Growth

The depth-psychology corpus treats ‘Growth’ not as a transparent developmental given but as a contested metaphor whose apparent self-evidence conceals multiple, often contradictory assumptions. Hillman is the dominant critical voice: across Suicide and the Soul, Kinds of Power, and Mythic Figures, he systematically dismantles the naïve, quantitative, ascensionist model — the biologistic notion that psychic development recapitulates childhood’s linear expansion — and proposes instead a richer vocabulary of deepening, intensification, repetition, shedding, and emptying. Against this critique, Neimeyer and Calhoun-Tedeschi introduce ‘posttraumatic growth’ as an empirically grounded counterpoint: genuine transformation can emerge from loss, provided that survivors engage in constructive meaning-making rather than mere restoration. Hillman’s Soul’s Code adds a topological correction, arguing that Western culture’s ascensionist bias systematically ignores the downward-rooting dimension of organic life. Spiritual traditions — represented here by Coniaris’s Orthodox Philokalia — retain growth language but redefine its telos as conformity to a divine image rather than mere increase. Neuroscientific texts (Schore, Panksepp) treat growth primarily at the cellular and neurohormonal level, supplying the biological substrate that depth psychologists are at pains to distinguish from psychological maturation. The governing tension throughout is thus between growth-as-expansion and growth-as-transformation — a distinction that carries profound clinical, philosophical, and cultural stakes.

In the library 15 passages

Growth, like evolution and development, or like any of the pregnant terms with which psychology operates — unconscious, soul, self — is a symbolic, emotionally charged word, evocative rather than descriptive, generally hortatory rather than particularly precise.

Hillman exposes ‘growth’ as a rhetorically charged symbolic term that conflates all psychological movement with linear increase, collapsing adaptation, suffering, and loss into a single compulsory developmental narrative.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

We each know intimately that the psyche grows through defeats, divorces, depressions, and that every change for the better was paid for by concomitant loss.

Hillman argues that authentic psychological growth is inseparable from loss and suffering, directly contradicting the American cultural fantasy of unending expansive improvement.

Hillman, James, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Growth as increase only, growth without death, echoes the wish for a loving Mother with ever-flowing milk from her breast. Creativity as expansive productivity has in it the omnipotent fantasies.

Hillman diagnoses the quantitative, biological model of growth as a regressive, maternally coded wish-fantasy ill-suited to adult psychological development.

Hillman, James, Suicide and the Soul, 1964thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Rather than exchanging growth for no-growth, I am adding to the list of notions with which this chapter began. I am filling in the shadow of these notions, by taking the idea of growth into profounder regions of intensification, repetition, deepening, shedding and emptying.

Hillman proposes a reconstructed concept of growth whose shadow dimensions — intensification, repetition, emptying — render it adequate to tragic and complex individual and collective experience.

Hillman, James, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Such growth and creativity cannot be measured by biological standards; it corresponds more with the patterns of spiritual development in religion, mysticism, and philosophy. Therefore the analytical process is described better as qualitative refinement than as quantitative growth.

Hillman reframes the analytical process as alchemical qualitative refinement, distinguishing psychic development categorically from biological growth models.

Hillman, James, Suicide and the Soul, 1964thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

By now, the upward idea of growth has become a biographical cliché. To be an adult is to be a grown-up. Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and a heroic one at that.

Hillman challenges the dominant ascensionist metaphor of growth by showing that organic life also moves downward, and that equating maturity with ‘growing up’ represents a culturally specific and partial heroic fantasy.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Constructive cognitive processing seems to involve finding meaning in the trauma and its aftermath and noticing that even terrible events have the potential to be growth enhancing.

Calhoun and Tedeschi argue that posttraumatic growth requires active meaning-making in which survivors reconstitute shattered belief systems following the disruption of core goals and assumptions.

Neimeyer, Robert A, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Lossthesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Posttraumatic growth has been reported by significant numbers of people who have encountered life challenges as diverse as the death of a child, the death of a spouse or parent, breast cancer, intense military combat.

The authors document the empirical breadth of posttraumatic growth across diverse categories of major loss, establishing it as a robust if paradoxical phenomenon.

Neimeyer, Robert A, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Merely growing up is not enough. We are to grow up into something that is perfectly mature, and that for us Christians, is Christ.

The Orthodox spiritual tradition redefines growth teleologically as conformity to a divine archetype, displacing biological maturation with a lifelong pneumatic process guided by the Holy Spirit.

Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Growth occurs not solely through our effort but only as we cooperate with the Spirit.

Macarius, via Coniaris, presents spiritual growth as a synergistic process between human will and divine grace, structurally analogous to depth psychology’s emphasis on the ego-Self axis.

Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Goethe’s examination of leaf growth in plants confirmed his intuition that the shape of the plant as a whole was determined in some way by the negative space around which the leaves unfold.

Hillman draws on Goethe’s morphology to introduce ‘emptying’ as a model of growth governed by negative space, paralleling Buddhist thought and offering an alternative to expansionist developmental logic.

Hillman, James, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

One hypothesis is that such individuals are more likely to view stressful circumstances as an opportunity for growth.

Johnson et al. propose that aesthetic engagement — particularly chill proneness — predisposes individuals toward a stress-related growth orientation, linking aesthetic sensitivity to adaptive reappraisal under adversity.

Johnson, Kimberley T., Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Stress-Related Growth Orientation, 2021supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the tree in its independence shows a growth where life and love are opposed.

Hillman uses the mythologem of the solitary tree to illustrate that individuated growth achieved in isolation may exact a cost to Eros and relational connection.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

a limited being is a polarizing being that possesses an indefinite dynamism of growth with respect to an amorphous milieu.

Simondon reformulates the individual not as a fixed substance but as a being whose growth consists in an ongoing polarizing dynamism relative to an undifferentiated field — a formulation resonant with Jungian individuation theory.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

it must be made clear that the endorsement of an item on a questionnaire such as ‘I have grown as a result of that experience’ cannot be concluded that in general tragedy and loss are desirable — or necessary for development — for any human being.

Neimeyer issues an important methodological caveat: the measurement of posttraumatic growth must not be read as a normative prescription that suffering is required for development.

Neimeyer, Robert A, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Lossaside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms