I am about to attempt something ambitious and it could easily exceed my grasp. At numerous times across several projects, I have attempted to give a detailed analysis of Carl Jung’s concept of the anima and animus. I’d like to pull that analysis into the Montaigne Project, connecting it in a couple ways that I find interesting.
The first is a biographical alignment. As I’ve written about in a couple recent essays, Montaigne’s later writing owed a huge debt to the contributions of Marie de Gournay, who also served as executor of his writings after Montaigne’s death. While there has been speculation for centuries about the nature of their relationship, there’s no question that it was a very close and affectionate partnership.
Carl Jung had a very similar bond with a remarkably talented, insightful woman named Sabina Spielrein. She deserves far more recognition for her unique contributions to the early formation of psychoanalytic concepts, and this biography is an insightful introduction to her life. The relationship between Jung and Spielrein was also the centerpiece of the David Cronenberg 2011 film “A Dangerous Method,” a generally admirable treatment of the subject, especially the relationship between Jung and Sigmond Freud, but I do have one major quibble with film. By simplifying the Jung-Spielrein relationship, it turned it into a typical movie romance, which I believe misses the point of their pairing. The movie’s unwillingness to explore the deep complexity of the pairing is a disservice to both Spielrein and Jung and therefore makes it inevitable that Freud wins the intellectual competition in the film in a rout.
It has been widely assumed for more than 100 years that Carl Jung first formulated his theory of the anima and animus to help explain the relationship that he had with Spielrein. And while there no doubt were some serious boundary issues inherent in their relationship (she started out as his analysand, and later became a pupil) the speculation that they also had a sexual relationship was directly refuted by both parties. “A Dangerous Method” goes to great lengths to dramatize this possibly non-existent sexual relationship, even throwing in elements of bondage. (Which works as a plot device, but has no historical basis.) Spielrein often referred to their connection as “poetic,” which is an accurate description of Jung’s anima/animus poetry in the form of a psychoanalytic theory. I wish the movie could have found a way to illustrate that.
One issue I’d like to explore is the question of whether de Gournay became something of an anima to Montaigne for his last series of essays and, if so, what influence she had on his thinking as his life drew to a close.
The second way I want to examine this issue is that poetry I alluded to … the primary puzzle of Jung’s anima/animus theory is the way it combines something that feels like a literary inspiration with several of his and Freud’s more grounded theories of personality development. This isn’t the only time Jung tried this. His concept of synchronicity combines numerous elements of eastern philosophy into a broad theory of a collective unconscious that somehow works in unison at times. But never mind that for now.
Why I think Montaigne belongs here is that he has a far more sophisticated and, in my mind, interesting theory of how personalities manifest. Instead of relying on broad categories like Jung (the whole Myers-Briggs universe of personality classification and letters is an elaboration of Jung ideas) Montaigne prefers to think that we are made up of numerous “bits and pieces” that combine and rearrange based on circumstance and mood, and continue to reshape throughout our lives based on experience.
So while Jung believed that we have a number of stable persona in our kit bag, and an additional one magically appears when an anima/animus is introduced to our life, in the Montaigne conception of personality, such an emergence doesn’t seems all that novel or interesting, because new forms of our “souls” are constantly being brought out in different ways. Sure, meeting a special man or woman could unlock something special in you, but so too could eating a madeleine cookie, as Proust experienced in his life’s project. (Actually, I just thought of that Proust-Montaigne connection and I’m suddenly proud of it … this too shall pass?)
So that’s my second mission, to see if there’s a way to meaningfully incorporate the anima/animus into Montaigne’s chaotic Pyrrhonism-based view of personality. And I’ll be jumping into that examination without a clue where it could possibly lead.
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