Talk:Anima and animus

Inaccuracy

From this article: "Jung believed anima development has four distinct levels of Eros, which in The Practice of Psychotherapy he named Eve, Helen of Troy, Mary, mother of Jesus and Sophia."

The descriptions in this article of the respective stages do not correlate with the descriptions Dr. Jung gives in The Practise of Psychotherapy. If no source can be provided, I recommend quoting the actual descriptions from the work.

Jung, The Practise of Psychotherapy, paragraph 361:

... Four stages of eroticism were known in the late classical period: Hawwah (Eve), Helen (of Troy), the Virgin Mary, and Sophia. The series is repeated in Goethe’s Faust: in the figures of Gretchen as the personification of a purely instinctual relationship (Eve); Helen as an anima figure;21 Mary as the personification of the “heavenly,” i.e., Christian or religious, relationship; and the “eternal feminine” as an expression of the alchemical Sapientia. As the nomenclature shows, we are dealing with the heterosexual Eros or anima- figure in four stages, and consequently with four stages of the Eros cult. The first stage—Hawwah, Eve, earth—is purely biological; woman is equated with the mother and only represents something to be fertilized. The second stage is still dominated by the sexual Eros, but on an aesthetic and romantic level where woman has already acquired some value as an individual. The third stage raises Eros to the heights of religious devotion and thus spiritualizes him: Hawwah has been replaced by spiritual motherhood. Finally, the fourth stage illustrates something which unexpectedly goes beyond the almost unsurpassable third stage: Sapientia. How can wisdom transcend the most holy and the most pure?— Presumably only by virtue of the truth that the less sometimes means the more. This stage represents a spiritualization of Helen and consequently of Eros as such. That is why Sapientia was regarded as a parallel to the Shulamite in the Song of Songs.

This is a passing remark about classical views in the context of transference in the therapeutic relation. He was not talking about phases of male development. In a brief look Jung did not expand on this elsewhere.

Hillman may have expanded this in the cited work, but Hillman is not a reliable interpreter of Jung.

Opinion

Random Googler thinks: This article is so bad and undecipherable that in the best interest of the Internet it should be deleted. It's a big problem that content this low quality sits at the top of Google purely based on the fact that it's in Wikipedia. From what I've seen in online communities the poor quality of this article actively drives people away from learning about Jung and psychology. Please just delete it and start over. Sorry if I don't know the rules of Wikipedia because I usually don't participate in it but I felt I needed to speak from the heart here about how this article basically discourages research and interest in Jung.

Criticism

this is a load of bullshit —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.52.142.7 (talk • contribs).

Glad someone finally saw the need of being specific in their criticism. --DanielCD 03:37, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think critising somebodies lifework as 'bullshit' is entirely unproductive, perhaps there should be a critisms section of the page. mikeoman 25/06/06 22:50

I made a minor edit on 3rd August 2006 at 19:03 replacing he with Jung as it was at first unclear whether it was refering to the Anima and Carl Jung himself. mikeoman 3rd August 2006

I believe that this consept is more a philosophy of the male and female mind and how it is hiden in the unconscious regions of our minds. Yet I do think animus is more complex... AnimeWoolf (talk) 14:45, 19 July 2011 (UTC)AnimeWoolf[reply]

This is a very superficial overview of the terms and doesn't really give any insight into what Jung was really talking about. As it's a massive task to do that, I feel that the article should make clear that Jung's work is not easy to summarise (he always refused such requests in person). In particular, the stages of Anima development make no sense whatsoever. There's no context. No background. In not being explicit about its superficiality, this page is doing a disservice to the ideas it's supposed to convey. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.185.112.204 (talk) 08:54, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Dreaming

Jung believed that dreaming was essential in understanding the Anima, what examples are there of this? mikeoman

Merger?

Should Anima and Animus be on the same page? as they are very similar? mikeoman

Well, the animus is discussed on this page, and the separate page animus (concept) does not mention Jung. Personally I think there should be one page titled "Anima/Animus" or the like--they are two sides of the same idea.

Dybryd 19:18, 3 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with this, there's not enough information for them to justify two separate pages... perhaps later down the line.

Marrshu 00:44, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Edit

I added the primary defintion in Jungian psychology.

Trowa 14:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WRONG

The anima is not an "aggregate of a person's mother, sister, aunts, teachers". Clearly Jung considers it an archaic, archetypal concept that predates any specific consciously known people. In fact Jung writes of "the" anima as opposed to "my" anima, meaning that at least in its unconscious elements it is part of the universal. So this needs significant rewriting by someone actually versed in Jung, not pop-Jung.

Also, the Mary Archetype has nothing to do with the Virgin Mary, but is about Mary Magdeline, the whore. I don't really know enough to feel comfortable editing this, but really should be fact checked. Bojac6 (talk) 16:26, 3 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Anima in Final Fantasy X

The Aeon Anima in the game is portrayed as a montrosity that is bound in chains. The attacks that it hurls at the player's chararcter-which are quite significant-are the results of its screams of agony! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by GnoSaba (talk • contribs) 23:38, 31 January 2007 (UTC).[reply]

What does that have to do with this?--SUIT^양복 04:37, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm removing the video game reference as they have NOTHING to do with the Anima/Animus in the context of this article.--Lepeu1999 18:32, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Im not saying you were wrong to remove it, but the character in the game was in fact a FEMALE monster summoned by a MALE character, and it was named after this concept. So there is a connection

This should be included in a "Trivia" or "Cultural References" section. It's not relevant to the theory, so it wouldn't go there. It does serve to illustrate that the concept is not limited to the Psychology disciplines, and has some cultural impact in wider society. 60.231.46.242 (talk) 20:20, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation page

I think it's definitely needed - we have this video game stuff, apparently... but, more importantly, "Anima" can also refer more specifically to the Latin word and the concept in ancient Roman & Greek philosophy. It was an important concept to Aristotle. Unfortunately, this is about the extent of my knowledge, but hopefully a disambiguation page would encourage this article to get written. Does anyone else agree? Eeblet 17:13, 9 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I would disagree only on the basis of perspective. This was my first learning of the subject, and trying to navigate back and forth between two different pages would be distracting. I do see how these could be separate, but the audience here is people that are learning the subject, seemingly not academics that would reference Jung's works directly

Animus

Why doesn't the concept of animus have its own article? This page should either be renamed to "Anima and anmius" or the section on animus moved to its own article. Samuel Grant 15:34, 9 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It's just a temporary measure until we have more of a substantial page, before there were two scatty small articles and as the two concepts were similar we merged it, I think that once we have a better article we can just copy and paste from our own article and create two better seperate ones, I think that together this article can give a reasonable academic starting point that people can get the general gist of the two concepts but it doesn't go deeply into detail and will look elsewhere in the meantime however the article shows that it's one of Jungs archetypes and it provides a starting point for the academic.--Mikeoman 14:31, 16 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think that animus having its own article would encourage expansion, especially since I could not even find any discussion on the topic at first. Animus (concept) seemed like the right place to go, but I then discovered that article is not about Jung's concept. Then on the disambiguation page I found that both anima and animus are lumped together on the same page with no mention of animus in the actual title of the page. Let us please consider my suggestions; there is no reason anima should take precedence over its opposite concept. Samuel Grant 21:20, 16 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to go ahead and move this page to "Anima and animus". If anyone has any objections please say so. Samuel Grant 22:45, 22 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm happy for you to change the name, I have also changed the name in the disambiguous page to anima and animus where it said anima to prevent any confusion. I think with this page it really is just a stub, I think there's a psychology wikiproject out there, i'm going to see if they'll help us alert more people to the expansion in this article.--Mikeoman 09:28, 6 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

lyrics of a song

there is a song called spoils by a band called protest the hero and there is a line in the song that reads "abstraction is the stake between the anima and animus" but i really dont understand what the entire message of the song is. could someone more educated on this topic translate the meaning of the song for me please i can post lyrics if needed

History of Usage

Guillaume Postel discussed anima and animus as the masculine and feminine aspect of the soul some 350 years before CG Jung. See Talk:Guillaume Postel. Did Jung base his ideas on Postel without crediting him?
Kildwyke (talk) 05:32, 4 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sexist perspective

So, as a woman, what I took away from this was: Men dealing with their anima are more important than women dealing with their animus and therefore need ten times as much information with organized lists and definitions and stages while women just need a couple sentences like "oh you know, muscle men, professors"; that the anima is about a man understanding that women are people too and capable of both good and ill and that the animus is about women understanding that men are the holders of all power and wisdom and that they need to find an inner man to access those things? 'Cause if that's not a proper impression I feel that this page is sorely lacking in both quality and quantity of information on the animus. Dec 13, 2010

That is just ignorant, It clearly states that Jung himself was the one that did not elaborate and go as in depth with the animus as he did the anima. not to mention the first lines of the animus category states that women already had a developed animus in their psyche so he focused on the males. if anything as a woman you should be proud that he thought you needed less help. dont bash on the writers of this fine passage without carefully reading it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.193.215.77 (talk) 18:24, 22 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Fucking fail, srsly. 60.231.46.242 (talk) 20:22, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Overly abstruse language from the very first sentence

"as opposed to both the theriomorphic and inferior-function of the shadow archetypes, as well as the abstract symbol sets that formulate the archetype of the Self." I have a doctorate in clinical psychology and I don't know what this means. Please consider rewriting to be more accessible to the lay reader. First paragraph should be easily readable with following sections getting into more detail and more nuance.

124.122.193.29 (talk) 02:00, 11 April 2024 (UTC) It is perhaps the worst introductory paragraph I've ever seen on Wikipedia... came to learn about the topic, but I would already need to have read all of Jung's work in order to read this summary[reply]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Anima and animus. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080616233747/http://search.aras.org:80/record.aspx?ARASNUM=1Cb.501 to http://search.aras.org/record.aspx?ARASNUM=1Cb.501

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{Sourcecheck}}).

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 07:23, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sources

Many of the sources seem to come from primary sources, not relying on a whole lot on secondary sources. Some sources may also seem to be a little outdated, as well as considering the complexities of Jung's ideas and content, there seem to be only a few amounts of resources that try to help expand and simplify Jung's ideas for an average reader. The language used in the article is decently complex and easy to misunderstand in that adding more sources as an attempt to clean up the article will assist with clarity. Westonfr (talk) 23:21, 20 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Lead Rewrite

I have tagged the lead as needing a rewrite as it's too technical, convoluted and obscure to adequately introduce the lay reader to the topic. I don't expect everyone to be able to dive straight into the anima/animus with no background, but per MOS:INTRO accessibility should be a priority.

Compare Color confinement and Azimuthal quantum number, they're complex ideas within complex fields, but their leads are simple enough to allow the reader to know where to start.

I'd suggest the following as a starting point:

Within Jungian psychology and archetypal psychology, the anima and animus are a pair of archetypes (among the array of other animistic parts) within the Self.

The article syzygy refers back to this article and is not useful. Cosmological dualism, that there are "only two fundamental concepts", seems to conflict with the "array of other parts" already mentioned in the lead. Therefore I've just used the overly simplistic word "pair". Lastly the transpersonal psychology article is tagged with fringe views, so safer to leave out of the lead, perhaps.

I'd like some feedback, or for someone with greater subject knowledge to edit, before I decide to be WP:BOLD 31.187.2.204 (talk) 01:54, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]