THE datum with which archetypal psychology begins is the image. The image was identified with the psyche by Jung ("image is psyche," CW 13: 75), a maxim that archetypal psychology has elaborated to mean that the soul is constituted of images, that the soul is primarily an imagining activity most natively and paradigmatically presented by the dream. For it is in the dream that the dreamer himself performs as one image among others and where it can legitimately be shown that the dreamer is in the image rather than the image in the dreamer. The source of images - dream images, fantasy images, poetic images - is the self-generative activity of the soul itself. In archetypal psychology, the word "image" therefore does not refer to an afterimage, the result of sensations and perceptions; nor does "image" mean a mental construct that represents in symbolic form certain ideas and feelings it expresses. In fact, the image has no referent beyond itself, neither proprioceptive, external, nor semantic: "Images don't stand for anything" (Hillman 1978). They are the psyche itself in its imaginative visibility; as primary datum, image is irreducible. (The relation of image and "structure" has been discussed by Berry 1974 and by Kugler 1979b.) Visibility, however, need not mean that an image must be visually seen. It does not have to have hallucinatory properties that confuse the act of perceiving images with imagining them. Nor do images have to be heard as in a poetic passage. Such notions of "visibility" tend to literalize images as distinct events presented to the senses. Hence Casey (1974), in his groundbreaking essay "Toward an Archetypal Imagination," states that an image is not what one sees, but the way in which one sees. An image is given by the imagining perspective and can only be perceived by an act of imagining. The autochthonous quality of images as independent (Watkins 1981) of the subjective, perceiving imagination takes Casey's idea one step further. First, one believes images are hallucinations (things seen); then one recognizes them as acts of subjective imagining; but then, third, comes the awareness that images are independent of subjectivity and even of the imagination itself as a mental activity. Images come and go (as in dreams) at their own will, with their own rhythm, within their own fields of relations, undetermined by personal psychodynamics. In fact, images are the fundamentals that make the movements of psychodynamics possible. They claim reality, that is, authority, objectivity, and certitude. In this third recognition, the mind is in the imagination rather than the imagination in the mind. The noetic and the imaginal no longer oppose each other (Hillman 1981a, b). "Yet this is still 'psychology' although no longer science; it is psychology in the wider meaning of the word, a psychological activity of creative nature, in which creative fantasy is given prior place" (CW 6: 84). Corbin (1958) attributes this recognition to the awakened heart as locus of imagining, a locus also familiar in the Western tradition from Michelangelo's l'immagine del cuor. This interdependence of heart and image intimately ties the very basis of archetypal psychology with the phenomena of love (q. v. eros). Corbin's theory of creative imagination of the heart further implies for psychology that, when it bases itself in the image, it must at the same time recognize that imagination is not merely a human faculty but an activity of soul to which the human imagination bears witness. It is not we who imagine, but we who are imagined.
— James Hillman
Hillman's reversal at the end is not rhetorical flourish — it is the load-bearing claim. If imagination were a faculty you possessed, then the logic of mastery would apply: develop it, train it, employ it. But the passage moves through three stations deliberately. First, images are things perceived, events at the senses. Second, they are acts of subjectivity, the mind generating its own contents. Third — and this is where the argument lands — images are independent of the perceiving subject entirely, coming and going at their own rhythm, within their own relational fields. You are not the artist. You are the canvas.
What collapses here is the assumption that the soul is something you carry, manage, or improve. Every version of depth work that sells itself as a practice for developing the imagination has already retreated from this third recognition. Corbin's awakened heart as locus of imagining shifts the grammar: the heart does not produce images, it receives them, it is the site where images become visible. Casey's formulation earns its place in this lineage — an image is not what one sees but the way in which one sees — because it breaks the object-relation that keeps the ego safely central. The dreamer is not the author of the dream; the dreamer is one figure among others, subject to the same authority the dream grants every other image. That is not a diminishment. It is a different ontology.
James Hillman·Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account·1983