Ego as Animus-Half of the Syzygy (Hillman)

In the Syzygy chapter of hillman-anima-anatomy-personified, james-hillman advances a revisionist thesis with broad consequences: “I suspect that the archetype behind the ego of Western culture as it has issued into ego psychology would reveal itself as the animus, that, in fact, ego is an animus idea. An animus that loses its soul (anima) connection, that posits itself as independent of the syzygy, is ego” (Hillman 1985).

The claim is etymologically grounded: in Latin, animus names “activities and functions of consciousness, attention, intellect, mind, will, courage, arrogance, and pride” — “those which we nowadays in somewhat different terms attribute to the ego” (ibid.). The “strong ego” Jungian developmental psychology aims at is, for Hillman, strengthened animus; the “weak ego” is an ego still in tandem with anima. “Ego may be heroic in content, but as a psychic function it derives from animus, enacting particular projections of anima. As a function of the syzygy, ego cannot have a valid identity of its own” (ibid.).

The consequence for analytic practice: “we might structure the psyche without ego, letting this concept drop out and experiencing in its place the imaginal constellations playing through various mythological pairings” (Hillman 1985). This is the core of Hillman’s Phase 8 critique of classical Jungian ego psychology — the axis on which the archetypal-school diverges from the developmental-school. It converges with giegerich-hillman-quarrel and with polytheistic-critique-of-the-self in dissolving the monocentric ego into a plurality of archetypal perspectives.

Sources

• james-hillman: ego is the animus-half of the syzygy; there is no freestanding ego (hillman-anima-anatomy-personified, Syzygy chapter)
• carl-jung: classical formulation of ego as center of consciousness (contested here; see jung-aion, CW 9ii)
• Etymological: Latin animus = intellect, will, pride — the very qualities later psychology calls ego