Waking Up the Anima – Jung Applied to Transgender Women

Guest writer Jocelyn Muchilinski takes a new approach to using Jung's theory of the subconscious to explain transgender experiences.  

The anima represents the female
side of the male psyche
Painting by Indra Grušaitė 

Guest Post by Jocelyn Muchlinski

The Anima and the Animus

Carl Jung introduced a new vocabulary into psychology. Among the most important words in this vocabulary are anima, animus, and projection.

In this essay, I will commandeer these words and twist them to suit my meanings. Perhaps Jung will forgive me for perverting his language so freely.

The anima is the female soul in every human. The animus is the male soul.

I want to encourage readers to understand the anima and animus as two entirely different people living in the same body. I also want to suggest that the animus, in cisgender men, is one and the same with the man himself.

That is to say, the animus has the reigns of the ego. The animus is expressed and brought to life in the words, thoughts, and actions of the man. The anima, on the other hand, gains life by projecting itself onto female figures in the man’s life.

In this way, both anima and animus take an essential and substantial role in the life of the cisgender man.

Conversely, the anima is the soul and person of the cisgender woman. This woman, who is the anima incarnate, experiences her animus by projecting it onto male figures in her life. Projection of anima and animus occurs naturally first on the parents of a child.

Thus, for a boy, his first experience of his own anima is vis-à-vis his mother. For a girl, she sees her own animus—her male soul—in her father.

The Other Side of your Transgender Soul -- Body and Mind

Here is my final post on Jung and a transgender psychology.

The starting point for this series is the idea that the subconscious psyche compensates for what the conscious ego considers taboo and therefore denies.

For instance: All male bodied persons have psychological traits associated with culturally defined feminine values, but they find it hard to admit to these feelings and therefore suppress them.

Among many transgender people these suppressed feelings find a way to  the surface through crossdreaming and crossdressing.

The anima and animus becomes one

As I noted in my post on the anima and animus archetypes, the anima and arnimus archetypes may be understood in at least two ways.

The traditional way is to think of the anima as the underdeveloped feminine side of man and the animus as the primitive man in the woman.

The second explanation is to think of the anima and the animus as the gateway to the unconscious. In this sense they are parallels to the persona, the "mask" we show the people around us. The persona helps us interact with the world outside. The anima/animus helps us to interact with the world inside.

In order to function as a gateway to "the other side" the anima/animus compensates for what is lacking in the persona and the ego. If the persona is hypermasculine the anima appears as hyperfeminine in dreams, fantasies and projections. If the persona of a woman is emotional, her animus becomes quasi-intellectual.

I add the term "quasi" to signify that this intellectual side is underdeveloped, for the simple reason that this particular woman has never been encouraged to develop that side of her psyche.

The anima  of a male bodied person does not have to express culturally defined feminine traits only. Nor does the animus of a female bodied person have to be symbolized as a man in dreams and fantasies. It all depends on to what extent "the other side" has been integrated into the ego and the persona.

If the cultural ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman changes, the anima and animus are also likely to generate different content. If a woman is allowed to explore her aggressive and dominant side, her animus is less likely to express this part of her psyche in dreams and fantasies.

Murray Stein's interpretation

There are Jungians who have reinterpreted Jung for a the contemporary age, somewhat in the same vein as I have done here.


Murray Stein asks the same question in the highly recommended book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction:

"But what about women who are not very feminine and men who are not very masculine in their personas? Does a not-very-feminine woman have a nonmasculine animus, and a not-very-masculine man have a nonfeminine anima? Jung would be obliged to follow this line of thought, given his premises."

The Other Side of your Transgender Soul - from Dostoyevski to Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Anima as the archetypal hero. Joss Whedon
turned the anima archetype upside down, turning the

brainless bimbo (Buffy) and the introvert nerd

(Willow) into fearsome warriors.

Image from the Dark Horse comic book.

Our understanding of what it means to be a woman or a man is changing. That has repercussions for how crossdreamers and transgender people see themselves.

The changing anima 


In my previous posts in my series on transgender psychology I argued that Carl Jung's concept of the anima (the repressed woman withing the man) and the animus (the unconscious masculine side of women) may be useful in a transgender context, but not in the way most people think.

Far too often the anima is understood as a given, biologically determined,  set of feminine personality traits that the man suppresses in order to live up to the masculine stereotype. According to this model the feminine side of man will always be - for instance -- emotional, irrational and opinionated.

But what happens if the cultural stereotypes change?

Will the anima represent the same timeless traits like  -- let's say -- being emotional as opposed to analytical, conflict shy as opposed to aggressive?

I find that very unlikely. The psychological traits found in the anima and animus will change in accordance with what is considered accepted behavior in that culture.

The traditional anima

In the 19th century and much of the 20th century the female archetype or anima appeared in novels written by men as the comforter, the emphatic and forgiving soul, the kind of woman who helps a man reconcile a tortured soul with the undercurrents of nature.  Goethe's Faust had Gretchen. Ibsen's Peer Gynt had Solveig.

In several of Fyodor Dostoyevski's books we meet men who have gone so far in the analytical direction, that they lose touch with Nature, God  or the Harmonious Life (which in Dostoyevski's case seem to be one and the same).

The Transgender Jung

Carl G. Jung

On using  Carl Gustav Jung's model of the psyche to describe transgender experiences.

I have posted a few articles where I have been using the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung to discuss the transgender psyche.

Only one post remains, but before I publish that one, I would like to take a look at to what extent Jung discussed transgender conditions.

Here are all the posts in the transgender psychology series:
1: The Role of the Unconscious
2: The Ego and the Complexes
3: The Shadow
4: The Animus and the Anima
5: The Other Side of your Transgender Soul - from Dostoyevski to Buffy the Vampire Slayer
6: Transgender and the mind and body conundrum
7: Spellbound transgender
8: Ponyo for Crossdreamers
9: Falling in love with your own anima

See also guest post by  Jocelyn Muchlinski: Waking Up the Anima – Jung Applied to Transgender Women

Jung ignored the transgender

Did Carl Gustav Jung himself say anything about crossdreamers, crossdressers or transvestites?

As far as I can see, he did not.

That is a bit peculiar, really, as there had already been  published some interesting research on trasvestites in Berlin, which might have given him some input on his discussion on the crossgender nature of the collective  unconscious (Magnus Hirschfield: Die Transvestiten 1910)

Falling in love with your own anima

Betty Boop falls in love

There i an interesting parallel between Carl Jung's anima-theory (that each man has an unconscious feminine side) and Ray Blanchard's autogynephilia-theory (that some men get aroused by the idea of having a woman's body).

A man will repress not only associated with what he and his culture considers the negative nature of woman, Jung argues. His anima will also be projected onto other women.

His unconscious misogyny may, for instance,  turn many of the women he meets  into stupid airheads.

But he will also project his inner ideal woman, i.e. the image of the beautiful, loving, merciful and perfect woman.

As Jung points out the man projects his own feminine side onto a woman, and then falls head over heals in love with her!


Yes, according to Jung infatuated love is indeed autoerotic, but unlike Ray Blanchard  -- who believes that it is only the "autogynephilac" who can fall in love with the image of himself as a woman,  Jung believes this applies to all men.

At this point it becomes, of course, meaningless to label this as a sexual perversion.

A Transgender Psychology 4: The Animus and the Anima

In Dante's Divine Comedy, Beatrice,
his anima, guides him through
Purgatory.

One of Carl Jung's most famous concepts is the Anima/Animus duo. The anima is said to be the woman in the man. The animus is said to be the the man in the woman.

It would be tempting to say that the animus is the inner woman of male to female transgender person and vise versa. That would be a mistake.

I will not argue that male to female transgender persons are possessed by their anima, or that female to male crossdreamers have suppressed their true femininity.

In fact, the Jung interpretation you find in this series, is very different from the standard "men are from Mars and women are from Venus narrative" many Jungians love.

The two stories about the anima and animus

It helps to keep in mind that Jung is telling two stories at the same time when presenting the anima and the animus. The first one is partly  misleading, I am afraid. The second one is more useful for exploring the transgender psyche.

The first story says that the anima is the unconscious feminine side of the man, the animus the unconscious masculine side of the female. Given that men and women are forbidden to accept their "opposite side", this unconscious side is underdeveloped.

When the man projects this anima onto women out there in the real world, he therefore reduces them to clichés. He might despise her or he might fall in love with her, but he is not seeing her for who she is. He is, in fact, not falling in love with a real woman out there, but in his own underdeveloped feminine side.

A Transgender Psychology 3: The Shadow

Voldmort may be understood as Harry Potter's Shadow

In this post I will look into the role of archetypes in the development of the transgender psyche, focusing on the "dark side of the soul": The Shadow.

The discussion is based on a model developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.

(Click here for the previous posts in this series).

Archetypes

One of the parts of Jung's theory that I find problematic, is that his categories have a tendency of becoming absolute.

He warns us against this, though, reminding us that the psyche is not a rational place organized on the basis of scientific principles. This is probably why some of his concepts contains contradictions that are hard to sort out.

The word "archetype" is, in my opinion, very useful. It is used to describe the natural basis of many psychological experiences.

The archetypes -- or "primordial images" -- are expressed through symbols in dreams and art. The symbols may vary from person to person and culture to culture, but the underpinning reality may be the same.

In fact, even the symbolic expressions of these archetypes are often very similar across cultural borders. It seems to me, for instance, that we in nearly all cultures find the image of the nurturing mother goddess.

Strongly inspired by a patriarchal Judaism, Christianity tried to get rid of the mother goddess, but lo and behold: She popped up again in the shape of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary even took over associated symbols from the Sumerian goddesses, like the moon crescent and circle of stars.

In other words: There is a psychological need underpinning the appearance of such symbols, and that the basis for that need can be described as archetypes.

(For a critical discussion of the interaction between archetypes and the mind, see my post on the mind/body conundrum.)

Related to instincts

Jung compares the archetypes to biological instincts. In the same way there is a hunger instinct that causes the sensation of hunger and the desire for a burger, there is a mother archetype that shapes your attitude towards motherhood.

Transgender and the mind and body conundrum

An instinct for soccer.

Given the strong criticism om the very idea of using Jung for studying the transgender psyche, I think it is time for me to make clear what I mean about the interaction between mind and body and terms like "the inner woman" and "the inner man".

Can instincts and archetypes generate symbols?

In the discussions at this blog wxhlup has repeatedly criticized  me for arguing that crossdreaming may have a biological core.

Her argument argument seems to be that crossdreaming is an expression of symbols, semiotics or language, and instincts have no language. Instincts cannot be expressed in symbols, and therefore they cannot influence the way we think about ourselves and others.

Because of this, the argument goes,  it makes no sense to talk about "an inner woman"  or "inner man", as I do, or about  instincts or archetypes that shape the way we see the world. Instincts and archetypes are not cultural and therefore cannot be translated into language or symbols.

Similarly the biological base cannot generate the desire to be a man or a woman, since both sex and gender -- according to this line of thinking -- are social constructs and social constructs only.

If I understand this line of thinking correctly, this also means that Jung's idea of primordial biological patterns or archetypes influencing the content of dreams, myths and fantasies, must be wrong.

These symbols are not produced by the human body, but by the "language games", "schemata", "belief systems" or "semiotics" of human culture. They are produced by the "cultural software" and not the "biological hardware".

The role of symbols

I have actually learned a lot from the kind of post-structuralist philosophy wxhlup is so fond of. I have no doubt the cultural belief systems we grow up in wields enormous power over our way of understanding the world. That is: Our words and concepts and the word views they are part of, forces us to think in certain ways.

My deconstruction of the "autogynephilia" narrative of Ray Blanchard is indebted to the postmodern philosophy of Michel Foucault, and my constant nagging about the differences between the genders being negligible as regards abilities and personality traits is also based on this way of thinking.

Ponyo for Crossdreamers

Another conversation between Jack and his inner woman Jackie, this time on what the Japanese animated movie Ponyo has to teach transgender crossdreamers (Yeah! Really! And it has a bit about Jung too...)

I wrote this dialogue between Jack and Jackie over a year ago, but at the time I decided not to publish it, as I considered it too strange.

It probably wouldn't make much sense to most of you. Now that I have started presenting my Jungian approach to the transgender psyche in detail, however, I believe  it may be of help.

Ponyo certainly helped me understanding more of myself.

 JACK: What do you mean, I get too academic? This blog is born out of my own life struggle, dammit. It is not academic!

JACKIE: Of course it is academic, Jack. There are not many in the world who have spent more time than you on deconstructing the autogynephilia theory of Ray Blanchard.

Not all transgender crossdreamers, crossdressers or transsexuals are interested in that kind of thing.

JACK: Well, they should be!

JACKIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah... but they don't, so get over it! They want to share their life experiences, be seen, respected, affirmed, comforted.

JACK: This is a girl thing, isn't it?

JACKIE: I hope for your sake that that was a joke!

JACK: Of course it was. Now, what do you want me to write about?

Writing about Ponyo

JACKIE: I want you to write about Ponyo.

JACK: "Ponyo", the Studio Ghibli movie? You want me to write about a Japanese children's manga?

JACKIE: Yeah, that is what I want, and since I am the one with the female intituion, that is what you'll do.

JACK: But why?

JACKIE: Because the movie is about you and me!

JACK: Really? Ponyo is about you and me?

Sosuke and the gold fish

JACK: Let me see... The movie is about a five year old Japanese boy Sosuke who lives with his mother and father in a house at the top of a hill. His mother is working at a service center for the elderly and he goes to a kindergarten nearby. And yes, his father is a sea captain who is always absent... I fail to see...

A Transgender Psychology 2: The Ego and the Complexes

In my first post in this series I argued that there is a need to develop a language that makes it possible for transgender people to analyze and discuss their feelings and experiences.  I proposed that we make use of Carl Gustav Jungs's model of the psyche as a starting point for developing such a language.

Jung's model simplified

I have made an illustration of the model of Jung's in order to speed things up.

Think of the psyche as an onion. The whole onion constitutes the totality of the psyche. This totality, which consists of the psychic content you are aware of, the things you have suppressed and the parts of the psyche you still have not become conscious of,  he calls "the Self".

My interpretation of Jung's model of the psyche.  The sphere represents the totality of the psyche: "the Self".  The "normal" male psyche to the left, the female to the right. Click on image to enlarge!

I have tried hard to find texts where Jung discusses the transgender conditions. The closest I have come is a text where he writes about homosexuality. That text is relevant, and I will discuss it in a separate post, but please note that when I interpret crossdreaming and the transsexual experience within a Jungian framework, that is my interpretation, not Jung's.

The Persona

The outermost layer of the Self, the one directly visible to the world, is the Persona. The persona is the mask we show the world, a reflection of what we would like the world to see.

Jung says:

"The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other hand, to conceal the true nature of the individual." 
(CW 7 paras 305-9)

A Transgender Psychology 1: The Role of the Unconscious

Transgender people need a language that can be used to describe their feelings. In a series of posts I will see it it is possible to use Carl Gustav Jung's model of the psyche as a tool for understanding the various transgender conditions.

Transgender crossdreamers, crossdressers and transsexuals may go through periods of emotional pain and confusion.

The most scary part of their experience is the fact that they lack the language needed to make sense of it all. Their surrounding culture -- family and friends -- have no idea about what they are going through, as they all lack the necessary reference points.

Fear and loathing

For crossdreamers this is especially difficult, for the simple reason that sex is defined as a unique and separate sphere of living in Western culture. In spite of all the talk of sexual liberation and tolerance, sex remains sullied and unclean in the minds of many, especially the kind of sexual fantasies and practices that lie outside the limited repertoire of traditional vanilla marriages.

Indeed, to the extent other people do have concepts of men and women getting excited about the idea of being the other sex, these are often followed by feelings of revulsion and contempt. Most transgender therefore go through periods in life where they try to forget or suppress their feelings.

At this moment in time the only transgender narrative that is accepted by society at large, is the classical transsexual narrative. This is the story where a person completely and unequivocally identifies with the culturally defined gender role of the opposite sex, and who -- without any doubt -- express a wish to transition.

The "ideal" transgender is a therefore a person who never has had any doubts about his or her cross-sexual identity, even as a child, and who therefore can use the  traditional language of sex and gender to express his or her feelings. Moreover, he or she is very careful not to talk about his or her sexual desires.

In fact, the reason so many seem to accept this narrative is that it is not a threat to the dominating ideas of gender roles and sex identity. Homosexuality is much more threatening, as is any fantasy or identity that blurs the line between men and women.