The Seba library treats Portmann in 8 passages, across 3 authors (including Hillman, James, von Franz, Marie-Louise, Russell, Dick).
Portmann’s approach to biology opened the way to an aesthetic reading of life’s phenomena. Form, color, pattern, movement, interrelatedness reveal the self-display of animals as living images.
Hillman establishes Portmann as a foundational ‘father’ of archetypal psychology whose biology of self-display (Selbstdarstellung) grounds the discipline’s aesthetic, imaginal epistemology.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
Portmann’s biology of living forms adds an animal dimension to the Neoplatonic idea of inherent intelligibility of all things, sometimes elaborated as the Doctrine of Signatures.
Hillman links Portmann’s zoological aesthetics to the Neoplatonic Doctrine of Signatures, positioning his biology as the naturalistic underpinning of archetypal psychology’s claim that visible forms disclose invisible potencies.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
Portmann insisted that ‘appearance, like experience, is a basic characteristic of being alive.’ All living things are urged to present themselves, display themselves, to show ostentatio.
Hillman elaborates Portmann’s core thesis that self-display is ontologically primary in living beings, using oceanic creatures with no visual organs as evidence for ‘unaddressed appearances’ — form for its own sake.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
As Adolf Portmann has said, the antlers of a stag are a nonsensical invention of nature because they are not very good as weapons… Portmann used this example to show that in nature there are not only utilitarian constructions, but also a certain amount of what he calls Selbstdarstellung.
Von Franz independently deploys Portmann’s concept of Selbstdarstellung to support a psychological reading of the stag’s pride as expressing non-adaptive, purely exhibitory natural form.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting
Portmann, of course, was focused on zoological and biological phenomena, but had discovered that tropical butterflies, for example, apparently display themselves not for any utilitarian purpose but simply for the sake of show.
Russell documents how Portmann’s empirical findings on non-utilitarian display provided Hillman with both a conceptual framework and vocabulary for a psychological aesthetics of the psyche’s self-presentation.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting
The biologist Adolf Portmann, Hillman’s other Eranos mentor besides Corbin, remained the organization’s president with the task of concluding and evaluating the proceedings.
Russell records Portmann’s institutional role as Eranos president and Hillman’s mentor, and documents the poignant scene of Portmann’s cognitive decline at his final Eranos presentation.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting
‘Psychotherapy’s Inferiority Complex’ first appeared in Eranos-Jahrbuch-46 1977, edited by Adolf Portmann and Rudolf Ritsema.
This bibliographic note documents Portmann’s editorial role in the Eranos-Jahrbuch, confirming his direct institutional relationship to key Hillman texts.
, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting
‘I could never free myself from the feeling…’: Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections p. 101 quoted by Adolf Portmann in ‘Jung’s Biology Professor: Some Recollections,’ Spring 1976.
Russell cites Portmann’s personal memoir on Jung, indicating that Portmann also served as a biographer-witness to Jung’s intellectual formation and their shared Basel scientific milieu.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023aside