Language of the Soul

This is a style attempting to be precise in distinguishing among the faces of the soul, all the while appealing to that many-sided soul by speaking in figurative language to the emotions, senses, and fantasy, working its persuasion through artfulness, even if at times becoming bombastic, contrived, even piously woolly. This has all been called
rhetoric. In Renaissance rhetoric anima appears yet once more, this time as Aphrodite Peitho, the persuasive Venus who turns our head
with a well-turned phrase. Rhetoric played such an important part in Renaissance writing because it is the speech form of the anima archetype, the style of words when informed by soul.

Our academic tradition has missed the psychology of the Renaissance partly because it has not been attuned enough to this use of language, excoriating it for lack of solid evidence and marshaled argument. But logic and proof do not convince the anima, neither then nor now, so that really to hear Renaissance language we have to listen through anima, which is brought to life by personified and pathologized figures of speech, by hyperbole and metaphor, by indirection, repetition, allusion, conceit, and innuendo. This speech is forceful, seductive,
and convincing--until examined as scientific analysis or theological discourse. Then it is no longer "serious philosophy." Rhetoric's pleading, complaining, and reiterating speaks the way our symptoms speak,
the way our dreams speak. It is an argument of mood; or rather, the imagination does not argue, it imagines.'a Rhetoric never persuades the mind unless that mind be from the beginning susceptible to passion and images; its main discriminatory concern is not with forming definitions but with shaping the imagination itself into words.

Depth psychology today is heavily entangled in the problem of language, pulled between extremes of basing all therapy upon linguistic structures or leaving speech altogether for preverbal grunts and gestures. Therapy turns back either to Cartesian structuralism which abstracts speech into unutterable root units or to pietistic revivalism
where the inchoate sound of feeling is all. Neither those structures nor those feelings can carry psychology toward giving words to the full size
of soul, for they lack the main mark of rhetoric: eloquence. We need again what was common in the Renaissance-belief in the verbal imagination and the therapeutic incantational power of words.  Besides the France of Lacan's intellect and the Germany of Reich's and Perl's feelings, there is the Mediterranean of the imagination, an inland sea of rhetoric from whose froth Venus rises.

~James Hillman , Re-Visioning Psychology