You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Chiron Clinical Series, to which this book belongs, provides a valuable forum for up-to-the-minute opinions by analytical psychologists on a variety of important topics.
The present volume is concerned with anima, animus, and the ways in which those archetypal configurations of gender are understood in the Jungian community today, and as applied to the wider world.
There is no doubt that the experiences covered by these two concepts are crucial to any understanding of Jung's psychology, but his writing on the subject is often confusing and contradictory. Consequently, his ideas can, on the one hand, appear dated and sexist to modern minds, given the cultural changes that have occurred this century: and they have been damned as such. While, at the same time, the apparent imprecision of the concepts can sometimes seem to allow them to be ‘all things to all people’. Certainly this book, while exceptionally stimulating (or should that be animating?), provides as many variations of understanding as there are contributors (twelve in all). This is, however, no bad thing, emphasizing as it does the kaleidoscopic nature of the human psyche, both as object of study and as subjective means of interpretation.
Of course Jung's ideas, or his expression of them, can be interpreted as sexist. He was a man of his times, brought up in a traditional, patriarchal, inward-looking society; and however much his theories may have been compensations for that internalized state, they could still only be expressed with the means at his disposal. Nevertheless his theory of archetypes permits us to search within the outer garments of his writing to an inner framework, capable of infinite ornamentation.
From the twelve presentations, it is possible to extract various strands, some shared, others denied, and some contradictory, which illuminate, as well as challenge our own understanding. A partial listing might run thus: gender and biological sex are not identical (general agreement here). The a