In the words of rogue depth psychologist James Hillman.
Craig Chalquist
Chalquist.com
2026
James Hillman and his friends and colleagues went into a Dublin pub in the 1970s and emerged with the beginnings of Archetypal Psychology, a new Jungian perspective that emphasized the fluidity of the psyche, the “polytheism” of its expressions, and the play of its mythopoetic dynamics.
By the time I met Hillman, I knew him to be a creative trickster. He helped me with my first PhD dissertation through intriguing questions (“What kind of an anima is California?”), occasional conversations, and postcards with bizarre art on the fronts and suggestions scrawled on the backs (“Read Keith Basso”).
Hillman challenged Jungian dogmas, and he wasn’t always nice about it. I told him once that he was like the Nietzsche of depth psychology, hammering idols to see which ones would break. He laughed heartily, nodding. He embraced controversy and took his version of Jungian psychology out of the classrooms and into boardrooms, city council meetings, and the streets.
From Re-Visioning Psychology:
Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.
To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real.
When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival.
By means of personifications my sense of person becomes more vivid for I carry with me at all times the protection of my daimones: the images of dead people who mattered to me, of ancestral figures of my stock, cultural and historical persons of renown and people of fable who provide exemplary images—a wealth of guardians. They guard my fate, guide it, probably are it. “Perhaps—who knows,” writes Jung, “these eternal images are what men mean by fate.” We need this help, for who can carry his fate alone?
The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.
There may well be more psychopathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing.
Symptoms, not therapists, led this century to soul.
The healer is the illness and the illness is the healer.
When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behavior, and fantasies are wrong.
Let us see pathologizing as a mode of speech.
Pathologizing forces the soul to a consciousness of itself as different from the ego and its life—a consciousness that obeys its own laws of metaphorical enactment in intimate relation with death.
Literalism prevents psychologizing by making psychology of it.
As truths are the fictions of the rational, so fictions are the truths of the imaginal.
Psychological awareness rises from errors, coincidences, indefiniteness, from the chaos deeper than intelligent control.
Knowledge makes us able to leave it behind, able to take off down the road of pitfalls in full foolishness, risking even greater windmills still further out, an old knight more and more bold, an old rogue more and more peculiar, ageing into the freedom of our pathology.
The psyche moves; but does psychology?
Now we are called defensive or resistant to the therapeutic process where once we might have been blamed for closing ourselves against God’s grace or turning from His will.
If our civilization suffers from hybris, from ego inflation and superbia, psychology has done its part. It has been looking at soul in the ego’s mirror, never seeing psyche, always seeing man. And this man has been monotheistic Reformational man, enemy of images.
From Puer Papers:
Reflection in the mirror of the soul lets one see the madness of one’s spiritual drive, and the importance of this madness.
The spirit turned toward psyche, rather than deserting it for high places and cosmic love, finds ever further possibilities of seeing through the opacities and obfuscations in the valley. Sunlight enters the vale. The Word participates in gossip and chatter.
Cure the symptom and lose the God. Had Jacob not grappled with the Daemon he would indeed have not been hurt, and he would not have been Jacob either.
From Kinds of Power:
Economics is our contemporary theology, regardless of how we spend Sunday.
We now call the destruction of old ideas, politely, a “paradigm shift.” “Catastrophe theory” would be more appropriate. The vitality of a culture depends less on its hopes and its history than on its capacity to entertain willingly the divine and daimonic force of ideas.
Two insanely dangerous consequences result from raising efficiency to the level of an independent principle. First, it favors short-term thinking—no looking ahead, down the line; and it produces insensitive feeling—no looking around at the life values being lived so efficiently. Second, means become ends; that is, doing something becomes the full justification of doing regardless of what you do.
Inefficiency becomes a favorite mode of rebellion against the tyranny of efficiency: slowdown, work-to-rule, buck-passing, absenteeism, delayed responses, mislaid documents, unreturned phone calls.
Anyone who justifies decisions by referring to the bottom line has something to learn from Treblinka.
For a candidate for political office to campaign on a platform of efficiency in government suggests the infiltration of fascistic ideals. Mussolini made the trains run on time—but at what cost?
Today we need heroes of descent, not masters of denial, mentors of maturity who can carry sadness, who give love to aging, who show soul without irony or embarrassment.
