The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman's ancestral experiences of man-and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative be-ing, not in the sense of masculine creativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might call the Aéyos oxequatixdc, the spermatic word. Just as a man brings forth his work as a complete creation out of his inner feminine nature, so the inner masculine side of a woman brings forth creative seeds which have the power to fertilize the feminine side of the man.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung's image here cuts against the usual reading of animus as obstacle — the opinionated voice, the possessed woman, the negative masculine. What he is pointing at instead is generative: the animus as the site where something crosses from one psyche into another, not as interference but as seed. The Greek phrase he reaches for, *logos spermatikos*, carries real weight from the Stoics forward — the rational principle that is not only ordering but fecundating, the word that does not merely name but quickens. Jung is borrowing that freight deliberately. The inner masculine in a woman is not a pale copy of outer masculinity; it carries a different creativity, one whose product is not object but possibility, not work but the conditions for work.
What this demands of the reader is a certain willingness to hold the asymmetry. Man's creation comes out of him through the feminine; woman's seed enters into him through the masculine. The direction reverses. Neither is prior. The inner figures are not simply mirrors of the outer; they are the unacknowledged ground of what the outer can become. That is a harder thought than the usual therapeutic instruction to manage the animus, and it is the thought Jung actually wrote down.
Carl Gustav Jung·Two Essays on Analytical Psychology·1953