A fundamental psychological activity whereby all
that one experiences is spontaneously and involuntarily personified,
i.e. becomes a psychic ‘person’. We meet our personifications in
DREAMS, FANTASY and in PROJECTION.
Jung’s first reference to personification provides us with an example.
It is part of his interpretation of a patient’s fantasy and he
says: ‘It was Miss M’s spirituality, which, personified as the Aztec,
was far too exalted for her ever to find a lover among mortal men’
(CW 5, para. 273). A psychic content that is of sufficient intensity or
mass to have broken away from the personality as a whole can be
perceived only when objectified or personified, according to Jung (see
APPERCEPTION; ARCHETYPE; COMPLEX). Personification thus enables
one to see the Psyche functioning as a series of autonomous systems.
It depotentiates the threatening power of what has broken away and
makes INTERPRETATION possible (see POSSESSION; PSYCHOSIS).
A natural psychic process, personifying was first observed by depth
psychologists in pathological states such as DISSOCIATION, hallucination
or break-up into multiple personalities. Later, Jung spoke of it
in connection with the psychology of PRIMITIVES and he likened it to
unconscious IDENTIFICATION or the PROJECTION of an unconscious
content into an object until such time as it could be integrated into
CONSCIOUSNESS. Freud translated concepts into personified images;
i.e. the censor, the super-ego, the polymorphously perverse child. He
was not the first physician or scientist to do so, however, as Jung
pointed out in his work on the physician/philosopher Paracelsus and
in elaborating the VISIONS of Zosimos, the alchemist (see ALCHEMY).
Jung himself personified those concepts that he observed empirically
(SHADOW; SELF, GREAT MOTHER, WISE OLD MAN/WOMAN, ANIMA AND
ANIMUS), saying, ‘the fact that the unconscious spontaneously personifies
… is the reason why I have taken over these personifications in
my terminology and formulated them as names’ (CW 9i, para. 51).
He was, in fact, writing of fantasy images. His radical formulation
was that psychological behaviour proceeds by way of changing patterns
between personified images (see IMAGE; IMAGO). De-personalisation
can be spoken of as LOSS OF SOUL. A patient who cannot
personify tends merely to personalise everything. ANALYSIS can be
seen as an exploration of the patient’s relationship to his or her
personifications. Since the ability to personify underlies all psychic

life, it ultimately provides us with the imagery of RELIGION and
MYTH.
Among Jung’s followers, Hillman (1975) has written at greatest
length and depth about personifying as a natural and essential
psychological process. He notes that: (1) it protects the psyche from
domination by anyone single power; (2) it provides a useful therapeutic
tool by establishing a perspective whereby a person can admit
that these figures belong to him and at the same time recognise they
are also free of his identity and control; (3) as Jung pointed out, by
personifying, the figures acquire objectivity and they are also differentiated
not only from unconsciousness but from one another as
well. That is to say, they no longer coalesce or adhere to one another;
yet (4) personifying encourages relationship between and among
psychic components; (5) it has an advantage over conceptualisation
in that it evokes a living response in contrast to intellectual nominalism.