The term 'Call' occupies a structurally pivotal position across the depth-psychology corpus, gathering meanings from at least four distinct registers: the Gnostic cosmological call from without, Heidegger's existential-phenomenological call of conscience, Hillman's acorn-theory notion of calling as daimonic destiny, and Campbell's mythological call to adventure. In Gnostic literature, as Jonas documents, the Call is a transmundane event — a voice penetrating the closed world to awaken the pneumatic self to its alien origin. Heidegger radically secularizes this structure: the call of conscience summons Dasein from its absorption in the 'they-self' to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, speaking in silence, bypassing public discourse. Hillman transposes the same logic into archetypal psychology, arguing that the soul's daimon issues a call that shapes character and destiny from before birth — an invisible claiming force that cannot be reduced to nature, nurture, or superego. Campbell maps the call as the threshold event that inaugurates mythological heroic transformation, and identifies its refusal as an equally consequential existential act. Together these voices articulate a tension fundamental to depth psychology: whether the call originates beyond the self (Gnostic, theological, archetypal) or from within its deepest structure (Heidegger), and whether it demands a heroic response or constitutes the very ground of authentic selfhood.
In the library
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"An Uthra calls from without and instructs Adam, the man"; "At the gate of the worlds stands Kushta (Truth) and speaks a question into the world"; "He stands at the outer rim of the worlds and calls to his elect." The transmundane penetrates the enclosure of the world
Jonas identifies the Gnostic 'Call from without' as the archetypal structure by which a transmundane voice penetrates the sealed cosmos to awaken the pneumatic elect to their alien origin.
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958thesis
each life is formed by a particular image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny, just as the mighty oak's destiny is written in the tiny acorn
Hillman's acorn theory posits calling as the central mystery of every life — the daimonic image that claims a person from before birth and orients character and fate.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
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.
Hillman characterizes the call as an unmistakable, annunciatory intrusion — an imperious summons from the soul's image that arrives as certainty of identity and vocation.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
the call has come to communicate to men? Its content is determined by its aim of "awakening," the simple naming of which may sometimes be the whole message itself
Jonas argues that the content of the Gnostic Call is awakening itself — the call does not merely announce but enacts the pneumatic self's recognition of its own alien nature.
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958thesis
the call must do its calling without any hubbub and unambiguously, leaving no foothold for curiosity. That which, by calling in this manner, gives us to understand, is the conscience.
Heidegger establishes the call of conscience as a mode of discourse that operates in silence, shattering the ambient noise of publicness to deliver Dasein to its ownmost understanding.
the call pushes it into insignificance. But the Self, which the appeal has robbed of this lodgement and hiding-place, gets brought to itself by the call.
Heidegger demonstrates that the call strips Dasein of its habitual refuge in the 'they-self,' forcing the Self into confrontation with its own uncanny Being.
there may come what I call a refusal of the call, where the summons is heard or felt, and perhaps even heeded, but for one reason or another cut off... the results are then radically different from those of the one following the call.
Campbell theorizes the call to adventure as a mythological threshold event whose refusal produces consequences as decisive as its acceptance, making the response to the call central to the hero's transformation.
Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004thesis
the more authentic the more non-relationally Dasein hears and understands its own Being-appealed-to, and the less the meaning of the call gets perverted by what one says or by what is fitting and accepted
Heidegger specifies that authentic hearing of the call demands resistance to social normalization, preserving the call's singular address from dilution by public interpretation.
The price of calling is often paid by the very circumstances in which the acorn has taken root — the body, the family, and the immediate participants in the life of the calling
Hillman acknowledges the destructive cost of responding to the daimonic call, framing collateral damage to intimate relationships as inherent to the acorn's ruthless self-actualization.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
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
Hillman grounds the call in pre-natal election — the daimon as carrier of destiny ensures that calling is ontologically prior to biographical circumstance.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
in the experience of a 'warning' conscience the tendency of its call is seen only to the extent that it remains accessible to the common sense of the "they"
Heidegger critiques the reduction of the call to a warning voice, arguing that everyday moral conscience captures only a derivative and distorted fragment of the call's full existential content.
Although the entire event blazes with importance and bears traces of Bergman's character and calling, there is no glimpse of future career, no message. There is no teleology, no determinism, no finalism.
Hillman illustrates that the call manifests as overwhelming felt significance rather than as legible telos, distinguishing his daimonic theory from deterministic or providential models.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
to know and understand which is first, to call on Thee or to praise Thee? and, again, to know Thee or to call on Thee? for who can call on Thee, not knowing Thee?
Augustine's opening aporia — whether knowledge precedes the call or the call precedes knowledge — establishes the call as a fundamental epistemological and theological structure underlying the religious dimension of depth-psychological discourse.
Levinas requires we hear a third level of call: the opening to the inter-human. The Other who suffers now speaks but cannot hear his own speech
Frank, drawing on Levinas, extends the concept of call into the ethical domain of illness narrative, where suffering itself becomes a call that demands response from the inter-human community.
Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting
Hearing his name called over and over, he dashed out into the starry, starry night
Estés deploys the motif of the called name as a narrative enactment of the soul's summons toward its wild, instinctual origin — here the seal mother's call draws the child back to his nature.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside