Carl Jung: anima and animus

It was Carl Jung who highlighted the idea of the contrasexual element in the psyche which he called the anima in the man, and the animus in the woman. These are opposite but complementary, and together make the whole. They represent a similar balance of opposites as yin and yang found in Chinese philosophy.

Jung distinguished three sets of factors that contributed to the development of this contrasexual element: the archetypal, the biological, and the sociological. The anima and the animus are potentially guides to the depth of the unconscious, but can only do this if we can learn to relate to these parts of ourselves in an open and contrastive way.

The difficulty is that both present a point of view which is opposed to the dominant attitude of our consciousness – so they remain largely unconscious and often projected onto others in our relationships with the opposite sex. They are an innate aspect which is somehow different from how the person functions consciously – an image of what is ‘other’ with an-other anatomy. The images that belong to both animus and anima are general principles for all humans, but can become easily personified in fantasy or dreams.

Jung first encountered this when he was very stressed. He called such figures ‘soul-guides’, describing the dialogues with female figures he encountered in his inner world, later recognizing the same pattern of male fantasy figures in women he analyzed. There are certainly cultural bias and generalizations in how Jung writes about this – but there are themes of difference, otherness, division, whatever we mean by ‘man’ or ‘woman’, that affect us psychologically and spiritually.

This example from the work of the analyst June Singer might throw some light on how this can affect relationships. She describes an attractive woman working in public relations who had fallen in love with her client, an actor. They were engaged to be married.

‘Fully unconsciously, with all the wary suspicion of a business man about to be taken over in an exploitative merger, her animus was resenting the advantages her fiancé was about to acquire. Nevertheless, on the conscious level the romance went along marvellously well until the man became seriously ill. Suddenly he was shaken, insecure in himself, wanting sympathy. The woman asked herself, “is this the man I was going to depend on?” But it was the woman’s animus driving her to the conclusion that she didn’t need him after all, and it was the animus that caused her to sever the relationship within a shockingly short time after the encounter with the man’s dependent and demanding anima.’

There is, as Jung reminds us, a many-sided character of the anima – some of which is to the fore in religious imagery of the feminine:

‘The bright side of the anima is a lovely figure full of grace and healing- an enabler … the Lady, Mater Dei [who] St Bernard addresses, “O Clement, O Pias, O Dulcis,” and so she is on the face at least. But equally fascinating, quite probably more so in view of the relative difficulty of assimilating her into consciousness, is the dark anima, whom we must expect to find right behind Our Lady. She is Kali, the destroyer.

The light and dark anima are inseparable like the two sides of a coin, and to accept only the light side is to bring on the consequences of the dark.’