Re-envisioning Animus: Healing Trauma and Embodying the Feminine on a Woman’s Journey toward Individuation

Abstract

Fundamental to a woman’s journey of individuation, conceptualized by C. G. Jung, the significant energies of anima and animus are to be integrated for the purpose of psychic wholeness. By exploring the psychological opposites, known as the masculine and feminine principles, this thesis examines how the unbounded masculine principle dominates the feminine principle on multiple levels, causing trauma. By synthesizing contemporary trauma theory with Jungian theory, this work investigates trauma and its effects on a woman’s brain, body, mind, and soul. Through traditional and alchemical hermeneutics, a feminine approach is employed to suggest ways to help heal a woman’s mother and father wounds, reclaim the feminine principle, soften the destructive animus, and expand the concepts of anima and animus to be more inclusive of people of any gender or sexual orientation for the purpose of healing on a woman’s journey toward individuation.