power · ares
The Power Archetype occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, resisting reduction to any single formulation while commanding sustained attention from Hillman, Guggenbuhl-Craig, Moore, and the mythographers who anchor the Ares figure at its center. Hillman's extended treatment in Kinds of Power is the corpus's most systematic engagement: he dismantles the unitary, domination-centered conception of power inherited through Indo-European linguistic roots and heroic mythology, arguing instead for a pluralistic, archetypal ecology of power-modes — rising, prestige, spirit, service, maintenance — none of which reduces to mere control. Guggenbuhl-Craig approaches the same problematic from the clinical angle, interrogating the power dynamics latent in the healer-patient archetype and exposing how institutional medicine constellates a pathological split between omnipotent doctor and helpless patient. Moore's Warrior-King framework triangulates power through the masculine archetypes, tracing its corruption when the King energy inflates into shadow tyranny. The mythographic tradition — Otto, Kerényi, Burkert, and Homer's Iliad — supplies the imaginal substrate: Ares as the war deity who embodies undifferentiated aggressive power, hateful to Zeus precisely because he is power without wisdom, force without telos. The key tension runs throughout: whether power is inherently dominating and hierarchical, or whether it can be reimagined as subtle, relational, and polytheistic in its manifestations.
A simple idea of power, any idea that defines it simply, lulls us into quiescent passivity, and so actually saps power. The mind needs richer foods and it likes to move subtly, like a snake or a fox
Hillman argues that reductive, monolithic definitions of power are themselves a form of disempowerment, and that psychological intelligence requires a pluralistic, archetypal approach to the concept.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis
power does not lie in the hands of human agents only, does not necessitate domination of the Other, and certainly
Hillman's central revisionary thesis: the power archetype is not exhausted by domination or sovereign agency but encompasses subtle, collective, and non-anthropocentric modes.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis
Already hierarchy and subordination, even despotism, are built into this idea of power. In the Western tradition — expressed in the language we all inherit the moment we speak English — we believe that agency, to do, to act, involves bossing, dominion, lording it over
Hillman traces the domination-model of power to its Indo-European linguistic roots, showing that the very word encodes a patriarchal and despotic archetypal structure.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis
Health and sickness, the healer and the ill, doctor and patient, are all archetypal motifs. Does power belong to the archetype of healer-patient as it does to the archetype of king-subject?
Guggenbuhl-Craig poses the foundational question of whether power is intrinsic to the healer-patient archetype itself, or whether it represents a pathological distortion of that relationship.
, Power in the Helping Professions, 1971thesis
Litima is the violent emotion peculiar to the masculine part of things that is the source of quarrels, ruthless competition, possessiveness, power-driveness, and brutality and that is also the source of independence, courage, upstandingness, and meaningful ideals.
Through the Gisu concept of Litima, Hillman identifies the ambivalent archetypal core of rising masculine power — simultaneously destructive and generative, brutality and idealism sharing a single root.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis
This is the man for whom the saying 'Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely' is entirely accurate.
Moore demonstrates how repressed grandiosity erupts as shadow King tyranny, illustrating the archetypal pathology that results when the power archetype inflates without the modulating ego-distance the mature masculine requires.
, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990thesis
He begins to have the impression that weakness, illness and wounds have nothing to do with him. He feels himself to be the strong healer; the only wounds are those of the patients
Guggenbuhl-Craig describes the pathological splitting of the healer-patient archetype in which the physician identifies exclusively with the power pole, suppressing the wounded-healer dimension.
, Power in the Helping Professions, 1971supporting
Remember Jung's definition of the power complex with which this Part began? The key word was 'above.' Spirit speaks in absolutes. It subordinates all that is below.
Hillman connects Jung's power complex directly to the archetypal language of spirit — verticality, absolutism, subordination — tracing how the spirit archetype and power archetype converge in the will to ascend above.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
the great hero Hercules, a mythical figure who provides a backdrop for much of our male, muscular, untiring, slaughtering, energetic sense of power, was classically called a 'beef eater.'
