In the first part, I shared Jung’s thoughts on Anima and how it influences our life. Honestly, I have noticed that following and understanding the text might be challenging. I know it is not easy, as I read them to translate. He mainly has long paragraphs and uses the word; Man, everywhere it would need as the third person. It is typical German! I kept trying to use “the one” instead because I find using the word “man” might be misunderstood. After all, we are talking about both sexes!

So let’s continue reading his words:

The tendency of relatively autonomous complexes to personify themselves immediately is also why the persona appears so “personal” that the ego can, without too much difficulty, doubt what its “true” personality is…

As we know, Persona is the soul; it images our protruding like a mask. We might hide it by changing our masks, but the unconscious always projects from behind. He explains this here in this way:

…So now, what is true of a persona, and all autonomous complexes in general, is also the case of the anima – she is also a personality, and that is why she is so easily projected onto a woman; that means she – as long as it is unconscious – always is projected. Because “everything unconscious” is projected. The first bearer of the soul picture is probably always the mother; later, it is the woman who arouses the man’s feelings, regardless of whether in a positive or negative sense. Because the mother is the first bearer of the image of the soul, separation from her is a delicate and important remoteness of the highest educational significance. We find, therefore, even among the primitives, a large number of rites which organise separation. Merely growing up with external separation is not enough; it still requires the particularly drastic male consecration and rebirth ceremonies to effectively complete the separation from the mother (and thus from childhood).

Dr Jung’s explanation about men may be too harsh to us men, but he is right! We might consider it honestly. He continues:

Just as the father acts as a protection against the dangers of the outside world and, in this way, becomes a model of the persona for the son, so the mother is a protection against the dangers that threaten his soul from the darkness. In the male initiations, therefore, the initiate receives instruction about things in the beyond, which enables him to renounce the protection of his mother.

Despite all its primitiveness, the modern civilised man has to do without this fundamentally excellent educational measure. The consequence of this is that the Anima is transmitted to the woman in the form of the mother-imago, with the result that the man, as soon as he marries, becomes childish, sentimental, dependent and submissive, or, in the other case, rebellious, tyrannical, and sensitive, always on considering the prestige of his superior manhood. The latter, of course, is merely the inverse of the former. The protection against the unconscious that his mother meant for him has yet to be replaced by the modern one, which is why he unconsciously designed his marriage ideal in such a way that his own might have to take on the magical role of mother. Under the cloak of the ideal, exclusive marriage, he actually seeks protection from his mother and thus seductively accommodates the woman’s possessive instinct. His fear of the dark unpredictability of the unconscious gives the woman illegitimate power and makes the marriage such an “intimate community” that it constantly threatens to burst from inner tension – or he does the opposite in protest with the same success.

I stop it here again for a break till the next post. Thank you all for your interest, and wishing a lovely time. 💖🙏🤗

Two first Pics at the top: Jake Baddeley