When we as literary critics endeavor to talk of love in literature, we may find it difficult to navigate, for we are on stormy seas.

The Importance of Shepherding One's Love: Anima Possession in The Idylls of Theocritus and Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther

Mathew V. Spano for Dr. Janet Walker & Dr. Steven Walker: Rutgers University Comparative Literature

When we as literary critics endeavor to talk of love in literature, we may find it difficult to navigate, for we are on stormy seas. After all, this is the realm of Venus, of emotion and feeling, and the compass points in nearly the opposite direction from the familiar Apollonian seas of reason and logic. What we need, it would seem, is a compass to help steer us at least part the way back to those familiar seas, a way to speak intelligently and reasonably about emotions powerful enough to dash us against the rocks at any moment. In short, we need a critical language of love. C.G. Jung's theories on the psyche may provide us with just such a language and enable us to at least partly understand one of the most powerful and mysterious forces in our lives as a good sailor might learn to read the tides and winds—so that we can ride them instead of trying to dominate them. We can also use this tool when it comes time to talk of love in the lives of our great writers and their characters. When we do so, we may find that the elemental forces that drive one character to the extremes of love may not be so very different from those that drive another—or from those that drive us! If we apply Jungian analytical psychology to The Idylls of Theocritus and to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, we suddenly discover in these seemingly very different works from two different culture-worlds an elementary construction of love as madness, that of anima possession.

Arising from the objective psyche, the anima is the archetype that consists of all of a man's contrasexual impulses. Typically the anima takes form as a psychic image, personifying a man's feeling function or capacity for eros which may have been left undeveloped, cast aside for the development of "more important" ego functions. It is in this undeveloped state that the anima is most dangerous, for a man may unconsciously identify with this negative anima and fall into "anima moods" of deep depression or irritability which may even lead to suicide. Just as dangerous, a man may also project this internal figure outward onto some unsuspecting woman by whom he is then helplessly and utterly bewitched:

It is this unintegrated eros of the anima that accounts for the unrelated quality of the romantic intensity of men who are—or think they are—in love, or the unrealistic sentimentality that possesses them when they believe their lives are fatally and inextricably intertwined with those of others, even others who care little for them or exploit them. (S.Walker 47)

Recognizing and integrating the anima, then, is essential for this kind of man so that he may ultimately withdraw the anima projection and build a more soulful, more meaningful, and hopefully longer lasting relationship with the "real" woman who has existed all the while underneath. Hence, a man who has cultivated a healthy relationship to the anima will relate well with women and may even discover an increased capacity for feeling, creativity, or spirituality of which his waking ego had been previously unaware. Such a positive anima appears in dream, fantasy, or even artistic representations as spiritual guide, for example Dante's Beatrice. Unintegrated, however, the image of the female beloved may take on a negative aspect and a life of her own within the mind of the male lover, drawing all his concentration and energy, possessing him and driving him to madness. A woman involved with such a man may find herself suddenly, perhaps innocently, caught in his anima projection, the object of all of his desires and hopes or of his frustrations and rage. We recall such figures as Keats' la Belle Dame Sans Merci or Homer's Calypso (S. Walker 47).

The power which such an image holds over the impassioned male lover is a theme Theocritus explored in several of his idylls. The brutish but sensitive Polyphemus, in Idyll 11, pines for the absent sea nymph Galatea. So lovesick is he that he neglects his shepherding duties, addressing her directly as if she were present when, in fact, she exists only as the memory of a girl he once met. She haunts his dreams but "unreachably graceful," she torments him, slipping away with waking consciousness. Piqued by his ugliness and her indifference (their first meeting meant "nothing at all" to her), he boasts of his material holdings: a thousand head of sheep and vast stores of milk and cheese. Yet for all this he is still powerless before Galatea's image which seems to dissolve each of his material accomplishments: "whiter than ricotta, gentler than a lamb, livelier than a calf, firmer than an unripe grape" (91). Almost as if to compensate for this powerlessness, he likens her to a fleeing sheep and himself to the pursuing wolf, in effect reversing the power dynamic by imagining himself in the dominant role and her as the defenseless prey. In another fantasy, he idealizes their meeting, imagining himself with gills, equalizing the relationship and nullifying her power over two realms. But even these compensatory fantasies cannot free him from her spell: grudgingly, he returns to his reality where he has no gills, he cannot dive, and he cannot swim (nor will the "kindly stranger" ever teach him). Finally, he concedes her mastery over his soul: he now beseeches her to "come up from the sea," curses his mother for his fate, and even undercuts his own fantasy of another, prettier Galatea with a memory of tormenting girls.

Jungians further believe that the formation of such an anima image may have its origins in a man's relationship with his mother. If he feels his mother has "had a negative influence on him, his anima will often express itself in irritable, depressed moods...[and she will] endlessly repeat this theme: "I am nothing. Nothing makes any sense. With others it's different, but for me..." (von Franz, "Process" 186). Such a description seems to characterize Polyphemus' moods and anger toward his mother; he blames her for not putting in a good word for him with Galatea and in his sulking hopes to make her feel guilty for her role in his suffering. The negative anima is furthermore often associated with the ocean and with sea nymphs who lure men to their demise. Again, Polyphemus' fantasizing about the nymph Galatea and about acquiring gills and diving into the sea to be with her suggests his possession by this negative figure. His apathetic and depressed mood carries over into the description of the poem's landscape. Agonizing over this elusive dream woman, he gazes out over the ocean, an ocean that is striking if only for its featurelessness: "...the Cyclops addresses himself to the blank expanse that reaches out before him, its indifference representing Galatea's own" (Wells 12). Lured from the responsibilities of daily life and home (represented by untended flocks, pastures, and his cave), he sings and wanders alone up and down the shore. "Weedstrewn shore" contrasts with the order and domesticity of pastures and flocks and introduces elements of wildness, of uncontrolled growth. Such images suggest a threshold between the rational and controlled and the uncultivated and uncontained nature of shore and ocean: Galatea's home. Lost in his reveries up on a rocky crag we wonder if he might let himself fall in. Only his songs seem to lift his spirits and hold him back.

Music, the speaker informs us in the frame for Idyll 11, is the only true remedy for the lovesick. He addresses one Nicias, a doctor and a poet, a "child of the Nine". The muses, invoked as they are throughout the idylls, may represent the positive anima as guide and healer: "[These] positive functions occur when a man takes seriously the feelings, moods, expectations, and fantasies sent by his anima and when he fixes them in some form—for example, in writing, painting, sculpture, musical composition, or dancing" (von Franz, "Process" 195). She may also serve as "a figure who raises love (eros) to the heights of spiritual devotion" (195). Hence, the anima, though she causes Polyphemus' madness in the form of Galatea, may, in the form of the muses, also inspire his love to a spiritual level. He sings and plays songs of his love "far into the night" and "[finds] more relief than if he had paid out gold" (93). Polyphemus, then, shifts his focus from the cause of the disease (Galatea) to the disease itself, precisely what Diotima recommends to Socrates in Plato's Symposium. Diotima, incidentally, represents just such a positive anima guide. Early in the Symposium, the men have ordered the pipe girl to leave, thus casting out the female presence and polarizing masculine philosophy from female physicality and procreation. The feminine returns, however, in Diotima who unites the sexual, procreative act with the philosophical search for truth and wisdom.

But what is Polyphemus doing to transform his potentially destructive relationship with the anima to a positive, creative one? His dialogue and fantasies with the negative anima may not all be in vain. Perhaps through his song and through addressing the fantasy image of the beloved directly, he is practicing what Jung called active imagination. Such a procedure would prove useful for one who is experiencing "an overwhelming emotion and needs to work directly at [his] affects by cultivating [his] creative spirit...creative...not only in the outer sense of creativity but in terms of the development of [his] own personality" (Ammann 4). Though Galatea slips away when he wakes, he "dreams the dream onward" as Jung would suggest by asking this dream woman questions, telling her how he feels, showing her what she may be missing, and conjuring memories of her. Through his fantasies of first diving into the ocean to meet her and then of having her come up from the sea to help him "follow the flocks...milk them..[and] set the cheese," he is actively engaging the anima and pulling her up into consciousness where he can address her instead of waiting for her to visit again in dreams, a time when the ego is more vulnerable, more susceptible to the archetypes. In short, he is "shepherding his love" and "[allowing] those split-off dimensions of his own experience to come back to him" (Hollis 1) by creating a dialogue with his passion.

Theocritus shows us the failure to deal with the negative anima most dramatically in Idyll 13, the account of the Hylas myth. Here, he begins by highlighting the primary characteristics of the pederastic relationship, the relationship which Michel Foucault saw as the primary problematization and the principle contributing factor to Greek philosophies of love, truth, and wisdom. Heracles stands as the ideal mature lover, accomplished, brave, skilled in warfare—heroic, while Hylas is presented as young, innocent, and naive: "[Heracles] was like a father to the child and taught him gently the lessons he had learnt the hard way...They were never apart...The example of Heracles was before the boy so that he might copy and learn how a man lives" (95). Indeed, it is in carrying out his duty to Heracles that Hylas discovers the nymphs. Theocritus describes the landscape as wild and rich in plant life, and the Nymphs who reside there are "feared the country round" (96). As with Idyll 11, we again notice the association of an alluring and possibly dangerous female presence with water and the wilds, all typical of representations of the negative anima. We don't have to look far to discover other incarnations of the archetype: the sirens, mermaids, the Lorelei, etc. (von Franz, "Process" 187). Hylas comes with an "empty vessel" suggesting his innocence and also, perhaps, the susceptibility of the ego to be flooded or overwhelmed by the archetypes. The fact that he fills the vessel by forcing it beneath the surface and the fact that he himself is subsequently overwhelmed and submerged by the Nymphs suggests that perhaps in the pederastic relationship something has been denied or even repressed, something far away from the male civilization and society. In explaining his process of Individuation, Jung believed that the anima denied could erupt and overwhelm the ego. The Hylas myth, then, may function as a compensatory myth for the pederastic relationship and patriarchal Greek society. Granted, Hylas does struggle, but he is quieted by the Nymphs whispers and reassurances as he lays "stretched across their knees" (96). In effect, he has been reduced to an infant by these negative animas, the pederastic nightmare of being returned to a completely dependent state, completely passive and stripped of free will. The myth also suggests that the victim of anima possession is beyond rescue by the adult male hero.

