ANIMA & ANIMUS: integrating the inner woman and man

[Music] welcome to this Union life three good friends and union analysts Lisa Marciano Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective two important issues of the day I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a union analyst in Philadelphia I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst In Virginia Beach Virginia I'm Debra Stewart a Jungian analyst and Cape Cod welcome to another episode of this Jungian life I wanted to do one quick housekeeping thing before we launch into this week's topic which is sometimes we're get

receiving dreams via email or people will braid in and say you know how can I submit a dream and we do mention this at the end of the podcast but I think it is helpful to mention it sometimes at the beginning as well if You go to our website which is this Union life.com you will see right there on the home page a little box to click that says I think it says let us interpret your dream and if you click on that then there's a button you can click that will take you to our

dream submission form so anyone can submit a dream we love getting your dreams and you can do it right from our website that's the easiest way okay for this week we decided to tackle a topic that Many people have requested which is this Union concept of anima and animus and I suggested to Deb and Joseph that we do this Hardy argument about it because it's a fairly it is actually a sort of a controversial notion among unions some unions you know really liked it and and sort of use it in the classical sense that Jung

used it and you know it's a little bit of a challenge to kind of square with these ideas and have they kind of outrun their usefulness do they Need to be reconfigured and it turns out that among the three of us we have I don't know maybe six different opinions on the topic so we just decided that we're gonna kind of let it rip see what happens and we get into a tussle I guess so much the better so maybe we should start with just talking about what is this and what did Jung say about

it and what is the kind of classical understanding of it so I think that to set the ground for the Conversation even though the ideas may have transformed over the amount of time to be able to look at it from the place of the early analysts did so young was having a lot of extraordinary experiences particularly around the time that he was writing his read book he was having these incredibly intense vivid very crisp visions and in these visions there were female figures that would appear to him in this imaginal world and interact With him

in very intense ways that he felt were powerful in his self-development and he came to understand that this was an aspect of his psychology that was in the opposite configuration to his ego so he identified himself as a cisgendered male and these female biologically female figures seemed to be in an opposite configuration also having opposite personality traits and that as he interacted with these inner figures He found himself very affected and one of the most powerful ways that the figures seem to affect him is by introducing him to very archetypal and powerful images that his

waking mind would not have had access to so this really brought together a powerful feeling about these opposite gender dinner figures and the kind of roles that they played at least in his psyche and then he came to universalize that in terms of male psychology in general and Then female analysts including his wife you know came in wanting to talk about how that's alive in the female psyche as well as an opposite gendered figure and how does that play out in the way that we imagine the psychology of women and the psychology of men right

so again according to the classical configuration the anima is an inner figure in a man psyche and anima of course is the latin word meaning soul and so you can see how incredibly important Jung thought this Was that he gave it that name and I guess one way of understanding it as you were saying to us if is that the anima plays this function of sort of introducing the conscious personality to the inner world and in that sense she can be considered to be a psychopomp one of the kind of classical images that comes or

classic images that comes up around that is in in Dante's work bayit reach a is his anima figure who shows him around Paradise so she she functions as a kind of inner image of his soul that leads him into the inner world well I have kind of the contrary initial here in keeping with my somewhat minimalist tendencies I'm harkening to this week that Lisa and I just spent at a conference about the inner other I think that these gendered inner opposites are only one form that the inner other can take I would say that male/female

saw Luna yin-yang have To do with inner opposites and I I always want to sort of protest the classical sort of definition as I understand it of anima and animus I think there are lots and lots of ways that a deeper level of the unconscious operates autonomously and Jung was forever stating and restating the autonomy of the unconscious and images that come unbidden that are not just part of our personal experience and so a figure who is of the opposite sex is the Dreamer can take that role so can a talking animal and alien from

another planet there are all kinds of ways in which that autonomous and/or other can appear but I'm curious about in terms of this concept is that the other nests of the ego of the psyche to me suggest anything that is not identified as ego so the self the shadow the anima the persona all our complex is presenting in their dream forms are all experienced as other than the Ego of the conscious self image so then if a Nima's just blend it into this great category of other then what's the point of any differentiation then there's

just ego and everything else like a big Cobb salad in the psyche that's all mushed together oh let the brawl begin I I do take your point Joseph but for me what I'm thinking about is that you know images in the personal psyche the personal level of the unconscious or the personal level of Shadow we relate to them very differently from how we relate to something that is truly and fundamentally other I think I really object to the concretization of this inner other that we receive as a surprise there's an effect and a surprise element

that something new different and not me has happened and that it can take a number of forms and I also think that young for women young was a little harsh in his description of Animus functions for women the inner other kind of came across as an argumentative abrasive you know kind of power seeking other I object to that whereas for men the anima was the soul oh how nice you know I think it distinguishes itself and where the differentiation lies is in the felt experience of something that is totally other as opposed to a shadow

figure that was let's say one of your high school teachers or the neighbor Across the street that's not quite so far away so Deb I'm I'm with you on a lot of your objections to this oh great but my other thought about the nature of kind of a contra sexual in the unconscious and thinking specifically here in terms of if we're sexual is that you know there there is something about the Contra sexual like that as it presents in life and in dreams is that that you know if we're a woman for example and we

have this kind Of very moving dream about an inner figure that that we're attracted to or that we're falling in love with I mean I think I think you know as per Joseph's point this differentiation making a special category for the Contra sexual you know one of the reasons that that's important is this idea of sort of that that falling in love experience whether that's with a person actual person out there and of course there's always a huge amount of projection that goes Along with that process or even I mean I know I've had some

really highly numinous dreams about male figures that were you know that had a real kind of erotic or romantic quality to it and it was that would have been different than a different kind of other you know I mean I can dream about a unicorn but that's not so likely to be erotic okay now we know North Wales and unicorns I know they're very hot first of all Deb I want to say that in Your characterization of young discussing the anonymous inside of a woman as this problematic belligerent in her figure he wasn't actually didn't

say that what there was a differentiation between the anima and the animus and while it was functioning in a way that facilitated individuation and when it was functioning in a way that seemed to impair individuation and so he talked about you know men for whom the anima Was functioning poorly as being overly sentimental deconstructed and overwhelmed by feelings being oversensitive and yet also when the anima was functioning well in a man's psyche that he had access to tenderness and empathy and all kinds of good softer qualities and is in a woman psyche if a woman

has a good relationship to the animus she can wake up one morning decide she's gonna write a book and feel that there's an internal Verve an Internal companion that's really cheering her on and supporting her and having the creative audacity to kind of get that project done the negative on Imus might show up as a woman who's bullying all of her subordinates you know in a world I would be the electron Emma's possession right that's the word that they would say is when the ego is being influenced from the negative side of these things so

there really is both a positive perception of these images in The psyche as well as a problematic perception and that's part of the bite polarity of the archetypes okay fair enough and I think it's also fair enough to say Jung was much more interested in anima than he was in animus he was much as a man and a man of his time you know he had his own experience as a male of this inner figure and his visions of Salome and others it was just closer to his own lived experience but you're right Joseph That

these are images that come from the archetypal world and they are bipolar so they have a positive and a negative aspect then we're talking about for me how they function in the psychic landscape and so young and particularly von Franz whose work with fairy tales was just enormous Lee important that the Animus in a woman's psyche could show up has all kinds of helpful inner figures so yes actually it could even be a helpful unicorn who actually engages the Princess and allows her to take a kind of heroic step you know in some direction it

could be a helpful creature it could even be a brother figure as in Bluebeard where the brothers rescue the feminine because she's kind of paralyzed and anxiety and I think in the for instance in the psyches of the LGBT community in gay men it's not uncommon for the inner feminine to show up as the always helpful sister which also then gets projected out into the community And the great friendships between gay men and heterosexual women you know are legendary because the image of the sister is the way that the inner feminine is experienced from in

a gay men and if we think about the incredible heroic dynamism in the lesbian community for instance during the AIDS crisis gay men were dying I mean in tremendous horrific numbers in terrible ways and it was actually the lesbian community in the major cities that just stood up and Claimed these men as their brothers intended for them fearless Lee in a way that the medical community and even other gay men had kind of abandoned them oh my gosh yes so the Contra sexual yes it can show up as a lover but it can also show

up as a passionate sibling relationship in the most positive sense yeah but it carries something different than some other other mm-hmm I think and I think some of that is the potential erotic charge I think you know what are We to do with this because there is a way that the classical conception of anima and animus seems to bind us into kind of antiquated gender norms you know that that the feminine soft and receptive and warm and nurturing and about connection and the masculine is sort of striving and rational well I agree we get right

into these gender roles and I personally protest that when I am striving and assertive and other kinds of Characteristics of why is that my animus it's not my animus it's my strong feminine capability that I have ready ego access to and it is not other but my question you dove is why does it irritate you to think of it as an inner man I mean because what we're doing is we're taking a category of behavior and we're saying how is that imaged there was a time in which imagining it contra sexually would have been acceptable

and perhaps even empowering you know we Imagine you know it's it's 1934 a woman who is in a perhaps a very oppressed patriarchal environment to have an experience that she has an inner man that is the equal of all these other men that seemed to have so much control in this world in that cultural frame that might have felt incredibly phallic Lee vigorous and not diminishing and not devaluing if it works and if it serves an individual person then that's that person's experience but as a sort of Theoretical matter what I feel kind of tends

to happen is that we start to concretize and categorize things as masculine inherently masculine kind of qualities belonging to the masculine principle and then it extends out to men versus women and that's where I have a concern that all of us have access to soulfulness tenderness compassion tears and assertiveness aggression willfulness linear thinking etc I think I want to separate those kinds of Qualities that belong to and can belong to ego from the experience the numinous experience of an in or whether it appears as a gendered opposite or a talking animal or a space alien

yeah it's thorny isn't it it just for me I will tell you that in my kind of practical experience when someone brings a dream for it let's say a woman brings in a dream that features a man okay and I'll often sort of say in my head well could I see this as anonymous and if so What would that mean and you know a lot of the times that question as a sort of opener just to begin to enter the dream is actually helpful to me in understanding the dream and I see the Animus and

a woman as relating to her creativity I know that that's how it appears in my dreams I remember working on a creative project I was giving a paper somewhere and I had really thrown myself into it and given the paper and it had gone very well was received very Well and I just had this dream about anonymously and it was it was you know just very lovely and I thought yep there there it is you know there is a way that it kind of works I certainly don't cling to it as some kind of Dogma

or doctrine if it doesn't work I'm happy to jettison it but there is something about you know these these opposites of male and female you know young said that psychic life proceeds according to pairs of opposites that that is where all psychic energy Derives from is these opposites and this is of course true in the natural world as well and male and female are a pair of opposites that you know that it's a very kind of archetypal essential difference and we recognize that that difference and there there are some differences I think between men and

women they're not exactly the same either of course you know physically or psychologically and of course the thorny question is well do those differences Come from nature or nurture and if they come from nurture are we you know reifying you know olds outworn stereotypes but I'm not sure they all come from nurture I think there might be inherent differences between the psychology of men and psychology of women so I want to land back into a classic Jungian perspective on some of these things and then we can hash it out and argue about it if we

disagree but I want to at least take a clear Traditional viewpoints so we're talking to the listeners about the pre-existing paradigm so the first thing I want to say is that Jung's work was about differentiations you know that for the average human being who has not had a self-reflective life when they get involved in their inner life it's a big mish mosh and he called that the masa confusa a big cloud of feelings and impulses with just vague internal images and whether or not we're you know a Cognitive behavioral therapist or a Jungian analyst or

anything in between one of the things we do is listen deeply and we try to parse things apart these images and ideas belong in over here and these images and ideas belong somewhere else and the observing ego belongs in a third place and just this organizing principle seems to allow change positive change to happen in the psyche so this differentiation of anima animus simul take it from the classic so in a woman's Psyche as when were being analyzed including the female analysts like ma Jung who wrote a great book anima animus they were noticing internal

figures images happening in their dreams but also their active imaginations they'd go into a deep meditative state and they'd also and her figure is much like a dream state and they would interact with them record these and then ponder them as to what this might mean in the classic idea When anonymous or an inner masculine figure is healthy in a woman psyche and by that it's not in conflict with the ego it's not warring but actually is a happy participant in the soul the earlier unions thought that a woman would be supported in a kind

of strong rational and logical ability a capacity for clear non-attached thinking and ability to construct projects in her own sphere of power with sustained efforts and defining practical applicability That a woman would have a very strong sense of Center and not be pulled excessively by family needs or other external needs that the persona was particularly strong and not constantly mutable depending on which man was in front of her or which circumstance she was in that a woman's psyche had a very strong bridge to knowledge and creative thought and problem-solving that's a category of capacity that

the early female unions felt was being Encapsulated in these kind of internal masculine images and then writers began to talk about the evolution of these masculine figures based upon the dream lives of themselves and people who they were interacting with and young talk about this on the anima side which we can go to in a moment that a woman would dream progressively about increasingly more sophisticated in her male figures who provided an array of support for her so if one has a very primal animus Figure it may show up as an almost tarzan like masculine

figure a physically robust primal vital not you know talking about refined concepts but very attractive in that physicality over time that the dreams may change and then that figure becomes a kind of James Bond figure still able to fight but also having some kind of a civilized components ability to navigate in a larger sense of the world this might then develop into a kind of Internal genius maybe a Steve Jobs kind of guy strong creative appealing but more androgynous less hirsute and then this might develop into something like Barack Obama Senatorial figure and then as

this evolution happened the animus would take on certain religious tones and feelings a kind of Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela feeling and then finally a totally religious component like a Christ or a Buddha or a Mohammed kind of feeling and Jung felt very Strongly that the real work around the Contra sexual was to eventually develop outside of and away from all the gender stereotypes and to restore the animus to it being a psychological function and no longer a personality and this was his struggle with his inner feminine as he kept projecting it onto women

he kept concretizing it his women and he said what I'm looking for is for it to stop doing that and be a linking function between my ego and the deepest parts of The unconscious and that is a very hard kind of purification process so if the inner animus in any of these configurations is helpful to the developing personality we talked about the positive qualities but there are times that the animus can actually be problematic let's just say there was a very difficult father figure in the home or other male caregivers who are really causing problem

for a young woman she's also integrating That and then that inner masculine figure can evoke very difficult behaviors so you might say that an animus possessed woman or anonymous that's really overwhelming her psyche could show it show up as a bully could show up as sadistic excessively controlling loudly talking other people down having it a know-it-all behavior and inability to effectively and meaningfully relate where the woman may be sort of attacked the ego may be Attacked by a sort of inner negative animus that really takes it out on the ego that happens a lot mm-hmm

I'm not sure that it's always helpful to categorize things as you know necessarily that this is the negative animus or the negative anima when somebody has had a lived experience with males a father and uncle teachers whatever that's part of her personal experience and part of one's own complexes defense systems what-have-you I think we get too glib about oh my goodness that's a negative animus or an animus possessed woman Oh hers no you know that might just be my inner but but you know I I have to say that that Joseph is scoring some points

with me because I think his point is yes these are psychic facts and then how do they get imaged and I do think that sometimes these psychic facts get imaged as the Contra sexual but that's really all it is it's Like that's yeah I agree completely sometimes these psychic facts and I agree about that and I appreciate your short sort of summary of the theory here Joseph but sometimes that's what it is but we have to be careful I think about limiting it to contra sexual figures or on the other side that every time a

woman dreams of a man or a man dreams of a woman that's the Artemis see anima sorry I'm with you but I can understand that if The concept of anima animus is not in the analysts mind is not developed in a therapeutic direction then it's not useful and it's going to seem hackneyed but if the idea is companioned by a kind of big basket of therapeutic concepts then it doesn't sound hackneyed and it's not just kind of you know a breath snatching or pearl snatching moment you know in the consulting room but you know if

it's just tossed out as almost a kind of invective well then of course it's it Should be disposed of because it's not useful but again coming back that Anonymous can take on many different images which is which Lisa you could speak to in terms of all the fairy tale versions of the helpful animus mm-hmm we can bring some fairy tales into it maybe to sort of illustrate again the classical position but I do think you know there's this important thing that I think Deb brought in that that's important to to state is that I think

We're not saying that these contra sexual qualities are not of the person right I mean they belong to the person they might be more or less distant from the ego and then to the extent that they are in the unconscious you know what is the imagery that gets associated with them and I suppose if you have these qualities really integrated then they don't necessarily get out pictured as the Contra sectional which i think is what you were saying a few minutes ago Deb this is just you and you have ready access to it it's like

these qualities are integrated yeah or they are on good days let's say I'm just not quite so ready to go into what seems to me to be a kind of reified theoretical structure and what I pay attention to always and I think we all do in the consulting-room is what a person's experience of an inner image whether it's contra sexual or some other dream image or something that came up in the Workplace around a colleague of where is the feeling and what is that experience like for that person and if we go to the phenomenology

of it instead of leaping into theory I think we are on more solid ground I totally agree and I think that you know what a Jungian perspective also brings though is this real attention to the symbolic which I think can be a corrective to the to literal attitudes that we take about many things in this culture including sex and gender you Know it's like if we can acknowledge that all of us have all possibilities within us that can be appreciated for their symbolic significance and lived out you know in a symbolic sense you know that

takes some of the pressure off I think to have to kind of conform to certain gendered stereotypes for example and I also think that in our current world that ideas of gender have been weaponized so that it's hard for us to even talk about this very archetypal Language without it being politicized without people's gender complexes which are part political and part of this patriarchal problem that exists in the world but also we because we're talking about archetypal language we have to do our best to be able to step away from that and to look at

this as phenomena of the psyche which is impersonal and as you started with Lisa these are archetypal phenomena that regardless of how one personally Identifies with a gender identity let's say you can't look at in the world without noticing oh that's a bull that's a cow that's a female dog that's a male dog you know of Fisher mating etc etc that the world presents in new mirabile images of sex and we can't we can pretend that that's not happening because we don't like the oppressive way that these ideas have been used in the world but

that doesn't make them not true mm-hmm now to your point about Perhaps having negative experiences with men growing up and and to say well that's just been my experience and I have this experience of myself thus so yes that's how people walk in the consulting room you know I am this way but those internal experiences are still complexes they have an archetypal core and they tend to be genderized if you're saying that men have behaved this way and in my psyche I have images of men that behave certain Ways in my psychic field long after

the external men have died or come out of my life it still exists organized around this internal sense of maleness negative or positive I agree that we notice that the world is gendered and we have fathers and we have mothers so we grow up most of us having exposure to two very very well godlike images who have to take care of us or maybe they don't do such a good job but it's mom and dad and that how we are constantly Associating things with those parental images those psychic templates that have their own archetypal core

and how that relates to the idea later on of animus and anima those archetypal images get funneled down to us originally through parents and then later on through other family members neighbors teachers clergy etc etc but how important those personal experiences are that relate to archetypal images before we go vaunting into animus and anima those images what We call the mediation of the archetype that these but this potential for the animus let's say is somehow in in this universal sphere and you're right we do need to have experiences of this up male gender which then

accretes around the archetype of the animus and those experiences can be very painful or very supportive and for most of us it's a combination of both things I want to just sort of bring up a couple of maybe odd bits here and there is is you know I Think of course we are hardwired to notice sex and sex differences and a lot of our psychic patterning just it just has to be that it's based on attending to the opposite sex because guess what that's how we all got here and and part of the archetype of

course of can you do is a kind of coming together of the opposites that that results in new creative life so I think there is something special about this particular archetypal image of the coming together Of the sexes because it is sort of the kind of foundational image of the continuation of life or the generation the generativity you know whether we mean that in the actual biological sense or in the symbolic sense so yeah I think it's pretty important I also want to share though that you know I always get tripped up with this too

and I'm really appreciating Deb listening to you struggle with it because it never seems to totally work for me I always kind of Hold it off to the side a little bit when I'm when I'm thinking about it and so as if I am appreciating your kind of clarity around it but one of the ideas that I've kind of played around with and I'm still just beginning to think about this but I read this really wonderful book called the master and his emissary by Iain McGilchrist and he talks about the different kinds of attention that

the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere Kind of bring to the world and how the world looks very different when we're looking at it from a kind of left hemisphere way than with a right hemisphere way and the left hemisphere is mechanistic and it's fragmented and decontextualized and the right hemisphere tends to be very kind of holistic and relational and focused on the natural world and there's all these other kinds of things and I found myself wondering as I was reading this really Extraordinary book whether there isn't something there that young was trying to get

at when young talked about the masculine and the feminine he spent a lot of his there's much in the collected works about how the feminine has been kind of relegated in our culture that it hasn't it has been unfairly relegated to the shadow he saw that it was very important that the feminine principle be redeemed and reintegrated and I think when he's talking like that he is Talking I think about something that's very close to what McGilchrist is talking about when he talks about the right hemisphere I think that if that proves to be true

with McGilchrist research it'd be a great way to abandon the idea of masculine or feminine and to bring it into this kind of bio neurologic model and still asking this question of you know I've hit midlife I seem to function in a predisposed way and that there are these less developed Aspects of my personality which no now there's a pressure to develop so whether one has lived rather artistic and perhaps diffuse life and then is moving or there's an internal pressure to be more organized and rigorous or vice versa there is this need or all

of the potentials to have some equal space and again this is a way of categorizing so that we can understand I would like to spend a few minutes to now Just talk about the classic idea of the anima in a man's psyche just so that the conversation is balanced if that's okay that's fine and atactic side of my personality so for the early young Ian's men were often bringing in dreams of powerful female figures they would often project onto various women in the environment and then pursue them with great order or avoid them actually depending

on the kinds of experiences they had early in life but in the Analysis of Jung's own psyche and his male clients he would see this inner feminine figure develop along several lines so the figure might initially present as a kind of virginal pre sexual feminine almost like Brooke Shields in that early movie when she stranded on an island I can't it's terrible I can't remember the name of that blue lagoon that was it this kind of innocent beautiful but uninitiated feminine as a man continues To interact with this part of his personality it could become

a kind of Helen of Troy or a Marilyn Monroe figure that is a fully developed kind of sexual goddess as this matures as the individual matures this might become a kind of Eleanor Roosevelt a mature feminine the supportive partner the mother the nurturer of Nations this might then develop into a strong intuitive internal leader and then eventually as we said before this moves Into a kind of spiritual eyes donk ssin a kind of Sophia the goddess of wisdom the Virgin Mary a mother teresa figure so this arc of movement that happens in a man's psyche

which eventually allows him to conceptualize the inner feminine as a religious function that gives him access to a depth in himself that he would not normally just based on his thinking function be able to find so some of the qualities that a man might have if he has a positive well Integrated anima is that he might have good access to self soothing kind of self nurturing and a caring attitude towards himself he might have access to creativity a kind of contained in her life that's not just spraying all over the room a capacity for empathy

and an attunement to other people an ability to make judgments that are not purely rational but take into account intuitive information he would have good access to his feeling life he'd be able to relate To people warmly and positively and frankly he just plain feel happy have either one of you seen this kind of imagery of the opposite sex actually play out over time with an analysis or a client I have not I think it's a theoretical construct that I personally have not seen happen in an individual through a depth psychological process I have absolutely

but it does take a very long relationship with another with a client I mean I've had a couple of Analysis Malin Allison's that I've seen for 20 years and they've gone away for a couple of months come back but over 20 years and I've seen them you know starting at 19 years old chasing these kind of Brooke Shields Marilyn Monroe figures and now in their forties this kind of mature internally focused spiritual dynamic that's waking up inside of them and what they then seek out in a partner is totally different from what they were Seeking

out at 19 I too have had long-term relationships and work more often with women I think than men and certainly the growth and development the individual process that I mean thank heaven that's what we see in the consulting-room er we wouldn't do this work but I have not seen it play out in this kind of imagery in women and I would posit that a woman's a woman psyche may manifest very differently from a man psyche and that this kind of Deepening and development is not necessarily parallel to these sort of stages of of Animus development

I haven't seen it that way I've certainly the arc that I've seen and even if I ask female and Alison's to you know provide a kind of retrospective even of their perception of opposite gender there still is a maturational arc that becomes very powerfully into the consulting-room when I have an older Woman who's become single and she's reassessing what kind of a partner that she would consider at this stage in her life and then this comparison between what she felt she needed when she was 20 from a male partner to compensate something in herself and

then what she's looking for a male partner now at 40 or 45 in terms of what would satisfy or complement her experience of herself but see Joseph I feel like you're conflating the sort of actual you know outer Partner with the kind of inner symbolic stuff that I think is what we're really talking about we're talking about on him anonymous I mean it's not just about who you're looking for in a partner that might get tangled up into it but it really I think you know is describing more of a kind of an inner marriage

or an inner partnering I think that that does happen if somebody has fully introverted their process but for most people they discover in this case what The Animus fantasy is through projection and then through conversations we begin to entertain the idea that the thing that's longed for out there has a symbolic correlate inside but unless somebody has you know the mundus imagine Alice has totally blossomed for them so that all they have to do is look in the imaginal world to see the inner figures and how they're dancing that's that's a wonderful and rare almost

mysticism what About a you know a woman who's you know older and and married and isn't looking for a partner and is still having really rich animus dreams about various men right that's an inner process she's not necessarily thinking of going out and having an affair she's having an inner aver but this just has to do with the realms of analysis so there are a specific realms in which we are analyzing we're analyzing someone's adaptation to life we're analyzing their Relationships to people and we're analyzing the inner life through their relationship to dreams and any

one of those realms are analytic considerations so it's not one or the other but if the dream life is bringing autumn most dynamic symbol then that's analyzed if it's being projected into the outer relationships well then that's analyzed with this same lens so it's not either/or is it's what's presenting and we have clients that come in and say I Can't remember a dream and then we're left with the transference I've had clients come in this is a client years ago who had been nursing the idea of a book had all the notes together was determined

to write it it been sitting on a desk for years within a week of just starting her analysis with me all of a sudden she can write the book and although I didn't want to analyze the heck out of that at the moment clearly having just a male figure to talk with The project and in essence to provide emotional support activated her internal animus and she knocked that book out in six months and it's published it's out there you know but to stand firm here and what I believe is my contrarian position today what we

don't know is that whether she she might have met with a female analyst who's assertive forward-moving creative personality could have galvanized the exact same thing and I think it's a Little on the clever side to say that you know it was it what if it was just you Joseph rather than you as an embodiment of a masculine I mean I think any of us can embody what we call masculine I'm not sure I think it gets just a little too rigid and concretize in gendered ways for my comfort well I would say first of all

that an analyst can receive any projection if they have enough objectivity on the personality if they're not excessively Positioned in the rooms you're absolutely right Deb that you could meet with this that same woman and she could internalize your relationship to dynamism and and figure that in someplace inside of her I would still categorize that is anima s-- energy however the image shows up because it's beneficial to categorize things it is sort of like we're just talking about the name you get something right because that that relationship to dynamism I Like how you put that

Josef like that's that's that's there right and then maybe someone can make use of it and you know we have this perhaps unfortunate tradition of calling that thing animus energy but we we could I think just call it something else too right we can call it dynamism dynamism or if we want to you know go into social work language it's agency is the word that's used the thing about calling it animus is that then we have an archetypal image if we Just stick with dynamism we don't have that archetypal image so I think we have

successfully made this much less clear need for completion this archetype of wholeness just will jump into the dream okay so we talked about the positive feminine this was something that was particularly important to young you know it's nineteen twenty thirty forty and it's Switzerland so there was a very tight rein on how men were allowed to be just As tight as how women were allowed to be so as young was doing his inner work he came into this incredible tension inside himself because what would have been considered socially feminine feelings and perhaps behaviors were being

fought both by the culture and by the way that he had internalized his image of himself so by embracing this idea that every man has an inner woman and that in a sense we can imagine young walking around saying I am a man and a woman I am a man And a woman which then and could give a man access to the positive qualities we talked about if that inner feminine figure is rather negative from having negative experiences with the mother or other caregivers the negative side is a man can seem like he's constantly seeking

affirmation externally he can have a blocked access to creativity he can be excessively moody a man can be very he can have very poor relatedness and really clumsy behavior In relationships he can actually orchestrate tremendous isolation from other people the early analysts connected this to masochism greed grasping behavior self-centeredness so if the inner feminine is in bad relationship to his masculine ego it can have a devastating impact on his inner and outer life and if we take it down even to something that is I think ubiquitous in the culture often if we think in our

culture of been who are in A very typical masculine relationship which I see all the time in my practice with all the military presence around men are taught not to display emotion or be tender maybe you have a baby you can be tender for a couple of years maybe but that is an enormous triumph for a man to be able to let himself feel and demonstrate qualities that are still socially associated with femininity and it is parsed out in his psyche in that way so it's been very powerful to me When I have been working

with men long enough for them to take on that experiment for themselves I'll send them home for a week and I'll say this is your mantra I'm a man and a woman and I want you to journal what comes up yeah and when they're ready to do that men come back and say things like I feel unbelievably compassionate towards my girlfriend just imagining the world from her eyes we don't even know if he's imagining it very well But the fact that he's imagining it we're imagining himself walking through the world as a woman because where

all this is going in the Rose areum is that the masculine and the feminine properties are meant to blend into this archetype of the androgen where a man has equal access to his feminine and masculine nature and a woman has equal access to her masculine and feminine nature and then something more akin to the self than emerges because the self Is the perfect blend of all opposites say a word about what the rosarium is Joseph for our listeners sure young came across these wonderful woodcut prints alchemical prints that he felt really symbolized a profound psycho

spiritual process and these images were showing up in his clients dreams without them having any access to these ancient works of art and so he actually sat and analyzed these alchemical images which start with an alchemical king and queen Representing opposites and through various stages wind up with the birth of an androgynous figure a single figure which is also associated with a kind of godlike dynamism this process of opposites coming together with a ven following religious sentiment around it led young to feel that this integration of opposites was part of the human achievement to the

human goal and incarnated just a little bit more of this spiritual center he Called the self will put a reference to it in the show notes so this is [Music] wrestling around we have been talking about this for just about an hour and no and we are hardly finished now we got to move on but it is time to look at a dream [Music] [Laughter] hi this is Lisa from this uni life podcast Josef Deb and I have been deeply Moved by your responses to our work producing editing and distributing the podcast involves substantial expenses

and we need your help please stop by our website this Union live.com and click on the heading be our patron you'll be redirected to our patreon funding page patreon creators connect with people who believe in projects like ours there you can sign up with your credit card to support us for as little as $1 a month and at higher levels of support we'll Provide special episodes behind-the-scenes photos and stories and a chance to join a select pool of listeners for dream interpretations thank you here is this week's a dream and it is from a male

dreamer who's 39 years old and is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst and here's the dream in the first dream my guy and I are watching each other masturbate over Skype he's in his house and he Ejaculates on his real wood floor in the second scene we're in my parents house they aren't there but there are children's toys around he masturbates himself and ejaculates on their laminate wood floor I'm anxious about this and clean up in the third scene I arrive in a cavernous Victorian public restroom below ground level in London the first chamber is a

men's urinal and lots of men are pleasuring each other it's a lively scene and they invite me in but I Refuse I moved to another chamber which is a spa but I don't go in in between the two chambers is a lecture theatre and my guy is giving a work presentation to an audience he doesn't acknowledge my arrival and I sit next to the projector under the chairs where the audience is sitting and watch him present he won't be able to see me as he'd be blinded by the projector but I can see him and

for clarifying content about this dream the dream of reports that he's been seeing The man in his dream for nearly three years that they are in love and that this man is married to a husband that he lives with in his long-term marriage his partners relationship has been difficult and he's trying to make it work about leaving and he began analysis a few months ago apparently the other man's husband doesn't know about the affair between the dreamer and this man they are in love they are enjoying their sexual life very very much And the dreamer

finds us so painful that this man won't give up his husband to be with him and he had this dream while they were apart he also reports anxiety about the strangeness of the orgasm and he awoke very disturbed and that they've never had sex over Skype before and I think that's probably enough to report of his personal associations to the dream so the dream is about sex love partnering the archetype of the lover the archetype of the spouse and all of The tensions that arise when this powerful erotic sexual romantic images are ignited in a

relationship this could be the story about a woman having an affair with a man two women having an affair two men having an affair because that archetype of eros being struck by a horse's arrow is universal and the incredible psychological and physical energies that are set in motion so I I can't help but comment in the context of our previous conversation anonymous and Anima that here we are talking about eros we're not talking about the Contra sexual we're talking about the archetype of love and passion and sexuality and attraction itself and it's it doesn't have

to be gendered so that's an aside but I agree that here is this intense sexual encounter but it's over Skype they are apart yeah they are not actually having an in-person physical relationship in this dream there's a separation you know there's sort of you Know pleasuring themselves right there there's not a real exchange because it's over Skype there's something something distant about it and I think it images the tension that they're having about the secrets that they're keeping the fact that it's an affair the fact that the can only connect through these circuitous you know

secret and indirect routes and that in the dream life that's not terribly satisfying well I think It's actually painful and there's also a kind of interesting confusion just in the scene setting part of he says we're in my parents house and ii see were in my parents house they aren't there and so there's something about whose house it's in which whether it's a real wood floor or a laminate floor that is separate confusing and kind of mixed up together just in the dream imagery well and in the second the second scene where they're in his

parents house and there's Children toys around and i feel anxious about the fact that he ejaculate saan the laminate floor it's like the dreamer is really pretty much in the child's position like you're at your parents house and if you spill something you feel like you have to clean it up and there's there's children's toys around I mean there's there's some kind of he's somehow infantilized or something he's there's a kind of level of anxiety about that at anytime that masturbation is the Primary sexual expression we know that there's something regressive I'm me because there's

a partner there and he says in the extra information that they generally are sexual together but here it's reduced to self stimulation which is a kind of regression and I think that that does make him anxious the the powerlessness that he's in and the fact that he's reduced to masturbating around the fantasy of the lover that he cannot have as you said Lisa pushes him against The child complex so he's gone down into underground right there's been some dropping below ground level into these three chambers you know one is this lots of men pleasuring each

other then there's the spa and in the middle is this lecture theater so there's this public space flanked by these two Dionysus revelries to the right and left which which really creates a powerful image of the tension that he's living in and it's interesting that there are that Two chambers of the pleasure chambers and then the third chamber is a work presentation right this is not not at all physical its formal its structured and it's one way it's a presentation being delivered by the dream egos lover right and presumably you know the lover is up

on stage yes with a projector and we can imagine make some connections between a projector and projecting the bright light of that projector makes the dream Ito invisible Joe sees the Presenter the presenter his lover does not see him so there's a bright light here that is blinding so on the stage we can imagine that persona is in the forefront that of course when any of us are you scenting there's some idea about how we wish to be perceived and what we want to keep secret so the chamber is the powerful homoerotic archetypal Diane Isaak

elements you know are behind the walls but they're just very close so there's this I don't know whether it's An exciting dimension or threatening dimension between these different worlds but it's you know it's just you know a doorway away from them exploding and this could be part of what the unconscious is saying is you know these two people may have this feeling of secrecy and proceed with impunity the unconscious could be feeling that exposure is eminent but the affair is not not an easy secret to keep in light of these different worlds that they Collide

in hmm but there's also another sort of repetition of the separateness that we see in the very beginning of the dream where they are masturbating each other over Skype and now there's a separateness the-dream ego can see his lover but the lover who is the presenter the person in charge does not see him they are separate yeah I mean if you think about it in the beginning the gays may be only virtual it's like what I can't really Have you you're just you know in a computer screen but at least there's a mutuality to it

we're both looking at each other and the dream progresses to the spinal scene which is so poignant I mean there's so much pain in it and if I'm looking at you I'm gazing at you you know there's hope there's something being projected up there but you can't see me so that sense of mutuality is gone and let's just take that as a metaphor I think that is exactly in his Comments what he is saying kind of over and over again is he doesn't feel seen there's a kind of passion there in love they have this

phenomenal great sex in the rest of the relationship he doesn't feel seen even though both of them give presentations that this man keeps his work life and people very much away from me mm yes and here it is right there in the dream right because if he were brought forward into that world then he would move out of the role of the Mistress into the role of the spouse and the lover is clearly wanting to keep that distant which is painful to the dreamer you know it does seem like the classic image and just in

the situation of that the dreamer is the mistress in this idea of projection I remember my analyst years ago introducing this idea that when we begin to dream about a dynamic it's a sign that it's rising into consciousness and we are being prepared to confront it mm-hmm so the Affair has been going on for three years and even in clinical psychology they call that initial stage limerence which they say can last anywhere from six months to two years which is that idealization stage all of that I'm in love and the passion is there and some

people you know it goes a little longer some people that goes shorter but we're here at about three years so I could imagine that there is a rising perhaps even ominous feeling that the projection Might be in process of being withdrawn hmm and the dreamers beginning to see things more objectively which is he's left his lover of 14 years yeah in order to be free for this fellow the guy is not leaving that spouse and so part of that fantasy is being sorely challenged and the dream might be delivering this painful medicine that there is

a great inequity of passion or an inequity of commitment in the relationship yeah I think you might have put your finger on It Joseph I think that might be when you have a dream is kind of nudging the dreamer toward yeah I concur so I feel sober nothing I'm just aware of it feels really painful mm-hmm you know the realization and also just the puncturing of the fantasy I know it was it urban golem that said I hate being loves executioner there's something about delving deeply into ourselves that begins to interrupt the projections that allow

us to be innocently and Passionately idealizing ly in love and it kind of shorts circuit it's a lot of that unconscious process and then we're left with reality in a real relationship yeah which tends to be rich of course but not quite so you the fully passionate not as magical maybe that's a place to leave it for today yes you've been listening to this Union life from our website this Union life calm you can follow us on Twitter like us on Facebook Help us produce future episodes by funding us through patreon and submit your dreams

or possible interpretation on another episode we'd like to thank our listener who shared a dream for today's show and hope you'll let us know what topics you'd enjoy hearing more about until next time keep living this union life [Music] you