The will to power stands as one of the most contested and generative concepts traversing the depth-psychology corpus. In its Nietzschean origin — formulated most lyrically in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and elaborated through On the Genealogy of Morals — it names the single motivating principle underlying all human striving: not merely domination of others, but the fundamental drive toward self-overcoming, the sublimation of primitive aggression into self-command, and the ceaseless creation of values. Jung’s engagement with the concept is decisive for depth psychology: in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, he refuses Freud’s subordination of the power drive to Eros, insisting that the will to power is ‘just as mighty a daemon as Eros, and just as old and original.’ For Jung, the collision with the shadow in Nietzsche’s case revealed the power instinct as a genuine unconscious force, not a secondary formation. James Hillman, approaching power through a post-Jungian archetypal lens, interrogates the heroic and domination-centred models that have historically defined power discourse, arguing for subtler, soul-indexed modes. Angela Hobbs traces structural parallels between Nietzsche’s will to power and the Platonic thumos, illuminating deep continuities in Western accounts of the drive toward self-achievement. The concept thus radiates outward — through self-overcoming, sublimation, shadow, Superman, and the critique of slave morality — touching virtually every major question in depth-psychological anthropology.
The will to power is surely just as mighty a daemon as Eros, and just as old and original. A life like Nietzsche’s, lived to its fatal end with rare consistency to the nature of the underlying instinct for power, cannot simply be explained away as bogus.
Jung argues that the will to power is an irreducible, autonomous drive co-equal with Eros, demonstrated by Nietzsche’s life as its ultimate exemplar.
, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1953thesis
fear as the feeling of the absence of power, he was left with a single motivating principle for all human actions: the will to power. Sublimated will to power was now the Ariadne’s thread tracing the way out of the labyrinth of nihilism.
This passage establishes the will to power as the unified motivational principle from which all human action derives, and identifies its sublimation as the path beyond nihilism.
, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883thesis
It is not the river that is your danger and the end of your good and evil, you wisest men, it is that will itself, the will to power, the unexhausted, procreating life-will.
Zarathustra identifies the will to power as the inexhaustible generative force underlying all value-creation, more fundamental than any particular moral table or system.
, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883thesis
A table of values hangs over every people. Behold, it is the table of its overcomings; behold, it is the voice of its will to power. And… Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power.
Nietzsche presents the will to power as universally present in all living creatures, expressing itself through the creation of moral and evaluative tables.
, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883thesis
The will to power is both the striving for self-achievement and the self that must be achieved. This ‘self’, however, that is the creation and manifestation of power lies far above what we normally take it to be.
Hobbs articulates the reflexive structure of the will to power in Nietzsche — it is simultaneously drive and telos — and connects this to the Platonic thumos’s creation of an ideal self-image.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
they love victory even more: for youth longs for superiority, and victory is a kind of superiority … And they are more courageous, for they are full of thumos and hope.
Hobbs draws on Aristotle’s account of thumos-driven youth as an analogue to Nietzsche’s will to power, establishing the ancient pedigree of the drive toward superiority and self-assertion.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
power does not lie in the hands of human agents only, does not necessitate domination of the Other, and certainly… to have power one must first train the will.
Hillman critiques the reduction of power to willful domination, proposing an archetypal psychology of power that transcends the heroic, ego-centred model associated with the Nietzschean tradition.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995supporting
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 situates the psychological analysis of power as an urgent contemporary necessity, implicitly positioning his project as a corrective to simplistic will-to-power frameworks.
, 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 gestures toward the exhaustion of the heroic-domination model of power — the model most closely identified with the popular reception of the will to power.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995aside
Plato’s idea of thumos as will-power which we found in an earlier part of the Republic, is not integrated with these other ideas, either by him or by later Platonists.
Sorabji notes the philosophical-historical gap between Platonic thumos-as-will-power and later theories of volition, situating the will-to-power concept within a longer unresolved genealogy.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000aside