On The Way Into This World, Our Soul Was Born In Two
By Jonathan Green, LMHC
It was during my first year of high school and I had recently attended a concert by the Jewish reggae singer, Matisyahu, at the River Center in my hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Most mornings on the school bus, I’d play his music on my iPod and focus on his lyrics, hoping to understand what he was saying about Judaism and Hashem.
One of the songs I loved began: “On the way into this world, our soul was born in two / Searching for you, I’ve been searching for you.”
Later in life, I learned some of Chazal’s statements that inform our popular concept of “soulmates.” The Gemara in Sotah teaches that a person’s first zivug is announced by a bas kol at the time of his conception. But just two lines before this teaching, Rabba bar bar Chanah states in the name of R’ Yochanan that finding one’s zivug is as difficult and as miraculous as the splitting of the Yam Suf.
Opinions differ about whether one’s soul was literally split into two and given to two people, but the image captures a common experience. We are born with a sense of incompleteness and a longing for wholeness, a feeling that something is missing from our lives, something or someone we must search for.
Judaism gives this feeling a striking metaphysical form, and through the mitzvah of marriage, an ideal resolution. Yet it is self-evident that the ideal of a complete reunion is not always easily realized. To do so requires humility and a tremendous amount of inner development. The psychoanalytic theories developed by the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung and his wife, Emma Jung, offer a psychological language that helps explain why reuniting with one’s zivug can be as difficult as splitting the Red Sea.
According to the Jungs, each person carries a mostly subconscious image of the opposite sex: the anima in a man, described as the inner feminine, and the animus in a woman, the inner masculine. Jungian psychology understands psychic life as organized around polarities: conscious and unconscious, persona and shadow, masculine and feminine. The anima and animus contain qualities and images that are not accessible to one’s conscious attitude, but shape one’s inner ideal of the opposite sex.
Our task is not to eliminate those polarities, but to integrate them by bringing them into consciousness. I knew about these Jungian ideas when I was dating, and being a therapist and the brother of a twin sister, I thought, in typical male fashion, that I’d done a great job getting in touch with my feminine side. I would think about this in the mornings while saying, “l’shem yichud kudsha brich hu u’shechintei,” imagining that my davening was for the sake of unifying Hashem and His feminine Presence. It was only after I married and moved in with my wife, a real person, that I realized just how far I was from truly understanding and respecting the feminine.
Common stereotypes suggest that many men lack access to qualities associated with the feminine, such as emotional sensitivity and relational attunement, while many women are disconnected from masculine qualities like justice, assertion, and endurance. While every person is unique, the common thread is that qualities experienced as unhelpful or unprotective, often associated with the opposite gender, tend to be rejected by the psyche. What is disowned, however, does not disappear. These undeveloped capacities live inwardly, forming a compelling but largely subconscious image that can appear in dreams, fantasies, and eventually romantic attraction.
Long before we date, we already carry a sense of what we are searching for, not only in another person, but in ourselves. When we meet someone who embodies these qualities, the experience can feel charged and meaningful, like we have found a lost part of ourselves. Attraction is not random; it is often drawn to what is missing or undeveloped within us. At first, this difference feels enlivening and complementary.
But two difficult parallel processes often unfold from there.
The first is familiar. Over time, the real person does not fully match the inner image we projected onto them. Differences emerge, limitations become apparent, and disillusionment follows. The person is not who we thought they were, and the friend who once warned, “You don’t even know them,” begins to sound uncomfortably prescient.
The second process is more subtle and often more destabilizing. The very qualities that initially attracted us, such as her emotional expressiveness, his assertiveness, her spontaneity, his steadiness, can begin to feel irritating and even threatening. What once felt complementary now feels disruptive because these qualities touch precisely what we have not yet integrated in ourselves. We were drawn to what we lacked, but living with someone who approaches life differently than we do creates real conflict.
It is important to add that this cuts both ways. If intense attraction can sometimes signal projection, the absence of fireworks does not necessarily mean that something essential is missing. In some cases, it may mean that less projection is taking place, and that we are encountering the other person more directly, without asking them to carry an inner image or symbolic promise. What feels quieter at first can sometimes reflect genuine meeting rather than fantasy.
In this sense, relationship conflict is not only interpersonal; it is intrapsychic. Through the other, we encounter aspects of ourselves that remain unintegrated and rejected.
Thus, the anima and animus are not merely sources of projection; they are also signposts. In this sense, the ideas of anima and animus can be read as describing the psychological path toward what Judaism understands as reuniting with one’s soulmate.
If two souls, perfectly integrated and unburdened by life experience, were reunited, marriage might indeed be seamless. Masculine and feminine would integrate effortlessly; l’shem yichud kudsha brich hu u’shechintei would unfold without friction.
But we are not just souls. We are souls clothed in bodies, shaped by childhood, disappointment, ego, and longing. By the time we reach the chuppah, the soul does not express itself unconstrained; it carries adaptations and unmet needs.
In this sense, the search for one’s soulmate represents an ideal and a direction, not a guarantee of ease. The soul may remember its other half, but that memory is filtered through the distortions of life. Jung’s anima and animus can be understood as psychological expressions of that memory: their existence in one’s subconscious is both a trace of one’s other half and a record of one’s disconnection from it.
Torah sources support this complexity. Rashi offers an explanation on the Torah’s description of the spouse as an ezer k’negdo, a helpmate opposite him: she is a helpmate if he merits her, and against him if he does not. When a person develops maturity and integrates what he has once rejected, the spouse truly complements him; when he does not, the spouse embodies precisely what he has rejected in himself. Pirkei Avot(5:16) similarly distinguishes between love that is dependent on something and love that endures. Love dependent on projection or psychic compensation collapses with disillusionment, but love that sees the other person fully and truthfully endures.
Marriage can therefore become the arena in which this inner work progresses. A spouse is not meant to remain the carrier of our inner subconscious masculine or feminine side. Over time, through listening, patience, respect, and real engagement with who the other actually is, not who we wish them to be, the relationship pushes us toward integration. We learn to suspend our preferences to respect our spouse’s and make decisions as a couple and family. Without necessarily realizing it, we become a more balanced and complete person. n
Jonathan Green, LMHC, is a psychotherapist in private practice in Cedarhurst. He specializes in therapy with men and teenagers struggling with relationship conflict, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and addictions and compulsions. He draws from psychoanalytic and spiritual disciplines to support the emergence and strengthening of each patient’s true and complete Self. He can be contacted through JonathanGreenTherapy.com, or by calling 917-720-6506. He is grateful to Rachel Ruchlamer and The Shidduch Project for giving him the opportunity to formulate the above thoughts for a talk at a recent Shabbaton.
