There is a short video on YouTube that all heterosexual men would do well to watch. It’s called ‘Women Who Play up to the Anima’, and is a clip from a mid 1980s interview with Marie-Louise Von Franz.
In it she explains why it is dangerous for a woman to identify with the projection of the idealised feminine, “in using the guise of love for worldly power. Such women want to rule the men…and then they naturally are unhappy because they don’t feel loved.”
As one commenter puts it:
“what a well spent 3 minutes of my life. you just cleared up the last 30 years of my misunderstanding of women”
But one wonders what Marie-Louise Von Franz would make of our situation if she was alive today.
It’s often joked about by many guys today that ‘the more attractive a woman is, the more crazy,’ boldly proclaimed as though they’ve stumbled upon some profound truth. Yet the thinking generally stops there.
The modern materialist and Darwinian explanation for this apparent phenomenon is usually some variant of ‘they don’t have to be reasonable because their appearance already gets them what they want.’ But, aside from being laden with assumptions that say more about the values of those who espouse it, this is patently false.
You’re not dealing with someone who would be sane if only external conditions were otherwise.
And what about all the perfectly reasonable, attractive women, who do take responsibility, and foster empathy—how do you account for those? Do you notice them?
The real explanation for what you see becomes clear when you sincerely approach a psychological study of your own mind and others. It’s because you’re dealing with a woman who is playing up to the anima, and the reason she is doing this is precisely because she doesn’t know the real masculine, nor the feminine, and she doesn’t truly want to.
She wishes to have power over that which she fears, and to play up to the anima is the only way—at least in appearances—because she isn’t really interested in freedom. It’s clear that the extent to which she does this will be in direct proportion to how much she craves for power over her contra-sexual opposite, and how little empathy she has for herself let alone you.
So it’s not so much about whether she is ‘attractive’ or not, so much as you’re engaging with an actress and are unable to tell the difference. You are equating ‘attractive’ with falsity. What the person in front of you is really advertising is that they have a very high need for control. Yet you do not see it. Perhaps you have a high need for control yourself, smuggling it in under the guise of something else.
But if you think this is fundamentally a man vs. woman issue then I’m afraid to say you are part of the problem.
As a heterosexual man myself, I may have more naturally felt the brunt of women playing up to the anima and my own foolishness in the face of it, but it is abundantly clear that the equivalent can be said about men, and men who play up to the animus. And they do just as much harm to themselves as they do to the women they seek to control, as well as to other men and all of society.
In exactly the same way, men who play up to the animus, who try to toy with the archetypal masculine, will inevitably fall short and render themselves unsatisfied when their deeper needs are not met, and they do so in swathes.
Ask them and they’ll tell you. They want to ‘date whoever they want,’ and all that stands in their way is the need for a system or tools to make it happen. They’ll tacitly admit their exaltation of power in each breath, just as they fail to realise what exactly they are self-selecting for. Coming across like a comic book character whose primary superpower is binging on ‘how to command charisma’ videos. Other people’s freedom doesn’t matter, and it’s not only funny but cool. The extent to which one feels the need to posture and peacock in this way is in precise proportion to how much they fear what they don’t understand.
YouTube abounds with content on ‘how to get any girl you want’ and, at the same time, ‘post-mortem divorce’ videos, from guys who’ve clearly learned nothing. The crux of which is invariably ‘I picked the wrong girl—here are the red flags to look out for.’ Because “you never know, right?”
You do know. Because you are in the driver’s seat of your own life, and because a marriage, while certainly a gift, isn’t something bestowed to you by the gods with the sole purpose of making your life easier.
The wisdom of the great idealist Friedrich Schelling can even apply here, that “through freedom itself…there shall unconsciously…come to pass what I did not intend.” Consciously, one thinks ‘I’m getting the girl I want.’ But unconsciously they are manifesting just the kind of person who falls for their trickery, and is on as much of a power-drive as they are.
Here’s a better idea—develop genuine self knowledge, and then the right people will appear. All tools and tips are secondary, and to learn the tools of communication without proper intentions is simply to attempt to reverse engineer a pre-selected result out of fear and self-avoidance.
‘But…I won’t be able to date whoever I want!’
That’s right, you won’t. You’ll have to let go of that thirst for control. But the benefit is you will actually no longer ‘want’ to date someone who isn’t what they purport to be.
Wouldn’t you rather be with the kind of woman who isn’t merely with you because you bound or beguiled her? You will learn to see through falsity and will no longer be attracted to it.
Early life naturally involves saying ‘yes’ a lot more than you say ‘no.’ But psychological adulthood involves realising that every yes contains a no and vice versa, and that true freedom, and hence power, is born in sacrifice and limitation.
You are not the animus.
Coming to understand, integrate bits and pieces of, and most of all cultivate a relationship to the true feminine, is one of the best things a man can do to improve the quality of his relationships, if that is something he is serious about.
Working with the anima through active imagination is one way to make some significant strides in this direction. Likewise for women and the animus. (Guided exercise playlist available here).
