Few terms in the depth-psychological lexicon carry as much freight as 'Soul.' Across the corpus, the term functions simultaneously as a structural concept, a metaphorical orientation, and an ontological claim — resisting definition even as it organizes the entire enterprise of depth psychology. Jung grounds the word etymologically and phenomenologically, connecting the German Seele to the Greek aiolos ('quick-moving,' 'changeful'), insisting the soul is uncannily alive and irreducible to dogmatic capture. Hillman radicalizes this by proposing that soul is not a substance but a perspective — the primary metaphor of psychology itself — one that 'transposes meaning and releases interior, buried significance,' and whose deepest affinity is with image, death, and the underworld. Moore, drawing on Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, treats soul as a quality of depth and resonance immanent in persons, relationships, and even objects — something nurtured rather than manufactured. Welwood situates soul between ego and absolute: an individualizing principle, the human element through which divine nature unfolds in time. Plotinus, Aristotle, and Plato form the philosophical backstop, establishing soul as form, as vital capacity, as cosmic intermediary. The tensions are irreducible: soul as metaphor versus soul as metaphysical entity; soul as inner life versus soul as world-quality; soul as given versus soul as cultivated. These tensions are not weaknesses — they constitute the term's generative power within the tradition.
the primary metaphor of psychology must be soul… soul-as-metaphor leads beyond the problem of 'how to define soul' and encourages an account of the soul toward imagining itself rather than defining itself.
Hillman argues that soul is not a definable entity but the root metaphor of all psychological activity, functioning through imagination rather than definition.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
the primary metaphor of psychology must be soul… soul-as-metaphor leads beyond the problem of 'how to define soul' and encourages an account of the soul toward imagining itself rather than defining itself.
In this parallel text, Hillman reaffirms that soul operates as a psychological instrument of soul-making rather than as a fixed, definable category.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
Soul is a way of speaking about the individual way that our larger being manifests in us, through us, as us… an intermediate element between the absolute or divine… and our conditioned ego.
Welwood defines soul as the individualizing principle mediating between universal divine nature and the conditioned ego, rejecting any reified metaphysical reading.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
'Soul' cannot be accurately defined, nor is it respectable in scientific discussion… To understand 'soul' we cannot turn to science for a description. Its meaning is best given by its context.
Hillman establishes that soul exceeds scientific operationalization and must be understood contextually, through its lived associations with experience and suffering.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964thesis
Anima means soul and should designate something very wonderful and immortal… this kind of soul is a dogmatic conception whose purpose it is to pin down and capture something uncannily alive and active.
Jung traces the etymology and archaic resonance of soul-as-anima, arguing that all doctrinal definitions are attempts to contain what is inherently vital and elusive.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis
For Aristotle, soul is not an immaterial substance, but in the broadest sense it is the capacity of the organism to be active in various ways… the soul is logically inseparable from the body.
Thompson recovers the Aristotelian doctrine that soul is the body's vital capacities — not a separate substance — rendering soul and body logically co-constitutive.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
People who clearly have soul show a certain depth, vitality, individuality, familiarity with pain and death, and good humor… Soul cannot be fabricated by evaluating experience, trying to figure it out, or through intense introspection.
Moore, following Ficino's Neoplatonism, characterizes soul as a qualitative depth immanent in persons and things — a downward resonance inaccessible to intellect or introspection alone.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990thesis
People who clearly have soul show a certain depth, vitality, individuality, familiarity with pain and death, and good humor… Soul cannot be fabricated by evaluating experience, trying to figure it out, or through intense introspection.
This parallel passage from Moore's earlier edition defines soul as experiential depth and resonance, distinguishing it categorically from intellectual understanding.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982thesis
She said that she was dead for she had lost her heart… 'That,' she said, 'is not my real heart.' Like the primitive who has lost his soul, she had lost the loving courageous connection to life.
Hillman illustrates soul-loss as a lived clinical reality — loss of vital connection rather than a metaphysical event — drawing a parallel between psychotic depersonalization and archaic soul-loss.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
Our task is to care for the soul, but it is also true that the soul cares for us… even in its pathology, and maybe especially then, the soul cares for us by offering a way out of a narrow secularism.
