Animus and Anima in Jung’s Red Book

Hello friends!

For those who don’t know the red book by CG Jung is one of the biggest current news within psychology. To better understand its importance, we have to go back in time a little.

Early in his career as a psychiatrist, Jung initially worked with Eugen Bleuler, who, among many other works, was the originator of the concept of schizophrenia. Until then, this disease was called dementia praecox. After a few years carrying out several experimental studies on affective complexes, Jung began to have contact with Freud and between the years 1907 and 1914, they collaborated with each other.

To get an idea of ​​Jung’s importance in the history of the psychoanalytic movement, he was the first president of the International Association of Psychoanalysis. However, due to theoretical divergences, Jung leaves psychoanalysis to create, then, analytical psychology.

However, between his departure from psychoanalysis and even the creation of analytical psychology, he felt lost and without knowing exactly what his point of view was regarding the psyche, mental illnesses, the unconscious.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he says:

“After the break with Freud, a period of inner uncertainty began for me, and more than that, of disorientation. I felt like I was floating, because I still didn’t find my own position”.

And it is precisely during this period that he begins to write the so-called Black Books, whose content was later rewritten in the Red Book. As the contents were quite personal, with dreams, imaginations and fantasies, the material was never published – until 2010 – with the exception of the part “Seven Sermons to the Dead”.

What is interesting in the material of the red book is that there we can find several concepts that will be present in his later theoretical work. And, in today’s text, we’re going to talk about the concepts of anima and animus.

In chapter 9, entitled Second day, the author dialogues with other characters, including Elias and Salomé who had already appeared in the first part of the book. Thinking about the relationships between men and women, Jung writes that the man must find the woman within himself, before seeking her outside himself, and vice versa, the woman must find the man within herself, so that your external search then makes sense.

In his words: “the person is male and female, not just a man or just a woman. Of your soul you cannot say what kind it is. But if you pay close attention, you will see that the most masculine man has a feminine soul, and that the most feminine woman has a masculine soul. The more of a man you are, the more removed from you is what woman really is, because the feminine in yourself is foreign and despicable to you” (JUNG, 2010, 263).

For those who have never heard of the concepts of anima and animus, the central idea is simple: the man has within himself an image of the woman, that is, in his dreams and fantasies, the self will constantly find female figures, good and bad, that will make reference to your experiences in the world, but will also be archetypal, that is, universal. Thus, if we analyze a large sequence of dreams of a man, we will see women appear and reappear as witches, sorceresses, goddesses, mothers, sisters, wives, prostitutes and so on. And, likewise, in women’s dreams and fantasies, we find figures that come and go from different men.

In short, in the unconscious of men there is the figure of the anima (of women) and in the unconscious of women there is the figure of the animus (of men).

This idea of ​​anima and animus will be treated in several volumes of Jung’s Collected Works and here, in red book, we can read the beginning of the elaboration that will become theory.

In the passage above, we can see that what makes a man a true man is having the possibility of having contact with his feminine soul, with his anima, while the same occurs for women. In this case, we are not exactly talking about sexual roles (heterosexuality or homosexuality), but rather the conception present throughout Jung’s work that the search is not for perfection, but for totality.

In other words, when we exclude a part of our psyche, and leave a whole large area of ​​our life only in the unconscious, we will have problems because inevitably this part will return and can even cause great harm and even mental illness.

If, for example, a man, by identifying himself exclusively with his persona as a man, excludes his entire anima, paradoxically there will be a psychic change that will make him face, in one way or another, what he is excluding. Therefore, it is not uncommon for the macho man who is intolerant of the perspective of women to end up being – behind the scenes – an effeminate guy.

Before criticisms can arise in this regard – even more so in our context of multiple sexual possibilities – I would like to make it clear that this issue of the union of sexual opposites is still valid if we start thinking about the activity/passivity dichotomy. For example, homosexual couples (gay or lesbian) also have a dynamic of one person taking on one role and another person taking on the other, active-passive, female-male.

Evidently, in Jung’s time there were more than eight or eighty questions and that is why his model reflects more his cultural circumstance, of the man in the role of breadwinner for the family and the woman, at home, taking care of the children.

In conclusion, and returning to red book, we see again the idea that the quest for the path of individuation, of wholeness, requires acceptance of opposites, including acceptance of the sides of our psyches that we normally exclude. In other words: “You are a slave to what you need in your soul. The most masculine man needs the woman, that’s why he is his slave. Become a woman yourself, and you will be free from enslavement to woman” (JUNG, 2010, 263).

That is to say, when a man is totally unaware of the anima, he will be trapped in its web, projecting his own anima into dozens of women. This will not be interesting – although projection is a natural factor – because there is a confusion between what the woman you are dealing with in reality is and the vision you have of her through projection.

In this sense, Jung’s famous phrase makes perfect sense for us to conclude: “Who looks outside, dreams; whoever looks inside, wakes up!”

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