Anima, Animus, Shadow in Analytical Psychology
Anima and animus are gender specific archetypal structures in the collective unconscious that are compensatory to conscious gender identity.
Thus, animus images primarily depict the unconscious masculine in a woman, and anima images primarily depict the unconscious feminine in a man.
The notion first appears in print in Carl Gustav Jung’s Psychological Types, in 1921.
One of the most complex and least understood features of his theory, the idea of a contrasexual archetype, developed out of Jung’s desire to conceptualize the important complementary poles in human psychological functioning.
From his experiences of the emotional power of projection in his patients and in himself, he conceived first of the anima as a numinous figure in a man’s unconscious.
Originally, Jung associated anima with mother and animus with father, but he soon began to identify their roots and effects in a broader spectrum.
By 1925 he considered these concepts the two most comprehensive foundation stones of the psyche.
Anima and animus, Jung says, are inborn as virtual images that acquire form in the encounter with empirical facts which touch the unconscious aptitude and quicken it to life (Jung, 1928, p. 300).
The initial contrasexual content is introjected from the infant’s relationship with the parental figures.
Developmentally, then, separation from parental figures as primary objects is followed by the idealizing identification of anima and animus with figures in the environment, usually, but not necessarily, persons of the opposite sex.
Subsequently, projections can be withdrawn from their objects and the apperception of anima/animus as intrapsychic objects made conscious.
At that point anima and animus can act as the ego’s interface to the collective unconscious.
In most clinical instances, anima and animus figures personify the struggle between the culture-bound, collective images of masculine and feminine and the developmental urge to liberate one’s individuality from collective norms.
The concept includes the potential in women and men to develop both masculine and feminine elements in themselves.
The contrasexual archetypes fuel the Oedipal predicament.
Differentiation between the parental imagoes and anima and animus projections leads out of the Oedipal fixation.
A narcissistic identification with the contrasexual figure may result in positive or negative inflation or, alternatively, deteriorate into a state of flooding of the ego by unconscious contents.
Critics fault Jung for his confusion of outer life realities of women and men and the inner world of anima and animus images; for example, his repeated assignment of relatedness (Eros) both to anima and to women, and rationality (Logos) both to animus and to men.
This confusion can lead to the false equation of culturally acquired elements with inborn male and female characteristics. Betty de Shongmedor, International Dictionary of Analytical Psychology, Page 86-87
SHADOW (ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)
In Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology, the shadow as a concept comprises everything the conscious personality experiences as negative.
In dreams and fantasies the shadow appears with the characteristics of a personality of the same sex as the ego, but in a very different configuration.
It is presented as the eternal antagonist of an individual or group, or the dark brother within, who always accompanies one, the way Mephistopheles accompanied Goethe’s Faust.
The role of the shadow within is sometimes hidden, and sometimes rejected or repressed, by the conscious ego.
In the latter case it is pushed into the unconscious, where, because of its energy, it acts as a complex.
People can, for example, be fully aware that they are avaricious, greedy, or aggressive and still manage to hide these truths from others beneath the mask of the persona.
But they can also repress those characteristics.
Then they are no longer conscious of them at all, and their moral ego is reestablished.
The shadow in everyone varies considerably depending on the guidelines in force within the family, the community, and the culture in which they grow up.
Moreover, the shadow is not only made up of aspects of personality experienced as disagreeable or negative, but it can also have a positive side.
When the shadow is not integrated into the conscious personality and remains unconscious, it can manifest itself in two different forms.
On the one hand, it can project itself onto another person in one’s immediate or distant circle, leading to serious conflicts among siblings, couples, or colleagues that have a tendency to recur and lead to lasting misunderstandings.
On the other hand, it can also cause deflation, so that those involved find themselves subjugated and thus inferior, bad, or clumsy.
In fact, the shadow corresponds to what one does not want to become but still is, within the self. ~Hans Dieckmann, International Dictionary of Analytical Psychology, Page 1596-1507
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