Abstract

This chapter presents the historical context of Jung’s controversial notions of anima and animus. It shows that the typological associations that have come to define these terms were a vestige of Jung’s work on the association tests which were amplified in his 1921 book Psychological Types. It proposes that rather than the psychological functions of thinking and feeling, it is intuition which may be most attuned to Jung’s early presentations of these ideas. It summarizes three early works on anima, animus, and gender in analytical psychology before highlighting the reformulation of anima offered by James Hillman, some version of which seemingly prevails among those seeking to revise this aspect of Jung’s thought. The chapter demonstrates, however, that by returning to Jung’s earliest articulations of these notions, anima and animus emerge anew as fundamentally non-gendered functions of relation between consciousness and the unconscious which, as such, retain their interpretive utility in the midst of modern social conditions.