The Gendering of Anima and Animus

The Objection From Inside

First attested
1921Anima and animus appear in print in Psychological Types (1921); the gendered Eros/Logos mapping is stated in full in Aion (1951, CW 9ii §§27–29). Goldenberg's objection reaches print in Signs in 1976.

Jung's gendering of anima and animus was contested from inside the tradition and with Jung's own tool: Goldenberg (Signs, 1976) proposed demoting the pair from archetype to archetypal image, making its Eros/Logos content historical and revisable.

Fifty years of argument from inside the tradition: is the content fixed by nature, or made by history?

In Aion (1951, CW 9ii §29) Jung matched the animus to the paternal Logos and the anima to the maternal Eros, adding that in women Logos "is often only a regrettable accident" — though §27 calls the whole formulation provisional. The objection came from inside the tradition, not outside it. Naomi Goldenberg argued in Signs in 1976 that anima and animus be demoted from eternal archetypes to archetypal images: socially formed, and so revisable. Demaris Wehr followed in 1987, the year Mary Ann Mattoon and Jennette Jones asked in Quadrant whether the animus was obsolete. Susan Rowland's Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002) turned Jung's 1929 admission that every psychology is a subjective confession on the anima writing itself; she chaired the International Association for Jungian Studies from 2003. Each argued for revising the concept, not for leaving analytical psychology.

Light

Goldenberg's 1976 move used Jung's own instrument — demote anima and animus from archetype to archetypal image and their content becomes historical, and revisable. The tradition then audited itself in its own journal: Quadrant printed "Is the Animus Obsolete?" in 1987.

Shadow

Goldenberg's 1976 objection was concrete: on Jung's mapping, once a woman "moves into a Logos arena" she is "behaving unnaturally as well". Jung hedged in §29 itself — "I use Eros and Logos merely as conceptual aids" — and the mapping outlived the hedge.

Sources and verification8 sources · 5 links

Primary source

  • C. G. Jung, "Freud and Jung: Contrasts" (1929), in Freud and Psychoanalysis (CW 4), 1929, §774Jung's admission that 'every psychology—my own included—has the character of a subjective confession', the sentence Rowland turns on his anima writing.
  • C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (CW 9ii), 1951, ch. III, "The Syzygy: Anima and Animus", §§27–29Jung's mapping of the animus to the paternal Logos and the anima to the maternal Eros; the sentence that in women Logos 'is often only a regrettable accident'; Jung's hedge in the same paragraph that 'I use Eros and Logos merely as conceptual aids'; the definition of the animus's 'opinions' as a priori assumptions claiming absolute truth; and Jung's own statement in §27 that the work is pioneer work and 'can only be provisional'.

Scholarship

  • Naomi R. Goldenberg, "A Feminist Critique of Jung", Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 2, no. 2, 1976, pp. 443–449The 1976 proposal that anima and animus be reclassified from eternal archetypes to socially, culturally and historically determined archetypal images; and the objection that once a woman 'moves into a Logos arena' she is 'behaving unnaturally as well'.
  • Demaris S. Wehr, Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes, 1987, Boston: Beacon Press, xii + 148 pp.A critique written by a Jungian psychotherapist in training that uses feminist theory and the sociology of knowledge against Jung's claims for the universality and purely empirical basis of the gendered archetypes, while retaining his account of individuation.
  • Mary Ann Mattoon and Jennette Jones, "Is the Animus Obsolete?", Quadrant, vol. 20, no. 1, 1987, Quadrant is published by the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, New YorkThat the question of retiring the animus concept was put in print, under that title, in the tradition's own journal in 1987.
  • Susan Rowland, Jung: A Feminist Revision, 2002, Cambridge: Polity Press; see pp. 24, 40–41The reading that Jung collapses gender into bodily sex; the use of Jung's 'subjective confession' principle against his own anima writing; and the treatment of the Eros/Logos assignment as Jung's fantasy rather than his finding.
  • Betty de Shong Meador, in Alain de Mijolla (ed.), International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, entry "Animus–Anima (Analytical Psychology)", 2005, Detroit: Macmillan Reference USAThat the notion first appears in print in Psychological Types (1921), and that the standing critical charge is Jung's conflation of relatedness (Eros) with women and rationality (Logos) with men.

Further reading

  • Andrew Samuels, The Plural Psyche: Personality, Morality and the Father, 1989, London: Routledge; ch. 6, 'Beyond the feminine principle'A Jungian analyst challenging the gendered categories from inside analytical psychology: Samuels' own preface describes chapter 6 as exploring 'whether there are sex-specific psychologies and, then, whether it is valuable or not to take "masculine" and "feminine" as metaphors'.

Linked entries

  • Derives fromThe Archetype and the Archetypal ImageAttested

    Goldenberg's 1976 move is Jung's own distinction applied to his gender writing: call anima and animus images rather than archetypes and their content becomes historical.

  • Set againstThe ShadowAttested

    Aion treats shadow, anima and animus in sequence, but only the contrasexual pair carries a fixed gender assignment — which is why only it drew this fifty-year objection.

  • Part ofIndividuationAttested

    Jung made the encounter with the contrasexual figure a stage of individuation, so the argument over its gendering is about the path itself and not only about a term.

  • Set againstThe AnimaAttested

    The objection to the contrasexual scheme as a whole — that it fixes what men and women are — has been made from inside analytical psychology since the 1970s and is treated there.

  • Set againstThe 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.

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