The Plotinus–Corbin–Hillman Transmission of the Imaginal

Re-Visioning Psychology is the first book in which the line from Plotinus through Corbin to Hillman becomes audible in an American idiom. The Plotinian grammar — in which soul is a level of reality (Enneads IV), the imagination is a real organ of the intelligible world, and the ascent of soul is the soul’s return to itself — provides the metaphysical footing on which Hillman rests the claim that “the human being is set within the field of soul.”

The intermediary is Corbin. Dick Russell’s biography documents that Hillman “revered Corbin’s ‘great cosmology of the imagination, which refuses any chasm between psyche and world’” (Russell 2023). Corbin’s articulation of the mundus-imaginalis — the ‘alam al-mithal, the imaginal realm of Persian Neoplatonism and Ibn ʿArabī — gives Hillman the ontological category that modern Western epistemology had lost: a world of image that is neither physical matter nor abstract intellect but a real third.

The transmission determines everything in the book. Without Plotinus there is no field of soul that surpasses the human; without Corbin there is no imaginal realm in which personifying is ontologically serious rather than figuratively decorative; without both there is no polytheistic ontology on which to ground a psychology of many gods. Re-Visioning Psychology does not cite the transmission academically — it enacts it.

Sources

• plotinus: soul as level of reality, imagination as organ of the intelligible
• henry-corbin: the mundus imaginalis as real third between matter and intellect
• james-hillman: archetypal psychology as the American inheritance of the line
• russell-life-ideas-james: biographical documentation of the debt