What Jung Really Said: The Anima
THE ANIMA
There are many similarities in the psychology of men and women and everything that has been said about the ego, the persona, and to some extent the shadow, applies to each sex.
In textbooks on psychology it seems to be assumed, wrongly, that the psychology of men and women is to all intents and purposes the same.
When we come to examine the unconscious of men and of women, by dream-analysis, active imagination or other methods, the differences between masculine and feminine psychology begin to stand out.
One of Jung’s most valuable contributions to normal psychology, and thence to abnormal psychology, lies in his recognition of the distinctive features in the unconscious of men and of women.
In the unconscious of every man there is a feminine element, personified in dreams by a female figure or image, and to this Jung gave the name anima, the latin word for “ soul” or “ breath of life” , that which animates.
Its counterpart in woman, the animus, is personified by a man, or sometimes by men.
It will be convenient to consider first the concept of the anima.
In its appearance in dreams it is not, of course, an actual woman, nor even a single image with constant characteristics.
Images of the anima vary and, being unconscious, it is likely to be projected on one, or at times on several women, perhaps in succession or even simultaneously.
With growing masculinity the boy, and then the youth, may try to put aside what he looks on as feminine qualities.
As an infant and in childhood his mother was his natural companion, and therefore his projection of the feminine element in himself fell on her.
Ordinarily the mother becomes less and less important to him, although her influence continues as the prototype of all women; she is the first woman he knew and she remains important whether he is conscious of it or not.
This, in part, is the origin of his anima qualities.
We speak here of the regular course of development.
But it may happen that the youth is unable to free himself from his mother
because he has developed a mother-complex, that is, his mother has become of intense importance to him.
This is liable to happen when his mother is demonstrative, over-affectionate, and his father somewhat remote.
Moreover his mother may consider his father as of secondary importance, merely an object to be looked after, perhaps a little more important than the furniture.
She clings to the son—often the youngest in the family—while urging him, in due course, to get married and become independent.
This he cannot do because his heterc quality is by now associated with his ideas of his mother.
With the mother-complex there are two sides: the woman who is the perfect mother also sucks the life out of her children because she has no life of her own, whilst every sort of good and noble reason is put forward by the son to prove that he must never leave his mother.
Jung attributes the influences affecting the child (or children) as only in part due to the mother herself.
In addition there are the projections of the child upon her, and these have more than a personal significance in so far as they attribute to her an authority greater than she as a person possesses.
In addition to the influence of his mother as a source of the anima there is the inherited image, that is the racial ideas of woman, derived as part of his personality from man’s experience of woman in the past.
The inherited image of woman always forms part of the anima image in
the man’s unconscious.
He comes into the world adapted for woman, and his direct experience of his mother, building on this inherited quality, enlarges it.
Then the boy has the experience of meeting girls and hearing his parents and friends talking about them; he observes the role given to girls in his social environment, which varies in different localities or from country to country.
That a man has this image of woman in his mind is a matter of everyday observation and its absence would be abnormal. Infants, whether boys or girls, are brought up in much the same way.
After two or three years the boy must become a little man, have his hair cut and put aside his feminine clothes.
In certain circumstances this may be difficult for the boy or alternatively he may accept the masculine role almost too thoroughly and everything feminine may become taboo.
Nevertheless he cannot alter his nature completely.
There remains in him his feminine side, and if this be repressed in favour of
masculinity, his anima may appear in irrational moods, in peevishness or bad temper, and not infrequently in sexual deviation, often associated with immature emotional development.
All these irregularities are disturbances of the normal operation of the feminine side of men.
When understood in this way they become comprehensible as symptoms due to repression of a part of himself.
In other words, such manifestations are an unconscious effort to bring about self-regulation through compensation.
Jung considered this attempt at compensation was of special importance in the second half of life, that is from about the age of thirty-six onward.
During the first part of life the man is making his way and developing his career, concerned with the family and other interests which demand conscious rational adaptation.
He thinks clearly and acts without effort.
He is unaware that his anima exists because it finds easy and natural expression
in friendships with girls.
This is healthy in adolescence and in the twenties, but not if it continues year after year, as it often does. Such projections can, of course, lead to disaster, and the man may learn by bitter experience that he cannot disregard parts of his normal make-up without penalty.
Jung writes:
“In dealing with the shadow or nima it is not sufficient just to know about these concepts and to reflect on them. Nor can we ever experience their content by feeling our way into them or by appropriating other people’s feelings. It is no use at all to learn a list of archetypes by heart. . . . The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. This is how daemonic power reveals itself to us. Until not so long ago it would have been an easy matter to do away with the young woman as a witch.”
‘ ‘It is often tragic,” says Jung, “to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole
tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.”
“Woman, with her very dissimilar psychology, is and always has been a source of information about things for which a man has no eyes. She can be his inspiration; her intuitive capacity, often superior to man’s . . . can show him ways which his own, less personally accented feeling, would never have discovered. . . . Here without a doubt is one of the main sources for the feminine quality of the soul. No man is so entirely masculine that he has nothing feminine in him . . . there is no human experience, nor would experience be possible at all, without the intervention of a subjective aptitude. . . . Thus the whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned in to woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates, etc. . . . an inherited collective image of woman exists in a man’s unconscious.”
Woman completes, fulfils man.
On the physical side also there is an analogous situation, for physically each sex
seems to complement the other.
In his body every man carries the vestigial characteristics of the woman (homologues), for example, vestigial breasts corresponding in type and structure to the female breast.
So also with the woman who carries homologues of the man, such as the clitoris which corresponds with the penis.
