Sufi mysticism and psychology

The connection runs deeper than influence or analogy. When Hillman named Henry Corbin "the second immediate father of archetypal psychology" — after Jung — he was not being polite. He was identifying the specific philosophical problem that Corbin solved for him: where do the archetypes live? Jung had left this question suspended in a kind of Kantian idealism, treating the archetypes as real but not phenomenal, transcendent but not locatable. Corbin gave them an address.

That address is the mundus imaginalis — his rendering of the Sufi ʿālam al-mithāl, the world of archetypal forms. Corbin was translating from Ibn ʿArabī and Suhrawardī, both of whom insisted on an intermediate order of being situated between sense perception and pure intellection: neither the imaginary (subjective fantasy) nor the abstract (pure concept), but a third realm where theophanies occur and visionary forms subsist with genuine ontological weight. Hillman received this as the mandate for what he would call archetypal psychology:

The mundus imaginalis offers an ontological mode of locating the archetypes of the psyche, as the fundamental structures of the imagination or as fundamentally imaginative phenomena that are transcendent to the world of sense in their value if not their appearance. Their value lies in their theophanic nature and in their virtuality or potentiality, which is always ontologically more than actuality and its limits.

The Sufi contribution, then, is not decorative. It is structural. Without the mundus imaginalis, archetypal psychology has no non-reductive account of where images come from or why they carry authority. With it, the image is not a symptom of something else — not a disguised drive, not a cultural projection — but a primary datum, a form that presents itself first to imagination and only secondarily to concept or sensation.

Corbin's double move, as Hillman reads it, is decisive: first, that the archetype is accessible to imagination before it is accessible to intellect; second, that the entire therapeutic procedure must therefore be imaginative rather than logical. The aim of depth work, on this account, is not insight in the cognitive sense but restoration to imaginal realities — a return to the intermediate world where soul actually lives.

The operative power within that world is himma — the heart's concentrated creative attention, which in Ibn ʿArabī's metaphysics precipitates higher-order forms into appearance. Hillman translates this into clinical language in The Thought of the Heart, where he argues that the heart's native act is not sentiment but imaginational thinking: the heart beholds imaginal figures rather than merely feeling them. Prayer, in this framework, is not petition but the activation of himma — the heart's ardent witness to persons independent of the heart that beholds them. Hillman saw Jungian active imagination as precisely this: "a form of prayer... realizing that the figures you engage with are numinous, not only pieces of your complexes" (Russell, 2023).

Where Corbin and Hillman diverge is equally instructive. Corbin's soul has a "hierarchical architecture," oriented toward a single supreme Angel — the Rabb, the personal Lord — who is both source and goal. The soul is not inhabited by multitudes; it has one divine counterpart. Hillman's soul, by contrast, is polytheistic through and through: it is inhabited by many gods, many figures, and the therapeutic task is to honor that plurality rather than resolve it into unity. As Hillman's colleague Tom Cheetham observed, Hillman ultimately abandons the kind of hierarchical angelology that Corbin's Islamic framework requires. For Corbin, pathology is a starting point to be transcended toward luminous unity; for Hillman, pathology is the via regia — "we must begin where we have fallen, flat on our backs in personal pain" (Russell, 2023).

This divergence is not a failure of the transmission. It is the transmission working as it should — a thinker receiving what he needs from a tradition and then pressing past it. What Sufi mysticism gave depth psychology was the ontological seriousness of the image: the insistence, against all reductive accounts, that what appears to imagination is real, that the intermediate world is not a lesser world but the world in which soul actually moves. That insistence remains the most durable contribution of the Corbin-Hillman encounter.

  • Henry Corbin — portrait of the French Islamicist whose mundus imaginalis became the ontological ground of archetypal psychology
  • Mundus Imaginalis — the intermediate realm between sense and intellect where imaginal forms subsist
  • Himma as Creative Imagination — the heart's operative power within the imaginal world
  • Sophianic Theophany — the structure by which the divine discloses itself through the Eternal Feminine in Corbin's reading of Ibn ʿArabī

Sources Cited

  • Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
  • Hillman, James, 1992, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World
  • Corbin, Henry, 1969, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabī
  • Corbin, Henry, 1971, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism
  • Russell, Dick, 2023, Life and Ideas of James Hillman