Moving Jungian psychology from types to images, to an image-based archetypal psychology, is James Hillman's concern in this volume. This volume leads from Hillman's principal essay on typology, "Egalitarian Typologies versus the Perception of the Unique," to his expansive "Inquiry into Image."

Hillman instigates an active re-visioning, re-imagining, of psychology as a self-generative activity of the soul: "An image is given by the imagining perspective and can only be perceived by an act of imagining."