ABSTRACT
Heart of Darkness sketches several alternative outcomes for the encounter with “the immensity” of the shadow in the jungle/unconscious. Anima and Africa makes occasional reference to Heart of Darkness but is primarily not about that novel or its main themes of colonialism and racism. Anima and Africa provides Jungian readings of selected texts, but by necessity the study omits more than it encompasses. Carl Jung states that those who travel to places like Africa that are not “overgrown by civilization” may experience the shadow as “a relapse into barbarism” and prehistory. Jung believes that a man must do shadow work before doing anima work and that the anima is multifaceted- the Kore and the “stages of eroticism”. Jung describes the anima as a field of energy even broader than the collective unconscious. Like Sigmund Freud, Jung was a universalist, who believed that there is a fundamental unity to the human psyche, independent of time and place.
