The anima factor
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
” The anima is a factor of the utmost importance in the psychology of a man wherever emotions and affects are at work. She 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. He is then in a state of “discontent” and spreads discontent all around him. Sometimes the man’s relationship to the woman who has caught his anima accounts for the existence of this syndrome.”
From “Concerning Archetypes with Special Reference to the Anima Concept.
Anima
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/08/24/the-anima-is-bipolar/Carl Jung on the Anima
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
“The anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore. ”
The fuller paragraph:
“When, therefore, in dreams and other spontaneous products we meet an unknown female figure whose presence oscillates between the extremes of goddess and whore, it is advisable to let her keep her independence and not reduce her arbitrarily to something known. If the unconscious shows her as an “unknown”, this attribute should not be got rid of by main force with a view to arriving at a “rational explanation.”
Like the “supraordinate” personality, the anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore. Besides this ambivalence, the anima also has “occult” connections with “mysteries,” with the world of darkness in general. Whenever she emerges with some degree of clarity, she is usually outside of time; as a rule she is more or less immortal, because outside time.” ~Carl Jung; Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; Page 356.
Visions of the Anima
[Carl Jung on Visions of the Anima]
To Mr. O.
My dear O., 7 May 1947
Your material is, as I feared, much too rich ! It needs a tremendous amount of mental work to reduce it.
Your first vision where your Beatrice appears contains a point where I can show you how you can come in.
Beatrice, as an anima figure, is most certainly a personification; that means, a personal being created in this shape by the unconscious.
You can safely assume that this is the shape your anima has chosen in order to demonstrate to you how she looks.
Such a huge Beatrice is surely an unexpected sight. Instead of reacting to this rather amazing sight, you are satisfied with continuing your vision.
But the natural thing would be that you make use of the opportunity and start some dialogue with your anima.
Anybody who feels natural about such things would follow his surprise and put a question or two to her: why she appears as Beatrice? why she is so big? why you are so small? why she nurses your wife and not yourself? Etc.
You also might ask her-since she is the “messenger of the grail”-what that funny thing is with that orange? what the magic ring means? What is the matter with all those animals?
Treat her as a person, if you like as a patient or a goddess, but above all treat her as something that does exist.
Moreover, in this vision you get right under the influence of your anima, and that’s the reason why she begins to feed your wife, because your wife becomes underfed when you fall for your anima.
Therefore you must talk to this person in order to see what she is about and to learn what her thoughts and character are.
If you yourself step into your fantasy, then that overabundance of material will soon come to more reasonable proportions.
But since you are giving free rein to your intuitions you are just swamped by it.
Keep your head and your own personality over against the overwhelming multitude of images and aspects.
You can do that, as I tell you, by stepping into the picture with your ordinary human reactions and emotions.
It is a very good method to treat the an1ma as if she were a patient whose secret you ought to get at.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume II, Page 461.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
