JUNGIAN.DIRECTORY
The inner figure of woman held by a man and
the figure of man at work in a woman’s psyche. Though unlike in
the ways in which they manifest, anima and animus have certain
characteristics in cOlpmon. Both are psychic IMAGES. Each is a configuration
arising from a basic archetypal structure (see ARCHETYPE).
As the fundamental forms which underlie the ‘feminine’ aspects of man
and the ‘masculine’ aspects of woman, they are seen as OPPOSITES.
As psychic components, they are subliminal to consciousness and
function from within the unconscious psyche; hence, they are of
benefit to but also can endanger consciousness by POSSESSION (see
below). They operate in relation to the dominant psychic principle
of a man or a woman and not simply, as is commonly suggested, as
the contra sexual psychological counterpart of maleness or femaleness,
however. They act as PSYCHOPOMPI or guides of soul and they
can become necessary links with creative possibilities and instruments
of INDIVIDUATION.
Because of their archetypal connections, anima and animus have
been represented in many COLLECTIVE forms and figures: as Aphrodite,
Athena, Helen of Troy, Mary, Sapientia and Beatrice; or as
Hermes, Apollo, Hercules, Alexander the Great, Romeo. In projection,
they attract attention and emotional fervour as public figures
but also as friends, lovers, commonplace and ordinary wives and
husbands. We meet them as consorts in our dreams. As personified
components of PSYCHE they connect and involve us with life (see
PERSONIFICATION). Complete realisation and integration of either
image requires partnership with the opposite sex. The disentanglement
and recognition of aspects of this SYZYGY between ANALYST
AND PATIENT is a primary task in ANALYSIS.
Among his definitions (CW 6), Jung summarised anima/animus as
‘soul-images’. He later elucidated this statement by calling each the
not-I. Being not-I for a man most probably corresponds to something feminine and, because it is not-I, it is outside himself, belonging to
his soul or spirit. The anima (or animus, as the case may be), is a
factor which happens to one, an a priori element of moods, reactions,
impulses in man; of commitments, beliefs, inspirations in a woman –
and for both something that prompts one to take cognisance of
whatever is spontaneous and meaningful in psychic life. Behind the
animus, lung asserted, lies ‘the archetype of meaning; just as the
anima is the archetype of life itself’ (CW 9i, para. 66) .
. These concepts were devised empirically and enabled lung to give
coherence to a wide range of observable psychic phenomena and to
differentiate it further when working with analysands. In analysis,
separation of anima or animus is closely connected with the initial
work of making conscious the SHADOW. The original images are
illustrative of semi-conscious psychic COMPLEXES, autonomous and
largely independent PERSONIFICATIONS until they acquire solidity, influence,
and, finally CONSCIOUSNESS by encounter with the everyday
world. lung warned against conceptual ising only (thereby losing
touch with anima/animus as living forces) or to work in a manner
which denies the PSYCHIC REALITY of such inner figures.
Possession by either anima or animus transforms the personality
in such a way as to give prominence to those traits which are seen
as psychologically characteristic of the opposite sex. Either way,
a person loses individuality, first of all, and then in either case, both
charm and values. In a man, he becomes dominated by anima and
by the EROS principle with connotations of restlessness, promiscuity,
moodiness, sentimentality – whatever could be described as unconstrained
emotionality. A woman subject to the authority of animus
and LOGOS is managerial, obstinate, ruthless, domineering. Both become
one-sided. He is seduced by inferior people and forms meaningless
attachments; she, being taken in by second-rate thinking,
marches forward under the banner of unrelated convictions.
Speaking in non-professional terms, lung said that men accepted
the anima readily enough when she appeared in a novel or as a film
star. But it was a different matter when it came to seeing the role she
played in their own lives.
Had he made a corresponding statement on the animus, he might
have said that until recently women have been only too ready and
prone to let men do their fighting for them, secretly hoping for
deliverance by a knight on a white charger. But now that it has come
to their accepting their places not as men but alongside men, it is a
different matter. Wanting to enjoy equal status, but, at the same time
desiring to remain true to their identity as women, they have to come
to terms with who is really boss in their lives and unmask their own
sources of authority.
Hillman (1972, 1975) has investigated and elucidated anima
psychology. He insists that it is she who personifies the unconsciousness
of our entire Western culture and may be the image by which
we will be liberated imaginatively.
There is no up-to-date work of corresponding depth on the animus.
Moreover, because of the unfortunate connotations of animus
possession that may have characterised pioneering women in a
male-dominated society, very little attention has been given to the
psychic interventions of the so-called positive or natural animus in
contrast to the negative and acquired animus (Ulanov, 1981).
Personification of the feminine nature of a man’s unconscious and masculine nature of a woman’s. This psychological bisexuality is a reflection of the biological fact that it is the larger number of male (or female) genes which is the decisive factor in the determination of sex. The smaller number of contrasexual genes seems to produce a corresponding contrasexual character, which usually remains unconscious. Anima and animus manifest themselves most typically in personified form as figures in dreams and fantasies (“dream girl”, “dream-lover), or in the irrationalities of a man’s feeling and a woman’s thinking. As regulators of behaviour they are two of the most influential archetypes.
C. G. Jung: “Every man carries with him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definitive feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organism of the man, an imprint or ‘archetype; of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman… Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion.” (The Development of Personality, Collected Works, Vol. 17, p. 198.)
“The natural function of the animus (as well as of the anima) is to remain in [their] place between individual consciousness and the collective unconscious; exactly as the persona as a sort of stratum between the ego consciousness and the objects of the external world. The animus and the anima should function as a bridge, or a door, leading to the images of the collective unconscious, as the persona should be a sort of bridge into the world.” (Unpublished Seminar Notes. “Visions” I, p. 116.)
The inner feminine side of a man. (See also animus, Eros, Logos and soul-image.)
The anima is both a personal complex and an archetypal image of woman in the male psyche. It is an unconscious factor incarnated anew in every male child, and is responsible for the mechanism of projection. Initially identified with the personal mother, the anima is later experienced not only in other women but as a pervasive influence in a man’s life.
The anima is the archetype of life itself.[“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” CW 9i, par. 66.]There is [in man] an imago not only of the mother but of the daughter, the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess, and the chthonic Baubo. Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forego; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya-and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it.[The Syzygy: Anima and Animus,” CW 9ii, par. 24]
The anima is personified in dreams by images of women ranging from seductress to spiritual guide. It is associated with the eros principle, hence a man’s anima development is reflected in how he relates to women. Within his own psyche, the anima functions as his soul, influencing his ideas, attitudes and emotions.
The anima is not the soul in the dogmatic sense, not an anima rationalis, which is a philosophical conception, but a natural archetype that satisfactorily sums up all the statements of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, of the history of language and religion. . . . It is always the a priori element in [a man’s] moods, reactions, impulses, and whatever else is spontaneous in psychic life.[“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” CW 9i, par. 57.]The anima . . . . intensifies, exaggerates, falsifies, and mythologizes all emotional relations with his work and with other people of both sexes. The resultant fantasies and entanglements are all her doing. When the anima is strongly constellated, she softens the man’s character and makes him touchy, irritable, moody, jealous, vain, and unadjusted.[“Concerning the Archetypes and the Anima Concept,”[ ibid., par. 144.]
As an inner personality, the anima is complementary to the persona and stands in a compensatory relationship to it.
The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible . . . and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona’s counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife’s slipper.[“Anima and Animus,” CW 7, par. 309.]
Hence the character of the anima can generally be deduced from that of the persona; all those qualities absent from the outer attitude will be found in the inner.
The tyrant tormented by bad dreams, gloomy forebodings, and inner fears is a typical figure. Outwardly ruthless, harsh, and unapproachable, he jumps inwardly at every shadow, is at the mercy of every mood, as though he were the feeblest and most impressionable of men. Thus his anima contains all those fallible human qualities his persona lacks. If the persona is intellectual, the anima will certainly be sentimental.[“Definitions,” CW 6, par. 804.]
Similarly, where a man identifies with the persona, he is in effect possessed by the anima, with attendant symptoms.
Identity with the persona automatically leads to an unconscious identity with the anima because, when the ego is not differentiated from the persona, it can have no conscious relation to the unconscious processes. Consequently it is these processes, it is identical with them. Anyone who is himself his outward role will infallibly succumb to the inner processes; he will either frustrate his outward role by absolute inner necessity or else reduce it to absurdity, by a process of enantiodromia. He can no longer keep to his individual way, and his life runs into one deadlock after another. Moreover, the anima is inevitably projected upon a real object, with which he gets into a relation of almost total dependence.[Ibid., par. 807.]
Jung distinguished four broad stages of the anima, analogous to levels of the Eros cult described in the late classical period. He personified them as Eve, Helen, Mary and Sophia.[“The Psychology of the Transference,” CW 16, par. 361. ]
In the first stage, Eve, the anima is indistinguishable from the personal mother. The man cannot function well without a close tie to a woman. In the second stage, personified in the historical figure of Helen of Troy, the anima is a collective and ideal sexual image (“All is dross that is not Helen”-Marlowe). The third stage, Mary, manifests in religious feelings and a capacity for lasting relationships. In the fourth stage, as Sophia (called Wisdom in the Bible), a man’s anima functions as a guide to the inner life, mediating to consciousness the contents of the unconscious. She cooperates in the search for meaning and is the creative muse in an artist’s life.
Ideally, a man’s anima proceeds naturally through these stages as he grows older. In fact, as an archetypal life force, the anima manifests in whatever shape or form is necessary to compensate the dominant conscious attitude.
So long as the anima is unconscious, everything she stands for is projected. Most commonly, because of the initially close tie between the anima and the protective mother-imago, this projection falls on the partner, with predictable results.
[A man’s] ideal of marriage is so arranged that his wife has to take over the magical role of the mother. Under the cloak of the ideally exclusive marriage he is really seeking his mother’s protection, and thus he plays into the hands of his wife’s possessive instincts. His fear of the dark incalculable power of the unconscious gives his wife an illegitimate authority over him, and forges such a dangerously close union that the marriage is permanently on the brink of explosion from internal tension.[“Anima and Animus,” CW 7, par. 316.]
No matter where a man is in terms of psychological development, he is always prone to see aspects of his anima, his soul, in an actual woman. The same is true of the animus. Their personal aspects may be integrated and their significance understood, but their essential nature cannot be exhausted.
Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition. Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind.[The Syzygy: Anima and Animus,” CW 9ii, par. 40.]
The psychological priority in the first half of life is for a man to free himself from the anima fascination of the mother. In later life, the lack of a conscious relationship with the anima is attended by symptoms characteristic of “loss of soul.”
Younger people . . . can bear even the total loss of the anima without injury. The important thing at this stage is for a man to be a man. . . . After the middle of life, however, permanent loss of the anima means a diminution of vitality, of flexibility, and of human kindness. The result, as a rule, is premature rigidity, crustiness, stereotypy, fanatical one-sidedness, obstinacy, pedantry, or else resignation, weariness, sloppiness, irresponsibility, and finally a childish ramollissement [petulance] with a tendency to alcohol.[“Concerning the Archetypes and the Anima Concept,” CW 9i, par. 146f.]
One way for a man to become familiar with the nature of his anima is through the method of active imagination. This is done by personifying her as an autonomous personality, asking her questions and attending to the response.
I mean this as an actual technique. . . . The art of it 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 genuineness of the voice of one’s interlocutor.[“Anima and Animus,” CW 7, pars. 323f.]
Jung suggested that if the encounter with the shadow is the “apprentice-piece” in a man’s development, then coming to terms with the anima is the “master-piece.”[“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” CW 9i, par. 61.] The goal is her transformation from a troublesome adversary into a function of relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. Jung called this “the conquest of the anima as an autonomous complex.”
With the attainment of this goal it becomes possible to disengage the ego from all its entanglements with collectivity and the collective unconscious. Through this process the anima forfeits the daemonic power of an autonomous complex; she can no longer exercise the power of possession, since she is depotentiated. She is no longer the guardian of treasures unknown; no longer Kundry, daemonic Messenger of the Grail, half divine and half animal; no longer is the soul to be called “Mistress,” but a psychological function of an intuitive nature, akin to what the primitives mean when they say, “He has gone into the forest to talk with the spirits” or “My snake spoke with me” or, in the mythological language of infancy, “A little bird told me.”[The Mana-Personality,” CW 7, par. 374.]