Corbin's double move — archetype as image first, method as imagination therefore — cuts against every therapeutic instinct that wants to arrive somewhere. The aim Hillman names here is not health, not integration, not a self made whole. It is something more modest and more radical: the restoration of a sense of soul, which is to say a restored capacity to inhabit the middle ground where psychic realities are neither pure spirit nor brute fact but image, always image.

Notice what gets refused. Social adaptation is refused — the soul is not being returned to function. Personalistic individualizing is refused — the work is not the production of a more coherent "you." What remains is neither a destination nor a product but a faculty: imagination, cultivated, as the organ through which archetypal realities become accessible at all. Rhetorical and poetic exposition is not decoration on top of the argument; it is the argument's only honest form, because logical reasoning moves away from image toward abstraction, and abstraction is precisely where the imaginal dissolves.

This is why depth work has no satisfying conclusion. Imagination is not a stage on the way to something else. It is the middle ground itself — the place the soul already lives, before any therapeutic procedure begins, and the place it returns to when the procedure remembers what it is for.