THE underlying aspiration of its work archetypal psychology has called "soul-making," taking the phrase from the poets William Blake and, particularly, John Keats: "Call the world if you please, 'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world ..." For all its emphasis upon the individualized soul, archetypal psychology sets this soul, and its making, squarely in the midst of the world. And, it does not seek a way out of or beyond the world toward redemption or mystical transcendence, because "the way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it" (Wallace Stevens, "Reply to Papini"). The curative or salvational vision of archetypal psychology focuses upon the soul in the world, which is also the soul of the world (anima mundi). The idea of soul-making by taking any world event as also a place of soul insists that even this Neoplatonic and "arcane" psychology is nonetheless embedded in the "vale" and its engagement therein. The artificial tension between soul and world, private and public, interior and exterior thus disappears when the soul as anima mundi, and its making, is located in the world. More specifically, the act of soul-making is imagining, since images are the psyche, its stuff, and its perspective. Crafting images - such as discussed below in regard to therapy - is thus an equivalent of soul-making. This crafting can take place in the concrete modes of the artisan, a work of the hands, and with the morality of the hands. And, it can take place in sophisticated elaborations of reflection, religion, relationships, social action, so long as these activities are imagined from the perspective of soul, soul as uppermost concern.
— James Hillman
Keats chose his words with care: a vale, not a valley of soul-finding, not a summit of soul-ascent. The vale is where mist collects, where you cannot see the full range, where the ground is soft underfoot. Hillman takes that image seriously enough to build a psychology inside it rather than out of it.
The usual move — the one the whole tradition rehearses — is to treat the world as an obstacle between the self and something purer. Neoplatonism, Christianity, most of what gets called "spiritual development": the logic runs that if you ascend far enough, practice long enough, detach cleanly enough, the world's noise will fall away and what remains will be worth having. Stevens saw through it before Hillman named it: the way beyond is easier precisely because it lets you stop being answerable to the vale and its stubborn particulars.
Soul-making refuses that economy. It insists that the image appearing in this difficult marriage, this grief, this compulsive return to a particular wound, is not raw material to be processed on the way toward something else — it is already the work. The psyche's substance is images, not insight about images. Which means the soul is not waiting to be found behind the world's noise; it is being made in the attention you bring to the noise itself.
James Hillman·Archetypal Psychology·1983