Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

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Woman’s Inner Man
A woman possessed by the animus is always in
danger of losing her femininity. 29
A woman’s inner man, her animus, is strongly colored by her experience
of her personal father. Just as a man is apt to marry his
mother, so to speak, so a woman is inclined to favor a man psychologically
like her father, or, again, his opposite.
Whereas the anima in a man functions as his soul, a woman’s
animus is more like an unconscious mind. It manifests negatively in
fixed ideas, unconscious assumptions and conventional opinions
that may be generally right but just beside the point in a particular
situation. A woman unconscious of her masculine side tends to be
highly opinionated—animus-possessed. This kind of woman proverbially
wears the pants; she rules the roost, or tries to. The men
attracted to her will be driven to distraction by her whims, coldly
emasculated, while she herself wears a mask of indifference to
cover her insecurity. Jung:
No matter how friendly and obliging a woman’s Eros may be, no
logic on earth can shake her if she is ridden by the animus. . . . [A
man] is unaware that this highly dramatic situation would instantly
come to a banal and unexciting end if he were to quit the field and
let a second woman carry on the battle (his wife, for instance, if she
herself is not the fiery war horse). This sound idea seldom or never
occurs to him, because no man can converse with an animus for five
minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. 30
A woman’s animus becomes a helpful psychological factor only
when she can tell the difference between her inner man and herself.
29 “Anima and Animus,” Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7, par. 337.
30 “The Syzygy: Anima and Animus,” Aion, CW 9ii, par. 29.
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