Is the Oak Already in the Acorn?

There is an experiment that anyone who has ever set foot in a school laboratory remembers, even after forgetting what it was called.

Alum is dissolved in hot water to the point of saturation, and the solution is then left to cool, perfectly still, for days. To all appearances nothing happens; then, all of a sudden, out of the transparent liquid there begins to emerge what is, to all intents and purposes, a true form: angular, unpredictable in size, and yet obliged, in its geometry, to respect angles that no one has drawn.

The crystal, then, is born neither from nothing nor from a whim of matter, but from an invisible order that was already there, in the mother liquid, before the first grain became perceptible to the naked eye.

For no fewer than fifteen centuries the alchemists busied themselves with solutions and coagulations, without knowing that they were also speaking of something else. They had a name for that patient liquid in which everything is possible and, at the same time, nothing has yet happened.

Carl Gustav Jung, who devoted the last thirty years of his life to their patient and mysterious work, recognized in it a figure of the soul. And when, in his Eranos lecture of 1938, later revised in 1954, he had to explain exactly what an archetype was, he took care not to resort to mythology, much less to theology. He chose crystallography instead.

The passage is found in the ninth volume of the Collected Works, in the essay Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype, and it is worth reading in full.

Jung—contrary to what his posthumous fame as an aphorist might suggest (or rather, the use made of certain passages of his writings, pressed into service as aphorisms)—becomes anything but lapidary when the stakes are decisively raised: he proceeds by accumulation, qualifies, corrects, retraces his steps, almost as if he knew he was walking on ground so treacherous that it might give way at any moment.

The representations themselves are not inherited, he writes, but the forms; and the form of a primordial image “might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own.”

Immediately afterwards comes the definition on which everything else rests: “The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori.”

And this is where the word empty comes into play. It is probably the most misunderstood term in the entire Jungian lexicon. It does not in the least mean inert, indifferent, or powerless, but devoid of any content of its own. The archetype, in fact, does not contain an image already drawn, which life would merely have to develop like a photographic plate, but a genuine disposition to organize, according to certain patterns, the material that experience will deliver to it from one occasion to the next.

Jung, with the punctiliousness of a clinician who distrusts even his own metaphors, specifies that the axial system “determines only the stereometric structure but not the concrete form of the individual crystal.”

A crystal, in short, may grow small or large, be crooked, twinned with another, or corroded on one face. All that remains constant is the relationship between the axes.

Content, then, comes from history, from chance, from encounter, even from a wound or from mere irregularity. What we tend to call form, on the other hand, comes from within. And since a form alone is not enough to make a life, that life is not already written at the moment it begins. On this premise rests the concept that Jung regarded as the crowning achievement of his entire work and which, in its most concise definition, reads: “I use the term ‘individuation’ to denote the process that produces a psychological ‘individual,’ that is, a separate, indivisible unity, a whole.”¹

Note carefully the terminology he uses: produces. This particular verb carries its own weight, for it neither reveals, nor recalls, much less brings to light a quid that would have been fashioned elsewhere. The unity Jung speaks of does not pre-exist the path that generates it and, what is more, it always remains unfinished, since consciousness, as Jung puts it, is far from covering the totality of the psyche.

Let us now take a step forward in time.

Sixty years after that lecture, in fact, a book destined to sell hundreds of thousands of copies around the world opened by asserting the exact opposite. James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code does not take Jung as its point of departure but reaches much further back, calling on Plato and, more precisely, on the myth that closes the Republic: the tale of the soldier Er, who returned from the realm of the dead to report what he had seen there.

It is from that tale that Hillman draws the image on which he will build a good part of the book:

“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.”

Before seeing where such a statement leads, however, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider who James Hillman was, because his relationship with Jung, in the story we are telling, is anything but secondary.

An American psychologist, Hillman had trained at the Jung-Institut in Zurich, where he would later become Director of Studies, and had therefore come to know Jungian thought not as an outside observer but from within that very school. As he gradually distanced himself from it—as Jung had once done with Freud—and developed what would become archetypal psychology, he was not contesting an alien tradition, but coming to terms with the one in which he had been formed.

And this is precisely what makes the comparison so interesting. In support of his thesis, Hillman even summons Plotinus, according to whom it was we ourselves who “elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul,” following a necessity that only the forgetfulness accompanying birth prevents us from recognizing as our own.

And there is a word that some will already have noticed and which, at this point, resurfaces significantly, almost as a polemical echo of Jung’s text: empty. Except that, decades later, its sign has been completely reversed.

For Jung we come into the world—and rightly so—with archetypes empty of content, which experience alone will fill. For Hillman, by contrast, we “believe we come empty into this world,” and it is precisely this belief that needs correcting. In the acorn theory, which we shall examine later, each of us would arrive already carrying a design that life, if anything, can either disclose or betray.

The easiest conclusion, at this point, would also be the most tempting: Hillman would have silently replaced his master’s edifice, preserving its vocabulary while substantially reversing its function—the unfaithful heir who moves into the house and changes the locks. This reading does circulate, and it has the advantage of making everything very simple: The Soul’s Code would thus become a betrayal disguised as homage.

But this reading, on closer inspection, turns out to be false, because Hillman had declared everything—quite plainly—a full twenty-one years earlier.

In 1975, six years after leaving the Jung Institute in Zurich, Hillman published Re-Visioning Psychology, the book that earned him a Pulitzer nomination and which remains to this day his major theoretical work.

It is not a work of popularization but a treatise rather forbidding to the lay reader, conceived and written almost exclusively for specialists; and it contains, formulated with little room for misunderstanding, the entire reasoned objection to Jungian orthodoxy.

The target, as it turns out, is individuation itself. While the existentialists neglect process, Hillman writes, the Jungians literalize it; and he goes on to state that the process in question is not the axiomatic law of the psyche, the one aim or goal of ensouled beings, since to assert this—even as a hypothesis—or to establish it with examples means abandoning psychologizing in favor of metaphysics.

It would mean, he adds, literalizing and systematizing a single psychological idea, forgetting that individuation is a perspective: an ideational instrument, something we do not see, but see by means of. And again, with his customary irony: one can take account of psychic process without falling into the comforting teleological fallacy according to which an overall process carries us along a rock-solid road toward some great final station.

On closer examination, we realize that we are not dealing with a mere technical correction.

Hillman, in fact, is declaring his secession. And his dissent deserves respect, because it does not stem from a desire to say something new, but from a very serious epistemological observation. Individuation, he argues, is not a fact that can be observed directly; it is the lens through which the Jungians bring everything else into view—and a lens, while one is using it, tends to disappear from sight.

If it is mistaken for the very structure of the psyche, instead of being regarded as one of the many archetypal perspectives available, one forgets that even the descriptions of the process are archetypally determined.

The notion of individuation may reveal, from case to case, the child and fantasies of developmental maturation, or the hero and fantasies of enlightenment, or again the mother and fantasies of nature’s cyclicity.

Nor does the psychic polytheism that Hillman proposes as an alternative truly spring from a break with Jung, but rather from a genuine excess of fidelity. To introduce it, in fact, Hillman turns to Jung himself, to the page where the master observes that, were tendencies towards dissociation not inherent in the human psyche, no fragmentary psychic systems would ever have split off—in other words, neither spirits nor gods would ever have come into being—and that our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness: a possession by it, together with a fanatical denial that fragmentary autonomous systems exist.

From these words of the man who had, to all intents and purposes, been his master, Hillman draws the conclusion that Jung himself did not draw: if a psychology “wants to represent faithfully the soul’s actual diversity, then it may not beg the question from the beginning by insisting, with monotheistic prejudgment, upon unity of personality. The idea of unity is, after all, only one of many archetypal perspectives.”

Now, stripped of the specialists’ highly refined vocabulary, the dispute can be told in a much simpler way, one that is accessible even to readers less accustomed to skirmishes of this kind.

Let us imagine, then, two men arguing over whether the soul more closely resembles a Bildungsroman or a theatrical company. In the first case there is a protagonist who, passing through encounters, conflicts, detours, and trials of every kind, does not remain identical to himself: there is a before, there is an after, and, above all, there is a direction, however rough the path that leads from one to the other. No one knows the ending in advance (and it would be a gross error to attribute such a view to Jung), but the story nonetheless has a movement, since something, in the course of the narrative, takes shape and gradually acquires a physiognomy it did not previously possess.

The theatrical company, by contrast, suggests a very different image, which likewise deserves careful examination. On stage there is not a single protagonist surrounded by minor characters, but a plurality of actors, each bearing his own reasons, his own voice, and even—within certain limits—a genuine autonomy. One of them may certainly hold the stage longer than the others, speak louder, win the audience’s favor, and even come to believe that the whole performance was staged for him; but this claim, observed from the wings, would appear for what it is: not proof of his sovereignty, but merely the attempt of one of the characters to take over the theater.

The difference between Jung and Hillman can be conveyed (with all the caution, of course, that an analogy of this kind requires) precisely through these two rather evocative images. Jung was by no means unaware of the second: autonomous complexes, dissociative tendencies, those fragmentary psychic systems from which spirits and gods are said to have arisen, belong to his own thought and are in no way a posthumous addition by his American pupil.

