Six, Spielrein, and Jung’s Anima
Last week, I wrote about the characters of Baltar and Six in the sci-fi TV series Battlestar Galactica. Such a relationship is not unprecedented.
From Carl Jung’s autobiography:
When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, “What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?” Whereupon a voice within me said, “It is art.” I was astonished… I knew for a certainty that the voice had come from a woman. I recognized it as the voice of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me. She had become a living figure within my mind. (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 185)
Later I came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a typical, or archetypical, role within the unconscious of a man, and I called her the “anima”. (MDR, p. 186)
What Jung does not mention in his autobiography is that he had what he considered a disastrous affair with the patient in question, Sabina Spielrein. Perhaps this explains why, for a very long time, Jung was consistently negative about the anima.
What the anima said seemed to me full of a deep cunning… The anima might then have easily seduced me into believing that I was a misunderstood artist, and that my so-called artistic nature gave me the right to neglect reality. If I had followed her voice, she would in all probability have said to me one day, “Do you imagine the nonsense you’re engaged in is really art? Not a bit.” Thus the insinuations of the anima, the mouthpiece of the unconscious, can utterly destroy a man. In the final analysis the decisive factor is always consciousness, which can understand the manifestations of the unconscious and take up a position toward them. (MDR, p. 187)
I find Jung’s attitude in this passage almost shocking. Such a lack of basic trust and respect between the persons of the psyche! Here are the roots of James Hillman’s reaction against Jung’s ‘psychic monotheism’—the decisive factor is always consciousness, but Jung keeps consciousness identified only with himself. Instead of encouraging the growth of her consciousness, she becomes only an instrument of his growth, who vanishes once she is no longer needed.
(There is another curious parallel between Spielrein and the character of Six—both were obsessed with the idea of the blending or hybridization of races. It was Spielrein’s fantasy that “Jung was descended from the gods, that their child, Siegfried, would heroically blend Jewish and Aryan qualities”. Make of this what you will.)
2 comments January 16th, 2006