Anima is a female quality in a man. Animus is a male quality in a woman. There is [in man] 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 forego; 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. Collected Works 9ii Jung, Carl. (1980). Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious The Syzygy: Anima and Animus, New York: NY. Paragraph 24 What can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man’s shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world. Collected Works 10 “Women In Europe” (1927) : P. 236 You are a slave of what you need in your soul. The most masculine man needs women, and he is consequently their slave. Become a woman yourself, and you will be saved from slavery to woman…. It is good for you once to put on women’s clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women and their tyranny. The acceptance of femininity leads to completion. The same is valid for the woman who accepts her masculinity. Jung, Carl. (2009). The Red Book. China. Pages 263-264. Take a personality test at: https://www.123test.com/jung-personality-test/ |
WOMAN IS COMPENATED BY A MASCULINE ELEMENT AND THEREFORE her unconscious has, to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychology difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit. (From The Syyzgy: Anima and Animus, Collected Works, 9ii, par. 28f.)
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.(From Anima and Animus, Collected Works 7, pg. 336.) Animus is the male quality in a woman that causes her to pursue intellectual matters. What does this mean? http://carl-jung.net/animus.html Can you recognize your Anima or Animus? |