When a man discovers his anima and has come to terms with it, he has to take up something which previously seemed inferior to him. It counts for little that naturally the anima figure, be it image or human, is fascinatingly attractive and hence appears valuable. Up to now in our world, the femi-nine principle, as compared to the masculine, has always stood for something inferior. We only begin at present to render it justice. Revealing expressions are, "only a girl," or, "a boy doesn't do that," as is often said to boys to suggest that their behavior is contemptible. Then, too, our laws show clearly how widely the concept of woman's inferiority has prevailed. Even now in many places the law frankly sets the man above the woman, gives him greater privileges, makes him her guard-ian, and so on. As a result, when a man enters into relationship with his anima he has to descend from a height, to overcome a resistance - that is, his pride - by acknowledging that she is the "Sovereign Lady" (Herrin) as Spitteler called her, or, in Rider Haggard's words, "She-who-must-be-obeyed." With a woman the case is different. We do not refer to the animus as "He-who-must-be-obeyed," but rather as the oppo-site, because it is far too easy for the woman to obey the author-ity of the animus - or the man - in slavish servility. Even though she may think otherwise consciously, the idea that what is masculine is in itself more valuable than what is feminine is born in her blood. This does much to enhance the power of the animus. What we women have to overcome in our relation to the animus is not pride but lack of self-confidence and the resistance of inertia. For us, it is not as though we had to demean ourselves (unless we have been identified with the animus), but as if we had to lift ourselves. In this, we often fail for lack of courage and strength of will.
— Emma Jung
Emma Jung is naming something the cultural atmosphere still tries to obscure: the asymmetry is not incidental, not a matter of individual psychology to be corrected by individual therapy. It is structural. The man's task is humiliation — genuine humiliation, a coming down from the height that social arrangement has handed him as his birthright. Pride is the precise name for what resists. The woman's task is not humiliation but something harder in its own way: lifting against the pull of a world that has, for centuries, confirmed her in the belief that what she is worth less than what stands over her.
What makes this passage still uncomfortable is that it refuses the leveling move. It would be easier to say that men and women face the same inner work, that the animus and anima are symmetrical structures requiring the same effort. Emma Jung refuses that. The inner figures are not symmetrical because the outer world is not symmetrical, and the psyche is not sealed off from history. The animus carries real cultural authority — not merely projected power, but the accumulated weight of laws, languages, and customs that have actually organized the world around masculine precedence. That weight enters the woman's interior. To work against the animus is to work against an internalized structure that the culture built, and then handed her as her own conviction.
Emma Jung·Animus and Anima·1957