The primary approach to myth thus must be psychological, since the psyche provides both its original source and its continually living context. Here, however, a psychological approach does not mean a simplified exchange of terms, exotic metaphors cashed in for the common currency of familiar concepts, the big made small for easy application. A psychological approach, as I understand it, does not mean a psychological interpretation. It does not mean to take myth over into the department of psychology or into a school of depth analysis, preparing a new series of psychological reductions equal in their narrowness to the other departmental simplifications (couched in technical conceits) that I would challenge. As myth belongs more to theoria than to pragmatics, so its understanding belongs more to exegesis and hermeneutics than to formulaic interpretation. A psychological approach means what it says: a way through the psyche into myth, a connection with myth that proceeds via soul, including especially its bizarre fantasy and its suffering (psychopathology), an unwrapping and leading out of the soul into mythical significance and vice versa. Only when the psyche realizes itself as enacting mythemes can it understand myth, so that a psychological exegesis of myth begins with the exegesis
— James; Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich Hillman
Hillman is drawing a line here that cuts against the most comfortable move in depth psychology — the move that takes Hermes or Dionysus or Pan and translates them into recognizable clinical furniture. That move is seductive precisely because it feels like rigor: the strange is domesticated, the image made portable, the myth safely housed in a framework that already knows what it contains. But the exchange is a loss. You haven't illuminated the myth; you've replaced it with a concept that flatters the framework.
The distinction he's after is between interpretation and exegesis. Interpretation takes something up into a pre-formed system; exegesis attends to what the text unfolds on its own terms. The direction is reversed — not the myth into psychology, but the soul outward into mythical territory, where it discovers that what it is living has a name older than its suffering. This is why psychopathology is not incidental here. The bizarre, the unbearable, the symptomatic: these are not failure-states awaiting correction. They are the points where the soul is already enacting something — some mytheme — without yet knowing it. The understanding Hillman is pointing toward is not an achievement of interpretation but a recognition, a seeing that what one is living belongs to a pattern wider than the life containing it.
James; Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich Hillman·Pan and the Nightmare·1972