The Mystery of the Father's Anima

One of the strangest experiences I have had was my first real relationship as a young adult. It was unlike any other relationship I have had with women. Strangely enough, I was not particularly fond of the young woman in question, but I was drawn into the relationship as if by an external force. One evening early in our dating, I decisively left her because I realized that this woman would not be good for me, but I literally came running back. It was very strange, but I won’t share more about this specific event, because I am convinced that no one would believe me; the sequence of events was almost supernatural. I am content to state the tangible experience that something within me demanded this relationship, regardless of my objections.

The subsequent relationship was rather poor, and during the three years we lived together as a couple, I remained ambivalent. But since I wanted the relationship to be good, I naturally repressed the negative aspects. I won’t delve further into that now, but as a result, the relationship became a predominantly negative theme in my dreams.

In any case, later I did not understand this unique experience – why was I drawn so strongly and impersonally into a psychologically destructive relationship? What was the purpose of it? This has been a mystery to me until recently, but now I have gained insights that I would like to share.  

Shortly after we moved in together, into a very pleasant and soon tastefully decorated apartment, I had a nightmare. While I have been able to understand the dream in broad strokes, one detail concerning my girlfriend has always struck me as peculiar. Let’s call her Lisa.

My father, Lisa, and I are headed to a round tower connected to an older-style apartment building. The courtyard we are in is messy and quite run-down. My father has shown us the way here. He points toward what remains of the door to the tower and says, “There it is!” Lisa runs ahead, getting in first. I think it’s inconsiderate toward my father, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

So Lisa goes up the stairs first, then my father, and finally I. The tower becomes increasingly well-maintained the higher up we go. The top floor is a charming library with bookshelves, paintings, mirrors, and decorative objects. The room is very pleasant, but for some unclear reason, we become nervous as we enter.  

I see an old, dusty mirror on the wall. I feel I shouldn’t look at it, that I will see something horrible, but I look anyway. My face is stiff and tense, numb and strange – I see myself as dead. I am terrified and want to warn my father and Lisa that the house is haunted, but I cannot speak. I fall to my knees and make the sign of the cross with my arms. They understand that something is wrong, and we run out of there.

The father points to a tower connected to an old apartment building, the top floor of which is an old library. The environment in which the dream unfolds is thus distinctly masculine. The climax of the dream occurs when I see myself in the mirror, with a stiff, unpleasant, and lifeless visage. The question of persona is therefore central. Persona is typically linked to the father complex, as this tends to represent the collective consciousness; that is, the general expectations of the individual, the collective values at play, and so on – what one must adapt to. This aspect of the father complex is expressed in the dream by the old apartment building. The tower is not freestanding or individual; it is part of the general, the anonymous.

I will not delve into my personal persona issues, but we see that my adaptation to the collective has led to a stiff, even dead persona. This, in turn, expresses an absence of life, of eros; I cannot use my persona to manifest eros, the relational function. One can go further and note that the challenges with eros are a consequence of my father’s inability to express this quality during my upbringing. (Compare James Hollis' recurrent discussions on the unlived lives of the parents.) The connection between the father, the collective consciousness, persona as adaptation, and the absence of eros is a coherent dynamic that the dream explicitly mirrors.

But, in that case – what is my new girlfriend doing here? Why would a girl I just met be part of this deep dynamic? She is not merely a passive dream figure in the background, either; she slips into the tower ahead of my father. My dream ego think this is somewhat rude, but my father doesn’t mind. Then she goes up the stairs first, taking the lead instead of – as the dream ego believes would be correct – my father. What is this about, and how does this detail relate to the overarching problem description?  

Let’s take a step back before returning to this central question. In the very first dream I had with Lisa, we visit my father, who in the dream lives alone on a hill. He brews murky wine that he offers us. A few months later, Lisa and I again go to my father in the dream world, where he is then working underground with other men. This is followed by the above dream a couple of months later; and half a year after that, I have another disturbing dream concerning my father, Lisa, persona, and the collective. I have had relationships since Lisa; I have now been married for a long time, but only during the time with Lisa was there a connection between the dream figures of my father and my partner.

So, on the one hand, what caused me to be so impersonally and powerfully drawn to the relationship with Lisa, despite the relationship being quite loveless; and on the other hand, why did I have significant, sometimes nightmarish dreams during our relationship, where both my father and Lisa were central?  

I recently came across a text by the Jungian analyst John Beebe, titled ”The Father’s Anima as a Clinical and as a Symbolic Problem.” The concept of "the father’s anima" struck a chord within me, and despite decades having passed, I immediately thought of this dream and my experience with Lisa. I realized that Lisa represented my father’s anima. With this hypothesis – though it felt more like an insight – everything falls into place.  

Let’s go back to the beginning of the dream: My father points to a tower, “That’s where we’re going.” He is an authority in my inner, youthful life and takes the lead. But as we are about to enter, Lisa slips in ahead, taking the lead. This creates the dynamic that my father’s anima leads my father, who leads me. In the dream, I react against this order, but my father does not. For him, it seems natural, as far as one can tell. If we trace the dynamic back, one might assume that the reason my father did not manifest eros in relation to me during my upbringing was that he did not have a good relationship with his eros-anima; and we know that what we are unconscious of is what leads us through life.

Lisa was, in reality, a person who had clear issues with the relational function, eros. Our relationship was, in short, neurotic (on both sides), periodically cold, and thus expresses my father’s relationship to his anima, and consequently to me. This effectively means that I carried my father’s anima and had to relate to it. Naturally, I was unconscious of this negative quality, and as I have noted in another reflection, burning questions within us that we remain unaware of tend to manifest outside us.** John Beebe expresses the same idea, arguing that a man will encounter the challenges posed by his father’s anima through synchronistic encounters with real women.*** If we assume that the unconscious, or the Self, strives for the realization or integration of unconscious contents within us, these “complexes” in a broad sense will manifest both in our dreams and in our outer lives.

Somehow, which I cannot explain, my father’s anima was activated and projected (entirely unconsciously, of course) onto Lisa. While I myself, my conscious ego, was doubtful about the relationship, even somewhat worried, I was driven by something powerful within me to "confront" this aspect of my psychology. Only in this way could it be brought into awareness, illuminated, and concretized. When Lisa and I had lived through this rather destructive relationship and broke up, I underwent a transformation and experienced my most extraverted and eros-filled period of my life. Would I, at twenty-five, have experienced this positive transformation, not least in relation to women, if I hadn’t first confronted my father’s anima? And is that why my inner self insisted on this experience?

"The father’s anima" is of course a hypothesis that is actually quite peculiar. At the same time, the theory seems to explain my otherwise puzzling and, for me, unique experience with Lisa, both in dreams and reality. It would, however, need development and concretization to gain broader acceptance.

The author of this short essay, John Beebe (MD), is a prominent Jungian analyst, particularly known for his further development of Jung’s typology. Unfortunately, ”The Father’s Anima as a Clinical and as a Symbolic Problem” is not particularly concrete. I have the impression that he is exploring an idea rather than presenting a cohesive theory. He does not seem to have pursued his theory further, at least not written or lectured about it since the mid-1980s. Nor can I see that other Jungian analysts have pursued it either. ”The father’s anima” appears to have been an idea that came and went without gaining traction in the Jungian world.

For me this is naturally a shame, as it is fascinating and personally valuable to me. Due to space constraints and out of respect for the privacy of the parties involved, I have not been able to delve deeply into my experiences in relation to the theory. But I hope that this text still sparks valuable thoughts in the reader.

* Journal of Analytical Psychology 1984, 29, 277-287. The essay is available for legal download as a separate document.

** “Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event,” on this blog.

*** ”The Father’s Anima as a Clinicial and as a Symbolic Problem,” p. 281/5.