Character occupies a pivotal and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus. James Hillman dominates the conversation, treating character neither as moral virtue nor as behavioural habit but as the qualitative form that constitutes individual uniqueness — the principle by which each soul is recognizably itself across time. Drawing on Heraclitus’s equation of character with fate, Hillman insists that character is inherently limited, qualified, and distinguishing; an empty or characterless person is, paradoxically, the truly ‘bad’ character. His late work frames character as the central enigma of aging and the lasting life. Erich Fromm extends the concept sociologically, distinguishing individual character structure from the ‘social character’ — the shared nucleus of traits shaped by common experience — and so situates character at the intersection of psychology and political economy. Karl Abraham grounds character formation in libidinal development, tracing anal, oral, and genital stages as sedimentary layers in the finished personality. Paul Ricoeur provides the most philosophically precise account, arguing that character is ‘sameness in mineness,’ a pole of personal identity understood through narrative emplotment. Winnicott attends to character disorder as a clinical category socially legible yet inwardly concealed. The I Ching tradition frames character as the outcome of temporal durability and the taming of instinct. Across these voices, the central tension is between character as innate form (daimonic, archetypal) and character as achieved structure (habitual, developmental, narrative).
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 argues that character is constitutively qualified and particular — a structural principle of differentiation rather than a moral category — so that a truly ‘bad’ character would be one entirely without distinguishing traits.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
we are unique qualitatively. You have your style, your history, a set of traits, and a destiny. You are essentially different from me by virtue of the lasting sameness of each of our individualized characters.
Hillman grounds individual uniqueness not in numerical distinction but in the qualitative sameness of character, arguing that without this concept individuality collapses into interchangeable units.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
Character is the finite openness of my existence taken as a whole… character is sameness in mineness.
Ricoeur defines character as the pole of personal identity that represents permanence over time — ‘sameness in mineness’ — constitutively partial and finite against the infinite intention of happiness.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
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 argues that character identity is not a fixed substrate but is narratively constituted — the emplotted story retroactively confers necessity on contingency, transmuting chance into fate.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
We can call this character the social character. The social character necessarily is less specific than the individual character… the essential nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group which has developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life common to that group.
Fromm distinguishes individual character from the ‘social character,’ a shared nucleus of traits produced by common historical conditions that shapes collective feeling, thought, and action.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
Character was the province of moralists, the Will writ large… ‘The will constitutes the man,’ he writes… ‘A character is a completely fashioned will.’
Hillman traces and critiques the Victorian conflation of character with will, identifying the tradition running from Emerson through Mill and James that reduced character to cultivated moral habit.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
To give more precision to Plato’s form, Aristotle’s soul, or Feynman’s dance, tradition often uses the language of characteristics. The soul is concerned with goodness and beauty, with justice and courage.
Hillman situates character as the traditional vocabulary used to describe the soul’s form — the maintaining principle of individual identity from Plato and Aristotle through modern physics.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
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 abstracting tendency as a lethal ‘death of character,’ arguing that the separation of practice from the character of the practitioner enabled atrocities like the gulag.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
‘Character is fate.’ ‘Character for man is destiny.’ ‘Habit for man, God.’
Hillman invokes Heraclitean formulations equating character with fate and destiny, anchoring the acorn theory’s claim that the daimon — as fate-carrying genius — is inseparable from character.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
the final stage of character-formation shows traces everywhere of its association with the preceding stages. It borrows from them whatever conduces to a favourable relation between the individual and his objects.
Abraham presents character as a developmental layering of libidinal stages, with genital character-formation selectively borrowing oral enterprise, anal perseverance, and sadistic drive-energy.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927thesis
In character disorder there is hidden illness in the intact personality. Character disorders in some way and to some degree actively involve society.
Winnicott defines character disorder as a concealed pathology within an apparently intact personality that necessarily implicates society as both audience and determinant of its fate.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis
A character is the one who performs the action in the narrative. The category of character is therefore a narrative category as well… characters, we will say, are themselves plots.
Ricoeur establishes character as an irreducibly narrative category whose identity is derived from and constituted by the plot structure of the story in which it acts.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Character could become an iron law, permitting only those acts that are ‘in character.’ In that case, the idea of character engenders little waves of repression.
Hillman warns against reifying character into a deterministic iron law that forecloses spontaneity, acknowledging that the concept risks becoming an instrument of self-suppression.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
Debbie knew in her bones: Her personality had been defeated by the older woman’s character… boring in on our character with scorn.
Hillman illustrates character’s force as something viscerally felt and interpersonally transmissible — a formative power that older character exercises upon younger personality.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
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 rooted in the daimon, the ethics it generates are irreducibly individual and daimonic, resistant to standardized moral codes.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
most times, the angel does not shout, and instead governs the slow and quiet revelation of character… not simply the pronounced calling to show business… but the character with which each performed the calling.
Hillman distinguishes vocation from the character with which it is performed, arguing that character is the daimon’s quiet governing of how one inhabits one’s calling.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
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 arrives at a reflexive conclusion: character is ultimately inseparable from the narratives and imaginative fictions through which it is perceived and transmitted.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
What is character, and how does it for[m]… The old become strikingly memorable, ancestral representations, characters in the play of civilization, each a unique, irreplaceable figure of value.
Hillman frames the question of character as the fundamental inquiry that must anchor any serious understanding of aging, linking individual character to ancestral and civilizational representation.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
the determinations of activity by the dominant trends of a person’s character structure are obvious in the case of neurotics… so-called rational behavior is largely determined by the character structure.
Fromm, drawing on Freud, argues that character structure — not rational deliberation — fundamentally determines both neurotic and apparently normal behaviour.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
It means the root and stem of character. The good that shows itself below is at first quite insignificant, but it is strong enough to be able constantly to prevail in its own unique character against any temptation.
The I Ching tradition presents character as having a root that persists against external temptation, with hexagrams tracing the temporal unfolding and training of character through the taming of instinct.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
Here we have the essence of character training. The hexagram shows first the difficult thing—the taming of the instincts—then the easy phase, when character is under control.
Wilhelm’s I Ching reading frames character training as essentially the subordination of instinctual drives to higher mental life, achieved through time and durational steadiness.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
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 contrasts ancient fate-from-without with the specifically modern — Elizabethan — form in which character is the inner source of tragic destiny, anticipating depth psychology’s equation of character with fate.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
In their social behaviour these people always seem to be asking for something… they are as little to be put off by hard facts as by reasonable arguments, but continue to plead and to insist.
Abraham traces oral character traits — persistent demanding, clinging, impatience — directly to fixation at the sucking stage, demonstrating the libidinal archaeology embedded in adult character.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
greatness of character matters as much as recognition by acclaim. New writings about histor[y]…
Hillman cites feminist biographical theory to argue that character greatness is independent of public recognition, redefining mediocrity away from statistical and social norms.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
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 self-reflexively acknowledges that writing about character is itself a character-act, folding the author’s own aging disposition into 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… fate and fatalism, character and desire, family influence and freedom, and, most of all, calling.
The book’s prefatory framing situates character alongside fate, calling, and the acorn image as the central coordinates of Hillman’s theory of individual destiny.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside