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The personified notion of which this book is an anatomy is also the lens through which we see the world. Anima, as Hillman uses that term, is psyche herself, or soul; and the archetypal images she ceaselessly throws up are not separate from the objective world. They are the way we see it. ‘Rather than analysing fantasies’, then, ‘we analyse by means of them’ (p. 95). For Hillman, ‘the job of psychology is to see the archetypal subjective factor in our sight before or while looking at facts and events’ (p. 99). A similar sense is surely behind the concern, in other quarters, with countertransference. This book is not to do with the phenomenology of anima, on which a goodly literature already flourishes. It is to do with the overriding concept: the idea, the archetype. It seeks to clean that lens, the countertransference of Jungian psychology, onto the world itself.
A highly competent team went into its making: Hillman's words on the right-hand page, and everything Jung ever said about anima on the left, 439 quotations checked, cross-checked, weighed, annotated. It is an exemplary piece of publishing, well-illustrated with drawings by Mary Vernon.
The essays originate in the early Seventies, with Hillman still in Zürich, locked in a wrestling intimacy with the words of Jung and with the reality of anima, clinging to both as fire clings to the wood that feeds it. As an illumination of the dynamics moving in Jung's thought there is, therefore, nothing quite like the Hillman of this period. The contradictions and ambivalences are thrown into a high relief. Those that can and should be resolved are taken forward in fidelity to their inner rhythm and dynamic. The essentially unresolvable is respected as is, in a sense, the heart of Jung's enduring greatness: the roots that feed in contradiction and are continuously fecund.