August 1, 2023
In Aion (CW9), Jung begins the chapter on the Anima and Animus by exploring the projection-making factor of Maya, the Spinning Woman, whom we may have encountered in our dreams. He’s setting up the idea of the anima but quickly pivots to speak about something more grounded and commonly understood: the destructive pattern of a devouring mother, and a son who would prefer to be devoured.
“Where does the guilt lie?” Jung asks. “With the mother or with the son? Probably with both.”
In Barbara Hannah’s commentary on Aion, meanwhile, she emphasizes the blame on the mother. She states that this is likely because she is a woman and, perhaps, feels embarrassed by a tendency she can recognize in herself and other women. (There is some shame within the blame.)
Marie-Louise von Franz does the same throughout her lectures and writings on heterosexual intimacy and discussions of the anima or animus—including in this lecture. She is notably hard on women in a way that to most people’s ears today, there is a note of a complex or an over-identification with Jung and perhaps, therefore, her own animus at play.
What is true? Who is right? How do we separate the gender of the speaker from the ideas being spoken?
Jung continues:
“The unsatisfied longing of the son for life and the world ought to be taken seriously. There is in him a desire to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field of the world. But he makes no more than a series of fitful starts, for his initiative as well as his staying power are crippled by the secret memory that the world and happiness may be had as a gift—from the mother. The fragment of world which he, like every man, must encounter again and again is never quite the right one, since it does not fall into his lap, does not meet him half way, but remains resistant, has to be conquered, and submits only to force. It makes demands on the masculinity of a man, on his ardour, above all on his courage and resolution when it comes to throwing his whole being into the scales. For this he would need a faithless Eros, one capable of forgetting his mother and undergoing the pain of relinquishing the first love of his life.”
Jung, a man, conveys a kind of thwarted agency of a growing young man and emphasizes his desire to slide back into unconsciousness and the embrace of the Mother. Jung names, meanwhile, the vivifying force of love, of a maiden, an anima image, by his side. The anima-Eros-woman offers support and motivation to leave Mother and, therefore, lends him the agency to live his own life. (But does he then need to leave her to find himself again?)
There is so much to be learned and discussed from these short paragraphs, and from Hannah and von Franz’s discussions too.
But also so many questions arise to the modern reader that can’t easily be set aside. What about a growing man who is attracted to men? Does the anima image take the form of a male? Is that, then, the animus? Or might we return to an original idea of Eros as the male god?
What, meanwhile, would we make of a mother-daughter relationship that is overly enmeshed and in which the daughter is being devoured? What agency is required of the daughter to break free and find her own life? Is Eros needed there too?
Join me to explore all of this and more in the upcoming seminar in which we’ll explore the masculine and feminine and how they might be integrated in our actual lives today.
xo, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies