Seba.Health
Concept · Seba Knowledge Graph
Soul as Perspective
Soul as Perspective
In Re-Visioning Psychology Hillman refuses the substantialist reading of soul — soul as a thing the person has, locates, or contains — and recovers soul as a perspective on experience rather than a component within it. Soul names the deepening of any event into psychological depth; it is the imaginative reflection by which life becomes more than its literal occurrence. “By soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy — that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical” (Hillman 1975).
Soul-as-perspective is the axis on which soul-making, psychologizing-seeing-through, and the whole archetypal critique of ego-psychology turn. Where the clinical gaze asks what is wrong with the person, the soul-perspective asks what the image is doing.