The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects
Jung’s view of the four stages of anima development:
Four stages of eroticism were known in the late classical period: Hawwah (Eve), Helen (of Troy), the Virgin Mary, and Sophia.
The series is repeated in Goethe’s Faust: in the figure of Gretchen as the personification of a purely instinctual relationship (Eve); Helen as an anima figure; Mary as the personification of the ‘heavenly’, i.e., Christian or religious, relationship; and the ‘eternal feminine’ as an expression of the alchemical Sapienta.
As the nomenclature shows, we are dealing with the heterosexual Eros, or anima-figure in four stages, and consequently with four stages of the Eros cult.
The first stage–Hawwah, Eve, earth–is purely biological; woman ins equated with the mother and only represents something to be fertilized.
The second stage is still dominated by the sexual eros, but on an aesthetic and romantic level where woman has already acquired some value as an individual.
The third stage raises Eros to the heights of religious devotion and thus spiritualizes him: Hawwah has been replaced by spiritual motherhood.
Finally the fourth stage illustrates something which unexpectedly goes beyond the almost unsurpassable third stage: Sapientia. How can wisdom transcend the most holy and most pure? – Presumably only by virtue of the truth that the less something means the more.
This stage represents a spiritualization of Helen and consequently of Eros as such. ~Carl Jung; (CW 16, par 361, 1954)
