In Part I of this two-part article, I laid out the map Emma Jung provided for the four stages of animus development in a woman. It traced from the man of physical power, through the man of deeds and the bearer of the word, to the figure of meaning and spirit. Each of them being a face the inner masculine wears as a woman’s psychology matures. It is a wonderfully detailed map and represents remarkable insight on Jung’s part and remains, even more than seven decades after its first publication, one of the most useful tools in the Jungian’s toolkit for understanding the dynamics of a projection and the possibility of their withdrawal.
But to be cliché, a map is not the territory. And the territory, as post-Jungian thinkers have discovered (or perhaps more accurately, as post-Jungian thinkers have had to grapple with as the times have changed), is considerably larger than even Emma Jung’s framework can accommodate. Such is the fate of any pioneer’s work. Pressures that have come to bear on both the Jungs’ work relate to the foundations on which the anima and animus rest: what gender means psychologically, which principles belong to which sex, and whether the anima and animus are figures belong respectively and exclusively to men’s and women’s inner life at all.
Here in Part II, I’ll take up these questions and try to find where the map’s edges are and perhaps what may lie beyond them.
Classical Assumptions
To understand what post-Jungian thinkers found problematic in the classical anima/animus framework, it helps to begin with what assumptions were baked into Jung’s thinking. He associated the animus with Logos and with the principles of discrimination, logic, and meaning. To the anima he assigned Eros and the principles of relatedness, soul, and feeling. He then mapped these onto gender: Logos as the masculine principle, Eros as the feminine. The animus, as the inner masculine in a woman, carried Logos. The anima, as the inner feminine in a man, carried Eros. The model is elegant, internally consistent, beautifully symmetrical, and has been tremendously influential.
It was also, as the British Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels argues in The Plural Psyche (1989), a cultural assumption that snuck in as a psychological truth. The equating of Logos with masculinity and Eros with femininity was not objectively discovered in the psyche, but rather inherited from the culture Jung lived in. Which was a culture with very particular ideas about what men and women were for. Building those assumptions into depth psychology enshrined them as archetypal truth rather than a culturally subjective arrangement – or assignment - of gender roles.
Samuels is not alone in this criticism. A whole generation of post-Jungian analysts argues that the framework, however useful it is, needs to be distinguished from its cultural inheritances. That is to say, the stages Emma Jung described were real. But the assumption that they applied only to women, or that Logos was inherently masculine, is not.
This distinction matters enormously in practice. A clinician or coach who applies the classical Jungian framework without taking into account its gender assumptions risks pathologizing in women what is celebrated in men, like intellectual authority, decisive action, and speaking with conviction. It makes these animus qualities that need to be integrated rather than ego capacities that simply need to be developed. The difference is subtle. But Jung’s map, applied too rigidly, can become a tool for the very limitations it was meant to transcend.
Logos and Eros Unbound
The post-Jungians questioned the specific gender assignment of Logos and Eros. But in doing so, they also free them from the shadows of each respective sex’s unconscious. In the classical Jungian framework, Logos and Eros function as a complementary pair. Masculine and feminine, discrimination and relatedness, word and feeling. Each sex carries one primarily and reaches toward the other through the contra-sexual, primarily unconscious figure. Integration means bringing the “other” to consciousness and achieving a cooperative balance between the two.
The post-Jungian revision, exemplified by the work of analysts like Gareth Hill, whose Masculine and Feminine: The Natural Flow of Opposites in the Psyche, proposes something subtler. Logos and Eros are not simply masculine and feminine hiding in the unconscious of the contra-sexual individual. They are each psychological orientations that every human psyche navigates, regardless of gender. A woman’s relationship to Logos is not mediated solely through her (unconscious) animus. Nor a man’s relationship to Eros solely through his (unconscious) anima. Both principles are available directly, and the work of psychological development involves their conscious integration in every individual psyche.
This is a significant shift. It moves the framework from a contra-sexual model, in which growth always requires reaching across the gender divide toward the inner other, to a model of psychological wholeness in which the full spectrum of human capacity is available to each person from within their own nature.
For practical purposes of coaching, analysis, therapy, or reflective self-examination this changes the question dramatically. It becomes, “what is your actual relationship to Logos and to Eros, and where have you consigned one of them to the unconscious?”
The Inner Masculine in Men
This all raises a question that the classical framework could not even contemplate, let alone answer: what does it mean for a man to have an animus?
From a classical Jungian point of view, the question is moot. If the animus is the inner masculine, and a man is already consciously identified with the masculine principle, what work is there for an inner masculine to do? Jung’s framework has no answer, because it organizes the contra-sexual figures around biological sex.
But post-Jungian thinkers, particularly those working in men’s psychology, have pursued this question. Robert A. Johnson, in his pithy book Lying with the Heavenly Woman, approached the question very accessibly. His concern was primarily the anima, and the dangers of remaining unconsciously identified with her rather than integrating her. But his work also implies that a man’s relationship to his own masculinity is by no means straightforward or fully conscious. The inner masculine in a man is not simply what he is, but rather what has. His relationship to the masculine principle can be as unconscious, as projected, and as developmentally arrested as any woman’s with her animus.
John Beebe, an analyst whose work on typology and the deeper layers of the psyche has extended Jung’s framework in several important ways, has suggested that the animus in men functions as a kind of inner authority. He describes it as a figure that either supports or undermines a man’s sense of his own legitimacy, competence, and right to take up space in the world. A man who has not come into a conscious relationship with his own inner masculine may be as tyrannized by an inner critic, as prone to compulsive intellectual pronouncements, and as cut off from genuine creative authority as any woman struggling with what has more traditionally been called animus possession. The dynamic is the same regardless of the gender under consideration.
This is perhaps the most generative insight the post-Jungian revision offers. The animus is not a feature of women’s psychology that men observe from the outside. It is a living reality in every psyche, and a relationship to the masculine principle that seeks to be made conscious in every human being.
A Larger Map
In a sense then, post-Jungian thought offers a natural continuation and expansion of Emma Jung’s work. The four stages she described remain as accurate as they ever were. The figures of physical power, decisive action, intellectual authority, and spiritual meaning are real presences in the inner life, and they continue to appear in dreams, in projections, in the inexplicable pull toward particular kinds of people. Nothing in the post-Jungian revision makes her map less useful.
What changes is the frame around the map. Logos and Eros are no longer the exclusive property of one sex or the other. The animus is no longer a figure that belongs only to women. Jung’s work of individuation turns out to require every human being to come into conscious relationship with both the masculine and feminine principles within themselves, regardless of which the ego identifies with most strongly.
The map, in other words, was always pointing toward wholeness. But Post-Jungian thought has expanded the frame of the map to account for more of the territory. And in doing so, it has lent a quality of wholeness to Jungian thought itself.
Emma Jung would, I suspect, have approved. The woman whose name means whole knew something about the direction of travel. And I think she herself perceived that there was more beyond the edges of her map than monsters.