Androgyny toward a new sexuality

The question of androgyny in depth psychology is not primarily a question about gender identity or sexual orientation — it is a question about the structure of the psyche itself, and about what kind of consciousness becomes possible when the masculine and feminine principles are no longer at war inside a single soul.

Jung's starting point is the syzygy: the observation that every psyche carries a contrasexual element — anima in the man, animus in the woman — and that these are not mere supplements to the dominant sex but autonomous archetypal figures with their own logic, their own desires, their own capacity to possess or to liberate. As Jung writes in Aion:

Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life.

The anima is not a woman; she is the soul's own feminine face, projected outward onto women until the projection is withdrawn and the figure is recognized as interior. The same logic applies to the animus. Androgyny, in this framework, is not a blending of external gender traits but the conscious integration of this interior other — what Hillman, reading the alchemical tradition, calls syzygy consciousness: a hermaphroditic awareness in which the One and the Other are co-present, a priori, at all times.

The alchemical tradition gave this integration its most vivid imagery. The Rosarium Philosophorum pictures Sol and Luna — king and queen, brother and sister — descending together into the bath, dying, and rising as the Rebis: the double-natured being who holds the opposites in a single image. Jung, in The Practice of Psychotherapy, reads this sequence as a map of the analytic transference, but also as a map of any transformative encounter between two people:

The unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a "You." Wholeness is a combination of I and You, and these show themselves to be parts of a transcendent unity whose nature can only be grasped symbolically.

This is the crucial move: androgyny is not a state one achieves alone. It requires the encounter with an actual other, because it is only in that encounter that the projections become operative, visible, and — eventually — withdrawable. The hieros gamos, the sacred marriage, is not a metaphor for self-sufficiency; it is a metaphor for the moment when two people, each carrying the other's soul-image, recognize what is actually happening between them.

Hillman presses this further, and more critically. He argues that the standard post-Jungian move — assigning anima to men, animus to women, and then imagining their union as the goal — locks the concept inside a biological binary it cannot sustain. Archetypes cannot be confined to human gender. The syzygy operates within any psyche, not only across the boundary between sexes. What matters is not the gender of the partners but the quality of the internal pairing: whether the soul's masculine and feminine faces are in dialogue or at war.

Patricia Berry goes further still, arguing that the concept of androgyny as it is usually deployed — a careful proportioning of masculine and feminine qualities — is itself a form of straightening, a way of avoiding the polymorphous, dirty, historically soiled reality of actual psychic life. The androgyne as ideal construct is "clinically clean, straight, and sterile, free from the germs of time and struggle and disrepute." What depth psychology actually encounters in the consulting room is not a balanced figure but a tangle — desire, shame, confusion, the body's insistence on its own logic.

This is where the question of a new sexuality enters. The alchemical and Jungian traditions do not promise a sexuality freed from conflict; they promise a sexuality that has passed through conflict and knows what it carries. The coniunctio is not the abolition of tension between masculine and feminine but its conscious holding. Hoeller, reading the Gnostic tradition alongside Jung, describes four stages of this transformation — from narcissistic auto-eroticism through romantic projection to the hieros gamos — and notes that the final stage is not a merger but an internalization: the love-relationship becomes a relationship to one's own depths, mediated through but not reducible to the actual partner.

What this means for sexuality is not a new set of practices but a new quality of attention: the recognition that every erotic encounter carries an archetypal charge, that what draws us to another person is never only that person, and that the work of individuation requires neither the repudiation of desire nor its inflation into mysticism, but its patient, honest examination. Anne Carson, reading Sappho and Plato, names the structure precisely: eros is the interval between reach and grasp, the edge where self meets what it lacks and discovers, in that lack, the shape of its own longing. The soul that can hold that interval without collapsing it — neither seizing the object nor fleeing the desire — is the soul that has begun to know itself.

  • anima — the soul-image in the masculine psyche; its projection, withdrawal, and integration
  • syzygy — the divine pair as structural principle of the psyche; anima and animus in their archetypal coupling
  • hieros gamos — the sacred marriage as alchemical and psychological symbol of the coniunctio
  • James Hillman — portrait and bibliography of the founder of archetypal psychology

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1951, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
  • Jung, C.G., 1954, The Practice of Psychotherapy
  • Hillman, James, 1985, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion
  • Berry, Patricia, 1982, Echo's Subtle Body
  • Carson, Anne, 1986, Eros the Bittersweet
  • Hoeller, Stephan A., 1982, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead