The miracles of character in children

In The Soul’s Code psychologist James Hillman writes: “Children present the best evidence for a psychology of providence. Here I mean more than providential miracles, those amazing tales of children falling from high ledges without harm, buried under earthquake debris and surviving. Rather, I am referring to the humdrum miracles when the mark of character appears. All of a sudden and out of nowhere a child shows who she is, what he must do.

“These impulsions of destiny frequently are stifled by dysfunctional perceptions and unreceptive surroundings, so that calling appears in the myriad symptoms of difficult, self-destructive, accident-prone, ‘hyper’ children—all words invented by adults in defense of their misunderstanding. The acorn theory offers an entirely fresh way of regarding childhood disorders, less in terms of causes than of calls and less in terms of past influences than of intuitive revelations.

“In regard to children and their psychology, I want the scales of habit (and the masked hatred within the habit) to fall from our eyes. I want us to envision that what children go through has to do with finding a place in the world for their specific calling. They are trying to live two lives at once, the one they were born with and the one of the place and among the people they were born into. The entire image of a destiny is packed into a tiny acorn, the seed of a huge oak on small shoulders. And its call rings loud and persistent and is as demanding as any scolding voice from the surroundings. The call shows in the tantrums and obstinacies, in the shyness and retreats, that seem to set the child against our world but that may be protections of the world it comes with and comes from.

“This book champions children. It provides a theoretical foundation for understanding their lives, a foundation that draws its own foundations from myths, from philosophy, from other cultures, and from imagination. It seeks to make sense of children’s dysfunctions before taking these disorders by their literal labels and sending the child off for therapy.

“Without a theory that backs the child from its very beginning and without a mythology that connects each child to something before its beginning, a child enters the world as a bare product—accidental or planned, but without its own authenticity. Its disturbances can have no authenticity either, since the child does not enter the world for its own reasons, with its own project and guided by its own genius.

“The acorn theory provides a psychology of childhood. It affirms the child’s inherent uniqueness and destiny, which means first of all that the clinical data of dysfunction belong in some way to that uniqueness and destiny. Psychopathologies are as authentic as the child itself, not secondary and contingent. Given with the child, even given to the child, the clinical data are part of its gift. This means that each child is a gifted child, filled with data of all sorts, gifts peculiar to that child which show themselves in peculiar ways, often maladaptive and causing pain. So this book is about children, offering a way to regard them differently, to enter their imaginations, and to discover in their pathologies what their daimon might be indicating and what their destiny might want.

“We can put on parade,” Hillman writes,” one after another, eminent men of accomplishment and bravery who as children gave quite opposite indications. Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel—the Desert Fox, a heroic soldier, decorated with the highest medals for bravery under fire in two world wars, a field marshal, campaign veteran, tactician, and inspirer of his men in campaigns in Belgium, France, Romania, Italy, and North Africa—as a little boy was known in his family as the ‘white bear’ because he was so pale, dreamy, and slow of speech. Falling behind his classmates in primary school, he was considered lazy, inattentive, and careless.

“Robert Peary, who walked the Arctic wastes until he ‘discovered’ the North Pole, was the only son of a widow. He stayed close to home, ‘to evade boys who called him ‘Skinny’ and teased him about his fearfulness.” And Mohandas K. Gandhi, who “was a short, thin, ailing, ugly, and frightened child, afraid especially of snakes, ghosts, and the dark.”

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 3-23.