In 2009, James Hillman was handed a proof copy of Liber Novus, the Red Book, months before its public release. He was eighty-three years old and in frail health, but he stayed up reading it. “This is the missing rung in the ladder of Jung’s thought,” he wrote afterward. “It changes everything.” Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology, had been building his own career on ideas that Jung developed in isolation between 1914 and 1930. The Red Book finally gave him the evidence he needed: that Jung’s deepest work was not a clinical document but a philosophical poem about the soul.
James Hillman’s relation to Jung’s Red Book is that of a heir who chooses a different ancestor. Where Jung saw the Red Book as the raw material for his later scientific psychology, Hillman treated it as the finished work itself: a thesaurus of images that demand to be taken literally as soul, not symbolically as personal symptoms. Hillman used the Red Book to justify a psychology without a unified self, a practice of active imagination that never resolves into integration, and a vision of the psyche as inherently multiple—what he called “polytheistic.”
What James Hillman Saw in the Red Book
The Red Book is a manuscript of 200-odd pages written in calligraphic German, illustrated with Jung’s own paintings and mandalas. Hillman saw it as an eruption of images that refuse to be tamed by a single interpretive system. In his 2009 essay “The Red Book: A New Paradigm,” he argued that Jung’s own later commentaries on the book were deceptive. Jung spent decades translating those visions into the language of analytical psychology: archetypes, individuation, the Self. Hillman claimed that the translation betrayed the original. The images in the Red Book, he said, are not stepping stones toward a higher unity. They are autonomous presences. They do not need to be integrated. They need to be kept company.
For Hillman, the crucial figure in the Red Book was not the wise old man Philemon (whom Jung famously identified as his inner guide) but rather the fractious, erotic, chaotic figures that appear in the early entries: the serpent, the dwarf, the red-haired woman. Jung had tried to domesticate them by reading them as stages of his own path toward wholeness. Hillman refused that reading. He saw the polytheistic crowd as the permanent condition of the soul, not a phase to be outgrown.
Where Hillman Parted Ways with Jung
Jung’s concept of the Self stands at the center of his mature psychology: the archetype of wholeness that regulates the ego and guides individuation. The mandalas Jung painted in the Red Book were for him images of that Self, a center around which the chaos could arrange itself. Hillman called that interpretation “a will to unity” that Jung imposed retroactively on his own experience. In Hillman’s archetypal psychology, the Self is not the goal. It is another image among images. The soul does not need a center. It can be decentered, multiple, and still be whole in its own way.
This disagreement is practical, not just theoretical. In classical Jungian analysis, the analyst helps the client move from complexes toward the Self. Hillman’s practice, often called “soul-making,” asks the client to stay with the image, personify it, and let it speak without trying to integrate it into a life narrative. The Red Book, Hillman argued, was the perfect model of that practice: Jung spent years talking to his figures without rushing toward a conclusion. The mistake was thinking that the conclusion was the point.
Hillman also rejected Jung’s claim that the Red Book was a private artifact never meant for publication. Jung had hesitated for decades, eventually allowing it to be published only posthumously. Hillman saw that hesitation as a failure of nerve. “The Red Book is not a secret journal,” he said. “It is a manifesto.”
How the Red Book Shaped Archetypal Psychology
Archetypal psychology, as Hillman outlined it in Re-visioning Psychology (1975) and The Soul’s Code (1996), borrows the Red Book’s method of active imagination but strips it of its therapeutic frame. In Jung’s own technique, the practitioner consciously enters a dialogue with an inner figure, then interprets what emerges. Hillman insisted that the dialogue itself is the work. Interpreting it is a form of reduction, a way of turning image into concept. He pointed to the Red Book’s paintings: they are not diagrams of an idea. They are presentations, not representations. A serpent painted in gold and vermilion does not stand for the mother archetype. It is a serpent. It demands to be looked at on its own terms.
Hillman’s students at the University of Dallas and later at the Archetypal School in New York used the Red Book as a primary text, reading its images the way a literature class reads a poem: line by line, color by color, without immediately asking what it means. This is not a purely academic exercise. In archetypal dreamwork, the practitioner treats the dream image the way Hillman treated a Red Book figure. You do not ask “What does this represent?” You ask “What is this creature doing here? What does it want from me?”
Hillman and Jung: A Comparison of Key Concepts
| Concept | Jung (Red Book) | Hillman (Archetypal Psychology) |
|---|---|---|
| Goal of analysis | Individuation, realization of the Self | Psychic polytheism, soul-making |
| The Self | Central archetype of wholeness | One image among many, not privileged |
| Active imagination | Method to integrate unconscious content | End in itself, ongoing dialogue |
| The Red Book | Private record of a personal crisis | Published manifesto of the psyche’s autonomy |
| Images | Symbols pointing toward the transcendent | Literal presences, irreducible |
| Ego | To be strengthened and relativized | To be dethroned, not strengthened |
This table oversimplifies both men, but it captures the pivot. Hillman never claimed to be a better Jungian than Jung. He claimed to be a different kind of psychologist altogether, one who found his warrant not in Jung’s published works but in the raw material Jung had later abandoned.
Common Misconceptions
1. Hillman was a devoted Jungian. He was a student of Jung’s ideas, but he broke decisively with the Jungian establishment in the early 1970s. He rejected the concept of the Self, the centralization of the ego, and the teleology of individuation. He was more influenced by the pre-Socratics, Renaissance Neoplatonism, and the polytheistic writers of the 19th century.
2. The Red Book is a psychotic document. Hillman was careful to avoid this reading. He argued that the Red Book is a deliberate literary and artistic work, composed with structure, revision, and intention. Jung was not psychotic during its creation. He was using a method that resembled the descensus ad inferos of Dante or the alchemical nigredo.
3. Hillman’s psychology is anti-intellectual. On the contrary, Hillman was deeply philosophical. He read the Red Book as a philosophical treatise in the tradition of Heraclitus and Plotinus. His emphasis on images did not mean a rejection of thought. It meant a different kind of thought, one that stays close to the image.
4. Archetypal psychology is a religion. Hillman often used religious language (soul, myth, the imaginal), but he did not found a cult. He insisted that his work remained within the frame of psychology, albeit a psychology that expanded its boundaries to include what the modern era had exiled.
FAQ
Did James Hillman meet Carl Jung?
No. Hillman studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich in the 1950s, but Jung was already in his eighties and rarely present. Hillman never had a direct relationship with him.
Why did Hillman emphasize the Red Book over Jung’s later works?
He believed that Jung’s later works (volumes on archetypes, alchemy, the Self) had systematized and flattened the raw visionary material of the Red Book. For Hillman, the Red Book was the authentic source.
Is Hillman’s reading of the Red Book widely accepted?
No. Many Jungian scholars disagree, arguing that Jung’s later theoretical work developed organically from his Red Book experiences. Hillman’s reading is considered radical and influential but not definitive.
Can I practice archetypal psychology today?
Yes. There are training programs and study groups, but the field remains small. Most practitioners focus on dreamwork, active imagination, and the study of mythological images, using the Red Book as a core text.
Closing
The Red Book is not a belonging of Jung alone. Hillman’s reading gave it a second life, one that continues to influence how we approach the soul’s images: not as symptoms to be cured but as presences to be hosted. If you want to work directly with these ideas, start with active imagination itself. Learn to let the figures speak without translating them. Then return to the Red Book and see what you notice that Jung himself might have missed.
For more on the shadow side of the psyche, see our guide to shadow work. For a glossary entry on active imagination, see here. And for a comparison between Jungian and archetypal approaches to the shadow, read Jungian vs. Archetypal Shadow Work.