Soul-Spirit Distinction

Archetypal psychology holds a tripartite anthropology — body, soul, spirit — against the Cartesian and post-Cartesian dualism of body and mind. “Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed, has been described as Hermetic consciousness (López-Pedraza 1977), as ‘esse in anima’ (Jung, CW 6: 66, 77), as the position of the mundus-imaginalis by Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries or figures of the metaxy” (Hillman 1983).

Hillman’s essay Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline gives the distinction its imagery. Spirit ascends — peaks, unity, transcendence, the One. Soul descends — vales, multiplicity, depth, the many. Spiritual discipline (yogas, monasticisms, contemplative ascents) attends to spirit; psychotherapy, properly understood, attends to soul. The confusion of the two — treating psychology as a spiritual ascent toward a single Self — Hillman identifies as a central error of twentieth-century therapeutic culture.

The historical genealogy is specific. The dualistic tradition has roots “before Descartes to at least the ninth century (869: Eighth General Council at Constantinople), occurring also in the mediaeval ascension of Averroës’s Aristotelianism over Avicenna’s Platonism. Consequences of this dualistic division are still being felt in that the psyche has become indistinguishable from bodily life, on the one hand, or from the life of the spirit on the other. In the dualistic tradition, psyche never had its own logos. There could be no true psychology” (Hillman 1983). Archetypal psychology is the attempt to restore psyche as tertium.

Relationships

• soul-as-perspective
• mundus-imaginalis
• polytheistic-psychology

Primary sources

• hillman-archetypal-psychology-brief (Hillman 1983)
• Peaks and Vales (Hillman, in Senex & Puer)
• Plotinus, enneads