Psychological Faith

[Triton]

Psychological Faith By James Hillman



"The work of soul-making is concerned essentially with the evocation
of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows
as faith in the reality of the soul. Since psyche is primarily
imagination and imagination is always psyche, this faith manifests
itself in the belief in images: it is "idolatrous," heretical to the
imageless monotheisms of transcendental metaphysics and theology.
Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly
through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, and
imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing
conviction of having, and then of being, an interior reality of deep
significance transcending one's personal life.

Psychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to
images and turns to them in its darkness. Its trust is in the
imagination as the only uncontrovertible reality, directly presented,
immediately felt. Trust in the imaginal and trust in the soul go hand
in hand, as depth psychologists have recognized. The reverse is also
true: when imagination is not evoked, there is a deep seated lack of
confidence to imagine fantasies in regard to one's problems and to be
free of the ego's literalizations, its sense of being trapped in
"reality." Lack of psychological faith is compensated by exaggerated
personalizing, a fantastic need for people (and a need for fantastic
people), of which a personalistic transference onto an analyst is only
one manifestation.

Soul-making, as work through images, offers a way of resolving
the dependencies of transference (therapy). For it is not the
therapist or any actual person whatever who is the keeper of my soul
beyond all betrayals, but the archetypal persons of the Gods to whom
my soul acts as bridge. The shaping of the soul's amorphous moods,
sulphuric passions, bitter resentments, and bubbles of distraction
into distinct personalities is the main work of therapuetic analysis
or soul-making. Therefore it works in imagination, with imagination,
and for imagination. It discovers and forms a personality by
disclosing and shaping the multiple soul personalities out of the
primary massa confusa of arguing voices and pushing demands.

Personality may be imagined in a new way: that I am an impersonal
person, a metaphor enacting multiple personifications, mimetic to
images in the heart that are my fate, and that this soul which
projects me has archetypal depths that are alien, inhuman, and
impersonal. My so-called personality is a persona through which soul
speaks. It is subject to depersonalization and is not mine, but
depends altogether upon the gift of belief in myself, a faith given
through soul in my worth as carrier of soul. Not I personify, but the
soul personifies me, or soul-makes herself through me, giving my life
her sense -her intense daydream is my "me-ness"; and "I," a psychic
vessel whose existence is a psychic metaphor, an "as-if being," in
which every single belief in literalism except the belief of soul
whose faith posits me and makes me possible as a personification of
psyche."


From 'Re-Visioning Psychology'.