Soul-Making

Soul-making is the governing term of Hillman‘s Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) and the central act of archetypal psychology. The phrase is taken from John Keats: “Call the world if you please, ‘The vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world … From this perspective the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul” (Keats, quoted in Hillman 1975).

For Hillman, soul is not a substance to be saved but a perspective to be cultivated. “By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment — and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground” (Hillman 1975). Consciousness rests on “a self-sustaining and imagining substrate,” and soul-making is the work of differentiating that substrate until the figures of an event appear as images.

Re-Visioning Psychology lays out four moves as the grammar of soul-making: personifying, pathologizing, psychologizing-seeing-through, and dehumanizing. Each moves the ego out of its literal register into an imaginal one. Soul-making does not produce a self; it produces a soul — a reflective middle, an imagining ground, a sensitivity to the figures that move through a life.

Relationships

• image-as-psyche
• personifying
• pathologizing
• psychologizing-seeing-through
• soul-as-perspective

Primary sources

• hillman-revisioning-psychology (Hillman 1975)
• hillman-archetypal-psychology-brief (Hillman 1983)