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# Psychology as the Study of the Soul
- URL: https://www.descentpress.com/psychology-as-the-study-of-the-soul/
- Published: 2026-10-13T00:24:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-13T01:36:44.000Z
- Description: Hillman asks psychology to widen its aperture and return to what the word meant from the beginning: the study of soul.
- Author: Jae Botávn

Traditionally, to study something, we must narrow our field of view. We apply a methodology such as the scientific method: we separate constituents, isolate patterns, reduce, and replicate. In The Myth of Analysis, Hillman insists that applying the same methodology that may serve humanity well in the natural sciences may be a disservice in another field, like psychology. He positions psychic life as fundamentally protean, and the psyche as demonstrably irreducible. He seeks to take in all the many forms, thoughts, ideas, and attitudes as “modes of apprehension” (Hillman, 2021, p. 16). He approaches inner life not by narrowing it, but by applying the widest aperture possible.

Hillman envisions a process he termed soul-making: “Psyche into life means also taking life as psyche, life as a psychological adventure lived for the sake of the soul” (Hillman, 1972, p. 5). Hillman harkens back to the etymological essence of the word psychology as much as he critiques the field. He reminds us that psychology literally means the study of the soul. Passion, pain, loss, suffering, and life’s vicissitudes go alongside pleasure, gain, joy, and happiness. They are intrinsically linked.

He carries this idea into Senex and Puer, where the apparent opposition between old and young, limitation and possibility, stasis and ambition, past and future, gives way to what Hillman calls a “union of sames.” Rather than resolving psychic tensions through a Jungian approach that works opposites into synthesis, Hillman asks us to look more deeply into each image, where one may already contain the other. What appears divided may belong to the same archetypal whole. If so, modern psychology has not merely lost its way; it has lost its soul, and its task is not to invent another path forward, but to return to what psychology meant from the beginning: the study of soul.

References

Hillman, J. (1972). The myth of analysis: Three essays in archetypal psychology. Northwestern University Press.

Hillman, J. (2021). Senex & puer (G. Slater, Ed.). Spring Publications.