The dream and the underworld

The Dream and the Underworld (1979) is Hillman's most radical book — the one where he breaks most cleanly with the interpretive tradition he inherited and proposes something genuinely new: not a better method for reading dreams, but a different ontology of what a dream is and where it belongs.

The argument begins with a question Hillman calls "obvious, though overlooked": to what mythological region, to what gods, do dreams belong? His answer is Hades — not as metaphor, not as poetic decoration, but as the structural claim that organizes everything that follows. Dreams are not dispatches sent upward from the unconscious to the waking ego. They are a topos, a place the dreaming soul enters by descent, governed by its own laws, irreducible to dayworld purposes.

The book's opening pages announce the reversal with unusual directness:

This little book attempts a different view of the dream from those we are used to. Its thesis does not rely on ideas of repression (Freud) or of compensation (Jung), but imagines dreams in relation with soul and soul with death. I have come to believe that the entire procedure of dream interpretation aiming at more consciousness about living is radically wrong. And I mean "wrong" in all its fullness: harmful, twisted, deceptive, inadequate, mistaken, and exegetically insulting to its material, the dream.

That last phrase — "exegetically insulting to its material" — is the hinge. Freud had said interpretation seeks to undo the dream-work, to unravel what the dream has woven. Jungian amplification, though it elevates the image to mythic register, still subordinates the dream to the waking ego's project of integration. Both traditions, Hillman argues, work against the dream rather than with it, translating its autochthonous images back into dayworld currency and thereby annulling their psychic specificity.

The classical warrant for this reversal is double. Heraclitus's fragment identifying Hades and Dionysos binds death to ecstatic generation; Homer's nekyia in Odyssey 11 presents the shades not as substantial persons but as eidola — phantom images, beings that look exactly like the living but cannot be grasped. Bremmer's philological work confirms the archaic grammar: the psychē of the dead is precisely the free soul, the breath-image that persists after the ego-potencies (thūmos, menos, noos) have dissolved with the body. What remains in Hades is not the vital, active self but the imaginal residue — and this, Hillman insists, is the native register of the dream. The dream-image is not a code concealing a latent content; it is the thing itself, the soul's primary activity.

The load-bearing distinction in the book is between underworld and underground. The underground belongs to physis: roots, seeds, fertility, the chthonic in its Demeter-mode. The underworld belongs to psychē: shade, eidolon, ontological statement rather than vital potential. Classical Jungian dreamwork, on Hillman's reading, consistently conflates the two — reading dark dream figures as earthy potentials awaiting integration, sexuality and aggression understood through Demeter and Persephone's vegetative grammar. Hillman refuses this. The figures in Hades are not seeds waiting to sprout; they are shades native to their own domain, requiring not integration upward but descent inward.

This is also where the book's implicit psychology of the dream-ego becomes decisive. The dream-ego — the experiencing subject within the dream — must be distinguished from the waking ego that remembers and decodes. Collapse that distinction and the dream loses its alterity; it becomes raw material for the dayworld project of becoming more conscious, more integrated, more whole. Hillman's counter-proposal is that the dream is already making soul each night, 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" (Hillman, 1983). The dream does not need the waking ego's interpretive labor to complete it; it is already complete in its own register.

The book's final section moves from theory to praxis, working through specific dream images — black, animals, bodies of water, ice, mud, roundness, ceremonial eating — not to decode them but to demonstrate what it means to receive them on their own terms, without translation. This is the practical consequence of the entire argument: dreamwork, properly reconceived, receives rather than undoes.

The Dream and the Underworld grew from a lecture Hillman delivered at Eranos in 1973, developed during a period when he and Patricia Berry were working through the implications of archetypal psychology in daily analytic practice — using their own dreams each morning as the primary material. Russell's biography records Berry's memory of that period: "Every day at Mittagessen we drank wine and figured out archetypal psychology primarily using our own dreams from the night before as well as those our patients had just brought to us. It was a highly productive and rich time. Really that's when archetypal psychology was created as a practice" (Russell, 2023). The book that emerged was, as its cover copy noted, "the first new view of dreams since Freud and Jung" — a claim that holds up precisely because it changes not the method but the direction of travel: vesperal, into the dark.

Sources Cited

  • Hillman, James, 1979, The Dream and the Underworld
  • Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology
  • Bremmer, Jan N., 1983, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul
  • Russell, Dick, 2023, Life and Ideas of James Hillman