Few concepts in the depth-psychological corpus generate more sustained controversy than the polarity of masculine and feminine. The tradition inherits the pair from Jung, who frames it simultaneously as archetypal symbolism, psychological typology, and the grammar of the contrasexual — anima in men, animus in women — while insisting, inconsistently, that the terms name psychic qualities rather than biological facts. Neumann extends the polarity into a developmental cosmology in which masculine and feminine mark transpersonal, archetypal ‘dominants’ that cultures and individuals enact through myth and symbol. Woodman reads the imbalance between the two as pathology, locating in the patriarchal over-valuation of the masculine the root of perfectionism and addiction. Samuels, the most rigorous critic, exposes the conflation of gender terminology with value-laden psychological qualities such as Logos and Eros, arguing that ‘much active and passive behaviour has nothing to do with sex or gender.’ Berry goes further still, diagnosing the very concept of gender categories as a psychological ‘dogma’ that forecloses the soul’s complexity. The tension between those who treat the masculine-feminine polarity as a cosmologically necessary pair of opposites and those who regard it as a culturally contaminated metaphor runs through every layer of the literature, making this one of the field’s most generative — and most disputed — conceptual axes.
Masculinity and femininity have nothing to do with being locked into a male or female body… It is a matter of psychic rather than biological differentiation.
Woodman establishes that masculine and feminine are intrapsychic polarities — Yang and Yin, animus and anima — entirely independent of biological sex, a foundational premise for her entire clinical argument.
, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982thesis
We use the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ throughout the book, not as personal sex-linked characteristics, but as symbolic expressions… The symbolism of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ is archetypal and therefore transpersonal.
Neumann explicitly designates masculine and feminine as archetypal and transpersonal symbolic categories, categorically distinguishing them from biological or sociological designations while acknowledging their erroneous cultural projection onto persons.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
The masculine principle he terms Logos… and the feminine principle Eros… It is important to see that Jung was speaking in symbolic terms of psychological factors that are independent of anatomical sex.
Samuels maps Jung’s Logos/Eros distinction onto the masculine/feminine polarity and argues that these are symbolic psychological principles whose independence from anatomy Jung himself intended, even if his gendered terminology obscured that intent.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
locked up in Jung’s copious writings on masculinity and femininity, there may lie clues to an understanding of our current conundrum… I have also detected an immense dissatisfaction — with Jung’s concepts and not just some of his expressed attitudes.
Samuels frames the post-Jungian debate on masculine and feminine as driven by both anticipation and frustration, situating the tension between feminist critique and theoretical promise as the central problematic of the field.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
Masculine has been almost universally defined by such adjectives as active, hard, penetrating, logical, assertive, dominant; feminine has been widely defined as receptive, soft, giving, nourishing, relational, emotional, empathic.
Stein catalogues the standard adjectival definitions of masculine and feminine in Jungian psychology and notes their apparent cross-cultural stability while flagging the ongoing debate about whether these categories should be associated with gender at all.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998thesis
No man is so entirely masculine that he has nothing feminine in him… A man counts it a virtue to repress his feminine traits as much as possible.
Jung argues that every man carries a repressed feminine component which, driven into the unconscious, becomes projected onto the woman who best mirrors his own inner femininity, explaining the psychological dynamics of romantic choice.
, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1953thesis
The basic pair of these dichotomized opposites for Adler is mascu[line/feminine]… to be pre-gender or un-gender is also to feel inferior.
Berry uses Adler’s theory of organ inferiority to question the primacy of gender dichotomy, suggesting that psychological theory constructs masculine/feminine as compensatory opposites to a more primordial sense of bodily inferiority.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis
Even the current notion of androgyny presents an opportunity for straightening… What the concept of androgyny declares as really truly masculine and genuinely feminine ends up in a realm of concepts and abstractions.
Berry critiques the concept of androgyny as a sterile abstraction that preserves the masculine/feminine binary while purporting to transcend it, arguing that soul-work requires the lived disorder these categories attempt to systematise away.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis
Although Jung never designates consciousness as masculine per se, he does make a sharp and somewhat tenuous distinction between masculine and feminine consciousness.
Samuels examines Neumann’s equation of consciousness with masculinity and critiques the tenuous Jungian distinction between masculine and feminine spheres of consciousness, questioning the gendering of mind itself.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
if one is attempting to describe the entire masculine-feminine spectrum, one has to be sure why terms with sexual or gendered associations are used at all.
Samuels challenges post-Jungian writers to justify their continued use of gendered language for psychological qualities, proposing that terms like ‘assertion’ be used independently of the masculine-feminine polarity.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
To the loss of distinction between the Gods, and between the masculine and feminine, we can attribute our loss of erotic identity. Masculinity has come to mean the rejection of the erotic as effeminate.
Hillman locates the cultural pathology of collapsed masculine-feminine distinction in the loss of erotic identity, arguing that the conflation of masculinity with anti-eros produces both coarsened sexuality and the feminisation of relatedness.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
Women are relational and receptive in their ego and persona, and they are hard and penetrating on the other side of their personality; men are tough and aggressive on the outside and soft and relational within.
Stein describes Jung’s structural claim that masculine and feminine qualities are inverted between the persona and the interior, so that men’s inner life is feminine and women’s inner life is masculine.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
Being women, they will bring a feminine eros and understanding to offset male rationality… Femininity is a category invented by men to keep women inferior and pliable.
Berry juxtaposes two feminist positions on gender to expose how each may use masculine/feminine categories defensively, arguing that both essentialist affirmation and categorical rejection of femininity can be psychologically defensive postures.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982supporting
these writers explore what it means, and has meant historically, to be a woman… whether there is not too great an emphasis on the innately feminine with the consequence that ‘the feminine’ is idealised.
Samuels critiques post-Jungian feminine-psychology writers for potentially idealising ‘the feminine’ as an innate quality exclusive to women rather than treating it as an internal hypothesis applicable to both sexes.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
what is now needed is restriction in the use of the oppositional theory and clarification of gender terminology… Active and passive define a spectrum of psychological possibilities around activity and passivity — nothing more.
Samuels calls for disciplined restriction of masculine/feminine terminology in analytical psychology, arguing that most psychological polarities (active/passive) carry no intrinsic gendered meaning.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
I have given the feminine archetype in man the name ‘anima,’ and the masculine archetype in woman the name ‘animus,’ for specific reasons.
Jung articulates his foundational naming of the contrasexual archetypes, grounding the masculine/feminine polarity in the structural theory of anima and animus as distinct from the parental imagos.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964supporting
The more the feminine ideal is bent in the direction of the masculine, the more the woman loses her power to compensate the masculine striving for perfection.
Drawing on Jung’s Answer to Job, Woodman argues that cultural subordination of the feminine principle to patriarchal perfectionism produces a psychic imbalance that forecloses the future, requiring a corrective return to the feminine ideal of completeness.
, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982supporting
they so deeply resented the patriarchy which had destroyed their femininity… they identified with the masculine side of their own psyches… they turned into the very thing they most feared — the witch side of their mothers, or in Jungian terms, the negative animus.
Woodman traces how women’s reactive identification with the masculine psychic pole, in response to patriarchal wounding, produces a destructive negative animus that replicates the very power dynamic it opposes.
, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982supporting
the hermaphrodite has gradually turned into a subduer of conflicts and a bringer of healing… the archetype, because of its power to unite opposites, mediates between the unconscious substratum and the conscious mind.
Jung interprets the hermaphroditic archetype as a transcendent symbol of the unified masculine-feminine polarity, arguing that its persistence across civilisations attests to the psychological necessity of reconciling these opposites.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
perhaps the majority of cosmogonic gods are of a bisexual nature. The hermaphrodite means nothing but a [union] of the strongest and most striking opposites.
Jung and Kerényi argue that the cosmogonic hermaphrodite represents not primitive non-differentiation but a deliberate symbolic unification of masculine and feminine opposites persisting across the highest levels of culture.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting
Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint… I do [not]…
Hoeller examines the tension between dogmatic Jungian claims about masculine and feminine confinement (as in Jacobi) and Jung’s own more tentative formulations of the contrasexual principle in women.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting
the animus theory is much more of an artificial construction, was developed by Jung later and much less well thought out… the symmetry would be broken.
Samuels relays Goldenberg’s feminist critique that the animus was a theoretical afterthought designed to create symmetry with the anima, suggesting the masculine-feminine pair in Jungian theory is structurally asymmetric.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
Many symbols have both masculine and feminine attributions… it makes little sense to argue over whether the symbol of anything is masculine or feminine, for in the end it appear[s not to matter].
Estés counsels pragmatic flexibility over symbolic essentialism regarding masculine and feminine attributions, affirming that mythic symbols serve as magnifying glasses for soul regardless of their gendered assignments.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The weak or absent father cripples both his daughters’ and his sons’ ability to achieve their own gender identity and to relate in an intimate and positive way with members both of their own sex and the opposite sex.
Moore grounds the crisis of masculine identity in the sociology of fatherhood, arguing that the absent father disrupts the developmental formation of gender identity in children of both sexes.
, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting
Only within intimate situations will men reveal this inner femininity, this sensitive, delicate, touchy spot.
Hillman observes that men’s access to their inner feminine dimension — vulnerability and self-pity — is conditional upon intimacy, constrained by religious and cultural injunctions against self-love.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967aside
the animus can be actually dangerous, because it injects itself into the relationship in place of feeling, thus making relatedness difficult or impossible.
Emma Jung warns that the masculine animus, when it usurps feminine feeling in relational contexts, produces a dangerous substitute for genuine connection, illustrating how the masculine-feminine dynamic operates pathologically in women’s psychology.
, Animus and Anima, 1957aside