James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology is a wild, imaginative shake-up of modern psychology’s obsession with rationality, behavior, and biological determinism. Instead of reducing human experience to neurons and conditioning, Hillman pushes for a radical shift—one that puts imagination, symbols, dreams, myths, and fantasies at the core of what it means to be human. Drawing from Carl Jung, Romantic poetry, Greek philosophy, and the deep well of Western tradition, he makes the case that psychology’s real job is soul-making—an ongoing process of weaving meaning from the rich, symbolic landscape of the psyche.

Ditching the idea of a singular, rational ego, Hillman argues for a polytheistic approach to psychology—one that embraces the many voices, contradictions, and complexities that make up the human soul. He treats archetypes not as abstract concepts but as living, emotional forces—almost like inner gods—shaping our thoughts, desires, and struggles. By framing psychology as something inherently poetic and symbolic, Re-Visioning Psychology challenges us to see the soul not as something to be “fixed” but as something to be engaged with through metaphor, imagination, and creative reflection. It’s a call to rethink not just psychology, but how we understand ourselves and the stories we live by.

Because my notes for this book are incredibly in-depth, I decided to share them via my nascent learning academy. This will allow me to do a couple of things, share my detailed notes and also get to grips with the mechanics of creating a course with Tutor LMS.

It’s a free course, all you have to do is enroll. If you don’t want access to my awesome notes, you can listen to the NotebookLM version below (but really, enroll in the course so you can test that enrolment process for me 😉).

You can enroll here:

And here’s the NotebookLM Deep Dive: