Reply to Rosemary Gordon's Comment

I Think Rosemary Gordon has been led astray by my tentative suggestions as to how the anima might usefully be thought of in a particular context into assuming that I must (1) flatly equate the anima with all male emotion and (2) believe that the anima relation is the only possible one between a father and son. My goal was merely to highlight the rôle that the anima may play in contributing to the complexities that abound in the father-son relationship, not to reduce all those complexities to anima. And, of course, this paper's focus is one-sided because it is compensatory—compensatory both to the Freudian tradition (in formulations like ‘identification with the aggressor’) of confining discussions of father-son dynamics to persona, ego, and shadow levels and to the Jungian tradition (in formulations like ‘the battle for deliverance from the mother’) of seeing the mother's animus as the only, or at least the main, obstacle to the development of the son's anima. Therefore, in this report (originally of only thirty minutes' length and addressed to an audience familiar with the analytic literature), I concentrated entirely on factors that I felt had been neglected by previous workers in this field.

In what I tried to do, I felt it important to emphasise from earlier Jungian literature two ideas which I think have been insufficiently appreciated as clinically useful. One is Jung's conception of the anima as the archetype of life (JUNG 2)—that conception I reformulated as a man's ‘working spontaneous sense of his life’. The second is Hillman's idea that the anima serves the instinct of reflection—that's what I picked up when I spoke of the anima as ‘the emotional attitude a man takes toward anything he reflects upon’, intending that my operative word should then be ‘reflects’ (HILLMAN 1). I wanted to get across that a man's reflections, those musings that he so often mistakes for consciousness, are grounded in an unconscious, archetypal base—the anima—and that it is in the