Too much knife, not enough handle: A reply to von Raffay's critical attack on the anima concept

In her article, ‘Why it is difficult to see the anima as a helpful object: critique and clinical relevance of the theory of the archetypes’, Dr Anita von Raffay mounts a spirited attack against analytical psychology's anima and archetype concepts, revealing as she does so a misunderstanding of these terms (von Raffay 2000a).

Her title itself suggests the misconceptions that are to come. There the anima is assumed to be an ‘object’, and a ‘helpful’ one at that (p. 541). As far as I know, however, analytical psychology has never claimed the anima to be an object. While Jung does occasionally speak of the anima as a ‘complex’ (a concept more or less synonymous with the notion of internal objects), it is more in keeping with the spirit of his over-all theory to regard the anima, not as a particular, clearly delineated complex, but as a ‘crepuscular’ or ‘threshold’ figure which personifies the archetypal core of any and all complexes (Jung 1928, para. 399). Like Maya, the Spinning Woman who veils the world with animating illusions in Hindu mythology, anima corresponds to the archetypally structured fantasy activity which underpins apperception from the beginning of our mental life (Jung 1951a, para. 24). Anima thus comes before our experience of the object world, inner or outer, inasmuch as all experience is psychically mediated. While we are utterly dependent upon the many (part and whole) objects which we need for our very survival, it is the surplus of meaning that attaches itself to these and other objects via projection of the archetypal potential latent in the subject that the anima concept is conceived to grasp. To express this in Kohutian terms, the anima is that factor of our psychic life which cathects outer (and inner) objects with the selfobject significance they come to have for us. Identical with the projection-making factor itself, it is ‘she’ who lends the things of life the allure and fateful quality that they have, drawing us into life thereby (Jung 1951