Two Halves

“You are a slave to what you need in your soul.”
Carl Jung

The Other Sex

We have gone over our Hyde’s and Grover’s, through currents of spiced wheat fields and roots to discover ourselves.  Paradoxically enough, the deeper you knowingly immerse yourself into the collective that all people share, the more you will discover and be able to define yourself.  The figure that will help bring you there is one that you might not expect to see, and the more you don’t expect it, the more you probably need it. Enter the contrasexual (opposite of your sex) archetype:  the anima for men, or the animus for women. Sex is determined by a majority of male or female genes in a person’s body, but the genes belonging to the other sex do not simply disappear. Men have more testosterone, and women more estrogen, but both sexes have both hormones.  The anima/us, is the personification of the other hormone within us. Now I am not saying everyone except you has disassociated and has another person from their psyche of the opposite sex that they talk to on the reg. But remember how the collective unconscious contains everything, the totality of history? All the repeated traits, normal and peculiar occurrences and situations that have ever happened?  Well the other sex is part of everything.

Masculinity and femininity are merely two halves of a whole, as they serve to balance the other one out.  This does not mean your anima/us is a one trick pony, that your animus will just yell and smash something and your anima will be demure and emotional, although they could drive you to do that.  Give the other sex some credit, there’s a wide spectrum. Remember the poles, there is good and bad and everything in between. You need to find the positive traits wrapped up in these hormones..

Why Integrate

That being said, used in an ideal way the anima does help men be more open and emotional and use emotional wisdom, and the animus can help women use more rationality and logic.  We need both! One is not better than the other! Logic without emotional maturity is just dumb, and vice versa.

Often cultures have rigid sexual roles and rules that we must do one thing and must not do another and all that.  You could say that individuals in those cultures often have tried to squash their anima and animus, and that gives way to pathology, or at least a whole bunch of people that are not free and suck to be around.  Why those rigid roles might have been needed in some form in the past, it has warped how we see each other and ourselves. We now have a patriarchal structure where everyone is confined and forced into roles, and our whole structure is built to keep a person in that role (I am not saying men and women have it the same, I think women are severely diminished and their voice is taken away, but that, and the way men are caught in patriarchy’s web too, both deserve their own post).  

How to Integrate?

Jung felt that integrating  your anima/us becomes more important the older you grow, as more of the other hormone (testosterone for women, estrogen for men) is released into your body. How can you even integrate that?  For men to integrate their anima, they should try to be more thoughtful and consider others needs and if they are quick to react, they should learn how to sleep on decisions, if they are slow to react, they need to learn to take action.  If this is allowed, the anima can bring tenderness to their life and they can feel more related to others and intuitive. For women, animus integration can take the form of being more assertive and confident, and taking on new roles. She must reflect on her own opinions and beliefs and how she reacts to others. For both sexes, it is easy to hide behind your anima/us and use it to continually not engage in life with passion and conviction.

Possessed by the Other

If this is not done for either sex, you run the risk of grabbing onto negative traits and it possessing you. Possession does not mean you have too much estrogen or testosterone, just that that part of you has control, and it is just being the worst. Think of those poles, the negative traits are often the inverse, so the anima possessed man can refuse to listen, be extremely moody and sulky, and feel and appear spineless, unable to take action. He will think “Why try? I’m just going to fail again”. For the animus possessed woman assertiveness becomes ruthlessness and aggression, fake and vain, always right and never wrong. She will hide behind fake bravado. When a anima/us takes over, it is not because it is happy.  It is angry that you are not doing your part. They will both use different ways to suck the joy and life out of everything and instill you with doubt in yourself. Just like with Hyde, we cannot solve the problem by refusing to admit it exists.

On the Soul Road

The anima is the Latin word for “Soul” and animus has more Latin meanings, such as “courage, will, logic, rationality” however they are both seen as “the roadmap of your soul” by Jung, as he felt it is the prime mediator between your conscious and unconscious. He felt that one’s task is to integrate the opposites as much as we can to make ourselves whole, and there is hardly any bigger task than uniting our sexual opposites and not letting either run rampant. Integrating your anima/us is a process that requires multiple specific levels (i.e. multiple posts), as each level helps you relate to yourself and others in a different way.

Forging Us

The  anima/us is an archetype that some Jungians today take issue of.  There’s a host of reasons for and against, and we can get into those and what I believe (I’m still figuring it all out to), but let’s get the basics down.  I’m just trying to explain some Jung, not turn y’all into…Observatons? Observatians? Observatorians.

Whatever you might call us and this, the things we have talked about is a tall order, not something everyone is capable of doing. Working with it in any capacity is improvement, and just like a little exercise, it goes a long way. Not everyone’s capable because we have to realize that accepting the unconscious, allowing it’s rightful due, doesn’t mean we continue to harm ourselves or engage in addictive, self-limiting behaviors.  It means we recognize the conflict, and take an objective aerial view of what each behavior is saying about us, and what it means in the big picture of our journey into ourselves. Holding these opposites and attempting to work with them is the way human life is meant to be. Jung says it is “a game of hammer and anvil. Between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an ‘individual’.”

Lifetime Grounding

There is, dare I say, a lifetime’s worth of these Jung ideas, and also a lifetime of other ideas, and I want to talk about both.  With that I am slowing down these directly Jung posts, but I have hopefully laid the groundwork to begin talking about how these figures appear in dreams and imagination, myths and religions, synchronicity, individuation, the Self and like so much stuff y’all.