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.
— James Hillman
Keats chose "vale" deliberately — not a garden, not a summit, not a platform of departure, but a valley, a low place where things collect and pool and press. Hillman hears that word and takes it seriously. Soul-making is not what happens after you survive the world, or beside it, or in the protected interior you've managed to carve free from it. It happens in the pressing itself, in the very thing you are most tempted to transcend.
The Stevens line does the harder work. The way *beyond* the world has 2,400 years of infrastructure behind it — philosophy, theology, contemplative practice, the accumulated credibility of traditions that have genuinely helped people bear what otherwise would have broken them. That is exactly what makes the beyond so available. It works. You ascend, you unify, you achieve some version of *apatheia*, and the suffering really does recede. Hillman is not disputing that it works. He is saying the soul is not there. It stayed in the vale, in the engagement, in the particularity of this event and this image and this face.
Anima mundi names the turn: the soul is not a private container you fill through inward labor, but a quality that appears in things — in the world's opacity, resistance, address. Making it means staying down long enough for the world to speak.
James Hillman·Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account·1983