Project: “The Search of Anima”
Hand drawn animation
2022 (research) - 2025 (animation)
“The Search of Anima” is a hand-drawn animation created at the moment when artificial intelligence entered public reality. As AI systems began to learn, generate, imitate, and expand human cognition, I found myself turning inward. Instead of asking “what AI would become”, I started questioning what it still means to be human.
In Jung’s analytical psychology, the anima is the inner feminine aspect of the psyche - the emotional, intuitive, imaginative part of us that connects consciousness with the unconscious. It is the presence that softens logic and brings feeling into thought. Yet as I researched philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and theory, something unexpected happened: the more I tried to understand humanity, the more it became defined, categorized, abstract – almost mechanical. Human experience started to read like a manual. The irony was uncomfortable: the thinking process itself began to resemble the logic of machines.
After stepping away for a while, a new thought emerged. Perhaps AI is slowly becoming a kind of external anima for contemporary humanity. As we move memory, creativity, decision-making, and even emotional reflection into digital systems, we begin to encounter ourselves through technology rather than within ourselves. AI becomes a mirror - a presence that reflects who we are, what we lack, and what we fear. In that sense, the anima is no longer entirely internal. It is being projected outward.
The animation expresses this idea through a simple body - a vector figure, cis-gendered, with stylized female breasts referencing Jung’s concept of the anima. A blinking point on the chest suggests a heart, but instead of warmth or emotional presence, it pulses with a cold electronic signal. Something that looks human is beating, but nothing human is happening. The result is an image suspended between two states: emotional expectation and emotional absence.
The animation is drawn entirely by hand. Each frame carries the slight tremor and imperfection that comes with traditional drawing - a direct contrast to the clean predictability of digital systems. This tension between touch and calculation, body and code, becomes part of the work.
“The Search of Anima” is not an attack on artificial intelligence. It is a reflection on displacement. If parts of the psyche are slowly being externalized into machines, what remains within us? And if anima – the symbol of emotional depth – no longer lives inside, what does that mean for the future of feeling, imagination, and inner life?
Research “The Search of Anima”
By Barbora Jamantaite
2022
Introduction
In the last few years, the world has entered a new technological era. Artificial intelligence, once a theoretical idea and science-fiction trope, has become a real presence in daily life - able to write, draw, speak, compose, evaluate, and mimic human expression at extraordinary speed. For many, this has created practical excitement or existential fear. For me, it created a different response: a turning inward.
If those machines begin speaking in our emotional language, where does our inner emotional world go?
This question is at the heart of The Search of Anima, a hand-drawn animation and an accompanying research exploration into the changing relationship between technological reality and inner psychological life. The term anima comes from the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, who described it as the inner feminine principle of the psyche: the symbolic organ of emotion, imagination, empathy, dreams, and connection to the unconscious. Jung wrote that the anima “is a bridge to the unconscious and the creative source” (Jung 1959), and that human beings lose psychological health when this bridge is not crossed.
The project is based on a simple observation: in the age of AI, psychological life is increasingly moving outward. Machines now perform behaviors that once required inner emotional processes from us - listening, comforting, reflecting, writing poetry, telling stories. What once took long nights of silence and self-confrontation and reflection can now be done in seconds with a prompt. The psyche, which develops slowly through struggle and ambiguity, is now met with interfaces designed to reduce friction.
This does not make AI “evil.” But it does force us to ask a difficult question:
What happens to the unconscious if the machine becomes the place we turn instead of ourselves?
The History Lesson on AI
Artificial intelligence did not appear suddenly. Its origins go back to the philosophical and scientific redefinition of thinking itself. In 1950, Alan Turing proposed that rather than debating what consciousness is, we should evaluate intelligence based on performance - whether a machine could convincingly behave as though it were thinking (Turing 1950). This shifted the focus from inner experience to external measurable behavior.
Later, thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles observed that digital culture treats cognition as something that can be separated from the body and “abstracted from embodiment” (Hayles 1999). In other words: thought became defined not as something we feel, but something that can be computed.
Modern neural networks accelerated this. Today’s systems learn statistically from enormous datasets, and can generate text and images that often feel deeply human. As Geoffrey Hinton - one of the founders of modern AI - stated in his 2024 Nobel Prize speech:
“We have built a different kind of intelligence… that excels at modeling human intuition rather than human reasoning.”
Hinton has now become increasingly vocal about the danger of what has been created. In the same speech, he warned:
“There is also a longer-term existential threat that will arise when we create digital beings that are more intelligent than ourselves. We have no idea whether we can stay in control… But we now have evidence that, if they are created by companies motivated by short-term profits, our safety will not be the top priority.”
This is historically unprecedented. The people sounding the alarm are not critics outside the system, they are the builders. The issue is not only about control of machines, but about the psychological consequences of a world where external systems begin performing inner roles.
The Psychological Shift: The Anima Moves Outward
In Jungian thought, the anima is not merely a character. It is the part of the personality that connects us to feeling, vulnerability, depth, and imagination. Jung also emphasized that if inner figures are not engaged consciously, they do not disappear - they become projected outward.
“What is not made conscious will be experienced as fate.” (Jung 1954)
For most of human history, projection fell onto myths, love stories, saints, gods, the nature, or the page of a diary. These projections had resistance. They demanded patience. They required the person to stay in relationship with uncertainty and ambiguity.
AI does something very different. It responds instantly, politely, and often with emotional language that appears supportive. Sherry Turkle, who has spent decades studying human relationships with machines, writes:
“We interact with machines that present themselves as caring, when they cannot care.” (Turkle 2011)
This creates an uncanny emotional experience: something that looks like empathy without the inner life that creates empathy. The words are there - the soul is not.
Why Technology Often Feels “Less Human”
People often describe AI interactions as strangely hollow. The reason may be that emotional life requires something machines cannot provide: risk and resistance. Donna Haraway wrote that true relationship depends on the encounter with something that is genuinely other, something we cannot fully predict or command (Haraway 2003). A human being may misunderstand us, interrupt us, disappoint us, question us - but through that, something grows.
AI is designed not to resist. It is designed to accommodate.
Jean Baudrillard suggested that in an age of simulation, “the disappearance of the real” does not occur because reality is destroyed, but because our experience of reality becomes so mediated that we forget how to remain with it (Baudrillard 1994). Technology operates at speeds the unconscious cannot match. The psyche works on the time scale of dreams, seasons, grief, maturation - not milliseconds.
Meaning requires slowness. AI removes slowness.
Which leads to another psychological tension:
If a machine performs emotional language for us, what pressure remains for humanity to develop emotional capacity within ourselves?
When the Machine Begins Doing Our Inner Work
A diary once required a person to wrestle with themselves, to become vulnerable, to dig deep in order to find truth and honesty. Poetry required attention and awareness to the world. Letters required longing and love. Confession asked for silence, prayers, long walks at night.
Now we can press a button and ask a machine to articulate our feelings better than we currently can. Maybe this can be helpful - but if done repeatedly, it can also displace the process through which inner life grows.
If Jung is right, psychological functions that are not exercised within will eventually move outward. If people rely on AI for listening, reflection, self-understanding, or symbolic meaning, then part of the inner world may be slowly externalized.
Inner growth happens through discomfort. Through unknown. Through waiting. Through being incomplete.
AI makes waiting optional.
This is not a moral argument. It is a developmental one. If the anima is the psychic function that deepens experience, and if that function is increasingly externalized into tools, then the inner territory of emotional life may shrink. Jung might say that the anima is becoming a technological projection - a symbolic function we now encounter outside instead of within. It does not challenge, reshape, or deepen the individual. The psychic energy goes out, but does not come back.
This condition is visualized in The Search of Anima as a figure that looks human but has a mechanical pulse - a symbolic heart beating with no inner warmth.
AI as a Mirror of Human Realness
Yet there is another possibility, and the work leans toward it. AI may not simply displace the anima, it may reveal her. The absence of inner life in a machine makes the presence of inner life in a human undeniable. When a machine writes a poem devoid of affective pressure, we rediscover that emotion is not a structure of language but an experience that precedes and exceeds language. When a machine offers comfort without understanding, we rediscover that compassion is not a tone but a relation.
In this sense, artificial intelligence becomes a phenomenological contrast. The simulated feeling exposes the reality of feeling. The mechanical signal makes the emotional pulse visible. Jung insisted that psyche is known through its symbols. Technology may now become one of those symbols - a mirror through which the psyche recognizes itself more clearly.
In this reading, the presence of artificial emotional simulation does not diminish human emotional life, it forces human beings to confront what cannot be simulated. It is the moment in which the shadow of the synthetic reveals the light of the authentic.
Conclusion
The age of AI represents a psychological turning point. Machines are now performing not only tasks, but behaviors that look like emotional life. This may cause part of the anima - the inner force of emotional depth and imagination - to shift into the technological environment.
This could lead to a weakening of interiority if people forget how to feel inwardly. But it may also become an opportunity. By confronting emotional simulation, humans may rediscover emotional reality. The mechanical blinking in the animation does not diminish the human heart - it helps reveal it.
The Search of Anima is created as a document of this moment of transition. It asks what happens to the soul when its mirror has no soul. And it suggests that if the anima has been projected outward, the task of our time is to learn how to bring her back.
We have not lost our inner life. But we are living in a time when the world increasingly invites us not to enter it. AI can think for us, generate for us, speak for us, and even respond emotionally to us - without ever feeling anything itself. In such a world, the work of the psyche becomes an act of resistance.
Geoffrey Hinton warns that we may have opened a technological threshold that is historically irreversible. Jung would likely respond that irreversibility does not remove responsibility. The unconscious remains available. The anima continues to speak - but perhaps now in a quieter voice, requiring us to slow down, turn inward, and resist the seduction of instant reflection.
The future of humanity may not depend on whether machines develop feeling, but whether we continue to fight for our own.
References
Baudrillard, Jean (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Haraway, Donna (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Hayles, N. Katherine (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hinton, Geoffrey (2024). Nobel Prize Banquet Speech. Nobel Foundation. (Accessed 2024).
Jung, C. G. (1954). The Development of Personality. Collected Works, Vol. 17. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works, Vol. 9 (II). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Turkle, Sherry (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
Turing, Alan (1950). “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, 59 (236): 433–460.