Insearch: Psychology and Religion

Name: Insearch: Psychology and Religion
Author: James Hillman

Insearch: Psychology and Religion is a work by James Hillman (1967).

Core claims

Insearch is not a book about the relationship between psychology and religion but a demonstration that their separation is itself a symptom of soul-loss — the very condition it diagnoses in modern pastoral care.
Hillman’s 1967 argument that the minister should pursue insearch rather than clinical sophistication is the embryonic form of his later polemic against ego-psychology: the pastoral counselor who imitates the therapist enacts the same heroic-ego myth that archetypal psychology would later dismantle.
The book’s most radical move is redefining the “psychological amateur” — the one who lovingly cultivates the soul — as the true specialist, thereby inverting the entire credentialing hierarchy of mid-century mental health and anticipating the anti-professionalist stance of Re-Visioning Psychology by nearly a decade.

How does Hillman’s distinction in Insearch between the unconscious as “door” and the soul as destination compare to Edward Edinger’s treatment of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype — are they mapping the same territory with incompatible compasses?
Hillman argues in Insearch that the minister should follow the imitatio christi rather than imitate psychotherapy. How does this relate to Jung’s own treatment of the imitatio in Answer to Job, and does Hillman’s later polytheistic turn in Re-Visioning Psychology effectively abandon this Christological frame?
Insearch claims that “the gradual replacement of ‘soul’ by ‘psyche’ in this century and the consequent professionalism in dealing with its troubles are beginning to do as much damage as did the ignorance and moralisms about the psyche in the last century.” How does this critique anticipate or diverge from Thomas Moore’s attempt in Care of the Soul to recover the amateur tradition Hillman describes?