home next back

Anima and Animus

Our Female and Male Traits

The anima is a personification of all feminine tendencies in a man's psyche, and, the animus is the personification of all masculine tendencies in a woman. Beginning in childhood, we create our gender identity and roles, consciously or unconsciously, by enhancing the qualities that characterize our gender, and repressing or suppressing the qualities that characterize the other gender. Those repressed or suppressed qualities are still within us, the feminine qualities within the man and the masculine within the woman. This sorting out process is similar to the one by which we create our ego through the enhancement of particular qualities while putting the opposite qualities into our potential. The terms anima and animus have been abbreviated to anima/us in this section.

We are androgynous.

Androgynous means that we have both male and female traits. We can view this androgyny from various perspectives:

--Energy is the substance of which our true self is composed. It is androgynous, in the sense that it contains all opposites, including male and female. Energy can incarnate into either a male body or a female body.
--Even in the biological realm, we are somewhat androgynous. Jung noted that men contain some female genes, and women contain some male genes.

It differs from the masculine and feminine stereotypes.

Society has created those stereotypes arbitrarily, by encouraging men and women to have different behaviors, attire, and occupations. Jung presented the concept of the anima/us not in the sense of those stereotypes but as the designs of Eros and Logos. Eros, the female, is associated with human relationships, earthiness, receptivity, creativity, and passivity. Logos, the male, is identified with power, abstraction, and action. We experience the Logos and Eros in their manifested forms. They have the peculiarities of our culture and of the people whom we have known of the opposite gender, particularly our father or mother. Just as the anima and animus are opposites of one another, they have opposite traits within themselves.

The male's anima.
--The anima has positive traits. When the anima is allowed to express herself through a man's psyche, she brings the attributes of feelings, emotions, tenderness, relatedness, commitment and fidelity, friendship, love and compassion, imagination, gentleness, romance, creativity, intuition, and a sense of aesthetics.
--The anima has negative traits. If the anima is rejected, her traits are deformed, feelings and emotions are replaced by moodiness, sentimentality, and hysteria. Fidelity becomes possessiveness, aesthetics become sensuality, tenderness becomes effeminacy, imagination becomes mere fantasizing and love and romance are twisted into a series of turbulent relationships or the man's withdrawal from his wife and family. The spurned anima does more than thrust her own feminine qualities into expression, she also disturbs the man's masculinity.

The female's animus.
--The animus has positive traits. The animus can endow a woman with assertiveness, courage, analytical thought, strength, vitality, decisiveness, a focused attentiveness, and a desire for achievement.
--The animus has negative traits. If the animus must push his way past the woman's resistance, his qualities are corrupted. Assertiveness becomes aggression and ruthlessness, analytical thought becomes argumentativeness, focus becomes mechanistic behavior.

We need to express it.

Logos and Eros are autonomous, impersonal entities that demand expression through every person, either internally, through our association with them in our own psyche, or externally, through relationships with people of the opposite gender. When we allow the anima/us to express itself, it enhances our lives. When we deny it, repress it, or we are unaware of it, it forces itself into manifestation anyway, with the following results:

-We refuse the balancing input from our anima/us, so our gender identification becomes a caricature:
---The man may become a macho, power hungry, overly competitive brute.
---The woman may become a fluffy, passive, Marilyn Monroe type figure with a vague ego and persona.

-We experience the same problems that occur whenever we repress, or when we mismanage our potential. If a man has repressed his anima, he cannot use its qualities such as tenderness when a situation requires tenderness.

It may become more apparent at midlife.

During midlife, our repressed qualities may become more persistent in their demands for expression. At midlife, many people acknowledge their anima/us qualities. We often see post midlife couples in which the formerly dominant husband has accepted a passive, contemplative role in the marriage and in society, while his wife has become the invigorated businesswoman or community leader.

We project it.

If we do not claim the anima/us as an active part of our lives, it is projected, as we would do with any other psychological force that we do not claim and use. This is like the projection of a picture onto a movie screen. As in all types of projection, an anima/us projection is not indiscriminate, it is hooked to particular people, depending upon various factors:

---It is projected onto a person who closely matches the image we took from our earlier experiences with people of that gender. If a woman's personal image of the animus is based on her father's aggressiveness, she would project her animus upon an aggressive man.
---It is projected onto a person whose level of refinement matches that of our anima/us. A woman who has cultivated her animus may be drawn to a man who displays intellectual power rather than a man who displays brute physical strength.

Effect on Relationships.

--We project the anima/us onto a suitable person of the opposite gender. The projection contains more than just an image, it is contains a highly charged energy.

--We are attracted to this image and energy, perhaps more so than to the person. In some cases, the energy is intoxicating, thus, we experience the phenomenon of falling in love. In truth, we are falling in love with our own anima/us or, we are falling in love with ourselves. The anima/us projection causes an unintentional deception leading us to believe that we adore the person when we actually adore the anima/us. This projection is a useful mechanism, for various reasons:

--It creates enough attraction toward the opposite gender to sustain us through the difficulties of a relationship.

--We are able to learn about the anima/us through our interactions with that person.

The projections cause problems in our relationships.

- A projection distorts our image of the person. When we are with that person, we are talking primarily to the projection, and we are interpreting the person's words as if they came from the projection, and we are expecting the person to fulfill the role that has been cast onto him or her. We can experience confusion, unfounded hopes, strife, disappointments, and anger. We are offering an incomplete person to our partner, because we have projected out the qualities of our anima/us. We are missing the parts that we could otherwise contribute to the relationship such as our power, our vitality, and our flexibility and range of potential behaviors. We can use the full spectrum of our capabilities, for our own happiness and for the well-being of the relationship. Each person could add his or her own talents, without regard to stereotyped gender roles.
-We lose our identity in co-dependency and a participation mystique. We are merely a spouse rather than a full person.
-We place a burden onto our partner to be the things that we refuse to be. An overly feminized woman can expect the man to express his own strength and also to express the strength of the woman's projected anima. Even though some domineering men enjoy this situation, the task is tiring and it is inherently frustrating, because a woman's power and perspectives can accomplish tasks that a man cannot accomplish. Ignorance of this fact, and the resulting failure to utilize the resources of women, has been one of the tragic errors of patriarchal societies.
-We can feel dissatisfaction and envy as we see our own qualities in others. A man needs to express his feelings as a natural part of communication and self expression, but, if he has relinquished that part of himself to others, he can no longer articulate the feelings himself and he envies those who do have this capability.
-The negative side of the anima/us must be confronted. As explained earlier, the anima/us has both a positive and a negative side. The unpleasant side is almost certain to appear occasionally in ourselves and in our mate. If we are not aware of the dynamics of the anima/us, we will mistakenly try to deal with an unhappy anima/us as simply the person's bad mood rather than a valid complaint of a design. One way to respond to our mate's antagonistic anima/us is with a natural, poised strength. When a woman's male animus arises, her husband can reply calmly with his male vitality to soothe both his own anima and his wife's animus. The woman's anima may have become quarrelsome for the specific purpose of provoking the man's masculine response in a case where the man has been too passive. Following that masculine response, the man, woman, anima, and animus can return to their proper constructive roles.
-The anima/us imposes its own moods into the relationship.
-The anima/us introduces an alien element into relationships. When one person's anima/us emerges in anger, it generally causes the other person's to rise up in defense. As the people vocalize the argument between these impersonal, non human designs, their words can have a coldness and cruelty that the humans never intended to say. To lessen the imposition of these designs, we can try to speak in personal, terms without referring the anima/us per se at all. The anima/us can lead us to select a partner simply because he or she is a close match to the image of our anima/us. We have lost our freedom to choose partners based on their capacity to fulfill other needs in addition to our need to explore the anima/us. We can even be diverted into a same gender relationship solely because we, as an effeminate male or a tom boy female, have identified with our own anima/us and we have projected our actual gender identity onto a person of our own gender. The latter statement does not imply a negative valuation onto same gender relationships in general, nor is it presented as an explanation for homosexuality.

The projections fail eventually.

During the falling in love stage, the individual can enjoy receiving the energy charged projection, and being treated like the consummate man or woman, however, no one can live up to these expectations. Eventually we notice that the person's behavior doesn't completely match our picture of the anima/us, and the person becomes uncomfortable in the realization that we are in love with an image rather than the individual. At that point, our choices are:

- To try consciously or unconsciously to change the person to comply with the image. The manipulation will cause stress that can lead to the failure of the relationship.
-To look for someone else to fulfill the image. If we select this option, we will probably experience a series of brief relationships, in a futile attempt to find someone to be our anima/us.
-To realize that we have been projecting. If we want to cease the destructiveness and unintentional dishonesty that have been caused by the projections, we proceed to the next stage.

We withdraw the anima/us projections.

We create a relationship between two people who each take responsibility for their own anima/us. We accomplish this feat by learning about the anima/us within our partner and within ourselves:

- Learning about the anima/us within ourselves. We become aware of the anima/us by noticing the impulses that are contrary to our gender stereotyping. The man observes his moments of tenderness and other anima qualities, the woman recognizes her animus' desire to achieve. Instead of squelching these impulses, we accept them as usable resources that will broaden and enrich our life. We can experiment with the traits that are generally associated with the opposite gender, a passive woman can use modeling to try on the behavior of male like assertiveness. Our anima/us and our partner are of the same gender, so our understanding of our anima/us helps us to understand our partner. Conversely, our understanding of our partner helps us to understand our anima/us. We seek a balanced relationship with the anima/us, we allow its expression, but we retain our gender identity so that the anima/us will not overwhelm us thus, creating a macho woman or an effeminate man.
-Learning about the anima/us within our partner. We look for the presence of the anima/us, to see how it influences our partner and our relationship. We can be a role model to help our partner in expressing this contrary part of himself or herself because we are the same gender as our partner's anima/us.
-Learning about our partner. We dismiss the design projection with its universal qualities, instead, we discern the individual's unique qualities, the unique needs, quirks, history, and personality. We discover this individuality by listening carefully to the person's statements, and closely observing his or her behavior.

The projection process becomes less active.

The reason the projection occurred initially was because we weren't utilizing the anima/us inside. The energy and image had to be projected outward in order to be recognized at all. Now we see the anima/us within us. Some projection will continue to occur, because we are never fully aware of all aspects of the anima/us. Our outer relationships, to an extent, have been mere substitutes for the relationship that we needed with the anima/us. We continue to need relationships with both our anima/us and with people of the opposite gender. Some contemporary women try to become free and strong by creating a relationship with their animus instead of a relationship with a man. This can lead to problems internally and externally. Women can experience an over development of the animus, and a disturbance in relationships with men.

Next Topic: Lateralization