WHEELWRIGHT, J. H. For Women Growing Older—the Animus. Houston, Texas,  C. G. Jung Educational Center. Pp.  59. N.p.

It is probably in the nature of the animus and of the anima that they are notoriously difficult to write about at all, let alone convincingly, for readers of either sex. This short book is an expanded version of a lecture given in 1982 at the C. G. Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas, an organisation founded and sustained primarily by women. Its writer, Jane Hollister Wheelwright, demonstrates that, at least where she is concerned, her basic theme is valid: old age can be the time when, after consistent psychological effort, we women can hope to have integrated the animus. She includes the anima in that contention (p. 6), so that although the book might give the impression of being for women only, it would be a pity if men did not read it. As well as finding a lot of sound, experience-based wisdom about women they would be enabled by it to do further work on their anima identifications. To say that in that way is to reverse the order in which C. G. Jung came to his conceptualisation of the two inner figures. But it is not, I hope, to fall into the same trap as he did, which was to assert, rather simplistically, the correspondingness of those two archetypes and to pay less attention to the positive potential in the animus than to the same possibilities in the anima. Emma Jung redressed with great dignity his shortcoming in that respect, and now Jane Wheelwright has done a very similar job for a later generation of women and of men, from the particular angle of women growing older, thereby giving change and development at least some of the scope they deserve.

The historical background of the concept of the animus goes a long way to explaining its partially culture-based character. Contemporary Jungian women have often pointed that out—but at times in doing so they have tended to complain about it rather than quite simply to give the history of it, in a non-animus fashion. Jane Wheelwright refers openly to her social origins and describes the stereotypes of womanh