The Anima

Four Names, One Paragraph

First attested
1921The anima concept is in print by Psychological Types (Zurich: Rascher, 1921), Chapter XI, Definitions, under Soul and Soul-image. The four stages are set out in paragraph 361 of the introduction to Die Psychologie der Übertragung (Zurich: Rascher, 1946), written autumn 1945, translated by R. F. C. Hull in Collected Works 16 (1954), with a footnote to that passage naming Simon Magus's Helen (Selene). It is the passage every later account cites, and no restatement of the series has been found elsewhere in the Collected Works. The introduction runs from §353; the Rosarium picture commentary begins later, at The Mercurial Fountain.
Claimed
around 300 CEasserted by C. G. Jung, The Psychology of the Transference (1946), CW 16 §361, which states that four stages of eroticism were known in the late classical period, and cites no ancient source for the series.

The claim runs about 1.6 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

The Eve–Helen–Mary–Sophia ladder is a single paragraph (§361) in the introduction to a 1946 alchemical study of the transference, where Jung asserts a late-classical pedigree, names no ancient source, and traces the only complete sequence to Goethe's Faust.

The inner feminine archetype in the male psyche, guiding emotional depth, relational sensitivity, and creative intuition.

Jung's anima is the feminine personification of a man's unconscious. The concept is in place by Psychological Types in 1921, where he calls it the soul-image, Seelenbild; the anima chapter follows in Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten of 1928, and Aion in 1951. The four stages everyone quotes — Eve, Helen, Mary, Sophia — come from one paragraph, §361, in the introduction to The Psychology of the Transference, written in autumn 1945 and published in 1946. Jung says late antiquity knew four stages of eroticism but cites no ancient source; his footnote names Simon Magus's Helen, and the only complete sequence he traces is Goethe's Faust, whose parts appeared in 1808 and 1832. It is an aside in an alchemical study of the transference, not a clinical series — and the four names are images, never the archetype itself.

Light

Names an experience people recognise and puts it inside the person having it: the stranger who seems already known is one's own material. Jung held that a projection withdrawn returns as a working relation to one's own inner life.

Shadow

Jung's first stage equates woman with the mother and treats her as matter for fertilising, and a ladder of four named women invites a reader to grade real ones. A scheme that puts the trouble in a projection can also excuse the man projecting.

Sources and verification9 sources · 7 links

Primary source

  • Irenaeus of Lyons, trans. Roberts and Rambaut, Against Heresies, Book I, in Ante-Nicene Fathers 1 (1885), 180, I.23The Helen whom Jung's footnote invokes is known from a heresiological report of c. 180 CE describing Simon Magus and his companion Helen — a hostile summary written to refute, not a cult's own account of graded stages.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One (1808) and Part Two (1832), 1808, Gretchen in Part One; Helena, the Mater Gloriosa and the closing Chorus Mysticus in Part Two, published in 1832, the year of Goethe's deathThe only complete Eve-Helen-Mary-Sophia sequence Jung actually traces is the one he finds in Goethe's Faust, and it spans both parts: Gretchen from the part of 1808, Helen, Mary and the 'eternal feminine' from the part of 1832.
  • C. G. Jung, trans. H. G. Baynes, rev. R. F. C. Hull, Psychological Types (Psychologische Typen), Collected Works 6, 1921, Chapter XI, Definitions: Soul; Soul-image. German Psychologische Typen (Zurich: Rascher, 1921); English trans. Baynes 1923, revised by Hull as Collected Works 6, 1971The concept is in place by 1921 under the term soul-image (Seelenbild): an inner, usually contrasexual personality represented in dreams by definite figures and commonly met in projection.
  • C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull, The Psychology of the Transference, in Collected Works 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1946, §361 and its footnote; German original Zurich: Rascher, 1946; English CW 16, 1954The four stages — Hawwah (Eve), Helen of Troy, the Virgin Mary and Sophia — appear in one paragraph of the introduction, are said there to have been known in the late classical period with no source given, are glossed by Jung as four stages of the Eros cult, are illustrated by the sequence in Goethe's Faust, and carry a footnote naming Simon Magus's Helen (Selene).
  • C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works 9ii, 1951, Chapter III, The Syzygy: Anima and Animus. German Aion: Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte (Zurich: Rascher, 1951); English Collected Works 9ii, 1959Jung's fullest late statement treats anima and animus as a paired archetype, the syzygy, rather than as a developmental ladder.
  • Joachim Telle (ed.), Rosarium philosophorum: Ein alchemisches Florilegium des Spätmittelalters, 2 vols, 1992, facsimile of the 1550 Frankfurt printing, 20 woodcutsThe book in which the four stages appear comments on ten woodcuts selected from the twenty of the 1550 Frankfurt Rosarium philosophorum: the images are the Rosarium's, the psychological reading is Jung's.

Scholarship

  • Wes Wallace, Jung's Erotic Phenomenology: I. A New Translation, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2024, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 27-50The passage belongs to the introduction of The Psychology of the Transference and condenses Jung's account of sexuality and romantic love; Wallace argues the Collected Works translation obscures it and supplies a new one with commentary.

The tradition itself

  • Jung, The Psychology of the Transference, 1946The esoteric reading given on this entry — CW 16, the four-stage passage

Further reading

  • Wes Wallace, Jung's Erotic Phenomenology: II. The Anima-Images, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2026, vol. 71, pp. 77-98Wallace takes the four images — Eve, Helen, Mary and Sophia — as four anima-images, each a stage in the spiritualisation of Eros; he traces the prior history of each image in Jung's own writings and identifies its cultural and literary sources, which he argues opens the scheme to critical reflection.

Linked entries

  • Part ofThe Archetype and the Archetypal ImageAttested

    Eve, Helen, Mary and Sophia are archetypal images; on Jung's own distinction the anima archetype itself is never seen, which is why a numbered set of names cannot be the thing.

  • Set againstThe AnimusAttested

    The paired term for a woman's inner masculine, and the one worked out largely by Emma Jung rather than by her husband.

  • Set againstThe Gendering of Anima and AnimusAttested

    The objection to the contrasexual scheme as a whole — that it fixes what men and women are — has been made from inside analytical psychology since the 1970s and is treated there.

  • Part ofIndividuationAttested

    Jung places the encounter with the anima inside individuation, after the shadow and before any relation to the Self.

  • Set againstThe ShadowAttested

    Aion §19 rules that the shadow is always of the subject's own sex, so the moment a stubborn projection turns contrasexual its source is the anima and not the shadow at all.

  • Set againstThe PersonaAttested

    Jung paired them only when he revised the 1916 manuscript (CW 7 §507, from an addendum absent from the 1916-17 printings), writing that beyond individuality "a kind of persona exists, but a persona of a compensatory nature which (in a man) could be called the anima" - the passage CW 7's editors name the first formulation of anima and animus in Jung.

  • Often confused withShekhinahA modern connection

    Modern writing that calls her the Divine Feminine often means something close to Jung's anima — a feminine image arising within a psyche. The kabbalists meant a rung of God whose separation from her husband was a catastrophe in the Godhead, repaired by human ritual, not a stage of anyone's individuation.

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