ABSTRACT
Hillman's re-visioned psychology places an "emphasis on the making of 'soul' rather than 'self'" so as to be transparent to its root metaphor, psyche. Immediately at the inception of Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman associated soul with metaphor, locating both as border phenomena that obtain between matter and mind, but go wanting in the Cartesian reduction. "Our desire", Hillman emphasized, "is to save the phenomenon of the imaginal psyche". Imaginal psychology's pursuit is not of soul as an object of desire, but as a process of desiring—of soul, psyche, or anima as "this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable". The aspect of hermeneutic interpretation relativizes that of phenomenological presentation to make of imaginal psychology a hermeneutic phenomenology. The imaging of soul as a root metaphor, Hillman said, "attempts two things": to state the soul's nature in its own language and to recognize that all statements in psychology about soul are metaphors.
