From the book "The Soul's Code : in search of character and calling." Copyright © 1996 by James Hillman. This Warner Books edition is published by arrangement with Random House, New York, NY. Warner Books, Inc., New York, NY.
Chapter 1 In A Nutshell: The Acorn Theory And The Redemption Of Psychology
There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this "something" as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am.
This book is about that call.
If not this vivid or sure, the call may have been more like gentle pushings in the stream in which you drifted unknowingly to a particular spot on the bank. Looking back, you sense that fate had a hand in it.
This book is about that sense of fate.
These kinds of annunciations and recollections determine biography as strongly as memories of abusive horror; but these more enigmatic moments tend to be shelved. Our theories favor traumas setting us the task of working them through. Despite early injury and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we bear from the start the image of a definite individual character with some enduring traits.
This book is about that power of character.
Because the "traumatic" view of early years so controls psychological theory of personality and its development, the focus of our rememberings and the language of our personal story-telling have already been infiltrated by the toxins of these theories. Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods. We are, this book shall maintain, less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us.
So this book wants to repair some of that damage by showing what else was there, is there, in your nature. It wants to resurrect the unaccountable twists that turned your boat around in the eddies and shallows of meaninglessness, bringing you back to feelings of destiny. For that is what is lost in so many lives, and what must be recovered: a sense of personal calling, that there is a reason I am alive.
'Not' the reason to live; not the meaning of life in general or a philosophy of religious faith---this book does not pretend to provide such answers. But it does speak to the feelings that there is a reason my unique person is here and that there are things I must attend to beyond the daily round and that give the daily round its reason, feelings that the world somehow wants me to be here, that I am answerable to an innate image, which I am filling out in my biography.
pick up again on p. 7:
This book sets out on a new course based on an old idea. Each person enters the world called. The idea comes from Plato, his Myth of Er at the end of his most well-known work, the 'Republic.' I can put the idea in a nutshell.
The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.
As explained by the greatest of later Platonists, Plotinus (A.D. 205--270), we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul's own choice---and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.
So that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth and, in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it.
The myth leads also to practical moves. The most practical is to entertain the ideas implied by the myth in viewing your biography---ideas of calling, of soul, of daimon, of fate, of necessity, all of which will be explored in the pages that follow. Then, the myth implies, we must attend very carefully to childhood to catch early glimpses of the daimon in action, to grasp its intentions and not block its way. The rest of the practical implications swiftly unfold: (a) Recognize the call as a prime fact of human existence; (b) align life with it; (c) find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache and the natural shocks the flesh is heir to, belong to the pattern of the image, are necessary to it, and help fulfill it.
A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.
For centuries we have searched for the right term for this "call." The Romans named it your 'genius'; the Greeks, your 'daimon'; and the Christians your guardian angel. The Romantics, like Keats, said the call came from the heart, and Michelangelo's intuitive eye saw an image in the heart of the person he was sculpting. The Neoplatonists referred to an imaginal body, the 'ochema', that carried you like a vehicle. It was your personal bearer or support. For some it is Lady Luck or Fortuna; for others a genie or jinn, a bad seed or evil genius. In Egypt, it might have been the 'ka', or the 'ba' with whom you could converse. Among the people we refer to as Eskimos and others who follow shamanistic practices, it is your spirit, your free-soul, your animal-soul, your breath-soul.
Over a century ago, the Victorian scholar of religions and cultures E. B. Tylor (1832--1917) reported that "primitives" (as nonindustrial peoples were then called) conceived that which we name "soul" to be a "thin insubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapor, film, or shadow . . . mostly palpable and invisible, yet also manifesting physical power." A later ethnological reporter, Ake Hultkrantz, whose special field is the Amerindians, says that soul "originates in an image" and is "conceived in the form of an image." Plato in his Myth of Er uses a similar word, 'paradeigma,' a basic form encompassing your entire destiny. Though this accompanying image shadowing your life is the bearer of fate and fortune, it is not a moral instructor or to be confused with conscience.
The Roman 'genius' was not a moralist. It "knew everything about the individual's future and controlled his fate," yet "this deity held no moral sanction over the individual; he was merely an agent of personal luck or fortune. One might ask without opprobrium (harsh criticism or censure) to have evil or selfish desires fulfilled by his Genius." In Rome, in West Africa, in Haiti you could well ask your daimon (whatever it might be called) to harm enemies, spoil their luck or aid in manipulations and seductions. This "evil" aspect of the daimon we also shall explore in a later chapter ("The Bad Seed").
The concept of this individualized soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks. The study and therapy of the psyche in our society ignore this factor, which other cultures regard as the kernel of character and the repository of individual fate. The core subject of psychology, psyche or soul, doesn't get into the books supposedly dedicated to its study and care.
I will be using many of the terms for this acorn---image, character, fate, genius, calling, daimon, soul, destiny---rather interchangeably, preferring one or another depending on the context. This looser mode follows the style of other, often older cultures, which have a better sense of this enigmatic force in human life than does our contemporary psychology, which tends to narrow understanding of complex phenomena to single-meaning definitions. We should not be afraid of these big nouns; they are not hollow. They have merely been deserted and need rehabilitation.
These many words and names do not tell us 'what' "it" is, but they do confirm 'that' it is. They also point to its mysteriousness. We cannot know what exactly we are referring to because its nature remains shadowy, revealing itself mainly in hints, intuitions, whispers, and the sudden urges and oddities that disturb your life and that we continue to call symptoms.
pick up again on p. 11:
The acorn theory proposes and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause---to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying. The theory also attributes to this innate image an angelic or daimonic intention, as if it were a spark of consciousness; and, moreover, holds that it has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons.
That the daimon has your interest at heart may be the part of the theory particularly hard to accept. That the heart has its reasons, yes; that there is an unconscious with its own intentions; that fate plays a hand in how things turn out---all this is acceptable, even conventional.
But why is it so difficult to imagine that I am cared about, that something takes an interest in what I do, that I am perhaps protected, maybe even kept alive not altogether by my own will and doing? Why do I prefer insurance to the invisible guarantees of existence? For it sure is easy to die. A split second of inattention and the best-laid plans of a strong ego spill out on the sidewalk. Something saves me every day from falling down the stairs, tripping at the curb, being blindsided. How is it possible to race down the highway, tape deck singing, thoughts far away, and stay alive? What is this "immune system" that watches over my days, my food sprinkled with viruses, toxins, bacteria? Even my eyebrows crawl with mites, like little birds on a rhino's back. We name what preserves us instinct, self-preservation, sixth sense, subliminal awareness (each of which, too, is invisible yet present). Once upon a time what took such good care of me was a guardian spirit, and I darn well knew how to pay it appropriate attention.
Despite this invisible caring, we prefer to imagine ourselves thrown naked into the world, utterly vulnerable and fundamentally alone. It is easier to accept the story of heroic self-made development than the story that you may well be loved by this guiding providence, that you are needed for what you bring, and that you are sometimes fortuitously helped by it in situations of distress. May I state this as a bare and familiar fact without quoting a guru, witnessing for Christ, or claiming the miracle of recovery? Why not keep within psychology proper what once was called providence---being invisibly watched and watched over?
Children present the best evidence for a psychology of providence. Here I mean more than providential miracles, those amazing tales of children falling from high ledges without harm, buried under earthquake debris and surviving. Rather, I am referring to the humdrum miracles when the mark of character appears. All of a sudden and out of nowhere a child shows who she is, what he must do.
These impulsions of destiny frequently are stifled by dysfunctional perceptions and unreceptive surroundings, so that calling appears in the myriad symptoms of difficult, self-destructive, accident-prone, "hyper" children---all words invented by adults in defense of their misunderstanding. The acorn theory offers an entirely fresh way of regarding childhood disorders, less in terms of causes than of calls and less in terms of past influences than of intuitive revelations.
