Comment on ‘The Father's Anima as A Clinical and as A Symbolic Problem’

I Am Afraid I feel rather critical of this paper. The root of my criticism lies in the very definition of ‘anima’ given by Dr Beebe:

I find it helpful to think of the anima as the emotional attitude a man takes towards anything he reflects upon. Perhaps his most consistent anima is the one towards the role he is playing in life; this is certainly the anima that affects his fate. It is his spontaneous working sense of his life, the way he approaches his life and the way he reflects upon it. But when I speak of the father's anima, I am referring to the father's working sense of his son's life, the emotional attitude that the father takes towards the son.

This definition is so broad, vague and all-inclusive that it can be of little practical use—except to confuse. The definition and the use Dr Beebe makes of it in this paper, seems to imply that all men personify all their emotions and feelings and image them as a female figure. This may, of course, happen in a particular cultural setting where a particular stereotype of ‘a man’ and ‘a woman’ predominates in a form in which all the emotions are attributed to the woman only, while all men are thought of as free from all emotion and feeling and as totally identified with ‘the stiff upper lip’. To some extent this seems to have been the case with Jung, for his descriptions of the anima figure and its characteristics appear to us nowadays as rather culture-bound.

Furthermore, Beebe's thesis seems to imply that a father can relate emotionally to his son only with and through his own feminine functions and image: and that there is in fact no archetypally-based relationship between man and man or between father and son. Such a thesis seems to me to be inconceivable.

Another point in this paper that puzzles me is that Beebe does not seem to differentiate the two archetypal figures concerning women, namely the mother and the anima. These two figures have obviously very different characteristics and very different functions. While t