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The following lecture was delivered Fall of 2001 as a segment of the San Francisco Jung Institute public program entitled Jung's Map of the Soul.  It currently is available for hardcopy journal publication by arrangement with the author, who can be contacted at pwatsky@aol.com

Anima

Between the time I finished researching this presentation and actually writing my lecture the attack on the WTC occurred. Our country has begun to suffer the consequences of having been targeted by people whose collective state of mind seems antithetical to what the word "anima" usually signifies. "Anima" literally means "soul," and the definition of Jung's term that suits me best emphasizes the psychological functions of relatedness and mediation, especially between the ego and the unconscious, processes which commonly entail love. But what so starkly confronted us on September 11 expresses hate rendered palpable--archetypal evil masquerading as good in the minds of its perpetrators. Religious fundamentalism, whether Jewish, Christian, or Islamic, strives to shore up the relatively undifferentiated ego by means of primitive defenses involving splitting and projection. Such an ego instinctively fears the rest of the psyche (including the anima) and tries to ward it off by resorting to simplistic collective formulas. How then does the righteous terrorist who adores Jihad expect to find recompense? Eternally, in paradise, through limitless sex with multiple virgins. For these men there will be pie in the sky by and bye. Many of us in America who reject fundamentalist and survivalist scenarios nevertheless have indulged in our own collective fantasy--of invulnerability through unrelatedness--by isolating ourselves from the larger segment of humanity who exist in horrendous poverty, and without meaningful civil rights. We hoarded our anima, lavishing it only on ourselves and those we perceived as most like us. We are paying the price.

The New Yorker's movie critic, Anthony Lane, writing in the memorial issue of September 24, concludes with a redemptive vision:

The most important, if distressing, images to emerge from those hours are not of the raging towers, or of the vacuum where they once stood; it is the shots of people falling from the ledges, and, in particular, of two people jumping in tandem. It is impossible to tell, from the blur, what age or sex these two are, nor does that matter. What matters is the one thing we can see for sure; they are falling hand in hand. Think of Philip Larkin's poem about the stone figures carved on an English tomb, and the "sharp tender shock" of noticing they are holding hands. The final line of the poem has become a celebrated condolence, and last Tuesday--in uncounted ways, in final phone calls, in the joined hands of that couple, in circumstances that Hollywood should no longer try to match--it was proved true all over again, and, in so doing, it calmly conquered the loathing and rage in which the crime was conceived. "What will survive of us is love." New Yorker, 10/24/2001, p. 80)

Lane doesn’t mention that the man depicted in Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb,” is dressed as a warrior:

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd--
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

To date the most heartening aspect of the US reaction to the WTC assault has been its measured quality, the acceptance that we must fight to protect ourselves, but not from a position of utter hatred for a generalized other, and with compassion for noncombatants. We are struggling to achieve harmony and tolerance in this world rather than a fantasy of perfection in the next. May the anima remain with us.

That said, let's get down to work. I am assuming you have read Stein's treatment of our subject in Jung's Map of the Soul, and are familiar with the anima basics, so that I can address some of the complexities, beginning, I'm afraid, with the worst question--how to define "anima." Much of the rest of the lecture describes the processes and attributes associated with the experience of anima. It concludes with some material concerning the anima's place in psychological development and in therapy.

As we will see, practically everything Jung wrote about the anima has been challenged by various theorists, which might suggest Jung botched the job. But Jung claims to have had a rationale, and stated in 1950 that whatever ambiguity he may have perpetrated resulted from strategy, not laziness or incompetence:

The realities subsumed under the concept "anima" form an extremely dramatic content of the unconscious. It is possible to describe this concept in rational, scientific language, but in this way one entirely fails to express its living character. Therefore I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological approach and terminology. In describing the living processes of the soul, such a terminology is not only more expressive but also more exact than abstract scientific terms. (Spring, 1950, p. 5)

He postulates that "anima" is a name for psychological processes best understood from the perspective of the experiencing subject, the individual ego, upon which the entire psyche acts. We can comprehend the behavior of suicide bombers more readily if, even as non-believers, we enter their rhetoric and accept that for them the virgins of paradise are realities, rather than atavistic fantasies.

Jung continues:

The projection-forming factor is the anima. Wherever she appears in dreams, phantasies or visions, she appears personified, thereby demonstrating that basically she possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a female person. She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous production of the unconscious; neither is she a substitute figure for the mother. On the contrary, there is every likelihood that those numinous attributes which make the Mother imago so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype, the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child." (Spring, 1950, p. 5)

We should note especially that Jung emphasizes the anima's role as that factor in the male psyche responsible for the process of projection, not just for projections of and onto women-all projection.

But what does Jung mean by referring to the anima as an archetype? From the standpoint of contemporary Jungian theory he has just piled a second conundrum on top of the first. This calls for more sorting out. In writing about the anima Verena Kast, a Swiss analyst, describes archetypes as:

...typical images that give form to fantasy and imagination These images govern relationships to the world (interpersonal), between consciousness and the unconscious (intrapersonal), and they produce characteristic fantasies that further the process of individuation and relatedness.... [Individuation] has four aspects: becoming first increasingly independent from parents and--more important--from parental complexes; second, more competent in relationships; third, more of who and what you are; and fourth, more 'whole'--which I call the spiritual dimension. (Harvest, 1993, V 39, p. 7)

I think this concise and otherwise useful passage contains a significant inaccuracy, namely Kast's assertion that archetypes are images. Kast seems to be equating archetype with what circa 1912 Jung called the "primordial image," a precursor of his better-known concept. In 1919 Jung introduced the word archetype " to avoid any suggestion that it was the content and not the unconscious and irrepresentable outline or pattern that was fundamental." (Samuels, Shorter, and Plaut, A Concise Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, Routledge, 1991, p. 26) Images are thus the products of archetypes, and are generated by an inherent tendency of the psyche to organize experience in "typical" configurations. Although the content of the images may vary, the patterning shows consistency. Jung has observed that "it often seems advisable to speak less of my anima or my animus and more of the anima and the animus. As archetypes, these figures are semi-collective and impersonal quantities...." CW 16, P 469) The London analysts Warren Colman makes an important point in this regard: "I think it best to leave archetypes as empty forms as far as possible since, as soon as definite qualities become attached to them, archetypes have a tendency to degenerate into stereotypes." (JAP, 1996, pp 42-3)

We need to bear in mind that when an archetype impinges upon the ego it does not necessarily act as a stabilizing or healing factor, often the contrary, especially if an individual can't reconcile the archetype with his sense of identity or his social milieu. The most naive, inexperienced, and/or defended people have the greatest susceptibility to states of archetypal possession. This may be true of many terrorists who depersonalize themselves and others in order to rationalize murder. A London analyst, Louis Zinkin, comments: "The archetype is a backdrop that universalizes our experience of the particular and thus deepens our experience. But there is no substitute for relationships with others which put the archetypes into perspective." (Gender & Soul in Psychotherapy, p. 132) Paradoxically, given that the anima has been defined understood as the archetype in males that governs relatedness, when a man seems most thoroughly in the grip of compulsive projections, most single-mindedly determined to reduce existence to a few fanatically loved or hated fetish objects, he likely has been possessed by the anima-albeit in a primitive state.

The usual meaning of soul--a word literally synonymous with anima--is on the order of "the spiritual, rational, and immortal part of man which distinguishes him from brutes,...and...renders him a subject of moral government." (Webster's Universal Unabridged Dictionary, p. 1581) Jung, however, by 1945, came to think of the anima as manifesting four developmental stages:

The first stage--Hawwah, Eve, earth--is purely biological; woman ins equated with the mother and only represents something to be fertilized. The second stage is still dominated by the sexual eros, but on an aesthetic and romantic level where woman has already acquired some value as an individual. The third stage raises Eros to the heights of religious devotion and thus spiritualizes him: Hawwah has been replaced by spiritual motherhood. Finally the fourth stage illustrates...Sapientia...wisdom. (CW 16, par 361, 1954)

How males worldwide distribute themselves according to this schema probably varies somewhat, with the modal stage in the industrialized western world somewhere around Two, and with males at Stage Four likely to constitute a negligible proportion anywhere on our planet.

For psychotherapists it is well worth bearing in mind not only that the soul gives the impression of evolving, but also how eerily it behaves at the lower stages. For example, Jung's description of a phenomenon called the bush-soul:

Primitives have extraordinarily well developed ideas about a plurality of souls. Some are immortal, others are only loosely attached to the body and can wander off and get lost in the night, or they lose their way and get caught in a dream. There are even souls that belong to a person without being lodged in his body, like the bush-soul, which dwells outside in the forest, in the body of an animal. (CW 11, par 198) The primitive often feels that he consists of several units. This indicates that his psyche is far from being safely synthesized; on the contrary, it threatens to fall asunder only too easily under the onslaught of unchecked emotion. (CW 18, par 440)

Extreme concretization and objectification are regressive warding-off tactics the ego may employ if threatened by anima energy. When, on the other hand, the anima seems to have become better socialized, it is giving a false impression, because, it seems to me, that as one of the archetypes the anima by definition cannot evolve (at least not at a rate measurable within one human lifetime). But a male ego can change, become more differentiated, resilient, consequently able to register nuanced anima attributes, and mistakenly assume the archetype itself has altered.

Let's touch on one further aspect of Jung's definition: he calls the anima "the personification of the inferior functions which relate a man to the collective unconscious" (CW 18, P 187), and also "the characteristic face turned towards the unconscious (CW 6, P 808)." If we pair up with this important formulation the dictum that the anima is knowable only through projection, we produce a good vehicle for analytic work, a tool whereby a man can learn to recognize that his attractions may say more about his own psyche than about the other person. For instance, when in a romantic situation opposites attract, the man may be projecting an unconsciously valued attribute of his inferior function onto a woman who offers it a convenient hook, while otherwise being ill-suited for a sustained relationship. Conversely, should a man persistently demonize his unconscious, or try subjugating it like a slave girl, he may be brought to understand his projections signify trouble.

The most comprehensive overview of Jung's writings on the anima appears in James Hillman's valuable source book Anima An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, which consists of "439 excerpts" from Jung's writings, presented on the left hand pages, with Hillman's commentary on the right. Hillman organizes the text in thematic chapters: "Anima and Contrasexuality," "Anima and Eros," "Anima and Feeling," "Anima and the Feminine," "Anima and Psyche," "Anima in the Sysygy," etc. This otherwise useful book, however, has two conceptual limitations, first that Hillman's commentary advances his own perspective and sometimes strays far from Jung's; and, second, that by organizing the Jung material under subject headings, Hillman ignores the fact that Jung's idea of the anima gradually became elaborated over several decades until, late in his life, it changed dramatically. By disregarding this evolution, Hillman allows the term "anima" to seem even more obscure and self-contradictory than is unavoidable.

David Tresan, a member of the San Francisco Institute, addresses the matter in his 1992 article "The Anima of the Analyst-Its Development." Tresan draws most of his illustrative material from Jung's letters and seminars, which went unpublished during Jung's lifetime, because he believes that Jung's Collected Works poorly reflect the shift in his attitude toward the anima concept, due to Jung's having "revised many earlier works" in the 1950's, bringing them into accord with his later opinions. He notes that Jung first employs the term in print in 1921, when he published Psychological Types, and that as he elaborates it over the next 23 years it reflects Jung's own largely distrustful attitude towards femininity:

Jung is...trying to understand how to regard the feminine for man both as a salutary psychic factor and as a functional link to actual women. He is having a hard time reconciling the two, for he simply does not feel comfortable yet with the nonmaternal feminine. (Gender & Soul in Psychotherapy, p. 89)

Tresan substantiates his position in part by quoting remarks Jung "made to Esther Harding during a supervisory session in 1922: ...[The male analyst] 'has got to learn the feminineness of a man, which is not the anima.[!] He must not let his masculinity be overwhelmed, or his weakness calls out the animus in a woman patient.'" (p. 89) Speaking of Jung's 1925 seminars, conducted when Jung was 50 years old, Tresan comments:

Jung is ever wary and critical of the anima. Whenever he speaks of her, it is negative, uncomplimentary, or, at least, ambivalent. He underscores at length the negative qualities of Salome: her snakelikeness, her ruthlessness, her cruelty, her evil, and her capacity to induce madness as she almost did to him in a dream.... He claims the anima induces "vulgar or banal" thoughts, and collective notions." (91)

Jung is still at it in the Zarathustra Seminars, which run from 1934 to 39, where, Tresan reports, "Jung's ambivalence about the anima is reflected in how dangerous he thinks she was for Nietzsche and the Nazis." (93) And in an interview of 1941: "Women are a magical force. They surround themselves with an emotional tension stronger than the rationality of men.... Woman is a very, very strong being, magical. That is why, I am afraid of women." (94) Tresan attributes this attitude to Jung's assumption "prior to 1944...that the ego and the unconscious were forever opposed, more or less, and that any real merger was theoretical." (94)

According to Tresan, in 1944, " as the result of a near-fatal heart attack and the ensuing "three weeks of nightly visions," Jung's "illusion of personal power came to an end." For the first time he underwent "a total submission to his seemingly immanent death..." and "a direct and immediate experience of beauty unmediated by his intellect." As a result, Jung came to perceive the anima differently, as "purely and irremediably irrational, the archetype of life,...direct, awesome, and immutable...."(103) Tresan posits that what was true for Jung applies to most males: "Paradoxically, it seems to take great suffering and/or loss of what we cherish most in order to defeat the last vestiges of ego and to connect us most deeply with the ultimate mysteries of anima: namely love, beauty, and wisdom." (103) Tresan emphasizes that Jung's personality was not wholly transformed by the events of 1944, but that his conceptualization of anima broadened, softened, and became far more respectful, even though his capacity to express the various aspects of the anima was at best uneven: "Jung knows the numinous well,...the direct emotional experience of love less,...and beauty least." (105).

Bearing in mind "anima's" tangled etymology, it's hardly surprising that Jung's successors frequently disagree about her nature. Louis Zinkin, like Tresan, blames Jung's style of thinking and of writing for causing the problem: "Particularly vexing is his way of making loose connections and associations which lead him to inconsistency and self-contradiction. Yet, on first acquaintance, many of his ideas seem quite simple and straightforward.... One can rapidly find oneself bemused by the way these apparently simple ideas become so complicated, so ambiguous, and create so many contradictions that the reader is tempted to give up the concepts themselves." (Gender & Soul, 112-3) All current Jungian definitions of anima with which I am familiar derive from Jung's theories, but they span a conceptual range that is irreconcilable at its extremities. Essentialism, which views the anima as an inherent property of the psyche, inborn, an archetype, faces off against social constructivism, wherein the anima is seen as a descriptive term for types of experience. Radical feminist constructivists might argue that "anima" signifies no more than a collection of demeaning stereotypes used to rationalize the oppression of women. A more nuanced constructivist voice belongs to a Pennsylvania analyst, Polly Young-Eisendrath, who states, "I believe that Jung's theory of a psychological complex, organized around an archetypal core of emotional arousal, is primarily a constructivist theory of psychological functioning in which emotion and image are the underlying forms for the construction of the world." (Gender & Soul, p. 159) Within this framework, she defines anima as a "gendered complex of not-I, as emotionally charged collections of images, habits, thoughts, actions and meanings that limit and define self." (Gender & Soul, p. 151) These habits, thoughts, meanings, etc. are transmissible elements of culture. They constitute attitudes about "anima" and should be regarded as artifacts rather than biological a prioris. Although Young-Eisendrath grants that archetypes may drive and organize this process, she considers anima images and concepts to be determined by one's society. Young-Eisendrath raises important objections to traditional assumptions regarding anima:

There are two major problems with the notion that masculine and feminine constitute universal principles of a cultural gender difference: (1) that it is self-evident and natural for men and women to fit into certain roles and attitudinal types because of their sexual structures or functions; and (2) that the anima complex of the male personality is subsumed under the same category as actual women...[leading to] confusion between male images of female people and the subjectivity (actual experiences) of female people. (Gender & Soul, p. 164)

The latter is an especially valuable distinction. She argues that what men perceive and experience to be female should not be assumed to be the same as how females subjectively experience and define themselves. From Young-Eisendrath's perspective much of what would be described as anima phenomena could be considered internalizations, in the object relations sense, rather than pre-programming that male infants bring into the world with them at birth.

There is also considerable disagreement among Jungian theorists about whether women as well as men have an anima, and vice versa regarding the animus. The opposing camps include James Hillman, Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Edward Whitmont and Verena Kast among those who say we all have both, and Young-Eisendrath, Ann Belford Ulanov, Louis Zinkin and Warren Colman who advocate sticking with Jung's original idea. The revisionists argue from various perspectives, including that archetypes cannot be gendered, i.e. "attributed to or located within the psyche of either sex" (Hillman, p. 53), nor can terms like "soul" and "spirit;" that what Hillman terms "anima phenomenology," primarily imagery--for example the muses--and emotions--such as bitchiness (p. 57)--is not the exclusive province of males; that to split apart what properly are considered conjoined pairs and assign them to the consciousness of one gender and the unconsciousness of the other is, as Schwartz-Salant asserts, an instance of "the patriarchal prejudice toward solar-rational thinking" (Gender and Soul, pp. 7-8); that clinical experience indicates "the man's unconscious contains unassimilated archetypal and personal male components just as the woman's contains unassimilated archetypal and personal female components" (Whitmont, Gender and Soul, P. 179); and finally that although both boy and girl infants have their original affective bonds with mothers, if Jung's theory were logically consistent "in the earliest development of the complexes we could only find mother complexes in boys and father complexes in girls" (Kast, Harvest, p. 7)

The counterposition, which favors leaving Jung's original formulation intact, offers a great advantage--its explanatory value: "The concepts of anima and animus are most useful clinically when they refer to psychological complexes of contrasexuality. The division into two genders, inscribed by culture with different power and status meanings, marks each of us from birth onward, leaving us always as outsiders to the others." (Gender and Animus, p. 151) This passage from Young-Eisendrath limits itself to the social-constructivist viewpoint, and seems to disregard the concept of archetypes, but Ann Belford Ulanov provides a more comprehensive perspective:

We share among us the same function of anima and animus as bridge between ego and Self. Where we differ is in the contents that walk across that bridge, even though we can describe them in general as issuing from another departure point, opposite to our conscious gender identity.... The contrasexual bridge functions to connect the worlds on either side, not to merge them. The contrasexual are border figures, taking us from one to another sexual departure point, from the personal to the collective, the conscious to the archetypal, the ego to the Self. (Gender and Soul, pp. 26-7)

Louis Zinkin, who in many respects utilizes constructivism, nevertheless asserts flat out "that there are innate psychological differences between the two sexes and this is the reason why we can talk of male and female archetypes and a male and female principle." (Gender and Soul, p. 146) Warren Colman, an adherent of the developmentally-oriented branch of Jungian psychology, who considers Jung's original theory of the anima far from problem-free, nevertheless finds it consistent with his observations of Oedipal dynamics: "While the child relates both to same sex and opposite sex figures, successful resolution of the {Oedipus] complex requires that he or she makes a positive identification with the same sex figure." (JAP 1996, 41, p. 39) Personally, I find the term "anima" most helpful in the fashion described by Ulanov, as a bridge to the unconscious and as a metaphor for the male's experience of the contrasexual. But I hardly expect everyone to agree with me.

It now should be easier to understand how, from the standpoint of contemporary theory, a relatively straightforward definition of anima can sound naive and/or vague--for instance, Emma Jung's, statement that "the anima, as is well known, represents the feminine personality components of the man and at the same time the image which he has of feminine nature in general, in other words, the archetype of the feminine." (Animus and Anima, Two Essays, APC, New York, 1957) Even a three-letter verb can makes lots of mischief. In English it is ambiguous to say "the man...has an image." We don't know whether the author refers to an external impression, to a product of the autonomous psyche, both in combination, though common usage implies at least some external mediation. By concluding her sentence with, "in other words, the archetype of the feminine," Mrs. Jung has rendered the supposedly "well known" exceedingly obscure.

