The Anima as the Woman within the Man
The “ultimate” questions referred to above do not always come up in the encounter with the shadow.
Much more often behind him or her another inner figure emerges as a personification of the unconscious.
This takes the form of a woman in a man, and in a woman, that of a man.
Often it is they who are at work behind the shadow, throwing up new problems.
C. G. Jung called them anima and animus.
The anima embodies all feminine psychic qualities in a man-moods, feelings, intuitions, receptivity to the irrational, his personal capacity for love, his sense of nature, and most important of all, his relationship to the unconscious.
It is no accident that, in ancient times many peoples used priestesses (think, for example, of the Greek Sibyls) to enter into relationship with the will of the gods.
The way the anima initially manifests in an individual man usually bears the stamp of his mother’s character.
If he experienced her in a negative way, then his anima often takes the form of depressive moods, irritability, perpetual malcontent, and excessive sensitivity.
If the man is able to overcome these, precisely these things can strengthen his manliness. Such a negative mother anima will endlessly whisper within a man:
“I’m a nothing,” “It doesn’t make sense anyhow,” “It’s different for other people,” “Nothing * gives me any pleasure,” and so on.
Continual fear of disease, impotence, or accidents are her work, and she constellates a general sense of gloom.
Troubled moods like these can intensify to the point of temptations to suicide; thus the anima can become a demoness of death.
She appears in this role in Cocteau’s film Orpheus.
The French call such an anima figure a femme fatale.
The sirens of the Greeks and the Lorelei of the Germans embody these dangerous aspects of the anima-in a word, destructive illusions.
The following Siberian tale gives a particularly apt portrayal of such a destructive anima:
A solitary hunter once had the experience of seeing a beautiful woman appear on the opposite bank of a river. She waved to him and sang, “Come, come. I’ve missed you, missed you. Now I want to put my arms around you, put my arms around you. Come, come, my nest is nearby, my nest. Come, come, lonely hunter, right now in the stillness of twilight.” As he threw off his clothes and began swimming across to her, she suddenly flew away in the form of an owl, laughing mockingly. Swimming back, he drowned in the ice-cold river.
Here the anima symbolizes an unreal dream of love and happiness, of motherly love and security (the nest), an illusion that holds a man back from life.
The hunter freezes to death because of his pursuit of an erotic fantasy. Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 311
