LECTURE VII 26 June 1929
Dr. Jung:
This is our last seminar this summer-I hope the next dream is a good one.
Dr. Schmitz: May I ask a question about the Puer Aeternus again? Isn't Euphorion, the son of Faust and Helena, such a child of the wise man and the anima, such a Puer Aeternus?
Dr.Jung: This leads us a bit far into the figures of the collective unconscious.
Faust is identical with the wise man, the magician.
It has often been said that he was Paracelsus ( or the son of Paracelsus).
If you take Faust as a real individual, Paracelsus for instance, then it would be the man Paracelsus identified with the collective figure of the old magician; many geniuses are thus identified with their differentiated function, and these people nearly always have the figure of the great wise man.
In the poem of Faust, the Puer Aeternus, Elphorion, would be the child .of Faust and Helena. Helena is very clearly the anima, so the child would be the product of the wise man with his anima.
That is of course one statement, one individual case.
It remains to be seen whether it is correct under all conditions.
There is a hitch here, for the Puer Aeternus would be the product of two figures in the collective unconscious.
Where does the real man come in?
Dr. Schmitz: Yes, Euphorion flies away after his birth, and I would ask what is his relation to the man? When individuation has been realized, and after the birth of the Puer Aeternus, doesn't the
Puer Aeternus take the place of the shadow, as the individuation takes the place of the man? .Perhaps there is some analogy here in the relation of the Puer Aeternus to the man, his anima and his
shadow. Is he a substitute for what the shadow was before?
Dr. Jung: That is an awful tangle. In Faust, as soon as Euphorion is born he begins to show symptoms of extraordinary desirousness, always after the girls, and eventually he vanishes in flames.
Exactly the same thing is true of the Charioteer and of Homunculus who, flying about in his retort, hurls himself against the throne of Galatea, the beautiful one, where he explodes and is gone.
These three identical fatal occurrences mean that the creation of the Puer Aeternus has had no long duration.
They indicate that something is wrong in the generation of the figure.
The mistake is probably that the creation is through two unconscious collective figures, and man does not come in.
This describes what one so often sees.
The wise man, when afoot in the world, occasionally hurls himself against the throne of a beautiful Galatea and vanishes completely!
How many of you have not known such a man.
As soon as there is such an obstacle in the way, as the throne of a Galatea or of some other beautiful girl, it will bring him to a premature end.
It is rather too much for a human being that he should be such a perfect wise man.
Therefore we must dismiss the idea of the Puer Aeternus altogether, or say that he should be created in a different way.
Man should not be identified with the "Great Wise Man," but he must assimilate his own shadow.
The usual characteristic of the great man, the genius, is that he does not know that he has a shadow, but he has, and a very ridiculous one.
Wagner for instance never realized, while he was sitting there writing about Siegfried, that he was revealing his own shadow for any one who saw him to look at.
He wore a crinoline while hammering out the sword of Siegfried!
In a dressing-gown tied with pink ribbons he wrote the Niebelungenlied, and made himself a perfect ass.
But such a man cannot admit he has a shadow.
He is never grateful to God for giving him his mind, but he assumes that he is creative mind, that he has done it all himself.
As soon as you see your own shadow and admit that you are not perfect, you cannot identify yourself with the "Great Wise Man" and create a Puer Aeternus with your anima.
Then the question arises, is it possible under certain conditions that man, completed by the consciousness of his own shadow and being individuated, is capable of creating something with his anima, a real Puer Aeternus, eternal as its name implies?
Through individuation you create something timeless and eternal, which carries the quality of immortality.
That is what the East seeks, and it is amply confirmed in their texts.
You can take it or leave it as you like. So the Puer Aeternus created thus has the quality of eternity.
Mind you, I make only a psychological statement, not a metaphysical one, for we are in conditions of time and space.
We call iron solid, but what is solidity?
Iron is really flowing. The question is only from what standpoint you judge it.
We think of sealing-wax as solid, but suspend it for some time and it flows, it is semi-fluid.
Solidity is merely a psychological attitude relative to man and his time.
So when you call something eternal, it means simply the quality of timelessness.
The complete individuation brings something of that quality.
Dr. Schmitz: Does that mean something not in a man's work, but in his life?
Dr. Jung: No, not in his work nor in his life, but in himself.
It is simply a mystical fact of inner experience.
One can only state it.
It is one of the inexplicable facts of life.