Again, the conflict with the anima seems to carry over into the poem's landscape. The Argo in port, we might argue, represents the masculine ideals of Greek civilization: adventure, heroism, quest, etc. The sun going down, Hylas strays far from camp to fill his vessel. The pool "in a valley hollow" which he discovers with all its marshy, dark greenery and flowers contrasts strikingly to the place Hylas has left as Robert Wells notes:

There is effrontery in his dismissal of the Argonauts' voyage in a few lines. The whole unwieldy story is referred to and pushed aside while some elaborate lines are given to describing the times of day, the return of spring and the flowers growing round the pool where Hylas has gone to fetch water. Because these details occur in a short poem, it is as if they have been enlarged to make their exactness more visible. (my emphasis, 40)

The Argo is at anchor, arrested for the moment in its quest we might say, while most of the detail in the poem focuses sharply on the dark pool and its wilderness: "plants growing thick about [the pool],/ Green maidenhair, marsh-creeping dog's-tooth grass, / Wild celery, rich celandines, tall flags" (Theocritus 96). Even the plant names suggest darkness and witchcraft. Moreover, when Hylas falls into the pool, Theocritus tells us "[He] toppled like a star that shoots from sky to sea / Bright, sheer and gone; while sailor calls to sailor / "Loosen tackle, lads. There's a wind blowing up" (96). Though it may be true that "these images embody sexual feelings which elude direct description" (Wells 41), perhaps Theocritus is illustrating the dynamics of the negative anima overwhelming, submerging the masculine ego in his dismissal of the Argo and its hero's quest, in his emphasis on the dark landscape of the pool, in the star falling into the ocean, in the strengthening gale, and in the ensuing chaos among the sailors.

Hence, in both Idylls 11 and 13 "...we watch [Theocritus] experimenting with the stories—perhaps familiar to him from childhood as well as from literary sources—turning them in different ways to discover their expressive range" (Wells 11). Writing in an age which championed the ego and the rational mind as well as the ideal of the pederastic relationship, it may well be that Theocritus re-tells these stories in such a way as to dramatize the problematization of anima possession, exploring anima myths and stories as compensation for an age which championed the rational mind as well as the ideal of the pederastic relationship.

Writing nearly two thousand years later, Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, a startling work about a young man's obsessive love which, though it is clearly a product of German Romanticism, once again presents us with the perennial drama of anima possession.

As the fictional case history, moreover, of a highly endowed and appealing individual who allows himself to drift into disaster under the spell of passion the danger of which he fails to sense until his will to live has been sapped and his sanity undermined, the story has a powerful appeal for the psychologically oriented reader who follows the stages of the hero's mental disintegration with rapt fascination. (my emphasis, Weigand viii)

We might even say that in Werther Goethe dramatizes the process of anima possession, showing us how the anima is constellated, how the hero falls under her spell, how he becomes aware of her and to what extent, and how he fails to integrate her properly. From the novel's beginning, Werther seems predisposed to bouts of anima sentimentality and moodiness. Furthermore, the scant evidence we can gather about his relationships prior to Lotte seems to suggest early on his tendency to project the anima:

How I regret that the sweetheart of my youth is no more, how I deplore the fact that I ever knew her! If I had not known her, I could say: "You are a fool. You are looking for something that does not exist." But she was mine. I experienced the warmth of a heart and the nobility of a soul in whose presence I seemed to be more than I was because I was everything I possibly could be. Dear God, was there a facet of my soul then that was not alive? With her I could fully develop that wonderful feeling with which my heart embraces nature. (my emphasis, 27)

Here, the young girl constellates the positive anima and becomes caught in Werther's projection. Indeed, she moves him to his very soul. In touch with the positive anima, he experiences a feeling of wholeness and in her presence all his potential for feeling and creativity flowers. But Werther's emphasis in describing this relationship seems to be on himself and what she brought out in him. Hence, he doesn't seem to really see her except as a projection of part of himself. Curiously, Werther himself seems to suspect on some level that this sweetheart is too good to be true, that she could not possibly exist in the real world. Hence, the relationship doesn't seem real nor does it seem to have been fully developed; because of the girl's premature death Werther perhaps never had the chance to withdraw his projection or develop his relationship to the anima. The girl remains frozen in all her perfection in Werther's memory. We may go one step further. As Jungians usually point out that the anima "is formed out of impressions of significant members of the female sex in a man's life...[and even] childhood impressions of the opposite sex" (S. Walker 51), perhaps this childhood sweetheart even helps form Werther's anima setting the stage for a subsequent projection onto Lotte. Indeed, in his suicide note to Lotte he associates her with this beloved from his past (123). At the very least, in his description of a childhood love affair we recognize Werther's predisposition for obsessive love affairs and his tendency to idealize the beloved, characteristics which manifest themselves again with Lotte.

Throughout these early letters, we also see how prone Werther is to reverie and how averse he is to the mundane, sordid duties of everyday life. He quits his job as clerk for the ambassador within the year and creates a social faux pas by overstaying his welcome at the Count's lunch. Werther, it would seem, has an under-developed persona, the Jungian term which refers to the social aspect of one's personality usually formed by one's social expectations: "[The persona] has its part in facilitating an adaptation to the requirements of society, and it also serves to help define the individual in a particular setting. We can present ourselves, depending on the situation, as teacher, parent, lover, business person, servant, guide" (Singer 159). Werther, however, seems to fit in nowhere socially and sets out into the countryside to settle his mother's affairs and to "heal [himself] through contact with nature and the life of simple people" (Bakhtin 231). Though he admires the peasant folk, he can't help but set himself apart from them (not to mention the rest of mankind):

The illusion that life is but a dream has occurred to quite a few people, and I feel the same way about it. When I see the limitations imposed on man's powers of action and inquiry and observe all his efficiency is aimed at nothing but the satisfaction of his needs, which in turn has but one purpose—to prolong his miserable existence—... all this, William, makes me mute. I turn in upon myself and find a world there, again more in a spirit of presentiment and dour longing than dramatically or with vitality. Then everything grows hazy in my mind and I go on smiling dreamily at the world. (28-29)

Rather than simply live for the pleasures of the moment, he prefers instead to flee from the commitments and responsibilities of the real world to his own inner world, a world which may nevertheless conjure gloominess and foreboding because of its very unreality. Such a bleak outlook with its "vague feelings and moods" whereby "the whole of life takes on a sad and oppressive aspect" (von Franz, "Process" 186-187) is typical of the man being drawn into the anima's orbit.

Despite such gloominess, Werther's flights of imagination into nature and art in general do the trick, and at their most intense inspire spiritual ecstasy:

I am alone and glad to be alive in surroundings such as these, which were created for a soul like mine. I am so happy, best of friends, and so utterly absorbed by the sensations of a peaceful existence that my work suffers from it ...when I can feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect closer to my heart and can sense the presence of the Almighty, who in a state of continuous bliss bears and sustains us—then, my friend, when it grows light before my eyes and the world around me and the sky above come to rest wholly within my soul like a beloved, I am filled with yearning and think, if only I could express it all on paper, everything that is housed so richly and warmly within me, so that it might be the mirror of my soul as my soul is the mirror of the Infinite God...ah, my dear friend...but I am ruined by it. I succumb to its magnificence. (my emphasis, 25)

Though epiphanies like this pull him from his work and from everyday life and society, he also concludes from them that he is somehow special, an artist who can reclaim aspects of the divine for his society but who wishes to fly above its mundane side and escape into nature; thus, we might even consider him a puer aeternus (eternal boy). As Robert Bly puts it, such a flying boy would rather spend his time reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead rather than books about wood working or plumbing (Stories), or, in Werther's case, reading Homer's Odyssey (as idyll) rather than editing for diction, missing conjunctions, and inversions in his clerical work for the ambassador. In his next letter Werther describes a curious well he has found:

I don't know whether deceptive spirits haunt these parts or whether it is the glowing fantasies of my heart that make everything around me seem blissful. Just outside of town there is a spring to which I feel mysteriously drawn, like Melusina and her sisters. You walk down a short slope and at the bottom find yourself facing an archway from which about twenty steps descend to a place where clearest water gushes out of a marble rock. The low wall that hems this spot in at the top, the tall trees all around it that conceal the coolness within, all suggest something mysterious. Not a day passes without my spending an hour there. Young girls come from town to fetch water... (25)

Again, Werther seems to intimate the slightest awareness of the internal feminine, but doesn't reflect more than a moment before losing himself once again in the description of the place. Again, the location is "just outside of town", away from the court and from society, and Werther feels "mysteriously drawn" there. The references to water nymphs, the position of the well away from civilization at the bottom of a slope concealed by tall trees, and the "mysterious" quality of the place which draws him in all conjure Theocritus's Hylas. Like that mythological character, Werther seems overwhelmed by the mystery of the place and ready to fall in, to be swallowed up by nature, by the anima. Perhaps through his love for both nature and for Lotte, Werther is really seeking a return to the womb: "...the image of a mother—the image of the perfect woman who will give everything to a man and who is without any shortcomings—is sought in every woman. He is looking for a mother goddess...He eternally longs for the maternal woman who will enfold him in her arms and satisfy his every need. This is often accompanied by the romantic attitude of the adolescent" (von Franz, Puer 2). Hence, the puer is instinctually drawn to the maternal anima—to mother nature and to his own nurturing beloved, Lotte.

