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All that remains for me now is to describe the Kore as observable in man, the anima. Since a man’s wholeness, in so far as he is not constitutionally homosexual, can only be a masculine personality, the feminine figure of the anima cannot be catalogued as a type of supraordinate personality but requires a different evaluation and position. In the products of unconscious activity, the anima appears equally as maiden and mother, which is why a personalistic interpretation always reduces her to the personal mother or some other female person. The real meaning of the figure naturally gets lost in the process, as is inevitably the case with all these reductive interpretations whether in the sphere of the psychology of the unconscious or of mythology. The innumerable attempts that have been made in the sphere of mythology to interpret gods and heroes in a solar, lunar, astral, or meteorological sense contribute nothing of importance to the understanding of them; on the contrary, they all put us on a false track. When, therefore, in dreams and other spontaneous products, we meet with an unknown female figure whose significance oscillates between the extremes of goddess and whore, it is advisable to let her keep her independence and not reduce her arbitrarily to something known. If the unconscious shows her as an “unknown,” this attribute should not be got rid of by main force with a view to arriving at a “rational” interpretation. Like the “supraordinate personality,” the anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore. Besides this ambivalence, the anima also has “occult” connections with “mysteries,” with the world of darkness in general, and for that reason she often has a religious tinge. Whenever she emerges with some degree of clarity, she always has a peculiar relationship to time: as a rule she is more or less immortal, because outside time. Writers who have tried their hand at this figure have never failed to stress the anima’s peculiarity in this respect. I would refer to the classic descriptions in Rider Haggard’s She and The Return of She, in Pierre Benoît’s L’Atlantide, and above all in the novel of the young American author, William M. Sloane, To Walk the Night. In all these accounts, the anima is outside time as we know it and consequently immensely old or a being who belongs to a different order of things.
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