The term soul-making comes from the Romantic poets. We find the idea in William Blake's Vala, but it was John Keats who clarified the phrase in a letter to his brother: "Call the world if you please, 'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world___From this perspective the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul. Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul. The notion of soul-making demands more precision, however, when it is used by a therapeutic psychologist rather than a Romantic poet, for it is not enough to evoke soul and sing its praises. The job of psychology is to offer a way and find a place for soul within its own field. For this we need basic psychological ideas. The four chapters that follow attempt to lay out four such ideas necessary for the soul-making process. While working on the first draft of these chapters-which were delivered as the 1972 Dwight Harrington Terry Lectures at Yale Uni-versity2-I had on the wall in front of my writing table this sentence from the Spanish philosopher and psychological essayist Ortega y Gas-set: "Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper x / Re-Visioning Psychology is not given a certain bull-fighting risk and we do not approach danger-ous, agile, and two-horned topics?"3 The first of these two-horned topics is the soul itself; how to define it, how describe it, how write of it at all? Psychology books generally save themselves a great deal of risk by avoiding this challenge al-together. But since "soul" is the dominant theme of my entire work, let us set down a few fence-poles to begin with. By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment-and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
— James Hillman
Keats understood something Hillman is careful to preserve: the world is not an obstacle to soul but its material. The vale is not a problem to be escaped through spirit, meditation, or any ascent to higher ground — it is the specific medium in which soul gets made. What Hillman does with that Romantic intuition is give it teeth. Soul is not a substance you have or lack; it is a perspective, a particular angle on events that introduces reflection where there would otherwise be only reaction. That middle ground — the gap between the doer and the deed — is where psychological life actually happens.
The risk Hillman flags with Ortega's bull-fighting image is real. Most psychology evacuates that middle space by rushing toward explanation, treatment, or transcendence. The soul as perspective cannot be stored, improved, or optimized; it can only be cultivated by staying inside the difficulty long enough for reflection to occur. What Keats called the vale and what Hillman calls the differentiating middle are the same refusal: the world will not be converted into something more comfortable than it is. Soul-making is not transformation in the therapeutic sense — not a passage from suffering to resolution — but the slow accumulation of reflective distance from one's own events, which is something far stranger and less consoling than recovery.
James Hillman·Re-Visioning Psychology·1975