The connection runs deeper than metaphor, though it begins there. Hillman, working through the dream and its underworld logic, arrives at what he explicitly names the homeopathic mode of healing — and the contrast he draws with allopathy is not rhetorical decoration but a structural claim about how the psyche actually moves.
The allopathic model, Hillman argues, operates by introducing what is missing, running counter to the presenting condition, restoring a lost balance. This is the logic of compensation as it gets practiced in the consulting room: inflation is dosed with earth, flight is grounded, one-sidedness is corrected by its opposite. The analyst, on this model, is always adding something — the missing feminine, the absent warmth, the unrepresented body. But Hillman notices that this procedure “constellates the hero,” the ego that takes itself straight into the opposite and achieves only a new literalism as one-sided as the former.
Becoming the same as what we are dealing with is the homeopathic mode of healing. It requires the feeling for likeness, a sense of kinship with what is taking place. The experience is like modes 4 and 3, identity and conjunction: because we feel the same as what is happening, we can join with it, which then leads to self-regulation, and finally to conversion out of oppositionalism altogether.
The homeopathic principle — similia similibus curantur, like cures like — is here transposed from pharmacology into imaginal method. You do not correct the dream; you enter it. You do not introduce what the dream lacks; you become like what the dream already is. The underworld perspective, Hillman insists, takes the image as all there is: “everything necessary to the situation is there, so that everything there is necessary.” Each dream compensates itself, is complete as it is. The analyst who imports a compensatory opposite has already left the dream’s own ground.
Jung himself invoked the homeopathic principle, though in a different register. In the Tavistock Lectures he cited similia similibus curantur as “a remarkable truth of the old medicine” — and immediately added that “as a great truth it is also liable to become great nonsense” (CW 18). The caution is characteristic: Jung was alert to the way healing principles, taken literally, become their own pathology. What the homeopathic principle names correctly, in his view, is the psyche’s self-regulating character — the symptom as purposive, as already containing the direction of its own resolution, not as a deficiency awaiting correction from outside.
This is where the two traditions converge on something genuinely structural. The symptom, in depth psychology, is not a defect to be eliminated but a purposive event demanding interpretation — carrying, as Jung put it, both an etiological and a teleological register. The soul’s suffering is not simply a wound to be dressed by its opposite; it is already moving toward something. The homeopathic intuition that the curative agent resembles the disease maps onto the depth-psychological insistence that the analyst must enter the patient’s world rather than stand outside it administering corrections.
The allopathic/homeopathic axis also maps onto the soul-spirit distinction Hillman develops elsewhere. Spirit corrects, ascends, introduces the missing element from above. Soul descends into the particular, the repressed, the painful — it stays with what is already there. The homeopathic mode is, in this sense, the mode native to soul: kinship with what is taking place, not intervention against it.
What this means practically is that the depth-psychological practitioner who works homeopathically is not amplifying the dream toward its opposite, not landing the inflation, not importing the violins into the brass band. She is asking: what is already here? What does this image require of me in order to be met on its own terms? The healing, if it comes, comes from within the condition — not from outside it.
- James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology, whose underworld hermeneutic grounds the homeopathic reading of dreams
- The Dream and the Underworld — Hillman’s sustained argument for the underworld perspective and its homeopathic implications
- Symptom — the depth-psychological account of suffering as purposive event, not deficiency
- Peaks and Vales — Hillman’s topographic axis for the soul-spirit distinction, which underlies the allopathic/homeopathic contrast
Sources Cited
- Hillman, James, 1979, The Dream and the Underworld
- Jung, C.G., 1976, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life