Although modern man appears to believe that the non-empirical approach to psychology is a thing of the past, his general attitude remains very much the same as it was before, when psychology was identified with some theory about the psyche. In academic circles, a drastic revolution in methodology, initiated by Fechner[2] and Wundt,[3] was needed in order to make clear to the scientific world that psychology was a field of experience and not a philosophical theory. To the increasing materialism of the late nineteenth century, however, it meant nothing that there had once been an "experimental psychology,"[4] to which we owe many descriptions that are still valuable today. I have only to mention Dr. Justinus Kerner's Seherin von Prevorst,[5] All "romantic" descriptions in psychology were anathema to the new developments in scientific method. The exaggerated expectations of this experimental laboratory science were reflected in Fechner's "psychophysics," and its results today take the form of "psychological tests" and a general shifting of the scientific standpoint in favour of phenomenology.
Nevertheless, it cannot be maintained that the phenomenological point of view has made much headway. Theory still plays far too great a role, instead of being included in phenomenology as it should. Even Freud, whose empirical attitude is beyond doubt, coupled his theory as a sine qua non with his method, as if psychic phenomena had to be viewed in a certain light in older to mean something. All the same, it was Freud who cleared the ground for the investigation of complex phenomena, at least in the field of neurosis. But the ground he cleared extended only so far as certain basic physiological concepts permitted, so that it looked almost as if psychology were an offshoot of the physiology of the instincts. This limitation of psychology was very welcome to the materialistic outlook of that time, nearly fifty years ago, and, despite our altered view of the world, it still is in large measure today. It gives us not only the advantage of a "delimited field of work," but also an excellent excuse not to bother with what goes on in a wider world.
Thus it was overlooked by the whole of medical psychology that a psychology of the neuroses, such as Freud's, is left hanging in mid air if it lacks knowledge of a general phenomenology. It was also overlooked that in the field of the neuroses Pierre Janet, even before Freud, had begun to build up a descriptive methodology [6] without loading it with too many theoretical and philosophical assumptions. Biographical descriptions of psychic phenomena, going beyond the strictly medical field, were represented chiefly by the work of the philosopher Théodore Flournoy, of Geneva, in his account of the psychology of an unusual personality.[7] This was followed by the first attempt at synthesis:
William James's Varieies of Religious Experience (1902). I owe it mainly to these two investigators that I learnt to understand the nature of psychic disturbances within the setting of the human psyche as a whole, I myself did experimental work for several years, but, through my intensive studies of the neuroses and psychoses, I had to admit that, however desirable quantitative definitions may be, it is impossible to do without qualitatively descriptive methods. Medical psychology has recognized that the salient facts are extraordinarily complex and can be grasped only through descriptions based on case material. But this method presupposes freedom from theoretical prejudice. Every science is descriptive at the point where it can no longer proceed experimentally, without on that account ceasing to be scientific. But an experimental science makes itself impossible when it delimits its field of work in accordance with theoretical concepts. The psyche does not come to an end where some physiological assumption or other stops. In other words, in each individual case that we observe scientifically, we have to consider the manifestations of the psyche in their totality.
These reflections are essential when discussing an empirical concept like that of the anima. As against the constantly reiterated prejudice that this is a theoretical invention or worse still sheer mythology, I must emphasize that the concept of the anima is a purely empirical concept, whose sole purpose is to give a name to a group of related or analogous psychic phenomena. The concept does no more and means no more than, shall we say, the concept "arthropods," which includes all animals with articulated body and limbs and so gives a name to this phenomenological group. The prejudice I have mentioned stems, regrettable though this is, from ignorance. My critics are not acquainted with the phenomena in question, for these lie mostly outside the pale of merely medical knowledge, in a realm of universal human experience. But the psyche, which the medical man has to do with, does not worry about the limitations of his knowledge; it manifests a life of its own and reacts to influences coming from every field of human experience. Its nature shows itself not merely in the personal sphere, or in the instinctual or social, but in phenomena of world-wide distribution. So if we want to understand the psyche, we have to include the whole world. For practical reasons we can, indeed must, delimit our fields of work, but this should be done only with the conscious recognition of limitation. The more complex the phenomena which we have to do with in practical treatment, the wider must be our frame of reference and the greater the corresponding knowledge.
Anyone, therefore, who does not know the universal distribution and significance of the syzygy motif in the psychology of primitives,[8] in mythology, in comparative religion, and in the history of literature, can hardly claim to say anything about the concept of the anima. His knowledge of the psychology of the neuroses may give him some idea of it, but it is only a knowledge of its general phenomenology that could open his eyes to the real meaning of what he encounters in individual cases, often in pathologically distorted form.
Although common prejudice still believes that the sole essential basis of our knowledge is given exclusively from outside, and that "nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu, it nevertheless remains true that the thoroughly respectable atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus was not based on any observations of atomic fission but on a "mythological" conception of smallest particles, which, as the smallest animated parts, the soul-atoms, are known even to the still Paleolithic inhabitants of central Australia.[9] How much "soul" is projected into the unknown in the world of external appearances is, of course, familiar to anyone acquainted with the natural science and natural philosophy of the ancients. It is, in fact, so much that we are absolutely incapable of saying how the world is constituted in itself-and always shall be, since we are obliged to convert physical events into psychic processes as soon as we want to say anything about knowledge. But who can guarantee that this conversion produces anything like an adequate "objective" picture of the world? That could only be if the physical event were also a psychic one. But a great distance still seems to separate us from such an assertion. Till then, we must for better or worse content ourselves with the assumption that the psyche supplies those images and forms which alone make knowledge of objects possible.
These forms are generally supposed to be transmitted by tradition, so that we speak of "atoms" today because we have heard, directly or indirectly, of the atomic theory of Democritus. But where did Democritus, or whoever first spoke of minimal constitutive elements, hear of atoms? This notion had its origin in archetypal ideas, that is, in primordial images which were never reflections of physical events but are spontaneous products of the psychic factor Despite the materialistic tendency to understand the psyche as a mere reflection or imprint of physical and chemical processes, there is not a single proof of this hypothesis. Quite the contrary, innumerable facts prove that the psyche translates physical processes into sequences of images which have hardly any recognizable connection with the objective process. The materialistic hypothesis is much too bold and flies in the face of experience with almost metaphysical presumption. The only thing that can be established with certainty, in the present state of our knowledge, is our ignorance of the nature of the psyche. There is thus no ground at all for regarding the psyche as something secondary or as an epiphenomenon; on the contrary, there is every reason to regard it, at least hypothetically, as a factor sui generis, and to go on doing so until it has been sufficiently proved that psychic processes can be fabricated in a retort. We have laughed at the claims of the alchemists to be able to manufacture a lapis philosophorum consisting of body, soul, and spirit, as impossible, hence we should stop dragging along with us the logical consequence of this medieval assumption, namely the materialistic prejudice regarding the psyche, as though it were a proven fact.
It will not be so easy to reduce complex psychic facts to a chemical formula. Hence the psychic factor must, ex hypothesl, be regarded for the present as an autonomous reality of enigmatic character, primarily because, judging from all we know, it appears to be essentially diflerent from physicochemical processes. Even if we do not ultimately know what its substantiality is, this is equally true of physical objects and of matter in general. So if we regard the psyche as an independent factor, we must logically conclude that there is a psychic life which is not subject to the caprices of our will. If, then, those qualities of elusiveness, superficiality, shadowiness, and indeed of futility attach to anything psychic, this is primarily true of the subjective psychic, i.e., the contents of consciousness, but not of the objective psychic, the unconscious, which is an a priori conditioning factor of consciousness and its contents. From the unconscious there emanate determining influences which, independently of tradition, guarantee in every single individual a similarity and even a sameness of experience, and also of the way it is represented imaginatively. One of the main proofs of this is the almost universal parallelism between mythological motifs, which, on account of their quality as primordial images, I have called archetypes.
One of these archetypes, which is of paramount practical importance for the psychotherapist, I have named the anima. This Latin expression is meant to connote something that should not be confused with any dogmatic Christian idea of the soul or with any of the previous philosophical conceptions of it. If one wishes to form anything like a concrete conception of what this term covers, one would do better to go back to a classical author like Macrobius,[10] or to classical Chinese philosophy,[11] where the anima (p'o or kuei) is regarded as the feminine and chthonic part of the soul. A parallel of this kind always runs the risk of metaphysical concretism, which I do my best to avoid, though any attempt at graphic description is bound to succumb to it up to a point. For we are dealing here not with an abstract concept but with an empirical one, and the form in which it appears necessarily clings to it, so that it cannot be described at all except in terms of its specific phenomenology.
Unperturbed by the philosophical pros and cons of the age, a scientific psychology must regard those transcendental intuitions that sprang from the human mind in all ages as proleclions, that is, as psychic contents that were extrapolated in metaphysictI space and hypostatized.[12] We encounter the anima historically above all in the divine syzygies, the male-female pairs of deities. These reach down, on the one side, into the obscurities of primitive mythology,[13] and up, on the other, into the philosophical speculations of Gnosticism [14] and of classical Chinese philosophy, where the cosmogonic pair of concepts are designated yang (masculine) and yin (feminine).[15] We can safely assert that these syzygies are as universal as the existence of man and woman. From this fact we may reasonably conclude that man's imagination is bound by this motif, so that he was largely compelled to project it again and again, at all times and in all places.[16]
Now, as we know from psychotherapeutic experience, projection is an unconscious, automatic process whereby a content that is unconscious to the subject transfers itself to an object, so that it seems to belong to that object. The projection ceases the moment it becomes conscious, that is to say when it is seen as belonging to the subject.[17] Thus the polytheistic heaven of the ancients owes its depotentiation not least to the view first propounded by Euhemeros,[18] who maintained that the gods were nothing but reflections of human character. It is indeed easy to show that the divine pair is simply an idealization of the parents or of some other human couple, which for some reason appeared in heaven. This assumption would be. simple enough if projection were not an unconscious process but were a conscious intention. It would generally be supposed that one's own parents are the best known of all individuals, the ones of which the subject is most conscious. But precisely for this reason they could not be projected, because projection always contains something of which the subject is not conscious and which seems not to belong to him. The image of the parents is the very one that could be projected least, because it is too conscious.
In reality, however, it is just the parental images that seem to be projected most frequently, a fact so obvious that one could almost draw the conclusion that it is precisely the conscious contents which are projected. This can be seen most plainly in cases of transference, where it is perfectly clear to the patient that the father-imago (or even the mother-imago) is projected on to the analyst and he even sees through the incest-fantasies bound up with them, without, however, being freed from the reactive effect of his projection, i.e., from the transference. In other words, he behaves exactly as if he had not seen through his projection at all. Experience shows that projection is never conscious: projections are always there first and are recognized afterwards. We must therefore assume that, over and above the incest-fantasy, highly emotional contents are still bound up with the parental images and need to be made conscious. They are obviously more difficult to make conscious than the incest-fantasies, which are supposed to have been repressed through violent resistance and to be unconscious for that reason. Supposing this view is correct, we are driven to the conclusion that besides the incest-fantasy there must be contents which are repressed through a still greater resistance. Since it is difficult to imagine anything more repellent than incest, we find ourselves rather at a loss to answer this question.
If we let practical experience speak, it tells us that, apart from the incest-fantasy, religious ideas are associated with the parental images. I do not need to cite historical proofs of this, as they are known to all. But what about the alleged objectionableness of religious associations?
Someone once observed that in ordinary society it is more embarrassing to talk about God at table than to tell a risqué story. Indeed, for many people it is more bearable to admit their sexual fantasies than to be forced to confess that their analyst is a saviour, for the former are biologically legitimate. whereas the latter instance is definitely pathological, and this is something we greatly fear. It seems to me, however, that we make too much of "resistance." The phenomena in question can be explained just as easily by lack of imagination and reflectiveness, which makes the act of conscious realization so difficult for the patient. He may perhaps have no particular resistance to religious ideas, only the thought has never occurred to him that he Could seriously regard his analyst as a God or saviour. Mere reason alone is sufficient to protect him from such illusions. But he is less slow to assume that his analyst thinks himself one. When one is dogmatic oneself, it is notoriously easy to take other people for prophets and founders of religions.
