literalism
De-literalizing stands as one of the most consequential operational concepts in the depth-psychological tradition, functioning simultaneously as a therapeutic stance, an epistemological critique, and a definition of soul-work itself. James Hillman, its most systematic proponent, equates de-literalizing with soul-making: the movement that releases events from their naïve, single-meaning givenness into what he calls their 'shadowy, metaphorical significances.' Literalism, its opposite, is identified as the besetting pathology of Western consciousness — the condition in which substantives become substances, concepts congeal into facts, and the imagination's 'as-if' collapses into crude ontological assertion. Hillman draws explicit allies from Owen Barfield and Norman O. Brown, and traces the movement in Freud's de-literalizing of sexual trauma into fantasy, and in Jung's treatment of incest and libido. Patricia Berry extends the critique to show how even psychic discovery can be immediately recaptured by literalism — the very moment psyche is found in concrete events, it risks being lost again to those same events taken literally. Wolfgang Giegerich presses further, interrogating whether imaginal psychology itself escapes a residual literalism through its genre-form. Campbell and Noel situate religious literalizing as a cultural pathology opposed to the metaphorical function of myth. Across these voices, de-literalizing is not negation of the concrete but its redemption into metaphorical depth.
Soul-making, in this sense, is equated with de-literalizing – that psychological attitude that suspiciously disallows the naive and given level of events in order to search out their shadowy, metaphorical significances for soul.
Hillman provides the canonical definition, identifying de-literalizing as the core psychological attitude of soul-making, equating it with releasing events from literal understanding into mythical appreciation.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
Soul-making, in this sense, is equated with de-literalizing – that psychological attitude that suspiciously disallows the naive and given level of events in order to search out their shadowy, metaphorical significances for soul.
Identical canonical formulation confirming de-literalizing as soul-making's operational definition across Hillman's Archetypal Psychology texts.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
The cause of these internal oppositions is literalism. Literalism prevents psychologizing by making psychology of it... 'the besetting sin to-day is the sin of literalism.'
Hillman identifies literalism as the primary internal enemy of depth psychology itself, aligning with Barfield and Brown in a programmatic call to protect psychological vision from single-meaning consciousness.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
As Freud began by deliteralizing the memory of sexual trauma into its fantasy, and as Jung began by deliteralizing incest and libido, we need to deliteralize a host of other substantialized concepts, beginning with 'the ego' and 'the unconscious.'
Hillman traces de-literalizing as the founding gesture of depth psychology from Freud and Jung forward, arguing that the work of de-literalizing must be extended to the field's own core concepts.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
We quarrel with the literalism that would take these objects only at face value, robbing them of metaphorical value, i.e., soul significance... Body, for example, then becomes only body, and we miss its metaphorical nature.
Berry distinguishes the concrete from the concretistic, arguing that literalism blocks access to the very body and matter it claims to honor by stripping them of their metaphorical, soul-significant dimension.
, Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis
The very moment we discover psyche, where before there were only concrete events, we again lose psyche to those same events, now taken literally.
Berry describes the characteristic dialectical trap of literalism: the instant of psychic discovery is simultaneously the moment of psychic recapture by the literal event itself.
, Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982supporting
For action the specific psychological attitude of literalizing is necessary... Literalism, in my view, is a more fundamental trait of hero psychology than the compulsion to act.
Hillman links literalizing structurally to the hero archetype and ego psychology, arguing that literalism is more foundational to heroic consciousness than action itself.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
Infanticide is a mythic manner of imagining literalism... literalism, when it is the father's desire to kill the child, is the semantic equivalent of the father-son conflict.
Hillman proposes that infanticide in myth symbolizes literalism's destruction of the 'second sense,' identifying the killing of imaginal possibility as the mythic equivalent of single-meaning consciousness.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
An enigma is like a mantra or a koan or a Heraclitean gnomon to carry with one and learn from; sphinx as emblem on a gemstone or mounted upon a pillar to be regarded, not shattered at the bottom of a cliff.
Hillman uses Oedipus's literalizing encounter with the Sphinx as an emblem of heroic single-mindedness that destroys the second sense by solving rather than dwelling within the enigma.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
The entire French effort may be alchemy-like attempts... to invite Mercurius duplex back into the discourse from which French logical clarity had excused him.
Hillman reads deconstructive thought as an incomplete, culturally specific attempt at de-literalizing, situating the broader project of freeing language from singleness within an alchemical framework.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
The most dangerously literal state of soul. Hence clinicians fear that nigredo conditions of depression will lead to literal suicide, revenge to violence, and hatred to domestic cruelty.
Hillman identifies the nigredo's black as the most oppressively literal alchemical state, where the failure of de-literalizing produces clinical danger as fantasy is enacted rather than imagined.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
A paranoid delusion is a factified imagination, a fantasy believed literally. The belief in this literal event, plot, or scheme cannot be shaken by appeal to feelings, by evidence of the senses, or by argument of reason.
Hillman defines paranoid delusion as 'delusional literalism' — a factified imagination — presenting the failure of de-literalizing as the clinical core of paranoid pathology.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
Sexual images must not be taken literally; they are metaphors; they do not necessarily talk about actual sexual behavior... the sexual is one particular means of expression for something categorically different.
Giegerich situates Jung's interpretive practice as foundational de-literalizing, arguing that the distinction between medium and message is the presupposition of any genuinely psychological reading of myth.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
A fantasy becomes a (subjective, depotentiated) fantasy because it implicitly, through the form of its genre, says, 'don't take me literally, I am only a product of the poetic imagination.'
Giegerich argues that the imaginal genre has de-literalizing built structurally into its form, but that this very internalization of the 'mental reservation' constitutes a duplicity that must itself be interrogated.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
marginal
Do not act out; do not hold in. A paradox. And a double negative that suggests a via negativa, a de-literalizing cancellation of both commandments.
Hillman presents the alchemical via negativa — neither acting out nor holding in — as itself a de-literalizing operation, a mercurial escape from the exhausting oscillation of behavioral literalism.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
Both of these positions make life literal, and both deny the metaphorical, thereby disregarding Jung's statement that 'every interpretation necessarily remains an as-if.'
Berry diagnoses opposing therapeutic stances — identifying life with psyche or radically separating them — as both literalizing moves that deny the 'as-if' quality essential to genuine psychological interpretation.
, Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982supporting
All the while that he is performing this imitatio animae, he is actually becoming more literal than imaginal and metaphorical which is what anima consciousness more likely implies.
Hillman argues that the attempt to integrate anima by behaviorally acquiring feminine traits is itself a literalizing mistake, confusing biological gender with the metaphorical psychological reality anima names.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting
The principal fight was between a literalist theology of spirit and an imaginational psychology... The iconoclasts saw an image as consubstantial in all aspects with its archetype.
Hillman reads the Byzantine iconoclast controversy as a historical enactment of the struggle between literalism and imaginal psychology, with iconoclasm representing the literalizing identification of image and archetype.
, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting
Against Religious Literalizing... Campbell provided an ostensibly non-religious approach to the understanding of religious experience.
Noel identifies Campbell's project as constitutively anti-literalizing in the religious domain, positioning his mythography as a sustained effort to restore metaphorical function to symbols hardened by doctrinal literalism.
, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting
Against Religious Literalizing... Campbell provided an ostensibly non-religious approach to the understanding of religious experience.
Noel's framing of Campbell's hermeneutics as explicitly 'against religious literalizing' situates de-literalizing as a defining feature of the broader mythological-psychological tradition.
, Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting
Problems are literalized fantasies. To make a problem of something appeals to the heroic ego, who needs his fantasy of problems.
Hillman inverts the conventional priority of problems over fantasies, arguing that problem-making is itself a literalizing defense that screens the imagination's deeper realities.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
'The imaginal' is a compromise formation. By taking images and fictions seriously, imaginal psychology does something that transcends the normal limits of our scientific, positivistic understanding of the world.
Giegerich critically assesses imaginal psychology's de-literalizing program as ultimately a 'compromise formation' that accepts positivist premises even while ostensibly transcending them.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside
Alchemy moves in two directions: it spiritualizes what is otherwise dense and literal, and it concretizes that which is excessively intellectual or spiritual.
Moore frames alchemical psychology's dual movement — away from both crude literalism and excessive spiritualism — as a bidirectional de-literalizing that maintains soul between matter and spirit.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990aside
Alchemy moves in two directions: it spiritualizes what is otherwise dense and literal, and it concretizes that which is excessively intellectual or spiritual.
Parallel formulation in the earlier Moore edition, reinforcing alchemy's structural role as the tradition's chief resource for thinking beyond literalism without flight into abstraction.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982aside
The curious thing is how literal these therapeutic prescriptions for earth become. The analysand must actually, literally, do some concrete activity that everybody would agree is 'earthy.'
Berry observes the irony by which therapeutic prescriptions for groundedness themselves fall into literalism, demanding actual physical earth-contact rather than cultivating psychic earth metaphorically.
, Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982aside