Anima

Definition

The anima, in Jung’s usage, is the feminine figure a man carries in his unconscious: the personification of what his masculine conscious attitude has left undeveloped, and at the same time the form in which the unconscious as a whole presents itself to him. He meets her first indirectly, in moods without sufficient cause, in sentimentality and touchiness, and in the pull of particular women, onto whom the image is projected before he knows he has it. He may also meet her directly, as a woman in dreams and fantasies who is nobody he knows. Jung treated the anima as an archetype rather than a personal acquisition: an inherited disposition that the mother first carries for the son and that is never fully absorbed, because what can be integrated is its contents and not the figure itself.

Three points are often lost. The anima is not the mother, though the mother is its first vessel. It is not a “feminine side” a man could simply adopt. And in Jung it belongs to men only. The corresponding figure in women he named the animus, and that asymmetry is where most of the later argument begins.

History

Jung dated the figure to his own imaginative experiments of 1913 to 1916, when a woman’s voice spoke from within. The first printed definition is in the glossary of Psychological Types (1921), under “Soul” and “Soul-image”. There the anima is a functional complex turned inward, the counterpart of the persona, “by and large, complementary to the character of the persona” (CW 6 ¶804, as quoted in Stein, 1998), and the gender rule is already stated: a very feminine woman has a masculine soul, a very masculine man a feminine one. The glossary also qualifies the rule: a man identified with his soul rather than his persona projects the unconscious persona instead, onto someone of the same sex (CW 6 ¶809, as given by Sharp, 1991). Murray Stein notes that in 1921 Jung was “just on the verge” of rooting the figure in the collective unconscious.

One caveat. The appendix to CW 7 prints “The Structure of the Unconscious” from a manuscript found among Jung’s papers, and anima and animus appear in it; but that manuscript carries later revisions, and the versions actually printed, in French in the Archives de Psychologie (1916) and as “The Conception of the Unconscious” in the 1917 Collected Papers, have not been collated against it. Neither the 1916 nor the 1917 Collected Papers uses the word, which is why 1921 stands as the first text. The developed theory is “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” (1928, CW 7), whose chapter “Anima and Animus” keeps the anima as the persona’s counterpart, left in the dark and at once projected (CW 7 ¶309, as given by Sharp, 1991). The 1925 essay on marriage adds the short definition: every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, “not the image of this or that particular woman” (CW 17 ¶338, as quoted in Stein, 1998).

The 1934 Eranos lecture “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, published in English in 1939, is the richest statement. The anima enters through the nixie of folklore, an early stage “still on the level of instinct” of the being Jung calls “the woman in a man”, and is “life beyond all categories” (The Integration of the Personality, pp. 73–78). The sentence everyone quotes ranks her against the shadow:

If the coming to terms with the shadow is the companion-piece to the individual’s development, then that with the anima is the masterpiece. For the relation with the anima is again a test of courage and—more than that—a test by fire of all a man’s spiritual and moral forces. — C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” (1934), in The Integration of the Personality (1939), pp. 78–79; CW 9i ¶61 as given by Sharp (1991)

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The same chapter calls her “the archetype of life itself” (pp. 80–82; CW 9i ¶66). The 1936 essay “Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept” is the methodological defence: what is inherited is not an idea of woman but the possibility of one (CW 9i ¶136, as given by Sharp, 1991). The book’s opening chapter names the novels Jung thought had caught her: Haggard’s She, Benoît’s L’Atlantide, Sloane’s To Walk the Night (pp. 22–23).

