Four Quartets: Defeated Anima

Eliot’s image as a highly reputable and influential literary figure does not go along with the personality as found in Four Quartets in terms of analytical psychology. What the reader is led to find there is the return to the world of his childhood, where the poet is ruled by the mother, rather than to seek for equal and harmonious terms with the anima-figures. Eliot strongly advocates the communion with the Logos, which is parallel to the psychological encounter with the Self, the God-image. However, in Four Quartets there is hardly found any feminine participation, which is a vital preliminary step for the union of the ego with the Self. The role of the feminine element, the anima, in the development of the psyche is to strengthen ego-consciousness against the overwhelming power of the unconscious. The ego-consciousness, firmly established with stability and autonomy, is then ready to experience the Encounter without the risk of self-dissolution, achieving a harmony and balance in its relationship to the Self. Four Quartets is dominated by the motif of self-abnegation and Eliot here appears to deny the value of autonomy of the human, urging giving it up altogether for an access to the Logos. Analytical psychology would not see this posture as any way leading to the goal of psychological development, the individuation, but just a regression to the mother-ruled childhood.