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ANIMA
An Anatomy of a Personified Notion
ANIMA
An Anatomy of a Personified Notion
James Hillman
A shorter version, differently arranged, appeared in Spring 1973 and Spring 1974,
Copyright by Spring Publications, Inc. All rights reserved
All excerpts from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung and the two volumes of C. G.
Jung Letters are Copyright by Princeton University Press and by Routledge & Kegan
Paul. Reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press. All excerpts from
Memories, Dreams, Reflections are Copyright by Random House, Inc.
International Distributors:
Spring; Postfach; 8800 Thalwil; Switzerland.
Japan Spring Sha, Inc.; 1-2-4, Nishisakaidani-Cho;
Ohharano, Nishikyo-Ku; Kyoto, 610-11, Japan.
Element Books Ltd; Longmead; Shaftesbury;
Dorset SP7 8PL; England.
Hillman, James.
Anima : an anatomy of a personified notion.
Bibliography: p.
1. Anima (Psychoanalysis) 2. Jung, C. G. (Carl
Gustav), 1875-1961. 1. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav),
1875-1961. II. Title.
BF175.5.A52H55 1985 150.19°54 85-18320
ISBN 0-88214-316-6
Cover design by Catherine Meehan and Sven Doehner. The anima image on the cover:
Bernardo Buontalenti, Ninfa marina, Firenze, B.N.F., C.B., 3, 53!', c. 10r; Fotocolor G.
Sansoni, per concessione della Bibi. Naz. Firenze and selected by Pierre Denivelle.
Mary Vernon acknowledges the following sources for assorted details of her images:
Carol B. Grafton, Treasury of Art Nouveau Design and Ornament; Jim Harter, Harter’s
Picture Archive; Jim Harter, Women: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century
Sources; and Theodore Menten, Pictorial Archive of Quaint Woodcuts: Joseph Crawhall,
all from Dover Publications.
Most of all, the author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the use of excerpts from the
following volumes of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F.C. Hull, Bollingen
Series XX. The excerpts are reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press.
The author and publisher also thank Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. (London), publisher
of the above-mentioned edition of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung in Great Britain.
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PREFACE
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PENOTERIEOD
UC TALON
1
Part I
6 ANIMA AND DEPERSONALIZATION
101
NIORIGES
184
Editorial Note
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Preface
Here is an essay that can stand for itself. Usually after twelve years
one wants to re-do the job. The urge to improve. Instead, I am
amazed with the way it is — that it was done so thoroughly and that
it was done at all. It needed only some re-formulations, exten-
sions, and practical cautions — in twelve years one does learn a
thing or two about anima. But once embarked on these expan-
sions, I could barely contain them within these pages. What an in-
stigator anima can be, though I doubt whether this essay, aimed at
clarifying her notion in my mind, did much to untangle her effects
in my life. Still today I defend myself against her with both ideali-
zations and scepticism.
The essay began as an excursion that I felt was essential to the
body of Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), but soon anima claimed
more display than the proportions of that work would allow. The
essay was even too flamboyant to print as one piece and so had to
be cut into halves (Spring 1973 and Spring 1974). Those issues of
that annual are long out of print, which gives the efficient cause for
making the essay into this book.
There are further causes, more deep-seated reasons. As I look
back, it seems my work has always been anima-based, from Emo-
tion (1960) to “Betrayal” and the Psyche/Eros tale as the myth of
analysis, on to “soul-making,” and more recently, the focus on the
aesthetic imagination and the soul of the world (anima mundt).
Specialized chapters of investigation into the salt, the silver, and
the color blue in alchemy also elaborate upon anima phenomenol-
ogy. If anima is my root metaphor, it seems psychologically neces-
sary to delve into this component who dominates my thought,
colors my style, and has so graciously proffered themes for my at-
tention.
Moreover, isn’t devotio to anima the calling of psychology? So,
ix
PREFACE
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Introduction
(c) ... I have noticed that people usually have not much difficulty in
picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow.... But it
costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is.
They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a
film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing
the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up every-
thing that a man can never get the better of and never finishes cop-
ing with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality
which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one
meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding.
CW 9,1, 8485
INTRODUCTION/HILLMAN
3
JUNG/SCRIPTA
eS
... every man “carries Eve, his wife, hidden in his body.” It is this
feminine element in every man (based on the minority of female
genes in his biological make-up) which I have called the anima.
CW 18, §429
The fact that the rotundum is ... contained in the anima and is
prefigured by her lends her that extraordinary fascination. ... Ata
certain level, therefore, woman appears as the true carrier of the
longed-for wholeness and redemption. CW 14, §500
6
CONTRASEXUALITY/HILLMAN
genes in a man’s body” (Cw 11, §48)2 Anima thus becomes the
carrier and even the image of “wholeness,”> since she completes
the hermaphrodite both psychologically and as representative of
man’s biological contrasexuality.
If anima represents man’s female lacuna, then a therapy gov-
erned by the idea of individuation toward wholeness focuses main-
ly upon her development. Anima development has thus become a
major therapeutic tenet in the minds of many analytical psychol-
ogists, and the “development of the feminine,” a major plank in
the platform of analytical psychology. But as long as “anima” re-
mains a portmanteau idea packed thick with other notions - eros,
feeling, human relationships, introversion, fantasy, concrete life,
and others we shall be uncovering as we proceed — the develop-
ment of anima, like anima herself, continues to mean many things
to many men. In the guise of “anima development,” there takes
place a rich trade in smuggled hypotheses, pretty pieties about
eros, and eschatological indulgences about saving one’s soul
through relationship, becoming more feminine, and the sacrifice of
intellect.
JUNG/SCRIPTA
el
In both cases [anima and animus] the incest element plays an im-
portant part: there is a relation between the young woman and her
father, the older woman and her son, the young man and his moth-
er, the older man and his daughter. Cw 16,§521
The inner personality is the way one behaves in relation to one’s in-
ner psychic processes; it is the inner attitude, the characteristic
face, that is turned towards the unconscious. I call the outer atti-
tude, the outward face, the persona; the inner attitude, the inward
face, I call the anima. CW 6, §803
SS
SS SSS
8
CONTRASEXUALITY/HILLMAN
10
CONTRASEXUALITY/HILLMAN
The more a man identifies with his biological and social role as
man (persona), the more will the anima dominate inwardly.’ As
the persona presides over adaptation to collective consciousness,
so the anima rules the inner world of the collective unconscious.
As male psychology, according to Jung,> shifts after mid-life
toward its female opposite, so there is a physiological and social
softening and weakening toward “the feminine,” all of which are
occasioned by the anima.
No doubt experience does confirm this first notion of the anima
which holds her to be the inferior distaff side of men. Indeed, she is
first encountered through the dream figures, emotions, symp-
tomatic complaints, obsessive fantasies and projections of Western
men. Anima is “the glamorous, possessive, moody, and sentimen-
JUNG/SCRIPTA
a
The anima... is the “energy of the heavy and the turbid”; it clings
to the bodily, fleshly heart. Its effects are “sensuous desires and im-
pulses to anger.” “Whoever is sombre and moody on waking . . . is
fettered to the anima.” Cw 13,857
Take, for example, the “spotless” man of honour and public ben-
efactor, whose tantrums and explosive moodiness terrify his wife
and children. What is the anima doing here? CW 7, §319
The growing youth must be able to free himself from the anima
fascination of his mother. There are exceptions, notably artists,
where the problem often takes a different turn; also homosexual-
ity, which is usually characterized by identity with the anima.
... Such a disposition should not be adjudged negative in all cir-
cumstances, in so far as it preserves the archetype of the Original
Man, which a one-sided sexual being has, up to a point, lost.
CW 9,i, 8146
12
CONTRASEXUALITY/HILLMAN
Just as the persona is the image of himself which the subject pre-
sents to the world, and which is seen by the world, so the anima is
the image of the subject in his relation to the collective uncon-
scious. . . One could also say: the anima is the face of the subject
as seen by the collective unconscious. ... If the ego adopts the
standpoint of the anima, adaptation to reality is severely compro-
mised. CW 728571
... the character of the anima can be deduced from that of the per-
sona. Everything that should normally be in the outer attitude, but
is conspicuously absent, will invariably be found in the inner atti-
tude. This is a fundamental rule... . CW 6, §806
14
CONTRASEXUALITY/HILLMAN
Apart from its lunar wetness and its terrestrial nature, the most
outstanding properties of salt are bitterness and wisdom. . . Salt,
as the carrier of this fateful alternative, is co-ordinated with the na-
ture of woman. CW 14, §330
16
EROS/HILLMAN
The Latin words animus, ‘spirit’, and anima, ‘soul’, are the same as
the Greek anemos, ‘wind’. The other Greek word for ‘wind’, pneu-
ma, also means ‘spirit’. In Gothic we find the same word in us-
anan, ‘to breathe out’, and in Latin it is anhelare, ‘to pant’. In Old
High German, spiritus sanctus was rendered by atum, ‘breath’. In
Arabic, ‘wind’ is mh, and rub is ‘soul, spirit’. The Greek word
psyche has similar connections; it is related to psychein, ‘to
breathe’, psychos, ‘cool’, psychros, ‘cold, chill’, and physa, ‘bel-
lows’. These connections show clearly how in Latin, Greek, and
Arabic the names given to the soul are related to the notion of
moving air, the “cold breath of the spirits.” CW 8, §664
For Heraclitus the soul at the highest level is fiery and dry, because
Ywuxh as such is closely akin to “cool breath” — Yvxelv means ‘to
breathe,’ ‘to blow’; Yuxpds and Ywxos mean ‘cold,’ ‘chill,’ ‘damp.’
CW 91,855
... another fact to which I have already alluded, [is] the character-
istically historical aspect of the soul. CW 7, §303
With this anima, then, we plunge straight into the ancient world.
CW 12, 8112 (cf. CW 7, §§299-303)
18
EROS/HILLMAN
19
JUNG/SCRIPTA
Se
“[Anima] is a subtle imperceptible smoke.” CW 12, §394n105
20
EROS/HILLMAN
But how do we dare to call this elfin being the “anima”? Anima
means soul and should designate something very wonderful and
immortal. Yet this was not always so. We should not forget that
this kind of soul is a dogmatic conception whose purpose it is to
pin down and capture something uncannily alive and active. The
German word Seele is closely related, via the Gothic form saiwald,
to the Greek word ald\os , which means ‘quick-moving,’ ‘change-
ful of hue,’ ‘twinkling,’ something like a butterfly — yux7 in
Greek — which reels drunkenly from flower to flower and lives on
honey and love. CW 9,i, §55
... the anima iliastri can burst forth from the heart when it lacks
“air”; that is to say, if psychic remedies are not applied, death oc-
curs prematurely. Cw 13,§201
24
EROS/HILLMAN
... the anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one mo-
ment 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, §356
26
EROS/HILLMAN
(a) Of course, I did not invent the term Eros. I learnt it from Plato.
But I never would have applied this term if I hadn’t observed facts
that gave me a hint how to use this Platonic notion. With Plato
Eros is still a daimonion or daemonium....
18 June 1947, Letter to Ermine Huntress Lantero
28
EROS/HILLMAN
Green, the life-colour, suits her [the anima] very well. ...
CW 5, 8678
30
EROS/HILLMAN
concept, renaming it psychic energy. With Jung’s de-libidinizing
the very basis of psychoanalytic theory, the archetypal premise of
the unconscious shifted from Aphrodite to Hermes-Mercurius,
and the soul’s fluxions were removed from the sexual eroticism
and personal concretism of Aphrodite.
But stili she influences our notions. How we welcome her color
green in fantasy and dreams,? indicating to what extent Venus has
colored our view of psychic events. They are seen through the
green lenses of her world, growth, nature, life, and love, so that in-
dividuation tends to mean increasing beauty and harmony of soul.
Little wonder that contemporary psychotherapeutic work — en-
counter, sensitivity, gestalt, Reichean — has led finally into overt
demonstrations of Aphrodite: non-verbal, nakedness, feel-and-
touch, body awareness, orgasm.
We may know a good deal about the manifestations of Aph-
rodite in myth and in our personal lives. But we know far too little
about how she governs the premises and conclusions of our think-
ing. These we naively think are based on empirical facts. But the
very idea of concrete, sensate facts suits her style of consciousness.
The erotic ‘facts’ on which we build our ideas are her creations.
Psychological evidence is never simply objective givens, lying
around like moonrocks, waiting to be picked up. Empirical evi-
dence of any psychological premise forms part of the same arche-
typal perspective: we find what we are looking for; we see what is
allowed to fit in by the perceptual defenses in the archetypal struc-
ture of our consciousness. So we see the soul filled with sexual
wishes when our premises and observations are Aphroditic. The
Aphroditic cast of the anima in Jung’s essay on transference is an
excellent case in point.>
Aphrodite may have given the correct perspective to trans-
ference and may have been the gateway to the repressed (in our
culture between 1870 and 1960), but it is not the anima’s only, or
even main, perspective. Athene, Artemis, Hera, and Persephone
produce ideas of soul that would show another twist. To place
anima events upon the altar of Aphrodite puts Psyche back in her
service, back to the beginning of Apuleius’s tale, the rest of which,
and the very point of which, displays a movement away from
Aphrodite, both of Eros and of Psyche.
If anima is defined as the eros factor, then we are always bound
a1
JUNG/SCRIPTA
ae
——
32
FEELING/HILLMAN
a
The most striking feature about the anima-type is that the mater-
nal element is entirely lacking. She is the companion and friend in
her favourable aspect, in her unfavourable aspect she is the courte-
san.... But the anima-type is presented in the most succinct and
pregnant form in the Gnostic legend of Simon Magus. . . . [who]
was always accompanied on his travels by a girl, whose name was
Helen. He had found her in a brothel in Tyre; she was a reincarna-
tion of Helen of Troy. Cw 10, §75
34
FEELING/HILLMAN
ness and personal evaluations that feeling has come to mean and
which confine anima into the personal feeling world of Helen?
Another source of the confusion between anima and feeling lies
in an idea, only occasionally occurring in Jung? but bruited widely
by later analytical psychologists, that feeling is a feminine prerog-
ative. (Women are more at home in the feeling world; men learn
about feeling from women; the development of the feminine goes
by way of the feeling function.) Since anima is by definition fem-
inine, then feeling refers to anima. Next in these steps of spurious
reasoning erected on questionable premises is the equation: anima
development = feeling development. Behind this equation still
lurks the idea of eros, which is supposed to be the force within
both the anima and the feeling function.
Just as anima is not eros or its psychic representative, so too the
relation between the God-daimon Eros and eros as an archetypal
principle, on the one hand, and feeling as a psychological function,
on the other hand, has never been established — neither empiri-
cally, nor logically, nor phenomenologically. The feeling function
works mainly through the realm of feeling of which at least fifteen
hundred different ones have been named by psychology. Only
some of this feeling has to do with eros. To give to eros either feel-
ing or the anima puts too many events all upon one altar, claiming
all for love. Not only is this biasedly Christian — in the sense of lim-
ited to only the one perspective of love — but also authentic aspects
of anima become judged only from the standpoint of love. Hatred,
spite, suspicion, jealousy, rejection, enmity, deception, betrayal,
cruelty, misanthropy, ridicule play their part in anima experiences.
35
JUNG/SCRIPTA
2
The nixie is ... a magical feminine being whom I call the anima.
She can also be a siren, melusina (mermaid), wood-nymph, Grace,
or Erlking’s daughter, or a lamia or succubus, who infatuates
young men and sucks the life out of them....
... An alluring nixie . . . is today called an “erotic fantasy,” and
she may complicate our psychic life in a most painful way. She
comes upon us just as a nixie might; she sits on top of us like a suc-
cubus; she changes into all sorts of shapes like a witch... . [and]
causes states of fascination that rival the best bewitchment. . . . She
is a mischievous being who crosses our path in numerous transfor-
mations and disguises, playing all kinds of tricks on us, causing
happy and unhappy delusions, depressions and ecstasies, out-
bursts of affect, etc.... the nixie has not laid aside her roguery.
The witch has not ceased to mix her vile potions of love and death;
her magic poison has been refined into intrigue and self-deception,
unseen though none the less dangerous for that.
CW 9,1, 8853-54
ee ee ee
36
FEELING/HILLMAN
38
FEELING/HILLMAN
who roots our human feeling in her historical soil. And, when
human feeling departs at death and we join our ancestors, anima
as the p’o soul (see below, chapter four) is reabsorbed into the cul-
tural earth of one’s racial geography perhaps only slightly affected
by whatever courageous development of feeling has been achieved
by an individual personality.
Yet when we look at Jung’s drawings in the Red Book and the
first incursion of anima in his active imaginations as described in
his memoirs, it was neither Gretchen nor any Alpine or Rheinisch
Magd who appeared to him, but blind Salome, a pathologized
companion of a Gnostic sage (see below, chapter nine).
That is: there seems to be another impersonal factor in anima
which is individual, endogenous, and independent of the racial un-
conscious. She and her companions brought Jung an individual
fate and perhaps also a style of feeling. I mean by this his range of
Einfithlung across cultures, his ability to distance by relating im-
personally through ancient symbols, his fascination with and un-
derstanding of pathology, and, accompanying his wisdom, the
blindness of which he has been accused in crucial relations, evalua-
tions, and judgments (Helene, Sabina, Freud, National Socialism,
and his choice of pupils).
The appreciation of Jung’s feeling and his contribution to the
psychology of feeling as a function must start with anima as an an-
cestrally ethnic dominant on the one hand, and, on the other, as an
individually fateful constellation. Neither aspect, however, is hu-
man. Precisely this inhuman quality is her gift to feeling.
The muddling of anima and feeling contributes to that primrose
path in analytical psychotherapy which considers the cure of souls
to be an anima cultivation of a specific kind, i.e., feeling develop-
ment. But anima cultivation, or soul-making to use the wider idea,
is first of all a complex process of fantasying and understanding of
which only part is the sophistication of feeling. Besides, the feeling
that is developed through soul-making is perhaps more imperson-
al, a detailed sensitivity to the specific worth of psychic contents
and attitudes, than it is personal. This development does not pro-
ceed from the impersonal to the personal, related, and human.
Rather, the movement goes from the narrower embrace of my em-
pirical human world and its personal concerns toward archetypal
events that put my empirical, personal world in a more significant
45
46
FEELING/HILLMAN
48
FEELING/HILLMAN
hood, the thought of whom can still catch one’s breath) do not
necessarily signify undeveloped feelings. They may also be the
gateways to the elfin world, or they may awaken nostalgic pothos,
that yearning for intimacy with ‘earlier’ times and the first home.
The archetypal child whom mythologists, and Jung, call Divine
leaves its radiance on every undeveloped trait. Hence these traits
are so difficult to renounce in the name of maturity. This peculiar
radiance pulls us not only regressively to the childish and inferior,
for it is also childlike and superb. We must be careful how we
touch the ‘immature.’ Development as adaptive normalcy to the
real world can be psychic child abuse, resulting in an imagination
without access to its Real world.
To read the psyche’s inhuman images as signals for feeling de-
velopment leads right into the “humanistic fallacy,” the belief that
psyche is a function of the human being and is meant to serve the
human life, its images humanized. I still see the connection be-
tween man and soul the other way around, as in the main Platonic
tradition where man is a function of psyche and his job is to serve
it. The therapist of psyche, which in root means “soul-servant,”
translates human events into the language of the psyche, rather
than the psyche into the language of humanism.
At the front of therapy’s secular humanism flies the banner of
feeling. Where the Church and then psychoanalysis did not quite
drive out the devils, ‘personal relatedness in a human context’ will
finally do the job. The anima will become socially presentable,
adapted. But if, as Jung says, “the Gods have become diseases,”#
then curing the soul of its unrelated, inhuman images may also
cure it of its Gods. The confusion of anima with feeling, and the
attempt to humanize by feeling, is thus not psychotherapy at all.
Rather it is part of contemporary secularism’s sickness of soul, or
psychopathology. We have yet to discover which archetypal per-
son has captured consciousness through the sentimental appeal of
humanism and feeling. At least we know it is not Eros, who pre-
fers the dark and silence to ‘relatedness,’ ‘communicating,’ and
‘sharing.’ Yet some archetypal power does influence therapy by in-
terpreting the psychic movement of our images and their animal-
daimonic forms into social relations and personal connections and
by raising such guilt over ‘unrelatedness.’ I suspect Hera, especially
in her ‘young-married’ form of Hebe.
49
TUNG/S
CR UP TA
ee Ee eee
The anima is the archetype of the feminine and plays a very impor-
tant role in a man’s unconscious. CW 5, §406n142
When projected, the anima always has a feminine form with def-
inite characteristics. This empirical finding does not mean that the
archetype is constituted like that in itself. CW 9,i, §142
50
THE FEMININE/HILLMAN
The spiritual man was seduced into putting on the body, and was
bound to it by “Pandora, whom the Hebrews call Eve.” She played
the part, therefore, of the anima .. . just as Shakti or Maya entan-
gles man’s consciousness with the world. CW 13, §126
... the deceptive Shakti, must return to the watery realm if the
work is to reach its goal. She should no longer dance before the
adept with alluring gestures, but must become what she was from
the beginning: a part of his wholeness. (The anima is thereby
forced into the inner world. .. .) CW 13, §223 (and n15)
He will learn to know his soul, that is, his anima and Shakti who
conjures up a delusory world for him. CW 14, §673
... She is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into
life with her Maya....
... T have suggested ... the term “anima”...
CW 9,11, 8824-25
eeeeet ee A
52
THE FEMININE/HILLMAN
I have seen Mrs. X. and I assure you she is quite an eyeful and be-
yond! ... If ever there was an anima it is she....
21 September 1951, Letter to Father Victor White
54
THE FEMININE/HILLMAN
(a) The anima is indeed the archetype of life itself... . CW 14, §646
(b) ... now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore....
the anima also has “occult” connections with “mysteries”. . . . [S]he
is more or less immortal, because outside time....|T]he anima...
belongs to a different order of things. CW 9,1, §356
The anima also has affinities with animals, which symbolize her
characteristics. Thus she can appear as a snake or a tiger or a bird.
CW 9,1, §358
56
THE FEMININE/HILLMAN
For, besides the romantic idealizations of anima, she can also be
tawdry, trite, trivial, barren, and cheap. And men can spend
hours, years, in nothingness with a silly ‘anima-type,’ fluff and
prattle. Seven years Ulysses passed in Calypso’s cavernous empti-
ness. Why? What for? Hedonism? Incarnation into the flesh? Or is
it to rescue and transform the woman, like Orpheus seeking to
bring Eurydice to the upper light? Rather, this ‘anima-type’ pre-
sents us with an archetypal condition of soul that is drowsily nym-
phic, neither asleep nor awake, neither self-sustainingly virginal
nor faithfully conjoined, lost and empty, a tabula rasa. Perhaps
Eurydice wants to remain marginal, a shade insubstantial, and
therefore the long years of escapes to dark bars and motel contra-
ceptions, the mute waste in a limbo without light and without
depth are a style of anima fascinations in which the absence of sig-
nificance is precisely the significance. Anima, as archetype of life,?
can be utterly devoid of meaning. Hence, she constellates the
search for the wise old Man, archetype of meaning.
Here again I believe we have an instance of our psychic premises
being determined by an archetypal figure so that we see that which
is already given in the premise. We call these women anima types
and we connect them with the ancient figure of the hetaera; yet
because of theory (no anima in women), we assume that the anima
archetype can affect a woman’s life only through men and their
fatuous projections.
Let us look at this more closely. The roles which Jung assigns to
the anima? — relation with the mysteries, with the archaic past,
enactment of the good fairy, witch, whore, saint, and animal asso-
ciations with bird, tiger, and serpent (to mention only those he
there mentions) — all appear frequently and validly in the psychol-
ogy of women. Anima phenomenology is not restricted to the male
sex. Women have little girls in their dreams, and whores; they too
are lured by mysterious and unknown women. The Saint, Sappho,
and Sleeping Beauty are part of their inscapes too. And as the im-
ages are not restricted to men only, so gnima emotion cannot be
confined only to the male sex. Women too bear an expectancy, an
interiority that is opposed to their outer persona actions. They too
lose touch and may be drawn away to meditate their fate, their
death, their immortality. They too sense soul and suffer its mystery
ny!
JUNG/SCRIPTA
Ce es
(a) ... I have reserved the term “animus” strictly for women....
Feminine psychology exhibits an element that is the counterpart of
a man’s anima. CW 13, §60
58
THE FEMININE/HILLMAN
: os 4 Bheey pr?”
Pe m
60
THE FEMININE/HILLMAN
ed, for you are the riddle yourselves.”)?2 But psyche, the sense of
soul, is not given to woman just because she is born female. She is
no more blessed with a congenitally saved soul than man who
must pass his life in worry over its fate. She is no more exonerated
from the tasks of anima cultivation than man; for her to neglect
soul for the sake of spirit is no less psychologically reprehensible
than it is in man who is ever being told by analytical psychology
that he must sacrifice intellect, persona, and extraversion for the
sake of soul, feeling, inwardness, i.e., anima.
The immense difficulty which some women have with imagina-
tion and the torment some go through in regard to a sense of inner
emptiness both point to soul as area of their need. No less than
men, women need fantasy, mythologizings in which they can read
themselves and discover fate. To find a sense of worth, confidence
as a person, or “psychological faith” as Grinnell?3 has called it, is
as much a need of woman as of man. The hokey substitutes for
soul, the anima sentimentalities and anima inflations, are found
equally in both sexes; women’s attempts at depth, inwardness,
sensitivity, and wisdom are as prey to pseudo-soul as those of men.
In women perhaps pseudo-soul is even more evident, for in the
absence of anima, animus fills the gap, a transvestite travesty.
Animus is given with the civilization, and its psychic representa-
tion which we foreshorten into the notion of ego is, as Neumann?4
pointed out, masculine in women too. Ego’s archetype is the Hero,
and so its underside in women too will show the soulful qualities
of anima. The neglected area is not animus but anima.
An animus development with which anima does not keep pace
will lead a woman away from psychological understanding. This
occurs by drying her fantasy, narrowing her range of mood and in-
volvement with life, turning her into at best a spiritual paragon
and a psychological dunce, her wisdom, her concern, her counsel
all being developed opinion, detached, rather than soul reflection
in the midst of her attachments — and this we see even where the
preferred field of animus development be psychology itself. The
domain of psychology does not guarantee that its inhabitants are
particularly psychological. The shingle over the door, “psychol-
ogist,” unfortunately attests to nothing about the soul of the prac-
titioner. And if the practitioner be a woman, then the epithet
“psychologist” even more certainly has nothing to do with soul,
61
JUNG/SCRIPTA
he
eeea a SS
(b) ... the Kore often appears in woman as an unknown young girl,
not infrequently as Gretchen or the unmarried mother. . . . [or] the
dancer, ... the corybant, maenad, or nymph.
CW 9,1, 8311
62
THE FEMININE/HILLMAN
since the (animus) developmental process which led to the title has
been by definition one of spirit, not of soul. To state this implies
nothing against the development of logos or against respect for
ideas in women, but as spirit is not soul, so animus is not anima,
and neither can be neglected nor substituted for the other. The
syzygy means both.
The power of our theoretical notions cannot be overestimated.
By our denying woman anima and giving her animus instead, an
entire archetypal pattern has been determined for women’s psy-
chology. The per definitionem absence of anima in women is a
deprivation of a cosmic principle with no less consequence in the
practice of analytical psychology than has been the theory of penis
deprivation in the practice of psychoanalysis.
While raising this doubt about the animus, I would as well raise
a hope that the typically anima constellations in a woman’s psyche
be treated as such, and no longer as shadow simply because these
manifestations are feminine. This in turn would lead to a more
precisely refined notion of shadow, perhaps keeping it reserved for
the morally repressed. Whenever it comes to a choice between sav-
ing the theory and saving the phenomena, the history of thought
shows that it profits more to side with the phenomena, even if for a
while theory is dislocated and some things we had considered clear
fall back into a new obscurity.
Returning now to the emptiness of the anima-type woman, we
may remember that hitherto her relationship to the anima arche-
type has had by definition to come through a man. But now we
may no longer regard her psychology in this way. The emptiness is
no mere void for catching a projection from the opposite sex. Nor
may we account for this emptiness through the notions of an un-
conscious shadow or an undeveloped animus. To derive it from a
father-complex again puts the origin onto man, leaving the woman
only a daughter, only an object created by projection, an Eve born
out of Adam’s sleep, without independent soul, fate, and individu-
ality.?
Rather this emptiness would be considered an authentic arche-
typal manifestation of the anima in one of her classical forms,
maiden, nymph, Kore, which Jung so well describes,” and hee
he also states that “she often appears in woman.” Even should we
63
JUNG/SCRIPTA
a_____________ El
Se
Melusina comes into the same category as the nymphs and sirens
who dwell in the “Nymphidida,” the watery realm.... [T]he
birthplace of Melusina is the womb of the mysteries, obviously
what we today would call the unconscious. . . . Melusina is clearly
an anima figure. Cw 13, §180
ae When projected, the anima always has a feminine form with defi-
nite characteristics. This empirical finding does not mean that the
archetype is constituted like that in itself. CW 9,i, 8142
64
THE FEMININE/HILLMAN
relate this maiden to the daughter, it may remain within the anima
constellation. There is no need to search outside for origins in a fa-
ther.
We all know that fathers create daughters; but daughters create
fathers too. The enactment of the maiden-daughter in all her re-
ceptive charm, shy availability, and masochistic wiliness draws
down a fathering spirit. But its appearance and her victimization
are her creation. Even the idea that she is all a result of the father
(or the absent or bad father) is part of the father-fantasy of the ani-
ma archetype. And so, she must be ‘so attached’ to father because
anima is reflection of an attachment. She creates the figurative
father and the belief in its responsibility which serves to confirm
the archetypal metaphor of Daughter that owes its source, not to
the father, but to the anima inherent in a woman’s psyche, too.
Moreover, the muse, to whom the nymph has a special connec-
tion and toward whom her consciousness is intending, if we follow
W.F. Otto,?> belongs also authentically to the potential of
women’s psychology in its own right and is not only in reflection to
men. It is not man’s anima, and so it is not a man’s inner life that
the nymph, hetaera, or muse is reflecting but anima as archetype,
which by other names is psyche or soul.
At this level of distinction Jung himself raises a doubt whether
we can truly speak of the anima per se as feminine. He suggests
that we may have to confine the archetype’s femininity to its pro-
jected form.> Paradoxically, the very archetype of the feminine
may not itself be feminine. (Cf. 8 June 1959, Letter to Traugott
Egloff: “The androgyny of the anima may appear in the anima her-
self... .”) One could raise a similar doubt about the “femininity”
of life of which anima is the archetype.
65
JUNG/SCRIPTA
LL
... [in] classical Chinese philosophy ... the anima (p’o or kuez?) is
regarded as the feminine and chthonic part of the soul.
CWO i ehh
... Lused the term “anima” in a way quite analogous to the Chi-
nese definition of p’o.... [T]he affective character of a man has
feminine traits. From this psychological fact derives the Chinese
doctrine of the p’o soul as well as my own concept of the anima.
CW 13, 858
“Anima,” called p’o, and written with the characters for “white”
and “demon,” that is, “white ghost,” belongs to the lower, earth-
bound, bodily soul, the yin principle, and is therefore feminine.
CW 23.557
Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in man,
that which lives of itself and causes life... . With her cunning play
of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does
not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life
may be lived. She is full of snares and traps, in order that man
should fall, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and
stay caught.... CW 9,i, §56
66
THE FEMININE/HILLMAN
68
THE FEMININE/HILLMAN
69
JUNG/SCRIPTA
ce ES
Anima means soul. ... [T]he soul is the magic breath of life (hence
the term “anima”).... CW 9,i, 855
... the queen and the king are one, in the sense that body and soul
or spirit and soul are one.... the queen corresponds to the soul
(anima).... CW 14, §536 (cf. CW 10, §243; Cw 13, §168n62)
70
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
71
JUNG/SCRIPTA
SS
ee
[In the German text the word Anima is used only twice....
Everywhere else the word used is Seele (soul). In this translation
anima is substituted for “soul” when it refers specifically to the
feminine component in a man.... “Soul” is retained only when it
refers to the psychic factor common to both sexes. The distinction
is not always easy to make....| CW 6, §803n80
Tes
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
>
i
73
JUNG/SCRIPTA
a
We may ... assume that the transferring of the water of life to the
sister really means that the mother has been replaced by the anima.
CW 125892
74
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
a
JUNG/SCRIPTA
76
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
Ti.
JUNG/SCRIPTA
ee
... the queen and the king are one, in the sense that body and soul
or spirit and soul are one.... the queen corresponds to the soul
(anima) and the king to spirit... . the secret of the work was some-
times called the “Reginae Mysteria.” CW 14, §536
. .. our picture represents the union of the spirit with material real-
ity.... [T]he spirit of the gold, [is] only the right half of the
king.... The queen is a sulphur, ... a chthonic spirit.... [T]he
self or imago Dei ... is here united with its chthonic counterpart.
... [T]his is personified in the psychological anima figure....
[T]he alchemical queen ... corresponds to the psychological
anima. CW 14, §736
78
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
(b) The soul functions ... in the body, but has the greater part of its
function .. . outside the body.... CW 12, §396
80
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
spark of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul.” Because we take the
anima personalistically, or she dupes the ego this way, we lose the
wider significance of anima. This loss of soul goes on even while
we are most engaged in the attempt to gain it: “developing my
anima” through relatedness, creativity, and individuation.
Unless we understand the “within” in a radically new way —- or
classically old way — we go on perpetuating the division between
my anima and world soul (objective psyche). The more we concen-
trate her inside and literalize interiority within my person, the
more we lose the sense of soul as a psychic reality interiorly within
all things. Anima within is not merely within my breast; introjec-
tion and internalization do not mean making my head or my skin
the vessel inside of which all psychic processes take place. The
“within” refers to that attitude given by the anima which perceives
psychic life within natural life. Natural life itself becomes the vessel
the moment we recognize its having an interior significance, the
moment we see that it too bears and carries psyche. Anima makes
vessels everywhere, anywhere, by going within.*
The means of doing this is fantasy. Phenomena come alive and
carry soul through our imaginative fantasies about them. When we
have no fantasy about the world, then it is objective, dead; even
the fantasy of pollution helps bring the world back to life as having
significance for soul. Fantasy is not merely an interior process go-
ing on in my head. It is a way of being in the world and giving back
soul to the world.
The attempt to take back soul from life outside deprives the out-
side of its “within,” stuffing the person with subjective soulfulness
and leaving the world a slagheap from which all projections, per-
sonifications, and psyche have been extracted. For this reason, the
more we work at our own personalities and subjectivities in the
name of the anima, the less we are truly soul-making and the more
we are continuing in the illusion that anima is in us rather than we
in it. Psyche is the wider notion than man, and man functions by
virtue of psyche and is dependent upon it Eanes than the other way
round: “man... is... in the psyche (not in his psyche)” (14 May
1950, Letter to esse @elibrnsien: “The greater part of the soul is
outside the body,” says Jung, quoting the alchemist Sendivogius
(12 July 1951, Letter to Karl Kerényi).? Because the anima notion
always implicates the world-soul, or soul of and in the world, a de-
j 81
(a) Although neither anima nor animus can be constellated without
the intervention of the conscious personality, this does not mean
that the resultant situation is nothing but a personal relation-
ship... [W]e are dealing with an archetype which is anything but
personal. CW 16, §469
82
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
83
JUNG/SCRIPTA
... the anima [can] continually thwart[s] the good intentions of the
conscious mind, by contriving a private life that stands in sorry
contrast to the dazzling persona....
_.. [T]he “nothing but fantasy” attitude will never persuade me ,
to regard my anima manifestations as anything more than fatuous
weakness. If, however, I take the line that the world is outside and
inside, .. . I must logically accept the upsets and annoyances that
come to me from inside as symptoms of faulty adaptation to the
conditions of that inner world. CW 7, §§318-19
84
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
(a) Through his imagination the timid man has made his eyes basilisk-
like, and he infects the mirror, the moon, and the stars.... Thus
man in turn will be poisoned by this mirror of the moon.... And
as the mirror is defiled by the woman, thus conversely the eyes... .
are being defiled by the moon, for the reason that at such times the
eyes of the timid imagining man are weak and dull....
CW 14, §215
86
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
(a) The anima is... a natural archetype that satisfactorily sums up all
the statements of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, of the
history of language and religion. ... [I]t is always the a priori ele-
ment in his moods, reactions, impulses, and whatever else is spon-
taneous in psychic life. It is something that lives of itself, that
makes us live; it is a life behind consciousness that cannot be com-
pletely integrated with it, but from which, on the contrary, con-
sciousness arises. CW 9,i, §57
88
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
... there are good grounds for the prejudice that the ego is the cen-
tre of the personality, and that the field of consciousness is the psy-
che per se.... {I]t is only since the end of the nineteenth century
that modern psychology ... has discovered the foundations of
consciousness and proved empirically the existence of a psyche
outside consciousness. With this discovery the position of the ego,
till then absolute, became relativized. ... It is part of the personal-
ity but not the whole of it. CW 9, ii, §11
90
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
striving. . . . the psyche has awakened to spontaneous activity. . . . some-
thing that is not his ego and is therefore beyond the reach of his personal
will. He has regained access to the sources of psychic life, and this marks
the beginning of the cure. (CW 11, §534)
94
PSYCHE/HILLMAN
realities. “The psyche creates reality every day. The only expres-
sion I can use for this activity is fantasy” (CW 6, §78).
In particular, the fantasies arising from and giving insight into
attachments would refer to anima consciousness. Because anima
appears in our affinities, as the fascinosum of our attractions and
obsessions, where we feel most personal, here this consciousness
best mythologizes. It is a consciousness bound to life, both at the
level of the vital, vegetative soul as it used to be called (the psy-
chosomatic symptom as it is now called) and at the level of in-
volvements of every kind, from petty passions, gossip, to the
dilemmas of philosophy. Although consciousness based on anima
is inseparable from life, nature, the feminine, as well as from fate
and death, it does not follow that this consciousness is naturalistic,
or fatalistic, otherworldly and morose, or particularly ‘feminine.’
It means merely in these realms it turns; these are the metaphors to
which it is attached.
Attachment now becomes a more significant term in anima con-
sciousness than do those more guilt-making, and thus ego-refer-
ent, terms like commitment, relatedness, and responsibility. In
fact, the relativization of the ego means placing in abeyance such
metaphors as: choice and light, problem-solving and reality test-
ing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing. In their
place, as more adequate descriptions of consciousness and its ac-
tivities, we would use metaphors long familiar to the alchemy of
analytical practice: fantasy, image, reflection, insight, and, also,
mirroring, holding, cooking, digesting, echoing, gossiping, deep-
ening.
97
t ; ; - - :j
: P al me
— Tv? ws io A) 7
| alae ot s7 : oe Od )
Para : rab Seuaees BIaie)
bd ice wear et Altsalarae
arth) ieee
9 x j
=) ~ lagi =
t
~ i?
rane “2 +
Pe
: gis
mh
—— hall
Da \a '
i —< — = ye
ai be
i A)
im
m~ =
:
rae it.
ty = , =
71
7
a
a >i oa 7 >,
I]
* All page references in this section, unless otherwise indicated, are to Depersonalisation.
101
102
DEPERSONALIZATION/HILLMAN
The richness of the human psyche and its essential character are
probably determined by this reflective instinct. CW 8, §242
Through reflection, “life” and its “soul” are abstracted from Na-
ture and endowed with a separate existence. (reflection is a spirit-
ual act that runs counter to the natural process; ... it should,
therefore, be understood as an act of becoming conscious.)
CW 11, §235 (and n9)
104
DEPERSONALIZATION/HILLMAN
It is a “factor” in the proper sense of the word. Man cannot make it; on
the contrary, it is always the a priori element in his moods, reactions, im-
pulses, and whatever else is spontaneous in psychic life. It is something
that lives of itself, that makes us live; it is a life behind consciousness that
cannot be completely integrated with it, but from which, on the contrary,
consciousness arises.
107
(a) The anima is nothing but a representation of the personal nature
of the autonomous system in question. CW 13,861
108
DEPERSONALIZATION/HILLMAN
110
DEPERSONALIZATION/HILLMAN
For decades I always turned to the anima when I felt that my emo-
tional behavior was disturbed, and that something had been con-
stellated 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....
MDR, pp. 187-88
112
DEPERSONALIZATION/HILLMAN
shows in the case of Jung — his dream of the little girl and the dove
— faith in psyche and in oneself as personality is a particular effect
of anima. Anima has this effect through the presentation of im-
ages, i.e., in Jung’s case, as Grinnell shows, after the break-up
with Freud and the break-down in Jung, Jung became Jung
through his encounter with imagination. The vivification of im-
ages led to his psychological faith, his personal psychological posi-
tion, and his sense of personality. But any therapeutic method for
restoring an animated, repersonalized world must constellate -
and in the therapist himself — the sense of utter reality of the per-
sonified image.
JUNG/SCRIPTA
To the degree that the patient takes an active part, the personified
figure of anima or animus will disappear. It becomes the function
of relationship between conscious and unconscious.
CW 7, §370
... the immediate goal has been achieved, namely the conquest of
the anima as an autonomous complex, and her transformation in-
to a function of relationship between the conscious and the uncon-
scious. CW 7, §374
SSS
114
INTEGRATION/HILLMAN
115,
JUNG/SCRIPTA
—
The dissolution of the anima means that we have gained insight in-
to the driving forces of the unconscious, but not that we have
made these forces ineffective. CW 7, §391
paee
It is not we who personify them [unconscious figures]; they have a
personal nature from the very beginning. Only when this is thor-
oughly recognized can we think of depersonalizing them, of “sub-
jugating the anima”.... CW 13, §62
116
INTEGRATION/HILLMAN
... for the archetypes are universal and belong to the collective
psyche over which the ego has no control. Thus animus and anima
are images representing archetypal figures which mediate between
consciousness and the unconscious. Though they can be made
conscious they cannot be integrated into the ego-personality, since
as archetypes they are also autonomous.
2 January 1957, Letter to Anonymous
Together they [the anima and animus] form a divine pair, one of
whom ...is... rather like Hermes ... while the other .. . wears
the features of Aphrodite, Helen (Selene), Persephone, and
Hecate. Both of them are unconscious powers, “gods” in fact....
CW 9,11, 841
118
INTEGRATION/HILLMAN
When we read the major passage with which we began this sec-
tion in the light of others on the same theme, we discover more
precisely what “integration” means. “Though the effects of anima
and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors
transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception
and volition. Hence they remain autonomous despite the integra-
tion of their contents” (CW 9,ii, §40).2 All we can do is remember
their spontaneous reality behind contents, projections, effects® and
grant “relative autonomy and reality” to these psychic “figures”
(CW 9, ii, §44), which Jung often presents as Gods and Goddesses.°
Anima “integration” is thus “knowledge of this structure,” a recog-
nition of her as archetype (CW 14, §616). The operative term is
thorough recognition.4 And just what is to be recognized? — the
relatively autonomous, personified nature of the archetype. From
this it would seem that anima integration means just the reverse of
turning personification into function and that, by continuing to
recognize her as a relatively independent person, we are indeed
performing the work of integration.
The question as answered by alchemy is no longer simply a dis-
junction: either figure or function, person or process. The person-
al image of anima is necessary for performing certain functions and
constellating certain contents. Without the personal image (e.g.,
Michael Maier’s imaginatio)* we would not be led (seduced) or
interested (tempted); we would not experience certain qualities
(the bitterness of salt, a personified substance); we could not expe-
rience the endogamous libido (incest with the soror); we would
not find the delight and delusion in the dissolving, coloring, and
whitening.
Consequently, the “depersonalizing” of anima (CW 13, §62) may
mean depriving the anima of her personalistic effects and projec-
eiie
{fUNG/SOCRIP
TA
(a) Melusina, the deceptive Shakti. ... should no longer dance before
the adept with alluring gestures, but must become what she was
from the beginning: a part of his wholeness. As such she must be
“conceived in the mind.” CW 13, §223
120
INTEGRATION/HILLMAN
There are no conclusive arguments against the hypothesis that these ar-
chetypal figures are endowed with personality at the outset and are not
just secondary personalizations. In so far as the archetypes do not repre-
sent mere functional relationships, they manifest themselves as daimones,
as personal agencies. In this form they are felt as actual experiences and
are not “figments of the imagination,” as rationalism would have us be-
lieve. (CW 5, §388) ... instead of deriving these figures from our psychic
conditions, [we] must derive our psychic conditions from these figures.
‘(CW 13, §299) It is not we who personify them; they have a personal na-
ture from the very beginning. (ibid., §62) [It] . . . is quite right to treat the
anima as an autonomous personality. ... (CW 7, §322; cf. §§317-27)
121
122
INTEGRATION/HILLMAN
Prometheus surrenders himself ... to his soul, that is, to the func-
tion of relation to the inner world. . .. Prometheus concedes her an
absolute significance, as mistress and guide.... He sacrifices his
individual ego to the soul, to the relation with the unconscious as
the matrix of eternal images and meanings.... Prometheus loses
all connection with the surrounding world, and hence also the very
necessary corrective offered by external reality. CW 6, §278
124
INTEGRATION/HILLMAN
ing, or whatever else one likes to call it. Jung gives an example of it
in Spitteler’s Prometheus.
This obtuse sort of literalism also affects the notion of the her-
maphrodite, as if it were simply a matter of joining the characteris-
tics of two genders in one person. A man attempts to become more
feminine, feeling and ‘eros-connected’ with the aim of integrating
the anima — a notion of anima which we have already tried to dis-
pel in earlier chapters. All the while that he is performing this imi-
tatio animae, he is actually becoming more literal than imaginal
and metaphorical which is what anima consciousness more likely
implies. As Jung shows all through the Mysterium Coniunctionis
(CW 14) and elsewhere, “male” and “female” are biological meta-
phors for the psychic conditions of conscious and unconscious.»
Anima integration in the model of the hermaphrodite does not
mean acquiring characteristics of the other gender; rather, it
means a double consciousness, mercurial, true and untrue, action
and inaction, sight and blindness, living the impossible oxymoron,
more like an animal who is at once superbly conscious in its ac-
tions and utterly unconscious of them. To take the freakish image
of the hermaphrodite and literalize it into sexual genders and then
moralize it into a bi-sexual goal for behavior is a move as mistaken
as considering the phallus to be the biological penis or the great
mother to be one’s own mother of one’s childhood. The battle over
literalism is never won; it simply reappears in new guises — thereby
forcing us to be psychological.
(a) As I see it, the psyche is a world in which the ego is contained.
CW 13, 875
126
INTEGRATION/HILLMAN
ee
127
JUNG/SCRIPTA
ace
... the anima is the image of the subject in his relation to the col-
lective unconscious.... CW 758521
128
MEDIATRIX/HILLMAN
127
JUNG/SCRIPTA
nS
—
X. is undoubtedly the anima, representing the coll.[ective] unc.
[onscious].
24 December 1931, Letter to Count Hermann Keyserling
... the anima plays the role of the mediatrix between the uncon-
scious and the conscious.... Cw 10,8715
... soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and
below human existence. ... CW 9,1, §56
~ When projected, the anima always has a feminine form with defi-
nite characteristics. This empirical finding does not mean that the
archetype is constituted like that in itself. CW 9,i, §142
130
MEDIATRIX/HILLMAN
131
JUNG/SCRIPTA
———
In elfin nature wisdom and folly appear as one and the same; and
they are one and the same as long as they are acted out by the ani-
ma. Life is crazy and meaningful at once. CW 9,i, §65
132
MEDIATRIX/HILLMAN
... the first encounter with her usually leads one to infer anything
rather than wisdom. This aspect appears only to the person who
gets to grips with her seriously. Only then. . . does he come to real-
ize more and more that behind all her cruel sporting with human
fate there lies something like a hidden purpose which seems to
reflect a superior knowledge of life’s laws. It is just the most unex-
pected, the most terrifyingly chaotic things which reveal a deeper
meaning. And the more this meaning is recognized, the more the
anima loses her impetuous and compulsive character.
CW 9,1, §64
~~ In his quest for wholeness ... Michael Maier ... has found the
animal soul and the sibylline anima, who now counsels him to
journey to the seven mouths of the Nile. ... CW 14, §287
Our author was led in the first place by the anima-sibyl to under-
take the journey through the planetary houses. ...
CW 14, §313
The anima ... now appears as the psychopomp, the one who
shows the way.... CW 12,874
134
MEDIATRIX/HILLMAN
is also the little child who leads, and the old sage or mentor, and
Hermes, and the heroic leader, and the friendly animal. Each of
these leads in a different way and to different conclusions. If her
route and goal is not feeling, femininity, counter-sexuality, or eros
— each of which did not stand the acid test in Part I — then what are
we left with?
In chapter five we said anima is the archetype of psychic con-
sciousness. But now we have been saying that anima is the arche-
type that mediates unconsciousness. Putting these two statements
together means that anima consciousness, consciousness of anima,
means first of all awareness of one’s unconsciousness. She brings
the possibility of reflection in terms of the unconscious; i.e., in
which way does this image, event, person, idea, feeling that is now
the content of my reflection produce unconsciousness? This is the
depth psychological viewpoint, and this is why anima (and not
wise old man or mother nature or culture hero) is the archetype of
the psychological calling. This is also why soul-making precedes
self-individuating. For, before we can become conscious we must
be able to know that we are unconscious, and where, when, and to
what extent. Soul-making in this context becomes nothing more
grandiose than the rather humiliating recognition of the anima ar-
chetype. It is first of all a “perception of differences” among her
endless guiles and guises, seeing where we are entangled in her gos-
samers; it is an ongoing fantasy activity about fantasies. Here soul-
making, to use an anima metaphor from Jung (CW 9,i, §158),
refers to the “‘discriminating knowledge’” that Prakrti evokes in
Purusha by dancing before him. Purusha, by the way, does not use
a sword for this discriminating. He watches.
Because anima mediates unconsciousness, making us not more
conscious but less, she therefore flourishes where unconsciousness
harbors: complexes, the illusion in life-attachments, states of
drowsiness and mood, isolated reflection, hysterical wetness and
vapors, and the follies of nympholepsy, those fascinations with
natural, simple, innocent, and cloudy causes and cures and per-
sons who embody them.
By believing that through integrating the manifestations we in-
tegrate and make conscious anima, we lose touch with the auton-
omy of her archetypal unconsciousness, and ours. The notion of
unconsciousness means autonomous, spontaneous, ubiquitous,
137
JUNG/SCRIPTA
ot
ee oe ee ae ee
138
MEDIATRIX/HILLMAN
I II
Opus naturalium Aqua
Divisio naturae Terra
Anima Aer
da Intellectus
ie
Rie Ignis
CW 9, ii, 8414
142
MEDIATRIX/HILLMAN
...in the end it makes very little difference whether the doctor un-
derstands or not, but it makes all the difference whether the pa-
tient understands. CW 16, §314
... lack of knowledge ... has exactly the same effect as uncon-
ScloUusness. CW 16, 8546
... the man’s opus is concerned with the erotic aspect of the ani-
ma.... Out of the prima materia grows the philosophical tree, the
unfolding opus.... Eve [stands] for the man’s anima who, as Sa-
pientia or Sophia, produces out of her head the intellectual content
of the work. CW 16, §519
144
MEDIATRIX/HILLMAN
145
JUNG/SCRIPTA
a
Every man carries within him ... a definite feminine image. ...
The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of
man. Actually, we know from experience that it would be more
accurate to describe it as an image of men, whereas in the case of
the man it is rather the image of woman. CW 17, §338
146
UNI-PERSONALITY/HILLMAN
9. Anima as Uni-Personality
147
JUNG/SCRIPTA
148
UNI-PERSONALITY/HILLMAN
149
JUNG/SCRIPTA
———
asinine a a I SE SE ES
150
UNI-PERSONALITY/HILLMAN
151
JUNG/SCRIPTA
(a) On the one hand the anima is the connecting link with the world
beyond and the eternal images, while on the other hand her emo-
tionality involves man in the chthonic world and its transitoriness.
CW 13, 8457
(b) [The anima]. . . in accordance with her Eros nature, wears the fea-
tures of Aphrodite, Helen (Selene), Persephone, and Hecate.
CW 9,11, 841
(d) ... the Kore as observable in man, the anima. CW 9,i, 8356
(f) Four stages of eroticism were known in the late classical period:
Hawwah (Eve), Helen (of Troy), the Virgin Mary, and Sophia... .
[W]e are dealing with the ... anima-figure in four stages. ...
CW 16, §361
... the four female figures of the Gnostic underworld, Eve, Helen,
Mary, and Sophia. Cw 15, §211
ey
UNI-PERSONALITY/HILLMAN
153
JUNG/SCRIPTA |
e
oe 8 e Se e
(b) The splitting of the anima into many figures is equivalent to disso-
lution into an indefinite state, i.e., into the unconscious, from
which we may conjecture that a relative dissolution of the con-
scious mind is running parallel with the historical regression (a
process to be observed in its extreme form in schizophrenia).
CW 12, 8116
154
UNI-PERSONALITY/HILLMAN
Despite these passages, the definition of anima as a “‘uni-per-
sonality’” (CW 7, §338) means that when the anima appears in
plural form* a regressive “dissolution”® must be taking place.
Moreover, each man has one anima figure that truly represents his
soul. Even if the psyche is a plurality of complexes, each with its
soul-spark, one man, one anima is the formula.
The first advantage of anima unity is practical. It limits. It places
a stricture upon our use of the term. We may not call “anima”
every female figure, mood, and aesthetic or historical concern.
Without this stricture every cat-like creature, every waitress, tele-
phone operator, usherette becomes anima, as well as sisters,
nieces, daughters, cousins, and so on through the public, familial,
historical, literary, legendary worlds. Then, as Graham Hough al-
ready recognized (Spring 1973, p. 93):
... we are faced with an embarras de richesse: .. . Are all the heroines of
romantic and idealised fiction anima figures? Yes. Are they equally ani-
ma figures regardless of the quality of the fictions in which they appear? I
am afraid, yes. . . From Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura to the vul-
garest heroines of soap-operas and girlie magazines, all are recognisable
as anima images.
... start some dialogue with your anima. ... put a question or two
to her: why she appears as Beatrice? why she is so big? why you
are so small? why she nurses your wife and not yourself? ... Treat
her as a person, if you like as a patient or a goddess, but above all
treat her as something that does exist. ... talk to this person .. . to
see what she is about and to learn what her thoughts and character
are. If you yourself step into your fantasy, then that overabun-
dance of material will soon come to more reasonable propor-
tions.... Keep your head and your own personality over against
the overwhelming multitude of images. ... treat the anima as if she
were a patient whose secret you ought to get at.
7 May 1947, Letter to Mr. O.
Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would
rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. CW 9,i, §56
156
UNI-PERSONALITY/HILLMAN
LS7,
JUNG/SCRIPTA
eT
158
UNI-PERSONALITY/HILLMAN
tion. They are the pre-Christian level always at the threshold, a re-
curring fantasy in Jung’s writings* — “how thin is the wall that sep-
arates us from pagan times” (CW 9, ii, §272). In fact Jung explicitly
connects — in a remarkable paragraph on “the worship of woman
and the worship of the soul” in the Romantics? — “the modern indi-
vidualistic principle” and “primitive poly-daemonism.” In this fan-
tasy of soul, Christian and Pagan constellate and compensate each
other. The fantasy of barbarian hinterlands, Wotan, Dionysus,
and the “poly-daemonic” unconscious that has not been Christian-
ized — all contrast strongly with the fantasy of the individualized
“uni-personality” of soul who is the guide of individuation toward
unified wholeness. Anima is thus anima naturaliter christiana, the
soul as naturally Christian because of her uni-personality defini-
tion. But! — should the contrast between the one and the many be
placed within the model of compensation, then the more the soul
image coalesces into unity, is not the likelihood increased at the
same time of even more psychotic and barbaric threats behind the
thin wall? In other words: the anxiety of some analysts about la-
tent psychosis in their patients may be a direct consequent of their
anima notion. Worship of the unified anima and “primitive poly-
daemonism” are two sides of the same coin.
To say it another way: a unified, unconscious anima constel-
lates its opposite, polygamous consciousness, in the masculine
ego. The multiple, unconscious animus constellates its opposite,
monogamous consciousness, in the feminine ego. Archetypally,
what is going on is projection in a reverse direction. Then we see
monogamy to be an idea born of the animus: an attempt to dis-
criminate among the many spirits by choosing one and sticking by
it. And polygamy is an idea born of anima, an attempt to loosen
masculine, compulsive singleness by paganizing and demonizing
with multiplicity.
By evoking the Christian—Pagan conflict, I am trying to make
explicit the historical background in Jung’s fantasy regarding this
question. I am trying to grasp why he had to insist on unity of ani-
ma in face of evidence that could just as well have turned it the oth-
er way. But evidence is not the determining factor, neither in our
discussion nor probably in Jung’s notion. There is something deep-
er at work, the subjective factor, which partly forms the empirical
ground of every anima definition.
159
JUNG/SCRIPTA
... L caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard
and a beautiful young girl. ... The old man explained that he was
Elijah, and that gave me a shock. But the girl staggered me even
more, for she called herself Salome! She was blind. What a strange
couple: Salome and Elijah. But Elijah assured me that he and
Salome had belonged together from all eternity. | MDR, p. 181
It has been objected that Christ cannot have been a valid symbol of
the self... . I can agree with this view only if it refers strictly to the
present time, when psychological criticism has become possible,
but not if it pretends to judge the pre-psychological age. Christ did
not merely symbolize wholeness, but, as a psychic phenomenon,
he was wholeness. CW 9,ii, §115n75
She [Eve, Pandora] played the part ... of the anima, who func-
tions as the link between body and spirit, just as Shakti or Maya
entangles man’s consciousness with the world. CW 13, 8126
co
161
JUNG/SCRIPTA
es
162
UNI-PERSONALITY/HILLMAN
(b) The goal [unity] is important only as an idea; the essential thing is
the opus which leads to the goal: that is the goal of a lifetime.
CW 16, 8400
164
UNI-PERSONALITY/HILLMAN
166
SA 2iiGao
40 Lala MAN
(a) Together they [anima and animus] form a divine pair.... the di-
vine syzygy.... CW 9,ii, 841 (cf. 8825-42)
168
SYZYGY/HILLMAN
170
SYZYGY/HILLMAN
(b) ... the soul (anima) released at the “death” is reunited with the
dead body and brings about its resurrection, or again the “many
colours” ... or “peacock’s tail” ... lead to the one white colour
that contains all colours. CW 12, §334
ips
SYZYGY/HILLMAN
the bounds of the syzygy who sets the limits to our psychological
field so that we cannot imagine beyond it. Within it, however, our
possibilities are as limitless as the ceaseless pairings and couplings
and interpenetrations of anima and animus.
To imagine in pairs and couples is to think mythologically.
Mythical thinking connects pairs into tandems rather than sep-
arating them into opposites which is anyway a mode of philos-
ophy. Opposites lend themselves to very few kinds of description:
contradictories, contraries, complementaries, negations — formal
and logical. Tandems, however, like brothers or enemies or trad-
ers or lovers show endless varieties of styles. Tandems favor inter-
course — innumerable positions. Opposition is merely one of the
many modes of being in a tandem.
The notion of the syzygy demands that an exhaustive explora-
tion of anima examine animus to the same extent. To do her full
justice one has to give him equal time. But this has been happening
indirectly. All our observations have come from a contrasting posi-
tion, and each of these other positions can be conceived as repre-
senting the other, the animus, in one of his perspectives. This gives
some justification to an old argument of Neumann’s (chapter four)
that the development of ego consciousness in men and women
alike was essentially a masculine process (or protest) out of a femi-
nine unconscious. There is the syzygy once more. They play into
each other, constellated by particular patterns, or mythologems.
Some we have already seen: chapter nine, where the unity—plural-
ity controversy turns anima into a polyopthalmic,? multicolored
peacock’s tailb and animus into a monotheistic cyclops; chapter
seven, where one notion of integrating the anima conceives her as
a dark dragon and him as a loin-girded swords-man.
By continuing to call the syzygy “her” and “him,” I am stressing
their personified nature.© Persons come in genders, even if psychic
persons do indeed transgress this naturalism (as Rupprecht’s Mar-
tial Maid shows in Spring 1974, pp. 269-93). Jung notes that: “The
male-female syzygy is only one among the possible pairs of oppo-
sites” (CW 9,i, §142). He hints in the same paragraph that in itself
anima and animus may have no special sexual gender, or as I tried
to put it above (p. 65): “Paradoxically, the very archetype of femi-
ninity may not itself be feminine.”
173
JUNG/SCRIPTA
Anima c Animus
174
SYZYGY/HILLMAN
Nonetheless, essential to thinking in syzygies is thinking in gen-
ders. Unfortunately, the next step in analytical psychology has
been identifying these genders with actual men and women, cou-
pling kinds of syzygies between man-and-anima, woman-and-ani-
mus, man-and-woman, and fourth, anima-and-animus, even with
diagrams, for example, the lengthy discussion of the Gnostic sym-
bol of the Self.*
Anima~—animus, the fourth of these syzygies, has two meanings:
a) a syzygy between two persons in an interpersonal relation, and
b) a syzygy of anima and animus within any man or any woman as
an intrapersonal relation. It is this latter that needs real attention.
It has been neglected because we have been locked into the con-
trasexual definition of anima and animus. But, as we worked out
above (pp. 51-65), archetypes cannot be confined to human gen-
der, and we saw how anima works equally in women. The next
consequent is to observe animus working in men.
The archetypal syzygy takes place inside us each and not only as
projected into our relationships.» That’s why men carry on and
talk like animuses, and women gaze and fade like animas. To ac-
count for this everyday behavior in terms of “animus of the moth-
er” or “anima of the animus,” etc. — contortions that analysts have
had to resort to — misses a main point about anima—animus projec-
tions.
Projections occur between parts of the psyche, not only outside
into the world. They occur between internal persons and not only
onto external people. The alchemical idea of projection referred to
interior events. Ruland’s alchemical dictionary describes projection
as a “violent interpenetration” of substances; there is a “sudden
egression” which is projected over a matter by another matter
therewith transforming it. Projection too can be psychologized; we
can take back projection itself, interiorizing it as an activity going
on blindly between anima and animus within.
Each anima figure projects a particular sort of animus figure and
vice versa.4? A Hebe wants a Hercules and Hercules does it for
Hebe - and not just on the college campus between cheerleader
and linebacker but “in here.” My hebephrenic soul, young and silly
and tied by social conventions, the bride and her shower, produces
an ego that comes home like a hero showing off and bearing tro-
175
SYZYGY/HILLMAN
179
JUNG/SCRIPTA
xm SP ESR GS STE RTE EE TB SE SET,
(a) ... we lack all knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue
the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else. Our true reli-
gion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled
with a fanatical denial of the existence of fragmentary autonomous
systems. CW 13,851
180
SYZYGY/HILLMAN
Ego consciousness would refer to what Jung calls the “monotheism
of consciousness,”* the single-minded viewpoint of the individual
“T,” where the other is lost sight of and which results in literalism.
Thus, ego consciousness is an unconsciousness of psychic actual-
ity.
Psychic actuality is such that “the two figures are always tempt-
ing the ego to identify itself with them” (CW 16, 8469). The iden-
tification of the conscious ego personality with one of them seems
to be the archetypal role the ego is bound to play, since “neither
anima nor animus can be constellated without the intervention of
the conscious personality” (ibid.). Because they always appear to-
gether, it logically follows that the “intervention of the conscious
personality” is actually an enacting of anima or animus, the other
half.
This is most difficult to recognize because in the conscious per-
sonality of the ego is where Jung locates our darkest spot. Sol, the
alchemical image of ego consciousness, is itself a “dark body,”
“light without and darkness within,” a “relatively constant per-
sonification of the unconscious itself” in “the source of [whose]
light there is darkness enough for any amount of projections” (CW
14, §129).
Although the conscious personality is relatively constant, it is
nevertheless subject to the sudden egressions of intrapsychic pro-
jections. However, because of its constancy, these projections,
which the ego calls its attitudes, decisions, and positions, are ex-
tra-durable, their very constancy making them extra hard to see
through. But it is in that opaque spot that we must look for the ac-
tual unconscious. The prima materia is ego.
183
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
CW C.G. Jung, The Collected Works, trans. R. F.C. Hull, ed. H. Read, M.
Fordham, G. Adler, Wm. McGuire, Bollingen Series XX, vols. 1-20
(Princeton: Princeton University Press and London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1953 ff.), paragraph numbers.
DU J. Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper &
Row, 1979).
184
NOTES
185
NOLES
1967), section “psyche”; also my discussions in DU, chapter “Psyche,” and in RP,
section “Anima” and pp. 44-51.
6. Because of the soul’s motility - a prime trait that sometimes even defined
soul — some Greek philosophy did associate psyche with fire (Atomists), and
Aristotle considered orexis (appetite, desire) the ultimate cause of the soul’s mo-
tion.
7. J.J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings,
Bollingen Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 93 ff. W.H.
Roscher, Lexikon d. Griech. u. Rom. Mythologie (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), vol.
Ill, i: “Pan,” pp. 1392 f. and “Nymphen,” pp. 500 ff. E. Jung, “The Anima as an
Elemental Being,” in her Animus and Anima. Cf. T. Wolffs amplification of the
hetaera in connection with the anima: “Strukturformen der weiblichen Psyche,”
in her Studien zu C.G. Jung’s Psychologie (Ziirich: Daimon Verlag, 1981),
pp. 175-76.
8. MA, pp. 61-79; “Peaks and Vales” in Puer Papers.
9. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed. A. Jaffe,
trans. R. and C. Winston (New York: Vintage, 1965), p. 286, for Jung’s ex-
perience and formulation of the historical anima personified in the Galla Placidia
incident in Ravenna: “The anima of a man has a strongly historical character.”
10. G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), chap-
ter 2, “Animus and Anima.”
11. Fora brief statement by Corbin on soul and imagination, see H. Corbin,
“Mundus Imaginalis,” Spring 1972, pp. 6-7.
12. M. Ficino, Theologia platonica, XII, in C. Trinkaus, In Our Image and
Likeness (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 2:476-78 and notes.
13. Onians, Origins, pp. 168-73 with notes.
14. Porphyry, “Concerning the Cave of Nymphs,” in Thomas Taylor the
Platonist: Selected Writings, ed. G.H. Mills and K. Raine, Bollingen Series
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 304. The discourse, too long to
quote, is upon nymphs and naiads and the Neoplatonic meaning of the moist ele-
ment.
15. Further on the aerial anima, see my “The Imagination of Air and the Col-
lapse of Alchemy” in Eranos Jahrbuch 50-1981 (Frankfurt a/M: Insel Verlag,
1982), pp. 273-333, and DU, pp. 185-88 on “Smell and Smoke.”
16. Bachelard, Poetics, p. 66: “anima becomes deeper and reigns in descend-
ing toward the cave of being. By descending, ever descending, the ontology of the
qualities of the anima is discovered.”
17. Onians, Origins, p. 170n.
18. Fora fuller discussion, see my “The Feeling Function,” Part Two of Lec-
tures on Jung’s Typology (with M.-L. von Franz) (Spring Publications, 1971), es-
pecially, “Feeling and the Anima,” pp. 121-29.
19. H.F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic
Books, 1970), pp. 199-201.
20. Ibid., p. 233.
21. Ph. Wolff-Windegg, “C.G. Jung - Bachofen, Burckhardt, and Basel,”
186
NOTES
188
Anima and Contrasexuality
Anima and Eros
Anima and Feeling
Anima and The Feminine