A patient once told James Hillman that his dreams felt like a room full of people arguing. Hillman asked who was arguing. The patient listed his father, his boss, his ex-wife, and a childhood bully. Hillman said: those are not people. Those are images of the soul. That distinction — between a person and an image, between the literal and the poetic — is the fault line that separates Hillman from Carl Jung. The key difference between James Hillman and Carl Jung is that Hillman rejected Jung’s concept of the Self as a unifying center of the psyche, replacing it with a polytheistic model of many autonomous images, each with its own intelligence, none subordinate to a single whole.
Where Jung sought integration, Hillman sought multiplicity. Where Jung saw a path toward wholeness, Hillman saw a trap of literalism. The two men share a vocabulary — archetype, soul, image, myth, but they mean different things by nearly every word.
Meta: A comparison of James Hillman and Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, covering their split over the Self, polytheistic vs monotheistic psyche, the role of images, and the practice of soul-making.
What James Hillman Actually Changed
Carl Jung published The Red Book between 1914 and 1930, working through his own confrontation with the unconscious. He emerged with a model of the psyche organized around the Self, an archetype of wholeness that transcends the ego and contains all opposites. For Jung, psychological development (individuation) meant the ego gradually relating to the Self, integrating shadow and anima, moving toward a center.
Hillman studied at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich in the 1950s and became its director of studies in 1959. He was trained in Jungian analysis. He knew the system from the inside. But by the time he published The Myth of Analysis in 1972 and Re-Visioning Psychology in 1975, he had turned Jung’s framework inside out.
The break happened over one question: is the psyche organized around a single center, or is it a field of many centers?
Jung said yes to the first. Hillman said no.
The Self: Center or Illusion?
Jung defined the Self as the totality of the psyche, the archetype of order and meaning. In his 1951 work Aion, he wrote that the Self is both the center and the circumference of the psyche, a circle whose center is everywhere and nowhere. The mandala, the Christ figure, the philosopher’s stone, these were symbols of the Self, pointing toward a unity that the ego could approach but never fully possess.
Hillman called this monotheism disguised as psychology. In The Soul’s Code (1996), he argued that the Self is not a thing but a fantasy, a useful fantasy, perhaps, but one that imposes a single narrative on the chaos of psychic life. The psyche, Hillman said, is inherently polytheistic. It contains multiple gods, multiple archetypes, multiple centers of meaning, none of which answer to a higher authority.
Where Jung saw the Self as the goal of analysis, Hillman saw it as a symptom of the Western tendency to flatten experience into a single story. The patient who dreams of a wise old man is not meeting the Self. He is meeting one voice among many. The analyst who interprets that voice as the Self is doing theology, not psychology.
Images Are Not Symbols
This disagreement runs deeper than theory. It changes how both men read a dream.
Jung treated dream images as symbols pointing toward something beyond themselves. A snake in a dream might symbolize the instinctual psyche. A house might symbolize the structure of the self. The work of analysis was to translate the image into meaning, to find what it pointed toward.
Hillman reversed this. In The Dream and the Underworld (1979), he argued that images are not symbols. They are not standing for something else. A snake in a dream is a snake. It is a snake of the psyche, a snake that exists in the underworld of imagination, and its meaning is exactly what it shows: its color, its movement, its behavior. The analyst who translates the snake into “instinct” has killed the image. Hillman called this “soul-making”, staying with the image, letting it deepen, refusing to turn it into a concept.
This is the most practical difference between the two approaches. A Jungian analyst might ask: what does this image mean? A Hillmanian analyst might ask: what does this image want?
Archetypes Without the Archetype
Jung’s archetypes were inherited patterns of perception and behavior, rooted in the collective unconscious. The mother archetype, the hero, the trickster, the wise old man, these were universal structures that shaped human experience across cultures and time.
Hillman kept the archetypes but removed their universality. In Archetypal Psychology (1970), he argued that archetypes are not biological structures. They are imaginative patterns that appear in specific contexts, shaped by culture, history, and the individual psyche. There is no single mother archetype. There is the mother as she appears in a particular dream, in a particular myth, in a particular moment of a particular life.
This is sometimes called “archetypal psychology” to distinguish it from Jung’s “analytical psychology.” The name matters. Hillman was not offering a revision of Jung. He was offering a different discipline altogether, one that takes images seriously as realities rather than as signs of something else.
The Practice of Soul-Making
Jung’s practice focused on individuation, the lifelong process of becoming who one truly is. This involved integrating the shadow, relating to the anima or animus, and moving toward the Self. The goal was wholeness, balance, the reconciliation of opposites.
Hillman’s practice had no such goal. He called his approach “soul-making,” a term he borrowed from the poet John Keats. In a letter written in 1817, Keats described the world as a “vale of soul-making”, a place where souls are formed through experience, not a place where pre-existing souls are tested. Hillman took this and ran with it.
Soul-making means staying with the image. It means refusing to resolve a conflict too quickly. It means letting the psyche speak in its own language, myth, dream, symptom, fantasy, without imposing a narrative of progress or healing. Hillman was famously skeptical of the therapeutic goal of “cure.” He once said that analysis should make you a better neurotic, not a cured one.
This is not nihilism. It is a refusal to treat the psyche as a problem to be solved. For Hillman, the psyche is not broken. It is doing exactly what it needs to do. The task is to listen, not to fix.
Where They Agree
Despite the differences, Hillman and Jung share a fundamental premise: the psyche is real. Both men rejected the materialist assumption that consciousness is a byproduct of the brain. Both took dreams, myths, and symptoms seriously as expressions of an autonomous inner world. Both insisted that psychology must engage with the humanities, with art, literature, religion, mythology, not just with laboratory data.
Hillman never stopped calling himself a Jungian. He said it in interviews, in lectures, in his later books. He saw his work not as a rejection of Jung but as a correction of the tendency to literalize Jung’s metaphors. The Self, the archetypes, the collective unconscious, these are useful fictions, Hillman argued, but they become dangerous when we treat them as facts.
Common Misconceptions
The most common mistake is treating Hillman as a Jungian who disagreed with his teacher. Hillman was not a dissident. He was a heretic. He did not want to reform analytical psychology. He wanted to replace its central organizing principle, the Self, with something more fluid, more plural, more resistant to dogma.
Another misconception: that Hillman rejected depth psychology. He did not. He deepened it. He pushed the logic of Jung’s own method further than Jung was willing to go. If the psyche is autonomous, Hillman asked, then why would it organize itself around a single center? Why would it obey the same rules as the ego?
A third misconception: that Hillman’s psychology is purely intellectual, disconnected from practice. In fact, Hillman wrote extensively about the practical implications of his work. His book The Soul’s Code (1996) offers a method for reading a life backward, finding the image that has been present from the beginning. His Pan and the Nightmare (1972) explores how specific symptoms, anxiety, depression, panic, can be understood as visitations from the underworld rather than as malfunctions to be eliminated.
FAQ
Did Hillman and Jung ever meet? They met briefly. Hillman attended lectures by Jung in Zurich in the 1950s and later corresponded with him. Jung died in 1961, before Hillman had fully developed his critique.
Is Hillman’s psychology compatible with Jung’s? Not fully. They share vocabulary but disagree on fundamentals, the nature of the Self, the role of images, the goal of analysis. Most practitioners choose one framework or the other.
What does Hillman mean by “soul”? Not the immortal soul of religion. Soul, for Hillman, is the depth dimension of experience, the capacity to be moved by images, to dream, to suffer, to find meaning in the particular.
Is Hillman’s approach still practiced today? Yes. Archetypal psychology has a small but dedicated following. The Hillman Institute in Connecticut offers training and certification. His books remain in print and are widely read outside academic psychology.
The Image Remains
The difference between Jung and Hillman is not a disagreement between two theorists. It is a fork in the road. One path leads toward integration, wholeness, the center. The other leads into the thicket of images, where no single god rules and no final meaning waits.
Hillman chose the thicket. He believed the psyche is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be inhabited. The image does not point beyond itself. It is the thing itself. And the work of soul-making is not to find the center but to stay with the multiplicity, to let each voice speak, to refuse the comfort of a single story.
For readers interested in how this approach changes the practice of dream work, see our guide to archetypal dream interpretation. For the broader context of depth psychology and its occult roots, the shadow work hub collects the full lineage from Jung through Hillman to contemporary practice. And for the specific concept that Hillman built his entire critique on, the glossary entry on the Self traces how Jung defined it and how Hillman dismantled it.