power · ares
The Power Archetype as treated across the depth-psychology corpus is no single, stable entity but a contested field of inquiry that ranges from the mythological figure of Ares — emblematic of raw, undifferentiated martial force — to Jung’s ‘power complex,’ to Hillman’s sustained effort to disaggregate and pluralize power into its many functional modes. The corpus registers a persistent tension between power conceived as dominion (the Latin dominus lineage, the despotic overlay built into Indo-European language itself) and power understood as a subtler, distributed capacity inhering in collective life, institutional structure, and psychic interiority. Guggenbuhl-Craig presses the question into the helping professions, where the healer-patient archetype encloses its own power asymmetry, vulnerable to shadow inflation. Moore situates power within the bipolar shadow forms of the King archetype, warning that unmodulated grandiosity produces the ‘Little Hitler’ effect. Hillman, the corpus’s most sustained theorist, argues that any simple definition of power ‘lulls us into quiescent passivity,’ and that Western civilization has etymologically hard-wired domination into the very act of agency. Ares in the Iliad and in Burkert’s cultic scholarship stands as the mythological anchor: the most hated of gods, embodying everything hateful in war, yet inescapably necessary to the Olympian economy. Together these voices insist that power is never neutral, never simple, and never merely personal.
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
Hillman argues that conceptual impoverishment of the power idea is itself a form of disempowerment, demanding a pluralized, psychologically sophisticated account.
, 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 demonstrates through etymology that the Western concept of power is structurally entangled with domination, making every act of agency implicitly despotic.
, 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 advances a post-domination model of power in which subtle, collective, and non-agentive forces are recognized as genuinely powerful.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis
his repressed grandiosity may explode to the surface, completely raw and primitive, completely unmodulated and very powerful. This is the man for whom the saying ‘Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is entirely accurate.
Moore locates the pathology of the Power Archetype in the shadow King’s unintegrated grandiosity, which erupts as tyranny when ego fails to maintain distance from the archetype.
, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990thesis
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 interrogates whether power is constitutive of the healer-patient archetype itself rather than merely an abuse of it, raising the possibility of an inherently archetypal power structure in helping relationships.
, 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.
Hillman invokes the Gisu concept of Litima to illustrate the inherent ambivalence of rising power energy — simultaneously destructive and generative — as a cross-cultural archetypal reality.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis
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 links the Jungian power complex to a spiritual inflation that always orients itself upward, translating archetypal power into hierarchical domination.
, 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 epigraph framing Hillman’s entire inquiry identifies the power drive as a daemonic force irreducible to biological or economic need, establishing the depth-psychological stakes of the book.
, 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 embodiment of undifferentiated, morally indefensible martial power, decisively contrasted with the ordered, purposive power of Athena.
, 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 commentary identifies Ares as an archetype of symbolic, nearly allegorical power — pure aggression divorced from honor — whose wounding reveals the limits of brute force.
, The Iliad, 2023supporting
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 traces the archaic roots of the healer’s power complex to priestly contact with transpersonal forces, arguing the power drive in medicine is archetypal rather than merely personal.
, Power in the Helping Professions, 1971supporting
It is no longer the wounded healer who confronts the ill and constellates their inner healing factor. The situation becomes crystal clear: On the one hand there is the doctor, healthy and strong, and on the other hand the patient, sick and weak.
Guggenbuhl-Craig shows that the repression of one pole of the healer-patient archetype produces a power pathology in which the doctor’s unilateral strength eliminates the therapeutic mutuality essential to healing.
, Power in the Helping Professions, 1971supporting
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 argues that the idea of power operative in contemporary business constitutes an unconscious archetypal field requiring psychological analysis as urgently as any private complex.
, 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 mythological amplification to expose how the Herculean archetype unconsciously shapes cultural assumptions about muscular, aggressive power.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
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 reframes individual powerlessness as a symptomatic resonance with collective archetypal crisis, dissolving the boundary between personal complex and cultural pathology.
, 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 situates the Power Archetype within a transpersonal, religious register, arguing that powers exceeding human will constitute the very ground of religious experience.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
I saw that Ares dominates the battle… He was made for trouble — violent, and aggressive, and insane. He promised me and Hera earlier that he would help the Greeks… But now he is colluding with the Trojans
The Iliad presents Ares as an embodiment of power that is inherently treacherous and ungovernable, shifting allegiances and defying rational control — the archetypal underside of martial force.
, The Iliad, 2023supporting
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 calls for a reflexive dismantling of the heroic power model as a precondition for imagining genuinely new modes of empowerment.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
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 clinically how shadow power operates beneath a conscious victim identity, enacting covert control while disavowing any relationship to power.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside
The main method for acquiring prestige is not the imitation of leadership or authority, but rather having a keen nose for what and who is important.
Hillman distinguishes prestige as a derivative, mimetic form of power that operates through attunement to collective forces rather than through genuine authority or inner strength.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995aside