Gendered Confrontations with the Unconscious: Anima Animus and the Surrealist Woman

Abstract

This inquiry is a cultural and historical hermeneutic that maps classical Jungian anima/animus theory over the lives and work of selected female Surrealist artists and writers. The goal is to see how this data might expand or reconfigure the concept of Individuation as Jung describes it. Enriching this study is special attention paid to the theoretical writing of Jungian women on anima/animus. Cited authors include Emma Jung, M. Esther Harding, Toni Wolff, Barbara Hanna, Marie-Louise von Franz, and Claire Douglas among others. This research benefitted greatly from the clinical experience of the female Jungian analysts mentioned above. Their work on the anima/animus dynamic added a great deal of nuance and subtlety to the broader outlines of Jung’s initial hypothesis. Although the intention of this study was to limit its comparative focus to ideas and therapeutic practices that were developed around the contrasexual archetypes while Jung was still alive, once data was accumulated and analyzed, it became necessary to mention relevant revisions and extensions of anima/animus theory made by Jungian and Archetypal scholars after Jung’s death in 1961.