The Anima and Animus

The Inner Opposite

Jung believed each of us carries an inner figure of the opposite sex. In a man it's a feminine figure he called the anima. In a woman, a masculine one he called the animus.

Neither is a real person. Each is an inherited image, shaped early by the opposite-sex parent, the anima by a man's mother and the animus by a woman's father. Both sit deeper than the shadow, which makes them harder to notice and harder to reach.

Falling for Her

When a man hasn't recognized his anima, he tends to project her outward. It's what's happening when he meets a woman and feels, with total certainty, that this is the one. He falls so fast it looks like madness from the outside.

What he's responding to is partly the real woman and partly the image he has carried all along, laid over her. Homer's Circe turned men into swine and kept them on her island; the anima can do something quieter and just as binding, holding a man to a fantasy of a woman instead of the person in front of him.

Moods and Convictions

Left unconscious, the anima usually shows up as mood. With a voice saying that nothing means much and that it's somehow different for everyone else. Jung saw a version of this in men who retreat into abstraction, theorizing about life so well that they never get around to living it.

The animus tends to work the other way in a woman. It arrives as conviction rather than mood, a set of flat verdicts that feel like simple truth: there's no point in trying, nothing will really change.

The Guide Inward

Neither figure is only trouble. Taken seriously, the anima becomes a man's guide to his inner world, the thing that puts him back in touch with what he actually values.

The animus can do the same for a woman, turning from a nagging inner judge into a source of clarity and nerve, the part of her that decides and acts. Jung saw both figures maturing over time, from raw instinct or brute force toward wisdom.

Taking It Seriously

The way in is to stop dismissing the moods and convictions as "just imagination" and start treating them as real. Jung’s advice was to give them a form: to write them down, paint them, work them into something you can look at. Once they have a shape, you can have a relationship with them instead of being run by them.

Jung tried this on himself first. During a long inner crisis he began hearing a woman’s voice rise up in him, and rather than brushing it aside he answered it, treating the figure as a real other with something to say. Those dialogues became the ground for much of his later work.

"Just as 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." — C.G. Jung