Dismantling The Animus

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Written by Lyn Cowan
Dismantling The Animus
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I started writing this in 1993, expanding on a lecture I had given to several Jung
Societies in the United States. I finished the monograph in 1994, intending to publish it, but,
for reasons which are now irrelevant, it went into a drawer instead.
October, 1994
Foreword
September, 2000

I started writing this in 1993, expanding on a lecture I had given to several Jung
Societies in the United States. I finished the monograph in 1994, intending to publish it, but,
for reasons which are now irrelevant, it went into a drawer instead.
Between then and now, the manuscript has kept breathing in spite of my neglect,
circulating around by occasional requests for copies. And happily, in the nearly eight years
that have passed, much interesting work has appeared in the field that deals with some of
the questions raised in this paper and continues the effort to re-think and re-shape some of
the most fundamental conceptions in the Jungian canon. More than three years ago, Don
Williams, webmaster of the C.G.Jung Page, invited me to publish the piece on the Internet.
Again I let it slip out of mind. Several weeks ago, in August, 2000, through a series of
synchronistic circumstances, the monograph brought itself back to my attention, and the time
seemed right to take a different perspective concerning its fate.
I have not attempted to update the work, relying on readers to remember the now-
dated examples and forgive the omissions. The ideas put forth in it were never intended to
be conclusive but to invite, and sometimes provoke, debate; thus, in keeping with the
subject, the style is deliberately polemical.
 With acknowledgement to those who have kept this piece alive, even when I was
unwilling to give it any more oxygen, I hope their confidence is justified. Special thanks to my
friend and colleague, Claudette Kulkarni. Off it goes now into cyberspace, answering an
invitation some years late and maybe too old for a new dance, but glad for the chance to
finally step out.

Trudy the Bag Lady:

After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin' but a
collective hunch. My space chums think reality was once a
primitive method of
crowd control that got out of hand.
In my view, it's absurdity dressed up
in a three-piece business suit.

—Lily Tomlin, in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, by Jane Wagner

CONTENTS
HE WHO WEARS THE MANTLE
PART I: DISMANTLING
Problem One: Genderism
Problem Two: Principles and Persons
Problem Three: Moralism
Problem Four: The "Ego"
Problem Five: Contrasexuality
Problem Six: Locus
PART II: THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES
No Re-Dressing of Grievances
Notes

HE WHO WEARS THE MANTLE

A few years ago I had occasion to do a news interview with an Israeli woman, then in
her early 50s, an ardent feminist and political activist. I was struck by her quiet intensity,
sharp intelligence, and self-containment. During our interview she remarked that her twenty-
five-year marriage to a university professor had always been very troubled. "Why?" I asked,
surprised. "Because," she said, "we both thought we were him."
 Then, a few months ago, as I sat listening to a new analysand, I remembered the
Israeli woman, and how the unhappy woman in the chair facing me was saying, in effect, the
same thing. Her misery, however, was palpable, just beginning to find its way out in tears
and words. She spoke a litany of sacrifice: nine years of dutiful marriage, two children (for
whom she "gave up" a career in architecture), a disinterested husband who seems to require
more than he returns, a father who took pride in, yet humiliated her, and a mother whose
love for her has been expressed for years in a vague on-going wish that her daughter would
soon "join a good church."
Her husband, a prosperous attorney, has unlimited freedom in this marriage to do as
he wishes, spend (his) money as he pleases, arrange his work and home schedules to his
convenience. He initiates, decides, announces, directs; she takes care of, responds,
accommodates, reacts. "He knows what's best for me," she says through tears, believing this
to be true and at the same time knowing it is not.
I comment on her obvious intelligence, her artistic talent, her natural curiosity, her
good health at age 34, and I wonder how her life could have slid into such mindless misery.
She tells me it was not always like this. She had been a "headstrong" little girl, right into
adolescence. "I had a mind of my own," she says, her wet eyes looking directly at me. "I was
ridiculed for it but I was proud of it. I had a mind of my own."

"What happened to your mind?" I ask. "Where did it go?"

"I don't know," she says, her gaze drifting away. "My husband thinks for both of us."

I remember the Israeli woman: They both have been thinking they are him.
My analysand's chronic condition is not hers alone, but is, at the very deepest level,
the condition of all women. If there is such a thing as a root complex that all women share, in
the furthest reaches of the psyche, it is probably this: we all think we are him, or should be.
After my patient and I do our analytic work of sorting out her own personality traits,
her one-sided perceptions and neurotic complaints, her desperate longings and real talents,
her mother's influence, her father's double messages, and her husband's privileged
dominance after we restore what is truly her own to her then what? The world, the culture,
the social environment, the church, the neighborhood, the very air she breathes, will not have
changed much. The world, comprising all these people and institutions, will look at her and
see, first, that she is a woman, a female this is the chronic condition from which she can
never "recover."
And yet, from the testimonies of countless women analysands past and present, and
from those now engaged on the same trek, and from my own slips and slides into and
around gender pitfalls, we demonstrate once again that not only "the personal" but also "the
psychological" is political. There is yet a fundament of real, incontrovertible change: When
my patient no longer wishes to "recover" from "femaleness" but instead falls in love with
it, the therapeutic process will be complete for the time, and she will be, in the most profound
sense possible, a changed person.
And I suppose the world will have changed just that much, too.
________________

There is a feminist rule-of-thumb: If something works well for and makes sense to
men, it probably is not good for women. "The animus" is an idea that has worked too well
and made too much sense.
Why haven't women Jungian analysts protested being smothered with this male
mantle sooner? Louder? With great urgency? Why has it been so difficult for most of us to
see through the imposing ermine-lined purple mantle to the non-magnificence hidden within?
Why have we not, like Dorothy in her desperation to leave Oz, followed Toto's lead and
pulled the curtain on the fraudulent Wizard?
Why is it that with only a few years left in the millenium there is no great apocalyptic
fervor to throw out the petrified skeletons in the Jungian closet? (Oppositional thinking,
"positive/negative" moralisms, repetitions about masculine/feminine "principles," unnatural
polarizations like "ego-Self axis," to name a few.) Why is it that after more than half a century
of exaltation in the pantheon of Jungian archetypal god-figures, "the animus" remains
sacrosanct: tended like a folk icon from medieval times, kept polished and in good repair,
even by heretics who doubt its validity and plot secretly, like mad Reformers, to replace it
with another creed.
Sometimes women Jungians treat the animus idea as if it were an unwanted child to
whose care they are morally committed because the father has abandoned it at their
doorstep. Sometimes they convey an uneasy mix of proud maternal affection and painful
uneasiness when speaking or writing about the animus, the affection of a mother for an
unruly child, the uneasiness of a mother who feels forced to hide the reality that her son is a
drug-pushing teenage delinquent, as if neighbors are watching to see how she treats this
criminally-inclined boy-man. As often in the "real" world, whenever "he" turns out bad as by
definition he must, ninety-five percent of the time it's the woman who gets the blame: for
neglecting, rejecting. smothering, working outside the home, not working outside the home,
not having a home.
And sometimes women analysts write about animus with the detachment and cool
objectivity we have been taught is a hallmark of good scholarship, and some men analysts
then write about "the animus" using these women as examples of the "positive" and
"creative" animus at work.
 I don't know why this has been so, even less why it is still so. But women analysts,
like their male counterparts, are just as much products of their culture and time, and are as
sorely wounded by that culture as by their male and female colleagues. No one of us is
immune to the weight of collective sanction. Most of us are introverts who would all but
perish under the notoriety that is reserved for heretics. Many of us suffer narcissistic wounds
which fatefully brought us into the analytic profession to begin with, and do not wish to re-
open those wounds by attacking the benevolent father. And finally, I think it has been
especially difficult for women analysts to challenge this pivotal animus theory of Jung's
because he is the father, and Jungian psychology has no mother. Like a Catholic priest who
no longer believes in the God to whose priesthood he is ordained but still celebrates Mass for
the faithful, there are growing numbers in the analytic ranks who use the word, keep the
concept, explain its usefulness, make minor annotations to give an impression of
independent thought, but are coming to realize ever more fully that the god-emperor has no
clothes. Not even a mantle.
____________

One of the root fears of women is of men, and this fear is neither totally irrational nor
unrealistic. Women are afraid of men's fear of women, of male violence toward women in all
forms, and of men's power to make the world in their own image, a mirror of his face but not
of her's. The lies about women on which much of this world is built have been told so well
and so often that even she believes them. And she believes the world is as it is
because he has said it, God has spoken, and no other belief has been allowed to be spoken,
or even imagined. Jung's animus theory originates in this belief.
Any woman who seeks to transform the world into a place more hospitable to her, or
enlarge the mirror to reflect her own image as well as his, risks exclusion from that world.
She risks being perceived by both men and other women as a traitor to the order of
things which we still, deep down, believe is the very will of God. A woman who wants to
overturn traditional modes of thinking, who tries to dismantle institutions which have excluded
or demeaned her, who challenges the most cherished and revered social assumptions
expressed in hallowed customs and proprieties, becomes a target of accusations that are
quite different from those thrown at men who seek revolution. When a man tries to effect
change, even radical change, he is still likely to be praised for his heroism, admired for his
courage, respected for his ideas even by those who think his ideas misguided. (No one, for
example, was publicly willing to call recent presidential candidate Ross Perot a narrow-
minded dictatorial simpleton.) When a woman steps out as an overturner, a dismantler, or a
challenger, she is likely to hear one of these variations on the theme:
— "You don't understand the complexity of the problem." "It's been this way for
centuries. What makes you think you can change it?"
— "It's been this way for centuries. Who do you think you are to say it's wrong?"
— "It's been this way for centuries. Obviously, this is the way it's supposed to be."
— "It's been this way for centuries. It needs a little fixing here and there, but it works, doesn't
it?"
— "It's been this way for centuries. If it's supposed to change it will have to come very slowly
through evolution. Not in our lifetimes."
— "What are you, a lesbian?"

The animus theory, with a few mild revisions, has been held by Jungians for more
than half a century, during which time much has changed on the surface, but just as much
has stayed the same in the shadow of the collective psyche. Women have been voting now
for more than seventy years, but usually for male politicians, and never for a female
presidential candidate. In 1973 women won a constitutional right to bodily integrity (which
men already had from the early days of creation) in Roe v. Wade, but twenty years later it is
the only constitutional right vulnerable to abridgment by individual states. More than half the
total population of the United States are women, and nearly half the number of law students
in the United States are women; yet only a handful serve in the Senate and only one woman,
at this writing, sits on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Even in the most modern of writings about women and the animus, a faint suggestion
that an "individuated" woman still resembles a sort of alpine Persephone: a serene "feminine
ego" (whatever that is) who has made a conjunction and settled down with a good "inner
man," and is being "creative" through "his" benevolence.
Nor Hall has written with beauty and insight of some of "those women" 1 who were the
first generation of women analysts to practice what became known as Jungian psychology:
Marie-Louise von Franz, Esther Harding, Frances Wickes, Eleanor Bertine, Barbara Hannah,
Linda Fierz-David, Hilde Binswanger. And there were many others: Liliane Frey-Rohn,
Jolande Jacobi, Mary Ann Mattoon, June Singer, et al., et al. The list is long and impressive.
These women certainly do not conform to the ideal: most of them married work instead of
men, none of them set standards for fashionable dress, few of them seemed to be more than
academically interested in sex. Why are they are not accused of being "animus possessed?"
Because Emma was "his wife?" Because Toni Wolff was both brilliant and "his lover?"
Or was it because they supported the animus theory in public lectures and classes and
writing, and thus forestalled such attacks? How odd it is to read in Frieda Fordham's
book, An Introduction to Jung's Psychology (1953; last reprint, 1973), that a woman's
"normal" place and function is in the domestic sphere while she herself followed quite a
different path.
The masculine principle—that is, the masculine element in women—found very
positive expression in women's activities during the war years, when it was made clear that
they could fill adequately most positions previously reserved for men. But only an abnormal
situation brings out such manifestations; there is a contemporary movement towards a wider
range of activity for women, but generally this activity is better expressed in a
domestic milieu, or in one that bears some relationship to it, e.g., teaching, nursing, social
work, &c.2
Did Dr. Fordham see no conflict? Feel no tension? Did she decide deliberately not to
speak about the discrepancy between what she wrote and how she lived? Did she make her
contribution less in her own eyes so as not to compete with male colleagues? One could ask
the same of Marie-Louise von Franz, whose articulation of Jung's animus theory is cogent,
deep, clear and remains Jung's, not challenging the premises about women on which the
theory rests.
As for contradicting Jung's theories, especially the animus theory, "those women"
appear to have avoided what Jung disdainfully called the animus of "critical
3
disputatiousness" at least in their public and professional spheres. The "first generation" of
authors including Barbara Hannah, Jolande Jacobi, Frieda Fordham, Liliane Frey-Rohn, et
al., do not go beyond amplifications of Jung's animus idea.
In all her published writings, Von Franz's encyclopaedic mind and dry wit does not
take Jung or his animus notion to task for assuming women are, "by nature," irrational in
thinking, domestic by inclination, maternal by instinct, and whose "heroism" is expected to be
manifested primarily, if not exclusively, in literal relationship with a man.
Following von Franz, Marion Woodman's writings have also amplified Jungian ideas
about women and men. Woodman's great contribution to the field is her clarity of thought
combined with the passion of felt experience. At the same time, however, she does not
challenge the formula of gender that underlies Jungian thinking about both "animus" and
"anima." Woodman places great importance on actual man-woman relationships as the
arena in which both come to consciousness, and also, more subtlely, as the yardstick by
which individuation is measured.
In a forward-looking attempt to push theoretical boundaries, Mary Ann Mattoon and
Jennette Jones applied a feminist critique to Jung's animus concept by raising the question
of whether the animus is obsolete, or still useful in some way. They found that the idea of
"animus," as Jung conceived it, was seriously flawed and harmful when misapplied as a
perjorative to women. But in the end, they argued for retention of both the term and the
concept, finding it "useful" in helping many women recognize within themselves those
qualities they value but attribute exclusively to men: creativity, assertiveness, coping ability.
Mattoon and Jones advocate "taming" the animus rather than "obliterating" it, making the
"positive animus" more conscious and thus "more under control of the ego."
Though a most welcome and necessary initial step, the work of Mattoon and Jones
was undermined by failure to pursue their own criticisms of the animus theory to the edge of
logic and experience: they do not fundamentally challenge the implied moralism in
"positive/negative" value judgments, do not adequately clarify the confusion between a
woman's "ego" and "animus," do not argue the idea of the animus in women as the carrier of
spirituality, and, while recognizing that ideas of "masculine" and "feminine" are culturally
relative, they do not challenge our culture's crazy notions of gendered qualities.
Emma Jung, who wrote the first comprehensive statement on the animus from a
female point of view,4 did much to rectify some of Jung's most blatantly unfounded
generalizations. Her contribution is all the greater considering the times and context in which
it appeared. She sees the "animus" as capable of progressive development in a woman. Her
solution to the negativity of the animus (appearing in a woman as stridency, low self-esteem,
opinionatedness, etc.), however, is to emphasize the positive qualities: spiritual strength,
intellectual focus, creativity. In the same vein, Irene Claremont de Castillejo sees not only
value but necessity in the "positive animus," insisting that the animus "is essential for any
creativeness" in a woman.5
When Polly Young-Eisendrath and Florence Wiedemann published Female Authority:
Empowering Women Through Psychotherapy in 1987, it was hailed as a breakthrough,
"unique in its combination of feminist theory, social psychology, and Jungian psychology"
(from the dust jacket). Young-Eisendrath and Wiedemann argued for a modified animus
concept: accentuating the positive and reducing, if not eliminating, the negative. They took a
developmental view, noting five "stages" they described as characterizing animus
development in women. But their interest was in "deconstructing" the animus complex in the
context of modern American culture, while retaining the essentials of Jung's animus theory;
they do not address the problem of deconstructing the complex without deconstructing the
theory that defines it. In effect, they took the old garment, added some new trim and buttons,
gave it an updated look, and hung it back on the same dummy.
Demaris Wehr's Jung and Feminism, published in 1987, clearly elucidates the
misogyny inherent in Jung's attitude toward women expressed in the animus concept. While
her work is scholarly and careful, she stops short of calling for entirely abandoning the
animus idea and dropping the word itself.
The most comprehensive and penetrating examination of the animus in Jungian
psychology to date is by Claire Douglas, in her book, The Woman in the Mirror: Analytical
Psychology and the Feminine. She gives us an illuminating history of the animus idea in both
Jung and Jungians, and like Wehr, though in greater scope and depth, exposes the
misogyny, implied and overt, in Jungian thinking about animus. Douglas found in Jung's work
"only three descriptions of a positive animus:"

(1) The positive animus tries to discern and discriminate. (Jung, [CW 16], p. 304)
(2) [He] gives a woman's consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation and self-
knowledge. (Jung, [CW 9,ii], p. 16)
(3) In his real form he is a hero, there is something divine about him. (Jung, [The Visions
Seminars, Book One] p. 238.6

But just as Douglas takes us to the very edge of historical thought in her wonderfully
thorough and sensitive study, she takes a step back, preserving the old categories of
"principles," "masculine," "feminine."
Andrew Samuels most recently has given us some groundbreaking work on the
"feminine principle," challenging, as James Hillman has done brilliantly over the years but
particularly in Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, the whole Jungian enterprise of
formulating gender principles on the basis of opposites. Some of his ideas will be noted in
Problem 2, "Principles and Persons."
One can't help but be impressed by the sheer energy that has gone into salvaging the
animus concept over the last 60 years or so. Those women of the early Jungian days, by
establishing themselves as excellent scholars, insightful and empathic analysts, and persons
of psychological integrity, have made it much easier for those of us women who follow to
speak our minds.
But all this work by these exceptional women still raises the question this monograph
is intended to address: If the concept of the animus isn't broken, why does it need so much
fixing and patching and tinkering and adapting and defending and explaining and
rehabilitating and modifying? When my toaster gets that bad, I junk it and get a new one.
I want to throw out the whole raggedy animus mantle. I don't like the style, the fabric is worn,
the stitching is shabby, the buttons are missing, it doesn't fit. I want to throw it out even
before I know what a new one will look like. Or, to use a different metaphor: I am a wrecker
of uninhabitable buildings, clearing the ground for architects to use for new construction.
Jung's notion of the animus and sixty years of assorted repair work needs to be taken
apart, disassembled, unraveled. It needs to be dismantled, in both senses of that word: to
have the mantle of concealment removed from it, exposing it as a fantasy created by men
about women that obscures and even denies women's actual experience of themselves. And
the mantle of authority that cloaks the animus and confers divine right and status to "the
masculine principle" needs to be removed. The imperative for this dismantling comes not
only from women's right to have authentic lives of their own, but also from the need for men
to responsibly realize their humanness, which is not possible as long as they are privileged to
cast the mantle of divinity upon their sex.

PART I
DISMANTLING
PROBLEM ONE: GENDERISM
Trudy the Bag Lady and her Space Chums:
We speculated what it was like before we got language skills:
When we humans had our first thought, most
likely we didn't know what to think. It's hard to think
without words 'cause you haven't got a clue as to what you're
thinking. So if you think we suffer from a lack of communication
now,
think what it must've been like then, when people lived in a
verbal void —
made worse by the fact that there were no words such as
"verbal void."
— Lily Tomlin, in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, by Jane Wagner

The first step in this dismantling operation, the first thread to be pulled to begin ripping
apart the fabric, is to take a closer look at the broader problem of gender thinking.
Gender is the archetypal backdrop and ground of all our thinkings about male and
female, men and women, masculine and feminine. It predisposes us to see things in terms of
its own categories: masculine, feminine, neuter, and these are only the m ost familiar three
classes. According to my Random House Dictionary, the number of genders in different
languages ranges from two to twenty, with the classification often (but not always) correlate
with sex or animateness. This suggests that the human disposition to classify "things" by
gender is an archetypal phenomenon, rooted in the deepest impulses of psychic imagination.
It is only one mode of classification, but it also suggests that this archetype of gender, as a a
factor in the construction of human symbolic language, has become the exclusive way in
which we perceive and speak of our world and ourselves in it. As long as our perception is
determined by the lens of the gender archetype, and as long as our languages perpetuate
the singularity of this perception, we will see and think of ourselves first and most essentially
as masculine and feminine beings and only secondarily as human beings.
 The advantage for consciousness of this genderized vision is that it begins to
differentiate living things into more clearly defined outlines; it is a first step in the process of
particularizing collective life by form and function. But "gender" has taken primacy over the
way we perceive and experience most everything, and thus has rendered us unconscious of
both its primacy and power to shape experience. The situation is one of the blind leading the
severely near-sighted.
Not seeing the ground of gender on which we stand, which is by itself neutral in value,
it is a small step (apparently) from differentiation of gender form and function to imposition of
a hierarchy of values based on gender differences. Not enough to recognize distinctions
based on gender: values are accorded to genders. In our world, for the last few millenia, men
have accorded highest value to the masculine gender.
In English, which we do not think of as a "genderized" language, even the word
"neuter" is an assignment of lesser value, subordinate to the masculine class: a sexually
neutered male, for example, is less than masculine, incomplete and therefore closer to a
feminine classification. A recent nationwide public service ad encouraging people to be
responsible pet owners by neutering their cats and dogs found it necessary to assure owners
that "neutering" did not mean "demasculinizing." Part of the ad copy reads: "Neutering your
dog won't turn him into a sissy. No, your four-legged stud will be the same manly thing after
being neutered as he was before. He'll still be as territorial. Still be a great watchdog. Still be,
you know, a guy."7 The message clearly plays to the fear that neutering means feminizing.
But the real, unasked, question is: Why should this be fearful?
The attribution of highest value to the masculine gender has been so pervasive and
insistent in what we know of human history, that men have become identified with the
masculine gender — so that the masculine gender is the central point of reference in
practically every field of human endeavor.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to investigate how a hierarchical ranking of values
based on gender occured. My concern here is with our given situation, rather than how it
came about. It is a short and remarkably easy leap (even after all these millenia) from a
value-free simple designation of "masculine gender" to all that such a designation implies
and assumes: a whole range of qualities, associations, values, judgments, expectations,
perceptions, behaviors. "Gender" is no longer, and perhaps never has been, a tool of purely
biological classification. It is a word-image that suggests and opens to a whole ream of
psychological possibilities (mostly as yet unimagined), and into a labyrinth of pathological
thinking as well.
In a provocative paper called "The Dogma of Gender," Patricia Berry wrote these
cautionary lines:
 That gender is a form in which we can feel and think and experience does not make it
right or true. If it is archetypal, it requires exactly that we not think this way all the time. For if
we take one archetypal perspective exclusively, we are caught by it. And the result of being
caught by an archetype is that experience shrinks. We cannot see beyond the archetype's
confines, and we begin to interpret more and more of our experience only in its terms. 8
The archetype of gender genderizes our perception. And like any archetype that
draws its strength and power from unconsciousness, we are dominated and influenced,
collectively and individually, by it. Add the assignment of cultural values to the archetypal
(and thus value-neutral) disposition to perceive in terms of gender, and the result
is genderism: the belief that gender is the only way to perceive, the only way to classify,
understand, or describe human life and experience. Since the dominance and pervasive
influence of the archetype is unconscious, the habit of genderization is also largely
unconscious, and thus the culturally assigned values become inseparable from the
categories they are assigned to: the superiority, inferiority, or "neutrality" of a gender class
appear to be natural, pre-determined, and a matter of course. All things appear to come into
the world with a "natural" gender designation — even electrical outlets ("male" plugs,
"female" sockets). So natural, in fact, that we all have come to assume, automatically, that
we "know" the qualities and "natures" of genders without having to think about them. Andrew
Samuels writes, "The fact that a penis penetrates and a womb contains tells us absolutely
nothing about the psychological qualities of those who actually possess such organs." 9
But "nature," too, is a metaphor, an archetypal image of what we call certain aspects
of reality: "nature" as if it were "essence," as if it were "prima materia," as if it were what the
world looked like before human intrusion. "Nature" is not to be taken literally as a sys tem of
incontrovertible "laws" of behavior. Conclusions drawn from a literalized conception of
"nature," and "knowledge" thus claimed about "gender," are mostly projection and
assumption (or occasionally given the dignity of "mystery"): not "objective" data, certainly not
"neutral" scientific data, but fantasies that are the psychic data of men.
Consider the old fantasy of women as somehow "closer to nature." Even if women
were once "by nature" more related to the natural world, primarily through their ability to bear
children, it does not follow that woman's essential psychological"nature" is identical to that of
the animal or vegetative world. It is possible that the instinctive "need" — if it ever was that —
to be a "mother" has gone through a mutation, programmed out of large numbers of women.
Women's instinctive response to danger, for another example, seems to have been
weakened, conditioned, or beaten into near-extinction. What psychologists have seen as
"natural passivity" in women actually may be the self-preservation instinct reduced to
minimum strength. For centuries women have been told: "Don't fight, you'll make him
madder; don't fight, you'll only get hurt worse; don't fight, it's not worth it; don't fight, it's God's
inscrutable will; don't fight, it's not ladylike, not effective, not right, and certainly not very
nice." After a long enough while, "do not" becomes "cannot." So now women have to learn to
"get in touch with issues around anger." Meaning that female anger has become so remote
one has to call long distance to get in touch with it, and that the normal experience of anger
has been replaced with an issue around anger, removing its felt immediacy and reducing its
life-sized emotionality to an issue: one step removed, no longer a generator of heat and
passion. It is time we considered instinctive female rage and anger as an aesthetic
response to a world made ugly by male violence.
For clarity, I could propose that the term "sex" refer to biology and anatomy:
chromosomes, hormones, genitalia. Since these are descriptive rather than definitive
characteristics, sex distinctions should be neutral as to value: a Y chromosome ought to be
considered equal in value to an X chromosome, estrogen ought to be equal in value to
testosterone, and a clitoris ought to be equal in value to a penis. But proposing such a
specific use of the term "sex" is ineffectual: the possibility of giving equal value to sex
characteristics as we "ought" would require that psyche become a culturally and historically
blank slate, upon which we might write a fresh, neutral, equal-value version of human biology
and anatomy. The word "sex" in human language is already loaded with history, values, and
images, which attach themselves to "purely" biological facts. Announcing an academic,
conceptual limitation on what we want the word to mean solves nothing, but is instead a
denial of all that powerful load in the word.
Similarly, I could propose that the term "gender" refer to a socially defined role played
by a male or female, a role through which a male becomes a "man" and a female becomes a
"woman." Used in this context, gender has little to do with anatomical or biological sex, but a
great deal to do with how the individual experiences her/his anatomical sex. "Gender" ought
to refer to the psychic aspect of physical sex, inasmuch as cultural assignments of gender
roles have been made exclusively on the basis of biological sex. But as with the term "sex,"
"gender" too is a loaded word, and so this proposed distinction — gender as psychic
component of literal sex characteristics — is also ineffectual. Because gender and sex have
been used as nearly interchangeable terms, and because cultural gender expectations are
assigned according to anatomical sex characteristics, and because they have been yoked
together in the cultural imagination for so long, another attempt to pour new meanings into
old word-vessels is probably misguided.
All the more reason to dismantle Jung's animus concept: it not only confused sex and
gender, it inferred wrong conclusions from false premises. Cut from poor fabric, there is no
point in trying to re-fashion it.
_______
 The gender archetype determines how we understand animus/anima, and may be the
root metaphor, the root idea behind Jung's conception. Jung spoke of animus/anima as
archetypes, but as he described it, the animus may more accurately be called a stereotypical
male representation of a woman's psychology as he perceives it through the gender
archetype. In this case, Jung has mistaken the symptom for the cause, or the image for the
form.
One of Jung's undeniably great contributions to psychology is his archetypal theory, a
way of perceiving and appreciating psyche's depth without attaching moralistic judgments to
its images. As archetypal forms, animus/anima are supposed to be value-free; in the gender-
language of their spawning archetype, they should be "neutral." But the words themselves
retain both the genders of the original Latin words and the meanings attached to cultural
definitions of masculinity and femininity. The most essential (though not exclusive) meaning
of "animus" in Latin is, "the activity of breathing," while "anima" refers to the breath itself. 10
Jung's theory of animus/anima never was and still is not value-free or neutral; it carries the
definitions and values assigned by Jung's culture to masculine and feminine genders. The
culture of America in the 1990s is only a slight variation on the cultural heritage which
informed Jung; its roots in the Western world reach back so far that to "know" a different
world we would have to return to a time before collective memory. We still live in a world
where the activity of breathing is more important than the quality of breath.
By assuming that description of the animus sufficed for definition, Jung failed to
recognize the epistimological trap in his animus pronouncements, and the danger, as
Demaris Wehr pointed out, that "the culture will confer ontological and normative status on
such [archetypal] images, turning them into stereotypes."11 Just as Jung did not adequately
or accurately distinguish between the "masculine," the "man," and the "animus" in women's
psychology, so he speaks indistinguishably both about and from the animus. Angelyn
Spignesi makes the point:
The distinction between epistimological assumptions and statements about an
archetype is a critical issue. It's one thing to say: this was believed then so we have to look at
the manifestation of the archetype in that consciousness; it's another to imply that since it
was believed, then it is the archetype.12
"Archetypes," observed Claire Douglas, "are not excuses for the status quo." 13
For centuries now, culture has genderized human qualities by defining some as
"masculine" and some as "feminine." Our culture has then arranged these gendered qualities
in a hierarchy, assigning "masculine" superior status and "feminine" inferior status. Feminist
scholarship in particular has shown the marvelous subtlety and intricacy of this hierarchical
arrangement and the ways it works psychologically, politically, and socially, to reinforce the
idea of "masculine" superiority and "feminine" inferiority.
 Jungians cast the individuation process, the process of becoming a complete,
differentiated individual, in terms of "integrating" these masculine-feminine polarities, called
animus and anima. The Jungian ideal is that masculine and feminine qualities should be
equal to each other in value and balanced in consciousness.
But what we call the animus and the anima are really partial, arbitrarily assigned
cultural representations from the gender archetype: in traditional Jungian theory men get the
"feminine" half called anima, women get the "masculine" half called animus. And though
these halves make a theoretical whole when placed side by side in Jungian theory, the
cultural assignment yet prevails in our attitude, and places them not side by side, happily
conjoined, but as upper and lower — consciousness above, the unconscious below,
masculine above, feminine below. Whether or not this is how it is supposed to be in theory,
this is how it is in fact. Interpretations of spatial arrangements and placements in dreams and
drawings are still made according to this hierarchical above/below construct (and not by
Jungians only), and modern psychotherapeutic language is loaded with unconscious
moralism, as in: valuing progressive action over regressive reflection, valuing assertive
behavior over a "submissive" attitude, "getting over" the "lowness" of depression (associated
with female inertia), having a "higher" rather than a "lower" power.
And yet, for a long time now it seems, Jungians keep writing about the process of
individuation in terms of "integration" of the opposites, as if these profoundly unequal
"halves" can indeed be made equal in consciousness.
As we go on, it will become clear that the content of Jung's concept of the animus
derives far more from cultural stereotype than from a priori archetype, and that the concept is
so one-sidedly skewed to reinforce hierarchical genderization (not to mention misogyny) as
to be useless in understanding women's psychology. It also will become increasingly
apparent why "animus" must be separated from its assumed connection with sexuality. And
eventually we will remove the term "animus" from our psychological vocabulary. W ith all due
respect to Jung, it is time to consign the animus concept to a museum of old psychological
ideas.

PROBLEM TWO - PRINCIPLES AND PERSONS

"I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir," said Alice,

because I'm not myself, you see."
"I don't see," said the Caterpillar.

—- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

 The archetype of gender works unconsciously, shaping our expectations of behavior.
Under its influence, and in accordance with enculturated attitudes, we assume that a man or
a woman enacts one set of gender characteristics more "naturally" than another. We expect
the male gender (called "men") to manifest "masculine" biological attributes and certain
behaviors, and the female gender (called "women") to manifest "feminine" biological
attributes and certain non-masculine behaviors. (Since men have written the definitions and
scientific studies, "feminine behaviors" are unknown in themselves and therefore are inferred
from identified "masculine behaviors." Thus we know what "feminine behavior" is not, but not
yet what it is.) We expect males and females to somehow embody, respectively, the
"masculine principle" and the "feminine principle."
But clearly, the alert reader will protest, the "masculine principle" is not the same thing
as a male person, and the "feminine principle" is not the same thing as a female person. Any
person of either gender can embody both principles. And since we can, we should, especially
since individuation according to Jung requires it.
The fact is, however, that we do assign principles to persons, and even equate them.
The fact is, we do literalize the principles into persons. Individuals are given culturally defined
gender assignments according to their sex, and this happens at birth, usually color-coded in
pink or blue, and the assignment is for life. We find unprincipled persons far more frequently
than we find an unpersoned principle. Psyche personifies principles, or archetypes; that is
how we know what they "look" like. But the particular problem with the masculine principle is
that it is both the principle we see personified in male forms and by which we interpret the
feminine principle.
The amalgamating of principle with person, or psychic image with literal fact, can
happen with any archetypal configuration; identification with any archetype can happen to
anyone. The singular difficulty with the animus is that we are all identified with it, and by it. It
is the lens through which we see virtually every phenomenon, every other archetypal pattern,
how we understand what we see and how we value what we see. For
examples: law perceived through the animus takes on animus qualities: law as transcendent
(no one is "above" it), having a divine origin (from a male deity), a clear system of sharply-
defined right/wrong conduct, "objective" evidence, upholding ideals of "impartiality" and
"justice." Animus-style religion emphasizes transcendence, enlightenment, rejection of
("female") materiality. Psychologyunderstood through the animus is imagined as a "science"
concerned with "measurement" and "assessment," emphasizing mental orderliness,
conceptual terminology, emotional self-control, clear diagnosis (literally, "through-
knowledge"). Hillman suggests that even what psychology calls "ego" is an "animus idea," a
thought we will return to in Problem Four. And so on: western civilization and culture is the
world of animus-image seen from the perspective of the animus archetype. Think of Rodin's
"The Thinker" thinking: the "masculine principle" contemplating itself.
The equation of the female/male principles with persons happens often and
disappointingly in Jungian thought. In Erich Neumann's classic work, The Origins and History
of Consciousness, the index entry for "women" reads: "women: degradation of, 340n; and
religious worship, 143; see also anima, feminine, femininity." The "see-also" is not merely a
casually related association. Jung himself often uses the terms "anima" and "woman"
interchangeably, and sometimes adds a phrase like "feminine weakness" to make a similar
equation. In his essay on "Anima and Animus" he writes: "The persona, the ideal picture of a
man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual
outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the
anima...."14 In Addiction to Perfection, Marion Woodman seems to recognize the problem:
Masculinity and femininity are not matters of gender, though historically in our Western
culture their long identification with gender still makes it difficult for us to view them in this
"liberated" war. It is this liberated view of masculinity and femininity with which I shall be
dealing throughout this book. It is a matter of psychic rather than biological differentiation. 15
But soon she, too, falls into the old way, as most of us do, attaching principles to
persons. Interpreting the myth of Kore-Persephone raped by Hades, Woodman states:
That is the archetypal pattern: the woman has to be separated from the mother, and
for that to happen she has to surrender to the masculine principle—externally or internally.
Either the external man carries her off sexually or she identifies with her inner man; in
either case she is in danger of animus possession. 16
It is the man who personifies and embodies the masculine principle; it is a he, not a
she, who is the external manifestation of the internal principle. "Man," "male," "masculine" are
interchangeable.
There are deeper questions raised if we do not take for granted these assumptions:
What is happening psychologically in a woman who is "carried off sexually" by another
woman? Must a woman be separated from the mother? Listen closely and you will hear the
patriarchal voice convincing women, and men too, that women must separate from "the
mother" (and turn to men in sexual and emotional allegiance), accusing women of infantile
"regression to the womb" if they don't, but requiring that women become the "mother" at the
same time.
Edward Whitmont also recognizes the problem, tries to solve it, then falls into it again.
In Return of the Goddess he writes, "Masculinity and femininity as a priori archetypal traits
are to be differentiated, then, from individual male and female persons. Thus we can avoid
the confusion inherent when we fail to distinguish between personal and psychological
problems from their religio-cultural determinants."17 In the hope of avoiding "the
terminological confusion of gender and sex, and having to explain over and over again the
differences between masculinity and men, and femininity and women," he suggests we "use
the words animus and anima to denote archetypal masculinity and femininity respectively,
regardless of whether they apply to women or men."18
Ah, but it is not so easily done. Whitmont continues the equation of woman with
anima (e.g., a man's "woman within, the anima,") and of man with animus, interchanging the
terms ("the woman without or the anima within") 19, as if the anima (feminine principle) is an
accurate interiorization, a symmetrical counterpart, of a woman (female person). He
recognizes that the function and qualities of "anima" belong as much to women as to men,
and conversely so for "animus;" but he seems to assume that they are nearly exact
counterparts as the contrasexual psychic figures, and therefore not characteristic of a
person's consciousness — i.e., that a woman's "masculine" traits are not essentially
charateristic of her conscious attitude.
Whitmont's work leaves us with the disquieting sensation that the old equations are
still being made to carry reformed and refined meanings, with the result that the reformation
and refinement slip unnoticed out of consciousness and nothing truly new is gained. Equally
unsettling is the continuing notion that "contrasexuality" works psychologically the same way
for everyone, an idea we will try to dismantle in the fifth of our problems, "Contrasexuality."
Andrew Samuels has come closest to reformulating the most pressing questions that need to
be addressed by Jungian psychology. In The Plural Psyche: Personality, Morality, and The
Father, he moves away from the "hamstringing" insistence on contrasexuality to the theme
of difference as a basis for discussion of gender. Not innate "opposites," which he refers to
as "an unjustified psychological division expressed in lists of antithetical qualities, each list
yearning for the other list so as to become 'whole'. A marriage made on paper." 20 Samuels is
referring to the fact and experience of "difference" itself, wanting to know "what difference is
like."
Not what a woman is, but what being a woman is like. Not the archetypal structuring
of woman's world but woman's personal experience in today's world. Not the meaning of a
woman's life but her experience of her life. Each person remains a "man" or a "woman", but
what that means to each becomes immediate and relative, and hence capable of
generational expansion and cultural challenge. My suggestion has been that paternal deficits
constrict the expansion and truncate the challenge.21
Following Berry's earlier lead, Samuels also argues eloquently for the necessity of
some "gender confusion," which he considers a "necessary antidote to gender certainty and
has its own creative contribution to make...Inadvertently, those who propound a 'feminine
principle' play into and replicate the dynamics of unconscious gender certainty , denying
gender confusion."22
 Though we think of the "masculine" and "feminine principle" as abstractions floating in
a disembodied psyche, we are accustomed to seeing them embodied. These "principles"
appear as "principals," in person, in the flesh, in persons of each sex. While any "principle"
may be personified as an imaginal figure in dreams and fantasies, it takes on flesh and a
profoundly greater and different substantiality in concrete human form.
When masculine/feminine "principles," with their culturally pre-defined contents, are
coagulated into actual human beings, it becomes virtually impossible to separate the
imaginal from the literal. These two principles are, or certainly seem to be, especially
resistant to "seeing through" the literal person (woman or man) to the imaginal
personification of the principle. Because the collective psyche is so saturated with age-old
visions of what "masculine" and "feminine" looklike, it can scarcely imagine these principles
looking like anything other than a "man" or a "woman." A man is just what the psychic
configuration of the masculine principle is supposed to "look" like, and the masculine
principle is supposed to "look" like a man in its physical embodiment. The same holds for a
woman and the feminine principle. If a man or woman does not embody her/his own gender
principle, they are thought to be"unnatural," one of those automatic condemn-ations that
constellates fear of the "unnatural" as "perverse," enforcing the psychosocial adherence of
person to principle, and vice-versa.
Despite warnings, disclaimers, conceptual hairsplitting and theoretical distinctions, the
fact is we usually do link masculine with male and feminine with female — and deflect from
the literalization by calling it "animus/anima." Then, individuation requires that the "opposite
principle" ("naturally" unconscious) be integrated into consciousness.
But given the severity of cultural devaluation of the so-called "feminine" principle, why
on earth would anyone, man orwoman, want to integrate it? Male institutions of theology,
psychology, medicine, politics, heterosexuality and all forms of art historically have defined
"feminine" as inferior, weak, lower, disordered, chaotic, sinful, alien, and the source of just
about every sexual trouble known to man. From the male perspective, woman is not only
Other, but also Outsider. Vivian Gornick, in an early essay entitled "Woman as Outsider,"
wrote with passion and insight about women's condition:
The terror of felt sexuality is the terror of our lives, the very essence of our existence.
It pervades the culture, manifesting itself not only in the bodies of religious codes but in every
aspect of moral law, every nuance of custom, every trace of human exchange, soaking
through social intercourse: it is there in restaurants, on buses, in shops, on country roads,
and on city streets; in university appointments and government decisions and pleasure trips
and the popular arts... And deeply woven into the fabric of this cultural cloak is the image of
woman: woman, the temptress; woman, the slut; woman, the heartless bitch—luring men
eternally toward spiritual death, making them come up against what they most fear and hate
in themselves, pulling them down, down, down into the pit of themselves....Woman herself is
not locked in this profound struggle with the self; she is only the catalyst for man's struggle
with himself. It is never too certain that woman has any self at all. What is certain is that onto
woman is projected all that is worst in man's own view of hims elf, all that is primitive,
immature, and degrading: all of his sloth and weakness is there in full vibrance, and only a
shadow of those higher emotions that will flame into full life in himself alone.
....Of course, there is also an opposite value to this exaggerated mythic projection of
woman—equally exaggerated, equally mythic, equally difficult to bear. The man who reviles
the slut slavers at the feet of his mother. If woman is not temptress, then she is goddess. She
is all, then, that breast-beating man would be if he were not the craven creature that he is.
Woman-the-mother is the golden ideal, the convenient repository for man's most
unexamined, unwanted, sentimentalized, suffocating, ahuman notions about his own
composite being She too is a creation of his adolescent dreams, of his frightened longing that
life should only prove not to be what he deeply suspects it is.
...the final mythic outsidedness of woman is that ultimately she is beyond sex.
Steeped in sex, drugged on sex, defined by sex, but never actually realized through sex, she
has gone beyond it, she has gone through it, she is on the other side.
....I am not real to my civilization. I am not real to the culture that has spawned me
and made use of me. I am only a collection of myths. I am an existential stand-in. The idea of
me is real—the temptress, the goddess, the child, the mother—but I am not real. The mythic
proportions of woman are recognizable and real; it is only the human dimensions that are
patently false and will be denied to the death, our death.23
Collectively, men continue to (dis)regard women, both as a class and as individuals,
as outside the culture. A few cabinet appointments and a few more women in the Senate do
not constitute a revolution. Women continue to have their thinking and feeling shaped and
governed by male tutoring in ways that are more or less subtle, but always with some degree
of unconscious coercion. In terms of her own desires and needs, a woman's conscious
"expectation" is often a hidden, unconsciously imposed, cultural requirement. Such tutoring
and coercion is manifested in every kind of behavior, from the way a female candidate for
political office speaks to how any woman should (or should not) cross her legs when sitting
down. In spite of more than twenty years of (only the most recent) feminist attempts to
educate both men and women, through scholarly writing, research, litigation, and any other
avenue available, the root image, the primal assumption, of woman as Outsider has not
changed significantly. The male-dominated culture still does not perceive her as "inside" her
culture's life, still less is she considered a creator of culture. Not too long ago, political analyst
William Schneider commented: "In abortion the women's movement has an issue that could
enable them to break into the mainstream."24The question is: Where were we breaking
in from?
Since "masculine" qualities are more desirable than "feminine" qualities, they are
more easily integrated into psychic and social life, and both men and women are encouraged
to manifest them. As always, however, there is a proviso for women: some masculine
qualities are desirable (such as rationality, objectivity, self-discipline), but others are not
because they make women appear less sexually attractive, or as what men perceive as
"competitive" (which is the derogatory word for "equal"). This makes women "unfeminine" or
"unwomanly," an effective blaming device used to "keep women in their place." Such
qualities as ambition, analytical reasoning, and pride in oneself, are too "manly" for a woman
to show blatantly, and because they appear in a female body (and therefore "against
nature"), are likely to be called aggression, frigidity, and bitchy arrogance. The psychological
person knows that things are not always as they appear, but in our world, appearance is still
nearly everything. One of my colleagues put it succintly when she remarked, "It's okay to be
a thinking woman if you look like Barbara Walters, but not if you look like Mary Daly." 25
The prejudice appears most obviously, perhaps, in the gendered meanings of dress,
where fashion is the vehicle through which the value of masculinity is reinforced. In the
corporate world, power and authority are among the highest values, and these belong to men
who "naturally" embody them. Here are some words of fashion advice to professional
business women, loaded with unintentional metaphors, from Emily Cho, a "personal image
and shopping consultant," interviewed in the New York Times:
Whether a woman wears a jacket depends on the pressure on her to be authoritative.
A dress with shoulder pads can also suggest authority. But there should be no hint of even
the top of the cleavage in V-necks. No cutouts. No strapless. No see-through, not even with
a camisole. No lace tops. No soft, messy fabrics. Sleeveless is not even right. A cap sleeve
is the most sleeveless you can go, if it has shoulder pads or the illusion of shoulder pads so
you haven't lost your look of authority.26
And Susan Shebairo, a consultant at Saks Fifth Avenue, agrees: "A young woman
starting out definitely needs a jacket to give her a very strong appearance."
Why this emphasis on strength and appearance of strength, and why this equation of
strength with authority, if the "feminine" is just as valuable and important as the "masculine?"
In fact, why this emphasis on "appearance," which is supposedly one of the ways Anima
seduces men into mistaking illusion for reality? Why do women have to give the impression
they are strong and authoritative in exactly the same way as men, yet be careful to convince
men they are really quite harmless and unthreatening at the same time? Though this next
example is more than thirty years past, it is still disturbingly current: I remember my mother
telling me, circa 1958 when I was sixteen, that after I got married ("of course you'll get
married"), I could do anything I wanted because I was "very smart." Then, fifteen minutes
later, she would remind me not to let boys know how smart I was, or else they wouldn't marry
me.
How is a woman who is interested in individuation supposed to value the "feminine
principle" as highly as the "masculine principle" when there is neither precedent nor incentive
to do so? Even in the American Armed Services, where genderized functions have perhaps
been most nearly eliminated, gender difference is retained in dress codes. While work
uniforms for men and women are essentially the same, she still wears skirts for certain
ceremonies while he wears — of course — pants. This is a way of collectively saying that
even though there are spheres of life where gender supposedly makes no difference,
difference and its attendant hierarchical status must be publicly preserved anyway, so that no
one forgets who really wears the pants. Thus, no fundamental assumptions about gender
need be challenged, or changed. (Presumably, if men were less fearful of blurred gender
distinctions, they could wear skirts too.)
Whatever inroads have been made to elevate "the feminine" to equal status have
mostly turned out to be cul-de-sacs. As we were talking about this one day, my partner asked
me, "Remember Alan Alda? How popular he was about ten years ago?" And I remembered
that he enjoyed a surge of popularity for a while when the public, and women particularly,
were charmed by his "feminine" qualities of "sensitivity," "vulnerability," "tenderness," which
he conveyed with an endearing boyishness that somehow did not diminish his "masculinity:"
moral clear-sightedness, strength, sexuality. Many women expressed the wish that their own
men might be "more like Alan Alda," including some of my own women analysands who
occasionally brought in dreams of Alan Alda as a lovable boy-man who appeared as
counterpoint to their less-appealing husbands or lovers. But very quickly there was a
backlash from the male-dominated media which introduced the phrase intended to get men
back on the old track: "Real men don't eat quiche." And from there it was on to Rambo.
In spite of the obvious, actual social inequality between men and women, Jungians
still imagine that "masculine" and "feminine" are equal principles, that the principles are
clearly separable from the persons, and that individuation is like a balancing act, two sides
together fair and equal, making an androgyne.
Never mind that no such well-balanced, symmetrical creature as an "androgyne"
exists in nature. The "androgyne" may be less a splendid image of happy coniunctio than
psyche's desperate attempt to escape from the tyranny of the gender archetype. In this
literally impossible, unachievable image of dearly longed-for "union of opposites," the soul
protests the extremes and literalizations of genderization, and the oppressive prejudices of
gender-thinking. The figure of the androgyne is, after all, a mental abstraction, conceived
fundamentally in "masculine/feminine" terms, not a true union, not a way of transcending or a
way out of genderism, but merely a contrivance to force opposites together. It is used in the
modern sense to deny or avoid the actual importance of gender and the oppressiveness of
male dominance. Women probably like the idea of androgyny better than men: it's always
been better to be at least half man than to be half woman.

PROBLEM THREE - MORALISM

The Physician says I have "Nervous prostration."

Possibly I have — I do not know the Names of Sickness.
The crisis of the sorrow of so many years
is all that tires me...
Please Sister to wait— ...

— Emily Dickinson (Letter to Mrs. J.G. Holland, 1883)

Moralism is the habit of assigning pre-determined, usually collective, moral (not

eligious) judgments to human behavior and attitudes. Since "moralism" sounds old-fashioned
and conjures up images of seventeenth-century Puritan Fathers and other dogmaticians, the
temptation for open-minded democratic moderns is to imagine ourselves less moralistically
inclined. But if moralism is not happening consciously, it is still happening unconsciously,
even (and perhaps most insidiously) when one thinks an "objective" and "impartial"
assessment is being made. And the therapized are not immune. Whenever we speak of an
archetypal image in terms of positive/negative, we impose a moral value on it — and thereby
pre-judge it. Pressed down under this burden to be "positive," "good," or "right," the soul
eventually dries up, becoming rigid in its meaning and stereotyped in its imagination.
Moralism creeps through and permeates the entire field of psychology, including
Jungian psychology, which abounds in positive/negative pronouncements. I suspect this is
so at least partly because "positive/negative" designations are a convenient defense against
ambiguity. While Jungian psychology fully appreciates the depth of meaning residing in
symptoms, dream images and symbolic behaviors, Jungians, being human, are just as likely
to look for avenues of retreat from psychic reality as any other practitioners — and perhaps
more so, since Jungians tend to invite and engage with the deepest realms of psychic life as
a matter of course.
Moralizing belongs to the "ego," and "positive/negative" labeling is a defense against
immediacy of psychological experience.
 Jungian psychology is also subject to moralism when it perceives itself as a "spiritual"
endeavor: individuation as a way of salvation. Spiritual exercises invite or presuppose a
moral underpinning. While archetypal reality precedes any specific religious creed, the
archetypal images that appear in the western psyche take are cast in the framework of
Christian morality. Jung himself, a lapsed protestant son of a despairing protestant father, set
the tone and precedent, devoting much of his attention to the figure of Christ and the
Christian mythos. But even more deeply, he was psychologically "christian" by heritage and
inclination — and his theories everywhere echo it.
Where there is moralism, there is psychic repression. Moralism is quite different from
conscious morality and very different yet from a personal or collective ethic. Moralism does
not provide a basis for individual relatedness and mutual human regard; it is a collectively
formulated and legalistically applied set of rules and regulations, imposed from without.
Moralism makes no attempt to understand phenomena, merely to judge it.
No image that appears, as in a dream, can be truly understood if it has already been
judged. No new possibility, no new life may appear from the richness of imagination, no new
meanings may enter consciousness to bring wisdom. Mythically, moralism belongs to Saturn,
the old sterile paranoid God who devours his newborns, and whose repressive aspect may
appear as harsh moral discipline and stern righteousness.
If the devouring Mother is labeled "negative," for example, what place can there be for
"her" in the life of a moral person? Devouring and mothering can be imagined only in their
negativity. The "negative" Mother must be domesticated, taught to accept and nurture; in a
word, become "positive." This is one way moralism splits archetypes so that we think of them
as inherently split, giving Ego the heroic job of "holding the opposites" together in some
bearable tension.
Once we fall into moralistic languge, we lose intellectual and emotional specificity,
individual detail, personal oddities and experience. We also lose the psychologically vital
sense of ambiguity, subtlety, nuance.
Usage of such terms as "positive/negative" to describe psychological phenomena
betrays the presence of a moralistic attitude. Because references to the animus as "positive"
or "negative" are moralistic, they reinforce the misogynist attitude inherent in Jung's
description of "animus." The moralistic violence in Jung's following comment is as chilling as
any rapist's justification that he was "provoked" and that "she had it coming."
No matter how friendly and obliging a woman's Eros might be, no logic on earth can
shake her if she is ridden by the animus. Often the man has the feeling — and he is not
altogether wrong — that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary power
of persuasion.28
_______
 Some of you reading this may have gotten the impression over the years, as I have,
that a man's "anima problem" is not quite as "nega tive" as a woman's "animus
problem." Close, but not quite. For the man who consciously attempts it, his engagement
with anima is a great struggle, often heroic (although one wonders, sometimes, why it must
be a struggle, and why heroic). As Hillman noted, Jung placed "the entire relationship with
anima...into the mythologem of the heroic ego and his archetypal fight with the
dragon."29 The language of tough heroism then describes the process of anima integration by
"conquest," reducing "her" from personification (of soul, and life) to function (of relationship
between conscious and unconscious). It is a battle between darkness and light, obvious in its
moralism and in the hostility of "masculine ego versus the feminine 'other'.30 The male ego in
search of heroism creates the battle, and the battle creates the Hero, the mythic figure that
inflates both the male ego to inhuman proportions and the "woman" to an inhuman adversary
of demonic proportions.
In the arena of everyday life, in small but continuous attempts to integrate the anima,
our hero finds himself caught and stuck and becomes mean or foolish, feeling lost, annoyed,
frustrated, forced into a skirmish to confront or extricate himself from anima's many veils. In
whatever way he does it, though, the man who so struggles with the anima often seems
boyishly appealing, even endearing. And just because he struggles, he proves himself
worthy and must surely win the support of a real woman he loves, who will help in the battle
to differentiate himself. (Was this some of Jung's appeal to women who loved him?)
There seems to be, "in the air," a faint but unmistakeable suggestion that men have a
hard time with anima and matters of the soul the same way adolescent boys have a hard
time with sex — as something for which they can't quite manage to be fully responsible. This
is one reason why women have to be convinced that they must "help" men control
themselves, by not wearing sexually provocative clothing, for example. He cannot help but
lose control if a woman provokes him, which he can explain as an "anima problem,"
assigning responsibility for his behavior to her. He is a fallen angel, she is the devil's
handmaid.
But: when a woman has an "animus problem," her wrestling is not a heroic struggle
but ungainly thrashing, rather like women's mud wrestling. No one sees anything heroic
about a woman with an "animus" problem, and, because of the negativity of Jung's
conception, the "animus" must be a problem. A woman identified as having an "animus
problem" is "too much like a man," and thus is perceived subliminally as an obstacle to men
and a threat that will rend the very foundation of society. Men (and women also, to the extent
that they collude in maintaining the status quo) generally find it easier to encourage her to
solve her animus problem than to insist that he and his brothers must change the social
order.
 A woman dealing with the animus does not appear to be struggling heroically, she is
not appealing, she does not endear herself to a man. Jung accused "the intellectual woman"
of being critically "disputatious" and "harping on irrelevancies." Such women, says Jung, "are
solely intent upon exasperating the man and are, in consequence, the more completely at
the mercy of the animus. 'Unfortunately I am always right,' one of these creatures [sic] once
confessed to me."31
A so-called "animus woman" is characterized as mean, strident, aggressive, grasping,
and "too" everything — too angry, too opinionated, too one-sided, too ambitious, too
manipulative, too much like a man. Or, if these qualities are still uncon-scious in her, she
appears empty, flighty, silly, foolishly girlish, hysterical, unfocused, and "too" everything —
too emotional, too undisciplined, too dependent, too unreliable, too much like a woman.
This is decidedly a no-win situation, and may be at least a partial clue as to why nearly
seventy percent of American psychiatric patients diagnosed as clinically depressed are
women.
A man's "positive anima" is a mythic Muse who allegedly inspires him to create art,
music, politics, economic theory; but a woman's "positive animus" only seems to give her
access to something called "focused thinking" and a creative adaptation to the male world.
Listen to Jung again: "Just as a man brings forth his work as a complete creation out of his
feminine nature, so the inner masculine side of a woman brings forth creative seeds which
have the power to fertilize the feminine side of the man."32

This is what she is good for.

Because a woman's animus is inferior to, or only a partial reflection of "real"
masculinity — a sort of "second rate man" — a woman's creative power must also be inferior.
Hence the culture acknowledges her creative genius only in relationships, in mothering
children, and in sexually nurturing adult males — not in symphonies, art galleries, corporate
board rooms, or political think tanks.
Jung insisted that women's consciousness was not inferior, "merely different from
masculine consciousness." Then, in a grand statement of dismissal, he adds:
there are naturally fields of experience in a man which, for woman, are still wrapped in the
shadows of non-differentiation, chiefly things in which she has little interest. Personal
relations are as a rule more important and interesting to her than objective facts and their
interconnections. The wide fields of commerce, politics, technology, and science, the whole
realm of the applied masculine mind, she relegates to the penumbra of
consciousness..."33 (Emphasis mine.)
This is just a pseudo-psychological way of saying that a woman's place is in the
home.
 Moralism loves the "by nature" argument because it proves "rightness." And the "by
nature" dictum literalizes: the male fantasy of what a woman "really" is becomes literal
"nature," the bottom line, her "true essence." The appeal-to-nature argument is an appeal to
the literalist in all of us who wants to touch bedrock, wants to fix the fantasy, wants to "get to
the bottom" of the mystery, and cannot tolerate the ambiguity, fluidity, and ambivalence of
psychic images.
But the "nature" argument is also satisfying and convincing because it restates the
apparently obvious. If, as in Jung's statement above, women rarely become actively engaged
in commerce, politics, technology and science, then the obvious conclusion is that she is not
interested, and further, it is not in her "nature" to be interested. The factors of exclusion are
not considered in the argument from "nature," and indeed, the nature argument prevents
such factors from being considered. Factors of exclusion are those social, political,
economic, sexual and psychological theories and systems which, invented and maintained
by men, become self-fulfilling realities and definitions of these fields as "essentially" male
provinces.
When Jung says a woman "by nature" relegates "the whole realm of the applied
masculine mind" to the "penumbra of consciousness, he mistakes the condition for the
cause: the "masculine mind" has relegated woman to the penumbra of its consciousness.
There, from a safe distance, the masculine mind's eye squints in protected curiosity and
makes pronouncements about woman's "nature." In a stroke, Jung finds himself in bed with
the sociobiologists, whose circular logic makes them the fascists of the social scienc es: the
male is dominant because we see male dominance, therefore the male is dominant by
nature.
In Jung's theory, which generally agrees with other theories that purport to know
woman's nature, a woman is in a much better position to relate consciously to the animus
when she lives according to her "nature;" this makes the animus more "positive". If she kicks
and flails against her "nature" (which is something men have called "feminine" nature), not
only does she make animus integration difficult, such kicking is itself a symptom of a
"negative" animus. The moral disapproval of the negative animus is unmistakeable, and to
her, inescapable: the negativity attributed to the animus in her is heard in harsh, condemning
moralisms from outside her as well — from the culture, and from the theory of animus itself.
Consider: How does "the positive animus" manifest in a woman? "He" manifests in a
way that redounds to his glory, but not to hers. Whatever a man accomplishes "naturally,"
from his ego-consciousness, is attributed to the activity of the animus in a woman when she
accomplishes the same thing. This kind of thinking puts a woman at a perpetual
disadvantage, both in terms of how she is collectively respected as a woman and how she
respects herself as an individual.
 Theoretically, if the ego in a woman is "feminine," then it must be her masculine side,
the animus, that accomplishes what a man's ego accomplishes: it plans, exercises will,
focuses thought, values rationality, provides logical continuity, introduces her ("mediates") to
the "whole realm" of masculine thinking, objectivity, etc. In short, a woman needs a man
(however second rate) around her psychic house in order to accomplish anything mental or
intellectual in an organized way, sort of like a hired brain-man to do her thinking, analyzing,
focusing, for her.
This is, to put it gently, ridiculous. What self-respecting woman is willing to give credit
to the "positive animus" for her own ego-self's accomplishment? Why should she? There was
a now-famous question put to Jung decades ago: Does a thinking-type woman think well
because of her typology or because of her "positive animus?" The question became famous
because Jung couldn't answer. The fact that it rarely, if ever, occurs to anyone to pose this
question about a man should send up at least a dozen red flags: genderism at work.
Yet Jungian theory still follows the collective, unconscious assumption that a man thinks in a
rational, coherent, logical way "naturally" — and this after twelve years of Ronald Reagan,
George Bush, and their intellectual heirs.34
The feminization of Jungian animus theory in recent years, apparent in a number of
works on female psychology by feminist Jungian analysts and Jungian-oriented writers, has
been a tremendous boon: women's experience perceived and understood from women's
perspective. And yet the problem of how we understand even the most basic psychological
terms remains, one of the most difficult being the notion of Ego. Most of the time "ego" is
meant to be used generically, referring to either gender; but the western idea of "ego" is
more accurately described as a masculine ideal of an "I." This is perhaps why the ego, as a
psychic function, is so prone to moralizing about other psychic functions: it is the carrier of
the masculine ideal image of masculinity, imaged usually in the Hero. "The moral dilemma,"
writes Hillman, "is in the nature of the ego."35
Dismantling the animus is hard enough, with its old trappings of male bias and
sacrosanct values; it gets harder when we have to dismantle some ideas of "ego" as well.
And along with this difficulty remains the problem of moralism, popping up in our books and
conversations like weeds in sidewalk cracks, the invisible pernicious seeds everywhere
underneath.

PROBLEM FOUR - THE "EGO"

...when I, or any woman, complains of
male injustices — we must joke.
—- Hortense Calisher, No Important Woman Writer

The problem of the Jungian idea of animus is also a problem of how we understand
"ego." In theory, the qualities we attribute to or expect from the ego are practically the same
as those attributed to the animus. What, then, is the difference between a woman with a
strong ego and a woman with a prominent animus? How do we tell the difference?
Just as Jung's animus theory is derived from male experience, so are his
assumptions about female ego. As Wehr notes, Jung "fails to account in his model for the
constant toll that misogynist society takes on women's egos, and thus he perpetuates an
illusion of equality between men and women."36
"Ego," of course, is not to be taken as a literal entity, but as a psychic figure
embodying one's personal identity. But male and female egos do not necessarily develop or
are constructed in the same way, and certainly not in a cultural and social context which in
various and subtle ways requires that they develop differently and emphasize different
characteristics.
Mainstream psychology also dictates standards by which to measure "normal" gender
identity — which is, in that style of thinking, almost identical to ego identity. To be disordered
in gender presupposes a clear understanding of what gender is; but lacking that, we have
substituted stereotypes. If boys and girls do not develop their gender identities along the
stereotypical sexist and heterosexist lines laid down as "normal" in the APA bible,
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual(IV-R), they are "at risk" for an "onset" of "gender
identity disorder" — a category of disturbance made to sound like a disease and useful as a
scare tactic for social and sexual control. "Gender identity disorder," says the DSM, may lead
to homosexuality — with the implication, of course, that this is a dreaded, if not fatal,
outcome of little girls not playing with dolls and little boys not liking sports. (And this even
after twenty years of the APA's own declassification of homosexuality as a "mental illness.")
The rich possibilities in the image of Freud's "polymorphously perverse child" are here
reduced to a "gender identity disorder."
Even though a girl may become ego-identified with her femaleness early in life, her
ego, her sense of her individual self, develops in a collective psychological environment
which is in varying degrees overtly or subtlely hostile to her femaleness. The notion of the
"animus" in an adult woman as a sort of superior, alter male ego, without which she can do
nothing seriously or of importance, does nothing to raise her undervalued sense of personal
identity; and if her most solid source of self has a masculine face, she is divided against
herself at her core.
 Laced with moral judgments, the animus theory not only forces neutral qualities into
moral cateogories of "positive/negative," it arbitrarily splits a woman's consciousness of
herself as well, forcing her to give over to the "animus" what properly belongs to her female
ego-identity. When Jung describes the animus as "the man, who is her mind," 37 he steals her
mind and right to a mind, and hands it over to "the man." Equating "mind" with "man," Jung
undercuts a woman's means of establishing individual identity, introduces mistrust about the
source of her authority to act and think, and completely undermines her autonomy. Since she
is "dependent" on "him" for her accomplishments, her own actual abilities are obscured on
one hand and felt as fraudulent on the other. Nor can she ever be fully conscious her mind's
limitations; "the man" decides this. And by defining animus as "the contrasexual" archetype,
the theory also narrows her field of erotic and sexual interest (with implications we will take
up in Problem Five, "Contrasexuality.")
If, as Jung supposed, the animus is a woman's "mind," her thinking cannot be
authentically her own — which is to say she has no mind of her own — any more than her
decisiveness, will, intention, or pride can be her own. Whatever tasks she accomplishes or
goals she achieves she can take only partial credit for; her failures are charged as her ego's
faulty "animus integration."
Since the descriptions of ego and animus are so similar, the theoretical waters
become hopelessly muddied when we try to talk about either a woman's ego or animus —
indeed, the terms are nearly interchangeable. It becomes virtually impossible to imagine
what a female "ego" looks like apart from an animus structure, and this is probably why a
woman with a "strong" ego is thought to be so full of animosity. The male-perceived
interchangeability of "ego" and "animus" in a woman's psychology has its correlate in the
concrete world: a woman has no independent reality apart from a man or from a male-
sanctioned context. She is existentially incomplete without him, and no number of other
women can make up for his absence. I remember a recent occasion when a male host at a
restaurant greeted two women friends of mine this way as they entered: "Good evening. Are
you two ladies alone?"
Jung answered the ancient question, "Does woman have a soul?" with a twist, saying
she doesn't "have" a soul (anima), she is soul. It should follow, then, that a man doesn't
"have" an animus, he is animus. In a man, so-called animus qualities belong "naturally" to his
ego-identity: purposefulness, courage, opinionatedness, action, willfullness, decisiveness,
animosity, etc. If these qualities accurately characterize a man's ego, why can they not
accurately characterize a woman's ego? They are not gendered characteristics; they become
genderized only after they are arbitrarily assigned to men or women. The gender archetype,
bringing that powerful conviction of rightness as any constellated archetype does, convinces
us that the cultural assignment is in fact not cultural but biological. Once again we mistake
the shell for the nut.
In general, Jungians have been slow to recognize that the question of ego-animus
confusion has been wrongly framed (i.e., in terms of gender and which qualities go where),
leaping instead to a handy answer: of the man who appears "animus-possessed" it is said,
"Ah, well, such a man has a serious anima problem, he is repressing his feminine side and
she has got him unconsciously by the balls." Which of course is merely the old male
prejudice of blaming animus-possession in a man on his anima, making it her "fault," a trick
first tried by Adam in the garden.
Different and opposing views of how a woman's ego and the animus are related
sometimes smack of men's anima confusion. For example, both Jung and Whitmont say a
woman's ego is "feminine" because she obviously isn't a man; but Neumann says a woman's
ego is "masculine" because even though she obviously isn't a man, consciousness (which is
ego's job) is always masculine. In The Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann
draws the distinction between consciousness as predominantly masculine and the
unconscious as predominantly feminine.
This correlation is self-evident [Neumann does not say to whom] because the
unconscious, alike in its capacity to bring to birth and to destroy through absorption, has
feminine affinities....Conversely, its opposite, the system of ego consciousness, is masculine.
With it are associated the qualities of volition, decision, and activity as contrasted with the
determinism and blind 'drives' of the preconscious, egoless state. 38
Volition, decision and activity are thus qualities of the masculine ego; the feminine is
an egoless state. There is no true counterpart to the masculine ego. For Neumann, a woman
is by nature, by her feminine nature, in an egoless state; she comes to consciousness, or to
the development of an ego, only through the activity of the masculine, the animus; she has
no volition, no decisiveness, no independent action, of her own. Like Eve in the garden, she
is merely an extra rib.
No wonder those damsels of medieval times were always in distress. No wonder
women are still taught, albeit through subtle double rather than overt single messages, to
wait for their knight in shining armor. Neumann inadvertently tells us a great deal
about male psychology when he writes: "Ego consciousness stands in manly opposition to
the feminine unconscious."39 (Emphais mine.)
What this all boils down to is: The more conscious I as a woman become, the more
like a man I am; and the more like a man I am, the more animus-possessed I must be. This
is the man-made double bind, the animus trap, for women.
The animus, as formulated by Jung, is less a genuinely "neutral" potential in women
than a reflection of the historical experience in which women have been defined by, and in
relation to, men. In works like Neumann's, and even those more recent that attempt to modify
the theory's sexism, the habitual presumption of the animus' authenticity is validated by
calling it "archetypal," a designation that seems to forestall challenge. 40
A number of Jungian writers have recognized the need to "relativize the ego," to
release it from its habitual heroic stance and its moralizing. But given the ancient tradition of
glory accorded to man-as-hero, it is very hard to relativize the male ego — to get it, in
classical Jungian terms, into proper relationship to the greater, deeper, more inclusive
capital-S Self. After all, it is constantly being inflated with powers and abilities that belong to
divinity. And this is what Jung said "the animus" is: an archetype producing images of such
power that they are called gods, or, in our Western culture, capital-G God in the male
singular. Mary Daly has stated the problem succinctly by saying that as long as God is male,
the male is god.
Given the theory, it is virtually impossible for a woman not to be "animus-possessed"
in the Jungian sense. She is either too full of "him" or too empty, possessed either way. If
she fulfills the stereotypical role of the empty-headed, seductively weak female, she is
thought to be possessed without her knowing it, in thrall to the image of "him" who rules her
attitudes and behavior from his lair in the unconscious psyche. And while this role is
encouraged and she often must play it in order to survive, she is simultaneously condemned
and disparaged for it.
But as soon as a woman begins to develop a strong ego, a strong sense of self-
definition, a consciousness of her own abilities and desires, and begins to act volitionally and
decisively, then she is perceived as too full of "him," arrogant, aggressive, ungrateful for "his"
activity in her. Imagine the Father's and the fathers' outrage if the Virgin Mary had said to the
angel of the annunciation, "Why, thanks very much, but I have my own child to bear and my
own book to write. Perhaps another time?"

PROBLEM FIVE — CONTRASEXUALITY

Trudy the Bag Lady:
You'd think by now evolutiion could've at least evolved us
to the place where we could change ourselves.
Seems like evolution has just kinda plateaued out,
left mankind with a middle management problem.
—Lily Tomlin, in The Search for Sings of Intelligent Life in the Universe, by Jane Wagner

"Contrasexuality" means not only the figure of opposite sex in the psyche; as Jung
constructs it, "contrasexuality" also means "heterosexuality." The powerful cultural bias in
favor of heterosexuality is deeply embedded in Jung's theory of animus/anima as the
"contrasexual" archetypes. The content and experienced effect of what Jung called "animus"
is profoundly conditioned by the culture's pre-definition of masculinity and its valuation of
superiority. And included in this pre-definition is an insistence on heterosexuality as the
norm. By declaring heterosexuality the psychological, social and biological norm, patriarchal
culture then uses it to support all other male-dominated institutions by ensuring that men
retain power in sexual form.
Our questions begin with these two: What does animus have to do with sex, and does
sexuality have to be "contra?"
Jung's theory posits the animus and anima as the projection-making factors in the
respective psyches of women and men. These factors make the genderized projections that
fly forth from each of us, and, since heterosexuality as the norm is the unconscious "given,"
these projections are presumed to be highly sexualized in erotic content. Based on the
assumption that heterosexuality is always and everywhere "natural," the erotic object
towards which these projections lustfully wing their way must always be a "contra," a person
of opposite sex. Thus, when the animus is perceived by a woman in an actual man, the
theory assumes that it is primarily a sexualized projection, and therefore the woman will
experience either a sexual attraction to that man, a sexual repulsion by him, a sexualized
conflict with him, or all three. The root assumption supporting the animus/anima
"contrasexual" theory is that whatever gender a person is identified with (and there had
better be no more than one), that person will "naturally" or always seek sexual satisfaction
and fulfillment in the opposite sex.
The bias is everywhere to be found in Jungian works. In the classic 1942 work by
Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung, (and in the 1968 edition as well), an
analysand's drawing of a female and male figure facing each other is used to illustrate "the
Right Coniunctio," symbolizing "the individual's relation to the contrasexual. It represents the
true, creative union."41 In the next drawing, from an alchemical work, Jacobi refers to the
figures of Sol and Luna as the "masculine" and "feminine," and then equates the masculine-
feminine union with man-woman union (an illustration of "the common effort of man and
woman in the living work of the coniunctio"42).
It is this kind of literalization that keeps heterosexual unions fixed in the collective
mind as the "true, creative" ones, so that unions of affinities and conjunctions of likenesses
appear false and sterile, or do not appear at all. This is how we stay unconscious, and
moralistic as well. And this is also one of the ways in which classical Jungian psychology has
kept itself strangely asexual. Since Jungians tend to not talk (publicly) or write much about
sex — preferring to follow Jung into the aerial world of transcendent symbols — the
sexualization of "contrasexual" assumptions are not challenged and remain largely
unconscious "givens," i.e., biases.
Sexual attraction is one of those things that everyone experiences but no one can
quite define. Sometimes it has to do with chemistry and physics, a physical sensation of
tension seeking release, or an unspeakably wonderful, possibly shocking, sometimes
sudden, rearrangement of all one's molecules. Or it erupts as the raw instinct to touch,
stroke, grab, squeeze, press, caress — the soul in its most tactile form, urgently wanting, and
wanting body. Sometimes sexual attraction comes from the stimulus of beauty, an aesthetic
response of the heart as well as the genitals. Sometimes it has to do with alchemical secrets,
dangerous and satisfying operations done with secretions, fluids, and flesh. Sometimes it has
to do with the desire for "gnosis," the lust to know someone so intensely that it is impossible
to tell where the body stops and the soul begins. And sometimes sexual attraction has to do
with all sorts of metaphors of perversion: bondage, slavery, compulsion, degradation. Each
one of us has to find out what turns us on, and then we know what sexual attraction is.
Our culture habitually and automatically puts sexual attraction and otherness
together, and equates "sexual other" with "sexual opposite." Once equated, distinctions
become blurred or lost, leaving us more confused about both "otherness" and "attraction."
("Experience shrinks," as Berry noted, when perception is only through the gender
archetype.43) Not only do we assume that the Other is the opposite, we also assume it
"naturally" makes for sexual attraction, and therefore must be male in the case of a woman,
and female in the case of a man. "Contrasexuality" means heterosexuality — not
homosexuality, not bi-sexuality.
From Jacobi again:
In the first half of life contact with the opposite sex aims above all at physical union
with a view to the "bodily child" as fruit and continuation; in the second half the essential
becomes the psychic coniunctio, a union with the contrasexual both in the area of one's own
inner world and through the carrier of its image in the outer world.44 (Emphasis mine)
And Woodman states: "The virgin needs a male bride-groom, whether actual or
spiritual, to complete her."45
Contrasexuality forces us to speak of sexuality in the singular, only one kind, rather
than of "sexualities," plural, imagining a variety of sexual dimensions, sometimes having only
a coincidental connection to biological sex and social gender, or perhaps none at all.
We are so accustomed to thinking of "otherness" as a difference of kind, that we
forget it might also be a difference of degree, found on points along a continuum. And yet
alchemical conjunctions may happen between "sames" as well as between "opposites,"
individuation may take place through unions of affinities as well as through unions of
opposites, consciousness comes through recognition of likenesses as well as through
dissimilars. Psychological thinking in terms of "opposites" is especially constrictive since the
very idea of "opposites" is usually illusory, arbitrary, and value-biased.
The root assumption of Jung's theory of animus as the archetype of the
"contrasexual" is that we are all, by nature, heterosexual beings by inclination as well
as capability: that heterosexuality is the beginning and central point of reference for
understanding all human sexuality. Since Jung saw heterosexuality everywhere, his
hypothesis of animus and anima as the makers of contrasexual projections are thus self-
fulfilling definitions. And like Jung, we see heterosexuality (contrasexuality) everywhere, not
so much because it is natural and universal, but because it is the only kind of sexuality of
which our animus-possessed culture approves. We have monosex, as we have monotheism.
The "contrasexuality" of the animus is the most difficult aspect of Jung's animus
theory to dismantle, because the idea of heterosexuality as normative for all behavior and
desire is so deeply rooted in our culture. The last twenty-five years, in particular, of the efforts
of women to free themselves from introjected male ideas have gone a long way to
dismantling the most blatant inadequacies and inaccuracies in Jung's thinking about male-
female characterizations. But women as well as men have collectively and unconsciously
inhaled the toxic fumes of homophobia — "fear of sames" — making institutional
heterosexuality still a bastion of male dominance and patriarchal moralism. Within the still-
prevailing norm of male heterosexuality, the "homosexual" of either gender is the Other, just
as woman is Other. Homosexuality has long been equated with femininity; both homosexuals
and women are outside the "norm" in the creation of culture or visibility within the culture.
Misogyny and homophobia go together: fear of women, fear of men who are imagined to be
"like women," fear of women who are imagined to be "like men." Alchemical monstrums in
our midst. Gay men and lesbians are unconsciously perceived as threatening to the
collective mind not because they "recruit" sweet-faced children, but because they threaten
heterosexual privilege and power on which the whole culture, including male-female
relations, depends. This is true at an even deeper level for lesbians than for gay men, who
still retain the privilege of maleness in a patriarchal culture. But lesbians are doubly outside
the patriarchy — in their femaleness and in their sexuality — and thus their very existence
"challenges its life."46
Jung considered homosexuality abnormal as a conscious orientation and not
congruent with an adult sexual adaptation. Though he recognizes its symbolic value as inner
homoeroticism, and the possible psychological necessity for some to go through a
homosexual period, Jung does not consider it either mature or "normal" to stay there.
Christine Downing has noted both the limitation and the gift we have from Jung:
Contrasexuality as the deepest truth of our inner and outer lives seems self-evident to
Jung. This meansthat we cannot expect to receive from him an understanding of
homosexuality that will see it as a valid form of adult sexuality. His emphasis on the psyche,
on inner experience, also means that for Jung literal sexual expression, not only among
homosexuals, is in a sense always a misdirection of a soul longing—rather than an
appropriate expression of it.
Yet Jung's emphasis on trying to explore the psychical longings that we use sexuality
to try to fulfill, his attempt to discover the symbolic meaning of our sexual fantasies and
behaviors, may immeasurably deepen our experience of our own sexuality, whether we are
homosexual or heterosexual, women or men. He reminds us to ask what age-old image of
transformation or fulfillment is being reenacted here. We may regret that he never considers
that to love another like oneself may represent not narcissism or immaturity, but a love
directed toward the Self; that he never looks on same-sex love as signifying a longing for a
love that is clearly not directed toward reproduction but toward psychical relationship, a
desire to be free of being defined by cultural gender definitions. Nevertheless, the notion that
homosexuality might express such meanings emerges from a way of looking taught us by
Jung.47
In keeping with Jung's general identification of femininity with women and masculinity
with men, his view of homosexuality is formed from those preconceptions. Male
homosexuals, presumably identified with the anima, are like women — already prejudged as
an "unnatural" occurrence.
The more homosexual a man is, the more prone he is to disloyalty and to the
seduction of boys. Even when loyalty and true friendship prevail the results may be
undesirable for the development of personality. A friendship of this kind naturally involves a
special cult of feeling, of the feminine element in a man. He becomes gushing, soulful,
aesthetic, over-sensitive, etc.—in a word, effeminate, and this womanish behaviour is
detrimental to his character.48
And lesbians, identified with the animus, are "unnaturally" like men:
Generally they are high-spirited, intellectual, and rather masculine women who are
seeking to maintain their superiority and to defend themselves against men. Their attitude to
men is therefore one of disconcerting [to whom?] self-assurance, with a trace of defiance. Its
effect on their character is to reinforce their masculine traits and to destroy their feminine
charm. Often a man discovers their homosexuality only when he notices that these women
leave him stone-cold.49
The moralism in these paragraphs is obvious; and the irony is lost on Jung that, while
he evaluates gay men in terms of "character," lesbians are judged not by character but by
the company they keep — that is, on their ability to be sexually attractive to a man. This is
the same logic Jung employs when he describes anima/animus "possession" in men and
women respectively.
 With Jung's definition, the animus' designation as "contrasexual" forces an intimate
connection between the animus and a woman's sexuality. In Jung's view, the health of a
woman's sexuality is determined by her relationship to the "inner man;" once again, a
woman's sexual maturity depends on a masculine referent. In Jungian terms, since the
animus is projected onto an actual man, a woman is sexually attracted to or repelled by the
man, depending on whether she has a "positive" or "negative" animus. If the woman has
"worked through" the animus complex, the sexual attraction will remain after
her positive projections are withdrawn; or, repulsion will become attraction after
her negative projections are withdrawn. This is a one-way street: if a woman is not attracted
sexually to a man, she hasn't got her animus complex right — yet. This attitude is only
slightly less crude than the one expressed by a male psychotherapist to a lesbian friend of
mine, who was his patient until he told her that what she "really needed was a good fuck."
Describing animus/anima as "contrasexual" not only locks us into literal gender
thinking, it also forces us to make arbitrary and moralistic assignments as to where one's
sexual interests ought to be placed: for the woman, always in the man; for the man, always in
the woman. If an individual refuses the cultural assignment, or fails in carrying it out, we
assume the presence of pathology: a negative mother complex in gay men, a negative
animus in lesbian women, various borderline pathologies in bisexual women or men.
Why must sex always be "contra?" Given Jung's formulation of the animus concept
and its intimate association with sexuality (the premise), the conclusion is self-evident:
sex must be contra because it is contra. (It is a strange sort of logic in which the
conclusion is the premise.) But there are other complicated questions as well: Why must sex
always be imagined in terms of gender? In terms of opposites? How can we ever learn much
about sex if we insist on implicitly judging all expressions of sex except the hetero- mode as
developmentally incomplete, psychologically deficient, or socially unadapted?
Some renowned Jungians have written about homosexuality as if it were just a stage
of immature development, an adolescent psychological phase to get through on the way to a
"mature" heterosexual relationship. In Addiction to Perfection, Woodman suggests that some
women, "Unconsciously identified with the masculine principle...try to find validation for their
femininity through a lesbian relationship."50 She observes that a woman whose female body
has been rejected by the mother almost inevitably goes through a period of lesbian dreams
or lesbian acting-out because her body requires the acceptance of a woman. Usually this is
only temporary and the woman's energy gradually turns toward men. If the lesbian phase has
been carefully integrated, insuring that the feminine ego is firmly located in the female body,
then the woman who has never been able to surrender to orgasm experiences a new world
of sexuality.51
 We are not told what happens to the lesbian who stays that way or to the
heterosexual woman who leaves that "phase" for a lesbian relationship. Then too, we might
wonder why, if a woman experiences acceptance and sexual pleasure with a woman, her
leaving that for a man would not be considered regressive or even self-destructive? And if a
woman in a "lesbian period" finds herself able to "surrender to orgasm" practicing lesbian
sex, perhaps she ought to keep practicing — which, as my piano teacher told me, makes
perfect.
Whitmont includes homosexuality among the "so-called perversions" and says it
"expresses an urge for an as yet inadequately realized fulfilling of one's own gender; for a
more adequate validation of one's femininity or manhood."52
Even though Whitmont does not intend his argument to do so, it supports the validity
of homosexual orientation: given the ancient and deep misogyny of our culture, it is
extremely difficult, and for some, impossible, to adequately validate "femininity" or "manhood"
in heterosexual pairings. For a woman this is more obviously so, since she gets little
validation of her femaleness from the male world except as she serves a sexually useful
function for that world. For men, "manhood" is validated only in a few ways: sexual potency,
athletic skill, and violence (from warfare to wife-beating). It seems the real question ought to
be: Why do we insist on exclusively heterosexual coupling when "adequate validation" is as
likely, or more likely, to be experienced in same-sex pairings?
The assumption that homosexuality is transitional or temporary, a sort of (un)dress
rehearsal for real life as a "mature" heterosexual adult, is a crude and arrogant dismissal of
lesbian and gay experience. It keeps homosexuality associated with adolescence and
immaturity; and therefore the unions between homosexual couples of either gender are
regarded as something considerably less than a "real" marriage or coniunctio: less important,
less solid, less serious; called perhaps a crush, or an affair, or just a random coupling for a
time.
The assumption of heterosexuality as universally "normal" is so ingrained in our
culture's psyche that few question it; hardly anyone asks what "causes" heterosexuality.
Heterosexuality is the locus of one of our culture's root neuroses, the place where we are
adamantly one-sided. Since usually it is only life's "aberrations" that catch our attention,
whatever is defined as "normal" tends to be taken for granted. That is, what is normal is what
is unconscious. Precisely because we see heterosexuality everywhere, we really do
not see it: what causes it, how it works, why it works, what it means, what else is there.
Heterosexism and its correlate, homophobia, are the great defenses against the
splendid freedom and allure of the psychic figure Freud called the "polymorphously perverse
child," which Jungians have transformed into the asexual divine child. In keeping with our
culture's pervasive christianism, and our frightening ambivalence about real children, the
psychic figure of the "child" has been stripped of all sexual possibilities (except when
literalized by adult perpetrators of sexual crimes). Polymorphous sexual possibilities are
projected onto homosexuals, in whom sex is then perceived as perverse and childish.
If we accept the premise that heterosexuality is the primary orientation of human
beings, the norm of practice, the natural desire, and the goal of relational maturity, we must
conclude that everyone individuates in the same direction, doing, feeling, and wanting the
same sort of sexual and relational life as everyone else. In a stroke, the process of
individuation becomes the process of collectivization.
_________________
The possibilities of the individuation process are severely restricted when
individuation is conceived as meaning only "getting it all together," "uniting opposites,"
"integrating" whatever is felt as "Other." Rather, the art of individuation has to do with
differentiating oneself, becoming different. It is a process of differentiation, of noting
particulars, which may also be peculiarities. The individuation process in each of us may be
better served if we began to think more in terms of wide-ranging eros between persons than
narrow genderism between sexes; more in specific terms of sex than vague sexuality; more
in terms of passion than principle; more in terms of imaginal possibilities than models of the
psyche — even Jungian ones.
Our failure, or refusal, to consider dimensions of sexual experience other than
hetersoexuality is a form of severe repression from which we all suffer. Such failure relegates
a vast territory of the sexual imagination to a corner of the psyche labeled immature, stuck,
regressive, sick or at least disturbed, and depending on one's religious orientation, immoral.
It is not only lesbians, gays, and bisexuals who may be thought to be incapable of full
individuation; heterosexuals who do not reflect upon the nature of their own sexual inclination
remain unconscious of all the collective assumptions about heterosexuality, and are thus
forced to accept its values by default: that heterosexuality is really all there is, the whole thing
and not just a part; that it is wondrously satisfying and prevents loneliness; that it means
adulthood and maturity; that it cures sexual rejection and inadequacy complexes; that it is the
golden archway to romantic love; that such unions are a foretaste of immortality because
they "normally" last forever; that human psychosexuality and human reproduction go
together as an obvious law of nature; and, most insidiously, that it is a matter of choice.
Consider this last assumption, for example. Heterosexuality is not really an individual
conscious decision, a sexual "lifestyle" selected from among many possibilities. On the
contrary: all of our cultural institutions work to compel it, our laws to preserve it, our
psychologies to normalize it, our arts to glorify it, our religions to sanction it. Why so much
effort to ensure heterosexuality if everyone will naturally and freely choose it anyway? 53
 Heterosexuality is a compulsive neurosis to the extent that it is unconscious; and like
most neuroses, we cherish its familiarity and are convinced of its rightness. It is the blind
spot, the unconscious point of reference for all psychologies of sex and within each of our
psyches. And because it is compulsory for all of us (with various social and legal penalties for
non-compliance), it does not easily lend itself to psychological reflection and is not open to
serious question.
I suspect heterosexism and the patriarchal attitude it supports, are, at the root, a
collective desperate male defense: a belligerent, resentful compensation against the reality
that the primal power of life and death belongs to women. There is no guarantee in the male
psyche that She will not, at some point, for some reason he will never understand, turn on
him: deny his right of access to her body, exclude him from her emotional bounty, abort him
in her womb, ruthlessly appropriate his money for her own need, create and exalt her own
goddesses, callously let him slip from memory when she speaks her deepest desires. Nearly
all the structures of western civilization — its theologies, laws, psychologies — from its
Gothic cathedrals to Gothic novels, from the Pantheon to the Pentagon to Prom night — all
these institutions, systems, and traditions, are constructed so that men need not face their
fear and the tenuous source of their power.
And underneath it all is the precarious hope that she, the woman, absorbed in her
"natural," God-given task of attending to him in all things, will not notice how fragile is the
throne on which he sits.

PROBLEM SIX - LOCUS

The public and the private worlds are inseparably
connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one
are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.
—- Virginia Woolf, "Three Guineas"

The question here is: "Where is the animus?" Where do we look to find the image of
"him?" Are we more likely to "know" and "recognize" animus through a woman's dream?
Through a man's heroic achievements? Through movies? Through a woman's sexual
partner? All of the above?
Jungians have always had a penchant for speaking in terms of "inner" and "outer"
experiences, even though there is no clear dividing line, for we know that "inner" and "outer"
are simply two aspects of psychic life. The one presupposes rather than excludes the other.
In fact, "inner/outer" designations miss the point entirely: all psychological experience is
interior — not "inner" experience as opposed to "outer" experience, but as the "depth" of
meaning of all experience.
Correlated to "inner/outer" designations is the "projection/introjection" dichotomy.
Though Jung's theory does not assume a one-way channel, the usual tendency in applying it
is to assume that archetypal images are first projected outward onto someone else or onto a
collective body and then have to be taken in as psychological experience. As a psychological
mechanism that happens to us, projection shows us ourselves on a big screen, "out there."
That is where we "see" it, and are then able to recognize it as originating "in here." The old
rule of thumb is: when you feel a strong emotional reaction to someone or something,
projection is likely happening.
Jung, and most Jungians following him, tend to locate the animus (and anima as well)
primarily in the individual psyche; it is then "seen" in the "outer" world as a "projection." The
woman who is "animus-possessed" is thought to have an individual "problem," projecting her
own "inferior masculinity" onto "real" men "out there." This conclusion (which is also a
judgment) is fortified by self-fullfilling interpretations of the "man" in her dreams as an
"animus figure."
But the difficulty with the placement of animus as an "inner" figure in a woman or as a
projection to the "outer" world obscures the question of a deeper and more essential
problem: What happens when an entire culture is "animus-possessed?"
The locus of the animus, the psychic place where we find it in its proliferation of
images, is not "within" the woman at all. For this chapter at least, I am being very unJungian
and not looking inward, because I do not think that the interior life of a woman spontaneously
produces and "develops" the animus of Jung's conception.
While we are accustomed to thinking that what we see "out there" is "out there"
because it is projected from "in here," we have to remember that if the animus is an
archetype, it is merely a form; its content is determined by history and culture, and it
is this conditioned content that we see manifested "out there." To find "animus" we must look
first at the actual daily world because, simply put, it's a man's world; and so, for a woman, the
world, in large measure, is animus.
For a woman as for a man, coming to consciousness involves, among other things,
recognizing and withdrawing projections; but in the case of "the animus," for a woman it
means recognizing the extent to which "animus" has been introjected. While it is certainly
true that my personal responsibility for consciousness is not minimized by recognizing that
the world was already here when I entered it, it is also certainly true that the m an's world is
not made by a woman's projection. Telling a woman to "take back" her "animus projection"
from the world "out there" is like telling her to inhale carbon monoxide to cure her headache.
Not all psychic experiences and images can be, nor ought to be, integrated by the "ego,"
especially when they may be toxic and hazardous to one's health.
Because our culture is a patriarchy, a woman's experience of "the masculine" cannot
be simply the reverse of a man's experience of "the feminine." For her, the very air she
breathes, the boundaries of her consciousness, the contents of her personal unconscious
psyche, and the complete cast of the collective psyche, are full of The Man: his image, his
history, his definitions, his requirements, his expectations, his needs, his desires, his threats,
his power, his laws, his religions, his gods, his money, and his ambivalent, unrealistic image
of her.
This is the world she lives in, a world of "his" making. The male of the human species,
having declared himself for the past few millenia the center of his universe, becomes
identical to, and identified with, divinity. From this supra-view, with the eye of a god, the world
unfolds itself according to his perspective. The institutions he creates and perpetuates in his
god-like power then — quite naturally — appear to be divinely sanctioned: law, religion,
governments. The archetype of the animus has been invented and defined by men (and not
only Jung), described entirely in terms of male psychology, and then applied to wom en.
It is not surprising that men are identified with the archetype. The image of The Man
and the actual man have been too firmly welded together for too long for us to suppose that
the situation can be remedied by making a simple conceptual distinction through conceptual
words (as in the distinction between "principles" applied to "persons"). To paraphrase Audre
Lord, we cannot use the tools of the animus to dismantle the animus.
Our culture has been not only perpetuated by the animus archetype as its dominant, it
is also interpreted by the animus archetype. The world-view of both men and women is an
animus-view, from the animus, through "his" eyes. This male archetype called "animus" is the
lens through which we perceive and then define virtually every other archetype: we
see law through the animus, with its codification of right/wrong, objective evidence, "fairness"
and "justice." Religion through the animus insists on transcendance, enlightenment, and
rejection of materiality. We see psychology through the animus, with its insistence on
ordered personality, conscious rationality, literalized conceptions, and diagnosis (literally,
"through-knowledge"). Seen through the animus, the institution of heterosexuality appears as
both divine decree and natural law (since both God and Nature are defined by animus). Jung
saw even the "anima" from the perspective of animus, identifying "her" with "woman," "the
feminine," Eros, feeling, life, seduction, illusion — all those qualities animus-identified men
have assigned to females, and which are then given legitimacy as "empirical discoveries" by
calling them "archetypal."
Western civilization and culture is the world of animus-image seen from the
perspective of the animus archetype. Man contemplating man. This is no place for a woman.
 PART II
THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant 'there's
a nice knock-down argument for you!"
"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I
choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things?"
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "who is to be master — that's all."

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

NO RE-DRESSING OF GRIEVANCES
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

—- Adrienne Rich, Natural Resources

There have been two aspects to dismantling the animus in this monograph. First,
there is the obvious meaning of taking "the animus" apart and not putting it back together
again; second, the less obvious meaning of trying to cut through the mantle that has acted as
a cloaking device: the fabric of prejudices and bad logic that have convinced women to wear
this ill-fitting, badly woven, old-fashioned whalebone-corseted image of themselves. We
should do with Jung's notion of "animus" what Sir Walter Raleigh did with his mantle when he
threw it down as a puddle-cover for Queen Elizabeth I to step on: leave it in the mud.
There are a lot of people who feel strongly that while the meaning of "animus" must
change, the word itself should be kept. Keep the word, they say, just change the "negative"
associations. One woman suggested to me, in a rather strange choice of cliche, that "we
shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water." This is an argument that imagines that
certain sanctified words can be cleansed of their soiled associations. After scrubbing up the
word "animus," the "positive" qualities will shine forth — that is, women will have something
"positive" to show for being women. For many women who find Jung's work valuable and
admirable, there is a reluctance to contradict or oppose him on such a basic matter; he is, to
use his own term, an "animus figure" par excellence. His authority and prestige intimidate,
and his animus theory in particular forestalls a direct attack from women, an attack easily
dismissed as an example of the very sort of animosity that proves the theory.
But it is not so easy to alter associations and implications of loaded words. If it were,
the attempts of recent years to refine, reform, update, and fix Jung's concept of "animus"
would have been successful. The fact that such attempts have been increasing suggests that
the concept still doesn't work, and still performs the same disservice to both women and men
in the greater body of Jung's invaluable work.
The first move toward changing the way we think is to change the way we speak.
"Animus" has become a word that impairs the psychological perception of both women and
men, and is a psychic health hazard. The first step, then, toward resolving the problem of
"the animus" is not to think in terms of a "problem," but to stop calling it "the animus." It is
impossible to keep Jung's term and not also keep all the old Jungian associations,
definitions, and expectations, which cling to it the way the smell of one's body clings to old
clothes no longer worn. A "second-rate man" by any other name is still second-rate.
The "animus" can be dismantled in three undressings. The naked reality is that the
emperor has no clothes.

FIRST UNDRESSING
The word "animus" is a generic term and keeps us thinking in generalizations instead
of specifics, and thus works against consciousness. Consciousnes comes in and through
specifics, details, particulars, individuals; generalizations keep us defensive and
unconscious, avoiding the precise, the exact, the idiosyncratic, the individual. Like other
concept-words (individuation, transcendent function, ego), "animus" obliterates the
particulars of experience.54 "Animus" refers not to a woman's own individual perception or
experience but to someone else's judgment about her perception or experience. Father
knows best, speaks best, thinks best, is best.
 Gender is little enough understood as it is; we cannot afford to continue the
assumption that one word, like one size, fits all. The word "animus" has become perjorative
and so broad in content as to be clinically damaging and theoretically useless — and this
beside the far more serious fact that it is frequently a fraudulent representation of a woman's
experience of her life.
It is not only "the Great Mother" who enjoys the "natural" state of unconsciousness; so
too does a patriarchy whose archetypal power depends on the unconsciousness of its
subjects. The notion of animus has not challenged the patriarchy's consciousness because
its male-assigned meaning serves to perpetuate it: "animus" assumes a gender-specific lack
of consciousness, a deficit. It has always been to the advantage of masculinist culture to
keep women believing that their capacity, or at least discipline, for thought is limited. So,
while a woman theoretically must "need the animus" as a sort of intellectual escort in the
world of thinking and logic, she must not appropriate too much of his gift as her own, lest she
become like him, a second-rate pseudo-man instead of a first-rate "real woman." The animus
that comes to her from the male world is both the "function" she supposedly needs and the
spirit of intellectual clarity she is not truly permitted to have,55 and there is hardly a woman,
dead or alive, who has not felt caught in this double bind. The term "animus" keeps us in the
double bind and unconscious of it at the same time.
Consider, as another instance of unconsciousness, the assumption made about
human spiritual life. The idea that women's spiritual life is somehow inaugurated or shaped
by "the animus" is the assumption of a culture whose deity is male, a culture that can only
imagine spirit in male forms, in the masculine gender. It is not self-evident that "the animus"
is responsible for a woman's ability to find meaning. What of all the female figures who
animate psyche and lead and move the soul to recognition? What of the stunning numinosity
of female divinities, in whom femaleness is an essential quality of their "spirit?"
A woman's image of her soul is female; the "animus" is not the image of her soul the
way the anima is a soul-image for men, as a number of writers have pointed out (Irene de
Castillejo, Demaris Wehr, Claire Douglas, et al.). Downing notes:
Although Jung ends up discussing the Kore archetype mostly as an anima projection,
he acknowledges the inadequacy, indeed the inappropriateness, of this approach. He
perceives that the myth is clearly essentially a feminine one centered on a female-female
relationship that is alien to men and shuts them out. Yet when trying to understand what the
Kore archetype might mean to women, he considers Kore only in terms of her relation with
Demeter, only in terms of mother-daughter bonding, as daughter not as maiden. Thus he
misses the opportunity to explore what role the relation to the inner maiden might have in the
psychology of women.56
 The generic term "animus" invites generalization. Like negative
mother or spirituality or ego-Self axis, "animus" is a technoterm, a shorthand concept-word
that implies a whole world of value-judgments as well as an analytic attitude in "treating" it.
The analytic stance itself is rooted in patriarchal thinking with its masculinist assumptions:
that a woman's "animus" is "naturally" unconscious, that it is the image of the desired sexual
partner, the source of her spiritual life, and that it needs integration (which will ensure that
she will not seriously challenge the status quo). But inadvertent or not, "animus has come to
mean mainly its derivative, animosity.
What would happen if we stopped using the word "animus?" How would we talk about
what we now describe or attribute to the animus? It will not do to merely replace "animus"
with another word; there is no other word. The whole point is to describe women in terms of
what it is like to be female, not in terms of what masculinity they are imitating or lacking.
There is nothing to be gained by pasting a new name on an old idea. The whole concept
must go, and that means a thorough-going change of mind, not merely a change of word.
It is perhaps too much to expect the rapid demise of the archetype of gender as a
dominant in our collective psyche. But for starters, we could omit the word "animus" from our
psychological vocabulary and see what happens. After all, since "animus" more accurately
describes women's experience of "man" or collective "men" better than it does the
"unconscious as such" of woman's psyche, we could just as well refer to male images that
appear in her dreams and fantasies and musings as "the Man." This recognizes that such
dream and fantasy figures have a correlate in the "outer" world and draw much of their
meaning from that world.
Why do we so often — almost automatically — interpret male figures in women's
dreams as "animus" figures, thus emphasizing gender? Is the maleness of the figure of prime
importance? Why? Is it not just as — or more — important to notice what the figure feels in
her dream, how he acts, what he teaches or destroys, what he wants desperately or gives
freely? What the figure means to the life of the dreamer's soul is more important than the
figure's gender. And if the importance of gender is relativized, making it but one quality
among many, it lessens the temptation to literalize the figure into an actual man. Women
correctly object to carrying projections and literalizations solely on the basis of their anatomy;
why would not a man also object?
Without the word "animus," we could get right to the style of consciousness we mean
to describe. For example, we could refer individual modes of behavior back to specific,
primary mythic structures (as in these examples from the Greeks), saying, "This person is
very Apollonic-minded, clear-thinking and musically creative." Or we could say, "Ah, this
person is Hermetic, quick-witted, glib, very clever, charming — and a shoplifter." Or we could
say, "Now this person has a rather saturnine temperament, very disciplined but depressed,
intellectually gifted but tormented by self-doubt."
This kind of specific, descriptive, metaphorical speech also begins to move us out of
genderized thinking, because such descriptions may apply to a man or a woman: they are
psychologically specific, but not gender-specific. Metaphorical language (as distinguished
from concept-words) focuses consciousness on a way of speaking that recognizes with some
depth who a person is, in their individuality, rather than what (gender) they are — or appear
to be. And one need not be a classical mythologist or well-educated to speak precisely. In
fact, knowledge of Greek or any other mythology is unnecessary; the god/desses are alive
and present in imagistic descriptions in a way that they are not in conceptual definitions.
What is needed is an eye and ear for metaphor, for finding the right word or phrase to convey
one's meaning. If we could speak with the precision and specificity of poets and storytellers,
we would not have to resort to general, "universal" words which sound learned but say little
and mean less.
What is most needed for consciousness and serviceable language is patience and a
willingness to work. In our culture, which favors one-dimensional "pictures" and technical
manuals to the living language of story and anecdote, it takes work to learn to speak in
particulars and specifics, but we can't afford not to do it. Consciousness, and therefore
survival, depends on it.

