Treachery

Within the depth-psychology corpus, treachery occupies a remarkably complex ontological position: it is neither simply condemned as moral failure nor dismissed as pathological aberration, but is theorized as an intrinsic constituent of intimacy, individuation, and the father-son dynamic. Hillman is the dominant voice here, treating treachery not as the antithesis of love but as its uncanny companion — arising from ‘the same left side’ as love itself. His analysis in Senex & Puer grounds treachery in the structural necessity of betrayal: the father who reveals his own treacherousness performs an initiation, breaking primal trust to awaken a more differentiated consciousness in the son. Hillman further implicates treachery in the anima, associating it with nature’s amorality, hermetic cunning, and the ambiguity of the serpent’s wisdom. The corpus also registers treachery as a social and literary phenomenon: Auerbach locates it in the medieval dramatic consciousness of the Devil as traitor, while the Homeric tradition frames it through the treachery attending Agamemnon’s homecoming and the deceit required of Neoptolemus in Sophocles. The tension between treachery as psychological necessity and as ethical violation — between its generative function in individuation and its capacity to produce cynicism, paranoia, and the collapse of trust — constitutes the central dialectic through which the corpus approaches this term.

In the library 10 passages

When an analyst (or husband, lover, disciple, or friend) attempts to meet the requirements of a paranoid relationship, by giving assurances of loyalty, by ruling out treachery, he is moving surely away from love. For as we have seen and shall come to again, love and treachery come from the same left side.

Hillman argues that treachery and love are structurally co-originate, such that any attempt to expunge treachery from intimate relationship actually moves away from love rather than toward it.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

He reveals his own treacherousness, stands before his son in naked humanity, presenting a truth about fatherhood and manhood: I, a father, a man, cannot be trusted. Man is treacherous. The word is not stronger than life.

Hillman reads the father’s deliberate betrayal of the son as a revelatory act of initiation, where the disclosure of treacherousness constitutes an essential truth about mortal human nature.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

one’s cold-heartedness and sealed lips are as Eve and the serpent whose wisdom is also close to nature’s treachery. This leads me to ask whether anima-integration might not also show itself in becoming nature-like: less reliable, flowing like water in the paths of least resistance, turning answers with the wind, speaking with a double tongue.

Hillman links treachery to anima-integration and nature’s amoral indifference, suggesting that psychological maturity may include assimilating a capacity for natural, serpentine treachery rather than remaining bound to moral reliability.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The need for security within which one can expose one’s primal world, where one can deliver oneself up and not be destroyed, is basic and evident in analysis. What one longs for is not only to be contained in perfection by another who can never let one down. It goes beyond trust and b

Hillman frames the analytic relationship as one structured around the longing for inviolable containment, establishing the context in which betrayal — and implicitly treachery — becomes most devastating and most transformative.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Then the boy jumped from a very high step, just as before; but this time the father stepped back, and the boy fell flat on his face. As he picked himself up, bleeding and crying, the father said to him, ‘That will teach you: never trust a Jew, even if it’s your own father.’

The Jewish parable Hillman recounts enacts treachery as pedagogical instrument, wherein the father’s calculated betrayal of accumulated trust delivers a foundational lesson about the limits of human reliability.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

From broken idealism is patched together a tough philosophy of cynicism. It is well possible that we encounter this cynicism — especially in younger people — because enough attention has not been paid to the meaning of betrayal, especially in the transformation of the puer eternus.

Hillman identifies cynicism as the pathological residue of unprocessed betrayal, arguing that failure to work through treachery’s meaning arrests psychological development in the puer and forecloses further growth of feeling life.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

‘Don’t you believe him,’ says Adam emphatically, ‘he is a traitor, I know all about him!’ Eve knows all about him too, but it has never occurred to her that such a thing could be called treason. There is no moral consciousness in her as there is in Adam.

Auerbach’s reading of the medieval mystery play shows treachery being morally cognized only by Adam, while Eve’s unreflective curiosity illustrates the absence of the moral consciousness required to recognize and resist it.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The sufferings of two great heroes, by long wandering away from home (Menelaos) and by treachery and disaster on arrival (Agamemnon), both well point up the case of Odysseus in two of its different aspects.

The Odyssey’s framing uses Agamemnon’s fate — destruction through treachery upon homecoming — as an orienting counter-example that illuminates the dangers Odysseus must navigate, situating treachery at the structural heart of the nostos narrative.

Lattimore, Richmond, Odyssey of Homer, 2009supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This necessary instrument, without whose help humanity would never have had a share in salvation, could not possibly be damned by the all-good God.

Jung’s reference to the Abbé Oegger’s musings on Judas raises the question of whether the archetypal traitor-figure may be understood as a necessary agent within the economy of redemption rather than as pure moral failure.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Neoptolemus’s role will be to feign sympathy for Philoctetes on the basis of their common hatred for the Greek leaders… But the need to resort to deceit (dolos) troubles the idealistic young warrior.

Konstan’s analysis of Sophocles’ Philoctetes shows deceit and treachery generating shame in a noble character, establishing classical precedent for the psychological tension between honor and the tactical necessity of betrayal.

David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms