Psychology is not one of the sciences and not a branch of medicine, but sublated science, sublated medicine. It is the merit of James Hillman's archetypal or imaginal psychology to have brought back the question of soul to psychology. However, a critical analysis shows that a psychology based on the imagination is only of preliminary value and due to the very structure of the imagination cannot truly overcome the positivistic, personalistic prejudice that it set out to overcome. Also, as polytheistic psychology it succumbs to nostalgia and misses the real plight of today's soul. This is what, in contrast to Jung's understanding of alchemy, the alchemists were on the way to.
Psychology needs more than imagining.
It needs rigorous thought. Only then can psychology be freed from its inherent positivism and cease being a subdivision of anthropology. The notion of soul is logically released from its attachment to the notion of the human being. The Soul's Logical Life. Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology.