For Hermes, whose territory is in the borderlands where many currents live side by side, there is no compartment mentality. He can commit "perjury with the most guileless face;" the baby-faced little brother is also a bare-faced liar. Borders always have two sides and Hermes thrives in this between-world. When psychologists degrade the between into a schizoid gap or a psychopathic lacuna, they eliminate Hermes altogether from their considerations. Then analysts become therapeutic bridge-builders above the gorge, working at "the problem of opposites," rather than workers in the bottom land. If we stay closer to the serpent, by means of duplicity, a kind of in-between consciousness emerges, an awareness-not of opposites-but of relations, the filiation or brotherhood of differences. Consciousness sees parallels, analogies, likenings, family resemblances. Nothing is except as it is, in its relations, and these are presented as situations (rather than as opposites). This succession of situations, whether in life, in symptoms or in dreams, requires that each darkness be interpreted in its own light and by the standards it brings with it. Individuation not as tree, spiral, child or Jungian; these paths gone. Instead, individuation as situational hermeneutics, opportunities for kairotic soul-making. It is the moments that are momentous, the pearls not their string.
— James Hillman
Hermes does not resolve the tension between opposites — he inhabits it, which is a different operation entirely. The bridge-builders Hillman names are working from a premise that the gorge is the problem: that what is split must be rejoined, that the work is integration, that somewhere downstream the opposites reconcile into a larger unity. This is a pneumatic premise, dressed in therapeutic clothing. It presupposes that the between-world is a deficiency to be corrected rather than a territory with its own intelligence.
Stay with the serpent and something else becomes possible: not synthesis but relation, which is harder to hold because it cannot be completed. Relation does not terminate. The "family resemblances" Hillman points to — borrowing the phrase Wittgenstein used to break the tyranny of essences — do not add up to a genus. Each situation arrives with its own light, its own hermeneutic demand, and that demand is not transferable to the next situation. Individuation understood this way has no shape you can track from the outside. The spiral, the tree, the progressive unfolding — these are topographies of an already-pneumatic imagination, ways of making the soul's motion legible by giving it direction. Hillman refuses the direction. What remains is the pearl: each moment complete in what it discloses, not valuable as a step toward anything further.
James Hillman·Senex & Puer·2015