Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
The Man on the River
Before we can understand what the man in the
La Uorona
story has done by polluting the river, we have to see how what he represents is meant to be a positive construct in a woman’s psyche. By classical Jungian definition,
animus
is the soul-force in
women, and is considered masculine. However, many women psychoanalysts, including myself, have, through personal observation, come to refute the classical view and to assert instead that the revivifying source in women is not masculine and alien to her, but feminine and familiar.
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Nevertheless, I believe the masculine concept of animus has great relevance. There is tremendous correlation between women who are afraid to create—afraid to manifest their ideas in the world, or else are doing so in some manner that is disrespectful or haphazard—and their dreams may present many images of injured or injuring men. Conversely, the dreams of women strong in outer manifesting ability often feature a strong male figure who consistently appears in .various guises.
Animus can best be understood as a force that assists women in acting in their own behalf in the outer world. Animus helps a woman put forth her specific and feminine inner thoughts and feelings in concrete ways—emotionally, sexually, financially, creatively, and otherwise—rather than in a construct that patterns itself after a culturally imposed standard of masculine development in any given culture.
The male figures in women's dreams seem to indicate that animus is not the soul of a woman, but “of, from, and for" the soul of a woman.
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In its balanced and nonperverted form, animus is an essential “bridging man.” This figure often has wondrous capabilities that cause him to rise to the work as bringer and bridger. He is like a merchant of soul. He imports and exports knowledge and products. He chooses the best of what is offered, arranges the best price, supervises the integrity of the exchanges, follows up, follows through.
Another way to understand this is to think of Wild Woman, the soul-Self, as the artist and the animus as the arm of the artist.
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Wild Woman is the driver, the animus hustles up the vehicle. She makes the song, he scores it. She imagines, he offers advice. Without him the play is created in one’s imagination, but never written down and never performed. Without him the stage may be filled to bursting, but the curtains never part and the marquee remains dark.
If we were to translate the healthy animus into Spanish
metaphor,
he would be
el
agrimensor
, the surveyor, who knows the lay of the land and with his compass and his thread measures the distance between two points. He defines the edges and establishes boundaries. Also call him
el jugador
, the gamesman, the one who studies and knows how to and where to place the marker to gain or to win. These are some of the most important aspects of a robust animus.
So the animus travels the road between two territories and sometimes three: underworld, inner world, and outer world. All a woman's feelings and ideas are bundled up and carted across those spans—in every direction—by the animus, who has a feeling for all worlds. He brings ideas from “out there" back into her, and he carries ideas from her soul-Self across the bridge to fruition and “to market." Without the builder and maintainer of this land bridge, a woman's inner life cannot be manifested with intent in the outer world.
You needn't call him animus, call him by what words or images you like. But also understand that there is currently within women's culture a suspicion of the masculine, for some a fear of “needing the masculine," for others, a painful recovery from being crushed by it in some way. Generally this wariness comes from the barely- beginning-to-be-healed traumas from family and culture during times previous, times when women
were treated as serfs, not self
s. It is still fresh in Wild Woman’s memory that there was a time when gifted women were tossed away as refuse, when a woman could not have an idea unless she secretly embedded and fertilized it in a man who then carried it out into the world under his own name.
But ultimately I think we cannot throw away any metaphor that helps us see and be. I wouldn’t trust a palette that had red missing from it, or blue, or y
ellow, or black, or white. Neither would you. The animus is a primary color in the palette of the female psyche.
So, rather than being the soul-nature of women, animus, or the contra-sexual nature of women, is a profound psychic intelligence with ability to act. It travels back
and forth between worlds, between the various nodes of the psyche. This force has the ability to extrovert and to act out the desires of the ego, to carry out the
impulses and ideas of the soul, to elicit a woman’s creativity, in manifest and concrete ways.
The key aspect to a positive animus development is actual
manifestation
of cohesive inner thoughts, impulses, and ideas. Though we speak here of positive animus development, there is also a caveat: An integral animus is developed in full consciousness and with much work of self-examination. If one does not carefully peer into one’s motives and appetites each step of the way, a poorly developed animus results. This deleterious animus can and will senselessly carry out unexamined ego impulses, pumping out various blind ambitions and fulfilling myriad unexamined appetites. Further, animus is an element of women’s psyches that must be exercised, given regular workouts, in order for her and it to be able to act in whole ways. If the useful animus is neglected in a woman’s psychic life, it atrophies, exactly like a muscle that has lain inert too long.
While some women theorize that a warrior-woman nature, the Amazonian nature, the huntress nature, can supplant this “masculine-within-the-feminine element,” there are to my sights many shades and layers of masculine nature, such as a certain kind of intellectual rule making, law giving, boundary setting, that are extremely valuable to women who live in the modem world. These masculine attributes do not arise from women’s instinctual psychic temperament in the same form or tone as those from her feminine nature.
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So, living as we do in a world that requires both meditative and outward action, I find it very useful to utilize the concept of a masculine nature or animus in woman. In proper balance animus acts as helper, helpmate, lover, brother, father, king. This does
not
mean animus is king of the woman’s psyche, as an injured patriarchal point of view might have it It means there is a kingly aspect existent in the woman’s psyche, a kingly element that when developed attitudinally, acts and mediates in loving service to the wild nature. Archetypally, the king symbolizes a force that is meant to work in a woman’s behalf and for her well-being, governing what she and soul assign to him, ruling over whatever psychic lands are granted to him.
So that is how it is supposed to be, but in the tale the animus has
sought other goals at the expense of the wild nature, and as the river fills up with waste, the flow itself begins to poison other aspects of the creative psyche, and especially the unborn children of the woman.
What does it mean when the psyche has given the animus the power of the river and it is misused? Someone told me when I was a child that it was as easy to create for good as it was to create for bad. I have not found this to be so. It is far harder to keep the river clear. It is far easier to let it molder. Let us say then that keeping the flow clear is a natural challenge we all face. We hope to remedy clouding as quickly and as extensively as we are able.
But what if something takes over the creative flow, making it muddier and muddier? What if we become trapped by that, what if we somehow perversely begin to somehow derive issue from it, to not only like it but rely on it, make a living by it, feel alive through it? What if we use it to get us out of bed in the morning, to take us somewhere, to make us a somebody in our own minds? Those are the traps that wait for all of us.
The
hidalgo
in this story represents an aspect of women’s psyche that, to put it colloquially, has “gone bad.” It has become corrupt, it derives benefit from its manufacturing of poison, it is somehow tied to unhealthy life. He is like a king who rules through a misguided hunger. He is neither wise nor can he ever be loved by the woman he purports to serve.
It is very good for a woman to have in her psyche a devoted animus figure, strong, able to see far, hearing both in the outer world and the underworld, able to predict what is likely to occur next, deciding laws and justice by the sum of what he senses and sees in all worlds. But the one in this story is an infidel. The role of the animus as portrayed by the well-realized
hidalgo,
king or mentor, in a woman’s psyche is supposed to be able to help her realize her possibilities and goals, make manifest the ideas and ideals she holds dear, weigh the justice and integrity of things, take care of the armaments, strategize when she is threatened, help her unite all her psychic territories.
When the animus has become a menace the way we see in this tale, a woman loses confidence in her decisions. As her animus becomes more weakened by its one-sidedness—its falsehoods,
thefts, posturings to and about her—the water of the river turns from something that is essential to life to something to be approached with the same caution as a hired killer. Then there is a famine in the land and pollution on the river.
To create is
creare
in Latin,
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meaning to produce, to make (life), to produce where there was nothing before. It is the drinking from the polluted river that causes cessation of inner and therefore outer life. In the tale, this pollution causes deformation of the children, and these children represent young ideas and ideals. The children represent our ability to produce a something where there was once a nothing. We can recognize that this deformation of new potential is taking place when we begin to question our ability, and especially our legitimacy, to think, or act, or be.
Gifted women, even as they reclaim their creative lives, even as beautiful things flow from their hands, from their pens, from their bodies, still question whether they are writers, painters, artists, people,
real
ones. And of course they are real ones even though they might like to bedevil themselves with what constitutes “real.” A farmer is a real farmer when she looks out over the land and plans the spring crops. A runner is real when she takes the first step, a flower is real when it is yet in its mother stem, a tree is real when it is still a seed in the pine cone. An old tree is a real living being. Real is what has life.
Animus development varies from woman to woman. It is not a perfectly formed creature that springs forth from the thighs of the Gods. It appears to have an innate or inborn quality to it, but also has to “grow up,” be taught and trained. It is meant to be a strong and direct force. But when there is damage to the animus through all the myriad, forces of culture and self, something weary, or mean-spirited, or a deadness some call “being neutral” interposes itself between the inner world of psyche and the outer world of the blank page, clear canvas, waiting dance floor, boardroom, gathering. This “something”—usually somehow slitty-eyed, misunderstood, or misappropriated—clots the river, clogs thinking, jams the pen and the brush, locks the joints for an interminable period of time, crusts over fresh ideas, and thusly we suffer.
There is an odd phenomenon in the psyche: When a woman is afflicted with a negative animus, any effort at a creative act
touches it off so that it attacks her. She picks up a pen, the factory on the river spews its poison. She thinks about applying to school, or takes a class, but stops in the middle, choking on the lack of inward nourishment and support. A woman revs up but continuously falls back. There are more unfinished needlework projects, more never-realized flower beds, more hikes never taken, more notes never written just to say “I care,” more foreign languages never learned, more music lessons abandoned, more weft hanging on the loom waiting and waiting...
These are the deformed life forms. These are
La Llorona'
s poisoned children. And they are all tossed into the river, they are all tossed back into the polluted waters that so afflicted them to begin with. In the best archetypal circumstances what is supposed to happen is that they burble around and like a phoenix rise from the ashes in a new form. But here something is wrong with the animus and therefore weights are awry in one’s ability to differentiate one impulse from the other, let alone to manifest and implement one’s ideas in the world. And the river is so filled with the excrement of complexes, nothing can rise from it for new life.
And so here is the hard part: We have to go into the sludge and look for the precious gifts that he under it all. Like
La Llorona,
we have to drag the river for our soul-life, for our creative lives. And one more thing, also difficult: We must clean up the river so
La
Llorona
can see, so she and we can find the souls of the children and be at peace to create again.
The culture makes the ‘factories” and pollution worse through its immense power to devalue the feminine—and its misunderstanding of the bridging nature of the masculine.
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Culture too often holds a woman’s animus in exile by pressing one of those insoluble and nonsensical questions that complexes pretend are valid, and before which many women are cowed: ‘‘But are you a
real
writer [artist, mother, daughter, sister, wife, lover, worker, dancer, person]?” “Are you
really
talented [gifted, worthy]?” “Do you
really
have anything to say that is worthwhile [enlightening, will help humankind, find a cure for anthrax]?”
Not surprisingly, when a woman’s animus is taken up with psychic manufacturing of a negative sort, a woman’s output dwindles as her confidence and creative muscle wane. Women in this