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… He leaves untouched the problems of the genesis of the capacity for faith and belief, the nature of the damage that can be inflicted upon it in the early life of the individual, the sources of its potential repair, and also the employment of it in the service of defensive idealization. For instance, Winnicott has shown possible connections between the ability to experience symbolically the ‘presence of God’ with the infant's ability to feel safe, as he lies in his cot or pram, to phantasize about and experience instinctual impulses towards mother —secure in the sensing of her presence about the place.…
Linked, surely, with the question of the capacity for religious experience is Hillman's considerable excursus on the notion of ‘soul’. He rather scolds ministers of religion for going after clinical and psychological conceptions when all the time ‘soul is their true province’ (p. 38). ‘Psyche’, he writes, ‘is used more as a natural concomitant to physical life, perhaps even reduced to it, whereas “soul” has, on the other hand, metaphysical and romantic overtones. It shares frontiers with religion’ (p. 36). Hillman adds that ‘soul’ is not really definable but is a symbol of something that ‘makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love and has a religious concern’ (p. 37).
His sense of the word seems to boil down to a capacity for creative phantasy in religious terms — together with a feeling for life which is the mark of a person healthy in psyche and soma. This is contrasted with a sick involvement in sentimentality, in illusion spinning and defensive idealization. Hillman's argument that ministers of religion wrongly neglect ‘soul’ carries some plausibility, but it seems difficult to blame them for getting interested in clinical and psychological work, for from this they can get help in anchoring ‘soul’ not only to the realities of the psyche—soma but also to the whole person who is handling the realities of personal relationships and