Anima and Animus as Authors of Evil

Late in jung-aion carl-jung makes a move that reorders the whole moral topology of the Jungian psyche. The shadow had been the first figure in whom evil was located — “the human shadow was the source of all evil.” But, Jung continues, “on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses” (Jung 1951, §423).

Where, then, does evil come from? Jung’s answer: from the anima and the animus. “On this level of understanding, evil appears more as a distortion, a deformation, a misinterpretation and misapplication of facts that in themselves are natural. These falsifications and caricatures now appear as the specific effects of anima and animus, and the latter as the real authors of evil” (Jung 1951, §423).

The move is structurally important. The shadow, at its root, is the rejected nature. The anima and animus stand at the threshold between ego and unconscious; they are the mediators by which unconscious content enters consciousness. Evil, in Jung’s refined account, is not the content itself but the distortion that occurs in mediation — the falsification, the exaggeration, the moralizing caricature imposed by animus-opinion or anima-mood on material that is, in itself, morally neutral.

The thread has Gnostic resonance. In the Sophia myth the fall of wisdom into matter produces not evil as a substance but error — the misprision of the good as its opposite. Jung’s reading of the anima and animus as authors of evil is a psychological rendering of the same theological structure.

Jung completes the thought: “But we cannot stop even at this realization, for it turns out that all archetypes spontaneously develop favourable and unfavourable, light and dark, good and bad effects. In the end we have to acknowledge that the self is a complexio oppositorum precisely because there can be no reality without polarity” (Jung 1951, §423). The self contains both poles; the anima and animus are the mediators of either; the ethical work is the recognition of the mediation itself.

Sources

• carl-jung: anima and animus as the real authors of evil (Aion 1951, §423).
• james-hillman: mediation as the site where moralization imposes its distortions (Anima 1985).
• esther-harding: the animus-possessed woman’s certainty as a form of falsification (The Way of All Women 1970).