The Feminine Within: Man’s Anima Development

In his “The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” Carl Jung writes extensively about the anima concept or archetype which he considered of paramount practical importance to the psychotherapist. He reminds the reader that his notion of anima, a Latin expression, “is meant to connote something that should not be confused with any dogmatic Christian idea of the soul or with any previous philosophical conceptions of it. If one wishes to form anything like a concrete expression of what this term covers, one should better go to the classics” where the anima is regarded as the feminine and chthonic part of the soul. Here Jung goes to great lengths to describe anima as a psychological rather than a religious idea.

This is Jung early in his career arguing that a scientific psychology must regard those transcendental intuitions that sprang from the human mind in all ages as “projections,” that is, psychic contents that were extrapolated in metaphysical space and treated as a concrete reality. Jung reminds us that we encounter the anima historically above all in the divine syzygies, “the male-female pair of deities.” These deities can be traced to primitive mythology, the philosophy of Gnosticism, and to classical Chinese philosophy where the cosmic concepts of “yin” (feminine) and “yang” (masculine) can be found. Jung suggests that “We can safely assert that these syzygies are as universal as the existence of man and woman. From this fact we may reasonably conclude that man’s imagination is bound by this motif, so that he was largely compelled to project it again and again, at all times and in all places.”

Jung, calling on extensive clinical experience, underscores that “projection is an unconscious, automatic process whereby a content that is unconscious to the subject transfers itself to an object, so it seems to belong to that object. The projection ceases the moment it becomes conscious, that is to say when it is seen as belonging to the subject.” For Jung it is the images of the parents that seem to be projected most frequently. His thinking in part is based on how easily and readily therapy patients project the father or mother image onto the therapist, a process known as transference. Jung reminds us that the projection is never conscious.

Jung writes that “We can hardly get around the hypothesis that an emotionally charged concept is lying ready in the unconscious and springs into projection at a certain moment. This content is the syzygy motif, and it expresses the fact that a masculine element is always paired with a feminine one. The wide distribution and extraordinary emotionality of this motif prove that it is a fundamental psychic factor of great practical importance.”

According to Jung, “The anima is a factor in the psychology of a man whenever emotions and affects are at work. She intensifies, exaggerates, falsifies, and mythologizes all emotional relations with his work and with other people of both sexes. The resultant fantasies and entanglements are all her doing. When the anima is strongly constellated, she softens the man’s character and makes him touchy, irritable, moody, jealous, vain, and unadjusted. He is then in a state of ‘discontent” and spreads discontent all around him. Sometimes the man’s relationship to the woman who has caught his anima accounts for the existence of this syndrome.”

Jung suggests that the need for a strong anima presence can vary with age. He writes that “Younger people, who have not yet reached the middle of life (around the age of thirty-five), can bear even the total loss of anima without injury. He adds that “The growing youth must be able to free himself from the anima fascination of his mother.” This is a fundamental developmental stage.

But this movement beyond the mother is not especially easy, as Jung notes, because the anima has been associated with the “magical feminine” who “infatuated young men and sucks the life out of them. …Everything the anima touches becomes numinous — unconditional, dangerous, taboo, magical. She is the serpent in the paradise of the harmless man with good resolutions and better intentions. She affords the most convincing reasons for not prying into the unconscious, an occupation that would break down our moral inhibitions and unleash that had better been left unconscious and undisturbed.”

The anima wants life, both good and bad. Jung suggests the anima might “no longer cross our paths 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 god 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.”

This can be dangerous shadow territory, necessary to enter but at a price. And this is essential for psychological growth, for what Jung calls “individuation,” finding my purpose, my path, my consciousness, my completeness. And the journey is usually fraught. So is its absence.

The psychologist adds, “After the middle of life, however, permanent loss of the anima means a diminution of vitality, of flexibility, and of human kindness. The result, as a rule, is premature rigidity, crustiness, stereotypy, fanatical one-sidedness, obstinacy, pedantry, or else resignation, weariness, sloppiness, irresponsibility, and finally a childish ‘ramollissement’ [a morbid softening and weakening] with a tendency to alcohol.”

Jung seems to be describing a loss of self and soul. So, reconnecting with this archetypal sphere experience is a matter of psychological life and death. Of course, therapy could be very useful in repairing this missing, self-nurturing feminine presence. I chose this path after the death of my mother. At the same time, I started my course work at the Jung Center in New York City.

In this spirit I started recording my dreams, many resulting in poetry. Perhaps more important the anima dreams found their way into my consciousness and seemed to temper my psyche. I’ll close with a recent dream that seemed to be begging to be a poem. I obliged with “Cooking the Dream Book.” This felt like a penultimate anima dream that seems to result in a certain consciousness and perspective, while everything remains in tension, as I spar with an open flame.

I welcome your views.

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Cooking the Dream Book

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In the dream I am on a bus or crowded

Subway car, surely in NYC, gazing

At a stunningly beautiful woman

Angular, with Mediterranean skin

And a scarf. We both act coy

Looking away but always return

To the object. I sense erotic tension

And expectation with every roll

Of her eyes and twist of the neck.

We exchange names that pass

Like ether and echo the beauty

Of the other. Then we enter ritual.

She takes me inside her apartment.

It is embroidered with gold

And looks like a museum.

The dream ends with both of us

Looking at mirrors, each reflecting

The other eternally, then going down

Going under, to an imposing hearth

Where she cooks duck in wine

Over an open fire. When I move

Closer, the fire goes out.

When I retreat the fire roars

The duck simmers

And what she wears more sheer

Now subject to my fading gaze

As in a mist of recognition.