The depth-psychology corpus treats ‘animal nature’ as one of its most contested and generative sites of inquiry. At one pole stands the dominant Jungian-analytical position, articulated with precision by Hillman’s critique: animal figures in dreams are routinely reduced to representations of instinctual drives, phylogenetically older psychic strata, or compensatory forces for an over-rationalized ego. Dream pigs become ‘piggish nature’; lion dreams index the power instinct. This interiorization, Hillman argues, colonizes the animal as a mirror of human psychology and erases it as an autonomous other with its own integrity. Against this stands Hillman’s archival-phenomenological counter-position—drawing on Egyptian religion, shamanic traditions, and depth-ecological thought—that animal nature is irreducibly external, possessing a lumen naturalis from which human reflective consciousness is derived rather than projected. A third current, visible in Jodorowsky’s Tarot hermeneutics and in Nichols’s Jungian commentary, treats the relationship between human and animal nature as a dynamic tension requiring neither suppression nor inflation but a carefully maintained ‘communication’ between instinctual and intellectual registers. The Stoic and Aristotelian background texts supply the philosophical grammar underlying these debates: the question of whether animal nature is simply the substrate from which rational nature departs, or whether it remains constitutive of the fully realized human being. The stakes are simultaneously cosmological, ethical, and clinical.
Psychoanalysts say that when people dream of animals, they reveal their animal nature. If you dream of a pig, it shows you that you’re piggish… You don’t have to take the animal as other.
Hillman identifies the dominant psychoanalytic reduction of animal dream-figures to reflections of the dreamer’s animal nature as a defensive maneuver that forecloses genuine encounter with the animal as a being in its own right.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
Strength teaches us that essential stakes are involved in this relationship with our animal nature and that we should not neglect this part of ourselves.
Jodorowsky argues that the Tarot card of Strength encodes an irreducible obligation to engage one’s animal nature as an equal partner in psychic life, with repression and neglect equally destructive outcomes.
, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004thesis
The dream animal compensates an overrationalized and denaturalized human condition… The instinctual basis of human nature is like an inner menagerie in which all species must be cared for.
Hillman critically exposes the contemporary Jungian orthodoxy that animal dreams function primarily as compensatory signals for the loss of instinctual grounding, arguing this framework reduces animals to instruments of ego-correction.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
The body is the original animal condition, we are all animals in the body, and so we should have an animal psychology in order to be able to live in it.
Quoting Jung’s Zarathustra seminar, Hillman grounds the necessity of a ‘theriomorphic imagination’—experiencing bodily states through animal imagery—as the proper mode of inhabiting one’s own corporeal animal nature.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
Lost is the animal as other, its ownership of itself as a self-possessed creature with its own nature not assimilable to mine.
Hillman’s central methodological objection: all interiorizing approaches—whether functionalist, symbolic, or subjective—destroy the animal’s ontological autonomy by converting its nature into a human psychological category.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
We have thrown off from our Adamic natures these animal parts. Out there roam the hyenas, gorillas, and little white lambs that we have cast from ourselves.
Drawing on Grant Watson, Hillman presents animal nature not as an evolutionary residue underlying human development but as a dimension of the Adamic self actively expelled and projected outward onto the animal kingdom.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
The integrity of the animal-man, conjuncted man and animal, the shaman… authority emanates from his horned head and fiery glance that knows nature from within the fire of his own nature.
The alchemical-shamanic figure of the conjuncted human-animal embodies an authority grounded in intimate knowledge of animal nature as an internal force, figured as Michelangelo’s horned Moses.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
There are also images like the Minotaur where you have a bull’s head and a human body… it’s so sad it makes you cry—of being caught inside that bull’s head.
Hillman distinguishes the monstrous from the healing hybrid: entrapment within animal nature, as figured by the Minotaur, produces tragedy, while integration, as in Chiron, generates wisdom and medicine.
, Animal Presences, 2008supporting
The lion can never be wholly domesticated, for he belongs to the realm of Artemis, goddess of the animals, who is herself a wild creature, untamed and unpredictable.
Nichols locates the irreducible wildness of animal nature within the archetypal domain of Artemis, cautioning that the psyche’s animal dimension resists complete civilizing without loss of its essential power.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
For archaic psychology in cultures the world over, the divine is partly animal and the animal partly divine.
Hillman invokes a cross-cultural archaic psychology in which animal nature and divinity interpenetrate, challenging post-Enlightenment frameworks that sharply separate bestial from sacred dimensions of being.
, Animal Presences, 2008supporting
We are animals and these animals are tied to our bodies. That’s why I gave many of the paintings anatomical names: to emphasize this connection of brotherhood-sisterhood.
The painter’s anatomical titling of animal images affirms that human and animal nature share a corporeal kinship whose stakes are existential: the extinction of animal others entails dimensions of human self-extinction.
, Animal Presences, 2008supporting
The Hindus do not assign the first place in the hierarchy of being to man: the elephant and lion stand higher.
Jung surveys cross-cultural mythological systems where animal nature occupies a higher ontological rank than the human, providing comparative evidence for the symbolic elevation of animal being within depth-psychological frameworks.
, Man and His Symbols, 1964supporting
The lives of all animals, even in the very early level of evolution, are shaped by what the behaviorists would call patterns… already on the animal level such patterns can collide or become confused.
Von Franz demonstrates that conflict and confusion of behavioral patterns are present at the animal level itself, grounding human psychopathology in the structural complexities of animal nature rather than in purely cultural or rational failures.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
They may be the animal compulsion in the sensate body of the world beyond human feeling, that brainless, bloodless insistence upon moving out and moving on.
Hillman posits insects as the archetype of animal compulsion operating beneath the threshold of human affect and cognition, indexing an impersonal, world-immanent dimension of animal nature.
, Animal Presences, 2008supporting
Nature is in the doghouse, an outcast from our corporate, capitalist, consumerized, commodified cosmos.
Hillman situates the contemporary diminishment of animal nature within a cultural-economic diagnosis of modernity’s rejection of the natural world as a living psychic presence.
, Animal Presences, 2008aside
The impressive performance given by the prehistoric menagerie would not be sufficiently explained if we…
Jung employs the image of a ‘prehistoric menagerie’ in the context of Job’s encounter with Yahweh, suggesting that animal nature carries numinous and pre-rational power within the divine drama itself.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958aside