22/07/2024
The Animus and Animus Possession
A woman is compensated by the masculine animus, the personified spirit of a woman that corresponds to the paternal Logos, representative of rationality, discrimination and cognition. It is the union of Eros, the expression of her true nature – that is, relatedness, connection and the feminine feeling value – and Logos that creates the instinctual drive toward wholeness necessary for psychological development and individuation.
While the animus is an eternal, inherited archetype of the collective unconscious, it is also influenced the context of one’s life, culture and personal relationships with the opposite s*x. Therefore, it is both an archetypal image that possesses a degree of autonomy, such that it cannot be wholly integrated into consciousness, and a personal complex. The animus is best thought of as a kind of psychopomp or guide to the unconscious, formulating the bridge between a woman’s ego and the Self, the psychological totality of her being. According to Jung, “If the encounter with the shadow is the ‘apprentice-piece’... then that with the anima [or animus] is the ‘master-piece.’” (Carl Jung, C.W. Vol 9. Part I. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious)
A woman possessed by the animus will develop emotionally charged, ‘sacred’ convictions and critical judgements, inflicted either against herself, causing deep feelings of inferiority, or indiscriminately against others. She exhibits ‘. . . a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth.’ (Jung, 1951, p.15) When challenged on her position, she becomes abrasive and dogmatic. Such convictions are never true to the reality of her personhood, and in fact threaten her feminine identity and her relationships, for the animus-possessed woman is gripped by an unconscious desire for power and control. This negative animus lures her away from life and encases her in fantasies of how things should be. It can also manifest as a destructive attitude. According to Marie Louise Von Franz, the animus shares the primitive propensity of man as hunter, capable of murdering life for a woman. If the animus robs her of all life and leaves her in a state of emotional paralysis, she may become a vampire who sucks the life from others. This is quite unlike the anima, which serves to enhance life. In fairytales, such a negative animus may appear as the personification of death itself.
“Just as the mother influence is formative with a man's anima, the father has a determining influence on the animus of a daughter. The father imbues his daughter's mind with the specific coloring conferred by those indisputable views mentioned above, which in reality are so often missing in the daughter. For this reason, the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life and full of wishes and judgments about how things "ought to be," prevents all contact with life. The animus appears in many myths, not only as death, but also as a bandit and murderer, for example, as the knight Bluebeard, who murdered all his wives.”
Marie Louise von Franz, The Animus, a Woman's Inner Man.
The animus becomes a valuable inner companion for a woman only once she is able to differentiate between the thoughts and opinions of this autonomous complex, and what she herself really thinks. To become familiar with the nature of her animus, she must create distance between herself and her convictions and look upon them with a critical eye. Manifest positively, the animus provides her with qualities of initiative, creative action, objectivity and spiritual wisdom. In his highest form, he is the incarnation of meaning.
“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, so the animus gives to a woman’s consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation and self-knowledge.”
Carl Jung, C.W. Vol 9. Part II: Aion. The Syzygy: Anima and Animus
Art: Blue Beard by Eune Ryu