Werther's passions for nature of course then find expression in his love for Lotte who, when seen from this perspective, seems to arise out of Wahlheim's environment like a nymph arising from the depths of a spring:

Thus, near the beginning there is the lasting image created by Werther's description of the garden with its steep descent to a spring where the village girls come to fetch water in jugs on their heads like the noble maidens of antiquity. In the second part, every detail of Werther's report of his first evening with Lotte vibrates with the breath of life—her motherly solicitude in distributing their supper to the swarm of children, ... (Weigard X)

The nurturing beloved he had previously found in nature he now finds in one individual. When he first meets her on his way to the country dance sponsored by Magistrate S., Werther is overcome by her plain white and pink attire and her simplicity and maternal grace as she cuts slices of black bread and distributes them to each of the children. In the days prior to meeting Lotte, he did not project the anima onto any one person but identified with it as we saw in the passionate feelings in which he likes to lose himself while roaming the countryside. There, the anima was nevertheless felt by Werther and seen all around by him in the beauty of the natural landscape. He was in a rapture within it, and described it in earthy detail, teeming with life. It was "like a beloved" though not like any woman in particular, and it was also maternal and seemingly benevolent as he feels nurtured and renewed. Thus, Werther may be maturing in his relationship with the anima, for "the anima figure in immature men tends to be multiple...Only as a man grows more mature psychologically does his image of the anima become represented by a single figure" (S. Walker 48). Though it has now been focused or personified, we must remember that the anima is a projected illusion which obscures the real woman. For all the passion and length of his letters on meeting Lotte, Werther never really gives a clear description of the woman. Mostly, he focuses on her maternal behavior and then relates his rapture: "I said something, a casual compliment, but all the while my whole being was absorbed with the sight of her, the sound of her voice, her behavior" (36). It is as if he never really sees her at all, but sees instead the vaguely divine and motherly "beloved" he had previously found in nature. The act of feeding the children bread also links Lotte to the land and to sex, for as Bakhtin tells us, the idyll links agriculture to place and family: "For the idyll, the association of food and children is characteristic (even in Werther we have the idyllic picture of Lotte feeding the children)...children [also] often function as a sublimation of the sexual act and of conception..." (227). Lotte's close association with the land, with food, and with children make her the ideal vehicle for the transference of Werther's passion for nature.

Though a man's anima begins to take on a single form and though he matures in his relationship to his own feeling function, this isn't necessarily such a good thing. The passions and longings Werther shows early in the novel for natural beauty now have a name and form, but as we've noted Lotte remains a fantastic mother figure to him. Furthermore, he loses the artistic ability he once used to connect to the anima in nature when he falls in love with Lotte: "I have no imagination, no more feeling for nature, and reading has become repugnant to me. When we are robbed of ourselves, we are robbed of everything" (65)! Now he sketches neither portraits of his beloved nor natural landscapes. Unlike Polyphemus, he has no way to aesthetically sublimate his passions, no way to engage in active imagination and dialogue with the anima. The vital connection from the ego to the unconscious he once possessed in his art has been lost altogether. As a result, he seems to fall deeper under the archetype's influence or, as James Hillman puts it, "The deeper we descend into her ontology, the more opaque consciousness becomes...she is the bridge both over the river into the trees and into the sludge and quicksand, making the known ever more unknown" (88).

The anima now assumes a more active, no to mention destructive, role in Werther's psyche. Whereas before it took on the aspect of the "unreal dream of love, happiness, and maternal warmth...a dream that lures men away from reality" (von Franz, "Process" 190) now it assumes the characteristics of "the death demon" (187) pursuing him into desperate thoughts of suicide and undermining his self esteem. Werther complains of his hopeless love for Lotte to William in several letters, but we can best see the effects of the anima turned devourer in his altered view of nature. In essence, nature goes from a kind of womb to a tomb for him as his relationship with the anima develops: " My full, warm enjoyment of all living things that used to overwhelm me with so much delight and transform the world around me into a paradise has been turned into unbearable torment, a demon who pursues me wherever I go" (64). At this point, Werther is like the puer who, longing for the eternal and the spiritual, nevertheless falls into the consuming waters of the anima. Like Icarus trying to escape the labyrinth, he writes, " Something has been drawn away from my soul like a curtain and the panorama of eternal life has been transformed before my eyes into the abyss of an eternally open grave...My heart is undermined by the consuming power that lies hidden in the Allness of nature...I can see nothing but an eternally devouring, eternally regurgitating monster" (65). These feelings for nature seem to correspond to his feelings for Lotte, for even as he desires her he seems to struggle to be free of her. He describes the all consuming intensity of his love for her to William, writing that "There are no more prayers in me except prayers to her; my imagination can shape no other figure but hers; I see everything around me only in its relationship to her" (67). A few lines later in his letter he shows his mounting frustration over his anima possession, admitting that he sometimes feels consumed by melancholy and swallowed by nature: "At moments such as these I like to climb a steep mountain or hack my way through uncleared forest, through hedges that hurt me, through brambles that scratch me" (67)! Werther will again climb a steep cliff to gain some perspective on his passion for Lotte shortly before he commits suicide. Again, we are reminded of Polyphemus pining for Galatea on his mountain crag overlooking the ocean. As James Appelwhite suggests in his Jungian reading of landscape in Romantic poetry, "...[such] lonely observers on peaks, figures overlooking vast landscapes...incorporate the spaces where consciousness merges with an objective underground" (27). Unlike the Cyclops, however, Werther has no way to contain, communicate with, or sublimate this objective underground. Instead, we are told, "The hat was found later on a rock that overlooks the valley from the precipitous side of a hill, and it is incredible that Werther could have climbed up it on a dark, wet night without falling out" (123). But by committing suicide, he does fall and does drown, in a manner of speaking, as a result of his anima possession. In one of his last letters, he writes:

