The cruel, jealous lover

The negative animus behaves here like a jealous lover. He wants to keep the woman for himself by cutting her off from all men. When she has some loving feelings toward any man, then up comes this “You should not do that” animus. Or it’s projected.

I know a classic case of a woman who once attacked Jung violently with the animus during the analytical hour. They later went into what happened, and Jung told her, “Whenever you have a feeling, that’s when you attack.” What happened was that on the way to meet with Jung, she had seen some beautiful strawberries. Her first impulse was, “Let’s buy them and bring them to him.” And then the animus said, “Oh, Jung will say that strawberries have an erotic meaning and he’ll mock you.” So she didn’t buy the strawberries and arrived in a fierce mood and attacked Jung the entire hour. All because she had suppressed the strawberries. If she had bought the strawberries everything would have gone well, but she had repressed her own feelings.

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[T]he worst thing is that she experiences it as if she thinks it herself. You see, the animus thinks in her “Jung is going to laugh at the strawberries,” and then she believes that she thinks that. That is one of the great difficulties in analytical work: to make women distinguish between what they really think themselves and what it thinks in them.

The problems is that they think animus thoughts are their own. Even after working for years on that, I sometimes still have negative thoughts against myself, and if you asked me at that moment, I would say, “Yes, that’s what I think about myself.” Later, I would have a dream of a man raping me, and realize, “No, that was an evil animus in me who thought that.” And then I could disidentify and wonder, “Why on earth did I ever think that about myself? Naturally, I don’t think that.” But, you see, that is the essence of what one calls possession. When a woman is possessed by the animus, she thinks that he animus is herself. Only when, or if, she wakes up does she comes to realize, “No, that’s not me.”

- Marie Louise von Franz, from Fraser Boa’s The Way of the Dream, p. 158