Character stands at one of the most contested intersections in the depth-psychological corpus, traversing questions of fate, soul, individuality, narrative identity, and social formation. Hillman is its most sustained theorist in this library: across The Force of Character and The Soul's Code, he argues that character is neither a moral construct nor a product of will, but the qualitative signature of the soul — the distinguishing form that makes each person irreducibly singular. Against the Victorian tradition that equated character with fashioned will (Mill) or habitual effort (James), Hillman recovers a classical sense in which character is fate — the daimonic image that accompanies and partially determines a life. Ricoeur approaches the same territory from hermeneutics: for him character is the pole of 'sameness' (idem-identity) in personal identity, intelligible only through narrative emplotment — characters are themselves plots. Fromm extends the concept sociologically, distinguishing individual character from 'social character,' the shared nucleus shaped by collective conditions. Abraham traces character formation through libidinal stages, treating it as mutable and developmental. Winnicott addresses character disorder as a hidden illness that actively implicates society. The I Ching contributes an entirely different register, treating character as a cultivated firmness achieved through the taming of instinct over time. Across these positions, the central tension is between character as given (image, daimon, fate) and character as made (habit, narrative, social formation).
we are unique because each of us has, or is, a specific character that stays the same… Since uniqueness depends on the qualitative differences forming the consistent sameness of your individuality, the idea of character is necessary
Hillman grounds personal uniqueness not in numerical individuation but in the qualitative, enduring sameness of character, making character the necessary condition for individuality itself.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
character is always qualified. It consists in traits, images, qualities. By definition, character refers to the distinguishing marks that make a thing recognizably different from every other thing.
Hillman redefines character away from morality toward qualitative distinctiveness, arguing that even a reprehensible set of traits constitutes character, while the truly characterless person is simply blank.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
'Character is the finite openness of my existence taken as a whole'… Character, I would say today, is sameness in mineness.
Ricoeur identifies character as the pole of idem-identity — the constitutive partiality and finitude that marks lived existence against the infinite horizon of happiness.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
The decisive step in the direction of a narrative conception of personal identity is taken when one passes from the action to the character… characters, we will say, are themselves plots.
Ricoeur argues that character is a narrative category whose identity is constituted through emplotment, making the story the ground of the person rather than the reverse.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Character was the province of moralists, the Will writ large, and manly men… 'A character is a completely fashioned will.'
Hillman situates the Victorian conception of character — as disciplined will formed through habit — as the tradition against which depth-psychological accounts must argue.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
'Character is fate.' 'Character for man is destiny.' 'Habit for man, God.'
Hillman opens his engagement with the Heraclitean formula 'character is fate,' linking it to the daimonic tradition in which character and destiny are indistinguishable.
, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
we deal with the character structure of the members of the group… that part of their character structure that is common to most members of the group. We can call this character the social character.
Fromm introduces 'social character' as the shared nucleus of traits shaped by common economic and cultural conditions, distinguishing it from individual character.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.
Ricoeur completes his argument that character's identity is not prior to narrative but constituted by it, with chance transmuted into fate through the concordant-discordant synthesis of emplotment.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
He has also succeeded in separating the practices of law, science, medicine, and commerce from the character of the practitioner… The one death that has caused so much death in the past century is the death of character.
Hillman diagnoses modernity's crisis as the systematic abstraction of character from practice, culminating in what he calls 'the death of character' with catastrophic historical consequences.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
The soul is concerned with goodness and beauty, with justice and courage, with friendship and loyalty. Character analysis and soul descriptions employ common terms.
Hillman draws on Aristotle and Feynman alike to argue that the language of character and the language of soul are coextensive — both describe the form that maintains individual sameness.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
Good habits to make good character and therefore a good life cannot conform with Boy Scout principles. Instead the ethics will be daimonic and inscrutable.
Hillman argues that because character is daimonic in origin, the ethics it generates are irreducible to conventional moral standards and may include apparently transgressive acts.
, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
they show the connection between certain features of character and a particular level of libidinal organization… they are evidence of the mutability of character; the character of a person can on occasion rise to a higher level of development or sink to a lower one.
Abraham presents character formation as a developmental process tied to libidinal stages, arguing for its essential mutability while tracing the final stage's inheritance from all preceding ones.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
Character could become an iron law, permitting only those acts that are 'in character.'… Is there no room for the spontaneous, for moments of speaking, thinking, and feeling quite 'out of character'?
Hillman cautions against reifying character into deterministic fate, acknowledging space for spontaneous acts that exceed or contradict established character patterns.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
character dissolves into stories about character. We become characters in these fictions; this implies that the very idea of character also becomes a fiction.
Hillman reaches a reflexive conclusion: character is not a fixed essence but a narrative and imaginative construction, dissolving into the stories told about it.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
Not only thinking and feeling are determined by man's character structure but also his actions… so-called rational behavior is largely determined by the character structure.
Fromm extends Freud's insight to argue that character structure — not rational deliberation — is the primary determinant of action, including behaviors that appear purely pragmatic.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
Character disorders are not schizophrenia. In character disorder there is hidden illness in the intact personality. Character disorders in some way and to some degree actively involve society.
Winnicott distinguishes character disorder from psychosis, defining it as hidden illness within an intact personality that is constitutively relational — its fate partly determined by society's response.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965supporting
most times, the angel does not shout, and instead governs the slow and quiet revelation of character… the character with which each performed the calling.
Hillman distinguishes between a specific vocational calling and character as the mode of performing any calling, arguing that character rather than job-type is the true expression of the daimon.
, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
This hexagram shows a decrease in influence of the lower faculties, the untamed instincts, in favor of the higher life of the mind. Here we have the essence of character training.
The I Ching frames character as the result of the disciplined subordination of instinct over time, yielding a unified firmness through accumulated experience.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
greatness of character matters as much as recognition by acclaim. New writings about histor…
Hillman endorses a feminist revision of biography that locates greatness in the quality of character itself, independent of public recognition or extraordinary achievement.
, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Her personality had been defeated by the older woman's character… We can all recall a drama coach, a music teacher, a shop supervisor, an old uncle coming down hard, boring in on our character with scorn.
Hillman illustrates character as a force that operates interpersonally and trans-generationally, capable of shaping — and overwhelming — the personality of another.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
The old become strikingly memorable, ancestral representations, characters in the play of civilization, each a unique, irreplaceable figure of value… What is character, and how does it for…
Hillman frames his inquiry into aging around the central question of character, proposing that older persons become archetypal figures precisely through the consolidation and display of their character.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
We meet certain traits of character in the same people which can be traced back to a peculiar displacement within the oral sphere. Their longing to experience gratification by way of suc…
Abraham demonstrates his method of tracing specific character traits — persistent oral demandingness, clinging, impatience — to fixations at particular libidinal stages.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
the hero's individual character plays a much greater part in shaping his destiny… Hamlet is Hamlet, not because a capricious god has compelled him to move to a tragic end, but because there is a unique essence in him.
Auerbach traces in literary history the shift from external fate to inner character as the determining force in tragedy, corroborating from a literary-historical perspective the depth-psychological thesis that character is fate.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Let’s imagine we are pushed by our theme, Character, and the author's variation on that theme, his character, all the while carrying the moral, sentimental, and radical baggage that all old people have strapped on their backs.
Hillman frames his own writing as an expression of character — both his subject and his method — modeling the reflexive entanglement of the inquirer with the inquiry.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999aside
each life is formed by a particular image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny… a liberating vision of childhood troubles… themes such as fate and fatalism, character and desire.
The book's prefatory framing presents character and calling as the twin axes of Hillman's acorn theory, with character as the imaginal essence that drives vocation.
, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside