In the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Spring’ operates simultaneously on three distinct registers, each with its own genealogy and significance. First, and most institutionally consequential, Spring designates the flagship journal and imprint — Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, later Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture — that James Hillman and his collaborators founded as the primary organ of archetypal psychology. Dozens of foundational texts in the tradition appeared first in its pages or under the Spring Publications imprint, making the name itself a bibliographic marker of an entire intellectual lineage stretching from Zürich to Dallas. Second, in the I Ching commentaries of Ritsema/Karcher and the Taoist readings of Liu Yiming and Cleary, Spring appears as YUAN — source, origin, head — the inaugural phase of the four-stage Time Cycle (Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter, corresponding to origination/development/fruition/consummation). Here Spring is not a season but an ontological moment: the germinating, sprouting emergence from potential into incipient form, the pivot at which the yang hemicycle begins. Third, in Robert Bly’s Iron John, the golden spring figures as a sacred threshold — a site of initiation, purity, and danger. These three valences — institutional vessel, cosmological origin-point, and mythic locus — rarely converge explicitly, yet together they reveal why ‘Spring’ carries unusual weight in depth-psychological discourse.
Spring, YUAN: source, origin, head; great,
This passage establishes Spring (YUAN) as a technical divinatory term meaning source and origin — the cosmological initiating phase of the Time Cycle — and contextualizes it as inherently auspicious and without fault.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
It is the power that gives full-grown form to what is initiated or sprouted in Spring, YUAN.
This passage positions Spring/YUAN as the initiating phase of the Time Cycle whose potential is then developed through Summer, thus defining Spring as the ontological ground of all subsequent manifestation.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
The Wild Man prepared a bed of moss for the boy to sleep on, and in the morning took him to a spring. ‘Do you see this golden spring? It is clear as crystal, and full of light. I want you to sit beside it and make sure that nothing falls into it, because if that happens, it will wrong the spring.’
Bly’s retelling of the Iron John fairy tale presents the golden spring as a sacred initiatory site whose purity must be guarded, functioning mythically as a threshold between wildness and consciousness.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
Connection to the inner: sprouting energies thrusting from below, the Woody Moment beginning. Shake stirs things up to issue-forth.
This passage links the spring-like quality of new germination to the trigram Shake (thunder), describing the psychic movement of incipient energies bursting upward from the interior.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
Creation, development, fruition, consummation, the successive movements of the four seasons, all are carried out by one strength; the one is the body, the four are the function.
Liu Yiming’s Taoist commentary places Spring’s originating movement within a unified energetic cycle, arguing that the four seasons — beginning with creative emergence — express a single underlying strength whose body and function are inseparable.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
Seedburst, C111: seeds bursting forth in spring; first of the Ten Heavenly Barriers in calendar system; begin, first, number one; associated with the Woody Moment.
The lexical gloss on ‘Seedburst’ establishes spring as the moment of first emergence in the Chinese cosmological calendar, directly aligning the season with beginning, primacy, and the Woody Moment.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
A shorter version, differently arranged, appeared in Spring 1973 and Spring 1974, Copyright by Spring Publications, Inc.
This publication note documents Spring Publications as the institutional organ through which Hillman’s foundational archetypal psychology texts — here Anima — were first disseminated and copyrighted.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting
“Poetry and Psyche,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1979).. “In the Shadow of the Gods: Greek Tragedy,” Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture (1982).
This bibliographic cluster demonstrates the centrality of Spring as the primary publication venue for core archetypal psychology scholarship, with the journal’s evolving subtitle marking the field’s own conceptual development.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
“Poetry and Psyche,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1979).. “In the Shadow of the Gods: Greek Tragedy,” Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture (1982).
As in its parallel passage, this bibliography establishes Spring as the institutional home of archetypal psychology’s defining texts and the publisher that materially sustained the tradition.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
Wolfgang Giegerich, “Ontogeny = Phylogeny?” Spring 1975 (New York/Zürich: Spring Publ.), p. 118.
Hillman’s citations in Healing Fiction consistently invoke Spring Publications as the archive of archetypal psychology’s critical dialogues, including Giegerich’s early ontological arguments.
, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting
Berry, Patricia (1973). ‘On Reduction,’ Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1973).. (1974). ‘An Approach to the Dream,’ Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1974).
The bibliography maps Spring’s role as the primary venue through which core methodological articles of archetypal psychology — on reduction, dreaming, and mythic neurosis — entered the scholarly record.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
The first yuga of each cycle is a kind of Golden Age; then each yuga is worse than the last until at the end comes the ‘great dissolution,’ and then the process begins
Von Franz’s discussion of cyclical time implies the spring-like inaugural phase of each cosmic cycle as an age of wholeness, contextualizing spring-as-origin within comparative mythological temporality.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014aside
“Archetypal Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic?” In Spring 1971: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought. Zurich: Spring Publications, 1971.
This bibliographic citation marks Spring 1971 as the venue for one of Hillman’s most programmatic statements on polytheistic psychology, reinforcing Spring’s role as the definitional platform of the movement.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside