Carl Jung: But the drama shows the proper function of the animus.

Well, they rode out into the desert till they came to a wigwam, where the Indian went to sleep. The wigwam is the right place for the Indian, he is among his own tribe where he belongs.

He is the natural mind, and instinct has taken him back into his natural conditions.

The animus is not meant to live in the depths of the unconscious, he is meant to live on the surface of the earth.

He must be connected with consciousness, one should always know wwhere he is; when he disappears, any- thing may happen.

That he is in the right place here is shown in the fact that when the dawn broke, he looked out if the tent and beheld three flaming crosses in the sky.

Here the animus functions in the proper way: he must have vision, he must see what is going on in the unconscious; he now informs the conscious that he has seen three flaming crosses, which the conscious does not see.

The vision is like a sort of story, because the conscious ego is still a mere onlooker and has no hand in the game; thus fare the animus and the animals are the active dramatis personae.

But the drama shows the proper function of the animus. It reveals the laws of the unconscious to the spectator.
I said, you remember, that a certain amount of disposable energy is used up in such a vision.

After a while the patient gets tired, and then the Indian goes to sleep, in spite of the fact that thre is still something in the end pointing to a future problem, as is often the case.

These three flaming crosses in the sky indicate that the problem of the Holy Ghost is not completely settled. What would you say about that symbolism? Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 134.

Carl Jung on the "Animus"

Lecture 7

Questions and Discussion

Mrs. Zinno’s question: “If the technique of introversion which you described be used before the pairs of opposites have been stretched to the uttermost in conflict, will the collective unconscious be constellated instead of the releasing symbol?”

Dr. Jung: It must not by any means be supposed that the technique described is suitable for general use or imitation.

That would indeed be disastrous.

It is something applicable to a particular case under particular circumstances, and is only applicable when the unconscious is animated, and when the unconscious content is necessary for further progress.

There are very many cases in which the conscious material is in need of being digested, and in those cases it would be quite futile to call up the unconscious content.

I can call to mind now a case where the analyst released the unconscious under wrong conditions, and with the most unfortunate results.

In my own case the release of the unconscious was demanded.

The conscious had become practically a tabula rasa, and the contents underneath had to be freed.

Dr. Mann: In speaking of the animus, one always does so in a derogatory way. I should like to hear a discus- sion of its positive value, but no doubt you will speak further about the animus later on.

Dr. Jung: Yes, on the whole I would rather defer this, but as a partial answer here I can say that the animus, being discovered as he usually is under the most unpleasant circumstances, suffers from the fact.

Most psychological things are discovered that way because as long as things are running smoothly, no one thinks of trying to understand them.

It is only when problems arise that we are forced into a conscious attitude toward our psychical processes.

By being discovered chiefly under disagreeable circumstances, the animus comes into ill repute, though of course it has a tremendously important positive function as presenting the relationship to the unconscious.

Similarly, “persona” has come into a bad name.

No one can imagine getting along without a persona—that is, a relationship to the outside world—but when one identifies with the persona, its valuable side disappears in its abuse.

So when one is all animus, one loses sight of the service the animus performs when it is held within its proper functioning limits.

Mrs. Zinno: In my question I had especially in mind the phenomenon one can see going on today in modern art—that is, the artist pumps his unconscious for the sake of the images he can find there and not for a psychological need, and so he brings out a lot of embryonic stuff instead of the releasing symbol.

Dr. Jung: This brings us into the problem of the significance of modern art.

I’m not at all sure that all those present would agree modern art brought out embryonic material from the un- conscious.

What would you say to that, Mr. Aldrich?

Mr. Aldrich: I think modern art is too big a term for satisfactory discussion. Dr. Jung: Limit it then to painting.
Mr. Aldrich: Some modern art has for me a really magic spell.

For example, not long ago I saw in Lugano a painting of a bull and a man struggling with it.

The background was flat blue, with six points of light set in it—six stars or planets, so that the man and the bull seemed to suggest that they were the seventh.

The bull was not like any bull that exists on the earth today; he was antique; he was not just a bull, he was The Bull.

So too with the human figure: there was no effort at portraiture or photographic rendering of a man—he was more than any one man, he was Man.

There was a sense of tremendous power and space.

The Bull swept past the stars dragging with him Man who strove to dominate him.

The artist—I questioned him—had never even heard of Mithras and the bull: the picture was pure fantasy that had come up from the unconscious.

Another example is a painting that was in the Kunsthaus here, a great black horse rearing up, wild with demo- niac energy.

On his back sat a heroic figure of a man armed with a spear, nude except for a helmet, who seemed to look intently ahead into the far distance.

He was undisturbed by the ferocity of his horse.

This horse, like The Bull, was no particular animal—rather, he was The Horse. Both these pictures stirred me greatly.
Dr. Jung: Why did they stir you?

If you could answer that it would explain the appeal of modern art.

Mr. Aldrich: I think they were libido symbols, and that the struggle with the bull, for instance, pictured the conflict in man’s soul.

Dr. Jung: Was there any difference between those pictures and one painted 150 or 200 years ago? Mr. Aldrich: Yes, a very great difference.
I could see a picture of a peasant’s horse painted in the old way, and while I would know it to be an excellent painting, it would not stir me.

Dr. Jung: That is just it.

The criterion of art is that it grips you.

Constable no longer does this to us, but undoubtedly he did stir the people of his time. Most probably the art produced now would be anathema to our ancestors.
It would have no value for them.

One has to assume, I think, that the artist adapts to the change of attitude.

Now I should be most interested to hear the views of the classon this theme of art.

One can take art as a form of dream.

Just as the dream seeks to maintain a psychological balance by filling out the daytime conscious attitude by the unconscious elements, so art balances the general public tendency of a given time.

What do you think about art from that viewpoint?

Mrs. Zinno: Is not the characteristic thing of modern art that it is subjective?

Dr. Jung: But if you say that, you must be very careful to define what you mean by subjective.

Very often it is assumed that an experience is subjective because it takes place within the mind of a subject, but it is not then necessarily in opposition to objective, because the images of the collective unconscious, from their collective character, are just as truly objects as things outside the psyche.

Now, I think modern art tends to be subjective in the sense that the artist is concerned with his individual con- nection with the object, rather than with the object per se.

It is perfectly true that modern art also tends toward an increased interest in the inner object, but that does not in itself, as I have just said, constitute subjectivity.

In modern art one feels decidedly the predomination of the internal processes.

To take the examples Mr. Aldrich gave, we could say that these artists were more interested in the image of the horse or bull than in any actual animals, and still more interested in their relation to those images.

But what then is the aim of art?

An artist would instantly resent that question and would say that art is just art when it has no aim. Miss Baynes: Is it not the aim of art to counteract the effects of machinery on modern life?
Mr. Bacon: Does it not do something for the artist?

Dr. Jung: Undoubtedly both of these points of view are true, but then there must be something over and above that.

Dr. de Angulo: I think modern art is a misplaced effort to balance the extreme to which scientific thought has forced modern man.

I say misplaced because the artist is almost driven into a morbid extreme, and “puts it up” to his public to make the connection between his product and the conscious viewpoint.

Dr. Jung: Many would certainly contest the point that modern art is morbid.

Mr. Aldrich: It seems to me that a characteristic thing of modern art is that it no longer concerns itself with being merely beautiful.

It has passed through and beyond mere conventional beauty, and in this it reflects our changed views of life.

Before the war we lived in a beautiful world—or perhaps I would better say in a world that was merely sweet and pretty, a world of sticky sentimentality
in which nothing brutal nor ugly was given place.

Modern art certainly cares nothing for prettiness; in fact, it would rather have the ugly than the pretty; and sometimes, I think, it seeks a new realization
of beauty beyond the pale of what was formerly considered possible—in ugliness itself, even.

(There followed here some discussion in the class as to whether modern art had really freed us from sentimentalism, or merely shifted the kind of sentimentalism a little.)

Dr. Jung: There is no doubt that sentimentalism catches the public and blinds it to its own sensuality and brutality.

Thus in the time of Louis XVI, one had all those beautiful shepherdesses and idylls of one sort or another in France, and then followed the Revolution.

Or again, we can see the raw hell of war coming after the purity and exaggerated delicacy of feeling of the Victorian age, when a lady and a gentleman neither spoke nor thought anything evil.

All through history one can see periods of pronounced brutality directly predicted by the sentimentality of the art preceding them.

And the same thing, of course, goes on in the case of the individual artist—that is, he uses sentimentality to cloak brutality.

These two seem to be opposites between which an enantiodromia works. Mrs. Zinno: Is not the best expression of modern art to be found in sculpture?
Dr. Jung: No, because sculpture demands form, and form [demands] an idea, while painting can dispense with form.

The cubistic sculpture seems to say all of nothing.

But in painting one can find the thread of development.

For example, I once followed very carefully the course of Picasso’s painting.

All of a sudden he was struck by the triangular shadow thrown by the nose on the cheek. Later on the cheek itself became a four-sided shadow, and so it went.

These triangles and squares became nuclei with independent values of their own, and the human figure gradually disappeared, or became dissolved in space.

There was once exhibited in New York a painting called the Nude Descending the Stairs.

This might be said to present a double dissolution of the object, that is in time and space, for not only have the figure and the stairs gone over into the triangles and squares, but the figure is up and down the stairs at the same time, and it is only by moving the picture that one can get the figure to come out as it would in an ordinary painting where the artist preserved the integrity of the figure in space and time.

The essence of this process is the depreciation of the object.

It is a somewhat similar performance such as that we go through when we cast aside the reality of a living man and reduce him to his infantile misdeeds.

The artist takes the object away from our eyes, and substitutes a partial derivative.

It is no longer a nose but its shadow we are shown.

Or, to put it another way, he shifts the emphasis from the essential to the unessential.

It is a little bit as though you explained a thing by a bon mot, a fugitive exhalation of the thing.

This process inevitably drives the interest away from the object to the subject, and instead of the real object, the internal object becomes the carrier of the values.

It is Plato’s conception of the eidolon coming again to the fore.

Thus, when the artist paints such a bull as that described by Mr. Aldrich, it is the bull he has painted, it is yours or mine—God’s bull, you might say.

The Bull-Tamer is a collective idea of tremendous power gathered into an image.

It speaks of discipline—only a man of heroic attributes overcomes the bull.

So modern art leads us away from the too great scattering of the libido on the external object, back to the creative source within us, back to the inner values.

In other words, it leads us by the same path analysis tries to lead us, only it is not a conscious leadership on the part of the artist.

We have analysis for exactly the purpose of getting us back to those inner values so little understood by the modern man.

Analysis would have been unthinkable in the Middle Ages, because those men were freely expressing those values from which we have cut ourselves off today.

Catholics today have no need of analysis because the unconscious in them is not constellated—it is kept perpetually drained through their ritual.

The unconscious of a Catholic is empty.

I once made a collection of portraits carrying back through the Middle Ages, in order to trace the change in psychological attitude between the medieval man and ourselves.

Down to the middle of the sixteenth century or thereabouts, these portraits are my relatives.

I understand these men and women in the same sense that I understand my contemporaries.

But in the middle of the sixteenth century a change begins and the Gothic man, the pre-Reformation man, comes on the scene, and he is a stranger to us.

There is a very peculiar look about him, his eyes are stone-like and inexpressive; none of the vivacity to be seen in our eyes is in them.

Sometimes one sees this face reproduced in modern times among peasants and people of the ignorant classes who have not awakened to modern life.

Thus the cook of my mother-in-law has a perfect Gothic face, the arched eyebrows and pointed smile of the Madonna.

If you notice Luther’s face you can find that he is not quite modern, but belonged to the time before the Reformation also.

He has still in a way the Gothic look and the Gothic mouth.

There is combined in this smile the paranoid’s idea of persecution, of martyrdom, and the sardonic smile of catatonia.

It is also the smile of Mona Lisa.

is connected, too, with the antique smile as one sees it on the Aegina marbles, those men who are enduring death with a smile.

The Gothic smile is almost like the beginning of a kiss—full of tenderness, like a mother.

Or it is the smile of a man who meets on the street the woman with whom he has a secret liaison.

There is understanding in the smile—“We know,” it seems to say.

I think these peculiarities of the Gothic attitude are to be explained by the fact that at one time there was one language, one belief, from north to south.

The smile bespoke the complete conviction that excluded all doubt, therefore the kinship with the paranoid.

All this disappeared with the advent of the modern viewpoint.

The world broke into diversified faiths, and the inner unit and quietude gave place to the materialistic urge toward conquest of the outer world.

Through science values became exteriorized.

Modern art, then, began first by depreciating these external values, by dissolving the object, and then sought the basic thing, the internal image back of the object—the eidolon.

We can hardly predict today what the artist is going to bring forth, but always a great religion has gone hand in hand with a great art.

Lecture:

At the last lecture I told you of my descent into the cavern. After that came a dream in which I had to kill Siegfried.

Siegfried was not an especially sympathetic figure to me, and I don’t know why my unconscious got engrossed in him.

Wagner’s Siegfried, especially, is exaggeratedly extraverted and at times actually ridiculous.

I never liked him.

Nevertheless my dream showed him to be my hero.

I could not understand the strong emotion I had with the dream.

I can tell it here appropriately because it connects with the theme we have been discussing with respect to art, that is, with the change of values.

This was the dream:

I was in the Alps, not alone, but with another man, a curious shortish man with brown skin.

Both of us carried rifles.

It was just before dawn, when the stars were disappearing from the sky, and we were climbing up the mountain together.

Suddenly I heard Siegfried’s horn sound out from above, and I knew that it was he we were to shoot.

The next minute he appeared high above us, lit up by a shaft of sunlight from the rising sun.

He came plunging down the mountainside in a chariot made of bones.

I thought to myself, “Only Siegfried could do that.”

Presently, around a bend in the trail, he came upon us, and we fired full into his breast.

Then I was filled with horror and disgust at myself for the cowardice of what we had done.

The little man with me went forward, and I knew he was going to drive the knife into Siegfried’s heart, but that was just a little too much for me, and I turned and fled.

I had the idea of getting away as fast as I could to a place where “they” could not find me.

I had the choice of going down into the valley or further up the mountains by a faint trail.

I chose the latter, and as I ran there broke upon me a perfect deluge of rain.

Then I awoke with a sense of great relief.

The hero, as I told you, is the symbol of the greatest value recognized by us.

Christ has been our hero when we accept the principles of his life as our own principles.

Or Herakles or Mithras becomes my hero when I am determined to be as disciplined as they were.

So it appeared as if Siegfried were my hero.

I felt an enormous pity for him, as though I myself had been shot.

I must then have had a hero I did not appreciate, and it was my ideal of force and efficiency I had killed.

I had killed my intellect, helped on to the deed by a personification of the collective unconscious, the little brown man with me.

In other words, I deposed my superior function.

The same thing is going on in art, that is, the killing of one function in order to release another.

The rain that fell is a symbol of the release of tension; that is, the forces of the unconscious are loosed.

When this happens, the feeling of relief is engendered.

The crime is expiated because, as soon as the main function is deposed, there is a chance for other sides of the personality to be born into life. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Chapter 7, Pages 55 - 62


. . . no man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough sense of humour to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, clichés from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain-splitting lack of logic.

It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all languages of the world and al- ways remains essentially the same. Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 392 and Aion, CW 9, ii, Page 15

Carl Jung: For the animus when on his way, on his quest, is really a psychopompos, leading the soul to the stars whence it came.

"For the animus when on his way, on his quest, is really a psychopompos, leading the soul to the stars whence it came.

On the way back out of the existence in the flesh, the psychopompos develops such a cosmic aspect, he wanders among the constellations, he leads the soul over the rainbow bridge into the blossoming fields of the stars.

You see, the mythological idea was that man originally came down like a shooting star, a spark of fire, from the infinity of space, and fell into a created form and became a definite isolated little flame.

That gave rise to consciousness which is an isolated light in the night of the infinite spaces.

But when that creation of a human being is fulfilled, the animus does not press on to further generation or shaping of matter.

He begins to detach himself, to fall out again; he goes back to his origin, to the interstellar spaces where he once more walks among the stars.

We don't know whether there is any definite abode there, but according to mythology, the testimony of the consensus gentium, the heavenly mansions, the abode of the souls of the deceased are somewhere out in interstellar space.

It is therefore quite natural that even in very modern people one still encounters the same symbolism- whatever it means.

It is of course metaphorical, but we have no other than symbolic means to express such an idea." ~~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1229.

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

Carl Jung: The technique of coming to terms with the animus is the same in principle as in the case of the anima

Instead of the woman merely associating opinions with external situations —the animus, as an associative function, should be directed
inwards, where it could associate the contents of the unconscious.

The technique of coming to terms with the animus is the same in principle as in the case of the anima; only here the woman must
learn to criticize and hold her opinions at a distance; not in order to repress them, but, by investigating their origins, to
penetrate more deeply into the background, where she will then discover the primordial images, just as the man does in his
dealings with the anima.

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.


A woman possessed by the animus is always in danger of losing her femininity, her adapted feminine persona, just as a man
in like circumstances runs the risk of effeminacy.

Just as a man brings forth his work as a complete creation out of his inner feminine nature, so the inner masculine side of a woman brings
forth creative seeds which have the power to fertilize the feminine side of the man. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336.

These psychic changes of sex are due entirely to the fact that a function which belongs inside has been turned outside.

The reason for this perversion is clearly the failure to give adequate recognition to an inner world which stands autonomously opposed to the
outer world, and makes just as serious demands on our capacity for adaptation. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 337

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Carl Jung: The anima is always connected with the inferior function.

LECTURE V 19 February 1930

Dr. Jung: I have brought you today the picture1 of which I spoke last week, the reproduction of the Tibetan mandala.

It is a yantra, used for the purpose of concentration upon the most philosophical thought of the Tibetan Lamas.

It shows in the innermost circle the diamond wedge or thunderbolt, that symbol of potential energy, and the white light symbolizing absolute truth.

And here are the four functions, the four fields of colour, and then the four gates to the world.

Then comes the gazelle garden, and finally the ring of the fire of desirousness outside.

You will notice that it is embedded in the earth region exactly to the middle, with the upper part reaching to the celestial world.

The figures above are three great teachers, the living Buddhas or Bodhisattvas, two yellow and one red.

That has to do with the Tibetan Lamaistic doctrine.

They correspond to the mountains on the earth below.

What the mountain is on earth the great teacher is among men.

I have another mandala where, instead of a thunderbolt in the centre, there is the god Mahasukha, one form of the Indian god Shiva, in the embrace of his wife Shakti.

Today I think we will continue our dreams.

Dream [23]

Our patient says that he is at a sort of festival celebration in a Protestant church, in which the benches are not all arranged in the same direction but in the form of a square, so that they all face the
pulpit, which is in the middle of one of the long walls of the church.

A hymn is being sung, a very well-known one, typical of our Christmas festivals: "O du frohliche, O du selige Weihnachtszeit."2 (One hears it everywhere at that time of the year.)

He joins in the singing of the hymn and suddenly hears somebody behind him singing the same words in a peculiar soprano voice, exceedingly loud and the melody quite different, so that everyone around that person gets completely out of tune.

Our dreamer immediately stops and looks back to see who the singer can be.

It is a man sitting on a bench at right angles to his own and wearing, strangely enough, a sort of woman's garment, so that he feels unable to make out positively whether it is a man or a woman.

Then the service comes to an end, and on going out, he finds he has left his hat and overcoat in the wardrobe. (He was thinking naturally not of the word "wardrobe," but of "garde-robe" which is of course really a French word, but in French one would say "vestiaire". "

Garde-robe" is used in German, taken over from the old French word, which originally meant the man who takes care of the wraps.)

On the way back to the wardrobe, he wonders whether the word "garde-robe" in French is a masculine or feminine noun, and he comes to the conclusion that one should say "le garde-robe," and not, as it is used in German as a feminine noun, "die Garde-robe."

While thinking of that, he suddenly hears the singer talking to a man who is with him saying that today he has shown for once that he too can sing.

Our dreamer again turns back to look at him and has to restrain himself from making a disagreeable remark to him.

He notices that he appears more masculine this time and that he has a Jewish type of face, and then seems to know who he is and remembers that his son is a friend of his.

Then the son suddenly appears and violently reproaches his father because he upset the hymn.

Associations:

As a child he had been forced to go to church every Sunday.

On account of that compulsion, he developed an antipathy to churches and parsons, which is the reason that he almost never goes to church except on special festivals. The church in which the benches are arranged as he described, all facing the pulpit, is the church to which he had been made to go as a boy.

Concerning the hymn he says, "When I think of that hymn, I think of the end, the refrain, 'Freue dich O Christenheit,' meaning 'Rejoice, 0 Christendom.'"

Then he associates with his joining in the hymn the fact that he cannot sing. He is quite unmusical, and if he tried he would probably upset the melody as much as the man who sang an entirely different
melody in a high woman's soprano.

With the peculiar singer, whose sex is uncertain, he associates the fact that he, as a boy, read a book called Der Golem by Meyrink. (That is quite a remarkable book; I think it has now been translated
into English.) You remember that in a former seminar he dreamed of a square building where he climbed over a fence.

We spoke especially of his associations with the end of that book, Der Golem, where the hero comes to the locked gates. Here again he associates just that last scene, where the hero arrives at the supreme moment when he really should find the answer to all riddles, the supreme solution of the whole problem, but then comes to the locked gate upon which is the symbol of the hermaphrodite.

The dreamer says that this symbol of the hermaphrodite means, as he would interpret it, the alchemical nuptial, that is, the blending of the male and female in one indivisible whole. He says that he can't help feeling that that song would sound very different from the hymn in the Protestant church-in other words, that such ideas would not fit in with the ideas of the Protestant church and would prove most
disturbing. Obviously!

Concerning the word "garde-robe," the uncertainty whether it is masculine or feminine refers naturally to the same thing as the dubious sex of the man, and again he associates the hermaphrodite symbol.

As to the discovery that the singer is Jewish, he says that he thinks Meyrink must be a Jew; he is convinced that even if he does not confess to it, his creed would be Judaic, he would be reserving in
the secret room of his soul the Judaic conviction.

That would explain, he says, why Meyrink in his book The Green Face sends the hero to Brazil to save him when the continent of Europe collapses.

You see, that book has a somewhat unsatisfactory ending.