And yet Jung never renounced, for all that, the other perspective: that of a psyche in which multiplicity could enter into relationship with a principle of totality, and in which individuation would describe with absolute precision the very process (never definitively completed) through which that relationship takes shape.

Hillman, for his part, carries out an even more radical operation. He takes Jung’s actors seriously—so to speak—but refuses to grant any one of them the right to turn himself into the director of the company; and—above all—he distrusts the idea that behind the confusion of voices there must necessarily lie a unitary script toward which the whole performance is oriented.

If the psyche presents itself as multiple, why on earth (and this, in essence, is his objection) should we decide in advance that that multiplicity is merely a provisional condition, destined to find its ultimate meaning in unity?

The paradox, at this point, becomes evident. Hillman moves away from Jung by means of authentically Jungian material and, at the very moment he seems to consummate his secession, he can claim to have remained faithful to something the master had seen perfectly well without, however, drawing the same conclusions from it. He does not, in short, invent the theatrical company: he finds it already on Jung’s stage. What he rejects, instead, is the need to establish—before the curtain even rises—that all those actors must eventually discover that they belong to a single story.

Re-Visioning Psychology, however, on closer inspection, is not a book that merely demolishes. Having dismissed unity as a sovereign principle, Hillman puts something far more demanding in its place.

The psyche, he maintains, must be inhabited as a populated place. Complexes, the figures that pass through our dreams, the voices that speak within us and sometimes against us, even the symptoms through which that other population claims its autonomy, are not simply malfunctions of a unitary mechanism: they belong to that “little people” of the psyche which the ego may try to silence, interpret as its own emanation, or bring under the rule of a single personality, but over which it can never definitively proclaim itself sovereign.

It is precisely for this reason that they rescue us from the literalism of the ego and from the presumption that it alone is truly real, since multiplicity is not necessarily the opposite of unity, but may be its condition. In this passage Hillman leans on the alchemists as naturally as Jung did, recalling that only what is separated can be united, and that the separatio precedes every conjunction worthy of the name, since it creates more interior space in which to move and to place events.

Then we come upon a page that, on its own, suffices to show how unjust the charge of aestheticism so often leveled at Hillman is. Soul-making, he writes, is the long therapeutic effort of lifting the weight of repression from the inhuman aspects of human nature; and becoming fully human means saving the unforgivable—saving, he specifies, in the sense of remembering, of holding fast in memory the pathologized experience and its images, including those that no therapy will ever succeed in transforming.

If we think about it carefully, there is very little that is consoling here. It is, if anything, the exact opposite of what we might call the contemporary cult of healing. Anyone who has cared for someone who will not recover knows how much harder—and how much more necessary—this can be than any promise of rebirth.

So far, then, no betrayal committed on the sly. There is a declared dissent, argued over nearly three hundred pages and accompanied by a serious proposal, which makes what happens next all the more interesting, because at that point the question no longer concerns the relationship between Hillman and Jung, but that between Hillman and himself.

The 1975 book, in fact, also contains a definition of the archetype. And, surprisingly, if read with great care, it is almost indistinguishable from Jung’s. The archetypes, writes Hillman, are the skeletal structures of the psyche, whose bones, however, are shifting constellations of light—sparks, waves, motions; they are principles of uncertainty. He then adds, once again citing his master in a decidedly approving sense, that the fact that they cannot be approached directly leads us to call them, as Jung always repeated, unknowable in themselves. Elsewhere, moreover, he reiterates that the archetypes are structures in process, that this process is multiform and mythical, and that no one-sided formulation can do it justice.

Principles of uncertainty, structures unknowable in themselves, bones that are shifting constellations. It must be said that, if we are looking for a twentieth-century paraphrase of the facultas praeformandi—that is, of the form that preforms without possessing a material existence of its own—it is by no means easy to find a better one.

And precisely on the ground where one would expect the widest rift, Hillman the theorist turns out to be more Jungian than many other Jungians. In 1975 his one, obsessive adversary is literalism, which he defines with surgical precision as the ego’s own point of view: that is, the error of taking what is an image to be literally real. In other words, the constitutive disease of the ego.

And the daimon? It too appears, already in 1975, in a sentence that seems to contain the literal seed of the 1996 book: what is at stake, Hillman writes, is not his individuation but the daimon’s; what interests the Gods is not his destiny, but the way he cares for the psychic persons entrusted to him during his life.

