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Carl Jung on the Anima and Animus

[Carl Jung on the Anima and Animus]


III. The Syzygy: Anima and Animus

What, then, is this projection-making factor? The East calls it the "Spinning Woman" Maya, who creates illusion by her dancing. Had we not long since known it from the symbolism of dreams, this hint from the Orient would put us on the right track: the enveloping, embracing, and devouring element points unmistakably to the mother, that is, to the son's relation to the real mother, to her imago, and to the woman who is to become a mother for him.

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!

If this situation is dramatized, as the unconscious usually dramatizes it, then there appears before you on the psychological stage a man living regressively, seeking his childhood and his mother, fleeing from a cold cruel world which denies him understanding.

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.

Where does the guilt lie? With the mother, or with the son? Probably with both.

The unsatisfied longing of the son for life and the world ought to be taken seriously.

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.

The mother, foreseeing this danger, has carefully inculcated into him the virtues of faithfulness, devotion, loyalty, so as to protect him from the moral disruption which is the risk of every life adventure.

He has learnt these lessons only too well, and remains true to his mother. This naturally causes her the deepest anxiety (when, to her greater glory, he turns out to be a homosexual, for example) and at the same time affords her an unconscious satisfaction that is positively mythological.

For, in the relationship now reigning between them, there is consummated the immemorial and most sacred archetype of the marriage of mother and son.

What, after all, has commonplace reality to offer, with its registry offices, pay envelopes, and monthly rent, that could outweigh the mystic awe of the hieros games?

Or the star-crowned woman whom the dragon pursues, or the pious obscurities veiling the marriage of the Lamb?

This myth, better than any other, illustrates the nature of the collective unconscious.

At this level the mother is both old and young, Demeter and Persephone, and the son is spouse and sleeping suckling rolled into one.

The imperfections of real life, with its laborious adaptations and manifold disappointments, naturally cannot compete with such a state of indescribable fulfilment.

In the case of the son, the projection-making factor is identical with the mother-imago, and this is consequently taken to be the real mother.

The projection can only be dissolved when the son sees that in the realm of his psyche there is an image not only of the mother but of the daughter, the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess, and the chthonic Baubo.

Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man.

It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life.

And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya and not only into life's reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another.

Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it.

This image is "My Lady Soul," as Spitteler called her.

I have suggested instead the term "anima," as indicating something specific, for which the expression "soul" is too general and too vague.

The empirical reality summed up under the concept of the anima forms an extremely dramatic content of the unconscious.

It is possible to describe this content in rational, scientific language, but in this way one entirely fails to express its living character.

Therefore, in describing the living processes of the psyche, I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.

The projection-making factor is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima.

Whenever she appears, in dreams, visions, and fantasies, she takes on personified form, thus demonstrating that the factor she embodies possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a feminine being.

She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous product of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute figure for the mother.

On the contrary, there is every likelihood that the numinous qualities which make the mother-imago so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype of the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child.

Since the anima is an archetype that is found in men, it is reasonable to suppose that an equivalent archetype must be present in women; for just as the man is compensated by a feminine element, so woman is compensated by a masculine one.

I do not, however, wish this argument to give the impression that these compensatory relationships were arrived at by deduction.

On the contrary, long and varied experience was needed in order to grasp the nature of anima and animus empirically.

Whatever we have to say about these archetypes, therefore, is either directly verifiable or at least rendered probable by the facts.

At the same time, I am fully aware that we are discussing pioneer work which by its very nature can only be provisional.

Just as the mother seems to be the first carrier of the projection-making factor for the son, so is the father for the daughter.

Practical experience of these relationships is made up of many individual cases presenting all kinds of variations on the same basic theme.

A concise description of them can, therefore, be no more than schematic.

Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint.

This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit.

The animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros.

But I do not wish or intend to give these two intuitive concepts too specific a definition.

I use Eros and Logos merely as conceptual aids to describe the fact that woman's consciousness is characterized more by the connective quality of Eros than by the discrimination and cognition associated with Logos. In men, Eros, the function of relationship, is usually less developed than Logos. In women, on the other hand, Eros is an expression of their true nature, while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident.

It gives rise to misunderstandings and annoying interpretations in the family circle and among friends.

This is because it consists of opinions instead of reflections, and by opinions I mean a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth.

Such assumptions, as everyone knows, can be extremely irritating.

As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are tight.

Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima.

With them the question becomes one of personal vanity and touchiness (as if they were females); with women it is a question of power, whether of truth or justice or some other "ism" for the dressmaker and hairdresser have already taken care of their vanity.

The "Father" (i.e., the sum of conventional opinions) always plays a great role in female argumentation.

No matter how friendly and obliging a woman's Eros may be, no logic on earth can shake her if she is ridden by the animus.

Often the man has the feelingand he is not altogether wrong that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary power of persuasion.

He is unaware that this highly dramatic situation would instantly come to a banal and unexciting end if he were to quit the field and let a second woman carry on the battle (his wife, for instance, if she herself is not the fiery war horse).

This sound idea seldom or never occurs to him, because no man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima.

Anyone who still had enough sense of humour to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, cliches from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain-splitting lack of logic.

It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all the languages of the world and always remains
essentially the same.

This singular fact is due to the following circumstance: when animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction.

The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight).

The language of love is of astonishing uniformity, using the well-worn formulas with the utmost devotion and fidelity, so that once again the two partners find themselves in a banal collective situation.

Yet they live in the illusion that they are related to one another in a most individual way.

In both its positive and its negative aspects the anirna /animus relationship is always full of "animosity/' i.e., it is emotional, and hence collective.

Affects lower the level of the relationship and bring it closer to the common instinctual basis, which no longer has anything individual about it.

Very often the relationship runs its course heedless of its human performers, who afterwards do not know what happened to them.

Whereas the cloud of "animosity" surrounding the man is composed chiefly of sentimentality and resentment, in woman it expresses itself in the form of opinionated views, interpretations, insinuations, and misconstructions, which all have the purpose (sometimes attained) of severing the relation between two human beings.

The woman, like the man, becomes wrapped in a veil of illusions by her demon-familiar, and, as the daughter who alone understands her father (that is, is eternally right in everything), she is translated to the land of sheep, where she is put to graze by the shepherd of her soul, the animus.


Like the anima, the animus too has a positive aspect.

Through the figure of the father he expresses not only conventional opinion butequally what we call "spirit," philosophical or religious ideas in particular, or rather the attitude resulting from them.

Thus the animus is a psychopomp, a mediator between the conscious and the unconscious and a personification of the latter.

Just as the anima becomes, through integration, the Eros of consciousness, so the animus becomes a Logos; and in the same way that the anima gives relationship and relatedness to a man's consciousness, the animus gives to woman's consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation, and self-knowledge.

The effect of anima and animus on the ego is in principle the same.

This effect is extremely difficult to eliminate because, in the first place, it is uncommonly strong and immediately fills the ego-personality with an unshakable feeling o lightness and righteousness. In the second place, the cause of the effect is projected and appears to lie in objects and objective situations.

Both these characteristics can, I believe, be traced back to the peculiarities of the archetype.

For the archetype, of course, exists a priori. This may possibly explain the often totally irrational yet undisputed and indisputable existence of certain moods and opinions.

Perhaps these are so notoriously difficult to influence because of the powerfully suggestive effect emanating from the archetype. Consciousness is fascinated by it, held captive, as if hypnotized.

Very often the ego experiences a vague feeling of moral defeat and then behaves all the more defensively, defiantly, and self-righteously, thus setting up a vicious circle which only increases its feeling of inferiority.

The bottom is then knocked out of the human relationship, for, like megalomania, a feeling of inferiority makes mutual recognition impossible, and without this there is no relationship.

As I said, it is easier to gain insight into the shadow than into the anima or animus.

With the shadow, we have the advantage of being prepared in some sort by our education, which has always endeavoured to convince people that they are not one-hundred-per-cent pure gold.

So everyone immediately understands what is meant by "shadow," "inferior personality," etc.

And if he has forgotten, his memory can easily be refreshed by a Sunday sermon, his wife, or the tax collector. With the anima and animus, however, things are by no means so simple.

Firstly, there is no moral education in this respect, and secondly, most people are content to be self-righteous and prefer mutual vilification (if nothing worse!) to the recognition of their projections. Indeed, it seems a very natural state of affairs for men to have irrational moods and women irrational opinions.

Presumably this situation is grounded on instinct and must remain as it is to ensure that the Empedoclean game of the hate and love of the elements shall continue for all eternity.

Nature is conservative and does not easily allow her courses to be altered; she defends in the most stubborn way the inviolability of the preserves where anima and animus roam.

Hence it is much more difficult to become conscious of one's anima/animus projections than to acknowledge one's shadow side.

One has, of course, to overcome certain moral obstacles, such as vanity, ambition, conceit, resentment, etc., but in the case of projections all sorts of purely intellectual difficulties are added, quite apart from the contents of the projection, which one simply doesn't know how to cope with.

And on top of all this there arises a profound doubt as to whether one is not meddling too much with nature's business by prodding into consciousness things which it would have been better to leave asleep.

Although there are, in my experience, a fair number of people who can understand without special intellectual or moral difficulties what is meant by anima and animus, one finds very many more who have the greatest trouble in visualizing these empirical concepts as anything concrete.

This shows that they fall a little outside the usual range of experience. They are unpopular precisely because they seem unfamiliar.

The consequence is that they mobilize prejudice and become taboo like everything else that is unexpected.

So if we set it up as a kind of requirement that projections should be dissolved, because it is wholesomer that way and in every respect more advantageous, we are entering upon new ground. Up till now everybody has been convinced that the idea "my father," "my mother," etc., is nothing but a faithful reflection of the real parent, corresponding in every detail to the original, so that when someone says "my father" he means no more and no less than what his father is in reality.

This is actually what he supposes he does mean, but a supposition of identity by no means brings that identity about. This is where the fallacy of the enkekalymmenos ('the veiled one') comes in.

If one includes in the psychological equation X's picture of his father, which he takes for the real father, the equation will not work out, because the unknown quantity he has introduced does not tally with reality.

X has overlooked the fact that his idea of a person consists, in the first place, of the possibly very incomplete picture he has received of the real person and, in the second place, of the subjective modifications he has imposed upon this picture.

X's idea of his father is a complex quantity for which the real father is only in part responsible, an indefinitely large share falling to the son.

So true is this that every time he criticizes or praises his father he is unconsciously hitting back at himself, thereby bringing about those psychic consequences that overtake people who habitually disparage or overpraise themselves. If, however, X carefully compares his reactions with reality, he stands a chance of noticing that he has miscalculated The fallacy, which stems from Eubulidcs the Megarian, runs: "Can you recognize your father?" Yes. "Can you recognize this veiled one?"

No, "This veiled one is your father. Hence you can recognize your father and not recognize him," somewhere by not realizing long ago from his father's behaviour that the picture he has of him is a false one.

But as a rule X is convinced that he is right, and if anybody is wrong it must be the other fellow.

Should X have a poorly developed Eros, he will be either indifferent to the inadequate relationship he has with his father or else annoyed by the inconsistency and general Incomprehensibility of a father whose behaviour never really corresponds to the picture X has of him.

Therefore X thinks he has every right to feel hurt, misunderstood, and even betrayed.

One can imagine how desirable it would be in such cases to dissolve the projection.

And there are always optimists who believe that the golden age can be ushered in simply by telling people the right way to go.

But just let them try to explain to these people that they are acting like a dog chasing its own tail.

To make a person see the shortcomings of his attitude considerably more than mere "telling" is needed, for more is involved than ordinary common sense can allow.

What one is up against here is the kind of fateful misunderstanding which, under ordinary conditions, remains forever inaccessible to insight.

It is rather like expecting the average respectable citizen to recognize himself as a criminal.

I mention all this just to illustrate the order of magnitude to which the anima/animus projections belong, and the moral and intellectual exertions that are needed to dissolve them.

Not all the contents of the anima and animus are projected, however.

Many of them appear spontaneously in dreams and so on, and many more can be made conscious through active imagination.

In this way we find that thoughts, feelings, and affects are alive in us which we would never have believed possible.

Naturally, possibilities of this sort seem utterly fantastic to anyone who has not experienced them himself, for a normal person "knows what he thinks."

Such a childish attitude on the part of the "normal person" is simply the rule, so that no one without experience in this field can be expected to understand the real nature of anima and animus.

With these reflections one gets into an entirely new world of psychological experience, provided of course that one succeeds in realizing them in practice.

Those who do succeed can hardly fail to be impressed by all that the ego does not know and never has known.

This increase in self-knowledge is still very rare nowadays and is usually paid for in advance with a neurosis, if not with something worse.

The autonomy of the collective unconscious expresses itself in the figures of anima and animus.

They personify those of its contents which, when withdrawn from projection, can be integrated into consciousness.

To this extent, both figures represent -functions which filter the contents of the collective unconscious through to the conscious mind.

They appear or behave as such, however, only so long as the tendencies of the conscious and unconscious do not diverge too greatly.

Should any tension arise, these functions, harmless till then, confront the conscious mind in personified form and behave rather like systems split off from the personality, or like part souls.

This comparison is inadequate in so far as nothing previously belonging to the ego personality has split off from it; on the contrary, the two figures represent a disturbing accretion.

The reason for their behaving in this way is that though the contents of anima and animus can be integrated they themselves cannot, since they are archetypes.

As such they are the foundation stones of the psychic structure, which in its totality exceeds the limits of consciousness and therefore can never become the object of direct cognition.

Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition.

Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind.

This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation.

The unconscious as we know can never be "done with" once and for all. It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys.

The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these clangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided.

It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensation works with entire success.

The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts.

His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature.

Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work.

Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are.

Both these archetypes, as practical experience shows, possess a fatality that can on occasion produce tragic results.

They are quite literally the father and mother of all the disastrous entanglements of fate and have long been recognized as such by the whole world.

Together they form a divine pair, one of whom, in accordance with his Logos nature, is characterized by pneuma and nous, rather like Hermes with his ever-shifting hues, while the other, in accordance with her Eros nature, wears the features of Aphrodite, Helen (Selene), Persephone, and Hecate.

Both of them are unconscious powers, "gods" in fact, as the ancient world quite rightly conceived them to be.

To call them by this name is to give them that central position in the scale of psychological values which has always been theirs whether consciously acknowledged or not; for their power grows in proportion to the degree that they remain unconscious.

Those who do not see them are in their hands, just as a typhus epidemic flourishes best when its source is undiscovered.

Even in Christianity the divine syzygy has not become obsolete, but occupies the highest place as Christ and his bride the Church.

Parallels like these prove extremely helpful in our attempts to find the right criterion for gauging the significance of these two archetypes. What we can discover about them from the conscious side is so slight as to be almost imperceptible.

It is only when we throw light into the dark depths of the psyche and explore the strange and tortuous paths of human fate that it gradually becomes clear to us how immense is the influence wielded by these two factors that complement our conscious life.

Recapitulating, I should like to emphasize that the integration of the shadow, or the realization of the personal unconscious, marks the first stage in the analytic process, and that without it a recognition of anima and animus is impossible.

The shadow can be realized only through a relation to a partner, and anima and animus only through a relation to the opposite sex, because only in such a relation do their projections become operative.

The recognition of anima or animus gives rise, in a man, to a triad, one third of which is transcendent: the masculine subject, the opposing feminine subject, and the transcendent anima. With a woman the situation is reversed.

The missing fourth element that would make the triad a quaternity is, in a man, the archetype of the Wise Old Man, which I have not discussed here, and in a woman the Chthonic Mother.

These four constitute a half immanent and half transcendent quaternity, an archetype which I have called the 'marriage quaternio.

The marriage quaternio provides a schema not only for the self but also for the structure of primitive society with its cross-cousin marriage, marriage classes, and division of settlements into quarters.

The self, on the other hand, is a God image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one. Of this the early Christian spirit was not ignorant, otherwise Clement of Alexandria could never have said that he who knows himself knows God. ~Carl Jung, Aion