A Teacher
James Hillman
Imaginal / archetypal psyche
The transmission
James Hillman was an American psychologist, former Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich, who broke from orthodox Jungian practice to found archetypal psychology.
In Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) and many later works he argued for a radical re-centering of psychology on soul (psyche) and image: rather than treating images as symptoms to be translated into concepts or integrated by a unifying ego, Hillman insisted on “sticking to the image” and honoring the autonomous, plural, imaginative life of the psyche.
Drawing explicitly on Henry Corbin’s mundus imaginalis and on Neoplatonic and Renaissance sources, he championed a polytheistic, poetic psychology of “soul-making.” Hillman’s relevance to the mind-power lineage is his powerful rehabilitation of the imaginal—the claim that images are primary realities of the soul, not mere mental epiphenomena.
This positions him as a crucial modern node connecting Corbin and Ibn ʿArabī’s imaginal metaphysics (in the Sufi branch of this Atlas) to contemporary psychology, and it provides intellectual ballast for the broader manifestation premise that imagination is a real and formative power rather than idle fantasy.
At the same time, Hillman is a corrective voice: he was sharply critical of the self-improvement and “growth” industry, of literalism, and of the heroic ego’s drive to master the psyche—making him both a deepener of the imaginal stream and a critic of its commercialized, ego-centric uses.
What they gave
Archetypal psychology: Re-centered psychology on soul and autonomous image rather than ego-integration.
- “Stick to the image”: Treated images as primary realities, dignifying the imaginal life.
- Imaginal lineage to Corbin: Carried Sufi/Neoplatonic imagination-metaphysics into modern psychology.
- Critic of literalism and growth-industry: Offered a corrective to ego-driven, self-improvement spirituality.
In their words
The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.
Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods.
By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.
Then she realized that what love is all about is heartbreak. And when you realize that what love is all about is heartbreak, you’re all right.
All your notions of love — that’s what’s given up. Your idea of love, what you’ve thought of love, what you expect from love, what you cling to as love — that is what you give up.
Because in the madness we grow way beyond ourselves.
We try to go to unsafe places. We risk. With our minds, we risk.
The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Carl Jung; Henry Corbin’s imaginal; Neoplatonism (Plotinus, Ficino); Greek polytheistic myth.
- Taught / Influenced: the archetypal psychology movement; imaginal and “soul-making” approaches; ecopsychology and cultural criticism; popular “soul” and daimon discourse.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Their Practices 1
Essential Works
- Re-Visioning Psychology1975
- The Dream and the Underworld1979
- The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling1996