“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

16. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung, ^©1961 by Random House, Inc., New York, N.Y.

17. For many readers Seth’s remarks about the anima and the animus will require a bit of explaining. Carl Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, postulated that the unconscious of the male contains a female, archetypal (or typical, instinctive) figure called the “anima”; the correlative male form in the unconscious of the female Jung called the “animus.” In Session 119, then, Seth comments on how Jane herself has an animus — the hidden male within — and on how Ruburt, that larger “male” entity of which she is a “self-conscious part,” contains an anima, or hidden female. (See the excerpts in this appendix from the 83rd session.) The contrasts are most interesting. From this information I infer that the entity or whole self of each of us, regardless of our current, individual sexual orientation, contains its own counterbalancing male or female quality, whichever the case may be. Seth hasn’t said so yet — nor have we asked him — but I suspect that an energy gestalt like the entity is much more aware than we can be of its “hidden” opposite-sex form — or forms; for there may be many of them.

Below, I’ll quote very short passages from sessions 555–56 in Chapter 13 of Seth Speaks, while referring the reader to them at the same time, then present some additional material from the 83rd session that I saved for this note — since in it Seth discussed the theories of both Jung and Jung’s famous teacher, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).

In Seth Speaks, Seth developed Jung’s ideas about the anima and the animus by stating that such other-sex qualities or personifications within each of us actually represent memories of past lives. (Jung himself thought the questions of reincarnation, and of karma [or, roughly, destiny or fate], to be “obscure” — he couldn’t be sure of the existence of such phenomena.) From Session 555 for October 21, 1970: “The anima and the animus … are highly charged psychically, and also appear in the dream state. They operate as compensations and reminders to prevent you from overidentifying yourself with your present physical body.” And from Session 556: “The reality of the anima and the animus is far deeper than Jung supposed. Symbolically speaking, the two together represent the whole self with its diverse abilities, desires, and characteristics … Personality as you know it cannot be understood unless the true meaning of the anima and the animus is taken into consideration.”

Two notes in connection with the excerpts from the 83rd session: 1. The famous professional break between Freud and the younger Jung occurred in 1931: Seth’s material touches upon the divergent psychological paths taken by each of them. 2. The libido is regarded as the sexual urge or instinct — positive, loving, psychic energy that shows itself in changing ways as the individual matures. Seth:

“There are a few points of a general nature that I would like to make. Ruburt has been reading Jung, though not consistently. The libido does not originate in the subconscious of the present personality. It begins instead in the energy of the entity and inner self, and is directed by means of the inner senses — outward, so to speak, through the deeper layers of the individual subconscious mind, then through the outer or personal areas.

“Your Freud and Jung have probed into the personal subconscious. Jung saw glimpses of other depths, but that is all. There are rather unfortunate distortions occurring in his writings, as well as in Freud’s, since they did not understand the primary, cooperative nature of the libido….

“I was somewhat concerned with Ruburt’s reading of Jung, simply because while Jung seems to offer more than Freud, in some aspects he has attempted much and his distortions are fairly important: Seeming to delve further and offering many significant results, Jung nevertheless causes conclusions … all the more hampering because of his scope.

“Basically, Jung feared such a journey because he felt that it led only to the racial source … that anyone involved in such a study would end up in the bottleneck of a first womb — but there, there is an opening up into other realms, through which the libido also passed. Figuratively speaking, it squeezed itself through the bottleneck, and there is a lack of limitation on the other side.

“Freud courageously probed into the individual topmost layers of the subconscious, and found them deeper than even he suspected. These levels are indeed filled with what may be termed life-giving differentiated and undifferentiated impulses acquired in the present life of an individual, but when these have been passed there are many discoveries still to be made. After that passage the diligent, consistent, intuitive, and flexible seeker-after-knowledge will find horizons of which Freud never dreamed. Freud merely touched the outer boundaries. Jung, with his eyes clouded by the turmoil set up by Freud, glimpsed some further regions, but poorly.”