Now religious ideas, as history shows, are charged with an extremely suggestive, emotional power. Among them I naturally reckon all representations Collectivs everything that we learn from the history of religion, and anything that has an attached to it. The latter is only a modern variant of the denominational religions A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating representation collective. His very materialism, atheism, communism, socialism, liberalism, intellectualism, existentialism, or what not, testifies against his innocence. Somewhere or other, overtly or covertly, he is possessed by a supraordinate idea.
The psychologist knows how much religious ideas have to do with the parental images. History has preserved overwhelming evidence of this, quite apart from modern medical findings, which have even led certain people to suppose that the relation-ship to the parents is the real origin of religious ideas. This hypothesis is based on very poor knowledge of the facts. In the first place, one should not simply translate the family psychology of modern man into a context of primitive conditions, where things are so very different; secondly, one should beware of ill-considered tribal-father and primal-horde fantasies; thirdly and most importantly, one should have the most accurate knowledge of the phenomenology of religions experience, which is a subject in itself. Psychological investigations in this field have so far not fulfilled any of these three conditions.
The only thing we know positively from psychological experience is that theistic ideas are associated with the parental images, and that our patients are mostly unconscious of them. If the corresponding projections cannot be withdrawn through insight, then we have every reason to suspect the presence of emotional contents of a religious nature, regardless of the rationalistic resistance of the patient.
So far as we have any information about man, we know that he has always and everywhere been under the influence of dominating ideas. Any one who alleges that he is not can immediately be suspected of having exchanged a known form of belief for a variant which is less known both to himself and to others. Instead of theism he is a devotee of atheism, instead of Dionysus he favours the more modern Mithras, and instead of heaven he seeks paradise on earth.
A man without a dominating representation collective would be a thoroughly abnormal phenomenon. But such a person exists only in the fantasies of isolated individuals who are deluded about themselves. They are mistaken not only about the existence of religious ideas, but also and more especially about their intensity. The archetype behind a religious idea has, like every instinct, its specific energy, which it does not lose even if the conscious mind ignores it. Just as it can be assumed with the greatest probability that every man possesses all the average human functions and qualities, so we may expect the presence of normal religious factors, the archetypes, and this expectation does not prove fallacious. Any one who succeeds in putting off the mantle of faith can do so only because another lies close to hand. No one can escape the prejudice of being human.
The representations collectives have a dominating power, so it is not surprising that they are repressed with the most intense resistance. When repressed, they do not hide behind any trifling thing but behind ideas and figures that have already become problematical for other reasons, and intensify and complicate their dubious nature. For instance, everything that we would like, in infantile fashion, to attribute to our parents or blame them for is blown up to fantastic proportions from this secret source, and for this reason it remains an open question how much of the ill-reputed incest-fantasy is to be taken seriously. Behind the parental pair, or pair of lovers, lie contents of extreme tension which are not apperceived in consciousness and can therefore become perceptible only through projection. That projections of this kind do actually occur and are hot just traditional opinions is attested by historical documents. These show that syzygies were projected which were in complete contradiction to the traditional beliefs, and that they were often experienced in the form of a vision.[19]
One of the most instructive examples in this respect is the vision of the recently canonized Nicholas of Flite, a Swiss mystic of the fifteenth century, of whose visions e possess reports by his contemporaries.[20] In the visions that marked his initiation into the state of adoption by God, God appeared in dual form, once as a majestic father and once as a majestic mother. This representation could not be more unorthodox, since the Church had eliminated the feminine element from the Trinity a thou-sand years earlier as heretical. Brother Klaus was a simple unlettered peasant who doubtless had received none but the approved Church teaching, and was certainly not acquainted with the Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as the feminine and motherly Sophia.[21] His so-called Trinity Vision is at the same time a perfect example of the intensity of projected contents. Brother Klaus's psychological situation was eminently suited to a projection of this kind, for his conscious idea of God was so little in accord with the unconscious content that the latter had to appear in the form of an ahen and shattering experience. We must conclude from this that it was not the traditional idea of God but, on the contrary, an "heretical" image [22] that realized itself in visionary form, an archetypal interpretation which came to life again spontaneously, independently of tradition. It was the archetype of the divine pair, the syzygy.
There is a very similar case in the visions of Guillaume de Digulleville,[23] which are described in Le Plerinage de l'dme. He saw God in the highest heaven as the King on a shining round throne, and beside him sat the Queen of Heaven on a throne of brown crystal. For a monk of the Cistercian Order, which as we know is distinguished for its severity, this vision is exceedingly heretical. So here again the condition for projection is fulfilled.
Another impressive account of the syzygy vision can be found in the work of Edward Makland, who wrote the biography of Anna Kingsford. There he describes in detail his own experiences of God, which, like that of Brother Klaus, consisted in a vision of light. He says: "This was - . . God as the Lord, proving by His duality that God is Substance as well as Force, Love as well as Will, feminine as well as masculine, Mother as well as Father." [24]
These few examples may suffice to characterize the experience of projection and those features of it which are independent of tradition. We can hardly get round the hypothesis that an emotionally charged content is lying ready in the unconscious and springs into projection at a certain moment. This content is the syzygy motif, and it expresses the fact that a masculine element is always paired with a feminine one. The wide distribution and extraordinary emotionality of this motif prove that it is a fundamental psychic factor of great practical importance, no matter whether the individual psychotherapist or psychologist understands where and in what way it influences his special field of work. Microbes, as we know, played their dangerous role long before they were discovered.
As I have said, it is natural to suspect the parental pair in all syzygies. The feminine part, the mother, corresponds to the anima. But since, for the reasons discussed above, consciousness of the object prevents its projection, there is nothing for it but to assume that parents are also the least known of all human beings, and consequently that an unconscious reflection of the parental pair exists which is as unlike them, as utterly alien and incommensurable, as a man compared with a god. It would be conceivable, and has as we know been asserted, that the unconscious reflection is none other than the image of father and mother that was acquired in early childhood, overvalued, and later repressed on account of the incest-fantasy associated with it. This hypothesis presupposes that the image was once conscious, otherwise it could not have been "repressed." It also presupposes that the act of moral repression has itself become unconscious, for otherwise the act would remain preserved in consciousness together with the memory of the repressive moral reaction, from which the nature of the thing repressed could easily be recognized. I do not want to enlarge on these misgivings, but would merely like to emphasize that there is general agreement on one point: that the parental imago comes into existence not in the pre-puberal period or at a time when consciousness is more or less developed, but in the initial stages between the first and fourth year, when consciousness does not show any real continuity and is characterized by a kind of island-like discontinuity. The ego-relationship that is required for continuity of consciousness is present only in part, so that a large proportion of psychic life at this stage runs on in a state which can only be described as relatively unconscious. At all events it is a state which would give the impression of a somnambulistic. dream, or twilight state if observed in an adult. These states, as we know from the observation of small children, are always characterized by an apperception of reality filled with fantasies. The fantasy-images outweigh the influence of sensory stimuli and mould them into conformity with a pre-existing psychic image.
It is in my view a great mistake to suppose that the psyche of a new-born child is a tabula rasa in the sense that there is absolutely nothing in it. In so far as the child is born with a differentiated brain that is predetermined by heredity and therefore individualized, it meets sensory stimuli coming from outside not with any aptitudes, but with specific ones, and this necessarily results in a particular, individual choice and pattern of apperception. These aptitudes can be shown to be inherited instincts and preformed patterns, the latter being the a priori and formal conditions of apperception that are based on instinct. Their presence gives the world of the child and the dreamer its anthropomorphic stamp. They are the archetypes, which direct all fantasy activity into its appointed paths and in this way produce, in the fantasy-images of children's dreams as well as in the delusions of schizophrenia, astonishing mythological parallels such as can also be found, though in lesser degree, in the dreams of normal persons and neurotics. It is not, therefore, a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas. Nor are they individual acquisitions but, in the main, common to all, as can be seen from the universal occurrence of the archetypes.[25]
Just as the archetypes occur on the ethnological level as myths, so also they are found in every individual, and their effect is always strongest, that is, they anthropomorphize reality most, where consciousness is weakest and most restricted, and where fantasy can overrun the facts of the outer world. This condition is undoubtedly present in the child during the first years of its life. It therefore seems to me more probable that the archetypal form of the divine syzygy first covers up and assimilates the image of the real parents until, with increasing consciousness, the real figures of the parents are perceivetl-often to the child's disappointment. Nobody knows better than the psychotherapist that the mythologizing of the parents is often pursued far into adulthood and is given up only with the greatest resistance.
I remember a case that was presented to me as the victim of a high-grade mother and castration complex, which had still not been overcome in spite of psychoanalysis. Without any hint from me, the man had made some drawings which showed the mother first as a superhuman being. and then as a figure of woe, with bloody mutilations. I was especially struck by the fact that a castration had obviously been performed on the mother, for in front of her gory genitals lay the cut-off male sexual organs. The drawings clearly represented a diminishing climax: first the mother was a divine hermaphrodite, who then, through the son's disappointing experience of reality, was robbed of its androgynous, Platonic perfection and changed into the woeful figure of an ordinary old woman. Thus from the very beginning, from the son's earliest childhood, the mother was assimilated to the archetypal idea of the syzygy, or conjunction of male and female, and for this reason appeared perfect and super-human.[26] The latter quality invariably attaches to the archetype and explains why the archetype appears strange and as if not be-longing to consciousness, and also why, if the subject identifies with it, it often causes a devastating change of personality, generally in the form of megalomania or its opposite.
The son's disappointment effected a castration of the hermaphroditic mother: this was the patient's so-called castration complex. He had tumbled down from his childhood Olympus and was no longer the son-hero of a divine mother. His so-called fear of castration was fear of real life, which refused to come up to his erstwhile childish expectations, and everywhere lacked that mythological meaning which he still dimly remembered from his earliest youth. His life was, in the truest sense of the word, "godless." And that, for him-though he did not realize it-meant a dire loss of hope and energy. He thought of himself as "castrated," which is a very plausible neurotic misunderstanding-so plausible that it could even be turned into a theory of neurosis because people have always feared that the connection with the instinctive, archetypal stage of consciousness might get lost in the course of life, the custom has long since been adopted of giving the new-born child, in addition to his bodily parents, two godparents, a "godfather" and a "godmother," who are supposed to be responsible for the spiritual welfare of their godchild. They represent the pair of gods who appear at its birth, thus illustrating the "dual birth" motif.[27]
The anima image, which lends the mother such superhuman glamour in the eyes of the son, gradually becomes tarnished by commonplace reality and sinks back into the unconscious, but without in any way losing its original tension and instinctivity. It is ready to spring out and project itself at the first opportunity, the moment a woman makes an impression that is out of the ordinary. We then have Goethe's experience with Frau von Stein, and its repercussions in the figures of Mignon and Gretchen, all over again. In the case of Gretchen, Goethe also showed us the whole underlying "metaphysic." The love life of a man reveals the psychology of this archetype in the form either of boundless fascination, overvaluation, and infatuation, or of misogyny in all its gradations and variants, none of which can be explained by the real nature of the "object" in question, but only by a transference of the mother complex. The complex, however, was caused in the first place by the assimilation of the mother (in itself a normal and ubiquitous phenomenon) to the pre-existent, feminine side of an archetypal "male-female" pair of opposites, and secondly by an abnormal delay in detaching from the primordial image of the mother. Actually, nobody can stand the total loss of the archetype. When that happens, it gives nse to that frightful "discontent in our culture," where nobody feels at home because a "father" and "mother" are missing. Everyone knows the provisions that religion has always made in this respect. Unfortunately there are very many people who thoughtlessly go on asking whether these provisions are "true,'' when it is really a question of a psychological need. Nothing is achieved by explaining them away rationalistically.
When projected, the anima always has a feminine form with definite characteristics. This empirical finding does not meanthat the archetype is constituted like that in itself. The male female syzygy is only one among the possible pairs of opposites, albeit the most important one in practice and the commonest. It has numerous connections with other pairs which do not display any sex differences at all and can therefore be put into the sexual category only by main force. These connections, with their manifold shades of meaning, are found more particularly in Kundalini yoga,[28] in Gnosticism,[29] and above all in alchemical philosophy,[30] quite apart from the spontaneous fantasy-products in neurotic and psychotic case material. When one carefully considers this accumulation of data, it begins to seem probable that an archetype in its quiescent, unprojected state has no exactly determinable form but is in itself an indefinite structure which can assume definite forms only in projection.
This seems to contradict the concept of a "type." If I am not mistaken, it not only seems but actually is a contradiction. Empirically speaking, we are dealing all the time with "types," definite forms that can be named and distinguished. But as soon as you divest these types of the phenomenology presented by the case material, and try to examine them in relation to other archetypal forms, they branch out into such far-reaching ramifications in the history of symbols that one comes to the conclusion that the basic psychic elements are infinitely varied and ever changing, so as utterly to defy our powers of imagination. The empiricist must therefore content himself with a theoretical "as if." In this respect he is no worse off than the atomic physicist, even though his method is not based on quantitative measurement but is a morphologically descriptive one.
The anima is a factor of the utmost importance in the psychology of a man wherever emotions and affects are at work. She intensifies, exaggerates, falsifies, and mythologizes all emotional relations with his work and with other people of both sexes. The resultant fantasies and entanglements are all her doing. When the anima is strongly constellated, she softens the man's character and makes him touchy, irritable, moody, jealous, vain, and unadjusted. He is then in a state of "discontent" and spreads discontent all around him. Sometimes the man's relationship to the woman who has caught his anima accounts for the existence of this syndrome.
The anima, as I have remarked elsewhere,[31] has not escaped the attentions of the poets. There are excellent descriptions of her, which at the same time tell us about the symbolic context in which the archetype is usually embedded. I give first place to Rider Haggard's novels She, The Return of She, and Wisdom's Daughter, and Benoit's L'Atlantide. Benolt was accused of plagiarizing Rider Haggard, because the two accounts are disconcertingly alike. But it seems he was able to acquit himself of this charge. Spitteler's Prometheus contains some very subtle observations, too, and his novel Imago gives an admirable description of projection.
The question of therapy is a problem that cannot be disposed of in a few words. It was not my intention to deal with it hee, but I would like to outline my point of view. Younger people, who have not yet reached the middle of life (around the age of 35) can bear even the total loss of the anima without injury. The important thing at this stage is for a man to be a man. The growing youth must be able to free himself from the anima fascination of his mother. There are exceptions, notably artists, where the problem often takes a different turn; also homosexuality, which is usually characterized by identity with the anima. In view of the recognized frequency of this phenomenon, its interpretation as a pathological perversion is very dubious. The psychological findings show that it is rather a matter of incomplete detachment from the hermaphroditic archetype, coupled with a distinct resistance to identify with the role of a one-sided sexual being. Such a disposition should not be adjudged negative in all circumstances, in so far as it preserves the archetype of the Original Man, which a onesided sexual being has, up to a point, lost.
After the middle of life, however, permanent loss of the anima means a diminution of vitality, of flexibility, and of human kindness. The result, as a rule, is premature rigidity, crustiness, stereotypy, fanatical one-sidedness, obstinacy, pedantry, or else resignation, weariness, sloppiness, irresponsibility, and finally a childish ramollissement with a tendency to alcohol. After middle life, therefore, the connection with the archetypal sphere of experience should if possible be re-established.[32]
where. Also Crawley, The Idea of the Soul, pp. 87f.
[10] Commentary on the Dream of scipio. [11] Cf. my "Co'rnentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower" pars. 57ff.. andChantepie de la 5atisaye, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschid'te, I, p.71.
[12] This standpoint derives from Kant's theory of knowledge and has nothing to do with materialism. [13] winthuis, Do' Zweigeschlechterwesen bei den Zentralaustraliern und anderen Vo.'Zkern. [14] Especially in the system of the Valentinians. Cf. Irenaeus, Adversus haerejes. [15] Cf. The I Ching or Book of Changes. [Aiso Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Il, pp. 75f.-EosTolsi [16] Hermetic aichemical philosophy from the 14th to the 17th cents. provides a wealth of instructive examples. For our purposes, a glimpse into Michael Maler's Symbola aureas mensae (117) would suffice. [17] There are ol course cases where, in spite of the patient's seemingly sufficient insight, the reactive effect of the projection does not cease. and the expected liberation does not take place. I have often observed that in such cases meaningful but unconscious contents are still bound up with the projection carrier. It is these contents that keep tip the effect of the projection, although it has apparently been seela through. [18] Fl. C. 300 a.c. Cf. Block, Euhtmre: son livre et sa doctrie. [19] This is not to overlook the fact that there is probably a tar greater number of visions which agree with the dogma. Nevertheless, they are not spontaneous and autonomous projections in the strict sense but are visualizations of conscious con tents, evoked through prayer, autosuggestion, and heterosuggestion. Most spiritual exercises have this effect, and so do the prescribed meditation practices of the East. In any thorough investigation of such visions it would have to be ascertained, among other things, what the actual vision was and how far dogmatic elaboration contributed to its form. [20] Cf. Stoeckli, Z)i' Visionen des seligen Bruder Klaus, and Blanke, Bruder Klaus von Fitle. [21] The peculiar lovestory of this youngest Aeon can be found in Irenacus, Ado. haer., I, 5, 2ff. (Roberts/Rambaut trans., I, pp. 7ff.) [22] Cf. my "Brother Klaus." [23] Guillaume wrote three Plerinages in the manner of the Divine Comedy, but independently of Dante, between 1330 and 1350. He was Pn'or of the Cistercian monastery at Chis, in Normandy. Cf. Delacotte, Cuillaume de Digulleville: Trois Rarnans-pomes du XIV. sik. [Also cf. Psychology and Akhemy, pars. 355ff. -EDITORs.] [24].Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letter', Diay, and Work, I, pp. io. Maitland's vision is similar in form and meaning to the one in the Poimandres (Scott, Hermetica, I, Lihellus I, pp. 1 i4ff.), where the spiritual light is described as "male-female." I do not know whether Maitland was acquainted with the Poimandres; probably not. [25] Hubert and Mauss (Mdlan ge's d'histoire' des religions, preface, p. xxix) call these a priori thought-forms "categories," presumably with reference to Kant:"They exist ordinarily as habits which govern consciousness, but are themselves unconscious." The authors conjecture that the primordial images are conditioned by language. This conjecture may be correct in certain cases, but in general it is contradicted by the fact that a great many archetypal images and associations are brought to light by dream psychology and psychopathology which would be absolutely incommunicable through language.
Conforming to the bisexual Original Man in Plato, Symposium, XIV, and to the hermaphroditic Primal Beings in general.
[26] The "dual birth" refers to the motif, well known from hero mythology, which makes the hero descend from divine as well as from human parents. In most mysteries and religIons it plays an important role as a baptism or rebirth motif.It was this motif that misled Freud in his study of Leonardo da Vinci. without taking account of the fact that Leonardo was by no means the only artist to paint the motif of St. Anne, Mary, and the Christ-child, Freud tried to reduce Anne and Mary. the grandmother and mother, to the mother and stepmother of Leonardo; in other words, to assimilate the painting to his theory. But did the other painters all have stepmothersll what prompted Freud to this violent interpretauon was obviously the fantasy of dual descent suggesteti by Leonardo's biography. This fantasy covered up the inceavenient reality that St. Anne was the grandmother, and preveftted Freud from inquiring into the biographies of other artists who also painted St. Anne. The "religious inhibition of thought" mentioned on p.79 (1957 edn.) proved true of the author himself. Similarly, the incest theory on which he lays so much stress is based on another archetype, the well-known incest motif frequently met with in hero myths. It is logically derived from the original hermaphrodite type, which seems to go far back into prehistory. whenever a psychological theory is forcibly applied, we have reason to suspect that an archetypal fantasy-image is trying to distort reality, thus bearing out Freud's own idea of the "religious inhibition of thought." But to explain the genesis of archetypes by means of the incest theory is about as useful as ladling water from one kettle into another kettle standing beside it, which is connected with the first by a pipe. You cannot explain one archetype by another; that is, it is impossible to say where the archetype comes from, because there is no Archimedean point outside the a pr'.ori conditions it represents.
[27] Cf. Avalon, The Serp'n P"'er, Shn-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra; Woodroffe, [28] Shakti qnd Shakta. [29] Schultz, Dokumente der Gnosts, especially the lists in Irenacus, Adversus haereses. [30] Cf. Psychology and Alchemy. [31] Cf. be first paper in this volume. [32] The most important problems for therapy are discussed in my essay 'The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" and also In the "Psychology of the Transference." For the mythological aspects of the anima, the reader is referred to another paper in this volume, "The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,"