Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

12
Relationship Problems in a Nutshell
When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword
of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction.
The outcome need not always be negative,
since the two are equally likely to fall in love. 33
We all want someone to love and someone to be loved by. But intimate
relationships are fraught with difficulty. There are any number
of landmines to be negotiated before two people feel comfortable
with each other; more when they become sexually involved,
and more again if and when they live together. On top of the twin
devils of projection and identification, there are each other’s personal
complexes and typological differences. In truth, the very
things that brought them together in the first place are just as likely
to drive them apart.
Most relationships begin with mutual good will. Why, then, do
so many end in acrimony? There are probably as many answers to
this as there are couples who split up, but in terms of a common
pattern, typology certainly plays a major role.
Following the logistics implicit in Jung’s model of psychological
types, 34 an extraverted man has an introverted anima, while an introverted
woman has an extraverted animus, and vice versa. This
can change through psychological work on oneself, but these inner
images are commonly projected onto persons of the opposite sex,
with the result that either attitude type is prone to being fascinated
by its opposite. This happens because each type is complementary
to the other.
The introvert is inclined to be reflective, to think things out and
33 “The Syzygy: Anima and Animus,” Aion, CW 9ii, par. 30.
34 See above, pp. 16f.
51