they were discussing psychological phenomena. He then tried to
repsychologize the terminology, but since he did not quite understand it
to begin with he could not but wind up with a distortion in the end.
It is little wonder that Jung came to imagine, through his own attempts
at meditation, that the Taoists had arrived at the entrance to the science
of psychology "only through abnormal psychic states," as he wrote in his
commentary to Wilhelm’s version of The Secret of the Golden Flower. It
is worth noting in this connection that Jung also found late medieval
baroque Christian alchemical books puzzling but did not openly accuse
their authors of having come upon their science through induction of
aberrated mental states.
10. The concepts of the higher and lower souls were among those that
caught the special attention of Wilhelm and Jung in connection with their
Christian backgrounds and interests. Wilhelm uses the term anima for
lower soul and animus for higher soul. In his introduction he
deemphasizes the gender associations of yin and yang, but in connection
with the concept of the souls Wilhelm calls the anima feminine and the
animus masculine. Jung then proceeds to exaggerate this distortion even
further in his
own disquisition on feminine and masculine psychologies. None of this
gets to the heart of the discussion of our text.
