Discriminating Feeling from Anima and Eros

A persistent error in mid-century Jungian writing is the identification — explicit or tacit — of the feeling-function with the anima and with eros. james-hillman devotes the central work of Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion to disentangling the three.

The conflation of feeling with anima rests on a structural accident: “When the feeling function in men is inferior (as is generally claimed by analytical psychology), it merges with men’s contrasexual anima inferiority. Then we believe we discriminate the anima by discriminating feeling, whereas the task more likely is one of discriminating anima from feeling, from the human relatedness” (Hillman 1985). Two underdevelopments in the same psyche merge phenomenologically; the analyst then mistakes the merger for an identity and writes about feeling as if it were the anima — or, worse, treats every man’s feeling life as a contrasexual phenomenon.

The conflation of feeling with eros is equally mistaken: “Eros refers to the principle of Jungian, attraction towards and attachment to, connection, relation, involvement that binds together… As an archetypal dominant, eros differs both from the anima as a psychological complex and from feeling as a psychological function, even if both may take on shades of eros and come under its sway in that eros is metapsychological, a god or daimon, and a wider category than either anima or feeling” (Hillman 1985).

The analytic gain of the discrimination: anima is a complex; eros is an archetypal dominant; feeling is a function. They occupy different ontological levels in the Jungian topology, and the work of integration differs in each case. To integrate the anima is to recognize and dialogue with a personified figure; to attend to eros is to participate in an archetypal pattern; to develop the feeling function is to exercise the somatic-evaluative faculty in conscious discrimination. The conflation collapses three distinct tasks into one.

The thread is load-bearing for any mature Jungian reading of the feeling function — without it, the function is repeatedly mistaken for one of its neighbors and never developed in its own right.

Sources

• james-hillman: feeling, anima, and eros are three distinct psychological realities
• carl-jung: feeling as a function distinct from affect and from anima-content (CW 6, 9ii)
• marie-louise-von-franz: the inferior feeling function as gateway to the unconscious, not as anima itself