by Ruth Snowden
The task for the woman is somewhat different. For her, understanding the energy of the supporting and guiding animus gives her a stronger structure on which to base her living. One of Jung’s clients, writer Margaret Flinters, describes her own discovery of a ghostly figure somewhere inside her that directed her behaviour. This animus figure was based on her own father, who was a great perfectionist. Consequently, she was always critical – her work was not good enough and her husband always fell short of her exacting ideal. In meeting Jung, she encountered for the first time in her life a man who was more easy going and this helped to bring her down to earth.
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Insight
Jung’s notion that the woman has to rely on a masculine animus to support and guide her is somewhat irritating to a modern female thinker, because of the underlying assumption that only men are logical and assertive. There again, of course, we nowadays acknowledge that men can be just as intuitive and emotional as women. The point to grasp with regard to the ideas of anima and animus is that it’s important to find balance within our own psyche.
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Opposite-sex relationships present us with the stage on which we can explore all the different anima/animus energy, and this explains why they are frequently so difficult! If we are willing to grow together and help one another we can begin to achieve a mutual understanding. Jung says that the man’s task here is to open his eyes to the psyche and the dark energies of the unconscious. Women on the other hand, who are naturally at home in the emotional and intuitive realms, have to find out how to function effectively in the outer world. It is interesting to speculate how all this will slowly change and evolve as the sex roles become less distinct in our modern world and as people begin to realize that we all have both male and female energies in our psyches.
We can begin to explore the world of the unconscious by means of dreams, because they represent ways in which the unconscious is trying to become conscious. Dreams reflect many of the processes going on in the unconscious, from simple everyday events that we may not have had time to assimilate fully, to exploring blocked-off shadow energy, right down to the numinous ‘big dreams’ that signal archetypal energies emerging from the collective unconscious. For more about dreams, see Chapter 6.
Jung also used active imagination techniques to work further with dream contents and to begin to unravel and understand their deeper meaning. These techniques encourage a person to produce fantasy images that are very much like waking dreams and work in much the same way. Jung encouraged people to listen to the voice of the unconscious by first asking themselves who or what is trying to be heard and why. Having asked this question, one should then relax, try to switch off the endless babble of the conscious mind, and pay attention to whatever imagery or words arise from the inner world. Afterwards, one can write down whatever comes to mind. Images should be painted or drawn. The final task is to meditate on whatever one has produced in an uncritical manner, and to carry on developing the themes that arise. Jung stresses that the important thing here is always to let the unconscious take the lead, but never to allow it to take over completely – it is a question of achieving a healthy balance between the rational and intuitive aspects of the mind.
All these methods – confronting the shadow, working with the anima/animus, exploring dreams and fantasies – can help us to understand much about ourselves. It is important to try not to repress anything and to accept things as they really are. This may not be comfortable at times, and Jung says that the ‘other’ that we discover lurking within us may often seem alien and unacceptable. But our task is to stay with it and let the feelings sink in, because we will be richer for every little bit of self-knowledge. We have to accept the parts of ourselves that seem evil because they show us our areas of imbalance. Once we are able to take a good look at the conflicting opposites in our psyche, it is possible to work towards the reconciling position that lies somewhere between the two. Jung found much to support this idea when he took up the study of alchemy – for more about this see Chapter 8.
The ‘reconciling third’ that appears when we integrate the positive and negative aspects of the psyche leads us to the goal, the inner core of our being, which Jung called the Self. He viewed this as a transpersonal, transcendent entity, and our final coming to it marks the end of the individuation process. The Self can appear in women’s dream imagery as a high-priestess or goddess figure and in men’s as a guru or nature spirit. It is also seen in many other images, such as the mandala, the famous philosopher’s stone of alchemy, or in hermaphrodite figures.
It always symbolizes wholeness and the completion of a cycle of living.
Jung saw the Self as being the most important aspect of the psyche. The ego merely serves as its mediator and protector, receiving and transmitting information, and observing progress. But, like all aspects of the psyche, even the Self has negative aspects that can lead to megalomania or possession. The important thing is always to seek and retain a sense of balance, connecting with both the inner and outer worlds.
Sex and gender
Psychologists have debated for many years as to whether ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ has the greater effect upon our development of gender awareness. Are we born with a genetic blueprint that determines the way our psyche develops, or is it all to do with the way we are brought up? As we have already seen, Jung said that we are all born with a built-in archetypal pattern that gives us the blueprint for all aspects of psychic development. He agreed that environmental factors were very important too, but he did not believe that we begin with a totally blank slate. More recent studies in psychology and anthropology have tended to prove him right. For example, by the time a baby is born there are biological sex differences in size and weight and also in the ways in which we react to visual and auditory stimuli. This shows that there is indeed a biological blueprint at work from before birth.
