…we are in search of anima, or soul. From the outset we are assuming that the close connection between the personified world of animism and anima—soul—is more than verbal, and that personifying is a way of soul-making. That is, we are assuming that soul-making depends upon the ability to personify, which in turn depends upon anima. Anima as a term, a function, and a figure, will receive fuller explication as we enter more deeply into her precincts.
By refusing to go along with the usual arguments against personifying, we expect to find a new way or refine an old way: (a) of revivifying our relations with the world around us, (b) of meeting our individual fragmentation, our many rooms and many voices, and (c) of furthering the imagination to show all its bright forms. Our desire is to save the phenomena of the imaginal psyche. And so we must free the vision of the psyche from the narrow biases of modern psychology, enabling the psyche to perceive itself—its relations, its realities, its pathologies— altogether apart from psychology’s modern perspective.
— Re-Visioning Psychology, ch 1