In other words, only when imagination is recognized as an engagement at the borders of the human and a work in relation with mythic dominants can this articulation of images be considered a psycho-poesis (Miller 1976b), or soul-making. Its intention is the realization of the images - for they are the psyche - and not merely of the human subject. As Corbin has said: "It is their individuation, not ours," suggesting that soul-making can be most succinctly defined as the individuation of imaginal reality. Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of an imagining that sees through an event to its image. Imaging means releasing events from their literal understanding into a mythical appreciation. Soul-making, in this sense, is equated with de-literalizing - that psychological attitude that suspiciously disallows the naive and given level of events in order to search out their shadowy, metaphorical significances for soul. So the question of soul-making is "what does this event, this thing, this moment move in my soul? What does it mean to my death?" The question of death enters because it is in regard to death that the perspective of soul is distinguished most starkly from the perspective of natural life. Soul-making does imply a metaphysical fantasy, and the implied metaphysics of archetypal psychology are best found in The Dream and the Underworld (Hillman 1979a), which elaborates the relations between psyche and death. There the dream is taken as the paradigm of the psyche - where the psyche presents itself encompassing the ego and engaged in its own work (dream-work). From the dream, one may assume that the psyche is fundamentally concerned with its imaginings and only secondarily concerned with subjective experiences in the day-world which the dream transforms into images, i. e., into soul. The dream is thus making soul each night.
— James Hillman
Corbin's line — "It is their individuation, not ours" — is the passage's most disorienting move, and it deserves to be held rather than softened. We arrive at depth work carrying an implicit contract: I will do this difficult thing, and I will become more fully myself. Hillman is canceling that contract. The images are not instruments of your development. They have their own claim, their own trajectory, and soul-making is the practice of subordinating your agenda to theirs.
This reorients what de-literalizing actually costs. It is not a method for finding the deeper meaning behind an event so that you can integrate it and move on — which would only re-center the human subject. De-literalizing means releasing the event from your ownership of it entirely, letting its mythic dimension assert primacy. The question Hillman frames — "what does this moment move in my soul, what does it mean to my death?" — is not an invitation to self-exploration in the ordinary sense. Death enters because death is the horizon where personal continuity stops being the measure. Only there does the soul's work appear as something genuinely distinct from the project of the self, still proceeding, still making images, the ego no longer the protagonist but the material being worked upon.
James Hillman·Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account·1983