Carl Jung: He is still in a sorry condition, for Hades is a gloomy place.

To Count Hermann Keyserling

Dear Count, 25 August 1928

The negative relationship to the mother is always an affront to nature, unnatural.

Hence distance from the earth, identification with the father, heaven, light, wind, spirit, Logos.

Rejection of the earth, of what is below, dark, feminine.

Negative relationship to material things, also to children.

Flight from personal feelings.

On the subjective level the "father" is an imago: the image of your relationship to the father and to everything he stands for.

In your dream this imago is dark, on the point of disappearing; that is to say a different attitude to the father imago is brewing (and to everything it stands for).

Your one-sided spiritual tendency is probably meant, for anyone whose stature requires the size of a continent is not so very far away from Father Heaven (Zeus).

This is too much for our human stature.

It is an inflation by the universal, supra-personal spirit.

(Originally this was forced on you by the negative attitude of your mother.)

This spiritual inflation is compensated by a distinct inferiority of feeling, a real undernourishment of your other side, the feminine earth (Yin) side, that of personal feeling.

Hence your feeling appears in negative form, as an obsessive symptom == fear of starvation. Symptoms are always justified and serve a purpose.

Because of your negative relation to the earth side there is a danger of actual starvation; you arouse enmity because you give out no warm feeling but merely autoerotic emotions which leave other people cold, also you are ruthless and tactless in manner.

But your inferior feeling is genuine, hence anyone who sees behind your heavenly cloak with its ten thousand meteors has confidence in you. (There aren't many
of them.)

By having too much libido in the father imago you give the spirit of your father too much blood, therefore he cannot get out of the chthonic shadow world into non-spatiality (eternal rest) as he would like to.

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One shouldn't attach the dead to the living, otherwise they both get estranged from their proper spheres and are thrown into a state of suffering.

Yours very sincerely,

Jung, ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 52-53