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Classical (Jung) · an archetype

Animus

The inner court of opinion.

Jung’s name for the unconscious masculine figure in a woman, the personification of her unconscious, met in opinions held with unexplained force, in dreams and in the men onto whom it is projected. The companion term is the anima.

The animus, in Jung’s usage, is the masculine figure in a woman’s unconscious, the counterpart of the anima in a man. Where the anima shows itself in moods, the animus shows itself in opinions: assumptions delivered as settled truth, taken over from father, teachers and the printed word, and argued with a force that has little to do with the matter in hand. In dreams and fantasies he appears as a man or a group of men; in life he is projected onto real men. Jung treated him, like the anima, as an archetype, first carried by the father, whose contents can be brought into consciousness but whose figure cannot be dissolved. In his positive form he is a psychopomp, carrying into a woman’s consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation and self-knowledge; in his negative form he is the inner judge and tireless prosecutor.

Go deeper

At the threshold

Still, let my tyrants know, I am not doomed to wearYear after year in gloom, and desolate despair;A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,And offers for short life, eternal liberty.He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.

Public domain · Brontë, The Prisoner. A Fragment. (1846) · read by Daniel

A woman held captive is visited each night by a masculine messenger who brings visions and desire, a resonance with the inner figure in his carrying, psychopomp form.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 5 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    The court of conscience

    H. G. Wells, Christina Alberta’s Father, 1925

    Jung’s own example of the figure as a plural tribunal.

  2. Jung’s example

    Bluebeard

    Perrault, 1697

    Emma Jung’s example of the destructive form.

  3. Jung’s example

    Faust’s deliberation on the Word

    Goethe, 1808

    Emma Jung’s vocabulary for its four powers: deed, word, meaning, power.

  4. a later reading

    King Thrushbeard

    Grimm, 1812

    Von Franz’s reading of the figure transformed.

  5. a later reading

    The Brontës’ men

    Barbara Hannah’s reading, 1971

    A later reading of the novels as animus portraits.

The wider sky

Where the Animus has been seen

50 exemplars across 17 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

To foe of his I'm deadly foe,None stir the second timeOn whom I lay a yellow eyeOr an emphatic thumb.Though I than he may longer live,He longer must than I,For I have but the art to kill—Without the power to die.

Public domain · Dickinson, My life had stood a loaded gun (1929) · read by Adam

A power that speaks for its master, strikes without a second look and can kill but not die meets the animus at its most certain and least yielding.

Not one voice but a bench of them: fathers, judges, authorities, all certain.

It argues. It is right. It has not read the room.

Turned, it becomes reflection, deliberation, the capacity to know.

The deep layer · what was written

Animus: the entry

Definition

The animus, in Jung’s usage, is the masculine figure in a woman’s unconscious, the counterpart of the anima in a man. Where the anima shows itself in moods, the animus shows itself in opinions: assumptions delivered as settled truth, taken over from father, teachers and the printed word, and argued with a force that has little to do with the matter in hand. In dreams and fantasies he appears as a man or a group of men; in life he is projected onto real men. Jung treated him, like the anima, as an archetype, first carried by the father, whose contents can be brought into consciousness but whose figure cannot be dissolved. In his positive form he is a psychopomp, carrying into a woman’s consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation and self-knowledge; in his negative form he is the inner judge and tireless prosecutor.

Two points qualify the definition. Jung reached the animus from the anima by symmetry and said so, while insisting that the picture was built from cases. And his description of the negative animus, written from the man’s side of the quarrel, is the most criticised passage in his writing on gender.

History

In the 1921 glossary of Psychological Types the animus has no entry of his own. Under “Soul” Jung sets an inner attitude against the persona: a functional complex turned towards the unconscious, compensating the outer one and of the opposite sex to it (CW 6 ¶804, as quoted in Samuels, 1985, and Stein, 1998). Under “Soul-image” the figure is met in projection between the sexes (¶809, as quoted in Sharp, 1991). The 1916 English Collected Papers do not use the word, which is why 1921 is given here as the first text. One qualification: Emma Jung’s dream notes name “my masculine aspect” in 1914 and analyse animus figures in 1916–17, and in 1934 Jung asked her for the animus chapter of Wirklichkeit der Seele (Lammers, 2025).

The portrait is the chapter “Anima and Animus” in “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” (1928, revised 1935, CW 7). There the animus produces opinions where the anima produces moods and argues as a plurality of fathers and judges; Jung’s literary example is the “court of conscience” in H. G. Wells’s Christina Alberta’s Father. The chapter grants men “the wide fields of commerce, politics, technology, and science” (¶330, as quoted in Samuels, 1985), calls the animus “a jealous lover” (¶334) and “the deposit, as it were, of all woman’s ancestral experiences of man” (¶336), and warns that a woman possessed by him “is always in danger of losing her femininity” (¶337, as quoted in Sharp, 1991). The 1925 essay on marriage gives the same inherited image (CW 17 ¶338, as quoted in Stein, 1998, and Stevens, 2003).

The Integration of the Personality (1939) already shows the asymmetry that troubled later readers. Its opening chapter calls the animus “the man in the woman”, names Ronald Fraser as author of the best literary portrait Jung knew, and adds:

It is a curious fact that no woman of talent has succeeded in producing an adequate picture. It may be that a woman’s animus writes her novels for her, and thus escapes portrayal. — C. G. Jung, “The Meaning of Individuation”, in The Integration of the Personality (1939), p. 23

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Emma Jung’s animus essay, published in German in 1934, reached English in the 1957 Animus and Anima of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York, in Cary F. Baynes’s translation.

The fullest statement is chapter III of Aion (1951). Having described the anima, Jung reasons that “an equivalent archetype must be present in women”, adding that the pair was reached not by deduction but by “long and varied experience” (CW 9ii ¶27). The father is the first carrier for the daughter (¶28). Then the definition:

Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit. The animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros. — C. G. Jung, Aion (1951), CW 9ii ¶29

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The same paragraph calls Eros and Logos “merely conceptual aids”, says a woman’s Logos “is often only a regrettable accident” and describes the animus as “opinions instead of reflections”; when the two figures meet, “the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction” (¶30). Against that stands the positive animus:

Just as the anima becomes, through integration, the Eros of consciousness, so the animus becomes a Logos; and in the same way that the anima gives relationship and relatedness to a man’s consciousness, the animus gives to woman’s consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation, and self-knowledge. — C. G. Jung, Aion (1951), CW 9ii ¶33

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The chapter then treats the two figures together: they fill the ego with an unshakable feeling of rightness (¶34), are harder to see through than the shadow (¶35), are “empirical concepts” that mobilise prejudice because they are unfamiliar (¶36), remain autonomous functions after their contents are integrated (¶40), form the syzygy (¶41), and are recognised only through a partner of the opposite sex (¶42).

The debate

The animus is the Jungian concept on which the feminist critique bit hardest, because the text invites it. Naomi Goldenberg (1976) argued that the animus theory was an artificial construction, developed later and less well thought out than the anima, and asked whether women need an internal male figure at all. Demaris Wehr (1987) read the pair as a social arrangement to which Jung had given the standing of an archetype. The explicit rejection is Lyn Cowan’s “Dismantling the Animus” (written 1994, posted on the Jung Page in 2000), which treats the term as a fantasy created by men about women and argues that it should be taken apart rather than patched. Andrew Samuels (1985) grants that Jung found the anima the more pleasant figure, that the animus-ridden woman is a prejudice later writers had to redress, and that the asymmetry ignores the clinic, where women also carry an unconscious femininity; his remedy is to detach the pair from sex and gender altogether. Polly Young-Eisendrath (1984) keeps the term for work with couples but treats the animus as the image of the “other” sex formed under a society’s gender arrangements, not an inherited essence.

The classical reply, from Emma Jung onwards, is that women do meet something inside that behaves as Jung described, and Samuels concedes that this experience “so parallels that of men” that symmetry may be assumed for the sake of argument. Murray Stein (1998) keeps the figure but calls the rule that animus-possessed women attack while anima-possessed men withdraw a conventional distinction, open to revision. Verena Kast (2006) restates the figure for the clinic while allowing that its contents are shaped by what a culture counts as masculine. Anthony Stevens (2003) argues that the contrasexual complex is a phylogenetic system for pair-bonding, yet assigns the “ought” and “should” of dogmatic moral assertion to the Freudian superego, which both sexes have. James Hillman’s reconception of the anima as the archetype of psyche itself, open to women as to men, leaves the animus with no clear place.

Empirical status

Narrow. No validated instrument measures the animus, but two studies have tried to operationalise it. Saiz and colleagues (2023) coded 141 dreams from nine people in Jungian psychotherapy, seven of them women, for anima, animus and androgynous figures, and used the counts and a qualitative reading to argue for revising the classical model; the sample is tiny and the coders were Jungian. Boyd and Kondrat (1991) applied the two concepts to the transactions of one small group, as a demonstration of method rather than a test. The nearest mainstream work is non-Jungian: gender-role inventories that treat masculinity and femininity as independent traits (Bem, 1974), and meta-analyses finding most sex differences in personality small (Hyde, 2005), which bear on Jung’s Eros and Logos generalisations rather than on the archetype.

Appearances

Jung’s own examples are thin, and he said why. He offered Wells’s Christina Alberta’s Father, Ronald Fraser’s The Flying Draper (he cites the 1931 New York edition) and, in a footnote, the “hero story” of the young woman whose fantasies he had analysed in 1912, now relabelled an animus-fantasy. The later literature is mostly post-Jungian and mostly by women, and every case below is a reading made with the concept in hand. Bluebeard is the standard one. Marie-Louise von Franz calls him the destructive animus par excellence, a murderer who cannot transform his wives or be transformed, and sets against him King Thrushbeard, whose harshness turns into a positive animus. Verena Kast gave the tale an essay of its own. Barbara Hannah’s Striving Towards Wholeness (1971) read Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights as a personification of the animus, demonic in appearance but the force that drives the second Cathy toward wholeness, and Lockwood’s dream of the interminable sermon as the animus’s ravings.

Sources

  • Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. CW 6, Definitions, “Soul” and “Soul-image”; ¶804 as quoted in Samuels (1985) and Stein (1998), ¶809 as quoted in Sharp (1991). English: H. G. Baynes (Trans., 1923).
  • Jung, C. G. (1925). Marriage as a psychological relationship. CW 17 ¶338, as quoted in Stein (1998) and Stevens (2003).
  • Jung, C. G. (1928). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7. Part II, chapter 2, “Anima and Animus”; ¶330 as quoted in Samuels (1985); ¶334, ¶336 and ¶337 as quoted in Sharp (1991).
  • Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. Chapter 1, pp. 21–25 and footnotes 7–8, for Fraser and the 1912 case. Chapters 3–5 were revised into CW 9i and CW 12.
  • Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii ¶27–42. Princeton University Press.
  • Jung, E. (1957). Animus and Anima (C. F. Baynes & H. Nagel, Trans.). Analytical Psychology Club of New York; Spring Publications edition (2022). ISBN 978-0-88214-964-6. The animus essay first appeared in German in Wirklichkeit der Seele (1934).
  • Lammers, A. C. (2025). Emma Jung’s years of self-liberation. Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/node/64397
  • Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entries “Animus” and “Soul-image”.
  • Goldenberg, N. R. (1976). A feminist critique of Jung. Signs, 2(2), 443–449. https://doi.org/10.1086/493369
  • Young-Eisendrath, P. (1984). Hags and Heroes: A Feminist Approach to Jungian Psychotherapy with Couples. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-17-5.
  • Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-7102-0864-4. Chapter 7, “Gender, sex, marriage”.
  • Wehr, D. S. (1987). Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-6734-5.
  • Stein, M. (1998). Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9376-8. Chapter 6.
  • Cowan, L. (2000). Dismantling the animus. The C. G. Jung Page (monograph of 1994, posted 2000). https://jungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psychology/105-dismantling-the-animus
  • Stevens, A. (2003). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. Chapter 11, “The archetypal masculine and feminine”.
  • Kast, V. (2006). Anima/animus. In R. K. Papadopoulos (Ed.), The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-148-8.
  • Hillman, J. (1985). Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-316-3.
  • von Franz, M.-L. (1970). The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Shambhala edition (1996). ISBN 978-0-87773-526-7. Chapter on Bluebeard and King Thrushbeard.
  • von Franz, M.-L. (1972). The Feminine in Fairy Tales. Shambhala edition (1993). ISBN 978-0-87773-567-0.
  • Kast, V. (1992). Bluebeard: on the problem of the destructive animus. In M. Jacoby, V. Kast & I. Riedel, Witches, Ogres, and the Devil’s Daughter: Encounters with Evil in Fairy Tales. Shambhala. ISBN 978-0-87773-613-4.
  • Hannah, B. (1971). Striving Towards Wholeness. Putnam for the C. G. Jung Foundation; Chiron edition. ISBN 978-1-888602-13-5. Chapters on the Brontës, as summarised in Sanford (1980).
  • Sanford, J. A. (1980). The Invisible Partners. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-2277-6. Pp. 46–47 and 73–74 for Hannah on Wuthering Heights.
  • Saiz, M., Abalos, M., Grez, G., Bartfeld, V., Benchin, F., Toloza, C., Porre, L., & Falcone, V. (2023). The syzygy, reformulation and new perspectives: dreams, anima-animus and gender. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 68(2), 301–326. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12903
  • Boyd, R. D., & Kondrat, M. E. (1991). The anima and animus in the transactions of small groups. In R. D. Boyd (Ed.), Personal Transformations in Small Groups: A Jungian Perspective. Tavistock/Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-04362-5.
  • Bem, S. L. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(2), 155–162. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036215
  • Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581–592. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581
  • Perrault, C. (1697). Blue Beard. In The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. Project Gutenberg #29021.
  • Brontë, E. (1847). Wuthering Heights. Project Gutenberg #768.

Leaving

’Tis written: “In the Beginning was the Word.”Here am I balked: who, now can help afford?The Word?—impossible so high to rate it;And otherwise must I translate it.If by the Spirit I am truly taught.Then thus: “In the Beginning was the Thought”This first line let me weigh completely,Lest my impatient pen proceed too fleetly.Is it the Thought which works, creates, indeed?“In the Beginning was the Power,” I read.Yet, as I write, a warning is suggested,That I the sense may not have fairly tested.The Spirit aids me: now I see the light!“In the Beginning was the Act,” I write.

Public domain · Goethe, Faust, Part I (Study scene, Faust translating the Word), trans. Bayard Taylor (1870) · read by George

Weighing word, thought, power and act in turn, Faust shows deliberation at work, the turn by which a fixed authority becomes the capacity to reflect and know.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey◉ Great MotherLoving and terrible, the first world.Return to the void