The soul-spirit distinction stands as one of the generative fault lines running through depth psychology, and no figure has pressed it more systematically than James Hillman. Tracing the problem to the Council of Constantinople (869 CE), Hillman argues that Western anthropology collapsed a tripartite cosmos — spirit, soul, body — into a dualism of mind and matter, thereby dispossessing soul of its own ontological territory. What soul loses in that collapse is precisely what depth psychology labors to recover: the intermediate realm of imagination, passion, fantasy, and reflection that is neither the abstraction of spirit nor the literalism of matter. Spirit, in Hillman's phenomenology, is characterized by height, transcendence, unity, purity, and the drive upward — 'peaks'; soul moves in depth, multiplicity, pathology, relatedness, and the labyrinthine — 'vales.' The distinction is not merely poetic: it underwrites the entire practical difference between spiritual discipline and psychotherapy, between the puer's ascent and the anima's descent. When soul and spirit are conflated — as Hillman argues they are in Maslow's peak-experience psychology or in split-off spiritualities — psychology loses its proper subject. Moore extends the concern into cultural therapy. The distinction also has classical and alchemical resonance: von Franz, Jung's translators, and the Neoplatonists each register the difficulty of separating anima, pneuma, and psyche with any finality. The term thus names both a conceptual boundary and a recurring site of theoretical crisis.
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at that Council in Constantinople the soul lost its dominion. Our anthropology, our idea of human nature, devolved from a tripartite cosmos of spirit, soul, and body (or matter), to a dualism of spirit (or mind) and body (or matter).
Hillman grounds the soul-spirit distinction in ecclesiastical history, arguing that a conciliar decision in 869 CE erased soul as a distinct ontological register, and that this loss defines the crisis depth psychology inherits.
Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975thesis
Maslow deserves our gratitude for having reintroduced pneuma into psychology, even if his move has been compounded by the old confusion of pneuma with psyche. But what about the psyche of psychology?
Hillman identifies the conflation of pneuma and psyche in humanistic psychology as the contemporary form of the ancient error, and calls for a rigorous separation that restores soul to its own domain.
Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975thesis
I call the high and light aspects of my being spirit and the dark and heavy aspect soul. Soul is at home in the deep, shaded valleys… Spirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers.
Through a cited prose-poem, Hillman offers the sharpest phenomenological contrast between spirit (height, light, spareness) and soul (depth, heaviness, moisture), making the topographic metaphor ontologically precise.
a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both. By having its own realm psyche has its own logic — psychology.
Hillman defines soul as occupying a genuinely intermediate ontological position between matter and spirit, and argues that psychology's distinctive logic depends on maintaining this middle ground.
Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
Soul and Spirit
IF imagining is the native activity of the anima mundi, then fantasy is always going on and is not subject to a phenomenological epoché.
Hillman opens the dedicated 'Soul and Spirit' chapter of Archetypal Psychology by grounding soul in the perpetual activity of fantasy, implicitly opposing it to spirit's aspiration toward a pure, bracket-able phenomenality.
Soul and Spirit
IF imagining is the native activity of the anima mundi, then fantasy is always going on and is not subject to a phenomenological epoché.
The parallel text in Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account restates that soul's identification with perpetual fantasy structurally prevents the kind of objective withdrawal that spirit-oriented disciplines seek.
Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
I want to suggest now three fundamental qualities of soul-making in distinction to spirit disciplines. These three are: 1) Pathologizing… 2) Anima… 3) Polytheism.
Hillman articulates three operational criteria — pathologizing, anima, and polytheism — that define soul-making practice as categorically distinct from the unifying, transcendent aims of spirit disciplines.
At Nicaea, a distinction was made between the image as such, its power, its full divine or archetypal reality, and what the image represents, points to, means. Thus, images became allegories.
Hillman connects the depreciation of images at Nicaea to the victory of spirit over soul, arguing that when images become mere representations they lose the soul's mode of presence.
Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975thesis
When spirit is imagined as above human life, as fundamentally masculine, as abstracting and distancing, and as pure and uncontaminated, the soul is particularly denigrated. For soul is always in the thick of things: in the repressed, in the shadow, in the messes of life.
Moore's editorial commentary extends Hillman's argument by showing how a monopolizing transcendent spirituality actively damages soul, which by nature inhabits immanence, shadow, and complication.
Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
the contrast between soul and spirit. First, did you notice how important it is to be literal and not 'merely metaphorical' when one takes the spiritual viewpoint? Also, this viewpoint requires the physical sensation of height, of 'highs.'
Hillman draws out the phenomenological signature of the spiritual viewpoint — its literalism about height and its demand for physical sensation of ascent — as diagnostically distinct from soul's tolerance for metaphor and depth.
Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
puer is the Who in our spirit flight, and anima (or psyche) is the Who in our soul. Now the main thing about the anima is just what has always been said about the psyche: it is unfathomable, ungraspable.
Hillman personifies the distinction, mapping puer onto spirit and anima onto soul, establishing that these are not abstract categories but living psychic figures with distinct modes of volition.
Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
puer is the Who in our spirit flight, and anima (or psyche) is the Who in our soul… it is unfathomable, ungraspable. For the anima, 'the archetype of life,' as Jung has called her, is that function of the psyche that is its actual life, the present mess it is in.
The 'Peaks and Vales' text's own version of the puer-anima personification grounds the soul-spirit distinction in archetypal figures, linking anima to soul's defining character of inexhaustible depth and complication.
Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975supporting
Humility is awed and wowed by meaning; the soul takes the same events more as the puns and pranks of Pan. Humility and humor are two ways of coming down to humus, to the human condition.
Hillman distinguishes spirit's characteristic mood of humble awe from soul's humor and irony, offering an affective phenomenology of the distinction that complements his topographic one.
Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975supporting
Once the spirit has turned toward the soul, the soul can regard its own needs in a new way… the psyche has spiritual needs, which the puer part of us can fulfill.
Rather than simply opposing the two, Hillman argues for their necessary mutual orientation, insisting that soul requires spirit's verticality even as spirit must be grounded in soul.
Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975supporting
I believe their identity is more pronounced when soul and spirit have not been discriminated; then anima is exaggeratedly mercurial, less the container than seductively elusive — all over the place — and then the spirit is predominately moist, vaporous, and in a soulful flux of uncertainties.
Hillman argues that the failure to discriminate soul from spirit produces a pathological blurring in which anima and spirit each take on the other's coloring, underscoring why the distinction is clinically consequential.
Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting
there is no consistent equivalent of Seele in English… 'soul' would give entirely the wrong meaning… an increasing tendency to replace the concept Seele by Psyche.
The Jung translator's notes on Seele document how the soul-spirit distinction is undermined at the level of translation, with 'soul,' 'psyche,' and 'mind' used interchangeably in ways that obscure conceptually important differences.
In the German text the word Anima is used only twice…. Everywhere else the word used is Seele (soul)… 'Soul' is retained only when it refers to the psychic factor common to both sexes. The distinction is not always easy to make.
Jung's editorial apparatus itself acknowledges the difficulty of maintaining clean distinctions between soul and anima, revealing how the soul-spirit problem ramifies into problems of translation and technical terminology.
Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting
The desert saint attempted to 'reverse the psychological effects of the ancient religion.' His discipline aimed to separate the monk from his human community and also from nature… By living in a cave… the desert saint performed a mimesis of death.
Hillman grounds the historical opposition of spirit to soul in the practices of early Christian asceticism, showing how the spiritual discipline of the desert fathers systematically rejected the soul's world of nature, sleep, dreams, and community.
Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975supporting
soul-making does not deny gods and the search for them. But it looks closer to hand, finding them more in the manner of the Greeks and Egyptians, for whom the gods take part in all things.
Hillman distinguishes soul-making's immanent, polytheistic engagement with the divine from spirit's drive to transcend the mundane, using Greek and Egyptian religious sensibility as the contrasting model.
Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975supporting
spiritus, anima, et corpus sunt unum, et omnia sunt ex uno… body, spirit, and soul, for all perfection consisteth in the number three.
The alchemical tradition in Aurora Consurgens preserves the tripartite anthropology — spirit, soul, body as three-in-one — whose collapse into dualism Hillman identifies as the origin of depth psychology's central problem.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting
'Thou art not the bodies; nay, nor yet the soul, which is the life of the bodies,' he wrote to God in his Confessions. 'But Thou art the life of souls.' Note 117 A rather fine distinction, yet it meant a great deal to Augustine.
Campbell's citation of Augustine's distinction between soul and the life of souls signals the theological lineage of graduated ontological distinctions that depth psychology inherits and secularizes.
Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968aside