The late formulation is chapter III of Aion (1951), “The Syzygy: Anima and Animus”. There the anima is the “projection-making factor”, at first identical with the mother-imago (CW 9ii ¶20–24); Spitteler had called her “My Lady Soul”, and Jung preferred “anima” as more specific (¶25). The definition this entry rests on follows:

Whenever she appears, in dreams, visions, and fantasies, she takes on personified form, thus demonstrating that the factor she embodies possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a feminine being. She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous product of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute figure for the mother. — C. G. Jung, Aion (1951), CW 9ii ¶26

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The chapter derives the animus by symmetry (¶27–29), calls both “empirical concepts” (¶36), pairs them as a divine couple (¶41), insists that both are archetypes whose contents can be integrated but which themselves cannot (¶40), and makes recognition of the anima the second stage of analysis, after the shadow and only through a relationship with a real partner (¶42). “The Psychology of the Transference” (1946) adds the four stages Eve, Helen, Mary and Sophia, which Jung aligned with the late-classical grades of the Eros cult rather than offering as a developmental law (CW 16 ¶361, as given by Sharp, 1991; Edinger, 1995).

The debate

Within analytical psychology the anima is accepted as a clinical description by almost everyone and contested as a theory by almost everyone. The disagreement is about the gender built into it.

The classical reading keeps Jung’s anatomy. Emma Jung’s Animus and Anima (1957) ties the anima to the inferior function left behind in the making of masculine consciousness. Stein (1998) is the most careful classical defender, and concedes that the gendered Latin endings were a choice Jung need not have made and that the moods-versus-opinions rule is “subject to revision in the light of recent cultural developments”. The evolutionary reading, in Anthony Stevens (2003), treats the anima as the contrasexual complex of an inherited system for forming the heterosexual bond, and admits that the evidence for the archetype itself is “less objectively persuasive, more inferential”.

The feminist critique began with Naomi Goldenberg (1976), for whom the animus was an afterthought added for symmetry, like Freud’s Electra complex, in an inequitable model. Andrew Samuels (1985) accepts much of this: the concept survives only if stripped of its connection to sex and gender, so that contrasexuality is a metaphor for otherness, “truly something contrapsychological”, and everyone has both figures. Polly Young-Eisendrath (1984, 1997) kept the terms but re-grounded them: the contrasexual figure is the image of the other sex a person builds inside a culture’s gender arrangements, not an inherited essence.

The imaginal reading went furthest. James Hillman, in Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) and at length in Anima (1985), argued that Jung’s uses of the word are inconsistent and that the anima should be released from men to stand as the archetype of psyche as such:

Anima is psyche personified, as Psyche in the ancient story of her by Apuleius personified the soul. — James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), p. 43

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Whether anything of Jung’s figure survives that detachment is the open question, and none of the three camps has a method that could settle it.

Empirical status

Narrow. One peer-reviewed study has operationalised the figure. Saiz and colleagues (2023) coded 141 dreams from nine people in Jungian psychotherapy, seven women and two men, all heterosexual and all bringing couple problems, for anima, animus and androgynous figures, and report that the pattern of occurrences supports a revision of the classical contrasexual model and the addition of an androgynous figure. The sample is tiny, clinical and self-selected, the coding is the analysts’ own, and there is no replication; it tests whether the classical scheme describes the dreams, not whether an inherited archetype exists. No instrument measures the anima. The nearest mainstream work, Bem’s (1974) androgyny inventory and Hyde’s (2005) finding that most sex differences are small, bears on Jung’s Eros and Logos generalisations, not on the archetype.

Appearances

Jung’s own examples were literary: She (1887), whose Ayesha he called a classic anima story; Benoît’s L’Atlantide (1919); Helen in Faust, and Goethe’s thread of Gretchen, Helen and the Mater Gloriosa; Simon Magus’s Helen, bought out of a brothel in Tyre; and the Gnostic Sophia, who gives the fourth of his stages its name. Dante’s Beatrice is the obvious case and is a reading rather than Jung’s: Campbell’s Creative Mythology (1968) names her an anima figure in Jung’s sense, as Hillman (1975) does Petrarch’s Laura. In every case the anima is read into the text afterwards; only Haggard’s and Benoît’s novels were in Jung’s hands when he formed the idea.

