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Anima Possession

Anima Possession

Anima possession is the state in which a man is spoken by the anima-complex rather than speaking of her. The affect is involuntary and tinted — an ill humor that has the character of a woman’s complaint, a sudden plunge into sentimentality, a fascinated attachment to a particular sphinx-like figure, a devaluation of life when her projection is withdrawn. Jung’s diagnostic is structural: “affects have an autonomous character, and therefore most people are under their power” (Alchemical Studies, §58). The man under anima possession does not recognize the source of his own moods; he takes them for conditions of the world.

Jung describes the unreflected form with unusual bluntness: “the unconscious anima is a creature without relationships, an autoerotic being whose one aim is to take total possession of the individual” (CW 16, §504). She speaks in irrational feeling as the animus speaks in irrational thinking (CW 10, §81). Hillman adds that such possession is not cured by “integration” understood as imitation: the man who sets about becoming more feeling-connected in order to accommodate her “is actually becoming more literal than imaginal and metaphorical” (Hillman, Anima) — and so more possessed, not less.

The release from possession is recognition. “Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness… Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents” (CW 9ii, §40). The ego does not assimilate her; it recognizes her as a real psychic personality and grants her “relative autonomy and reality.” What changes is not the figure but the relation.

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