Kinds of Power: A Guide to its Intelligent Uses

James Hillman

Currency/Doubleday, New York, 1995, 260 pp.

In his 1995 book Kinds of Power: A Guide to its Intelligent Uses, the prolific Jungian author James Hillman explores the mythologies behind our notions of power. Since our ideas about power and its connections to economics and business are largely unconscious, Hillman declares that a psychological perspective on these subjects is sorely needed.

The author derides the culturally dominant values of growth and efficiency as too dangerously one-sided. Hillman condemns the heroic American virtues – “the grandiosity of expansionism and victorious conquest” – which have led to the toxic pollution of lands and waters.

Writing from his vantage as an elder, Hillman warns against the cult of “inner growth” which “remains freighted with positive implications like fertility, hope, good health.” He asserts that “the archetypal perspective of the inner child lies at the root of the heroic growth idea.” A good part of this book is a critique of America’s manifest heroic destiny and its “addictive optimism". It also shows the author's desire to “darken its innocence.” This historic moment is full of sad and eery proof of innocence lost.

To counter the growth model, Hillman urges the need for “heroes of descent.” He writes: “Better sadness in high places than endemic depression in the population and the economy." Growth ought to move in the direction of deepening and intensification.

Efficiency is the twin sister to growth, writes the author. Short-term thinking and ends justifying means are the common practice of a culture whose primary ethic is efficiency. Cost effectiveness and profit margins may be dangerously overrated. Hillman cites the death camp at Treblinka as a stark and chilling reminder of the dehumanizing effects of the uncritical worship of efficiency.

In place of growth and efficiency, Hillman proposes the under-rated values of service and maintenance. The task of honouring service and maintenance is difficult. The word service stems from the root “servus”, slave. This is no way to become “empowered”! Productivity and a bottom-line attitude come from a heroic ethos and not from service. Where quantity overrules quality, the human element drops out.

An antidote is to summon the aesthetic dimension. The Japanese, with their “precision consciousness” and appreciation of “sensate detail,” might add some value to our notions of quality control. At its best, service would keep in mind an ideal toward which one would act. Doing a job beautifully would be a practical asset as well as a virtue. If repetition could somehow be seen as ritual, today’s cultural wasteland might be restored. Hillman is urging us toward a grander service. Service ought to turn our attention toward the planet, to what the ancients called “anima mundi”. Hillman offers this “theology of immanence” - “to see the planet as a whole and in each of its smallest components” - as a corrective to a remote notion of the sacred.

Along with service, Hillman would have us consider maintenance. We usually associate this quality with blue collar work, generally occupied by the lowest paid workers in our cities, often ethnically different and socially disadvantaged. Low maintenance encourages a hands-off, negligent sloughing-off of responsible stewardship. A disturbing lack of maintenance programs inevitably leads to incidents like last year's Walkerton, Ontario tragedy and a witches’ brew of toxic dumps, the not-in-my-back-yard phenomenon, (NIMBY) and sales of nuclear fuels and power generators overseas.

Hillman contends that we have come to so admire love and spirit that we tend to avoid thornier subjects like power. Thus we are especially vulnerable to its effects. He has us reconsider Jung’s adage: where love reigns, there is no will to power. And conversely: where the will to power dominates, love is lacking. Do idealists and romantics too willingly abjure power? He wonders why conflicts about power are so ruthless in idealistic professions whereas in business and political circles power is handled quite naturally. “So long as power is opposed to love, soul, goodness and beauty, power will indeed corrupt.” He concludes that our problem lies not in power itself but our ignorance about it!

Hillman then proceeds to describe 21 different styles of power. These styles range from control, prestige, reputation and influence, to authority, ambition, fame, charisma, veto, decision and subtle power. Hillman roots out their historical and mythological antecedents to liberate our notions of these varied forms of power.

Writing about reputation, Hillman casts us back to the Roman goddess Fama, “covered with feathers as well as with countless eyes, tongues, mouths and ears - the equipment of rumor.” Cassio, Othello’s good and valiant lieutenant, lamented his fallen status after Iago had worked him over by crying out “O, I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!” As his reputation is sullied, so his daemon, his angel, and his power are left in ruins.

Hillman gives ambition a better name by suggesting that it brings with it the quest for the impossible. He brings appetite to the domain of ambition by venturing that:

“The appetite in ambition lifts us off the ground and carries us to that verge of the farthest possibility. Perhaps... the attempts to control the appetite by diet are scientistic, unimaginative means of reducing the wings of desire and the power of ambition to the properly correct proportions of the puritan corset.”

By presenting this plethora of powers, Hillman reworks his oft-repeated theme of polytheism as the chief corrective to monotheism. Hillman argues that power is dangerous only when it is ignored, suppressed or dealt with in a monotheistic, simplistic or singular way. Perhaps we could learn to love it more!

Hillman believes two archetypes/gods dominate our world. Hermes is present by virtue of the paramount importance of trade in today’s global economy. This sometimes invisible, always transgressive, god of communication, is ever-present in the world of virtual reality. At his best, Hermes demonstrates “innovative mercurial cunning that can shift genes and outwit germs, invent sexual lures and hybrid seeds.”

On the darker side, “frankly Phallic Hermes (also) sends scurrilous anonymous messages through the internet, and shady adolescent hackers steal my thoughts and violate my privacy.“

The other deity/archetype is calm and centred Hestia. She is critical to saving our sanity, Hillman proposes. Her sense of intimacy and stillness inspire the very notion of therapy as well as the virtue of service. Hestia’s intimacy complements Hermes’ peripheral vision. While Hermes may make intuitive business leaps, no new leadership can cope without Hestia’s attention to detail.

Hillman concludes this book with the injunction that we add an “s” to “power” to give the notion greater imaginative scope. Powers can also suggest powers “beyond human agency” . By shifting our reference point beyond the individual will, we continue to try to fathom the unfathomable: religion, the state, and even psyche.

Hillman’s writings have always demonstrated his belief in the power of ideas. This book shows the therapist of ideas giving the subject of power its due. And so, once again, Hillman has challenged our Jungian perspective with worldly issues and thus helped to broaden our analytic vision with new insights.

–Murray Shugar