Amazon (Wolff)

Definition

The Amazon, in Toni Wolff’s essay “Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche”, is the form of a woman’s psyche that is turned towards the impersonal world outside her: work, achievement, objective standards and her own development. She sits on Wolff’s impersonal axis, opposite the Medial woman, who is turned towards the impersonal world within. The Amazon is self-contained and independent. She does not need a man to give her life its direction, and when she meets men it is, in her readers’ phrase, as a comrade or competitor rather than as wife or lover. Her interest is in the task and in how well it is done.

Wolff gave each form a fitting and an unfitting expression, and for the Amazon she drew a sharper line than for the others. The natural Amazon follows a real ambition for achievement and makes a real contribution to culture. What Wolff called the inferior Amazon is driven by unconscious personal anger. She turns every setting into a contest and cannot sustain adult relationship (Molton & Sikes 2011, p. 16). In ordinary unbalance the form becomes efficiency without feeling, insensitive to relationship and to what cannot be measured. Because the Medial woman is the Amazon’s opposite, a woman led by the Amazon will, on Wolff’s model, find receptivity to the unconscious her weakest capacity. The form is Wolff’s, not Jung’s, and the name is a label for an orientation, not a claim about the warrior women of Greek legend.

History

The essay was printed in German in Der Psychologe (Bern) in 1951 and in Paul Watzlawik’s English translation, privately printed for students of the C. G. Jung Institute, in 1956 (Hall 1980, bibliography). Wolff’s own first note dates the paper earlier: first read to the Psychological Club in Zürich in 1934, and given in a fuller version at the C. G. Jung Institute in 1948 (1956 translation, endnote 1). Other dates in the secondary literature (1932, 1946, or 1948 as the first reading) are slips against that note; the Mother entry sets them out.

Wolff’s name borrows the Greek legend, but her readers chose the mythological images. Edward Whitmont described the Amazon as the collective form of impersonal relating, oriented to objective cultural values and to a woman’s own performance. He found her image in Artemis the huntress, Pallas Athene, the Valkyries and the Amazons (1969; 1991 printing, p. 180). He gave her a masculine counterpart in the Hero, the dynamic, achieving form of the masculine (p. 182). He also worked through combinations: a woman led by the Mother with the Amazon second has push and energy as well as care, and may well chair the local committee (p. 183). Nor Hall glossed the Amazon as “one who goes off alone” and gave the pole a chapter under the name of Artemis (1980, p. 33; ch. 6). Mary Dian Molton and Lucy Anne Sikes devote seven chapters to the form. They open with Elizabeth I renouncing her suitors, and develop Wolff’s distinction between the natural and the inferior Amazon (2011, pp. 15–16; chs 15–21).

The debate

Among the classical ten the Amazon stands nearest the animus, and her commentators say so. Anthony Stevens found the pole hard to tell apart from the animus because of its masculine overtones. In his account, a woman possessed by it becomes a tyrannical “organization” lady (2002, p. 211). Whitmont’s unbalanced Amazon is the “animus-ridden career woman” (1991 printing, p. 180). John Sanford judged the animus strongest in this form, with the attendant danger of over-identifying with it (1980, pp. 103ff). Andrew Samuels’s gloss shows the period: the amazon is not dependent on a man, “though she may come to resemble one, at least as it is expressed in the culture of Wolff’s time” (1985, ch. 7).

That last point is the main criticism of the form. A typology that files work and achievement under an orientation resembling a man’s takes a mid-century division of labour as a structure of the psyche. Whitmont came to agree. In 1982 he renamed the form “Pallas”, the creating and striving side of the feminine. Against Wolff, he gave this form, not the Hetaira, the real concern with personal relationship (1982, pp. 140–141). Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, mapping Wolff’s forms onto their own four, objected to the image itself:

Wolff’s second mistake is to weight the feminine Warrior with the culturally compromised image of the Amazon. — Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, The King Within (1992), appendix C

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

In their reading the legendary Amazon turns her aggression against men, so Wolff ends up describing mainly the Warrior’s sadistic shadow (1992, appendix C). Whitmont’s pairing of the Amazon with the Hero makes the same equation from the other side.

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Artemis and Athena (1984), two of her virgin goddesses, are the nearest of her types, and Whitmont had already named both as the Amazon’s images. The mapping is not settled even among Wolff’s readers. Sanford gave the Amazon Athena only “perhaps” and assigned Artemis to the Medial woman (1980, pp. 110–111), while Hall made Artemis the Amazon. Bolen draws on Wolff only for the Hetaira, which she sets beside her Aphrodite (1984, p. 230), and her note cites Wolff’s “A Few Thoughts on the Process of Individuation in Women” (Spring, 1941), not the structural-forms essay.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the Amazon as a construct, and no validated instrument measures Wolff’s forms. Monika Górowska (2025) proposes, as a conceptual exercise with no data, that the Amazon corresponds to high conscientiousness and extraversion in trait models.

Appearances

The form appears mainly in Jungian workshops and in readings of film and drama. Molton and Sikes use Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) and Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1985), whose heroine sets out to make the best ramen in Tokyo, as portraits of the natural Amazon. Barry Levinson’s Disclosure (1994) gives them seven Amazons at different stages of maturity. They add drama studies of Aeschylus’ Eumenides and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose Hippolyta is an Amazon queen (2011, pp. 15–16; chs 16–19). Sharon Blackie’s popular account describes the Amazon as excelling in work usually seen as men’s domain (2022, ch. 2). These are their authors’ readings, not examples from Wolff’s essay.

Sources

• Wolff, T. (1951). Strukturformen der weiblichen Psyche. Der Psychologe, 3(7/8), 303–315. Bibliographic record: https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/?p=20504
• Wolff, T. (1956). Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche (P. Watzlawik, Trans.). Privately printed for the students of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich. Endnote 1 (dates of the 1934 and 1948 readings) checked in the scan held by the University of Florida Digital Collections, https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/AA/00/00/15/82/00001/AA00001582_00001.pdf. Reprinted (1995) in Psychological Perspectives, 31(1), 77–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332929508404852
• Wolff, T. (2021). Essays of Analytical Psychology. Daimon Verlag. ISBN 978-3-85630-623-6.
• Molton, M. D., & Sikes, L. A. (2011). Four Eternal Women: Toni Wolff Revisited, A Study in Opposites. Fisher King Press. ISBN 978-1-926715-31-5. Pp. 15–16; chapters 15–21.
• Healy, N. S. (2017). Toni Wolff and C. G. Jung: A Collaboration. Tiberius Press. ISBN 978-0-9981128-0-0.
• Whitmont, E. C. (1969). The Symbolic Quest: Basic Concepts of Analytical Psychology. Putnam for the C. G. Jung Foundation; Princeton University Press printing with revisions and afterword, 1991. ISBN 978-0-691-02454-7. Chapter 11, pp. 178–184.
• Whitmont, E. C. (1982). Return of the Goddess. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-7102-0000-6. Pp. 140–141.
• Hall, N. (1980). The Moon and the Virgin: Reflections on the Archetypal Feminine. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-090793-8. P. 33; chapter 6, “Artemis”; bibliography.
• Stevens, A. (2002). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. Chapter 11, p. 211.
• Sanford, J. A. (1980). The Invisible Partners. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-2277-6. Pp. 103ff and 110–111.
• Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter 7, “The search for the feminine”.
• Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The King Within: Accessing the King in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09591-8. Appendix C, “Archetypes and the Anima”.
• Blackie, S. (2022). Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life. New World Library. ISBN 978-1-60868-843-2. Chapter 2.
• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3. Chapter 11, “The Alchemical Goddess”, pp. 229–230 (Wolff’s hetaira; “hetaira woman”, 230, in the index), and the note there citing Wolff (1941). Via Internet Archive full-text search of the 1984 printing: https://archive.org/details/goddessesinevery00jean
• Górowska, M. P. (2025). Archetypy Toni Wolff jako pomost między modelem cech a tożsamością narracyjną. In J. Felczak (Ed.), Przekraczanie granic między sferami egzystencji, t. 1. Wydawnictwo WSB-NLU. https://repozytorium.wsb-nlu.edu.pl/handle/11199/11393