Apparently Meyrink got very involved in a complicated plot and did not know how to find his way out of the tangle; then by divine providence, a great storm came up and devastated the whole Occident
and got him out of the difficulty of a satisfactory solution.

His hero, Sephardi, the Jewish scholar, having foreseen it, had collected his family and friends and emigrated to Brazil unharmed, as it is a local storm in Europe only.

Obviously the dreamer means that Meyrink, being a Jew, saves his tribesmen in the fatal moment and nobody else, a sort of exodus out of the cursed land.

You probably would not have expected such a dream after the ones before, I certainly would not have guessed it.

That is the wonderful irrationality of the unconscious which always beats us.

I would not have foreseen it--except in one respect: that last mandala dream would upset certain Occidental convictions, and as this man has had a definite religious education of a narrow kind, he
cannot help preserving certain prejudices which would be cruelly hurt by the ideas of the mandala psychology, because that brings a new ethical orientation.

It is a point of view that does not fit into the Christian standpoint, which divides the world into good and evil and does not allow any reconciliation.

The whole of Christian eschatology follows this line of thought in teaching about the ultimate things-that at the end of the world there will be a Last Judgment where good and evil are divided definitely and forever by those two remarkable institutions Heaven and Hell.

All the evil ones will be cast into hell and will cook there forever, and the good ones will attain that blissful condition where they are allowed to make music during all eternity.

This is a dogmatic statement of the irreconcilability of good and evil.

Nothing to be done about it, just give up, no choice.

But the mandala psychology is of a very different kind: an endless chain of lives moving on through good and evil, through all aspects of things.

The eternally revolving wheel of existence, now in the shadow, now in the light.

This is an extraordinary relativation of the ethical problem-that having been high you will be low, having been low you will be high.

Out of the darkness comes the light, and after the light comes again the darkness, so evil is not so bad and good is not so good because they are related and only together by a mistake which remains inexplicable.

Why, after all, is it not perfect since it is the work of a perfect Master?

The Occidental answer is: because the devil put some dirt into it, or man was such an ass that he spoiled it somehow, this work of an omnipotent and omniscient Being. The fact of evil was

the cause of the invention of the devil, who double-crossed the good intentions of the perfect Master.

In the Eastern mandala psychology, all this takes on an entirely different aspect. Relativity is rather shocking to a Westerner.

It intimates a certain indulgence even, and to a puritanical mind that is almost unbearable.

That is the case with this man. It would not be so much so in theory.

He does not go to church, he does not follow the traditional creed; but when it comes to practical life it is a bit awkward, because our church views are all linked up with our real god, which is respectability, the eyes of the community.

When he comes to that, the real god, and his fear of those eyes, he collapses into a terrible conflict.

Now, if he has really understood the meaning of the last dream, that the machine is now going to function, it would indicate that he is about to enter life in a new way, where every wheel is in place
and where the machine will yield the all-around life which it is meant to yield, a complete life, with light and shadow.

But no sooner is he at that point than he hurts himself against traditional convictions, and this next dream contains obviously the problem of the offended Western values.

Therefore he is brought instantly back to his childhood, when he was forced to go to church.

It is as if a voice from within said, "Remember the days when you were still in the church and believed these things. How can you get away from that?

You are still there singing the same song as the whole Christian community." And then comes the first disturbance, that soprano voice.

Now where does that soprano voice come from?

Miss Howells: It is the feminine side of himself, the anima.

Dr. Jung: Sure!

It is Madame Anima who suddenly begins to sing too.

He was singing the song of the community as if he were a perfectly respectable member of that church, and then the anima breaks in with an entirely unsuitable song.

And what does that melody express? Not the words, but the melody. What is the value of that?

Answer: Feeling.

Dr. Jung: Yes, nothing is more impressive than an organ.

When you are reminded of a Protestant church you just yawn, a terrible bore, but when you hear the music, you cannot help having feeling, it stirs you. Perhaps not if you go regularly, but a man like myself, who has not been to church for an eternity, will naturally have a sentimental feeling-a beautiful remembrance which appeals to one's feeling.

It is wrong not to acknowledge it. A sermon is tedious, while music pulls at the heart.

So it is very typical that the dream speaks of feelings, which are really dangerous in a man's case.

In his thinking these ideas have no hold on him any longer; he is firm in his convictions.

But the music gets him, and he is ground under.

He is drawn in and cannot help singing, so he gets into a situation or mood that is quite opposed to the intention mentioned in the dream before.

Then the conflict arises in his feeling sphere, and that is why his anima begins to sing. The anima is always connected with the inferior function.

As he is an intellectual, his feelings are somewhat inferior, and she is like a personification of his inferior feeling function.

Why does the anima not sing the church song?

Why an entirely different melody?

Mrs. Baynes: To tell him she is there.

Dr. Jung: But what for?

Mrs. Baynes: Because she wants to make trouble.

Dr. Jung: That would be almost a depreciation of the anima.

Mrs. Baynes: He does not appreciate her, so she wants to make herself felt.

Dr. Jung: But if she only wants to make herself felt or to make trouble, she could just as well be a dog that barks, or an automobile that begins whooping outside the church.

Mrs. Sigg: The anima has a different taste. It is not the taste of the Church, it would perhaps be more like the Indian style.

-Dr. Jung: You mean more in favor of the mandala psychology?-

That is exceedingly probable, because the anima has to be excluded from the Christian frame.

She is eternally a heretic and does not fit in at all, a perfect pagan, in more or less open revolt against the Christian point of view.

Perhaps you are astonished that I speak of her in such a personal way, but that has forever been the way of taking her, that figure has always been expressed by poets in a personal form.

Usually she is projected into a real woman, who thereby becomes more imaginary, like the Lady of the Troubadours and the Knights of the Cours d'Amour, slightly divine.

Then you know how Rider Haggard speaks of "She who must be obeyed"; he makes her a very definite figure.

So to give her the right quality we must describe her as a personality and not as a scientific abstraction.

In zoology you can speak of the species, the whale. But there are many different kinds of whales, you must say which whale, and then it has a specific value.

The anima represents the primitive layer of man's psychology, and primitive psychology shuns abstractions.

There are practically no concepts in primitive languages.

In Arabic, there are sixty words for types of camel and no word for camel in the abstract.

Ask an Arab the word for camel and he does not know. It is either an old, or a young, or a female camel, etc., each called by a different name. In a language more primitive still there are thirty different words for cutting-cutting with a knife, a sword, string, etc.-and no word for the act of cutting.

My particular friend Steiner7 supposes that there were pre-stages of the earth, one a globe of fire, another a globe of gases, and on one of them, he says, there could even be observed some sensations of taste.

Now, whose were the sensations of taste?

There is no such thing as abstract sensation, some sensation suspended in space to the Big Dipper or Sirius.

In one Negro language there are fifty expressions for walking, but not one for the act of walking; one cannot say, "I am walking." Nor is there a word for man.

We have all these abstract concepts, and in a way they are misleading, or rather, not informing.

We can say a man or a woman or, even more indefinite, a person wants to speak to you, and how little we know whether he or she is outside, inside, standing up, alive or dead.

A primitive telling you the same thing by the very nature of his language would inform you, for instance, that an alive, erect man was standing outside your door.

There are no words in their language for a man without an almost complete description.

They have the most curious expressions for walking which describe exactly how it is done, each specific case of walking, with knees bent, on his heels, etc., so if you hear of him at all you can fairly see that man moving.

It is an almost grotesque description of each subject. This absence of collective notions is absolutely characteristic of the primitive mind.

