Copyright © 2026 by Lois E. Wilkins, PhD, APRN
All rights reserved.
I have been thinking about what it means to bargain with the daimon, and the longer I sit with the idea, the more it seems that bargaining itself reveals a misunderstanding of the relationship. To bargain assumes that there are terms to be negotiated, concessions to be made, and some agreement that can finally be reached between what the daimon asks and what the ego is willing to give. It suggests that I can listen to the call while retaining the right to decide how much of it I will permit to enter my life. The daimon, however, does not seem to work that way.
We may spend years believing that even the deepest demands of the psyche can be negotiated because much of life teaches us to negotiate. We learn to accommodate the expectations of family, profession, culture, and relationship. We learn when to speak and when to remain silent, when to persist and when to compromise. These are necessary capacities for living in the world, but they can also lead us to believe that everything important can eventually be brought to the negotiating table. The daimon belongs to another order of relationship, one that asks something quite different of consciousness.
The Greeks understood the daimon as something intimately connected to a person’s life without being identical to the conscious personality. Depth psychology gives us another way of approaching this mystery because it recognizes that the psyche contains purposes, images, and movements that are not created by the ego. We discover them rather than invent them, often recognizing their presence only after they have appeared repeatedly in dreams, creative work, relationships, symptoms, or those peculiar turns in a life that refuse to disappear simply because we have decided to go in another direction.
This does not mean that every persistent desire should be called daimonic. Psyche contains complexes, wounds, ambitions, fears, and compensations, and any of these can speak with considerable authority. A powerful feeling is not sufficient evidence that the daimon has arrived, which is why discernment remains essential whenever we encounter something that seems to carry a claim upon us. Discernment is necessary, but discernment and bargaining are not the same thing.
Discernment allows us to remain in relationship with an image without immediately deciding what it means or what we must do about it. We can turn toward it, ask questions of it, and notice where it has appeared before. We can wait to see whether it deepens or disappears while paying attention to what gathers around it. None of this requires surrendering consciousness, and none of it places the ego outside the relationship. It asks the ego to relinquish the assumption that it must always occupy the position of mastery.
This distinction matters because bargaining is easily mistaken for dialogue. I can tell myself that I am in conversation with the daimon when I am actually trying to make it reasonable. I can ask it to wait until the timing is better, to become less disruptive, or to find a form that fits more comfortably into the life I have already constructed. Beneath these negotiations lies the hope that the unknown will eventually agree to become known on my terms, while the daimon may be asking for something much simpler and much more difficult: my attention.
There are moments when something appears in a life that does not fit the existing arrangement. A dream returns with an image we cannot explain. A piece of work that was abandoned years earlier begins asking for attention again. A room we thought had been closed opens unexpectedly, or an old question returns carrying an entirely different weight. We may discover that what seemed finished was merely waiting for us to become capable of meeting it differently.
These encounters often occur at thresholds because thresholds disturb the illusion that the life we know is the only life available to us. We stand between what has been and what has not yet taken form, while the familiar structures that once oriented us become less reliable. At such times, the desire to bargain becomes particularly strong because bargaining promises that we can cross the threshold without relinquishing our certainty about what waits on the other side. Yet the daimon offers no such certainty and gives us no map before asking us to travel.
I find this especially important when thinking about elderhood because age changes our relationship to what we believed our lives were supposed to become. Earlier years necessarily involve building a place in the world. We establish professions, relationships, homes, identities, and responsibilities while learning the complicated work of sustaining them. We spend much of our lives constructing the rooms in which we believe we will live, while elderhood may offer us another view of the house.
From this position, we may begin to see connections that were invisible while we were occupied with building. An image that followed us for decades may suddenly belong beside a choice we made years earlier. Work we believed had ended may reveal itself as preparation for work we could not yet have imagined. A book, a dream, a relationship, a loss, or a creative impulse may take its place within a larger pattern that was present long before consciousness could recognize it. Perhaps one of the gifts of elderhood is enough distance to look back through the rooms of our own lives and notice that something has been moving among them with us.
The daimon may not have been directing the journey in the way consciousness likes to imagine direction. It may have been appearing instead through repetition, interruption, attraction, resistance, and return. What we once experienced as detour may reveal another meaning when viewed across the length of a life, while what seemed accidental may begin to show a relationship to something that has been asking for our attention all along.
There is an important humility in this recognition because the ego is neither dismissed nor enthroned. We still have the responsibility to decide how we will live what comes to us. We must consider the people we love, the promises we have made, the limitations of the body, and the consequences of our actions. To claim that the daimon has spoken does not absolve us from these responsibilities, and it certainly does not turn every inner demand into an instruction that must be followed. Our responsibility may be more difficult than obedience because we are asked to remain conscious in the presence of something we cannot completely understand.
Perhaps this is where relationship with the daimon actually begins. We stop asking howto make it fit the life we have planned and begin listening for the life that has been trying to emerge within the one we are already living. We allow the image to remain an image long enough for it to speak beyond our first interpretation, and we allow the mystery to remain mysterious without turning uncertainty into failure.
The daimon can be questioned, resisted, misunderstood, and even ignored for long periods of time. It can disappear from consciousness and return years later wearing another face. What it cannot become, without losing something essential to the concept itself, is a partner in an arrangement designed to preserve the ego’s authority. Relationship asks something different because it does not require that the Other become the same as ourselves. It asks that we listen without assuming possession,
remain curious without demanding certainty, and recognize that some encounters become meaningful precisely because we cannot master them.
I no longer think the important question is what bargain we might make with the daimon. I think the more important question is whether, after all the years spent constructing a life, we can become quiet enough to recognize what has been accompanying us through it. Perhaps the daimon has never been waiting for us to agree to its terms at all. Perhaps it has been waiting for us to listen.