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Soul-Making
Also known as: vale of soul-making, soul work
Soul-making is the central aspiration of James Hillman's archetypal psychology. Borrowed from the poet John Keats, the term designates the psyche's fundamental activity: crafting images from the raw material of lived experience. Soul-making does not seek transcendence or cure. It locates psychological depth in the world itself — in suffering, longing, and reflective engagement with events.
What Does Soul-Making Mean?
Hillman adopted the phrase from Keats’s 1819 letter, which reframed the world not as a “vale of tears” but as a workshop for psychological substance. As Hillman articulated the concept:
“Call the world if you please, ‘The vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world…” — John Keats, cited in Hillman (1983)
Hillman read this line as a therapeutic mandate. The world’s difficulty is not an obstacle to the soul but its necessary material. Soul-making occurs whenever mythic imagination meets the sufferings and visions of ordinary life, generating the quality Hillman calls “soul” — a term he largely resuscitated for modern psychology (Hillman, 1983). Soul arises, as the editors of his collected puer writings note, “when the universal meets the unique, when depth is sounded, and open wounds begin to scar over with the skin of reflective engagement” (Hillman, 2015).
How Does Imagining Relate to Soul-Making?
Hillman’s equation is direct: “the act of soul-making is imagining, since images are the psyche, its stuff, and its perspective” (Hillman, 1983). This is not metaphor. For archetypal psychology, images are not representations of something else — they are psychic reality itself. Crafting images, whether through artisanal work, therapeutic reflection, or social engagement, constitutes soul-making so long as these activities proceed from the perspective of soul as “uppermost concern” (Hillman, 1983).
Why Does Soul-Making Reject Transcendence?
Hillman explicitly positioned soul-making against spiritual disciplines that seek escape from worldly conditions. The distinction between soul and spirit, a persistent theme across his work, guards against collapsing psychological depth into mystical ascent (Hillman, 1983). Hillman’s insistence on staying in the “vale” connects directly to the ancient Greek physics of the thumos, where value is forged not by rising above suffering but by retaining it within the enclosed vessel of the soul. Soul-making is not redemption. It is the slow, pressurized work of becoming through what one undergoes.
Sources Cited
- Hillman, James (1983). Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Spring Publications.
- Hillman, James (2015). Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 3: Senex and Puer. Ed. Glen Slater. Spring Publications.