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The Ghostly Lover

The Ghostly Lover

Esther Harding’s name for the inner phantom-lover that the girl forms in adolescence and that, surviving in the unconscious of the adult woman, becomes the criterion against which every actual man is measured and found wanting. The Ghostly Lover is the unredeemed, unrelated animus in personified form: an “impossible possibility” who “remains only an ‘impossible possibility’” and who, by his very inaccessibility, “keeps her from life” (Harding 1970, p. 47).

He shows himself in three modes. First as a projection onto a real man, whose actual qualities the woman cannot see because the projected image overrides them. Second as a serial projection — the woman is “bound to the wheel which drags her through an endless series of projections” of the same image onto man after man (Harding 1970, p. 54). Third as inner vision: “the would-be artist who sees marvellous pictures which she never paints, or the author whose poem or novel remains unwritten” — the values lured into the inner world and never made actual (Harding 1970, p. 54).

The Ghostly Lover is overcome not by analytic interpretation but by the operative work of active-imagination: the woman must “get her mood to talk to her” (citing Jung, Two Essays, par. 348, in Harding 1970, p. 63), allow the libido released from the broken projection to activate the primordial images of the unconscious, and through this work transform the Ghostly Lover into the spiritual animus, “a mediator between conscious and unconscious” (Harding 1970, p. 68). The phantom is not banished; he is redeemed.

The concept is one of Harding’s most enduring contributions to the analytical psychology of women, naming a structure that earlier Jungian work had treated only as a sub-case of anima/animus theory and that Harding made specific to the woman’s predicament.

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