Just as gender is experienced as an affirmation of the archetypal principle appropriate to one’s sex, so relations with the other sex rest on archetypal foundation. Of all the archetypal systems enabling us to adapt to the typical circumstances of human life, that involved in relating to the opposite sex is the most crucial. Jung called this contra sexual archetype the animus in women and the anima in men. As feminine aspect of man and the masculine aspect of woman, they function as a pair of opposites (the syzygy) in the unconscious of both, profoundly influencing the relations of all men and women with each
also found that in practice both anima and animus act in dreams in the imagination as mediators of the unconscious to the ego, so ding a means for inner as well as outer adaptation. He described ii as ‘soul-images’ and the ‘not-I’, for they are experienced as something mysterious and numinous, possessing great power. The e unconscious the anima or animus, the more likely it is to be projected – the psychodynamic process responsible for the experience of falling in love’. For this reason, Jung called the contra sexual complex projection-making factor’. Man carries within him the eternal image of the woman, not the of this or that woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, a hereditary factor of primordial – .’ (Cw XVII, Para. 338). ‘Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has so to speak, a masculine Ft… . And accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus. . . The animus corresponds to the paternal just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros’ (CW IX. ii, para.28).the shadow; the contra sexual complex possesses qualities opposite to those manifested in the persona, for, even in our egalitarian times, boys are expected to be boys and girls to be girls. Thus, the more a man is incapable of accepting his shadow and the feminine qualities in him the more he is identified with his persona. Indeed, Jung even
goes so far as to declare that ‘the character of the anima can be deduced from that of the persona’ because ‘everything that should normally be in the outer attitude, but is conspicuously absent, will invariably be found in the inner attitude. This is a fundamental rule… (CWVI, Para. 806).