Dear William, I am in the condition in which those unfortunates who were believed to be possessed of evil spirits must have found themselves. Sometimes it takes hold of me—not fear, not desire, but an inner unfathomable turmoil that threatens to burst the confines of my breast and choke me. Then I wander about in dread nocturnal setting of this unfriendly season. (107)

In the very next lines, Werther goes on to describe the river that has overflown its banks and flooded Wahlheim, a "stormy sea in a howling gale" (107). He has dark fantasies of hurling himself into the foaming waves and associates the destruction with Lotte: "the willow...her meadows...her neighborhood..." (108). From a Jungian perspective, such an image in a dream would suggest that psychic energy is surging (the flooded river), infiltrating the bounds of the ego (the inundated village). As we've seen, river and sea images are also associated in Jungian psychology with the anima (nymphs, mermaids, mother, etc.). Hence, from this perspective the destruction of the idyll may be seen as the death of the positive anima and the birth of her negative counterpart. Werther is drowning in the anima transformed from soul guide to soul devourer. This transformation is also echoed in other images in the novel. Consider, for example, the new clergyman's wife "a gaunt, sickly woman who has every reason not to participate in life" (91) who has the old walnut trees Werther and Lotte used to sit under when visiting the vicar cut down. Even Werther's new choice in poets reflects the change: he once read in Homer an idyllic escape from reality but then chooses Ossian with his "blustering wind storms," "rushing of forest streams," and "half-fading groans of specters issuing from caves in the hillside" (92). Taking these parallel landscape descriptions into consideration along with the novel's overall narrative point of view, as Doris Kadish suggests in her book on reading landscape (6), we can conclude that the descriptive details Werther chooses to include in his letters are all indicative of the ego's gradual deterioration and submersion as he falls deeper and deeper under the anima spell.

But where is the real Lotte in all of this? Early in the novel, she seemed unconscious of his feelings and her own, never addressing his passions nor coming to him with her own—all of which perhaps made her an even more effective "screen" for Werther's projected anima. By novel's end, however, she becomes more aware of what has been growing and raging outside the ego's blinders all along. Her confusion about wanting to be alone with him, her assessment that the loss of Werther would "tear a gap into her life that she feared could never again be closed" (114), and her giving way to their passionate embrace suggest that she has become aware of the ego's limitations but is powerless to act on this understanding. All she can do when faced with the honesty and intensity of Werther's passions is either ignore it or withdraw to the security of rationality and try to redefine and contain his passions (and hers) within its parameters:

"I implore you," she went on, taking him by the hand, "practice moderation! Your mind—all your knowledge and talents...think of the happiness they can give you! Be more manly! Divert this tragic devotion from a human creature who can only pity you...Think calmly, Werther...Don't you see that you are deceiving and ruining yourself on purpose? Why me, Werther? Why me of all people, who belongs to another? Why?...I fear that it is just the impossibility of possessing me that makes your desire for me so fascinating...Try to win control over yourself. A journey might distract you. Surely it would. Seek and find a worthy object of your affections and come back and let us enjoy the bliss of true friendship." (my emphasis, 111)

Caught in society's projection of the good and reasonable wife and "mother", Lotte chooses to view Werther's passions through the lens of ego. To the heroic ego, Werther seems weak, undisciplined, childish, possessive and out of control; moreover, he has chosen this particular state and can therefore choose a more moderate and reasonable course for himself—selecting a more socially suitable beloved and becoming friends with Lotte. Or perhaps another solution might be to "[turn] him into a brother" or "[marry] him off to one of her friends" (115), but again she realizes (too late) that she has all along secretly wanted to keep him for herself, to have this deeper soul-relationship with him within the safe context of her marriage to Albert. Hence, when Lotte realizes the ego can no longer confine and exploit the deeper passions, she experiences her dark melancholy (115). Of course, reason and society have determined her life all along since she has obeyed her mother's deathbed wish to assume the maternal duties and responsibilities and to marry Albert.

But though Lotte may suspect and feel the limitations of reason, she clearly does not realize the depths of Werther's passions and the extent to which they have dictated both her and Werther's destinies. Once the anima is constellated, both the man who projects her image and the woman who receives it are swept into the archetype's orbit, its sphere of influence or field. Recent studies on archetypal fields show that they are autonomous organizing forces, existing and operating independently of the individuals involved: "Entire cultures and individual lives respond to the presence and influence of these archetypal fields—even to the extent that we may speak of destiny as a response to them" (Conforti 1). As Jungian analyst Mary Stamper explains, "Just as a magnet sits unnoticed and uninfluential until something comes into its surrounding field, so too does the archetype. As material gets drawn into the archetypal field, a complex is formed..." (4). As we've seen in his earlier relationships to both his childhood sweetheart and to nature, Werther has felt the influence of the anima field from the beginning, but falls completely under its sway once he meets Lotte. In his July 26 letter to William, he briefly reflects on the strength of Lotte's gravity and his inability to break free of its pull: "I am too close to her aura...whoosh! and I am there. My grandmother used to tell a fairy tale about the Magnet Mountain: the ships that came too close to it were robbed suddenly of all their metal, even the nails flew to the mountain, and the miserable sailors foundered in a crash of falling timber" (55). Through his recollection of the fairy tale, Werther intuits the extent of the anima's influence and the potential consequences of getting swept into its field. Typically, fairy tales are a prime repository for archetypal images and may offer insight into archetypal dynamics, and serious reflection on either the fairy tale or on his relationship to Lotte might have provided deeper insight and enabled Werther to steer a different course:

Reflection can bring a sensitivity to the field so that one knows immediately when one is in danger of being drawn into it. This awareness of the boundaries of the field makes it possible to choose not to enter it. Or if one does get in it, this sensitivity could allow one to leave the field before getting in so far that its power is overwhelming. That is, before one is completely swallowed up by the complex. We might say that reflection decreases one's susceptibility to the field. Through reflection, one hopefully brings awareness to one's behavior patterns and thus opens the possibility of choosing different responses from those dictated by the archetype. (Stamper 6).

But Werther breaks off his ruminations on Lotte's influence over him and abruptly shifts to thinking about Albert's return. The archetypal pull is apparently too strong for him, and he is instantly drawn back into the anima field with his thoughts of competition and rivalry for Lotte: "...I would find it insufferable to see him take possession of so much perfection" (55).

Lotte, as we've seen, approaches deeper understanding when she admits she has been trying to keep Werther to herself as a kind of soul mate while maintaining her commitments to Albert and enjoying the stability he offers. But she too stops short of any deeper reflection on the nature of her own passions for Werther and identifies (overidentifies) with the persona of the reasonable mother and wife. We should also note that society would expect and accept nothing less of her. She must rationalize and moderate her emotions, then, by imagining Werther in the role of brother or friend's husband. But Lotte is caught in the crossfire, for overidentifying with the persona blinds her to the influence of the anima field, or as Jungian analyst Thomas Moore puts it, "We are condemned to live out what we cannot imagine. We can be caught in myth, not knowing that we are acting as characters in a drama" (224). Lotte, then, also gets caught in the anima field, unconsciously playing the role of anima in all her guises for Werther throughout the novel.

When he first meets her, she is the anima as mother and guide. He first sees her feeding bread to the children and instructing them, and then he marvels as she provides intellectual sustenance and guides the conversation during the carriage ride to the country dance. Curiously, she associates her maternal duties with her love of literature, stating that she prefers novels "where the sort of things happen that happen all around me, and the story is as interesting and sympathetic as my own life at home, which may not be paradise but is, on the whole, a source of quite inexplicable joy to me" (37). Nourished by her words, Werther rattles off his own views on her favorite works of literature, and he and Lotte dominate the conversation. At the dance, he admires more of her guiding maternal qualities. The way she organizes a game of numbers to raise the spirits of those frightened by the storm, the way she scolds him and boxes his ears when he misses, and the poetic reference she offers when they part all indicate the anima role as mother and spiritual guide (Weigand X). But as we've seen, when Werther fails to integrate his feelings and becomes overwhelmed by them, the anima assumes her negative aspect. By the night of his last, fateful meeting with Lotte, he is fully possessed by the negative anima mood and his outlook on life is filled with dread and foreboding. The length of time he spends reading the lugubrious Ossian passages and the number of tales reinforcing the themes of death and mourning illustrate the depth of his anima mood and also serve to draw Lotte into the field of the negative anima. It is as though the spell he is under now extends out to her and by the end of his reading both are in tears. In a sense, they replay "Salgar and Colma" since Lotte intuits Werther's death and tries in vain to reach him and hold him back (122), and her passion here is motivated by the erotic field created by the negative anima. In other words, she is finally able to express her passion for him because she feels she may never see him alive again. Also, her embraces and kisses, her first real expression of passion toward him, only punctuate the impossibility of their love and moves him closer to suicide: "She loves me! She loves me! The sacred fire that streamed to me from you still burns on my lips. A new, warm rapture is in my heart. Forgive me, forgive me!" (124). Her kisses, however, don't burn with new life, but with death. Hence, once again Lotte unconsciously plays the anima role for Werther. Instead of providing bread and sustenance, she now provides the pistols he will use to commit suicide (J. Walker). At Albert's command, she rises, takes the pistols from the rack, dusts them off, hands them to the boy without a word, returns to the table, engages in conversation with her friend, and "[forgets] herself" (127). Though she is wracked with anxiety and guilt as she carries out the action, she is unable to articulate her feelings, to stop herself, to break free of the negative anima field. Thus, we can argue that both Werther and Lotte are victims of the tragedy of anima possession.

Ironically, the novel opens with Werther as the object of a young girl's desire. Unconsciously, it would seem, he has aroused the passions of young Leonore while socializing with her sister and has had to disengage himself from the whole affair. This incident seems to be one of the reasons for Werther's travel, and he seems glad to have left it all behind him. Yet after expressing his initial relief to William, he reflects briefly on his role in the affair: "Yet I ask myself—am I entirely blameless? Did I perhaps encourage her? Didn't I quite frankly enjoy her completely sincere and natural outbursts, which often made the two of us laugh, although there was really nothing laughable about them? I shall do better in the future, my dear friend, I promise you" (23). Curiously, Werther seems to gain insight from the experience; he seems to understand how one can quite innocently become the screen for another's projected passion and how one needs to be aware of such an occurrence and accept responsibility for it. He implies that one should not only recognize the possibility and the consequences but take steps to avoid being drawn further into that erotic field. Ironically, Lotte fails to possess this insight. Would that she had come to this realization so early in the novel! Werther, for his part, only perceives the danger from the perspective of the projection's object. He never considers the possibility of being in Leonore's shoes, of being the projector.

All along, Werther, "self-indulgent in his cult of pure feeling" (Weigand ix), has denied the ability of the ego to pilot one through the storms of emotion believing instead that the winds and tides of feeling will steer us where they may, even to shipwreck! In his argument with Albert over the lovesick girl who was driven to suicide, he believes that "the little bit of sense [man] may have plays little or no part at all when passion rages in him, and the limitations of humankind oppress him" (63). But Goethe seems to be presenting us with an either/or situation here. Albert argues for doing the sensible thing when one finds oneself overcome by emotions, but this is really trying to dominate them—like trying to steer the tides in a reasonable direction. Werther takes the opposite extreme, arguing that we are all really emotional castaways and should simply submit to our fate and, in some cases, pity it. But there is a third option: that of developing a strong and flexible ego to relate to and pay honor to the constellated archetypes without overidentifying with them (i.e. becoming possessed by them). To continue our metaphor, one should use the ego as rudder and sails to adjust one's course—as much as possible. This third option is the one Werther never considers and herein lies the tragedy of the novel, for Werther seems to be reacting (understandably) to a society which overvalues reason and moderation and which has too little respect and understanding for the passions. To Werther's defense, however, such an option might not have been viable given the times and conditions. Perhaps "the limitations of humanity" are too confining, for the novel is filled with parallel stories of those who have tried and failed to negotiate safe passage over the archetypes. The lovesick girl we've just mentioned drowns herself, and Goethe perhaps intends this as metaphor for drowning in one's passions and the inability to bring the passions up into consciousness—a kind of Ophelia story. We also hear of the doomed peasant boy who, "pursued by demons" and "drawn" (88) to the widow, is unable to gain her heart and murders her lover. Finally, there is the fool, one time secretary to Lotte's father, whose love for her results in his dismissal and subsequent madness. Curiously, the fool says he felt happiest when he was completely submerged in his passion and dementia, when he was "like a fish in water" (100). This man has carried out what Polyphemus only imagined, leaving reason and work behind and plunging into madness so as to reunite with his beloved. Not one story do we hear of one who has "shepherded his love" and been cured of lovesickness; instead, Goethe seems to be showing us a time and society in which a cult of pure reason inhibits such remedies.

Perhaps, like Theocritus, Goethe shows us through his art how the anima constellates in compensation for an overly rational society and how it may wreak havoc if it is not properly honored and expressed. Both Theocritus and Goethe, then, seem to have understood and dramatized the tragedy of anima possession: the emergence of the anima and of the development of the man's relationship to her, the mechanism and dynamics of the anima field, the consequences for both the possessed man as well as the woman whom he believes to be the source of his bewitchment, and the importance of active imagination as a way of reflecting on and aesthetically sublimating (shepherding) one's passions.

Works Cited

Appelwhite, James. Seas and Inland Journeys: Landscape and Consciousness From Wordsworth to Roethke. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Ammann, Adolf. "When to Use Active Imagination." The Round Table Review of Contemporary Contributions to Jungian Psychology. IV. 3, Jan./Feb. 1997: 4-5.

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Conforti, Michael. "On Archetypal Fields." The Round Table Review of Contemporary Contributions to Jungian Psychology. IV.2 Nov./Dec. 1996: 1, 4-8.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Trans. Catherine Hutter. New York: Signet, 1962.

Hillman, James. A Blue Fire: Selected Writings of James Hillman. ed. Thomas Moore. New York: Harper Collins, 1989.

Hollis, James. "The Image Behind the Emotion: Practicing Active Imagination." The Round Table Review of Contemporary Contributions to Jungian Psychology. IV. 3. Jan./Feb. 1997: 1, 4-10.

Kadish, Doris. The Literature of Images: Narrative Landscape from Julie to Jayne Eyre. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Moore, Thomas. Care of the Soul. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Singer, June. Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Stamper, Mary. "Understanding "Fields" Magnetic and Archetypal." The Round Table Review of Contemporary Contributions to Jungian Psychology. IV.2 Nov./Dec. 1996: 4, 6.

Theocritus. The Idylls. Trans. Robert Wells. New York: Penguin, 1988.

von Franz, M.L. "The Process of Individuation." Man and His Symbols. ed. C.G. Jung. New York: Dell Books, 1964.

von Franz, M.L. Puer Aeternus. Zürich: Sigo Press. 1970.

Walker, Janet. Lecture: Concepts of Love in Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ., 1996.

Walker, Steven F. Jung and the Jungians on Myth. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995.

Weigand, Hermann J. Forward. The Sorrows of Young Werther. By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. New York: Signet, 1962. vii-xvii.

Wells, Robert. Introduction. Theocritus: The Idylls. New York: Penguin, 1988. 9-50.

Copyright 1997 Mathew V. Spano. All rights reserved.

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