116 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
his feminine side is casting her spell; instead, he either ignores the irrationality of
the feelings or tries to explain them in a very rational masculine manner. In either
event he denies that an autonomous archetype, the anima, is responsible for his mood.Animus
The masculine archetype in women is called the animus. Whereas the anima rep-
resents irrational moods and feelings, the animus is symbolic of thinking and rea-
soning. It is capable of influencing the thinking of a woman, yet it does not
actually belong to her. It belongs to the collective unconscious and originates from
the encounters of prehistoric women with men. In every female-male relationship,
the woman runs a risk of projecting her distant ancestors’ experiences with fathers,
brothers, lovers, and sons onto the unsuspecting man. In addition, of course, her
personal experiences with men, buried in her personal unconscious, enter into her
relationships with men. Couple these experiences with projections from the man’s
anima and with images from his personal unconscious, and you have the basic
ingredients of any female-male relationship.
Jung believed that the animus is responsible for thinking and opinion in
women just as the anima produces feelings and moods in men. The animus is also
the explanation for the irrational thinking and illogical opinions often attributed to
women. Many opinions held by women are objectively valid, but according to
Jung, close analysis reveals that these opinions were not thought out, but existed
ready-made. If a woman is dominated by her animus, no logical or emotional
appeal can shake her from her prefabricated beliefs (Jung, 1951/1959a). Like the
anima, the animus appears in dreams, visions, and fantasies in a personified form.Great Mother
Two other archetypes, the great mother and the wise old man, are derivatives of
the anima and animus. Everyone, man or woman, possesses a great mother arche-
type. This preexisting concept of mother is always associated with both positive
and negative feelings. Jung (1954/1959c), for example, spoke of the “loving and
terrible mother” (p. 82). The great mother, therefore, represents two opposing
forces— fertility and nourishment on the one hand and power and destruction on
the other. She is capable of producing and sustaining life (fertility and nourish-
ment), but she may also devour or neglect her offspring (destruction). Recall that
Jung saw his own mother as having two personalities—one loving and nurturing;
the other uncanny, archaic, and ruthless.
Jung (1954/1959c) believed that our view of a personal loving and terrible
mother is largely overrated. “All those influences which the literature describes as being
exerted on the children do not come from the mother herself, but rather from the
archetype projected upon her, which gives her a mythological background” (p. 83). In
other words, the strong fascination that mother has for both men and women, often in
the absence of a close personal relationship, was taken by Jung as evidence for the
great mother archetype.
The fertility and nourishment dimension of the great mother archetype is
symbolized by a tree, garden, plowed field, sea, heaven, home, country, church,
and hollow objects such as ovens and cooking utensils. Because the great mother