Psychological vs metaphysical reality

The question cuts to the heart of what depth psychology is and what it refuses to be. Jung's answer, worked out across decades and sharpened in the Alchemical Studies, is not a compromise between two positions but a third claim that dissolves the opposition:

Everything of which we are conscious is an image, and that image is psyche.

The metaphysical assertion says: there is a reality behind appearances — God, the One, the Form — and the soul's task is to reach it. The reductive counter-assertion says: there is no such reality; what we call soul is mechanism, chemistry, social conditioning. Jung refuses both. His move is to grant the psyche the same ontological weight that metaphysics grants to its transcendent objects — not by smuggling in a hidden substance, but by insisting that the image is the reality, not a window onto something more real behind it.

This is what Jung means by esse in anima — "being in soul." The formula appears in Psychological Types as a resolution to the medieval quarrel between realists (esse in intellectu: universals exist in the mind of God) and nominalists (esse in re: universals exist only in particular things). Jung proposes a third term: living reality is neither pure idea nor brute fact but the combination of both in the psychic process. "The psyche creates reality every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy." Edinger, reading this passage closely, notes that it is not a retreat into subjectivism but a recognition that the psyche is the medium in which idea and thing meet — neither above nor below, but the site of their conjunction.

Hillman presses this further. In Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), he insists that the image is not a representation of something else, not a sign pointing beyond itself, but the psyche in its own imaginative visibility. The soul is constituted of images; to decode them into biological mechanism or theological substance is to subtract reality, not add it. Fictions, he writes, "cannot be mistaken for metaphysical existence. They are envisioned figurations... but not metaphysical reals or spiritual substances." This is the anti-substantialist move: the psyche's autonomy belongs to the image's self-presentation, not to an entity behind it.

Where Jung and Hillman part company is instructive. Jung retains the language of the Self, the collective unconscious, the objective psyche — terms that carry metaphysical weight even when Jung insists they are empirical. Writing to Jolande Jacobi in 1948, he is explicit: "I chose the term 'objective psyche' in contradistinction to 'subjective psyche' because the subjective psyche coincides with consciousness, whereas the objective psyche does not always do so by any means." The objective psyche behaves, he says, "exactly like the world of things, which is partly known, partly unknown, the unknown being just as objectively real as that which is known to me." This is not metaphysics in the classical sense — Jung is not positing a transcendent realm — but it is a claim about the givenness of psychic contents, their resistance to ego-manipulation, their autonomous life.

Hillman's revision is to strip even this residual reification. The autonomy of the image does not require an "objective psyche" as its substrate; it requires only that we take the image seriously on its own terms. Giegerich pushes the argument in yet another direction: for him, the soul's reality is logical, not imaginal — the soul thinks in concepts, and psychological work is the soul's self-comprehension in the medium of thought, not the cultivation of images. This is where Giegerich breaks with Hillman most sharply: both begin from the priority of soul, yet diverge on whether the imaginal register suffices or must be sublated into what Giegerich calls "logical negativity."

What all three share — and what distinguishes depth psychology from both theology and neuroscience — is the refusal to treat the psyche as secondary. The metaphysical tradition made the soul a vehicle for reaching something beyond itself: the Form, the One, God. The scientific tradition made it an epiphenomenon of something beneath itself: neurons, drives, social forces. Depth psychology insists that the psyche is not a vehicle or an epiphenomenon but the primary datum — the only place where anything, including God and matter, becomes real for us.

Jung put it with characteristic directness in Alchemical Studies: "If I assume that God is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that he is a powerful impulse of my soul, at once I must concern myself with him." This is not atheism; it is the refusal of a God who functions as a "final term" outside the psychic field. Peterson (2024) traces exactly this move in the Twelve Step tradition — Wilson's replacement of the "Czar of Heaven" with a psychologically grounded God-image opens the possibility of genuine self-examination, because it locates the divine within the range of experience rather than beyond it.

The practical consequence is this: psychological reality is not less real than metaphysical reality — it is the only reality we can actually work with. The image of the mother, the dream of the flood, the compulsion to drink, the longing for transcendence — these are not symptoms of something more fundamental. They are the soul's speech, and they are what depth work actually listens to.

  • esse in anima — the ontological stance of taking psychic images as real on their own terms
  • image as psyche — Hillman's first principle: the image is not a representation but the psyche in its own visibility
  • James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology
  • Edward Edinger — portrait of the Jungian analyst who traced the ego-Self axis through alchemy and antiquity

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1967, Alchemical Studies
  • Jung, C.G., 1921, Psychological Types
  • Jung, C.G., 1975, Letters Volume 2, 1951–1961
  • Hillman, James, 1975, Re-Visioning Psychology
  • Edinger, Edward F., 1999, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One
  • Giegerich, Wolfgang, 2020, The Soul's Logical Life
  • Peterson, Cody, 2024, The Shadow of a Figure of Light