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Re-Visioning Psychology
Re-Visioning Psychology
Re-Visioning Psychology (Harper & Row, 1975) is the programmatic text of archetypal psychology, delivered in earlier form as the 1972 Dwight Harrington Terry Lectures at Yale. The book is organized as four moves — personifying or imagining things, pathologizing or falling apart, psychologizing or seeing through, and dehumanizing or soul-making — and its governing subject is announced in the first line: “This book is about soul-making” (Hillman 1975).
The book frames itself as a radical return and a radical novelty. It “harks back to the classical notions of soul and yet advances ideas that current psychology has not even begun to consider,” staying “rooted in the main ground of our psychological culture … nourished by accumulated insights of the Western tradition, extending from the Greeks through the Renaissance and Romantics to Freud and Jung.” The term soul-making comes from Keats — “Call the world if you please, ‘The vale of Soul-making.’” Re-Visioning takes the Romantic phrase and gives it a psychological grammar.
The book’s definition of soul is the definition that governs Hillman’s entire later work. “By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment — and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground” (Hillman 1975).
The fourth chapter, Dehumanizing or Soul-making, opens the Renaissance-Neoplatonic ground of the school — Ficino, the return to Greece, Hades and Persephone as a psychology of death, anima in the Renaissance — which Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account would formalize eight years later.