Carl Jung on Feeling, Sensation, Intuition Thinking

So now you see what I think of feeling.

I have been asked whether, if a number of individuals in the class draw up a statement of feeling as it appears to them, I would be willing to discuss it.

Of course I will do this very gladly, it will be an advantageous way of going into the subject; but I must warn you not to take feeling too subjectively in that case.

Each function type has a special way of viewing feeling, and is likely to find things about it which are untrue for the other types.

Thus one of the points with respect to the functions that has been most combated is my contention that feel- ing is rational.

My books have been read largely by intellectuals, who have, of course, not been able to see feeling from this aspect, because feeling in themselves is thoroughly irrational by reason of its contamination by elements from the unconscious.

Similarly, people with a fairly developed amount of feeling, but in whom there is also intuition with it, hold feeling to be an irrational function.

It is the fate of people to seek to interpret life chiefly through the function strongest in them.

Sometimes it is quite impossible to convince a person that he cannot grasp the trans-subjective world with one function alone, no matter how strong that function may be.

With respect to the thinking type, this was once borne in upon. me very impressively by a man who came to consult me about a compulsion neurosis.

He said to me, “I don’t think you can cure me, but I would like to know why it is that I can’t be cured, be- cause as you will see, there is really nothing that I do not know about myself.”

And that proved to be true, he had covered his case with truly remarkable intelligence and from the Freudian point of view he was completely analyzed, for there was no corner of his past, even back to the remotest infancy, that remained unexplored.

For a moment I could not make out myself why it was that he could not get well.

Then I began to question him about his financial situation, as he was just coming from St. Moritz and had spent the winter at Nice.

“Were you able to make so much money that you could live that way without working?”

I asked him. He became annoyed with me for pressing this point, but finally had to tell the truth, namely that he was unable to work, had never made any money for himself, but was being supported by a schoolteacher, ten years older than himself.

He said none of this had anything to do with his neurosis, that he loved the woman, and she him, and they both had thought the situation out together and that it was all right.

Nor was I ever able to make him see that he was behaving like a pig to this woman, who was living on next to nothing while he was carousing over Europe.

He left my office with the firm conviction that, having “thought” the whole thing out, as he was pleased to put it, that finished it.

But the sensation type can crucify reality with equal facility.

Suppose there is a woman who has fallen in love with her sister’s husband.

He is her brother-in-law, and one does not fall in love with one’s brother-in-law, therefore the fact is never ad- mitted into consciousness.

It is only the facts as they are controlled by the situation as it is that come into the argument; the possibilities behind must be carefully excluded.

So these two live for twenty years and only arrive at the true state of affairs through analysis.

I have spoken more than once of the way an intuitive type can neglect reality, and you can, I am sure, supply an equal number of examples of the ways a feeling type can do the same thing.

If a thing is disagreeable to the feelings, a feeling type will slide over the reality of it with the greatest facility.

Inasmuch as women are more connected with Eros than are men, they tend to have particular notions about feeling, just as men, even if not intellectual, tend to have particular notions about thinking.

So it is hard for men and women to understand one another.

The woman tends to identify feeling with reality, the man clings obstinately to the logical statement.

Up to this time we have spoken of the subject as though it were unchanging in time, but as we know, the

body is a four-dimensional entity, the fourth dimension being time.

If the fourth dimension were spatial, our bodies would be wormlike—that is, drawn out in space between two points.

In Diagram 7, I have tried to give some idea of an individual moving through space, that is, three-dimensional space.

The individual cannot be understood merely as a static entity.

If we want to have a complete notion for the individual, we must add the factor of time.

Time means a past and a future, and so the individual is only complete when we add his actual structure as the result of past events, and at the same time the actual structure taken as the starting point of new tendencies.

According to this idea, we can make out two types, those individuals who hang back in their time under the spell of the past, and others too much ahead of themselves.

The latter are only to be understood by their tendencies. So far, these pictures have disregarded the unconscious. In Diagram 8, I have brought this factor into consideration.

This diagram presupposes a fully developed thinking type in whom sensation and intuition are half conscious and half unconscious, and in whom feeling is in the unconscious.

This does not mean that such a type is devoid of feeling; it only means that, compared to his thinking, his feeling is not under his control but eruptive in character, so that normally it is not in the picture at all, and then all of a sudden it quite possesses him.

In Diagram 9, I have shown the individual in relation to the world of external objects on the one hand and to the collective unconscious images on the other.

Connecting him with the first world, that is, the world of external objects, is the persona, developed by the forces from within and the forces from without in interaction with one another.

We may think of the persona as the bark of a conscious personality.

As we have indicated elsewhere, it is not wholly our choice what the persona shall be, for we can never control entirely the forces that are to play on our conscious personalities.

The center of this conscious personality is the ego.

If we take the layer “back” of this ego, we come to the personal subconscious.

This contains our incompatible wishes or fantasies, our childhood influences, repressed sexuality, in a word all those things we refuse to hold in consciousness for one reason or another, or which we lose out of it.

In the center is the virtual nucleus or central government, representing the totality of the conscious and unconscious self.

Then we come to the collective unconscious as it is present in us—that is, the part of the racial experience which we carry within us.

It is the home of Cabiri or dwarfs whom we may not see else they cease to serve us. In this region another virtual center often turns up in dreams.
It is a minor figure of oneself usually projected on a friend, for the unconscious pays these compliments very easily.

I have called it the shadow self.

The primitive has developed an intricate set of relationships to his shadow which symbolize very well my idea of the shadow self.

He must never tread on another’s shadow, so too we must never mention the weaknesses of another, those things in him of which he is ashamed and has therefore put out of sight.

A primitive says, “Don’t go out at midday, it is dangerous not to see your shadow.” We say, “Be careful when you don’t know your weaknesses.”
We can speak of the conscious ego as the subjective personality, and of the shadow self as the objective personality.

This latter, made up of what is part of the collective unconscious in us, carries the things that appear in us as effects. For we do have effects on people which we can neither predict nor adequately explain.
Instinct warns us to keep away from this racial side of ourselves.

If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death.
The primitive says, “Don’t let a ghost get into you.”

By this he conveys the double idea, “Don’t let a visitor get into your unconscious, and don’t lose an ancestral soul.”

The feeling of awe of the primitive with respect to what we call the collective unconscious is very great. It is to him the ghost world.

The following story told by an explorer among the Eskimo is an example of this awe, shared even by the medicine man.

The explorer came to the hut of a Polar Eskimo where incantations were going on over a sick man for the purpose of driving away the ghosts or evil spirits that were making him sick.

There was a tremendous noise going on, with the sorcerer jumping and running about like mad. As soon as he saw the explorer he became very quiet and said: “This is all a nonsense.”

He had taken him for another medicine man because no one but a medicine man is supposed to approach a hut where such an incantation is going on.

It is the custom, too, for the medicine men who are struggling with the ghosts to smile and say to one an- other that the whole thing is nonsense, not because they think it is, but because they use it as
a sort of apotropaic joke.

It is in the nature of a euphemism that should protect them against their own fear. This instinctive fear of the collective unconscious is very strong indeed in us.

There can be a continual flow of fantasies inundating us from it, the danger signal coming when the flow cannot be stopped.

If one has once seen this happen one feels deeply frightened.

We have in general not much imagination about these things, but the primitive knows all about it. For the most part, we are so cut off from it as to float above it.
When it comes to the rather delicate task of locating the collective unconscious, you must not think of it as being compassed by the brain alone but as including the sympathetic nervous system as well.

Only that part of it that is your vertebrate inheritance—that is, that comes to you from your vertebrate ancestors—is to be thought of as within the limits of the central nervous system.

Otherwise it is outside your psychological sphere.

The very primitive animal layers are supposed to be inherited through the sympathetic system, and the relatively later animal layers belonging to the vertebrate series are represented by the cerebrospinal system.

The most recent human layers form the basis of actual consciousness, and thus the collective unconscious is reaching into consciousness, and only thus far can you call the collective unconscious psychological.

We wish to reserve the term “psychological,” used thus, for those elements which, theoretically at least, can be brought into conscious control.

On this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological but psychical.

We cannot repeat this distinction too often, for when I have referred to the collective unconscious as “out- side” our brains, it has been assumed that I meant hanging somewhere in mid-air.

After this explanation it will become clear to you that the collective unconscious is always working upon you through trans-subjective facts which are probably inside as well as outside yourselves.

As an example of how the collective unconscious can work upon you through the inside fact, I would give the following: Suppose a man is sitting somewhere out of doors and a bird flies down near him.

Another day he is in the same place and a similar bird comes.

This time the bird stirs him in an altogether strange way, there is something mysterious attaching to that second bird.

The naïve man certainly assumes that the extraordinary effect of the second bird belongs as much to the out- side world as the ordinary effect produced by the first bird.

If he is a primitive he will distinguish between the two effects by saying the first bird is just a bird, but the second is a “doctor” bird.

But we know that the extraordinary effect of the “doctor” bird is due to a projection upon it from the collective unconscious, from within the man.

Ordinarily, it is only by such a projection into the external world that we become conscious of the collective unconscious images.

Thus suppose we meet with an extraordinary effect from without.

An analysis of that effect shows that it amounts to a projection of an unconscious content, and so we arrive at the realization of such a content.

The case mentioned above is an ordinary one insofar as we assume an individual who is chiefly identical with the ego or conscious, but if it should happen that the individual should be more on the side of his shadow, then he would be capable of realizing without projection an immediate—that is, an autonomous—movement of the unconscious contents.

But if the individual is identical with his normal ego, then even such an autonomous manifestation of the unconscious—that is, one not released by the projection, nor by external effect, but originating within himself— appears to him as if in the external world.

In other words, it requires a very close contact with the unconscious, and an understanding of it, for a man to realize that the origin of his mythological or spiritual experiences is within himself, and that whatever forms these experiences may appear to take, they do not in fact come from the external world.

Using the diagram I have just discussed, that is, Diagram 9, we could give an explanation of analysis. The analyst makes his approach through the persona.

Certain formalities of greeting are gone through, and compliments exchanged. In this way, one comes to the gateway of the conscious.

Then the conscious contents are carefully examined, and the one passes to the personal subconscious.

Here the doctor often marvels that many of the things found there are not conscious since they seem so obvi- ous to an observer.

At the personal subconscious a Freudian analysis ends, as I indicated above.

When you have finished with the personal subconscious, you have finished with the causal influence of the past.

Then you must come to the reconstructive side, and the collective unconscious will speak in images and the consciousness of unconscious objects will begin.

If you can succeed in breaking down that dividing wall made by the personal subconscious, the shadow can be united with the ego and the individual becomes a mediator between two worlds.

He can now see himself from the “other side” as well as from “this side.”

Here consciousness of the shadow self is not though, one must have the unconscious images also at one’s disposal.

The animus or the anima begins to be active now, and the anima will bring in the figure of the old man.

All these figures will be projected into the conscious external world, and objects of the unconscious begin to correspond to objects in the external world, so that the latter, the real objects, take on a mythological character.

This means an enormous enrichment of life.

I have often been asked about the “geology” of a personality, and so I have tried to picture this after a fashion.

Diagram 10 shows individuals coming out of a certain common level, like the summits of mountains coming out of a sea.

The first connection between certain individuals is that of the family, then comes the clan which unites a number of families, then the nation which unites a still bigger group.

After that we could take a large group of connected nations such as would be included under the heading “European man.”

Going further down, we would come to what we could call the monkey group, or that of the primate ances- tors, and after that would come the animal layer in general, and finally the central fire, with which as the diagram shows, we are still in connection. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 134 - 143

Carl Jung on the “Four Functions.”

Lecture 16 Dr. Jung:

I think there are some points about the functions in general that need ia.

I would like to speak now of the four functions in relation to reality, for it is my idea that each of them brings to the subject a special aspect of reality.

This diagram then (Diagram 6) represents the four main functions emanating from a virtual center and constituting, in their totality, the subject.

The subject is suspended in a world of objects and cannot be thought of apart from them.

Ordinarily we class as objects only those things belonging to the external world, but equally important are the intrapsychical objects with which the subject is in contact.

To this latter class belong any conscious content that has slipped out of consciousness, been forgotten, as we say, or repressed, and all unconscious processes.

There are always parts of your functions that are within your conscious, and parts that are without your con- scious but still within the sphere of psychical activity.

Some of these intrapsychical objects really belong to me, and when I forget them they can be likened to pieces of furniture that have got lost.

But some, on the other hand, are intruders into my psychical entourage and come from the collective unconscious.

Or the intruder may be from the external world. Take, for example, an institution.
This may be unconscious and therefore an object rising out of myself, or it might be started from without by something in the surroundings.

Obviously, the external world does not remain without effect on the functions.

If sensations were only subjective and not founded on reality, it would not carry with it the conviction it does.
To be sure, not all the sense of conviction rests on the effect derived from the outer object.

Sometimes there is also a strong subjective element, as the hallucinations and illusions to be observed in pathological cases prove.

But the greater part of the conviction carried by sensation derives from the connection of sensation with the trans-subjective or objective fact in reality.

It is of reality as it is that sensation speaks, not reality as it might have been nor as it might be, but as it is now.

Therefore sensation gives only a static image of reality, and this is the basic principle of the sensation type. Now, intuition carries with it a similar feeling of certainty, but of a different kind of reality.

It speaks of the reality of possibilities, but to an intuitive type this is just as absolute a reality as that possessed by the static fact.

Inasmuch as we can test the validity of intuition by seeing whether or not the possibilities do occur actually, and since millions of these possibilities arrived at by intuition have been realized, it is legitimate for the intuitive type to value his function as a means of understanding one phase of reality, that is, dynamic reality.

When we come to the rational functions, things become different.

Thinking is based on reality only indirectly, but nonetheless it can carry just as much conviction. Nothing is more real than an idea to a person who thinks.
There are certain general or collective ideas from which the thinker derives his judgment, and these we know as the logical modi, but these in turn are derived from some underlying idea; in other words, the logical modi go back to archetypal origins.

It would be difficult indeed to trace out their history, but someday, when men are more intelligent than they

are now, it will undoubtedly be done.

But if we follow the history of thought in the rough way possible for us, it can be readily seen that all times have recognized the existence of primordial images.

To Kant they were the noumena, “das Ding an sich.”

To Plato they were the eidola, the models that existed before the world existed, and from which all things in the world were derived.

Thinking, then, derives from the reality of the image, but has the image reality?

To answer that question, let us turn to the field of natural science, where we can find abundant evidence of the potency of an image.

If you cut an earthworm in two, the segment with the head will grow a new tail, and the tail segment will grow a new head.

If you destroy the lens of a salamander’s eye, a new lens will develop.

In both these cases it must be assumed that the organism carries within itself, in some way, an image of its totality, which totality tends to be reestablished when disturbed.

In the same way, the fact that the mature oak is contained within the acorn suggests this principle of the image of the whole.

Of course, the principle of reestablishing the integrity of the whole when a portion is lopped off works within limitations.

The thing replaced is of a more archaic type than the original.

So one can say in general that if a differentiated form is removed, the organ substituted goes back to a more primitive level.

The same thing happens psychologically.

That is, as soon as we set aside the more differentiated function, we hark back to the archaic level. We can see such a thing even in so simple a thing as the progress of an argument.

If we fail to convince by means of logical thought, we abandon it and resort to more primitive means, that is, we raise our voices, catch after current phrases, become sarcastic or bitter.

In other words, our refined tools failing, we grasp the hammer and tongs of emotion.

Returning to this question of the images, we find something in nature corresponding to the principle involved in them.

When we apply the conception to thinking only, we suppose the images to be static.

The great philosophers have spoken of them always as being eternal. It is these static images that underlie thinking.

We could call them, if we chose, Logos.

Feeling, as we have seen, has also its reality conviction, that is, it has to do with a trans-subjective fact. If we take it from certain aspects, it can bear a resemblance to thinking, but this is merely an apparent, not a real connection.

Thus, for example, I can take the concept freedom, and show it to be a highly abstract static concept; that is, I can keep it an idea, but freedom can convey also a powerful feeling.

In the same way, the phrase “my country” can be taken abstractly or emotionally.

