02/23/24
Stendhal had great difficulty getting his project started. These early chapters seem more like cocktail napkin jottings than well-thought out introductions – and from his later descriptions of his process, that's not far off from reality. Apparently the first draft of this book consisted of Stendhal plopping a bunch of notes down on a publisher and asking him to make something of it.
As a result, we get some pieces like chapter 4, which consists of a few short musings of what love is like for a 16 year old girl, then back to another framework to describe his theory, in this case the seven stages of love. All of this material could have easily been added to previous chapters in a few lines, there's nothing new or important here.
But just because Stendhal didn't set the stage very well for his chapters to come doesn't mean I need to make the same mistake. I'm doing my best to build support for the chapters ahead with theory that I can later draw on and apply to the illustrations that Stendhal gives. The risk is that these theories are mine and in some cases may stray from Stendhal's ideas – but I'll live with that, because this is my project, not his.
And so, I'm going to fill up Stendhal's empty space here with another framework about love, Carl Jung's concept of the anima and animus. While Jung was extremely well read, I have not come across any quotes or acknowledgments of Stendhal in his work, so I can't bring him into this discussion with the same confidence that I did with limerence theory.
Whenever I think of romantic relationships, however, I can't help myself from applying Jung's thoughts. This is due to a connection I made with an attractive female therapist several years ago that I could describe as an experience of transference ... or I could call it a fit of limerence ... or, in the language of Jung, I could say that I came in touch with my anima. These are not necessarily mutually-exclusive classifications, it is possible that what I experienced had elements of all three ideas.
I see no reason to explore the transference angle here. That is a clinical term that relates to the relationship between therapist and client and I have learned over the past few years (sometimes painfully and fitfully) that therapy is something to be held private. But because this therapeutic alliance was severed abruptly and unexpectedly, there were lingering issues for me about it that lasted beyond our time in the consulting room.
I've come to believe that limerence explains part of the feelings that lingered on for nearly a year afterwards. But there was something else as well. Jung describes it this way:
Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or "archetype" of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman – in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no woman existed, it would still be possible , at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically .... I have called this image the "anima."
But while the anima is an archetypal image of all women, it's constituent parts vary for each man. For Jung, coming into contact with one's anima is an extremely exciting, but potentially perilous, occurrence. For a man, it means getting a glimpse of an essential part of your personality as projected onto a woman:
In so far as (animas) are "containers," the filling out of this image is an experience fraught with consequences, for it holds the possibility of finding one's own complexities answered by a corresponding diversity. Wide vistas seem to open up in which one feels oneself embraced and contained. I say "seem" advisedly, because the experience may be two-faced. Just as the animus projection can often pick on a man of real significance who is not recognized by the mass, and can actually help him to achieve his true destine with her moral support, so a man can create for himself a femme inspiratrice by his anima projection.
There's a lot of unpack in that quote. What Jung is saying is that the anima projection can help a man realize unconscious goals in his life that suddenly feel awakened and achievable. But at the same time, be aware that women have similar needs and that they make similar projections. What they are taking from the connection and project back onto you may also unlock something vital.
But here's where things get very tricky. Jung makes clear that even when there is some kind of mutual anima/animus connection made between a man and a woman, this is not a real relationship:
One should on no account take this projection for an individual and conscious relationship. In its first stages it is far from that, for it creates a compulsive dependence based on unconscious motives other than biological ones .... They are in essence spiritual contents, often in erotic disguise, obvious fragments of a primitive mythological mentality that consists of archetypes, and whose totality constitutes the collective unconscious. Accordingly, such a relationship is at bottom collective and not individual.
In other words, don't even think about dating your anima/animus, because when you do, you're in essence dating yourself. But how do you know this kind of projection is happening? Jung gives some guidance on the types of people who set off these unconscious desires:
There are certain types of women who seem to be made by nature to attract anima projections; indeed one could almost speak of a definite "anima type." The so-called "sphinx-like" character is an indispensable part of their equipment, also an equivocalness, an intriguing elusiveness – not an indefinite blur that offers nothing, but an indefiniteness that seems full of promises, like the speaking silence of a Mona Lisa. A woman of this kind is both old and young, mother and daughter, of more than doubtful chastity, childlike, and yet endowed with a naïve cunning that is extremely disarming to men.
This basically describes every woman that Stendhal's male characters fall in love with in each of his books (including this one.) It's also highly descriptive of my two recent romantic walking daydreams. But it's also important to point out that Jung has a description of the typical animus as well:
Not every man of real intellectual power can be an animus, for the animus must be a master not so much of fine ideas as of fine words – words seemingly full of meaning which purport to leave a great deal unsaid. He must also belong to the "misunderstood" class, or be in some way at odds with his environment, so that the idea of self-sacrifice can insinuate itself. He must be a rather questionable hero, a man with possibilities, which is not to say that an animus projection may not discover a real hero long before he has become perceptible for the sluggish wits of the man of "average intelligence."
What I must address first in this description is its obvious self-flattery – Carl Jung is basically saying that he's the ideal animus. And in my self-flattering moments, I like to see myself in this description somewhat as well. Sometimes I believe, in fact, that I would rather a desirable woman love my writing than love me.
But for the purposes of this project, it needs to be pointed out that Stendhal meets this description about as well as a real human being can. So when we look at his (many, failed) relationships, we can both notice elements of his anima projections onto women and consider what these women are getting back from him. Their association with this archetypical animus type could have been quite energizing for them, even while they were rejecting is romantic advances.
These are some thoughts and theories to keep filed away as we move through Stendhal's work. It will be interesting to see when and if they apply and how they compliment or clash with the other theories of love explored in the book.