Necessity seizes us through images. An image has its own inherent necessity, so that the form an image takes "cannot be otherwise" - whether when we paint, move a line of verse, or when we dream. An image exists in its specific epiphany and course of behavior (the compulsion of necessity which Jung caIls "instinct"). Because the force of the image is inseparable from the image, it is spoken of as unimaged. Necessity has no image because it works in each and every image. We must not take this unimaged force literally and metaphysically, as if archetypes were in themselves unimaged, unknowable, and transcendent to their appearances. The unimaged power of the image is right in the image itself: the archetype is wholly immanent in its image. This unimaged power gives an image its compelling effect and the implacable law of its precise forming. This inexorability of the image is none other than Necessity who, as the Alcestis passage says, is herself "without image."
— James Hillman
Hillman is closing a trap that Western thought has been setting for two millennia: the idea that what is most real must be most invisible. The moment you say the archetype lives *behind* its images, transcendent to them, you have already made the move Plato made with the Forms — and you have already lost the image. The soul's power bleeds out toward a metaphysical elsewhere, and what remains in front of you, the actual dream-figure, the precise line of verse, the compulsion you cannot explain, gets demoted to symptom or symbol-pointing-beyond-itself.
The force Hillman names here is not hiding. It is not waiting to be decoded into something purer. The inexorability *is* the image — the way this face and no other face keeps returning, the way the movement of a line cannot be revised without becoming a different thought. Necessity is without image not because she transcends her appearances but because she is entirely distributed into them, present in each one without remainder. That is the harder claim, and the one that cuts against the dominant current: you cannot escape into an abstract Necessity while dismissing the image that seized you. The compelling image is already the archetype's full arrival. There is nowhere more fundamental to go.
James Hillman·Mythic Figures·2007