As we grow up, we begin to create a persona that reflects the teachings of the society into which we were born. The animus or anima develops to compensate for this, incorporating the characteristics that we are not supposed to show publicly. In Jung’s day the division between the two sexes was more marked than it is now, and so his anima showed markedly different behaviour from that of his persona. For example, men were supposed to be the bread winners and behave in an unemotional, logical fashion. Women were seen as being illogical, unpredictable and mysterious – which is just the way Jung’s anima tended to behave.
Jung saw masculine and feminine as two major archetypal forces that coexisted as a balancing complementary pair of opposites. This idea is seen in myth and philosophical teachings all over the world, for example in the Chinese yin and yang (see the section on I-Ching in Chapter 8). These basic masculine and feminine principles are built into the psyche from birth, and it is upon these archetypal beginnings that personal gender awareness is built, beginning at a very early age. At first the child identifies with the mother, which causes a problem for the growing boy, who has to establish a gender identity that is opposite to that of the mother. If all goes well, he will be able to transfer his gender identity to his father, or to other masculine figures. This enables him to learn how to function effectively in the outer world. Peer-group interactions are also vitally important in this process, and all children normally go through a stage before puberty where they interact almost exclusively with same-sex playmates.
For girls the problem is a different one – they do not have to break away from gender identification with the mother, because she is the same sex as they are. However, just like the boys, they are expected to develop a strong ego-identity and function in the outer world, gaining a good education and progressing on to earning a living. This means that they too have to follow the hero myth cycle. This is even truer today than it was in Jung’s time, and yet the female superhero is still not as common in our mythology as her male counterpart. One only has to read children’s books or watch films to see that this is true.
; There is another problem for girls too, which Jung illustrates by referring to the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. In this story, the beast represents an older layer of the mind, an ancient, archetypal, animal energy (i.e. an erotic, sexual energy), which drives the woman towards biological fulfilment by giving birth to and mothering children. In order to do this, she has to break the emotional and spiritual bond between herself and her father, because she has to seek a new man to be her mate. In the fairy tale, Beauty goes to live with the Beast in his castle, and is torn between loyalty to him and to her father, who subsequently falls ill. Frequently women resist the more primitive urge of the beast because it drives them away from the world of careers, competition, success and friendship in the outer world. This was even worse for women in Jung’s day, when academic women and women with successful careers were frequently seen as being ‘mannish’ and rather sexless. In fact, women were frequently expected to abandon their careers altogether when they got married, because it was assumed that a woman’s role would then be to bear children and look after the home.
Things are slow to change and even in the modern world there can still be enormous conflicts. These show not only in the psyche of the individual woman, but also in interactions with her man as they battle with the gender roles and arguments about who should do what around the home and in child-rearing. This is one example of the problems that Jung suggested our modern psyches will encounter when they try to develop along lines that have been laid down by thousands of years of evolution. He warns that our personal psychology is only skin deep, like a ripple on the ocean of the collective unconscious. Collective psychology is the most powerful force in our lives, the one that changes the world and makes history.
Rites of passage
Throughout life we all pass through different stages that bring change into our lives. Many of these changes, for example birth, marriage, childbirth, retirement and death, are marked by special ceremonies. These are so firmly established in the human psyche that many of them are archetypal: in more primitive societies, times of transition for the developing psyche were similarly marked by rites of passage. One of the most important ancient rituals, frequently neglected by modern society, is the initiation rite to mark puberty.
Jung says that all primitive groups and tribes that are at all organized have special rites of initiation to mark puberty. These are very important in the social and religious life of the tribe. Some of the rituals are very highly developed, but the underlying theme is always the same. Boys are usually isolated from their mothers and led away to special places where tribal elders initiate them into adulthood. Special rituals such as circumcision take place to emphasize their coming into manhood. Girls too are often taken to one side and instructed in the women’s mysteries, such as menstruation and childbirth, by the wise older women. For both sexes the chief aim of these rites of puberty is to separate the young person from the parents, and mark a definite end to childhood.
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Insight
Interestingly, modern children deprived of proper initiation rites at puberty often seem to invent their own, perhaps by becoming members of a teenage gang. This seems to bear out Jung’s idea of deep archetypal roots for human behaviour within the psyche.
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In the childish stage of consciousness, there are usually few problems for the psyche because everything is taken care of by the parents. For Jung, puberty actually marks psychic birth, bringing with it a conscious distinction of the ego from the parents – the birth of the hero. From now onwards the demands of life put an end to the dreams of childhood and, if all goes well, the person will be able to make the transition to adulthood and independence. For others, this stage is not easy and they soon run into problems, usually connected with sexual issues or a sense of inferiority. Jung says that although a huge variety of problems is encountered at this stage, they nearly always have one particular feature in common – that of clinging to the childhood level of consciousness in one way or another. People want to go on being unconscious, or at any rate be conscious only of the ego, rejecting everything foreign and indulging their own craving for pleasure or power.
Unfortunately, in the modern world initiation rites have either vanished altogether or turned into shadowy imitations, so that many people do not get any help in reaching maturity. Jung says that because of the archetypal roots deep in our psyche, we still need and crave ritual. Maybe our neglect of the initiation rite is one of the reasons so many people today seem to be finding it hard to enter adulthood fully.
Midlife crisis
As we approach middle age, it often seems that we have got everything sorted out at last. Hopefully by now we have established our personal views and social positions, our careers and so on. But this is a point at which many people once more get stuck, assuming that their position is going to be eternally valid and clinging to their hard-won outlook. What they have overlooked is that unfortunately our achievements in society can only ever be won by focusing our awareness – a kind of narrowing down process. We have to concentrate on certain aspects of interest and push others away into a sort of psychic lumber room – there simply is not time or scope to do everything we would like to do!
Suddenly at the mid-point of our lives, it dawns on us that time is beginning to run out. We still haven’t been to Australia, won the Nobel Prize or travelled in outer space. This is the time of the midlife crisis, which Jung says is frequently marked in men by a period of depression around the age of 40, and at a slightly younger age in women.
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Insight
Some women seem to hit the mid-life crisis when their children have all started school and they suddenly have a bit more freedom. Others, especially those who are working full time, seem to have a later one when the children leave home.
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Once again, a significant change is being prepared for in the human psyche. This may appear as a slow change in a person’s personality, or certain traits from childhood may re-emerge, or a person’s interests may simply begin to change. Attitudes and beliefs may become more and more entrenched, until a person either becomes fanatical and bigoted, or else may have a sudden total change in their belief system. Jung describes the enchanting case of a very pious man he knew who was a churchwarden. He gradually grew more and more fanatical and intolerant about religious and moral matters, until by the time he was about 40 he had become ‘a darkly lowering pillar of the church’. Then one night, when he was 55, he suddenly sat up in bed and announced to his wife that he had just realized he was actually ‘a plain rascal’. Apparently he then spent his declining years in a feast of riotous living, wasting most of his accumulated fortune. Jung remarks that he was obviously ‘quite a likeable person, capable of both extremes’ (see Modern Man in Search of a Soul in Further reading).
Midlife crisis, then, marks the return of the opposite, an attempt on the part of the psyche to re-balance itself. Jung says that this stage is actually very important, because otherwise we risk developing the kind of personality that attempts always to recreate the psychic disposition of youth. This is another way of getting stuck in looking to the past, in just the same way as some people get stuck at the childhood stage. Such a personality becomes wooden, boring and stereotyped.
Ageing
Jung says that the second half of life should have a very different quality from the first half. He compares the journey of the psyche to the daily journey of the sun, rising towards the zenith and then falling again. In the first half of life we are concerned with achievement, establishing ourselves in the world, earning a living, raising a family and so on. The problems we encounter are mainly biological and social. Later in life, we can hopefully afford to become more inward looking and reflective. The problems we are involved with become more cultural and spiritual in nature. Confronting and integrating the repressed aspects of the personality may now lead eventually to the individuation of the psyche.
Jung says that the psychic
changes that come with ageing tend to be reflected to some extent in the physical body. Women tend to develop more masculine features, such as deep voices and wispy moustaches. Men’s voices often get thinner and higher, their faces soften and they tend to become plumper. Jung reports the case of a Native American chief, to whom Great Spirit appeared in a dream, announcing that from then on he must live with the women and children, wearing women’s clothes and eating their food. This story illustrates the stage of life’s decline, where our human values and even our bodies tend to undergo a reversal into the opposite.
In the realm of the psyche Jung observes a similar process going on. He says that it is as if we have a certain store of masculinity or femininity which by midlife is starting to run low, so we then allow our unused opposite-sex energy to come into play. He gives the example of a middle-aged man who, feeling tired of work, winds up his business. His wife then takes over and perhaps opens a little shop, where he potters around being the handyman. Very often these role reversals are accompanied by upheavals in the marriage as the husband discovers his emotional side at last, and the wife her sharp and logical mind.
Jung warns that we cannot live the afternoon of life as we did the morning: what was great in the morning will be seen to be little in the evening, and what was true in the morning will become a lie. At this stage, it is essential to begin to explore the world within the psyche if we wish to stay psychologically healthy; we must begin to understand ourselves and our spiritual nature. But this is not always easy, and many people prefer to get stuck in the past, perhaps becoming endlessly moaning victims, tedious eternal adolescents, or stuffy boring old doctrinaires.