Deliteralize the ego archetypal psychology

The question cuts to the methodological heart of Hillman's project. To deliteralize the ego is not to dissolve it, abolish it, or declare it an illusion — it is to stop taking it at its word. The heroic ego presents itself as the natural center of psychological life, the agent who develops, integrates, overcomes. Archetypal psychology's move is to read that self-presentation as image rather than fact, as one mythic posture among many rather than the universal grammar of psychic life.

The argument begins with a diagnosis. Hillman identifies the dominant model of the ego in analytical psychology as structurally Protestant — a pilgrim on progress toward integration, every fantasy conscripted into the service of the one path. As David Miller (1974) put it, within this framework

every fantasy becomes a prisoner for Christ. Every fantasy cannot help but find meaning in terms of the one path, like the pilgrim on his progress towards integration. Even those that do not willingly fit in can be taken prisoner through the idea of a "pagan anima," a "chthonic animus," a "puer inflation," or the "problem of evil."

The monotheistic psychology that governs this model — ego toward Self, "single one to single One" — is not neutral description but inherited theology wearing a scientific coat. To deliteralize the ego means first to see through this theological capture.

The instrument of seeing-through is psychologizing itself. Hillman's third Yale lecture, which became the core of Re-Visioning Psychology, defined the move precisely: psychologizing happens "whenever the mind attempts to reflect in terms other than those presented" — when it suspects an interior intention not evident on the surface, when it refuses to take the presenting phenomenon as the final account of itself (Russell, 2023). Applied to the ego, this means refusing to take the ego's own story — its narrative of development, achievement, integration — as the soul's story. The ego's heroic self-portrait is itself a fantasy, an image, a fiction. The task is not to strengthen it but to read it.

What replaces the heroic center is not chaos but plurality. Hillman's polytheistic psychology distributes psychic authority across multiple gods rather than consolidating it in one triumphant figure. As Samuels (1985) summarizes, this means "non-ego experience — challenging our conventional notion of the necessity of an experiencing ego." The soul has many registers, many modes of perception; no single archetype has the right to govern them all. The ego is one complex among others, one voice in what Hillman calls the massa confusa of arguing voices — not the chairman but a participant.

This is where the deliteralization becomes most precise. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes that the anima personifies the ego rather than the reverse:

Not I personify, but the anima personifies me, or soul-makes herself through me, giving my life her sense — her intense daydream is my "me-ness"; and "I," a psychic vessel whose existence is a psychic metaphor, an "as-if being," in which every single belief is a literalism except the belief of soul whose faith posits me and makes me possible as a personification of psyche.

The ego, on this reading, is not the author of experience but its site — a vessel through which soul speaks, not the speaker. The "I" that feels most uniquely personal is precisely when it is most collective, most archetypal, most possessed by a transpersonal pattern. To take that "I" literally — to believe it is the originating center — is the primary psychological literalism, the one that generates all the others.

Giegerich (2020) presses this critique further, arguing that even Hillman's imaginal alternative does not fully escape the ego's gravity. By remaining in the register of images and personifications, archetypal psychology may inadvertently preserve the ego's sovereignty under therapeutic disguise — the ego now "doing" imaginal work rather than heroic work, but still doing, still at the center. The quarrel between Giegerich and Hillman turns precisely on whether the imaginal register dissolves or perpetuates ego-dominance. Giegerich's charge is that archetypal psychology "unwittingly still carries the unshaken position of the ego in itself and reaffirms it in the very premises of its own work." This is the sharpest internal critique the tradition has produced, and it has not been resolved.

What the deliteralization accomplishes, at minimum, is this: the ego's adventures — its sufferings, its desires, its failures — become readable as images rather than as biographical facts requiring repair. Soul-making, as Hillman (1975) frames it, is not the salvation of the ego but the cultivation of a perspective that can hold the ego's material without being captured by it. The symptom is not a problem the ego must solve; it is an image the soul is presenting. The ego's collapse is not a catastrophe to be reversed; it may be the disclosure of something the heroic posture was preventing from being heard.

  • soul-making — the central act of archetypal psychology: deepening events into experience rather than resolving them
  • the heroic ego disputed — the post-Jungian fault line between Neumann, Hillman, and Giegerich on the ego's mythic self-portrayal
  • James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology
  • Wolfgang Giegerich — Giegerich's critique of the imaginal and his notion of the soul's logical life

Sources Cited

  • Hillman, James, 1975, Re-Visioning Psychology
  • Miller, David L., 1974, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses
  • Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians
  • Giegerich, Wolfgang, 2020, The Soul's Logical Life
  • Russell, Dick, 2023, Life and Ideas of James Hillman