Carl Jung: The animus is in this respect rather difficult to deal with because it is a plurality.

The animus is in this respect rather difficult to deal with because it is a plurality.

One can compare the animus, as I have said, to a group of people, a court, or a limited company, or an organization; while the anima is very definitely one person and therefore more clearly to be
seen.

The anima behaves exactly like a definite person, yet she is also a function, her true function being the connection between the conscious and the unconscious; there the anima is in her right place.

That is, she is not in between myself and my audience, but in between myself and my unconscious audience, a mirror reflex of this world, the collective unconscious.

There again, those people who think of the unconscious as being a psychological tissue contained in one's head are completely bewildered, for they can hardly form an idea of a tissue standing in one's head.

That is indeed a very wrong idea.

You should think of the collective unconscious in a very primitive way, then you are about right, at all events much nearer to the facts than when you think of it in psychological terms.

You should think of it in the terms of primitive man, as the ghost land, all the invisible dead people amongst us.

Or a good idea of the collective unconscious is that it is a sort of unknown or unconscious reality, the unknown in everything and in everybody.

For instance, the unknown and invisible nature of this chair.

Of course, any person of ordinary mind would deny emphatically that there was anything unknown in this chair.

If they don't know what is in the chair they simply tear it open and see that there is hair or some other kind of stuffing in it, and the wood can be examined to see whether there is anything inside
that, and they know about the maple tree from which it is made, so everything is perfectly normal.

Yet they entirely forget that they have not penetrated the secret of cellulose, nor the secret of the atoms of which the chair is composed.

There is an absolutely cosmic secret, an existing thing in the chair, and you see that forms the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 204-205