Wrinkles

Wrinkles occupy a surprisingly rich position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as somatic fact, symbolic carrier, and cultural battleground. The term appears most insistently in James Hillman’s late work on aging, where wrinkles are neither defects to be erased nor mere biological artifacts but legible marks of character’s progress upon the face — what Hillman calls a ‘work in progress.’ Against gerontology’s reductive biologism and a cosmetic-surgery culture that treats facial change as pathology, Hillman argues that the traces aging leaves are precisely what cosmetic surgery seeks to undo, thus amputating the record of a life lived. Murray Stein, writing from a Jungian developmental perspective, situates wrinkles within the broader phenomenology of midlife decline: they arrive as ‘daily reminders of mortality,’ prompting the psyche toward interiority. Esther Harding’s earlier archetypal-feminine approach finds in the wrinkled face a legibility of soul — beauty after forty expressing character rather than physical accident. Von Franz engages the image obliquely, through a literary scene in which a puer aeternus strokes the wrinkled cheeks of an old woman, enacting his projective fantasy of timeless kinship. The Platonic-mythological tradition, as mediated by Campbell, records wrinkles as the deliberate remnant left by the divine craftsman — memorial traces of primordial transformation. Across these voices, wrinkles emerge as inscriptions of time, individuation, and finitude.

In the library 11 passages

If you consider your face as one more part of the body, then it withers, crinkles, blotches, and falls away like other parts of the body. If you imagine your face as a phenomenon with a different significance … all that goes on there, after sixty especially, is a work in progress

Hillman argues that imagining facial aging — including wrinkling — as purposive rather than merely biological transforms it from deterioration into the progressive building of a character-portrait.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

color of their complexion changes or wrinkles replace the smooth contours of youth … after forty a woman’s beauty depends much less than formerly on physical features and far more on her character and disposition

Harding contends that wrinkles mark the passage from physical charm to soul-legibility, repositioning them as signs of inner being rather than aesthetic loss.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Wrinkles, sagging stomachs and breasts, aches and pains in the joints — all of these are daily reminders of mortality.

Stein situates wrinkles within the Jungian phenomenology of midlife, reading them as somatic prompts that redirect psychic energy from bodily aspiration toward the interior work of the second half of life.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The frown lines, the sleepy look, the sagging cheeks and neck were gone … Something was lost. A sense of sadness welled up.

Hillman documents the psychological cost of cosmetic erasure of aging marks, showing that the removal of wrinkles can produce identity disorientation and grief for a lost self.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth out leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval change

Campbell’s citation of the Platonic myth presents wrinkles as intentional divine residue, memorial inscriptions of the original trauma of human bisection and thus markers of ontological origin.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

to her astonishment, stroked the wrinkled cheeks of the woman. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, beaming. ‘We know each other. We are old friends.’

Von Franz uses the puer’s gesture of touching an old woman’s wrinkled face to illustrate his projective fantasy of timeless familiarity, revealing the puer’s inability to engage aging as a real, bounded phenomenon.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The Great Sag: eye pouches, double chins, jowls, pendent breasts, hanging skin on upper arms, droopy belly, butt, scrotum, labia; even the earlobes grow long toward the floor.

Hillman catalogs the gravitational changes of late life, of which wrinkling is one feature, framing the entire complex as a shift from ascent to descent that character must learn to inhabit.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

As their faces are locked, stiffened, or grossly distorted, their characters seem nonetheless to deepen and become more resolute. Face and character must not coincide; then how conceive their relation? Not as one of identity; as interplay.

Hillman argues that facial change — of which wrinkling is exemplary — does not determine character but enters into dynamic interplay with it, intensifying in old age toward a kind of marriage.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

pUOOC; [adj.] ‘shrivelled, shrunk, wrinkled’ … pualAAuc;, Ta.C; pUTlOUC; ‘wrinkles’ … pUTlO-W<JlC; [f.] ‘wrinkling’

The Greek etymological record documents an extensive lexical family for wrinkles and wrinkling, suggesting the concept’s deep linguistic rootedness in classical thought about bodily change.

Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms