The Anima Woman

Esther Harding’s name for the woman who lives not as herself but as the reflecting screen of the man’s anima projection. She is “quite fluid, having few solid attitudes or points of consciousness of her own, which would only distort the reflection of the man’s unconscious contents. She is like a deep pool of water which only reflects what passes before it” (Harding 1970, p. 25).

The figure has both a degraded and a redeemed form. Degraded: the woman who lives entirely by playing anima to one man after another, who has no inner content of her own, and who is — when the man’s projection withdraws — “a creature destitute of all that he found through his association with her” (Harding 1970, p. 26). Redeemed: the femme inspiratrice who has her own contact with the inner world and “can lead a man whom she loves into touch with the hidden truths of life because of the reality of her own inner experience” (Harding 1970, p. 26). The redeemed form is “a ‘redeemed’ anima woman — redeemed, that is, from the hold of her own biological instincts, on the one hand, and from self-seeking and egotistic motives, on the other” (Harding 1970, p. 26).

Harding’s contribution is to render the anima not only as a structure in the man’s psyche (Jung’s primary frame) but as a role the woman herself is constantly invited and pressured to play — by the man, by social custom, and by her own animus. The pressure is structural: “for the man wants a woman to fulfill his ideal of womanhood… She is compelled by his set purpose and at the same time by an inner urge, to give him what he wants” (Harding 1970, p. 91). To stop playing anima is to begin individuating as a woman.

The concept thus turns Jung’s anima theory inside-out: where Jung diagnosed the man’s projection, Harding describes the woman’s collusion with it and the work of withdrawing.

Relationships

Primary sources

the-way-of-all-women (Harding 1970, Ch. 1, Ch. 4)