Identity with the persona automatically leads to an unconscious identity with the anima because, when the ego is not differentiated from the persona, it can have no conscious relation to the unconscious processes. Similarly, where a man identifies with the persona, he is in effect possessed by the anima, with attendant symptoms. If the persona is intellectual, the anima will certainly be sentimental.
Thus his anima contains all those fallible human qualities his persona lacks. Outwardly ruthless, harsh, and unapproachable, he jumps inwardly at every shadow, is at the mercy of every mood, as though he were the feeblest and most impressionable of men. The tyrant tormented by bad dreams, gloomy forebodings, and inner fears is a typical figure. Hence the character of the anima can generally be deduced from that of the persona all those qualities absent from the outer attitude will be found in the inner. and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona’s counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife’s slipper. But because the inner world is dark and invisible. 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, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. As an inner personality, the anima is complementary to the persona and stands in a compensatory relationship to it. When the anima is strongly constellated, she softens the man’s character and makes him touchy, irritable, moody, jealous, vain, and unadjusted.
The resultant fantasies and entanglements are all her doing. intensifies, exaggerates, falsifies, and mythologizes all emotional relations with his work and with other people of both sexes. It is always the a priori element in moods, reactions, impulses, and whatever else is spontaneous in psychic life. The anima is not the soul in the dogmatic sense, not an anima rationalis, which is a philosophical conception, but a natural archetype that satisfactorily sums up all the statements of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, of the history of language and religion. Within his own psyche, the anima functions as his soul, influencing his ideas, attitudes and emotions. It is associated with the eros principle, hence a man’s anima development is reflected in how he relates to women. The anima is personified in dreams by images of women ranging from seductress to spiritual guide. Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it. And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya-and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forego she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. There is an imago not only of the mother but of the daughter, the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess, and the chthonic Baubo. The anima is the archetype of life itself. Initially identified with the personal mother, the anima is later experienced not only in other women but as a pervasive influence in a man’s life. It is an unconscious factor incarnated anew in every male child, and is responsible for the mechanism of projection. The anima is both a personal complex and an archetypal image of woman in the male psyche. (See also animus, Eros, Logos and soul-image.)
0 kommentar(er)
