Comment on ‘Why it is difficult to see the anima as a helpful object’

I would like to address the issues the author raises in the sequence she takes them, beginning with her general comments about archetypes.

The author's comments and criticisms are valid in the sense that there is evidence for what she says. Jung makes understanding his concept of archetypes extremely difficult because he uses several different languages to refer to them. If we step outside the frame of logical analysis, however, and ask the question Simon Stein posed, which was: does this word archetype do a job? , then I think we can focus on why archetype theory is of value. I would argue that the job it does is twofold: a) it provides a reliable way of describing the universality of certain experiences and why they are fascinating and powerful, and b) it demonstrates at an explanatory level the consequences of separating the universal from the personal. By this I mean that patients who come for analysis are in need of integrating the personal and the collective. Through analysis within the transference, the awful figures of their internal world (the fantasy or collectively structured images) become integrated because the analyst, to paraphrase Mary Williams, recognizes that ‘the archetypal activity which forms the individual's myth is dependent on material supplied by the personal unconscious' (Williams 1973).

For Jung archetype theory has two main aspects; one is phenomenological, and includes descriptions of what the archetypal images signify; the other aspect is what the experience of them is. This second category of description leads Jung to personify archetypes, to romanticize them, to deify them and to incarnate them. The author has much difficulty with this way of evoking the experience of the archetype, and when she criticizes Jung she is not in my view giving sufficient weight to Jung's intention to evoke the experience for the benefit of the reader rather than make a scientific statement. The importance for Jung of this approach to archetypal experience i