Ask a pious man about his religion, his experience of God, he can only assert it.
He has nothing more to say.
You can add nothing to it nor take anything from it.
So it is with that eternal quality.
Now we are concerned with the dream of the building and the garden, and the road leading to this place.
We had finished the interpretation of the dreamer tearing the rod away, with blood, from the boy's mouth.
Now the building represents the goal of the road.
The road has been built exclusively for that building, and when you walk on the road you come up to the gate, with a bar across it. Have you -any ideas about that building?
It is a square sort of structure of yellow stone, with two wings.
The dreamer emphasizes the fact that it is built of yellow stone and says that it reminds him of an administration building near the desert in Egypt, save that there, there was no garden.
My patient had read The Golem, and I have told you that this dream is closely related to the end of that story, which I have translated for you, and in which there is such a building, representing the ultimate goal of the road. The gate is made out of a figure of Osiris with the head of a hare.
Osiris is really never represented with the head of a hare.
That has been invented by Meyrink, whether consciously or unconsciously we cannot know.
There is something peculiar about this image that Meyrink may be unconscious of.
While Osiris is never represented with the head of a hare, his adversary, Set, the Egyptian devil, is represented with the head of an animal with long ears.
Some say that it is the head of a hare, some that it is an ass, others that it is the head of an okapi (a kind of antelope recently discovered in the Congo, now quite rare, but possibly in earlier times more widely distributed).
In antiquity it was associated with the ass.
There is a Roman legend that the Jews worshipped the head of an ass in Jerusalem.
This was because the Jews were opposed to the worship of Osiris, so it was assumed that they worshipped Set his enemy.
Then there is a picture of the mock Christ in the military academy in Rome, a rough drawing of a crucifix on the wall done in a very funny fashion.
The figure on the cross was depicted with an ass's head, and the inscription in bad Greek runs: "Thus the young officer Alexandros is worshipping his God."
It is making fun of Jesus as the God of the Jews having an ass's head.
Set is the Egyptian devil, the evil opponent of the sun-god Ra.
Osiris is really a very old god, later superseded by Ra.
It happened once, when Osiris was very old, that as he was walking over the earth, he suddenly complained of a pain in his eye.
When his son Horus asked him what he had seen, he said, "I saw a black pig."
"Then," said Horus, "you have seen Set."
Horus took out his own eye and gave it to Osiris to restore his sight, with the fatal result, however, that Osiris became the judge of the dead in the underworld and Horus was the rising god.
This is all symbolic of the second part of human existence.
While we have no actual texts about it, it is quite clear that the eye of Horus leads directly to Christ. Early Catholic teaching mentioned Isis and Horus as anticipations of Mary and Christ.
Horus is the "healer," he heals the old god by giving him his own eye (which always means vision, view, teaching).
Horus is also the god of the Mysteries; he is generally represented in the centre of the picture with his four sons in the four corners, one with a human head, the other three with animal heads.
This absolutely coincides with the Christian representations of the four Evangelists, three as animal figures and one human, the lion, ox, eagle, and the angel.
The four Evangelists surrounding Christ in the centre form the Christian mandala; Horus and his sons make the Egyptian mandala.
These mandalas are individuation symbols.
The old mystical meaning of Christ was the perfect man who was the realization of the gnostic Adam Kadmon,the Primordial Man, lifted up and perfected to the most perfect man.
This is a lengthy introduction to the gate made of the statue of Osiris with the head of Set, the coming together of Osiris and Set, thus making a union of opposites; but all this belongs to the interpretation
of the dream, so what do you assume about the building now? Have you any idea?
The interesting thing is that it is expressed in a very banal way, as a public administration building.
One cannot associate any individuality with such a building, impersonal like a hotel or barracks.
It has a social value, it is a centre for many people.
It serves a multitude, and many people live in it, streaming in and out of it.
Mr. Gibb: It is a symbol for himself.
Dr. Jung: One would assume that the symbol for himself would be individual. Why is it so utterly impersonal?
Dr. Bertine: He probably has a special idea of himself and has to come at it through something that contains all the common human elements, as a compensation for the wrong idea.
Dr. Jung: True, it is a compensation for the wrong idea regarding individuation. People assume that the self contains simply the ego personality, "I myself!"
So the dream says, "You make a mistake, it is not yourself-it is a public building a collective institution.”
Dr. Schmitz: It is necessary to emphasize the universality of the self, the self contains the whole of collectivity.
Dr. Jung: Yes, we all instinctively make that mistake; when we speak of "self' we mean to say "I myself."
Many people think individuation is selfish and egotistical, but far from it.
If you do not exist the crowd does not exist.
There is no ocean without the drop of water.
The whole of the Sahara does not exist without every grain of sand.
Provided you are a good grain of sand you make the Sahara.
The individual, besides having the quality of eternity, is "smaller than small though greater than great."
This dream compensates his individual error that the self is the ego.
In the philosophy of Swedenborg (whom most of you would not consider a philosopher) there is the teaching of the greatest man, the Homo maximus, in whose body we are all like cells.
Some of us inhabit his soul, some his eyes, some his brain, so we all contribute to make him as a whole.
People with good brains would live in his brain, those with good eyesight would be hunters perhaps, making his eyes.
Even the genitalia were not left out, by which he explains certain peculiar temperaments.
This is Swedenborg's doctrine of the correspondentia, but these ideas remained in a metaphysical concretization. They were never fully evolved psychologically.
They got stuck on the way to consciousness.
The dreamer says that this building gave him a peculiar impression of being a prison, and his association is "the body is the prison of the soul."
Dr. Bertine: Doesn't that explain the feeling of "being caught" when people are themselves? It is the net of the Gnostics.
Dr. Jung: I should say that is a very typical example.
When people come to themselves they expect a peculiar liberation, to be free from responsibilities and from vices and virtues, but in reality it is quite different.
It is like a trap, you suddenly fall into a hole.
"Hang it all!" you say, and there you are, where you belong.
We are all like a little liver cell that has wandered away from the place where it belongs.
The little liver cell escapes and wanders through all the tissues.
When he finds the brain, he says, "This is a nice high place, there is good air here" but his neighbours say, "Get out, you are no good here," so the little cell is pushed out and it wanders along to the lungs but the same thing happens there.
It says, "The world is very hard, nobody understands me."
If it understood itself it would know that it didn't belong there I Finally it wanders along through the tortuous passages of the blood vessels into the liver and there it falls into a hole, a fatal catastrophe.
The little cell says, "Damn it, most unsuitable place, how did I get here?"
But God says, "Hold it fast," and it turns out to be a liver cell!
This is what you might call individuation! So the worst trap is the body.
We have all been taught that our minds and other virtues are wings we put on, so we get to flying about above ourselves, and we live as if the body did not exist.
This happens often with intuitives, with everybody in fact.
The body appears to us as a most serious obstacle.
It is heavy, and we have a feeling of helplessness about it, as though it were a terrific impediment.
Through our mediaeval Christian education the body has gotten a bad name.
The hole which one falls into is through the body, and its bodily limitations; then one accuses the body, and the body says "but this is you."
All this is expressed by the prison, therefore the dreamer's association is "The body is the prison of the soul."
The soul, in contrast to the body, is that winged thing that is free to fly above the earth.
Here again he mentions that the sun is burning hot, that it is burning up the whole place.
That heat is characteristic of the whole situation.
This man has lived for many years in the tropics, and he knows the danger of the African sun.
Dr. Deady: His mind is in danger by sun-stroke. He would have to give up something of his intellectual attitude. The unknown thing he is going into is dangerous, the collective unconscious material.
Dr. Jung: I should rather think of the extraordinary intensity of the African sun.
It is his association with the problem, he feels that he is laboring under the stain of extraordinary intensity.
Thus when we get into a difficult situation we say we "get into hot water."
The sun is painful, so he tries to escape it by monkey tricks.
He seeks the shade, while the woman and the boy walk on the road in the full glare of the sun.
When the dream speaks of the intense sun it means an intense situation, that is, much libido is involved.
This man happens to be well aware of Egyptian mythology, so we might make a poetic interpretation and say that the building is heated up by the eye of the merciless God.
That he is in the presence of the divinity is surely in his unconscious mind.
This is again a quality of individuation which we should not fail to see.
The individual wielding power, who thought he was all of the ocean, who thought he was the whole of the Sahara, is reduced by individuation to a drop of water, to a grain of sand.
At that moment of hopeless smallness and futility of existence he constellates the idea of universality.
The most supreme thing, the greatest idea, has always been called God.
The smallest power is always confronted with the greatest power, the smallest space with the infinite, so always the inner experience of individuation is what the mystics called "the experience of God."
That is a psychological fact and it is why the process of individuation has always been appreciated as the most valuable and important thing in life.
It is the only thing that brings any lasting satisfaction to a man.
Power, glory, wealth, mean nothing in comparison.
These things are external and therefore futile.
The really important things are within.
It is more important to me that I am happy than that I have the external reason for happiness.
Rich people should be happy, but often they are not, they are bored to death; therefore it is ever so much better for a man to work to produce an inner condition that gives him an inner happiness.
Experience shows that there are certain psychological conditions in which man gets eternal results.
They have something of the quality of eternity, of timelessness, they have the quality of reaching beyond man.
The have a divine quality and yield all that satisfaction which man-made things do not.
Now we come to the second part of the dream.
You will remember that the gate is locked, and apparently there is no way to get in except by climbing over the bars, cheating.
Locked means not easy of access; one is not meant to enter right away.
There is a sort of porch or lodge at the entrance to the gate.
The dreamer sees within the gate an old man with ragged clothes.
His arms are outstretched, and he is quite immobile, so it is doubtful whether he is dead or alive.
In his associations the dreamer says that such a lodge is quite the usual thing, for the porter of such a house.
With the old man, in his rigid posture, he associated a yogi in the yoga state of abstraction, what he calls complete introspection, even to the point of disregarding his own body.
The dreamer says that such a state is unsympathetic to him.
What would your conclusion be in regard to the figure of the old man?
Mr. Gibb: His interest in his former theosophical studies is not quite dead.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the old man surely represents to his former theosophical studies, the fakir stunts and philosophy which tend to get people out of their bodies.
That was one of the reasons why the dreamer came to analysis, he was involved to a certain extent.
The picture is not inviting at all, and as a matter of fact the old man disappears from the dream at this point, he plays no further role.
This is a sort of intermezzo in the progress of unconscious thought.
The old man might evoke pictures in the unconscious of a yoga philosopher who would symbolize an individuation process, for the yogis have worked out a philosophy of "the way."
So naturally the picture comes in here as he approaches the gate, it might be in this way the gate could be opened.
But when you find the porter in a state of coma he cannot open the gate.
It is useless to call to him, he is removed from his body in a trance, he is not a good doorkeeper.
Obviously the desire of the dreamer to get inside the garden is very great, apparently it is evident to him that he must get in by any means.
He sees a child of eight years or so inside the gate in the garden-the Arab child who is mocking at the dreamer, the woman, and the little boy.
What about that child?
The man's association is that he is just an ordinary street urchin, such a child as one sees hanging around a porter's lodge, one of the many children of the porter's relations all living together while the owner is away.
You must imagine that child is not very attractive, he is dirty and ragged, with inflamed eyes from trachoma.
Probably he has eczema, sleeps on dirt-heaps, and is covered with lice and fleas.
Dr. Schmitz: Can he be a Puer Aeternus in a negative form?
Dr. Jung: Well, it is not certain whether the child is a boy or a girl. In a later dream there is a similar child, a girl, but with this child he is not certain, though we have another clue which is far more valuable.
Miss Chapin: The Arab child is a parallel to the porter at the gage but in a youthful form.
Dr. Jung: Yes, surely. The old man cannot open the gate, while the child can, but he is such a dirty little urchin.
You see such children by the score in that country, and they are a plague like flies.
Why is the young guardian of the gate presented in such an unattractive way?
Mr. Dell: He is the humble, very unattractive first beginning, a sort of hermaphroditic being.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the dreamer wishes to open the gate and walk right in, but here is this dirty little boy when he enters the final goal.
The door is opened not by an angel with lovely golden wings, but by a dirty little urchin!
What would you expect when you come up to Paradise?
Prof Schmaltz: This is the humiliation he must undergo. He is not a nice man but a dirty little boy.
Dr. Jung: Yes, do you know what that means in the Orient nasty, dirty little children?
Christ tells us "except ye become as little children."
He didn't speak of clean little children in school in those days, but of these same filthy children in the street, just as Christ saw them.
Miss Howells: Far away from stained-glass windows.
Dr. Jung: When you have to pass over the bridge, sharp as a knife-blade, narrow as a hair, you meet all your sins, or all your virtues.
Since this man is very virtuous he will meet all his sins, so a nasty little brat of a child opens the gate for him.
If he does not accept his low-down condition, he will surely not enter Paradise, he will not take this step towards individuation.
But he jumps over the gate and climbs into Paradise, "taking the Kingdom of Heaven by storm" ; the way of intuitive thought. What about that?
Dr. Gilman: Monkey tricks.
Dr. Schmitz: The intuitive way.
Dr. Jung: As soon as he is inside, the woman and the boy are there too.
The woman and the boy are a part of himself, his psychological family.
As soon as the dreamer jumps into the garden the child begins to shout that he is not allowed to enter.
As he approaches the building, he sees some new pieces of furniture exposed to the hot sunshine, and among them is a washstand in which the mirror is lacking; the frame is there, but no mirror.
The dreamer's association is that these pieces of furniture are all in very bad taste, cheap and common, with nothing individual about them.
Obviously they have just been unpacked and are waiting to be stored in the house.
This must refer to a recent happening.
Dr. Bertine: I should think it means his domestic affairs. The furniture lacks a mirror, so that he cannot see himself at all.
Dr. Jung: Yes, there is no mirror.
The intellect is often called a mirror. As the mirror is lacking in the frame so insight is not there.
Prof Schmaltz: This man is very enterprising, so he has sent his furniture on ahead, being quite sure that he will be admitted.
Dr. Jung: He was particularly excited because the new furniture is left out in the sun where the wood will be injured.
As he is not admitted, the furniture is not admitted.
It is a parallel, it is left outside, and it is in the same position as he would be if he had not climbed over the fence.
Furniture cannot climb over the fence, so it stays in the hot sun.
It surely belongs to him, and he has no doubt that the place belongs to him, so if the gate is not opened he slips right over.
One could call this enterprising!
He has the idea that he is a very respectable and righteous man, and when he comes to the gate of Heaven, he will be admitted right away into the drawing-room and he will expect that God himself will receive him, but there is only the little dirty child.
His furniture which he has sent to Paradise has been left outside in the sun and it is very cheap stuff. The mirror is not in the washstand yet (unripe fruit again).
In this enterprise of taking the "Kingdom of Heaven by storm," he makes some very disagreeable discoveries about himself.
ln the last part of the dream, before he came to the furniture, he paid no attention to the Arab child, he practically stepped over him, and now he seems to have some resentment in the dream, he
evidently realizes that things are going wrong.
He says, "Here is that damn little urchin again! I must catch him."
He binds him with a rope.
The child cries out, and as he doesn't want to have too much fuss he lets him go again. What does binding the child with a rope mean?
Dr. Schmitz: He is torturing his own soul.
Dr. Jung: But you must take only his associations.
He says, "It is as though I were showing that Child that I am not afraid of it and that I can suppress it, even if it does belong to that house."
He obviously wants to incapacitate that child who says, "You cannot enter."
Mrs. Crowley: He wants to suppress that side of himself, his inferior side.
Dr. Jung: Yes, at all costs he must suppress that side of himself, this is his unpresentable side.
No one can live in a country like Africa without absorbing something of it.
Its uncivilized character gets into and influences the unconscious, so afterwards it may be very difficult to get rid of the relatively primitive element and adapt to civilization again.
Europeans who have lived for a long time in the East discover this.
Now that our dreamer is living in Europe again, this uncivilized element will cause no end of trouble to him.
He tries to bind it but it is so difficult to handle that he has to let it go.
You will see in later dreams how this side of himself comes up.
Mrs. Sigg: He must not identify with the child from Heaven, or with the dirty child from earth.
Dr. Jung: There is no question of identification in this dream.
It might come up later, but now he is most emphatically disidentified.
Mr. Gibb: Was he before a little proud of the child of the anima, so this child is a compensation?
Dr. Jung: He has the pride of the white man, which would disidentify him.
Dr. Deady: His struggle is with what the boy represents. He tries to bind his conflict.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but he simply does not want that child to run about free, "I will show that child." This shows the power of the white man in Africa.
If a Negro at the gate of a house should say, "No admittance," the white man would say, "You go to Hell, I enter."
After the intermezzo with the child he comes to the actual door of the house and discovers the plate with the name of. Bauer.
His association is Dr. Faust or the two last words in the inscription from Meyrink's Golem: "Aur Bacher."
Dr. Kirsch has looked it up so we can get the whole inscription.
It is a sequence of cabalistic words partly unintelligible.
The meaning would be community, or power, then an untranslatable word, and then the "light of the disciple."
These are of course words and concepts which play a great role in the book.
The "disciple" is the initiate led up the path to individuation, the "light" is illumination.
It is quite possible that it is a quotation from some magic book in a sort of Hebrew.
The Gnostics fabricated any number of them in faulty Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, even inventing artificial words.
These inscriptions were very powerful, because nobody understood the words.
"Power" and "community" play a great role in this dream and show how closely it was associated with the reading of The Golem.
Let us look at the context of that quotation.
It comes at the end of a series of exciting visions, during which the hero has lost consciousness.
He fell into the bottomless depths, and finally he feels that his feet have touched bottom.
There he sees a group of bluish figures who form a ring around him.
They all wear golden hieroglyphs on their breasts and each one of the figures holds a red seed-pod in its hand. (He had refused to accept a handful of seedpods and even struck the hand of the phantom who offered them, thus scattering the pods.)
Now these figures hold up the pods again.
There is a storm with lightning flashes.
He feels feeble and terrified, and he hears a voice say: "It is the Night of Protection" (the night of the exodus, when the Israelites were protected against the Egyptians).
Then someone in the circle says: "He whom you seek is not here." (This was said of Christ when the women came to the tomb and found it empty.)
Then the figure says something he cannot understand, he only gets the word "Henoch."
Suddenly one of the figures in the circle comes up to him and points to the hieroglyphs on his breast, and when he reads the inscription, he feels that thisis the end and falls into a deep sleep.
Obviously these visions are a series of mandalas, not such as you would draw, but they could be danced or acted.
Forming a magic circle means individuation.
The offering of the seeds is just like the story of the crocodile that would eat the child whichever way the mother answered.
The seeds are the same thing, a sort of fatal question. So whether you say "I accept" or "I do not accept," you do not know what will happen either way, because you don't know what it means.
The hero in The Golem refused the seeds, so they come up again in a threatening form. The meaning is that the seeds are his various parts.
We consist of a lot of particles which must come together as in the magic cauldron or melting-pot where all the dissociated parts of our personality are welded together.
So the hero is asked, "Do you accept all the grains as parts of yourself?"
He answers, "No, I don't," but he cannot refuse, because these are grains of himself.
The result is that they come up against him, they form a magic circle around him, and a voice says, "The one you seek is not here."
Meyrink knows what "Messiah" meant to the Cabbalist: "The one that unites, that makes perfect, is not here."
Because he has refused the parts of his personality, the parts are now standing up against him.
Then one of the spectres comes up and shows him the way of enlightenment.
Undoubtedly the second part means that he is a disciple who receives illumination.
Our dreamer is in the same situation.
He is also one who has refused the grains, he does not want to bring together all his compartments, he wants to force his way into Paradise.
So he is in the position of the disciple who must still learn.
He is not a master, and he cannot enter the place where Dr. Faustus lives, because in a way Dr. Faustus would be the complete man, the initiated one.
He must go to the next door and humbly ring the bell ( quite unlike his monkey tricks and climbing over the fence and catching people).
That in plain language would mean "Well, that was a bit quick, I had better go to Dr. Jung and ring his bell."
He had better confess that he is only a disciple and has still something to learn.
This is the last attempt of the patient to solve his problem in a magic way, by yoga or any other theosophical means.
From now on he takes an entirely different road.
In the next dream he takes an auto trip to Poland, he travels with a man who is a sort of acquaintance of his, famous as being a great coureur de femmes, a boulevardier.
His associations with Poland are interesting also. In the dream after that he goes into a poor little hut in Africa where there is a crocodile.
It is just like Parsifal, who, having come by chance to see the Holy Grail and being then quite immature, is turned away; he goes out into the world and after a long time and many adventures comes
back to the Grail.
So this man goes back, in a way, to the little urchin, the Arab devil, as though he had to assimilate the thing most disagreeable to him, the weakness and humility of his more or less primitive feeling.
Therefore he first goes to a country of lesser civilization, Poland with its disorder and corruption, then he goes even further back, to a primitive hut inhabited by a crocodile, into the mouth of hell, into danger, for crocodiles occasionally eat people!
From now on the dreams deal with the most inferior and rejected part of his personality, his inferior man.
Only when he can deal with his inferior part and unite his two sides can he come to the whole man, and take the place that this dream hints at. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 282-295
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