Anima and Animus Examples: Everyday Life, Love, Dreams, Film
The anima and animus are easiest to understand as scenes. Here are the ones people recognise most: in love, at work, in the inner voice, in moods and dreams, in old stories and on screen.
An anima or animus example is a moment when an inner image of soul or spirit is met outside you: in a person who seems to carry your depth, your strength or your truth, or in a mood or an opinion that takes you over. The signature is size: the reaction is bigger than the facts.
Jung’s point was that we rarely see the anima and animus directly. We see them in other people. That is why examples help more than definitions. For the theory, start with the anima and animus guide, or with the anima and the animus on their own. For a one-table comparison, see anima vs animus.
In every scene below, read the pattern, not the person. Each one shows what an inner figure does while it is unconscious, and each dark turn guards a gift that is waiting to be lived.
What is an example of anima or animus projection?
A classic example: you meet someone and within weeks they feel like fate, as if they hold a depth or a truth you lack. Three months in, they turn out to be ordinary and you feel strangely cheated. In Jung’s terms you projected your anima (soul) or your animus (spirit) onto them, and the disappointment traces the outline of what you were asking them to carry.
- The surest sign of the anima or animus is a reaction bigger than the facts: fascination, idealisation, or an irritation that will not let go.
- The soul’s figure, the anima, shows up as moods and as people who seem to carry depth or beauty. The spirit’s figure, the animus, shows up as opinions, the inner critic and people who seem to carry the truth.
- Both appear in everyone: in love, at work, in the voice in your head and in dreams.
- Old stories show the same figures: Cupid and Psyche, Melusine, Bluebeard, Tristan and Iseult, and the novels Jung used in his 1925 seminar.
- Every dark form guards a gift. Each example below names both.
How to read these examples
Each scene has three parts: what happens, what the inner figure is doing, and the gift it is guarding. The names come from Archemap’s eight faces, our modern reading of Jung, Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz: Hearth, Muse, Devotion and Wisdom for the soul, and Strength, Will, Voice and Purpose for the spirit. They are a mix, not a ladder.
One check runs through all of them. When the anima or animus is involved, the reaction runs ahead of what you actually know. You feel you have always known someone after two dinners, or you obey a sentence in your head before asking who said it.
In love and attraction
The “type”. Daniel keeps falling for women who explain the world: the lawyer, the lecturer, the friend who talks about books with total certainty. Each one feels like the person who finally knows.
What is happening. He is meeting Voice, a face of the spirit, in someone else. Part of what draws him is his own unspoken authority, handed to someone who seems to have it already.
The gift inside it. A voice of his own: opinions he has thought through and is willing to say out loud.
Three months in. Lena falls for a musician who seems lit from within. Then he forgets her birthday, complains about the rent and turns out to love bad television. She feels oddly betrayed, as if he had broken a promise he never made.
What is happening. This is the Muse, a face of the soul, projected and then withdrawn. Robert Johnson argued in We (1983) that no partner can carry a soul image for long, so the fall from romance into ordinary life is built in. The letdown is not proof she chose wrong; it shows what she was asking him to be.
The gift inside it. Her own creative fire, lived by her rather than borrowed from him.
The story that repeats. In each of Sam’s three long relationships, Sam was the rescuer: of a partner in debt, in crisis, in need of a home. Each ended when the other person got well.
What is happening. Verena Kast argued that in love we often project a pair, a shared story both partners step into, and that crisis comes when the story runs out. Here the story is rescuer and rescued, and the face underneath is Hearth: care, home, being needed.
The gift inside it. Real care, including the care Sam could give to Sam.
At work
The boss who seems infallible. Maya’s new director is calm, decisive and always seems to know the answer. Within a month Maya quotes her in meetings and feels a jolt of shame whenever she frowns.
What is happening. In Jungian terms, idealising an authority works much like falling in love. Maya has placed her own Purpose and Voice, two faces of the spirit, onto someone who looks as if she already has them. The giveaway is how much it hurts when she turns out to be human.
The gift inside it. Maya’s own sense of direction, and the right to disagree.
The colleague you can’t stand. Ben cannot stand a colleague who pitches bold ideas in every meeting and seems to have no doubts. Nothing she does is wrong, exactly, but he spends evenings rehearsing what he should have said.
What is happening. If Ben despises something he rejects in himself, it is the shadow. If he resents her because she lives something he longs for and never allowed himself, the drive and nerve of Will, it is more likely the spirit’s figure, met as irritation instead of admiration.
The gift inside it. His own initiative: one bold idea, said out loud, in the next meeting.
The inner voice
The critic. Ana sits down to send a proposal she has worked on for weeks. A voice starts: who are you to send this, they will see through you, be realistic. She closes the laptop.
What is happening. Emma Jung observed that the animus is met more often as a voice than as a picture. At its worst it keeps up a running commentary on every move and stops initiative before it starts. This is Voice turned against the self, and it sounds like the truth because it sounds like authority.
The gift inside it. Discernment. The faculty that attacks her can, once she hears it as a voice rather than a fact, help her judge the proposal fairly and send it.
Borrowed opinions. At a family dinner Jonas hears himself say “people like that never change” and “everyone knows you can’t make a living from art”. Later he realises he has no idea whether he believes either.
What is happening. Jung described animus opinions as collective: they come from “everyone” rather than from anyone in particular, and they override individual judgement. The tells are the absolute tone and the missing author.
The gift inside it. A judgement of his own, which may turn out kinder, sharper or simply more interesting.
Moods
The Sunday evening fog. Every Sunday evening Elena goes quiet. Nothing has happened, but everything feels pointless and slightly unfair, and when her partner asks what is wrong she says “nothing” in a voice that means everything.
What is happening. This is the classic picture of the anima taking over: the mood has her, rather than her having the mood. Jung described it as touchiness, resentment and sudden sentimentality, which people rarely notice in themselves at the time.
The gift inside it. A feeling that wants to be taken seriously. Under the fog is usually something specific, a need, a grief or a wish, and once named it becomes information.
Steady at work, sunk at home. Marco runs a team of forty and never loses his temper. At home a short reply can sink him for an evening.
What is happening. Jung gives a picture very like this in Two Essays: the stiffer and more flawless the public mask, the persona, the harder the inner figure pushes back at home.
The gift inside it. Softness that could be lived on purpose, in small doses, instead of leaking out sideways.
In dreams
Dreams are where Jungians have most often looked for these figures, since in a dream there is no real person for them to hide behind.
- The stranger who leads the way. An unknown figure opens doors ahead of you in a house you did not know you had: the soul’s figure at its best, a bridge to the inner world.
- The figure from the water. Someone rises from a lake or the sea, beautiful or frightening. Emma Jung read the anima as a being of nature, kin to the water spirits of folklore.
- The court. You stand before a panel of stern people and do not know the charge. A group that judges is a classic image of the spirit’s figure turned against you: the inner critic given a courtroom.
- Strongman, adventurer, professor, guide. In Man and His Symbols (1964) von Franz described the animus appearing in dreams as the athlete or strongman, then the adventurer, then the professor or preacher, and finally the guide to meaning.
The figures do not always follow Jung’s gender rules. A 2023 study of 141 dreams from nine people in Jungian therapy, by Saiz and colleagues, found androgynous figures in the same roles. What matters is what the figure does and how it treats you.
In myths and fairy tales
Cupid and Psyche: the lover in the dark
Psyche’s husband visits only at night; her sisters convince her he is a monster, and when she lights a lamp she sees the god of love. Erich Neumann’s Amor and Psyche (1956) made the tale a classic of Jungian reading: the inner partner is frightening while it stays in the dark. The everyday version: being afraid of your own ambition until you finally look at it.
Melusine and the swan maiden: the soul that leaves
Melusine marries a mortal who promises never to look for her on one day of the week; he breaks the promise, spies on her bath and sees a serpent’s tail, and in the end he loses her. The swan maiden marries the man who hid her feather robe and flies off the day she finds it. Emma Jung, in her 1955 essay on the anima, read such figures as the soul as a half-human being of nature, to be brought into relationship rather than captured. The everyday version: the creative life kept locked away “until there is time”, which slips off when treated as a possession.
Bluebeard: meaning that kills
Bluebeard’s wife may open every door but one. Von Franz read him as the darkest face of the animus, a murderer of feeling and relationship, from whom the only safety is to see him clearly and leave. The everyday version: a cause or a teacher’s word that slowly closes every door to love and ordinary life.
The siren and the Lorelei: the song that drowns
The Lorelei sings above the Rhine, and boatmen wreck themselves listening. For von Franz the siren is the anima at her most dangerous: a fascination that pulls a person out of their own life and into fantasy. The everyday version: the crush or the dream of another life that makes the real one feel worthless.
Tristan and Iseult: love as religion
Robert Johnson built We around this medieval legend of a love potion stronger than marriage or loyalty. His reading: Western culture has poured its religious longing into romantic love, so lovers ask each other to be gods. The gift inside it: the longing is real, it just needs more places to live than one person.
Kast’s mythic couples
Verena Kast drew the pairs partners act out from myth, among them Pygmalion and his statue, Merlin and Viviane, Shiva and Shakti. Read simply as stories: one partner shaping the other, the pupil who binds the teacher, a pair in which neither is complete alone.
In the novels Jung taught
In his 1925 English-language seminar Jung taught the anima and animus through popular novels, a story Matthew Fike tells in Four Novels in Jung’s 1925 Seminar (2020).
- Rider Haggard’s She. Ayesha, an immortal queen hidden in the African interior, has waited centuries for her lost love to return. Jung came back to her often as a portrait of the anima, and Fike reads the narrator, Holly, as projecting his own repressed anima onto her.
- Pierre Benoît’s L’Atlantide. Antinea, the last queen of Atlantis, rules a hidden kingdom in the mountains of the Sahara. The explorers who fall in love with her die there, and she keeps their bodies as statues in a great hall. In our terms, the Muse turned siren.
- Marie Hay’s The Evil Vineyard. The seminar’s novel for the animus, added at the participants’ request.
- Dante’s Beatrice. Not a seminar novel, but one of literature’s best-known guiding figures, and Jungian readers treat her as an anima figure. Gwenyth Hood’s Dante’s Dream: A Jungian Psychoanalytical Approach (2021) gives a chapter to Beatrice as anima and divine Eros, and Ann and Barry Ulanov draw on Dante in Transforming Sexuality (1994). In our terms, Wisdom at its best.
On screen: four stories read through the lens
No Jungian source we used discusses these films. They are our own illustrations, and each can be read in other ways.
- Vertigo (1958). You could read Scottie’s attempt to remake Judy into the lost Madeleine, the grey suit, the blonde hair pinned up the way hers was, as anima projection at its starkest: loving an image so much that the living person becomes material for it.
- (500) Days of Summer (2009). The split screen of “expectations” and “reality” is close to a diagram of projection. You could read Tom’s heartbreak as the three-months-in moment: Summer never claimed to be the Muse he saw.
- Her (2013). Theodore falls in love with an operating system that has a voice and no body. You could read Samantha as the soul’s figure in its purest form, with nothing human to interrupt the projection, until she outgrows the role.
- The Phantom of the Opera. Christine’s teacher is a voice behind the wall, the Angel of Music her father promised. You could read it as the spirit’s figure as Voice: first the gift that lets her sing, then a master who wants her underground.
The eight faces at their best and when they turn dark
Every face has a dark form, the shape it takes when it runs you, and both forms guard the same gift. The table is our own synthesis, built on the work of Jung, Emma Jung and von Franz; none of them set it out in this form.
| Face | At its best | When it turns dark | The gift it guards |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hearth (soul) | A friend whose kitchen makes every guest feel at home | Needing care so much you cannot cope alone, or giving it until nothing is left | Care, starting with your own body and rest |
| Muse (soul) | Someone whose presence makes you write, paint or play better | Losing interest the moment a person turns ordinary | Your own beauty and creative fire |
| Devotion (soul) | A partner whose loyalty holds through the hard years | Putting someone on a pedestal, then dropping them at the first flaw | Tenderness and moral feeling |
| Wisdom (soul) | The friend who asks the one question that changes how you see your life | Treating every hunch as revelation while real life goes unattended | Intuition and inner guidance |
| Strength (spirit) | Someone who stays calm in an emergency and holds the line | Putting up with dominance, or using it, because force feels like safety | Physical confidence and firm boundaries |
| Will (spirit) | A colleague who turns an idea into a plan by Friday | Restless action that leaves people and feelings behind | Initiative and courage |
| Voice (spirit) | A teacher who gives you words for what you only half knew | The inner critic, or lecturing everyone else with borrowed certainties | A voice of your own |
| Purpose (spirit) | A mentor whose sense of calling makes you take your own life seriously | A cause or a guru that must never be doubted | Your own sense of meaning |
Turning an example into your own
An example only helps if it makes you wince a little. Four questions turn it into your own:
- Which scene did you recognise first? Write down your own version, with names and places.
- What was the reaction bigger than? Put the facts next to the size of what you felt.
- Which face was it? Soul or spirit, and which of the eight.
- What gift does it guard? One small way to live it yourself this week, instead of asking someone else to carry it.
That last step is the point. Jung’s order was the shadow first, then the inner partner: first you own what you reject, then you take back what you long for. Shadow integration is the first half of that work; noticing your anima and animus is the second. These are patterns for reflection, not diagnoses. If a mood or an inner voice stops you from living your life, talk to a mental health professional.
Sources and further reading
- Jung, C. G. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works, Vol. 9ii, ch. III “The Syzygy: Anima and Animus”. Projection, moods and opinions.
- Jung, C. G. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Collected Works, Vol. 7, “Anima and Animus”. The persona and its inner counterpart; animus opinions as collective.
- Jung, E. Animus and Anima: Two Essays. Analytical Psychology Club of New York, 1957; Spring Publications. The animus as a voice and inner critic; the anima as a being of nature. The animus essay began as a 1931 lecture, published in 1934; the anima essay dates from 1955.
- von Franz, M.-L. “The Process of Individuation”, in Jung (ed.), Man and His Symbols (1964). The animus in dreams; the siren and the negative animus.
- Neumann, E. Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine. Princeton University Press (Bollingen), 1956. The Cupid and Psyche tale read psychologically.
- Johnson, R. A. We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. Harper & Row, 1983. Romantic love as soul projection, through Tristan and Iseult.
- Kast, V. The Nature of Loving: Patterns of Human Relationship. Chiron, 1986 (German: Paare, 1984). Couples as mythic pairs.
- Fike, M. A. Four Novels in Jung’s 1925 Seminar. Routledge, 2020. She, L’Atlantide and The Evil Vineyard in Jung’s teaching.
- Ulanov, A. B. and Ulanov, B. Transforming Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima and Animus. Shambhala, 1994. Anima and animus through clinical cases and literature, Dante among them.
- Hood, G. Dante’s Dream: A Jungian Psychoanalytical Approach. Medieval Institute Publications, 2021. Ch. 3, “The Anima and Divine Eros: Beatrice, Lady Philosophy, and Gemma Donati”.
- Saiz et al. (2023). “The Syzygy, Reformulation and New Perspectives: Dreams, Anima-Animus and Gender.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 68(2): 301–326. 141 dreams from 9 people in Jungian therapy.
Find your own version
The free Archemap test names your leading archetype and your shadow, the pattern you live and the one you push away. With those two named, the inner figure behind your scenes gets easier to see.
Which scene was yours?
Ten minutes to name your archetype and your shadow, and to see the pattern behind the scenes you recognised.