🌟But the moment we realize body also as a subtle body–a fantasy system of complexes, symptoms, tastes, influences and relations, zones of delight, pathologized images, trapped insights–then body and soul lose their borders, neither more literal or metaphorical than the other. Remember: the enemy is the literal, and the literal is not the concrete flesh but negligence of the vision that concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors.
Putting soul inside man also neglects that man, too, is a personified literalism- no more an actual real container than soul. In Chapter 1 the realization grew that a human life is actually a personification of
the soul, a projection of it, contained by it. Although we readily accept the notion that human energy, and nature, life, and Gods are not specifically human privileges and that they exist “‘outside” human be-
ings, we curiously balk over distinguishing soul from human being. Is this because we do not allow anima her independence? Is this the fundamental intolerance of human psychology: its inability to admit the distinct reality, the full reality, of soul, so that all our human struggle with imagination and its mad incursions, with the symptoms of com-
plexes, with ideologies, theologies, and their systems, are in root and essence the unpredictable writhing movements of Psyche freeing herself
from human imprisonment?
Our distinction between psyche and human has several important consequences. If we conceive each human being to be defined individually and differently by the soul, and we admit that the soul exists
independently of human beings, then our essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all, but more the gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service. It is not my individuation, but the daimon’s; not my fate that matters to the Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to my stewardship during my life. It is
not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul. This bears upon dreams. Dreams, we said earlier, are the best model of the actual psyche, for they show it personified, pathologized, and
manifold. In them the ego is only one figure among many psychic persons. Nothing is literal; all is metaphor. Dreams are the best model also because they show the soul apart from life, reflecting it but just as often unconcerned with the life of the human being who dreams them. Their main concern seems not to be with living but with imagining.”
~James Hillman , Re-Visioning Psychology
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