#nini2011

Day 176 (062511) Girls' night in...

Day 175 (062411) Scary is the new pretty!

Day 170 (061911) Helen. (Part 2 of the ANIMA series)

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Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung first proposed the theory of archetypes. Like his mentor, Sigmund Freud, Jung believed that all people possess an unconscious mind containing personal forgotten and repressed contents which Jung called complexes. Unlike Freud, however, Jung believed that the personal unconscious acted as a superficial layer of a much larger and deeper layer of the unconscious “which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn” (Jung, Archetypes 3). Jung called this deeper layer the collective unconscious, and its contents he called archetypes.

The anima (as one of these so called archetypes) personifies all the feminine psychological tendencies within the man, such as prophetic hunches, intuitions, moods, receptivity, capacity for personal love, a feeling for nature, and his relation to the unconscious.

Jung distinguished four broad stages of the anima in the course of a man’s psychological development. He personified these, according to classical stages of eroticism, as Eve, Helen, Mary and Sophia.

In the second stage, personified in the historical figure of Helen of Troy, the anima is a collective sexual image. ("All is dross that is not Helen"-Marlowe). The man under her spell is often a Don Juan who engages in repeated sexual adventures. These will invariably be short-lived, for two reasons:

(1) he has a fickle heart, and