LECTURE II 30 January 1929
You remember that we left off last time with the sewing-machine.
Mr. Gibb's question: "Last week you interpreted the symbol "sewing machine" as "method."
May we not go farther and particularize the method from this symbol?
Cinderella got a ball-dress including slippers, and the method was a movement of the wand of a fairy.
For the purposes of a dream, a charm, a cheque-book, a thread and needle and scissors, or a fairy with a wand could all have symbolized a method of producing a new suit of clothes, just as effectively as the sewing-machine, but would there not have been a significant difference in the principle involved in each case?
My point is, are we not justified in assuming that dream material has a sort of logic of its own, provided we accept completely the premises its symbols suggest and refrain from projecting into it our own obsession in favour of some particular premise or principle?
In the dream in question, the symbol sewing-machine suggests to me that we should accept a rather mechanical cause and effect atmosphere, so far as the element of it is concerned."
Dr. Jung: The very nature of the machine suggests a very particular kind of method.
This is where I differ from Freud.
You cannot say the symbol in a dream is merely a facade behind which you can hide and then say what the dream is.
The symbol is a fact, as in this dream it is a sewing-machine, and we can only go on with the dream by understanding what the sewing-machine means.
We cannot merely say that the sewing-machine means a method of getting new clothes, for you can get new clothes in a number of ways: in a mystical way, a magical way, etc.
The point of the sewing machine method would mean a mechanical way, purely of cause and effect, a soulless way.
You get the idea of what this mechanical way can be by studying the patient's associations.
A symbol in a dream is meant to be what it is.
When a doctor analyses urine and finds sugar he cannot say it is only a facade, so we must follow the way Mr. Gibb has pointed out.
We have not exhausted the meaning of the sewing-machine.
I would particularly point out that the sewing-machine is a mechanical thing.
In his associations the dreamer says, "Could it be that the girl, who is infected with T.B., represents my sick feelings, that they must live in a dark hole?
I had the feeling that the sewing machine really belonged to my wife and that she should say the first word."
With this association what does the sewing-machine mean?
Answer: An anatomical relation, sexual only.
Dr. Jung: He understands the method as purely mechanical, and that is the way he looks at sex.
This is the source of the eternal misconception between man and woman.
For most men the idea of sexuality is purely mechanical and unpsychological, while with women it is associated with feeling.
Mr. Gibb: What prompted that question was that you so often speak of dream material as irrational and now you say it is rational.
Dr. Jung: There are certain irrational things which must be accepted as facts, as, for instance that water reaches its greatest density at 4 °C. That is irrational, but it is a fact.
The dreamer asked me how he should take this material and I told him to accept these things as facts; that this is the way things are.
And I said, “I don’t’ know whether your devil or your good angel has suggested this; we must just wait and see how it works out. I admit that it would be very awkward for you to fall in love with this girl and upset your marriage, but you are immensely attracted to the idea of getting your feelings out into the open.
You must be patient and wait and see."
The role of saviour to this poor thing shut up in a dark hole appeals to him immensely.
Few men could resist this role.
Freud's idea is that the dream is rational.
I say that it is irrational, that it just happens.
A dream walks in like an animal.
I may be sitting in the woods and a deer appears.
It is Freud's idea that dreams are prearranged, which I do not agree with.
The general meaning of this dream is a continuation of what we have been working on.
The patient's feelings do not permit him to come out into the open.
As the sewing-machine belongs to his wife, the sex mechanism belongs to his wife.
He got a tremendous kick out of this dream, although he is confronted with the fact that it would be awkward for him to be in love with the girl.
Mrs. Schevill: Three ladies would like to know more about the natural mind of women.
Dr. Jung: I gave you an example last time, about my mother without sparing myself. You can ask yourselves this question.
I am sure that you have something behind this question in your black souls.
Natural mind is a thing you never see on the surface, for every woman is afraid of that kind of mind, just as a man is afraid to admit his feelings.
Mrs. Gibb: What can you do about it, can you educate it?
Dr. Jung: No, you must just accept that it is there and have no illusions about it. If you try to educate it you fall into it.
It cannot be touched, it is a live wire.
A man will admit every kind of sinful thinking but not feeling, and a woman cannot admit thoughts.
You get a very good example of this in Wells' Christina Alberta's Father.
There the girl is doing all sorts of nonsensical things during the day, and in the evening she holds a court of conscience which tells her just what she has been doing during the day.
This is inexorable thinking, she cannot get away from it.
You must accept the fact that there is such a dissociation in your minds.
The only thing you can do with the natural mind is to accept it.
We all want to have one God, we all want to have one soul, etc., we all want to escape the duality of life, the contrast, the dissociation in our nature, but we cannot.
On one side you are what you appear to be, perfectly innocent, on the other side there is the natural thinking.
Young people are quite right to jump away from it; but for older people, it is very important that they should know that they themselves, the world, etc., are ambiguous.
It is the beginning of wisdom to doubt.
It is important that they begin to doubt the value of existence, so that they can disentangle themselves from the world.
Young people cannot live in doubt.
If one has profound doubts of life one cannot get into the world, but a mature man should have more detachment from the world.
This is perfectly normal when one has passed the middle of life.
If a man loses his grasp earlier in life he goes to pieces, and if he does not attain a new attitude later he becomes a nuisance.
Dr. Shaw: Is the natural mind type of thinking animus thinking?
Dr. Jung: A woman gets that type of thinking through the animus, but if she accepts it, she is herself and so depotentiates the animus.
The animus of a woman is always powerful at the expense of the extension of her mind.
As her mind expands the animus grows less powerful, so that as a woman gets conscious she should no longer see that kind of thinking with a doubt, for she is thinking in a perfectly normal way.
As soon as she has depotentiated these things they lose their power, they belong to the veil of Maya.
If you could put yourselves back into the primitive world there would be so much outside of yourselves and so little inside that anything could happen, all the world would begin to act in a queer way, trees to talk, animals to do strange things, ghosts to appear.
Now, increase your consciousness and these phenomena will all vanish, they were only expressing to you what you yourself thought.
The trees will no longer talk, and no ghosts will walk.
This is the progress of man, that he depotentiates the outside world; the last remnant is the idea of an absolute God, or such figures as the anima and animus.
The more you increase your consciousness the less these things exist.
This is what the East says.
They came to it from a continuity of the experience of living,
I came to it through psychology.
People often reproach me with materialism.
This is not materialism at all, it simply advances the importance of what we call the psyche.
We have not the faintest idea what the psyche is, we have not the faintest idea what we are,
We do not know, and it is childish to say that we do.
Mrs. Schevill: But you have not given us more examples of the natural mind.
We all admit that we have examples we might give but they are too personal to talk about.
Dr. Jung: That's just it.
You never can get a woman to express her real thoughts, just as you can never get a man to tell his real feelings.
To give examples of these things is always going to the core. I have a great many but they are very personal.
They would concern you or someone whom you know and that would never
do.
The natural mind is a very immediate thing and goes right to the core.
Often the son gets his first idea of the natural mind from his mother.
I could give you another aspect of the natural mind; if the boy is strong and full of the devil he can resist it, but if not then he may be crushed by it-poisoned.
Mothers are capable of injuring their sons by letting loose their natural minds.
When I was a little boy my father was a clergyman in a city which is famous for its narrow-mindedness.
If I had lived on in that set I should have been completely suffocated.
People were living in the actual rooms where their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years, with portraits of them hanging on the walls, by Diirer and Holbein.
One of my best friends had a library which dated from 1680 to 1790, a library that simply remained as it was, nothing new was ever added to it.
The whole atmosphere of this life was tremendously captivating.
The natural mind says that a boy can never get out of it. Of course I had to create my whole life anew, I had to work it out.
At a very critical moment in my life, when I was working very hard, my mother came to see me.
My mother loved me very much and tried to help me, but she could undermine me with her natural mind.
I had been working very hard on my association tests and my walls were covered with charts, when my mother came unexpectedly to visit me. She looked all around my walls and said, "Do those things really mean anything?"
What she said was thin as air but it fell on me heavier than tons of lead. I did not touch a pen for three days.
If I had been a weak boy I would have been crushed and said, "Of course, it is no good," and given up.
My mother would have said that she loved me and meant nothing by it, but man is a civilized being and his greatest danger is nature.
Many men remain nice spectres painted on the wall, the devils in them are all killed; the mother has eaten them with her natural mind.
A good mother would not use her natural mind on her son, as a good father would not use his natural feeling on his daughter.
Well, I had a terrific fit of anger and then I could work again.
The next dream [3] follows.
The patient says: "It is as if I were seeing a sort of steamroller from a point above. The machine is going and is apparently making a road, forming a particular pattern
like a labyrinth."
And in the dream he thinks, "That is my analysis"; and then he is in the picture which he has looked at from above.
He is standing at the bifurcation of the road in a wood, and he does not know which way to go.
At first he did not pay much attention to the arabesque the machine was making.
The patient's association with his position above is that one can see
things more in their true relation, less personally, while when one is closer the machine dominates.
About the road machine he says: "I have read in a technical paper that with these machines one can make a macadam road in a relatively short time."
The arabesque association is:
"There is no sense in building roads that lead nowhere." (I reply that the particular design these roads make may lead somewhere.)
He says, "This design looks like a puzzle. Perhaps if one has the necessary patience one can find the goal, perhaps it means I must have patience if I want to get anywhere with my analysis.
The bifurcation of the road might come from the conversation about the preceding dream.
The doctor said to me there is no compulsion to go through analysis if the problem seems too difficult."
Apparently I had told him that he should think about whether he felt a resistance and whether he wished to go on.
He associates in a wood with Dante's Divine Comedy.
This is a known symbol of the Middle Ages, and it means the descent into the unconscious. Dante loses his way then finds the descent into the unconscious.
The patient thinks also of another old story, dating about 1450, of the monk who lost his way in the Black Forest and a wolf becomes his guide to the Lower World.
One thing is quite conspicuous, the motive of the "machine" is on his mind.
When a subsequent dream takes up the problem of a previous dream it means that the analysis of the previous dream has not been exhaustive.
His problem is a sex one.
When a man comes to something urgent it is always expressed by sex.
The unconscious says, "What about sexuality now?" so the problem is not finished.
A man has to deal with his active urgent type of sexuality.
In a woman it is not so; it only becomes so in the second half of life; in the beginning it is not so.
With a man sexuality becomes the symbol for the urge of what has to be.
The fact that he is placed high above the machine means he could be less personal, less difficult.
He could see himself and his problem more impersonally as Mr. and Mrs. Ant who are having some dispute about ant sexuality and Mr. Ant's interest in another
ant, and then he can look at it easily.
Even a steamroller looks smaller when you look down from an airplane; everything is Lilliputian.
When you are high up you are no longer under the power of the steamroller, you see the road, the way in; when you are near you see the power of the machine, the dirt and the noise and the fuss, but you cannot see what the roller is doing.
But from above you see a symmetrical pattern.
In a dream a pattern always makes sense of a sort.
He says, "It is very interesting to see that the apparently meaningless pattern is a labyrinth."
That is what he must get into his mind-once in there is no way out.
That is why he is avoiding it.
Of course, no one wants to get into a place where there is no way out, but that is just what he must see.
If he is going to go into analysis he must see that he must go through that way.
There is no escape from himself. He is getting into something from which there is no escape.
He thinks, "That is analysis."
In the next part of the dream he is at the parting of the roads.
Shall he go on?
He notices that he is in a wood, like the Divine Comedy.
That is the divine comedy of Man.
In the drawing of the pattern the road may begin anywhere, and he noticed at the end that he was no longer on the road made by the steamroller, but on a spiral foot-path.
The whole plan is symmetrical: outside are very bewildering roads, but presenting an unmistakable pattern, and inside is a spiral made by his own feet.
He is the man of woe and joy, the one who makes the two movements, high above and deep below.
Gilgamesh is shown in greatest joy and deepest despair, rising to the greatest heights and descending to the lowest depths.
The idea of the complete life is the enormous swing from high to low, from low to high; from extra version to introversion and vice versa.
If life does not contain the pairs of opposites, it is just a straight line.
It is just as if you did not breathe, it is just as though you did not live.
When life is lived as rhythm, diastole and systole, then it is a whole, it is approaching completion.
So when the dreamer looks at himself in a three-dimensional (temporal) way, it is in and out, but if he sees himself sub specie aeternitatis, then he is suspended in the water of life, breathing back and forth as a cell.
When the steamroller, the rhythmic quality of life, has fulfilled its duty, this particular movement of in and out can branch off and become a spiral.
In that inner sphere the man can give up moving back and forth and the rhythm is then like the life of a plant.
This pattern suggests something exceedingly meaningful, and it is surely most significant that the dream says,
"Here you are in the mythological situation of the hero, like Hercules.
You are in the wood of the Divine Comedy."
Remember how Dante swung from heaven to hell, from hell to heaven.
Dreams are very marvellous. They stop just where a great artist would leave the drama.
The great question of fate has been put to this man-are you a hero?
Which way are you going to take?
We must wait for the man's answer.
Mr. Gibb: Isn't he already lost in the wood?
Dr. Jung: Well, he could run away. Do you think he will run away?
Mr. Roper: The roads in the outer designs intermingle continuously and never cross.
Dr.Jung: Well, we have not exhausted all the possibilities.
There are at least two melodies.
A second line is weaving through which has far less swing; the one is larger, the other smaller.
I do not know exactly what that hints at.
If I am right in the assumption that it means the rhythm of life, there is a wave-length of different amplitude. We have two amplitudes. - Man can live in an active or a passive way, in a masculine or feminine way.
A man may be knocked by fate in some way, and be completely changed and become female, for he has a female wave-length as well.
The masculine amplitude is more excessive. In a woman it is less excessive.
-A woman less often flies off the handle, or loses herself inthe world.
When she does she loses herself altogether, but she rarely does.
A man must be able to get out into the world with its greater risks in order to adapt.
Women often get the shock of their lives when they see how their husbands act in their business lives. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 93-102
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