Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion

Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (1985) is james-hillman‘s most sustained treatment of the anima and the single text in which the archetypal-psychological transvaluation of the Jungian feminine is most rigorously worked out. The book is structured as a set of “scripta” — extended citations from Jung — followed by Hillman’s essayistic response to each, a method he calls “working through the lexicon.”

The argument is twofold. First, against the conventional reading that restricts the anima to the man’s psyche and assigns women the animus instead, Hillman reasserts the classical sense: anima is the archetype of psyche itself, and “women are as salty in their weeping and resentments, as bitchy in their gossip, as abysmal in their dour brooding as men. The intensifications, exaggerations, and mythologizings that belong to the description of anima do appear in women and may not be ascribed to her unconscious feminine personality” (Hillman 1985). The anima is not a gendered content but a mode of psychic life available to any soul.

Second, against the reading that treats the anima as content to be integrated, Hillman insists that anima is the medium of integration itself — esse in anima, being in soul. To attempt to integrate the anima is to miss her, since she is the integrating activity. The appropriate stance is not possession but cultivation; not mastery but esse in anima.

The book is load-bearing for the Seba lineage because it is the single text that establishes the anima as the founding figure of depth psychology rather than a sub-region within analytical psychology.

Concepts introduced or developed

Cited by

carl-jung (implicitly, through citation)
wolfgang-giegerich
thomas-moore