Ann Mankowitz, The Archetypal Masculine in Women
The Archetypal Masculine in Women
Rachel’s feelings in Scene 7 of the dream were undoubtedly similar to her adolescent feelings toward her parents, and what she was rejecting could be seen as
symbolic of the solid conventions and lifeless traditions of her background. Yet the clergyman, though a father figure, was a stranger and not like her own father. Was
he therefore, she asked, an animus figure?
And if so, why was he leading her back to her adolescence, and what was he trying to tell her about her life now? I suggested that she should try the technique of personification in order to find the answer.
The proven usefulness of the technique of personifying dream objects and dream figures seems to me to go a long way toward demonstrating the validity of many of the more complex and controversial images which Jung has described as archetypes of the unconscious. Among these images are those of the animus and the anima. It was and is not my general practice to discuss Jungian theory or to use specifically Jungian terms in analytic sessions. However,
Rachel had a probing intellect and had done some reading in the psychological literature. She was familiar with the concept of the animus and was now interested in its application to herself.Anima and animus are the terms Jung used for the contrasexual elements in the human psyche.
The anima refers to the feminine side in a man and the animus to the
masculine element in a woman.
The idea of the difference between masculine and feminine ego consciousness is based on nature, on the difference between bodily form and function, and has persisted through all cultures. Equally persistent has been the idea that men and women carried within them, both consciously and unconsciously, elements of the opposite sexual principle. These elements have been seen variously as gods, demons, soul, spirit, etc., and given names, such as Yin and Yang, according to culture or religious belief.
Freud called this concept bisexuality; Jung saw it as an archetype of both the personal and collective unconscious, and used the names animus and anima for the masculine and feminine images of the archetype. Although ideas of what is masculine and what is feminine have undergone many changes, and in spite of contemporary feminist protests that any differentiation is discrimination, there are eternal truths based on the facts of nature. June Singer expresses this reality as follows:
It is evident that what is qualitatively different about The Creative and The Receptive is the Masculinity of the first and the Femininity of the second, and what is equally
important is that both of these qualities are present in the intrinsic nature of each human being regardless of sex. These qualities are not necessarily culture bound
or culturally conditioned, as some contemporary sociologists assert, except in so far as the trends of society follow the necessities of Nature. . . . When this Masculine archetype [The
Creative] becomes manifest in a woman, as it surely does, it needs to be recognised as the fertilizing “other.”
This Jung saw when he called this archetype animus, meaning the Masculine element in the psyche of the female. . . . Men are born with a penis which simply and naturally is used for penetration, while women need to develop their phallic potential in order to penetrate the world.
It is interesting that Rachel had complained in so many words that her father had not helped her to “penetrate the world.” The clergyman in the dream, however, seemed to be trying to fulfill just that animus function. After much work of amplification and personification, Rachel came to the following conclusions.
The clergyman is hurrying her away from the burnt family house, and busily getting her interested in something entirely new. This new thing is connected with traditional
education and established religion. The clergyman reminds her of a Canon Jones who used to visit the headmistress of her boarding school and sometimes take prayers. The school was built of red brick and had “solid foundations,” both physically and metaphorically. Her college, too, was a similar Edwardian building. Her father was keen on her having this sort of conventional education.
The clergyman, then, she saw as that masculine part of herself that wanted to succeed and gain recognition in the solid world of the academic establishment. He wanted to get her away as quickly as possible from the old femininereproductive life that was over, and he paid no heed to the protestations of the feminine part of her. He was an animusfigure from her unconscious, derived partly from her father and partly from the teacherpriest image of her schooldays.
His interaction with her in the dream represented a conflict within herself. She could see that the conflict referred to her present stage of life and its problems of adaptation to a new sort of creativeness; but she was disturbed by the apparently immature behavior of the dream protagonists, which made her feel the confusion and insecurity of her
adolescence.
She had hoped that her animus would prove to be the perfect spiritguide into the future, instead of a “narrowminded, boring, insensitive old fool with conventional ideas.” Her anger turned toward her father, whom she blamed for being the representative of masculinity branded on her impressionable young mind, molding the configurations of her animus. What she needed and lacked now were the masculine qualities of thrust, initiative, originality, daring.
She then realized that her husband had these qualities. She had been instinctively attracted to him because of this dynamic quality which contrasted with the cautious
stability of her father. As she and Phil inevitably changed with parenthood and the years, she had come to recognize and appreciate the complementary nature of their
relationship. While their children were growing up it was fine that he should have the aggression and determination needed for the intense competition of the outside
world, leaving her free to develop her feminine side in the home.
But now it seemed to her that they had become rather too polarized in their masculinity and femininity.
She had relied too much on Phil’s dynamism, and because of it she had never developed her own “phallic poten tial.” Against all reason she felt angry with him again, as if he were responsible for depriving her of the power she needed to go forward, and for leaving her with an
inadequate animus image.
She was brought back by these associations to the overdependency of her adolescence, and the anger and humiliation she had felt because of it. It seemed that the
scars of this time had never quite healed and now were making themselves felt again. Men were always building walls around her and protecting her from the world,
but the walls made a prison as well as a shelter.
Recent experience had shown her that anger was needed in order to break out (e.g., the wombtomb
in Scene 5 of her dream). Now perhaps anger would arm her
for the unknown world outside. Hitherto, her reason and her sense of guilt (both well developed) had curbed the full expression of her anger.
Now she let go with
streams of abuse against her parents and her husband. Murderous fantasies that had been concealed by overanxious deathfears
were exposed; the culmination was a
fantasy of the clergyman drowning in the water surrounding the foundations, overbalanced by his own clumsy eagerness.
At the end of this, she felt no sense of forward progress toward independence or selfrealization;
but neither did she feel any longer her former disappointment with her
interior animusfigure.
With the release of anger, she became reconciled to him. Instead of expecting too much (the perfect guide), she accepted him as he was — just
one of many changing forms of her animus. If he were as yet inadequate to guide her, then for the time being she would have to rely more on her femininity. Her focus
had shifted. She did not feel pressured to follow a linear route to individuation, but experienced herself more as looking around and waiting. There were other animusfigures
in the dream and, meanwhile, she felt stronger and calmer. The desperation of the newly reborn had left her.
Psychoanalyst Pearl King, writing about the treatment of
older patients, emphasized the importance of accepting destructive impulses, as well as loving ones, toward those people we consciously love and value. This enables
us to see and feel toward them as whole people (i.e., not split into good and bad) with their own separate existence, feelings and point of view, etc., and not as
extensions of ourselves.
If this stage has not been satisfactorily reached in the course of life up to adulthood, individuals find it very difficult to accept and integrate (without falling ill) the sequence of
losses and depletions that ageing and death inevitably confront them with. It offers the possibility of working through the guilt and bitterness of life’s failure, and gaining
enrichment thereby.
Rachel’s confrontation with the clergyman animusfigure
in her dream, and with the anger resulting from it, enabled her to withdraw many of her animus projections
from the real men in her life.
She began to see that she had projected onto her husband the positive masculine qualities which she herself needed. He did in fact
possess them to a great extent (i.e., he was a good “hook”), but, like herself, had other sides to him and problems of his own; he did not exist only in order to
complement her and to prop up her weaknesses. She had always known this with her head, but now she understood this aspect of their partnership and began to
relate to her husband in a more realistic and psychologically objective way.
For some years Phil too had been going through a midlife
crisis. Each of them had tried to show goodwill toward the other and to be sympathetic to the other’s
problems, but their mutual unconscious projections made this difficult. Lately, as Rachel moved toward more independence, Phil had been showing signs of strain and
depression. The rationalization they both accepted was that it was the usual “male menopausal” crisis of waning potency, expressed in Phil’s case mainly in terms of
careerfatigue
and disillusionment, and fear of the upandcoming
younger men.
With her new sensitivity to Phil as a “whole person” with a “separate existence,” Rachel now realized that while his creativity at work was central, it was intertwined
with his unconPage
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scious needs of, and demands on, her. She observed (and remembered it had happened before), that with each step of hers toward independence, he was affected in
some way.
He might become ill, or irritable or depressed, and the effect on her was a feeling of guilt and a temptation to step back. She now saw that he was as
ambivalent about her independence as she was. In one way it was a threat to him. Her dependency had kept her bound to him, as it had to her parents; it meant she
was always there to minister to him (as his working mother had not been). His protection of her was thus also a protection of himself and the family.
But as they all grew older, the strain of maintaining the protective walls increased, and by the time they had reached their present stage, he was torn between a desire
to have a strong woman who could keep him (a standing joke between them), and the old infantile fear that such a woman would just get up and leave.
Emma Jung, the wife of C.G. Jung and herself an analyst, wrote about the nature of the animus and the anima:
The character of these figures is not determined only by the latent sexual characteristics they represent; it is conditioned by the experience each person has had in the course of
his or her life with representatives of the other sex, and also by the collective image of woman carried in the psyche of the individual man, and the collective image of man carried
by the woman. . . .
Just as there are men of outstanding physical power, men of deeds, men of words, and men of wisdom, so, too, does the animus image differ in accordance with the woman’s
particular stage of development or her natural gifts. This image may be transferred to a real man who comes by the animus role because of his resemblance to it; alternatively, it
may appear as a dream or phantasy figure; but since it represents a living psychic reality, it lends a definite coloration from within the woman herself to all that she does.
