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JUNG AND THE ANIMUS
From the book 'Animus Rising' by Bernard X. Bovasso
Animus and the Shadow
For all secular purposes, Death and sexuality are still blurred in the contemporary life destiny insofar as God has been proclaimed dead (Nietzsche), mythology discarded and the new collective consciousness left denuded of Divine imperatives. Even Jung took his turn at reducing the God-image to a personal psychological dimension in his work Answer to Job. The result in all cases was a release of the raw instinctual expressions following Freud's original presentation of a personalized and psychologised "pleasure principle(. Indicated here is how a traditional sublimation of evil amounts to another collective repression. Jung notes:
"The problem of opposites offers an eminently suitable and ideal battleground for the most contradictory theories and above all for partially or wholly unrealized prejudices regardless of one's philosophy of life. With this development psychotherapy stirred up a hornet's nest of the first magnitude. Let us take as an example the supposedly simple case of a repressed instinct. If the repression is lifted the instinct is set free. Once freed it wants and functions in its own way. But this creates a difficult--sometimes intolerably difficult--situation. The instinct ought therefore to be modified, or "sublimated," as they say. How this is to be done without creating a new repression nobody can explain."
It of course went unnoticed that the death of God must equally end the life of Satan and which would subvert the psychological understanding of the Mythogenic animus and its relation both to the subject of death and sexuality. Where did the agency of Evil go but as another form of repression in the collective mortal destiny and settle in the prevailing culture as a most dynamic but concealed presence. Hence, as animus rising it is freed from its traditional repression. The death of God, however, would also apply as the death of Evil represented by Death or Hades.
The animus as a transgressive Spirit, however, was already well detailed in the Biblical Garden of Eden. As the nefarious serpent, it served as the animus for Lilith, and an incomplete understanding of the nature of both Death and sexuality, something that has remained at large to this day. As in the phenomenon of animus- rising it is represented as the phallic serpent in the Garden. Yet, the animus as phallus qua Hades also performs as consort to the singular feminine image in the traditional myth of Mother/Daughter known as the Demeter/Kore, or much later, as the Christian Virgin Mother that combines the mother and virgin as one image.
From this traditional standpoint, the animus was easily repressed and evolved as the shadow side of all men, quite evident in the marital strife of the 20th Century. The unsavory contention, apparently from the start, cast all men as in fact living out their own nefarious shadow image as an animus of either Mum, a wife, the Mother Church, the political state, or an ideology. The fusion of such hierarchies as a single expression included the projected traditional circumstance of mother as virgin, in effect incarnated as a problematical duality in a woman's life experience. It found more intimate expression via the animus in its relation to the singularity of the combined mother and Daughter image. The dyadic circumstance was especially a quality of the animus reflecting its plurality of affectations and thus maternally passed to the male who in effect acted it (the animus) out in object reality. It may thus be said that the male personality was in effect collectively designed in a matri-centic tradition, now culture-wise again at full face value.
In view of much recent biographical exploration of the life and views of famed Swiss psychologist, Dr. C.G. Jung, most provocative was his agape relation to women for whom he represented a supraordinate animus pulling at a most critical inner and unconscious male image of the feminine psychology. The man and the animus were thus not separate in such a circumstance and resulted in his many extra-marital affairs. As collectively common as such traffic is it does not in Jung's case, quite measure up to his creatively brilliant stature as one of the leading psychologists of the 20th Century, more so because his forte was a preoccupation with theological and religious subjects. Jung acclaimed or derided as "mystical" and measured with his collective and ordinary masculine necessities does not, from the standpoint of the old fashioned Freudian super-ego, meet with a traditional moral propriety however promiscuous excesses were adopted as the less mentionable norm for the collective male life style.
In this respect he lived as an ordinary collective male, no better or no worse, insofar as the male of Western society exists in the thrall of the feminine projection of the animus. This by no means reflects a moral judgement on my part but a phenomenological approach to collective maleness and its relation to Animus Rising. It, of course, by necessity of the subject, would include myself and account for my own occasional intrusions of autobiographical details in the following work.
It must, however, be noted at the outset, that in my private views I fully appreciate most of Jung's metapsychological notions as well as his Analytical Psychology and its therapeutical effectiveness. Since, however, I am a practicing Painter and Poet my private relation to the figure of Jung is perhaps from his bottom side where for much of his life he secretly practiced painting and sculpture. But more to complicate matters I am also indulged of an interest in philosophy, something gained after studying Pre-Socratic philosophy with Prof. Hans Jonas. Thus my approach to both Art and Psychology includes existential and ontological concerns and includes a philosophical measure of Animus Rising.
This was, however, an alarming proposition for Jung, more so it included where he himself was predisposed for such a compelling animus. Outside of all culture and collective forms the more psychogenic aspect of the animus was explicitly reported in a dream that he had as a three-year-old child: of a giant erect penis standing in an underground cave and as if rising upward from its confinement in the underworld of Hades. In a more pedestrian and collective interpretation, suggested is the Devil himself, as if ascending from Hell in an attempt to free itself and take form as an incarnate being. Following this cue the animus may be cast, on one hand, in the image of Hades, the Lord of Death, and on the other, as a rude and compelling phallus.
The phallus as such has been banned as a public iconic representation following the Christian kenosis where it was the first item to be purged and sent to and repressed in the realm of Death and oblivion, ostensively out of sight and maintained so until this day. Such was not the case, however, for pre-Christian culture.
The purged phallus was thus endowed with an ambivalence. It at once indicated the primordial animus as simultaneously representing both the power of collective generation and that of death and destruction. The latter, secondary repression, is horrendously alive and well in contemporary Culture as an unconscious todestriebe (Death drive). This new repression would be most problematical if projected as the contrasexual agent of the feminine psychology. But that is hardly the case insofar as the personal psychological animus more often presents itself in more benign terms, sometimes as the common persona of a nasty and demanding fellow and other times as a gentle old man. The animus image of the wise old man is thus traditionally accepted as the chronically given ideal personality of the male, something definitively demonstrated in Ingmar Bergman's film, Wild Strawberries. The wise old man archetypal image, however, equally infers a diminishment or lack of sexual expression. But such an image equally represents the animus as thymos and a benign Spirit at that.
The nature of the endopsychic animus as a function of the maternal unconscious is, therefore, only cursorily addressed except when the main cultural emphasis characterizes it as something worriedly addressed by the Poet William Butler Yeats as the animus mundi in his poem, The Second Coming. The nature of the animus thus enjoys a bi-polarity from the personal psychology to a transhistorical dimension and, as it were, part of the autonomously unfolding phenomena of Culture. In such collective demeanor, it serves as the agency of apocalypse, the final Revelation: the animus revealing itself most archaically as an image beyond all conscious expectation. But this was precisely the case for Jung's baby dream that astoundingly revealed itself to a child.
The Two Personalities
On the other hand, the alarming notice of this dream image indicated that Jung considered himself from early on gripped by this primordial phallic animus and which he preferred not to deal with. He observes to the contrary in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections: "At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. Here I am, as it were, the 'age-old son of the mother.' That is how alchemy puts it, very wisely, for the 'old man,' the ancient,' whom I had already experienced as a child, is personality No. 2, who has always been and always will be. He exists outside time and is the son of the maternal unconscious. In my fantasies he took the form of Philemon, and he comes to life again at Bollingen."3
He accordingly proposes his active personality ideal as the traditional wise old man and in that sense, as Philemon it represented his conscious expectation. Yet, personality No. 2, active in his childhood, was also archetypally predisposed by the underground phallus and in that sense barred to his active No.1 personality and the ideal of the wise old man. Raised, as such, is the question of whether his childhood underground phallus dream was more likely an animus projected by his mother to her son. Would this not characterize Jung No. 2 as the supreme example of the maternally projected animus that for the most part remains unconscious for personality No.1 whose goal, Like Faust's, is to attain the ideal final perfection of the wise old man? The phallic animus would thus prevail as the complement to the wise old man image, the ideal unconsciously compromised by the demonic.
Neglected in either case is the maternal presence and its influence in the infantile reality of a child. As much is academic enough in the taxologies of Psychoanalysis except for one conclusion: the maternal image never appears as a singularity but is imperatively bonded with a daughter image and by which the roles of Mother and her virgin nature express a fused two-in-one image: the feminine nature sustained simultaneously as both Mother and Daughter. Without this understanding, the nature of the feminine ambivalence and its relation to the animus remains two-dimensional and not expressed in depth. The feminine ambivalence, nevertheless, is astoundingly evident in the myth of Mother Demeter and her virgin daughter, Persephone.
Such a myth was in service to the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, a matricentric cult of the dead that reaches back to pre-history and what may be assigned as a trans-historical collective tradition. Both figures were combined as one image representing both mother and virgin long before the event of the Virgin Mother Mary who also shared the duplex mother/virgin daughter image. Most conspicuously, however, mother and daughter in the Feminine Mysteries case were incestuously involved with the most stupendous animus of all otherwise logged as Hades, the Lord of Death that, beyond common expectation, was phallically active. The image as such was later evolved as Satan and finally taken up by Goethe's rendition of the Faust legend and its Mephistopheles. The Faust representation played a compulsive part in Jung's bi-polar persona as a conflict between his No. 1 and No. 2 personalities.
The Faustian lineage followed in a tradition from mythic representation of Hermes, an animus image that was traceable to the 8th Century, BC. The god also figured in Homer's Ode to Hermes as Hermes the Thief. Yet, in the extended collective tradition the focus on Hermes, as the mobile extension of Hades, more currently figured as at large in the upper world as the original representation of the animus, more so that both were identified with traditional fetish worship of the phallus. Hades as Death is, of course, the original thief and greatest Evil known to mortals. Hermes in service to Hades as procurer of the dead, however, was also personified the phallus. In this venue the phallus was also detailed as the agency that stole the souls of the dead who, as his sheep, followed him to the realm of Death. The Pied Piper of Hamlin was also such a Shepherd as was Jesus Christ who led the way to Hell after his death by crucifixion. Jung was also such a soter Shepard, leading his patients into the unconscious. All were collective figures represented as agape, "love" as the awe for a certain collectively selected leader or messiah (soter). It was as if to follow, although hardly arrived, directional animus that pointed to the lap of Persephone, the virgin assigned as consort of Death and Evil in the figure of Hades.
The Philandering male
More troubling, was the extraordinary possibility that the archaic phallic nature of the rising animus lingered as a most compulsive aspect of the collective masculine psychology and by which men of the highest moral and ethical caliber could not resist. It was as if it were a given that they were unconsciously identified with the animus of their own anima, the Persephone nature as virgin. The result is a an item of unconsciousness that is not to be easily resolved in the collective masculine life experience: the unconscious lust for the "other woman," other that is, to either mother or wife. As the hetero or hetaera anima it represented for the male his unrealized potential and, as such, the virgin daughter and sexual congress with her as if a reflection of and a requirement for his success in the world. As much was demonstrated by the Demeter\Persephone myth where the virgin daughter is drawn into the underworld of Hades (Death) as the Queen of Death. Her vigorous erotic pastime with her Lord Hades, however, served to obscure his infamous role in the world as a reclaimed of living souls. It would be as if the male potential was exclusively directed toward the overcoming of others as a means of inflating the ego beyond the capacity of its given personality. It is aptly demonstrated in the psychoanalytical Oedipal Complex and in the case of Jung's No.1 personality, as virtual son to Papa Freud. Sooner or later, the Persephone image enters the scene.
In the collective practical psychology of the philandering male, the mistress would perform in this role. Represented as such the mistress would indulge the male in the repressed zone of consciousness by contrast to his compromised relation to a mother\wife figure. The male, however, was more commonly drawn to such a woman from an erotic standpoint hardly aware of its relation to a death image. Was C. G. Jung indulging what he assigned as his less developed No. Two personality without coming to terms with his erotic compulsions? However, it produced a trauma by which he wasn't what he thought he was in his more active No. One extraverted personality. Here a collective and traditional rather than psychological question is raised: whether the need for a young mistress was no less the same compulsion demonstrated traditionally and historically and at the climax of the so-called "Victorian Age" summed up by Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde image.
The male certainly could not understand himself as given to such indulgence by which he was wagged by his tail. It was, nevertheless, actualized by the male as giving in to philandering or "wandering" from his formal relation with his wife who in effect served as the mother to himself as well as their, if any, children.
Was this a moral issue that was compromised by a peculiar necessity? Did it place such necessity where the psyche was the greatest evil in ethical terms and thus expressed itself pathologized? Did it in turn over-ride such psychological masculine questions of both "who am I" and "what am I" if indeed I Am at all? Was ontological correctness surrendered to this compulsion for the as if unlimited potential of the Other Woman who was only nominally assigned as "virgin"?
In Jung's case this involved redeeming his Number Two personality; in effect his repressed introversion at home in its infantile maternal state complete with archaic images. Yet, he did not explore this while composing his so-called "Red Book", dedicated to the wise old man, Philemon, and so masterly rendered with calligraphic text and well-wrought images. Philemon in Jung's phantasy, was an outgrowth of Elijah who was revealed to him in the company of a blind Salome. Less problematical, however, was the nature of his Number One personality as the extraverted thinker early on regulating his career and ambitions yet unable to resist temptation even as its ideal was Philemon. From the more unconscious standpoint, however, a young woman, whether virgin of not, was as if the unlimited virgin feminine as womb of potential and went hand in hand with the male's heroic hope for collective prestige and celebrity.
The blind Salome image would also be in equation to the unawakened virgin so that both personifications would represent potential. However, a threesome is involved in this. Jung notes: "I have mentioned that there was a third figure in my fantasy besides Elijah and Salome: the large black snake. In myths the snake is a frequent counter of the hero."4 Although His No. 1 personality enjoyed heroic ambitions, the snake image reverts to his nascent No. 2 personality and the Underground phallus. But, it also relates to the erotic necessities for the other woman of the No.1 personality and its extraverted object seeking predisposition.
The Extraverted Male Necessity
The peculiar fascination for this phenomenal necessity for the other woman, or woman younger than a wife, did not overlook that every male of self or public station required a mistress. This included just about every President of the U.S. to every male marked in fame whatever his station from Beverly Hills to Zurich and, of course, Washington, DC. In most cases, first love (of wife) and as the good son of a mother was thrown to the wind. All matrimonial obligation was by such necessity violated. This would indicate that neither mother or wife, because in formal relation to the Son/Husband, did not perform as anima images. The anima, indeed, appears only as the young mistress as "other woman" who represents the Queen of death Persephone nature that is no longer a virgin maiden. For Jung the role was reserved for the blind Salome. Opened wide is the question of need by an older man for a young woman to further his expectation of the potential to still achieve "in the world" his final perfection. The problem is that such a supraordinate ideal is also in equation with Death. In that case, the male assumes the animus role of Death, complete with wandering phallus. The shadow side of his persona is thus akin to Hades as the figure representing death.
Such "perfection(, however, as a euphemism for Death is also an intimation of immortality. The implication is tautological insofar as it posits Death as "killing" Death. Because the mistress anima as an instrument to this quest performs as a daughter figure raised is the question of a de facto incest. Apparently, mother and wife did not fit the bill in this view for what Jung called the anima. The anima was indeed designed in temptation. Such need not have been the case, however, for the anima cast as a daughter or a younger sister. They were more easily sublimated in the person of the anima as elicit other woman. Implied, accordingly, was an unconscious incestuous necessity for a man's daughter and by which "other" was in fact the analog for "inner" at its deepest level of repression. Lifting the repression, as Jung much later understood, simply created a brand new repression of an unknown sort in this case wrought as the incest motif.
Jung early on defended the functional necessity of endopsychic "incest" and much to the chagrin of his mentor Sigmund Freud. In all cases, a mother was included, not as a "mother-in-law" but one that was outside of all law, demonstrated by the female conquests of a Mr. Hyde. Here we must take the seasoned male traffic in young ladies as the greatest unknown and, anomalously, as the receptacle of the greatest potential. In either case daughter and mistress as anima figures were unquestionably marked as in-the-world realities and as open ended agencies of the new repression harboring an unknown potential. Such extra-marital affairs and their incestuous implications were, indeed, the instruments for Jung unraveling his No.Two personality that soon enough led to his apparent psychosis in his Confrontation With the Unconscious as cited in his Memoir.
It was at that point the destructive and thanatic intent of the anima of the animus became fearsomely apparent. It was difficult to either take it to heart and suppress it or leave it all to forgetfulness. Such was not the case with the animus rising whose venue as spirit was invested in the culture at large. At this point, some account must be taken for the nature of collective expressions, their superficial if not often droll affectations. Collectivity, as such, would be the antithesis to the archetypal reality of the animus at large on a broad historical reach.
Bernard X. Bovasso bernx@aol.com