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Anima as Projection-Making Factor

Anima as Projection-Making Factor

Jung’s most compressed definition of the anima appears in jung-aion: “the projection-making factor… the archetype of life itself” (Jung 1951, §26). The phrase is load-bearing. Projection-making names a faculty, not a symptom: the anima is the activity by which the unconscious gives its contents to consciousness in the form of images attached to persons and things. “The projection-making factor… has undeniable reality. Anyone who insists on denying it becomes identical with it” (Jung 1951, §44). To deny the anima’s autonomy is to be possessed by her.

carl-jung develops the point across jung-aion and CW 16: transference, for instance, is “closely akin to ‘projection’ — a phenomenon that cannot possibly be demanded” (Jung 1954, CW 16 §359). Projection is not a failure of objectivity but the psyche’s native mode of self-disclosure. The anima’s “characteristic work,” as Jung puts it elsewhere, is precisely this projecting: she is how the soul first appears.

james-hillman extends the definition beyond its gender-bound frame. If the anima is the projection-making factor, then she is operative in every psyche whenever projection occurs — in women as in men, in intra-psychic tandems as in outer relationships. “Projections occur between parts of the psyche, not only outside into the world. They occur between internal persons and not only onto external people” (Hillman 1985, hillman-anima-anatomy-personified). The alchemical sense of projection — “a violent interpenetration of substances” — is the deeper grammar.

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