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The Union of the Woman and the Man: A Jungian Model of Love Between the
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 The Union of the Woman and the Man:
A Jungian Model of Love Between the Sexes
George A. Parks, Ph.D. © 1995

“For one human being to love another;

That is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks,
The ultimate, the last test and proof, the work
for which all other work is but preparation.”

Ranier Marie Rilke

“Whose idea was this,

To have the lover visible,
and the Beloved invisible!

Rumi

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

I have been fascinated and puzzled by love between women and men for as long
as I can remember. From what I read and hear, I am not alone in my confusion over how
women and men can have better intimate relationships. I am writing about this issue from
the point of view of a forty five year old man of French-English ancestry. I am
heterosexual and married. My experiences of love between sexes began by observing the
relationship between my parents. Their marriage was at times passionate, tender, and
stable and at other times chaotic, conflictual, and cold. What was it like between your
parents? I ask this because our first model of the union of the woman and the man
occurred in the family romance.
Largely because of the unpredictable nature of my parent’s relationship, my
attachment to my mom and to my dad was intense, but ambivalent. I was never sure if
they would be the loving couple I felt safe with or the warring couple that scared me and
made angry at their apparent disregard of the effects of their fighting on me and my
brothers and sister. These childhood love wounds made me doubt my lovability and
convinced me that I would have little hope of ever having a loving relationship with any
woman I truly desired. My adolescent and early adult love relationships fulfilled this
prophecy and I, like many of you, have had my share of pain and disappointment in my
efforts to form satisfying and lasting relationships with the other sex. Fortunately, I have
also had a fair amount of joy and fulfillment in my relationships with the other sex
especially as I have grown older, somewhat wiser, and more mature. I assume my
situation while unique is not atypical.
Whether you are a woman or a man, I imagine your parents were also fallible
human beings who loved you at times well or at least adequately and who may have
failed you, neglected you, or abused you at other times. Disappointed love within the
proverbial ‘“dysfunctional family” and confusion about female-male intimate
relationships are both an individual and collective wound. For both personal and
professional reasons, I have been obsessed for some time with trying to better understand
love between the sexes. For the past twenty years, this quest to understand love has taken
the form exploring a variety of models of female-male intimate relationships from
disciplines ranging from anthropology and sociology to psychology and mythology
which has inspired me to do some model building or map making of my own. My intent
in this brief article is to summarize a Jungian model of love between the sexes that I have
developed to guide my quest to understand love between the sexes, to have better love
relationships with my partner and to become a more loving man.
This article will focus on female-male love relationships with the understanding
that both gay men and lesbian women engage in loving relationships that have many
similarities as well as significant differences from love between the sexes. I focus on love
between sexes not in order to be heterosexist or sexist, but because this is my orientation
and my passion. However, I do assume that homosexual relationships both between men
and between women have many of the same emotional and ‘gender’ dynamics that
heterosexual relationships do, but I have no direct experience in these types of
relationships and will leave their exploration to those who do. I hope what I share with
you about love between the sexes will be useful regardless of your sexual orientation or
love style. We all originated from the sexual union of a woman and a man and whether
our adult attachments are heterosexual or homosexual, all our love lives have been
profoundly affected by female-male love relationships.

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 It is possible to approach love between the sexes from a variety of disciplines.
Books like Helen Fischer’s The Anatomy of Love and David Buss’s The Evolution of
Desire focus on human mating and the biology of love. They are both useful books that
make for fascinating reading. Books like Lillian Rubin’s Intimate Strangers: Men and
Women Together, Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual
Arrangements and Human Malaise, and Francesca Cancian’s Love in America: Gender
and Self-Development take a sociological approach to sex differences in love and have
taught me a great deal. Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men
in Conversation and John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus focus on
psychological differences between women and men and are among the most popular
books on loves between the sexes. Other books like Sukie Colegrave’s Uniting Heaven
and Earth: A Jungian and Taoist Exploration of the Masculine and Feminine in Human
Consciousness, Verena Kast’s The Nature of Loving: Patterns of Human Relationship,
and John Sanford’s The Invisible Partners: How the Male and Female in each of us
Affects our Relationships take a mythic or archetypal approach to love between the sexes.
I find the mythic approach, which is often presented from a Jungian perspective, to be the
most useful because it resonates with my experience, because it has been the most helpful
in my own love journey, and because it avoids generalizations about behavioral
differences the sexes which have the danger of reinforcing sex roles stereotypes about
women and men.

FEMININE AND MASCULINE ARCHETYPES

I call my approach to understanding love between the sexes Archetypal

Transactional Analysis. This model is within the Jungian tradition of focusing on
archetypes of the feminine and the masculine as opposed to stereotypes. Nor Hall says
that “A stereotype is a stricture where an archetype is an enabler. (A stereotype is literally
a printer’s mold cast in mental).” Jung said that “Archetypes are primordial images of the
limited range of typical situations of human life” and that “archetypes are not mere
names, or even philosophical concepts, they are pieces of life itself, images that are
integrally connected to the living individual by the bridge of emotions.” (Collected
Works, 9) Jung went on to say that archetypes themselves are usually unconscious and

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dimly perceived, if at all. We experience and see only their manifestations in fantasy, in
dreams, in symbols, in myths, and with regard to anima and animus, in the great passions
of our lives.
Jung referred to the archetypal feminine as Anima, the Latin word for soul, and
the archetypal masculine as Animus, the Latin word for spirit. Jung associated anima
with soul, the breath, and the Goddess and animus with spirit, the act of breathing, and
the Gods. His theory was that women are not wholly feminine, but have within them the
image of an inner man or animus and that men are not wholly masculine, but have within
them the image of an inner woman or anima. In love between the sexes, because women
are usually unconscious of the inner presence of the archetypal masculine, women tend to
project their inner man or animus on the man they love. Men because they are usually
unconscious of the inner presence of the archetypal feminine, men tend to project their
inner woman or anima on the woman they love.
In above terms, the erotic desire of a heterosexual woman for union with the
archetypal masculine is typically expressed in her love for a man while the erotic desire
of a heterosexual man for union with the archetypal feminine is typically expressed in his
love for a woman. If this archetypal stuff and the concepts of anima and animus are
causing you any confusion, that’s not unusual. Jung was aware that the concepts of anima
and animus were vague and clumsy. He said, “I have noticed that people usually have not
much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow ... But it costs
them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima (or animus) is ... The degree of
unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding.”
(Collected Works, 9)
These archetypal images of the feminine and the masculine are universal and are
not limited to any culture or historical period. Archetypes are personifications of
impersonal psychic forces whose form of expression may change from time to time, from
culture to culture, and from individual to individual. One way to better understand
archetypes is to imagine that all human beings participate in a mysterious relationship
with great psychic forces that it is our nature to experience metaphorically as Spirits,
Gods, or Great Beings . All cultures recognize essentially the same set of existential
mysteries and have developed symbols, stories, and myths to express the actions of

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archetypal figures on human experiences in this case, on our experiences of love between
the sexes. Our goal as human beings is to be in touch with these powerful forces, to
understand their influence on our inner lives and relationships, and not to allow them to
unconsciously possess us nor to allow them to be unconsciously projected on others. The
more aware we become of our inner cast of archetypal characters, the greater our growth
and individuation. Regarding love between the sexes, Jung said, “If the encounter with
the shadow is the ‘apprentice-piece’ in the individual’s development, then that with the
anima (or aminus) is the ‘masterpiece.” (Collected Works, 9).
While Jung wrote extensively about the dynamics of the animus and the anima, it
was his colleague Toni Wolff who first elaborated or decoded the structure of the
archetypal feminine in an unpublished manuscript entitled, “Structural Forms of the
Feminine Psyche.” A structural model of the archetypal feminine is a description of the
nature of anima within a woman as part of her self image and within a man as part of his
feminine alter ego.
Toni Wolff’s writings are soon to be published in book form, but Nor Hall’s book,
The Moon and the Virgin: Reflections on the Archetypal Feminine, uses Wolff’s model a
guide and is an excellent resource on the feminine for both women and men. Nor Hall
makes it clear in her book that the archetypal feminine functions within women as the
bedrock of their identity and functions within men as the as their feminine side which is
usually projected on to women.
Recently, Jungian psychologist, Robert Moore and his colleague, mythologist,
Douglas Gillette in their book, King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover: Rediscovering the
Archetypes of the Mature Masculine have elaborated or decoded the structure of the
archetypal masculine in a way that is complementary with the earlier work of Toni Wolff
on the archetypal feminine. As with the feminine in woman, a structural model of the
archetypal masculine is a description of the nature of animus within a man as self image
and within a woman as part of her masculine alter ego. Moore and Gillette say in their
book that the archetypal masculine functions the bedrock of a man’s identity and
functions within women as their masculine side that is usually projected on to men.

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FIGURE 1 FOURFOLD STRUCTURE OF FEMININE AND MASCULINE ARCHETYPES

The Archetypal Masculine The Archetypal Feminine

(Moore & Gillette) (Toni Wolff, Nor Hall)

KING MOTHER

LOVER WARRIOR HETAIRA AMAZON

MEDIAL
MAGICIAN WOMAN

ARCHETYPAL TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS

Robert Moore expresses the relationships between the archetypal feminine and the
archetypal masculine as the Four Couples Within in his audiotape program entitled, “The
Archetypal Self and the Dynamics of Relationships.” He pairs the King with the Mother
which he calls the Queen, he pairs the Warrior with the Amazon which he calls the
female Warrior, he pairs the Magician with the Medial Woman which he calls the female
Magician, and lastly, he pairs the Lover with the Hetaira which he calls the female Lover.
It possible then for a woman to be identified with any one of the four archetypal feminine
figures in terms of her self-image while she is projecting any one of the four archetypal
masculine figures on to her male partner. Alternatively, it is possible for a man to be
identified with any one of the four archetypal masculine figures in terms of his self-image

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while he is projecting any one of the four archetypal feminine figures on to his female
partner.
For example, what if the woman is identified with her Hetaira (or female lover)
and she is projecting the masculine love on her male partner, but the man is identified
with his Warrior and projecting his female warrior on to her? They will probably not be
after the same goals! Conversely, what if the man is identified with his Lover and
projecting the feminine lover on his woman partner, but the woman is identified with her
Amazon (or female warrior) and is projecting her male warrior on to him. A similar
misunderstanding is likely. Moore’s analysis suggests the situation in female-male
relationships is a complex one and even constellating the lover space at the same time is
problematic. Of course, all combinations of female and male identification and female
and male projection are possible and probably have occurred. Lest we get too rigid or
“structured” about these typologies, it is important to recognize and be aware that in our
experience the influence of these feminine and masculine archetypes overlaps and merges
together, our strict separation and naming of both the feminine and the masculine
archetypes is for analytical and explanatory purposes only.
The Archetypal Transactional Analysis of love between the sexes focuses
exclusively on those situations when the man is identified with his Lover and projecting
the feminine lover (or Hetaira) while the woman is identified with her Hetaira (or female
lover) and projecting the masculine lover. While the other archetypes are still “on line”
and active to some degree and will certainly influence any female-male love relationship,
focusing just on the archetypal lovers simplifies our analysis somewhat and yet is
complex enough to do justice to subtle variations in heterosexual love relations. Does this
mean that a man and a woman both in the Lover space will experience only harmony and
erotic bliss. Unfortunately no, even though the ultimate potential of love between the
sexes is the ecstasy of the “Garden of Delight”, there are obstacles in both women and
men to creating this lover’s garden as a reality.
In the terms used in the model I have been developing, the Hetaira or the Lover
can appear in an immature form, the Girl or Boy Lover; a shadow form, the Female
Shadow Lover or the Male Shadow Lover; or in a mature form, the Loving Woman or the
Loving Man. Constellating or manifesting the Lover Archetype creates the garden of

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sorrow and delight. Whether the lovers are experiencing sorrow or delight depend on
which combination of the forms of the archetypes of the lover are constellated.
Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette in their book, The Lover Within: Accessing
the Lover in the Male Psyche and Linda Schierse Leonard in her books, The Wounded
Woman: Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship and On the Way to the Wedding:
Transforming the Love Relationship have presented models of these archetypal dynamics
in men and women respectively.
Archetypal Transactional Analysis is intended as a map and as a tool to help
women and men to better understand the dynamics of their love relationships as a dance
between the various feminine and masculine archetypal lovers. Archetypal Transactional
Analysis is the process of determining on an archetypal level who each lover is identified
with and who they perceive their beloved to be. The following diagram depicts these
relationships as transactions between a female love and a male lover. The nine possible
transactions pictured here form six styles of love which will be briefly described below.
Before you read my brief descriptions of each love style, I invite you to describe for
yourself each of the six archetypal lovers as you have experienced or imagined them.

FIGURE TWO: TRANSACTIONS BETWEEN FEMALE AND MALE ARCHETYPAL LOVERS

----------Insert Figure Two about here----------

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 SIX STYLES OF LOVE BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN

Romantic Love: The Girl Lover and the Boy Lover. In this relationship a woman
is identified with the archetype of the girl lover and a man is identified with the boy
lover. She is expressing what Leonard and others call the puella eterna or eternal girl. The
potentials of immature lover in the woman are symbolized by the radiant or divine child
who lives in unity, in ecstasy, and wholeness. He is expressing the puer eternus or eternal
boy whose potential is also radiant and divine. However, each will be wounded in some
way in the family romance as they grow into the Oedipal child who is in a triangle with
mom and dad. The dilemma for the girl and boy lover are different. The girl must
recognize her female identity and maintain her bond with her mother despite her growing
interest in and desire for love from her father. Adult women who are possessed by this
archetype are described by Leonard as lost, dependent or counterdependent and full of
despair in their relations with men.
The boy’s dilemma is to recognize his male identity and maintain his bond with
his mother while at the same time differentiating from her and identifying with his father.
Adult men who are possessed by this archetype are described by Moore and Gillette as
flighty, a momma’s boy who without help from his father will as a man express love for
women in immature ways that are narcissistic and self defeating. The girl and the boy
lover are both unconscious of the inner lover, they are both still in the world of the
mother, and neither has had an adequate bond to the father. They can play at love, but
cannot tolerate the frustration, conflict, and sorrow that are part of growing to maturity.
Abusive Love: The Female Shadow Lover and the Boy Lover and the Male
Shadow Lover and the Girl Lover. The shadow in a woman or a man consists of all those
aspects of the personality that are unacceptable to the ego or our conscious self.
Encountering and beginning to integrate the shadow is what Jung called the “apprentice-
piece” of our development. The shadow contains much that is fertile for our growth and
much that without maturity and ego strength can destroy us and hurt those we love.
When a woman is identified with her shadow lover and her male partner is
identified with his boy lover, she is likely to abuse him. From her position of power, she
will express her unconscious anger and rage at her father and other men in her past on
this man who is boyish and vulnerable. Taken to the extreme, she may become a demon

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lover who love has undergone a malevolent transformation from a life giving force to a
force for hatred, pain, even death. Many women and men remain naive about the
existence of the female shadow lover.
When a man is identified with his shadow lover and his partner is identified with
her girl lover, he is likely to abuse her. He will often express his unconscious anger and
rage at his mother and other women in his past on this woman who is girlish and
vulnerable. He may also under go a malevolent transformation into a demon lover who
tortures and devours women he “loves.” In our culture, we see example of the male
shadow lover in fiction, film, and the media everyday.
Moore and Gillette in The Lover Within have described the male shadow lover as
bipolar with an active and a passive form. The active pole of the shadow lover (the
Addict Lover) involves addiction, histrionics, and anti-social behavior while the passive
pole (the Impotent Lover) involves impotence, dependence, and depression. They suggest
that oscillation between these two pole is the rule rather the exception for men who are
too wounded and immature to love in an adult way. Perhaps similar dynamics occur in
the female shadow lover.
Chaotic Love: The Female Shadow Lover and the Male Shadow Lover. In this
very pathological form of love between the sexes, both the man and the woman are
identified with their shadow lovers. They may have a sadomasochistic relationship with
each partner always playing the same role or they may oscillate being the perpetrator and
the victim. Both shadow lovers might be in the passive pole so that not much overt abuse
goes on, but both are impotent, depressed, and unloving. Finally, this couple may at
constant war even unto death as both try to conquer and abuse the other.
Nuturing Love: The Loving Woman and the Boy Lover and the Loving Man and
the Girl Lover. The mature lover in her or his fullness is called the loving woman or the
loving man. They will be described in greater detail below, but when a woman has
developed and matured in her capacity to love she is patient and nurturent to the
immature, boy lover inside her male partner. She attempts when appropriate to reassure
her partner of his love worthiness, to assist him in strengthening his remaining
vulnerability, and to provide him with support to develop more maturity. This does not
mean that a loving woman will spoil a man, accommodate to him, or except his continued

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irresponsibility. If he simply cannot or refuses to grow, she may be forced to separate or
break up with him, but she will do so with respect, honesty, and love. The loving man in
relationship with a woman identified with her girl lover will be similarly nurturent and
supportive. He will express his tenderness and care for his partner as she struggles to
become more love worthy, less vulnerable, and more mature. He will also have
appropriate limits and will severe the relationship if absolutely necessary, but he will do
so in a loving and respectful way.
Healing Love: The Loving Woman and the Male Shadow Lover and the Loving
Man and the Female Shadow Lover. How does a loving person respond when their
partner is identified with the shadow lover? Is there not the same danger of exploitation
as there is in the abusive love relationships previously described? Yes, there is, but the
loving woman or the loving man is not naive like the child lover and while she or he will
attempt to be a loving and healing presence; abusiveness and exploitation will be seen for
what it is and will not be tolerated for long.
Loving women can help their male shadow lovers heal their pain especially if he
is not as pathological and dangerous as the demon lover can be. If he is the Impotent
Lover or the Addict Lover in Moore and Gillette’s typology, she may be able to support
him to face his wounds, to take responsibility for his pain, to stop being passive or
addicted, and perhaps to seek personal help, a support group, or create and use a social
support system of others especially male friends. The loving woman must remain vigilant
and as with the boy lover and there will be limits to her ability to remain in relationship
with a man who is not moving out of the shadows. If he is possessed by the demon lover,
she must wake up, protect herself, and disengaged perhaps to save her life.
Loving men can also help their female shadow lovers heal their pain. They too
must be wary of women possessed by the demon lover who are dangerous and potentially
murderous. The loving man will make every effort to help his lover lost in the shadow to
grow toward empowerment, to heal old wounds, and to move beyond addiction. His
maturity like the loving woman will allow him to help while not taking responsibility for
her pain and to help while not allowing himself to swallowed in the shadows too. If his
partner will not or cannot seek use his support and seek whatever additional help is
necessary, he too will be forced to let go and move on. If she is dangerous, the loving

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man is not naive, he will sense it and see it and act according to protect himself and other
innocent victims in harms way.
Ecstatic Love: The Union of the Loving Woman and the Loving Man. When a
woman has done her inner work, when she has encountered her shadow, when she has
begun to recognize and court her animus as the inner masculine lover, then she is a
mature lover with the capacity for appreciative consciousness, for integrity, for sensual
pleasure, for loyalty, and for becoming generative and live giving both within and beyond
her loving relationship with a man. When a man has done his inner work, when he has
encountered his shadow, when he has begun to recognize and court his anima as the inner
feminine lover, then he is ready to meet the loving woman with equal maturity and
capacity for loving relationship.
The union of the woman and the man at this level is the divine marriage, the
wedding of the Goddess and the God reenacted at the human level as Hieros Gamos.
From early agricultural societies to the golden age in Greece to the Tantric sexual union
practiced in India and China, human being have practiced an ecstatic ritual in which the
woman seen as a Goddess engages in holy intercourse with the man seen as a God. The
sex act as pleasurable as it can be, is not meant to be taken only literally, but as symbolic
of union of the archetypal feminine with the archetypal in the form of mortal women and
men.
Jung discussed this sacred marriage in his work called the Psychology of
Transference. He said in the sacred wedding there is a “marriage quaternio” or four
marriages which he said is an archetype that can be traced in history back to the primitive
marriage-class system or the four-kin system. The union of the loving woman and the
loving man embodies the marriage quaternio. The four marriages are: (1) the inner
marriage of the women to her animus, the archetypal masculine, (2) the outer marriage of
the woman to the man becoming his wife, (3) the inner marriage of the man to his anima,
the archetypal feminine, (4) the outer marriage of the man to the woman becoming her
husband. This Ecstatic Love is the ultimate expression of the potential in the union of the
woman and the man.

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 “If men and women could perceive intercourse, orgasm, and other less
‘erotic’ expressions of love as a unifying experience, a holy experience, a
symbol, as a miracle, or as a religious experience ... such perceptions and
awareness should be able to help any male and any female to experience
the transcendent and unitive, both in oneself and in the other. In this way,
the eternal becomes visible in and through the particular ... the sacred can
fuse with the profane, and one can transcend the universe of time and
space while being of it.”

(Abraham Maslow in Religion, Values, and Peak-Experiences, 1964)

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