Healing Fiction

Name: Healing Fiction
Author: James Hillman

Healing Fiction is a work by James Hillman (1983).

Core claims

Hillman does not argue that therapy should use fiction; he argues that therapy already is fiction, and that the pathology lies in not recognizing this—making the book less a proposal than a diagnostic revelation of depth psychology’s own unconscious literary practice.
By reading Freud as a novelist, Jung as a demonologist, and Adler as a philosopher of the as-if, Hillman dissolves the factional wars among the three founders and reconstitutes them as three modes of poetic imagination operating under different generic conventions.
The concept of “healing fiction” is itself a double genitive—fiction that heals, and the healing of fiction from its demotion to mere falsehood—which positions Hillman’s entire archetypal project as a rehabilitation of the imaginal against the tyranny of literalism.

How does Edinger’s structural model of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype hold up against Hillman’s insistence in Healing Fiction that the psyche is a pandaemonium of autonomous images rather than a centered system with a single transpersonal referent?
In what ways does Hillman’s claim that case histories are literary fictions challenge or deepen the practical method of active imagination that Robert A. Johnson outlines in Inner Work—particularly Johnson’s assumption that images carry determinate symbolic meaning?
How does Hillman’s retrieval of Adler’s fictional finalism in Healing Fiction compare with Marie-Louise von Franz’s treatment of teleological purpose in individuation across her work on fairy tales, and does Hillman’s anti-literal stance ultimately undermine or refine the Jungian concept of the Self as goal?