Carl Jung: Such a dream has always to be understood under two aspects.

To Jolande Jacobi

Dear Frau Jacobi, 27 October 1936

Best thanks for your kind letter.

I have just got back from America, where I had a pretty gruelling time.

I am thinking of severely restricting my work this winter because I am working on a book that has long been due.

I have also suspended most of my lectures and therefore cannot, unfortunately, accept your kind invitation to lecture in Vienna.

I regret very much that I cannot duplicate or triplicate myself, which would make things decidedly easier.

With regard to your dream, I entirely agree that it is a "big" one.

It is obviously dreamt in a state of introversion.

In such a state the deeper layers of the unconscious become activated, and since the collective unconscious does not keep strictly within the limits of time and space as we conceive them, shifts in time and space may easily occur.

If in a dream there is an intense regression in time, for instance back to earlier centuries, this also indicates a progression covering the
same span of time.

Such a dream has always to be understood under two aspects.

On the one hand the historical root, on the other the freshness of the tree.

The tree is what grows in time.

The youth always signifies enterprise, hastening ahead, anticipation.

The tree expresses spiritual growth in time.

The planting of the tree means the beginning of a development whose fruits will appear in the new Platonic month.

The two historical vagabonds are the opposite of the youth, namely the historical, primitive element, the deposit of the past in the body.

The blood potion seals the union of opposites, the coniunctio oppositorum from which new growth will come.

The dream is in my opinion a look behind the scenes into the age-old processes of the human mind, which might explain your
special feeling of happiness.

With best regards,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol I, Pages 221-222

Carl Jung: The stuff men talk on such occasions, sniffing around each other like dogs, is what the English call "eyewash."

Dear Frau Jacobi, 21 April 1933

Many thanks for your detailed letter.

From what you say of him, Dr. N. seems to be the right man.

If he can win over Frau S., in whose sound judgment I have the fullest confidence, he must be quite something.

An ordinary idiot of a neurologist couldn't do that.

X. is an extraordinarily difficult case, unfortunately far advanced in neurotic degeneration.

The danger is that the treatment will get lost in trivialities.

With X. one must always keep the whole in mind.

He should be cured from "above," for ultimately it is a question of the great conflict for a Weltanschauung, which in his case has collided with an antiquated infantile attitude embodied by his wife.

Hence on the one hand this great question must be considered, and on the other his infantilism and the junk shop of trivialities.

No small task!

I would be glad to know of an intelligent neurologist in Vienna. I have often been asked.

My wife has told me of all the garbage that has piled up round the magazine project.

Oh this animal I hope I won't need to do any more explanatory work.

For instance the essence of the "famous" meeting in Munich was my private talk with Heyer, where only the two of us were together.

I had to see what sort of programme he would commit himself to.

Even then I had my private doubts, but had still to wait for the official document, the prospectus, where it was bound

to come out how those gentlemen were planning the project.

I then saw that everything would devolve upon me and that I would be boundlessly overburdened.

An absolutely unworkable proposition!

The stuff men talk on such occasions, sniffing around each other like dogs, is what the English call "eyewash."

Everything null and void, valueless, until there's a signed contract. That alone counts.

Everything else a capricious, deceptive anima intrigue that simply drives women crazy, because they always want to know why and how.

The main thing is to know how things are not done.

Please give X. my best greetings and tell him-because his love is all too easily injured-he should meditate on Paul's words in the Epistle to the Corinthians: "Love endureth all things."

With cordial greetings,

Yours ever,

Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 120-121