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.