The term ‘Soul Image’ occupies a pivotal and technically precise place in the depth-psychological lexicon, functioning at the intersection of Jungian typology, analytical theory, and the broader imaginal tradition. In Jung’s foundational usage — most rigorously elaborated in Psychological Types (1921) — the soul-image designates the unconscious inner personality whose character is complementary to the outer persona: in a man, this figure is feminine (the anima); when the soul remains unconscious through identification with the persona, its image is projected onto an external person, generating compulsive affect, idealization, or terror. The potency of any such object, Jung insists, is entirely dependent on the projection of the soul-image. Hillman’s archetypal psychology subsequently transforms this dyadic structure: the soul-image is no longer merely a contrasexual compensation within one individual psyche but an ontological horizon — the imaginal as such. For Hillman, the image is soul; imaging is soul-making; and the soul-image opens onto a Neoplatonic tertium between body and spirit. Giegerich presses the argument further, insisting that if ‘Image is soul,’ images must ultimately be sublated into logical thought rather than merely savored. The corpus thus stages a productive tension between Jung’s projective-relational model, Hillman’s ontological imaginal, and Giegerich’s dialectical critique — each position redefining both what a soul-image is and what psychological work with it demands.
the soul-image is transferred to a real person. This person is the object of intense love or equally intense hate (or fear)… the potency of the object depends on the projection of the soul-image.
Jung’s canonical account: when the soul-image remains unconscious, it is projected onto an external person, producing compulsive affect and precluding genuine objective relationship.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
The inner personality is the way one behaves in relation to one’s inner psychic processes; it is the inner attitude, the characteristic face, that is turned towards the unconscious. I call the outer attitude, the outward face, the persona; the inner attitude, the inward face, I call the anima.
Jung establishes the structural parallel of persona and anima as the theoretical ground from which the soul-image concept directly proceeds.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
“Image is soul” 114, 187
Giegerich’s index entry signals his sustained engagement with — and logical critique of — the Hillmanian equation of image with soul, which he treats as an important but ultimately insufficient stopping-point.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
The more profoundly archetypal my experiences of soul, the more I recognize how they are beyond me, presented to me, a present, a gift, even while they feel my most personal possession.
Hillman argues that the soul-image, figured as anima, transcends personal ownership even as it feels most intimate — the archetype of the personal paradoxically dissolving individuality into the collective.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
soul-making can be most succinctly defined as the individuation of imaginal reality… Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of an imagining that sees through an event to its image.
Hillman redefines soul-making as the individuation of images themselves rather than of the human subject, recasting the soul-image as an active ontological process rather than a psychological content.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
the universals problem is presented by the soul itself whose perspective is harmoniously both the narrow particularity of felt experience and the universality of archetypally human experience.
Archetypal psychology positions soul — and by extension the soul-image — as the site where personal particularity and universal archetypal significance coincide, following Neoplatonic precedent.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
the universals problem is presented by the soul itself whose perspective is harmoniously both the narrow particularity of felt experience and the universality of archetypally human experience.
Parallel formulation confirming that the soul-image bridges personal experience and collective archetypal significance within archetypal psychology’s Neoplatonic frame.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
JUNG distinguished between the archetypal image and the ‘irrepresentable’ (unanschaulich) archetype-in-itself or archetype as such. This distinction has often been severely criticized.
Giegerich situates the soul-image debate within the broader problematic of Jung’s archetype-in-itself versus archetypal image, arguing the distinction reflects an important if problematic intuition about soul’s logical depth.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
the fantasy-image has ‘everything it needs’… we have to dispel the possible presupposition of myth’s pointing to something else outside its own clearly defined sphere by another idea, the ‘self-sufficiency’ of an image.
Giegerich endorses the methodological principle of the image’s self-sufficiency — a cornerstone of soul-image work — while simultaneously pressing toward its logical sublation.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Imaginal psychology refused to go along with JUNG’s distinction between the ‘archetype-in-itself’ and the ‘archetypal image’… thereby deprives the image of its self-sufficient reality.
Giegerich explains how imaginal psychology collapsed Jung’s two-tier model to preserve the image’s ontological completeness, a move with direct consequences for how soul-images are understood.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Whether we conceive of this interior person as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, or a Paredros, or one of the personified souls in the tradition
Hillman catalogues the cross-cultural figures through which the soul-image has been personified, situating anima within a wider transpersonal phenomenology of interior otherness.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
Jung’s resuscitation of images was a return to soul and what he calls its spontaneous symbol formation, its life of fantasy (which, as he notes, is inherently tied with polytheism).
Hillman reads Jung’s restoration of the image as a historically significant reinstatement of soul against centuries of spirit’s iconoclastic victory, grounding the soul-image in political and theological history.
, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975supporting
his desire is the image and expression of his soul… If we possess the image of a thing, we possess half the thing.
In Liber Novus, Jung identifies the image as the direct expression and medium of soul, providing the experiential basis for the later theoretical construct of the soul-image.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
The imago Dei imprinted on the soul, not on the body, is an image of an image, ‘for my soul is not directly the image of God, but is made after the likeness of the former image.’
Jung’s treatment of the imago Dei in patristic thought provides a theological genealogy for the soul-image concept, linking it to Origen’s layered ontology of reflection and resemblance.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
soul as a tertium between the perspectives of body (matter, nature, empirics) and of mind (spirit, logic, idea). Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed
Hillman’s Neoplatonic framing of soul as tertium provides the metaphysical infrastructure within which soul-images operate as mediating, intermediary presences rather than mere mental representations.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth.
Hillman’s acorn theory extends the soul-image into the register of destiny and calling, the daimon serving as the individualized carrier of an originary soul-image.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
We are still in search of reconstituting that third place, the intermediate realm of psyche — that is also the realm of images and the power of imagination — from which we were exiled by theological, spiritual men more than a thousand years ago.
Hillman’s historical argument for the loss of the imaginal realm contextualizes the soul-image’s modern diminishment within a long theological and institutional suppression of psyche.
, Senex & Puer, 2015aside
‘The soul may be shaped into all varieties of forms … and the soul profits from everything without distinction. Error and dreams serve it usefully’
Hillman invokes Montaigne and the Protean metaphor to argue for the soul-image’s inherent polymorphism, its capacity to take on multiple, even contradictory, configurations.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975aside