Re-Visioning Psychology

James Hillman describes a new way of looking at psychological symptoms and pathology. He views them as giving one an opportunity to do “soul making.” Interestingly, the original Greek term “psyche” means “soul.” Thus, psychology should be the study of the soul, as psychological healing only begins when we focus on what an individual’s soul needs and wants (not simply what the ego wants.)

"...is about seeing everything twice, seeing through, doing a double-take, being sufficently paranoid to look for hidden meanings. And in the process of seeing through psychology, demonstrates a way of experiencing everything psychologically."      ~Parabola

"It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence - that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives one the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity."