Anima and Animus: Will one Sex ever understand the other?
Of old, Heaven and Earth were not yet separated, and the In and Out not yet divided.
They formed a chaotic mass hke an eggy which was of obscurely defined limits, and contained germs.
The purer and clearer part was thinly diffused and formed Heaven, while the heavier and grosser element settled down and became Earth.
The finer element easily became a united body, but the consolidation of the heavy and gross element was accomplished with difficulty.
Heaven was therefore formed first, and Earth established subsequently.
Thereafter divine beings were produced between them.
Creation myth from the eighth-century a.d. Nihongi collection (Chronicles of Japan.
The ancient myth relates that creation begins with a primordial wholeness which is in a state of chaos.
It divides itself into two, and the two thus separated are able to come together in coitus; the earth conceives and brings forth.
Through the power of this union, this coniunctio everything that fills the world is brought into being.
The two halves which are required for the creative act are each incomplete without the otlier.
Their longing for each other brings them together.
Their separation produces their longing.
There is an archetypal need, also, for a conjunction of opposites in our lives as human beings.
This is experienced through the natural biological opposition between men and
women, which generates the spring of all creativeness.
The opposition between the sexes is also experienced as an opposition within the individual.
Every man has a feminine side to his being, and every woman has a masculine side.
Tlie contrasexual sides are largely repressed as we develop our conscious
adaptation in the process of growing up as a man or as a woman.
The feminine aspect within the man remains or becomes largely unconscious, and likewise the masculine aspect within the woman.
To say, however, that these contrasexual aspects are merely the result of repressions would give an entirely wrong impression.
It would suggest that the social structure into which we are born determines what is to be repressed, and that these repressions give form and shape to our unconscious image of the opposite sex.
This is only partly true.
Other factors play important roles in the formation of this unconscious figure that we carry in us.
We must go back to biology for a second factor and recognize hat, as Jung has said,
“the whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned in to woman from t he start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates, etc.”
Similarly, the nature of woman presupposes man; therefore she seeks union with man, whether or not she consciously wishes to do so.
Our early experiences with our parents are a third factor which contributes to the development of awareness of the differing qualities inherent in the nature of the two sexes.
The young child not only experiences the parents as they are, but he derives his own subjective impressions of them.
These impressions are highly charged with responses to hurt and jealousy and also to love and dependency needs.
Later, in the process of development, as the child begins to gain distance from his parents and to make other associations, the parents’ general attitudes become internalized as a part of the child’s own value structure.
They are accepted unconsciously by him as modes of functioning associated either vdth the masculine or with the feminine temperament.
Father becomes the son’s model for manhood, mother becomes the feminine ideal.
Or, mother becomes the daughter’s feminine model and father her masculine ideal.
In my work every day I hear adults recalling small incidents which were crucial to them as children, causing them to bury any desires they may have felt to function according to the traditional style of the opposite sex.
A little boy has watched his mother knitting.
Alone in his room he manages to figure out how it is done, and he takes her needles and yam and manages to knit a few inches together.
Proudly he brings out his production when his mother’s bridge club is there, expecting to be praised for his cleverness.
The ladies laugh derisively at him.
A girl is asked by her grandmother what she wants to be when she grows up, and she answers “a doctor.” Grandmother looks at her and with a smile of saccharine wisdom says, “You mean a nurse, don’t you, darling?”
A five-year-old boy comes into the living-room, stumbling about in his mother’s shoes and blouse.
Mother and Father look at each other in a funny way, and Father says sternly,
*Tou go into the bedroom and take those things off, and don’t you ever put them on again.”
The child never quite understands, but the investment of emotion behind the prohibitions is not lost on him.
There is something mysterious, something forbidden about things belonging to the other sex.
Each person is expected to renounce that myster with all of its temptations.
Tlius we can distinguish three sets of factors which contribute to the development of a contrasexual element within the psyche: the archetypal the biological, and the sociological.
Taken together, these factors constitute the basis of what Jung has called the anima in the man, and the animus in the woman.
The man’s anima and the woman’s animus are potentially guides to the depths of the unconscious; they will so function if only man and woman can learn to relate to
them within themselves in an open and constructive way.
But this is not an easy matter, for animus and anima are unlikely to be experienced directly, since they present a point of view which is opposed to the dominant attitude of consciousness.
Therefore animus and anima remain for the most part unconscious, and are experienced primarily in a projected form or relationships with people of the opposite sex.
The anima and the animus endow relationships between the sexes with a special
qualify of strength that transcends nearly all other human feelings.
Tlie yearning for the beloved is a longing for all that one is not, consciously—but may be, unconsciously.
The longing is not all.
There is also a sense of awe, a fear of the unknown and the incomprehensible.
The ages have received the impress of these mixed feelings, and a man is a psychological heir to them just as he is a biological heir to the instincts.
The crucial primordial image or archetype for the man is the Great Mother.
This does not refer to “any concrete image existing in space and time, but to an
inward image at work in the human psyche.
The symbolic expression of this psychic phenomenon is to be found in the
figures of the Great Goddess represented in the mythic and artistic creations of mankind.”
The whole of history bears witness to the effect of this archetype.
Her workings are apparent in the rites, myths and symbols of early man, and
through literature and art in every age.
In our own day she may be seen in the dreams, fantasies and creative work of
both the emotionally sound and the man who is sick or disturbed.
The Great Mother archetype gi\’es rise to many different kinds of feminine images in the psyche of men, as has been pointed out by Jung and others.
In my view, the images of the Great Mother archetype are equally present in the
psychic formation of women, and they precondition women’s attitudes and behaviors quite as much as they do those of men.
Both sexes experience this archetype as the reality of an all-powerful, numinous woman upon whom they are dependent for all things.
She precedes the awareness of the personal mother who, with her owti distinct personality, emerges for the child as his ego develops and begins to interact with
hers.
Furthermore, throughout his life, the archetypal image of The Mother continues to stand behind the conscious perception he calls ”my motlier.”
A woman perceives the archetype of the feminine differently than a man—it is accessible to her consciousness for the reason that she is able personally to experience the incomparable feeling of being a woman, and this is something which will always remain in some part a mystery to a man.
As tlie depths of the earth contain their mystery—the germinating seed in the damp darkness—so it is within the body of the woman, unseen, that transformation takes place.
There are at least four distinct transformations which women experience and come to know intimately, and which in their essence elude full awareness by men.
The first menstruation brings about an extremely important transformation, much more so according to Erich Neumann) than the first seminal emission
of the male which generally occurs during sleep and is quickly over and done with.
For the woman, menstruation is an ongoing process for several days, and because what is involved is blood, with its strong association with the substance of life,
it is an experience which changes her whole being from that of a child into a person who is now capable of bearing children of her own.
The event is celebrated with awareness of this : new capacity; tlie taboos and responsibilities associated with it as well as tlie fears, do not fail to make their impression.
Woman’s second transformation occurs with conception and pregnancy, in which the unfathomable space within her body becomes filled.
The third transformation is the act of giving birth; it entails sacrifice in her physical separation from the infant—giving up to the world what once belonged alone and
fully to her as woman.
The last transformation is the one which causes milk to flow from her breasts and makes it possible for her to nurse her infant.
It seems to me that tlie essence of the difference in the ways in which a man or a woman perceives these transformations is that woman experiences them over a protracted period of time, during which something is going on in her, while a man experiences tliese transformations indirectly, that is, through her.
Woman is there, and in her condition of being a woman she is like the earth, waiting patiently for tlie rain, which comes when the clouds are filled to bursting and stops when tliey are emptied.
All of this is well-known to women, for we have plenty of time to brood on it.
Our cyclic life provides for periods of less and periods of more activity, a
balance of introversion and extraversion of a sort which may escape a man because he is less at the mercy of his body.
And even though, in our day, many of the biological restrictions which women have felt as impositions have been greatly lightened, the woman who elects to bear children must carry them just as long as did her prehistoric forebears, and she may feel responsible for them and their welfare even longer.
Furthermore, the woman who chooses not to bear children must remain acutely conscious of her decision if she is not to become trapped in an unwanted pregnancy.
A man’s involvement in all this may also be intense, but rarely to tlie same degree as that of a woman.
Society teaches a man responsibility for his family, for a woman it is instinctive. ~June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul, Page 229-234
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