Sources

• Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. CW 6, Definitions, “Soul” and “Soul-image”; ¶801–804 as quoted in Stein (1998), ¶804, ¶807 and ¶809 as given by Sharp (1991). English: H. G. Baynes (Trans., 1923). Princeton paperback ISBN 978-0-691-01813-3.
• Jung, C. G. (1917). The conception of the unconscious. In Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (C. E. Long, Ed., 2nd ed.). Baillière, Tindall & Cox. Project Gutenberg #48225 (the 1920 reprint of the second edition). Checked for the absence of “anima” and “animus”.
• Jung, C. G. (1925). Marriage as a psychological relationship. CW 17 ¶338, as quoted in Stein (1998) and Stevens (2003).
• Jung, C. G. (1928). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7. Part II, chapter “Anima and Animus”; ¶309 as given by Sharp (1991). Appendix, “The Structure of the Unconscious” (1916), from the posthumous manuscript. Princeton 2nd ed. ISBN 978-0-691-09776-3.
• Jung, C. G. (1934). Archetypes of the collective unconscious. CW 9i; ¶61 and ¶66 as given by Sharp (1991). English in The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans., 1939), chapter 3, pp. 73–82. Farrar & Rinehart.
• Jung, C. G. (1936). Concerning the archetypes, with special reference to the anima concept. CW 9i, pp. 54–72; ¶136 as given by Sharp (1991). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850969.54
• Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. Chapter 1, pp. 21–25, for Haggard, Benoît and Sloane. Chapters 3–5 were revised into CW 9i and CW 12.
• Jung, C. G. (1946). The psychology of the transference. CW 16 ¶361, as given by Sharp (1991); the four stages Eve, Helen, Mary, Sophia also as quoted in Edinger (1995), pp. 166–167.
• Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii ¶20–42. Princeton University Press.
• Jung, E. (1957). Animus and Anima. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-964-6 (Spring reprint). Pp. 57–58 as quoted in Stevens (2003).
• Hillman, J. (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-063931-0. Pp. 21–22 and 43–45 on anima as personification of psyche; p. 195 on Petrarch.
• Hillman, J. (1985). Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-316-3.
• Goldenberg, N. R. (1976). A feminist critique of Jung. Signs, 2(2), 443–449. https://doi.org/10.1086/493369
• Young-Eisendrath, P. (1984). Hags and Heroes: A Feminist Approach to Jungian Psychotherapy with Couples. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-17-5.
• Young-Eisendrath, P. (1997). Gender and Desire: Uncursing Pandora. Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 978-0-89096-746-1.
• Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-7102-0864-4. Chapter 7, “Gender, sex, marriage”.
• Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entries “Anima”, “Archetype”, “Soul”, “Soul-image”; online at https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
• Stein, M. (1998). Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9376-8. Chapter 6, which also cites Memories, Dreams, Reflections (pp. 185–188) for the 1913–16 experience.
• Stevens, A. (2003). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. Chapter 11, “The archetypal masculine and feminine”.
• Edinger, E. F. (1995). The Mysterium Lectures. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-66-3. Pp. 166–167.
• Campbell, J. (1968). Creative Mythology (The Masks of God, vol. 4). Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-46111-0.
• Saiz, M., Abalos, M. P., Grez, C., Bartfeld, M., Benchin, F., Toloza, S., Porre, M., and Falcone, J. (2023). The syzygy, reformulation and new perspectives: Dreams, anima–animus and gender. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 68(2), 301–326. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12903
• Bem, S. L. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(2), 155–162. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036215
• Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581–592. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581
• Haggard, H. R. (1887). She: A History of Adventure. Project Gutenberg #3155.
• Goethe, J. W. von (1808). Faust, Part I (B. Taylor, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #14591. Helen appears in Part II (1832).
• Dante Alighieri (c. 1320). The Divine Comedy (H. W. Longfellow, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #1004.