Instead of adventuring forward to explore and research unknown territory, control fights a rearguard action, keeping inventory of what has already happened. It likes complete reports. Control, for all its self-assured position of command, relies on a defensive vision, and the traits enumerated—enforced loyalty, exactitude, suspicion of the hidden, watchfulness—are paranoid traits.
The lead horse does not run because it is whipped.
Absolutism is not a ruthless ruler, but a ruthless rule—and this we don’t easily remember, for our minds fix upon the figures of czars and crime lords. These images serve to keep the danger of tyranny projected onto Stalin, Genghis Khan and Al Capone, protecting us from the absolutism that can rule the psyche in the guise of fundamentalism in religion, bottom-lineism in business and progress in the sciences.
Purists are deadly, and so they know all about deadly sins.
Something always has you in mind.
From Hundred Years of Psychotherapy:
“Well, what can I do about the world? This thing’s bigger than me.” That’s the child archetype talking. “All I can do is go into myself, work on my growth, my development, find good parenting, support groups.” This is a disaster for our political world, for our democracy. Democracy depends on intensely active citizens, not children.
The ideal of growth makes us feel stunted; the ideal family makes us feel crazy.
We’re not allowed in the street. We have to be careful, pretty correct, not extreme or radical, and not mix it up with our clients and patients out in the world. And this slants our thinking toward white, middle-class psychology.
You can move to nirvana, but the Gods find out where you go.
Is there a reality that is not framed or formed? No. Reality is always coming through a pair of glasses, a point of view, a language—a fantasy.
Sometimes, the genius seems to show only in symptoms and disorders, as a kind of preventive medicine, holding you back from a false route.
Let’s call them “troubles.” Can you imagine a blues singer going on about problems?
Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies—the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding.
Now when therapy decides to cure the pathology, instead of seeing that the pathology is part of the crack or the broken window, and that something is trying to get in, then it seems to me it’s creating more pathology and keeping the Gods even further away. And then they break in through the whole fucking society.
The sexual fascination is the soul trying to get out and get into something other than itself.
From Thought of the Heart:
If we could recover the imaginal we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy.
The heart in the beast is not your heart only: it is a microcosmic sun, a cosmos of all possible experiences that no one can own.
The desert is not in Egypt; it is anywhere once we desert the heart.
I find today that patients are more sensitive than the worlds they live in.
My practice tells me I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Moreover, it tells me that to place neurosis and psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced.
The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality.
An analyst sitting in his chair all day long is more aware of the faintest flickers of arousal in the seat of his sexuality than of the massive discomfort in the same seat brought by the chair: its wrongly built back, its heat-retaining fabric, its resistant upholstery and formaldehyde glue. His animal sense has been trained to notice only one set of proprioceptions to the exclusion of the psychic reality of the chair. A cat knows better.
Recognition that the soul is also in the world may awaken us from the psychotherapeutic trance in which we pay a hundred dollars for an hour of subjectivism and no more than $19.95 for a beach chair in whose cold metallic arms and plastic lap reflection actually takes place, day after day.
From Soul’s Code:
By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim.
Each person enters the world called.
So long as the statistics of normalizing developmental psychology determine the standards against which the extraordinary complexities of a life are judged, deviations become deviants.
There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books.
Psychology has no self-help manual for its own affliction.
As civilization subsides into its own waste deposits, it doesn’t matter whether you are feminine or masculine or any composite of them. We all dissolve together.
To plant a foot firmly on earth—that is the ultimate achievement, and a far later stage of growth than anything begun in your head.
Do you really believe that humans invented the wheel out of their big brains alone, or fire, or baskets, or tools? Stones rolled downhill; bolts of fire shot from the sky and out of the earth; birds wove and probed and pounded, as did apes and elephants. The sciences that master nature were taught by nature how it could be mastered.
To what does the soul turn that has no therapists to visit? It takes its trouble to the trees, to the riverbank, to an animal companion, on an aimless walk through the city streets, a long watch of the night sky. Just stare out the window or boil water for a cup of tea. We breathe, expand, and let go, and something comes in from elsewhere. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased, preferring melancholy to desperation. It’s in touch.
Victim is the flip side of hero.
