LECTURE I 15 October 1930
Dr. Jung:
Ladies and Gentlemen: My plan was to go on with the series of dreams that we have been dealing with these last two years.
But I have just given a course of German lectures about unconscious pictures, and as a consequence I have been asked to repeat that course here.
So I had to make up my mind to interrupt the Dream series and to give the same lectures in English which I have just given in German.
Now, naturally, I have been asked by only a few persons, and since we are living in a democratic country, I should much prefer to have you vote on this plan.
I must explain to you that the lectures are about the development, one might say, of the transcendent function out of dreams and visions, and the actual representations of those images which ultimately serve in the synthesis of the individual: the reconciliation of the pairs of opposites and the whole process of symbol formation.
(The Class voted for the pictures.)
I have not always applied that "picture method," as it is now sometimes called.
People always try to make a method of everything that seems to work, but I much prefer to treat the subject not as a method, but as a series of events which we observe, without drawing too many
and too far-reaching conclusions from it.
We don't know enough about it to call it a method, a word which in natural science means an absolutely certain way which must yield certain results.
It is not that. It is a point of view, a sort of hypothesis, and I don't even want to give the impression that it is a usual procedure.
As I said, I prefer to deal with that subject as just a case which we observe and on which we pronounce no opinion or judgment, whether the thing is advisable or not advisable.
It is certainly not a method in the sense of being a necessary procedure, that one ought to draw pictures.
People take it up because it is a natural expression, as when one's words do not suffice to explain a point under discussion, one makes a drawing or a diagram to explain it.
For there are certain happenings in the development of the human psyche where things become particularly confused and dark, and people become incoherent and cannot express themselves.
Situations come up in dreams which seemed to be very clear, but as soon as you are back in the conscious state, everything is blurred and you find it exceedingly difficult to describe what you actually experienced; you have no words to explain those intricate situations.
There are many thoughts which cannot be thought clearly; and there are many inner experiences which are apparent only to the inner eye or heart-whatever you like to call that organ.
It seems perfectly simple there, but human language is inadequate, and then people take to drawing.
Also, certain experiences in dreams or visions are so expressive, so full of color and plastic life, that they recommend themselves to the dreamer, and he naturally yields to the temptation to reproduce what he has seen.
So there are all sorts of reasons why people take to it.
Of course, when I see that the quality of my patients' experiences suggests representation, I encourage them, because I have learned through long experience-about fourteen years when to encourage the people
to whom it is useful. It helps them to concretize inner events.
For most people are suffering from the prejudice that they are not real because they cannot be handled, or even talked about in a logical way.
In such a case the drawing is invaluable.
It concretizes; it makes a statement so that other people can see it.
It is there in reality as if painted on the wall; they begin to think that it does exist.
You see, we are still so foolish in our psychology that quite intellectual people are unable to admit the reality of psychical facts.
I see that in practical analysis all the time.
For instance, a person speaks reverently about a venerable old man though he has a grudge against him and thinks he is a damned fool.
But he denies the thought, he insists that he would never say such a thing.
Then I ask: "But who has said it?"
We have not enough objectivity to admit that we have had a certain thought, that it has been present.
I am not speaking of idiots and liars, but of perfectly reasonable everyday people with good and logical minds.
I have to train people with logical minds.
I remember a professor of psychiatry who had a dream in which he showed tremendous emotion about a certain man-he was beating him up-and when he told it to me, I remarked th~t it was obvious from his dream that he had some personal emotion or resentment about Mr. So-and-So. "Oh no, I have not, I never had such a feeling."
Then I said: "Now tell me, have !had that dream?" But he could not acknowledge the fact that such a thought had been present.
It is as if a very strange bird should turn up in this room-a flamingo, for instance-and then fly out of the window again.
One might say that it was impossible that such a bird had been here; it was a hallucination.
But as a scientist I would say it was a fact that a certain vision had taken place, and there was no getting away from it.
People deny their thoughts and visions till they become so flimsy that they simply evaporate into thin air and it seems as if they had never existed.
Again and again, patients have had quite definite experiences, but they could not hold therri because they were inner experiences; they exposed them to conscious criticism, which poured in and lacerated those facts till after a while nothing was left.
I remember a case of compulsion neurosis, a man who ought to have taken up his studies again at the University.
We had made the agreement, after long and tedious work, that he would do so if the analysis showed that it was necessary.
The moment came when I said: "This is what you are to do, provided you can make up your mind." And he acknowledged it, he said it was perfectly logical.
Next day he came and announced that he had had an interesting dream that night.
I was about to ask if he had registered his name at the University when he told me the dream, which showed me that he had made a re-gression.
I said to him: "Tell me, are you not receding from something into the past?”
"Not at all," he said, "I feel perfectly all right." I said: "But what about our plan-we agreed to yesterday?" "What plan? I can't remember." It was all gone-entirely gone!
So I said: "Oh, if it goes as easily as that, then you go as easily as that-there is the door!" That case was finished.
No use continuing an analysis under such conditions.
What happened there was simply that he had submitted that psychological fact to the disintegrating process.
He allowed it to go on till no trace was left. And that happens all the time with inner experiences; they are disintegrated by actual facts and criticism.
But when such an experience is put into drawing and color, it is as if it had taken form.
It works like magic sometimes, as if it had been born into reality; people cannot deny it, having seen it externally.
For instance, if you tell a man that you have discovered a goldmine, he doesn't quite believe it; there is doubt in the background of his mind, and after a fortnight he thinks it was a funny illusion.
But if you pull out a handful of gold dust or nuggets of gold, that makes an impression on him, that convinces him.
We are as primitive as that. So in order to hold an inner experience, it is almost a necessity for certain people to see it expressed in external physical form.
That is such an important point that one really might be tempted to call it a method, but I do not feel quite safe because these things are very delicate and complicated.
You will see from the way I handle this case that I take it as facts which we observe.
And in order to see how such a procedure develops, I am giving you first a series of dreams in which the events that ultimately led to pictures are demonstrated.
Our patient is a woman of about thirty years of age.
She is highly educated, very intelligent, a typical intellectual, with an almost mathematical mind.
She is a natural scientist by education and exceedingly rational.
She has a great deal of intuition, which really ought to function but is repressed because it yields irrational results, and that is very disagreeable to the rational mind.
Such a case, a mental attitude of such a character, is likely to come up against a situation early in life where that attitude becomes useless.
If fate is benevolent, one soon gets into a tight hole. If fate is not benevolent, it allows one to live a long time with such an attitude, and so one loses a lot of opportunities in life.
This woman got into a hole at about thirty.
That is pretty decent; obviously her fate is benevolent, it has given her a chance at thirty.
Other people only have their chance at forty-five or fifty.
I have seen people even at sixty who finally discovered that they had seen only half of the world, that they had lived only half of their life, which is of course a very sad discovery at that age.
People with such a one-sided development of their thinking function have on the other side an inferior feeling function, because feeling is opposite to thinking.
The feeling is then archaic and has all the advantages and disadvantages of an archaic function.
The inferior function is generally characterized by traits of primitive psychology-above all by participation mystique-that is, it makes one peculiarly identical with other people or with other situations.
Our patient had the feelings that circumstances gave her.
She could think hypothetically, but she could not feel hypothetically.
As a matter of fact, her intelligence was so highly developed that she thought things that the people in her environment did not think; she even made it her ideal to be unlike other people.
And because her thinking was so differentiated and so different from other people's, it put her into a strange position with everybody.
There was no approach, no bridge to her.
She was secluded, a tour d 'ivoire, and she naturally suffered from that ice-cold isolation.
Now, her inferior feeling is in the foundations of that tour d 'ivoire and has secret passages, underground ways where it can escape, and because it is blind like a mole one does not know where it will turn up.
But you can be sure it establishes connections somewhere.
If you are absolutely isolated, like a lighthouse in the sea, so that nobody can approach, if you are perfect in your perfectly differentiated function, then underneath something escapes in the night.
It digs underground passages and bores into other people, perhaps.
This woman is rational, married, propagating the species, everything is quite all right, yet she is completely isolated.
Of course many people who are married are not particularly connected, and others who are not married are able to connect very well.
People often marry because it is an institution, it is the rational thing to do, but there is no real union.
So it is quite inevitable, when not living in relatedness, that feeling simply cannot climb to the heights of the head; it is overwhelmed by the intellect apparently and disappears, but reappears
projected upon a man who, of course, is not the husband.
That is a woman's case, and there are similar cases with men.
The lack of relatedness is then compensated by a sudden magic relationship, a fascination, a participation mystique.
Therefore it is usually love at first sight and the most compulsory form of love.
It is natural that our patient suffered from such a problem, which means the ultimate conflict between her rational thinking and primitive nature.
I omit personal details intentionally, because they matter so little to me.
We are all spellbound by external circumstances, and they make our minds deviate from the real thing, which is that we ourselves are split inside.
Appearance blinds us and we cannot see the real problem.
Quite naturally, being in such a red-hot conflict, this young woman did not know what to do.
She tried all the usual things, squashing it, insisting that it did not exist, trying to put the whole thing out of reality, and it did not work.
Naturally it would not work.
It became a moral conflict, conjuring the Ten Commandments and God knows what, but nothing would work, not even the wrath of God, because it was a superior fact which really was not a destructive element.
It was the very best thing that could happen to her, the kindness of nature that wanted to make a whole of her and not half an egg.
When she had made every attempt to squash what she understood to be the most amazing nonsense, she finally gave up and collapsed.
Then she heard of my existence and thought I might be a fellow who knew some magic word, so she came to me, very much in the attitude of the primitive woman who goes to the medicine man and says: "Here is a hen and a beautiful black pig as an offering, and now kindly perform your miracles upon me."
I had no trouble in showing her that such an attitude was a mistake. She was soon on the right track.
She understood that it was entirely up to her, and there was no question of a miracle.
I said: "I don't know what to do, I have not the slightest idea how to solve such a problem, I am an ordinary human being, and if ordinary human beings knew what to do, they would not have laws."
The law makes the statement that it is wise to keep within a certain row of poles-laws always make the impression upon me of a row of telegraph poles set out in the desert.
You can travel where you like, but you may go astray.
If you are not a perfect fool you will follow that line, a simple way marked out in chaos.
I can only say that millions and millions of human beings have most certainly gone through the same situation.
It is a typical situation-you know these love situations are most banal, and in every generation the conscious answers differ.
You would be terribly shocked at the way Luther solved the problem. "If your wife is no good," he said, "take your servant."
We have entirely different views now, but that was a holy man.
His friend Bugenhagens had three wives, all perfectly legitimate, and Luther himself had two; they still show his bedroom with the three beds.
That is what people in those days did. And there are old civilizations now where they have no trouble at all in knowing what to do in such a case.
Sure enough, that situation has repeated itself innumerable times, and man's mind or consciousness or psyche is a system of methods of adaptation, ways of dealing with the facts of life.
For instance, we have eyes because there is sun; our eyes and ears are systems of adaptation, and our psyche is exactly the same, adapted not only to exterior conditions but also to conflicts within.
Mythological motifs contain many typically human situations-such as the fairy-tale motif where a man is trapped somewhere or caught by dwarfs and put into a place where he cannot escape; then in the night a little mouse comes and tells him if he does so-and-so, he can get out.
This is the motif of the helpful animal intervening when all is lost and only catastrophe lies ahead; it is help out of a tight corner.
Now these animals in fairy tales are merely representatives of lower instinctive forces in man.
One might observe the flight of birds, for instance, in order to be shown where there is water.
Or a man might leave it to his horse to smell the water.
Or if there are no helpful animals around, he might take to magic-make a sand-drawing, or try a magic rod over the ground-and his unconscious will tell him where the water is.
Now these are facts, and I say, if the unconscious can help in such cases, why not in this woman's situation?
I am pretty sure that the unconscious contains a solution, so I propose to my patient to watch its activity as given through dreams.
For we do not make the dreams, they simply come up from the unconscious; we don't know whether they are true or not, and it is a matter of our experience to find out whether they are merely nonsense.
She agreed to this idea and so we started in with her analysis.
At first, as is usually the case, the dreams contained more personal stuff, all sorts of little resistances and wrong attitudes; but when all that was settled, they began to touch the fundamental things and to
prepare very carefully an attitude favorable for the production of the symbols which would bring about the solution of the problem.
We begin now with the dreams which occurred when the first part of the analysis, all the personal part, was practically over.
I was trying to play some music and all the different members of my family were interfering.
I was on a terrace looking out over the sea, when a rich Jew at the next table began to play also.
The music that he played was so beautiful that I stopped playing for a minute myself to listen to him.
This is a very simple dream. Do you know what the music means?
Mrs. Baynes: Feeling.
Dr. Jung: Yes, since she is very intellectual it is most probable that we would encounter most of her feeling in the unconscious.
The dream brings up that problem. She is playing with her feelings, compensating her chiefly intellectual attitude during the day.
Even in analysis she takes the whole thing chiefly from an intellectual viewpoint and uses her feelings very little, because they are not manageable, not disposable in reality.
Therefore she uses them in the dream.
For example, old Socrates was a very rational man, and he had a sort of humorous daemon that whispered very wise advice to him.
On one occasion he was walking through the streets of Athens in deep conversation with a friend, rationalizing the world as usual, when suddenly the daemon made him go into a side street; and no sooner was he there than a large herd of pigs came down the street he had left, trampling down every passerby (a nice light on the Athens of antiquity-herds of pigs on the main streets!) as he would have been trampled down had he not followed his daemon's advice.
Then on another occasion, probably after a strenuous night of rational talking, the daemon said: "Thou shouldst make more music, Socrates.
He couldn't get it, but after a great deal of thought he finally bought a flute!
I am not denying his justification in doing this, though to us it is funny.
Music in those days meant the Dionysian element, which was very much a feeling affair, quite the reverse of the usual rational attitude of Socrates.
So my patient was admonished to play music, but what is hidden in the unconscious does not exist in the conscious-or not sufficientlyand she observes that while she is trying to play, the members of her
family continually interfere.
Mrs. Wickes: The conventional family is interfering in the love life.
Dr. Jung: When she tries to play her feelings-use her own feelings-it suddenly becomes evident that the entire family is against it. "Such a terrible thing must not happen in our family!"
Yet despite this holy family, she insists upon playing. Then a rich Jew nearby plays very much better than she and therefore she gives up.
But how can these feelings develop if she cannot use them?
She must pathetically admit that she has to exercise them just to keep them alive, and naturally her family and everybody in her surroundings will be dead against it and advise her not to have any feelings.
But then something rather subtle happens: the opposition of the family does not kill her, but the fact that somebody plays better than she kills her.
Now just what the rich Jew means is a bit cryptic.
Do not forget that this woman is a Protestant of Puritan extraction.
We must go a little more deeply into the psychology of the Protestant religion.
Mrs. Norris: The Jew stands for authority.
Dr. Jung: Of course, anyone who plays better than she would have a certain authority. He might be a great artist.
Miss Sergeant: He stands for beauty and love of art.
Dr. Jung: Well, there is a far more immediate connection.
His religion is not the religion of the New Testament; he has never heard of St. Paul.
And in the unconscious of the Protestant one finds a Jew; the worldly success of the Protestant comes from the fact that he is a Jew inside.
For instance, my great-grandfather on my mother's side was a very pious Protestant, and he believed that the language spoken in Heaven was Hebrew.
Therefore he became a professor of the Hebrew language; he wanted to make ready, in order to be a sort of guardian angel who understood the language of that company.
On the other side he was a Jew.
That is the reason why children in those days were given Jewish names; it had nothing whatever to do with the New Testament.
So the whole mental makeup of the Protestant showed that he believed in authority, he worshipped the law, he did not worship the God of love, he did not believe in a God of tolerance.
There is no comparison between what is called Christian love in the Protestant church and what the Catholic church can do in that respect.
The Catholic church can stomach anything, but the Protestant church can stomach nothing.
The Protestant has a very hysterical stomach and easily gets upset; they are a terribly scrupulous lot.
That Jew is this woman's unconscious mind, the unconscious man in her.
I suppose everybody here knows about the animus in woman, namely, a figure personifying the opinionating of a woman.
I cannot put it better-unrealized, ready-made opinions spoken with authority.
I know women who have an opinion about everything; yet when I say yes, that is so, they are disappointed.
They want me to say no. But ifl said no, that unconscious man would come up and have a terrible row with me.
For that opinion in a woman is a man who wants to fight, who makes enemies; she is very often a victim of that unconscious figure.
Of course, a man has a corresponding female figure, the anima, but that manifests itself differently.
This Jew is an animus of great wealth, which means great power, great authority, and he is in possession of her feelings.
Naturally everything which falls into the unconscious of a woman is possessed by the animus.
He is there with open mouth and catches everything that falls down from the table of her consciousness, and the more she is unaware of the other side, the more powerful he is.
For instance, it is practically a rule of thumb in analyzing a woman that, after I have gotten along quite smoothly with her for a while, suddenly everything goes wrong; she begins to argue and everything has capsized apparently.
And it is all the work of the animus; suddenly the animus has overridden her and made a complete mess of the whole thing.
I ask how all this has come about, and she doesn't know.
So I say: "Well, your animus has been starved, he is very hungry, and he then becomes particularly attentive.
You were apparently not conscious enough, you didn't watch your treasures; you didn't watch a feeling, let us say, for a while. Some infinitesimal part of yourself has been left unconscious and instantly the animus seizes itand having eaten it, he is strong again and begins to argue."
For instance, it sometimes happens that a woman shows me her feelings in a particularly nice way-gives me flowers or something of the sort.
But then again, when such an expression suggests itself, up comes the thought, Dr. Jung knows so many women who have transferences and send flowers, so why should I?-and they let it go.
That is food for the animus.
It may be a very inconsiderable thing, a quantite negligeable, but they should have expressed a feeling, thanked me for something perhaps, and they neglect it. Instantly it turns round into the unconscious,
and that neglected little feeling duty develops into a most murderous discussion if one is fool enough to allow it.
The only thing a man can do is to agree with her opinions, to punish her by a disappointment.
Then she suddenly discovers that she has been the victim of an evil spirit.
There is a very nice German folk song about a little hunchback who follows a girl; everywhere she goes there he is, always saying something evil which spoils the pleasure, a sort of whispering ghost inserting his poison.
That is the animus.
In this dream, then, the subtle fact happens that she is not stopped in her music by actual obstruction through her relations or her ideas as expressed by her relations, but by a factor in herself-that figure who turns up playing far more wonderful music than she ever could.
That comes from the fact that psychologically she is not master of her inferior function, as a man with differentiated feeling is never completely in possession of his thinking, but is suddenly possessed by a thought.
A thought alights upon his brain like a bird, and it won't go away when he wants it to go away, and it won't come when he wants it to come.
The differentiated function is at one's disposal; it is identical with one's will and within one's reach.
But the inferior function is nature. It may partially obey one, but it is never entirely under one's control.
For instance, I may talk to this lady of her child, or of the books which interest her, and she has an identical feeling tone.
There the feeling is allowedinasmuch as it is guided by the intellect and feels in the right way.
But the feeling which is allowed in the conscious you could compare to that part of nature which is cultivated in your garden.
It is nature, but nature chosen by yourself, by no means the unrestrained, uncontrollable force of nature in a primeval forest.
The rest of the function, which is by far the most wonderful part really, is not under your guidance.
It belongs to nature, to the nature of the soul, to all those realms which you cannot possibly control, because they are unconscious and as if under the power of that mysterious figure.
The animus, or the anima, is felt by the primitive, or by an unprejudiced man who does not think intellectually, as a most powerful presence-like a daemon or a god.
So one could say that a god began to play in her, and therefore she had to stop.
But in using the word god I may arouse prejudice, for I am not using it in a particularly favorable sense-if you understand the word rightly, in the antique sense, it means a power.
She must make the attempt to play herself, and nothing should discourage her, even if the gods do it better.
And if the god, the power, takes the form of the animus, then especially she must not allow herself to be stopped, inasmuch as the interference of the animus here would be completely negative.
So if I am allowed to use the word god at all, I use it naturally in the antique sense which may be quite negative.
You see, the gods had too many scandalous love affairs, they made themselves ridiculous and lost their authority.
The primitive man could stand it because he only looked on and naively marveled.
As nowadays, when a white man gets into a tight corner, the natives just sit around and wonder what he is going to do next.
So the primitive man watched his gods, and if they did something particularly immoral, it was yet admirable; the greatest obscenity was regarded with awe.
But to a higher civilization, they were ridiculous when they became disreputable, so they finally collapsed and new gods entered the scene.
The new attitude of the patient ought to be that of the more civilized man.
She should criticize her animus, she should say it was outrageous that he should stop her playing, she should not allow him to stop her.
That is what I told her.
The next dream came the same night: I was going to see a doctor who lived in a house by the sea. I lost my way and desperately asked people to put me on the right path so that I could get to him.
Naturally when she dreams of the doctor, everybody is inclined to think he is myself; since she is under my treatment that must refer to me.
It is only funny that the unconscious does not say so more definitely.
Of course anybody who analyzes dreams according to Freud's point of view would say that it was I, but I am not so sure.
If the unconscious wanted to convey the idea that it was Dr. Jung, it would say so; the dream itself, which we cannot criticize, would have brought me in.
But the dream says a doctor who lived by the sea, and the lake of Zurich is not a sea.
Therefore there is some change in the whole situation, and we see that behind the impressions of daily life, behind the scenes, looms up another picture, covered by a thin veil of actual facts.
In order to understand dreams, one must learn to think like that; one should not judge dreams from realities only, because in the long run that leads nowhere.
The dream lives in an atmosphere which is not our atmosphere in this hard conscious world, where if one does not pay attention to realities as such, they simply drag one under.
But on the other side such realities mean little.
Sometimes the veils are so thin that one perceives at once the greater picture behind the veil of facts.
So what we call important here, the stupendous fact that she is now actually under my treatment, that I have a house on the bank of a lake where she comes almost daily to hear disagreeable news, all that becomes like a mist.
One can look through it to another picture, to that dream doctor whose house is by the sea-a different, big, sort of heroic landscape by the sea.
Here we have a view of a few miles, no view at all, but in the dream there is a tremendous horizon, the vastness of the ocean, an extraordinary view.
Also, a house placed on the shore of the sea is quite different from a villa on the bank of the lake of Zurich; one gets into an entirely different atmosphere.
Moreover, there is no question in reality of her losing her way.
She would not lose her way in finding my house; she has been two months under my treatment, and even if she lost her way there would be no desperate asking for it.
But if that house were a strange house, if that doctor were a strange doctor, then she might lose her way; it is vast country, and she might have to fight desperately to find the way to that place.
Now that is the kind of archetypal image which puts one right back into prehistoric ages. She is in terrible trouble, she feels cheated by a daemon or, say, by a hostile god.
In such an archetypal situation, under such conditions, what can she do?
What can a mortal do against the interference of the gods?
But primitives know that there are certain doctors, medicine men, who have mana, prestige, healing powerwhatever you like to call it-and are therefore supposed to stand between the gods and the ordinary crowd.
The medicine man is the guardian of all those unknown and uncanny things which ordinary people don't know about.
This woman is in the position of the primitive cave woman who is haunted by a hostile god, so she seeks the help of the medicine man who has been there since eternity.
Usually he lives alone and in an inaccessible place.
You find excellent descriptions of such men in Rider Haggard's stories, that famous big-headed man who lives in an uncanny gorge, for instance.
Not only is he himself a queer bird, but the place where he lives is queer, far away, magic and fascinating, which adds of course to his prestige.
Since the place chosen is expressive of his own psychology, the medicine man always chooses an extraordinary place, and the more· difficult to find the better, for of course the medicine man is never here, he is always in some strange corner of the world-beyond the seas.
For instance, we have perfectly good doctors here, but in a case of serious illness, we have a consultation with a doctor from abroad because good medicine is always far away.
In Africa, there were medicine men who were general practitioners, but in any extraordinary case they got an authority from Uganda.
He was the head sorcerer, because they assumed that the people living beyond the mountains had the authority, since great men are always living somewhere else.
People are so impressed by the ordinary quality of their surroundings that they never suspect that Mr. So-and-So is a great genius.
They can't imagine that he would live on such an ordinary street; that does not appeal to their feelings.
Of course, this fact is used by medicine men as a device to build up their prestige, as is done in all the countries of the world-like the academic diploma which a doctor must have for prestige. And successful doctors must have a certain cock-sureness, the patients expect it; otherwise it isn't good treatment.
Therefore also we have all those terrible words-we prefer the Latin language.
If a fellow is mad, one must say, "This is a paranoid form of schizophrenia."
I have known people to pay five hundred dollars for those words!
So this woman who is now seeking the great healer would make a great mistake to see the great healer in me.
To find the medicine man, she must travel far, she must toil, she must ask her way desperately to that far and unknown place.
Naturally her first leap was at me, but I said no, thank you, for she would hang me later on if things went wrong.
That doctor will most certainly be hard, very difficult; those primitive medicine men do terrible things, they torture people!
And then she will cry: ''You said you were the great Medicine Man-you led me on that way!"
So I don't make for that moment; right from the beginning, I decline the great honor of being called the medicine man.
If a dream should say that someone was going to Dr. C. G. Jung living on Seestrasse, Kiisnacht, then I would admit it referred to myself.
But if the police should ask her who that doctor was who had led her such a hell of a way, and she explained that he was the doctor who lived by the shore of the sea, they would never have heard of him, any more than I recognize myself from that description.
The problem is much greater than I, and it is wise to hold fast to the words the dream gives, because one cannot expect to be wiser than nature.
Freud would say wish-fulfillment-a resistance; she wishes not to find her way to you because things are getting disagreeable.
And that is the truth too, there are doubts in her; it is such a novelty to her that the unconscious should find a solution where she does not.
For we are bored by the unconscious, and we have tremendous pride and imagination about ourselves, about the power of our consciousness, because we really are efficient.
Who has built those powerful machines?
Our conscious of course, and so we believe in it, and we think of that unconscious self as nothing, a more or less disreputable appendix to the wonderful light up in our heads.
Therefore if I said to her: "Apparently you have great difficulty in getting to that doctor. What are your resistances?"
I would be on the wrong track.
For she would gladly accept that personal aspect, she would see a loophole, she would say to herself: "That man likes to assume the role of the Great Healer. I will hand all my stuff to him and if he does not succeed, woe to him!"
She would have somebody to make responsible if things did not turn out as they should.
So I have learned from painful experience to interpret dreams correctly.
The healer is again the animus.
This time he is no longer a musician, he appears in the guise of a doctor, and you will see later that he takes on many different forms.
Now on that occasion I explained to this lady what I understood about the animus, and the relation between the animus and the unconscious, as I explained it to you.
And it happened that when she went home she felt very sleepy and lay down, expecting to fall asleep. Instead, she merely got into a very drowsy condition and saw with her inner eyes two hypnagogic visions:
A beautiful peacock was perched on the back of a man, and the beak of the peacock was pointed at the man's neck.
Then this picture disappeared and another one came up where she was just seeing herself, she was looking down at a large hole in her shoe, and she thought that it was so worn that she could not wear it
any longer.
Now these two visions were her first ones, and they came quite spontaneously.
She happened to notice them, and naturally she did not understand them at all.
As the first picture, the peacock, was exceedingly symbolic, I asked for her associations, and she said it was a most beautiful bird when it spread out its tail, it had gorgeous colors, blue eyes, and all that. I felt what she meant; it is again an experience difficult to describe but if you have a feeling heart, you will understand.
When that marvellous beauty of color and form and light appears, you have a feeling of unfolding lines, and that is what the peacock stands for in the history of symbolism: the spring and the sunrise.
The idea was that his flesh was incorruptible.
In the early Christian church, and in the sermons of St. Augustine and St. Anthony of Padua, for instance, the peacock was a symbol of resurrection.
That was because with the approach of winter he loses his feathers and regains them again with the sun in the spring.
So he symbolizes regeneration, and as such he is depicted in the early church, meaning the resurrection of the soul.
He also symbolizes the Redeemer, because he brings back the divine childhood, rebirth.
In the East, the peacock plays a more unfavorable role.
It is a proud Lucifer kind of bird there, self-produced, and disobedient to the creator.
In the Kurd tribes there were so-called devil worshippers who worshipped the peacock as a symbol of the creative power, again the unfolding of spring.
They worshipped him for the same reason that the French peasants in the thirteenth century worshipped the devil: there was a prolonged period of black plague, wars, etc., and since their prayers to
the good God were perfectly useless, since he didn't help and disaster pursued them, they began to celebrate the Black Mass-they reversed the Christian rite for the worship of Satan.
That was the origin of the devil worship which still flourished in the eighteenth century.
Three times the Black Mass was said for Mme. de Montespan in order to keep the love of the king, and each time they sacrificed a living child.
The Mass was celebrated on the abdomen of a living woman, and the cross was reversed. Instead of wine, the blood of the slaughtered child was in the communion cup. It was the Evil One, Sheitan, the creative principle, whom they worshipped, and it was under the symbol of the peacock.
Naturally it is the same peacock, spring, the sudden vision of the unfolding of beauty and form.
All this material was of course not conscious to our patient.
She was vaguely aware that it had some religious meaning, but what it was she did not know.
In the fantasy, the peacock is perched on the back of a man, and the back always symbolizes the unconscious side.
The unconscious bounds our field of vision, and therefore the shadow becomes the symbol of man's unconscious.
The primitive man is always haunted by the feeling of a presence, as if someone were following him, and we can observe the same thing in ourselves. In the silence of the night on a lonely path you
feel that someone is surely following you, and you look behind to see.
And if you are quite alone in a house, after a while there is a noise, as if something had been said, and you get the feeling of a presence.
The primitives sought for the cause of that feeling and have expressed it by the idea of the living shadow behind one, and that shadow, that power behind one, became a precious idea.
The Greeks have a beautiful word for it: synopad6s, meaning the one that comes with me and is behind me.
But that is by no means what we would call shadow, a lack of light, but a living thing of great mana, great power.
Therefore if you tread on it, or if a shadow falls upon you, it is most dangerous.
If you are sitting in the sun and the shadow of a medicine man, walking past, falls upon you, you are dead in a fortnight.
There have been many cases where people were accused of having killed a child in that way, the fact being that the child was playing in the sun when a man inadvertently passed; his shadow fell
on the child and in two months, perhaps, the child died.
Although the shadow has the simplest causes, it is mysterious, it has different qualities-it has no body or weight, for instance.
Sometimes it reaches very far, from miles back, and sometimes it disappears altogether in a ghostlike way.
They describe it as a cool wind. Ghosts are shadows and Hades is the shadow world, the shadows dwell there.
It is also often symbolized as a bird that flies away.
The idea is that when we die, we become shadows and put on wings, feathered garments.
In the Gilgamesh epic there is a description of that sad place where souls wear feathered garments.
So here the peacock assumes the role of a sort of ghost that possesses the man.
We must always cling to our original hypothesis that this is again the animus, this is the man in her; and the vision now says that behind that man is a new principle that possesses him.
It is his genius that sits behind him like the king's hawk, or the eagle of Zeus; it is the peacock-ghost of unfolding, of beauty, of spring.
This is an almost prophetic vision and it is very difficult to translate.
Therefore I prefer to hold fast, quite naively, to the picture itself.
There is still one detail to which I call your attention-that the peacock is holding his beak to the man's neck.
There is a slight menace in it.
If the man should make a wrong move, the peacock might kill him from that position; he might stab him in a vital place, breaking his neck.
It suggests that this man is controlled from the unconscious by that powerful being, which means that the animus we saw expressed as the rich Jew, or the doctor, or anybody else, is not only the animus really.
The animus is himself controlled by something much greater, by the spirit of creation, or sunrise, or rebirth.
And that means, too, that if this woman maintains the right relationship to the man, she might attain rebirth through the realization of the magical spirit that controls her, the daimonion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 3-19
