Honoring the World-Soul

Abstract

James Hillman speaks of the need for "a psychology that returns psychic reality to the world," that restores the Renaissance cosmology of an anima mundi. In this essay, I present an argument for an imaginal epistemology which takes as its central claim that the anima mundi is biologically and psychologically enacted as image, pattern, metaphor, and narrative. I offer a revisioning of selected findings within empirical psychology and biology as first steps toward legitimating such an epistemology, and I try to suggest that dangers for self-deception implicit in an imaginal epistemology may be met through the tools provided by poststructural critique.