In this way, most of our general [Diagram 6] ideas are feeling values and intellectual images also, so that we can say that the underlying fact of feeling is a dynamic image.

That is to say, it is an image that works, it has motive power.

An abstract statement of feeling does not move, it is static.

If I define God as the unchanging totality of all changing processes, what have I but a thoroughly static idea? But it is easy to imagine God as a most potently dynamic image.

For the totality of the dynamic images can use Eros.

To sum up, we have considered four kinds of realities: (1) static reality that comes to us through sensation; (2) the dynamic reality revealed by intuition; (3) static images given us by thinking; (4) dynamic images sensed by feeling.

I assume that the fact of the discovery of the four functions is equivalent to a statement about the world, that is, that the world has these four aspects of reality.

We have no way of knowing whether the world is Cosmos or Chaos, for, as we know the world, all the order is put into it by ourselves.

We can think of the possibility of the world changing in such a way as to bring another function, or other functions, into existence; meantime I offer these conceptions as a possible point of orientation. Carl Jung, Lecture 16 excerpt, 1925 Seminar, Pages 134 -134

Mrs. Jung: “Could you say something about the relation of the animus to immortality…

Mrs. Jung: Could you say something about the relation of the animus to immortality in the same way that you discussed the anima and immortality?

Dr. Jung: The animus seems to go back only to the fourteenth century, and the anima to remote antiquity, but with the animus I must say I am uncertain altogether.

Mrs. Jung: It had seemed to me that the animus was not a symbol of immortality, but of movement and life, and that it is man’s attitude that gives that different aspect to the anima.

Dr. Jung: It is true that the animus is often represented by a moving figure—an aviator or a traffic manager.

Perhaps there is something in the historical fact of women being more stable, therefore there is more movement in the unconscious.

Mr. Schmitz: Surely there could have been no repression of the animus at the time of the matriarchy. Dr. Jung: We cannot be too sure.
Mrs. Zinno: The figures of gods carry the idea of immortality, do they not?

smuch as they are also animus figures and come into women’s dreams, I should think one could say the ani- mus carried the meaning of immortality also.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is true, but there remains a tremendous difference between the animus and the anima. Mr. Schmitz: Is immortality in the individual?
Dr. Jung: No, only as the image. Immortality belongs to the child of the anima. Inasmuch as the anima has not brought forth, she assumes immortality.

When she brings forth she dies. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 168.

Carl Jung: on three books written on the Anima theme

Lecture 15

Questions and Discussion Dr. Jung:

Before taking up the questions, I would like to assign to the class a piece of work I am anxious to have it undertake: that is the analysis of three books written on the anima theme:

She, by Haggard; L’Atlantide, by Benoît; and Meyrink’s Das grüne Gesicht.

I would like you to choose three committees of about five people each for these three books, each committee selecting a chairman who will bring in the findings of the group.

If you do this you will furnish me with a very good idea of what you have gained from these lectures.

Of course you may proceed about it in any way you see fit, but I would like to make the following suggestions:

(1) For the sake of the people in the class who may not have read the particular book under discussion, we should have a résumé of the contents;

(2) then there should be a characterization and interpretation of the dramatis personae;

(3) this should be followed by a presentation of the psychological processes involved, transformations of the libido, and behavior of the unconscious figures from start to finish.

No doubt the presentation of the material will take about one hour, and then we should have about half an hour for discussion.

(It was suggested by the class that, instead of having all three books on anima problems, it would be interesting to have one that dealt with the animus.

On Dr. Jung’s recommendation, a novel called The Evil Vineyard, by Marie Hay,was substituted for Das grüne Gesicht.) The committees were chosen as follows (the chairman is indicated with §):

comment on the Hay, Haggard, and Benoît novels, cf. “Mind and Earth” (1927; CW 10), pars. 75–91. For the reports and discussion in the seminar, see below, following the appendix to Lecture 16.
Dr. Harding§ Mr. Aldrich§ Dr. Mann§ Miss Baynes Mrs. Zinno Mr. Robertson She Dr. Bond L’Atlan –tide Miss Houghton The Evil Vineyard Miss Hincks Mr. Radin Miss Sergeant Mr. Bacon Dr. Ward Mr. Bacon Dr. de Angulo

Diagram 5

Lecture

Diagram 5 is of an ideal condition which we never meet in reality, that is, it presupposes a complete consciousnessof all the functions.

Therefore I have represented the functions on one plane.

In the center is a virtual nucleus I call the self, which represents the totality or sum of the conscious and un- conscious processes.

This is in contradistinction to the ego or partial self, which is not conceived of as being in contact with the un- conscious elements of the psychological processes.

Because the ego is not in touch with the unconscious side of our personality—that is, not necessarily in touch with it—we very often have a very different idea of ourselves from what others have of us, even allowing for projections.

The unconscious is continually playing its part, sometimes even an emphatic one, without our being cognizant of its imprint upon ourselves.

I can do what in fact are really very complicated things without knowing that I have done them—as, for in- stance, in walking down the street, I may carefully weave my way in and out of a crowd of people, and yet if someone asks me at the end of a block or two, “How many people did you pass?”

I am perfectly unable to say.

Each of the people I have passed, however, has been registered separately in my mind; I simply have not brought the results to bear upon my ego.

Similarly, we seldom see to it that we become conscious of the expressions on our faces, and all the time things are peeping out from the unconscious that are perfectly visible to the outside observer, who sometimes finds it hard to realize our ignorance of the things that he can see so clearly.

As long, then, as there remains so much in us that is not taken into account by the ego, the latter cannot be said to represent the totality of the mental processes.

Of course we cannot be too sure that we have this virtual center that I have assumed as existing; it is some- thing that is not susceptible of proof. Instead of one center, we may have two or, as in dementia praecox, a multitude. But when you deal with a fairly normal individual there is always a center to which things lead up, and when something critical happens, it seems to come from that central government.

Some people project the reaction they get from this central core of themselves as a God-given message. This center of self-regulation, then, is a postulate that is assumed.

I have represented the self as a point in the middle of the diagram, but it could just as well be thought of as including the whole, or indeed as spreading over all the world. Indian philosophy describes the self as I have taken it as being smaller than small, yet greater than great.

Turning to the diagram you will see that I have arranged the functions as sectors of the circle. Let us start with thinking, or pure intellect.
This as a rational function is connected with the irrational function intuition by what we call speculative thinking, or intuitive thinking.

Then we pass to the polar opposite of thinking, namely feeling, through intuitive feeling, and from there to the polar opposite of intuition, sensation, via emotion of feeling.

Emotion is that sort of feeling which is a physiological condition, and which is perceived by sensation.

From sensation we get back again to thinking through a kind of thinking we call empirical, i.e., thinking to the fact.

We have now the conception that thinking passes by easy transition to both intuition or sensation, or vice versa, but that it is furthest removed from feeling.

Let us now try to arrive at a precise notion of feeling, though, as we have observed in previous lectures, this is a task beset with difficulties.

Will the class volunteer some suggestions as to the essential nature of feeling?

(The class volunteered one or two suggestions but, it must be said, with more enthusiasm for the theme than success in finding a solution.

From one point of view there was an effort to define feeling in such a way that it should be shown to be present in all the other functions, from another point of view it was thought that the definition should be of such a character as to apply to feeling alone.

It was generally agreed that the definition of feeling now accepted in analytical psychology—that is, as the function wherein subjective values are formulated—was not satisfactory, and that a satisfactory definition

must include the ideal of a dynamic existing between subject and object. The end of the hour found the class still deep in this discussion.
Dr. Jung was asked to give a brief summary of his viewpoint.)

Dr. Jung: My idea is that feeling is an unthinking kind of appreciation on the one side, and on the other a dynamic relation. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 127-130

Carl Jung on the relationships between Man, Woman, Anima, Animus, Collective Unconscious

Lecture 14 Dr. Jung:

I will continue the discussion begun last time, using a similar diagram (see Diagram 3).

As I have tried to show by the dark and light coloring in a and b, a man has both positive and negative relations to the real woman and to the anima.

Usually if his attitude toward the real woman be positive, then his attitude toward the anima is negative, and vice versa.

But it very often happens that he has a positive and a negative attitude toward the woman at the same time, only the negative is buried and must be sought out from the depths of the unconscious.

It is often to be observed in marriages, for example, that this negative factor starts out as something quite negligible, and then with the years becomes the most patent thing about the relationship, until finally the break comes, though all the while the two people have had the illusion of a most harmonious marriage.

We find the principle of duality in man’s collective conscious, as I have tried to show in the double symbols x and x’.

That is, in general our laws and ideals are good, so when we begin to investigate man’s conscious world, we come first on the positive symbol x.

If we go through history we can be greatly impressed with the scope and magnitude of the things developed in church and state

If we were to speak in terms of primitive men, we would say there was a wise council of elders that had seen to these things.

Let us take as a sample the Catholic Mass.

If we study this we must recognize it to be one of the most perfect things we possess.

Similarly with our laws, there are many aspects of them that must excite our respect and admiration.

But that does not complete the picture; we cannot escape the fact that these things have also a very evil side.

Take the goodness expressed in Christianity, for instance.

That is apparent to us, but get outside of your own skin and into that of a Polynesian native, and Christianity looks very black indeed.

Or ask the Spanish heretics who have been burned for the glory of God what they think of Christianity. Turning to the side of the unconscious, the duality of the anima figure is obvious.

When a man knows his anima, she is both night and day to him.

As we have so often observed in connection with Rider Haggard’s “She,” the classic anima figure, we can never be too sure either of her goodness or of her evilness; now it is the one, now the other that grips us.

Her potency lies in large measure in the duality of her nature.

A man may, as I have said, know the real woman also as lightness and darkness, but when he sees in a woman the magical quality that is the essence of She, he at once begins tremendous projections of the unconscious upon her.

There is duality also in a man’s relation to the collective unconscious.

Passing through the anima into the collective unconscious one comes to the figure of the wise old man, the shaman or medicine man.

In general, the medicine man has a very beneficent side.

If cattle are lost, he must know how and where to find them; if there is need of rain, he must see that it is made.

Then he must also undertake the cure of disease.

In all these purposes he appears as a positive figure, as I have shown in the diagram by y.

But there is black magic to be taken into account, and this is closely associated with evil, so that one often has y’, which we can call the black magician, split off from y.

This dual aspect in which a man’s collective unconscious can present itself was brought very vividly to my attention through the dream of a young divinity student about whom I was once consulted.

He was in a conflict of doubts as to whether he had chosen right in becoming a minister, as to whether he really believed as he thought he did, etc.

Many of you, however, have heard this dream before, so I do not know that it is worthwhile for me to repeat it.

(It was requested that the dream be repeated.)

Well then, the dreamer found himself in the presence of a very beautiful venerable old man who was clad in a black robe.

He knew this man was the White Magician.

The old man had just finished a sort of discourse, which the dreamer knew was full of fine things, but he could not quite remember what had been said, though he did know the old man had said the Black Magician would be needed.

Just then in came another very beautiful old man dressed in white, and this was the Black Magician. He wanted to speak to the White Magician but, seeing the young man there, hesitated.

Then the White Magician immediately explained that the young man was “an innocent,” and that the Black Magician could speak quite freely before him.

So the Black Magician related that he came from a country where there was an old king reigning, and this old king, bethinking himself of approaching death, began to look about for a suitable and dignified grave in which he should be buried.

Among some old monuments he came upon a very beautiful tomb, which he caused to be opened and cleaned. Within they found the grave of a virgin who had lived ages and ages ago.

When they threw out the bones and these came into the sunlight, they immediately formed themselves into a black horse which ran away into the desert and was lost.

The Black Magician said he had heard about this horse and thought it very important to find him, so he went back to the place where all this had taken place, and there he found the horse’s tracks.

These he followed into the desert, and for days and days, until he came to the other side of the desert, and there he found the black horse grazing.

By his side lay the keys to Paradise. With these he had come to the White Magician for help, as he did not know what to do with them.

This was the dream of a man quite untouched by analytical ideas.

By himself he had come into problems that activated his unconscious in this way, and bcause he had an unrecognized poetic faculty, the unconscious content took this form, which without that faculty would not have been possible.

Obviously the dream is full of wisdom, and had I analyzed the young man he would surely have been impressed with that wisdom, and come to have deep respect for the unconscious.

I would like now to try to present to you something about the psychology of women, using this same diagram, with a few changes (see Diagram 4).

We may say that the real man is seen by the woman on his bright side, and that her relationship to the real man is a comparatively exclusive one—that in this respect, it is just the opposite of the average relation of a man to the real woman.

In a man this relationship is not exclusive.

When the average man permits comparison of his wife with other women he says, “She is my wife among women.”

To the woman, though, the object that personifies the world to her (a in our diagram) is my husband, my children, in the midst of a relatively uninteresting world. This “unique” husband has a shadow side for the wife, just as we saw in the case of the man in relation to the real woman.

Similarly the animus has a bright and a dark side, but balancing the unique man in the conscious, we have in the unconscious of woman a multitude of animus figures.

Man understands his relation to his anima as being a highly emotional affair, while woman’s relation to her animus is more in the Logos field.

When a man is possessed by his anima, he is under peculiar feelings, he cannot control his emotions, but is controlled by them.

A woman dominated by her animus is one who is possessed by opinions. Nor is she too discriminating about these opinions.

She can easily say, “In nineteen hundred and so and so, Papa said this to me,” or, “Some years ago a man

with a white beard told me this was true,” and so it remains true for her into eternity. It is felt as a silent prejudice by a man who meets this phenomenon in a woman.

It is something exceedingly baffling to him, and irritating to a degree through its power and invisibility. Now then we come to the woman’s relation to the collective conscious.

Since I have not a woman’s feelings, I am perhaps not competent to throw much light on what that relation- ship is, but inasmuch as the family seems the real basis of a woman’s life, perhaps it would be fair to say that her attitude toward the world of the conscious is that of a mother.

A woman too has a peculiar attitude toward nature, much more trusting than that of a man.

She is always saying, “Oh, well that will come out all right,” just when a man is ready to explode with anxiety.

There must be something like this to account for the fact that there are three times more suicides among men than among women.

But we can always find that, though there is not the marked split in the woman’s relation to the collective conscious that occurs in man, still there is enough of duality to permit us to make a symbol such as x’x. In other words, the woman sees that the dear old god who is going to make everything come out all right has moods of his own, so one must not be too trusting.

This is the element of skepticism, the shadow side.

Men tend to separate x and x’. Women tend to take them together.

If you listen to an argument between men you can always hear them keeping the negative and the positive aspects of the subject distinct; they may discuss now the one, now the other.

But begin an argument with a woman in which the premise carries in it this principle of discrimination, and in about two minutes she has shot through your whole logical structure by bringing the positive right into the middle field of the negative aspect and vice versa.

Nor can you ever persuade her that she has thus destroyed the logic of the discussion. To her way of thinking, the two belong very close together.
This struggle for a principle of unity runs through all her psychological processes, just as the opposite principle, that of discrimination, runs through those of man.

Now when it comes to the unconscious of the woman, the picture becomes obscure indeed.

I think there again is to be found the figure of a mother, and again she has a dual aspect, but in a peculiar way. As we saw with man, he has the definite division into good and bad, Cosmos and Chaos, but in woman’s collective unconscious it is a fusion of the human with the animal.

I have been tremendously impressed with the animal character of the unconscious of woman, and I have reason to think that her relation to the Dionysian element is a very strong one. It looks to me as if man were really further away from the animal than the woman—not that he has not a strong animal likeness in him, but it is not so psychological as in women.

It is as though in men the animal likeness stopped at the spinal cord while in women it extends into the lower strata of the brain, or that man keeps the animal kingdom in him below the diaphragm, while in women it extends throughout her being.

When man sees this fact in women, he immediately assumes that the animal nature of women is exactly like his own, the only difference being that she has more of it.

But that is altogether a mistake, for their animalness contains spirituality, while in the man it is only brute.


The animal side of woman is probably like that we would find in any such an animal as the horse, if we could see such an animal from within itself instead of just from the outside as we do see it.

If we were viewing the psychic life of a horse from within, it would appear very strange to us.

But a man is always looking at an animal from the outside—he has not the psychic animalness in his uncon- scious that a woman has in hers.

Obviously, I have only been able to give you here an outline of the field of women’s psychology. There are many questions that can arise in connection with it.
(There followed here a discussion that took two general lines: first the fact that men tended to separate the pairs of opposites, and women to preserve a relative union of them, and secondly, as to whether or not Dr. Jung had done justice to the degree of consciousness that women had achieved in their special world of feeling.

In connection with the first point it was said by Mr. Schmitz that it seemed to him the essential difference be- tween men and women was that the woman had a sense of polarity given her by nature, while man got it through intellect—in other words that the woman was still unconscious and the man conscious, and that this was the basic idea of the presence of Helena, or the figure of an anima, with the old man.)

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is the way it appears to men, but you must always remember that a woman may have a kind of consciousness that a man does not understand, and out of this fact we have the typical mistakes a man makes about women.

Helena is only a man’s woman, she is what a man would wish, but not in the least what a woman would call a true woman—she is an artifact.

A real woman is an altogether different person, and when a man runs against the latter and projects Helena upon her, the thing simply doesn’t fit, and disaster is inevitable.
•
Mr. Schmitz thought that there was nothing so strange in the kind of consciousness of women, only they had this inevitable tendency to mix things that should be kept separate.

Dr. Jung: But that again is a masculine prejudice.

The kind of consciousness that man has developed tends toward splitting, or discrimination, but the principle of union which the woman holds to is not necessarily merely a state of unconsciousness, as
you would imply, though it is perfectly true that in general women often do show a reluctance to becoming conscious.

•(About the second point, namely as to whether Dr. Jung had done justice to the consciousness women had achieved in the world of feeling, it was said that, while he had shown very clearly the discriminations men had achieved in the field of the collective conscious, when it came to the woman in that field, he had rather left us with the impression that she was a hopelessly amorphous creature.

It seemed to some of the class that, in order to have the picture complete, some more stress should have been laid on the fact that woman had built a world of feeling values in which she discriminated with as much nicety as man in the world of the intellect, and that it was just as confusing to her to have these feeling values trampled underfoot by the unfeeling man as often happened, as it was upsetting to the man to have his intellectual values “messed together” by the unthinking woman.) Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 119 -125

Carl Jung: Insofar as you live in a world, you cannot escape forming a persona.

Lecture 13

Questions and Discussion Dr. Jung:
I have brought with me some pictures done by a young American who, at the time that he made the pictures, had no knowledge of my theories.

I merely told him to try to express in color the inner condition of his mind, which was very badly muddled.

He had no prescription as to the style in which he should paint, and I explained very little about the pictures to him so as not to disturb the naïveté of his attitude about them.

The pictures follow a progressive series and, as you will see, are a further expression of the transcendent func- tion, that is, an effort to make the unconscious content conscious.

They show a struggle between the pairs of opposites, with an attempt to solve the problem of bringing the two together, and so they really belong to the discussion we had of the pairs of opposites, but I was not able to get them before today.

First picture (see Diagram 1):

In this picture he said he felt clearness above; below, something moving or snakelike, and then the weight of the earth; in between was emptiness, blackness.

We might observe in passing that only an American could produce a symbol like this.

The blue in the top part of the lowest circle is associated with the sea—he actually does feel he is at sea in his present condition.

The black, the unconscious, is associated with the idea of evil.

This picture is typical of masculine psychology: consciousness above, sex below, nothing in the middle.

Second picture:

Two circles separate, one above and one below.

This shows a complete division, Yang above and Yin below.

In the lower circle a tendency to develop primitive ornamentation is shown.

Third picture:

Shows an attempt to get things together.

Yang colors above, Yin below, some signs of growth shown in an effort to depict a tree green in color. Snakes are coming up from below.
Fourth picture:

Here is a very vigorous attempt at getting things together. The two principles, Yang and Yin, join in a star-like figure.

The problem of intuition-sensation is shown in a vertical form of design.

As soon as horizontal forms show in design it is the appearance of the rational functions, because they are on our earth.

Fifth picture: Here is shown a more typical Indian or primitive character. “Soul-birds” are shown; helpful animals are needed.

In previous designs he came to an impossibility because a rational function cannot be taken up directly by an

irrational type; therefore he has birds.

The Yang has almost disappeared; the birds are in the center.

In the earth peculiar movement is shown: canals, snakes, roots perhaps. Birds show an instinctive tendency.
If he can see that there are some helpful birds about, that means more to him than any rational function. Sixth picture:
In the previous picture he approached the earth sphere. Here he is deeply in it.

The earth reaches up to heaven, the clouds hide the sun, but Yang descends into the earth, deep into the sea.

High up there is a man who is looking to see if he can jump down into the depths of the unconscious. The unconscious contents are felt as fishes.

There is no connection between the man’s standpoint and the depths; he cannot take the leap.

Seventh picture:

Here the man has taken the leap.

But it is air, not water; it is a desert, skulls are present. The man is fastened to the bottom with iron balls.

All life is shown above.

This means that the going to the other extreme is as disastrous and full of death as if he had remained above. He is in the bowels of the earth.
The production of these pictures is a stimulation of the primitive layers of the mind, and the individual will get at instinctive impulses thereby.

The pictures show a marked influence from the East, which is generally characteristic of American psychology as opposed to European.

No European could have produced these drawings.

(There followed some discussion as to the ways in which the various races tend to react toward the primitive cultures with which they come in contact.)

North and South America have followed very different ways in this respect.

The Anglo-Saxon holds himself away from the primitive, while the Latin goes down to his level.

I have come into contact with some very strange psychological problems illustrating this.

The following will show you something of what happens in South America.

I was once consulted by a South American family as to the condition of their son, who had been nearly driven crazy by his friends.

The parents were Austrian and went to South America only after their marriage.

Inside their house European traditions prevailed, but outside everything was Indian, the Latin inhabitants not having resisted those influences.

It was the custom for the Indian families to send their children into the city to work for little or no wages, and in the case of the little girl this meant inevitable sexual abuse.

This way of life got terribly on the nerves of the son of these Austrians, and he went to a professor of whom he was very fond to ask him for advice.

The professor asked him if he had a mascot, and of course the boy had none, so he was given one.

The professor told him he had to take this mascot, which was a doll, and attend to the task of increasing its strength all the time, and the stronger the doll got, the more the boy’s troubles would diminish.

The first thing he had to do with it was to carry it about the streets in his arms, and this the boy did, though with great shame.

Then he took it to the professor and asked him if there was anything more to be done, and was told there was.

The doll was not yet strong enough.

He must take it to a great celebration that was about to be held for the president of the republic and he must break through the cordon of police and swing the doll three times in the face of the president.

The boy did this and of course got into trouble with the police, but was set free when they found that the affair had only to do with the strengthening of a mascot.

The boy went back to the professor.

No, the doll was not yet as strong as it ought to be!

He must now find a little girl and throttle her over the doll until she was nearly dead.

Then the force of her agony as she approached death would go into the doll and it would be really strong.

he boy broke down after this last ordeal, but he was afraid to say anything, for if he did all the strength would

go out of the doll, and so he continued in a thoroughly neurotic condition till his parents had to seek help.

The boy’s mother was Catholic, but it would be absurd to say that the Church supported such things. The Spanish clergy is and always has been terribly superstitious in these Latin American countries.

One can find things such as I have described going on in all of them, and it comes from the fact that the Conquistadores mixed with the natives in marriage.

In doing this the Latins have managed to keep out of the split between the conscious and the unconscious, but have lost their superiority.

The Anglo-Saxons did not mix with the primitives, but in the unconscious they sank down to the primitive level.

Miss Taylor’s question: (1) “Do you think that some development of the Mithraic religion may become a living religion in the near future?”

Dr. Jung: I could not assume that anything like that is going to happen.

I merely mentioned the Mithraic religion because my fantasies were so much connected with it. In itself this religion is as antiquated as can be.

It is only relatively important as being the brother of Christianity, which has assimilated some elements from it.

It is interesting to trace out both those elements that were discarded and those that were accepted by Christianity.

The ringing of the bells in the celebration of the Mass probably comes from the Mithraic cult, where bells were rung at a certain point in the mysteries.

Also, Christmas day is a Mithraic feast.

In early days, Christmas came on the 8th of January, and was a day taken over from the Egyptians, being the day celebrating the finding of the body of Osiris.

It was only in later days, when the Mithraic cult was being overcome, that the Christians took the 25th of December, the day celebrated by the followers of Mithras as the day of Sol invictus, for their Christmas.

To the early Christians, Christmas was the resurrection of the sun, and as late as Augustine, Christ was identi- fied with the sun.

Miss Taylor’s question: (2) “Is the view you expressed in your last lecture a further development of an earlier view that the contents of the unconscious can be deduced from what is lacking in the unconscious?”

Dr. Jung: Yes, but I do not mean to imply a contradiction between my earlier view and what I said the other day about the unconscious being balanced.

I have simply gone one step further.

There is no doubt that to a certain extent the conscious can be deduced from the unconscious and vice versa.

If a dream says such and such a thing, we are justified in saying the conscious attitude must have been thus and so.

If a person is only intellectual he must have repressed feelings in the unconscious, and we have a right to ex- pect to find them there.

I went on further to say that the unconscious shows a balance within itself, over and above the compensatory role it plays to the conscious.

That is, we cannot say that the main contents of the unconscious are nothing but a balance to the conscious, nor vice versa.

Therefore one can perfectly well live wholly in the conscious as most people do, and pay little or no attention to the unconscious.

As long as you can put up with the symptoms and inhibitions that come from such a life, it does not matter. Now the balance in the conscious consists in weighing processes.

You say yea to this thing and nay to that.

Similarly, if you take a dream, you can find a yea and a nay in that also—that is what I call the ambiguity of a dream; it is never wholeheartedly committed to one thing or the other, and so I speak of the unconscious as being balanced in itself when it is operating properly.

In all cases where the unconscious is heavily one-sided, it is so because it is out of gear.

A case in point is that of Saul and Paul—had Saul been more balanced in his conscious, his unconscious would have run a different course also, and would not have produced the full-fledged Paul overnight, so to speak.

One can follow this same principle of balance in any separate units holding a compensatory relation to one another—for example, in the relation of men and women to each other.

There is no man who could not exist without a woman—that is, he carries the necessary balance within him- self if he be obliged to live his life that way, and the same thing applies to a woman with respect to a man, but if either sex is to have a complete life, it requires the other as a compensatory side.

It is the same thing with the conscious and the unconscious, and we seek analysis just to get at the benefits of the compensation from the unconscious.

Primitives show a much more balanced psychology than we do for the reason that they have no objection to letting the irrational come through, while we resent it.

Sometimes a patient becomes greatly outraged at the mere possibility of a dream or a fantasy having a sexual content, though to be sure, today it has become fashionable to recognize sexuality.

But let a dream show a moral criticism about the individual—let it say there is something unclean and ugly about you—and there is the same violent reaction that used to come with a sexual dream.

Mr. Robertson: Isn’t there another way of looking at the balancing that goes on in the conscious? That is, if all four functions are in operation, does not that mean balance?

Dr. Jung: But even if all four functions are in operation, there are things that are forgotten, and the unconscious contains these.

There is a tendency among some people to make the unconscious carry what properly belongs to the conscious, and this always upsets the functioning of the unconscious.

Such people could remove much both from the personal and from the collective unconscious, and so free the unconscious to function more normally.

For example, you can run across people who think themselves born without a religious sense, and this is just as absurd as if they said they were born without eyes. It simply means they have left all that side of themselves in the unconscious.

If you get these things out of the unconscious into the conscious, then, as I said, the unconscious functions are helped.

As another example, one is always hearing persons who have had some experience of analysis saying, “I won’t make up my mind about that, I’ll see what my dreams say.” But there are hosts of things which call for decisions from the conscious, and about which it is idiotic to “put it up” to the unconscious for a decision.

This freeing of the unconscious of elements that really belong to the conscious is greatly aided by all the old mystery practices.

All who go through the initiation ceremonies in the right spirit find a magic quality in them, which is simply due to the effect they have had upon the unconscious.

One can develop astonishing insights through the release that comes to the unconscious in this way.

One can even come to clairvoyance; but when such a gift as the latter is developed, it makes the person permeable to all sorts of atmospheric conditions that may result in his misery.

When life becomes unbearably impoverished, people reach out for such extensions of powers, only to curse fate often when they have achieved them; but when one has fire, one welcomes the insight.

Those of you who heard Dr. Radin’s last lecture remember the zigzag road that was encountered after the fourth lodge in the Medicine Dance had been passed.

At the end of the fourth lodge the initiate has been given high honors and has won great increase of powers, and now the road becomes full of appalling obstacles.

So when you relieve the unconscious of non-realized contents, you release it for its own special functioning, and it will go ahead like an animal.

You will have the zigzag road with all the fears of the primitive to be met on it, but also you will have all the wealth of his experience.

For it is a fact that, to the primitive, life is far more voluminous than to us, because there is not only the thing but also its meaning.

We look at an animal and say it is such and such a species, but if we knew that animal to be our ghost brother, it would be a different situation for us.

Or, we sit in the woods and a beetle drops down on someone’s head.

“What a nuisance,” is all the comment it elicits, but to the primitive there is meaning in that event.

Sometimes I have met this primitive reaction in my patients—an extraordinary sense of the meaningfulness of apparently trivial things in nature.

After all, an animal is not just a thing with fur on it; it is a complete being.

You may say a coyote is nothing but a coyote, but then along comes one that is Dr. Coyote, a super-animal who has mana and spiritual powers.

So says the primitive.

The unconscious should act for us like a super-animal.

When one dreams of a bull, one should not think of it as being below the human only, but also as being above—that is, as of something godlike.

Miss Houghton: If it is permissible to ask the question here, I would like to know why Americans are closer to the Far East than Europeans.

Dr. Jung: First, they are closer geographically, and secondly there are much stronger art connections of the East with America than with Europe, and then Americans are living on the soil of that race.

Miss Houghton: Do you mean ethnologically?

Dr. Jung: Yes. I was enormously struck by the resemblance of the Indian women of the Pueblos to the Swiss women in Canton Appenzell, where we have descendants of Mongolian invaders.

These might be ways of explaining the fact that something in American psychology leans toward the East. Dr. de Angulo: Is not that to be explained from the conscious?

Dr. Jung: Yes, it might be explained that way too.

That is, Americans, being so split, turn to the East for the expression of the unconscious. The appreciation of the Chinese in America is extraordinary.

All my knowledge of Chinese things comes from the Anglo-Saxon side, not from Europe—from England, it is true, but America is an extension of England.

Lecture:

I want to give you today a scheme for understanding such figures as I spoke of last time, that is, the anima and the wise old man.

When you analyze a man, you almost always come to these figures if you go deep enough.

At first you might not have them separated—I had three figures—but you might get them fused with an animal, say with a feminine form.

Or the animal can be split off, and there can be a hermaphroditic figure.


Then the old man and the anima are one.

All these figures correspond to certain relations of the conscious ego to the persona, and the symbolism varies according to conscious conditions.

Let us start with this diagram [2].

Take this room as consciousness: I feel myself as a luminous point in this conscious field of vision.

I am not aware of what you think, so it is a field limited in extent—outside it is the world of tangible reality.

This world can be represented to me through an object; thus, if I ask Mr. A. something he becomes my bridge to that world for that specific instant.

But if I ask myself how I establish an absolute or unconditioned connection with the world, my answer is that I can only do that when I am both passive and active at the same time, as much victim as actor.

This only occurs for a man through woman. She is the factor that links man to the earth.

If you do not marry you may go where you please, but as soon as a man marries, he must be in some particular spot, he must put down roots.

This field of vision of which I speak is my sphere of action, and as far as my action extends, I extend my sphere of influence.

This makes my mask, but when I am active, my action can only get to you by your receiving it, thus you help make my appearance—I cannot make it alone.

In other words, I create a shell around me due to my influence on you and yours on me. This we call persona.

The fact that there is a shell is no intentional deception; it is simply due to the fact that a system of relation-

ships is there whereby I am never apart from the effect of the object on me. Insofar as you live in a world, you cannot escape forming a persona.

