care of the soul
Soul Making stands as one of the most generative and contested concepts in the depth-psychology corpus, drawing its original impetus from John Keats’s letters before being systematically elaborated by James Hillman and subsequently refracted through the practices of Thomas Moore, Marion Woodman, and others. In Hillman’s archetypal formulation — developed across Re-Visioning Psychology, Archetypal Psychology, and The Dream and the Underworld — soul-making designates nothing less than the individuation of imaginal reality itself: a process of de-literalizing events, releasing them from naive facticity into mythical resonance, and asking what each moment moves in the soul. This is emphatically not self-improvement or problem-solving; it is psycho-poesis, the crafting of psychic substance through engagement with image, suffering, and death-awareness. Moore translates this project into a practical ethics of daily life, insisting that symptoms are the raw material of soul-making and that the task belongs to each person rather than to a professional. Woodman, while acknowledging the Keatsian origin, situates soul-making within the body and the encounter with archetypal images, maintaining a certain critical distance from Hillman’s branch. A persistent tension runs through all treatments: soul-making resists heroic, ego-driven striving and demands instead receptivity, reflection, and the tolerance of darkness — qualities antithetical to the ameliorative ambitions of mainstream psychotherapy.
soul-making can be most succinctly defined as the individuation of imaginal reality. Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of an imagining that sees through an event to its image.
Hillman provides his canonical definition of soul-making as the individuation of imaginal reality, equating it with de-literalizing — the movement from naive factual perception to mythical, metaphorical significance.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
only when imagination is recognized as an engagement at the borders of the human and a work in relation with mythic dominants can this articulation of images be considered a psycho-poesis (Miller 1976b), or soul-making.
Hillman establishes the necessary conditions for soul-making: imagination must engage mythic dominants, not merely human subjectivity, making the process a psycho-poesis whose aim is the realization of images rather than the self.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
soul-as-metaphor leads beyond the problem of ‘how to define soul’ and encourages an account of the soul toward imagining itself rather than defining itself. Here, metaphor serves a psychological function: it becomes an instrument of soul-making rather than a mere ‘figure of speech.’
Hillman argues that metaphor is the operative instrument of soul-making, transposing meaning and releasing buried significance — and that this metaphorical move entails the death of naive literalism.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
Your symptoms are the raw material for your soul-making. If you are having emotional problems, don’t automatically just try to get rid of them. Look at them closely to see what your soul needs.
Moore recasts soul-making as a practical discipline in which psychological symptoms are not obstacles to be eliminated but the essential material through which the soul’s deeper needs are disclosed.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
care of the soul is not primarily a method of problem solving. Its goal is not to make life problem-free, but to give ordinary life the depth and value that come with soulfulness.
Moore defines care of the soul in explicit opposition to problem-solving psychotherapy, positioning it as the cultivation of depth and meaning in ordinary life — a more demanding and imaginatively active enterprise.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
Originally I was a student of English literature. I loved John Keats before I ever heard of psychology. He uses the phrase soul-making. He talks about learning life by heart.
Woodman traces soul-making to its Romantic source in Keats, situating her own practice within but not entirely within Hillman’s archetypal branch, and emphasizing the bodily, temporal dimension of the concept.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993thesis
soul-making… neither ‘self-improvement nor better mental health’… as periods of suffering… transformation of consciousness via deepening… vs. problem-solving.
Russell’s concordance of Hillman’s usage confirms the consistent anti-therapeutic, anti-ameliorative thrust of soul-making: it operates through suffering and deepening rather than cure or self-enhancement.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting
We want not only ‘old souls,’ ‘good souls,’ and ‘great souls,’ but worked souls, in contact with whom we get a sense of what matters… What we look for is soul-matter. How is this psychic matter made?
Hillman frames soul-making in terms of labour and craft — the production of psychic substance through sustained engagement with images — distinguishing ‘worked souls’ from merely natural or gifted ones.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
This humanitas was in fact an exercise of imagination, an exploration and discipline of the imaginal, whether through science, magic, study, love, art, or voyages… Renaissance ‘care of soul’ looked less to social context and human experiences.
Hillman locates the Renaissance precedent for soul-making in the disciplined exercise of humanitas as imaginative cultivation, distinguishing it from both theological piety and modern humanist sentimentality.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
it is only when the world enters the heart that it can be made into soul. The vessel in which soul-making takes place is an inner container scooped out by reflection and wonder.
Moore describes the interior conditions for soul-making: an inner vessel formed by reflection and wonder, into which the world must be received and transformed — a process incompatible with the relentless pace of modern life.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
Jung stresses the importance of the human connection for soul-making, stating that man’s ‘soul… can live only in and from human relationships;… the conscious achievement of inner unity clings desperately to human relationships as to an indispensable condition.’
Hillman, citing Jung, grounds soul-making in relational necessity: the individuation of psychic substance cannot proceed in isolation but requires the interrelation of souls.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
we need to use soul-making to strengthen our own soul, and let that be a kind of shield or protection against the evil.
Woodman applies soul-making therapeutically as a means of ego-strengthening against compulsive and addictive forces, emphasising its protective and integrative function over its purely imaginal one.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993supporting
the soul cares for us by offering a way out of a narrow secularism. Its suffering can only be relieved by the reestablishment of a particular mythical sensibility. Therefore, its suffering initiates a move toward increased spirituality.
Moore articulates the paradox central to soul-making: the soul’s own pathology is the initiating force that moves life toward mythical depth and renewed spirituality.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
even Psyche’s work of soul-making. Not for the sake of learning love only, or for community, or for better marriages and better families, or for independence does the psyche present its symptoms and neurotic claims.
Hillman positions soul-making as one imperative among several that psyche voices through symptoms, insisting that its demands must be complemented by spiritual needs — a corrective to reducing all psychic life to soulwork.
, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975supporting
Care of the soul doesn’t mean wallowing in the symptom, but it does mean trying to learn from depression what qualities the soul needs… it attempts to weave those depressive qualities into the fabric of life.
Moore demonstrates care of the soul in practice through depression, showing that soul-making requires assimilating Saturn’s dark aesthetics into lived existence rather than either indulging or eliminating them.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
If you can tolerate the full weight of human possibility as the raw material for an alchemical, soulful life, then at the end of the path you may have a vision within yourself of the lapis.
Moore frames soul-making alchemically: the toleration of the full spectrum of human passion as raw material produces, over time, the refined gold of a deeply ensouled character.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
For him, to care for the soul meant building, painting, and carving. His tower stands as the embodiment of his inner urgency for simplicity and eternity.
Moore uses Jung’s Bollingen Tower as an exemplar of soul-making through concrete creative acts, demonstrating how inner imaginative life demands external, material expression.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
Observance is homeopathic in its workings rather than allopathic, in the paradoxical way that it befriends a problem rather than making an enemy of it.
Moore characterises the mode of attention appropriate to care of the soul as homeopathic and non-heroic — a receptive observance that allows soul to reveal itself rather than a muscular therapeutic intervention.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside
A soulful life is never without shadow, and some of the soul’s power comes from its shadow qualities. If we want to live from our depths — soulfully — then we will have to give up all pretenses to innocence.
Moore underscores that soul-making necessarily incorporates the shadow, and that genuine soulfulness requires the surrender of innocence and the embrace of the soul’s darker, more powerful dimensions.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside