My Inner Men

Don't discount a dream if you only remember a fragment; sometimes these are are surprisingly revealing.

The Dream: An image of a large group of transvestites.

Interpretation: Jung thinks that men have an inner woman, the anima, whom he describes as the soul, or Eros. Like most psychiatrists of his era, he had a harder time understanding the inner workings of women, but he came up with the concept that we each had an inner unconscious man, which he called our mind or spirit: Logos.

I’ll let Jung speak for himself: “Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. . . . woman’s consciousness is characterized more by the connective quality of Eros than by the discrimination and cognition associated with Logos.  . . .  In women . . . Eros is an expression of their true nature, while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident. “*

Hmmm: those terribly logical and rational men, their consciousness in touch with Logos, can’t seem to stop fighting and killing each other—but Jung will explain my comment this way, “. . . it consists of opinions instead of reflections, and by opinions I mean a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth.”**

So be it. But I bet if you ran the numbers (murders committed by women vs. murders committed by men, for example) they’d back me up. And this is why my inner men are wearing dresses!

*Carl Gustav Jung, The Portable Jung, Edited by Joseph Campbell, Translated by R.F.C. Hull, New York: Penguin Books, 1976, p152.
**Ibid.