Friday 24 January 2003

Pic of the day: Transformation scene from Happy World. The angel transforms into a human girl to be by the boy's side. From childlike yet supernaturally powerful, to sensual and vulnerable, yet she remains the same mystery. And as long as she is by his his side, she will protect him from the curse of sadness. (Yeah, right.)

Boy meets Anima

It's Freeeday! I have all night and all Saturday and all Sunday to do nothing but being me! This is good. And since my current fad is anime, it means watching as much anime as my DSL line can download. (Fansubbed only.) I got to see more Jungle Wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu, yay! And late at night, I realized what it had in common with Happy World, which I had also liked. They had a common theme: Boy meets Anima!

Do you know the psychology of C.G. Jung? Unlike his teacher and coworker Sigmund Freud, Jung could not see the subconscious as just a bag filled with lust. He felt that sometimes dreams were not simple wishes (and especially the wish for sex, according to Freud). Some dreams were grand and meaningful, like myths. In fact, some of the dreams of Jung's patients reminded him of myths from other cultures, which his patients did not know. Jung was a curious soul, always looking for new ways of thinking, and he found this in other cultures and then in our own subconscious. Far from being primitive, the subconscious was a city of labor, where small units of independent personality ("complexes") were working tirelessly. Sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, even conflicting. And while some of the complexes were just small slivers, shaped by individual experience, there were some who stood out. Inner personalities that seemed to be present in all or at least most cultures; stronger than others, they were gatekeepers between day and night, between the conscious and the collective subconscious where the myths grow.

The first gatekeeper is the opposite sex. (Freud, the poor man, never got any further. He was born and raised in a society fixated on and scared by sex.) The sexuality part is only a part of it, though, normally. It encompasses the totality of being the opposite sex, with all its power over us and all its mystery. For men, this creature is called "anima", the man's female spirit. Because we can never truly understand how it is to be a woman, anima is mysterious. Because we would not even be here without a woman, anima is powerful, like a goddess. (Or perhaps also because women are so strangely attractive.) The best metaphor is perhaps the triple goddess that some heathens believe in: The virgin, the mother and the wise old woman. (Actually these can be found as separate complexes further down the road, but anima has traits of them all.) Anima is the person we men project onto a woman when we fall in love.[1]

There is lots of literature about this, you can probably search on google.com for "Jung & anima" and learn more than I could ever tell you. I don't do this for a living. I just noticed that these two cartoon series pretty accurately portrayed the "boy meets anima" situation: When a boy starts to turn into a man, anima wakes up. In the movies, the boys just happen to have a mysterious female companion move into their life. She has no past that they can know, she has supernatural powers, nobody else seems to notice how strange she is, she causes lots of trouble but also saves his life when that's needed. And somehow she becomes his constant companion. Yep, that's our friend the anima. Fancy seeing you here!

---

([1]I use "we" generally here. I don't do this. I am complete, self-contained, needing no one. But that's just me.)