A Man and His Anima Dreams
In my experience, men don’t talk much about their dreams. Occasionally I share dreams with my brother over morning coffee. We usually concentrate on the language and architecture of the dream and not the psychology of it. I’ve enjoyed many discussions of dreams during sessions at the Jung Foundation in NYC, where the place feels safe and open to intimate discussions that won’t carry over into the street. After all, dreams are private and usually telling.
Of late I’ve picked up chatter on social media and in traditional media about complaints from women that their boyfriends are looking for a therapist as much as a lover. I’m not aware of any formal research on this subject but suspect that there’s a least a kernel of truth in this complaint. Men are generally slow to therapy and to open up psychologically.
Carl Jung has a lot to offer men, especially those of us in our second half of life who have raised families and fought our wars in the marketplace. For Jung, the second half of life is a time for reflection and introspection, a time for a conversation with the psyche.
As he reveals in his “The Symbolic Life” and in other writings, Jung was deeply interested in the interior, repressed and shadow sides of men and women. The anima is man’s internal feminine; the animus is a woman’s internal masculine. A man’s anima can be seen as a collection of all of the experiences he’s ever had with women, with his mother taking center stage. Lovers, fantasies, betrayals, secrets, dreams, nightmares and all that unrequited sex are mixed together in the soup of the unconscious and waiting for that trigger to send it in forth into the bedroom on that first night of a vacation. Nonetheless, a man’s problem with the feminine and his anima side likely originated with the mother.
We all run the risk of being “possessed” by this interior “other” because these forces are largely unconscious. Understanding and making conscious this repressed self is the first and perhaps most important step in what Jung called the individuation process or the path to psychological wholeness.
In Jung’s psychological world view there are four primary or superior functions: Thinking, Feeling, Intuition and Sensation. These functions dictate how we perceive the world, relate and take in information. Each of us favors one superior function. In turn, if my window on the world is my thinking function, my feeling function, conversely, will be inferior and underdeveloped. If I am an intuitive, sensation will be my inferior function.
The important psychological insight here is that anima will always attack my inferior function. If I’m a thinker, anima will go after my feeling function. In this case I am likely to be out of sorts, complaining and perhaps even throw a tantrum. The net effect is that I might become more suspicious of my feelings and try to keep them at bay.
Individuation is work, perhaps a lifetime of work. Therapy can be helpful. I entered Jungian therapy after my mother died and it changed my life. Perhaps even more helpful were the workshops I attended at the Philadelphia and New York Jung Foundations. These classes provided the occasion to start a dream journal, a thirty-year project.
At a recent Jung class in New York the instructor posed a number of life questions. This one caught my eye: “On reflection, how does/did the pursuit of your life-goals determine the balance of feminine and masculine principles in your personality? What was neglected or put on hold? Consider your relationship to your body, to loved ones, to play, to soul-life. On the whole, have you lived a reasonably balanced life? Are there imbalances you’d like to address?”
As one born in war and also having served in war, I had a little trouble finding myself in this proposition. The psychologist Maslow wrote about being “pinned down at the safety level” and slow to what he called self-actualization. I am in that group. I did understand early on that my life was on a patriarchal and military arc. Later on, a PhD in philosophy helped, but not enough. Charting my unexamined life, my inferior side, and the state of my anima was helped immensely by recording, reflecting on, and at times sharing some of hundreds of anima dreams I had over the years. I’ve had a lot of help along the way.
For Jung, dreams are central to archetypal psychology. Unlike Freud, Jung found a science in dreams; an ontology of sorts. In his “The Symbolic Life” he writes that the general function of dreams is to balance some disturbance in the psyche by producing a complimentary or compensatory narrative. In our conscious state, our shadow side is often overlooked and repressed. Dreams present a parallel narrative that is vaguely analogous to what is rational and comprehensible during our waking life. For Jung, dreams serve as a corrective for a defect in one’s conscious life. Sometimes it can be in the dream itself; sometimes it comes with conscious reflection. Here is an anima dream from a year ago that makes this point:
“I am on a college campus, flirting with a young woman. When I am leaving, she says she loves me, just like that. I can see her face. She is 20-something, pretty, blonde. She gives me a piece of paper to write down her number. I begin to start worrying about the consequences. I think of my marriage and feel some guilt.
“In a related scene I am kneeling in a pew in front of a church praying with long rosary beads as the ‘woman’ walks by, as if she’s keeping an eye on me. In this instance the rosary seems to win out.”
Once awake, I wrote in my journal that “This seems like theater, or play, a bit of fun, then reflection, then a public penance.” It must have been pure coincidence that this dream occurred on Good Friday. I am not a regular church goer.
Whatever the dream, whatever the theme, the objective is to make the dream conscious and integrate with the psyche. The Sirens are regular visitors in men’s dreams, puffing us up and whispering what we might want to hear. She seems to visit me nightly. The woman in a recent dream tells me how great I look, then proceeds to pull a nose hair out of my left nostril, as if she’s conducting an orchestra. A dream trumpet doesn’t have to sound for the psyche to shift even slightly.
I’ll close with Jung: A person who confronts his shadow finds his own light.
