Deliteralizing psychology
Deliteralizing names the psychological move that releases an event, symptom, or image from its surface facticity into the figurative ground that sustains it. It is not interpretation in the ordinary sense — not the substitution of one meaning for another — but a loosening of the grip that the literal has on the soul's attention, so that what was merely happening becomes something the psyche can actually inhabit. Hillman calls it the central discipline of soul-making: "seeing or hearing by means of an imagining that sees through an event to its image."
The move has a specific target. Literalism is not naivety or stupidity; it is the soul's default posture when it has lost access to the imaginal register. We take the symptom as a medical fact to be corrected, the dream as a coded message to be deciphered, the emotion as a behavioral problem to be managed. Each of these responses treats the psychic event as a thing in the world rather than as an image — and in doing so, it forecloses the depth the event was opening. Hillman's formulation in Archetypal Psychology (1983) is precise:
Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of an imagining that sees through an event to its image. Imaging means releasing events from their literal understanding into a mythical appreciation. Soul-making, in this sense, is equated with de-literalizing — that psychological attitude that suspiciously disallows the naive and given level of events in order to search out their shadowy, metaphorical significances for soul.
"Suspiciously disallows" is the operative phrase. Deliteralizing is not a gentle reframing; it is a refusal — a refusal to let the event settle into its most obvious form before the soul has had a chance to speak through it.
The philosophical underwriting for this move comes largely from Corbin's mundus imaginalis — the intermediate realm between sensory fact and pure intellect, where images carry their own ontological weight. Hillman drew from Corbin the conviction that the imaginal is not a lesser register of the real but its most psychically alive form. Without the imaginal, as Russell (2023) summarizes Corbin's warning, "we are left with only the literal — a reduction and distortion of everything." Deliteralizing is therefore not a retreat from reality but a recovery of its depth.
The method connects directly to psychologizing — seeing through — which Hillman developed as one of the four methodological movements of Re-Visioning Psychology (1975). Where pathologizing refuses to correct the symptom, deliteralizing refuses to take it at face value. The two moves work in tandem: the symptom is honored as a genuine psychic event (pathologizing), and then its literal surface is dissolved so that the image beneath can be read (deliteralizing). The question that orients the whole movement is Hillman's own: What does this event, this thing, this moment move in my soul?
Giegerich presses a serious objection here. He argues that the imaginal register, however much it insists on its own non-literalism, cannot fully escape the ontological pull it claims to dissolve. The image, by its very form, "posits beings, persons, animals and so on as positively existing" — and the subsequent instruction not to take them literally is, in his reading, an external correction that never reaches the image's inherent logic (Giegerich, 2020). On this account, deliteralizing is a half-measure: it moves partway out of the literal without completing the logical negation the soul actually requires. Hillman and Giegerich part company sharply here. For Hillman, the imaginal register suffices — the soul is image all the way down, and the discipline of staying within the image rather than sublating it into concept is precisely what depth work demands. For Giegerich, that discipline is a comfortable avoidance of the soul's harder demand: to think its own dissolution.
The disagreement is real and worth sitting in. What is not in dispute is the diagnostic observation that drives deliteralizing in the first place: the soul, when it speaks through symptom, dream, or desire, is not reporting facts. It is making images. The practitioner who takes those images literally — who hears the dream as a prediction, the symptom as a malfunction, the longing as a shopping list — has already left the room where depth psychology works.
- soul-making — Hillman's central term for the cultivation of the imaginal perspective, drawn from Keats
- psychologizing (seeing through) — the methodological practice of dissolving literalism into its figurative ground
- mundus imaginalis — Corbin's intermediate realm where images carry their own ontological weight
- James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology
Sources Cited
- Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
- Hillman, James, 1975, Re-Visioning Psychology
- Russell, Dick, 2023, Life and Ideas of James Hillman
- Giegerich, Wolfgang, 2020, The Soul's Logical Life