Anima as Archetype of Psyche

The thread by which the anima is reinterpreted from a contrasexual figure within the male psyche to the archetype of psyche itself is the founding move of james-hillman‘s archetypal psychology and the hinge on which the post-Jungian reception turns.

carl-jung‘s original formulation is gendered: “I have reserved the term ‘animus’ strictly for women… Feminine psychology exhibits an element that is the counterpart of a man’s anima” (Jung, CW 13, §60, cited Hillman 1985). The man has anima; the woman has animus. The formulation was load-bearing for Jung because it preserved the symmetry of the syzygy — every psyche has a contrasexual other.

Hillman’s reading, in hillman-anima-anatomy-personified, is that this gendered restriction obscures the deeper claim already present in Jung’s own writing. “Jung therefore generally steers clear of the term ‘soul,’ using, instead, ‘anima,’ ‘psyche,’ and ‘self’” (Hillman 1972, The Myth of Analysis). The anima, as “the archetype of life itself” (Jung CW 9i §66), is not a content within the psyche but the psyche’s own mode of self-personification. To restrict her to male experience is to gender the soul itself in a way that cannot be sustained phenomenologically.

“By our denying woman anima and giving her animus instead, an entire archetypal pattern has been determined for women’s psychology. The per definitionem absence of anima in women is a deprivation of a cosmic principle with no less consequence in the practice of analytical psychology than has been the theory of penis deprivation in the practice of psychoanalysis” (Hillman 1985).

The thread matters for the Seba lineage because it determines whether the depth tradition’s vocabulary is universal or gendered. Hillman’s reading preserves the universality: anima is the soul’s own name, available to every soul. The animus is preserved as a distinct figure (see soul-spirit-as-anima-and-animus) but is not the female counterpart of a male-only anima.

Sources

• carl-jung: the gendered restriction of terms (CW 13, §60).
• james-hillman: anima as archetype of psyche, available to every soul (Anima 1985; The Myth of Analysis 1972).