The anima can be defined as the image or archetype or deposit of all the experiences of man with woman. As we know, the poets have often sung the anima's praises.6 The connection of anima with ghost in the Chinese concept is of interest to parapsychologists inasmuch as mediumistic "controls" are very often of the opposite sex. 59 Although Wilhelm's translation of hun as "animus" seems justified to me, nonetheless I had important reasons for choosing the term "Logos" for a man's "spirit," for his clarity of consciousness and his rationality, rather than the otherwise appropriate expression "animus." Chinese philosophers are spared certain difficulties that aggravate the task of the Western psychologist. Like all mental and spiritual activity in ancient times, Chinese philosophy was exclusively a component of the masculine world. Its concepts were never understood psychologically, and therefore were never examined as to how far they also apply to the feminine psyche. But the psychologist cannot possibly ignore the existence of woman and her special psychology. For these reasons I would prefer to translate hun as it appears in man by "Logos." Wilhelm in his translation uses Logos for hsing, which can also be translated as "essence of human nature" or "creative consciousness." After death, hun becomes shen, "spirit," which is very close, in the philosophical sense, to hsing. Since the Chinese concepts are not logical in our sense of the word, but are intuitive ideas, their meanings can only be elicited from the ways in which they are used and from the constitution of the written characters, or from such relationships as obtain between hun and shen. Hun, then, would be the light of consciousness and reason in man, originally coming from the logos spermatikos of hsing, and returning after death through shen to the Tao. Used in this sense the expression "Logos" would be especially appropriate, since it includes the idea of a universal being, and thus covers the fact that man's clarity of consciousness and rationality are something universal rather than individually unique. The Logos principle is nothing personal, but is in the deepest sense impersonal, and thus in sharp contrast to the anima, which is a personal demon expressing itself in thoroughly personal moods ("animosity"!). 60 In view of these psychological facts, I have reserved the term "animus" strictly for women, because, to answer a famous question, mulier non habet animam, sed animum. Feminine psychology exhibits an element that is the counterpart of a man's anima. Primarily, it is not of an affective nature but is a quasi-intellectual factor best described by the word "prejudice." The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the "soul," or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions. As it is made up of a plurality of preconceived opinions, the animus is far less susceptible of personification by a single figure, but appears more often as a group or crowd. (A good example of this from parapsychology is the "Imperator" group in the case of Mrs. Piper.7) On a low level the animus is an inferior Logos, a caricature of the differentiated masculine mind, just as on a low level the anima is a caricature of the feminine Eros. To pursue the parallel further, we could say that just as hun corresponds to hsing, translated by Wilhelm as Logos, so the Eros of woman corresponds to ming, "fate" or "destiny," interpreted by Wilhelm as Eros. Eros is an interweaving; Logos is differentiating knowledge, clarifying light. Eros is relatedness, Logos is discrimination and detachment.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung is working here at the edge of two traditions that do not quite fit together, and the seam shows in ways worth attending to. He reaches for *Logos* not because it is the obvious translation of *hun* but because he needs a term that signals universality — something impersonal, something that exceeds the individual man who carries it. The *logos spermatikos*, the seed-reason scattered through matter in Stoic cosmology, is what he is after: a principle prior to any particular mind. But notice what this move costs. *Logos* in the Greek tradition is already shaped by 2,400 years of preference for the pneumatic over the affective, the clear over the entangled. When Jung uses it to anchor the masculine psyche, he is not just borrowing a translation convenience — he is inheriting the entire philosophical preference that found soul's mess intolerable and reached for spirit as relief.
The anima, by contrast, is defined through affect, through mood, through what Jung himself calls "animosity" — the word cracking open to show its root. She is personal where Logos is impersonal, entangling where Logos discriminates, fated where Logos clarifies. What is quietly staged here is not a neutral complementarity but a hierarchy dressed as a balance. Eros as *ming*, as fate, as interweaving — that is soul's texture, the thing that does not resolve. Jung names it feminine and leaves the pneumatic preference standing underneath his own typology.
Carl Gustav Jung·Alchemical Studies·1967