Animal self-presentation occupies a distinctive theoretical node in the depth-psychology library, emerging primarily through James Hillman’s sustained engagement with the Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann. Portmann’s concept of Selbstdarstellung — the self-display intrinsic to living organisms — furnished archetypal psychology with a biological warrant for its aesthetic epistemology: the animal does not merely function but presents itself as image, and this presentational act is prior to and independent of any communicative or adaptive utility. Hillman radicalized this insight by arguing that the animal’s ostentation is its fantasy of itself, its existence as an aesthetic event, and that the organic structures enabling display are genetically prior to the visual organs that perceive them. The concept dissolves the utilitarian reduction of organic form and relocates beauty as a constitutive feature of being alive. Dick Russell’s biographical account of Hillman confirms that Portmann supplied a conceptual vocabulary for speaking about the psyche’s self-presentation — in feeling, fantasy, and pathology — as displays for their own sake, beyond the ego’s instrumental concerns. The tension the corpus registers is between a naturalistic biology of form and a depth-psychological reading that treats animal display as a model for psychic inwardness made visible. The stakes are substantial: if appearance is its own purpose, then the phenomenal world is already intelligible — already ensouled — and requires an aesthetic, rather than explanatory, mode of reception.
Each animal’s ostentation is its fantasy of itself, its self-image as an aesthetic event without ulterior function… ‘Here, self-display is realized in its purest form. Appearance is the result of a very specific structure of the plasma; it is its own purpose.’
Portmann’s concept of unaddressed appearance — display without recipient or function — is presented as the foundational evidence that animal self-presentation is an aesthetic act constitutive of being alive.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
The animal’s inwardness (Innerlichkeit) is afforded by its self-display (Selbstdarstellung), that is, it presents itself as an image affording intelligibility to its surround.
Archetypal psychology formally grounds the concept of perceived presence as available inwardness in Portmann’s Selbstdarstellung, linking animal self-display to the Neoplatonic Doctrine of Signatures.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
Form, color, pattern, movement, interrelatedness reveal the self-display of animals as living images… Reading the world requires an ‘animal eye’ of aesthetic perception and an ‘animal body’ of aesthetic responses.
The same programmatic statement from the Brief Account establishes that animal self-display requires a correspondingly aesthetic perceptual faculty in the observer — the ‘animal eye.’
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
Self-presentation focuses on the aesthetic of a life, rather than the practical sociology of it… The self-presentation of the psyche in feeling, in fantasy, in pathology doesn’t serve another purpose — these are simply the colors of its wings displayed for their own sake.
Russell explicates how Portmann’s zoological findings were transposed by Hillman into depth-psychological terms, treating psychic phenomena as self-presentations without hidden purpose, beyond the ego’s concern for self-preservation.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023thesis
To be seen is as genetic as to see: the organic structures of patterning, coloring, and symmetrical display are as genetic as the ocular organs that allow seeing the display. In fact, the coat is genetically prior to the eye that sees the coat.
Hillman argues for the ontological primacy of self-presentation by inverting the common assumption that visual organs precede the forms they perceive, grounding display in biology before perception.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
This ‘animal psychology’ would be to return the ‘body’ to its ‘original animal condition,’ that is, to imagine and experience ‘body’ events as animals — although not in the fashion of Jaworski, Jacoby, etc.
Citing Jung’s Zarathustra seminar, Hillman calls for a theriomorphic imagination of bodily experience, extending animal self-presentation from zoology into somatic and psychological life.
, Animal Presences, 2008supporting
Through this inquiring conversation and this display of the image by means of its rhetoric, psyche becomes knowledgeable, noetically aware of itself… the ostentation of images, a parade of fantasies as imagination bodies forth.
Hillman transposes the biological concept of ostentation directly into psychological epistemology, treating the soul’s self-knowledge as the parade of its own images — a display analogous to animal self-presentation.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
The word geraph, seraph, from Arabic, supposedly means ‘the lovely one,’ and it was hunted and traded neither for its meat, nor for sport, but for its beauty, the coat, the long eyelashes and brush-like tail.
Through the cultural history of the giraffe, Hillman demonstrates that human response to animal beauty has historically recognized display as intrinsically valuable, independent of utility — a cultural parallel to Portmann’s biological thesis.
, Animal Presences, 2008supporting
The crab conceals its tender sweetness wholly within: who would guess the delicate articulated sectioning of its interior from the spiny, crusty, barnacle-covered, pugnacious external display.
The crab’s external display is analyzed as a form of concealment-as-presentation, illustrating that animal self-display encompasses modes of hiddenness and armor alongside ostentation.
, Animal Presences, 2008supporting
If something happened in the soul of these people that can reach the animals, that would be the best thing of all, because these animals have done so much for us for thousands of years.
Hillman articulates a reciprocal ethic implied by animal self-presentation — that animals have offered humanity food, wisdom, and skill, warranting a return of soul-attention from the human side.
, Animal Presences, 2008aside