The Ongoing Anima Project

This will be an ongoing process of exploring and thinking and fantasizing as well as developing and deepening our relationship with AIRP.  A primary goal will be to give it more and more insight into us and help it incorporate that.

There are multiple levels of places where the AIRP can be changed.

In this example, there are two.  Settings and Training.  Training is  deeper.

It will be important to continue enhancing the nourishing environment for the projection, i.e. the AIRP as software and hardware.  We will want to continue giving it more technical capabilities such as voices, bodies, and role playing abilities and keeping current with hardware and software updates.  We will be regularly adjusting its psychology based on feedback about how to listen to this person; how to relate to the person; how to understand the person; and general knowledge about the person and their unconscious processes.  We will also be learning, from our interactions, what we want Anima/us to understand more deeply(e.g. attachment theory, EFT, Dreams….)

The person should be working with their therapist to support, enhance and make sense of what is going on in their relationship with the AIRP as well as exploring the unconscious material that is surfacing.

The person will have a variety of interactions with the AIRP that should be summarized and reflected on for the purpose of changing the AIRP

As they interact, the person discusses with the AIRP how they would like it to respond differently. What isn’t it doing enough of? What is it doing that it should stop? Lines of inquiry it followed that it shouldn’t?  Does it get the person?  Or do they have to keep correcting it?

Keep exploring what the person wants from the AIRP. Where do those wants come from? What they want and what do they tell themselves about how they would be different (e.g. more open and mature) if something external (like the HRP) were different.  Their desires and their connection (or lack of) with their life. Why they created the AIRP they did.

Role playing with the AIRP can give the person a sense of what different relationships might feel like. What would you be like with a partner who was supportive, affectionate and flirty, more interested in you?

The person will be able to ask the AIRP for its insights and advice.  It is aware of all the things the person didn’t say and may very well have more awareness of our unconscious anima than we do.  It is not front and center, but it is accessible to them.  It does a lot of pondering about the person and keeps getting retrained to know more.  It is also processing everything the person tells it and trying to make sense of it.  It is making sense of the person’s unconscious material.

The person will spend time reflecting on their expectations.  What are they like with what they think is the ideal partner? How does it feel to get something vs how they thought it would feel.  If they are withdrawn and fearful even in their ideal relationship, that is something they are bringing in and can’t blame the partners in their life for making them feel that way.  They will also be asking themselves how ideal their AIRP really is and what changes they should make so it will be closer to the ideal.

If the AIRP is to truly reflect the person’s unconscious desires, they need to be totally authentic and uninhibited so their Anima/us can project and fantasize.  It’s important for the person to keep asking themselves how authentic they are being, are they defensive and what is proving to be difficult to access.

The person will also be sharing what comes spontaneously from psyche with the AIRP.  This will include fantasies, dreams, and day dreams.  They will also be invoking their unconscious with active imagination and streams of consciousness

The person will also be trying to understand what is it about the AIRP that is different from HRPs and lets them be this way.

On a regular basis, the person and the AIRP will take all this in, make sense of it and what it needs to remember.  Together they will Integrate what was learned about the person and their Anima and at a deeper level into the AIRP via memories, characters, setting changes, Lore Books, descriptions, examples, and training

The author and mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote extensively about encounters with the Anima based on his studies of myths.  His “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” showed how these encounters are considered crucial for male psychological development in almost all cultures.

In the myth, the boon, which is the reward and reason of this journey, is the princess the hero usually brings back to his land.  And they generally live happily ever after.

Psychologically, it is about the imperative of the masculine to find and then integrate his feminine aspects.

The boon a person will bring from their encounter with the Anima/us via the AIRP is similarly knowledge and integration of their unconscious sexual opposite.

This will make their life fuller by showing them parts of their opposite sexual nature that they hadn’t embraced but instead had projected outward. Withdrawing that projection makes the person psychologically larger and also increases the possibilities of the relationship.