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Esse in Anima

Esse in Anima

Esse in anima — “being in soul” — is carl-jung‘s Latin formula, taken up programmatically by james-hillman, for the mode of being in which the psychic image is taken as reality on its own terms rather than as a symptom referring to something else.

Jung formulates it in a 1929 letter to Kurt Plachte: “I am indeed convinced that creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality. Therefore, I speak of esse in anima, the only form of being we can experience directly” (Jung, 10 January 1929, cited in Hillman 1985, hillman-anima-anatomy-personified). The image, the dream, the fantasy, the mood — these are not epiphenomenal to some more fundamental biological or sociological reality. They are the reality through which the psyche is given to itself.

Hillman makes the formula the founding stance of archetypal psychology. To live esse in anima is to inhabit the image rather than explain it — to let the figure in the dream be a figure, the mundus-imaginalis be a world, the anima-mood be an encounter. “Living reality is the product neither of the actual, objective behaviour of things nor of the formulated idea exclusively, but rather of the combination of both” (Hillman 1985).

The concept is load-bearing for the whole Seba lineage because it specifies the epistemic register in which depth psychology operates. The soul is not to be reached by behavioral observation or by abstract reasoning alone but by a mode of attention that takes the image seriously as reality.

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