There are still further definitions of anima, some of which appeal to me greatly, including the three which follow, but while taken singly they appear to be a helpful clarification, they start to seem fuzzy when one tries to reconcile them with each other. There is John Beebe's, "I find it helpful to think of the anima as the emotional attitude a man takes towards anything he reflects upon;" ("The Father's Anima as a Clinical and as a Symbolic Problem" JAP 1984, 29, 277-87) There is Ann Belford Ulanov's "Anima...forms a bridge, across which the contents of the Self come to address the ego. These questions seem to issue from an other-personified as an anima...figure-who says, in effect: You must deal with me, respond to me, even if it is to reject me, but here I am and you cannot escape." (Gender and Soul, p. 25) There is even a definition Hillman proposes, and describes as "derived" from Jung: "archetype of the psyche." (Anima, p. 73)

Much as I feel obliged to provide you a straightforward, accurate, concise yet comprehensive definition of anima, the task has defeated me, and I think we had best just move on to discuss the processes and qualities that comprise a functional description of this term.

In regard to psychological processes, the crucial principle is that the anima, an unconscious factor, acts upon the ego. The ego, in turn, reacts. The more a man identifies himself with his ego functioning, the more disruptive, perhaps threatening, he will experience the anima to be. Jung at times posits an ideal relationship between ego and anima, that can be taken as a partial model for individuation. In his posthumously completed autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes:

For decades I always turned to the anima when I felt that my emotional behavior was disturbed, and that something had been constellated in the unconscious. I would then ask the anima: "Now what are you up to? What do you see? I should like to know." After some resistance she regularly produced an image. As soon as the image was there, the unrest or sense of oppression vanished. The whole energy of these emotions was transformed into interest in and curiosity about the image. I would speak with the anima about the images she communicated to me. (pp.187-188)

At first, this passage conveys a sense of Jung as tranquil sage immersed in self contemplation, and I downplay the implications of his phrase, "I felt that my emotional behavior was disturbed." Then I recollect that Jung was known to possess quite a temper, and is rumored once to have kicked a female associate downstairs. So Jung's observing ego must have had to struggle to maintain its footing while negotiating with the anima. But the incentives were great. Many of Jung's negative comments about what the anima put him through seemingly reflect his awareness of how she retaliates when the ego avoids encountering her diplomatically. In a paper originally published in German in 1948, four years after the personality transformation Tresan attributes to his heart attack, Jung writes:

The "animos" mist surrounding the man is made up chiefly of sentimentality and resentment.... The effect on the ego... is extremely difficult to eliminate. In the first place, it has extraordinary force and immediately endows the ego personality with an unshakable feeling of rightness and righteousness; and because in the second place, the reason for the effect is projected, that is, it appears to originate in objects and objective situations.... The archetype...fascinates and captures consciousness in an hypnotic way. Not infrequently this gives the ego an indistinct feeling of moral defeat, leading it to behave in an even more defensive, defiant and self-righteous manner. This inferiority feeling then closes the vicious circle and excludes all possibility of the reciprocal approbation essential for a relationship. (Spring, 1950, p. 7)

When the male ego feels under threat from the anima, Jung postulates, it may project the attacking motive onto an external woman or women, and try to suppress what it experiences as a malignant influence. Here is an excerpt from a story in the Los Angeles Times:

As she walked home from a family wedding in the capital, Kabul, three weeks ago, 14-year-old Farkhanda crossed the line from carefree girlhood to fearful womanhood, simply by showing her face. When the police from the Ministry for the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice caught sight of...[her] they gave chase with their sticks and beat her [because]...she should be wearing the burka, the head-to-toe shroud compulsory for women in much of this culture.... In Taliban-controlled areas...there are even rules on the way a woman can walk[-]...not too energetically lest her feet slap too hard on the ground, making an unseemly noise, or lest she kick up a corner of the garment, showing a glimpse of ankle." (reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle, 10/6/01, Section A, p. 7)

The article also states that women are allowed to hold hardly any jobs and have nothing to do with themselves but sit indoors. These policies are a perversion of the Koran, whose attitude towards women was remarkably liberating when its doctrine was promulgated 1400 years ago, mandating for women "the right to education, to choose one's husband, to divorce, inherit, engage in business and own property." The Taliban code seems like a collective response to an experienced threat to the male ego, an hysterical reaction to desire and the sense of vulnerability it entails.

A bit further along in Jung's essay quoted above, he writes of the anima and animus that:

both archetypes...can on occasion produce tragic results. They are quite actually father and mother of all the disastrous entanglements of fate.... They are powers in the unconscious, in fact, gods.... To designate them so acknowledges the central importance among psychological values which is theirs in any case, whether consciousness concedes it to them or not; for their power only increases in proportion to the degree that they remain unconscious. He who does not see them is in their hands. (Spring, 1950, p. 10)

Persona functioning requires the ego to enact a role determined by and directed towards one's social collective. Anima functioning demands that a man's ego participate in a value-imbued relationship with his mind. According to Emma Jung:

The anima makes certain demands upon a man. She is a psychic factor that insists on being considered, not neglected as is the general tendency, since a man naturally likes to identify himself with his masculinity.... What matters to a woman is the personal relation, and this is true also of the anima. Her tendency is to entangle a man in such relationships, but she can also serve him well in giving them shape--that is she can do so after the feminine element has been incorporated into consciousness. As long as this element works autonomously, it disturbs relations or makes them impossible. (Two Essays, p. 81)

Mrs. Jung's homey language refers to a crucial, rare, and somewhat hard-to-grasp aspect of individuation that Jung called "the relativization of the ego," referring to a type of self-awareness whereby one recognizes that one's conscious sense of identity is but one component of the psyche. Where she acts on men as their internal other, the anima can mediate the discovery. This is how she serves, in Ulanov's term, as the bridge to the unconscious. Our achievement of any new awareness imposes on us, Jung would assert, a moral obligation to use what we now know--which, In the present case, means to continue relating to the anima. A first step might be to pay attention to our projections. As Jung says, "The anima has an erotic, emotional character.... Hence most of what men say about feminine eroticism, and particularly about the emotional life of women, is derived from their own anima projections and distorted accordingly." (CW 17, Par 338) That is the foremost manifestation of the anima's process, but she acts upon us as well by way of dreams, visions, fantasies, memories, moods, and, I also would assume, physical sensations.

During the following discussion of the anima's qualities we should remind ourselves intermittently that the word "anima" refers to a personification of psychological process, not to an actual person or deity.

The arts, ranging from myth through movies, offer a gold mine of anima projections. John Beebe provides a checklist of cinema motifs that help us identify anima figures:

1. Unusual radiance [compared with other characters]

2. A desire to make emotional connection as the main concern of the character.... The anima figure wants to be loved, or occasionally to be hated, in either case living for connection, as is consistent with her general role as representative of the status of the man's unconscious eros and particularly his relationship to himself.

3. Having come from some, quite other, place into the midst of a reality more familiar to us than the character's own place of origin.

4. The character is the feminine mirror of traits we have already witnessed in the attitude or behavior of another, usually male, character.

5. The character has some unusual capacity for life, in vivid contrast to other characters in the film.

6. The character offers a piece of advice, frequently couched in the form of an almost unacceptable rebuke, which has the effect of changing another character's relation to a personal reality.

