Hillman is cutting beneath the usual furniture of psychological discourse — the inner life housed somewhere behind the sternum, the outer world held reliably at arm's length — and insisting there is no such division to begin with. Image is not the medium through which we access reality; image is the substance of what we are. The soul does not *have* a fantasy life; it *is* one.

This matters most when you notice what it does to the suffering-avoidance logic. If the psyche is imaginal through and through, then the move toward pure spirit — toward the place beyond image, beyond the body's noise, beyond the specific and the particular — is a move away from soul itself. Every fantasy of transcendence is still a fantasy; the desire to leave the imaginal world is itself an imaginal act. You cannot step outside your own substance. The pneumatic tradition promises exactly that exit, and the promise holds enormous force — it really does feel like relief. But Hillman's ontology blocks the escape route at the level of structure, not of morality. There is nowhere to transcend *to* that is not also an image of somewhere. The world you wake into, the world you interpret as hard fact, the spiritual heights you aspire toward — all of it is psyche, and psyche is image, and image is precisely what refuses to be gotten past.