Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'psychopath' occupies a genuinely contested conceptual space, resisting reduction to any single clinical or diagnostic framework. Jung established an early, and notably permissive, boundary: the overwhelming majority of psychopaths function within the population deemed 'normal,' so that the category interrogates normalcy itself rather than demarcating a sealed pathological class. Hillman, the most sustained voice on the subject across multiple works, approaches psychopathy through the lens of the daimon, the acorn theory, and archetypal evil — arguing that conventional etiological explanations (bad parenting, hereditary taint, neurochemical deficit) systematically miss the demonic dimension of the Bad Seed. Guggenbuhl-Craig's concept of the 'emptied soul' — the absence of eros rather than the presence of shadow — provides a complementary archetypal anatomy. Hillman's underworld typology, developed in The Dream and the Underworld, frames psychopathic dream figures as permanent inhabitants of an amoral underworld, immune to dayworld ethical transformation. López-Pedraza locates psychopathy at the borderline between symbolic number and raw image-horror, suggesting a structural relationship with perversion and the uncanny. Sardello extends the category culturally, diagnosing electronic technology as the generator of a collective psychopathic soul. Across these positions, the psychopath functions less as a diagnostic object than as a depth-psychological limit-concept: the place where soul, shadow, daimon, and evil converge.
In the library
14 passages
I am using the concept of psychopathy interchangeably with that of sociopathy, preferring the former because it keeps the description to the psyche rather than relating it primarily with the field in which this 'pathic' behavior shows itself, society.
Hillman grounds psychopathy firmly in the psyche rather than the social field, frames psychopathic dream figures as morally unchangeable underworld inhabitants immune to dayworld values, and treats the concept as one of the most riddling problems in depth psychology.
Hillman, James, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
Something fundamentally human is missing. Your character, your personality inventory has a hole in it... principal and more basic is that erotic lacuna, that cold absence.
Drawing on Guggenbuhl-Craig, Hillman identifies psychopathy's essential feature not as the presence of shadow but as a specific absence — the erotic lacuna, a deprivation of eros — distinguishing it from ordinary evil.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
When the claim for the benefits of the information age is put forth, what is being stated is that with electronic technology a new soul of the world is being formed. This is true — it is the psychopathic soul. Psychopathy is a kind of programming in life, a learning
Sardello argues that electronic technology collectively produces a psychopathic soul of the world — defined by dissociation, consequence-free action, and reductive problem-solving — extending the concept from individual pathology to a civilizational condition.
Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992thesis
only a very small fraction of so-called psychopaths land in the asylum. The overwhelming majority of them constitute that part of the population which is alleged to be 'normal.'
Jung dismantles the assumption that psychopathy is a rare asylum-bound condition, placing most psychopaths within the 'normal' population and revealing the concept of normality itself as a fluctuating, imprecise construction.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis
Behind the container of symbolic numbers is that part of the psyche where those elements lurk which would otherwise be expressed in perversions, sado-masochism, sexual oddities, religious and political psychopathic behavior, or even illness.
López-Pedraza maps psychopathic behavior as eruption from the borderland between symbolic containment and raw image-horror, using the mythological figure of Hermes to delineate where symbol fails to contain and psychopathy breaks through.
López-Pedraza, Rafael, Hermes and His Children, 1977thesis
To reflect upon Hitler is to do more than present a case study in psychopathy or political tyranny... It is a ritual act of psychological discovery, an act as necessary to the claim of being a conscious human.
Hillman insists that Hitler transcends the diagnostic category of psychopathy, demanding instead a ritual act of depth-psychological reflection on demonic potential within Western civilization itself.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
A criminal psychopath was the consequence of biophysical forces and endowed with a particular physiology shared also by geniuses and artists and strongly influenced by sexual libido.
Hillman surveys the hereditary-taint tradition in psychiatry, which conflated criminal psychopathy with physiological determinism, noting that its logic justified extreme interventions and was shared paradoxically with theories of genius.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Many of the aspects which you ascribe to the puer aeternus could also be ascribed to the psychopath. What distinction do you make between the two? Quite a lot.
Von Franz directly addresses the structural overlap between the puer aeternus and the psychopath, insisting on a meaningful distinction while acknowledging that shared traits — cold brutality, social non-adaptation, exploitative behavior — make the boundary genuinely difficult to draw.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting
Many of the aspects which you ascribe to the puer aeternus could also be ascribed to the psychopath. What distinction do you make between the two? Quite a lot.
A parallel passage to the Puer Aeternus volume, confirming von Franz's careful differentiation between puer psychology and psychopathy despite their shared surface characteristics of cold affect and social non-adaptation.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting
Psychopathology can be generally defined by one catchword: concretism, taking psychological events such as delusions, hallucinations, fantasies, projections, feelings, and wishes as actually, literally, concretely real.
Hillman provides his general definition of psychopathology as concretism — the literalization of psychological events — situating the psychopathic tendency within a broader archetypal failure of symbolic imagination.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
'I was in an animal fever and I remember some of my actions only vaguely.... At the moment of the crime I wanted to tear everything.... I don't know what happened to me... seized by an uncontrollable urge.'
Through a serial killer's confession, Hillman demonstrates the daimon's deadly face — the acorn as possessing force rather than guiding angel — raising the question of daimonic agency within psychopathic violence.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Above the world is also where M. Scott Peck places some of his patients who have in common a condition that Peck calls 'evil.' He uses the term as a diagnosis: evil basically consists in arrogant, selfish narcissism or supreme willfulness.
Hillman engages Peck's diagnostic use of 'evil' as supreme willfulness, linking it to hubris and superbia, positioning the psychopathic personality's grandiosity within a long tradition of moral-psychological diagnosis.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, The Emptied Soul: The Psychopath in Everyone's Life (Woodstock, Conn.: Spring Publications, 1996).
A bibliographic reference to Guggenbuhl-Craig's key monograph on psychopathy, confirming its centrality to Hillman's theoretical apparatus and its place within the Spring Publications depth-psychology canon.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside
Bleuler's index entry situates 'psychopath' as a recognized nosological category within early twentieth-century European psychiatry, providing the clinical-diagnostic background against which depth-psychological reframings later emerged.
Bleuler, Eugen, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911aside