Edward F. Edinger: The Syzygy — Anima and Animus
Jung’s chapter on the syzygy begins with paragraph 20.
Let us first examine the term itself.
It means pair or couple.
The pairs of aions that the Gnostic god emanated were called syzygies, but the original meaning of the word was “to yoke together.”
It is derived from two different stems: “syn” meaning with, and “zygon” meaning yoke or the cross-bar of a harness.
The longitudinal bar of the harness is connected to the wagon as illustrated opposite in figure 4, and the cross bar is called the zygon.
The necks of the horses slip into the two loops of the zygon.
The zygon or the syzygy literally means the pair of horses that are yoked together in a single harness.
As Jung uses this term, it refers to the masculine and feminine principles that are yoked together in the human psyche.
Figure 5 (page 31) can be thought of as an abstract representation of the psyche.
It is also a representation of this book, Aion.
Working our way down from above, we start with the ego at the top.
Next comes the shadow, drawn in a way to indicate that the shadow is cast because of the light of the ego, so to speak.
It could also be drawn as just another layer.
As one goes deeper there is the syzygy, the masculine and feminine principles represented by the anima in the man and animus in the woman.
Deeper still comes the Self, first in its personal manifestations, then in its more collective ones as history, world, and then as the total space-time continuum.
All these levels will be explored exhaustively later.
Figure 5 also illustrates how the masculine and feminine egos approach the Self through their contrasexual components.
In the middle of the diagram there is a kind of neutral ego that sneaks right between the masculine and feminine principles, which is an ideal situation that does not really exist.
On the left hand side is the feminine ego which, in order to get to the Self, must go through the animus.
Contrariwise, the masculine ego has to go through the anima.
Jung tells us that the anima and animus in the psyche are composed of three factors: the contrasexual qualities of the individual, the archetypal image, and the person’s life experience of the opposite sex. (par. 41, note 5)
The first two factors are innate.
The third, one’s life experience of the opposite sex, is acquired, and of course in actual living experience those innate and acquired factors are not neatly discriminated, but are overlapping and intermixing.
In the third factor, the experience of the mother and father is overwhelmingly important, but the parents are not the only ones to contribute the acquired characteristics.
The major contributors to the anima experience in the man, in addition to the mother, are the sister, the daughter, the lover, the wife and companion.
Those are all on the acquired level.
Behind those personal experiences will be archetypal factors which will be met as divine guide and source of inspiration, or evil seductress, or a personification of fate or destiny or life itself, and finally the principle of eros.
In the woman’s animus experience there will be similar factors: first of all the father, then brother, son, lover, husband and companion, all on the personal, acquired level.
At the archetypal level may be found the divine guide and source of inspiration, or the evil rapist, or the personification of spiritual meaning, and finally the principle of Logos.
Also important in this context are the different states of the ego’s relation to anima or animus, which is of some importance in evaluating analytic patients.
I distinguish four different states: the infantile state, the projected state, the possessed state, and the conscious state.
The infantile state is the original one of symbolic mother-son or father-daughter incest.
Jung describes this condition in a man in a lengthy passage which is profoundly relevant to daily analytic work.
This is the man’s infantile relation to the anima:
His Eros is passive like a child’s; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured.
He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him.
No wonder the real world vanishes from sight!
. . . Often a mother appears beside him who apparently shows not the slightest concern that her little son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might hinder him from growing up and marrying.
You behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life.
. . . There is in him a desire to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field of the world.
But he makes no more than a series of fitful starts, for his initiative as well as his staying power are crippled by the secret memory that the world and happiness may be had as a gift from the mother.
The fragment of world which he, like every man, must encounter again and again is never quite the right one, since it does not fall into his lap, does not meet him half way, but remains resistant, has to be conquered, and submits only to force.
It makes demands on the masculinity of a man, on his ardour, above all on his courage and resolution when it comes to throwing his whole being into the scales.
For this he would need a faithless Eros, one capable of forgetting his mother and undergoing the pain of relinquishing the first love of his life. (pars. 2022)
Edward F. Edinger, The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in Jung’s Aion, Page 28-30
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