Now, concerning my concept of the anima, I have been reproached occasionally by scholars for using an almost mythological term to express a scientific fact.

They expect me to translate her into scientific terminology, which would deprive the figure of its or her specific life.

If you say, for instance, that the anima is a function of connection or relationship between the conscious and unconscious, that is a very pale thing.

It is as if you should show a picture of a great philosopher and call it simply Homo sapiens; of course a picture of a criminal or an idiot would be Homo sapiens just as well.

The scientific term conveys nothing, and the merely abstract notion of the anima conveys nothing, but when you say the anima is almost personal, a complex that behaves exactly as if she were a little person, or at times as if she were a very important person, then you get it about right.

Therefore, chiefly for practical purposes, I leave the anima in her personified form, just as I would in describing President Wilson, or Bismarck, or Mussolini.

I would not say they were specimens of Homo sapiens, I deal with them specifically as they are. And so the anima is personal and specific.

Otherwise it is just a function, as intuition or thinking are functions.

But that does not cover the actual facts, nor does it express the extraordinary personality of the anima, the absolutely recognizable personality, so that one can easily point it out anywhere.

Therefore I quite intentionally keep to the very personal term, meaning that she is a personal factor, almost as good as a person.

Naturally there is danger on the other side that people think she is a sort of ghost. Sure enough, to the primitive mind she is a ghost.·

She is a definite entity, and, if you are in a very primitive mood, you might see her in the form of a ghost a smoke figure or a breath figure. .

She may become an hallucination.

One sees that, for instance, in lunatics when they are possessed by the anima.

Not very long ago I was called in as consulting physician to see an insane boy in a clinic in Zurich.

When I came into the room he greeted me very politely and said, "You will probably not believe it, but I am my sister and I am a Buddhist."

He has actually a married sister, but she plays no role in his life.

He thought it was just a mistake that people took him for a man, and even declared that it was a malevolent invention on the part of his mother.

To him that anima sister was absolutely real, more real than himself, he was identical with her.

She was a Buddhist and therefore initiated into the mysteries of the East, and she had an Indian name, which was an extraordinarily clever contrivance.

I don't remember it exactly, but it consisted of three syllables, and the middle syllable was dava, which is a Hindu word for divine. It was half Italian and half Hindu or Sanskrit and a bit of Greek.

It was a typical designation, and the meaning was divine-mistress-sister.

I have known many other cases where men have felt the anima as an extraordinary reality.

I am quite certain that Rider Haggard could not possibly have written such an interminable series of novels if the anima had not been extremely real to him.

That is the reason why I stress the personal character so much.

We have to deal with the figure in a form that is entirely different from the usual because it designates a living factor, despite the fact that this factor, under certain conditions of development, may lose all that personal character and transform into a mere function.

But that can only be the case when the conscious attitude is such that it loses the quality and characteristics of a human being-that is the mandala psychology.

Miss Howells: Is it common for her to take on the quality of the Orient or an older civilization? Here she is a Jewess.

Dr. Jung: It would seem so. In She the anima is an Oriental being, and in Pierre Benoit's Atlantide.

The animus also. But we had better not talk of the animus now.

It just scares me, it is much more difficult to deal with. The anima is definite and the animus is indefinite.

Question: Is the anima definitely a part of every man and every woman?

Dr. Jung: No, she is the female part of a man's psychology, so she would not naturally exist in a woman.

When she does, she is absolutely identical with the woman's conscious principle, and then I would call it Eros. The same is true of a man reversed.

Animus in a man is not a person, it is his conscious principle, and then I call it Logos.

In Chinese philosophy they speak of the masculine and feminine souls of a man.

Therefore Wilhelm uses animus and anima exactly as I would.

The terms animus and anima correspond to the Chinese hun and kwei, but always they apply to a man.

The Chinese were not concerned with women's psychology-as I unfortunately am!

Even in the Middle Ages women were said to have no souls worth mentioning, or only "little souls," like the story of the penguins in L'zle des pingouins, by Anatole France.

Since St. Mael had baptized them, it became a question whether they had souls or not, and they at last called in St.

Catherine of Alexandria to decide. "Well," she said, giving the final word in the celestial discussion, "Donnez-leur une ame immortelle, mais petite!"

So in the Middle Ages women's psychology was chose inconnue, and similarly the old Chinese philosophers had the concept that the masculine animus was meant for heaven, while the female soul would become only a spectre, a phantom, who sinks into the earth after death.

One goes on into Eternity and the other becomes a sort of haunting ghost, a demon.

Therefore the Chinese meant by the animus in man what we mean by the Logos principle, or the conscious principle.

But since I have to deal with women's psychology as well as men's,

I have found it better to call the conscious principle in man Logos, and the principle of relatedness in women Eros.

The inferior Eros in man I designate as anima and the inferior Logos in woman as animus.

These concepts, Logos and Eros, correspond roughly with the Christian idea of the soul.

And the thing that does not fit in, the thing that sings the wrong tune, would be in a man the anima representing the Eros principle, and in a woman the animus representing the Logos principle, but in a sort of inferior form, a minor position.

The reason why the anima is here playing that role of diabolos in musica is that the exclusive Logos principle in man not follow the Eros principle.

He must discriminate, see things in their separateness, otherwise he is unable to recognize them.

But that is against the principle of relatedness.

A woman does not want to have things segregated, she wants to see them almost synchronized.

A man who is possessed by his anima gets into the most awful difficulties, for he cannot discriminate, especially among women.

While a woman under the law of the animus cannot relate, she becomes nothing but discrimination, surrounded by a wall of spiky cactus laws.

She tells a man what he is up to and that chills him to the bone and he cannot get at her.

Now in regard to the particular role of the anima in this dream, that she is feminine is probably quite clear to you, but why is she masculine too?

This is a very unusual case. And mind you, afterwards she becomes a man, a Jew.

What do you think of the conditions under which a man's anima would be either male or hermaphroditic?

Answer: Homosexuality.

Dr. Jung: That is true. One often encounters anima figures of very doubtful sex, or quite indubitably masculine, when the conscious mind is feminine.

But in the case of our dreamer there is no question of homosexuality.

He is perhaps not quite free of perversions, everybody has the statistical amount; we all have that percentage of murder in our being, the whole population.

But in him there is no trace of anything like repressed homosexuality. So why has he a masculine anima?

Mrs. Fierz: The anima is so incapable of making the man accept her that she has to play that role, use a sort of mimicry, to do so. It is the unconscious approaching the conscious.

Mrs. Sawyer: Isn't he identified with her and therefore she is masculine?

Dr. Jung: You mean since he cannot approach her he has to identify?

Mrs. Fierz takes it from the unconscious side, that the unconscious is trying to make itself heard. Mrs. Sawyer sees it as the conscious trying to connect with the unconscious-his conscious possessed by the anima and so hermaphroditic.

In either point of view one must detach her in order to establish a connection.

Mrs. Henley: Might it in this case simply express lack of development, because homosexuality is an attribute of youth?

Dr. Jung: That is also true, since he is undeveloped on the side of religion; from that point of view he could be expressed as a sort of homosexual boy about ten or twelve years old.

That would be symbolic homosexuality. It is a fact that certain apparent sex perversions are merely symbolical; expressing an undeveloped state.

In this case, there was no conscious manifestation of homosexuality that could be pointed out, so we may assume that this is symbolical homosexuality and not a disturbance of the normal.

There have been traces of this feeling in some of his former dreams, in the dream of the Puer Aeternus, for instance, where he called the boy Eros and had a decided feeling of tenderness towards him.

And again in a dream which he had during our last seminar, that case of synchronicity, where he was worshipping the boy Telesphoros and had doubts then also whether there was something homosexual
about it.

But it was merely symbolical, a certain immaturity, like the twelve-year-old condition.

Such mental immaturity may be very local, it may refer to a specific expression of it, or it may go so far that a man is capable of believing that he actually is homosexual, in spite of the fact that he never had the experience.

I have had men come to me complaining that they were homosexual, but when I say to such a man, "How was it?

Did you get into trouble with boys," he exclaims indignantly that he would not touch a boy. "Men hen?" "No." "Then why the devil do you call yourself homosexual?"

And then he explains that a doctor said he was because he had had dreams where something homosexual happened.

This simply means that the man in certain respects is not mature, and his immaturity may express itself in different ways-that he is not up to women, or not up to life, or not up to spiritual things.

That must be the case here: that he is definitely immature in certain respects is expressed in the dream by his being brought back to his boyhood.

Now in regard to what is he immature? Where is he unconscious?

Mrs. Deady: He can't manage his sexuality.

Dr. Jung: But you must keep in mind that he is a man who has allowed himself all sorts of things with fast women and who is not at all unaware of sexuality.

His sex is wrong but not concretely.

Now what is the trouble with him?

Dr. Deady: He has the sex of a boy of sixteen without feeling.

Dr. Jung: That is the point, no feeling.

His sex is perfectly normal but it is unrelated sex, a sort of auto-eroticism, a kind of masturbation.

There is no relation to the object, and that is probably the reason for the frigidity of his wife, and the reason of his other adventures. Eros is undeveloped, not his sexuality.

That is by no means undeveloped, but his relationship to sexuality is wrong.

In the last dream he was going to set his machine in motion, and the question came up whether the parts of the machine were properly related to the central part.

All these functions, particularly his sexuality,

have to be worked into the total mechanism.

If unrelated, he naturally cannot function as a total personality.

His sexuality must come into complete consideration, and he must have feelings about it. In other words, the Eros principle must be recognized.

The reason why the anima appears is that she is Eros.

And when he has the old point of view, singing the old song, Eros is repressed forever and the very devil.

Therefore she comes up in church and disturbs the church hymn.

His immaturity is expressed by the fact that he is back in his childhood and also by his symbolic homosexuality.

If a man's anima is masculine, he is absolutely possessed obsessed by her, and he cannot establish a relationship with her until she is feminine.

To say he is effeminate means the same thing-that she has power over him.

The fact that the dream expresses is: you are effeminate, you are possessed by your anima. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 479-491

Carl Jung: THE SYZYGY: ANIMA AND ANIMUS

The Zyzygies

What, then, is this projection-making factor? The East calls it the “Spinning Woman” Maya, who creates illusion by her dancing. Had we not long since known it from the symbolism of dreams, this hint from the Orient would put us on the right track: the enveloping, embracing, and devouring element points unmistakably to the mother, that is, to the son’s relation to the real mother, to her imago, and to the woman who is to become a mother for him. His Eros is passive like a child’s; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured. He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him. No wonder the real world vanishes from sight!

If this situation is dramatized, as the unconscious usually dramatizes it, then there appears before you on the psychological stage a man living regressively, seeking his childhood and his mother, fleeing from a cold cruel world which denies him understanding. Often a mother appears beside him who apparently shows not the slightest concern that her little son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might hinder him from growing up and marrying. You behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life.

Where does the guilt lie? With the mother, or with the son? Probably with both. The unsatisfied longing of the son for life and the world ought to be taken seriously. There is in him a desire to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field of the world. But he makes no more than a series of fitful starts, for his initiative as well as his staying power are crippled by the secret memory that the world and happiness may be had as a giftfrom the mother. The fragment of world which he, like every man, must encounter again and again is never quite the right one, since it does not fall into his lap, does not meet him half way, but remains resistant, has to be conquered, and submits only to force. It makes demands on the masculinity of a man, on his ardour, above all on his courage and resolution when it comes to throwing his whole being into the scales. For this he would need a faithless Eros, one capable of forgetting his mother and undergoing the pain of relinquishing the first love of his life. The mother, foreseeing this danger, has carefully inculcated into him the virtues of faithfulness, devotion, loyalty, so as to protect him from the moral disruption which is the risk of every life adventure. He has learnt these lessons only too well, and remains true to his mother. This naturally causes her the deepest anxiety (when, to her greater glory, he turns out to be a homosexual, for example) and at the same time affords her an unconscious satisfaction that is positively mythological. For, in the relationship now reigning between them, there is consummated the immemorial and most sacred archetype of the marriage of mother and son. What, after all, has commonplace reality to offer, with its registry offices, pay envelopes, and monthly rent, that could outweigh the mystic awe of the hieros games? Or the star-crowned woman whom the dragon pursues, or the pious obscurities veiling the marriage of the Lamb?

23 This myth, better than any other, illustrates the nature of the collective unconscious. At this level the mother is both old and young, Demeter and Persephone, and the son is spouse and sleeping suckling rolled into one. The imperfections of real life, with its laborious adaptations and manifold disappointments, naturally cannot compete with such a state of indescribable fulfilment.

In the case of the son, the projection-making factor is identical with the mother-imago, and this is consequently taken to be the real mother. The projection can only be dissolved when the son sees that in the realm of his psyche there is an image not only of the mother but of the daughter, the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess, and the chthonic Baubo. Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it.

This image is “My Lady Soul,” as Spitteler called her. I have suggested instead the term “anima,” as indicating something specific, for which the expression “soul” is too general and too vague. The empirical reality summed up under the concept of the anima forms an extremely dramatic content of the unconscious. It is possible to describe this content in rational, scientific language, but in this way one entirely fails to express its living character. Therefore, in describing the living processes of the psyche, I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.

The projection-making factor is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima. Whenever she appears, in dreams, visions, and fantasies, she takes on personified form, thus demonstrating that the factor she embodies possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a feminine being. She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous product of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute figure for the mother. On the contrary, there is every likelihood that the numinous qualities which make the mother-imago so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype of the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child.

Since the anima is an archetype that is found in men, it is reasonable to suppose that an equivalent archetype must be present in women; for just as the man is compensated by a feminine element, so woman is compensated by a masculine
one. I do not, however, wish this argument to give the impression that these compensatory relationships were arrived at by deduction. On the contrary, long and varied experience was needed in order to grasp the nature of anima and animus empirically. Whatever we have to say about these archetypes, therefore, is either directly verifiable or at least rendered probable by the facts. At the same time, I am fully aware that we are discussing pioneer work which by its very nature can only be provisional.

Just as the mother seems to be the first carrier of the projection-making factor for the son, so is the father for the daughter. Practical experience of these relationships is made up of many individual cases presenting all kinds of variations on the same basic theme. A concise description of them can, therefore, be no more than schematic.

Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit. The animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros. But I do not wish or intend to give these two intuitive concepts too specific a definition. I use Eros and Logos merely as conceptual aids to describe the fact that woman’s consciousness is characterized more by the connective quality of Eros than by the discrimination and cognition associated with Logos. In men, Eros, the function of relationship, is usually less developed than Logos. In women, on the other hand, Eros is an expression of their true nature, while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident. It gives rise to misunderstandings and annoying interpretations in the family circle and among friends. This is because it consists of opinions instead of reflections, and by opinions I mean a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth. Such assumptions, as everyone knows, can be extremely irritating. As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are tight. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima. With them the question becomes one of personal vanity and touchiness (as if they were females); with women it is a question of power, whether of truth or justice or some other “ism” for the dressmaker and hairdresser have already taken care of their vanity. The “Father” (i.e., the sum of conventional opinions) always plays a great role in female argumentation. No matter how friendly and obliging a woman’s Eros may be, no logic on earth can shake her if she is ridden by the animus. Often the man has the feelingand he is not altogether wrong that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary power of persuasion. He is unaware that this highly dramatic situation would instantly come to a banal and unexciting end if he were to quit the field and let a second woman carry on the battle (his wife, for instance, if she herself is not the fiery war horse). This sound idea seldom or never occurs to him, because no man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough sense of humour to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, cliches from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain-splitting lack of logic. It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all the languages of the world and always remains essentially the same. This singular fact is due to the following circumstance: when animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). The language of love is of astonishing uniformity, using the well-worn formulas with the utmost devotion and fidelity, so that once again the two partners find themselves in a banal collective situation. Yet they live in the illusion that they are related to one another in a most individual way.

In both its positive and its negative aspects the anirna /animus relationship is always full of “animosity/’ i.e., it is emotional, and hence collective. Affects lower the level of the relationship and bring it closer to the common instinctual basis, which no longer has anything individual about it. Very often the relationship runs its course heedless of its human performers, who afterwards do not know what happened to them.

Whereas the cloud of “animosity” surrounding the man is composed chiefly of sentimentality and resentment, in woman it expresses itself in the form of opinionated views, interpretations, insinuations, and misconstructions, which all have the purpose (sometimes attained) of severing the relation between two human beings. The woman, like the man, becomes wrapped in a veil of illusions by her demon-familiar, and, as the daughter who alone understands her father (that is, is eternally right in everything), she is translated to the land of sheep, where she is put to graze by the shepherd of her soul, the animus.

Like the anima, the animus too has a positive aspect. Through the figure of the father he expresses not only conventional opinion butequally 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. Just as the anima becomes, through integration, the Eros of consciousness, so the animus becomes a Logos; and in the same way that the anima gives relationship and relatedness to a man’s consciousness, the animus gives to woman’s consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation, and selfknowledge.

The effect of anima and animus on the ego is in principle the same. This effect is extremely difficult to eliminate because, in the first place, it is uncommonly strong and immediately fills the ego-personality with an unshakable feeling o lightness and righteousness. In the second place, the cause of the effect is projected and appears to lie in objects and objective situations. Both these characteristics can, I believe, be traced back to the peculiarities of the archetype. For the archetype, of course, exists a priori. This may possibly explain the often totally irrational yet undisputed and indisputable existence of certain moods and opinions. Perhaps these are so notoriously difficult to influence because of the powerfully suggestive effect emanating from the archetype. Consciousness is fascinated by it, held captive, as if hypnotized. Very often the ego experiences a vague feeling of moral defeat and then behaves all the more defensively, defiantly, and self-righteously, thus setting up a vicious circle which only increases its feeling of inferiority. The bottom is then knocked out of the human relationship, for, like megalomania, a feeling of inferiority makes mutual recognition impossible, and without this there is no relationship.

As I said, it is easier to gain insight into the shadow than into the anima or animus. With the shadow, we have the advantage of being prepared in some sort by our education, which has always endeavoured to convince people that they are not one-hundred-per-cent pure gold. So everyone immediately understands what is meant by “shadow,” “inferior personality,” etc. And if he has forgotten, his memory can easily be refreshed by a Sunday sermon, his wife, or the tax collector. With the anima and animus, however, things are by no means so simple. Firstly, there is no moral education in this respect, and secondly, most people are content to be self-righteous and prefer mutual vilification (if nothing worse!) to the recognition of their projections. Indeed, it seems a very natural state of affairs for men to have irrational moods and women irrational opinions. Presumably this situation is grounded on instinct and must remain as it is to ensure that the Empedoclean game of the hate and love of the elements shall continue for all eternity. Nature is conservative and does not easily allow her courses to be altered; she defends in the most stubborn way the inviolability of the preserves where anima and animus roam. Hence it is much more difficult to become conscious of one’s anima/animus projections than to acknowledge one’s shadow side. One has, of course, to
overcome certain moral obstacles, such as vanity, ambition, conceit, resentment, etc., but in the case of projections all sorts of purely intellectual difficulties are added, quite apart from the contents of the projection, which one simply doesn’t know how to cope with. And on top of all this there arises a profound doubt as to whether one is not meddling too much with nature’s business by prodding into consciousness things which it would have been better to leave asleep.

Although there are, in my experience, a fair number of people who can understand without special intellectual or moral difficulties what is meant by anima and animus, one finds very many more who have the greatest trouble in visualizing these empirical concepts as anything concrete. This shows that they fall a little outside the usual range of experience. They are unpopular precisely because they seem unfamiliar. The consequence is that they mobilize prejudice and become taboo like everything else that is unexpected.

So if we set it up as a kind of requirement that projections should be dissolved, because it is wholesomer that way and in every respect more advantageous, we are entering upon new ground. Up till now everybody has been convinced that the idea “my father,” “my mother,” etc., is nothing but a faithful reflection of the real parent, corresponding in every detail to the original, so that when someone says “my father” he means no more and no less than what his father is in reality. This is actually what he supposes he does mean, but a supposition of identity by no means brings that identity about. This is where the fallacy of the enkekalymmenos (‘the veiled one’) comes in.

If one includes in the psychological equation X’s picture of his father, which he takes for the real father, the equation will not work out, because the unknown quantity he has introduced does not tally with reality. X has overlooked the fact that his idea of a person consists, in the first place, of the possibly very incomplete
picture he has received of the real person and, in the second place, of the subjective modifications he has imposed upon this picture. X’s idea of his father is a complex quantity for which the real father is only in part responsible, an indefinitely large share falling to the son. So true is this that every time he criticizes or praises his father he is unconsciously hitting back at himself, thereby bringing about those psychic consequences that overtake people who habitually disparage or overpraise themselves. If, however, X carefully compares his reactions with reality, he stands a chance of noticing that he has miscalculated The fallacy, which stems from Eubulidcs the Megarian, runs: “Can you recognize your father?” Yes. “Can you recognize this veiled one?” No, “This veiled one is your father. Hence you can recognize your father and not recognize him,” somewhere by not realizing long ago from his father’s behaviour that the picture he has of him is a false one. But as a rule X is convinced that he is right, and if anybody is wrong it must be the other fellow. Should X have a poorly developed Eros, he will be either indifferent to the inadequate relationship he has with his father or else annoyed by the inconsistency and general Incomprehensibility of a father whose behaviour never really corresponds to the picture X has of him. Therefore X thinks he has every right to feel hurt, misunderstood, and even betrayed.

One can imagine how desirable it would be in such cases to dissolve the projection. And there are always optimists who believe that the golden age can be ushered in simply by telling people the right way to go. But just let them try to explain to these people that they are acting like a dog chasing its own tail. To make a person see the shortcomings of his attitude considerably more than mere “telling” is needed, for more is involved than ordinary common sense can allow. What one is up against here is the kind of fateful misunderstanding which, under ordinary conditions, remains forever inaccessible to insight. It is rather like expecting the average respectable citizen to recognize himself
as a criminal.

