Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'Valley' functions as a charged topographic symbol standing in deliberate opposition to 'peak,' 'mountain,' and 'height' — the traditional figures of spirit, transcendence, and abstract elevation. The term's most theoretically consequential articulation belongs to James Hillman, who, drawing on Keats's phrase 'vale of Soul-making,' establishes the valley as the privileged locus of psyche: depressed, suffering, shadowed, and generative precisely because it is low. The vale of tears, the valley of the shadow of death, the lonesome valley of sacred song — these are not deficits to be overcome but constitutive conditions of soul-life. Against Maslow's pneumatic 'peak experience,' Hillman erects the vale experience as psychology's proper domain. Jung's own use of valley imagery — in the Red Book's desert ravines and in the East African dawn vista — sustains this polarity: the valley is the place where light enters from below, where the liminal and transformative are encountered. Von Franz elaborates the valley as a dream-landscape saturated with mother-complex imagery: stagnant water, non-reflecting ice, descent and collapse. In Sufi mysticism, filtered through Corbin, the 'seven valleys' map an interior itinerary culminating in the darkness of divine annihilation. Descartes's famous logical pairing of mountain and valley as ontologically inseparable introduces a philosophical register that resonates, however differently, with depth psychology's insistence that height and depth require one another. The valley, across these traditions, names the soul's native terrain.
In the library
12 passages
Vale in the usual religious language of our culture is a depressed emotional place—the vale of tears; Jesus walked this lonesome valley, the valley of the shadow of death
Hillman establishes 'vale' as the canonical image of soul-space — low, suffering, shadowed — in deliberate contrast to the pneumatic 'peak,' grounding his soul/spirit distinction in this topographic opposition.
Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975thesis
You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark.
Jung articulates the mountain-valley polarity as a psychological rhythm rather than a fixed opposition, presenting the soul's path as dialectical movement between heights and depths.
Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
the mystic enters the first valley, following an itinerary the successive stages of which are marked by the visualization of colored lights, leading him to the seventh valley, the valley of 'black light'
Corbin's account of Najm Razi's Sufi system presents the 'seven valleys' as a structured interior topography in which each valley corresponds to a distinct stage of illumination culminating in divine darkness.
Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis
the thought of a God (that is, a supremely perfect being) who lacks existence is no less contradictory than the thought of a mountain without a valley
Descartes deploys the mountain-valley pair as a figure of ontological inseparability, an argument structure that resonates within depth psychology's treatment of the high-low polarity as mutually constitutive.
Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting
Before me, at the bottom of the little valley, lay a dark, almost black-green strip of jungle... the contrasts between light and darkness would be extremely sharp. Then objects would assume contour and emerge into the light
Jung's experiential description of an African valley at dawn enacts the symbolic dynamic of light-from-below: the valley as the site where illumination and sacred encounter occur at the world's lowest register.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963supporting
There is stagnant water at the bottom of the valley. It is gray, and dirty, and does not reflect... It is like ice at the bottom of the valley and it does not mirror.
Von Franz reads the recurring valley-floor image in a puer's dreams as a manifestation of the unintegrated mother complex — stagnant, non-reflective, simultaneously deathly and generative.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting
There is stagnant water at the bottom of the valley. It is gray, and dirty, and does not reflect... It is like ice at the bottom of the valley and it does not mirror.
This parallel text corroborates von Franz's interpretation of the dream valley as a symbol of the unreflective, inert mother-complex, reinforcing the depth-psychological equation of valley-floor with psychological stagnation.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting
I have a pupil who studied agricultural engineering. He was sent to a little valley in the mountains with the task of exploring whether this valley had the right to continue to exist.
Von Franz uses a literal mountain valley as a concrete case study for the conflict between patriarchal statistical abstraction and a more feminine, relationally grounded way of knowing a place and its inhabitants.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Some Sufis describe the 'seven valleys' to traverse in order to reach the court of Simburgh, where the mystic 'birds' find themselves gloriously effaced and yet full
Suzuki introduces the Sufi 'seven valleys' as a cross-traditional parallel to Zen stages of spiritual development, positioning the valley sequence as a universal topology of mystical itinerary.
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series), 1949supporting
on my right side a deeply cut valley with a dry river bed, some languid grass and dusty brambles... I see the tracks of naked feet that lead up from the rocky valley to the plateau
In the Red Book's visionary landscape, the valley appears as a transitional zone between below and above, with the tracks of an unknown other ascending from its depths foreshadowing a figure of the unconscious.
Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
Silent is the lofty mountain; Long is the deep valley. Bright are the purple mushrooms; They can still my hunger.
This Daoist hermit poem pairs the lofty mountain and deep valley as complementary aspects of a sacred landscape sustaining contemplative withdrawal, illustrating the cross-cultural topos of valley-as-refuge.
the Apache seem to take great pleasure simply in uttering the native names of various locations within the Cibecue valley
Abram's account of Western Apache place-name practice in the Cibecue valley illustrates how a specific valley functions as a sacred linguistic and relational geography binding community to landscape.
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside