal world”; (Islamic studies of Henry Corbin)
Soul-making is not interpretation, it is not change, and it is not self-improvement - all modern attempts to get the upper hand on fate and therefore to constrain the soul
Hillman’s emphasis on patologizing: of its nature the soul pathologizes, it gets us into trouble, it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it seems to make relationships impossible. It also makes us see perversely.
The soul also of its own accord presents pathologized images: fantasies that are bizarre, twisted, immoral, painful, and sick. For Hillman, these pathologized experiences and images are special revelations of soulfulness
He criticises various techniques for avoiding the twistedness, cloudiness, and general mess of the soul; distinguishes soul from spirit, sees the tendencies of spiritual practice to rise above or move beyond the valley of the soul;
Spirit tends to be escapist, literalistic, and single-minded in its detours around soul. In a context in which spirit (religion, strategies for life, and new-age experiments) is widely championed, Hillman speaks strongly for the soul, but at the same time he values spirit highly, stressing the importance of the arts, a religious sensibility, and, especially, psychological ideas
these are ideas that do not work against soul; we need to entertain ideas, and we need a therapy of our ideas. Our problems, he says, are due to sick ideas that are not reflected and are too rigid and unimaginative; modern psychology has replaced ideas with nominalistic, allegorical, and disembodied words
often it seems we need another actual person in life in order to encounter the soul’s otherness, sometimes imaged in dreams and myth as a twin or double, family member or intimate, but still, soul other; there is no self to deprive the soul of its own personality
James Hillman’s work aims toward an appreciation of the soul’s beauty and in giving soul love: interest, acceptance, faithfulness, desire, attachment, friendship, and endurance; great secret of archetypal psychotherapy is love for what the soul presents