---
slug: hillman-logoi-psyches-5845e7a7
title: "Hillman on Logoi Psyches"
author: "James Hillman"
work: "Archetypal Psychology"
section: ""
year: "1983"
tradition: classical
themes:
  - logoi-psyches
fragment: |
  Metaphor, as the soul's mode of logos, ultimately results in that abandonment to the given that approximates mysticism (Avens 1980).
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Hillman is not offering comfort here. Metaphor as the soul's mode of speech — not image, not symbol, not concept, but metaphor specifically — means the psyche never speaks in literal terms, never arrives at a stable ground. Every statement about the soul is already a comparison, already held in the tension between what is said and what is meant, and that tension does not resolve. What he calls abandonment to the given is the consequence of following this all the way: when you stop reaching past the metaphor for the thing it supposedly represents, what remains is an immediacy that has no transcendent shelter above it. The mysticism he names through Avens is not the warm mysticism of union, not the pneumatic current that promises the suffering will end when you ascend high enough. It is the mysticism of pure immanence — of finding that the image is not a door to something else, that the given is already it, already complete in its own ache. That is why this move is harder than it sounds. The soul that has been running on the logic that enough spiritual depth will finally dissolve the tension reads "approximates mysticism" and hears relief. What Hillman means is the opposite: you are handed back to exactly what you were trying to leave.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The sentence turns on "abandonment" — not surrender, not acceptance, but a specific relinquishing of the ego's management of meaning. Hillman is pointing to something that looks, from the outside, like passivity but is better understood as a form of precision: the soul, given its own idiom, arrives somewhere the will cannot take it. The comparison to mysticism is provocative and exact. Where mysticism abandons the self to the divine, archetypal psychology abandons interpretation to the image — and the structure of the move is the same. Meister Eckhart would recognize it; so would Plotinus, for whom the soul's return to the One was never an act of striving but of releasing the striving. What follows from this is harder to sit with: if metaphor is the soul's mode of knowing, then any psychology that converts images immediately into concepts is not clarifying the soul — it is changing the subject.
parent_id: Hillman_1983_Archetypal_Psychology__par0008
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Hillman writes:

> Metaphor, as the soul's mode of logos, ultimately results in that abandonment to the given that approximates mysticism (Avens 1980).

— James Hillman

Hillman is not offering comfort here. Metaphor as the soul's mode of speech — not image, not symbol, not concept, but metaphor specifically — means the psyche never speaks in literal terms, never arrives at a stable ground. Every statement about the soul is already a comparison, already held in the tension between what is said and what is meant, and that tension does not resolve. What he calls abandonment to the given is the consequence of following this all the way: when you stop reaching past the metaphor for the thing it supposedly represents, what remains is an immediacy that has no transcendent shelter above it. The mysticism he names through Avens is not the warm mysticism of union, not the pneumatic current that promises the suffering will end when you ascend high enough. It is the mysticism of pure immanence — of finding that the image is not a door to something else, that the given is already it, already complete in its own ache. That is why this move is harder than it sounds. The soul that has been running on the logic that enough spiritual depth will finally dissolve the tension reads "approximates mysticism" and hears relief. What Hillman means is the opposite: you are handed back to exactly what you were trying to leave.

---

James Hillman · *Archetypal Psychology* · 1983