Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the notion of ego and focuses on what it calls the psyche, or soul, and the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991).
Influential artists, poets, philosophers and psychologists include Nietzsche, Henry Corbin, Keats, Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus.
Jungian archetypes are thought patterns that find worldwide parallels in individuals or entire cultures.
Archai appear in dreams, religions, the arts, and social customs in all people and they manifest impulsively in mental disorders.
Corbin created the idea of the existence of the mundus imaginalis which is a distinct field of imaginable realities and offers an ontological mode of location of archetypes of the psyche.
The second contribution Corbin made to the field was the idea that archetypes are accessible to imagination and first present themselves as images, so the procedure of archetypal psychology must be rhetorical and poetic, without logical reasoning, and the goal in therapy should be to restore the patient's imaginable realities.
[1] Edward S. Casey is attributed with distinguishing archetypal psychology from other theories by explaining an image as a way of seeing rather than something seen.
[2] In Hillman's archetypal/polytheistic view, the psyche or soul has many directions and sources of meaning – and this can feel like an ongoing state of conflict – a struggle with one's daimones.
"[5] Hillman further insists that he does not view the pantheon of gods as a 'master matrix' against which we should measure today and thereby decry modern loss of richness.
A great portion of Hillman's thought attempts to attend to the speech of the soul as it is revealed via images and fantasies.
Hillman often quotes a phrase coined by the Romantic poet John Keats: "call the world the vale of soul-making."
Because Hillman's archetypal psychology is concerned with fantasy, myth, and image, dreams are considered to be significant in relation to the soul.
Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue or flotsam from waking life (as advanced by physiologists), but neither does he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with "secret" meanings of how one should live (à la Jung).
It argues against theories which attempt to map life into phases, suggesting that this is counter-productive and makes people feel like they are failing to live up to what is normal.
Hillman rejects formal logic in favour of reference to case histories of well known people and considers his arguments to be in line with the puer aeternus or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats and Byron and in recently deceased young rock stars like Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain.
Hillman also rejects causality as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul or acorn in question.
Psychopathology is viewed as the psyche's independent ability to create morbidity, disorder, illness, abnormality and suffering in any part of its behavior and to imagine and experience life through a deformed perspective.