“ANIMA WOMAN”
M. Esther Harding, a distinguished Jungian analyst, began her
book The Way of All Women by describing the type of woman who
is “all things to all men.” This type is the “anima woman” who
“adapts herself to his wishes, makes herself beautiful in his eyes,
charms him, pleases him.” She is “not sufficiently aware of herself
to be able to give a picture of what her subjective life is like.” She is
“generally unselfconscious; she doesn’t analyze herself or her
motives; she just is; and for the most part she is inarticulate.”^1
Harding described the ease with which an “anima woman” re-
ceives the projection of a man’s unconscious image of woman (this
anima) and unconsciously conforms to the image. Harding describes
her thus: “She is like a many-sided crystal which turns automatically
without any volition on her part...by this adaptation, first one facet
and then another is presented to view and always that facet which
best reflects his anima is presented to the gazer.”^2
A Persephone woman’s innate receptivity makes her very malle-
able. If significant people project an image or expectation onto her,
she initially does not resist. It is her pattern to be chameleonlike, to
“try on” whatever others expect of her. It is this quality that predis-
poses her to be an “anima woman”; she unconsciously conforms to
what a man wants her to be. With one man, she’s a tennis buff who
fits into the country club set; in the next relationship, she’s on the
back of his motorcycle as they roar down the highway; she’s a
model for the third, who paints her as an innocent ingenue—which
she is, to him.
CHILD-WOMAN
Prior to her abduction, Persephone was a child-woman, unaware
of her sexual attractiveness and her beauty. This archetypal combin-
ation of sexuality and innocence permeates the United States’ culture,
where the woman who is considered desirable is a sex kitten, a wo-
man with a girl-next-door look posing nude for Playboy Magazine.
In the film Pretty Baby, for example, Brooke Shields played the arche-
typal child-woman—a virginal, desirable, twelve-year-old girl in a
brothel, whose
Persephone: The Maiden and Queen of the Underworld, Receptive