You can say, “I won’t have such and such a persona,” but as you discard one you get another—unless, of course, you live on Everest.

You can only learn who you are through your effects on other people. By this means you create your personality.

So much for the conscious.

On the unconscious side, we have to work by inference through dreams.

We must assume a field of vision somewhat the same, but a little peculiar since one is never exactly oneself in dreams; even sex is not always clearly defined in the unconscious.

We can assume that there are things in the unconscious also, namely images of the collective unconscious. What is your relationship to these things?

Again it is a woman.

If you give up the woman in reality, you fall a victim to the anima.

It is this feeling of inevitability about his connection with woman that man dislikes the most.

Just when he is sure he has cut himself free of her and is moving about at last in an inner world which is his own, behold, he is in his mother’s lap! Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 109-118

Carl Jung: I thought, “Ha, this is a Druidic sacred place.”

Carl Jung: I thought, “Ha, this is a Druidic sacred place.”

Lecture 12

Questions and Discussion

Dr. Ward’s question: “You speak of energy as falling from a higher to a lower level and use the waterfall as the illustration.

How do you account for the opposing though equal energy that lifts the water to the rain cloud? In this case is the rain cloud the lower level?
It is if you transform your level into terms of heat energy.

Should we not take into consideration in psychic energy this transformability into various modes of expression?

Is not this the crux of the problem of the neurosis?

If the psychic energy were sufficiently free or fluid to make easy transformations, the neurosis would not oc- cur.

But here enters the problem of ethics—the choice of direction. Will you kindly discuss this question?”

Dr. Jung: To make water rise from the sea you need new energy.

When water runs uphill there is always an additional source of energy; in other words, the energy of the sun lifts it.

Water lifted to the clouds must fall again.

In the collective unconscious we release additional sources of energy that make our level rise.

In the collective unconscious there is energy in “solid” forms from of old, but it is additional energy similar to the energy found in coal mines, and like the energy in the mines, it is subject to exhaustion.

If we do not succeed in releasing atomic energy, or the energy of the tides or the wind, the population of Europe will have to decrease.

If we release the energy of the collective unconscious until we have no more, then we arrive at differentiation.

The archetypes are sources of energy.

If people who have no views of life catch hold of an archetypal idea, say a religious idea, they become efficient.

Put an idea into the heads of small people and they become big and tremendously efficient.

We like to think that with moral ideas we can direct our lives, but these things do not catch; if they did we would have been all right long ago.

Moral views do not touch the collective unconscious.

Within the realm of willpower we have choice, but beyond that no choice at all.

The black serpent symbolizes the introverting libido. Salome is the anima and Elijah the wise old man.

Salome, being instinctive and quite blind, needs the foreseeing eyes of wisdom that Elijah possesses.

The figure of the prophet is compensatory to that of the blind anima.

As I am an introverted intellectual my anima contains feeling [that is] quite blind.

In my case the anima contains not only Salome, but some of the serpent, which is sensation as well.

As you remember, the real Salome was involved in incestuous relations with Herod, her stepfather, and it was because of the latter’s love for her that she was able to get the head of John the Baptist.

I had read much mythology before this fantasy came to me, and all of this reading entered into the condensation of these figures.

The old man is a very typical figure.

One encounters him everywhere; he appears in all sorts of forms, and usually in company with a young girl. (See Rider Haggard: Wisdom’s Daughter.)

Feeling-sensation is in opposition to the conscious intellect plus intuition, but the balance is insufficient.

When you assume the anima is due to the preponderance of the differentiated function in the conscious, the unconscious is balanced by a figure within itself that compensates the anima figure.

This is the old man Elijah.

It is as though you have a scale, and in the one side of the scale is the conscious, in the other the unconscious. This was one of my first hypotheses.

With Freud, the unconscious is always pouring out unacceptable material into the conscious, and the conscious has difficulty in taking up this material and represses it, and there is no balance.

In those days I saw a compensatory principle that seemed to show a balance between the conscious and unconscious. But I saw later that the unconscious was balanced in itself.

It is the yea and the nay. The unconscious is not at all exactly the opposite of the conscious.
It may be irrationally different.

You cannot deduce the unconscious from the conscious. The unconscious is balanced in itself, as is the conscious.

When we meet an extravagant figure like Salome, we have a compensating figure in the unconscious.

If there were only such an evil figure as Salome, the conscious would have to build up a fence to keep this back, an exaggerated, fanatical, moral attitude.
But I had not this exaggerated moral attitude, so I suppose that Salome was compensated by Elijah.

When Elijah told me he was always with Salome, I thought it was almost blasphemous for him to say this.

I had the feeling of diving into an atmosphere that was cruel and full of blood.

This atmosphere was around Salome, and to hear Elijah declare that he was always in that company shocked me profoundly.

Elijah and Salome are together because they are pairs of opposites. Elijah is an important figure in man’s unconscious, not in woman’s.

He is the man with prestige, the man with a low threshold of consciousness or with remarkable intuition.

In higher society he would be the wise man; compare Lao-tse.

He has the ability to get into touch with archetypes.

He will be surrounded with mana, and will arouse other men because he touches the archetypes in others.

He is fascinating and has a thrill about him. He is the wise man, the medicine man, the mana man.

Later on in evolution, this wise man becomes a spiritual image, a god, “the old one from the mountains” (compare Moses coming down from the mountain as lawgiver), the sorcerer of the tribe.

He is the legislator.

Even Christ was in company with Moses and Elijah in his transfiguration.

All great lawgivers and masters of the past, such as for example the Mahatmas of theosophical teaching, are thought of by theosophists as spiritual factors still in existence.

Thus the Dalai Lama is supposed by theosophists to be such a figure.

In the history of Gnosis, this figure plays a great role, and every sect claims to have been founded by such a one.

Christ is not quite suitable; he is too young to be the Mahatma. The great man has to be given another role.

John the Baptist was the great wise man, teacher, and initiator, but he has been depotentiated.

The same archetype reappears in Goethe as Faust and as Zarathustra in Nietzsche, where Zarathustra came as a visitation.

Nietzsche has been gripped by the sudden animation of the great wise man.

This plays an important role in man’s psychology, as I have said, but unfortunately a less important part than that played by the anima.

The serpent is the animal, but the magical animal.

There is hardly anyone whose relation to a snake is neutral.

When you think of a snake, you are always in touch with racial instinct. Horses and monkeys have snake phobia, as man has.

In primitive countries, you can easily see why man has acquired this instinct.

The Bedouins are afraid of scorpions and carry amulets to protect themselves, especially stones from certain Roman ruins.

So whenever a snake appears, you must think of a primordial feeling of fear.

The black color goes with this feeling, and also with the subterranean character of the snake. It is hidden and therefore dangerous.

As animal it symbolizes something unconscious; it is the instinctive movement or tendency; it shows the way to the hidden treasure, or it guards the treasure.

The dragon is the mythological form of the snake.

The snake has a fascinating appeal, a peculiar attraction through fear. Some people are fascinated by this fear.
Things that are awe-inspiring and dangerous have an extraordinary attraction.

This combination of fear and attraction is shown, for instance, when a bird is hypnotized by a snake, for the bird flutters down to fight the snake, and then becomes attracted and held by the snake.

The serpent shows the way to hidden things and expresses the introverting libido, which leads man to go be- yond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness, as expressed by the deep crater.

The snake is also Yin, the dark female power.

The Chinese would not use the snake (i.e., dragon) as a symbol for Yin, but for Yang.

In Chinese [tradition], the Yin is symbolized by the tiger and the Yang by the dragon.

The serpent leads the psychological movement apparently astray into the kingdom of shadows, dead and wrong images, but also into the earth, into concretization.

It makes things real, makes them come into being, after the manner of Yin.

Inasmuch as the serpent leads into the shadows, it has the function of the anima; it leads you into the depths, it connects the above and the below.

There are mythological parallels.

Certain Negroes call the soul “My serpent”—they say, “My serpent said to me,” meaning “I had an idea.” Therefore the serpent is also the symbol of wisdom, speaks the wise word of the depths.
It is quite chthonic, quite earth-born, like Erda, daughter of the earth. The dead heroes transform into serpents in the underworld.
In mythology, that which had been the sun-bird devours itself, goes into the earth, and comes up again. The Semenda Bird, like the phoenix, burns in order to renew itself.
Out of the ashes comes the snake, and out of the snake the bird again. The snake is the transition from the Heaven-born, back again to the bird.
The snake encoils the vessel of Ra. In the Night Journey, in the Seventh Hour, Ra must fight the serpent. Ra is supported by the ritual of the priests: if he kills the serpent, the sun rises, if he should not succeed, the sun would rise no more.

The serpent is the personification of the tendency to go into the depths and to deliver oneself over to the al- luring world of shadows.

I had already engaged the old man in an interesting conversation; and, quite against all expectations, the old man had assumed a rather critical attitude toward my kind of thinking.

He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but, according to his views, thoughts were like animals in a forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air.

He said, “If you should see people in a room, you would not say that you made those people, or that you were responsible for them.”

Only then I learned psychological objectivity.

Only then could I say to a patient, “Be quiet, something is happening.” There are such things as mice in a house.

You cannot say you are wrong when you have a thought.

For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena. We must have perfect objectivity.

A few evenings later, I felt that things should continue; so again I tried to follow the same procedure, but it would not descend.

I remained on the surface.

Then I realized I had a conflict in myself about going down, but I could not make out what it was, I only felt that two dark principles were fighting each other, two serpents.

There was a mountain ridge, a knife edge, on one side a sunny desert country, on the other side darkness. I saw a white snake on the light side and a dark snake on the dark side.
They met in battle on the narrow ridge. A dreadful conflict ensued.
Finally the head of the black snake turned white, and it retired, defeated. I felt, “Now we can go on.”

Then the old man appeared high up on the rocky ridge.

We went far up, and reached a cyclopean wall, boulders piled up in a great ring. I thought, “Ha, this is a Druidic sacred place.”

We entered through an opening, and found ourselves in a large place, with a mound[ed] Druid altar. The old man climbed up on the altar.

At once he became small and so did the altar, while the walls grew bigger and bigger.

Then I saw a tiny house near the walls, and a tiny, tiny woman, like a doll, who turned out to be Salome.

I also saw the snake, but it too was very tiny.
The walls kept on growing, and then I realized that I was in the underworld, that the walls were those of a crater, and that this was the house of Salome and Elijah.

All this time, I did not grow, but kept my own size.

As the walls grew, Salome and Elijah grew a bit bigger. I realized that I was at the bottom of the world.

Elijah smiled and said, “Why, it is just the same, above or below.” Then a most disagreeable thing happened.

Salome became very interested in me, and she assumed that I could cure her blindness. She began to worship me.

I said, “Why do you worship me?”

She replied, “You are Christ.”

In spite of my objections she maintained this.

I said, “This is madness,” and became filled with skeptical resistance. Then I saw the snake approach me.
She came close and began to encircle me and press me in her coils.

The coils reached up to my heart. I realized as I struggled, that I had assumed the attitude of the Crucifix- ion.

In the agony and the struggle, I sweated so profusely that the water flowed down on all sides of me. Then Salome rose, and she could see.
While the snake was pressing me, I felt that my face had taken on the face of an animal of prey, a lion or a tiger.

The interpretation of these dreams is this:

First the fight of the two snakes: the white means a movement into the day, the black into the kingdom of darkness, with moral aspects too.

There was a real conflict in me, a resistance to going down. My stronger tendency was to go up.
Because I had been so impressed the day before with the cruelty of the place I had seen, I really had a ten- dency to find a way to the conscious by going up, as I did on the
mountain.

The mountain was the kingdom of the sun, and the ring-wall was the vessel in which people had gathered the sun.

Elijah had said that it was just the same below or above. Compare Dante’s Inferno.

The Gnostics express this same idea in the symbol of the reversed cones. Thus the mountain and the crater are similar.

There was nothing of conscious structure in these fantasies, they were just events that happened. So I assume that Dante got his ideas from the same archetypes.
I have seen these ideas very often in patients—the upper and the lower cones, things above and things be- low.

Salome’s approach and her worshiping of me is obviously that side of the inferior function which is surrounded by an aura of evil.

I felt her insinuations as a most evil spell.

One is assailed by the fear that perhaps this is madness.

This is how madness begins, this is madness.

For example, in a certain Russian book there is a story of a man who fears he will go mad. Lying in bed at night, he sees a bright square of moonlight in the middle of the room.

He says to himself, “If I should sit there and howl like a dog, then I would be mad, but I am not doing it so I am not mad.”

Then he tries to dismiss this thought, but after a while he says to himself, “I might sit there and howl like a dog, knowing it and choosing it, and still I would not be mad.”

Again he tries to put the thought away, but finally he can resist it no longer—he gets up and sits in the moonlight and howls like a dog, and then he is mad.

You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them.

If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself down, then these facts take on a life of their own.

You can be gripped by these ideas so that you really go mad, or nearly so.

These images have so much reality that they recommend themselves, and such extraordinary meaning that one is caught.

They form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact, it is such figures that made the mysteries. Compare the mysteries of Isis as told in Apuleius, with the initiation and deification of the initiate. Awe surrounds the mysteries, particularly the mystery of deification.
This was one of the most important of the mysteries; it gave the immortal value to the individual—it gave cer- tainty of immortality.

One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation.

The important part that led up to the deification was the snake’s encoiling of me. Salome’s performance was deification.

The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus of the Mithraic mysteries, the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake’s head resting on the man’s

head, and the face of the man that of a lion.

This statue has only been found in the mystery grottoes (the under-churches, the last remnants of the catacombs).

The catacombs were not originally places of concealment, but were chosen as symbolical of a descent into the underworld.

It was also part of those early conceptions that the saints should be buried with the martyrs in order to go down into the earth before rising again.

The Dionysian mysteries have the same idea.

When the catacombs decayed, the idea of the church continued.

The Mithraic religion also had an underground church, and only initiates assisted at the underground cere- monies.

Holes were cut in the walls of the underground portion in order that lay people might hear in the church above what was being said by the initiates in the church below.

The lower church was fitted up with divans or cubicles placed opposite each other. Bells were used in the ceremony, and bread marked with a cross.
We know that they celebrated a sacramental meal where this bread was eaten with water instead of wine. The Mithraic cult was strictly ascetic.
No women were admitted as members.

It is almost certain that the symbolical rite of deification played a part in these mysteries. The lion-headed god encoiled by the snake was called Aion, or the eternal being.
He derives from a Persian deity, Zrwanakarana, which word means “the infinitely long duration.”

Another very interesting symbol in this cult is the Mithraic amphora with flame arising from it, and the lion on one side with the snake on the other, both trying to get at the fire.

The lion is the young, hot, dry July sun in culmination of light, the summer. The serpent is humidity, darkness, the earth, winter.
They are the opposites of the world trying to come together with the reconciling symbol between them.

It is the famous symbolism of the vessel, a symbolism that survives till 1925—see Parsifal. It is the Holy Grail, called the Vase of Sin (see King: The Gnostics and Their Remains).

Also it is a symbol of the early Gnostics.

It is of course a man’s symbol, a symbol of the womb—the creative womb of the man out of which rises the fire.

When the pairs of opposites come together, something divine happens, and then it is immortality, the eternal, creative time.

Wherever there is generation there is time, therefore Chronos is God of Time, Fire, and Light.

In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the oppo- sites reconcile.

The more these images are realized, the more you will be gripped by them.

When the images come to you and are not understood, you are in the society of the gods or, if you will, the lunatic society; you are no longer in human society, for you cannot express yourself.

Only when you can say, “This image is so and so,” only then do you remain in human society.

Anybody could be caught by these things and lost in them—some throw the experience away saying it is all nonsense, and thereby losing their best value, for these are the creative images.

Another may identify himself with the images and become a crank or a fool. Question: What is the date of this dream?
Dr. Jung: December 1913.

All this is Mithraic symbolism from beginning to end. In 1910 I had a dream of a Gothic cathedral in which Mass was being celebrated.

Suddenly the whole side wall of the cathedral caved in, and herds of cattle, with ringing bells, trooped into the church.

You may remember that Cumont remarks that if something had happened to disrupt Christianity in the third century, the world would be Mithraic today. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 99-108