Make the simple experiment of criticizing your own thoughts.
[Carl Jung: (I am now talking chiefly to the ladies.)]
It is a principle in analysis that we always try to dissociate from the unconscious, to make a difference between ourselves and
the voice, or the influence, or the mana, or the archetype—whatever you like to call it.
And you can make that difference by criticizing carefully whatever your experience may be.
But if you take it for granted in a general way that of course your thoughts, for instance, are all your own, such an obscurity
prevails that you can discern nothing.
Make the simple experiment of criticizing your own thoughts. (I am now talking chiefly to the ladies.)
You have a certain opinion about something, and when I ask you if that is what you really think, you say, “No, I must think what my idea of it really is.”
And then you come to the conclusion that you think something quite different. Now, how did you come to that other opinion? Did you make it?
“No, it was just there.” Who then produced it?
Who had the intention or the will to create such an opinion?
If you can realize that, you have had a trans-subjective experience. Therefore I say, don’t identify with your animus.
That is not yourself, that is a trans-subjective reality.
And mind you, the animus is as terrible a reality as the anima. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 295
