People who are not consciously aware of the body suffer from a certain unreality of life in that inter-relatedness through participation mystique; they don’t know when they are hungry, and they neglect the simple functions of the body.
I had a case, a girl of twenty-eight, who no longer heard her steps when she walked out in the street. That frightened her and she came to me.
She dreamt that she was riding in a balloon—not in the basket but on top, high up in the air—and there she saw me with a rifle shooting at her from below.
I finally shot her down.
She was that girl I have told you about who never had seen her body.
I suggested that she must bathe once in a while, and then she told me she had been brought up in a nunnery where the nuns taught her that the sight of the body was sin, that she should always cover her bath tub with a linen, so she never saw herself. I said: “Now go home and undress and stand before your long mirror and look at yourself.”
And when she came back, she said: “It was not so bad after all, only I think my legs are a bit too hairy!”
That is the truth, that is the way people think and feel when they have such symptoms. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 65.
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