The more completely a man occupies the masculine position, the more decisively he hands over his feminine nature to the unconscious — and the unconscious does not hold things gently. What is refused at the threshold of personality does not disappear; it intensifies, consolidates, and begins to act autonomously. A man who has built his outer life on hardness, decisiveness, the suppression of receptivity, does not thereby become more masculine in any deep sense. He becomes someone with a very active interior feminine he has never met, one that will choose his partners for him, shape his angers, determine which ideas he falls in love with and which he cannot hear at all.

Jung is not prescribing androgyny here — he is diagnosing a structural necessity. The soul compensates. The more extreme the outer stance, the more charged the interior counterpart, and the more likely that counterpart is to arrive as projection rather than as anything the man can own. What he refuses to recognize in himself he will locate, with unsettling precision, in the women he loves or despises. That is the mechanism, not a metaphor — and it runs whether or not anyone involved knows the word *anima* or has read a single page of depth psychology.