Carl Jung: Animus in a man is not a person, it is his conscious principle
LECTURE V 19 February 1930
Dr. Jung: I have brought you today the picture1 of which I spoke last week, the reproduction of the Tibetan mandala.
It is a yantra, used for the purpose of concentration upon the most philosophical thought of the Tibetan Lamas.
It shows in the innermost circle the diamond wedge or thunderbolt, that symbol of potential energy, and the white light symbolizing absolute truth.
And here are the four functions, the four fields of colour, and then the four gates to the world.
Then comes the gazelle garden, and finally the ring of the fire of desirousness outside.
You will notice that it is embedded in the earth region exactly to the middle, with the upper part reaching to the celestial world.
The figures above are three great teachers, the living Buddhas or Bodhisattvas, two yellow and one red.
That has to do with the Tibetan Lamaistic doctrine.
They correspond to the mountains on the earth below.
What the mountain is on earth the great teacher is among men.
I have another mandala where, instead of a thunderbolt in the centre, there is the god Mahasukha, one form of the Indian god Shiva, in the embrace of his wife Shakti.
Today I think we will continue our dreams.
Dream [23]
Our patient says that he is at a sort of festival celebration in a Protestant church, in which the benches are not all arranged in the same direction but in the form of a square, so that they all face the
pulpit, which is in the middle of one of the long walls of the church.
A hymn is being sung, a very well-known one, typical of our Christmas festivals: “O du frohliche, O du selige Weihnachtszeit.”2 (One hears it everywhere at that time of the year.)
He joins in the singing of the hymn and suddenly hears somebody behind him singing the same words in a peculiar soprano voice, exceedingly loud and the melody quite different, so that everyone around that person gets completely out of tune.
Our dreamer immediately stops and looks back to see who the singer can be.
It is a man sitting on a bench at right angles to his own and wearing, strangely enough, a sort of woman’s garment, so that he feels unable to make out positively whether it is a man or a woman.
Then the service comes to an end, and on going out, he finds he has left his hat and overcoat in the wardrobe. (He was thinking naturally not of the word “wardrobe,” but of “garde-robe” which is of course really a French word, but in French one would say “vestiaire”. ”
Garde-robe” is used in German, taken over from the old French word, which originally meant the man who takes care of the wraps.)
On the way back to the wardrobe, he wonders whether the word “garde-robe” in French is a masculine or feminine noun, and he comes to the conclusion that one should say “le garde-robe,” and not, as it is used in German as a feminine noun, “die Garde-robe.”
While thinking of that, he suddenly hears the singer talking to a man who is with him saying that today he has shown for once that he too can sing.
Our dreamer again turns back to look at him and has to restrain himself from making a disagreeable remark to him.
He notices that he appears more masculine this time and that he has a Jewish type of face, and then seems to know who he is and remembers that his son is a friend of his.
Then the son suddenly appears and violently reproaches his father because he upset the hymn.
Associations:
As a child he had been forced to go to church every Sunday.
On account of that compulsion, he developed an antipathy to churches and parsons, which is the reason that he almost never goes to church except on special festivals. The church in which the benches are arranged as he described, all facing the pulpit, is the church to which he had been made to go as a boy.
Concerning the hymn he says, “When I think of that hymn, I think of the end, the refrain, ‘Freue dich O Christenheit,’ meaning ‘Rejoice, 0 Christendom.'”
Then he associates with his joining in the hymn the fact that he cannot sing. He is quite unmusical, and if he tried he would probably upset the melody as much as the man who sang an entirely different
melody in a high woman’s soprano.
With the peculiar singer, whose sex is uncertain, he associates the fact that he, as a boy, read a book called Der Golem by Meyrink. (That is quite a remarkable book; I think it has now been translated
into English.) You remember that in a former seminar he dreamed of a square building where he climbed over a fence.
We spoke especially of his associations with the end of that book, Der Golem, where the hero comes to the locked gates. Here again he associates just that last scene, where the hero arrives at the supreme moment when he really should find the answer to all riddles, the supreme solution of the whole problem, but then comes to the locked gate upon which is the symbol of the hermaphrodite.
The dreamer says that this symbol of the hermaphrodite means, as he would interpret it, the alchemical nuptial, that is, the blending of the male and female in one indivisible whole. He says that he can’t help feeling that that song would sound very different from the hymn in the Protestant church-in other words, that such ideas would not fit in with the ideas of the Protestant church and would prove most
disturbing. Obviously!
Concerning the word “garde-robe,” the uncertainty whether it is masculine or feminine refers naturally to the same thing as the dubious sex of the man, and again he associates the hermaphrodite symbol.
As to the discovery that the singer is Jewish, he says that he thinks Meyrink must be a Jew; he is convinced that even if he does not confess to it, his creed would be Judaic, he would be reserving in the secret room of his soul the Judaic conviction.
That would explain, he says, why Meyrink in his book The Green Face sends the hero to Brazil to save him when the continent of Europe collapses.
You see, that book has a somewhat unsatisfactory ending.
Apparently Meyrink got very involved in a complicated plot and did not know how to find his way out of the tangle; then by divine providence, a great storm came up and devastated the whole Occident and got him out of the difficulty of a satisfactory solution.
His hero, Sephardi, the Jewish scholar, having foreseen it, had collected his family and friends and emigrated to Brazil unharmed, as it is a local storm in Europe only.
Obviously the dreamer means that Meyrink, being a Jew, saves his tribesmen in the fatal moment and nobody else, a sort of exodus out of the cursed land.
You probably would not have expected such a dream after the ones before, I certainly would not have guessed it.
That is the wonderful irrationality of the unconscious which always beats us.
I would not have foreseen it–except in one respect: that last mandala dream would upset certain Occidental convictions, and as this man has had a definite religious education of a narrow kind, he
cannot help preserving certain prejudices which would be cruelly hurt by the ideas of the mandala psychology, because that brings a new ethical orientation.
It is a point of view that does not fit into the Christian standpoint, which divides the world into good and evil and does not allow any reconciliation.
The whole of Christian eschatology follows this line of thought in teaching about the ultimate things-that at the end of the world there will be a Last Judgment where good and evil are divided definitely and forever by those two remarkable institutions Heaven and Hell.
All the evil ones will be cast into hell and will cook there forever, and the good ones will attain that blissful condition where they are allowed to make music during all eternity.
This is a dogmatic statement of the irreconcilability of good and evil.
Nothing to be done about it, just give up, no choice.
But the mandala psychology is of a very different kind: an endless chain of lives moving on through good and evil, through all aspects of things.
The eternally revolving wheel of existence, now in the shadow, now in the light.
This is an extraordinary relativation of the ethical problem-that having been high you will be low, having been low you will be high.
Out of the darkness comes the light, and after the light comes again the darkness, so evil is not so bad and good is not so good because they are related and only together by a mistake which remains inexplicable.
Why, after all, is it not perfect since it is the work of a perfect Master?
The Occidental answer is: because the devil put some dirt into it, or man was such an ass that he spoiled it somehow, this work of an omnipotent and omniscient Being. The fact of evil was
the cause of the invention of the devil, who double-crossed the good intentions of the perfect Master.
In the Eastern mandala psychology, all this takes on an entirely different aspect. Relativity is rather shocking to a Westerner.
It intimates a certain indulgence even, and to a puritanical mind that is almost unbearable.
That is the case with this man. It would not be so much so in theory.
He does not go to church, he does not follow the traditional creed; but when it comes to practical life it is a bit awkward, because our church views are all linked up with our real god, which is respectability, the eyes of the community.
When he comes to that, the real god, and his fear of those eyes, he collapses into a terrible conflict.
Now, if he has really understood the meaning of the last dream, that the machine is now going to function, it would indicate that he is about to enter life in a new way, where every wheel is in place
and where the machine will yield the all-around life which it is meant to yield, a complete life, with light and shadow.
But no sooner is he at that point than he hurts himself against traditional convictions, and this next dream contains obviously the problem of the offended Western values.
Therefore he is brought instantly back to his childhood, when he was forced to go to church.
It is as if a voice from within said, “Remember the days when you were still in the church and believed these things. How can you get away from that?
You are still there singing the same song as the whole Christian community.” And then comes the first disturbance, that soprano voice.
Now where does that soprano voice come from?
Miss Howells: It is the feminine side of himself, the anima.
Dr. Jung: Sure!
It is Madame Anima who suddenly begins to sing too.
He was singing the song of the community as if he were a perfectly respectable member of that church, and then the anima breaks in with an entirely unsuitable song.
And what does that melody express? Not the words, but the melody. What is the value of that?
Answer: Feeling.
Dr. Jung: Yes, nothing is more impressive than an organ.
When you are reminded of a Protestant church you just yawn, a terrible bore, but when you hear the music, you cannot help having feeling, it stirs you. Perhaps not if you go regularly, but a man like myself, who has not been to church for an eternity, will naturally have a sentimental feeling-a beautiful remembrance which appeals to one’s feeling.
It is wrong not to acknowledge it. A sermon is tedious, while music pulls at the heart.
So it is very typical that the dream speaks of feelings, which are really dangerous in a man’s case.
In his thinking these ideas have no hold on him any longer; he is firm in his convictions.
But the music gets him, and he is ground under.
He is drawn in and cannot help singing, so he gets into a situation or mood that is quite opposed to the intention mentioned in the dream before.
Then the conflict arises in his feeling sphere, and that is why his anima begins to sing. The anima is always connected with the inferior function.
As he is an intellectual, his feelings are somewhat inferior, and she is like a personification of his inferior feeling function.
Why does the anima not sing the church song?
Why an entirely different melody?
Mrs. Baynes: To tell him she is there.
Dr. Jung: But what for?
Mrs. Baynes: Because she wants to make trouble.
Dr. Jung: That would be almost a depreciation of the anima.
Mrs. Baynes: He does not appreciate her, so she wants to make herself felt.
Dr. Jung: But if she only wants to make herself felt or to make trouble, she could just as well be a dog that barks, or an automobile that begins whooping outside the church.
Mrs. Sigg: The anima has a different taste. It is not the taste of the Church, it would perhaps be more like the Indian style.
-Dr. Jung: You mean more in favor of the mandala psychology?-
That is exceedingly probable, because the anima has to be excluded from the Christian frame.
She is eternally a heretic and does not fit in at all, a perfect pagan, in more or less open revolt against the Christian point of view.
Perhaps you are astonished that I speak of her in such a personal way, but that has forever been the way of taking her, that figure has always been expressed by poets in a personal form.
Usually she is projected into a real woman, who thereby becomes more imaginary, like the Lady of the Troubadours and the Knights of the Cours d’Amour, slightly divine.
Then you know how Rider Haggard speaks of “She who must be obeyed”; he makes her a very definite figure.
So to give her the right quality we must describe her as a personality and not as a scientific abstraction.
In zoology you can speak of the species, the whale. But there are many different kinds of whales, you must say which whale, and then it has a specific value.
The anima represents the primitive layer of man’s psychology, and primitive psychology shuns abstractions.
There are practically no concepts in primitive languages.
In Arabic, there are sixty words for types of camel and no word for camel in the abstract.
Ask an Arab the word for camel and he does not know. It is either an old, or a young, or a female camel, etc., each called by a different name. In a language more primitive still there are thirty different words for cutting-cutting with a knife, a sword, string, etc.-and no word for the act of cutting.
My particular friend Steiner7 supposes that there were pre-stages of the earth, one a globe of fire, another a globe of gases, and on one of them, he says, there could even be observed some sensations of taste.
Now, whose were the sensations of taste?
There is no such thing as abstract sensation, some sensation suspended in space to the Big Dipper or Sirius.
In one Negro language there are fifty expressions for walking, but not one for the act of walking; one cannot say, “I am walking.” Nor is there a word for man.
We have all these abstract concepts, and in a way they are misleading, or rather, not informing.
We can say a man or a woman or, even more indefinite, a person wants to speak to you, and how little we know whether he or she is outside, inside, standing up, alive or dead.
A primitive telling you the same thing by the very nature of his language would inform you, for instance, that an alive, erect man was standing outside your door.
There are no words in their language for a man without an almost complete description.
They have the most curious expressions for walking which describe exactly how it is done, each specific case of walking, with knees bent, on his heels, etc., so if you hear of him at all you can fairly see that man moving.
It is an almost grotesque description of each subject. This absence of collective notions is absolutely characteristic of the primitive mind.
Now, concerning my concept of the anima, I have been reproached occasionally by scholars for using an almost mythological term to express a scientific fact.
They expect me to translate her into scientific terminology, which would deprive the figure of its or her specific life.
If you say, for instance, that the anima is a function of connection or relationship between the conscious and unconscious, that is a very pale thing.
It is as if you should show a picture of a great philosopher and call it simply Homo sapiens; of course a picture of a criminal or an idiot would be Homo sapiens just as well.
The scientific term conveys nothing, and the merely abstract notion of the anima conveys nothing, but when you say the anima is almost personal, a complex that behaves exactly as if she were a little person, or at times as if she were a very important person, then you get it about right.
Therefore, chiefly for practical purposes, I leave the anima in her personified form, just as I would in describing President Wilson, or Bismarck, or Mussolini.
I would not say they were specimens of Homo sapiens, I deal with them specifically as they are. And so the anima is personal and specific.
Otherwise it is just a function, as intuition or thinking are functions.
But that does not cover the actual facts, nor does it express the extraordinary personality of the anima, the absolutely recognizable personality, so that one can easily point it out anywhere.
Therefore I quite intentionally keep to the very personal term, meaning that she is a personal factor, almost as good as a person.
Naturally there is danger on the other side that people think she is a sort of ghost. Sure enough, to the primitive mind she is a ghost.·
She is a definite entity, and, if you are in a very primitive mood, you might see her in the form of a ghost a smoke figure or a breath figure. .She may become an hallucination.
One sees that, for instance, in lunatics when they are possessed by the anima.
Not very long ago I was called in as consulting physician to see an insane boy in a clinic in Zurich.
When I came into the room he greeted me very politely and said, “You will probably not believe it, but I am my sister and I am a Buddhist.”
He has actually a married sister, but she plays no role in his life.
He thought it was just a mistake that people took him for a man, and even declared that it was a malevolent invention on the part of his mother.
To him that anima sister was absolutely real, more real than himself, he was identical with her.
She was a Buddhist and therefore initiated into the mysteries of the East, and she had an Indian name, which was an extraordinarily clever contrivance.
I don’t remember it exactly, but it consisted of three syllables, and the middle syllable was dava, which is a Hindu word for divine. It was half Italian and half Hindu or Sanskrit and a bit of Greek.
It was a typical designation, and the meaning was divine-mistress-sister.
I have known many other cases where men have felt the anima as an extraordinary reality.
I am quite certain that Rider Haggard could not possibly have written such an interminable series of novels if the anima had not been extremely real to him.
That is the reason why I stress the personal character so much.
We have to deal with the figure in a form that is entirely different from the usual because it designates a living factor, despite the fact that this factor, under certain conditions of development, may lose all that personal character and transform into a mere function.
But that can only be the case when the conscious attitude is such that it loses the quality and characteristics of a human being-that is the mandala psychology.
Miss Howells: Is it common for her to take on the quality of the Orient or an older civilization? Here she is a Jewess.
Dr. Jung: It would seem so. In She the anima is an Oriental being, and in Pierre Benoit’s Atlantide.
The animus also. But we had better not talk of the animus now.
It just scares me, it is much more difficult to deal with. The anima is definite and the animus is indefinite.
Question: Is the anima definitely a part of every man and every woman?
Dr. Jung: No, she is the female part of a man’s psychology, so she would not naturally exist in a woman.
When she does, she is absolutely identical with the woman’s conscious principle, and then I would call it Eros. The same is true of a man reversed.
Animus in a man is not a person, it is his conscious principle, and then I call it Logos.
In Chinese philosophy they speak of the masculine and feminine souls of a man.
Therefore Wilhelm uses animus and anima exactly as I would.
The terms animus and anima correspond to the Chinese hun and kwei, but always they apply to a man.
The Chinese were not concerned with women’s psychology-as I unfortunately am!
Even in the Middle Ages women were said to have no souls worth mentioning, or only “little souls,” like the story of the penguins in L’zle des pingouins, by Anatole France.
Since St. Mael had baptized them, it became a question whether they had souls or not, and they at last called in St.
Catherine of Alexandria to decide. “Well,” she said, giving the final word in the celestial discussion, “Donnez-leur une ame immortelle, mais petite!”
So in the Middle Ages women’s psychology was chose inconnue, and similarly the old Chinese philosophers had the concept that the masculine animus was meant for heaven, while the female soul would become only a spectre, a phantom, who sinks into the earth after death.
One goes on into Eternity and the other becomes a sort of haunting ghost, a demon.
Therefore the Chinese meant by the animus in man what we mean by the Logos principle, or the conscious principle.
But since I have to deal with women’s psychology as well as men’s,
I have found it better to call the conscious principle in man Logos, and the principle of relatedness in women Eros.
The inferior Eros in man I designate as anima and the inferior Logos in woman as animus.
These concepts, Logos and Eros, correspond roughly with the Christian idea of the soul.
And the thing that does not fit in, the thing that sings the wrong tune, would be in a man the anima representing the Eros principle, and in a woman the animus representing the Logos principle, but in a sort of inferior form, a minor position.
The reason why the anima is here playing that role of diabolos in musica is that the exclusive Logos principle in man not follow the Eros principle.
He must discriminate, see things in their separateness, otherwise he is unable to recognize them.
But that is against the principle of relatedness.
A woman does not want to have things segregated, she wants to see them almost synchronized.
A man who is possessed by his anima gets into the most awful difficulties, for he cannot discriminate, especially among women.
While a woman under the law of the animus cannot relate, she becomes nothing but discrimination, surrounded by a wall of spiky cactus laws.
She tells a man what he is up to and that chills him to the bone and he cannot get at her.
Now in regard to the particular role of the anima in this dream, that she is feminine is probably quite clear to you, but why is she masculine too?
This is a very unusual case. And mind you, afterwards she becomes a man, a Jew.
What do you think of the conditions under which a man’s anima would be either male or hermaphroditic?
Answer: Homosexuality.
Dr. Jung: That is true. One often encounters anima figures of very doubtful sex, or quite indubitably masculine, when the conscious mind is feminine.
But in the case of our dreamer there is no question of homosexuality.
He is perhaps not quite free of perversions, everybody has the statistical amount; we all have that percentage of murder in our being, the whole population.
But in him there is no trace of anything like repressed homosexuality. So why has he a masculine anima?
Mrs. Fierz: The anima is so incapable of making the man accept her that she has to play that role, use a sort of mimicry, to do so. It is the unconscious approaching the conscious.
Mrs. Sawyer: Isn’t he identified with her and therefore she is masculine?
Dr. Jung: You mean since he cannot approach her he has to identify?
Mrs. Fierz takes it from the unconscious side, that the unconscious is trying to make itself heard. Mrs. Sawyer sees it as the conscious trying to connect with the unconscious-his conscious possessed by the anima and so hermaphroditic.
In either point of view one must detach her in order to establish a connection.
Mrs. Henley: Might it in this case simply express lack of development, because homosexuality is an attribute of youth?
Dr. Jung: That is also true, since he is undeveloped on the side of religion; from that point of view he could be expressed as a sort of homosexual boy about ten or twelve years old.
That would be symbolic homosexuality. It is a fact that certain apparent sex perversions are merely symbolical; expressing an undeveloped state.
In this case, there was no conscious manifestation of homosexuality that could be pointed out, so we may assume that this is symbolical homosexuality and not a disturbance of the normal.
There have been traces of this feeling in some of his former dreams, in the dream of the Puer Aeternus, for instance, where he called the boy Eros and had a decided feeling of tenderness towards him.
And again in a dream which he had during our last seminar, that case of synchronicity, where he was worshipping the boy Telesphoros and had doubts then also whether there was something homosexual
about it.
But it was merely symbolical, a certain immaturity, like the twelve-year-old condition.
Such mental immaturity may be very local, it may refer to a specific expression of it, or it may go so far that a man is capable of believing that he actually is homosexual, in spite of the fact that he never had the experience.
I have had men come to me complaining that they were homosexual, but when I say to such a man, “How was it?
Did you get into trouble with boys,” he exclaims indignantly that he would not touch a boy. “Men hen?” “No.” “Then why the devil do you call yourself homosexual?”
And then he explains that a doctor said he was because he had had dreams where something homosexual happened.
This simply means that the man in certain respects is not mature, and his immaturity may express itself in different ways-that he is not up to women, or not up to life, or not up to spiritual things.
That must be the case here: that he is definitely immature in certain respects is expressed in the dream by his being brought back to his boyhood.
Now in regard to what is he immature? Where is he unconscious?
Mrs. Deady: He can’t manage his sexuality.
Dr. Jung: But you must keep in mind that he is a man who has allowed himself all sorts of things with fast women and who is not at all unaware of sexuality.
His sex is wrong but not concretely.
Now what is the trouble with him?
Dr. Deady: He has the sex of a boy of sixteen without feeling.
Dr. Jung: That is the point, no feeling.
His sex is perfectly normal but it is unrelated sex, a sort of auto-eroticism, a kind of masturbation.
There is no relation to the object, and that is probably the reason for the frigidity of his wife, and the reason of his other adventures. Eros is undeveloped, not his sexuality.
That is by no means undeveloped, but his relationship to sexuality is wrong.
In the last dream he was going to set his machine in motion, and the question came up whether the parts of the machine were properly related to the central part.
All these functions, particularly his sexuality,
have to be worked into the total mechanism.
If unrelated, he naturally cannot function as a total personality.
His sexuality must come into complete consideration, and he must have feelings about it. In other words, the Eros principle must be recognized.
The reason why the anima appears is that she is Eros.
And when he has the old point of view, singing the old song, Eros is repressed forever and the very devil.
Therefore she comes up in church and disturbs the church hymn.
His immaturity is expressed by the fact that he is back in his childhood and also by his symbolic homosexuality.
If a man’s anima is masculine, he is absolutely possessed obsessed by her, and he cannot establish a relationship with her until she is feminine.
To say he is effeminate means the same thing-that she has power over him.
The fact that the dream expresses is: you are effeminate, you are possessed by your anima. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 479-491