SECOND UNDRESSING
The second reason to stop using the word "animus" is to free ourselves from a
chronic heterosexism that keeps us psychologically impoverished. In our culture heterosexist
thinking is automatic, and to that extent we are unconscious of it. The heterosexism
embedded in the animus concept is exclusive, relegating a vast territory of the sexual
imagination to an impossibly cramped and airless corner of the psyche no bigger than a
condom, and disallowing an expansive range of psychosexual and erotic possibilities to enter
into cultural life.
The term "animus" does not help broaden consciousness any more than it deepens
understanding of the phenomena it purports to explain. If we stopped using the word
"animus" in Jungian psychology we may begin to change the pattern of our heterosexist
thinking, and re-cut the pattern to a larger size, more appropriate to the breadth and range
and depth of psychic life.
The contrasexual aspect of the animus is basic and essential to Jung's concept; so as
long as we talk about animus, we force all sexuality that is not "contra" into a footnote, a
secondary afterthought.
 But all dimensions of sexual experience belong in the main body of our psychic text.
Neither homosexuality nor bisexuality nor any other orientation can be considered
"alternative" because, from psyche's perspective, there is no standard referent. Arguments
that appeal to "nature" and/or "the biological imperative" to support and enforce the
heterosexist bias are irrelevant here, since psyche is not derived from the physical body but
corresponds to it. (As Jung said, psyche is not a mere "secretion.")
We have long mistaken conditioned response for normative instinct. The
unreflectiveness of our heterosexist assumptions point to cultural conditioning, not
necessarily to universal instinctive behavior. Assumptions about heterosexuality as "the
norm," as a matter "of course," as "according to nature," are all assumptions made from a
male-dominated culture which fears and devalues women — particularly those women who
may find men lovable but at times simply unnecessary. Gay men are equally threatening
because they have betrayed the brotherhood's rule of sexual dominance: men may not be
"like women" but may not love other men sexually either.
Jung's own attitude toward sex, rooted no doubt in the christianism that pervades his
psychology, appears to be avoidant, if not ambivalent. On one hand, he wisely and
passionately calls for the unity of psychic life through recognition of the spiritual significance
of human sexuality. He is comfortably at home with alchemical images of sublimation and
conjunction, operations which provide both a symbology for sexual coupling and for the
spiritualization of sexual union as an interior, psychological experience. On the other hand,
he perpetuates the long-standing division between sex and spirit by implicitly giving greater
value to the latter.
Jung's thinking about contrasexuality, then, so essential to his idea of the animus, has
less to do with actual sex than it does with contraries: metaphysical oppositions, matter
versus spirit, body versus soul, male versus female — and the old Christian problem of how
to reconcile these opposites. At the same time, however, Jung's idea of "contrasexuality" is
rooted in cultural assumptions about the essential "nature" of male and female sexuality, the
respective characteristics of which are also posited as contraries.
Talking about sex in terms of the contrasexual animus keeps sex "contra," "against"
and "in opposition to," with the attendent associatons and feelings of contrariness, hostility,
violence, and anxiety. Contrasexuality is the language of the Western Christian Animus
talking righteously about itself, its own paranoid insistence on One Way, This Way, Only. It is
not the language of a polymorphously perverse psyche enjoying itself.

THIRD UNDRESSING
A third reason to stop using the word "animus" it that it forces us to think and talk
wrongly about the anima, as if it is the exact counterpart of the animus. Contrary to Jung's
idea and many Jungians following him, they are not counterparts, do not perform the same
intrapsychic functions, are not projected and introjected in the same way, and do not, in fact
and in life, have the same value in the psychic economy.
I believe efforts to rehabilitate or reform Jung's animus concept to make it conform to
women's experience are not efficacious. Usually such attempts take the moralistic form of
accentuating the "positive" and eliminating the "negative," which only makes the inherent
flaws all the more obvious. A woman does not need to refer to "animus" at all to help her
claim her own authority, to act as mediator to her feminine psyche, or to lead her on a
spiritual journey. Educational and therapeutic applications that assist individual women to
become and appreciate themselves as women generally are successful not because animus
theory has been modified, but because anima has been realized.
Re-fashioning the animus theory to make it wearable for modern women would
require the injection of "feminine values" into the idea, and emphasis on the importance of
"feminine qualities" for wholeness. Though this emphasis may be helpful in a limited way, I
am convinced such an approach cannot redeem the animus concept, still less make it worthy
of redemption. Proper valuation of "the feminine" cannot correct the fundamental
unworkability of Jung's animus concept, which is itself a symptom of the deeper problem of
entrenched, chronic, one-sided masculinism which afflicts all of us. Treating the symptom will
not cure the disease; rehabilitating, reforming, modifying, positivizing the animus will not
challenge the pathology that engenders it.
By envisaging animus and anima as direct counterparts, Jung imagined them ideally
as "separate but equal." But we know from the Supreme Court — that perfect embodiment of
the collective masculinist mind and every woman's image of ultimate Judgment — that
separate is inherently unequal.57 In Jung's view, a woman's "differentiated, integrated
animus" is not, and can never be, equal in value to a man's "differentiated, integrated anima,"
because while her masculinity is at best derivative, his femininity is his true soul.
When we think of animus/anima as Jung thought of them, as ideally co-equal,
symmetrical in the model psyche, we fall romantically into the recent trend toward "returning
to the goddess" and "restoring the goddess" and "descending to the goddess." I have no
question about the seriousness of anyone's intent in engaging in this pursuit. I do, however,
question its effectiveness in altering the collective psyche. Attempts to give equal time and
place to "the feminine" are more valuable for showing us the appalling depth of the problem
than they are for providing a substantial solution.
Theoretical attempts to "value the feminine" or "restore the goddess image" are
attempts to compensate for what is missing, the way one balances credits and debits in an
account. But no amount of restoration can make a flawed foundation sound; theorizing about
equal value for the feminine does not change the fact that those collective bodies of men that
rule the world still determine how much, what kind, and to what extent such restoration may
take place. Jung inadvertently but accurately pointed to the entrenched power concentrated
in male institutions and modes of thought when he described the animus as a "collection of
condemnatory judges...an assembly of fathers or dignitaries who lay down
incontestable...judgments."58
Imagine the horror of a thinking woman (who, as Adrienne Rich wrote, "sleeps with
monsters") waking from a disturbing dream of just such an image of supremely
condemnatory black-robed men on July third, 1989. She picks up her morning newspaper
with a headline about abortion, and finds that the prelude to her "independence day" is the
Supreme Court ruling (Webster vs. State of Missouri) which, by limiting the scope of a federal
constitutional amendment (Roe vs. Wade, 1973), has returned her body to the state as an
area of reproductive jurisdiction. Asleep or awake, she is subject to the will of the Judges; in
her dream and in their court, they have laid down "incontestable judgments " governing even
the most intimate, private expression of herself, her body, regardless of her personal views
and feelings about abortion. When she protests their tampering or questions their
qualificatioins to judge, as Anita Hill did, she falls into the nightmare of dismissal,
disparagement, superfluity.
The "masculine principle" does not and will not yield its position of privilege easily if at
all — and certainly not to the feminine principle, which it has judged to be inferior, lesser, and
not to be taken too seriously. Given men's legacy of assumed male superiority, and women's
legacy of introjected belief in male superiority, I have trouble believing that more than a few
in our masculinist culture can recognize the inherent equality of a goddess. No feminine
figure, however divine, can be regarded as equal in power when placed next to the supreme
God of the western world, the Father — who has no mother, no wife, no daughter, no sister,
and no consort, and whose most visible body is a mother-wife church run by men.
The return-to-the-goddess movement, popular among some Jungians and New Age
people and feminist theologians and others, makes me uneasy. (And it is possible that some
of my uneasiness originates in my own frustration that change comes so slowly.) The idea of
restoration of the devalued feminine springs from the still-frustrated hopes of women for an
accommodation with the male world, a hope that men will make room for women, that the
Father God will share power with the Mother Goddess. And yet: the restoration of powerful
female figures, like Artemis or Gaia or Isis, seems more like rectification of an unintentional
error than deep recognition of how grievous and destructive to the human soul has been the
effect of their absence. And since goddesses have no cathedrals or conventions or synods or
scriptures, and no congregations clamoring for a constitutional amendment forcing prayer to
them in school, it is hard for any goddess to compete in a male culture for deity space.
However great she is, she is no match for Him, whose pronoun is always capitalized and
whose reign has long eclipsed the memory of Her glory, Her power, Her great passion for
life.
__________
I see no value in coining a new word for an old concept, nor a re-styled concept to
wear the old word. The ideas I present here speak to and for a different model entirely, and
are intended as rough cuts only, yet to be tailored to serve as workclothes for collective
realities and individual experiences. They are partial moves toward a possible new
consciousness that may help us pack away the outworn nineteenth-century mantle of "the
animus."
Perhaps, when we see that the old emperor has no clothes, we will be free to dress
our realities in new imaginal designs, more varieties of fabric with more texture of thought,
ideas of bold and subtle colors, sharply defined lines and daring weaves of thought,
descriptions whose drapes and intriguing folds express the individual body even more than
they conceal it.
If we can be more specific and precise and less general and automatic in our thinking,
if we can stop relegating much of our sexual possibilities to footnote status, and if we can
face the world's realities and our own stunning complexities without too much fluffy idealism,
we might begin to throw some reflective light on our profound psychological dilemmas.
But if we cannot extricate ourselves from the labyrinthine patterns of genderism,
sexism, heterosexism, and all other confining isms, our entire species must remain
psychologically imprisoned and physically on the brink of disaster. It will take many minds,
and every contribution, every milligram of consciousness, counts. And there is probably more
than one way out of the labyrinth; I suspect Ariadne did not tell Theseus she had more than
one thread in her sewing basket.

NOTES
1.Nor Hall, Those Women. Dallas: Spring Publications, Inc., 1988.
2.Frieda Fordham, An Introduction to Jung's Psychology (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin
Books, 1973 ed.), p. 55.
3.C.G. Jung, Collected Works (New Jersey: Princeton University Press), Vol 7, para. 335.
(The Collected Works are hereafter referred to as CW.)
4.Emma Jung, Animus and Anima. Dallas: Spring Publications, Inc., 1985. The English
translation of these essays appeared in Spring 1941.
5.Irene Clarement de Castillejo, Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology (New York:
Putnam's, 1973), p. 73.
6.Claire Douglas, The Woman in the Mirror: Analytical Psychology and the
Feminine (Boston: Sigo Press, 1990), p. 63.
7.Ad by Martin/Williams Agency, Minneapolis. Story appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press,
March 20, 1992.
8.Patricia Berry, "The Dogma of Gender," in Echo's Subtle Body (Dallas: Spring Publications,
Inc., 1982), p. 40.
9.Andrew Samuels, The Plural Psyche (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 101.
10.James Hillman, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (Dallas: Spring Publications,
1985), p. 179.
11.Demaris Wehr, Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987),
p. 103.
12.Angelyn Spignesi, book review in Quadrant: Journal of Contemporary Jungian
Thought, Fall 1984, p. 97.
13.Douglas, p. 60.
14.Jung, CW 7, para. 309.
15.Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1982), p. 14.
16.Ibid., p. 121.
17.Edward Whitmont, Return of the Goddess (New York: Crossroad, 1982), p. 127.
18.Ibid., p. 143.
19.Ibid., p. 138.
20.Samuels, p. 97.
21.Ibid.
22.Ibid. Author's italics.
23.Vivian Gornick, "Woman as Outsider," in Woman in Sexist Society, V. Gornick & B.K.
Moran, eds. (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 137-144.
24.Article in Time Magazine, August 14, 1989.
25.Annette Brandes, personal communication.
26.Reprinted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 26, 1989.
27.Ibid.
28.Jung, CW 9, ii, para. 29.
29.Hillman, p. 117.
30.Jung, CW 16, para. 434.
31.Jung, CW 7, para. 335.
32.Ibid., para. 336.
33.Ibid., para. 330.
34.When asked her impression of Vice President Dan Quayle, who had just visited her
school, 14-year-old Vanessa Martinez said: "He seems like an average type of man. He's
not, like, smart. I'm not trying to rag on him or anything, but he has the same mentality I have
— and I'm in the eighth grade." (St. paul Pioneer Press, May 21, 1992).
35.Hillman, p. 117.
36.Wehr, p. 103.
37.Jung, The Visions Seminars (Zurich: Spring Publications, 1976), p. 216.
38.Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1954), p. 125.
39.Ibid., p. 126.
40.The intimidation and forestalling of challenge of "archetype" comes from its elevation to
universal metaphysical truth — an elevation encouraged by much of the "religious" language
Jung uses when writing about the "numinosity" and "transcendance" and "sovereign" nature
of the archetype. If we look at any archetype from a system of belief rather than a
psychological attitude, it cannot be challenged. I think of the archetype less as a universal or
horizontal phenomenon than as a vertical, signifying psychic depth in individual and cultural
life. I am not as concerned with the archetype per se(about which we can say little since we
cannot apprehend it directly) as with the archetypal images that govern the psyche,
embodying our emotions, resonating with significance. And it is clear the the images change,
both reflecting and influencing cultural and social constructions, including those that govern
"scientific definitions" of, and relations between, genders.
41.Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1942),
7th ed. 1968), Plate 18 caption.
42.Ibid., Plate 19 caption.
43.Berry, p. 40.
44.Jacobi, p. 123.
45.Woodman, p. 182-3.
46.Charlotte Bunch, "Not for Lesbians Only," in Quest, 1975.
47.Christine Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love (New York: The Continuum
Publishing Co., 1989), p. 126-7.
48.Jung, CW 10, para. 220.
49.Ibid., para. 221.
50.Woodman, p. 122.
51.Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin (Toronto: Inner City Books), p. 59-60.
52.Whitmont, p. 250.
53.The most incisive essay I know of on this subject is Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," which first appeared in the journal Signs, 1979.
54.As Berry noted, we fall back on generalities when we cannot or will not differentiate
among particulars. "We draw upon generalities when we need the broadest possible
conceptual organization. Yin/yang, lunar/solar, right/left brain, passive/active,
matriarchy/patriarchy, provide large oppositional categories. Biological gender is usually
clearly observable, universal, unambiguous, offering a point of view that need not be
confused by the variety and ambivalence of phenomena." (Berry, "Dogma of Gender," op.
cit., p. 46.)
55.The more successfully a woman "integrates" the "positive animus" the more she risks
severe social penalty, usually carried out through social, economic, political, and
psychological exclusion from the male-dominated collective life of the culture. However
"positive" the animus in her may be, she is still collectively regarded as having "too much"
animosity on one hand, and "too much" masculinity on the other — even though it is "good"
masculinity: independence of thought, autonomy of action, mental and physical stamina,
dexterity, acuity, and sexual vitality. Power and fame don't help: Geraldine Ferraro was
practically tarred and feathered as a vice presidential candidate. Hillary Clinton was
considered a possible liability (conservatives called her an "ultraradical feminist") to her
husband's candidacy because she is an outspoken woman of strong ideas with a well-
defined personality. Most telling was the perception of her as a potential liability to her
husband rather than as a potential candidate in her own right.
56.Downing, Psyche's Sisters (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 138-9.
57.Supreme Court ruling, Brown vs. Board of Education, 1954.
58.Jung, CW 7, para. 332.

© Lyn Cowan 2000. All rights reserved.

Contact the author: lyncowan@houston.rr.com
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