Henry Corbin

Sebastian reads Corbin

Corbin matters to depth psychology because he recovered something the tradition needed and could not generate from inside itself: a rigorous metaphysics of the imaginal. The *mundus imaginalis* is not fantasy, not projection, not the Jungian unconscious by another name — it is an ontological register, a world between sensory appearance and pure intellect where the soul’s activity is cosmologically real. Hillman knew this and borrowed hard from it; the Hillmanian insistence that psyche is neither brain-event nor spirit-ascent but image with its own substantiality is unthinkable without Corbin’s recovery of Ibn Arabi and Suhrawardi. What Corbin saw, and what makes him irreplaceable, is that the Islamic mystical tradition had held this middle world in technical philosophical language for centuries while the West dissolved it into allegory or dismissed it as superstition. Turn to Corbin when a question about soul, image, or vision demands more ontological ground than Jung’s empirical bracket can supply — when you need the claim made, not merely entertained.