Seba.Health

Thread · Seba Knowledge Graph

Hillman Revises Jung on the Anima

Hillman Revises Jung on the Anima

Hillman’s Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (1985) stands as the most thorough revision of the anima concept from within the Jungian tradition. The revision has three interlocking moves.

First, Hillman dissolves the contrasexual reading. “It has become difficult to speak of the anima as inferior femininity since we are no longer certain just what we mean with ‘femininity,’ let alone ‘inferior’ femininity… A man’s ego may perform all [kinds of] ‘feminine’ styles in behavior without this indicating either ego-weakness or incipient ego-loss.” The anima is not the man’s opposite-sex complement; she is a psychic function that happens to personify feminine.

Second, Hillman elevates her from complex-among-complexes to archetype of psyche itself. Jung’s own late formulations point this way — “the anima is the archetype of life itself” (CW 9i, §66); she “personifies the collective unconscious” (CW 10, §714) — and Hillman reads these as warrant: personifying is her work, and personifying is the soul’s native mode. “Our sense of personality, attachment to persons, beliefs in personal immortality, and our cult of personal relationships and development — all rest upon personifying, which in turn is an effect of the anima archetype.”

Third, Hillman redefines loss and integration. “Loss of anima means both the loss of internal animation and external animism.” Integration is not assimilation but restoration of the image in our sight. The Lineage records this as a productive contradiction rather than a resolved one: Jung’s anima remains contrasexual in Aion; Hillman’s anima is esse in anima as such. Both hold.

Sources