Long before I knew about Jung I knew about animus. I didn’t know what the name was, but I had known my animus for YEARS. There was the dark animus who had harassed me since I was ten. In my nightmares this faceless man had chased me and threatened me and insisted I didn’t look at him. I thought, as most would do at 10, that he was my bogeyman and it certainly didn’t occur to me that he was a psychological complex and/or an archetype. Years later there were positive animus figures who showed up in my dreams and they completed me. With him I felt strong, self-confident, smart and loved. Now that we were together all would be well forever….but then I would wake up and I would be crushed and completely lost without him. The details of some of my positive animus dreams have stayed with me longer than memories of actual men I have dated.
Just in case you don’t know anima from anime, let me try to break this down for you. The first task of individuation, consciousness or just not being an unconscious git is to pull back our projections and become aware of our shadow. Once we have done that we then need to integrate the inner opposite gender aspect of ourselves and/or, in fancy terms we need to integrate our unconscious contrasexual nature, or we haven’t become all we can be (I didn’t intend to quote an Army commercial but my animus inspired Muse made me do it. Stay with me, men have anima figures, that function as their soul, and women have animus figures.
The anima is something each guy has, no matter how butch or bad ass or unevolved he may be, he has an inner feminine even if he is completely disconnected from it—it’s there. Really, it is, trust me—I am a paid professional. When you think of anima think of Dante’s Beatrice, Jerry McGuire and the gal who completes him or the other one who makes him jump on the couch like it was a trampoline at a kid’s birthday party, or that Twilighty vampire guy and the human he loves too much. These are literary versions of what happens internally. Dante needed his anima, his soul, or he was in hell. Jerry needed Renee Zellweiger or he was just a soulless agent. Vampirey guy has no soul and so he needs Anima figure to get one and he also needs sunblock but that is a different post. And women have animus figures, this is really at the core of every romance novel. “He completes me.” But the he that completes you is in fact an inner he, he is your animus.
Note to reader: please read the following in your head or out loud in a thick Swiss accent. If you can’t manage that at least have a cup of Swiss Miss as you read the following:
Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, 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. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man.
“Marriage as a Psychological Relationship” (1925) In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P.338
The animus, according to Jung, is both a personal complex and an archetypal image that exists within all women. This is not easy stuff to boil down, so let me have my good friend Carl Gustav Jung say it for himself (and no he doesn’t have a blog and you can’t friend him on Facebook).
The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman’s ancestral experiences of man-and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being, not in the sense of masculine creativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might call . . . the spermatic word.["Anima and Animus," CW 7, par. 336.]
That is the last I am going to quote Jung for a while because he had some serious issues about women with large animus figures. Really, it is almost unbearable to read his writings on the subject without wanting to cast dispersions on his manhood and suggest he get a sports car and a Costco size vat of Viagra. Let’s just put it this way, I think he had a very small *animus*, if you get my drift. Truly, for a guy being surrounded by super smart women he had some serious biases about women. I know it was the time in which he lived but it can still be hard to read his theories on women without occasionally wanting to throw out the Basel-born Jung with the bath water.
Back to the the animus. The animus in women isn’t so much a soul figure, as the anima is in men. The animus is more of an inner guy who is loaded “with fixed ideas, collective opinions and unconscious a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth. In a woman who is identified with the animus (called animus-possession), Eros generally takes second place to Logos.” I was, prior to lots of work, such a gal. I had a serious animus complex. I tended to idealize the masculine and logos over the feminine and feeling. Being as Athena daugter of a Zeus father, i.e. born out of the head of my father (if you have no idea what I am talking about I will include a link to a mythological Cliff notes on the subject). The animus is also a bridge to the Self (yikes, me trying to explain the Self could take a while. Suffice to say the Self is what you are after in Jungian psychology and it is the more transcendent/trans-personal part of yourself). Here is what my dead and somewhat sexist friend and the Father of Analytic Psychology has to say on the subject:
Like the anima, the animus too has a positive aspect. Through the figure of the father he expresses not only conventional opinion but-equally-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.[Ibid., par. 33.]
Differentiation is the key in working with animus. The animus, tends to be bossy and opinionated and has answer for everything…mine certainly did/does. What one wants to do is differentiate the messages that come from you( the ego) and those that come from the animus and that way you are conscious of where these messages come from and that gives you more freedom to take or leave the Old Testament truths that the animus likes to bust out ( lots of rules, thou-shalts and general Super-ego kind of statements that can at the very least be oppressive and at their worst they can be paralyzing).
And since my animus was unusually large, before I learned to differentiate my animus, I had a hard time being around groups of women. This made attending grad school in my chosen field a little hard( as of late Psychology has become a mostly female profession)and made it harder still to attend a conference given by Marion Woodman, the grand poobah of Jungian Femininity, on the Feminine in which all of the attendants were garbed in shawls and gypsy skirts and Goddess necklaces. My animus was repulsed by the idea when I suggested we attend.
“Are you kidding me?” My animus asked. “We got to get out of here. This isn’t for us. This is too touchy, feely. Where is the intellect? Where is the logic? Where is the objective????? Hell no, we won’t go.” It shouted in a chant of self-preservation.
There was a big part of me that agreed with my animus and wanted to hightail it out of the Hilton Ballroom that this estrogen rich event was happening in. I was ready to go faster than you can say “Sororities, Knitting Circles, Estrogen, and Ovaries”. However I knew that my animus had been running the show for far too long and at the time I was trying to learn about mothering, as most of my practice had been filled with college aged girls who had mother wounds and my mother wound had left me feeling like it was MUCH better to identify with the masculine. I knew that Marion Woodman had something to teach me about the feminine. So I did some differentiation work with my animus. In my imagination I booked my animus a suite at Caesar’s Palace. I gave him cigars and booze and chips and gift certificate’s to steak houses and strip clubs. I told him to leave me alone for the weekend so I could get to know myself independent of him and that I would be back for him on Monday. My animus agreed. And it worked. This was the beginning of me differentiating from my animus. I began to see what thoughts, ideas and feelings were mine and which were from the animus. This was big and it was totally worth being a part of Shawl Fest 2006. That said, I am still pretty identified with my animus—only now my animus is more positive and not the dark one that so long tormented me.
Speaking of the dream that I had for decades in which the dark animus was chasing me, what I have come to realize is that I wouldn’t have died if I looked at him. He would have died. He was afraid of the light of consciousness and so he lied to me and told me that if I looked at the complex it would kill me. Guess what, I am still here and he is gone. The positive animus remains.
So, ladies, any animus figures in your dreams? Fellows, any anima dreams????
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More on animus:
Here, here, here , here and here.
If more than two people are interested in this topic, I could write a post about how our animus or anima can create acrimony in relationships with *real* men and explore Jung’s idea of marriage as a psychological relationship. If you are interested vote with your comments. If you aren’t I can always write about shoes, Igor, Lily and how much I hate L.A. No hard feelings. 
My positive animus’ feelings won’t be hurt.
So you know how I often write detailed accounts of what I told Igor and what he told me in my sessions with him? Well, there is a school of thought that would say that by my doing that I am damaging the work and even impinging my growth. I have kept this idea in the back of my mind as long as I have been writing about my own personal therapy here on the blog and chose to keep it there, that is until now. Cheryl Fuller, on her brilliant blog Jung at Heart, wrote a post about the importance of container for transformation to occur in psychotherapy and it got me thinking and I felt like I needed to think about/write about this issue as a means of coming to understand exactly how I feel about this and to see if perhaps my writing about my own therapy is helping or hurting my work with Igor.
