You should find a way to realize your shadow in your life somehow. Next comes the problem of gender. Every man has to be a manly man, and all of the things that society doesn’t allow him to develop he attributes to the feminine side. These parts of himself he represses in his unconscious. This is the counterplayer to the persona. They become what Jung calls the anima: the female ideal in the masculine unconscious.

Likewise, the woman carries the animus in her unconscious: the male aspect in herself. She’s a woman, and the society gives her certain things to do. All that is in her that she has associated with the masculine mode of life is repressed within the animus.

The interesting thing is that biologically and psychologically-we have both sexes in us; yet in all human societies, one is allowed to accent only one. The other is internalized within us. Furthermore, our imagery and notions of the other are functions of our biography. This biography in- cludes two aspects. One is general to the human species: nearly everybody has a mother and a father. The other aspect is peculiar to yourself: that your mother should have been as she was and your father as he was. There is a specification of the male and female roles as experienced, and this has com- mitted, has determined, the quality of our experience of these great, great bases which everyone experiences. Everyone experiences Mother; everyone experiences Father.

In both cases, the buried ideal tends to be projected outward. We usually call this reaction falling in love: projecting your own ideal for the opposite sex onto some person who, by some kind of magnetism, causes your anima /animus to emerge. Now, you can go to a dance and there’s some perfectly decent, nice-looking girl who’s sitting all alone. Then there’s some other little bumblebee with everybody all around her. What’s she got? Well, it’s something about the way her eyes are set that just evokes anima projections from all the males in the neighborhood. There are ways to present yourself that way; yet we don’t always know what they are or how to achieve them. I’ve seen people who are perfectly good anima ob- jects so make themselves up that they repel the anima projection.

Two people meet and fall in love. Then they marry, and the real Sam or Suzy begins to show through the fantasy, and, boy, is it a shock. So a lot of little boys and girls just withdraw their anima or animus. They get a divorce and wait for another receptive person, pitch the woo again, and, uh-oh, another shock. And so on and so forth.

what goes on when you marry this love-at-first-sight situation? Well, what you have married is a projection. You have married something that has been projected from yourself: the mask that you’ve put over the other person.

What is the sensible thing to do in a circumstance like this? What is the pedagogically advisable thing to do in a situation like this? What shows itself through the mask of the projection is a fact. The mask is your ideal. This fact does not coincide with the ideal; it is imperfect. What do you do about what is imperfect?

Jung believed that the idea is to reject all projections. Not to identify the women you meet with your anima projection. Not to identify yourself with your persona projection. To release all projections and ideals. This is what Jung means by individuation. Jung calls the individual who identifies himself with his persona a mana personality; we would call him a stuffed shirt. That’s a person who is nothing but the role he or she plays. A person of this sort never lets his actual character develop. He remains simply a mask, and as his powers fail-as he makes mistakes and so forth.

he becomes more and more frightened of himself, puts more and more of an ef- fort into keeping up the mask. Then the separation between the persona and the self takes place, forcing the shadow to retreat further and further into the abyss.

You are to assimilate the shadow, embrace it. You don’t have to act on it, necessarily, but you must know it and accept it.

You are not to assimilate the anima/animus-that’s a different chal- lenge. You are to relate to it through the other.