Carl Jung: In all these visions there is really not much blood.

Dr. Jung:

I have received certain reactions to the last seminar.

One is from Mrs. Sigg, but I am afraid it is too extensive to deal with now.

She chiefly objects to the white placenta that apparently contains no blood.

This objection is quite justified.

But of course we are in no way capable of changing these visions, they are just what they are; there is no mistake about them, they are facts.

Naturally facts do not always satisfy us, and we wish perhaps in a very natural yet shortsighted way that they were different.

Dreams also are not always what we want them to be; they are sometimes unpleasant, unsatisfactory, yet they are what they are.

So this placenta is unfortunately white; there is nothing to be done about it.

But I understand that Mrs. Sigg misses the blood in that rebirth mystery.

In all these visions there is really not much blood.

As a matter of fact, they are thinner than ether, they are the flimsiest fabric you can imagine; when one reads them without any commentary one gets nothing out of them; it is an almost meaningless succession of images which convey practically nothing.

Yet they contain the skeleton of ideas. The forms are there, but it takes no end of trouble to make the contents visible.

They are like a book consisting of mathematical formulae which convey nothing to the layman, but give it to a mathematician and he will tell you a most interesting story.

Or like a musical composition, which to someone who cannot read the notes is just paper printed with black hieroglyphics; but let
a man with musical imagination read it and he hears the music.

So if I read these visions with attention, I hear the music, I get the meaning of the whole thing, because they have meaning. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 821

[Image courtesy of Craig Nelson]