ABSTRACT
In his seminal 1981 lecture, “Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World,” Hillman (1992:94) calls into question the Cartesian conception of reality “which generally operates throughout depth psychology.” But this is nothing new for Hillman who has been a daunting critic of the subjectobject, internal-external divisions advanced by both natural science and psychology. What is new in this essay is a shift, long in the making, in Hillman’s thought. In his magnum opus Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman (1975:189) holds that “the path of depth psychology still remains the individual psyche.” By the time of the “Anima Mundi” essay, Hillman (in paraphrase of the title of one of his later works) comes to the disturbing conclusion that we have had 100 years of depth psychology’s tending to the individual soul and the world has become worse. Hillman attends to the breakdown of the world by directly calling into question the idea of the world.