Moore argues for a reciprocal relationship between human agency and soul, in which pathology itself becomes a mode of soul's caring — an initiatory route toward depth and spiritual renewal.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
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. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here.
Hillman's acorn theory presents soul as a pre-natal individuality — the daimon — that carries one's destiny and chooses the circumstances of incarnation.
, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
SOUL Our true nature as it unfolds and individuates in time and space, soul is, in Rumi's…
Welwood's glossary entry crystallizes his position: soul is true nature in the process of temporal individuation, distinguished from ego and from the universal absolute.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
We are trying here in our own way and by means of the dream to restore a view of the soul that is still widespread among so-called primitive peoples… a world-wide experience of two kinds of souls.
Hillman marshals ethnological evidence for a dual-soul typology found cross-culturally, grounding his underworld psychology in comparative anthropology of the soul.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
Serve the soul rather than the surface needs of life. If your soul is suffering neglect, you will have symptoms… Your symptoms are the raw material for your soul-making.
Moore offers a clinical ethics of soul-care in which symptoms are not to be eliminated but read as the soul's own communications requiring attention and depth.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
any psychology that would keep soul in mind would have to remain aware of the fact that psychology is the rational mind talking about the life of soul… all our psychologies are different perspectives on soul, allusions to soul, which remains elusive.
Romanyshyn argues that soul perpetually exceeds psychological language, requiring psychology to adopt a stance of permanent approximation and metaphorical humility.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
The soul is concerned with goodness and beauty, with justice and courage, with friendship and loyalty… the soul's beauty is harder to see than beauty of the body.
Hillman synthesizes Aristotelian and Platonic accounts, presenting soul as the incorporeal form whose character-qualities are harder to perceive than physical beauty.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
Another difference between getting life in order and caring for your soul is that we usually like to keep life stable, while the soul is dynamic. It seems always to be ushering in new forms of vitality.
Moore distinguishes soul from ego-managed life by its inherent dynamism — a restless energy that disrupts stability in the service of deeper becoming.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
No soul is mediocre, whatever your personal taste for conventionality… A soul is said to be old, or wise, or sweet. We speak of someone having a beautiful soul, a wounded soul, a deep soul.
Hillman insists on the irreducible individuality of each soul, maintaining that commonplace language about soul already encodes a vision of its qualitative uniqueness.
, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
statements about the soul reflect the state of soul of the one making the statement. They reveal the special bent of a person's own psyche-soma problem.
Hillman argues that all philosophical positions on body-soul relations are themselves psychic phenomena — projections of the theorist's own soul-state — dissolving metaphysics into psychology.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964supporting
animistic religion, found close at home in American Indian traditions, recognizes soul (anima) in everything that exists… All beings are in movement. The presence of soul implies movement.
Moore extends the concept of soul beyond the personal to a world-animism, where soul's presence is evidenced by internal movement and significance in all things.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting
animistic religion, found close at home in American Indian traditions, recognizes soul (anima) in everything that exists… All beings are in movement. The presence of soul implies movement.
Parallel passage in the 1982 edition affirming Moore's animistic extension of soul to world and object, grounded in Ficino's Neoplatonic cosmology.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982supporting
the Grail was not something one had, but the mysterious object of a quest… an outlook toward the world as soul and an outlook toward others as soul.
Sardello uses the Grail legend to articulate community as a soul-practice — a relational orientation toward world and others as themselves ensouled.
, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992supporting
the eye of the soul perceives the eternal realities so important to the heart. In waking life, most of us see only with our physical eyes, even though we could… glimpse fragments of eternity in the most ordinary passing events.
Moore articulates soul as a perceptual faculty — an 'other eye' capable of perceiving eternal realities within ordinary experience, cultivated by dream and art.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
IF imagining is the native activity of the anima mundi, then fantasy is always going on… One is never beyond the subjectivism given with the soul's native dominants of fantasy structures.
