-
24 Jun ' 20:16
C.G. Jung: Ten Quotations About the Anima
May 14, 2011
Salome Dancing
Gustav Moreau
The projection-forming factor is the anima. Wherever she appears in dreams, phantasies or visions, she appears personified, thereby demonstrating that basically she possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a female person.
She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous production of the unconscious; neither is she a substitute figure for the mother.
On the contrary, there is every likelihood that those numinous attributes which make the Mother imago so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype, the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child.
Spring
1950
Page 5
It is possible to describe this concept in rational, scientific language, but in this way one entirely fails to express its living character.
Therefore I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological approach and terminology.
In describing the living processes of the soul, such a terminology is not only more expressive but also more exact than abstract scientific terms.
Spring
1950
Page 5
Sedna The anima is not the soul in the dogmatic sense, not an anima rationalis, which is a philosophical conception, but a natural archetype that satisfactorily sums up all the statements of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, of the history of language and religion. . . .
(Inuit Mythology)
It is always the a priori element in [a man's] moods, reactions, impulses, and whatever else is spontaneous in psychic life.Collected Works 9
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious-
Paragraph 57
Michalangelo’s Pieta There is [in man] an imago not only of the mother but of the daughter, the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess, and the chthonic Baubo.
Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man.
It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forego; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life.
And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya-and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another.
Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it.Collected Works 9ii
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
The Syzygy: Anima and Animus,
Paragraph 24 What can a man say about woman, his own opposite?
I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion, and theory.
Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority?
Woman always stands just where the man’s shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two.
Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.Collected Works 10
“Women In Europe” (1927) :
P. 236
You are a slave of what you need in your soul.
The most masculine man needs women, and he is consequently their slave.
Become a woman yourself, and you will be saved from slavery to woman….
It is good for you once to put on women’s clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women and their tyranny.
The acceptance of femininity leads to completion.
The same is valid for the woman who accepts her masculinity.The Red Book No man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima.
Pages 263-264
Collected Works 7
Anima and Animus
Paragraph 29
Asherah
circa 750 BC
The first stage–Hawwah, Eve, earth–is purely biological; woman ins equated with the mother and only represents something to be fertilized.
The second stage is still dominated by the sexual eros, but on an aesthetic and romantic level where woman has already acquired some value as an individual.
The third stage raises Eros to the heights of religious devotion and thus spiritualizes him: Hawwah has been replaced by spiritual motherhood.
Finally the fourth stage illustrates…Sapientia…wisdom.Collected Works 16
Page 354
1954
For decades I always turned to the anima when I felt that my emotional behavior was disturbed, and that something had been constellated in the unconscious.
I would then ask the anima: “Now what are you up to? What do you see? I should like to know.”
After some resistance she regularly produced an image. As soon as the image was there, the unrest or sense of oppression vanished.
The whole energy of these emotions was transformed into interest in and curiosity about the image. I would speak with the anima about the images she communicated to me.
Page 187-188
Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist
Lorenzo Pasinelli (1629-1700)
Women are a magical force.
They surround themselves with an emotional tension stronger than the rationality of men….
Woman is a very, very strong being, magical.
That is why, I am afraid of women.
From an interview with Jung
Cited in The Anima of the Analyst-Its Development 1992
David Tresan
Page 90
The Myth of Medusa: It Takes a Mirror…..
May 2, 2011
from Wikepedia
Medusa
The three Gorgon sisters—Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale—were children of the ancient marine deities Phorcys (or Phorkys) and his sister Ceto (or Keto), chthonic monsters from an archaic world. Their genealogy is shared with other sisters, the Graeae, as in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound who places both trinities of sisters far off “on Kisthene’s dreadful plain”:Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged
With snakes for hair— hated of mortal man—While ancient Greek vase-painters and relief carvers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form, sculptors and vase-painters of the fifth century began to envisage her as being beautiful as well as terrifying. In an ode written in 490 BC Pindar already speaks of “fair-cheeked Medusa”.
In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid, Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, “the jealous aspiration of many suitors,” priestess in Athena’s temple, but when she and the “Lord of the Sea” Poseidon lay together in Athena’s temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa’s beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. In Ovid’s telling, Perseus describes Medusa’s punishment by Minerva (Athena) as just and well-deserved.
In most versions of the story, she was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who was sent to fetch her head by King Polydectes of Seriphos as a gift. With help from Athena and Hermes who supplied him with winged sandals, Hades’ cap of invisibility, a sword, and a mirrored shield, he accomplished his quest. The hero slew Medusa by looking at her harmless reflection in the mirror instead of directly at her, to prevent being turned into stone. When the hero severed Medusa’s head from her neck, two offspring sprang forth, the winged horse Pegasus and the golden-sworded giant Chrysaor.
Carl Jung: Ten Quotations on Individuation
April 30, 2011
I will try to explain the term “individuation” as simply as possible.
By it I mean the psychological process that makes of a human being an “individual”-a unique, indivisible unit or “whole man.from a lecture at the Eranos Meeting at Ascona
The Meaning of Individuation
Prometheus bound What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist?
Amphoriskos
C6th B.C., Vatican City Museums
It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. … Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called.The Development of Personality
Paragraph 299f
The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers Stone Alchemy has performed for me the great and invaluable service of providing material in which my experience could find sufficient room, and has thereby made it possible for me to describe the individuation process at least in its essential aspects.
Joseph Wright
1771Mysterium Coniunctionis
Paragraph 792
“Insofar as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.
Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age things only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman… People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations in the world can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans.The Undiscovered Self
A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species.
The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
The significance of the morning undoubtedly lies in the development of the individual, our entrenchment in the outer world, the propagation of our kind, and the care of our children.
This is the obvious purpose of nature.
But when this purpose has been attained -and more than attained-shall the earning of money, the extension of conquests, and the expansion of life go steadily on beyond the bounds of all reason and sense?
Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning, or the natural aim, must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure.
In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
The Stages of Life
Page 787
The discovery of the value of human personality is reserved for a riper age.
For young people the search for personality values is very often a pretext for evading their biological duty.
Conversely, the exaggerated longing of an older person for the sexual values of youth is a short-sighted and often cowardly evasion of a duty which demands recognition of the value of personality and submission to the hierarchy of cultural values.
The young neurotic shrinks back in terror from the expansion of life’s duties, the old one from the dwindling of the treasures he has attained.CW 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis
Page 664
To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is.Collected Works:Two Essays on Analytical Psychology.
Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious
Page 242
Vajrayogini Mandala, Tibet; 18th century, Rubin Museum of Art I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self.Memories, Dreams and Reflections
Page 196
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man.
Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.Memories, Dreams and Reflections
Page 192
Source of Image
You cannot individuate on Everest.
cited in Jung: His Life And Work
Author Barbara Hanna
Page 290
Click to return to JungCurrents Home Page
>- C.G. Jung: Ten Quotations About the Anima
- The Myth of Medusa: It Takes a Mirror…..
- Carl Jung: Ten Quotations on Individuation
- The Unknown Visitor: Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus Deus Aderit
- Why Did Jung Chose Salome During Active Imagination for the Red Book?
- “I Am Elijah and This Is My Daugher Salome”
- Hippity, Hoppity Easter Is on Its Way
- Hail, Children of Zeus!..
- Seven Paintings of the Birth of Venus
- The Great-Grandfather of Hercules: Uranus
-
Archives
Search the Site
Custom Search
