 THE ANIMA, THE WOMAN WITHIN Difficult and subtle ethical problems are not invariably brought up by the appearance of the shadow itself. Often another inner figure emerges. If the dreamer is a man, he will discover a female personification of his unconscious, and it will be a male figure in the case of a woman. Often this second symbolic figure turns up behind the shadow, bringing up new and different problems. Jung called its male and female forms animus and anima. The anima is a personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man's psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature, and, last but not least, his relation to the unconscious. It is no mere chance that in olden times, priestesses, like the Greek Sibyl, were used to fathom the divine will and to make connection with the gods. A particularly good example of how the anima is experienced as an inner figure in a man's psyche is found in the medicine men and prophets, shamans, among the Eskimo and other arctic tribes. Some of these even wear women's clothes or have breasts depicted on their garments in order to manifest their inner feminine side, the side that enables them to connect with the ghostland, that is, what we call the unconscious. One reported case tells of a young man who was being initiated by an older shaman and who was buried by him in a snow hole. He fell into a state of dreaminess and exhaustion. In this coma he suddenly saw a woman who emitted light. She instructed him in all he needed to know, and later, as his protective spirit, helped him to practice his difficult profession by relating him to the powers of the beyond. Such an experience shows the anima as the personification of a man's unconscious. In its individual manifestation, the character of a man's anima is as a rule shaped by his mother. If he feels that his mother had a negative influence on him, his anima will often express itself in irritable, depressed moods, uncertainty, insecurity and touchiness. If however he is able to overcome the negative assaults on himself, they can even serve to reinforce his masculinity. Within the soul of such a man, the negative mother anima figure will endlessly repeat this theme, I am nothing. Nothing makes any sense. With others it's different, but for me, I enjoy nothing. These anima moods cause a sort of dullness, a fear of disease, of impotence or of accidents. The whole of life takes on a sad and depressive aspect. Such dark moods can even lure a man to suicide, in which case the anima becomes a death demon. She appears in this role in Kokto's film, Orphe. The French call such an anima figure a femme fatale. A milder version of this dark anima is personified by the Queen of the Night in Mozart's magic flute. The Greek sirens, or the German Lorelai, also personify this dangerous aspect of the anima, which in this form symbolizes destructive illusion. The following Siberian tale illustrates the behavior of such a destructive anima. One day a lonely hunter sees a beautiful woman emerging from the deep forest on the other side of the river. She waves at him and sings, Oh, come, lonely hunter, in the stillness of dusk, Come, come, I miss you, I miss you. Now I will embrace you, embrace you. Come, come, my nest is near, my nest is near. Come, come, lonely hunter, now in the stillness of dusk. He throws off his clothes and swims across the river, but suddenly she flies away in the form of an owl, laughing mockingly at him. When he tries to swim back to find his clothes, he drowns in the cold river. In this tale, the anima symbolizes an unreal dream of love, happiness, and maternal warmth, her nest, a dream that lures men away from reality. The hunter is drowned because he ran after a wishful fantasy that could not be fulfilled. Another way in which the negative anima in a man's personality can be revealed is in waspish, poisonous, effeminate remarks by which he devalues everything. Remarks of this sort always contain a cheap twisting of the truth and are in a subtle way destructive. There are legends throughout the world in which a poison damsel, as they call her in the Orient, appears. She is a beautiful creature who has weapons hidden in her body or a secret poison with which she kills her lovers during their first night together. In this guise, the anima is as cold and reckless as certain uncanny aspects of nature itself, and in Europe is often expressed to this day by the belief in witches. If, on the other hand, a man's experience of his mother has been positive, this can also affect his anima in typical but different ways with the result that he either becomes a feminist or is preyed upon by women, and thus is unable to cope with the hardships of life. An anima of this sort can turn men into sentimentalists, or they may become as touchy as old maids, or as sensitive as the fairy tale princess who could feel a pee under 30 mattresses. A still more subtle manifestation of a negative anima appears in some fairy tales in the form of a princess who asks her suitors to answer a series of riddles, or perhaps to hide themselves under her nose. If they cannot give the answers, or if she can find them, they must die, and she invariably wins. The anima in this guise involves men in a destructive intellectual game. We can notice the effect of this anima trick in all those neurotic pseudo-intellectual dialogues that inhibit a man from getting in direct touch with life and its real decisions. He reflects about life so much that he cannot live it, and loses all his spontaneity and outgoing feeling. The most frequent manifestation of the anima takes the form of erotic fantasy. Men may be driven to nurse their fantasies by looking at films and striptease shows, or by daydreaming over pornographic material. This is a crude primitive aspect of the anima, which becomes compulsive only when a man does not sufficiently cultivate his feeling relationships when his feeling attitude toward life has remained infantile. All these aspects of the anima have the same tendency that we have observed in the shadow. That is, they can be projected so that they appear to the man to be the qualities of some particular woman. It is the presence of the anima that causes a man to fall suddenly in love when he sees a woman for the first time and knows at once that this is she. In this situation, the man feels as if he has known this woman intimately for all time. He falls for her so helplessly that it looks to outsiders like complete madness. Women who are of fairy-like character especially attract such anima projections because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her. The projection of the anima in such a sudden and passionate form as a love affair can greatly disturb a man's marriage and can lead to the so-called human triangle with its accompanying difficulties. A bearable solution to such a drama can be found only if the anima is recognized as an inner power. The secret aim of the unconscious in bringing about such an entanglement is to force a man to develop and to bring his own being to maturity by integrating more of his unconscious personality and bringing it into his real life. But I have said enough about the negative side of the anima. There are just as many important positive aspects. The anima is, for instance, responsible for the fact that a man is able to find the right marriage partner. Another function is at least equally important. Before a man's logical mind is incapable of discerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious, the anima helps him to dig them out. Even more vital is the role that the anima plays in putting a man's mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths. It is as if an inner radio becomes tuned to a certain wavelength that excludes your relevancies but allows the voice of the great man to be heard. In establishing this inner radio reception, the anima takes on the role of guide or mediator to the world within and to the self. That is how she appears in the example of the initiations of shamans that I described earlier. This is the role of Beatrice in Dante's Paradiso and also of the goddess Isis when she appeared in a dream to Apuleus, the famous author of the Golden Ass, in order to initiate him into a higher, more spiritual form of life. The dream of a 45-year-old psychotherapist may help to make clear how the anima can be an inner guide. As he was going to bed on the evening before he had this dream, he thought to himself that it was hard to stand alone in life, lacking the support of a church. He found himself envying people who are protected by the maternal embrace of an organization. He had been born a Protestant, but no longer had any religious affiliation. This was his dream. I am in the isle of an old church filled with people. Together with my mother and my wife, I sit at the end of the isle in what seemed to be extra seats. I am to celebrate the mass as a priest, and I have a big mass book in my hands, or rather a prayer book or an anthology of poems. This book is not familiar to me, and I cannot find the right text. I am very excited because I have to begin soon and to add to my troubles my mother and wife disturbed me by chattering about unimportant trifles. Now the organ stops and everybody is waiting for me, so I get up in a determined way and ask one of the nuns who is kneeling behind me to hand me her mass book and point out the right place, which she does in an obliging manner. Now, like a sort of sexton, this same nun precedes me to the altar which is somewhere behind me and to the left as if we are approaching it from a side aisle. The mass book is like a sheet of pictures, a sort of board, three feet long and a foot wide, and on it is the text with ancient pictures in columns, one beside the other. First the nun has to read a part of the liturgy before I begin, and I have still not found the right place in the text. She has told me that it is number fifteen, but the numbers are not clear, and I cannot find it. With determination, however, I turn toward the congregation, and now I have found number fifteen, the next to the last on the board, although I do not yet know if I shall be able to decipher it. I want to try all the same. I wake up. This dream expressed in a symbolic way an answer from the unconscious to the thoughts that the dreamer had had the evening before. It said to him, in effect, you yourself must become a priest in your own inner church, in the church of your soul. Thus the dream shows that the dreamer does have the helpful support of an organization. He is contained in a church, not an external church, but one that exists inside his own soul. The people, all his own psychic qualities, want him to function as the priest and celebrate the mass himself. Now the dream cannot mean the actual mass, for its mass book is very different from the real one. It seems that the idea of the mass is used as a symbol, and therefore it means a sacrificial act in which the divinity is present, so that man can communicate with it. This symbolic solution is of course not generally valid, but relates to this particular dreamer. It is a typical solution for a Protestant, because a man who through real faith is still contained in the Catholic Church usually experiences his anima in the image of the church herself, and her sacred images are for him the symbols of the unconscious. Our dreamer did not have this ecclesiastical experience, and this is why he had to follow an inner way. Furthermore, the dream told him what he should do. It said, your mother-boundness and your extroversion, represented by the wife who is an extrovert, distract you and make you feel insecure, and by meaningless talk keep you from celebrating the inner mass. But if you follow the nun, the introverted anima, she will lead you as both a servant and a priest. She owns a strange mass book, which is composed of sixteen, four times four, ancient pictures. Your mass consists of your contemplation of these psychic images that your religious anima reveals to you. In other words, if the dreamer overcomes his inner uncertainty caused by his mother complex, he will find that his life task has the nature and quality of a religious service, and that if he meditates about the symbolic meaning of the images in his soul, they will lead him to this realization. In this dream the anima appears in her proper positive role, that is, as a mediator between the ego and the self. The four times four configuration of the pictures points to the fact that the celebration of this inner mass is performed in the service of totality. As Jung has demonstrated, the nucleus of the psyche, the self, normally expresses itself in some kind of fourfold structure. The number four is also connected with the anima because, as Jung noted, there are four stages in its development. The first stage is best symbolized by the figure of Eve, which represents purely instinctual and biological relations. The second can be seen in Faust's Helen. She personifies a romantic and aesthetic level that is, however, still characterized by sexual elements. The third is represented, for instance, by the Virgin Mary, a figure who raises love, eros, to the heights of spiritual devotion. The fourth type is symbolized by sapientia, wisdom transcending even the most holy and the most pure. And this, another symbol, is the Shulamite in the Song of Solomon. In the psychic development of modern man, this stage is rarely reached. The Mona Lisa comes nearest to such a wisdom anima. At this stage, I am only pointing out that the concept of fourfoldness frequently occurs in certain types of symbolic material. The essential aspects of this will be discussed later. But what does the role of the anima as guide to the inner world mean in practical terms? This positive function occurs when a man takes seriously the feelings, moods, expectations and fantasies sent by his anima, and when he fixes them in some form, for example in writing, painting, sculpture, musical composition or dancing. When he works at this patiently and slowly, other, more deeply unconscious material wells up from the depths and connects with the earlier material. After a fantasy has been fixed in some specific form, it must be examined both intellectually and ethically with an evaluating feeling reaction. And it is essential to regard it as being absolutely real. There must be no lurking doubt that this is only a fantasy. If this is practiced with devotion over a long period, the process of individuation gradually becomes the single reality and can unfold in its true form. Many examples from literature show the anima as a guide and mediator to the inner world. Francesco Colonna's Hypnarrotomachia, writer Hagrid Shee, or the eternal feminine in Goethe's Faust. In a medieval mystical text, an anima figure explains her own nature as follows. I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys. I am the mother of fair love and of fear and of knowledge and of holy hope. I am the mediator of the elements, making one to agree with another. That which is warm I make cold and the reverse and that which is dry I make moist and the reverse and that which is hard I soften. I am the law in the priest and the word in the prophet and the counsel in the wise. I will kill and I will make to live and there is none that can deliver out of my hand. In the Middle Ages there took place a perceptible spiritual differentiation in religious, poetical and other cultural matters and the fantasy world of the unconscious was recognized more clearly than before. During this period the nightly cult of the lady signified an attempt to differentiate the feminine side of man's nature in regard to the outer woman as well as in relation to the inner world. The lady to whose service the knight pledged himself and for whom he performed his heroic deeds was naturally a personification of the anima. The name of the carrier of the grail involved from von Eschenbach's version of the legend is especially significant. Komtya Muur, Guide in Love Matters. She taught the hero to differentiate both his feelings and his behavior toward women. Later however this individual and personal effort of developing the relationship with the anima was abandoned when her sublime aspect fused with the figure of the virgin who then became the object of boundless devotion and praise. When the anima as virgin was conceived as being all positive her negative aspects found expression in the belief in witches. In China the figure parallel to that of Mary is the goddess Kuan Yin. A more popular Chinese anima figure is the Lady of the Moon who bestows the gift of poetry or music on her favorites and can even give them immortality. In India the same archetype is represented by Shakti, Parvati, Rati and many others. Among the Muslims she is chiefly Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad. Worship of the anima as an officially recognized religious figure brings the serious disadvantage that she loses her individual aspects. On the other hand if she is regarded as an exclusively personal being there is the danger that if she is projected into the outer world it is only there that she can be found. This latter state of affairs can create endless trouble because man becomes either the victim of his erotic fantasies or compulsively dependent on one actual woman. Only the painful but essentially simple decision to take one's fantasies and feelings seriously can at this stage prevent a complete stagnation of the inner process of individuation because only in this way can a man discover what this figure means as an inner reality. Thus the anima becomes again what she originally was, the woman within, who conveys the vital messages of the self.