names
Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Name’ functions as far more than a linguistic label: it operates as a locus of ontological power, psychological identity, and sacred presence. Jung’s treatment in Symbols of Transformation establishes the foundational depth-psychological thesis—that naming is a quasi-magical act analogous to baptism, through which personality is created and power is conferred or seized. To know the secret name is to possess the named; the Rumpelstiltskin motif and the Egyptian myth of Isis and Ra exemplify this principle at the mythological level. Hillman extends the argument into a poetics of individuation: divine epithets, nicknames, and the ‘other name’ of genius all signal that a person harbors at least two identities, the civil self and the daimonic calling. Gnostic sources, particularly the Gospel of Truth as read by Meyer, push the metaphysics further—the Father’s Name is identified with the Son himself, pre-cosmically conceived and transmitted in an act of pure revelation beyond ordinary word-giving. Orthodox theology (John of Damascus, Coniaris) treats the Name of Jesus as a form of divine presence and soteriological power. Campbell documents the child’s animistic identification of name with thing, where the name inheres inside the object itself. Across these registers a central tension persists: name as arbitrary social marker versus name as intrinsic essence—a tension that organizes much of the corpus’s inquiry into identity, calling, and sacred power.
The act of naming is, like baptism, extremely important as regards the creation of personality, for a magical power has been attributed to the name since time immemorial. To know the secret name of a person is to have power over him.
Jung posits naming as a magically constitutive act that creates personality and confers power, grounding the depth-psychological valuation of the name in cross-cultural mythological evidence.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
This is the true name, which is confirmed by his authority in perfect power. This name does not derive from ordinary words or name-giving, for it is invisible. The father alone gave the son a name, because he alone saw him and he alone could name him.
The Gospel of Truth articulates a Gnostic theology in which the Father’s Name is ontologically identical with the Son, transcending ordinary linguistic designation and accessible only through divine revelation.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005thesis
The essence of the person is in the name. Part of the name is its etymon, its hidden truth buried in its root. The search for the roots of words, th
Hillman argues that the mythic divine epithet locates the essential character of a figure within its name, making etymology a psychological and theological act of revelation.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
If the ‘other name,’ other than the one in the civil records, indicates the ‘other one,’ then about whom is the biography? Is this the appeal of biography, that it is the genre for connecting the two souls, called by biographers the life and the work
Hillman treats the duality of names—civil and daimonic—as the structural problem of biography and individuation, suggesting that genius operates under a name distinct from the legal self.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
The nickname contains some inner truth that may stick through life and be perceived before the genius shows in larger style. Nicknames are not mere tokens of affection to humanize shortcomings.
Hillman argues that nicknames are pre-linguistic recognitions of the daimonic self, capturing an inner truth about the individual’s calling before it fully manifests.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
The name is a quality of the object, situated within it, and likewise known to the object. ‘Where is the name of the sun?’ ‘Inside the sun,’ a child of seven said.
Campbell documents the child’s animistic participation mystique in which name and named are ontologically fused, a stage of consciousness that parallels archaic and magical worldviews.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
There is tremendous power in the name of Jesus. St. Paul says: ‘Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved’… The power of the Jesus Prayer, then, lies in the name Jesus, ‘the name that is above every name.’
Orthodox hesychast theology treats the Name of Jesus as a vehicle of divine presence and salvific power, making invocation of the Name a transformative spiritual practice.
, Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting
I felt a powerful and deep joy on invoking the name of Jesus Christ, and I understood the meaning of his saying, ‘The Kingdom of God is within you.’… Paul Evdokimov states that the Name of God is a form of his presence.
The experiential testimony of the Pilgrim and Evdokimov’s theological formulation converge to present the Name as a sacramental mode of divine immanence.
, Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting
The identification or intimate relation of soul and name is a commonplace elsewhere and appears to lie behind the rite of calling the name over the dead and calling his name when praying for the safety of one who sneezed.
Onians demonstrates the archaic Indo-European identification of name with soul, evidenced in Roman funerary and apotropaic ritual, providing comparative mythological grounding for the depth-psychological thesis.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
From the emotional experience the infant abstracts certain elements… these abstracted elements are given a name ‘Daddy’ in other situations in which the same elements appear to be conjoined; thus a vocabulary is established. The theory I abstract is: ‘Daddy’ is the name of an hypothesis.
Bion reframes the name as an epistemological hypothesis rather than a fixed referent, grounding naming in the infant’s abstraction of conjoined emotional elements into a provisional concept.
, Learning from Experience, 1962supporting
I name a stone, I name the sun, the things themselves not being present to my senses, but their images to my memory… unless its image also were present in my memory, I could by no means recall what the sound of this name should signify.
Augustine locates the efficacy of the name in the memorial image it summons, establishing an early phenomenology of naming in which name and memory-image are inseparable.
, Confessions, 397supporting
The name which expresses His nature proves the truth of our confession of the faith. For the name, which indicates any single substance, points out also any other substance of the same kind.
John of Damascus argues that the divine Name is not merely honorific but expresses the very substance of the divine nature, making Trinitarian theology inseparable from the theology of naming.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
These words, dealing with a future time, are addressed to the carnal Israel, which is taunted with the prospect of having to surrender its name to the chosen of God. What is this name? Israel, of course.
John of Damascus treats the prophetic transfer of the name ‘Israel’ as a theological argument that sacred names encode the identity and destiny of a people or community.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
autobiography itself, is essentially duplicitous because the auto and the bio may represent two distinct tales, that of the acorn and that of the life. There may even be a third person in the complot: the act of writing, the graph.
Hillman’s discussion of autobiographical duplicity provides the narrative context for his argument that each person bears two names corresponding to two different stories of a single life.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside
She was a many-named goddess, for whose sake men esteem gold… Besides being called Theia—‘the Divine’, a word for precisely that quality by virtue of which the gods were gods—the mother of the Sun was also called Euryphaessa, ‘the widely shining’
Kerényi’s account of the Titaness Theia’s multiple names illustrates the Greek mythological principle that divine multiplicity of names reveals the full phenomenological range of a god’s power.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951aside
force, by giving it the quality of a name (‘this animal is called lion’), and thus making it into an object of thought. The general concept, we may conclude, absorbs characteristic features of all three types of noun—proper, concrete, and abstract.
Snell traces the philosophical emergence of the general concept from the three types of noun, locating the proper name as a foundational moment in the Greek development of rational abstraction.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside