Hetaira (Wolff)

Definition

The Hetaira, in Toni Wolff’s essay “Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche”, is the form of a woman’s psyche that is turned towards the individual: a particular partner, and the life of the relationship between them. Wolff took the word from the hetairai of classical Athens, educated women who were companions to men outside marriage, but she meant the orientation, not the trade. The Hetaira sits on Wolff’s personal axis, opposite the Mother. Where the Mother relates to a man as father of the family, the Hetaira relates to him as a person. She draws out his individual psychological life, and her own, and pays little attention to the social forms, marriage, household and children, through which relationship is usually contained.

As with each of the four, Wolff gave the Hetaira a fitting and an unfitting expression. At her best she is a companion who helps a partner find his individual direction and inner life. At her worst she draws him away from his responsibilities into an unlived fantasy, loses herself in the relationship, or moves from one relationship to the next. Because she is the Mother’s opposite, a woman led by the Hetaira will, on Wolff’s model, find mothering her least natural form. The definition excludes two readings. The Hetaira is not a courtesan type, and she is not the anima, though her readers relate her to it closely. She is Wolff’s construct, not Jung’s.

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.

This is the form Wolff is usually said to have recognised in herself. Molton and Sikes write that she considered herself a Hetaira, by her own definition a woman committed first to the quality of her relationship with a partner (2011, p. 14). Biographers read the form against her decades as Jung’s companion and collaborator, and Jung’s own later remark on the form is often quoted beside it:

It is unfortunately true that when you are wife and mother you can hardly be Hetaira too, just as it is the secret suffering of the Hetaira that she is not a Mother. — C. G. Jung, letter to Carol Jeffrey, 18 June 1958, Letters, vol. 2 (1975), p. 455, as quoted in Molton & Sikes (2011), p. 8

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

That biographical reading is the commentators’, not something the essay states. According to Nor Hall, Wolff remarked in the essay that her own period favoured the Mother and the Amazon, and that the Hetaira and the Medial woman had been more highly valued in the Middle Ages and perhaps the Renaissance (Hall 1980, p. 153).

Later writers gave the form its mythology. Edward Whitmont made the Hetaira the individual form of personal relating, called her the eternal daughter or sister, the puella aeterna, and matched her to Julius Evola’s Aphroditic type and to the love goddesses and their priestesses (1969; 1991 printing, pp. 176, 179–180). He gave her a masculine counterpart in the Son, the puer aeternus (p. 182). Anthony Stevens calls the pole “the Love Goddess”, exemplified by Aphrodite (2002, pp. 211–212). Hall’s chapter on the Hetaira treats her as the “father’s daughter” whose surrender is to relationship (1980, ch. 7). Molton and Sikes give the form seven chapters, with portraits of Lou Andreas-Salomé, Simone de Beauvoir and Wolff herself (2011, chs 8–14).

The debate

Among the classical ten the Hetaira stands nearest the anima, and the relation runs two ways. She is the form most ready to receive and live out a man’s anima projection. Whitmont warned that a woman who identifies with that projection may become “all things to all men” (1991 printing, ch. 12). She also raised the question of whether anima belongs to men at all. John Sanford noted that the animus plays the least part in this form, and asked whether the hetaira woman shows a feminine soul-quality of her own (1980, pp. 103ff). James Hillman answered that the nymph, hetaera and muse reflect not a man’s inner life but the anima as archetype, which belongs to women’s psychology too (1985, pp. 63–65). Whitmont’s puella aeterna links the form to the kore, as his Son links its masculine counterpart to the puer aeternus.

The form has drawn the most pointed criticism of the four. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette called the name culture-bound. Because the historical hetaira was also a prostitute, they read Wolff’s form as the shadow side of the Lover, a “second-generation archetype” made of fragments of more basic ones (1992, appendix C). They also read her claim that the form tends to go from one man to another as the Lover’s addictive shadow. Whitmont, revising his own earlier account, renamed the form “Lila”, play and lightness, and argued that it is the Amazon-like Pallas, “not the Hetaira as Wolff implies”, who is concerned with the possibilities and limits of personal relationship (1982, pp. 140–141). Sylvia Perera, writing of Inanna as hetaera, saw in the form a danger of losing oneself in subservient connectedness (1981). From the other side, Marion Woodman argued that the culture had made mothering sacred while the hetaera “has been the outcast” (1982, p. 122). The general objection, that all four forms define a woman by her relation to men, applies here most directly (Mattoon 1981, as cited in Samuels 1985; Whitmont 1982, p. 140).

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Aphrodite (1984) is the nearest of her goddess types. Whitmont, Sanford, Hall and Stevens all drew the Aphrodite match before her (Sanford 1980, pp. 110–111), and Bolen draws it herself: in her chapter on the alchemical goddess she likens the “special woman” who inspires a man’s creative side to Wolff’s “hetaira woman”, and suggests that Wolff may have been such a woman for Jung (1984, pp. 229–230). 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 Hetaira as a construct, and no validated instrument measures Wolff’s forms. Monika Górowska (2025) proposes, without data, that the four forms could be read against trait models of personality.

Appearances

Outside Jungian practice the form appears mostly in readings of history, film and fiction. Molton and Sikes open with Aspasia, the companion and later wife of Pericles (2011, pp. 12–14), and use John Huston’s The African Queen (1951), in which a missionary’s sister draws out her shipmate’s gifts and finds her own (p. 14). Their later studies include Postcards from the Edge (1990), Kaye Gibbons’s Charms for the Easy Life (1993) and A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects (1992) (chs 13–14). All of these are the 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. 8 (quoting Jung, Letters, vol. 2, p. 455), 12–14; chapters 8–14.
• 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. 176–184; chapter 12.
• 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. Chapter 7, “Hetaira”; p. 153; bibliography.
• Stevens, A. (2002). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. Chapter 11, pp. 211–212.
• Sanford, J. A. (1980). The Invisible Partners. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-2277-6. Pp. 103ff and 110–111.
• Hillman, J. (1985). Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-316-3. Pp. 63–65.
• 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”.
• Perera, S. B. (1981). Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-05-2.
• Woodman, M. (1982). Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-11-3. P. 122.
• Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter 7, citing Mattoon, Jungian Psychology in Perspective (1981), p. 90.
• 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