Modern research depth psychology

Depth psychology has never been a single research program, and the contemporary moment is no exception: it is a field in productive argument with itself, pulled between the imaginal tradition Hillman consolidated, the logical critique Giegerich pressed against it, and a growing neuroscientific literature that wants to give Jungian constructs empirical traction. Understanding where the research stands requires holding all three tensions at once.

The imaginal tradition remains the most influential post-Jungian inheritance. Hillman's central claim — that soul is image, that psyche is fundamentally concerned with its imaginings and only secondarily with subjective experience in the day-world — established a research orientation that is phenomenological rather than experimental. Soul-making, in this framework, is not a therapeutic technique but an epistemological commitment: releasing events from their literal understanding into mythical appreciation, asking what an event moves in the soul rather than what it causes in the brain. As Hillman put it in Archetypal Psychology (1983):

Soul-making can be most succinctly defined as the individuation of imaginal reality.

The phrase is Corbin's, and Hillman's debt to him is decisive: the imaginal realm is not imaginary but ontologically intermediate, the place where matter and spirit meet in image. Research in this tradition proceeds through close reading of myth, clinical phenomenology, and cultural criticism — not through controlled trials.

Giegerich's challenge to this tradition is the sharpest internal critique depth psychology has produced. His argument in The Soul's Logical Life (2020) is that imaginal psychology cannot see through its own medium: it transforms the literal into the imaginal and then stops, treating the imaginal as the non plus ultra. But the soul's movement, Giegerich insists, is dialectical and logical — it sublates its own images rather than resting in them. Imaginal psychology, he argues, "inevitably begins with, and never transcends, what is already positive psychological behavior, experience or fantasy." This is not a rejection of depth psychology but a demand that it complete itself — that it move from image to the logical constitution of what the image is about. The debate between Hillman and Giegerich is where the tradition is most alive and most unresolved.

The neuroscientific research program is newer and more speculative, but it has become increasingly serious. McGovern, Aqil, Atasoy, and Carhart-Harris (2025) propose that Jungian archetypes can be understood as shared minima — stable spatiotemporal patterns instantiated through a trilogical interplay of subcortical affective systems, low-level cortex, and high-level cortical networks. The affective core of the archetype, they argue, is subcortical; the archetypal image emerges when higher cortical networks are disinhibited, as under psychedelic drugs or in dream states. Jung himself had anticipated something like this:

I have long thought that, if there is any analogy between psychic and physiological processes, the organizing system of the brain must lie subcortically on the brain stem. This conjecture arose out of considering the psychology of an archetype of central importance and universal distribution represented in mandala symbols... its uniting properties are predominantly affective.

The predictive processing framework McGovern et al. deploy — drawing on Friston's Free Energy Principle — treats archetypes as generative models installed in the brain's hierarchical prediction machinery, released "off the leash" when top-down cortical constraints are loosened. This is a genuine attempt at construct validity, not mere analogy, and it opens testable hypotheses about hippocampal and periaqueductal gray involvement in archetypal emergence.

What connects these three research orientations is the complex — Jung's foundational empirical unit, first demonstrated in the word-association experiments at the Burghölzli and still the point where clinical, imaginal, and neuroscientific approaches converge. The complex has an archetypal nucleus, an affective charge, and a somatic signature; it operates below ego-threshold with sufficient autonomy to possess the personality. McGovern et al. read it through predictive processing as either a canalized pathological belief or an unresolvable competition between imperatives — the "negative mother complex" as a system that cannot satisfy both attachment and authenticity simultaneously. Hillman reads it as a daimonic figure demanding imaginal engagement. Giegerich reads it as a logical moment in the soul's self-movement. The same phenomenon, three incompatible research languages.

The honest assessment is that modern depth psychology research is most productive where it refuses premature synthesis — where Hillman and Giegerich are allowed to genuinely disagree, where the neuroscientific program acknowledges that it is building a neurophenomenological scaffold rather than a mechanistic reduction, and where the clinical tradition keeps asking what the image moves in the soul rather than what it correlates with in the brain.

James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology and the imaginal tradition
Wolfgang Giegerich — portrait of depth psychology's most rigorous internal critic
complex — the foundational empirical unit of analytical psychology, from the word-association experiments to archetypal theory
soul-making — Hillman's central concept, the individuation of imaginal reality

Sources Cited

Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
Giegerich, Wolfgang, 2020, The Soul's Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology
McGovern, Hugh et al., 2025, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience
Jung, C.G., 2014, Collected Works, Vol. 18