--- slug: clarissa-pinkola-estes-anima-animus-bf468836 title: "Clarissa Pinkola Estés on Anima Animus" author: "Ph D Clarissa Pinkola Estés" work: "Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild" section: "" year: "2017" tradition: jungian-core themes: - anima-animus fragment: | Another way to understand this is to think of Wild Woman, the soul-Self, as the artist and the animus as the arm of the artist.14 Wild Woman is the driver, the animus hustles up the vehicle. She makes the song, he scores it. She imagines, he offers advice. Without him the play is created in one's imagination, but never written down and never performed. Without him the stage may be filled to bursting, but the curtains never part and the marquee remains dark. If we were to translate the healthy animus into Spanish metaphor, he would be el agrimensor, the surveyor, who knows the lay of the land and with his compass and his thread measures the distance between two points. He defines the edges and establishes boundaries. Also call him el jugador, the gamesman, the one who studies and knows how to and where to place the marker to gain or to win. These are some of the most important aspects of a robust animus. So the animus travels the road between two territories and sometimes three: underworld, inner world, and outer world. All a woman's feelings and ideas are bundled up and carted across those spans-in every direction-by the animus, who has a feeling for all worlds. He brings ideas from "out there" back into her, and he carries ideas from her soul-Self across the bridge to fruition and "to market." Without the builder and maintainer of this land bridge, a woman's inner life cannot be manifested with intent in the outer world. You needn't call him animus, call him by what words or images you like. But also understand that there is currently within women's culture a suspicion of the masculine, for some a fear of "needing the masculine," for others, a painful recovery from being crushed by it in some way. Generally this wariness comes from the barely-beginning-to-be-healed traumas from family and culture during times previous, times when women were treated as serfs, not selfs. It is still fresh in Wild Woman's memory that there was a time when gifted women were tossed away as refuse, when a woman could not have an idea unless she secretly embedded and fertilized it in a man who then carried it out into the world under his own name. But ultimately I think we cannot throw away any metaphor that helps us see and be. I wouldn't trust a palette that had red missing from it, or blue, or yellow, or black, or white. Neither would you. The animus is a primary color in the palette of the female psyche. lead_in: "" reflection: | Estés is making a claim that will land differently depending on what a reader brings to the word "masculine." If you arrive at this passage carrying the wound she names — the history of women's ideas fertilized in a man who then harvched them under his own name — the palette metaphor may feel like a demand to forgive before the injury has been fully spoken. That is worth sitting with, not bypassing. The wariness she describes is not pathology; it is accurate historical memory. She knows this, and she names it directly before asking you to hold the animus as primary color anyway. What the passage is actually after is something more structural than reconciliation. The animus in her reading is not the masculine as social phenomenon but as psychic function — the faculty that takes what lives in the inner theater and carries it, with intention, into form. The curtains-never-parting image is the real weight: a fully charged imaginative life that cannot discharge into the world. Not because the ideas are absent, but because the function that translates vision into scored music, written play, market-bound work, is underdeveloped or mistrusted as contaminated. The soul-Self generates; the animus traverses. Neither can complete the circuit alone. That is a description of a mechanism, not a prescription about gender, and Estés herself invites you to rename it whatever your images will bear. reflection_v0_3: | What resists here is the double ask: hold the real history of women's ideas being stolen and erased, and still keep the masculine as a living image in the inner palette. Estés does not dissolve the tension — she stages it plainly and then refuses to let the wound become the whole argument. The surveyor, the gamesman, the builder of the land bridge — these are figures for a capacity, not a capitulation. Where Hillman reads the animus as soul's messenger moving between registers of reality, Estés locates the same function in the labor of bringing inward life to fruition in the world — scoring the song, parting the curtain, carrying the idea to market. The disagreement with those who would set this image aside is acknowledged and treated with care: the wariness is earned, the forgetting is recent. And still — a palette with a color missing cannot mix what it needs to mix. Notice today what idea you have been carrying quietly, waiting for someone else to deliver it. parent_id: ClarissaPinkolaEsts_2017_Women_Who_Run_With_the__par0130 source: oracle-v3-retrieve generated: 2026-04-16 regenerated: 2026-04-18 prompt_version: v2.7 status: draft --- Estés writes: > Another way to understand this is to think of Wild Woman, the soul-Self, as the artist and the animus as the arm of the artist.14 Wild Woman is the driver, the animus hustles up the vehicle. She makes the song, he scores it. She imagines, he offers advice. Without him the play is created in one's imagination, but never written down and never performed. Without him the stage may be filled to bursting, but the curtains never part and the marquee remains dark. If we were to translate the healthy animus into Spanish metaphor, he would be el agrimensor, the surveyor, who knows the lay of the land and with his compass and his thread measures the distance between two points. He defines the edges and establishes boundaries. Also call him el jugador, the gamesman, the one who studies and knows how to and where to place the marker to gain or to win. These are some of the most important aspects of a robust animus. So the animus travels the road between two territories and sometimes three: underworld, inner world, and outer world. All a woman's feelings and ideas are bundled up and carted across those spans-in every direction-by the animus, who has a feeling for all worlds. He brings ideas from "out there" back into her, and he carries ideas from her soul-Self across the bridge to fruition and "to market." Without the builder and maintainer of this land bridge, a woman's inner life cannot be manifested with intent in the outer world. You needn't call him animus, call him by what words or images you like. But also understand that there is currently within women's culture a suspicion of the masculine, for some a fear of "needing the masculine," for others, a painful recovery from being crushed by it in some way. Generally this wariness comes from the barely-beginning-to-be-healed traumas from family and culture during times previous, times when women were treated as serfs, not selfs. It is still fresh in Wild Woman's memory that there was a time when gifted women were tossed away as refuse, when a woman could not have an idea unless she secretly embedded and fertilized it in a man who then carried it out into the world under his own name. But ultimately I think we cannot throw away any metaphor that helps us see and be. I wouldn't trust a palette that had red missing from it, or blue, or yellow, or black, or white. Neither would you. The animus is a primary color in the palette of the female psyche. — Ph D Clarissa Pinkola Estés Estés is making a claim that will land differently depending on what a reader brings to the word "masculine." If you arrive at this passage carrying the wound she names — the history of women's ideas fertilized in a man who then harvched them under his own name — the palette metaphor may feel like a demand to forgive before the injury has been fully spoken. That is worth sitting with, not bypassing. The wariness she describes is not pathology; it is accurate historical memory. She knows this, and she names it directly before asking you to hold the animus as primary color anyway. What the passage is actually after is something more structural than reconciliation. The animus in her reading is not the masculine as social phenomenon but as psychic function — the faculty that takes what lives in the inner theater and carries it, with intention, into form. The curtains-never-parting image is the real weight: a fully charged imaginative life that cannot discharge into the world. Not because the ideas are absent, but because the function that translates vision into scored music, written play, market-bound work, is underdeveloped or mistrusted as contaminated. The soul-Self generates; the animus traverses. Neither can complete the circuit alone. That is a description of a mechanism, not a prescription about gender, and Estés herself invites you to rename it whatever your images will bear. --- Ph D Clarissa Pinkola Estés · *Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild* · 2017