Category: Jung and Anima

I’m enjoying my voyage through Carl Jung more than I expected. Jung’s writing is firmly in the tradition of Augustine, Emerson, Nietzsche, William James and, yes, Montaigne. It seems to me that writers of this type are drawn to different pegs for their ideas based on the accepted means of intellectual discourse in their time….

Aug. 12 Update — Read this if you’d like, there might be some interesting thoughts, but I’d just like the reader to know that I pretty much disown the theory that I’d embraced here. (This project is starting to take on elements of Nabokov’s Pale Fire.) I can’t really follow my own train of thought expressed…

Given the importance that I have put on Carl Jung’s concept of the anima in my recent writings, I thought it would be useful to take a step back and figure out exactly what Jung meant when he described it. The source material I will be analyzing is his essay “The Relations Between the Ego…

(In my never-ending quest to get this essay right, I’ve been rewriting this piece frequently of late and am starting to wonder if I need to break it into parts. For now, I will keep iterating here.) This lengthy essay about anima and animus is far from a comprehensive examination of the subject. There’s roughly…

April 2025 update — This is arguably the strangest essay I’ve ever written. I have not read this piece in almost five years, and looking back now, it’s extremely disjointed and somewhat irrational. In fairness to the 2020 version of me writing this, not only were we in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis and…

This project restarted in March in a time of lockdown and grief. Deaths were accelerating globally and we had no idea where the Coronavirus would take us. The isolation of the moment seemed unbearable. How would we survive not just days, but weeks of this? How will we live without sports and new movies to…