Psychologically it is also true that the spiritual animus comes to dwell within the psyche only after the projection of the animus, the incarnation of the Ghostly Lover, has been overcome. Thus it is that the Ghostly Lover disappears and in his stead is born a new spiritual power transforming the life of the individual. Through this redeemed animus the woman gains a relation to the masculine principle within herself. This masculine principle is the Logos, or wisdom. When she is identified with the animus she is possessed by opinions and rationalizations and so-called principles which do not represent true wisdom at all. These are the work of the Ghostly Lover. True wisdom can be known only through the spiritual, or redeemed, animus who is a mediator between conscious and unconscious. He brings the values of the creative sources of the unconscious within reach of that human being who has had the courage and the strength to overcome the Ghostly Lover.
— Esther Harding
Harding's confidence here is worth slowing down inside. The Ghostly Lover is overcome, the animus is redeemed, and through that redemption wisdom arrives as mediator between conscious and unconscious. The structure is clean, almost architectural — and that cleanness is exactly where the passage asks something of you.
Notice what drives the logic: if the projection is withdrawn, if the work is done, the spiritual power is born. The "if enough" is not spoken, but it is load-bearing. This is how the pneumatic promise enters the clinical register — not as mysticism but as developmental sequence, as earned transcendence dressed in the vocabulary of stages. The Ghostly Lover becomes a way of naming everything that keeps the soul from arriving at its proper, luminous Logos.
What Harding does not account for is the soul that has withdrawn the projection and found not wisdom but a different kind of emptiness — the gap where the Ghostly Lover was, which does not fill on schedule. The suffering that follows successful disidentification is, in its own way, more disorienting than the possession it replaced. That gap is not a sign the work failed. It may be precisely where the animus, unredeemed and uncooperative, first becomes audible in its own key rather than in the key Harding prepared for it.
Esther Harding·the way of all women·1970