Pathologizing

the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective. There is no cure of pathologizing; there is, instead, a re-evaluation.

This passage provides Hillman’s canonical definition of pathologizing as an irreducible psychic activity and explicitly forecloses cure in favor of re-evaluation, establishing the term’s theoretical core.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective. There is no cure of pathologizing; there is, instead, a re-evaluation.

A near-identical canonical statement of the term, affirming pathologizing as an autonomous psychic function aligned with Bachelard’s imaginative deformation and Jung’s opus contra naturam.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Starting with psyche means to take pathologizing to be a valid form of psychological expression, as an underived, metaphorical language, one of the ways the psyche legitimately and spontaneously presents itself.

Hillman argues that grounding pathologizing within the psyche — rather than in medical or religious frameworks — reveals it as a primary, underived metaphorical language, aligning Freud and Jung with this third, psychological line.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

pathologizing is valid, authentic, and necessary. For to deny or omit pathologizing from the study of the soul denies the soul this area of its phenomenology, refusing this mode of its life, this language of its expression, this means of reflecting itself.

Hillman argues that pathologizing is not a secondary or abnormal field but a primary ‘fundament’ of all soul-life, and that any psychology omitting it is insufficient and even dangerous.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Pathologizing is a way of mythologizing. Pathologizing takes one out of blind immediacy, distorting one’s focus upon the natural and actual by forcing one to ask what is within it and behind it.

This passage identifies pathologizing as a mode of mythological consciousness that disrupts naive naturalism and returns the soul to an archetypal, imaginal register.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

if pathologizing is necessary and is the expression and experience of Necessity itself, then this errant, disordering activity must be a ‘norm’ of the soul, much as Plato imagined it.

Hillman grounds pathologizing in the archetype of Ananke (Necessity), arguing that it is woven throughout all psychological existence and that any concept of ‘normal’ must include it.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The wound and the eye are one and the same. From the psyche’s viewpoint, pathology and insight are not opposites… Pathologizing is itself a way of seeing; the eye of the complex gives the peculiar twist called psychological insight.

Hillman identifies pathologizing with a distinct epistemological capacity — the ‘eye of the complex’ — arguing that psychological insight is inseparable from the twisted, wounded perspective.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

we begin in the odd, ununderstandable, and alien symptom rather than in the familiar ego, and as in all depth psychology we draw our insights about the familiar from the alien… Pathography remains the traditional source of psychoanalytic insight.

Hillman situates his treatment of pathologizing within the foundational depth-psychological method of beginning with extremity and the alien symptom rather than the familiar ego.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Wrong pathologizing has spread well beyond the games of the consulting room and clinic, becoming a covert political instrument of the state. Political heretics may be declared mentally ill in order to banish them.

Hillman distinguishes legitimate pathologizing from its coercive misuse, showing how wrong pathologizing functions as a political instrument of social control.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

when we are psychological about pathologizing we are not treating it; when we are treating pathologizing we are not being psychological about it… By taking the soul’s sickness fantasy at face value as clinical pathology, the clinical approach creates what it then must treat.

Hillman exposes a structural contradiction between the clinical and the psychological attitudes, arguing that treatment literalizes what should be understood imaginally.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

pathologizing is a psychic activity per se. Psychic sickness remains as an archetypal category of existence independent of its contents… The definitions of psychopathology can never stand up universally across time and space.

Hillman argues that pathologizing as an archetypal category transcends any particular cultural or historical definition of mental illness, whose contents vary while the category itself persists.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Our attitude toward the pathologizing may be more destructive than the pathologizing itself.

Hillman cautions that the normative, interventionist attitude toward pathologized fantasies risks enacting the very harm it fears, making the stance toward pathologizing the real therapeutic issue.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The soul moves, via the pathologized fantasy of disintegration, out of too-centralized and muscle-bound structures which have become ordinary and normal… the psyche itself insists on pathologizing the strong ego.

Hillman reads cultural and personal disintegration as the psyche’s own pathologizing of overly rigid ego-structures, aligning dissolution with Dionysian loosening and alchemical decay.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

pathologizing fantasies are required. A bloodied or obscene image in a dream, a hypochondriacal fantasy, a psychosomatic symptom, is a statement in imaginal language that the psyche is being profoundly stirred.

Hillman argues that horrifying and distorted images in dreams and symptoms are necessary imaginal statements registering deep psychic movement rather than errors to be corrected.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Pathologizing as Metaphorical Language. The psyche uses complaints to speak in a magnified and misshapen language about its depths.

Hillman reframes pathologizing as a specific mode of metaphorical speech through which the psyche articulates what cannot be expressed in normative language.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Only when things fall apart do they open up into new meanings; only when an everyday habit turns symptomatic… does a new significance dawn… an archetypal psychology can never leave its base in pathography.

Hillman argues that pathologizing is the condition of possibility for new psychological meaning, and that archetypal psychology is structurally dependent on pathography as its base.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

What pathologizing does for the individual’s psychology it does as well for the field of psychology: it keeps us close to the actuality of the psyche, preventing metaphysical and scientific escapes.

Hillman, citing Minkowski, argues that pathologizing functions epistemologically to anchor psychological inquiry in concrete psychic reality against the twin dangers of abstraction and scientism.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Pathologizing processes are a source of imaginative work, and the work provides a container for the pathologizing processes. The two are inextricably interwoven.

Hillman identifies a reciprocal relationship between pathologizing and creative imagination, arguing that artistic production both arises from and contains pathologized processes.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

we could do nothing whatsoever therapeutically about the literal act of suicide unless we understood very closely the fantasy and its intentions of returning the soul from life to death as a metaphor for another sort of existence.

Hillman illustrates the practical consequence of reading pathologizing as metaphorical: the therapist must grasp the fantasy within suicidal behavior before any meaningful response is possible.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The complexity of psychopathology with its rich variety of backgrounds has been absorbed by this one central image and been endowed with one main meaning: suffering.

Hillman critiques the Christian allegorization of pathologizing as ‘suffering,’ arguing it forecloses the full range of psychopathological perspectives present in the crucifixion imagery itself.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

pathologizing supplies material out of which we build our regular lives. Their styles, their concerns, their loves, reflect patterns that have pathologized strands woven all through them.

Hillman argues that pathologized strands are constitutive of ordinary life and self-knowledge, dissolving the boundary between normality and abnormality.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the terms, so arbitrary and so empty, are attached to persons who, by so becoming ‘alcoholics,’ ‘suicidals,’ ‘schizophrenics,’ ‘homosexuals,’ seem thereby to substantiate the words, giving through their visible persons an empirical psychic reality to the terms.

Hillman critiques diagnostic nominalism, showing how psychiatric labels parasitically acquire reality from the persons they name rather than from any genuine archetypal comprehension.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

For Hegel insanity is inherent in the soul’s nature; it is not a result or a strategem. ‘In insanity the soul strives to restore itself to the perfect inner harmony out of existing contradiction.’

Hillman situates his view within a philosophical lineage by contrasting Hegel’s structural account of insanity with Laing’s socio-political model, lending historical depth to the necessity of pathologizing.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →