Re-Visioning Psychology

Re-Visioning Psychology is James Hillman's manifesto for what he names archetypal psychology, a discipline re-centred not on the ego or its disorders but on soul and image. Its central claim is that the imaginal life of the psyche is primary and autonomous: images are not symptoms to be decoded into concepts or absorbed by a unifying self, but realities in their own right, the very stuff of soul.

The argument proceeds by way of "soul-making," the deepening of experience through imagination rather than its cure. Hillman urges the reader to "stick to the image," resisting the impulse to translate, literalise, or heroically master psychic material. Drawing on Henry Corbin's mundus imaginalis and on Neoplatonic and Renaissance sources, he proposes a frankly polytheistic, poetic psychology that honours plurality over integration.

The book marks the decisive break of post-Jungian thought from orthodox practice and supplies a sustained philosophical defence of imagination as a formative power. At once it sharpens the depth tradition's critique of literalism and the self-improvement industry, positioning Hillman as both a champion of the imaginal and a corrective to the ego's drive to grow.