When the tradition of Romantic grandeur, with its cast of lunatics, lovers, and poets, is downsized by egalitarianism, deconstructed by academic cynicism, or labeled grandiosity by psychoanalytic diagnostics, then the vacancy in the culture is occupied by pop-star squatters, Trumped-up magnificoes, and Batman, civilization left with only tinsel celebrities to model its culture.
Behind each and every interpretation of the tale is the tale.
Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.
Why do we believe angels prefer angelic persons? Why assume that the genius wants only to be with geniuses? Maybe the invisibles are interested in our lives for the sake of their realization and as such are inherently democratic: Anyone will do.
From Suicide and the Soul:
Academic psychology, in its eagerness to be as scientific as physics, has one-sidedly chosen the “outside,” so that the soul no longer finds a place in the only field dedicated by its very name to its study. Hence, depth psychology has been more or less kept out of the academics of official psychology….depth psychology is the stone the builders of the academy have rejected.
The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just “believe” in it.
The word “normal” comes from the Greek norma, which was a carpenter’s square, that right-angled tool for establishing straightness.
Expectations that are only statistical are no longer human.
It is the immature who are preoccupied with the search for maturity. And is it not typical of adolescence to see growth and creativity in protean images of “becoming”?
Loving in safety is the smaller part of loving.
From A Blue Fire:
The world comes with shapes, colors, atmospheres, textures--a display of self-presenting forms. All things show faces, the world not only a coded signature to be read for meaning, but a physiognomy to be faced. As expressive forms, things speak; they show the shape they are in. They announce themselves, bear witness to the presence: “Look, here we are.” They regard us beyond how we may regard them, our perspectives, what we intend with them, and how we dispose of them.
Each particular event, including individual humans with our invisible thoughts, feelings, and intentions, reveals a soul in its imaginative display….Each object is a subject, and its self-reflection is its self-display, its radiance. Interiority, subjectivity, psychic depth--all out there, and so, too, psychopathology.
The soul that is uncared for--whether in personal or in community life--turns into an angry child. It assaults the city which has depersonalized it with a depersonalized rage, a violence against the very objects--storefronts, park monuments, public buildings--which stand for uniform soullessness.
An education that in any way neglects imagination is an education into psychopathy. It is an education that results in a sociopathic society of manipulations. We learn how to deal with others and become a society of dealers.
Those who have most to do with children seem to have lost the feeling for the child’s terror and fascination with terror and, even more, to have lost the child’s extraordinary possibility for joy. Instead, we meet children with worried concern, therapeutic goodwill and professional smiles, but few laughs. We would bring the child under the normalizing shelter of the bell curve: nothing to extremes. Keats and Blake and Whitman, however, insist on the wildest joy.
One could expect Job’s friends or the companions of Jesus in Gethsemane today to step forward with a tranquilizer.
Each thing needs other things--once called “the sympathy of all things.” Attachment is embedded in the soul of things, like an animal magnetism (Mesmer), a cosmic longing or cosmogonic eros of the Greeks and Freud. The soul’s longing does not call for deliverance, rather it reports cosmic dependence, declaring frankly that clutching and clinging are ecological passions of the soul, keeping things in the embrace of each other and maintaining the intercourse of their self-revealing conversations.
From Inter Views:
When Freud says, “Where Id was, there shall Ego be”—it is also an extraordinarily greedy statement. He wants to get every last stone out of the quarry. But what about the quarry?
As long as you’re going to create a castle, the psyche can only come in as an invader.
Adler died right out in the street. What a powerful blessing.
In Freud’s time we felt oppressed in the family, in sexual situations, in our crazy hysterical conversion symptoms, and where we felt oppressed, there was the repressed. Where do we feel that thick kind of oppression today? In institutions—hospitals, universities, businesses; in public buildings, in filling out forms, in traffic…
Psychopathic behavior is a fundamentalist behavior: taking fantasies literally and also confusing the literal and the concrete. Now this is just what the Fundamentalist churches support: if your arm offend thee, cut it off. If your nose offend thee, get it straightened.
Psychoanalysis has to get out of the consulting room and analyze all kinds of things. You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that “normalcy” is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid.
Hard to believe, but the hypochondrias are taking care of us, the depressions are slowing us down, obsessions are ways of polishing the image, paranoid suspicions are ways of trying to see through—all these moves of the pathological are ways we are being loved in the peculiar way the psyche works.
The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm’s length because they are so full of love.