Anima

1. Etymology

Anima is Latin for soul, breath, or the quickening life of a living being—kin to animus (mind, spirit, courage). Classically it can mean a person’s soul or vital principle; in scholastic speech, an anima rationalis—a dogmatic “rational soul.”

Jung keeps the Latin word but refuses to let dogma capture it. “Anima means soul and should designate something very wonderful and immortal,” yet that doctrinal sense is not what the psychic figure does: the living anima is uncanny, changeful, and hard to pin down. Related forms: anima-figure, anima-image, anima possession; the complementary masculine figure in a woman’s psyche is the animus; together they form a syzygy. German usage often keeps Anima beside Seele (“soul”).

2. Plain summary

The anima is Jung’s name for a deep feminine figure in a man’s inner life—in dreams, moods, fascinations, and projections onto real people. She is not “just a girlfriend in the head.” She can feel like a soul, a lure into life, a trouble-maker, or a guide—sometimes all of these in turn.

Imagine a crush that rearranges your week, or a dream-woman who changes shape and will not obey your plans. Jung’s fairy-tale cousins include water-spirits and witches: beings that sit on you, change form, and act with a stubborn independence that does not feel like a thought you invented. The anima can make life feel vivid and worth living; she can also tangle consciousness until a person is possessed by mood or fantasy.

She is not the church’s or the philosophy book’s “immortal soul.” She is closer to a living pattern—an inherited image of the feminine and of life itself—that each person colors in differently.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common anima-related figures and motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):
anima as soul-image / soul-figure; anima as archetype of life itself; anima projection; anima possession / entanglement; syzygy (anima–animus pair); animus (complement); inherited collective image of woman; nixie / water-nymph / water-spirit; succubus; witch / shape-shifter; elfin being; erotic fantasy as modern “alluring nixie”; femme fatale; muse / inspiratrice; Beatrice-type guide; Helen / Circe / Kalypso-type enchantress; Sophia / wisdom-figure; Virgin / Madonna valence; Kali / Terrible Mother valence (anima–mother fusion); Kore / maiden; Great Mother overlap; mana-personality (ego inflation via anima mana); coniunctio / sacred marriage; night-sea / descent motifs; “leaping and twinkling of the soul”; soul that “lures into life”; anima rationalis (dogmatic soul—not Jung’s anima); numinous / taboo / magical charge; realm of the gods / metaphysical reservation.

3. Academic elucidation

In analytical psychology the anima is both a personal complex and an archetypal image of woman in the male psyche. As complex, she gathers biography—the mother, early feminine carriers, cultural ideals—into an autonomous feeling-toned factor that can possess ego-consciousness. As archetype, she is more than private history: Jung names an inherited collective image of woman by which a man apprehends feminine nature, and a natural archetype that sums up statements of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, and of the history of language and religion—expressly not the soul in the dogmatic sense, not an anima rationalis.

She appears as fascination, idealization, terror, and lure. Mythic staging (nixie, witch, elfin being) stresses her unbearable independence as a psychic content. Functionally she is bound to life: soul is “the living thing in man,” and with her play of illusions she lures inertness into living. With the anima one enters “the realm of the gods”; what she touches becomes numinous—unconditional, dangerous, taboo, magical. Descent Press keeps Sharp and Samuels in §4 so lexicon paraphrase never silently becomes Jung’s voice.

4. Lexicon

The anima is both a personal complex and an archetypal image of woman in the male psyche. … The anima is the archetype of life itself.

(Sharp, 1991, p. [provisional — unverified])

Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986)

As psychic components, [anima and animus] are subliminal to consciousness and function from within the unconscious psyche; hence, they are of benefit to but also can endanger consciousness by possession. … Behind the animus … lies ‘the archetype of meaning; just as the anima is the archetype of life itself’.

(Samuels, Shorter, & Plaut, 1986, pp. 23–24)

5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

An alluring nixie from the dim bygone is today called an “erotic fantasy,” and she may complicate our psychic life in a most painful way. … she sits on top of us like a succubus; she changes into all sorts of shapes like a witch, and in general displays an unbearable independence that does not seem at all proper in a psychic content.
(Jung, 1934/1968, CW 9i, ¶54)

But how do we dare to call this elfin being the “anima”? Anima means soul and should designate something very wonderful and immortal. Yet this was not always so. We should not forget that this kind of soul is a dogmatic conception whose purpose it is to pin down and capture something uncannily alive and active.
(Jung, 1934/1968, CW 9i, p. 26, ¶55)

Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life. … With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. … Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. … But to have soul is the whole venture of life.
(Jung, 1934/1968, CW 9i, pp. 26–27, ¶56)

The anima is not the soul in the dogmatic sense, not an anima rationalis, which is a philosophical conception, but a natural archetype that satisfactorily sums up all the statements of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, of the history of language and religion.
(Jung, 1934/1968, CW 9i, p. 27, ¶57)

With the archetype of the anima we enter the realm of the gods, or rather, the realm that metaphysics has reserved for itself. Everything the anima touches becomes numinous—unconditional, dangerous, taboo, magical.
(Jung, 1934/1968, CW 9i, p. 28, ¶59)

An inherited collective image of woman exists in a man’s unconscious, with the help of which he apprehends the nature of woman. This inherited image is the third important source for the femininity of the soul.

References

Jung, C. G. (1966). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 7, p. 261, ¶301). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1928; German 2nd edn 1935 and 1916 lecture ancestry — note-only. 1954 not applicable to this essay.)

Jung, C. G. (1968). Archetypes of the collective unconscious. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 3–41). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1934; German revised text 1954 in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins, Hull source — note-only)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.