LECTURE VI 11 June 1930
Dr. Jung:
Mrs. Crowley asks a question concerning the autonomous figures we spoke of last time.
She would like to know how to distinguish such autonomous figures from instincts or very strong impulses.
I am afraid I could not distinguish between them.
Instincts that would appear in our psychology are chiefly personified as autonomous figures, inasmuch, of course, as the instincts are not smoothly integrated in the whole of the personality.
As soon as one is at variance with them, they have a decided tendency to become objectified in some way, and then they oppose us.
It is as ifit were another person with a will that contrasts with one's own.
We will go on now to the next dream. The dream before was mythological, St. George and the dragon, and in this case the dragon was a turtle that was giving birth to a child.
Now, after that mythological dream, the unconscious by the law of enantiodromia returns to a very businesslike proposition.
Dream [29]
The dreamer says that he is going to look into his business abroad.
His brother-in-law, who is a director in the business, complains that the buying agents in the interior are buying a lot of high-quality cotton for high prices, and that there is a standstill in the selling
of just that high-quality cotton at present.
So the dreamer says to him that, in such a case, one should proceed energetically to reduce very much the buying power of the agents, as otherwise one would lose an enormous amount of money.
Naturally, a great deal of capital would be invested where large quantities are bought at high prices.
Associations: He says that this dream can be interpreted on the objective plane, because he is really afraid that his brother-in-law, the director, is somewhat too slow in his decisions, and might lose
control of the buying agents, or miss certain opportunities. But on the other hand, on the subjective side, it also is possible that his unconscious is complaining that he acquires far too much high quality
merchandise, which might lead to serious losses, as this kind of merchandise has no currency just now.
Well now, do you get anything from his associations or his interpretations?
Do you understand the dream?
Dr. Baynes: Does it mean that he is doubtful, because he is putting more capital than he can afford into a thing of a very rare quality that has not much currency?
Dr. Jung: Yes, but how is that applied?
Mr. Richmond: His new value is getting into his old, into his main stream of life, and he is afraid of overvaluation of this high grade material.
Dr. Jung: But what value would this particular high-grade material represent?
Mr. Richmond: The new value that he has been finding. It is becoming high-grade coffee.
Dr. Jung: Coffee is just a side branch. Here it is the main business.
Do you mean he is afraid of putting too much value on, or of making too great an investment in, his new enterprise?
Mr. Richmond: Are they not coming together now?
Dr. Jung: That remains to be seen. I am not so sure.
I think we had better go through the dream in detail in order to be certain of its meaning.
The first thing of importance is that the dream takes a most objective and practical situation.
It is exactly like his business where he formerly was the chief, though now his brother-in-law is in charge as director.
That is all quite clear, the situation in the dream is perfectly real as he knows it.
Of course, to a business man his business is just as much a reality as, say, his wife; it is sometimes a much greater reality than his family, so we cannot say that it is entirely symbolical.
In all his associations the reality character is stressed, as in his anxiety lest his brother-in-law might buy a bit carelessly.
So we are led to believe that the unconscious wants to accentuate the point of reality quite particularly.
Sure enough, his business life is in the strongest contrast with what he is actually doing here in analysis.
Practically all these considerations in his dream point to a former habitual way of life.
So one could say that the difference between his daily, ordinary reality and his new enterprise is particularly emphasized, and there obviously must be trouble or the unconscious would not insist upon it.
Therefore we must assume that there is some conflict going on in him about the relation of analysis to reality, expressed in terms of hard cash.
Now don't you think, Mr. Richmond, that the buying of cotton might be that new enterprise?
I see no evidence in this dream which would speak against that assumption.
It looks as if the dream had forgotten all about the coffee, because it views the problem obviously from an entirely different angle, that is, the new enterprise is no longer handled as if it were a branch or a sort of side issue.
It is now expressed in terms of the main business; it has become, apparently, even the main consideration.
It is interesting in this connection that Goethe, whenever he made an entry in his diary about the second part of Faust, on which he worked so long, wrote, "Have worked on the main business," das Hauptgeschaft.
So as far as this dream goes, we have no reason to assume that the analytical enterprise is still a branch business.
It has become identical with the main business and therefore can be expressed through the main business.
But a fear is in the dreamer's mind that the buying agents might invest too much money in that indubitably high-grade merchandise.
Mr. Schmitz: The employees of the last dream are putting too much libido into this new enterprise, and he fears it will not be changed into cash.
Dr. Jung: Well, he recognizes in the dream that this merchandise is of high quality, excellent stuff, yet what could he do with it?
That is the question.
He acquires a lot of very good and interesting ideas, new interests and so on, in analysis, yet there is no selling; in other words, there is no application.
Now why is that?
Mr. Schmitz: Because his shadow, his brother-in-law, is not efficient enough.
Dr. Jung: The brother-in-law is not responsible for the bad selling. It is a general condition of the market.
Dr. Baynes: No demand for it.
Dr. Jung: Yes. And who refuses to buy the valuable stuff?
Mrs. Baynes: His wife.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. He has no market for his good material because she won't buy, and so he, as a good business man, naturally thinks: why the devil should I invest such a lot of money in that high grade stuff when I cannot sell it, when it does not work?
Now that is a perfectly justifiable doubt.
The condition of the market is a sort of atmospheric thing and decidedly an outside condition.
His wife is his outside condition, and she is extremely reluctant to acquire that high-grade merchandise.
He cannot talk to her about it because it hurts her somehow, and she does not want it.
Of course, it would be putting a bit too much responsibility upon his poor wife if he should cling to that explanation exclusively.
His wife is more or less an exponent here.
Of course, she has her own dignity.
She plays a considerable role in the game, but I would not make too much of her; she is an exponent in his own psychology, perhaps his anima, the feminine quality in him, his Yin quality.
And it may be a very tough and unwilling quality that refrains from buying good cotton and wants cheaper and perhaps worse material.
As you know, the public does not always buy the high-grade merchandise, they want to have things cheap; so it is quite possible and even very probable that his own new realizing powers are more or
less unwilling to acquire that high-grade merchandise.
Now, what would that mean?
Well, this is a precious piece of masculine psychology.
We have so often spoken critically of women, and here we come to men. I shall not spare them.
Mr. Schmitz: He does not realize it enough. It is unconscious.
Dr. Jung: That is right, and that is a very important point about men.
You see, a man knows exactly when a thing is wrong or what it should be if it were right, and he is inclined to assume that, when he thinks the thing, it is done, because he is convinced of it in his mind.
Yet it is not done at all.
A man can write a book or preach a marvellous sermon about how people should behave without carrying out the principle at all in his private life.
He does not live it. That is an entirely different consideration.
The spirit is strong but the flesh is awfully weak.
The Yin power, the realization power, is very low, very inferior, it doesn't follow suit, it doesn't accept that wonderful thought and put it to work; it remains inert and passive and fails to move at all.
The thought enjoys itself in itself, revolves in itself and goes on revolving in itself, and nothing comes out of it.
Reality goes on as it always has and nothing is changed, yet the man who is identical with that wonderful thought up in the air thinks it has changed a great deal.
He thinks: I have an entirely different view of things and the world, therefore everything is different.
Yet when it comes down to hard facts nothing is different, everything is as it ever was.
If such a man had a good Yin power, a good realizing power instead of an inferior one, he would feel at once that he thought but never realized, and therefore he had no right to think that way-that he shouldn't think those things.
If he does think those things, he must realize that he has pledged himself. But that absolutism of thought and conviction is rarely to be found, as it is entirely a religious quality.
Only a religious man has that quality, that Yin power, that puts his thoughts through into work.
The mere intellectual has nothing of the kind, he has absolutely no realizing powers; it is air.
Thus the most important thing he can imagine turns out to be just words; to say it is nothing but words is not far from the truth.
And this is so common that nearly all men believe it is words and not reality.
When they hear somebody talking, I say about ninety-nine per cent of all men surely assume that it is just words and not reality, because in ninety-nine cases that is true.
So the public that is somewhat reluctant to buy that high-grade stuff represents very probably this man's own inertia, his own low realizing power that unfortunately is backed up by the reluctant attitude of his wife.
As I remember, I actually told him that this dream should be taken on the subjective side despite the fact that his wife is truly resistant.
Even in such a case, he should not use it as an excuse, he should not make her responsible; he should say instead: after all, that is my wife.
She is the exponent of his psychology, and if he considers her as that, he is doing justice to himself as well as to her.
For if he realizes, if he begins to put things into practice, the situation will change altogether, as we shall see.
As a matter of fact this was the case.
When he had worked up his impotent Yin power, things changed. He became suddenly quite different.
Then even his wife changed, which is evidence of the fact that it was really in the first place his own inertia, his passivity, which was also hindering her.
This is especially obvious since, when they reached a better relationship, she still did not give up her resistance to his interests.
Yet despite this resistance, the situation became normal.
Mr. Schmitz: You said that the power of realization is the Yin principle. Is the realization characterized by the sensation function?
Dr. Jung: Oh no, not necessarily, for a sensation type has the same kind of psychology. It is a Logos and Eros question, which has nothing to do with the functions.
Mr. Schmitz: Then sensation would not be la fonction du reel?
Dr. Jung: No, because you can be absolutely detached from realization in your sensation.
The point is that a man's psychology is chiefly characterized by what I call Logos or the thought principle.
Whether he functions according to this type or that does not matter, the main feature is Logos, as the woman's is Eros, no matter what type she is.
Mr. Schmitz: But very often it is the same thing with women. They cannot realize what they feel. They feel very well but they do not realize it.
Dr. Jung: That is an entirely different question.
In German one uses the verb "to realize" chiefly with the connotation of concretizing things, and I was using it in that sense.
In English one uses it in a much lighter way. It has more the meaning of "to see," "to understand."
I should have said concretize.
Mr. Schmitz: For women is it the same difficulty?
Dr. Jung: Naturally, only the process is reversed.
lt is then not a question of a weak Yin, but of a weak Yang.
Women with a perfectly good realizing power cannot put their minds into action.
They may be convinced that they know a thing for a very long time yet they do not know it because the mind has no power; whereas a man can make up his mind every day to do a certain thing and yet never do it.
Dr. Baynes: Would you say that a man could think a thing and not give it, and a woman could surrender without thinking, but surrender constructively with thinking?
Dr. Jung: Absolutely. It is characteristic of a woman's psychology that she can do a lot of things without thinking about them.
Mr. Baumann: I have just seen a very nice example of not realizing things, and it happened to a famous psychologist.
I spent a day with Mr. Forel, who has written a book about the sexual question.
He talked for about half an hour at breakfast about votes for women and the rights of women, and said the men ought to let the women do things.
An hour later he went to the kitchen, where his wife was making peach marmalade, and proposed one pound of sugar to one pound of peaches, though Mrs. Forel said that half a pound of sugar was the proper amount.
The marmalade was too sweet and Mr. Forel was extremely angry and smashed all the pots on the floor.
Dr. Jung: Exactly like him! Now the next dream.
Dream [30]
Our patient says: "I am walking in the street and a wagon is passing, a big sort of furniture van full of stuff, and I see that the driver, a tall, slender man, is doing acrobatics on top of the van. Then
suddenly the wagon changes into a little house in which I find myself with the driver, who is now changed into a terribly uncouth and vulgar fellow, and he continues his gymnastics up on a sort of ledge running along the ceiling on one of the walls.
He is quite naked. Several other people are in the same room, among them a boy. The atmosphere gets very peculiar, something like a spiritualistic seance, and one of the people says to the boy that he ought to call up somebody, meaning a sort of invocation, and another person, joining the conversation, says: 'Oh yes, we will call up his great-grandmother and we will rape her.'
