Jung At Heart.

The Clinical Magus: Of particular relevance to New Zealanders struggling to come to terms with the sudden departure of their prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is Jung’s concept of the anima. Much more than what others have called “the feminine principle”, the anima is what the human male has made out of women. All women. From mothers and grandmothers, to sisters and cousins. From female friends and colleagues, to wives and lovers. From Nobel Prize-winners to porn stars. Sirens to soulmates. Jung’s anima is the distillation of every human female in which the human male invests his emotions.

CARL JUNG (1875-1961) was a magician masquerading as a psychoanalyst. His psychological theories were conjured out of myths and symbols, and he transmuted the human individual’s fraught journey from birth to death into the hero’s sacred quest for wholeness.

It’s easy to laugh at this little Swiss doctor now, but he developed his theories in a world that did, indeed, seem to have fallen under an evil spell. In the same Viennese streets where he and Sigmund Freud walked, sharing excitedly their ideas about the unconscious elements of the human personality, there also wandered the young Adolf Hitler.

This terrifying embodiment of Europe’s worst psychoses and obsessions (what Jung would later call “the shadow”) seems, in retrospect, to confirm Jung’s key insight that all of us inhabit curiously familiar stories, peopled by characters we have never met, but whom we recognise instantly. Humanity itself, Jung argued, possesses its own unconscious, within which move the archetypes we have collectively fashioned to confer order upon chaos – the characters we once called gods.

Of particular relevance to New Zealanders struggling to come to terms with the sudden departure of their prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is Jung’s concept of the anima. Much more than what others have called “the feminine principle”, the anima is what the human male has made out of women. All women. From mothers and grandmothers, to sisters and cousins. From female friends and colleagues, to wives and lovers. From Nobel Prize-winners to porn stars. Sirens to soulmates. Jung’s anima is the distillation of every human female in which the human male invests his emotions.

Think about that for a moment. Scary, isn’t it? Because, obviously, not every female in which a male invests his emotions responds as anticipated or desired. The sum total of all these responses – good and bad – adds up to his anima, his unconscious formulation of what being female means.

What, then, does it say about New Zealand’s men and boys that so many of them were so eager to heap abuse upon New Zealand’s young female prime minister, Jacinda Ardern? Quite obviously, she presented a version of the feminine which in no way comported with the inner sheila of the average Kiwi bloke.

Viewed objectively, Jacinda Ardern was remarkably close to her own self-assessment: Kind, but strong. Empathetic, but decisive. Optimistic, but focused.

Since the archetypal leader is often represented as a kingly figure, Jacinda’s leadership says a great deal about the strength of her own animus – the human female’s unconscious formulation of what it means to be male. Her experience of maleness has clearly been sufficiently positive to produce a harmonious personal blending of both the masculine and the feminine. On the one hand, strong, decisive and focused. On the other, kind, empathetic and optimistic.

Such rare psychological harmony should evoke both confidence and admiration – and among most New Zealanders those were indeed the feelings Jacinda inspired. But, for a minority of New Zealanders the woman they listened to on the radio, watched on television, and read about in newspapers and magazines proved to be seriously psychologically jarring.

Called upon to respond to a woman in the top job, many New Zealand males betrayed a stunted and impoverished anima. Their unconscious formulation of the feminine left them utterly incapable of recognising anything at all positive in their country’s leader.

Jung might have surmised that their anima was the product of acutely damaging experiences of emotional and possibly physical abuse meted out by the females who dominated their early lives. Certainly, the psychological concept of projection would explain why so many New Zealand men were eager to describe their prime minister as something monstrous and evil. As a woman in charge she could not, in their unconscious minds, be anything else. Females with power were terrifying, and what human-beings fear, they hate.

Jacinda Ardern’s critics were not exclusively male, however, many New Zealand women joined in the abuse of the Prime Minister and her family. Observing a woman with power over them and their families, their reactions betrayed the impact of terrible experiences not dissimilar to those of abused males. They, too, projected outward the feelings they were too terrified to acknowledge in themselves.

And so the story ended as all Jung’s stories end, with the hero learning and leaving. We are saddened – but not surprised.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 January 2023.