---
slug: hillman-archetype-a02f9016
title: "Hillman on Archetype"
author: "James Hillman"
work: "Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account"
section: ""
year: "1983"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - archetype
fragment: |
  Furthermore, unlike Jung who radically distinguishes between noumenal archetype per se and phenomenal archetypal image, archetypal psychology rigorously refuses even to speculate about a nonpresented archetype per se. Its concern is with the phenomenon: the archetypal image. This leads to the next step: "... any image can be considered archetypal. The word 'archetypal' rather than pointing at something ... points to something, and this is value ... by archetypal psychology we mean a psychology of value. And our appellative move is aimed to restore psychology to its widest, richest, and deepest volume so that it would resonate with soul in its descriptions as unfathomable, multiple, prior, generative, and necessary. As all images can gain this archetypal sense, so all psychology can be archetypal ... 'Archetypal' here refers to a move one makes rather than to a thing that is" (Hillman 1977b).
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  The distinction Hillman is drawing here is not primarily philosophical — it is therapeutic, or more exactly, it is about where psychological life actually happens. Jung kept the archetype per se as a kind of dark backing behind the image, a noumenal guarantor that explained why certain images recur with such weight. Hillman's refusal to speculate about that backing is not skepticism but a discipline of attention: if you posit an invisible thing behind the image, you will keep looking through the image instead of at it, and what arrives in the psyche — the dream-figure, the symptom, the sudden quality of light on a particular afternoon — will be treated as a sign pointing elsewhere rather than as a presence with its own authority.
  
  This is where "archetypal" becomes a verb rather than a noun. To call an image archetypal is to declare that it has been allowed its full depth, its unfathomability — not because it belongs to a universal category but because the perceiving soul has refused to reduce it. Value, in this frame, is not assigned from outside; it names what happens when an image is met without the flight toward explanation. The image earns the designation by resisting being spent.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The sentence that should stop us is the last one: "a move one makes rather than a thing that is." This is not a rhetorical flourish — it is a complete ontological relocation. For Jung, archetypes are structural facts about the psyche, prior to and independent of any given image; the image is their phenomenal clothing. Hillman refuses the coat-check. There is no naked archetype waiting backstage. There is only the image, and what happens when you take it seriously enough — press it, follow it, refuse to dissolve it into concept — is that it begins to deepen, to acquire what he calls value. The move, then, is an act of attention, not discovery. Edinger would resist this: for him, something genuinely numinous precedes the image and makes it possible. But Hillman's wager is that the numinosity is in the looking, not the looked-at — and that realizing this returns psychology to soul rather than to theory about soul. What changes in practice, today, if you treat depth as something you enact rather than something you find?
parent_id: Hillman_1983_Archetypal_Psychology_A_Brief_Account__par0005
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Hillman writes:

> Furthermore, unlike Jung who radically distinguishes between noumenal archetype per se and phenomenal archetypal image, archetypal psychology rigorously refuses even to speculate about a nonpresented archetype per se. Its concern is with the phenomenon: the archetypal image. This leads to the next step: "... any image can be considered archetypal. The word 'archetypal' rather than pointing at something ... points to something, and this is value ... by archetypal psychology we mean a psychology of value. And our appellative move is aimed to restore psychology to its widest, richest, and deepest volume so that it would resonate with soul in its descriptions as unfathomable, multiple, prior, generative, and necessary. As all images can gain this archetypal sense, so all psychology can be archetypal ... 'Archetypal' here refers to a move one makes rather than to a thing that is" (Hillman 1977b).

— James Hillman

The distinction Hillman is drawing here is not primarily philosophical — it is therapeutic, or more exactly, it is about where psychological life actually happens. Jung kept the archetype per se as a kind of dark backing behind the image, a noumenal guarantor that explained why certain images recur with such weight. Hillman's refusal to speculate about that backing is not skepticism but a discipline of attention: if you posit an invisible thing behind the image, you will keep looking through the image instead of at it, and what arrives in the psyche — the dream-figure, the symptom, the sudden quality of light on a particular afternoon — will be treated as a sign pointing elsewhere rather than as a presence with its own authority.

This is where "archetypal" becomes a verb rather than a noun. To call an image archetypal is to declare that it has been allowed its full depth, its unfathomability — not because it belongs to a universal category but because the perceiving soul has refused to reduce it. Value, in this frame, is not assigned from outside; it names what happens when an image is met without the flight toward explanation. The image earns the designation by resisting being spent.

---

James Hillman · *Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account* · 1983