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Anima

Anima

The anima — Latin for soul, cognate with Greek ψυχή — is in carl-jung‘s formulation the personified image of the soul: the feminine figure in the unconscious of the man who mediates between ego and depths, and in james-hillman‘s later elaboration the archetype of psyche as such. She is “the archetype of life itself” and “the projection-making factor” of the psyche (jung-aion, Jung 1951, §26). She is the organ by which soul discloses itself to consciousness.

Jung’s definition is experiential before metaphysical: “To the psychologist, the anima is not a transcendental being but something quite within the range of experience… A person roused by affect does not show a neutral character but a quite distinct one… the affective character of a man has feminine traits” (alchemical-studies, §58). She is first met in moods and affects that break over the ego without its consent, in projection onto the beloved, in the dream-figure “whose significance oscillates between the extremes of goddess and whore” (the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious, §356). Her phenomenology is intrinsically bipolar — “now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore” (Jung and Kerényi 1949, jung-kerenyi-essays-science-mythology).

Jung organizes her unfolding into four stages: Eve (biological), Helen (aesthetic-romantic), Mary (spiritualized), Sophia (alchemical Sapientia) — “four stages of the Eros cult” (CW 16 §361). The fourth stage, sophia, is the point at which anima becomes wisdom itself. The alchemical register identifies anima with mercurius as anima media natura — “a life-giving power like a glue, holding the world together and standing in the middle between body and spirit” (alchemical-studies, §262) — and therefore with the anima-mundi of the Timaeus. The alchemical Regina “corresponds to the psychological anima” (jung-mysterium-coniunctionis, §736), and her transformation from serpent to queen is the signature of the coniunctio (CW 14 §540).

In jung-aion the anima stands within the syzygy: her recognition is the second station after shadow, opening a triad whose fourth term, the Wise Old Man, completes the marriage quaternio of the self (Jung 1951, §42). The anima is “a bridge to the unconscious… a function of relationship to the unconscious” (CW 13 §62). She is the ego-self-axis itself under one aspect, as edward-edinger reads her in edinger-ego-and-archetype — “the anima as personification of the ego-Self axis transmits guidance and support to the ego from the archetypal psyche” (Edinger 1972, frontispiece).

james-hillman in hillman-anima-anatomy-personified breaks with Jung on the contrasexual confinement. Women too have anima, because “anima names the soul’s mode of self-disclosure” and “the archetype of the feminine may not itself be feminine” (Hillman 1985, citing Jung’s 1959 letter to Traugott Egloff). For Hillman the anima is “the archetype of life… that function of the psyche which is its actual life, the present mess it is in, its discontent, dishonesties, and thrilling illusions” (Hillman 1975, Peaks and Vales). The contrast anima/animus is no longer gender-bound but tracks the classical soul-spirit-distinction: anima is soul, animus is spirit; both belong to any psyche. Hillman’s further radical move: “much of what psychology has been calling ego is the animus-half of the syzygy… An animus that loses its soul connection… is ego” (Hillman 1985). See ego-as-animus-half-hillman.

Anima possession — the condition in which the ego is swamped by her unconscious autonomy — is documented by Jung as “blind moods and compulsive entanglements on one side, and on the other, cold, unrelated absorption in principles” (CW 14 §539). edward-edinger glosses plainly: “if the ego falls into a state of identification with the anima, then the man becomes a kind of effeminate, resentful whiner” (Science of the Soul 2002, p. 22). The transformation of “the feminine element from a serpent into a queen” (CW 14 §540) happens only when consciousness submits to “the suprapersonal decrees of fate” — at which point anima is raised “from that of a temptress to a psychopomp” (ibid.). See anima-possession.

The classical root is the psyche of Homer and Plato, the Greek word itself naming a feminine soul cognate with breath and flutter. plotinus‘s enneads III.5 provides the Neoplatonic charter: Love is an “Hypostasis sprung from a Real-Being”, the offspring of Soul gazing upon Nous — classical grounding for Jung’s insistence that anima is not reducible to instinct. The transmission runs through paracelsus and gerhard-dorn‘s anima mundi, reaching Jung through the alchemical corpus treated in alchemical-studies and jung-mysterium-coniunctionis.

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