The Animus

Her Lecture, His Book

First attested
1921The term's first appearance in print is the definition of "soul" in Jung's Psychologische Typen (Rascher, Zurich, 1921) — a single sentence reasoning that if we speak of a man's anima we must speak of a woman's animus. In H. G. Baynes's English of 1923 the word occurs once in the body of the book, at page 595, and the index carries one page reference for it; the German has not been checked against that count. The first sustained treatment is Emma Jung's paper read to the Psychological Club of Zurich in November 1931 and printed in expanded form in 1934.

The animus's first sustained treatment is Emma Jung's November 1931 lecture, printed inside her husband's 1934 book, Englished in Spring in 1941, and a book of her own only in 1957, two years after she died — with a footnote in Collected Works 7 pointing readers to it.

The inner masculine archetype in the female psyche, representing assertive conviction, logical drive, and inner strength.

The word enters Jung's published work as a corollary: in Psychological Types (Zurich 1921; H. G. Baynes's English, 1923) the definition of soul reasons that if a man has an anima, a woman must have an animus. His 1928 chapter Anima and Animus gives the anima twenty-three pages and the animus eight, and grants that the difficulties become almost insuperable. The sustained account is Emma Jung's (1882–1955), read to the Psychological Club of Zurich in November 1931, printed expanded inside her husband's Wirklichkeit der Seele (Rascher, 1934), Englished by Cary F. Baynes at pages 27–51 of Spring's first issue in 1941, and issued as the book Animus and Anima in 1957, two years after her death. Her four stages, power, deed, word and meaning, come from Faust translating logos, not from a case series.

Light

The first sustained account of the animus, written from inside a woman's experience rather than deduced from men's, and developmental — power through deed and word to meaning, open to work rather than complaint. A footnote in her husband's Collected Works sends readers to it.

Shadow

Her scheme still ranks women by the stage their animus has reached, and keeps her husband's framing of it as unbidden opinion. That she may have originated the concept is Princeton's own 2025 description, not a read argument; her essay says Jung named the pair.

Sources and verification10 sources · 5 links

Primary source

  • C. G. Jung; trans. H. G. Baynes, Psychological Types; or, The Psychology of Individuation, 1923, p. 595, in the Definitions chapter under 'Soul'; index entry 'Animus of woman: 595'. German original: Psychologische Typen, Rascher, Zurich, 1921In this English text the word 'animus' occurs once in the body of the book, as a logical corollary to the anima rather than as a described phenomenon: if we speak of the anima of a man, we must speak of the animus of a woman.
  • C. G. Jung; trans. H. G. and Cary F. Baynes, Anima and Animus, in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1928, Part II, Individuation, chapter II, pp. 202–232 (chapter III opens at p. 233); the turn to the animus is at p. 225. German original: Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten, Rascher, Zurich, 1928Jung's own extended treatment, three years before Emma Jung's lecture: twenty-three pages on the anima, then his statement at p. 225 that he has kept exclusively to masculine psychology, and that the difficulties become almost insuperable when he approaches the psychology of the animus — which occupies the remaining eight pages.
  • Emma Jung, Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Animus, in C. G. Jung, Wirklichkeit der Seele: Anwendungen und Fortschritte der neueren Psychologie, 1934, Psychologische Abhandlungen, Bd. IV; Rascher, Zurich; title page reads 'mit Beiträgen von Hugo Rosenthal, Emma Jung, W. M. Kranefeldt'The paper was read to the Psychological Club of Zurich in November 1931 and first printed, in slightly expanded form, inside a volume published under C. G. Jung's name, with Emma Jung listed second of three contributors on the title page.
  • Emma Jung; trans. Cary F. Baynes, On the Nature of the Animus, in Spring: Contributions to Jungian Thought, 1941, Spring 1941, pp. 27–51; verified against Spring Publications' own complete index of published articles, 1941–2015The first English appearance — of the version read to the Club, not of the expanded 1934 text — in the inaugural issue of Spring, the journal founded in 1941 by the Analytical Psychology Club of New York, alongside Toni Wolff's paper on individuation in women at pp. 81–103.
  • C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works 9ii), 1951, chapter III, 'The Syzygy: Anima and Animus', §§20–42 (chapter IV opens at §43); the animus at §§29–33. German original: Aion: Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte, Rascher, Zurich, 1951Jung's standard later statement, the one usually cited for the animus, gives it five paragraphs, defines it as the paternal Logos answering the maternal Eros, declines to give the two concepts 'too specific a definition', and names no writer on the animus — the chapter's one pointer to other work, at note 3, is to Linda Fierz-David's The Dream of Poliphilo and to Jung's own 'Psychology of the Transference', both on the anima.
  • Emma Jung; trans. Cary F. Baynes and Hildegard Nagel, Animus and Anima: Two Essays, 1957, Analytical Psychology Club of New York, 94 pp.; LCCN 57002265, LC BF692 .J812. The companion essay translates 'Die Anima als Naturwesen', first printed in Studien zur analytischen Psychologie C. G. Jungs, vol. 2 (Rascher, 1955)The standard English book, published in 1957 — twenty-six years after the lecture and two years after Emma Jung's death in 1955 — by a members' club rather than by a press, and never included in the Collected Works, because the essays are not C. G. Jung's.
  • C. G. Jung; trans. R. F. C. Hull, On the Psychology of the Unconscious, in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works 7, 2nd edn), 1966, footnote to par. 141, indexed in the volume as 'Jung, Emma: "On the Nature of the Animus," 90n'; the bibliography gives 'JUNG, EMMA. "On the Nature of the Animus." Translated by Cary F. Baynes, in: Animus and Anima. New York (Analytical Psychology Club), 1957'The footnote reads: 'I have called this masculine element in woman the animus and the corresponding feminine element in man the anima. See infra, pars. 296-340; also Emma Jung, "On the Nature of the Animus."' Her paper is therefore pointed at from inside the Collected Works although never printed in them; because the bibliography cites the 1957 book, the pointer as printed cannot predate her death, and the English does not show whether Jung or his editors added it.

Scholarship

  • Brigitte Allain-Dupré, Jung-Rauschenbach, Emma (1882–1955), in International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, ed. Alain de Mijolla, 2005, signed entry; Macmillan Reference / Thomson Gale, DetroitEmma Jung's dates — born 30 March 1882 in Schaffhausen, died 27 November 1955 in Zurich — her first presidency of the Psychological Club of Zurich from 1916, the 1931 Club paper on the problem of the animus and its publication by C. G. Jung in Wirklichkeit der Seele in 1934, and her long Grail study completed after her death by Marie-Louise von Franz.

The tradition itself

  • Emma Jung, lecture to the Zurich Psychological Club, 1931, November 1931The esoteric reading given on this entry — published in English as Animus and Anima (1957)

Where this claim originates

  • Ann Conrad Lammers, Thomas Fischer and Medea Hoch (eds); trans. Lammers and Alison Kappes, Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung, 2025, Princeton University Press, published 14 January 2025The current scholarly re-presentation of Emma Jung as an early collaborator in the making of analytical psychology. Princeton's own description of the book says it sheds new light on her 'as an early collaborator who may have originated the concept of the animus' — the publisher's sentence, to be reported as such rather than as the editors' argument, which this entry has not read.

Linked entries

  • Part ofIndividuationAttested

    The 1928 chapter that names the pair sits inside Part II of Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, headed 'Individuation' — coming to terms with the animus was placed within that process, not treated as a topic on its own.

  • Derives fromThe Archetype and the Archetypal ImageAttested

    Jung classed the animus among the archetypes, so the position he settled on in 1946 and revised in 1954 applies to it: nobody has observed an animus, only images, and the descriptions in Jung's 1928 chapter and Emma Jung's 1931 paper are descriptions of figures met in analysis.

  • Set againstThe Gendering of Anima and AnimusAttested

    The objection that has run since the 1970s is aimed at the animus as Jung described it in 1928 and in Aion §29 — a woman's unbidden opinions, her Logos 'often only a regrettable accident' — and Emma Jung's paper, though written from a woman's side, keeps a good deal of that framing.

  • Set againstThe ShadowAttested

    The same §19 rule from the woman's side; and at §35 Jung adds that 'it is easier to gain insight into the shadow than into the anima or animus', because education has already prepared everyone to hear that they are not pure gold.

  • Set againstThe AnimaAttested

    The paired term for a woman's inner masculine, and the one worked out largely by Emma Jung rather than by her husband.

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