Dr. K Explains: Animus & Anima

Jung noticed something kind of interesting. There are these primitive things in our unconscious mind, which are universal across cultures. What he noticed is that there is this fundamental masculine thing in our unconscious. This is what he called the animus. And the animus is that which deals with the external world, is logical, motivated to accomplish. So he like looked across cultures. He was like, okay, there's this basic thing that all human beings have the capacity to deal with the external world. And dealing with the external world involves a set of skills. It's interpreting information, it's some amount of analysis, it's building things in the outside world. And he said, you know what, this is what we're going to call the masculine principle. Because if you look at men, especially in Jung's time, right? Men are people who go out and they build things. They shape the external world. They build tree houses. They don't talk about their feelings. Then what he also noticed is that there was an internal principle as well. There's an inner sense of being, a sense of feeling, a sense of connection, a sense of relation. And because the society was very gendered in that time, people associated masculinity with external stuff, with accomplishment, with logic. And women are emotions, feeling, internal, relational, connection. But this is really important to understand. What Jung said is that these are not male and female, they're masculine and feminine. So every human being has both of these qualities. These are primitive parts of our unconscious mind. If you look at any human being on the planet, there's a part of us that wants to shape and interact with the external world, and there's a part of us that has an inner sense of being, feeling, aliveness, and connection. This is what he called animus, and this is what he called anima.