7. The character exerts a protective and often therapeutic effect on someone else.

8. Less positively, the character leads another character to recognize a problem in personality which is insoluble.

9. The loss of this character is associated with the loss of purposeful aliveness itself. (Gender & Soul, pp.262-4)

Only two of Beebe's list of nine qualities, the second--that the anima character desires emotional connection--and the fourth--that she is the mirror image of a male character--lie outside the scope of Jung's pronouncement that "everything the anima touches becomes numinous--unconditional, dangerous, taboo, magical." (CW 9,i, par 59) I would agree that her cardinal attributes are power and otherworldliness, which befit her function as emissary of the unconscious.

In a research study on dreams, entitled "Animus and Anima: Spiritual Growth and Separation," the Swiss analyst Verena Kast looked at five groups of dream characters: "1. Authority figures: teachers,politicians,...priestesses,... queens. Such figures closely resembled images of...mother. 2...Sister figures (with an archetypal quality). 3. Mysterious strangers: nixies, gypsies, travellers from outer space, death as ...sister...Goddesses. Subcategory: animal bride.... 4. Wise old...woman. 5. Unknown girl." She then discussed these categories with "colleagues and students," and concluded that, "Strictly speaking, only the mysterious stranger (including wise old woman...and divine child qualified as an anima figure." (Harvest, 1993, v. 39, p. 8)

Beside power and numinosity, a third major attribute of the anima, consistent with her identity as an archetype, is her polyvalence. As Jung writes, "The anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore." (CW 9,i, par 356) Small wonder that the male ego at the early, hero stage of differentiation, could feel both profoundly attracted and threatened by recipients of the anima projection.

Hillman does an excellent job of depicting the introverted and sometimes negative pole of the anima's numinosity, which is the antithesis of the Audrey Hepburn princess in Roman Holiday, cited by Beebe to exemplify the figure who enters the man's world from "some, quite other, place." Hillman points out the anima's aura of being

inward (hence "closed" and called "virginal," in religious and poetic metaphors of the soul), devoted, yet labile, generous and generative, yet reserved (shy, shameful, retreating, pure, veiled--these latter qualities presented by the virgin nymphs and Goddesses such as Maria and Artemis). To this interiority belongs a movement of deepening downward (caves, deeps, graves) which in the phenomenology of Kore-Persephone connects her with the realm of the underworld. "Anima was not the name for the life-soul till after death." [Onions, Origins] She carries our death; our death is lodged in the soul....

This consciousness is mood-determined, a notion that has been represented in mythological phenomenology by images of natural atmospheres (clouds, waves, still waters). Anima-consciousness favors a protective mimicry, an attachment to something or someone else to which it is echo. Here we see the wood nymphs that belong to trees, the souls which hover over waters, speak from dells and caves, or sing from the sea--rocks and whirlpools--and, most vividly, the succubus....

Anima is the reflective partner, she it is who provides the moment of reflection in the midst of what is naturally given. She is the psychic factor in nature, an idea formulated in the last century as "animism." We feel this moment of reflection in the contrary emotions that anima phenomena constellate: the fascination plus danger, the awe plus desire, the submission to her as fate plus suspicion, the intense awareness that this way lie both my life and my death. Without these soul-stirring emotions, there would be no significance in the natural places and human affairs to which she is attached. But, life, fate, and death cannot become 'conscious,' so that with her is constellated a consciousness of our fundamental unconsciousness. In other words, consciousness of this archetypal structure is never far from unconsciousness. Its primary attachment is to the state of nature, to all things that simply are--life, fate, death--and which can only be reflected but never separated from their impenetrable opacity. Anima stays close to this field of the natural unconscious mind. (Anima, pp 23, 25)

Such is also the theme of Emma Jung's important essay, highly evocative of the anima's numinosity, entitled "The Anima as an Elemental Being." Mrs. Jung surveys myths and folktales which portray alluring females who either are in large part animals--swans, snakes--can transform into such creatures, or are fairies and water nymphs, the later having a special affinity with...water,... believed to be the life element, [and hence] "the anima represents the connection with the spring or source of life in the unconscious." (E. Jung, p. 67). In regard to the psychological import of swan maidens, a ubiquitous folktale motif, she writes:

The comparison of these figures with mist and clouds is apt, for apparently as long as what are called the unconscious contents remain unconscious, or almost so, they are without firm outlines, and can change, turn into each other, and transform themselves. Only when they emerge from the unconscious and are grasped by consciousness do they become plainly and clearly recognizable, and only then can anything definite be said about them. Really one does better not to picture the unconscious as an actual area, with firmly defined, quasi-concrete contents. (E. Jung, p. 49)

The maturational implications of many tales containing anima figures can be inferred from Emma Jung's account of "'The Dream of Oenghus,' an Irish legend ascribed to the eighth century:

Oenghus, who was himself of mythical descent, saw in a dream a beautiful girl approaching his couch, but as he went to take her hand she sprang away from him. The following night the girl came again, this time with a lute in her hand, "the sweetest that ever was," and she played a tune to him. So it went on for an entire year and Oenghus fell into a "wasting sickness." But a physician diagnosed his trouble and thereupon messengers were sent to scour the whole of Ireland for the girl who--so the physician said--was destined to be his. Finally they discovered that her father was the king of a fairy hill and that she changed her shape into that of a swan every other year. To meet her Oenghus must come on a definite day to a certain lake. Arriving there, he saw three times fifty swans upon the water, linked together in pairs by silver chains. But Oenghus called his dream lover by name, and she recognized him and said she would come ashore if he would promise that she might return to the lake again. When he promised she came to him and he threw his arms about her. Then "they fell asleep in the form of two swans and went round the lake three times so that his promise might not be broken." Finally, as two white birds, they flew away (to his father's castle) and sang a beautiful choral song that put the people to sleep for three days and three nights. "The girl stayed with him after that." (E. Jung, p. 50)

We should note especially, regarding the psychological implications of this tale, that in order to fulfill his desires, as Mrs. Jung remarks, Oenghus "attempts to meet [the swan maiden] in her own element, her niveau...--conduct which should prove of value...in relating to the anima." (E. Jung pp. 50-1)

There seems often to be a correspondence between the man's level of ego development and the sort of anima figure with whom he forges a relationship. Mrs. Jung speaks of the Norse Valkyries as appropriate anima figures for "savage and war-loving" men. "Although...usually thought of as riding, they are also able to 'course through air and water,' and take the shape of swans." (E. Jung, p. 51) The role of such beings often can be to awaken the hero's mind "like an intuition, disclosing new possibilities to the man," perhaps even by "foretelling the future," but, as in medieval courtly poetry, she can be cruel, "demanding senseless and superhuman feats of her knight as the sign of his subservience." (E. Jung, p. 53) Nonetheless, maturation requires the hero to submit, for if he should "take possession of a woman more or less by force [it would be] a clear sign that his erotic attitude is at a completely primitive level." (E. Jung, p. 60) Mrs. Jung asserts that "because the anima, as the feminine aspect of man, possesses...receptivity and [an] absence of prejudice toward the irrational, she is designated the mediator between consciousness and the unconscious." (E. Jung, p. 56) She can function as "a looking glass for a man, to reflect his thoughts, desires, and emotions." (E. Jung, p. 65) Her role in psychological growth is analogous to that of the inferior function, since "in the development of masculine ego-consciousness the feminine side is left behind and so remains in a 'natural state.'" (E. Jung, p. 57) By reason of this primitivity the anima figure may behave compulsively, "not possessing the freedom of choice allowed to man," (E. Jung, p. 62) and maladaptively, as if inadequately socialized--laughing at funerals, mourning at weddings, easily offended and prone to flee:

The exaggerated touchiness frequently to be met with in otherwise robust men is a sign of anima involvement. Likewise to be discerned in the anima are the incalculability, mischievousness and frequent malice of these elemental spirits, which constitute the reverse side of their bewitching charm. These beings are simply irrational, good and bad, helpful and harmful, healing and destructive, like nature herself of which they are a part." (E. Jung, p. 64)

While on the one hand the swan maiden threatens to draw the male ego downwards and backwards into animalistic unconsciousness, "being a creature of the air, the bird [also] symbolizes...unawakened spiritual potentialities." (E. Jung, p. 59) The legends often portray anima maidens seeking relationships with human males because, as Parcelsus asserted, "although they do indeed resemble human beings, they are not descended from Adam, and have no souls.... Through union with a man they receive a soul and the children, too, of such unions possess souls." (E. Jung, p. 69) What this means psychologically is that:

some unconscious and undeveloped component of the personality is seeking to become joined to consciousness.... For the unconscious has not only a tendency to persist in its primal state and to engulf and extinguish what has already been made conscious; it also shows plain signs of activity in the opposite direction. There are unconscious contents that struggle to become conscious and, like elves, revenge themselves if this is not taken into account. The urge towards increased consciousness seemingly proceeds from the archetypes, as though, so to speak, there were an instinct tending towards this goal. (E. Jung, p. 78-9)

Here Emma Jung not only calls to our attention the paradoxical, polarized quality of the anima--the double nature inherent in all archetypes--exemplified by the contrary pulls towards both unconsciousness and consciousness, she also points out the evolutionary tendency I mentioned earlier for Eve to transform into Helen into Mary into Sophia--more and more and more soul. But as I said, I don't think this represents the archetype changing its nature, but rather challenging the ego to develop.

Hillman, too, alerts us to the anima's doubleness when he describes her as an ambassador of death as well as life: "She carries our death; our death is lodged in the soul." (quoted above, p. 23) Such a potential of the anima pertains to a broad spectrum of morbid male reactions, from the obsessions of poets to the psychology of suicidal assassins. The literary theme has been studied extensively, for instance in Mario Praz' The Romantic Agony, a work originally published in 1933 which largely eschews psychoanalytic perspectives, mentioning Freud only peripherally and Jung not at all. Consequently it's especially gratifying to see how well Praz's interpretations dovetail with Jungian material on the negative anima, for instance in his reading of the late-nineteenth century English poet Swinburne:

Given the very limited experience that Swinburne had of the opposite sex, it is natural that the women described by him should all conform to our type[-of femme fatale-] which is a mere projection of his own turbid sensuality: they have a good deal of the idol about them--in fact of the eidolon, the phantom of the mind rather than of the real human being. The greatest effort made by the poet in the study of the feminine soul is the character of Mary Stuart.... (The Romantic Agony, Meridian Books, Cleveland and New York, 1963, p. 217) The manuscript of Chastelard is the Fatal Woman par excellence, a type drawn from the poet's own intimate sensual nature and without reference to historical truth. [Mary Stuart] is cold, she cannot weep--rather she enjoys the spectacle of suffering, she is a vampire. Chastelard strives to obtain her surrender at the price of his own life:...

He would have given his body to be slain,
Having embraced my body. Now, God knows,
I have no man to do as much for me
As give me but a little of his blood
To fill my beauty from, though I go down
Pale to my grave for want.... (Praz, pp. 220-1)

Few men endowed with such an anima are inclined to get as close to her as possible.

More commonly they engage in an ambivalent dance between a virginal good girl who threatens to trap them into a stultifying conventional marriage and a sexually-charged bad girl version of the femme fatale, from whom they also must flee, because she is so dangerous. The ultimate refuge is the wilderness, with like-minded "lost boy" male companions, a pattern Leslie Fiedler traces in Love and Death in the American Novel. Maria Von Franz's Puer Aeternus, considers negative anima issues to have underlain the suicidality implicit in the aviator/writer Antoine St. Exupery's risk-taking behavior.

Saint-Exupery had a hero aspect, alive and constellated, and...this aspect would never quite come through but would be swallowed back by the regressive tendencies of the unconscious and, as we know by later events, by death. The devouring-mother myth should naturally also be pinned down in connection with his own mother, but, as she is still alive, and, in a way, in a conspicuous position, I hesitate to comment on her too much. I recently saw a photograph of her in a newspaper, which shows that whatever else she may be, she is a very powerful personage. She is a big, stout woman, about whom the newspaper article says that she has a tremendous amount of energy, is interested in all kinds of activities, and tries her hand at drawing and painting and writing. She is a very dynamic person and, in spite of the fact that she is now pretty old, is still going strong. Obviously, it must have been very difficult for a sensitive boy to pull away from the influence of such a mother. It is also said that she always anticipated her son's death. Several times she thought he was dead and very dramatically dressed herself in large black veils such as French women like to wear when they become widows, and then rather disappointedly had to take them off again as he was not yet dead. So the archetypal pattern of what we call the death-mother was alive in her psyche. In our layers of society the death-mother is something not so openly acknowledged, but I got the shock of my life when I had the following experience. I had to go somewhere to meet someone, and at that place the house-owner had a puer aeturnus son whom she had quite eaten up. They were very simple people. They had a bakery and the son did no work at all but went about in riding-kit and was a typical Don Juan type, very elegant and having a new girl about every four days, but that I only heard from the gossip around. The young man once went bathing and carried his girl friend out into the Lake of Zurich and, in the classical situation halb zog sie ihn, halb sank er hin ('Half drew she him, half sank he down') as Goethe would have put it--both went under. The girl was saved, but when he was brought out he was already dead. This I read in the paper, but when I came back to this house, I bumped into the mother, who was a widow, and condoled with her saying how sorry I was when I heard of the terrible accident. She invited me in and took me to the sitting-room where there was a big photograph of the son on his death-bed, surrounded by flowers, set up like a hero's tomb, and she remarked: 'Look at him! How beautiful he looks in death!' I agreed, and then she smiled and said: 'Well, I'd rather have him like that than give him away to another woman.' (Puer Aeturnus, Zurich, Spring, 1973, pp. 18-9)

The puer has been unable to achieve the level of ego development that would enable him to liberate himself from his connection to an excessively energized mother archetype--namely to sacrifice the mother--as Beowulf does when he slays Grendel's Dam--rather than sacrifice himself. His anima cannot sufficiently help him to break free by forming bonds with women of his own generation. A suicidal death allows him to escape from his painful ambivalence, and simultaneously submit to the symbolic death-mother.

The link between aesthetics and mortality, with the anima as bridge, has been clearly delineated in a passage from Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning":

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. ... ... ...
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. (CP 69)

Keats' phrase "half in love with easeful death" is vastly amplified by a statement from an Al Qaeda representative quoted in the October 10 San Francisco Chronicle, as part of the organization's first communique since September 11:

Spokesman Sulaiman Abu Gaith called for a holy war against U.S. interests and praised the suicide hijackers who killed more than 5,000 people for their "good deed." "America must know that the storm of airplanes will not stop, and there are thousands of young people who look forward to death like the Americans look forward to life." (Front Page)

We have no reason to assume Gaith is referring to a spontaneous upwelling of suicidal impulses in hordes of youthful Islamic men. They are diligently schooled by their male elders, in a process that might more accurately be termed indoctrination. Such a phenomenon may exemplify an area of psychopathology explored by John Beebe in his article "The Father's Anima as a Clinical and as a Symbolic Problem." What intrapsychic force could motivate a father or other man acting in loco parentis to educate his sons in suicide? Beebe explains:

When I speak of the father's anima, I am referring to the father's working sense of his son's life, the emotional attitude that the father takes toward his son. The emotional attitude is communicated to the son as his father's felt sense of the younger man's worth. The father's emotional attitude toward his son is normally ambivalent, and there is usually splitting in any father's experience of that ambivalence.... There is a side of any father-figure which is bound to resent the anima investment he has made in a son. (JAP 1984, 29, p. 280, 282)

Beebe illustrates his thesis with two Old Testament stories, that of Joseph and that of David, the latter of whom sends Uriah, a loyal officer in his army, on a death mission, in order to gain possession of Uriah's wife. Years later one of David's sons, Absalom, rebels against his father, who winds up killing him in order to maintain his political power. Combat is predominantly an activity of the younger males, but so often they are launched toward death by the fathers, all in the name of virtue, and primed by wish-fulfilling fantasies of union with various anima figures. Consciously or unconsciously fathers may envy their sons' youth, vitality, and prospects, an envy that can express itself by filling the children with their fathers' own festering hatreds, and then expunging the next generation from the scene under the pretext of despatching them to a better place. Emma Jung observes:

Being carried away to fairyland is, psychologically, a very important motif. In the Celtic tradition this realm does not have the terrible and fearful character that it possesses elsewhere. It is not a kingdom of the dead, but is called "Land of the Living" or Land under the Waves," and is thought to be composed of 'green islands," which are inhabited by fair feminine beings.... Eternally young and beautiful, these creatures enjoy a life without sorrow, full of music and dancing and the joys of love. (p. 71)

According to an old joke, neurotics build castles in the air, and psychotics live in them. I'm tempted to add that puers use these castles for playing house with the anima--perhaps as projected onto the mother and blessed by the acting-out father.

Men need to develop enough ego differentiation to cope with a double challenge from the anima archetype: both to meet her with sufficient openness to benefit from her inspirational energy; and also to resist falling wholly under the sway of the primitive unconscious. Warren Colman considers the influence of the anima--in a boy's childhood usually projected onto his mother--as the catalyst to successfully working through Oedipal issues:

At the height of the Oedipus complex parental and contra-sexual images are fused, and, in a way, this creates the complex, since the intense longing for union with the oedipally loved parent is due to the fascinating power of the contrasexual archetype with which they are identified. If anima...can be detached from the parental imago, this fascinating archetypal power is exactly the element that will later fuel the longing for sexual union, a longing that pulls the child out of the charmed circle of the parents towards adult relationships. (JAP, 1996, 41, pp. 37-57)

Colman explains the importance of learning to recognize how the anima and mother archetypes are unlike: "The ability to make this distinction in lived experience (as opposed to theory) is tantamount to a capacity for symbolic thought." (p. 41) When symbolization is impossible, a dreadful literalization of fantasy may occur, as seems to be the case with terrorism: "Where anima and animus are most active, narcissistic object relationships are likely to predominate, in which, as Jung says, 'the subject cannot distinguish between the soul and the object.'" (Colman, p. 40) Emma Jung, too, emphasizes the importance of a cross-fertilization occurring between the maturing ego and the anima archetype:

The confrontation and coming to terms of the ego personality with these figures of the unconscious serve on the one hand to differentiate them from the ego, on the other, to relate them to it, and both sides are affected. A good and very charming example of this is to be found in "Libussa," an originally Czech fairy tale:...

A tree nymph, seeing her oak endangered, obtains protection from a young and noble squire named Krokus. For his service she proposes to reward him with the fulfillment of a wish: for fame and honor, perhaps, or riches, or happiness in love. But he chooses none of these, desiring instead "to rest in the shade of the oak from the weary marching of war," and there from the mouth of the nymph to learn lessons of wisdom for unriddling the secrets of the future." This wish is granted and every evening at twilight she comes to him and they wander together along the reedy shores of a pond. "She instructed her attentive pupil," we are told, "in Nature's secrets, taught him the origin and essence of things, their natural and magical qualities, and so transformed the crude warrior into a thinker and a man of world-embracing wisdom. In the degree that the young man's sensitivity and feeling became refined by his association with this fair elf, her fragile, shadowy figure seemed to take on additional solidity and substance. Her breast gained warmth and life, her brown eyes sparkled fire and, along with this womanly aspect, she seemed also to acquire the feelings of blossoming maidenhood. (E. Jung, p. 83. Italics Jung's)

Apparently a joyous ending, a resolution. The youth has matured and integrated the anima. Now they can live happily ever after. Such, we would like to believe, is individuation--the ideal actualized.

The painful reality, however, is that rather than getting drained and converted to arable land like the Zuider Zee, the unconscious remains unconscious, and, from the standpoint of the conscious ego, uncivilized. And regrettably the anima, its herald, remains largely inscrutable. Then what is it to integrate the anima? I agree with Hillman when he says that "anima consciousness, consciousness of anima, means first of all awareness of one's unconsciousness." (Anima, p. 137) Such an attitude, in its downright humility, hardly smacks of the heroic, but it represents greater maturity. J.W.T. Redfearn states the case very nicely:

The value projected onto the anima can be recovered only if the anima projections are worked through, and if the value is restored to the self-image.... The integration of the anima paradoxically means the abandonment of omnipotence and possessiveness as well as the gaining of the treasure. The treasured object internalized, it becomes an eternal possession in one sense; on the other hand its illusory or elusive quality of unattainability is also fully and sadly acknowledged. (JAP, p. 198)

Hillman is helpfully explicit about what the process of working through, and hence withdrawing, projections, actually demands of the ego:

Depersonalizing the anima means what it says: seeing through the personal aspects of all personifications. It refers to that recognition that all the personal me-ness and self-important subjectivity derive from an archetype that is quite impersonal. Precisely this connection between the personal and the archetype of the personal both depersonalizes and is sacrifice. For sacrifice, as we all know and always forget, means just this sort of connecting personal human events with their impersonal divine background. (Anima, pp. 125, 127)

The endeavor to become wiser entails opening ourselves to become sadder as well.

An approach to analysis that emphasizes enhanced adaptation and mastery will shrink from engaging with the anima as Redfearn and Hillman depict her. She behaves too unpredictably: "As mediatrix to the eternally unknowable she is the bridge both over the river and into the trees and into the sludge and quicksand, making the known ever more unknown." (Hillman, Anima, p. 133) How can psychotherapists respond effectively to anima energy? Peter Schellenbaum's "The Role of the Anima in Analysis" addresses the question:

The anima is always situated on the moving point of an individual's drive toward development, on the point of the strongest pressure toward individuation. The original appearance of the anima is thus one of Dionysian oneness. She is life, life that moves apparently without plan from one point of concentration to another. Only when we entrust ourselves to her do we begin to sense her in-dwelling coherence.... The art in analysis for any individual is the optimal dissolving of resistance to the anima, in the sense of her original meaning as life-bringing energy. It has to do with admitting the anima in her meaninglessness (Jung 1954, par. 66): she doesn't offer any interpretations, but rather confuses and involves one in goalless being. Without breakdown, the breakthrough which belongs to any initiation cannot happen.... As long as there is in us the slightest secret motive regarding definite achievable progress, we are evading the anima. (Gender and Soul, p. 59)

The techniques Schellenbaum recommends are familiar staples of classical Jungian therapy--active imagination, dreamwork, drawing, painting, modeling--aimed at conducting a dialogue with the anima, paying special attention to the feeling-tone of the encounter:

An aggressive affect...will neither be devalued nor denied. Instead, judgment-free questions will be put: What do you want to say to me? What neglected aspect of my self seeks expression in you? Is there some necessary delimitation that you want to force from me? Are you signaling some life task that needs tackling? Or, what in my life would you like to destroy? A particular attitude or relationship, or a particular behavior of mine? Such a dialogue with the anima should, according to Jung, last as long as required for a subjective feeling of peace and satisfaction to set in.... The basic attitude of the mature anima, active receptivity, stimulates the pouring forth of images. (Gender and Soul, p. 60, 62)

Schellenbaum contends that analysts often evade such highly-charged encounters, through a process he terms "anima collusion," which results when analyst and analysand both enact roles that involve maintaining at least partial "unconsciousness with respect to the anima." (Gender and Soul, p. 63) He captions the various avoidant roles played by a male analyst with a male analysand: "Each Encounters the Other in Terms of an Unconscious Aversion to the Feminine," "Analyst and Analysand Encounter in Unconscious Anima-Possession," "There is a Conflict Between the Analyst's Anima and the Analysand's Need to Define Boundaries," and "The Analyst Defends Against the Anima Identity of His Analysand," and also lists an equal number of dodges involving male analysts and female analysands. Time prevents me from giving a full account of these situations, but here is a sample, Schellenbaum depicting an analyst defending against the anima identity of his analysand:

The analyst...is unspontaneous, controlled, and cautious in his emotional expression. His anima expresses itself more or less in the image of a young, reticent girl or a holy virgin. The anima of the analysand...appears perhaps in the image of a whore who propositions the other with no respect for the niceties. Because the two anima figures are related to each other as opposites, antipathy and defensiveness develop easily between the two opposing players in the analytical discussion. The analysand will become even less respectful of distance and the analyst reacts with even more aloofness than with other analysands.... As in all forms of anima collusion, it would be necessary for the analyst to gain consciousness and openly discuss with the analysand the polarizing collusion of the transference and countertransference which is driving them. (Gender and Soul, p. 66)

In order to resolve such problems the analyst must engage and draw upon his own capacity for anima-relatedness, eros--a very tall order under the circumstances, but nobody should have led him to expect that his job always would be easy.

This concludes my prepared remarks on the anima. A reasonable lecture would end with a summing-up. But how to finish a lecture about an unreasonable topic? When I asked my anima how to sum her up, she replied irritably, "Don't patronize me!" And so I'll just leave it at that.

Bibliography

Beebe, John. "The Anima in Film," in Schwartz-Salant, Nathan and Stein, Murray, Eds., Gender and Soul in Psychotherapy. Wilmette, Illinois, Chiron Publications, 1992, pp. 261-268.

__________. "The Father's Anima as a Clinical and as a Symbolic Problem," Journal of Analytical Psychology, v. 29, 1984, pp. 277-287.

Colman, Warren. "Aspects of Anima and Animus in Oedipal Development," Journal of Analytical Psychology, v. 41, 1996, pp. 37-57.

Hillman, James. Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Dallas, Spring Publications, 1987.

Jung, C. G. The Collected Works.

__________. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

__________. "Shadow, Animus, and Anima," Spring, 1950, pp. 1-11.

Jung, Emma. Animus and Anima, Two Essays. New York, The Analytical Psychology Club, 1957.

Kast, Verena. "Animus and Anima: Spiritual Growth and Separation," Harvest, v. 39, 1993, pp. 5-15.

Lane, Anthony. "This is not a Movie," The New Yorker, September 24, 2001, pp. 79-80.

Larkin, Philip. The Whitsun Weddings. New York, Random House, 1964.

Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Cleveland and New York, Meridian Books, 1963.

Redfearn, J. W. T. "The Captive, the Treasure, the Hero, and the 'Anal' Stage of Development," Journal of Analytical Psychology, v. 24, 1979, pp. 185-205.

The San Francisco Chronicle, October 6, 2001, Section A, p. 7.

Schellenbaum, Peter. "The Role of the Anima in Analysis," Gender and Soul in Psychotherapy, pp. 55-72.

Schwartz-Salant, Nathan. "Anima and Animus in Jung's Alchemical Mirror," Gender and Soul in Psychotherapy, pp. 1-24.

Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.

Tresan, David. "The Anima of the Analyst-Its Development," Gender and Soul in Psychotherapy, pp. 73-110.

Ulanov, Ann Belford. "Disguises of the Anima," Gender and Soul in Psychotherapy, pp. 25-54.

Von Franz, Maria. Puer Aeturnus. Zurich, Spring, 1973.

Whitmont, Edward C. "The Gender Archetypes," Gender and Soul in Psychotherapy, pp. 179-184.

Young-Eisendrath, Polly. "Gender, Animus, and Related Topics," Gender and Soul in Psychotherapy, pp. 151-178.

Zinkin, Louis. "Anima and Animus: An Interpersonal View," Gender and Soul in Psychotherapy, pp. 111-150.

Anima is copyright © 2001 by Paul Watsky

Paul Watsky is a Jungian analyst with a private practice in San Francisco.  He moonlights as a poet, and has a website,  paulwatskypoetry.com, where some of his work can be found.

© 2002 C.G. Jung Society of Atlanta. All Rights Reserved.

updated 06/16/02
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