Esse In Anima

I speak of esse in anima, the only form of being we can experience directly... What indeed is reality if it is not a reality in ourselves, an esse in anima? 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

Jung's own canonical statement of esse in anima, defining it as the psyche's creative synthesis of objective fact and formulated idea into the only reality directly accessible to experience.

Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985thesis

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

What indeed is reality if it is not a reality in ourselves, an esse in anima? 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 in the living psychological process, through esse in anima.

Edinger cites and elaborates Jung's formulation to argue that the psyche's autonomous fantasy-activity is the condition of all living reality, linking esse in anima to the creative act of the soul.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

has the Other been present throughout in the perspectives toward the anima, and thus in the author, making this essay on anima both an esse im anima and an animus exercise?

Hillman reflexively identifies his own analytical inquiry into anima as an enactment of esse in anima, demonstrating that the concept self-implicates any psychological investigation conducted within the soul's medium.

Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

the 'as-if' is the partition wall that keeps objective positing safely apart from the subjective retraction of it... fantasy... by its own positing gives things their reality character in the first place.

Giegerich critically interrogates imaginal psychology's claim that fantasy constitutes reality, arguing that the appeal to soul's reality-giving function (the core of esse in anima) can become a logical escape hatch rather than a genuine philosophical grounding.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

psychology now can pretend that it has already arrived on a firm ground (the middle ground) as its starting point... psychology is in fact located in a no-man's land, not here,

Giegerich argues that imaginal psychology's 'middle ground' between fact and metaphysic — the operative space of esse in anima — functions as an unexamined starting assumption rather than a philosophically secured position.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

We can make only the dimmest theoretical guesses about the nature of matter, and these guesses are nothing but images created by our minds... This is the psychological standpoint.

Jung advances the epistemological argument underlying esse in anima: matter itself is accessible only through psychic images, making the psychological standpoint the unavoidable horizon of all knowledge.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

Anima within is not merely within my breast... The 'within' refers to that attitude given by the anima which perceives psychic life within natural life. Natural life itself becomes the vessel the moment we recognize its having an interior significance.

Hillman extends the interior logic of esse in anima beyond personal subjectivity, arguing that anima's 'within' is an attitude that discovers psychic reality immanent in the natural world itself.

Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

The Platonism of imaginal psychology is the mirror image of an idea of soul that is anima alba, pure, unbroken, only 'anima' (i.e., untouched by the 'animus').

Giegerich charges imaginal psychology with a Platonic idealism that preserves the soul's creative primacy (the esse in anima claim) at the cost of excluding the logos-dimension necessary for genuine psychological rigor.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

Value arises not from man as in humanism, but from what is behind and within man, soul, anima. Psychology is soul-centered, not man-centered as is existential humanism.

Hillman's claim that value originates in soul rather than in the human subject implicitly grounds his work in the esse in anima principle, positioning anima as the locus of reality and meaning.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983aside

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →