Glossary: Anima

The woman in the man; the feminine counterpart that lives within men. Carries both the archetypal feminine qualities (nurturing, feeling, etc.) as well as shadow qualities cut off from the ego. When unconscious, the anima is projected onto important women in a man’s life (first the mother, then the lover and wife, etc.) She often creates mischief when projected, but when brought into consciousness she becomes the guide to the spiritual world. The soul of a man.

When the anima is directed outward – when a man is identified with his persona, or one-sidedly masculine (i.e. “macho”), or when she’s simply not well integrated into the conscious personality – the anima causes many problems in a man’s life. Anima possessed men are moody, sulky, and irrational. She poisons his life, causes him to doubt himself and his experiences. He may be harsh and brutal… or he may be the opposite, a weak-willed coward. Such a man will often be obsessively attracted to inappropriate women when he unconsciously projects his anima onto them (as illustrated in Vladimir Nabokov’s book Lolita.) However, when the anima is directed inward, she connects him with the source of life and meaning, the Self.

Integrating the anima or animus is one of the most difficult but most important accomplishments we can achieve. Jung said that while coming to terms with the shadow was the “apprentice-piece,” doing the same for the anima is one’s “master-piece."

There is [in man] an imago not only of the mother but of the daughter, the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess, and the chthonic Baubo. Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forego; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya-and not only into life's reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it.

- The Syzygy: Anima and Animus," CW 9ii, par. 24

Further reading:
Anima Possession: Are you a spineless wimp?