literalism
De-literalizing stands as one of the cardinal operations in the archetypal psychology of James Hillman and constitutes a sustained polemic running through the entire depth-psychology corpus. The term names the deliberate movement away from single-meaning, face-value reception of events, images, and concepts toward their metaphorical, mythical, and soul-laden significance. For Hillman, literalism is not merely an intellectual error but a psychological pathology — the ‘besetting sin’ (he cites Barfield and Norman Brown) that forecloses psychologizing by reducing symbol to fact, myth to history, fantasy to problem. In Re-Visioning Psychology he identifies literalism as the internal enemy of psychology itself; in Alchemical Psychology he traces it through the blackening of consciousness and links it to paranoid delusion — ‘a factified imagination, a fantasy believed literally.’ Patricia Berry sharpens the phenomenology, distinguishing the concretistic attitude from legitimate engagement with the concrete: literalism robs objects of their metaphorical value and thereby blocks, paradoxically, genuine access to the concrete. Wolfgang Giegerich offers a structural critique: where imaginal psychology celebrates de-literalizing, it risks a compromise formation that refuses the question of truth altogether and thus remains captured by the very positivist logic it claims to transcend. Campbell and Noel identify ‘religious literalizing’ as a distinct cultural syndrome. Across these voices the term functions as both therapeutic method and epistemological principle, placing soul always in the ‘as-if’ space between event and meaning.
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’s most concentrated definitional statement, equating soul-making itself with the de-literalizing movement from naive event to metaphorical soul-significance.
, Archetypal Psychology, 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.
Parallel passage establishing de-literalizing as synonymous with soul-making and the imaginal attitude across Hillman’s major accounts of archetypal psychology.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
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 frames the entire psychoanalytic tradition as a progressive project of de-literalizing, from Freud’s treatment of trauma to the need to dissolve reified theoretical concepts such as ego and unconscious.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
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 psychology’s self-defeating enemy, allying himself with Barfield and Brown in treating metaphor as the alternative to a single-meaning consciousness.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
We quarrel with the literalism that would take these objects only at face value, robbing them of metaphorical value, i.e., soul significance.
Berry distinguishes legitimate engagement with the concrete from literalism, arguing that literalism is not a fidelity to matter but a theft of metaphorical — that is, soul — significance.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis
I am proposing that 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’s most mythologically developed argument: infanticide in myth is the narrative equivalent of literalism, which destroys the second sense — the child of imagination — wherever the heroic, single-meaning ego prevails.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
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 argues that literalizing is the deeper structural feature of heroic ego psychology, more fundamental even than action itself.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
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 diagnoses delusional literalism as the clinical extreme of the literalizing tendency — imagination so thoroughly concretized that it becomes impervious to all de-literalizing influence.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
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 traces the characteristic recursive trap: the discovery of psychic significance is immediately re-literalized, so that the concrete event re-captures what had been opened into soul.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982supporting
The most oppressive and 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.
Within alchemical psychology, the nigredo is identified as the archetypal locus of literalism — the condition in which soul is at maximum risk of collapsing from psychic process into physical event.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
The very blackness of the inked letter supports its indelible fixity and abets the cursing power of literalism.
Hillman reads the cultural dominance of black ink as a material emblem of literalism’s fixating power, connecting the alchemical nigredo to the epistemic rigidity of single-meaning discourse.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
A double negative that suggests a via negativa, a de-literalizing cancellation of both commandments. A mercurial escape from the exhausting oscillation between them.
Hillman treats the alchemical paradox ‘do not act out; do not hold in’ as itself a de-literalizing move — a via negativa dissolving both imperatives into imaginative inwardness.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
According to JUNG, sexual images must not be taken literally; they are metaphors; they do not necessarily talk about actual sexual behavior… For JUNG, the sexual is one particular means of expression for something categorically different.
Giegerich traces the de-literalizing impulse back to Jung’s foundational interpretive principle that sexual and incest imagery are metaphors for non-sexual psychological realities.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
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 argues that both identifying life with psyche and radically separating them collapse into literalism, because both deny the irreducible ‘as-if’ quality that marks 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 warns that attempts to ‘integrate’ the anima by acquiring feminine characteristics are themselves a literalism that substitutes behavioral mimicry for the genuinely imaginal and metaphorical quality of anima consciousness.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting
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 identifies the de-literalizing injunction as structurally built into the genre of psychological fantasy itself — the imaginal comes pre-coded with its own anti-literal disclaimer.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
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 paradigm case of literalism — the confusion of image with its archetypal source — whose resolution required a proto-imaginal psychology.
, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting
Against Religious Literalizing. Campbell provided an ostensibly non-religious approach to the understanding of religious experience.
Noel frames Campbell’s entire mythographic project as a cultural movement against religious literalizing — offering symbolic understanding to an audience that had abandoned literal religious institutions.
, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting
Against Religious Literalizing. Campbell provided an ostensibly non-religious approach to the understanding of religious experience.
Parallel passage in Noel situating Campbell’s anti-literalizing stance as a defining feature of his appeal and the religious-studies problematic his work engages.
, Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting
For the mightiest man, an enigma becomes a problem to be solved, vanquished. Yet an ainigma… refers to ‘all things with a second sense: symbols, oracles, Pythagorean wise-sayings.’
Hillman reads Oedipus’s defeat of the Sphinx as the archetypal heroic literalizing act — dissolving the enigma’s second sense into a single solvable problem and thereby closing off the imaginal.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
‘The imaginal’ is a compromise formation… by then refraining from raising the question of truth, it shows that it accepts the very premises of this understanding after all.
Giegerich’s critical counter-thesis: the imaginal mode that performs de-literalizing is itself compromised insofar as it evades the question of truth, leaving it structurally dependent on the positivist framework it purports to transcend.
, 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 the alchemical solve et coagula as a bidirectional de-literalizing: dissolving what is overly dense and concrete while simultaneously grounding what is excessively abstract — soul requiring both movements.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990aside
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 notes the irony that therapeutic efforts to cultivate psychic ‘earth’ collapse into literal prescriptions for concrete activity, illustrating how the literalizing tendency infiltrates even explicitly psychological practice.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982aside