I mention all this just to illustrate the order of magnitude to which the anima/animus projections belong, and the moral and intellectual exertions that are needed to dissolve them. Not all the contents of the anima and animus are projected, however. Many of them appear spontaneously in dreams and so on, and many more can be made conscious through active imagination. In this way we find that thoughts, feelings, and affects are alive in us which we would never have believed possible. Naturally, possibilities of this sort seem utterly fantastic to anyone who has not experienced them himself, for a normal person “knows what he thinks.” Such a childish attitude on the part of the “normal person” is simply the rule, so that no one without experience in this field can be expected to understand the real nature of anima and animus. With these reflections one gets into an entirely new world of psychological experience, provided of course that one succeeds in realizing them in practice. Those who do succeed can hardly fail to be impressed by all that the ego does not know and never has known. This increase in self-knowledge is still very rare nowadays and is usually paid for in advance with a neurosis, if not with something worse.

The autonomy of the collective unconscious expresses itself in the figures of anima and animus. They personify those of its contents which, when withdrawn from projection, can be integrated into consciousness. To this extent, both figures represent -functions which filter the contents of the collective unconscious through to the conscious mind. They appear or behave as such, however, only so long as the tendencies of the conscious and unconscious do not diverge too greatly. Should any tension arise, these functions, harmless till then, confront the conscious mind in personified form and behave rather like systems split off from the personality, or like part souls. This comparison is
inadequate in so far as nothing previously belonging to the ego personality has split off from it; on the contrary, the two figures represent a disturbing accretion. The reason for their behaving in this way is that though the contents of anima and animus can be integrated they themselves cannot, since they are archetypes. As such they are the foundation stones of the psychic structure, which in its totality exceeds the limits of consciousness and therefore can never become the object of direct cognition. Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition. Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind. This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation. The unconscious as we know can never be “done with” once and for all. It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual
attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys. The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these clangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided. It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensation works with entire success. The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature. Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work. Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are.

Both these archetypes, as practical experience shows, possess a fatality that can on occasion produce tragic results. They are quite literally the father and mother of all the disastrous entanglements of fate and have long been recognized as such by the whole world. Together they form a divine pair, one of whom, in accordance with his Logos nature, is characterized by pneuma and nous, rather like Hermes with his ever-shifting hues, while the other, in accordance with her Eros nature, wears the features of Aphrodite, Helen (Selene), Persephone, and Hecate. Both of them are unconscious powers, “gods” in fact, as the ancient world quite rightly conceived them to be. To call them by this name is to give them that central position in the scale of psychological values which has always been theirs whether consciously acknowledged or not; for their power grows in proportion to the degree that they remain unconscious. Those who do not see them are in their hands, just as a typhus epidemic flourishes best when its source is undiscovered. Even in Christianity the divine syzygy has not become obsolete, but occupies the highest place as Christ and his bride the Church.6 Parallels like these prove extremely helpful in our attempts to find the right criterion for gauging the significance of these two archetypes. What we can discover about them from the conscious side is so slight as to be almost imperceptible. It is only when we throw light into the dark depths of the psyche and explore the strange and tortuous paths of human fate that it gradually becomes clear to us how immense is the influence wielded by these two factors that complement our conscious life.

Recapitulating, I should like to emphasize that the integration of the shadow, or the realization of the personal unconscious, marks the first stage in the analytic process, and that without it a recognition of anima and animus is impossible. The shadow can be realized only through a relation to a partner, and anima and animus only through a relation to the opposite sex, because only in such a relation do their projections become operative. The recognition of anima or animus gives rise, in a man, to a triad, one third of which is transcendent: the masculine subject, the opposing feminine subject, and the transcendent anima. With a woman the situation is reversed. The missing fourth element that would make the triad a quaternity is, in a man, the archetype of the Wise Old Man, which I have not discussed here, and in a woman the Chthonic Mother. These four constitute a half immanent and half transcendent quaternity, an archetype which I have called the ‘marriage quaternio. The marriage quaternio provides a schema not only for the self but also for the structure of primitive society with its cross-cousin marriage, marriage classes, and division of settlements into quarters. The self, on the other hand, is a God image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one. Of this the early Christian spirit was not ignorant, otherwise Clement of Alexandria could never have said that he who knows himself knows God. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Chapter 10.

Carl Jung: The real individuality does not show, or it only shows by its absence.

Dr. Jung:

Yes.

To wear particularly individual hats and neckties, for instance, is personal.

The real individuality does not show, or it only shows by its absence.

If it is expressed by curiosities or peculiarities, you are simply not yourself, then you have delegated it, projected it into an external appearance, so the symbol of individuality is left to the animus.

And then you can be sure that the animus will misbehave; that is, theperson herself will play an utterly collective role with fits of individualistic animus, when the animus suddenly jumps out and talks rot.

It might be analytical rot, making himself important with apparent knowledge, or with a missionary attitude, or in brooding on circumstances, knowing everything better of course, having known everything long before.

This kind of animus indicates a most unfortunate condition, yet sadly enough, it is very frequent.

Hardly anybody gets through an analysis without going through a stage when the whole thing is delegated to the animus; then the mouth is full while the heart is empty.

Dr. Barker: What would be the corresponding mechanism in a man? Does his anima have an animus?

Dr. Jung: Oh heavens, even that!

If the anima is exaggerated and luxuriant she even develops a particular animus, and then a man talks fearful rot; if he has a mind he can prevent it, but if it is a very powerful anima, he will be subject to all sorts of anima illusions.

At a certain stage, analysis sometimes has a softening influence, a man is then in danger of being far too much swayed by his feelings, so that his judgment suffers.

And on account of that he may develop a megalomania and a corresponding system of persecution ideas, the idea that he is a great genius who should have been discovered long ago, for instance, and the cruel world does not recognize the fact.

But the effect with a man is not so conspicuous, because through the influence of the anima he becomes peculiarly inconspicuous.

You see a man is meant to be conspicuous, he is meant by nature to have multicolored feathers, to crow and make a great noise, but when the anima gets at him, he becomes personal and is apt to lose himself in mouse holes.

Instead of perching on the dung heap and showing his feathers, he is lost in all sorts of little corners and practically disappears.

He grows effeminate through the influence of the anima and is a bundle of nerves and sensitiveness, all sorts of foolish reactions and moods; he weeps a good deal and such stuff, and he suddenly drops out of things in a funny way, nobody sees him any longer.

You may discover him somewhere with drooping feathers, being offended or misunderstood.

He becomes peculiarly uninteresting, something poor and lamentable, unless he falls into a wild emotion, and then he makes a great noise but in the wrong way so that everybody laughs at him.

He is a little tyrant at home and perfectly ridiculous abroad.

While, quite the contrary, at a certain stage of analysis, a woman becomes conspicuous; a former nice humble woman apparently-for nobody hears what she has been saying to her husband-will suddenly talk a great deal in an assembly of men and become conspicuous for mannishness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1219-11220

Carl Jung: The technique of coming to terms with the animus is the same in principle as in the case of the anima

Instead of the woman merely associating opinions with external situations —the animus, as an associative function, should be directed inwards, where it could associate the contents of the unconscious.

The technique of coming to terms with the animus is the same in principle as in the case of the anima; only here the woman must learn to criticize and hold her opinions at a distance; not in order to repress them, but, by investigating their origins,to penetrate more deeply into the background, where she will then discover the primordial images, just as the man does in his dealings with the anima.

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.

A woman possessed by the animus is always in danger of losing her femininity, her adapted feminine persona, just as a man in like circumstances runs the risk of effeminacy.

Just as a man brings forth his work as a complete creation out of his inner feminine nature, so the inner mas- culine side of a woman brings

forth creative seeds which have the power to fertilize the feminine side of the man. Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336.

These psychic changes of sex are due entirely to the fact that a function which belongs inside has been turned outside.

The reason for this perversion is clearly the failure to give adequate recognition to an inner world which stands autonomously opposed to the
outer world, and makes just as serious demands on our capacity for adaptation. Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 337