In a man the anima finds expression principally in the form of specific positive or negative moods or feeling tones, of erotic fantasies, of impulses, inclinations and of emotional incentives for life; while the animus of a woman will appear rather in the form of unconscious impulses to action, sudden initiative, autonomous babbling, opinions, reasons or convictions. On the one hand these contrasexual personality components form a bridge in relations with the opposite sex (mostly by way of projections); on the other hand they are also a special obstacle in trying to understand one's partner, since the man's anima tends to irritate women and the woman's animus tends to irritate men. This is almost always the cause of the socalled 'war of the sexes,' and most marital difficulties can be traced back to the influence of these unconscious factors.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Von Franz is describing something more unsettling than it first appears. The anima and animus are not simply our interior lives made personified — they are the grammar by which we misread one another, systematically, and with great feeling. The man's moods and erotic undertow, the woman's sudden convictions and uninvited initiatives: these are not failures of character but the ordinary operations of what is unconscious reaching toward what it lacks. And that reaching distorts as much as it connects. The same force that builds the bridge also poisons the crossing.
What makes this worth sitting with is the word "bridge." Projection is usually spoken of as error, something to dissolve so that reality can be seen clearly. But von Franz is more precise: projection is how eros moves at all, initially. The irritation — the anima enraging the woman, the animus maddening the man — is not a malfunction of the system but evidence that the projection has made contact. When you are most certain that your partner is wrong, most convinced that their mood or their opinion is unreasonable, the unconscious has likely just disclosed what it most needs from you to examine in yourself. The war of the sexes, on this reading, is not a failure of communication. It is communication — just addressed to the wrong recipient.
Marie-Louise von Franz·C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time·1975