Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses

Power Is Not a Resource to Be Seized but an Idea to Be Diagnosed

Hillman opens Kinds of Power with a declaration that reframes the entire project: “Ideas we have, and do not know we have, have us.” The book is not a guide to acquiring power but a psychoanalytic session conducted on the concept itself. Hillman treats the word “power” the way Freud treated a dream — as overdetermined, layered with smuggled meanings, and dangerous precisely when taken at face value. His method is phenomenological: rather than defining power and then measuring approximations to the definition, he lets the word display itself through twenty-odd cognate terms — control, prestige, authority, charisma, fearsomeness, purism — each examined as a distinct psychological style with its own mythology and shadow. The therapeutic intent is explicit: “If I define power simply as ‘control,’ I will never be able to let go of control without fear of losing power.” The simple equation Power = Force, Hillman argues, has “immeasurable consequences all through our culture from the exorbitant cost of the military budget to wife beatings and rape.” This is not moralizing; it is clinical. A culture entranced by a single definition of power is, in archetypal terms, possessed by a monotheism. The cure is pluralization — “just add an s.” This therapeutic posture toward collective ideas places Hillman in direct conversation with Jung’s insight that “where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.” But Hillman refuses Jung’s binary. He shows that love and power are not opponents but have been constructed as such by impoverished thinking, and that recognizing persuasion, influence, and generosity as genuine forms of power dissolves the antagonism entirely.

Treblinka Reveals Efficiency as the Shadow of Heroic Consciousness

The book’s most uncompromising passage uses Treblinka — not Auschwitz, not the Holocaust in general, but the specific managerial operations of extermination camp commandant Franz Stangl — to expose what efficiency worship conceals. Hillman is brutally precise: open-pit shooting was abandoned not because it was evil but because it was inefficient. Escaping gases revealed the operation; soldiers failed to shoot; victims mimicked death. The extermination camp solved these problems with industrial rationality. Hillman forces us to read Stangl’s testimony as managerial discourse: “A transport was normally dealt with in two or three hours. At twelve I had lunch.” The effect is not shock for its own sake. Hillman is demonstrating that efficiency, when elevated to an absolute value, requires the elimination of everything that impedes throughput — including conscience, complexity, and human beings themselves. This connects directly to his critique of growth ideology: the nineteenth-century heroic model of expansion and improvement, embodied by Hercules and Marduk, drives toward its own destruction. “Hercules gone mad; Jesus crucified; Oedipus blind.” The corporate parallels — GM, IBM, Kmart — are not metaphorical decoration; they are the same archetype operating at a different scale. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil hovers behind this analysis, but Hillman’s contribution is specifically archetypal: efficiency is not a neutral tool corrupted by bad actors but a mythic structure with its own telos, its own gravitational pull toward the elimination of friction, including the friction of moral thought. This resonates powerfully with Robert Moore’s analysis of shadow king energy and with Marion Woodman’s work on the tyranny of perfection in the body — all cases where an archetypal pattern, uninspected, devours what it claims to serve.

Polytheism as Organizational Psychology: The Mythical Grids Behind Every Management Style

The final third of the book reveals its deepest architecture. Hillman argues that behind every style of power lies an archetypal figure whose attributes shape perception, decision, and relationship without the conscious ego’s awareness or consent. Ares/Mars governs not only warfare but the staccato rhythms of television editing, the red car advertisements, the manic speed of disc-jockey patter. The Hermes-Hestia pairing structures the modern condition: Hermes as the god of communication, speed, boundary-crossing, and theft; Hestia as the goddess of the hearth, concentration, and interior fire. The contemporary executive lives entirely in Hermes — plugged in, doubled up with call waiting, knowing Panama but not the neighbor down the road — while therapy functions as an unconscious Hestian compensation, “centering” in the midst of mercurial dispersion. Robert Greenleaf’s servant leadership theory, Hillman suggests, is not a management innovation but a Hestian eruption within corporate culture, seeking to restore focus and intimate attention against the centrifugal force of Hermes. This polytheistic reading does something that Charles Handy’s Gods of Management attempted but could not fully achieve: it refuses to let any single mythic figure serve as the ideal. Hillman insists that “any God or Goddess can be an enemy and a killer” and that “any form of power can be destructive or constructively valuable.” There are benign despots; there is tyrannical nurture. The mother who provides too well produces passive dependence. The purist who serves the spirit with absolute dedication becomes, structurally, indistinguishable from the fanatic. This refusal of moral sorting is what separates Hillman from every business book that sorts leadership styles into good and bad columns.

Why the Plural Changes Everything

The book’s culminating argument — that the resolution of the power-versus-love debate “requires but one simple step, a move from the singular to the plural” — sounds deceptively simple. It is, in fact, the core of Hillman’s entire archetypal psychology applied to political and economic life. A monotheism of profit produces the same pathology as a monotheism of efficiency or a monotheism of heroism: it flattens the imaginal field, eliminates alternatives, and drives toward the very catastrophe it seeks to prevent. Pluralizing profit — making it accountable to beauty, to future generations, to the spirit — is not a moral correction but a psychological one, a restoration of polytheistic consciousness within the marketplace. For readers encountering depth psychology through its usual clinical or mythological portals, Kinds of Power offers something unavailable elsewhere in the tradition: a sustained demonstration that archetypal analysis applies not only to dreams, symptoms, and relationships but to the ideas that structure boardrooms, budgets, and national policy. No other work in the Hillman corpus — not Re-Visioning Psychology, not The Soul’s Code — takes the archetypal method so directly into the territory where most adults actually spend their waking lives. The book’s true audience is anyone who has felt the word “empowerment” ring hollow and suspected that the emptiness lives not in their personal psychology but in the impoverished idea of power itself.