The Seba library treats Fictional Finalism in 8 passages, across 1 author (including Hillman, James).
Goals are thrown up by the psyche as bait to catch the living fish, fictions to instigate and guide action… This is the finalistic viewpoint: ‘there are no purposeless psychic processes,’ says Jung.
Hillman articulates fictional finalism as the psyche’s generation of guiding goals that are structurally fictive—purposefulness without literalized destination—uniting Adler’s striving and Jung’s individuation under a shared finalistic orientation.
, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis
Finalism, another term for teleology, maintains that each of us, like the cosmos itself, is moving toward a final goal. The goal may be defined in a variety of ways.
Hillman defines finalism as a teleological conviction that events are pulled toward a purposeful end, positioning it as one of several philosophies of destiny alongside fatalism and determinism.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Teleological finalism says: It all has a hidden purpose and belongs to your growth… In each of these replies, the accidental as category dissolves into the larger philosophy of fatalism, finalism, and heroism.
Hillman critically triangulates teleological finalism against fatalism and heroism, warning that each risks erasing genuine accident and contingency by absorbing them into an overarching narrative.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Although the entire event blazes with importance and bears traces of Bergman’s character and calling, there is no glimpse of future career, no message. There is no teleology, no determinism, no finalism.
Through the Bergman case, Hillman demonstrates that the daimonic image of calling need not operate through explicit finalism, distinguishing imaginal significance from teleological determination.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Hades is the final cause, the purpose, the very telos of every soul and every soul process… All soul processes, everything in the psyche, moves towards Hades.
Hillman grounds finalism in chthonic mythology, recasting the Hadean underworld as the ultimate telos of psychic process—an archetypal rather than eschatological finalism.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
discovers profundity in his sense of the fictional in therapy… images speak directly with patients in their process of recomposing life into a new story.
The introduction to Healing Fiction frames Adler’s fictional sense of therapeutic purpose as the generative core of the volume’s engagement with fictional finalism.
, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting
As truths are the fictions of the rational, so fictions are the truths of the imaginal… None, not a single one, of its premises is an actuality, a demonstrable happening, a fact of the world.
Hillman grounds the epistemology of fictional finalism in his broader doctrine that imaginal fictions constitute their own order of truth, irreducible to empirical or metaphysical fact.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
moving from Freudian facts to Adlerian fictions… Instead our question will be: what have we already done to lose our twin who was given with the soul.
In contrasting Freudian causal fact with Adlerian fiction, Hillman invokes the Adlerian fictive orientation as a necessary counterweight to reductive literalism in psychological interpretation.
, Healing Fiction, 1983aside