Rachel’s experience corresponded with all these points. The original animus image, derived from her experience of her father, she had supplemented with a rather
more heroic image derived from the collective unconscious; this she had pro jected onto her husband, who came nearer to filling the heroic role.
As Emma Jung writes:
We try with real cunning to make the man be what we think he ought to represent. Not only do we consciously exert force or pressure; far more frequently we quite unconsciously
force our partner, by our behavior, into archetypal or animus reactions.
Naturally, the same holds good for the man in his attitude toward the woman. He, too, would like to see in
her the image that floats before him, and by this wish, which works like a suggestion, he may bring it about that she does not live her real self but becomes an anima figure. This,
and the fact that the anima and animus mutually constellate each other, . . . forms one of the worst complications in the relations between men and women.
Rachel spent some sessions sorting out Phil’s problems from hers, his anima projections from her animus projections. Then she returned to the dreamscene,
where
she now saw her animus presented in yet another form, that of the two young men.
The first important factor seemed to be that while she was being hurried away from the house by the elderly clergyman, the two young priests were walking back in the
direction from which she had come. But who were they and what did they mean to her? Why was one animusfigure
leading her one way while this mysterious pair
went the opposite way?
They had priesthood in common, which suggested to Rachel “spiritual guidance,” as well as the negative personal associations with the
clergyman. But the boys were also “gangsters” and seemed rather dangerous; at the same time, they looked slightly ridiculous. Rachel felt as attracted to this enigmatic
pair as she had felt repelled by the other, and her inclination was to follow them. Then she had a sudden and vivid personal association.
At her mother’s cremation nearly two years before, she had stood in the chapel with her two sons, one on either side of her. At the awful moment when the coffin
started to slide inexorably toward the opened doors and into the furnace, Rachel was stricken with grief. Her sons moved closer to her, each taking an arm. She felt
great strength and support from
them. Earlier on, before the funeral service started, she had noted their strange appearance in very similar dark suits.
Normally dressed in jeans and sweaters, they had
all found the funereal garb somewhat ludicrous. Her sons were the same height, and, dressed alike, they gave the impression of an almost identical clerical pair.
This association released a flood of emotion and later understanding. The animus was truly functioning as, in June Singer’s words, “the fertilizing other.”
The two dreamfigures
were leading her back to the burnt house, symbol of her dead motherhood. They were like her sons who had given her strength when the body
of her dead mother was burning, and perhaps like those heavenly twins Castor and Pollux, who represented respectively mortality and immortality. Her sons were not
normally seen in a religious setting, dressed like clerics. Usually they looked more like cowboys in their jeans, boots and leather jackets, and were busy fighting for a
living in the competitive outside world. It was that aspect of Rachel’s sonimage
which was expressed by the gangsters’ black facescarves.
Her attraction to these figures was based on the remembered feeling of loving strength coming from her children, at a time when she was poised in middle life between
the death of the old generation (and her own powers of generation) and the vital growth of the next (her first grandchild was a month old). This young strength
supported her and helped her forward, away from the past and into something new.
Yet the dream seemed to indicate that the “something new” derived from the youthful and positive animus was to be found back at the house. This was an enigma to
Rachel; she wondered if anything had been forgotten, if there was “unfinished business” connected with her family relationships.
The emotional release which these memories of her mother’s funeral had triggered had already brought about one change in her life. She had become close again to her
younger son. For some years there had been a hiatus in their relationship. There was no quarrel or even coolness, but they seemed
to have very little to say to one another. She had called it noninterference, and ”letting him get on with his own life.” Ever since he left home and she had had no active
mother function
toward him, they had both withdrawn almost to noncommunication.
Rachel had noticed the same change in the relationship with her older son when
he no longer needed her mothering. But it had not been so extreme and had changed again when he got married and started his own family. She had decided that she
and her younger son were too alike, in that they were both introverted and inclined to be withdrawn, and so she had accepted the static condition of their relationship,
telling herself that this was what it meant to let one’s children go.
She now discovered that it was possible to get close to him again, to talk and laugh together and to exchange ideas. Their encounters, whether frequent or rare, were
warm and dynamic, as in the old days. Her son’s response clearly indicated that he felt no need to defend his privacy by anxious withdrawal; on the contrary, he was
released by her initiative, and seemed free to express his feelings or not, as he felt inclined.
Rachel now understood that she had simply lacked the “phallic power” to
penetrate his world. Consciously experiencing her animus had given her the creative power to break the deadlock that had stultified their relationship. ~Ann Mankowitz, Change of Life: A Psychological Study of Dreams and the Menopause, Page 81-90
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