Within the depth-psychological corpus, ‘pathologizing’ designates far more than clinical diagnosis: it names a primary, autonomous activity of the psyche itself. The concept receives its most sustained theoretical elaboration in James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), where it is elevated from medical category to archetypal function — the soul’s inherent capacity to generate illness, deformity, disorder, and suffering as modes of self-expression and self-knowledge. Hillman insists that pathologizing is not an aberration to be corrected but a fundament woven into every psychic complex, a metaphorical language through which the soul reflects upon its own depths. The critical tension in this literature runs between what Hillman calls ‘wrong pathologizing’ — the medicalized, literalized, politically co-opted misuse of diagnosis — and the legitimate, even necessary, psychic function of pathologizing rightly understood. Wrong pathologizing kills soul; right pathologizing deepens it. Hillman’s polemic targets the naturalistic fallacy of normative psychologies, the asymmetry of the therapy game, and the state’s weaponization of psychiatric labels. His archetypal psychology reclaims pathology as imagination’s deforming eye, linking it to Bachelard’s aesthetics and Jung’s opus contra naturam. The corpus thus positions pathologizing at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, and soul-making.
pathologizing is valid, authentic, and necessary. For to deny or omit pathologizing from the study of the soul denies the soul this area of its phenomenology… pathologizing is not a field but a fundament, a strand in all our being, woven into every complex.
Hillman’s foundational argument: pathologizing is not a secondary abnormality but an intrinsic, irreducible dimension of psychic life that any adequate psychology must validate.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
There is no cure of pathologizing; there is, instead, a re-evaluation. That pathologizing is also a ‘deformed perspective’ accounts for its place in the work of imagination that… must proceed by ‘deforming the images offered by perception’.
Archetypal psychology formally defines pathologizing as the psyche’s autonomous image-deforming capacity and aligns it with Bachelard’s aesthetics and Jung’s opus contra naturam, displacing cure with re-evaluation.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
pathologizing is a psychic activity per se. Psychic sickness remains as an archetypal category of existence independent of its contents… The definitions of psychopathology can never stand up universally across time and space.
Hillman establishes pathologizing as a transhistorical archetypal category whose specific contents vary culturally but whose structural reality is constant, undercutting all normative clinical definitions.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
Wrong pathologizing has spread well beyond the games of the consulting room and clinic, becoming a covert political instrument of the state. Political heretics may be declared mentally ill in order to banish them.
Hillman distinguishes ‘wrong pathologizing’ — the literalized, power-serving misuse of psychiatric categories — from authentic soul-work, extending the critique from clinical to political domains.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
we begin in the odd, ununderstandable, and alien symptom rather than in the familiar ego… ‘Pathography remains the traditional source of psychoanalytic insight.’ The insights of depth psychology derive from souls in extremis.
Hillman situates pathologizing at the methodological origin of all depth psychology, following Freud and Erikson in treating pathography as the privileged access route to psychic truth.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
Our attitude toward the pathologizing may be more destructive than the pathologizing itself… Even if psychopathology speaks an alien tongue and deserves the respect we give to any language not our own, this language is not only alien; it is distorted.
Hillman argues that therapeutic attitude toward pathologized material is more consequential than the material itself, while acknowledging the irreducible tension between accepting and judging distortion.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
The soul moves, via the pathologized fantasy of disintegration, out of too-centralized and muscle-bound structures… it seems the psyche itself insists on pathologizing the strong ego and all its supportive models.
Pathologizing is presented as the psyche’s Dionysian instrument for dissolving ego-centrism and rigid normative structures, functioning analogously to alchemical dissolution.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
pathologizing fantasies are required. A bloodied or obscene image in a dream, a hypochondriacal fantasy, a psychosomatic symptom, is a statement in imaginal language that the psyche is being profoundly stirred.
Pathologized imagery is identified as the psyche’s primary vehicle for deep self-communication, making horrifying and traumatic images the very focal points of psychic movement.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
Pathologizing as Metaphorical Language. The psyche uses complaints to speak in a magnified and misshapen language about its depths… Something keeps telling us these weird tales.
Hillman recasts pathologizing as a metaphorical-linguistic phenomenon — the psyche’s distorted idiom for communicating depths that literal language cannot reach.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
pathologizing supplies material out of which we build our regular lives… the deeper we know ourselves and the other persons of our complexes, the more we recognize how well we, too, fit into the textbook sketches of abnormal psychology.
Pathologizing is normalized as a constitutive ingredient of ordinary personality rather than an exceptional clinical condition, collapsing the boundary between normal and abnormal.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
In my symptom is my soul. What pathologizing does for the individual’s psychology it does as well for the field of psychology: it keeps us close to the actuality of the psyche, preventing metaphysical and scientific escapes.
Pathologizing serves an epistemological function for the discipline itself, anchoring psychological theory in concrete psychic reality and guarding against abstract philosophical overreach.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
the terms, so arbitrary and so empty, are attached to persons who, by so becoming ‘alcoholics,’ ‘suicidals,’ ‘schizophrenics,’ ‘homosexuals,’ seem thereby to substantiate the words, giving through their visible persons an empirical psychic reality to the terms.
Hillman critiques psychiatric nomenclature as nominalistic labeling that parasitically borrows reality from the persons it names, calling instead for an archetypal psychopathology.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
The complexity of psychopathology with its rich variety of backgrounds has been absorbed by this one central image and been endowed with one main meaning: suffering.
Hillman critiques the Christian allegorization of pathology as reductive, arguing that collapsing all pathologized experience into ‘suffering’ impoverishes the psyche’s full range of pathological expression.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
One is to follow the chronic disorder and social pathologizing into its depth, leading to genuine culture, to arts and ideas engendered by pathology.
An editorial summary of Hillman’s position affirms that following pathologizing into its depths — rather than combating it — leads to genuine cultural and imaginative creation.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
By iconoclasm, I do not mean breaking the tremendous pathologized imagery of crucifixion, but rather shattering its crusted allegorization into a too-specific meaning which impedes us from recognizing the other figures within the Christ image.
Hillman’s iconoclasm targets the allegorical fixation of pathologized religious imagery, arguing that such fixation forecloses the multiple mythic figures speaking through pathological experience.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
TWO / PATHOLOGIZING 1. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Lecture 31)… 2. E. H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle… p. 122.
A bibliographic apparatus for Hillman’s pathologizing chapter, documenting the Freudian and Eriksonian sources that anchor his revisionary argument in the depth-psychological tradition.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975aside