Hillman uses mythic figures as archetypal grids for analyzing cultural expressions of power, showing how Hercules condenses the heroic-muscular power fantasy that underlies contemporary business ideology.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
Ares embodies everything that is hateful in war; the splendour of victory, Nike, is reserved for Athena. Ares' home is accordingly located in the wild, barbarous land of Thrace.
Burkert establishes Ares as the mythological archetype of undiscriminating, brutish martial power — power divorced from wisdom and victory — in explicit contrast to Athena's strategic intelligence.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
Ares, the war god who inspires men on the battlefield with joy in battle and the intense desire for slaughter... Ares and Aphrodite lack honor because they are so closely associated with the
The Iliad's framing of Ares as the archetypal force of aggressive power — motivating the Trojan War itself — establishes the mythic substrate from which depth-psychological treatments of the power archetype draw.
, The Iliad, 2023supporting
Do not be scared of Ares, nor any of the other deathless gods... He was made for trouble — violent, and aggressive, and insane. He promised me and Hera earlier that he would help the Greeks
Athena's characterization of Ares as inherently violent, unreliable, and insane dramatizes the mythic conception of raw power as ungovernable — a force requiring intelligence to harness or oppose.
, The Iliad, 2023supporting
the idea which sustains its power — the idea of power itself — must become a focus for any psychology that would try to understand the members of contemporary society.
Hillman identifies the psychological analysis of the power idea as a civilizational necessity, situating the power archetype at the core of contemporary collective unconscious dynamics.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
medicine men were always regarded as powerful figures who did not hesitate to resort to any means in order to retain this power. The medicine man's power, and lust for power, was linked to the fact that he was not only a doctor but a priest in contact with higher forces.
Guggenbuhl-Craig grounds the power archetype in the helping professions historically, showing that the doctor's power is an inheritance of the shaman's transpersonal authority — sacred power tending toward its own abuse.
, Power in the Helping Professions, 1971supporting
the feelings of failure, impotence and entrapment which assail an individual person may well be reflections in the individual of agonies in the collective soul.
Hillman argues that individual experiences of powerlessness are symptoms of collective archetypal disturbance, relocating the power complex from personal psychology to the soul of the world.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
there are powers altogether beyond human agency which other cultures acknowledge by sacrificing a chicken, by lighting a candle, giving alms, making signs, dances and gestures. These powers outside our agency... are the source of whatever we mean by the word 'God'
Hillman extends the power archetype beyond human volition entirely, encompassing transpersonal and divine forces that religious practice acknowledges through ritual acts of propitiation.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
Heroism is asked to face its own myth, thereby releasing the imagination to find other ways to think about power which has been defined for so long by heroic notions.
Hillman proposes that the heroic power archetype must undergo self-reflexive critique to release alternative, post-heroic conceptions of power adequate to contemporary organizational life.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
Neither necessity nor desire, but the love of power, is the demon of mankind. You may give men everything possible — health, food, shelter, enjoyment — but they are and remain unhappy and capricious, for the demon waits and waits; and must be satisfied.
The Nietzschean epigraph framing Hillman's entire project characterizes the power archetype as a demonic autonomous force irreducible to biological or material need.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
There were tales in which Aphrodite took to husband the war-god Ares. In other tales she was the wife of Hephaistos.
Kerényi's account of the Ares-Aphrodite-Hephaistos mythic complex situates power (Ares) in creative tension with love and craft, providing the archetypal triangle from which depth psychology draws the power-eros dialectic.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951aside
She had fallen so far down into the victim role and identified with it so fully that she was completely unaware of her efforts to control both her husband and me.
Moore illustrates how the power archetype operates unconsciously in the therapeutic relationship, surfacing through the apparent victim's concealed controlling behavior.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside
the Greek gods make up a highly differentiated and richly contrasted group... the eleven to thirteen Olympian gods form a well attuned team.
Burkert's account of the differentiated Olympian system provides the polytheistic framework within which Ares as power archetype must be understood as one node in a relational divine ecology, not an absolute.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977aside