Monday 16 May 2016

Anima and Animus

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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