In a nutshell, then, this book is about calling, about fate, about character, about innate image. Together they make up the "acorn theory," which holds that each-person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived. "Before it can be lived"' raises doubts about another principal paradigm: time. And time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop. It, too, must be set aside; otherwise the before In a Nutshell ~& 7 always determines the after, and you remain chained to past causes upon which you can have no effect. So this book devotes more of its time to the timeless, attempting to read a life backward as much as forward. Reading life backward enables you to see how early obsessions are the sketchy. preformation of behaviors now. Sometimes the peaks of early years are never surpassed. Reading backward means that growth is less the key biographical term than form, and that development only makes sense when it reveals a facet of the original image. Of course a human life advances from day to day, and regresses, and we do see different faculties develop and watch them wither. Still, the innate image of your fate holds all in the copresence of today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Your person is not a process or a development. You are that essential image that develops, if it does. As Picasso said, "I don't develop; I am." For this is the nature of an image, any image. It's all there at once. When you look at a face before you, at a scene out your window or a painting on the wall, you see a whole gestalt. All the parts present themselves simultaneously. One bit does not cause another bit or precede it in time. It doesn't matter whether the painter put the reddish blotches in last or first, the gray streaks as afterthoughts or as originating structure or whether they are leftover lines from a prior image on that piece of canvas: What you see is exactly what you get, all at once. And the face, too; its complexion and features form a single expression, a singular image, given all at once. So, too, the image in the acorn. You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth. This book sets out on a new course based on an old idea. Each person enters the world called.
— James Hillman
Hillman is making a move here that cuts against almost every assumption the culture carries about what it means to grow. The developmental story — you were wounded, you work on yourself, you become — is so thoroughly embedded that questioning it feels like nihilism. But Hillman's objection is not nihilism; it is a different ontology. If you are an image rather than a process, then maturation is not addition but disclosure: facets of something already whole coming into better light, or worse.
The Picasso line is doing real work. "I don't develop; I am" is not arrogance — it is a phenomenological claim about what an image is. A painting is not its chronology. The reddish blotches do not cause the gray streaks; they coexist, they belong to the same face. Hillman wants you to read your own life the way you read a canvas: the early obsessions, the eccentric early gifts, the precocious intensities that seemed to fade — these were never raw material waiting to be refined. They were the image, showing itself in rough form before the conditions existed to bear it clearly.
What resists this is the familiar logic: if I work hard enough, practice long enough, heal thoroughly enough, I will finally arrive at myself. Hillman is saying you were already there. The acorn is not a promise about the oak; it is the oak, held in a different mode of time.
James Hillman·The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling·1996