The boy now becomes quite rigid, as if in a trance, and suddenly an old lady appears, with grey hair but a very young and distinguished looking face. The uncouth, vulgar fellow, who had been clinging to the ceiling hitherto, suddenly jumps down and catches her in his arms. She defends herself and succeeds in jumping out of the :window, where, held by the arms, she shouts for help. People are coming and the man lets her drop and curses her for having broken the window. Now the lady goes away with the people who gathered in the street; obviously she is going for the police.
One of the men present in the room says that he has succeeded in taking a picture of the whole situation with his cinematograph apparatus, he has made a film of the scene, and he is hurrying to get the pictures into safety before the police come.
Then I am looking out of the window and I see that the house is standing near a river which is flowing past, and to my astonishment I see that artillery is coming toward us on the other side of the river.
They are loading the cannons to shoot and aiming at our house, I call the attention of the other people present
and propose that we go into the cellar or into a neighbouring house, as a bombardment seems to be imminent.
One of them answers that the neighbours would not like to have us, but we can go into the cellar, and the photographer says it is all indifferent to him as long as his pictures are safe, and he is sure they will be a tremendous success and that it will be a great business for him."
Associations: He says that the wagon or car is one of those big furniture vans that one sees in the street, especially at the time when people are moving in the spring or fall.
The driver reminds him of a photograph he had seen in an illustrated paper of a peasant, a particularly strong and powerful man. I remember having seen that picture. He was a woodman from the wine country near Lake Geneva and he was a very beautiful fellow, quite masculine. The dreamer says that when he saw his face, he thought: no more inhibitionsl-a real coq du village! You know, nearly every village has one or two idiots, and usually one typical character who is always called the coq du village, and that man was evidently such a masculine beauty. But immediately afterwards the driver becomes transformed into an uncouth and vulgar fellow and the dreamer calls him a human animal, an apeman, which explains his acrobatics-he is behaving exactly as a monkey would in a room.
The boy, he says, is obviously a medium, a link in a chain, and it is his effect in the room that makes the unconscious soul or anima, the great-grandmother, rise from the depths of the past.
In the scene of the attempted rape, the dreamer understands that the great-grandmother is obviously his anima or soul, and the instinctive ape-man is jumping on her in order to destroy her, a sort
of violation. So the conflict is not solved through the occultization of the animal side of man, or through the subjection of the white soul, but only by the flight of the soul, her escape, which is brought
about by her own wits and by the help of the environment.
Concerning the peculiar intermezzo of the photographer, he says that the fact that the whole scene has been perpetuated in a picture means that it should not be forgotten.
The next feature in the dream is the discovery of the river that flows past the house, and he says that the consequence of the flight of the anima into the external world is his separation from that world, which now is in a hostile attitude to the conscious ego-the ego which on one side could not be subdued (he identifies here with the ape-man) and on the other side was not strong enough to subjugate the anima.
He suggests that going into the cellar might mean retiring into oneself.
Concerning the last rather cynical remark of the photographer, that the whole thing is perfectly indifferent to him as long as his pictures are in safety, he says that this record, the pictures, seemed to possess
a very great importance but he does not know why.
Now we will interpret this dream.
It is very difficult to grasp it as a whole; it is so long and there is so much detail that one can hardly take it all in.
Therefore the ordinary technique in such a case is to divide the dream into scenes or parts, and to look at each part separately.
Only in the end shall we try to bring it all together.
The first picture in the dream is that furniture van and the driver performing his acrobatics on top.
The driver seems to be identical with that coq du village that he saw in the illustrated paper.
He says nothing about the acrobatics.
As a matter of fact, he did not put that association down because it was so reminiscent of his recent dream when he was doing acrobatics himself, and the mouse escaped from under the bed.
Since that reminiscence points to the very vital moment when the mouse ran away, we may assume that he is again concerned with a similar problem, perhaps of equal importance.
Then the last figure in this dream is the photographer who says that having gotten his pictures into safety, the whole thing is absolutely indifferent to him, and there our patient observes that that seems to be of very great importance somehow.
So we may conclude that he had a feeling of importance attached to this dream.
Whether we can see the justification for it does not matter-we know that it is important, and it begins with a reminiscence from a former very important one.
The acrobatics in that dream were associated with analysis, they were mental acrobatics.
Naturally it meant a certain strain to him to follow my psychological arguments, a good deal of patience to become acquainted with that peculiar kind of thinking which seems so illogical and irrational at
times.
Now here again somebody is performing acrobatics, but it is no longer himself; here it is the driver who afterwards changes into an ape-man.
Have you an idea about that?
Dr. Baynes: Was there not a dream in which a monkey was doing acrobatics in the trees?
Dr.Jung: Oh yes, that was some time ago.
It was not a monkey, but the dreamer performed acrobatics like a monkey in the branches of trees, in a sort of alley which led up the house with the square courtyard, where Dr. Faustus lived.
Dr. Baynes: There was also the motif of the moving of furniture there.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the furniture had been brought out of the house and it was cracking in the sun, indicating that it should be moved.
Mrs. Crowley: It might mean his shadow here.
Dr.Jung: Yes, the driver is what one would designate as a typical shadow figure.
He is everything the dreamer is not-a coq du village.
That conveys the whole meaning.
The dreamer is rather inhibited and very correct, so he admires that lack of moral inhibition and envies him the faculty of playing the role.
It is the typical shadow, the inferior man, and this time the inferior man is performing gymnastics, while in the former dreams it was the dreamer himself, the conscious ego, who was doing them.
Also, in the drearĪ¼ of disporting himself in the trees in the alley, it was his conscious ego.
This must indicate an important change.
You see, he has dreamt twice that he was doing acrobatic stunts, which is obviously a sort of realization in the dream of how difficult it was for him to train his mind to a more psychological way of thinking.
To his rational mind, this intuitive kind of thought, these fantastic analogies, were perfectly unknown, and he found it very difficult to deal with these evasive ideas, which would surely be considered perfectly fantastical vapours by nearly everybody.
People always wonder how I can deal with them as if they were concrete things.
When they get a glimpse of the anima, for instance, that intangible presence, they wonder how one can talk of it as if it were a concrete figure.
And for many people it is extraordinarily difficult to deal with illogical concepts, which are much too abstract, and they feel perfectly lost in handling them.
Well then, after this acrobatic motif has occurred in his dreams twice already, it is now the shadow that is concerned with these exercises, no longer the dreamer.
What does that mean?
Mr. Schmitz: His conscious is interested but the unconscious is not.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the conscious has mastered the thing. He got it more or less, that is perfectly true.
Consciously, he was accustomed to it, but now comes the inferior person concerned with the same difficulty.
It is as if the struggle were going on in a lower stratum; it is no longer his conscious but his unconscious which suffers.
This may be a strange thought to you.
You are perhaps inclined to think that when your conscious has mastered a thing, the difficulty is overcome, but as a rule that is not true.
You can master a thing in the conscious quite easily, yet the lower man finds it exceedingly difficult and suffers from that trouble.
For instance, take any kind of human relationship in your life, or any kind of painful duty.
Your conscious knows it is necessary, you must adapt to it, and you really can do it; but if you get a bit tired or don't feel quite well, up comes the old resentment, and suddenly you cannot cope with
it any longer.
It is as if you had never learned to deal with it.
The weak, inferior man comes up as soon as your conscious gets a bit soft.
It only needs a little fatigue and all your beautiful faculties are completely gone-whatever you have learned completely gone.
That truly can happen.
I remember an occasion when it happened to me.
We were making experiments in the Physical Laboratory and I was concerned with a pretty complicated case. I was about to explain to my pupils how the thing worked.
It was perfectly clear to me how that whole phenomenon came to pass, I knew it quite well, and I said I would tell them after lunch.
But after lunch I could not understand it, simply on account of the fact that there was not enough blood in my brain.
That amount of after-dinner dullness was sufficient to disable me, I had not the clarity of thought that I had before eating.
It often needs no more than that-like the philosopher who said that before dinner he was a Kantian and after dinner a Nietzschean.
This first statement of the dream, then, means that the difficulty now is chiefly with the inferior man in himself.
The conscious has mastered that part of the problem more or less.
It is only the inferior man who gives the trouble; he has begun to exercise himself also, which means that he is about to come up to the level of consciousness.
Naturally one cannot expect the shadow ever to come quite up to that level, but one may expect it to be more or less adapted, to chime in, so that the two come together.
That stage is not yet attained, it is still only in the preparatory stage, but it seems to be on the way.
The inferior man is performing his arts
on the top of the furniture van, which afterwards becomes a little house. That gives us a clue.
You see, the luggage van always denotes a change, leaving one place for another, a state of transition.
The dreams before have spoken of new enterprises.
He is obviously going to find a new place, to create a new condition.
Even in the dream where the acrobatics occurred the first time, as Dr. Baynes has just mentioned, there was already the motif of house-moving and furniture, and here the change is effected apparently.
Now what does the luggage van suggest, apart from the idea of house moving?
It is a big and clumsy thing.
Dr. Baynes: Is it not a temporary container of his effects, his goods?
Dr. Jung: But what would the goods be?
Dr. Baynes: His psychological effects or values which he is changing.
Dr.Jung: Yes, but are you not impressed with what the dreamer particularly emphasizes, the clumsy bigness of the car containing a lot of furniture?
Mr. Schmitz: Impedimenta!
Dr. Jung: That is it.
You see that these impedimenta (that beautiful Latin word which really means obstacles, hindrances) are a very typical symbol for a certain psychological fact.
For example, you know those moments when you are hurrying to the station and you have three bags on one side and one on your back, and naturally you lose a parcel and have to go back for it, and then you remember that there are twenty more trunks which should be shovelled into your compartment and which are not yet at the station, and only at the last moment the porter comes hurrying along with them.
That typical dream!
Those are the dead things we have to carry, things which are no longer living, things which we are bothered with but which have to be carried along.
They belong to our existence in the flesh, because we cannot travel without any- luggage, and we cannot live on this earth without any furniture.
And nothing wants to get lost, everything accumulates; old shoes and old trousers never leave you, they are always there just waiting for you, they are jealous of the new ones.
One can't get rid of a single thing.
And these impedimenta, which cling to us and which we have to carry along, are simply an exposition of our psychology.
Our psychology consists not only of an eye that is able to cover vast spaces, travel in the fraction of a second a hundred-mile distance and more.
It also consists of functions moving in a much more clumsy way.
For instance, you may understand a thing, know every corner of it, yet your feeling has not yet realized it; you know all about it, yet it is still not your property and only in time does it begin to sink in.
You are in the vanguard of your mind, and the army, the greater part of you, is still miles and miles behind, not here yet. I see that very often in my American patients.
They are here in the flesh, but they seldom dream of Europe, they are always dreaming of America.
So they are not really here-everything is looked at through the spectacles of New York or Boston, only one half or one-third reality.
And only after some time trunk after trunk comes from America; it takes them I don't know how long.
Sometimes they never arrive, a part of them always remains where they have been before, which is quite reasonable; surely if we Europeans were to go to America, it would take us very much longer
to get across, for we cling to the soil still more than the Americans.
This is simply a natural psychological law.
And so you may find a good friend, but after a while you discover that he has a sort of suite behind him and a lot of disagreeable things come in. Or you marry, and you think you are marrying
just that woman or that man, but not at all.
Their whole ancestry down to the ape-man crowds into your marriage and naturally into your psychological relationship.
It takes time, because they have to travel up from the remote past, and so for quite a while, say for half a century you keep on being astonished,and-you-are~notthrough with it yet, mind you.
Therefore, you see, when you move you cannot simply take your umbrella and step into the next house, it needs more than a toothbrush.
You carry a bag, and then somebody comes after you with a trunk, and then comes a car, and then a van, and then you are not through with it, because memories of all sorts of things will still cling to the places where you have been.
So a real change seems nothing short of an earthquake.
You can change the conscious by a mere thought.
In five minutes I can clear up a difficulty. I say: Well, it is so-and-so, and the fellow to whom I am talking, if he happens to be an intuitive, says: That is grand, now I understand.
And he walks out all puffed up.
But nothing has happened, he has heard nothing.
He turns the next corner and collapses.
There are such fellows who are born weekly, like the Buddha, who went through about 570 rebirths.
That is a psychological truth too.
So here the inferior man is on top of a load of goods that never will do acrobatics; the only acrobatics they will experience are the acrobatics one has to do in managing all those trunks.
It is good exercise for one, and they won't do it because they are dead contents which don't move unless one moves them.
They consist of all the dead passivity and inertia of the deepest layers of the unconscious.
We don't think of that ordinarily, but whatever we have to carry, well, they just have to be carried.
One never can change them, one has to make up one's mind to travel with that whole load on one's back.
Beneath the inferior man comes the load of things that are dead; they are an encumbrance, but one must carry them like a snail carrying his house on his back.
Mr. Holdsworth: What about the Europeans who go to America?
Dr. Jung: I just said that he would probably be less in America than the American is in Europe, I think that Americans are much more able to move than Europeans, but naturally a part of the
American is so deeply rooted in the Indian soil that it will never leave America at all, as we would never leave Europe--or only in some generations.
Then the colonial split occurs.
The furniture van, then, expresses the idea of moving, and that is probably the reason why in the next picture the van changes into a little house, and the dreamer finds himself in the house as well as the driver.
What does that mean in psychological terms?
Mr. Schmitz: He has found a new place for all his stuff.
Dr. Jung: Well, yes, he has arrived here in the new space in which he is supposed to move. A new situation is reached.
Mrs. Deady: Doesn't he have to drop some of his impedimenta? The dream says it is a little house.
Dr. Jung: More modest than he is accustomed to, but I know that man and I am pretty certain that if he moves into a new house, he will carry all that stuff with him.
He obviously arrives in a new situation, in a house which is not movable in itself, it is a settled situation.
He arrives at a certain conclusion, a definite standpoint, one could say, a dwelling-place where he is meant to stay for a while apparently.
That means a new psychological attainment, a definite step forward.
And then something very peculiar happens the transformation of that beautiful man, the driver, into a perfectly uncouth, primitive ape-man.
How does such a change come about?
We must see a reason somewhere.
Dr. Deady: The van contained the deepest layers of the unconscious.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but why should that affect the driver?
Dr. Deady: What is appropriate to the moving-van becomes inappropriate in a house. The nomadic animal-self is inappropriate when he is settled down.
Dr. Jung: You mean the fact of settling down is more or less offensive to the inferior man, and he instantly shows further bad qualities?
That is a perfectly permissible point of view, because it is backed up by facts.
One sees people, who, as long as they are on the move, as long as they can be nomadic, are manageable, but no sooner do they settle down than they develop all sorts of disagreeable qualities.
They can't stand being stationary. Why is that?
Mrs. Crowley: A resistance to responsibility.
Mr. Schmitz: They are very repressed in a house. Having a house represses a lot of instincts which a nomadic life would allow them to realize.
Dr. Jung: But is that the only reason?
Mrs. Sigg: They must make a great effort at adaptation, and that comes slowly.
Dr. Jung: That is right.
Do you remember that dream of the hut where this man found the crocodile, the saurian?
That was a similar situation.
The hut was a kind of house, meaning a definite situation.
You see, it is very typical of human beings that as long as things are suspended and they have a chance to move on and on, they always have hope of finding the good thing round the next corner, so they never insist on having happiness where they are.
But when you settle down and assume that now it will come off, you are up against a brick wall.
Happiness does not descend upon you, it is even a considerable strain to keep quiet.
And then you think regretfully of former times when you could escape and disappear somewhere in the clouds on the horizon.
So you promise yourself all the time new countries, new chances, wonderful things, and are lured on and on, living the provisional life.
That is very typical of the specific psychology of the neurotic; part of the neurosis consists of that suspended life, or rather, the provisional life.
I learned that term from a patient who had a compulsion neurosis.
He said: "The trouble is, I am living a provisional life, and the name of it is Happy Neurosis Island, where nothing has come off yet.
I am now forty-five, and I know I began my provisional life-I went to Happy Neurosis Island-when I was seventeen.
And I cannot be cured because, if I should remember again. I should wake up a boy of seventeen and have to realize that so many years had gone by wasted.
Now I have hope and I can live."
I told him in the beginning that he would not put it through, because he could not bring off the sacrifice of thirty years; it is a bloody sacrifice to cut away thirty years of your life.
He could have done it if he had wanted to be cured, but he didn't.
Such a case hardly ever does.
That is an excellent formulation of the peculiar psychology of the neurotic.
He lives as if there were no time, as if nothing had yet come off and everything were still to come.
There is no here and now but an eternity of ten million possibilities, and because he is lured by a sort of imagination or dim feeling, every action which might lead to something definite is instantly checked
and somehow made inefficient.
The neurotic cannot or will not occupy the new place for which he must declare himself entirely responsible for better or worse.
Now, we see the great difficulty that my patient is confronted with.
He might declare himself responsible for his situation, but to actually stick makes a tremendous difference.
I do not mind at all when people say this is impossible, that they can't do it. I say: Of course it is difficult to put your neck in a noose, it is as if you were hanging yourself; but otherwise you are suspended on a possibility that gets fainter and fainter and is wasting away time and life.
If you have to choose between the devil and the deep sea, it is better sometimes to choose one or the other than the state in between, where nothing happens.
So it is a very great step forward for the dreamer when he can say: This is my house, I am here. It does not look very considerable, yet it is his own and he makes up his mind to stay.
Then one expects that things will now be all right since he has made such a great sacrifice, but then the very devil begins.
Spooks. The house is haunted by the ape-man, and the unconscious begins to play all the monkey tricks it can possibly invent. There is an enormous revolution in the unconscious.
It is a wild animal suddenly and begins to raise hell with him.
A door closes. Nothing else, there is food and water, but there is a closed door, and that is the typical moment.
It is now in the house and the very devil, it becomes more ape than man and begins to climb about.
This climbing about is very much like the dreamer's former acrobatics.
He is not very offensive, he is like a baboon or something of the sort.
Mrs. Baynes: Naturally the great-grandmother won't stand for the baboon.
Dr. Jung: The baboon is the shadow, we have located him.
But this great-grandmother is not a figure that can be explained personally.
This man's great-grandmother has vanished in the dust of ages. And this new figure, an entirely impersonal, mythological sort of figure, who would she be?
Mr. Schmitz: The anima.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but would you just say anima?
That is too indefinite, we should make it more specific; we must pay attention to the very word.
You see, the word "great-grandmother," which is exactly the same in German, means a very grand mother or the grand grandmother, as the primitives would say, which means a great intensity, the very grandest mother.
That is a very high title of honour.
She must be an extraordinary being.
You see, the primitive idea is that when a man dies, if he leaves a son, he enters the ghost land as a father and only a hen is sacrificed to him.
Then his son becomes a father, and the father in ghost land becomes a grandfather, and instantly his rank is increased; he is then a sort of duke, and the son has to sacrifice, not a hen, but a bull.
So the importance of the grandfather is much greater than that of the father.
We do not realize that that is the origin of the word.
It means that the further you remove the mother from the present moment into the past, the more her importance increases.
She becomes more and more ducal, more and more an exponent of the origin of mankind.
One could say, as the father comes nearer to the totem animal, so, the more generations there are between the mother and the present generation, the more she becomes a great grand power, for she then represents the totality of power of the human past.
Prof Hooke: Why has she a young face?
Dr. Jung: That is the aspect of the great-grandmother as the anima. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 654-671
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