Very well. But we must look at the function it performs. In 1975 the daimon serves to wrest the soul from the hands of the ego and to remind us that the soul exists independently of human beings; this does not mean, however, that it is foreign to destiny. In the same book, speaking of his own daimones—a multitude of protective figures—Hillman writes that they protect his destiny, guide it, and probably are his destiny. The link, then, already exists, and it is closer than a hasty opposition would lead one to suppose.

In The Soul’s Code, some twenty years later, that same daimon “remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern,” and is therefore “the carrier of your destiny.” The novelty, then, does not lie in having introduced destiny where it was previously absent, but in having traced it back to a single individual image, chosen before birth, in place of a multitude of protectors. Rather than a reversal, what emerges is a tension between two elaborations of the same problem—and it is precisely this tension that allows us to question the Hillman of 1996 with the critical tools forged by the Hillman of 1975.

This is the most delicate point, and it goes well beyond a mere quarrel between schools of thought. If archetypes are principles of uncertainty, if literalism consists in taking—precisely—literally what belongs to the order of the image, and if, finally, the worst of presumptions consists in imposing a systematic character on a single psychological idea, then an acorn that carries within itself, from birth, the determinate design of a life risks turning, by Hillman’s own criteria, into exactly what he had warned against: a literalism, and no ordinary one. For it ends up confining the soul within individual biography, putting the single individual and his personal destiny back at the center, precisely where the 1975 book had spent nearly three hundred pages calling their primacy into question.

In short, if one wishes to look for the most severe objection to a possible literalization of the acorn, one need not necessarily step outside Hillman’s own work: some of the tools needed to formulate it had already been prepared, twenty-one years earlier, by the defendant’s own hand.

Now, however, at least two counterweights are needed, so as not to turn the argument into an indictment.

The first counterweight concerns fatalism, which Hillman, in The Soul’s Code, does not uphold at all. In the pages devoted to the Greek moira—fate understood as an allotted part, a portion—he observes that, just as fate has only a part in what happens, so the daimon occupies only a portion of our life: it calls it, but does not possess it.

It calls, then—and the nuance is far from secondary, because it exerts an attraction, points to a possible direction, but does not dispose of existence as a sovereign would. It is no accident that Hillman distinguishes with some care between catching fate’s wink, which implies reflection, attention to particulars, and the ability to recognize a sign without immediately turning it into a verdict, and fatalism proper, which he describes instead as a state of feeling, that is, a surrender of deliberation. To dismiss him as a mere determinist, therefore, is to attribute to him a thesis that the book takes express pains to avoid.

The second counterweight concerns the very nature of the 1996 book.

The Soul’s Code is not a treatise, nor does it claim to be one: it is a book written for a very wide readership, and it is no accident that it offers several levels of reading and is accessible even to non-specialists.

Let us pause to reflect, because it is here that the story becomes most instructive and ceases to concern Hillman alone.

To popularize means handing the reader an image that can be grasped even without the apparatus needed to handle it with due caution. The acorn is magnificent precisely because it is concrete, memorable, immediately translatable into a question each of us can ask about our own lives. But that very concreteness is also the soil in which this blessed literalism thrives. A principle of uncertainty is hard to narrate; an acorn is not. The price Hillman paid for being read by hundreds of thousands of people is thus, at least in part, the very coin he had spent years refusing. It would be ungenerous not to acknowledge that few authors in psychology have ever paid so conscious a price.

The question, moreover, has not remained confined to psychological studies, since over thirty years the acorn theory has slipped out of its author’s hands and become a commonplace of public discourse, often unrecognizable and far simpler than the original. It returns whenever young people are urged to discover their passion as though it were a lost object, rather than something that can also be built; whenever a successful career is narrated backwards as manifest destiny; or whenever a twenty-year-old is asked what their vocation is, in the expectation that they already know it.

It is a relapse into literalism, this time for corporate purposes. It is not Hillman’s fault—he would have been horrified by that language—but it is the risk run by every powerful image when it ceases to be an image and becomes a formula. Whoever fails to find their acorn (in a world that takes for granted that one exists) does not conclude that the theory is imprecise, but that they themselves are defective.

That Hillman was aware of the danger is shown by the most courageous part of the book, where he confronts the extreme case of “the bad seed” and chooses the biography of Adolf Hitler to illustrate it. What makes a calling demonic, we read there, is its “single-track obsession,” its “monotheistic literalism that follows one prospect only,” which ends up “perverting the larger imagination of the seed toward serial reenactments of the same act.”

The diagnosis is accurate. But note what is being diagnosed: a literalism. In short, having reached its limit case, the acorn theory meets precisely the disease its author had described in 1975 as the disease of the ego.

At this point history grants us one of its finest ironies, one that neither of the two could have foreseen. The image of the oak on which the 1996 book is built had already appeared in Jung. But there it meant almost the opposite.

In the essay The Spirit Mercurius, collected in the thirteenth volume of the Collected Works, Jung analyzes a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. A young woodcutter, beneath a great old oak, hears a voice rising from the ground, digs among the roots, and finds a sealed bottle. Out of it comes the spirit Mercurius, who, as his first token of gratitude, promises to break his neck. Jung lingers over the tree. Trees, he writes, have an individuality of their own and are therefore often synonymous with personality; and the old oak, a king of the forest, as it were, represents among the contents of the unconscious a central type, distinguished by a very strong personality. Then comes the decisive formula: the oak is the prototype of the self, a symbol of the source and goal of the individuation process.

Of the source and of the goal: both reside in the same image. This is precisely what the acorn theory, by shifting almost all the weight onto the source, risks losing. And what follows is even more interesting, because among those roots Jung places something that recalls the “bad seed” Hillman would examine half a century later. The evil spirit of the fairy tale, he observes, is confined in the roots of the self, like the secret hidden in the principium individuationis. But the oak did not generate it: nothing in the fairy tale, Jung notes, suggests that the oak, symbol of the self, grew out of the spirit in the bottle. Someone hid it there artificially, as one hides a treasure in a recognizable place in order to find it again.

Here too, the difference is anything but academic. If evil sprouts from the seed, then there really is a bad acorn, and the biography of a tyrant risks becoming the unfolding of a daimon flawed from the outset: a reading toward which the 1996 book, for all its caveats, is pushed by its own premise. If, on the other hand, evil was buried among the roots, it belongs to history and not to nature. It is not what that life was destined to be, but what was put into it—and what another story might perhaps have left sealed in the bottle.

It would not be fair, however, to leave Jung on the side of caution and Hillman on the side of daring, because Jung too had his acorn and defended it with a stubbornness greater than the ridicule it cost him. In the very years in which he was refining the doctrine of the empty archetype, he was in fact working on what is perhaps the notion most exposed to sarcasm in his entire oeuvre: synchronicity, defined as a “meaningful coincidence of two or more events” in which meaning exceeds probability. To illustrate it, in a lecture of 1951, he recounted an ordinary day. On the morning of April 1, 1949, he had noted down an inscription depicting a man above and a fish below; at noon fish was served; someone mentioned the custom of the “April fish”; in the afternoon a former patient he had not seen for months showed him pictures of fish; in the evening someone showed him a piece of embroidery with sea monsters; the following morning another former patient, absent for ten years, told him she had dreamed of a large fish. Months later, having finished writing the work in which he had used that series, he left the house, went down to the lakeshore, where he had already been several times that morning, and found there a fish about a foot long.

One may laugh at the list, and Jung knew very well that he was exposing himself to ridicule. Precisely for this reason he accompanied the anecdote with a far broader theoretical and statistical discussion, aware that the fish would stick in the memory more easily than the calculations. But a man who spends months collecting coincidences around a fish and suspects in them an acausal order is not simply the theorist of the absolute openness of form. Like Hillman, he senses in life a plot that causality alone does not seem to explain. The difference is that he does not place it inside the seed, but in the unpredictable relationship between psyche and world. Both were seeking a meaning that could not be reduced to a chain of causes. One placed it in the origin; the other, among things.

In the end, what remains is the mother liquid from which we set out. Jung, elsewhere, evokes it once more to say that without matter—the very matter of which the body is made—fantasies would be like abstract crystal lattices in a mother liquid before the process of crystallization: pure form, not yet life. In that liquid, mark well, the two authors see something different. Jung discerns in it the expectation of a structure that has yet to meet its matter and that will each time become an unrepeatable crystal, because no one can know in advance what concrete form it will take. The Hillman of 1996, by contrast, seems to read in it the outline of the oak, already dissolved, already present.

The Hillman of 1975, however, would have had an objection ready: that outline is an image, and to take it literally is to fall back into the oldest of errors. Such is the fate of truly original thinkers: to be called into question, even before their adversaries do so, by a younger version of themselves. And perhaps this is the only way in which a doctrine of the soul can prove itself alive: by remaining restless enough to contradict itself.

As for the question in the title, the fact that the same oak can figure, for Jung, as both the source and the goal suggests that it is ill-posed. But it is a question that, ill-posed or not, we will go on asking ourselves every time someone looks at us and says that we were destined for this.