what does "habet mulier animam" mean (from Carl Jung's writings on anima and animus)?

Question

I can't seem to find a exact translation to this. Would I be right to assume that it means "to have a woman's soul"?

"They say that Jung used to actually speak to and have both verbal and inner dialog with his inner woman... LOL What a nut ball/genius he was! "
I would have to agree there! He explains it in 'The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious' stating that "The psyche not being a unity but a contradictory multiplicity of complexes, the dissociation reuired for our dialects with the anima is not so terribly difficult. The art consists only in allowing our invisible partner to make herself heard, in putting the mechanism of expression momentarily at her disposal, without being overcome by the distaste one naturally feels at playing such an apparently ludicrous game with oneself, or by doubts as to the genuinness of the voice of one's interlocutor."
So basically, he feels like an screwball when he has full conversations with himself yet does it anyway. hmmm
"habet ...." comes from Part II of the Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, the chapter on Anima and Animus

Answer 1

Habeo, habere: to have/hold
Mulier, muleris: woman/wife
Animus, animi: spirit/heart/character

I haven't been actively taking Latin for a while but it's a pretty simple phrase so I'm confident that I'm right. "mulier" is the nominative, "habet" is a present 3rd person singular verb, and Animam is the accusative. If that made no sense at all, then:

Literally, this means "the woman holds the spirit"

Or "the Woman has the heart" or "Woman has the soul"

These would all make sense gramatically, and would mean that the phrase is of typical Latin sentence structure. In Latin, the verb is commonly at the beginning, followed by the subject, followed by the direct object.

The problem with your translation is that to make "woman" possessive instead of the subject of the sentence, it would need to be the genative conjugation, meaning the word would read "mulieris," not "mulier." Another problem is that in order to mean "to have" the word would have to be "habere."

So check your source. If the phrase is "Habere mulieris animam" it means "to have the soul of a woman." If it is exactly what you wrote, the best I can come up with is what I put earlier.

Answer 2

Well that is what the work itself (as a general idea) is about but that word "mulier" is strange to me. I could not find, nor did I recognize these words in either french, Latin, Spanish or Italian. Where did you hear this? Just curious... I didn't check German because it just doesn't sound German so... I didn't bother

They say that Jung used to actually speak to and have both verbal and inner dialog with his inner woman... LOL What a nut ball/genius he was!