The 1997 film “Titanic” tells an extraordinary love story that can be viewed as a psychological night-sea journey—a watery initiation of anima development as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and C. G. Jung described —that brings the heroine from Eve to Helen to Mary to Sophia. The contemporary framing story of the elder heroine’s remembered love stimulated by found objects on the ship (comb, mirror, and a drawing) exemplifies the process by which the anima develops to Sophia wisdom.
Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film “Ikiru” presents the viewer with a more private night-sea journey: a sudden awareness of an individual’s mortality that leads to living a more engaged and meaningful life. The film’s hero confronts what psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom has called “the four existential issues”: death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom. Simultaneous to his outward late-life “Hero’s Journey”, the hero experiences a far deeper inward arc of transformation of consciousness, which takes him from the individual persona and ego, to a realization of the Self, and finally the transpersonal Unus Mundus.