The term 'heart' occupies a peculiarly contested position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as anatomical organ, psychic center, epistemic faculty, and spiritual locus. Hillman's sustained engagement with the concept—most rigorously in 'The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World'—establishes the heart as the seat of imaginal perception, a faculty he traces through Corbin's himma, alchemical sulfur, and Harvey's circulatory anatomy, arguing that Harvey's demonstration of the cor duplex fractured the naive wholeness associated with the coeur de lion and inaugurated the reflexive, divided modern psyche. Welwood approaches the heart as the ground of therapeutic eros, drawing on the Buddhist chitta—heart-mind—to recover what the clinical literature has systematically excised. The Orthodox Philokalic tradition, represented by Coniaris and the Philokalia itself, understands the heart as the 'inner man,' the unifying center of prayer, will, and divine encounter, a site requiring perpetual watchfulness and the descent of mind into heart. Wilhelm's Taoist material locates the 'heavenly heart' as the germ of the Great Way, opened through stillness and rhythmic breath. Sullivan's philological survey anchors all these metaphysical deployments in the archaic Greek triple vocabulary—kradie, etor, ker—reminding the reader that the heart's psychic loading is ancient and irreducible to metaphor alone. Across traditions, the heart names what the brain cannot know.
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Harvey affirmed an archetypal idea, that the heart is not simple, not one, but is inherently divided against itself; its left and right chambers, though side by side, are most remote to each other, without communication.
Hillman argues that Harvey's discovery of the cor duplex confirmed an archetypal truth—the heart's innate duplicity—which shattered the naive unity of the coeur de lion and made reflexive, divided modern consciousness possible.
Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992thesis
Sulfur literalizes the heart's desire at the very instant that the thymos enthuses. Conflagration and coagulation occur together. Desire and its object become indistinguishable.
Hillman identifies alchemical sulfur as the agent that simultaneously fires and entraps the heart's desire, placing the heart at the juncture of passionate engagement and psychic captivity.
Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992thesis
The heart is the central and unifying organ of our personal life. Our heart determines our personality, and is therefore not only the place where God dwells but also the place to which Satan directs his fiercest attacks.
The Orthodox tradition, following Nouwen and Theophan, defines the heart as the integrating center of person, will, perception, and divine encounter—simultaneously the locus of prayer and the primary site of spiritual warfare.
Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998thesis
You must pray not only with words but with the mind, and not only with the mind but with the heart, so that the mind understands and sees clearly what is said in words, and the heart feels what the mind is thinking.
St. Theophan articulates the Philokalic doctrine that genuine prayer requires the unification of mind and heart, a descent from cognitive function into the felt center of the person.
Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998thesis
Not only is this term missing from the psychological literature, but the tone of the literature itself also lacks heart. My interest in the place of heart in psychotherapy developed out of my experience with meditation.
Welwood diagnoses Western psychotherapeutic discourse as structurally heartless, and proposes the Buddhist chitta—heart-mind as open, friendly awareness—as the foundation for a genuinely healing clinical presence.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
This thought of the heart returns us to an animal thought, intimacy released from confession into immediacy, the courage of immediate intimacy, and not merely with ourselves, but with the particular faces of the sensate world.
Hillman concludes that the heart's mode of knowing is fundamentally animal and aesthetic—an immediate perceptual rapport with the sensate world, prior to and distinct from reflective subjectivity.
Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992thesis
Green is the color of the heart and of the vitality of the heart… This ardent green has to be enlightened, the sulfur chastened: a whitening of the heart. To make white the heart is an opus contra naturam.
Drawing on Corbin and alchemical tradition, Hillman argues that the heart's natural vitality (green) must undergo a transformative whitening—an opus contra naturam—to achieve genuine imaginal perception rather than reactive desire.
Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992thesis
The heart like a prince in a kingdom, in whose hands lie the chief and highest authority, rules overall; it is the original and foundation from which all power is derived.
Hillman traces Harvey's pre-circulatory, regal conception of the heart as sovereign organ, before showing how Harvey's mechanistic demonstration displaced this archetype with a pump metaphor.
Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
We shall have to turn to some of these in order to recover from those disguises a true philosophy originating in the imaginal heart itself, the heart of Corbin.
Hillman establishes the Corbin-Freud axis as the central methodological problem: recovering the imaginal heart from within a modernity that has disguised or expelled it.
Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
The 'thought of the heart' can be expressed in more ideographic languages such as Chinese Hsin-li as heart reason; Hebrew leb as heart imagination or intelligence; and Egyptian ab, which means 'interior sense intelligence, understanding, attention, intention, manner, will, wish, desire, mind, courage, lust, and self.'
Hillman marshals cross-cultural philological evidence that the heart has universally served as the organ of a comprehensive inner intelligence encompassing cognition, will, desire, and selfhood.
Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
The heart has its own intelligence. It knows what to do without orders from the brain. The heart has reasons that may or may not find sympathy from the brain.
Moore, relaying Sardello, asserts the heart's autonomous cognitive and emotional authority—an intelligence independent of cerebral direction, expressed in the rhythms of passion.
Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
Character is concerned with the heart failures of love, inner truth, and honor, and with the suppression of beauty… Heart disease and heart unease may be as near each other in fact as in language.
Hillman proposes that the clinical category of heart disease is inseparable from moral and psychological failures of character—cowardice, betrayal, suppression of beauty—making cardiology and soul-work contiguous.
Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
The heavenly heart is the germ of the great Way. If you can be absolutely quiet then the heavenly heart will spontaneously manifest itself.
The Taoist text identifies the 'heavenly heart' as the originary principle of the Way, accessible only through complete inner stillness, linking the heart to cosmological and spiritual source.
Wilhelm, Richard, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931supporting
If the heart is light, the breathing is light, for every movement of the heart affects breath-energy. If breathing is light, the heart is light, for every movement of breath-energy affects the heart.
The Secret of the Golden Flower articulates a bidirectional somatic-psychic relationship between heart and breath, in which each determines the quality of the other in meditative practice.
Wilhelm, Richard, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931supporting
We shall look briefly at the three terms that express 'heart' in early Greek poetry. These are kradie (or kardie), etor, and ker. These psychic entities have a strongly physical aspect as the 'heart' within, endowing life by its activity.
Sullivan's philological analysis reveals that archaic Greek distinguished three heart-terms, all of which carry both somatic and psychic valence, grounding the later metaphysical deployments in concrete bodily experience.
Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
Are we right in translating heart by feeling? You see, it is more or less figurative, the heart is the central and essential thing… the heart may break, we say in German that it splinters, which naturally means an emotional fact.
Jung resists reducing heart to feeling alone, insisting on its status as a metaphor for the central, integrating principle—rhythmic, courageous, and only secondarily emotional.
Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
Other feelings can affect the heart, too… patients who had stressful feelings were twice as likely to have a bout of ischemic pain an hour later as patients who didn't have stressful feelings. Emotional stress reduces blood flow to the heart.
Dayton provides psychophysiological evidence that emotional states directly compromise cardiac function, grounding the depth-psychological intuition of heart-emotion interdependence in clinical data.
Dayton, Tian, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Lasting Fulfillment, 2007supporting
The thumos is also implicitly compared to a person: it is not Ajax who is zealous to fight but his thumos… the internal sensations of large circulatory and muscular changes are a thing into which strength can be put.
Jaynes traces the archaic Greek thumos—located in the chest—as a proto-subjectivity, a precursor to interior mind-space, linking cardiac sensation to the emergence of reflective consciousness.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
'WHAT WE ARE ABOUT IS THE BROKEN HEART.'—James Hillman.
Russell records Hillman's pithy formulation of depth psychology's central concern as the broken heart, underscoring that for Hillman the wounded heart—not the ego or the complex—is the fundamental clinical reality.
Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023aside
Darwin speculated about the bidirectional communication between the brain and the heart via the vagus more than 100 years ago, the importance of vagal afferents and efferents in the expression, experience, and regulation of emotion has not been addressed.
Porges situates the heart within a neurophysiological framework of vagal regulation, providing a somatic substrate for the bidirectional emotion-heart relationship that depth psychology addresses symbolically.
Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011aside
We might find a way into the mystery of this emptiness of the heart. We might also discover that depression has its own angel, a guiding spirit whose job it is to carry the soul away to its remote places.
Moore connects the emptiness of the depressed heart to Saturn's purposeful withdrawal, suggesting the heart's desolation is not pathology but a soul-making movement toward unique insight.
Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside