Carl Jung, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
In the unconscious of a man there lives a feminine figure, the anima; in the unconscious of a woman, a masculine figure, the animus.123 These are not the woman or the man themselves but the contrasexual soul-image, the deposit of all the ancestral experience of the opposite sex, and the mediator between the ego and the deeper unconscious.4 Bound up with them is a difference of principle: consciousness in a woman is characteristically ruled by Eros, the principle of relatedness and connection, and in a man by Logos, the principle of discrimination, judgment, and objective interest.
When a woman thinks in the register of Logos it often comes out as opinionated animus-possession, and when a man feels in the register of Eros it can come out as moody anima-possession — each sex is least developed, and most archaic, precisely in the contrasexual function. I report this as I found it in the analysis of hundreds of men and women.
It is a description of typical psychic structure, not a decree about what any individual may become, and least of all a ranking of worth: Eros is not lesser than Logos, only other, and the whole aim of individuation is that each person integrate the contrasexual side rather than remain by it possessed.5
When the animus breaks "out in a woman feelings do not appear, as was the case with the man, but she begins to discuss and to rationalize; and just as the anima feelings are arbitrary and moody, so Te feminine arguments are illogical and unreasonable.Contributions to Analytical Psychology
In the unconscious, therefore, we might expect a compensation by the opposite. The relatively sharply defined anima-figure of the man's unconscious fulfils this expectation beautifully, as does also the polymorphism shown by the woman's animus. The description of the anima and the animus that I.am. 1 An excellent example of this is to be found in H. G. Wells' Christina Alberta's Father.Contributions to Analytical Psychology
Just as a man produces his work as a complete creation out of his inner feminine nature, so the inner masculine side of a woman produces creative seeds that can fertilize the feminine element in the man. This would be the ' femme inspiratrice ' who, when falsely cultivated, can also be the worst kind of dogmatist and high-handed pedagogue, an ' animus hound ' as one of my patients aptly expressed it.Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
Unfor- timately our western mind, from a profoimd lack of culture in this relation to the soul, has never foimd a concept, not to mention a name, to represent that most fundamental main- spring of inner experience, namely, the union of the opposites in a middle way, which could in any way compare with the ANIMA AND ANIMUS 225 Chinese Tao.Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
Just as the persona is an entity, which often appears to constitute the whole character of a man, even accompanying him practically without change throughout his entire life, so the soul is also a definitely circumscribed entity, with a character which may prove unalterably firm and independent. Hence, it frequently offers itself to characterization and description.Psychological Types, pp. 594–595
The most sustained line of feminist criticism against Jung, and one of the two positions (with the race writings) on which his reputation is most gravely charged. Critics from within and without analytical psychology have judged the Eros/Logos account essentialist — a projection of the assumptions of Jung's time and class into the structure of the psyche, and one that recurrently casts women's thinking as derivative and men's feeling as defective. Sympathetic revisionists (Andrew Samuels and the post-Jungian schools) have sought to save the contrasexual archetypes as symbolic and compensatory functions detachable from any claim about actual women and men, and to read Eros and Logos as qualities present in both sexes. The debate over whether the account describes the psyche or merely a historical ideology of gender is unresolved within the tradition itself.