By Bob Bongiovanni, MA
Today we continue our series on the practical applications of Jungian thought. In the first session, I proposed that individuating individuals, as defined by Jung, are both personally and collectively resilient, that is, are better able to encounter challenges or needs for change and to respond in a healthy manner. This week, we’ll discuss a more specific topic, the challenge and the promise of healthier relationships. And, as you might imagine, I will propose that Jungian thought holds promise in deepening relationships and making them stronger and transformative.
First, though, I would like to invite you to think about the cult of romantic love that pervades our culture. What exactly do I mean by “the cult of romantic love?” Basically, if you think about the way that the topic of love dominates art, literature, movies, music, poetry, and other aspects of modern culture, you have some idea of what I mean by “the cult of romantic love.” In a culture that dismisses most other sentimental ideas, and is so rife with violence and hatred, love still dominates, particularly the form of romantic love that draws together and binds two people. Even in stories about outer space adventures or invasions by space aliens or other monsters, there is usually a romantic story line that results in the lovers miraculously prevailing against all odds. Romantic love is magical – it protects, transforms, emboldens, and comforts. It even transcends death.
Of course, our American culture is
not the first culture to mythologize love.
In the Hindu tradition, there are three forms of yoga, each of which is
held to be a pathway to mystical experience and union with the divine. One is hatha yoga, the way of action. The second is jnana yoga, the path of
intellect and intuition. The third is
bhakti yoga, the way of love. Now, the
type of romantic love that is so enshrined in Western thought is only a part of
bhakti yoga. Swami Nikhilananda explains:
Love as a force of attraction operates at different
levels: the material, the human, and the spiritual. On the
material level it draws together the particles of an inanimate object; on the
human level it joins friend and friend, parents and children, husband and wife;
and on the spiritual level it unites people with God. The real source of
attraction is the spirit or God; a particle of matter cannot of itself attract
another particle. Because God as spirit pervades the whole universe and because
He is the inmost self of all beings, one sees the force of attraction operating
everywhere. There is no essential difference between a lower form of
attraction, for instance the attraction of a mistress for her lover, and a
higher form of attraction, such as the attraction of children for the mother.
The apparent difference is due to the difference in the channels through which
the love is expressed.
Clearly, by these labels, the cult of romantic love operates mainly at the human level, with brief intimations of the material and spiritual levels.
For those who are fully immersed in the Western cult of romantic love, finding and remaining partnered with an ideal lover is the ultimate human aspiration. The ideal lover makes all of life’s challenges endurable, enlivens the deadening effects of daily life, and takes one to the ecstatic heights through sex. If children come from this relationship, they can’t help but grow up health and well adjusted in the glow of this wondrous love. I know this may sound trite and arouse your cynicism, but it still operates as a powerful myth in the Western psyche. Perhaps no one we know achieves it, but we all think it is possible and ideal – that is one of the key aspects of a myth. It can’t be proven tangibly, but it is still believed to be true and powerful. We may choose to dismiss it as impossible and even silly, but it must have meaning since it is so pervasive and has endured for hundreds of years.
Jung was well aware of this cult of romantic love and did find it deeply meaningful. Essentially, it comes down to this: if increasing wholeness is the ultimate aim of human life, we tend to fall in love with people who help us become whole. We begin our lives immersed in everything that is – we don’t know where we end and the world begins. Then, the ego starts to develop, and we differentiate between what is part of our identity and what is not. In other words, our identity narrows. In some cases, this is a necessary part of participation in the human family – if we had no boundaries at all, it would be hard for us to co-exist. Your car is your car; it’s not mine. But, in many other cases, these narrowings of identity leave us unnecessarily diminished and far from whole. For instance, a young boy is punished whenever he displays anything feminine in his character, and so all of his femininity is banished from his identity when he becomes a man. He is left with only 50% of what’s possible for him. Is he then doomed to have absolutely no connection with the feminine – no opportunity to grow in wholeness – for the rest of his life? No – he will experience the feminine by falling in love with a woman.
This, of course, is the basis of Jung’s concept of anima and animus. Whatever we do not live out in our conscious lives does not disappear; it sinks into the unconscious. So, if we live our conscious lives with masculine energies allowed full expression, then all the disallowed feminine energies drop into the unconscious. These feminine energies still attempt contact with the ego, personified as an archetypal entity that Jung called “anima,” which is Greek for “soul.” In dreams, she can appear as a numinous female character with unusual mystery and allure. In waking life, these energies tend to be projected onto people, who then take on a similarly mysterious and alluring quality. There’s an analogous process for people who live their conscious lives with feminine energies predominating; their masculine energies drop into the unconscious, appearing in dreams as a forceful male character, or projected during waking life onto people, who then take on an explicable numinous power. Jung called this masculine character the “animus,” which is Greek for “spirit.”
Now, that all seems quite neat and tidy from a theoretical standpoint. It’s far from neat and tidy as a lived experience. But, at least the Jungian standpoint allows some conscious light to be shined on situations that are extremely feeling-laden and prone to problems of compulsion and obsession.
It’s also not so dichotomous as Jung described it. Perhaps because he was an early pioneer, or perhaps because of the time he lived, Jung drew clear distinctions between men and woman. Men live their lives almost entirely in a masculine mode; therefore, they have an anima. Women live their lives almost entirely in a feminine mode; therefore, they have an animus. Many people still feel that is the ideal. But it is, of course, far from universally true, and the exceptions are not pathological.
First, though, let’s consider a traditional example. Bill grew up with a very masculine heroic-type father and a very nurturing mother. As a result, Bill came to rely on his mother to advise and console him in any situation involving emotion – dating, loss, fear, and so on. The rest of the time, Bill approached life like a warrior, conquering difficulties, obliterating the competition, never showing weakness. Bill met Sally in high school, and was almost immediately mesmerized by her. She seemed very vulnerable to him, which brought out his protective strength. She expressed emotions easily, which partly frustrated him, but also made her oddly alluring. She sometimes feared him – he seemed so brutal, and could be thoughtlessly contemptuous of her at times. He was like her father in that way, but also very different and very alluring. They married, and they soon fell into traditional gender roles. Bill spent his time earning a living, making household repairs, and urging his sons to excel – as his father had done for him. Sally consoled Bill in his times of defeat of weakness – always in private, of course – and created a nurturing environment for the family.
I know this seems like a unrealistic “Father Knows Best” example – almost insulting in its oversimplification – but how many people live out this pattern, or as close to this pattern as they can make happen? Many millions, I would guess. Now, where it gets interesting is in those private moments that no one sees – when Sally lays awake at night imaging taking off on a Harley Davidson and touring the biker bars of California, and Bill fantasizes what it would be like to wear women’s underwear to work. The anima and animus do work in mysterious ways.
We might say that Bill carried Sally’s animus for her and Sally carried Bill’s anima for him. At some point in her development, Sally embraced feminine energies as part of her identity, and projected masculine energies outward, first on her father, then on Bill. Similarly, Bill embraced masculine identity, and projected feminine energies onto his mother and Sally.
Let’s add a few wrinkles to our example, to make it more interesting and perhaps more realistic. After about ten years of marriage, Sally keeps getting a nagging feeling that she is a stranger to Bill. Early in their marriage, Bill always compared Sally to his mother, usually in a less than complimentary manner. Mom kept the house more neatly, was a better cook, didn’t seem to struggle with child rearing, and so on. Sally put a quick end to that – since he wanted to be married to his mother, she invited him to move back to her house. Now, Bill just seems to criticize her for the things he used to like about her – she is too emotional, too predictable, no longer physically attractive, not sexually adventurous enough. Who is this woman that Bill thinks he married? It no longer feels like Sally.
That’s the problem with projections. Inevitably, the person who is the object of projection ceases to be a good projection screen. No flesh-and-blood woman can embody an archetypal anima – she will always come up lacking. If nothing else, she is a mortal, and the anima is timeless. Every woman must age out of maiden into mature woman and ultimately into crone. What happens when a husband prefers the perpetual maiden as his wife?
A few more wrinkles, just to keep it interesting. Increasingly, Bill feels dismissed by Sally. Whenever he makes mistakes, she delights in pointing them out, preferably in a very public way. Increasingly, she asks her eldest son to do the things around the house that Bill used to do – fix the plumbing, deal with auto repairs, and so on. When he was laid off from his job, Sally launched into a tirade, telling him that he never showed enough ambition, never made the right kinds of connections at work, never given the family the kind of lifestyle they deserved. She had given everything up for him – her own career, better husband prospects – and now she was stuck in a dismal existence. Her only comfort is that her son may “actually amount to something,” as she puts it.
Again, no flesh-and-blood man can embody an archetypal animus – he will always come up lacking. He’s also mortal, and the animus is timeless. He cannot stay the conquering hero forever.
These last two scenarios also point out an odd paradox in the path to wholeness through love. How can you fully love someone else when they display traits that you find contemptible in yourself? If a man lives almost entirely in the hyper-masculine mode, then he would rather die that be caught displaying any feminine qualities. How should his wife feel when he uses terms like “pussy” and “sissy” to describe men he holds in contempt? For women, it can be even more complicated. Owing to the predominant negative fathering that most women experience in childhood, the animus they experience is quite often very negative. It’s that needling masculine voice that says, “you’ll never amount to much,” “you’re pathetic,” “you can’t make it.” Now, some women silence this voice by testing herself and achieving great success by the world’s standards, but even then, there’s a tendency to be tuned to hear that same needling voice coming from the men in their lives, including their male love partners. It seems that love often comes an edge of hate when it’s a matter of anima or animus projection. Herein are the roots of domestic violence.
I would like to add another example, to go beyond where Jung left this, and to update it to the modern world. What about same-sex love? Jung expressed some skepticism that a homosexual man could achieve the same level of wholeness as his heterosexual counterpart, due to his inability to project anima onto a woman other than his mother, sexualize her, and thereby achieve real separation from his mother. Again, we must remember that Jung was a product of his time and could only take these ideas so far. More modern Jungian analysts have found that, among homosexuals, there is a process of projection onto the lover, but it is not necessarily projection of anima or animus, per se. San Francisco analyst Robert Hopcke wrote the book Same Sex Love and the Path to Wholeness which includes an essay by John Beebe, who writes:
My own quite different personal and clinical
experience has led me to an opposing view: the man who takes his homosexuality
seriously enough to work on finding a relationship with a male partner and
making it prosper also develops a relation-ship to the anima within and, like
his heterosexual counterpart, finds "her" of inestimable
value in strengthening his ability to contain the tensions of the partnership
while sustaining contact with himself. Indeed, the inner material of a man who
has confronted his own internalized prejudices against making so unconventional
a commitment will show clear signs of an anima function separate from the
mother archetype. This anima will then undergo a developmental process that
deepens and se-cures his inner relation to his homosexuality as well as his
lived relationships in the outer world with other homosexual men. Such
development clearly parallels the anima's function of deepening the object
relations of a heterosexual man and, just as in the heterosexual situation, to
the degree that the homosexual man loves convention and his parents' values
more than the relationship at hand, the anima will not develop. (page 153)
. . .
Although the idea that the anima remains necessary to
the mature development of a homosexual man is important, it should not be
turned into dogma. The proof is always in the actual material of the individual
patient. I stress the anima not as the archetype of love, but as the archetype
of life.
I think the analyst needs to be
sensitive to the homosexual man's search for an alive, internal
relationship to his homosexuality—an aliveness that the anima is uniquely
qualified to bring him. The analyst supporting such discovery of the anima by a
homosexual male client will have to overcome the prejudice that love is based
on projection of the anima and that, because the anima is not projected and sexualized,
she is absent or too undeveloped to be of any help. This prejudice, which has
confused the understanding of heterosexual love as well, is an analytic enemy
of real individuation. As I have indicated, the job of the anima is better
conceived as one of opening up the man’s inner depths to himself, and if these
depths are homosexual, the anima engagement will make him more homosexual, not
less. (page 154)
In addition to its explanation of the male homosexual variation on the theme of love, this quote opens us up to a profound truth about love, anima, and animus: mere projection will not take us far in our path to wholeness. It takes much more work and courage for both heterosexuals and homosexuals.
If mere projection will not suffice, what must we do to deepen relationships? We must withdraw and integrate the projections. It seems almost inevitable that those early days of falling in love will be dominated by projection – as it should be, perhaps. It’s a fundamental human experience. But, imagine a scenario where one can consciously say, “I think part of why I am so intensely in love with this person is because he or she opens me up to parts of myself I have feared or neglected.” Your partner should not be duty-bound to carry those elements, to win and keep your love. Owning projection is the first stage to integration. You are not my anima or my idealized self. You are a separate human being with your own needs, wants, fears, and desires. The real magic comes when I strip away my projections, and I discover that you are MORE than I originally thought, and I love you more because of it. Then, we can journey together on a mutual path to wholeness, neither partner carrying the other, but both partners engaged in a relationship of mutual loving support.