Showing posts with label Dream Analysis Seminar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dream Analysis Seminar. Show all posts

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Carl Jung: "Dream Analysis Seminar" - Quotations




The Rosicrucians probably represented a half-baked attempt to make up for the dry Protestantism of that day with its lack of imagination. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 240

Henri IV of France said, "My ideal is that every French peasant has his chicken in the pot on Sunday." I say, "Every man must be concerned with his own morality, and not with the welfare of other people." ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 218

The spirit was there before man's consciousness. It makes people do certain things in certain ways that you can never explain. Animals do not lift their paws to the rising sun, but men do. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 221

The new Gnostic churches are all new inventions of old things, like soup warmed up again, they have no direct relation. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 240

King's Gnostics and Their Remains and Mead's Fragments of a Faith Forgotten are two books dealing with the old Gnostics. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 240

The last trace ()f the Gnostic. teaching. probably died out with the Cathar and the Albigenses. They were the Manichaeans; Gnostics called Bougres in France. "Bougre" derives from the word for Bulgarian and came into southern France. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 240

Some people, and particularly introverts, always put the wrong foot forward. They have a particular genius for putting their finger on the sore spot. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 258

In Christianity we are taught to throw all our burdens on Jesus, and he will bear them for us, and in such a way we maintain a suckling psychology. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 263

Yellow is the colour of envy, jealousy, anger, all things negative with us but in the East just the opposite. There is a reversal between the East and the West. The colour of mourning with us is black, there it is white. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 268

Wagner for instance never realized, while he was sitting there writing about Siegfried, that he was revealing his own shadow for anyone who saw him to look at. He wore a crinoline while hammering out the sword of Siegfried! ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 283

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. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 283

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. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 286

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. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 288

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. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 293

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. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 294


In the beginning everything was in the form of a vaporous cloud, so he drew that together till it became more and more condensed, and suddenly a light burnt through, and that was the Son, the first ray of Light. (Cf. The Gospel of St. John.) ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 612.

The idea that God was perfectly helpless and lost in his loneliness and had to create man in order to become or to be is expressed in many myths or philosophical parabola, and thus is explained how man is in a way the indispensable means of God's becoming. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 612.

That is beautifully expressed by Meister Eckhart where he says that God in his very divinity is not God, he must be born through the soul of man again and again. "Without me God cannot live." ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 612

Look at the men in Wall Street! At forty-five they are completely exhausted. Modern life in America is more efficient than in any place in the world, but it completely destroys the man. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 621-622

I don't say that we should accept an Eastern philosophy. Many people do go in for Indian theosophy and such stuff, but I am an opponent of that because I know that for us it is not healthy. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 622.

One could say that Eastern psychology suffers from an introversion neurosis. All those terrible epidemics out there, or the awful famines, and the fact that the West is able to conquer those peoples, all that is a sort of rebellion of objects against their introversion. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 622

We speak of Chinese philosophy in terms of the highest appreciation but we forget how cruel the Chinese are. I am glad that such things do not happen with us, though since the Great War we can say nothing. We have organized cruelty; there they do it in a more dilettantic way. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 623.

If the personal unconscious is cleared up, there is no particular pressure, and you will not be terrorized; you stay alone, read, walk, smoke, and nothing happens, all is “just so,” you are right with the world. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 75.

Doubt is the crown of life because truth and error come together. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 89.

Doubt is living, truth is sometimes death and stagnation. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 89.


Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Carl Jung's Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture VIII 25 June 1930




LECTURE VIII 25 June 1930

Here is a question from Dr. Howells: "Did the dreamer have any feeling of disintegration when he had this dream in which his anima escaped?"

One would assume that he would have a certain feeling about such an agitated dream, that he would feel it in the daytime even, but the fact of such a dream does not necessarily bring about a conscious realization of excitement or nervousness or anything of the sort.

We know that dreams are very often compensatory, so the conscious feeling might be quiet.

If there is no proper realization of the possible implications, there is no particular excitement.

The dream, rather, brings a sort of information about a storm that is beginning to rage in the unconscious.

So this man was not particularly restless or nervous. In this phase of his analysis, the dreams were more or less outside of him.

In the night he had funny dreams and in the daytime things were as they usually were.

Only commonplace and everyday things happened, and he was not in the least bothered, nor did he feel any direct connection with his dreams.

There is an indication in the latter part of this dream that for the first time he gets a sense of his profound relationship to them.

Hitherto, they have been quite interesting to him, and naturally he got a lot out of the interpretations, but it was as if they didn't get under his skin.

I was for a long time in doubt as to what he would make of it, whether the thing would really grip him or not.

He was tremendously objective and scientific in his whole attitude, and I felt that that was the only relationship one had to him, or that the dreamer had to his unconscious; only occasionally was there a glimpse of something more.

If he had been deeply agitated in his conscious life, most probably his dreams would have mitigated the conditions, as is often the case.

Last week we were talking about the attack of the ape-man upon the anima, and how she succeeded in getting out of the window and into the world.

And when she shouted for help, people instantly came, and the ape-man desisted.

Then something quite typical happened, which happened already in the Bible, right in the beginning.

It seems to be a basic trouble of mankind, or perhaps one would say of men. What did Adam say when things became awkward?

Mrs. Baynes: He said that Eve tempted him.

Dr. Jung: Yes, there it is. The woman did it. So the ape-man said to her: Why the devil did you break the window?

She had to fight for her life and he complained that she had broken the window.

That is characteristic of the more or less civilized ape-man.

First he raises hell, and then he complains that he has to dust his coat off perhaps.

That shows the nature of the ape-man: he is terribly impulsive, he tries to violate her, and when it doesn't work he says: "Oh, excuse me, I just wanted to ask you what time it is."

He is a coward.

As long as he succeeds it is all right, but when he sees that he has failed, he instantly swings round and complains that she has disturbed the noble household by breaking those windows.

The next thing is that the anima goes away with the people outside, obviously for the police.

Now what have the police to do with the situation?

That is a very serious turn in the dream.

Mrs. Deady: They are the guardians of the collective situation.

Dr. Jung: Yes, but what is the collective situation?

Mr. Schmitz: The moral situation. The police are the protection of morality.

Dr. Jung: It is not exactly morality but it has to do with it. I told you what the father said to the son when he was twenty-one, but I will repeat it:

"You have come of age and I must tell you something that will be important for your later life: For stupid people there is the Bible, but for more intelligent people there is the penal code."

That was his concept of morality.

Now here the police means a very particular degree of morality.

Our dreamer has never been bothered much with the moral problem, yet here it approaches in the form of the police.

Mrs. Crowley: It is not the individual standpoint but the collective conventional standpoint.

Dr. Jung: It is the most brutal form of the collective standpoint. When the policeman gets you, it is most convincing, most immediate.

It is a stone in at your window. Conflict and trouble.

And what is the problem which leads him into collision with the collective powers?

Mr. Schmitz: If one doesn't assimilate the ape-man oneself, the police must interfere, because one gets into opposition to the civilized world.

Dr. Jung: But would you assume that he is played by the apeman?

Mr. Schmitz: If he is identical with the ape-man, he is in conflict with the police.

Dr. Jung: Have we evidence? It is the ape-man that makes the attack.

Mr. Schmitz: He allows the ape-man to make the attack in the unconscious.

Dr. Jung: But he does not allow it, it just happens.

There is a story of three old veterans and an officer who were defending a fortress.

The enemy attacks, and suddenly one of the veterans shouts: "I have made a prisoner!"

The colonel says: "Bring him here!" and the veteran shouts back: "He won't let me!"

That is the story of the ape-man. The complication is that the ape-man seems to be something quite apart as in reality the dreamer is by no means an ape-man, he is a very nice gentleman.

But it happens often that a very nice gentleman has some affiliation with the apeman though in a very remote degree.

And now this ape-man is loose and we don't know how far he will go. In that former dream, the mouse escaped and now it is already the size of a gorilla, and the anima jumps out of the window and calls for help.

Nobody knows the ape-man is inside, but from the internal conflict the anima has escaped into the open.

Now that is a very special case, and it is not simple.

We ought to know what it means in order to understand why the police come in.

She is the reason for the police coming, for the mere presence of the ape-man does not call for the police.

Miss Sergeant: She wants protection.

Dr. Jung: That is mythological speech, and we should know how that applies to practical psychology, because I have to make the meaning clear to the dreamer.

He naturally would follow one's argument and nod his head as if he understood, but then he goes away completely bewildered, unless something dawns on him on his way home.

So we must know what will happen.

Prof Eaton: The anima is not interested in the ape-man. She wants the other aspect of the man.

Dr. Jung: Yes. Otherwise she would have stayed, she would have had her time.

If he had shown some interest in her, she probably would not have run away, but he was indifferent and showed only ape-man activity.

Prof Eaton: Now she is calling the police because the other side, collective morality, wants the other aspect of his personality.

Dr. Jung: That is exactly true, but how would that work out in human life?

I must know in order to show the man how the thing appears on the surface of the world.

What does it mean in reality when the anima has escaped?

It is as if she were somewhere out in the world.

Dr. Draper: This may be the moment when he meets her as the concrete woman.

Dr .Jung: That is it.

When the anima is outside, she is projected into a real woman.

When the anima is a psychological spectre, it means just nothing to a matter-of-fact man, it is a theoretical conflict.

But when the anima is projected, when she turns up as a real woman, things get really awkward.

Now it dawns upon him that she no sooner escapes from his own house than she is incarnated in a woman, and at any moment he may meet her.

Then instantly he will be fascinated, caught, for she is reinforced by the whole collective unconscious.

And then there will be trouble, because he will be up against conventional morality.

It was that which I was trying to make clear to you when we were speaking of the mouse.

Of course it was not recognizable there, but most of his libido and his own personality escaped where it could not be reached, and that will probably return to him.

For all our split-off parts return, all the people we meet in life who have a fascinating influence upon us are really split-off parts of ourselves, things we have repressed which are brought back by other people, and that is the great value and the great danger and difficulty of human relationship.

In this case it is a very serious matter, because when the anima escapes, the whole woman side of this man has a chance to appear anywhere, he doesn't know when or where.

Perhaps tomorrow he will step out into the street and along comes a woman who is the anima.

He cannot get away from her.

He may repress it but it will arouse a hell of sexual fantasies; he will become quite neurotic and be unable to deal with it properly, for the way to deal with such a problem is not generally known.

This very complicated situation is what he foresees, and this accounts for the conflict with the police, collective morality.

Now, in this great moment, the moment of the dawn of this insight, another man appears on the scene, the photographer, and he seems to be an extremely indifferent, detached individual, for he assures them that things are all right as far as he is concerned, because he has taken all the pictures and the whole thing will make a most interesting story. Now who is he?

Miss Sergeant: His mirror.

Dr. Jung: Yes, but what would that be literally, in concrete language?

Mr. Schmitz: It is a conflict of the mind. The man has understood everything and now he can go home, but nothing is changed.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is the observer in him, probably his differentiated function.

His mind watches the performance in a more or less detached way, looking down at it, as if he were seeing rather an exciting scene in the movies; his mind takes records, photographs, of the whole performance.

As a matter of fact, the dreamer associates this whole series of dreams, all the pictures he has seen in his dreams with that photographer’s film.

He has a very personal relationship to his dreams; he values them very highly and has kept all the records and made a book of them.

He gave me this copy.

It is a most unique collection, very carefully done with associations, and drawings and pictures interspersed.

He is quite proud of having the whole collection and he treasures it; he feels that if everything goes to hell, he has at all events rescued this precious material, these precious thoughts.

That is a great consolation to him, it is something to stand on.

He can open a business, he can sell that film!

His mind has achieved something quite positive that is capable of establishing a continuity of experience.

Of course, the undifferentiated function in him has a primitive character.

Primitives never take note of experiences and there is no continuity in their minds, everything is like dreams interrupted by conflicting impulses; like children and animals, they cannot concentrate.

An animal that has been on the point of death in the next moment begins to play again.

That is the inferior function.

It makes no history because it is all the time living in the moment that is eternity.

But the differentiated function has the quality of the historian, it records things, it gives continuity, and one can always withdraw more or less upon that continuity, upon that sort of historical consciousness; that has been to many people really a refuge, the foundation of an island.

For sometimes things move with such rapidity, with such turmoil and chaos, that nobody could keep track of them, and the only thing which holds such people straight and humanly quiet is the continuity of their records.

I suppose you have seen that film of the Titanic.

There is one man, a journalist, who sticks to his records within the turmoil, where everybody becomes unreasonable and goes to pieces.

He is the only one who goes under in a complete way, quiet, because he succeeded in withdrawing to the standpoint of the timeless observer.

His life is before his eyes, it is moving away, and yet he is peaceful. That is the superiority of the differentiated function.

Prof Eaton: If feeling were the superior function instead of thinking, would it be the same?

Dr. Jung: Oh yes, because feeling is only in quality a different function, it has the same general principle.

So the real religious principle, the idea of God, inner religiousness, is an intellectual as well as a feeling and emotional value.

The feeling type is perfectly able to detach his feeling from the turmoil and hold it against external circumstances; it is amazing what he can do, he can hold his feeling in a hypothetical way just by being able to cling, to persevere.

The ancients could not do that.

For instance, they had all the knowledge of the mechanical processes which would have enabled them to invent machines that worked, but they did not invent them.

They only put together a few pieces and a nice toy resulted. Instead of continuing with whatever manifested in that experimental arrangement, they began to play with it and it became a mere curiosity.

One still sees that play quality in early machines: they were always decorated with goat's legs and Corinthian columns and all sorts of figures which have nothing whatever to do with the meaning of a machine.

The real machine is only a very recent discovery, and it has made its own style, but the old machines were covered with flowers and parts of human beings and God knows what, perhaps little angels sitting on the wheels, which simply shows that the artist or inventor was not quite capable of being matter of fact.

That playfulness is the reason why children cannot think like adult people; they cannot be entirely concrete and matter-of-fact.

And that is the reason why, even in the Middle Ages, men were not able to use all the knowledge they possessed; and, of course, that was still more obvious in antiquity, not to speak of the primitive
man who for a hundred thousand years got nowhere at all because he had no power of concentration.

That is not merely a point of view, an apercu; it is actually most impressive to see how the mind of the primitive man is easily tired-perfectly strong men, fine male figures of savages.

At a palaver, for instance, where one asks them very simple questions, whether they believe in ghosts for instance, after two hours everybody goes to sleep.

They say: we are so tired, can't you finish the palaver?-for they cannot go away till the magic word is spoken by the elder, the word meaning: now the business is at an end.

But then the same men are able to hunt game for forty-eight hours without eating or sleeping.

When they are carrying letters, they walk a hundred and twenty kilometres in one stretch, because in doing that their instinct is roused and the)'" can do things which we cannot do.

They can walk in terrible heat sixty two kilometres, with loads of sixty pounds on their heads.

I had all the trouble in the world to keep up with them without carrying such a load-they were almost running.

They die at an early age about fifty-from overwork.

They spend themselves utterly, which we are too reasonable to do; we would become doubtful, but they spend themselves to the last breath if they are acting with the instinct. Against the instinct they are very easily tired. .

And that is the same with the primitive in us: the primitive undifferentiated functions are not concentrated, they are vague, they are easily interrupted, they have no continuity.

These qualities are the virtues of the differentiated function, whatever it is.

It doesn't matter which function is differentiated, its main point is that it can

hold out against ever-changing nature.

It is like the human structure that holds out against every change in environment; or a house, which is a shelter that does not tumble down or lose its leaves; or a road, which is not interrupted, which has bridges, for instance.

If one follows an elephant's trail, it is perhaps quite smooth for a while, one can travel it on one's bicycle, and then suddenly it gets lost in a swamp and there is an end to it.

Civilization is characterized by the fact that it holds out against the changes of nature; and that is the virtue of the superior function.

Mr. Schmitz: How would a feeling type behave, as a parallel to the journalist on the Titanic?

Dr. Jung: A loving woman can hold a situation against everything, against death and the devil, and create a duration in chaos with complete conviction.

In thought, Galileo could hold out against torture-well, he did make denial, but immediately after, he got up and he said, "E pur si muove."

That is holding out against the disintegrating powers of nature, and it is the same with feeling.

Feeling is a most powerful function.

Mr. Schmitz: We know how the journalist on the Titanic behaved. How would a corresponding feeling type behave?

Dr. Jung: A feeling type would behave like his wife, for instance. She simply loved him, and she stood death and panic with him.

It was done very beautifully.

He was identical with his philosophical observation of the situation and quite aloof.

He was already in a timeless land. And she too, through love. That is feeling.

Mr. Schmitz: But love is not a capacity of the feeling type only.

Dr. Jung: Naturally, for the feeling of a woman, even the thinking of a woman, can be detached only with the aid of Eros, as the thought of a man can be detached only with the help of Logos.

Therefore the highest forms of the great helpful powers of the unconscious correspond to those principles.

The highest form of thinking in a man coincides with Logos, as the highest form of feeling in a woman coincides with Eros.

It was only through the aid of the gods that man was able to detach himself from the meaninglessness of nature.

Therefore, the greatest redeemer of whom we know, Jesus Christ, has been called the Logos.

He was the light that rescued us from that darkness.

Mr. Schmitz: But I have the impression that in a feeling type the capacity for loving is greater.

Dr. Jung: No, love is a feeling, yet the principle of Eros is not necessarily loving, it can be hating too.

Eros is the principle of relationship, and that is surely the main element in woman's psychology, as Logos is the main element in man's psychology.

But the Logos naturally is in relation to feeling as well as to thinking.

One can have sensation and intuition more under the influence of Logos or more under the influence of Eros.

The functions are interrelated as well as permeated by the two basic principles.

Mr. Schmitz: The fact of being a feeling type does not give one a greater capacity for loving?

Dr. Jung: No, it has nothing to do with loving.

A feeling type can be as cold as ice if there is not Eros.

He can maintain a feeling of hatred through death and the devil, he can die with hatred all over him, or he may have a feeling of indifference and hold out against anything.

Mr. Schmitz: But also a woman, a feeling type, can be incapable of love?

Dr. Jung: Absolutely.

There are women who are feeling types and yet who are entirely cold and without sex.

The feeling type is never particularly warm, because the differentiated function is often lacking in human qualities.

Yu must never mix up feelings with love.

That is due to a miserable shortcoming of language.

For instance, in the war, the political department issued declarations beginning:

The President has a feeling about such and such a thing.

Perfectly ridiculous. It should be: he has an opinion about such and such a thing.

That suggests again an entirely different application of the word "feeling."

Then there are feelings of duty, of admiration, ten thousand ways of using the word.

In the German language it is still worse; even Goethe confuses sensation and sentiment.

chiefly on the intuitional and intellectual side, and therefore feeling and sensation are all muddled up.

Differentiated sensation is the fonction du reel, the perception of reality, and it has nothing to do with the functions of the body.

People think they are developing sensation when they have sexual experiences, or when they eat and drink well, or when they take a hot bath.

Mr. Schmitz: Yet they are sensations.

Dr. Jung: But in a psychological sense it has nothing to do with sensation.

The psychological function of sensation is the perception of reality, and the standpoint of the sensation type is simply the standpoint of facts.

When a person practices recognition of facts, he is doing something for his sensation; but taking a hot bath or painting himself with iodine has nothing to do with it.

That is an intuitive misconstruction, he is mixing up the sensations of the body with the principle of sensation, which is really the principle of facts.

Among the Latin peoples the recognition of sensation, of reality, expresses itself in their language, and sentiment and sensation can never be mixed up.

But they are badly mixed up in the German language.

Dr. Schlegel: Is not the so-called feeling of love an emotional element which does not enter into the frame of the functions, as you understand it?

Dr. Jung: The feeling function has to do with the feeling of values, and that has nothing necessarily to do with love.

Love is relatedness. One can feel without having relationship.

When admiring a beautiful woman, one does not necessarily have a relationship with her or love her.

Love has to do with Eros.

If love had only to do with feeling, a thinking type couldn't love.

We have to use these intuitive concepts, but there are two principles which are beyond functions.

Mr. Schmitz: A thinking type is not necessarily connected with Logos? He can be a blockhead?

Mrs. Baynes: A thinking type cannot be a blockhead surely, for most differentiated functions can. do something!

Dr. Jung: Only in as much as the type is influenced by other functions.

Mrs. Baynes: He said the thinking type could be a blockhead, and it seems to me that that is contradictory. If he is a blockhead, he becomes some other type.

Dr. Jung: You are quite right in the case of a really differentiated thinking type.

Prof Eaton: Is Logos constructive planning?
.
Dr Jung: It can be constructive planning.

Logos is the principle of discrimination, in contrast to Eros, which is the principle of relatedness.

Eros brings things together, establishes dynamic relations between things, while the relations which Logos brings about are perhaps analogies or logical conclusions.

It is typical that Logos relationships are devoid of emotional dynamics.

Prof Eaton: More abstract than concrete?

Dr. Jung:

You can see these qualities best through practical examples.

For instance, the Logos element, being a principle of discrimination, not only allows one but forces one to give equal dignity to any object of thinking or observation.

It enables a man to devote himself with almost religious concentration to the classification of lice, or to the different qualities of faeces, to put it quite drastically,6 as well as to counting the stars.

To make a picture of it, suppose there are a series of laboratories.

In No. 1 is the observatory of a man who has devoted himself for years to astronomical researches.

In the next laboratory is the man who is classifying lice, sixty thousand different specimens, a most interesting enterprise.

And in the third is a man tremendously interested in the different qualities of faeces, a very unsavoury undertaking.

Yet every man is working with the same concentration, the same spirit.

Now what is Eros, represented by a woman, doing in that situation?

Let us say she is the charwoman in the place.

She finds the astronomer a terribly disagreeable man, hard and cold; he never gives her a tip, and naturally he is a bachelor.

Mr. Professor Concerned with lice would be quite a nice man if he were not always interested in those ugly things; he occasionally gives her a tip, he is married and has very nice children, he is perfectly respectable and he has a great-uncle somewhere.

She knows all that. That is relatedness, you see. It is an entirely different aspect of the world.

The man devoted to the stars, who sits there passionately attending to his work, is absolutely unaware of the fact that he can fall in love with a woman.

He thinks that falling in love is a kind of illness which happens in early youth and which one combats by marrying –as a man said to me "Just in order to get through with the damned thing."

That is Logos.

I didn't mean to lose myself in a discussion of these principles, but apparently they still give rise to all sorts of doubts.

I find on my desk a question which has just rained down from heaven, apparently, but I am afraid we cannot discuss every item of the theory of psychological functions now.

The question is about the perception of the inner reality, in contradistinction to the introverted sensation function.

That is a complicated question which I am quite unable to answer now; it would lead us too far away from our dream into the theory of functions.

Perhaps for the time being we could leave it with the statement that the functions are vehicles for the forces, or influences, or activities, which emanate from those two principles, those two gods, Logos and Eros.

And perhaps you can also understand that if there were no principles whatever outside of the functions, one could never hope to detach anything from the unconscious.

There must be something which helps one to detach a function, some principle outside which allows one to tear it away from the original lump of unconsciousness.

One could say that both principles play a tremendous role in the history of the thought of redemption, which is really a psychological affair.

For instance, in Christianity it is not only Logos that plays the role of redeemer, it is also Eros in the form of the principle of love.

There again one sees the incorporation of the two principles.

I may add here that the ideal Logos can only be when it contains the Eros; otherwise the Logos is not dynamic at all.

A man with only Logos may have a very sharp intellect, but it is nothing but dry rationalism.

And Eros without the Logos inside never understands, there is nothing but blind relatedness.

Such people can be related to God knows what-like certain women who are dissolved completely in little happy families-cousins, relations-and there is nothing in the whole damned thing, it is all perfectly empty.

Exactly like the low sort of Logos people, those classifying fellows with a low understanding.

Mr. Schmitz: But there is a certain affinity between Logos and thinking and between Eros and feeling?

Dr. Jung: As between all other functions.

Don't mix up the word "feeling" with love as relationship.

As I said, feeling is the function of values. I grant you that in reality nothing is separate, everything is flowing in the same space, so if one talks long enough of psychology, one gets quite mad and confused.

As Goethe says: Names, concepts of men, are sound and smoke, feeling is everything.

Everything can function in Eros, and everything can function in Logos.

Dr. Draper: l still don't understand what the dreamer's reaction was with that wandering anima. What was his response when he found her outside?

Dr. Jung: Oh, he was afraid of the police, and then comes the discovery with which we are now concerned.

Since he is a man with differentiated thinking and differentiated sensation, he has a very accurate observation of reality, and that is expressed by the photographer.

And the superior function, as I explained, is exceedingly valuable, it gives that man a standpoint of refuge in the great turmoil, a refuge to which he can return.

It gives him a sense of continuity and safety which he would not have in his inferior functions.

There the ape-man comes in and there is no discrimination, no reliability; everything is muddled, there is no relatedness.

But in this supreme moment when danger appears in all forms, he remembers that he can withdraw, with the recognition:

If all else fails, at least I have my inner continuity, I have my records, these images.

And when you remember what he has gotten in these dreams, what his vision is, you understand that he has a treasure, something exceedingly valuable.

People who have no differentiated function are very badly off indeed in such a turmoil, they are nothing but panic and confusion; but such a man has the chance at least of not necessarily getting into a panic, because he has a basis to stand on.

In many cases of neurosis, it is very important that one builds up first such a differentiated function to which one can retire, and that gives one a chance.

When a patient has no such basis, how can one talk to him?

There is no place to talk together, the scene shifts and shifts, and the doctor never knows with whom he is talking.

While with a man who has a differentiated function, one can always return to some sort of initial statement.

One can always say: now we return to our agreement; or now we return to reason; or to actual scientific truth; or to the reliability of a personal relatedness; we return to the fact that you recognize that I am a decent fell ow and not a humbug, and that you are a human being and not a criminal.

Now, the photographer simply makes the statement that he has those photographs and that he is going to take them to a safe place, and afterwards, in the end, he turns up again and says the whole
situation is indifferent to him because his records are safe and that they will be a great success.

But just before that is a new scene, and there the danger really begins.

On the other side of the river soldiers appear and even artillery, and the dreamer assumes that the bombardment will now take place, that they are going to shoot at his house.

This is a very dangerous situation and the symbolism is quite distinct.

He makes here a very involved remark in his associations about the external world being hostile to the ego, but I will not translate that again as it is not very important.

The important point here is that he understands this attack upon his house as an attack of the external world upon his own safety, and that is on account of the fact that the anima has escaped into that external world.

We have already seen that the possible incarnation of the anima in a real woman would constitute a typical danger which would bring him into conflict with conventional morality, so it is a logical conclusion that the police would become interested in the case. But here the thing goes much further.

You see, it would be quite enough if two or three policemen came.

The dreamer himself would offer no resistance.

Neither would the photographer inasmuch as he has rescued his records; the situation is perfectly indifferent to him. So there remains only the ape-man, and perhaps three or four policemen would be quite sufficient to get him down.

It seems exaggerated to bring artillery, but the unconscious has probably certain reasons for bringing it into play.

How would you explain that?

Mr. Baumann: The photographer has taken the pictures and wants to go off with the films to a safe place.

Dr. Jung: There is no evidence in the dream which would explain why it should be an offence that the photographer gets away with his films.

That is no reason for artillery and would not even explain the police, for they are only concerned with public morality.

We can allow for the police, but soldiers and artillery-such an upheaval against one single ape-man is going too far.

Dr. Schlegel: It means that the fact must be a very serious one.

Dr.Jung: Yes, it is very serious. If one very determined criminal Is defending himself with a gun, the police are needed.

And if it is a whole crowd of criminals, soldiers must be called in; they would get one or two cannons into position against such a mob.

So here it must be something like that, something very serious which goes quite beyond his individual case.

Mrs. Jaeger: He remarked in the dream that there was a river in between. Perhaps the artillery was needed to shoot across.

Dr. Jung: They could shoot with rifles, they would not need artillery.

Moreover, if the anima escaped, we may suppose that there is a bridge.

Therefore we may assume that the river is there merely to designate a division, but is not really an obstacle.

Make a picture of it in your minds, a house, a river, and the artillery on the opposite side.

You see, that is obviously again a story of pairs of opposites.

A river always symbolizes the river of life, the river of energy, the living energy that __ draws its dynamism from opposition.

Without I I opposition, there is no energy.

Where there --is opposition, where the opposites clash, energy will result.

The river is an eternal image, and fording a river and bridging a river are important symbols for the contact of the opposites that cause energy.

It is obvious from the dream that here is such a case.

On one side, the ape-man, an impulsive thing with no moral considerations, and on the other side the revolt of the collective moral standpoint.

That is the standpoint which is revealed by this picture.

You see, it is not a very individual conflict apparently, because you would not bring big guns into action in that case.

It would be terribly exaggerated to turn a battery of big guns on that single ape-man-like shooting sparrows with cannon.

Therefore we assume that the ape-man stands for more than the personal unconscious, he must stand for collectivity, the whole crowd.

Only if a whole herd of ape-men attacked the anima would it be reasonable to bring up the artillery.

So the tremendous emotion which the dream brings out suggests that this problem of the ape-man is by no means a personal one.

Naturally the dreamer would be inclined to assume that it was all his personal shortcoming, for which there was no redemption.

People think of their conflicts as subjective only, and therefore they are isolated; they think they are the only ones who have such problems, and that even to a very grotesque degree.

I remember a young man of eighteen who came into my office, saying that he had something terrible to tell me, and requested me to shut the door into my library which I always leave open.

I asked if he had committed a murder, and he replied: "If it were only that!"

I have a little picture with a curtain over it, and he wanted to know if there was not a window behind where a secretary might sit and listen-that is the usual supposition.

Then when everything was absolutely sure and tight he said, "I have to confess something very terrible; if it were known the world would cease to exist."

He had discovered masturbation, and he assumed that if it were known, no-one would propagate and the race would die out.

People with the neurotic conflict always feel that it is quite subjective in every detail, happening perhaps for the first time in the world; they admit that other people suffer from similar difficulties, but it is not the same.

When a person is in love, it seems that there is no love in the world that could be as beautiful.

In supreme passions, one always has the feeling of being isolated, and it is true that one is isolated in any kind of extreme emotion; one loses contact with other people, one becomes completely autoerotic.

So the dreamer in this conflict labours under the prejudice that he is the only one in such a situation, particularly of course because he cannot talk to his wife.

One of the reasons of the success of the analytical treatment is that people can at least confess

their secrets, for the more secrets one has the more one is isolated.

His feeling is that it is his apeman, but the unconscious says, no, it is the ape-man, the ape-man that is in everybody, and it is because it is a public danger that artillery is brought into action.

This naturally reminded him of the war, which we then discussed, with the result that he saw that in the war the ape-man got loose, that people were mutually killing the ape-men in each other.

For wherever the ape-man appears there is destruction.

Naturally the. dreamer cannot realize at once that the conflict is not peculiar to himself, that it is in the entire world, and that it is the coming up of the primitive man in the actual world which has that destructive influence.

Therefore we draw up artillery and make wars, seeing the enemy in our neighbours because we are unable to see it in ourselves.

The coming up of the ape-man is a release of man's instinctual nature, so we have all sorts of problems; our philosophical and religious feelings go to hell and we are more or less helpless.

Formerly we had religious feelings, but now we are disoriented and nobody really knows what we should believe.

And our unrest expresses itself in other forms.

In art, for instance, the Negro, who we have always thought was a born slave, is now the most admired artist.

We admire his dancing; Negro actors play a great role; we find Negro spirituals exceedingly beautiful.

We could not possibly tolerate the hypocrisy of other revivalist meetings, but in these Negro spirituals there is living faith, there is something immediate and touching.

Don't forget that from the Jews, the most despised people of antiquity, living in the most despicable corner of Palestine or Galilee, came the redeemer of Rome.

Why should not our redeemer be a Negro? It would be logical and psychologically correct. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 690-706

Friday, September 22, 2017

Carl Jung's Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture VII 18 June 1930




LECTURE VII 18 June 1930

We discussed the ape-man in the dream last week, and today we come to the next point, the boy. Y

ou remember that we have occasionally come across the boy in former dreams.

Of course, that symbol does not always mean the same thing.

Sometimes it is repeated in exactly the same sense as before, and sometimes not at all. It always depends upon the context in the dream itself and also upon the conscious attitude of the dreamer.

The best technique, therefore, is to take every dream as an entirely new proposition, every situation as entirely new, as if we had never heard of the meaning of symbols before.

I recommend that technique in this case.

The dramatis personae so far are the dreamer himself, the driver who has become the ape-man, and several unknown people only hinted at, among them a boy, obviously not very conspicuous to
Begin with. Have you an idea concerning these people?

Mr. Schmitz: They are those minor forces-sort of cabiri. They were the employees in the former dream.

Dr. Jung: It would be the same, but in this case without the particular connotation of the employees.

You see, an employee denotes a person who is in a certain dependent or cooperative position, but here they are mere presences, and it is not sure that they are in any cooperative relationship to the dreamer.

They are just there, and we cannot even say whether they are hostile or friendly.

That is, they represent subconscious figures that are not yet clear, not yet decided, but among them there is this recognizable figure, the boy.

Naturally we must have the dreamer's associations in such a case, because we cannot afford to assume that the boy is exactly what he was in former dreams.

You remember, for instance, a dream in which he had decidedly divine qualities, like a Greek god, Eros, as the dreamer said.

Here the boy obviously functions as a sort of medium, for the dreamer says that he gets into a trancelike state and then that great-grandmother appears.

This is the first time we have had such a figure in a dream.

Now, that in itself is a symbol, because it is not reality; he is not concerned with any boy that would be a medium in reality, and therefore it is a perfectly fantastic symbolical creation.

How would you translate that in psychological language?

Mrs. Sigg: The boy is young, so he suggests a beginning, a new attitude.

Dr. Jung: But what else?

Mrs. Fierz: Perhaps the mind of all those other subconscious figures.

Dr. Jung: If the dreamer were a woman, we might say that he represented a new thought in her, because the mind in a woman is usually represented by a male figure, but since the dreamer is a
man, it would be something else.

Mr. Schmitz: A message from the unconscious to the conscious.

Dr.Jung: Yes, but that is a very positive interpretation. You can also interpret it a bit more reductively.

Mrs. Sigg: A boy also appeared in that former dream when the dreamer was doing acrobatics in the trees, and he tried to beat the dreamer with a rod.

Mrs. Sawyer: The dreamer pulled the rod out of the boy's mouth so that he was bleeding.

Dr. Jung: That is true, The boy was holding in his mouth the rod with which he had tried to beat the dreamer, and when the dreamer took it out of his mouth, he made the boy's mouth bleed.

Well, here we have, as often happens, two motifs that have also occurred together in a former dream, in this case, the ape-man and the boy.

So we are at once confronted with the question of what connection there is between them, and that leads us to the reductive interpretation of the boy. What is the boy?

Mrs. Crowley: The opposite of the man, the compensation for the ape-man.

Dr. Jung: That is again a very positive idea of the boy, but we could have a negative idea of him just as well.

We might say, for instance, that he was the childish aspect of the dreamer, the dreamer himself as a boy.

You know real boys have very ape-like qualities, climbing where they should not climb and playing all sorts of monkey tricks; boys are known for that, they often behave like monkeys.
We have absolutely no reason for thinking little boys are angels.

So men who still have the boy in them are by no means charming human beings, they can be beasts.

You see, when he turns up in connection with the ape-man, we have to look at the other side; the boy is a very ambiguous symbol.

I hope you remember the German book which I quoted when we were speaking about this motif, Das Reich ohne Raum (The Kingdom without Space), by Goetz.

That is about the negative side of the Puer Aeternus, the story of the boys with the leather caps who played the most amazing tricks on people, by no means nice.

In the former dream, then, we have the ape-motif, climbing in the trees, and the boy, and here again this ape-man appears, and immediately after comes the boy.

So we must pay attention to the connection.

As a matter of fact, the childish element in a man naturally leads down to ancestral figures, ancestral life.

That is why the primitives have such peculiar ideas about education.

They hold that the ancestral spirits are incarnated in the children, and therefore they are very loath to punish them; the children must not be beaten, because if one offends the children one would offend the ancestors.

But when they reach the age of puberty those spirits go away, and then there is violence.

The spirit of the young man is broken in as a horse’s spirit is broken in.

Before that there is no education on account of their fear of the anger of the ancestral spirits, who might turn against them, and then the child might die or some other evil befall the family.

Now, that idea that the child is possessed by a spirit, or that the very essence of the child is an ancestral spirit, corresponds to the fact that the psychology of children does really consist of ancestral spirits, or the collective unconscious.

It is a long time before the child develops a psychology of its own, and all our attempts to create a child psychology will be quite fatal as long as we disregard the fact that it is collective psychology.

It is impossible to understand children's dreams if one assumes otherwise.

They have dreams which are absolutely adult and more than adult and which come directly from the collective unconscious.

That of course is quite understandable, since the child starts in complete unconsciousness.

It is the psychology of the collective unconscious, including the ancestors back to remote ages-to the cave-man or the ape-man.

Therefore one sees the most amazing symbols in their dreams, and in their behaviour old rites become revivified.

And everybody knows the wisdom of little children; they say the most extraordinary things if one cocks one's ears.

There is a German proverb that children and fools tell the truth.

That is because they speak out of the collective unconscious and therefore reveal things which the ordinary man would never think of revealing.

So the boy, or the boyish element, in an adult man may mean a part of his psychology which reaches back into his remote past and which links up through his instinctive life with the collective unconscious.

And inasmuch as our future is brought forth through the collective unconscious, the boy also points to the future.

For everything that we are going to be in the future is prepared in the collective unconscious, so it is in a way also the mother of the future.

Therefore on the one hand the boy means something exceedingly childish, right back to the monkeys, and on the other hand something that reaches out into the far future.

One often sees that a little boy in his games seems to be anticipating the future, as when he is playing with soldiers and arranging battles-he will perhaps do that in reality.

The boy is in a way a bridge between the remote past and the remote future.

In this case he is a medium, and a medium is a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious, or between this reality and ghost-land.

Now, this is all theory, but I should like to know what it means practically, how it feels in reality.

How can I bring it home to the dreamer so that he feels it himself for that is the main point of dream interpretation, that one brings it right home to the dreamer so that he feels: now it clicks!

How would you proceed in that respect? Where does he feel it in himself?

Mrs. Sigg: He might feel it in his physical nature. It seems that the dreamer has sometimes an inclination towards things that are too artificial.

Dr. Jung: It would naturally have the effect that he would get more simple as he becomes a child, but it would have a further effect.

You see, the boy is pushed up into the foreground of his dreams, which is simply a graphic demonstration of something which happens to the dreamer himself in reality.

How would he feel this in his psychology?

Mr. Schmitz: He was interested in spiritualism before he was occupied with psychology, and since this boy is a medium, it is as if he went back to occult things.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is an important hint.

Obviously this part of the dream is taken from his spiritualistic interests.

The boy is a medium, and thus far it is a regression to a former interest; he takes a step out of psychology back into spiritualism.

Moreover it is not very mental, it is a piece of infantile psychology-he is becoming partially infantile.

But I would like to know if you have any imagination about it, whether you get what that means.

You have the hint that the boy is getting into a rigid state of trance, and that would about describe what the dreamer would feel if he could realize the boy.

Dr. Schlegel: Would he not feel somewhat separated from reality?

Dr. Jung: That is true.

The trance itself is obviously a means used by the professional medium to cut off the individual from reality, so that the mental process is completely isolated from external influences.

It is a sort of sleep, yet not an ordinary sleep; it is a part which is split off from consciousness, isolated from the real surroundings.

That is one step, but we must go a bit farther.

Why should he get isolated from his surroundings? What is the trance condition?

Mr. Schmitz: Is it a regression to magic-a minor means?

Dr. Jung: Yes, obviously his regression is to a magic mentality, so we must try to find our way through the complications of the primitive mind.

This is a piece of primitive life.

The situation immediately before, in the dream, is very awkward and could easily become dangerous; the driver has been transformed into a naked ape-man, and he is doing acrobatics.

There is a sense of danger in the whole dream which is confirmed by its later development.

Of course, it is most uncanny to the dreamer that a quality expressed by a naked ape-man should get loose in himself; that fellow can do God knows what, and immediately following comes his attempt at violence against the great-grandmother, which is a crime.

There is an overwhelming, uncontrollable power about, a sort of gorilla, and what can he do against that feeling?

And when they begin to shoot, what can he do against cannons? So he is bordering on panic, and in the moment of panic people develop a primitive psychology.

This is an inner panic which the man realizes in his dream state.

You see, it began originally with the mouse that ran away and now it is becoming more an avalanche, it is growing on him, he has already to deal with an ape-man.

Under such conditions man always regresses to the magic mentality.

When you are confronted with a dangerous situation which you don't know how to deal with, what do you do? Did you ever observe yourself at such a moment?

Dr. Howells: People do most absurd things.

Dr. Jung: What would you call absurd?

That is a value which comes from our conscious standpoint when we say afterwards: God! have I not been absurd!-or when we see something happen in a panic and call it idiotic, judged from the outside.

Miss Sergeant: Sometimes people pray.

Dr. Jung: Yes, sometimes people who ordinarily never think of praying suddenly begin to pray, or they make corresponding gestures.

Or they make quite different gestures-I will tell you something I once saw.

A barn was on fire near my house. It was in the night, people came right out of sleep, there were peasant women very scantily dressed and naturally in a state of complete panic.

I was one of the first on the spot, and I opened the stables to let out the cattle.

Then a woman came running out.

She simply walked on the highway in the moon, imploring the gods with tragic gestures, sort of intoning Oh-h-h-! I ran after her and said: "What the devil are you doing here?"

Whereupon she fell on my neck and crushed herself against me in the most caressing embrace.

Being a psychologist, I knew that it was a moment when sexual cohabitation would be indicated, for here was a great tragedy, the world was going to pieces, and therefore she must propagate on
the spot.

It was no joke, it was a very serious business.

That happened in the streets of Messina at the time of the earthquake, numerous couples were observed.

Almost invariably in a family murder, a man has sexual intercourse with his wife before he shoots her; it is the usual thing, a well-known fact, human nature reacts like that.

Mind you, that was not the only case on the evening of which I am telling you; there was another woman, a servant, who woke up suddenly and lost her head.

Mr. Schmitz: But also the contrary is true. If sexual intercourse is expected and not fulfilled, then one has a dream of a conflagration.

Dr. Jung: Yes, or a corresponding hallucination that the house is on fire. And in such a moment apotropaic actions, old magic rituals, come about. So our dreamer is obviously in distress about
the presence of the ape-man, for one must not think of such a dream as a sort of picture-painting on the wall; it is a drama enacted in him. He is in the throes of the drama and it has got him, a sort
of delirium, a fury of emotions, and now in his fear he applies a very peculiar means, a magic ritual: the boy goes into a trance in order to bring up the great-grandmother from Hades.

People would have done that a thousand or two thousand years ago when they were in great trouble, or in doubt as to an important decision.

We know that from the Bible: they went to the dead, or they went to a witch.

Now they go to a doctor, which is the same thing, and he analyses their dreams, calling up the dead, calling the unconscious, all magic ritual from beginning to end.

Here the boy is used for the purpose of raising the dead.

Boys are very often used for crystalgazing or for other magic performances.

For instance, I remember the story of a snake charmer (a true story told me by a Swiss engineer employed in Egypt) who always went about holding a little boy on his arm while he was catching
snakes.

He was not a professional like the famous man in Cairo, he was a Bedouin who was called in when snakes were really a pest.

The country was infested by the horned sand-viper; they are terribly poisonous and they live buried in the sand waiting for their victims, with just the tip of the head sticking out.

There had been a number of casualties among the native labourers.

They could not catch them, so with some reluctance they called in this snake-charmer, who appeared, whistling, and carrying that little boy.

He said the child was absolutely necessary to give him protection.

He went from bush to bush, put in his hand, and pulled out the snakes in a completely stiff and charmed condition.

You have probably read such stories, where boys or little girls functioned as mediums in a somnambulistic state.

In antiquity it was a sort of profession.

A very interesting example of that was found in an excavation in Egypt.

They discovered a list of the servants in the house of a Roman official in imperial times, and among them was a name written in Greek, Walburga Sibylla.

Walburga is a German name, and the women of Germany were particularly mediumistic; it is known that many German women slaves were sold to be used as mediums and somnambulists.

So that was the name of the house medium, a German girl who had been sold as a slave up the Nile.

She belonged to the household of a distinguished nobleman, and in case of emergency could be his medium; he could ask his Sibylla to prophesy what he should do.

And now also we have clairvoyants whom we consult when in doubt.

That is an expedient which was used in early civilizations as well as among the primitives, and that is the connection in the dream.

The situation becomes awkward, and in his panic this man seizes upon that old means to get advice or help.

Because there is no human help, the unconscious is conjured, and in this case it is the great-grandmother.

We still have not gotten down to the concrete fact of how this boy symbolism would function in our patient.

It is obviously the childish element; the adult man in him does not know how to solve the problem, and I was incapable of telling him.

I told him that there must be some mysterious solution of which I did not know.

So he is thrown back upon himself and has most obviously come to the end of all his mental resources.

He feels something is creeping upon him, something is increasing in strength and danger, and now it is the ape-man, and under these conditions people become childish.

Many neurotics impress themselves upon one through this particular childishness, but if you knew their particular problem, you would understand.

When everything is absolutely dark, the only thing to do is to become hysterical or childish.

Sometimes it needs very little to reduce a man, no matter how adult, to a whimpering child who simply breaks down and weeps for his mother, and that is what happens to this man.

He finds no other way out so he becomes a little boy, and that proves to be the way for the time being.

By following that way, which he cannot find by intellectual means, by indulging himself in that regression, he falls down into the archetype of the boy, as millions and millions of people in untold thousands of years have already done.

When they were in a bad condition they became childish, utterly absurd.

They simply let themselves drop down upon the bedrock of instinct.

Thus is formed the pattern of the boy who doesn't know what to do and in his desperation gets to a state of eh.stasis.

That is the term, for when a panic or a terrible pain reaches the culmination, it ceases and people become ecstatic.

Pain cannot be endured in ever-increasing intensity beyond a certain point. Then it turns and becomes eh.stasis.

This symptom is mentioned in the famous book, the Malleus Maleficarum, as one of the symptoms of witchcraft; it was called the witches' sleep.

When one's mood reaches the deepest blackness, then the light comes.

That is the sun myth.

One simply falls into the mythical pattern, the archetype; it is the natural way which things take.

There are innumerable cases in the Bible: when despair has reached its climax God reveals himself, which is simply a psychological truth.

So when this man is reduced to that little boy, perfectly helpless and rigid with fear, after that state of numbness and utter exhaustion, then the eh.stasis comes and the mother appears.

Of course, no real mother appears, but the great

It is not as the ordinary mother appears to the little boy; when the adult man becomes like a child, utterly despairing, then the divine mother appears, and she is very old and yet quite young, as the description says in his dream he has a very young face.

Now before going on, I hope you are sufficiently acquainted with the inner mood of the dreamer.

He is rather desperate on account of the coming up of the ape-man.

You must realize what it means to a respectable and very rational person when he is suddenly confronted with such a reality.

We are naturally inclined to think: Oh, well, dreams are not so real.

But in the night these things are terribly real.

One may forget oneself for awhile, and then up comes the problem again.

He cannot get away from it.

He confesses that he knows nothing to do about it, so he simply gives up, and that is the most favourable moment for the manifestation of the unconscious.

When we come to the end of our wits, then the archetype begins to function.

For since eternity man has gone through situations with which he could not cope, where instincts had to step in and solve the situation, either in a cunning way or by a coup de force, and that is the situation now.

We would expect that the unconscious in such a situation would produce the image that is the most likely to be helpful, and when a man is reduced to a little boy, he is naturally crying for the mother.

If an adult man comes to that reduced condition, it is not the ordinary mother, because he knows very well that his own mother would not be very helpful, unless she happened to possess second sight or to be a superior personality.

The ordinary mothers are not superior personalities.

So it is the great-grandmother, an early mythical mother, the mother of an immense past, who appears.

Mr. Schmitz: I think a man would not do that in his conscious. I know a case where a man met a wild man in a dream and said to himself:

Of course, I can do nothing against that man by using force, but there are tricks; people have always been able to kill animals much stronger than themselves in that way.

So in the dream he plays a trick and he kills the ape-man.

What would you say about that?

Dr. Jung: That was presence of mind. And it was not a case of complete despair.

The man kept his rational mind and applied jiu jitsu.

The ape-man could obviously be dealt with in such a way.

But in this case it is of no use for our dreamer to kill the ape-man.

Mr. Schmitz: The man I am speaking of was satisfied with the dream, but two hours afterwards he had a fit of sickness.

Dr. Jung: That is a very questionable case.

You see, in mythology, the hero has to kill a series of monsters and nothing particular happens, but suddenly with a certain monster something does happen.

Usually there are quite a series of victories over the ape-man until life is so purified that nothing happens any longer.

But then the ape-man comes again, and that time you cannot kill him.

The trouble is that no general prescription is possible. In certain cases, one has to say: now kill it, just stamp it out.

In another case, quite the contrary. Therefore I give no advice at all.

Mr. Schmitz: That fit of sickness perhaps meant that in his case it would have been better to be a little more masculine; instead of killing it, to go to the grandmother.

Dr. Jung: Well, he could not choose to do that, it would be a case of necessity as it is with our dreamer.

He has tried practically all means of dealing with his problem, and in such a case there is nothing to do but to go to the mother.

Like Faust-he couldn't kill Mephistopheles, and he had to go to the mothers to seek rebirth.

Mr. Schmitz: If he had tried to kill him, it would have been wrong perhaps?

Dr. Jung: If he had been Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones, he might have been allowed to kill the devil. But not Faust.

There are many unimportant people who are obliged to kill the devil, but it could have no value at all in such cases.

In this case, our dreamer had to deal with the problem of the ape-man.

He could not kill him, and the situation was such that the great-grandmother had to come up.

Now what is that great-grandmother?

Dr. Schlegel: The whole past of humanity.

Dr. Jung: Yes, in a way, But why not the great-grandfather?-is he not also the whole past?

Miss Bianchi: She is Mother Nature.

Dr. Jung: But why Mother Nature?

Dr. Schlegel: Because man must yield to her. If it were the father, he would not yield.

Dr. Jung: Why not? If I were in such a situation, I would not run to the mother, but if there were a nice old father, I should go to him perhaps.

Mr. Schmitz: He is bound to the paternal principle, and here is a moment where the male principle no longer helps; he must go to the female principle. I believe that is the reason why the man I spoke of was ill.

He should not have killed the wild man.

He should have gone to the female principle.

Dr. Jung: That is perfectly true.

And this is the case of a man who has used up all the masculine means at his disposition.

You often find that in mythology.

If a man does not know how to solve his problem, he turns to the witch, as Saul in the Old Testament turned to the witch of Endor.

In the Wagner legend, it was Wotan and Erda.

There are many other examples in mythology where men had to go back to women's advice.

A very good case is in L'fle des pingouins, which I have quoted several times, where all the great Fathers in Heaven could not decide about the baptism of the penguins, and finally they had to call in St. Catharine and ask her what she thought about it, and she decided it very nicely.

So here, it is obviously a case which cannot be decided by the masculine mind, and therefore Mother Nature, the great-grandmother, as a last resort has to be called in, and she is very old and very young.
like eternal nature.

She appears to him as a mystical revelation out of the trance of the boy.

When childishness appears and ekstasis begins, then nature comes in to speak the last word.

But now something exceedingly important happens, the ape-man springs upon her to violate her. What does that mean?

Mrs. Baynes: He won't have her compete with his authority. They are naturally two antagonistic forces, and if he possibly can, he will subjugate her.

Dr. Jung: But the ape-man-nature-and the great-grandmother are not antagonistic.

Mrs. Baynes: But I thought, considering the position this man was in, that the great-grandmother would have to cope with the ape-man. I mean, she could not co-operate with him.

Dr. Jung: The unconscious, it is true, reveals the great-grandmother at this moment with the idea of doing something really helpful, but it is not a bit sure whether one's conscious would feel it as that. Sometimes the solution of a problem is something that one would consider far from helpful.

Therefore I ask: why should the ape-man not jump on Mother Nature? Is that wrong necessarily?

Mrs. Baynes: In this particular case, I should think it was very wrong.

Mr. Schmitz: He does it, of course, in a very primitive and violent way, but symbolically he must take possession of Nature. Mrs. Baynes: But the great-grandmother is not going to have it, so that shows that she doesn't think it a good idea.

Dr. Jung: You hold opposite points of view. What are you going to do about it?

Mrs. Baynes: Mr. Schmitz is all theoretical, but I have on my side the great-grandmother who jumped out of the window!

Dr. Draper: ls there an implication of the Osiris myth here, with the figure of the great-grandmother in this case as Isis?

Dr. Jung: You are quite right, it is a complete analogy.

The apeman would fill the role of Set.

In contradistinction to all the other Egyptian gods, Osiris was a god-man, he was supposed to have lived on earth like a man, and his fate was the typical fate of the sacrificed god, like Christ, Attis, etc.

He was dismembered by Set, the Egyptian devil, who usually appeared in the form of a black pig, utterly despicable and evil, a pig that lived in the mud.

The left eye of Osiris was blinded because he had seen Set-that was enough to blind one.

The famous motif of the eye of Horus comes in here, which is a very important symbol in Egypt; Horus sacrificed one of his eyes for his father Osiris.

Unfortunately the tradition in that respect is quite deficient, we don't know the whole myth.

The Catholic Church has justified that cycle of myths as a dogmatic precursor of the Christ myth, because they could not deny the extraordinary analogy.

It is the eternal problem of man, the typical situation in which man has found himself millions of times, and therefore it was expressed in a current myth.

And the value of the myth in those days was that it was a sort of recipe, a medical prescription what to do in case of trouble.

In old Egypt, when someone was in such a typical condition, the medical man, the priest, would read the corresponding chapter from the collection of myths in order to effect a cure, so it had a very practical therapeutic value.

For instance, if a man was bitten by a snake, they read the particular legend of Isis, how she prepared a poisonous worm and laid it on the path of Ra-or Osiris-in order to sting him, so he was lamed
and very sick.

And they had to call in Mother Isis again to cure him,

Because they had no other means; as she had prepared the poison, she also knew how to heal him; Mother Isis spoke the true word and the god was healed.

He was not, however, as strong as he had been, as people are apt to feel rotten after a snake-bite.

That was Egyptian medicine, and we still have something like it.

People go to a doctor just to have an opinion.

That is very typical of Americans; one must only utter an opinion and they believe.

A doctor says: "He is suffering from a catatonic form of schizophrenia," and the Americans believe that something has happened he has said it!

The patient tells all his symptoms, and the doctor says, "Yes, it is so," and gives names to his trouble, and so he assimilates it to the conscious of the patient; he lifts it out of the sphere of pain and anguish and uncertainty into the sphere of contemplation.

He reads out a certain chapter of the legend or the hymn, or makes some other incantation about it.

Thus he brings up an archetypal image of eternal and universal truth, and that evocation has a peculiar influence upon the unconscious.

It is like the effect of music on a company of soldiers after a long march; they may be quite tired and demoralized and don't want to walk any farther, but then the music starts in and the whole thing comes
into motion again.

Our dreamer is now in despair, as primitive people are when they are ill; if they do not receive a moral kick, they let themselves drop and fade away, and they get such a kick out of certain incantations because that mobilizes the forces of the collective unconscious.

Therefore, exactly as it is in the Osiris legend, or the poisoning of the sun-god when the great mother Isis comes in to heal him, here comes in a great-grandmother.

And that is simply Nature-Nature as it is, with no moral considerations at all.

You see, that is the position of masculine psychology.

I don't know whether women will agree with me, but a man is convinced that the real standpoint of woman is amoral.

He is fundamentally convinced of that, no matter what women have attained or to what they aspire.

I personally hear a great deal about moral considerations from them, they talk of it because they do not believe in it!

So when a man comes to the end, he appeals to that amoral female principle.

Having no morality, she is in federation with the devil and knows what to do in such a case.

I remember a most respectable lady doctor who was concerned with a typical case and did not know what to do about it.

A very distinguished gentleman, quite well known, founded a dairy for poor people during the war.

He had appointed two young girls to run it, and became interested in one of them and even fell in love with her.

He was a married man, highly respectable, and it dawned upon him that he was up against a conflict, but he had no psychology for the situation.

So he went to the lady doctor and asked her advice, and she didn't know what to do in such a delicate case either, so she asked me.

I said: "Could his lordship perhaps inform his wife?" "Of course," she said, "but how do you know that?

You must be a very wicked man to know that!"

Moral considerations right away! But that is exactly what a man thinks; when Isis-Mother Nature-comes in, he fears a hell of a trick, something terribly evil and doubtful.

Now that is the mythological situation.

A man would feel exactly as Ra did when Isis was called in, for of course Ra knew who had made that poisonous worm and naturally he mistrusted such a doctor.

So one could expect such a reaction here.

Obviously the ape-man has not purely friendly intentions.

If she understood his action as particularly nice behaviour, she would not jump out of the window, so we must assume that it is not very welcome to her; she finds it somewhat rash perhaps and prefers to withdraw.

Therefore we must conclude that the behaviour of the ape-man is not very clever.

He obviously frightens Mother Nature very badly so she cannot fulfil the helpful role.

Even though it was Nature that got our dreamer into such trouble, she might have known a means, a counter poison to help the man, but after that interference of the ape-man, she can do nothing, the help she might have brought cannot come off.

Now we should understand why the ape-man is jumping on her.

It is quite obvious in the dream that he gets sexually excited and that explains his action.

But how do you understand that?-a thing that upsets the helpful purposes of the unconscious, the healing properties of the archetype.

What if Set had suddenly felt attracted and jumped on Mother Isis, for instance?

In Faust, the devil is attracted by the nice little angel-boys.

Mr. Holdsworth: You. said just now that when a man murders his wife, he first cohabits with her. In this dream do you think the man is ashamed of the unconscious appeal of the great-grandmother
and so he wants to kill her?

Dr. Jung: That would be right if we were certain that the apeman was making a murderous attack upon her, but that is not the case. He is obviously attracted by her sexually, and anger is not mentioned, so we have no evidence for such a conjecture.

Prof Eaton: Is it not the ape-man himself who has to be regenerated through Isis?-and naturally he would be sexually attracted by her, because he himself is going to be made over.

Dr. Jung: Yes, the ape-man has been generated by just that poisonous worm, and when he sees Mother Isis, he wants to enter her again.

It is a sort of incest. It is as if the worm that Isis made wanted to return into her.

That is like primitive magic: the primitives hold that when someone with magic influence wants to commit murder, for instance, he sends out a sort of magic projectile which kills the victim; but then it returns, and if the sorcerer is not very careful it will kill him too.

The magic effect always returns, according to primitive ideas.

And that is a psychological fact; a fascination or magic effect only takes place if the person who causes it is a victim himself.

If you are just moderately angry, if you say something rather nasty to the other fellow but in a controlled way, then it has only a surface effect.

But if you are overcome by your own anger, made sick by it, then through contagion mentale you arouse the same condition in him.

The thing that the primitives are most afraid of is arousing the anger of the medicine-man, for that has a most destructive effect on every living thing through unconscious contagion; but it only takes place if the magician himself is under the effects.

There is a case of magic influence in a book called Black Laughter by Powys, an Englishman, about a sorcerer whose hut had been burnt down.

It is based upon the fact that as long as one feels that one's opponent controls his emotion, it is not so dangerous, but if it is really uncontrolled, anything might happen, and one is afraid.

Then it reaches you as nothing else does; nothing is so contagious as uncontrolled emotion; it is almost unsurmountable, it just grips one.

For instance, if everybody is laughing like mad in an uncontrolled way, one is almost obliged to join in. One sees that very clearly in children and primitives.

Here the magic effect plays a great role.

Mother Isis has generated the ape-man and produced that whole conflict, and now the upset reaches a certain culmination, and the mother comes back in order to cure the trouble.

She sent out the projectile and to her it returns, and that means terrible danger because it might kill her.

Therefore she jumps out of the window.

She has to do what the primitive sorcerer does-jump aside when the projectile comes back.

He is all the time afraid of ghosts and spells and magic factors, and Mother Nature is working with just such desperate means; she also is the victim of returning projectiles.

Of course, that is primitive psychology, that is mythology, but how does it feel in the dreamer himself?

You see, he is in a way the primitive man, but when you say to such a person that there is a very natural solution, he says: But one cannot afford to behave like that.

The dreamer tries to be very respectable and repress the whole problem, and then nature works and works so that he cannot deny it any longer.

Then the ape-man breaks loose, and in comes Mother Nature and there is the very devil to pay.

If he says: "That is my nature!-! am the monkey-man!" then nature escapes or nature is destroyed; something happens which should not happen.

Now what would be the result if the dreamer were to identify with the ape-man?

You see, the dream shows how much he is afraid of it, and yet how great the temptation is to do just that.

Mr. Schmitz: His life would be destroyed.

Dr. Jung: Yes, he would lose all his civilized values, his moral and philosophical values.

He would no longer be a conscious rational man, he would fall down into the mud and lose himself entirely.

Well, that is exactly what modern nature has produced, that is the eternal paradox.

Nature has obviously not only two, but many sides, and it is quite possible that one side destroys another.

We might say that she is an equal mixture of construction and destruction; she is not only a kind and generous mother, she is also a beast.

She produces not only lovely plants and flowers and animals, but also the hellish parasites which feed upon them.

So here is the helpful side of nature which would be destroyed if the other side were allowed to jump on it, and here obviously something must interfere to help the situation.

Is there any hint in the dream to show how this problem could be solved?

The great-grandmother goes to the police, and then comes the danger of the artillery, and ~~tnen ~the photograph:er appears wno saves tne wnolecollection oC pictures which he has taken of that scene.

That seems to be the solution.

But the main point that we must make clear today is the attack on the great-grandmother.

It is by no means easy to formulate, because the psychological concept of nature is as paradoxical as Mother Isis in the myth-almost revoltingly paradoxical.

Picture Mother Isis, that treacherous hell of a woman, fixing the poison worm for her husband to step on, and then coming in as saviour, while he is the damned fool in the whole game.

That is revolting but that is nature.

Nature has produced the problem of our dreamer and nature is meant to cure it.

But if nature comes in, he will misunderstand it in the way the ape-man misunderstands it, he will assume: here is complete freedom for the ape-man.

That is the eternal mistake.

You have heard of the mistake of the eleven thousand virgins.

There is a little something repressed, perhaps; naturally nature has something to say, so they become neurotic and go to the doctor.

And he says: You should live, that is all repressed sex, you should have a friend or you should marry.

So if the girl is in the position of having the right kind of parents, they take the thing in hand and put her in the marriage box.

But then there is a hell of a trouble, and it does not work at all.

People say it is repressed nature and they solve it on the cow-bull level, forgetting that they have to do with a human being.

That other is done in stables. A man on that level will think: Oh, well, any woman will do.

And then he will wonder afterwards, because he is confronted with all the civilized values he has attained and he has completely lost his self-esteem.

Provided he understands this, our dreamer will reflect about what he is doing.

He cannot merely live, he has tried it and sees that it did not work. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 672-689

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Carl Jung's Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture VI 11 June 1930




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