Psychologically and physically the concept of the anima (and animus) is reminiscent of Plato’s well-known story 9r myth, that originally the human being was round like a ball, signifying wholeness, and androgynous—that is, the
characteristics of both sexes were united.
These strange beings had four feet, four hands, one neck and two faces.
Everything was double.
Possessed of enormous power these male-female beings attempted to assault the gods and Zeus split each into two individual parts.
Since then, the striving to be reunited is expressed in the longing of each sex for the other so that, as in the former state, they may be one.
That the psychology of men and that of women differ can hardly be questioned.
Jung’s postulate seems to offer a reasonable basis in explaining the psychological
distinctiveness of each.
This distinctiveness, as part of the natural order of life, has been taken for granted
almost everywhere—except perhaps in certain areas of psychological thought.
Literature provides many examples of the compulsive drive of the man towards completeness by marrying a certain woman upon whom he has projected his anima.
An example appears in Hardy’s novel, The Well Beloved, which was published while Jung was still a student.
Jung first saw the book many years after his work on the anima and animus had been published.
In the novel Hardy traces the career of a man who fell in love at first sight with a girl.
He did not meet her again for a considerable time, yet he remained convinced that
the success and fulfilment of his life lay in marrying this girl.
Dante, from what we know of his life, had much the same experience when he met Beatrice when she was eight years and four months old and he was nearly nine.
Jung considered Rider Haggard’s She gave an interesting and accurate description of the “ anima type” of woman. “
The so-called ‘sphinx-like’ character is an indispensable part of their equipment, also an equivocalness, an intriguing elusiveness—not an indefinite blur that offers nothing, but an indefiniteness that seems full of promises, like the speaking silence of a Mona Lisa.
A woman of this kind is both old and young, mother and daughter, of more than doubtful chastity, childlike and yet endowed with a naive cunning that is extremely
disarming to men.”
When a girl happens to be the “ anima type” or, as it is sometimes put in popular language, “ all-the-world’ssweetheart” she is likely to be annoyed when a man
projects his anima-image upon her and insists that she is what he thinks she must be.
She wants to be recognised for what she is or thinks she is, and she may find the man’s attentions boring and entirely stupid.
On the other hand, as the relation of the two is also on a conscious level, and as each carries, or may carry, the projections of the other, it is possible that they may form a satisfactory friendship leading to a happy marriage.
Unless the man had, in the first instance, projected his anima upon the woman, the
friendship might never have started.
It should be remembered that the anima is an autonomous complex and is not set in movement by the conscious intentions of the man.
It just “ happens” that he projects his anima, that is his image and ideals of womanhood, on a particular woman.
As the friendship develops her other qualities (and his) will become apparent. Consequently “ fallinginlove”—whatever meaning we attach to this indefinite
state of affairs—may well be a compound of projection and conscious appreciation of the qualities of the other person.
In passing it may be remarked that many marriages continue to be successful when one or both partners retain their projections; they remain happily unconscious.
It is not essential to insist that all projections should be dissolved “ into the light of common day” .
Dissolution of projections, in individual relations with the opposite sex, often happens, but this is far from invariable.
Often enough an intelligent man behaves sensibly and correctly in all situations in life—with the exception of contacts with the other sex.
Yet his life may be interrupted, marred, by passionate episodes in which he is absolutely certain that he must establish the closest possible friendship with a particular woman.
That the same thing has happened in the past is no deterrent.
He may agree that two or perhaps three marriages have been preceded by such an infatuation, and that the present friendship, to the uninvolved outsider, is a replica of others which did not last.
When strong emotion dominates, common sense is powerless.
It is not unusual to find that men, having psychological treatment and using painting to make clearer their dreams or other inner thoughts, produce a picture, or a series of pictures, of an unknown woman that cannot be identified with any actual woman.
Usually the eyes are veiled or the face averted.
This happens again and again with men who have never heard of Jung or his concept of the anima.
Such experiences support his contention:
“Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman . . .an imprint or ‘archetype’ of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman—in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation.”
“The anima,” says Jung, “is presumably a psychic representation of the minority of female genes in a man’s body. This is all the more probable since the same figure is not to be found in the imagery of a woman’s unconscious. There is a corresponding figure, however, that plays an equivalent role, yet it is not a woman’s image but a man’s. This masculine figure in a woman’s psychology has been termed the ‘animus’ One of the most typical manifestations of both figures is what has long been called ‘animosity’ . The anima causes illogical moods, and the animus produces irritating platitudes and unreasonable opinions. Both are frequent dream-figures. As a rule they personify the unconscious and give it its peculiarly disagreeable or irritating character. The unconscious in itself has no such negative qualities. They appear only when it is personified by these figures and when they begin to influence consciousness. Being only partial personalities, they have the character either of an inferior woman or of an inferior man—hence their irritating effect. A man experiencing this influence will be subject to unaccountable moods, and a woman will be argumentative and produce opinions that are beside the mark.”
Alongside this we must place another statement of
Jung’s:
“Although to begin with, we meet the anima and animus mostly in their negative and unwelcome form, they are very far from being only a species of bad spirit. They have . . . an equally positive aspect . . . they have formed since olden times, the archetypal basis of all masculine and feminine divinities and therefore merit special attention. They therefore represent a supreme pair of opposites . . . because of the mutual attraction between them, giving promise of union and actually making it possible.”
“When the anima is recognised and integrated a change of attitude occurs toward the feminine generally . . . for life is founded on the harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces, within the individual human being as well as without. Bringing these opposites into union is one of the most important tasks of present-day psychotherapy.” ~E.A. Bennet, What Jung Really Said, Page 117-121
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