The Benefits of Physical Exercise on Mental Disorders and Quality of Life

The Body Without Imagination: Exercise Science as Symptom of Psychology’s Lost Soul

Jorge Giménez-Meseguer’s The Benefits of Physical Exercise on Mental Disorders and Quality of Life belongs to a growing body of clinical literature demonstrating what traditional cultures never doubted: that moving the body changes the mind. The book marshals evidence linking structured physical activity to measurable improvements in depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and substance use disorders, positioning exercise as an adjunctive or even standalone intervention. Its value is epidemiological and practical. Yet read from within the depth psychological tradition, the book functions less as a revelation and more as a mirror reflecting modern psychology’s peculiar blindness. The entire framework assumes that the body is an instrument to be optimized and that mental disorders are problems to be solved—assumptions that James Hillman spent a career dismantling. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman insisted that “where there is a connection to soul, there is psychology; where not, what is taking place is better called statistics, physical anthropology, cultural journalism, or animal breeding.” Giménez-Meseguer’s exercise protocols, however well-intentioned, operate squarely in the domain of statistics applied to bodies. The soul of the moving body—its images, its fantasies, its relationship to world—goes entirely unexamined.

Thomas Moore, drawing on Ficino, made the counter-argument with surgical precision in Care of the Soul: “Exercise could be more soulfully performed by emphasizing fantasy and imagination. Usually we are told how much time to spend at a certain exercise, what heart rate to aim for, and which muscle to focus on for toning.” Ficino’s prescription—walking among aromatic plants, engaging the senses, attending to the world’s body—stands in stark opposition to the treadmill-and-heart-rate-monitor paradigm that undergirds Giménez-Meseguer’s clinical trials. Moore’s point is not that clinical exercise is useless but that it is incomplete: “Body exercise is incomplete if it focuses exclusively on muscle and is motivated by the ideal of a physique unspoiled by fat. What good is a lean body that can’t hear Thoreau’s owls or return a wave to Emerson’s wheat?” The ensouled body is relational, imaginative, in communion. Giménez-Meseguer’s body is a biochemical system producing endorphins and neurotransmitters. Both descriptions are true. Only one touches the soul.

Symptoms as Communication, Not Targets: The Depth Psychological Challenge to Exercise-as-Intervention

The deeper tension lies in what exercise is being prescribed for. Giménez-Meseguer treats depression, anxiety, and psychosis as conditions to be ameliorated—their reduction measured by standardized instruments. Depth psychology offers a radically different frame. Hillman argued at his Yale Terry Lectures that “the soul naturally pathologizes,” that symptoms are how the gods enter human life, “how the myths reach us.” Moore echoed this in his therapeutic principles: “Your symptoms are the raw material for your soul-making. If you are having emotional problems, don’t automatically just try to get rid of them.” This does not mean depression should go untreated. It means that any treatment—pharmacological, behavioral, or physical—that aims solely at symptom elimination risks severing the person from the very communications their psyche is attempting to make. When Giménez-Meseguer demonstrates that thirty minutes of aerobic exercise reduces Beck Depression Inventory scores, the finding is clinically real. But it tells us nothing about what the depression wanted, what image was trying to emerge, what the soul was fermenting through its suffering.

Moore drew a crucial distinction between cure and care: “A major difference between care and cure is that cure implies the end of trouble… But care has a sense of ongoing attention. There is no end.” Exercise-as-cure fits the medical model; exercise-as-care would look entirely different. It would attend to the images that arise during movement, the memories the body releases, the relationship between physical exertion and the landscape traversed. It would be closer to what Moore envisioned as “a soul-oriented yoga” that pays attention to “the memories, emotions, and images that arise in conjunction with physical motion and posture.” Giménez-Meseguer’s framework has no vocabulary for this dimension. The clinical trial cannot measure what Hillman called “the deepening of events into experiences.”

Why the Mechanical Body Needs the Imaginal Body

What makes this book valuable for the depth psychology reader is precisely its limitation. It represents the best that evidence-based medicine can offer the suffering body-mind—and that best, while genuinely helpful, remains spiritually thin. Hillman’s own life illustrates the paradox. Dick Russell’s biography records Hillman introducing softball and touch football to his Zürich students not as exercise but as eros—“a different way to relate to the people around him… to get more into the body.” Pat Berry observed that physical sports “helped assuage some of the intellectual wounds and to redress damaged egos.” The body here is not a machine being tuned; it is a field of relationship, play, humiliation, and grace. The game has soul because it has imagination, social eros, and the unpredictability of a thrown ball.

Giménez-Meseguer’s book matters because it provides the empirical scaffolding that the medical establishment demands before sanctioning any intervention. For clinicians working within institutional psychiatry, it is an indispensable tool. But for anyone encountering depth psychology today—anyone who suspects that the reduction of human suffering to diagnostic codes and treatment protocols leaves something essential unaddressed—the book serves as a precise negative image. It shows, by omission, exactly what Moore meant when he wrote that “an unimagined body is on its way toward disease.” The body that exercises without imagination, without sensory engagement with world, without attending to the images that rise from movement, may indeed lower its cortisol and raise its serotonin. But it has not yet begun the work of soul-making. This book maps the territory of the body-as-mechanism with admirable rigor. The territory of the body-as-soul remains uncharted within its pages, and that uncharted space is where the real therapeutic frontier lies.