In Jung's view, because a person's conscious mind is identified with
their own gender, their unconscious will be experienced as being of the
opposite sex. Anyone who has ever been in love will probably agree.
When the beloved is with us and relating well to us, the world seems
perfect. Conversely, absence of the beloved (by geography or emotional
withdrawal) gives us a feeling as if we are incomplete. He called this
contrasexual aspect of the unconscious anima in men and animus in
women. The word used to describe both is syzygy, from a Greek word
suzugos, meaning yoked or paired, and is really only included here for
Scrabble players.
Anima and
animus are the large complexes into which all our experiences of the
other gender are filed. This will start with our parent of the opposite
sex, and be extended to siblings, relations, friends (and enemies!) and
associates throughout our lives. Thus at any time in our life we will
have a constantly evolving image of the other sex, and anyone who
appears to correlate closely to that image will have a remarkably
powerful effect on us. The creep at the party who comes up and says,
"Where have you been all my life?" inadvertently puts this situation
quite well. Meeting a person who approximates to anima or animus will
make us feel as if they are somehow familiar even though we know it is
our first encounter with them.
The syzygy is more than this. English is rather a unique language in
which the word "the" is not genderised. Most romantic languages have
masculine and feminine indefinite articles. For instance most languages
have the sea as feminine, the sky as masculine and so on. As a result,
anima and animus contain our responses to a wide variety of non-human
events and phenomena as well. To further complicate matters, we may
associate a certain person with a country or region, perhaps because
our emotional relationship to such a place is so strong that we
accommodate it by placing it on another human. This is one (though by
no means the only) reason for holiday romances being so sudden and
passionate, but easily terminated when we return to work.