In regard to children and their psychology, I want the scales of habit (and the masked hatred within the habit) to fall from our eyes. I want us to envision that what children go through has to do with finding a place in the world for their specific calling. They are trying to live two lives at once, the one they were born with and the one of the place and among the people they were born into. The entire image of a destiny is packed into a tiny acorn, the seed of a huge oak on small shoulders. And its call rings loud and persistent and is as demanding as any scolding voice from the surroundings. The call shows in the tantrums and obstinacies (stubbornness, inflexibility), in the shyness and retreats, that seem to set the child against our world but that may be protections of the world it comes with and comes from.
pick up again on p. 25:
A theory so degrading to inspiration deserves the derision I am giving it. Compensation theory kills the spirit, by robbing extraordinary persons and acts of their sui generis (unique) authenticity. Superiorities emerge from a lower source rather than expressing a more significant image. For, as almost every extraordinary life shows, there is a vision, an ideal that calls. To what precise actuality it calls usually stays vague if not altogether unknown.
If all superiorities are nothing more than overcompensated inferiorities, and all gifts but reformed wounds and weaknesses in nobler disguise, which can be unmasked by analytical acumen, then Franco is nothing but a short man, 'really', still caught in competing with his brothers, and Pollock, too, is but a "baby." They are nothing but the theory itself; and so too is everyone else, a "nothing but." There is no gift and there is no daimon who gives it. We are each alone on the planet, without an angel, subject to our hereditary flesh and all the oppressor's wrongs of family and circumstances, which only the willpower of a "strong ego" can overcome.
With compensation theory torched and discarded, let's go back and review from the perspective of the acorn theory the childhood characteristics of Gandhi, Stefansson, Peary, and Rommel, reading backward as we did with Manolete's early shyness. Gandhi was afraid of invisible presences and the dark because the daimon that held his destiny knew of the lathi charges and beatings, of the long imprisonments in dark cells, and knew that death would be his steady companion on the road. Assassination was written in Gandhi's script. Were Peary and Stefansson already rehearsing in their odd, childish ways the barren loneliness at the icy top of the world? And Rommel (who said to his son, "Even as an army captain I already knew how to command an army")---perhaps that pale, slow, lazy, inattentive "white bear" of a boy was retreating in a kind of precognitive shell shock from the overwhelming artillery fire of El Alamein, the poundings and bombings he was to meet in two world wars, including the strafing that fractured his skull in Normandy and the suicidal poison the SS required him to take for his suspected part in the plot to kill Hitler.
Franco's pretentious posturing, too, can be reread less as an Adlerian compensation and more as a demonstration of the dignity of the daimon. "I am not a little baby-faced boy. I am El Caudillo ('the leader') of all Spain and must be accorded the respect of my calling." Whatever the calling---for not only caudillos demand respect (murderers do, too, as we learn in the chapter on the Bad Seed)---the daimon stands in dignity. Don't dis [disrespect] the daimon. A child defends its daimon's dignity. That's why even a frail child at a "tender" age refuses to submit to what it feels is unfair and untrue, and reacts so savagely to abusive misperceptions. The idea of childhood abuse needs to be expanded beyond the sexual kind---which is so vicious not principally because it is sexual, but because it abuses the dignity at the core of personality, that acorn of myth.
Motivation Theory
Although I condemned the compensation theory of calling, the theory of motivation finds support in our anecdotal evidence. Eminent people whose lives present the most striking examples of calling are characterized, according to the study of creativity by Harvard professor of psychiatry Albert Rothenberg, by one supreme factor. He rules out intelligence, temperament, personality type, introversion, inheritance, early environment, inspiration, obsession, mental disorder: All these may or may not be present, may contribute, may be strongly dominant, but only motivation is "absolutely, 'across the board,' present in all."
Is not psychology's "motivation" the push in the acorn of the oak---or better, the oakness of the acorn? Oaks bear acorns, but acorns are pregnant with oaks.
pick up again on p. 28:
Extraordinary people display calling most evidently. Perhaps that's why they fascinate. Perhaps, too, they are extraordinary because their calling comes through so clearly and they are so loyal to it. They serve as exemplars of calling and its strength, and also of keeping faith with its signals.
They seem to have no other choice. Canetti had to have letters and words; how else could he ever be a writer? Franco had to be as physically tough as any cadet in the school. Barbara McClintock and Yehudi Menuhin demanded real tools; they had to get their hands started. Extraordinary people bear the better witness because they show what ordinary mortals simply can't. We seem to have less motivation and more distraction. Yet our destiny is driven by the same universal engine. Extraordinary people are not a different category; the workings of this engine in them are simply more transparent.
Our interest therefore is less in these people and their "personalities" than it is in the extraordinary factor of fate itself---how it arrives and shows itself, what it demands, and its side effects. We look to these biographies for manifestations of destiny.
Clearly then, we are not engaged in a worship of the rich and famous or in a study of creativity and genius, of why Mozart and van Gogh were as they were. A genius belongs to everyone. No person is a genius or can be a genius, because the genius or daimon or angel is an invisible nonhuman escort, not the person with whom the genius lives.
pick up again on p. 33:
Case histories do demonstrate more what's wrong with psychology than with its cases. The clinical stories show how usual psychology---and we are each affected by its style of thought---draws its conclusions by working backward from the ordinary to the extraordinary, taking the "extra" right out of it.
Among the epigraphs at the opening of this book was one by Edgar Wind, perhaps the greatest scholar of the renaissance imagination. It's worth repeating:
A method that fits the small work but not the great has obviously started at the wrong end. . . . . the commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but the exceptional cannot be understood by amplifying the commonplace. Both logically and causally the exceptional is crucial because it introduces . . . the more comprehensive category.
If the exceptional is the more comprehensive category, then we may comprehend more, by studying an extraordinary person, about the deeps of human nature than by studying even the largest sample of accumulated cases. A single anecdote lights up the whole field of vision. Manolete in the kitchen cowering from the bulls in his destiny; Canetti taking to the ax for the sake of words. Then we may see disturbances in children less as developmental problems than as revelatory emblems.
Each biographical bit exemplifies in a nutshell this book's main thesis: We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives. I am intending to assault the conventions of biographical perception, which insist that time and the past determine your day.
Ever since Herodotus and Thucydides invented history and the Bible told who begat whom, all Western things are chronicled by time. About time, the Hebrews and the Hellenes agree; time really counts. Progress depends on it, evolution requires it, measurements, without which we would have no physical sciences, are based on it. The very notions of "new" and "improved" that lure your consumer desire are inventions of time. The Western mind has trouble stopping its clock. It conceives its inmost life as a biological clock and its heart as a ticker. The electronic gadget on the wrist encloses in a concrete symbol the Western time-bound mind. The word "watch" is cognate with "awake" and "aware." We do believe that all things move through time, which carries on its river all the world, all the species, and each individual life. So when we look at anything, we see it in time. We even seem to see time itself.
To change how we see things takes falling in love. Then the same becomes altogether different. Like love, a shift of sight can be redemptive---not in the religious sense of saving the soul for heaven, but in a more pragmatic sense. As at a redemption center, you get something back for what you had misperceived as merely worthless. The noisome symptoms of every day can be revalued and their usefulness reclaimed.
Symptoms in our culture mean something "bad." The word itself merely means a combination (sym) of accidental happenings, neither good nor bad, that coalesces this with that into an image. As judgment of their value need not be moral, so their province need not be medical. As accidental happenings, symptoms do not belong first to disease but to destiny.
If symptoms---even if they show suffering---are not primarily regarded as something wrong or bad in a child, then we can release imagination from its focus on fixing a child's symptoms. We can end that perversion of the medical adage "Like cures like": Doing something wrong to a child to get rid of the wrong that is the symptom. If the symptom is not "bad" we do not have to use bad methods to make it go away.
Sophisticated and superstitious therapists often wonder where a symptom goes when it goes away. Is it really gone? Will it come back in another form? And now that it's gone, what might it really have been trying to express? These wonderings show a sense that there is a "something else" in a symptom besides its asocial, dysfunctional, and handicapping badness.
These wonderings open the eye toward an invisible intention in a symptom, so that we can regard the symptom less anxiously, less (moralistically) as a wrong, and more simply as a phenomenon (which meant, originally, something that shows, shines, lights up, brightens, appears to be seen). A symptom wants to be looked at, not only looked into.
A restructuring of perception is what I am after in this book. I want us to see the child we were, the adult we are, and the children who require us in one way or another, in a light that shifts the valences from curse to blessing, or if not blessing at least symptom of calling.
Beauty
Of all psychology's sins, the most mortal is its neglect of beauty. There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books. Again, psychology fails what it studies. Neither social psychology, experimental psychology, nor therapeutic psychology find a place for the aesthetic appreciation of a life story. Their tasks are investigation and explanation, and should an aesthetic phenomenon pop up in any of their material (and not only in the aesthetically dedicated, like Jackson Pollock, Colette, or Manolete) it will be accounted for by a psychology that is without aesthetic sensitivity to begin with.
Each Twist of fate may have its interpretation, but it also has its beauty. Just look at the image: Menuhin stomping away from the metal-stringed toy; Softy Stefansson sailing his boats in a tub; jug-eared and bony Gandhiji with all his fears. Life as images does not ask for family dynamics or genetic dispositions. Even before there are life stories, lives display themselves as images. They ask first to be seen. Even if each image is indeed pregnant with meanings and subject to dissecting analysis, should we jump to the meanings without appreciating the image, we have lost a pleasure that cannot be recovered by the very best of interpretations. We have also taken the pleasure out of the life we are regarding; the display of its beauty has become irrelevant to its meaning.
pick up again on p. 37:
As evidence of this book's attempt to exit the mortuary is the absence from these pages of the contemporary language of psychology. Except where set apart in quotation marks to keep from contaminating a sentence with psychological morbidities, you will not find any of these infectious agents: performance, growth, creativity, thresholds, continuum, response levels, integration, identity, development, validation, boundaries, coping measures, operant conditioning, variance, subjectivity, adjustment, verifiable results, test results, emergence, hope. You will find few diagnostic labels and no acronyms. This is a psychology book without the word "problem." Little mention of "ego," of "consciousness," and none of "experience"! I have also tried to prevent the most pernicious (destructive) term of all, "self," from creeping into my paragraphs. This word has a big mouth. It could have swallowed into its capacious limitlessness and without a trace all the more specific personifications such as "genius," "angel," "daimon," and "fate." And finally, I boast this triumph: a book with passionate psychological intent whose passion was not diverted into the indulgences of the gender war. As civilization subsides into its own waste deposits, it doesn't matter whether you are feminine or masculine or any composite of them. We all dissolve together. Far more urgent matters than gender call out to the passion of psychology.
So this book wants to join psychology with beauty. Though this redemptive move is a consummation devoutly to be wished, it becomes possible in general only when we make particular moves with our individual biographical images---taking our life as an image into a connection with beauty.
Looking for the acorn affects how we see each other and ourselves, letting us find some beauty in what we see and so love what we see. Thereby we may come to terms with the oddities of human character and the claims of its calling. To love this calling and to live with its demanding love on us, our very marriage to it till death, if that does, us part---that vision informs this book.
pick up again on p. 39:
To come down and look back: Let me put in a nutshell what we may so far cautiously attribute to the acorn theory. It claims that each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.
The daimon's "reminders" work in many ways. The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when it is neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life---and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
The daimon has prescience (foresight, prediction)---maybe not of particulars (that Rommel and Pollock would commit suicide, that "Granny" Eleanor would be first lady, that Canetti would receive a Nobel Prize), because it cannot manipulate happenings to accord with the image and fulfill the calling. Its prescience is therefore not perfect, but limited to the significance of the life in which it has its embodiment. It is immortal, in that it doesn't go away and can't be killed off by merely mortal explanations.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. It is slow to anchor and quick to fly. It can't shed its own supernal (celestial) calling, sensing itself both in lonely exile and in cosmic harmony. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.
We will be elaborating the acorn theory and discovering other effects of the daimon in other chapters of this book.
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