Hillman argues that soul's constitutive activity is fantasy — an inescapable subjectivism that precludes any purely objective psychology.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
IF imagining is the native activity of the anima mundi, then fantasy is always going on… One is never beyond the subjectivism given with the soul's native dominants of fantasy structures.
Parallel text establishing that soul's identification with fantasy ensures that psychology can never achieve the objectivity it sometimes claims.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
The path of the soul will not allow concealment of the shadow without unfortunate consequences… if you can tolerate the full weight of human possibility as the raw material for an alchemical, soulful life.
Moore frames soul's path as necessarily inclusive of shadow — an alchemical embrace of the full range of human experience as the condition for soulful depth.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
Renaissance Neoplatonism enabled the soul to welcome all its figures and forms, encouraging the individual to participate in the soul's teeming nature.
Hillman situates the soul's rehabilitation in Renaissance Neoplatonism — particularly Ficino — as the historical source for modern depth psychology's imaginal orientation.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
sees the kind of soul involved in success, sees also what success looks like from the point of view of the soul of the world… this thinking through becomes a way of ensouling.
Sardello proposes 'ensouling' as a cognitive-ethical practice of thinking through phenomena simultaneously from individual and world-soul perspectives.
, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992supporting
Platonism and democracy share a vision of the principal importance of the individual soul… it enters the world of interactions; it shows itself in geography, as if to say it so enters the world that it takes on the garments of place.
Hillman connects soul's individuality to democratic political philosophy, arguing that both require recognition of the daimon's unique particularity as it incarnates in place and circumstance.
, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
the body when asleep has no perception; but the soul when awake has cognizance of all things — sees what is visible, hears what is audible, walks, touches, feels pain, ponders.
Bremmer documents the Hippocratic account of the 'free soul' active during sleep, a foundational ancient source for the soul's independence from bodily states.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting
This new ensouling does not mean, however, an increase in the number of souls: all depend from the one or, rather, all remains one… the total of spiritual beings is unaffected.
Plotinus articulates the unity of Soul — all individual souls depend from and ultimately remain one — establishing the Neoplatonic metaphysics underlying much depth-psychological soul-discourse.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
each man has one anima figure that truly represents his soul. Even if the psyche is a plurality of complexes, each with its soul-spark, one man, one anima is the formula.
Hillman examines the limiting Jungian equation of anima with soul, noting both its practical utility in clinical work and the conceptual problems of a plurality of soul-figures.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting
The Early Greek Concept of the Soul… ONE. THE SOUL… TWO. THE SOUL OF THE LIVING… THREE. THE SOUL OF THE DEAD.
Bremmer's monograph provides the scholarly historical-philological framework for Greek soul-concepts — free soul, ego souls, soul of the dead — foundational to depth psychology's classical references.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983aside
In neither sense is it reasonable to call the soul a harmony. In particular the claim that the soul is the composition of the parts of the body is easily disposed of.
Aristotle refutes the 'soul as harmony' theory, insisting that soul cannot be reduced to a ratio of bodily ingredients — a position foundational to his later hylomorphism.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350aside
Love is a Hypostasis, a Real-Being sprung from a Real-Being — lower than the parent but authentically existent… Love… is itself filled with the sight; it is first.
Plotinus treats Love as a hypostasis born from Soul's contemplation of Divine Mind, situating soul within the emanative hierarchy as the generative source of Eros.
, The Six Enneads, 270aside
to be true to soul, I should keep the friendship model… You will be following the example of the great teacher of soul, Socrates, and doing something concrete to introduce soul into your life.
Moore invokes Socrates as a model for soul-work as friendship — a relational rather than technical practice — introducing soul into everyday life through spirit of companionship.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside
the soul, realizing it could not disobey, would unwillingly descend and come into this world… The lower it gets, the more difficulty we have grasping its meaning.
Hillman surveys Kabbalistic and Platonic descent-of-soul myths, noting that the soul's increasing embodiment renders its meaning progressively more opaque.
, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside