The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of Analyt

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of Analyt

Postby admin » Fri Apr 26, 2019 5:41 am

The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of Analytical Psychology
by C.G. Jung
Bollingen Series XX
The Collected Works of C.G. Jung
The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings
Volume 18
Edited and translated by Gerhard Adler & R.F.C. Hull
1957-1979
Editors: Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, F.R.C.Psych., Hon. F.B.PS.S., Gerhard Adler, Ph.D., William McGuire, executive editor

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Table of Contents:

• I: The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of Analytical Psychology
o Editorial Note
o Prefatory Note to the Original Edition
o Lecture I
o Lecture II
o Lecture III
o Lecture IV
o Lecture V

Allen Dulles served with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a Round Table creation that would eventually become the CIA, and of which he would become head. In 1938, US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt executed a secret agreement with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which in effect ceded U.S. sovereignty to England, by agreeing to let the Special Operations Executive (SOE) control U.S. policies. To implement this agreement, Roosevelt sent General “Wild Bill” Donovan to London before setting up the OSS under the aegis of SOE-MI6. The entire OSS program, as well as the CIA, have since worked on guidelines set up by the Tavistock Institute. [12]....

According to the author of Mind Control The Ultimate Terror, it was through Mengele that the MK-Ultra and Monarch programs were developed. The project was begun in the 1950s, and coordinated by the British psychological warfare unit called the Tavistock Institute, with the Scottish Rite Freemasons, the CIA, and other British, American, Canadian, and UN agencies. [25] The Tavistock Institute, formed at Oxford University, London, by the RIIA [Royal Institute of International Affairs] in 1922, became the Psychiatric Division of the British Army during World War II. [26]

-- Terrorism and the Illuminati: A Three Thousand Year History, by David Livingston
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Re: The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of An

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I. THE TAVISTOCK LECTURES

On the Theory and Practice of Analytical Psychology

EDITORIAL NOTE


C. G. Jung was invited by the Institute of Medical Psychology (Tavistock Clinic), Malet Place, London, at the instigation of Dr. J. A. Hadfield, to give a series of five lectures, which he delivered September 30 to October 4, 1935. According to the 1935 report of the Institute, the Lectures when announced were not titled. The audience, of some two hundred, consisted chiefly of members of the medical profession. A stenographic record was taken of the lectures and the subsequent discussions; the transcript was edited by Mary Barker and Margaret Game, passed by Professor Jung, and printed by mimeograph for private distribution by the Analytical Psychology Club of London, in 1936, under the title “Fundamental Psychological Conceptions: A Report of Five Lectures by C. G. Jung …” The work has become widely known as “The Tavistock Lectures” or “The London Seminars.”

Passages from the Lectures were published in a French translation by Dr. Roland Cahen in his edition of Jung’s L’Homme à la découverte de son âme (Geneva, 1944; cf. infra, pars. 1357ff.), where the editor inserted them in a transcript of a series of seminars that Jung gave to the Société de Psychologie of Basel in 1934. Jung included much of the same material in both the London and Basel series as well as in lectures given in 1934 and 1935 at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich.

The present text underwent stylistic revision by R.F.C. Hull, under the supervision of the Editors of the Collected Works, and the footnotes inserted by the original editors were augmented (in square brackets). The text was published in 1968 under the title Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice; The Tavistock Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books, and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), with the addition of a foreword, by E. A. Bennet, and an appendix giving biographical details of the participants in the discussion (both now omitted).

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Mrs. Barker and Mrs. Game, for their co-operation; to those living among the participants in the discussions who gave permission to reproduce their remarks; to Dr. Roland Cahen; and to Mr. Sidney Gray, present secretary of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, for his assistance. For advice in the preparation of the notes, the Editors are obliged to Joseph Campbell, J. Desmond Clark, Etienne Gilson, Norbert Guterman, Mrs. Lilly Jung, E. Dale Saunders, and Mrs. Ruth Spiegel.
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PREFATORY NOTE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

This report of Professor Jung’s Lectures to the Institute of Medical Psychology is edited under the auspices of the Analytical Psychology Club, London.

On the whole the report is verbatim, though it has been considered advisable to alter the construction of certain sentences with a view to avoiding any ambiguity of meaning. The editors can only hope that in making these minor changes they have not destroyed the very individual flavour of the Lectures.

In a few cases it was found impossible to ascertain the names of those taking part in the discussions, nor was it practicable to submit proofs of their questions to each of the speakers. For this deficiency and for any possible errors in the reporting of questions we offer our apology.

The stencils of the charts, diagrams, and drawings have been cut with Professor Jung’s permission from the originals in his possession.1

Our thanks are due to the Institute of Medical Psychology not only for giving the Analytical Psychology Club permission to report the Lectures but also for facilitating the work in every way. To Miss Toni Wolff we would express our special gratitude for helping us with our task. Finally, and above all, we wish to thank Professor Jung for answering questions about difficult points and for passing the report in its final form.

MARY BARKER
MARGARET GAME
London, October 1935
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Re: The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of An

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Part 1 of 2

LECTURE I

The Chairman (Dr. H. Crichton-Miller):

[1] Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here to express your welcome to Professor Jung, and it gives me great pleasure to do so. We have looked forward, Professor Jung, to your coming for several months with happy anticipation. Many of us no doubt have looked forward to these seminars hoping for new light. Most of us, I trust, are looking forward to them hoping for new light upon ourselves. Many have come here because they look upon you as the man who has saved modern psychology from a dangerous isolation in the range of human knowledge and science into which it was drifting. Some of us have come here because we respect and admire that breadth of vision with which you have boldly made the alliance between philosophy and psychology which has been so condemned in certain other quarters. You have restored for us the idea of value, the concept of human freedom in psychological thought; you have given us certain new ideas that to many of us have been very precious, and above all things you have not relinquished the study of the human psyche at the point where all science ends. For this and many other benefits which are known to each of us independently and individually we are grateful to you, and we anticipate with the highest expectations these meetings.

Professor Jung:

[2] Ladies and Gentlemen: First of all I should like to point out that my mother tongue is not English; thus if my English is not too good I must ask your forgiveness for any error I may commit.

[3] As you know, my purpose is to give you a short outline of certain fundamental conceptions of psychology. If my demonstration is chiefly concerned with my own principles or my own point of view, it is not that I overlook the value of the great contributions of other workers in this field. I do not want to push myself unduly into the foreground, but I can surely expect my audience to be as much aware of Freud’s and Adler’s merits as I am.

[4] Now as to our procedure, I should like to give you first a short idea of my programme. We have two main topics to deal with, namely, on the one side the concepts concerning the structure of the unconscious mind and its contents; on the other, the methods used in the investigation of contents originating in the unconscious psychic processes. The second topic falls into three parts, first, the word-association method; second, the method of dream-analysis; and third, the method of active imagination.

[5] I know, of course, that I am unable to give you a full account of all there is to say about such difficult topics as, for instance, the philosophical, religious, ehical, and social problems peculiar to the collective consciousness of our time, or the processes of the collective unconscious and the comparative mythological and historical researches necessary for their elucidation. These topics, although apparently remote, are yet the most potent factors in making, regulating, and disturbing the personal mental condition, and they also form the root of disagreement in the field of psychological theories. Although I am a medical man and therefore chiefly concerned with psychopathology, I am nevertheless convinced that this particular branch of psychology can only be benefited by a considerably deepened and more extensive knowledge of the normal psyche in general. The doctor especially should never lose sight of the fact that diseases are disturbed normal processes and not entia per se with a psychology exclusively their own. Similia similibus curantur is a remarkable truth of the old medicine, and as a great truth it is also liable to become great nonsense. Medical psychology, therefore, should be careful not to become morbid itself. One-sidedness and restriction of horizon are well-known neurotic peculiarities.

[6] Whatever I may be able to tell you will undoubtedly remain a regrettably unfinished torso. Unfortunately I take little stock of new theories, as my empirical temperament is more eager for new facts than for what one might speculate about them, although this is, I must admit, an enjoyable intellectual pastime. Each new case is almost a new theory to me, and I am not quite convinced that this standpoint is a thoroughly bad one, particularly when one considers the extreme youth of modern psychology, which to my mind has not yet left its cradle. I know, therefore, that the time for general theories is not yet ripe. It even looks to me sometimes as if psychology had not yet understood either the gigantic size of its task, or the perplexingly and distressingly complicated nature of its subject-matter: the psyche itself. It seems as if we were just waking up to this fact, and that the dawn is still too dim for us to realize in full what it means that the psyche, being the object of scientific observation and judgment, is at the same time its subject, the means by which you make such observations. The menace of so formidably vicious a circle has driven me to an extreme of caution and relativism which has often been thoroughly misunderstood.

[7] I do not want to disturb our dealings by bringing up disquieting critical arguments. I only mention them as a sort of anticipatory excuse for seemingly unnecessary complications. I am not troubled by theories, but a great deal by facts; and I beg you therefore to keep in mind that the shortness of time at my disposal does not allow me to produce all the circumstantial evidence which would substantiate my conclusions. I especially refer here to the intricacies of dream-analysis and to the comparative method of investigating the unconscious processes. In short, I have to depend a great deal upon your goodwill, but I realize naturally it is my own task in the first place to make things as plain as possible.

[8] Psychology is a science of consciousness, in the very first place. In the second place, it is the science of the products of what we call the unconscious psyche. We cannot directly explore the unconscious psyche because the unconscious is just unconscious, and we have therefore no relation to it. We can only deal with the conscious products which we suppose have originated in the field called the unconscious, that field of “dim representations” which the philosopher Kant in his Anthropology1 speaks of as being half a world. Whatever we have to say about the unconscious is what the conscious mind says about it. Always the unconscious psyche, which is entirely of an unknown nature, is expressed by consciousness and in terms of consciousness, and that is the only thing we can do. We cannot go beyond that, and we should always keep it in mind as an ultimate critique of our judgment.

[9] Consciousness is a peculiar thing. It is an intermittent phenomenon. One-fifth, or one-third, or perhaps even one-half of our human life is spent in an unconscious condition. Our early childhood is unconscious. Every night we sink into the unconscious, and only in phases between waking and sleeping have we a more or less clear consciousness. To a certain extent it is even questionable how clear that consciousness is. For instance, we assume that a boy or girl ten years of age would be conscious, but one could easily prove that it is a very peculiar kind of consciousness, for it might be a consciousness without any consciousness of the ego. I know a number of cases of children eleven, twelve, and fourteen years of age, or even older, suddenly realizing “I am.” For the first time in their lives they know that they themselves are experiencing, that they are looking back over a past in which they can remember things happening but cannot remember that they were in them.


[10] We must admit that when we say “I” we have no absolute criterion whether we have a full experience of “I” or not. It might be that our realization of the ego is still fragmentary and that in some future time people will know very much more about what the ego means to man than we do. As a matter of fact, we cannot see where that process might ultimately end.

[11] Consciousness is like a surface or a skin upon a vast unconscious area of unknown extent. We do not know how far the unconscious rules because we simply know nothing of it. You cannot say anything about a thing of which you know nothing. When we say “the unconscious” we often mean to convey something by the term, but as a matter of fact we simply convey that we do not know what the unconscious is. We have only indirect proofs that there is a mental sphere which is subliminal. We have some scientific justification for our conclusion that it exists. From the products which that unconscious mind produces we can draw certain conclusions as to its possible nature. But we must be careful not to be too anthropomorphic in our conclusions, because things might in reality be very different from what our consciousness makes them.

[12] If, for instance, you look at our physical world and if you compare what our consciousness makes of this same world, you find all sorts of mental pictures which do not exist as objective facts. For instance, we see colour and hear sound, but in reality they are oscillations. As a matter of fact, we need a laboratory with very complicated apparatus in order to establish a picture of that world apart from our senses and apart from our psyche; and I suppose it is very much the same with our unconscious—we ought to have a laboratory in which we could establish by objective methods how things really are when in an unconscious condition. So any conclusion or any statement I make in the course of my lectures about the unconscious should be taken with that critique in mind. It is always as if, and you should never forget that restriction.

[13] The conscious mind moreover is characterized by a certain narrowness. It can hold only a few simultaneous contents at a given moment. All the rest is unconscious at the time, and we only get a sort of continuation or a general understanding or awareness of a conscious world through the succession of conscious moments. We can never hold an image of totality because our consciousness is too narrow; we can only see flashes of existence. It is always as if we were observing through a slit so that we only see a particular moment; all the rest is dark and we are not aware of it at that moment. The area of the unconscious is enormous and always continuous, while the area of consciousness is a restricted field of momentary vision.

[14] Consciousness is very much the product of perception and orientation in the external world. It is probably localized in the cerebrum, which is of ectodermic origin and was probably a sense organ of the skin at the time of our remote ancestors. The consciousness derived from that localization in the brain therefore probably retains these qualities of sensation and orientation. Peculiarly enough, the French and English psychologists of the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tried to derive consciousness from the senses as if it consisted solely of sense data. That is expressed by the famous formula Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu. 2 You can observe something similar in modern psychological theories. Freud, for instance, does not derive the conscious from sense data, but he derives the unconscious from the conscious, which is along the same rational line.

[15] I would put it the reverse way: I would say the thing that comes first is obviously the unconscious and that consciousness really arises from an unconscious condition. In early childhood we are unconscious; the most important functions of an instinctive nature are unconscious, and consciousness is rather the product of the unconscious. It is a condition which demands a violent effort. You get tired from being conscious. You get exhausted by consciousness. It is an almost unnatural effort. When you observe primitives, for instance, you will see that on the slightest provocation or with no provocation whatever they doze off, they disappear. They sit for hours on end, and when you ask them, “What are you doing? What are you thinking?” they are offended, because they say, “Only a man that is crazy thinks—he has thoughts in his head. We do not think.” If they think at all, it is rather in the belly or in the heart. Certain Negro tribes assure you that thoughts are in the belly because they only realize those thoughts which actually disturb the liver, intestines, or stomach. In other words, they are conscious only of emotional thoughts. Emotions and affects are always accompanied by obvious physiological innervations.

[16] The Pueblo Indians told me that all Americans are crazy, and of course I was somewhat astonished and asked them why. They said, “Well, they say they think in their heads. No sound man thinks in the head. We think in the heart.” They are just about in the Homeric age, when the diaphragm (phren = mind, soul) was the seat of psychic activity. That means a psychic localization of a different nature. Our concept of consciousness supposes thought to be in our most dignified head. But the Pueblo Indians derive consciousness from the intensity of feeling. Abstract thought does not exist for them. As the Pueblo Indians are sun-worshippers, I tried the argument of St. Augustine on them. I told them that God is not the sun but the one who made the sun. 3 They could not accept this because they cannot go beyond the perceptions of their senses and their feelings. Therefore consciousness and thought to them are localized in the heart. To us, on the other hand, psychic activities are nothing. We hold that dreams and fantasies are localized “down below,” therefore there are people who speak of the sub-conscious mind, of the things that are below consciousness.

[17] These peculiar localizations play a great role in so-called primitive psychology, which is by no means primitive. For instance if you study Tantric Yoga and Hindu psychology you will find the most elaborate system of psychic layers, of localizations of consciousness up from the region of the perineum to the top of the head. These “centres” are the socalled chakras 4 and you not only find them in the teachings of yoga but can discover the same idea in old German alchemical books, 5 which surely do not derive from a knowledge of yoga.

[18] The important fact about consciousness is that nothing can be conscious without an ego to which it refers. If something is not related to the ego then it is not conscious. Therefore you can define consciousness as a relation of psychic facts to the ego. What is that ego? The ego is a complex datum which is constituted first of all by a general awareness of your body, of your existence, and secondly by your memory data; you have a certain idea of having been, a long series of memories. Those two are the main constituents of what we call the ego. Therefore you can call the ego a complex of psychic facts. This complex has a great power of attraction, like a magnet; it attracts contents from the unconscious, from that dark realm of which we know nothing; it also attracts impressions from the outside, and when they enter into association with the ego they are conscious. If they do not, they are not conscious.

[19] My idea of the ego is that it is a sort of complex. Of course, the nearest and dearest complex which we cherish is our ego. It is always in the centre of our attention and of our desires, and it is the absolutely indispensable centre of consciousness. If the ego becomes split up, as in schizophrenia, all sense of values is gone, and also things become inaccessible for voluntary reproduction because the centre has split and certain parts of the psyche refer to one fragment of the ego and certain other contents to another fragment of the ego. Therefore, with a schizophrenic, you often see a rapid change from one personality into another.

[20] You can distinguish a number of functions in consciousness. They enable consciousness to become oriented in the field of ectopsychic facts and endopsychic facts. What I understand by the ectopsyche is a system of relationship between the contents of consciousness and facts and data coming in from the environment. It is a system of orientation which concerns my dealing with the external facts given to me by the function of my senses. The endopsyche, on the other hand, is a system of relationship between the contents of consciousness and postulated processes in the unconscious.

[21] In the first place we will speak of the ectopsychic functions. First of all we have sensation, 6 our sense function. By sensation I understand what the French psychologists call “la fonction du réel,” which is the sum-total of my awareness of external facts given to me through the function of my senses. So I think that the French term “la fonction du réel” explains it in the most comprehensive way. Sensation tells me that something is: it does not tell me what it is and it does not tell me other things about that something; it only tells me that something is.

[22] The next function that is distinguishable is thinking.7 Thinking, if you ask a philosopher, is something very difficult, so never ask a philosopher about it because he is the only man who does not know what thinking is. Everybody else knows what thinking is. When you say to a man, “Now think properly,” he knows exactly what you mean, but a philosopher never knows. Thinking in its simplest form tells you what a thing is. It gives a name to the thing. It adds a concept because thinking is perception and judgment. (German psychology calls it apperception.)8

[23] The third function you can distinguish and for which ordinary language has a term is feeling.9 Here minds become very confused and people get angry when I speak about feeling, because according to their view I say something very dreadful about it. Feeling informs you through its feeling-tones of the values of things. Feeling tells you for instance whether a thing is acceptable or agreeable or not. It tells you what a thing is worth to you. On account of that phenomenon, you cannot perceive and you cannot apperceive without having a certain feeling reaction. You always have a certain feeling-tone, which you can even demonstrate by experiment. We will talk of these things later on. Now the “dreadful” thing about feeling is that it is, like thinking, a rational10 function. All men who think are absolutely convinced that feeling is never a rational function but, on the contrary, most irrational. Now I say: Just be patient for a while and realize that man cannot be perfect in every respect. If a man is perfect in his thinking he is surely never perfect in his feeling, because you cannot do the two things at the same time; they hinder each other. Therefore when you want to think in a dispassionate way, really scientifically or philosophically, you must get away from all feeling-values. You cannot be bothered with feeling-values at the same time, otherwise you begin to feel that it is far more important to think about the freedom of the will than, for instance, about the classification of lice. And certainly if you approach from the point of view of feeling the two objects are not only different as to facts but also as to value. Values are no anchors for the intellect, but they exist, and giving value is an important psychological function. If you want to have a complete picture of the world you must necessarily consider values. If you do not, you will get into trouble. To many people feeling appears to be most irrational, because you feel all sorts of things in foolish moods; therefore everybody is convinced, in this country particularly, that you should control your feelings. I quite admit that this is a good habit and wholly admire the English for that faculty. Yet there are such things as feelings, and I have seen people who control their feelings marvellously well and yet are terribly bothered by them.

[24] Now the fourth function. Sensation tells us that a thing is. Thinking tells us what that thing is, feeling tells us what it is worth to us. Now what else could there be? One would assume one has a complete picture of the world when one knows there is something, what it is, and what it is worth. But there is another category, and that is time. Things have a past and they have a future. They come from somewhere, they go to somewhere, and you cannot see where they came from and you cannot know where they go to, but you get what the Americans call a hunch. For instance, if you are a dealer in art or in old furniture you get a hunch that a certain object is by a very good master of 1720, you get a hunch that it is good work. Or you do not know what shares will do after a while, but you get the hunch that they will rise. That is what is called intuition,11 a sort of divination, a sort of miraculous faculty. For instance, you do not know that your patient has something on his mind of a very painful kind, but you “get an idea,” you “have a certain feeling,” as we say, because ordinary language is not yet developed enough for one to have suitably defined terms. The word intuition becomes more and more a part of the English language, and you are very fortunate because in other languages that word does not exist. The Germans cannot even make a linguistic distinction between sensation and feeling. It is different in French; if you speak French you cannot possibly say that you have a certain “sentiment dans l’estomac,” you will say “sensation”; in English you also have your distinctive words for sensation and feeling. But you can mix up feeling and intuition easily. Therefore it is an almost artificial distinction I make here, though for practical reasons it is most important that we make such a differentiation in scientific language. We must define what we mean when we use certain terms, otherwise we talk an unintelligible language, and in psychology this is always a misfortune. In ordinary conversation, when a man says feeling, he means possibly something entirely different from another fellow who also talks about feeling. There are any number of psychologists who use the word feeling, and they define it as a sort of crippled thought. “Feeling is nothing but an unfinished thought”—that is the definition of a well-known psychologist. But feeling is something genuine, it is something real, it is a function, and therefore we have a word for it. The instinctive natural mind always finds the words that designate things which really have existence. Only psychologists invent words for things that do not exist.

[25] The last-defined function, intuition, seems to be very mysterious, and you know I am “very mystical,” as people say. This then is one of my pieces of mysticism! Intuition is a function by which you see round corners, which you really cannot do; yet the fellow will do it for you and you trust him. It is a function which normally you do not use if you live a regular life within four walls and do regular routine work. But if you are on the Stock Exchange or in Central Africa, you will use your hunches like anything. You cannot, for instance, calculate whether when you turn round a corner in the bush you will meet a rhinoceros or a tiger—but you get a hunch, and it will perhaps save your life. So you see that people who live exposed to natural conditions use intuition a great deal, and people who risk something in an unknown field, who are pioneers of some sort, will use intuition. Inventors will use it and judges will use it. Whenever you have to deal with strange conditions where you have no established values or established concepts, you will depend upon that faculty of intuition.

[26] I have tried to describe that function as well as I can, but perhaps it is not very good. I say that intuition is a sort of perception which does not go exactly by the senses, but it goes via the unconscious, and at that I leave it and say “I don’t know how it works.” I do not know what is happening when a man knows something he definitely should not know. I do not know how he has come by it, but he has it all right and he can act on it. For instance, anticipatory dreams, telepathic phenomena, and all that kind of thing are intuitions. I have seen plenty of them, and I am convinced that they do exist. You can see these things also with primitives. You can see them everywhere if you pay attention to these perceptions that somehow work through the subliminal data, such as sense-perceptions so feeble that our consciousness simply cannot take them in. Sometimes, for instance, in cryptomnesia, something creeps up into consciousness; you catch a word which gives you a suggestion, but it is always something that is unconscious until the moment it appears, and so presents itself as if it had fallen from heaven. The Germans call this an Einfall, which means a thing which falls into your head from nowhere. Sometimes it is like a revelation. Actually, intuition is a very natural function, a perfectly normal thing, and it is necessary, too, because it makes up for what you cannot perceive or think or feel because it lacks reality. You see, the past is not real any more and the future is not as real as we think. Therefore we must be very grateful to heaven that we have such a function which gives us a certain light on those things which are round the corners. Doctors, of course, being often presented with the most unheard-of situations, need intuition a great deal. Many a good diagnosis comes from this “very mysterious” function.

[27] Psychological functions are usually controlled by the will, or we hope they are, because we are afraid of everything that moves by itself. When the functions are controlled they can be excluded from use, they can be suppressed, they can be selected, they can be increased in intensity, they can be directed by will-power, by what we call intention. But they also can function in an involuntary way, that is, they think for you, they feel for you —very often they do this and you cannot even stop them. Or they function unconsciously so that you do not know what they have done, though you might be presented, for instance, with the result of a feeling process which has happened in the unconscious. Afterwards somebody will probably say, “Oh, you were very angry, or you were offended, and therefore you reacted in such and such a way.” Perhaps you are quite unconscious that you have felt in that way, nevertheless it is most probable that you have. Psychological functions, like the sense functions, have their specific energy. You cannot dispose of feeling, or of thinking, or of any of the four functions. No one can say, “I will not think”—he will think inevitably. People cannot say, “I will not feel”—they will feel because the specific energy invested in each function expresses itself and cannot be exchanged for another.

[28] Of course, one has preferences. People who have a good mind prefer to think about things and to adapt by thinking. Other people who have a good feeling function are good social mixers, they have a great sense of values; they are real artists in creating feeling situations and living by feeling situations. Or a man with a keen sense of objective observation will use his sensation chiefly, and so on. The dominating function gives each individual his particular kind of psychology. For example, when a man uses chiefly his intellect, he will be of an unmistakable type, and you can deduce from that fact the condition of his feeling. When thinking is the dominant or superior function, feeling is necessarily in an inferior condition.12 The same rule applies to the other three functions. But I will show you that with a diagram which will make it clear.

[29] You can make the so-called cross of the functions (Figure 1).

Image
FIG. 1. The Functions

In the centre is the ego (E), which has a certain amount of energy at its disposal, and that energy is the will-power. In the case of the thinking type, that will-power can be directed to thinking (T). Then we must put feeling (F) down below, because it is, in this case, the inferior function.13 That comes from the fact that when you think you must exclude feeling, just as when you feel you must exclude thinking. If you are thinking, leave feeling and feeling-values alone, because feeling is most upsetting to your thoughts. On the other hand people who go by feeling-values leave thinking well alone, and they are right to do so, because these two different functions contradict each other. People have sometimes assured me that their thinking was just as differentiated as their feeling, but I could not believe it, because an individual cannot have the two opposites in the same degree of perfection at the same time.


[30] The same is the case with sensation (S) and intuition (I). How do they affect each other? When you are observing physical facts you cannot see round corners at the same time. When you observe a man who is working by his sense function you will see, if you look at him attentively, that the axes of his eyes have a tendency to converge and to come together at one point. When you study the expression or the eyes of intuitive people, you will see that they only glance at things—they do not look, they radiate at things because they take in their fulness, and among the many things they perceive they get one point on the periphery of their field of vision and that is the hunch. Often you can tell from the eyes whether people are intuitive or not. When you have an intuitive attitude you usually do not as a rule observe the details. You try always to take in the whole of a situation, and then suddenly something crops up out of this wholeness. When you are a sensation type you will observe facts as they are, but then you have no intuition, simply because the two things cannot be done at the same time. It is too difficult, because the principle of the one function excludes the principle of the other function. That is why I put them here as opposites.

[31] Now, from this simple diagram you can arrive at quite a lot of very important conclusions as to the structure of a given consciousness. For instance, if you find that thinking is highly differentiated, then feeling is undifferentiated. What does that mean? Does it mean these people have no feelings? No, on the contrary. They say, “I have very strong feelings. I am full of emotion and temperament.” These people are under the sway of their emotions, they are caught by their emotions, they are overcome by their emotions at times. If, for instance, you study the private life of professors it is a very interesting study. If you want to be fully informed as to how the intellectual behaves at home, ask his wife and she will be able to tell you a story!

[32] The reverse is true of the feeling type. The feeling type, if he is natural, never allows himself to be disturbed by thinking; but when he gets sophisticated and somewhat neurotic he is disturbed by thoughts. Then thinking appears in a compulsory way, he cannot get away from certain thoughts. He is a very nice chap, but he has extraordinary convictions and ideas, and his thinking is of an inferior kind. He is caught by this thinking, entangled in certain thoughts; he cannot disentangle because he cannot reason, his thoughts are not movable. On the other hand, an intellectual, when caught by his feelings, says, “I feel just like that,” and there is no argument against it. Only when he is thoroughly boiled in his emotion will he come out of it again. He cannot be reasoned out of his feeling, and he would be a very incomplete man if he could.

[33] The same happens with the sensation type and the intuitive type. The intuitive is always bothered by the reality of things; he fails from the standpoint of realities; he is always out for the possibilities of life. He is the man who plants a field and before the crop is ripe is off again to a new field. He has ploughed fields behind him and new hopes ahead all the time, and nothing comes off. But the sensation type remains with things. He remains in a given reality. To him a thing is true when it is real. Consider what it means to an intuitive when something is real. It is just the wrong thing; it should not be, something else should be. But when a sensation type does not have a given reality—four walls in which to be—he is sick. Give the intuitive type four walls in which to be, and the only thing is how to get out of it, because to him a given situation is a prison which must be undone in the shortest time so that he can be off to new possibilities.

[34] These differences play a very great role in practical psychology. Do not think I am putting people into this box or that and saying, “He is an intuitive,” or “He is a thinking type.” People often ask me, “Now, is Soand-So not a thinking type?” I say, “I never thought about it,” and I did not. It is no use at all putting people into drawers with different labels. But when you have a large empirical material, you need critical principles of order to help you to classify it. I hope I do not exaggerate, but to me it is very important to be able to create a kind of order in my empirical material, particularly when people are troubled and confused or when you have to explain them to somebody else. For instance, if you have to explain a wife to a husband or a husband to a wife, it is often very helpful to have these objective criteria, otherwise the whole thing remains “He said”—“She said.”

[35] As a rule, the inferior function does not possess the qualities of a conscious differentiated function. The conscious differentiated function can as a rule be handled by intention and by the will. If you are a real thinker, you can direct your thinking by your will, you can control your thoughts. You are not the slave of your thoughts, you can think of something else. You can say, “I can think something quite different, I can think the contrary.” But the feeling type can never do that because he cannot get rid of his thought. The thought possesses him, or rather he is possessed by thought. Thought has a fascination for him, therefore he is afraid of it. The intellectual type is afraid of being caught by feeling because his feeling has an archaic quality, and there he is like an archaic man—he is the helpless victim of his emotions. It is for this reason that primitive man is extraordinarily polite, he is very careful not to disturb the feelings of his fellows because it is dangerous to do so. Many of our customs are explained by that archaic politeness. For instance, it is not the custom to shake hands with somebody and keep your left hand in your pocket, or behind your back, because it must be visible that you do not carry a weapon in that hand. The Oriental greeting of bowing with hands extended palms upward means “I have nothing in my hands.” If you kowtow you dip your head to the feet of the other man so that he sees you are absolutely defenceless and that you trust him completely. You can still study the symbolism of manners with primitives, and you can also see why they are afraid of the other fellow. In a similar way, we are afraid of our inferior functions. If you take a typical intellectual who is terribly afraid of falling in love, you will think his fear very foolish. But he is most probably right, because he will very likely make foolish nonsense when he falls in love. He will be caught most certainly, because his feeling only reacts to an archaic or to a dangerous type of woman. This is why many intellectuals are inclined to marry beneath them. They are caught by the landlady perhaps, or by the cook, because they are unaware of their archaic feeling through which they get caught. But they are right to be afraid, because their undoing will be in their feeling. Nobody can attack them in their intellect. There they are strong and can stand alone, but in their feelings they can be influenced, they can be caught, they can be cheated, and they know it. Therefore never force a man into his feeling when he is an intellectual. He controls it with an iron hand because it is very dangerous.

[36] The same law applies to each function. The inferior function is always associated with an archaic personality in ourselves; in the inferior function we are all primitives. In our differentiated functions we are civilized and we are supposed to have free will; but there is no such thing as free will when it comes to the inferior function. There we have an open wound, or at least an open door through which anything might enter.

[37] Now I am coming to the endopsychic functions of consciousness. The functions of which I have just spoken rule or help our conscious orientation in our relations with the environment; but they do not apply to the relation of things that are as it were below the ego. The ego is only a bit of consciousness which floats upon the ocean of the dark things. The dark things are the inner things. On that inner side there is a layer of psychic events that forms a sort of fringe of consciousness round the ego. I will illustrate it by a diagram:

Image
FIG. 2. The Ego

[38] If you suppose AA′ to be the threshold of consciousness, then you would have in D an area of consciousness referring to the ectopsychic world B, the world ruled by those functions of which we were just speaking. But on the other side, in C, is the shadow-world. There the ego is somewhat dark, we do not see into it, we are an enigma to ourselves. We only know the ego in D, we do not know it in C. Therefore we are always discovering something new about ourselves. Almost every year something new turns up which we did not know before. We always think we are now at the end of our discoveries. We never are. We go on discovering that we are this, that, and other things, and sometimes we have astounding experiences. That shows there is always a part of our personality which is still unconscious, which is still becoming: we are unfinished; we are growing and changing. Yet that future personality which we are to be in a year’s time is already here only it is still in the shadow. The ego is like a moving frame on a film. The future personality is not yet visible, but we are moving along, and presently we come to view the future being. These potentialities naturally belong to the dark side of the ego. We are well aware of what we have been, but we are not aware of what we are going to be.

[39] Therefore the first function on that endopsychic side is memory. The function of memory, or reproduction, links us up with things that have faded out of consciousness, things that became subliminal or were cast away or repressed. What we call memory is this faculty to reproduce unconscious contents, and it is the first function we can clearly distinguish in its relationship between our consciousness and the contents that are actually not in view.

[40] The second endopsychic function is a more difficult problem. We are now getting into deep waters because here we are coming into darkness. I will give you the name first: the subjective components of conscious functions. I hope I can make it clear. For instance, when you meet a man you have not seen before, naturally you think something about him. You do not always think things you would be ready to tell him immediately; perhaps you think things that are untrue, that do not really apply. Clearly, they are subjective reactions. The same reactions take place with things and with situations. Every application of a conscious function, whatever the object might be, is always accompanied by subjective reactions which are more or less inadmissible or unjust or inaccurate. You are painfully aware that these things happen in you, but nobody likes to admit that he is subject to such phenomena. He prefers to leave them in the shadow, because that helps him to assume that he is perfectly innocent and very nice and honest and straightforward and “only too willing” etc.,—you know all these phrases. As a matter of fact, one is not. One has any amount of subjective reactions, but it is not quite becoming to admit these things. These reactions I call the subjective components. They are a very important part of our relations to our own inner side. There things get definitely painful. That is why we dislike entering this shadow-world of the ego. We do not like to look at the shadowside of ourselves; therefore there are many people in our civilized society who have lost their shadow altogether, they have got rid of it. They are only two-dimensional; they have lost the third dimension, and with it they have usually lost the body. The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like; there are too many things about the body which cannot be mentioned. The body is very often the personification of this shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing. I think this makes sufficiently clear what I mean by subjective components. They are usually a sort of disposition to react in a certain way, and usually the disposition is not altogether favourable.

[41] There is one exception to this definition: a person who is not, as we suppose we all are, living on the positive side, putting the right foot forward and not the wrong one, etc. There are certain individuals whom we call in our Swiss dialect “pitch-birds” [Pechvögel]; they are always getting into messes, they put their foot in it and always cause trouble, because they live their own shadow, they live their own negation. They are the sort of people who come late to a concert or a lecture, and because they are very modest and do not want to disturb other people, they sneak in at the end and then stumble over a chair and make a hideous racket so that everybody has to look at them. Those are the “pitch-birds.”

[42] Now we come to the third endopsychic component—I cannot say function. In the case of memory you can speak of a function, but even your memory is only to a certain extent a voluntary or controlled function. Very often it is exceedingly tricky; it is like a bad horse that cannot be mastered. It often refuses in the most embarrassing way. All the more is this the case with the subjective components and reactions. And now things begin to get worse, for this is where the emotions and affects come in. They are clearly not functions any more, they are just events, because in an emotion, as the word denotes, you are moved away, you are cast out, your decent ego is put aside, and something else takes your place. We say, “He is beside himself,” or “The devil is riding him,” or “What has gotten into him today,” because he is like a man who is possessed. The primitive does not say he got angry beyond measure; he says a spirit got into him and changed him completely. Something like that happens with emotions; you are simply possessed, you are no longer yourself, and your control is decreased practically to zero. That is a condition in which the inner side of a man takes hold of him, he cannot prevent it. He can clench his fists, he can keep quiet, but it has him nevertheless.

[43] The fourth important endopsychic factor is what I call invasion. Here the shadow-side, the unconscious side, has full control so that it can break into the conscious condition. Then the conscious control is at its lowest. Those are the moments in a human life which you do not necessarily call pathological; they are pathological only in the old sense of the word when pathology meant the science of the passions. In that sense you can call them pathological, but it is really an extraordinary condition in which a man is seized upon by his unconscious and when anything may come out of him. One can lose one’s mind in a more or less normal way. For instance, we cannot assume that the cases our ancestors knew very well are abnormal, because they are perfectly normal phenomena among primitives. They speak of the devil or an incubus or a spirit going into a man, or of his soul leaving him, one of his separate souls—they often have as many as six. When his soul leaves him, he is in an altered condition because he is suddenly deprived of himself; he suffers a loss of self. That is a thing you can often observe in neurotic patients. On certain days, or from time to time, they suddenly lose their energy, they lose themselves, and they come under a strange influence. These phenomena are not in themselves pathological; they belong to the ordinary phenomenology of man, but if they become habitual we rightly speak of a neurosis. These are the things that lead to neurosis; but they are also exceptional conditions among normal people. To have overwhelming emotions is not in itself pathological, it is merely undesirable. We need not invent such a word as pathological for an undesirable thing, because there are other undesirable things in the world which are not pathological, for instance, tax-collectors.
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Re: The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of An

Postby admin » Fri Apr 26, 2019 5:45 am

Part 2 of 2

Discussion

Dr. J. A. Hadfield:

[44] In what sense do you use the word “emotion”? You used the word “feeling” rather in the sense in which many people here use the word “emotion.” Do you give the term “emotion” a special significance or not?

Professor Jung:

[45] I am glad you have put that question, because there are usually great mistakes and misunderstandings concerning the use of the word emotion. Naturally everybody is free to use words as he likes, but in scientific language you are bound to cling to certain distinctions so that everyone knows what you are talking about. You will remember I explained “feeling” as a function of valuing, and I do not attach any particular significance to feeling. I hold that feeling is a rational function if it is differentiated. When it is not differentiated it just happens, and then it has all the archaic qualities which can be summed up by the word “unreasonable.” But conscious feeling is a rational function of discriminating values.

[46] If you study emotions you will invariably find that you apply the word “emotional” when it concerns a condition that is characterized by physiological innervations. Therefore you can measure emotions to a certain extent, not their psychic part but the physiological part. You know the James-Lange theory of affect.14 I take emotion as affect, it is the same as “something affects you.” It does something to you—it interferes with you. Emotion is the thing that carries you away. You are thrown out of yourself; you are beside yourself as if an explosion had moved you out of yourself and put you beside yourself. There is a quite tangible physiological condition which can be observed at the same time. So the difference would be this: feeling has no physical or tangible physiological manifestations, while emotion is characterized by an altered physiological condition. You know that the James-Lange theory of affect says that you only get really emotional when you are aware of the physiological alteration of your general condition. You can observe this when you are in a situation where you would most probably be angry. You know you are going to be angry, and then you feel the blood rushing up into your head, and then you are really angry, but not before. Before, you only know you are going to be angry, but when the blood rushes up into your head you are caught by your own anger, immediately the body is affected, and because you realize that you are getting excited, you are twice as angry as you ought to be. Then you are in a real emotion. But when you have feeling you have control. You are on top of the situation, and you can say, “I have a very nice feeling or a very bad feeling about it.” Everything is quiet and nothing happens. You can quietly inform somebody, “I hate you,” very nicely. But when you say it spitefully you have an emotion. To say it quietly will not cause an emotion, either in yourself or in the other person. Emotions are most contagious, they are the real carriers of mental contagion. For instance, if you are in a crowd that is in an emotional condition, you cannot help yourself, you are in it too, you are caught by that emotion. But the feelings of other people do not concern you in the least, and for this reason you will observe that the differentiated feeling type usually has a cooling effect upon you, while the emotional person heats you up because the fire is radiating out of him all the time. You see the flame of that emotion in his face. By sympathy your sympathetic system gets disturbed, and you will show very much the same signs after a while. That is not so with feelings. Do I make myself clear?

Dr. Henry V. Dicks:

[47] May I ask, in continuation of that question, what is the relation in your view between affects and feelings?

Professor Jung:

[48] It is a question of degree. If you have a value which is overwhelmingly strong for you it will become an emotion at a certain point, namely, when it reaches such an intensity as to cause a physiological innervation. All our mental processes probably cause slight physiological disturbances which are so small that we have not the means to demonstrate them. But we have a pretty sensitive method by which to measure emotions, or the physiological part of them, and that is the psychogalvanic effect.15 It is based on the fact that the electrical resistance of the skin decreases under the influence of emotion. It does not decrease under the influence of feeling.

[49] I will give you an example. I made the following experiment with my former Professor at the Clinic. He functioned as my test partner, and I had him in the laboratory under the apparatus for measuring the psychogalvanic effect. I told him to imagine something which was intensely disagreeable to him but of which he knew I was not aware, something unknown to me yet known to him and exceedingly painful. So he did. He was well acquainted with such experiments and gifted with great power of concentration, so he concentrated on something, and there was almost no visible disturbance of the electrical resistance of the skin; the current did not increase at all. Then I thought I had a hunch. That very morning I had observed certain signs of something going on and I guessed it must be hellishly disagreeable to my chief. So I thought, “I am going to try something.” I simply said to him, “Was not that the case of So-and-So?”—mentioning the name. Instantly there was a deluge of emotion. That was the emotion; the former reaction was the feeling.

[50] It is a curious fact that hysterical pain does not cause contraction of the pupils, it is not accompanied by physiological innervation, and yet it is an intense pain. But physical pain causes contraction of the pupils. You can have an intense feeling and no physiological alteration; but as soon as you have physiological alteration you are possessed, you are dissociated, thrown out of your own house, and the house is then free for the devils.

Dr. Eric Graham Howe:

[51] Could we equate emotion and feeling with conation and cognition respectively? Whereas feeling corresponds to cognition, emotion is conative.

Professor Jung:

[52] Yes, one could say that in philosophical terminology. I have no objection.

Dr. Howe:

[53] May I have another shot? Your classification into four functions, namely those of sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition, seems to me to correspond with the one-, two-, three-, and four-dimensional classification. You yourself used the word “three-dimensional” referring to the human body, and you also said that intuition differed from the other three in that it was the function which included Time. Perhaps, therefore, it corresponds to a fourth dimension? In that case, I suggest that “sensation” corresponds with one-dimensional, “perceptual cognition” with two-dimensional, “conceptual cognition” (which would correspond perhaps with your “feeling”) with three-dimensional, and “intuition” with four-dimensional on this system of classification.

Professor Jung:

[54] You can put it like that. Since intuition sometimes seems to function as if there were no space, and sometimes as if there were no time, you might say that I add a sort of fourth dimension. But one should not go too far. The concept of the fourth dimension does not produce facts. Intuition is something like H. G. Wells’s Time Machine. You remember the time machine, that peculiar motor, which when you sit on it moves off with you into time instead of into space. It consists of four columns, three of which are always visible, but the fourth is visible only indistinctly because it represents the time element. I am sorry but the awkward fact is that intuition is something like this fourth column. There is such a thing as unconscious perception, or perception by ways which are unconscious to us. We have the empirical material to prove the existence of this function. I am sorry that there are such things. My intellect would wish for a clear-cut universe with no dim corners, but there are these cobwebs in the cosmos. Nevertheless I do not think there is anything mystical about intuition. Can you explain beyond any possibility of doubt why, for instance, some birds travel enormous distances, or the doings of caterpillars, butterflies, ants, or termites? There you have to deal with quite a number of questions. Or take the fact of water having the greatest density at 4° Centigrade. Why such a thing? Why has energy a limitation to quantum? Well, it has, and that is awkward; it is not right that such things should be, but they are. It is exactly like the old question, “Why has God made flies?”—He just has.

Dr. Wilfred R. Bion:

[55] In your experiment why did you ask the Professor to think of an experience which was painful to himself and unknown to you? Do you think there is any significance in the fact that he knew you knew of the unpleasant experience in the second experiment and that this had some bearing on the difference of emotional reaction which he showed in the two examples you gave?

Professor Jung:

[56] Yes, absolutely. My idea was based on the fact that when I know that my partner does not know, it is far more agreeable to me; but when I know that he knows too, it is a very different thing and is very disagreeable. In any doctor’s life there are cases which are more or less painful when a colleague knows about them, and I knew almost for a certainty that if I gave him a hint that I knew, he would jump like a mine, and he did. That was my reason.

Dr. Eric B. Strauss:

[57] Would Dr. Jung make clearer what he means when he says that feeling is a rational function? Further, I do not quite understand what Dr. Jung means by feeling. Most of us when we employ the term feeling understand polarities such as pleasure, pain, tension, and relaxation. Further, Dr. Jung claims that the distinction between feelings and emotions is only one of degree. If the distinction is only one of degree, how is it that he puts them on different sides of the frontier, so to speak? Still further, Dr. Jung claims that one of the criteria or the chief criterion would be that feelings are unaccompanied by physiological change, whereas emotions are accompanied by such changes. Experiments conducted by Professor Freudlicher16 in Berlin have, I think, shown clearly that simple feelings, in the sense of pleasure, pain, tension, and relaxation, are as a matter of fact accompanied by physiological changes, such as changes in the blood pressure, which can now be recorded by very accurate apparatus.

Professor Jung:

[58] It is true that feelings, if they have an emotional character, are accompanied by physiological effects; but there are definitely feelings which do not change the physiological condition. These feelings are very mental, they are not of an emotional nature. That is the distinction I make. Inasmuch as feeling is a function of values, you will readily understand that this is not a physiological condition. It can be something as abstract as abstract thinking. You would not expect abstract thinking to be a physiological condition. Abstract thinking is what the term denotes. Differentiated thinking is rational; and so feeling can be rational in spite of the fact that many people mix up the terminology.

[59] We must have a word for the giving of values. We must designate that particular function, as apart from others, and feeling is an apt term. Of course, you can choose any other word you like, only you must say so. I have absolutely no objection if the majority of thinking people come to the conclusion that feeling is a very bad word for it. If you say, “We prefer to use another term,” then you must choose another term to designate the function of valuing, because the fact of values remains and we must have a name for it. Usually the sense of values is expressed by the term “feeling.” But I do not cling to the term at all. I am absolutely liberal as to terms, only I give the definition of terms so that I can say what I mean when I use such and such a term. If anybody says that feeling is an emotion or that feeling is a thing that causes heightened blood pressure, I have no objection. I only say that I do not use the word in that sense. If people should agree that it ought to be forbidden to use the word feeling in such a way as I do, I have no objection. The Germans have the words Empfindung and Gefühl. When you read Goethe or Schiller you find that even the poets mix up the two functions. German psychologists have already recommended the suppression of the word Empfindung for feeling, and propose that one should use the word Gefühl (feeling) for values, while the word Empfindung should be used for sensation. No psychologist nowadays would say, “The feelings of my eyes or of my ears or of my skin.” People of course say that they have feelings in their big toe or ear, but no scientific language of that kind is possible any more. Taking those two words as identical, one could express the most exalted moods by the word Empfindung, but it is exactly as if a Frenchman spoke of “les sensations les plus nobles de l’amour.” People would laugh, you know. It would be absolutely impossible, shocking!

Dr. E. A. Bennet:

[60] Do you consider that the superior function in the case of a person suffering from manic-depression remains conscious during the period of depression?

Professor Jung:

[61] I would not say that. If you consider the case of manic-depressive insanity you occasionally find that in the manic phase one function prevails and in the depressive phase another function prevails. For instance, people who are lively, sanguine, nice and kind in the manic phase, and do not think very much, suddenly become very thoughtful when the depression comes on, and then they have obsessive thoughts, and vice versa. I know several cases of intellectuals who have a manic-depressive disposition. In the manic phase they think freely, they are productive and very clear and very abstract. Then the depressive phase comes on, and they have obsessive feelings; they are obsessed by terrible moods, just moods, not thoughts. Those are, of course, psychological details. You see these things most clearly in cases of men of forty and a little bit more who have led a particular type of life, an intellectual life or a life of values, and suddenly that thing goes under and up comes just the contrary. There are very interesting cases like that. We have the famous literary illustrations, Nietzsche for instance. He is a most impressive example of a change of psychology into its opposite at middle age. In younger years he was the aphorist in the French style; in later years, at 38, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he burst out in a Dionysian mood which was absolutely the contrary of everything he had written before.

Dr. Bennet:

[62] Is melancholia not extraverted?

Professor Jung:

[63] You cannot say that, because it is an incommensurable consideration. Melancholia in itself could be termed an introverted condition but it is not an attitude of preference. When you call somebody an introvert, you mean that he prefers an introverted habit, but he has his extraverted side too. We all have both sides, otherwise we could not adapt at all, we would have no influence, we would be beside ourselves. Depression is always an introverted condition. Melancholies sink down into a sort of embryonic condition, therefore you find that accumulation of peculiar physical symptoms.

Dr. Mary C. Luff:

[64] As Professor Jung has explained emotion as an obsessive thing which possesses the individual, I am not clear how he differentiates what he calls “invasions” from “affects.”

Professor Jung:

[65] You experience sometimes what you call “pathological” emotions, and there you observe most peculiar contents coming through as emotion: thoughts you have never thought before, sometimes terrible thoughts and fantasies. For instance, some people when they are very angry, instead of having the ordinary feelings of revenge and so on, have the most terrific fantasies of committing murder, cutting off the arms and legs of the enemy, and such things. Those are invading fragments of the unconscious, and if you take a fully developed pathological emotion it is really a state of eclipse of consciousness when people are raving mad for a while and do perfectly crazy things. That is an invasion. That would be a pathological case, but fantasies of this kind can also occur within the limits of normal. I have heard innocent people say, “I could cut him limb from limb,” and they actually do have these bloody fantasies; they would “smash the brains” of people, they imagine doing what in cold blood is merely said as a metaphor. When these fantasies get vivid and people are afraid of themselves, you speak of invasion.

Dr. Luff:

[66] Is that what you call confusional psychosis?

Professor Jung:

[67] It does not need to be a psychosis at all. It does not need to be pathological; you can observe such things in normal people when they are under the sway of a particular emotion. I once went through a very strong earthquake. It was the first time in my life I experienced an earthquake. I was simply overcome by the idea that the earth was not solid and that it was the skin of a huge animal that had shaken itself as a horse does. I was simply caught by that idea for a while. Then I came out of the fantasy remembering that that is exactly what the Japanese say about earthquakes: that the big salamander has turned over or changed its position, the salamander that is carrying the earth.17 Then I was satisfied that it was an archaic idea which had jumped into my consciousness. I thought it was remarkable; I did not quite think it was pathological.

Dr. B. D. Hendy:

[68] Would Professor Jung say that affect, as he defined it, is caused by a characteristic physiological condition, or would he say that this physiological alteration is the result of, let us say, invasion?

Professor Jung:

[69] The relation between body and mind is a very difficult question. You know that the James-Lange theory says that affect is the result of physiological alteration. The question whether the body or the mind is the predominating factor will always be answered according to temperamental differences. Those who by temperament prefer the theory of the supremacy of the body will say that mental processes are epiphenomena of physiological chemistry. Those who believe more in the spirit will say the contrary, to them the body is just the appendix of the mind and causation lies with the spirit. It is really a philosophical question, and since I am not a philosopher I cannot claim to make a decision. All we can know empirically is that processes of the body and processes of the mind happen together in some way which is mysterious to us. It is due to our most lamentable mind that we cannot think of body and mind as one and the same thing; probably they are one thing, but we are unable to think it. Modern physics is subject to the same difficulty; look at the regrettable things which happen with light! Light behaves as if it were oscillations, and it also behaves as if it were “corpuscles.” It needed a very complicated mathematical formula by M. de Broglie to help the human mind to conceive the possibility that oscillations and corpuscles are two phenomena, observed under different conditions, of one and the same ultimate reality. 18 You cannot think this, but you are forced to admit it as a postulate.

[70] In the same way, the so-called psychophysical parallelism is an insoluble problem. Take for instance the case of typhoid fever with psychological concomitants. If the psychic factor were mistaken for a causation, you would reach preposterous conclusions. All we can say is that there are certain physiological conditions which are clearly caused by mental disorder, and certain others which are not caused but merely accompanied by psychic processes. Body and mind are the two aspects of the living being, and that is all we know. Therefore I prefer to say that the two things happen together in a miraculous way, and we had better leave it at that, because we cannot think of them together. For my own use I have coined a term to illustrate this being together; I say there is a peculiar principle of synchronicity 19 active in the world so that things happen together somehow and behave as if they were the same, and yet for us they are not. Perhaps we shall some day discover a new kind of mathematical method by which we can prove that it must be like that. But for the time being I am absolutely unable to tell you whether it is the body or the mind that prevails, or whether they just coexist.

Dr. L. J. Bendit:

[71] I am not quite clear when invasion becomes pathological. You suggested in the first part of your talk this evening that invasion became pathological whenever it became habitual. What is the difference between a pathological invasion and an artistic inspiration and creation of ideas?

Professor Jung:

[72] Between an artistic inspiration and an invasion there is absolutely no difference. It is exactly the same, therefore I avoid the word “pathological.” I would never say that artistic inspiration is pathological, and therefore I make that exception for invasions too, because I consider that an inspiration is a perfectly normal fact. There is nothing bad in it. It is nothing out of the ordinary. Happily enough it belongs to the order of human beings that inspiration takes place occasionally—very rarely, but it does. But it is quite certain that pathological things come in pretty much the same way, so we have to draw the line somewhere. If you are all alienists and I present to you a certain case, then you might say that that man is insane. I would say that that man is not insane for this reason, that as long as he can explain himself to me in such a way that I feel I have a contact with him that man is not crazy. To be crazy is a very relative conception. For instance, when a Negro behaves in a certain way we say, “Oh well, he’s only a Negro,” but if a white man behaves in the same way we say, “That man is crazy,” because a white man cannot behave like that. A Negro is expected to do such things but a white man does not do them. To be “crazy” is a social concept; we use social restrictions and definitions in order to distinguish mental disturbances. You can say that a man is peculiar, that he behaves in an unexpected way and has funny ideas, and if he happens to live in a little town in France or Switzerland you would say, “He is an original fellow, one of the most original inhabitants of that little place”; but if you bring that man into the midst of Harley Street, well, he is plumb crazy. Or if a certain individual is a painter, you think he is a very original artist, but let that man be the cashier of a big bank and the bank will experience something. Then they will say that fellow is surely crazy. But these are simply social considerations. We see the same thing in lunatic asylums. It is not an absolute increase in insanity that makes our asylums swell like monsters, it is the fact that we cannot stand abnormal people any more, so there are apparently very many more crazy people than formerly. I remember in my youth we had people whom I recognized later on as being schizophrenic, and we thought, “Well, Uncle So-and-So is a very original man.” In my native town we had some imbeciles, but one did not say, “He is a terrible ass,” or something like that, but “He is very nice.” In the same way one called certain idiots “cretins,” which comes from the saying “il est bon chrétien.” You could not say anything else of them, but at least they were good Christians.

The Chairman:

[73] Ladies and Gentlemen, I think we must let Professor Jung off any further activity for tonight, and we thank him very much indeed.

_______________

Notes:

1 [Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), Pt. I, Bk. I, sec. 5.]

2 [“There is nothing in the mind that was not in the senses.” Cf. Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement humain, Bk. II, ch. 1, sec. 2, in response to Locke. The formula was scholastic in origin; cf. Duns Scotus, Super universalibus Porphyrii, qu. 3.]

3 [In Johannis Evang., XXXIV, 2. Cf. Symbols of Transformation (C.W., vol. 5), par. 162 and n. 69.]

4 [Cf. “The Realities of Practical Psychotherapy” (C.W., vol. 16, 2nd edn.), pars. 558ff.]

5 [What Jung may have had in mind are the melothesiae, explained in “Psychology and Religion” (C.W., vol. 11), par. 113, n. 5; cf. Psychology and Alchemy, fig. 156.]

6 [Psychological Types (C.W., vol. 6), Definition 47.]

7 [Ibid., Def. 53.]

8 [Ibid., Def. 5.]

9 [Ibid., Def. 21.]

10 [Ibid., Def. 44.]

11 [Ibid., Def. 35.]

12 [Ibid., Def. 30.]

13 [Ibid.]

14 [The theory was independently advanced by William James and by the Danish physiologist C. G. Lange, and is commonly referred to by both their names.]

15 [Jung and Peterson, “Psychophysical Investigations with the Galvanometer and Pneumograph in Normal and Insane Individuals” (1907); Jung and Ricksher, “Further Investigations on the Galvanic Phenomenon and Respiration in Normal and Insane Individuals” (1907); in C.W., vol. 2.]

16 [Possibly a stenographic slip for Jakob Freundlich, who conducted electrocardiogram experiments; see his article in Deutsches Archiv für klinische Medizin (Berlin), 177:4 (1934), 449–57.]

17 [According to a Japanese legend, the namazu, a kind of catfish of monstrous size, carries on its back most of Japan, and when annoyed it moves its head or tail, thus provoking earthquakes. The legend is often depicted in Japanese art.]

18 [Louis Victor de Broglie, French physicist, recipient of Nobel Prize for physics (1929), discovered the wave character of electrons. In the preceding sentence of the text, instead of “oscillations” and “corpuscles” the more usual terms would be “waves” and “particles.”]

19 [Cf. “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” (C.W., vol. 8).]
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Re: The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of An

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Part 1 of 2

LECTURE II

The Chairman (Dr. J. A. Hadfield):

[74] Ladies and Gentlemen, you have already been introduced to Dr. Jung and that in the most eulogistic language, but I think all who were here last night will recognize that even such a great eulogy was in no sense exaggerated. Dr. Jung last night was referring to a number of the functions of the human mind, such as feeling, thinking, intuition, and sensation, and I could not help feeling that in him all these functions, contrary to what he told us, seemed to be very well differentiated. I also had a hunch that in him they were bound together in the centre by a sense of humour. Nothing convinces me so much of the truth of any conception as when its creator is able to see it as a subject of humour, and that is what Dr. Jung did last night. Over-seriousness in regard to any subject very often displays the fact that the individual is dubious and anxious about the truth of what he is trying to convey.

Professor Jung:

[75] Ladies and Gentlemen, yesterday we dealt with the functions of consciousness. Today I want to finish the problem of the structure of the mind. A discussion of the human mind would not be complete if we did not include the existence of unconscious processes. Let me repeat shortly the reflections which I made last night.

[76] We cannot deal with unconscious processes directly because they are not reachable. They are not directly apprehended; they appear only in their products, and we postulate from the peculiar quality of those products that there must be something behind them from which they originate. We call that dark sphere the unconscious psyche.

[77] The ectopsychic contents of consciousness derive in the first place from the environment, through the data of the senses.

Then the contents also come from other sources, such as memory and processes of judgment. These belong to the endopsychic sphere. A third source for conscious contents is the dark sphere of the mind, the unconscious. We approach it through the peculiarities of the endopsychic functions, those functions which are not under the control of the will. They are the vehicle by which unconscious contents reach the surface of consciousness.


[78] The unconscious processes, then, are not directly observable, but those of its products that cross the threshold of consciousness can be divided into two classes. The first class contains recognizable material of a definitely personal origin; these contents are individual acquisitions or products of instinctive processes that make up the personality as a whole. Furthermore, there are forgotten or repressed contents, and creative contents. There is nothing specially peculiar about them. In other people such things may be conscious. Some people are conscious of things of which other people are not. I call that class of contents the subconscious mind or the personal unconscious, because, as far as we can judge, it is entirely made up of personal elements, elements that constitute the human personality as a whole.

[79] Then there is another class of contents of definitely unknown origin, or at all events of an origin which cannot be ascribed to individual acquisition. These contents have one outstanding peculiarity, and that is their mythological character. It is as if they belong to a pattern not peculiar to any particular mind or person, but rather to a pattern peculiar to mankind in general. When I first came across such contents I wondered very much whether they might not be due to heredity, and I thought they might be explained by racial inheritance. In order to settle that question I went to the United States and studied the dreams of pure-blooded Negroes, and I was able to satisfy myself that these images have nothing to do with so-called blood or racial inheritance, nor are they personally acquired by the individual. They belong to mankind in general, and therefore they are of a collective nature.

[80] These collective patterns I have called archetypes, using an expression of St. Augustine’s. 1 An archetype means a typos [imprint], a definite grouping of archaic character containing, in form as well as in meaning, mythological motifs. Mythological motifs appear in pure form in fairytales, myths, legends, and folklore. Some of the well-known motifs are: the figures of the Hero, the Redeemer, the Dragon (always connected with the Hero, who has to overcome him), the Whale or the Monster who swallows the Hero.2 Another variation of the motif of the Hero and the Dragon is the Katabasis, the Descent into the Cave, the Nekyia. You remember in the Odyssey where Ulysses descends ad inferos to consult Tiresias, the seer. This motif of the Nekyia is found everywhere in antiquity and practically all over the world. It expresses the psychological mechanism of introversion of the conscious mind into the deeper layers of the unconscious psyche. From these layers derive the contents of an impersonal, mythological character, in other words, the archetypes, and I call them therefore the impersonal or collective unconscious.

[81] I am perfectly well aware that I can give you only the barest outline of this particular question of the collective unconscious. But I will give you an example of its symbolism and of how I proceed in order to discriminate it from the personal unconscious. When I went to America to investigate the unconscious of Negroes I had in mind this particular problem: are these collective patterns racially inherited, or are they “a priori categories of imagination,” as two Frenchmen, Hubert and Mauss,3 quite independently of my own work, have called them. A Negro told me a dream in which occurred the figure of a man crucified on a wheel.4 I will not mention the whole dream because it does not matter. It contained of course its personal meaning as well as allusions to impersonal ideas, but I picked out only that one motif. He was a very uneducated Negro from the South and not particularly intelligent. It would have been most probable, given the wellknown religious character of the Negroes, that he should dream of a man crucified on a cross. The cross would have been a personal acquisition. But it is rather improbable that he should dream of the man crucified on a wheel. That is a very uncommon image. Of course I cannot prove to you that by some curious chance the Negro had not seen a picture or heard something of the sort and then dreamt about it; but if he had not had any model for this idea it would be an archetypal image, because the crucifixion on the wheel is a mythological motif. It is the ancient sun-wheel, and the crucifixion is the sacrifice to the sun-god in order to propitiate him, just as human and animal sacrifices formerly were offered for the fertility of the earth. The sun-wheel is an exceedingly archaic idea, perhaps the oldest religious idea there is. We can trace it to the Mesolithic and Paleolithic ages, as the sculptures of Rhodesia prove. Now there were real wheels only in the Bronze Age; in the Paleolithic Age the wheel was not yet invented. The Rhodesian sun-wheel seems to be contemporary with very naturalistic animal-pictures, like the famous rhino with the tick-birds, a masterpiece of observation. The Rhodesian sun-wheel is therefore an original vision, presumably an archetypal sun-image.5 But this image is not a naturalistic one, for it is always divided into four or eight partitions (Figure 3). This image, a sort of divided circle, is a symbol which you find throughout the whole history of mankind as well as in the dreams of modern individuals. We might assume that the invention of the actual wheel started from this vision. Many of our inventions came from mythological anticipations and primordial images. For instance, the art of alchemy is the mother of modern chemistry. Our conscious scientific mind started in the matrix of the unconscious mind.

Image
FIG. 3. Sun-wheel

[82] In the dream of the Negro, the man on the wheel is a repetition of the Greek mythological motif of Ixion, who, on account of his offence against men and gods, was fastened by Zeus upon an incessantly turning wheel. I give you this example of a mythological motif in a dream merely in order to convey to you an idea of the collective unconscious. One single example is of course no conclusive proof. But one cannot very well assume that this Negro had studied Greek mythology, and it is improbable that he had seen any representation of Greek mythological figures. Furthermore, figures of Ixion are pretty rare.

[83] I could give you conclusive proof of a very elaborate kind of the existence of these mythological patterns in the unconscious mind. But in order to present my material I should need to lecture for a fortnight. I would have first to explain to you the meaning of dreams and dream-series and then give you all the historical parallels and explain fully their importance, because the symbolism of these images and ideas is not taught in public schools or universities, and even specialists very rarely know of it. I had to study it for years and to find the material myself, and I cannot expect even a highly educated audience to be au courant with such abstruse matters. When we come to the technique of dream-analysis I shall be forced to enter into some of the mythological material and you will get a glimpse of what this work of finding parallels to unconscious products is really like. For the moment I have to content myself with the mere statement that there are mythological patterns in that layer of the unconscious, that it produces contents which cannot be ascribed to the individual and which may even be in strict contradiction to the personal psychology of the dreamer. For instance, you are simply astounded when you observe a completely uneducated person producing a dream which really should not occur with such a person because it contains the most amazing things. And children’s dreams often make you think to such a degree that you must take a holiday afterwards in order to recover from the shock, because these symbols are so tremendously profound and you think: How on earth is it possible that a child should have such a dream?

[84] It is really quite simple to explain. Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it. Millions of people do not know they have a thymus, but they have it. They do not know that in certain parts of their anatomy they belong to the species of the fishes, and yet it is so. Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it. But because I speak of a collective unconscious, I have been accused of obscurantism. There is nothing mystical about the collective unconscious. It is just a new branch of science, and it is really common sense to admit the existence of unconscious collective processes. For, though a child is not born conscious, his mind is not a tabula rasa. The child is born with a definite brain, and the brain of an English child will work not like that of an Australian blackfellow but in the way of a modern English person. The brain is born with a finished structure, it will work in a modern way, but this brain has its history. It has been built up in the course of millions of years and represents a history of which it is the result. Naturally it carries with it the traces of that history, exactly like the body, and if you grope down into the basic structure of the mind you naturally find traces of the archaic mind.

[85] The idea of the collective unconscious is really very simple. If it were not so, then one could speak of a miracle, and I am not a miracle-monger at all. I simply go by experience. If I could tell you the experiences you would draw the same conclusions about these archaic motifs. By chance, I stumbled somehow into mythology and have read more books perhaps than you. I have not always been a student of mythology. One day, when I was still at the clinic, I saw a patient with schizophrenia who had a peculiar vision, and he told me about it. He wanted me to see it and, being very dull, I could not see it. I thought, “This man is crazy and I am normal and his vision should not bother me.” But it did. I asked myself: What does it mean? I was not satisfied that it was just crazy, and later I came on a book by a German scholar, Dieterich,6 who had published part of a magic papyrus. I studied it with great interest, and on page 7 I found the vision of my lunatic “word for word.” That gave me a shock. I said: “How on earth is it possible that this fellow came into possession of that vision?” It was not just one image, but a series of images and a literal repetition of them. I do not want to go into it now because it would lead us too far. It is a highly interesting case; as a matter of fact, I published it.7

[86] This astonishing parallelism set me going. You probably have not come across the book of the learned professor Dieterich, but if you had read the same books and observed such cases you would have discovered the idea of the collective unconscious.

[87] The deepest we can reach in our exploration of the unconscious mind is the layer where man is no longer a distinct individual, but where his mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind—not the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the same. As the body has its anatomical conformity in its two eyes and two ears and one heart and so on, with only slight individual differences, so has the mind its basic conformity. On this collective level we are no longer separate individuals, we are all one. You can understand this when you study the psychology of primitives. The outstanding fact about the primitive mentality is this lack of distinctiveness between individuals, this oneness of the subject with the object, this participation mystique, as Lévy-Bruhl8 terms it. Primitive mentality expresses the basic structure of the mind, that psychological layer which with us is the collective unconscious, that underlying level which is the same in all. Because the basic structure of the mind is the same in everybody, we cannot make distinctions when we experience on that level. There we do not know if something has happened to you or to me. In the underlying collective level there is a wholeness which cannot be dissected. If you begin to think about participation as a fact which means that fundamentally we are identical with everybody and everything, you are led to very peculiar theoretical conclusions. You should not go further than those conclusions because these things get dangerous. But some of the conclusions you should explore, because they can explain a lot of peculiar things that happen to man.

[88] I want to sum up: I have brought a diagram (Figure 4). It looks very complicated but as a matter of fact it is very simple. Suppose our mental sphere to look like a lighted globe. The surface from which the light emanates is the function by which you chiefly adapt. If you are a person who adapts chiefly by thinking, your surface is the surface of a thinking man. You will tackle things with your thinking, and what you will show to people will be your thinking. It will be another function if you are of another type.9

[89] In the diagram, sensation is given as the peripheral function. By it man gets information from the world of external objects. In the second circle, thinking, he gets what his senses have told him; he will give things a name. Then he will have a feeling about them; a feeling-tone will accompany his observation. And in the end he will get some consciousness of where a thing comes from, where it may go, and what it may do. That is intuition, by which you see round corners. These four functions form the ectopsychic system.

[90] The next circle in the diagram represents the conscious ego-complex to which the functions refer. Inside the endopsyche you first notice memory, which is still a function that can be controlled by the will; it is under the control of your ego-complex. Then we meet the subjective components of the functions. They cannot be exactly directed by the will but they still can be suppressed, excluded, or increased in intensity by will-power. These components are no longer as controllable as memory, though even memory is a bit tricky as you know. Then we come to the affects and invasions, which are only controllable by sheer force. You can suppress them, and that is all you can do. You have to clench your fists in order not to explode, because they are apt to be stronger than your ego-complex.

[91] This psychic system cannot really be expressed by such a crude diagram. The diagram is rather a scale of values showing how the energy or intensity of the ego-complex which manifests itself in will-power gradually decreases as you approach the darkness that is ultimately at the bottom of the whole structure—the unconscious. First we have the personal subconscious mind. The personal unconscious is that part of the psyche which contains all the things that could just as well be conscious. You know that many things are termed unconscious, but that is only a relative statement. There is nothing in this particular sphere that is necessarily unconscious in everybody. There are people who are conscious of almost anything of which man can be conscious. Of course we have an extraordinary amount of unconsciousness in our civilization, but if you go to other races, to India or to China, for example, you discover that these people are conscious of things for which the psychoanalyst in our countries has to dig for months. Moreover, simple people in natural conditions often have an extraordinary consciousness of things of which people in towns have no knowledge and of which townspeople begin to dream only under the influence of psychoanalysis. I noticed this at school. I had lived in the country among peasants and with animals, and I was fully conscious of a number of things of which other boys had no idea. I had the chance and I was not prejudiced. When you analyse dreams or symptoms or fantasies of neurotic or normal people, you begin to penetrate the unconscious mind, and you can abolish its artificial threshold. The personal unconscious is really something very relative, and its circle can be restricted and become so much narrower that it touches zero. It is quite thinkable that a man can develop his consciousness to such an extent that he can say: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto.10

Image
FIG. 4. The Psyche

[92] Finally we come to the ultimate kernel which cannot be made conscious at all—the sphere of the archetypal mind. Its presumable contents appear in the form of images which can be understood only by comparing them with historical parallels. If you do not recognize certain material as historical, and if you do not possess the parallels, you cannot integrate these contents into consciousness and they remain projected. The contents of the collective unconscious are not subject to any arbitrary intention and are not controllable by the will. They actually behave as if they did not exist in yourself—you see them in your neighbours but not in yourself. When the contents of the collective unconscious become activated, we become aware of certain things in our fellow men. For instance, we begin to discover that the bad Abyssinians are attacking Italy. You know the famous story by Anatole France. Two peasants were always fighting each other, and there was somebody who wanted to go into the reasons for it, and he asked one man, “Why do you hate your neighbour and fight him like this?” He replied, “Mais il est de l’autre côté de la rivière!” That is like France and Germany. We Swiss people, you know, had a very good chance during the Great War to read newspapers and to study that particular mechanism which behaved like a great gun firing on one side of the Rhine and in exactly the same way on the other side, and it was very clear that people saw in their neighbours the thing they did not recognize in themselves.

[93] As a rule, when the collective unconscious becomes really constellated in larger social groups, the result is a public craze, a mental epidemic that may lead to revolution or war or something of the sort. These movements are exceedingly contagious—almost overwhelmingly contagious because, when the collective unconscious is activated, you are no longer the same person. You are not only in the movement—you are it. If you lived in Germany or were there for a while, you would defend yourself in vain. It gets under your skin. You are human, and wherever you are in the world you can defend yourself only by restricting your consciousness and making yourself as empty, as soulless, as possible. Then you lose your soul, because you are only a speck of consciousness floating on a sea of life in which you do not participate. But if you remain yourself you will notice that the collective atmosphere gets under your skin. You cannot live in Africa or any such country without having that country under your skin. If you live with the yellow man you get yellow under the skin. You cannot prevent it, because somewhere you are the same as the Negro or the Chinese or whoever you live with, you are all just human beings. In the collective unconscious you are the same as a man of another race, you have the same archetypes, just as you have, like him, eyes, a heart, a liver, and so on. It does not matter that his skin is black. It matters to a certain extent, sure enough—he has probably a whole historical layer less than you. The different strata of the mind correspond to the history of the races.

[94] If you study races as I have done you can make very interesting discoveries. You can make them, for instance, if you analyse North Americans. The American, on account of the fact that he lives on virgin soil, has the Red Indian in him. The Red man, even if he has never seen one, and the Negro, though he may be cast out and the tram-cars reserved for white men only, have got into the American and you will realize that he belongs to a partly coloured nation.11 These things are wholly unconscious, and you can only talk to very enlightened people about them. It is just as difficult to talk to Frenchmen or Germans when you have to tell them why they are so much against each other.

[95] A little while ago I had a nice evening in Paris. Some very cultivated men had invited me, and we had a pleasant conversation. They asked me about national differences, and I thought I would put my foot in it, so I said: “What you value is la clarté latine, la clarté de l’esprit latin. That is because your thinking is inferior. The Latin thinker is inferior in comparison to the German thinker.” They cocked their ears, and I said: “But your feeling is unsurpassable, it is absolutely differentiated.” They said: “How is that?” I replied: “Go to a café or a vaudeville or a place where you hear songs and stage-plays and you will notice a very peculiar phenomenon. There are any number of very grotesque and cynical things and then suddenly something sentimental happens. A mother loses her child, there is a lost love, or something marvellously patriotic, and you must weep. For you, the salt and the sugar have to go together. But a German can stand a whole evening of sugar only. The Frenchman must have some salt in it. You meet a man and say: Enchanté de faire votre connaissance. You are not enchanté de faire sa connaissance at all; you are really feeling: ‘Oh go to the devil.’ But you are not disturbed, nor is he. But do not say to a German: Enchanté de faire votre connaissance, because he will believe it. A German will sell you a pair of sock-suspenders and not only expect, as is natural, to be paid for it. He also expects to be loved for it.”

[96] The German nation is characterized by the fact that its feeling function is inferior, it is not differentiated. If you say that to a German he is offended. I should be offended too. He is very attached to what he calls ”Gemütlichkeit.” A room full of smoke in which everybody loves everybody—that is gemütlich and that must not be disturbed. It has to be absolutely clear, just one note and no more. That is la clarté germanique du sentiment, and it is inferior. On the other hand, it is a gross offence to a Frenchman to say something paradoxical, because it is not clear. An English philosopher has said, “A superior mind is never quite clear.” That is true, and also superior feeling is never quite clear. You will only enjoy a feeling that is above board when it is slightly doubtful, and a thought that does not have a slight contradiction in it is not convincing.

[97] Our particular problem from now on will be: How can we approach the dark sphere of man? As I have told you, this is done by three methods of analysis: the word-association test, dream-analysis, and the method of active imagination. First of all I want to say something about word-association tests. 12 To many of you perhaps these seem old-fashioned, but since they are still being used I have to refer to them. I use this test now not with patients but with criminal cases.

[98] The experiment is made—I am repeating well-known things—with a list of say a hundred words. You instruct the test person to react with the first word that comes into his mind as quickly as possible after having heard and understood the stimulus word. When you have made sure that the test person has understood what you mean you start the experiment. You mark the time of each reaction with a stop-watch. When you have finished the hundred words you do another experiment. You repeat the stimulus words and the test person has to reproduce his former answers. In certain places his memory fails and reproduction becomes uncertain or faulty. These mistakes are important.

[99] Originally the experiment was not meant for its present application at all; it was intended to be used for the study of mental association. That was of course a most Utopian idea. One can study nothing of the sort by such primitive means. But you can study something else when the experiment fails, when people make mistakes. You ask a simple word that a child can answer, and a highly intelligent person cannot reply. Why? That word has hit on what I call a complex, a conglomeration of psychic contents characterized by a peculiar or perhaps painful feeling-tone, something that is usually hidden from sight. It is as though a projectile struck through the thick layer of the persona13 into the dark layer. For instance, somebody with a money complex will be hit when you say: “To buy,” “to pay,” or “money.” That is a disturbance of reaction.

[100] We have about twelve or more categories of disturbance and I will mention a few of them so that you will get an idea of their practical value. The prolongation of the reaction time is of the greatest practical importance. You decide whether the reaction time is too long by taking the average mean of the reaction times of the test person. Other characteristic disturbances are: reaction with more than one word, against the instructions; mistakes in reproduction of the word; reaction expressed by facial expression, laughing, movement of the hands or feet or body, coughing, stammering, and such things; insufficient reactions like “yes” or “no”; not reacting to the real meaning of the stimulus word; habitual use of the same words; use of foreign languages—of which there is not a great danger in England, though with us it is a great nuisance; defective reproduction, when memory begins to fail in the reproduction experiment; total lack of reaction.

[101] All these reactions are beyond the control of the will. If you submit to the experiment you are done for, and if you do not submit to it you are done for too, because one knows why you are unwilling to do so. If you put it to a criminal he can refuse, and that is fatal because one knows why he refuses. If he gives in he hangs himself. In Zurich I am called in by the Court when they have a difficult case; I am the last straw.

[102] The results of the association test can be illustrated very neatly by a diagram (Figure 5). The height of the columns represents the actual reaction time of the test person. The dotted horizontal line represents the average mean of reaction times. The unshaded columns are those reactions which show no signs of disturbance. The shaded columns show disturbed reactions. In reactions 7, 8, 9, 10, you observe for instance a whole series of disturbances: the stimulus word at 7 was a critical one, and without the test person noticing it at all three subsequent reaction times are overlong on account of the perseveration of the reaction to the stimulus word. The test person was quite unconscious of the fact that he had an emotion. Reaction 13 shows an isolated disturbance, and in 16–20 the result is again a whole series of disturbances. The strongest disturbances are in reactions 18 and 19. In this particular case we have to do with a so-called intensification of sensitiveness through the sensitizing effect of an unconscious emotion: when a critical stimulus word has aroused a perseverating emotional reaction, and when the next critical stimulus word happens to occur with in the range of that perseveration, then it is apt to produce a greater effect than it would have been expected to produce if it had occurred in a series of indifferent associations. This is called the sensitizing effect of a perseverating emotion.

Image
FIG. 5. Association Test

[103] In dealing with criminal cases we can make use of the sensitizing effect, and then we arrange the critical stimulus words in such a way that they occur more or less within the presumable range of perseveration. This can be done in order to increase the effect of critical stimulus words. With a suspected culprit as a test person, the critical stimulus words are words which have a direct bearing upon the crime.

[104] The test person for Figure 5 was a man about 35, a decent individual, one of my normal test persons. I had of course to experiment with a great number of normal people before I could draw conclusions from pathological material. If you want to know what it was that disturbed this man, you simply have to read the words that caused the disturbances and fit them together. Then you get a nice story. I will tell you exactly what it was.

[105] To begin with, it was the word knife that caused four disturbed reactions. The next disturbance was lance (or spear) and then to beat, then the word pointed and then bottle. That was in a short series of fifty stimulus words, which was enough for me to tell the man point-blank what the matter was. So I said: “I did not know you had had such a disagreeable experience.” He stared at me and said: “I do not know what you are talking about.” I said: “You know you were drunk and had a disagreeable affair with sticking your knife into somebody.” He said: “How do you know?” Then he confessed the whole thing. He came of a respectable family, simple but quite nice people. He had been abroad and one day got into a drunken quarrel, drew a knife and stuck it into somebody, and got a year in prison. That is a great secret which he does not mention because it would cast a shadow on his life. Nobody in his town or surroundings knows anything about it and I am the only one who by chance stumbled upon it. In my seminar in Zurich I also make these experiments. Those who want to confess are of course welcome to. However, I always ask them to bring some material of a person they know and I do not know, and I show them how to read the story of that individual. It is quite interesting work; sometimes one makes remarkable discoveries.

[106] I will give you other instances. Many years ago, when I was quite a young doctor, an old professor of criminology asked me about the experiment and said he did not believe in it. I said: “No, Professor? You can try it whenever you like.” He invited me to his house and I began. After ten words he got tired and said: “What can you make of it? Nothing has come of it.” I told him he could not expect a result with ten or twelve words; he ought to have a hundred and then we could see something. He said: “Can you do something with these words?” I said: “Little enough, but I can tell you something. Quite recently you have had worries about money, you have too little of it. You are afraid of dying of heart disease. You must have studied in France, where you had a love affair, and it has come back to your mind, as often, when one has thoughts of dying, old sweet memories come back from the womb of time.” He said: “How do you know?” Any child could have seen it! He was a man of 72 and he had associated heart with pain—fear that he would die of heart failure. He associated death with to die—a natural reaction—and with money he associated too little, a very usual reaction. Then things became rather startling to me. To pay, after a long reaction time, he said La Semeuse, though our conversation was in German. That is the famous figure on the French coin. Now why on earth should this old man say La Semeuse? When he came to the word kiss there was a long reaction time and there was a light in his eyes and he said: Beautiful. Then of course I had the story. He would never have used French if it had not been associated with a particular feeling, and so we must think why he used it. Had he had losses with the French franc? There was no talk of inflation and devaluation in those days. That could not be the clue. I was in doubt whether it was money or love, but when he came to kiss/beautiful I knew it was love. He was not the kind of man to go to France in later life, but he had been a student in Paris, a lawyer, probably at the Sorbonne. It was relatively simple to stitch together the whole story.

[107] But occasionally you come upon a real tragedy. Figure 6 is the case of a woman of about thirty years of age. She was in the clinic, and the diagnosis was schizophrenia of a depressive character. The prognosis was correspondingly bad. I had this woman in my ward, and I had a peculiar feeling about her. I felt I could not quite agree with the bad prognosis, because already schizophrenia was a relative idea with me. I thought that we are all relatively crazy, but this woman was peculiar, and I could not accept the diagnosis as the last word. In those days one knew precious little. Of course I made an anamnesis, but nothing was discovered that threw any light on her illness. Therefore I put her to the association test and finally made a very peculiar discovery. The first disturbance was caused by the word angel, and a complete lack of reaction by the word obstinate. Then there were evil, rich, money, stupid, dear, and to marry. Now this woman was the wife of a well-to-do man in a very fine position and apparently happy. I had questioned her husband, and the only thing he could tell me, as she also did, was that the depression came on about two months after her eldest child had died—a little girl four years old. Nothing else could be found out about the aetiology of the case. The association test confronted me with a most baffling series of reactions which I could not put together. You will often be in such a situation, particularly if you have no routine with that kind of diagnosis. Then you first ask the test person about the words which are not going directly to the kernel. If you asked directly about the strongest disturbances you would get wrong answers, so you begin with relatively harmless words and you are likely to get an honest reply. I said: “What about angel: Does that word mean something to you?” She replied: “Of course, that is my child whom I have lost.” And then came a great flood of tears. When the storm had blown over I asked: “What does obstinate mean to you?” She said: “It means nothing to me.” But I said: “There was a big disturbance with the word and it means there is something connected with it.” I could not penetrate it. I came to the word evil and could get nothing out of her. There was a severely negative reaction which showed that she refused to answer. I went on to blue, and she said: “Those are the eyes of the child I have lost.” I said: “Did they make a particular impression on you?” She said: “Of course. They were so wonderfully blue when the child was born.” I noticed the expression on her face, and I said: “Why are you upset?” and she replied: “Well, she did not have the eyes of my husband.” Finally it came out that the child had had the eyes of a former lover of hers. I said: “What is upsetting you with regard to that man?” And I was able to worm the story out of her.

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FIG. 6. Association Test

[108] In the little town in which she grew up there was a rich young man. She was of a well-to-do family but nothing grand. The man was of the moneyed aristocracy and the hero of the little town, and every girl dreamed of him. She was a pretty girl and thought she might have a chance. Then she discovered she had no chance with him, and her family said: “Why think of him? He is a rich man and does not think of you. Here is Mr. So-and-So, a nice man. Why not marry him?” She married him and was perfectly happy ever after until the fifth year of her marriage, when a former friend from her native town came to visit her. When her husband left the room he said to her: “You have caused pain to a certain gentleman” (meaning the hero). She said: “What? I caused pain?” The friend replied: “Didn’t you know he was in love with you and was disappointed when you married another man?” That set fire to the roof. But she repressed it. A fortnight later she was bathing her boy, two years, and her girl, four years old. The water in the town—it was not in Switzerland—was not above suspicion, in fact it was infected with typhoid fever. She noticed that the little girl was sucking a sponge. But she did not interfere, and when the little boy said, “I want to drink some water,” she gave him the possibly infected water. The little girl got typhoid fever and died, the little boy was saved. Then she had what she wanted—or what the devil in her wanted— the denial of her marriage in order to marry the other man. To this end she had committed murder. She did not know it; she only told me the facts and did not draw the conclusion that she was responsible for the death of the child since she knew the water was infected and there was danger. I was faced with the question whether I should tell her she had committed murder, or whether I should keep quiet. (It was only a question of telling her, there was no threat of a criminal case.) I thought that if I told her it might make her condition much worse, but there was a bad prognosis anyhow, whereas, if she could realize what she had done, the chance was that she might get well. So I made up my mind to tell her point-blank: “You killed your child.” She went up in the air in an emotional state, but then she came down to the facts. In three weeks we were able to discharge her, and she never came back. I traced her for fifteen years, and there was no relapse. That depression fitted her case psychologically: she was a murderess and under other circumstances would have deserved capital punishment. Instead of going to jail she was sent to the lunatic asylum. I practically saved her from the punishment of insanity by putting an enormous burden on her conscience. For if one can accept one’s sin one can live with it. If one cannot accept it, one has to suffer the inevitable consequences.
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Re: The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of An

Postby admin » Fri Apr 26, 2019 5:48 am

Part 2 of 2

Discussion

Question:

[109] I want to refer to last night. Towards the end of his lecture Dr. Jung spoke of higher and lower functions and said the thinking type would use his feeling function archaically. I would like to know: is the reverse true? Does the feeling type, when he tries to think, think archaically? In other words, are thinking and intuition to be regarded always as higher functions than feeling and sensation? I ask this because … I gathered from lectures elsewhere that sensation was the lowest of conscious functions and thinking a higher one. It is certainly the case that in everyday life thinking seems to be the top-notch. The professor—not this Professor—thinking in his study regards himself and is regarded as the highest type, higher than the countryman who says: “Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits.”

Professor Jung:

[110] I hope I did not give you the impression that I was giving a preference to any of the functions. The dominating function in a given individual is always the most differentiated, and that can be any function. We have absolutely no criterion by which we can say this or that function in itself is the best. We can only say that the differentiated function in the individual is the best for adapting, and that the one that is most excluded by the superior function is inferior on account of being neglected. There are some modern people who say that intuition is the highest function. Fastidious individuals prefer intuition, it is classy! The sensation type always thinks that other people are very inferior because they are not so real as he is. He is the real fellow and everybody else is fantastic and unreal. Everybody thinks his superior function is the top of the world. In that respect we are liable to the most awful blunders. To realize the actual order of functions in our consciousness, severe psychological criticism is needed. There are many people who believe that world problems are settled by thinking. But no truth can be established without all four functions. When you have thought the world you have done one-fourth of it; the remaining three- fourths may be against you.

Dr. Eric B. Strauss:

[111] Professor Jung said the word-association test was a means by which one could study the contents of the personal unconscious. In the examples he gave surely the matters revealed were matters in the patient’s conscious mind and not in his unconscious. Surely if one wanted to seek for unconscious material one would have to go a step further and get the patient to associate freely on the anomalous reactions. I am thinking of the association with the word “knife,” when Professor Jung so cleverly assumed the story of the unfortunate incident. That surely was in the patient’s conscious mind, whereas, if the word “knife” had unconscious associations we might, if we were Freudian-minded, have assumed it was associated with an unconscious castration complex or something of that kind. I am not saying it is so, but I do not understand what Professor Jung means when he says the association test is to reach to the patient’s unconscious. Surely in the instance given tonight it is used to reach the conscious, or what Freud would perhaps call the preconscious.

Professor Jung:

[112] I should like very much if you would pay more attention to what I say. I told you that unconscious things are very relative. When I am unconscious of a certain thing I am only relatively unconscious of it; in some other respects I may know it. The contents of the personal unconscious are perfectly conscious in certain respects, but you do not know them under a particular aspect or at a particular time.

[113] How can you establish whether the thing is conscious or unconscious? You simply ask people. We have no other criterion to establish whether something is conscious or unconscious. You ask: “Do you know whether you have had certain hesitations?” They say: “No, I had no hesitation; to my knowledge I had the same reaction time.” “Are you conscious that something disturbed you?” “No, I am not.” “Have you no recollection of what you answered to the word ‘knife’?” “None at all.” This unawareness of facts is a very common thing. When I am asked if I know a certain man I may say no, because I have no recollection of him and so I am not conscious of knowing him; but when I am told that I met him two years ago, that he is Mr. So-and-So who has done such and such a thing, I reply: “Certainly I know him.” I know him and I do not know him. All the contents of the personal unconscious are relatively unconscious, even the castration complex and the incest complex. They are perfectly known under certain aspects, though they are unconscious under others. This relativity of being conscious of something becomes quite plain in hysterical cases. Quite often you find that things which seem unconscious are unconscious only to the doctor but not perhaps to the nurse or the relatives.

[114] I had to see an interesting case once in a famous clinic in Berlin, a case of multiple sarcomatosis of the spinal cord, and because it was a very famous neurologist who had made the diagnosis I almost trembled, but I asked for the anamnesis and had a very nice one worked out. I asked when the symptoms began, and found it was the evening of the day when the only son of the woman had left her and married. She was a widow, quite obviously in love with her son, and I said: “This is no sarcomatosis but an ordinary hysteria, which we can prove presently.” The professor was horrified at my lack of intelligence or tact or I don’t know what, and I had to walk out. But somebody ran after me in the street. It was the nurse, who said: “Doctor, I want to thank you for saying that it was hysteria. I always thought so.”

Dr. Eric Graham Howe:

[115] May I return to what Dr. Strauss said? Last night Professor Jung reproved me for merely using words, but I think it is important to get these words clearly understood. I wonder if you have ever asked for the association experiment to be applied to the words “mystic” or “fourth dimension”? I believe you would get a period of great delay and concentrated fury every time they were mentioned. I propose to return to the fourth-dimensional, because I believe it is a link badly needed to help our understanding. Dr. Strauss uses the word “unconscious,” but I understand from Professor Jung that there is no such thing, there is only a relative unconsciousness which depends on a relative degree of consciousness. According to Freudians, there is a place, a thing, an entity called the unconscious. According to Professor Jung, as I understand him, there is no such thing. He is moving in a fluid medium of relationship and Freud in a static medium of unrelated entities. To get it clear Freud is three-dimensional and Jung is, in all his psychology, four-dimensional. For this reason, I would criticize if I may the whole diagrammatic system of Jung because he is giving you a three-dimensional presentation of a four-dimensional system, a static presentation of something that is functionally moving, and unless it is explained you get it confused with the Freudian terminology and you cannot understand it. I shall insist that there must be some clarification of words.

Professor Jung:

[116] I could wish Dr. Graham Howe were not so indiscreet. You are right, but you should not say such things. As I explained, I tried to begin with the mildest propositions. You put your foot right into it and speak of four dimensions and of the word “mystic,” and you tell me that all of us would have a long reaction time to such stimulus words. You are quite right, everybody would be stung because we are just beginners in our field. I agree with you that it is very difficult to let psychology be a living thing and not to dissolve it into static entities. Naturally you must express yourself in terms of the fourth dimension when you bring the time factor into a three-dimensional system. When you speak of dynamics and processes you need the time factor, and then you have all the prejudice of the world against you because you have used the word “four-dimensional.” It is a taboo word that should not be mentioned. It has a history, and we should be exceedingly tactful with such words. The more you advance in the understanding of the psyche the more careful you will have to be with terminology, because it is historically coined and prejudiced. The more you penetrate the basic problems of psychology the more you approach ideas which are philosophically, religiously, and morally prejudiced. Therefore certain things should be handled with the utmost care.

Dr. Howe: [117] This audience would like you to be provocative. I am going to say a rash thing. You and I do not regard the shape of the ego as a straight line. We would be prepared to regard the sphere as a true shape of the self in four dimensions, of which one is the three-dimensional outline. If so, will you answer a question: “What is the scope of that self which in four dimensions is a moving sphere?” I suggest the answer is: “The universe itself, which includes your concept of the collective racial unconscious.”

Professor Jung:

[118] I should be much obliged if you would repeat that question.

Dr. Howe:

[119] How big is this sphere, which is the four-dimensional self? I could not help giving the answer and saying that it is the same bigness as the universe.

Professor Jung:

[120] This is really a philosophical question, and to answer it requires a great deal of theory of cognition. The world is our picture. Only childish people imagine that the world is what we think it is. The image of the world is a projection of the world of the self, as the latter is an introjection of the world. But only the special mind of a philosopher will step beyond the ordinary picture of the world in which there are static and isolated things. If you stepped beyond that picture you would cause an earthquake in the ordinary mind, the whole cosmos would be shaken, the most sacred convictions and hopes would be upset, and I do not see why one should wish to disquiet things. It is not good for patients, nor for doctors: it is perhaps good for philosophers.

Dr. Ian Suttie:

[121] I should like to go back to Dr. Strauss’s question. I can understand what Dr. Strauss means and I think I can understand what Professor Jung means. As far as I can see, Professor Jung fails to make any link between his statement and Dr. Strauss’s. Dr. Strauss wanted to know how the wordassociation test can show the Freudian unconscious, the material that is actually pushed out of mind. As far as I understand Professor Jung, he means what Freud means by the “Id.” It seems to me that we should define our ideas well enough to compare them and not merely use them, each in our own school.

Professor Jung:

[122] I must repeat again that my methods do not discover theories, they discover facts, and I tell you what facts I discover with these methods. I cannot discover a castration complex or a repressed incest or something like that—I find only psychological facts, not theories. I am afraid you mix up too much theory with fact and you are perhaps disappointed that the experiments do not reveal a castration complex and such things, but a castration complex is a theory. What you find in the association method are definite facts which we did not know before and which the test person also did not know in this particular light. I do not say he did not know it under another light. You know many things when you are in your business that you do not know at home, and at home you know many things that you do not know in your official position. Things are known in one place and somewhere else they are not known. That is what we call unconscious. I must repeat that we cannot penetrate the unconscious empirically and then discover, for instance, the Freudian theory of the castration complex. The castration complex is a mythological idea, but it is not found as such. What we actually find are certain facts grouped in a specific way, and we name them according to mythological or historical parallels. You cannot find a mythological motif, you can only find a personal motif, and that never appears in the form of a theory but as a living fact of human life. You can abstract a theory from it, Freudian or Adlerian or any other. You can think what you please about the facts of the world, and there will be as many theories in the end as heads that think about it.

Dr. Suttie:

[123] I protest! I am not interested in this or that theory or what facts are found or not, but I am interested in having a means of communication by which each can know what the others are thinking and for that end I hold that our conceptions must be defined. We must know what the other person means by a certain thing like the unconscious of Freud. As for the word “unconscious,” it is becoming more or less known to everybody. It has therefore a certain social or illustrative value, but Jung refuses to recognize the word “unconscious” in the meaning Freud gives to it and uses “unconscious” in a way that we have come to consider as what Freud calls the “Id.”

Professor Jung:

[124] The word “unconscious” is not Freud’s invention. It was known in German philosophy long before, by Kant and Leibniz and others, and each of them gives his definition of that term. I am perfectly well aware that there are many different conceptions of the unconscious, and what I was trying humbly to do was to say what I think about it. It is not that I undervalue the merits of Leibniz, Kant, von Hartmann, or any other great man, including Freud and Adler and so on. I was only explaining what I mean by the unconscious, and I presuppose that you are all aware of what Freud means by it. I did not think it was my task to explain things in such a way that somebody who is convinced of Freud’s theory and prefers that point of view would be upset in his belief. I have no tendency to destroy your convictions or points of view. I simply exhibit my own point of view, and if anybody should be tempted to think that this also is reasonable, that is all I want. It is perfectly indifferent to me what one thinks about the unconscious in general, otherwise I should begin a long dissertation on the concept of the unconscious as understood by Leibniz, Kant, and von Hartmann.

Dr. Suttie:

[125] Dr. Strauss asked about the relationship of the unconscious as conceived by you and by Freud. Is it possible to bring them into precise and definite relationship?

Professor Jung:

[126] Dr. Graham Howe has answered the question. Freud is seeing the mental processes as static, while I speak in terms of dynamics and relationship. To me all is relative. There is nothing definitely unconscious; it is only not present to the conscious mind under a certain light. You can have very different ideas of why a thing is known under one aspect and not known under another aspect. The only exception I make is the mythological pattern, which is profoundly unconscious, as I can prove by the facts.

Dr. Strauss:

[127] Surely there is a difference between using your association test as a crime detector and for finding, let us say, unconscious guilt. Your criminal is conscious of his guilt and he is conscious that he is afraid of its being discovered. Your neurotic is unaware of his guilt and unaware that he is afraid of his guilt. Can the same kind of technique be used in these two very different kinds of cases?

The Chairman:

[128] This woman was not conscious of her guilt though she had allowed the child to suck the sponge.

Professor Jung:

[129] I will show you the difference experimentally. In Figure 7 you have a short illustration of respiration during the association test. You see four series of seven respirations registered after the stimulus words. The diagrams are condensations of respirations after indifferent and critical stimulus words in a greater number of test persons.

[130] “A” gives respirations after indifferent stimulus words. The first inspirations after the stimulus words are restricted, while the following inspirations are of normal size.

[131] In “B” where the stimulus word was a critical one the volume of breathing is definitely restricted, sometimes by more than half the normal size.

[132] In “C” we have the behaviour of breathing after a stimulus word relating to a complex that was conscious to the test persons. The first inspiration is almost normal, and only later you find a certain restriction.

[133] In “D” the respiration is after a stimulus word that was related to a complex of which the test persons were unconscious. In this case the first inspiration is remarkably small and the following are rather below normal.

[134] These diagrams illustrate very clearly the difference of reaction between conscious and unconscious complexes. In “C,” for instance, the complex is conscious. The stimulus word hits the test person, and there is a deep inspiration. But when the stimulus word hits an unconscious complex, the volume of breathing is restricted, as shown in “D” I. There is a spasm in the thorax, so that almost no breathing takes place. In that way one has empirical proof of the physiological difference between conscious and unconscious reaction.14

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FIG. 7. Association Test Respiration

Dr. Wilfred R. Bion:

[135] You gave an analogy between archaic forms of the body and archaic forms of the mind. Is it purely an analogy or is there in fact a closer relationship? Last night you said something which suggested that you consider there is a connection between the mind and the brain, and there has lately been published in the British Medical Journal a diagnosis of yours from a dream of a physical disorder.15 If that case was correctly reported it makes a very important suggestion, and I wondered whether you considered there was some closer connection between the two forms of archaic survival.

Professor Jung:

[136] You touch again on the controversial problem of psychophysical parallelism for which I know of no answer, because it is beyond the reach of man’s cognition. As I tried to explain yesterday, the two things—the psychic fact and the physiological fact—come together in a peculiar way. They happen together and are, so I assume, simply two different aspects to our mind, but not in reality. We see them as two on account of the utter incapacity of our mind to think them together. Because of that possible unity of the two things, we must expect to find dreams which are more on the physiological side than on the psychological, as we have other dreams that are more on the psychological than on the physical side. The dream to which you refer was very clearly a representation of an organic disorder. These “organic representations” are well known in ancient literature. The doctors of antiquity and of the Middle Ages used dreams for their diagnosis. I did not conduct a physical examination on the man you refer to. I only heard his history and was told the dream, and I gave my opinion on it. I have had other cases, for instance a very doubtful case of progressive muscular atrophy in a young girl. I asked about dreams and she had two dreams which were very colourful. A colleague, a man who knew something of psychology, thought it might be a case of hysteria. There were indeed hysterical symptoms, and it was still doubtful if it was progressive muscular atrophy or not; but on account of the dreams I came to the conclusion that it must be an organic disease, and the end proved my diagnosis. It was an organic disturbance, and the dreams were definitely referring to the organic condition.16 According to my idea of the community of the psyche and the living body it should be like that, and it would be marvellous if it were not so.

Dr. Bion:

[137] Will you be talking of that later when you speak on dreams?

Professor Jung:

[138] I am afraid that I cannot go into such detail; it is too special. It is really a matter of special experience, and its presentation would be a very difficult job. It would not be possible to describe to you briefly the criteria by which I judge such dreams. The dream you mentioned, you may remember, was a dream of the little mastodon. To explain what that mastodon really means in an organic respect and why I must take that dream as an organic symptom would start such an argument that you would accuse me of the most terrible obscurantism. These things really are obscure. I had to speak in terms of the basic mind, which thinks in archetypal patterns. When I speak of archetypal patterns those who are aware of these things understand, but if you are not aware you think, “This fellow is absolutely crazy because he talks of mastodons and their difference from snakes and horses.” I should have to give you a course of about four semesters about symbology first so that you could appreciate what I said.

[139] That is the great trouble: there is such a gap between what is usually known of these things and what I have worked on all these years. If I were to speak of this even before a medical audience I should have to talk of the peculiarities of the niveau mental, to quote Janet, and I might as well talk Chinese. For instance, I would say that the abaissement du niveau mental sank in a certain case to the level of the manipura chakra,17 that is, to the level of the navel. We Europeans are not the only people on the earth. We are just a peninsula of Asia, and on that continent there are old civilizations where people have trained their minds in introspective psychology for thousands of years, whereas we began with our psychology not even yesterday but only this morning. These people have an insight that is simply fabulous, and I had to study Eastern things to understand certain facts of the unconscious. I had to go back to understand Oriental symbolism. I am about to publish a little book on one symbolic motif only,18 and you will find it hair-raising. I had to study not only Chinese and Hindu but Sanskrit literature and medieval Latin manuscripts which are not even known to specialists, so that one must go to the British Museum to find the references. Only when you possess that apparatus of parallelism can you begin to make diagnoses and say that this dream is organic and that one is not. Until people have acquired that knowledge I am just a sorcerer. They say it is un tour de passe-passe. They said it in the Middle Ages. They said, “How can you see that Jupiter has satellites?” If you reply that you have a telescope, what is a telescope to a medieval audience?

[140] I do not mean to boast about this. I am always perplexed when my colleagues ask: “How do you establish such a diagnosis or come to this conclusion?” I reply: “I will explain if you will allow me to explain what you ought to know to be able to understand it.” I experienced this myself when the famous Einstein was Professor at Zurich. I often saw him, and it was when he was beginning to work on his theory of relativity. He was often in my house, and I pumped him about his relativity theory. I am not gifted in mathematics and you should have seen all the trouble the poor man had to explain relativity to me. He did not know how to do it. I went fourteen feet deep into the floor and felt quite small when I saw how he was troubled. But one day he asked me something about psychology. Then I had my revenge.

[141] Special knowledge is a terrible disadvantage. It leads you in a way too far, so that you cannot explain any more. You must allow me to talk to you about seemingly elementary things, but if you will accept them I think you will understand why I draw such and such conclusions. I am sorry that we do not have more time and that I cannot tell you everything. When I come to dreams I have to give myself away and to risk your thinking me a perfect fool, because I am not able to put before you all the historical evidence which led to my conclusions. I should have to quote bit after bit from Chinese and Hindu literature, medieval texts and all the things which you do not know. How could you? I am working with specialists in other fields of knowledge and they help me. There was my late friend Professor Wilhelm, the sinologist; I worked with him. He had translated a Taoist text, and he asked me to comment on it, which I did from the psychological side.19 I am a terrible novelty to a sinologist, but what he has to tell us is a novelty to us. The Chinese philosophers were no fools. We think the old people were fools, but they were as intelligent as we are. They were frightfully intelligent people, and psychology can learn no end from old civilizations, particularly from India and China. A former President of the British Anthropological Society asked me: “Can you understand that such a highly intelligent people as the Chinese have no science?” I replied: “They have a science, but you do not understand it. It is not based on the principle of causality. The principle of causality is not the only principle; it is only relative.”

[142] People may say: What a fool to say causality is only relative! But look at modern physics! The East bases its thinking and its evaluation of facts on another principle. We have not even a word for that principle. The East naturally has a word for it, but we do not understand it. The Eastern word is Tao. My friend McDougall20 has a Chinese student, and he asked him: “What exactly do you mean by Tao?” Typically Western! The Chinese explained what Tao is and he replied: “I do not understand yet.” The Chinese went out to the balcony and said: “What do you see?” “I see a street and houses and people walking and tramcars passing.” “What more?” “There is a hill.” “What more?” “Trees.” “What more?” “The wind is blowing.” The Chinese threw up his arms and said: “That is Tao.”

[143] There you are. Tao can be anything. I use another word to designate it, but it is poor enough. I call it synchronicity. The Eastern mind, when it looks at an ensemble of facts, accepts that ensemble as it is, but the Western mind divides it into entities, small quantities. You look, for instance, at this present gathering of people, and you say: “Where do they come from? Why should they come together?” The Eastern mind is not at all interested in that. It says: “What does it mean that these people are together?” That is not a problem for the Western mind. You are interested in what you come here for and what you are doing here. Not so the Eastern mind; it is interested in being together.

[144] It is like this: you are standing on the sea-shore and the waves wash up an old hat, an old box, a shoe, a dead fish, and there they lie on the shore. You say: “Chance, nonsense!” The Chinese mind asks: “What does it mean that these things are together?” The Chinese mind experiments with that being together and coming together at the right moment, and it has an experimental method which is not known in the West, but which plays a large role in the philosophy of the East. It is a method of forecasting possibilities, and it is still used by the Japanese Government about political situations; it was used, for instance, in the Great War. This method was formulated in 1143 B.C.21

_______________

Notes:

1 [Cf. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (C.W., vol. 9, i), par. 5.]

2 See Psychology of the Unconscious [or Symbols of Transformation (C.W., vol. 5), index, s.v.].  

3 [Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Mélanges d’histoire des religions, p. xxix.]  

4 [Cf. Symbols of Transformation, par. 154.]  

5 [Cf. “Psychology and Literature” (C.W., vol. 15), par. 150; “Psychology and Religion” (C.W., vol. 11), par. 100, and “Brother Klaus” (ibid.), par. 484. Documentation of the Rhodesian “sun-wheels” has not been possible, though such rock-carved forms are noted in Angola and South Africa: cf. Willcox, The Rock Art of South Africa, fig. 23 and pls. xvii–xx. Their dating is in doubt. The “rhino with tick-birds” is from the Transvaal and is in a museum in Pretoria. It was discovered in 1928 and widely publicized.]  

6 [Albrecht Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie.]  

7 [Symbols of Transformation, pars. 151ff.; The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, par. 105; The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (C.W. vol. 8), pars. 228 and 318f.]  

8 How Natives Think, trans. by Lilian A. Clare.  

9 For general description of types and functions, see Psychological Types, Chap. X.  

10 [Cf. Terence, Heauton Timorumenos, 1.1.25: “Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto” (I am a man; I count nothing human alien to me).]  

11 [Civilization in Transition (C.W., vol. 10), pars. 94ff. and 946ff.]  

12 Studies in Word Association, trans. by Eder. [Also in Experimental Researches (C.W., vol. 2).]  

13 Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (C.W., vol. 7), pars. 245f., 304f.

14 [Cf. supra, par. 48, n. 15.]  

15 [Cf. T. M. Davie, “Comments upon a Case of ‘Periventricular Epilepsy,’ ” British Medical Journal, no. 3893 (Aug. 17, 1935), 293–297. The dream is reported by a patient of Davie as follows: “Someone beside me kept on asking me something about oiling some machinery. Milk was suggested as the best lubricant. Apparently I thought that oozy slime was preferable. Then a pond was drained, and amid the slime there were two extinct animals. One was a minute mastodon. I forgot what the other one was.”

Davie’s comment: “I thought it would be of interest to submit this dream to Jung to ask what his interpretation would be. He had no hesitation in saying that it indicated some organic disturbance, and that the illness was not primarily a psychological one, although there were numerous psychological derivatives in the dream. The drainage of the pond he interpreted as the damming-up of the cerebrospinal fluid circulation.”]  

16 [The Practice of Psychotherapy (C.W., vol. 16), pars. 344f.]  

17 [Cf. supra, par. 17, n. 4.]  

18 [The mandala motif, in a lecture, “Traumsymbole des Individuationsprozesses,” that Jung delivered a few weeks previously at the Eranos Tagung. It was published the next year in EranosJahrbuch 1935; in translation, as “Dream Symbols of the Process of Individuation,” The Integration of the Personality, 1939; revised as Part II of Psychologie und Alchemie, 1944 (= C.W., vol. 12). See also infra, par. 406, n. 15.]  

19 The Secret of the Golden Flower. [The Chinese text was translated by Richard Wilhelm. The commentary by Jung is contained in Alchemical Studies (C.W., vol. 13).]  

20 [William McDougall (1871–1938). American psychiatrist. Cf. Jung’s “On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia” (C.W., vol. 3), par. 504, and “The Therapeutic Value of Abreaction” (C.W., vol. 16), par. 255.]  

21 [Cf. The I Ching, or Book of Changes, trans. by Wilhelm/Baynes, 3rd edn., introduction, p. liii.]
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Re: The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of An

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Part 1 of 2

LECTURE III

The Chairman (Dr. Maurice B. Wright):

[145] Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my privilege to be the Chairman at Professor Jung’s lecture at this evening’s meeting. It was my privilege twenty-one years ago to meet Professor Jung when he came over to London to give a series of addresses,1 but there was then a very small group of psychologically minded physicians. I remember very well how after the meetings we used to go to a little restaurant in Soho and talk until we were turned out. Naturally we were trying to pump Professor Jung as hard as we could. “When I said goodbye to Professor Jung he said to me— he did not say it very seriously—”I think you are an extravert who has become an introvert.” Frankly, I have been brooding about that ever since!

[146] Now, ladies and gentlemen, just a word about last night. I think Professor Jung gave us a very good illustration of his views and of his work when he talked about the value of the telescope. A man with a telescope naturally can see a good deal more than anybody with unaided sight. That is exactly Professor Jung’s position. With his particular spectacles, with his very specialized research, he has acquired a knowledge, a vision of the depth of the human psyche, which for many of us is very difficult to grasp. Of course, it will be impossible for him in the space of a few lectures to give us more than a very short outline of the vision he has gained. Therefore, in my opinion anything which might seem blurred or dark is not a question of obscurantism, it is a question of spectacles. My own difficulty is that, with my muscles of accommodation already hardening, it might be impossible for me ever to see that vision clearly, even if for the moment Professor Jung could lend me his spectacles. But however this may be, I know that we are all thrilled with everything he can tell us, and we know how stimulating it is to our own thinking, especially in a domain where speculation is so easy and where proof is so difficult.

Professor Jung:

[147] Ladies and Gentlemen, I ought to have finished my lecture on the association tests yesterday, but I would have had to overstep my time. So you must pardon me for coming back to the same thing once more. It is not that I am particularly in love with the association tests. I use them only when I must, but they are really the foundation of certain conceptions. I told you last time about the characteristic disturbances, and I think it would be a good thing, perhaps, if I were briefly to sum up all there is to say about the results of the experiment, namely about the complexes.

[148] A complex is an agglomeration of associations—a sort of picture of a more or less complicated psychological nature—sometimes of traumatic character, sometimes simply of a painful and highly toned character. Everything that is highly toned is rather difficult to handle. If, for instance, something is very important to me, I begin to hesitate when I attempt to do it, and you have probably observed that when you ask me difficult questions I cannot answer them immediately because the subject is important and I have a long reaction time. I begin to stammer, and my memory does not supply the necessary material. Such disturbances are complex disturbances—even if what I say does not come from a personal complex of mine. It is simply an important affair, and whatever has an intense feeling-tone is difficult to handle because such contents are somehow associated with physiological reactions, with the processes of the heart, the tonus of the blood vessels, the condition of the intestines, the breathing, and the innervation of the skin. Whenever there is a high tonus it is just as if that particular complex had a body of its own, as if it were localized in my body to a certain extent, and that makes it unwieldy, because something that irritates my body cannot be easily pushed away because it has its roots in my body and begins to pull at my nerves. Something that has little tonus and little emotional value can be easily brushed aside because it has no roots. It is not adherent or adhesive.

[149] Ladies and Gentlemen, that leads me to something very important— the fact that a complex with its given tension or energy has the tendency to form a little personality of itself. It has a sort of body, a certain amount of its own physiology. It can upset the stomach. It upsets the breathing, it disturbs the heart—in short, it behaves like a partial personality. For instance, when you want to say or do something and unfortunately a complex interferes with this intention, then you say or do something different from what you intended. You are simply interrupted, and your best intention gets upset by the complex, exactly as if you had been interfered with by a human being or by circumstances from outside. Under those conditions we really are forced to speak of the tendencies of complexes to act as if they were characterized by a certain amount of willpower. When you speak of will-power you naturally ask about the ego. Where then is the ego that belongs to the will-power of the complexes? We know our own ego-complex, which is supposed to be in full possession of the body. It is not, but let us assume that it is a centre in full possession of the body, that there is a focus which we call the ego, and that the ego has a will and can do something with its components. The ego also is an agglomeration of highly toned contents, so that in principle there is no difference between the ego-complex and any other complex.

[150] Because complexes have a certain will-power, a sort of ego, we find that in a schizophrenic condition they emancipate themselves from conscious control to such an extent that they become visible and audible. They appear as visions, they speak in voices which are like the voices of definite people. This personification of complexes is not in itself necessarily a pathological condition. In dreams, for instance, our complexes often appear in a personified form. And one can train oneself to such an extent that they become visible or audible also in a waking condition. It is part of a certain yoga training to split up consciousness into its components, each of which appears as a specific personality. In the psychology of our unconscious there are typical figures that have a definite life of their own.2

[151] All this is explained by the fact that the so-called unity of consciousness is an illusion. It is really a wish-dream. We like to think that we are one; but we are not, most decidedly not. We are not really masters in our house. We like to believe in our will-power and in our energy and in what we can do; but when it comes to a real show-down we find that we can do it only to a certain extent, because we are hampered by those little devils the complexes. Complexes are autonomous groups of associations that have a tendency to move by themselves, to live their own life apart from our intentions. I hold that our personal unconscious, as well as the collective unconscious, consists of an indefinite, because unknown, number of complexes or fragmentary personalities.

[152] This idea explains a lot. It explains, for instance, the simple fact that a poet has the capacity to dramatize and personify his mental contents. When he creates a character on the stage, or in his poem or drama or novel, he thinks it is merely a product of his imagination; but that character in a certain secret way has made itself. Any novelist or writer will deny that these characters have a psychological meaning, but as a matter of fact you know as well as I do that they have one. Therefore you can read a writer’s mind when you study the characters he creates.

[153] The complexes, then, are partial or fragmentary personalities. When we speak of the ego-complex, we naturally assume that it has a consciousness, because the relationship of the various contents to the centre, in other words to the ego, is called consciousness. But we also have a grouping of contents about a centre, a sort of nucleus, in other complexes. So we may ask the question: Do complexes have a consciousness of their own? If you study spiritualism, you must admit that the so-called spirits manifested in automatic writing or through the voice of a medium do indeed have a sort of consciousness of their own. Therefore unprejudiced people are inclined to believe that the spirits are the ghosts of a deceased aunt or grandfather or something of the kind, just on account of the more or less distinct personality which can be traced in these manifestations. Of course, when we are dealing with a case of insanity we are less inclined to assume that we have to do with ghosts. We call it pathological then.

[154] So much about the complexes. I insist on that particular point of consciousness within complexes only because complexes play a large role in dream-analysis. You remember my diagram (Figure 4) showing the different spheres of the mind and the dark centre of the unconscious in the middle. The closer you approach that centre, the more you experience what Janet calls an abaissement du niveau mental: your conscious autonomy begins to disappear, and you get more and more under the fascination of unconscious contents. Conscious autonomy loses its tension and its energy, and that energy reappears in the increased activity of unconscious contents. You can observe this process in an extreme form when you carefully study a case of insanity. The fascination of unconscious contents gradually grows stronger and conscious control vanishes in proportion until finally the patient sinks into the unconscious altogether and becomes completely victimized by it. He is the victim of a new autonomous activity that does not start from his ego but starts from the dark sphere.

[155] In order to deal with the association test thoroughly, I must mention an entirely different experiment. You will forgive me if for the sake of economizing time I do not go into the details of the researches, but these diagrams (Figs. 8, 9, 10, 11) illustrate the results of very voluminous researches into families.3 They represent the quality of associations. For instance, the little summit in Figure 8 designated as number XI is a special class or category of association. The principle of classification is logical and linguistic. I am not going into this, and you will simply have to accept the fact that I have made fifteen categories into which I divide associations. We made tests with a great number of families, all for certain reasons uneducated people, and we found that the type of association and reaction is peculiarly parallel among certain members of the family; for instance, father and mother, or two brothers, or mother and child are almost identical in their type of reaction.

[156] I shall explain this by Figure 8. The dotted line (.....) represents the mother, the broken line (-----) her sixteen-year-old daughter, and the unbroken line (-) the father. This was a very unfortunate marriage. The father was an alcoholic and the mother was a very peculiar type. You see that the sixteen-year-old daughter follows her mother’s type closely. As much as thirty per cent of all associations are identical words. This is a striking case of participation, of mental contagion. If you think about this case you can draw certain conclusions. The mother was forty-five years old, married to an alcoholic. Her life was therefore a failure. Now the daughter has exactly the same reactions as the mother. If such a girl comes out into the world as though she were forty-five years old and married to an alcoholic, think what a mess she will get into! This participation explains why the daughter of an alcoholic who has had a hell of a youth will seek a man who is an alcoholic and marry him; and if by chance he should not be one, she will make him into one on account of that peculiar identity with one member of the family.

Image
FIG. 8. Association Test of a Family

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FIGS. 9–11. Association Tests of Families

[157] Figure 9 is a very striking case, too. The father, who was a widower, had two daughters who lived with him in complete identity. Of course, that also is most unnatural, because either he reacts like a girl or the two girls react like a man, even in the way they speak. The whole mental make-up is poisoned through the admixture of an alien element, because a young daughter is not in actual fact her father.

[158] Figure 10 is the case of a husband and wife. This diagram gives an optimistic tone to my very pessimistic demonstrations. You see there is perfect harmony here; but do not make the mistake of thinking that this harmony is a paradise, for these people will kick against each other after a while because they are just too harmonious. A very good harmony in a family based on participation soon leads to frantic attempts on the part of the spouses to kick loose from each other, to liberate themselves, and then they invent irritating topics of discussion in order to have a reason for feeling misunderstood. If you study the ordinary psychology of marriage, you discover that most of the troubles consist in this cunning invention of irritating topics which have absolutely no foundation.

[159] Figure 11 is also interesting. These two women are sisters living together; one is single and the other married. Their summit is found at number V. The wife in Figure 10 is the sister of these two women in Figure 11, and while most probably they were all of the same type originally, she married a man of another type. Their summit is at number III in Figure 10. The condition of identity or participation which is demonstrated in the association test can be substantiated by entirely different experiences, for instance, by graphology. The handwriting of many wives, particularly young wives, often resembles that of the husband. I do not know whether it is so in these days, but I assume that human nature remains very much the same. Occasionally it is the other way round because the so-called feeble sex has its strength sometimes.

[160] Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now going to step over the border into dreams. I do not want to give you any particular introduction to dreamanalysis.4 I think the best way is just to show you how I proceed with a dream, and then it does not need much explanation of a theoretical kind, because you can see what are my underlying ideas. Of course, I make great use of dreams, because dreams are an objective source of information in psychotherapeutic treatment. When a doctor has a case, he can hardly refrain from having ideas about it. But the more one knows about cases, the more one should make an heroic effort not to know in order to give the patient a fair chance. I always try not to know and not to see. It is much better to say you are stupid, or play what is apparently a stupid role, in order to give the patient a chance to come out with his own material. That does not mean that you should hide altogether.

[161] This is a case of a man forty years old, a married man who has not been ill before. He looks quite all right; he is the director of a great public school, a very intelligent fellow who has studied an old-fashioned kind of psychology, Wundt psychology,5 that has nothing to do with details of human life but moves in the stratosphere of abstract ideas. Recently he had been badly troubled by neurotic symptoms. He suffered from a peculiar kind of vertigo that seized upon him from time to time, palpitation, nausea, and peculiar attacks of feebleness and a sort of exhaustion. This syndrome presents the picture of a sickness which is well known in Switzerland. It is mountain sickness, a malady to which people who are not used to great heights are easily subject when climbing. So I asked, “Is it not mountain sickness you are suffering from?” He said, “Yes, you are right. It feels exactly like mountain sickness.” I asked him if he had dreams, and he said that recently he had had three dreams.

[162] I do not like to analyse one dream alone, because a single dream can be interpreted arbitrarily. You can speculate anything about an isolated dream; but if you compare a series of, say, twenty or a hundred dreams, then you can see interesting things. You see the process that is going on in the unconscious from night to night, and the continuity of the unconscious psyche extending through day and night. Presumably we are dreaming all the time, although we are not aware of it by day because consciousness is much too clear. But at night, when there is that abaissement du niveau mental, the dreams can break through and become visible.

[163] In the first dream the patient finds himself in a small village in Switzerland. He is a very solemn black figure in a long coat; under his arm he carries several thick books. There is a group of young boys whom he recognizes as having been his classmates. They are looking at him and they say: “That fellow does not often make his appearance here.”

[164] In order to understand this dream you have to remember that the patient is in a very fine position and has had a very good scientific education. But he started really from the bottom and is a self-made man. His parents were very poor peasants, and he worked his way up to his present position. He is very ambitious and is filled with the hope that he will rise still higher. He is like a man who has climbed in one day from sea-level to a level of 6,000 feet, and there he sees peaks 12,000 feet high towering above him. He finds himself in the place from which one climbs these higher mountains, and because of this he forgets all about the fact that he has already climbed 6,000 feet and immediately he starts to attack the higher peaks. But as a matter of fact though he does not realize it he is tired from his climbing and quite incapable of going any further at this time. This lack of realization is the reason for his symptoms of mountain sickness. The dream brings home to him the actual psychological situation. The contrast of himself as the solemn figure in the long black coat with thick books under his arm appearing in his native village, and of the village boys remarking that he does not often appear there, means that he does not often remember where he came from. On the contrary he thinks of his future career and hopes to get a chair as professor. Therefore the dream puts him back into his early surroundings. He ought to realize how much he has achieved considering who he was originally and that there are natural limitations to human effort.

[165] The beginning of the second dream is a typical instance of the kind of dream that occurs when the conscious attitude is like his. He knows that he ought to go to an important conference, and he is taking his portfolio. But he notices that the hour is rather advanced and that the train will leave soon, and so he gets into that well-known state of haste and of fear of being too late. He tries to get his clothes together, his hat is nowhere, his coat is mislaid, and he runs about in search of them and shouts up and down the house, “Where are my things?” Finally he gets everything together, and runs out of the house only to find that he has forgotten his portfolio. He rushes back for it, and looking at his watch finds how late it is getting; then he runs to the station, but the road is quite soft so that it is like walking on a bog and his feet can hardly move any more. Pantingly he arrives at the station only to see that the train is just leaving. His attention is called to the railway track, and it looks like this:

Image
FIG. 12. Dream of the Train

[166] He is at A, the tail-end of the train is already at B and the engine is at C. He watches the train, a long one, winding round the curve, and he thinks, “If only the engine-driver, when he reaches point D, has sufficient intelligence not to rush full steam ahead; for if he does, the long train behind him which will still be rounding the curve will be derailed.” Now the engine-driver arrives at D and he opens the steam throttle fully, the engine begins to pull, and the train rushes ahead. The dreamer sees the catastrophe coming, the train goes off the rails, and he shouts, and then he wakes up with the fear characteristic of nightmare.

[167] Whenever one has this kind of dream of being late, of a hundred obstacles interfering, it is exactly the same as when one is in such a situation in reality, when one is nervous about something. One is nervous because there is an unconscious resistance to the conscious intention. The most irritating thing is that consciously you want something very much, and an unseen devil is always working against it, and of course you are that devil too. You are working against this devil and do it in a nervous way and with nervous haste. In the case of this dreamer, that rushing ahead is also against his will. He does not want to leave home, yet he wants it very much, and all the resistance and difficulties in his way are his own doing. He is that engine-driver who thinks, “Now we are out of our trouble; we have a straight line ahead, and now we can rush along like anything.” The straight line beyond the curve would correspond to the peaks 12,000 feet high, and he thinks these peaks are accessible to him.

[168] Naturally, nobody seeing such a chance ahead would refrain from making the utmost use of it, so his reason says to him, “Why not go on, you have every chance in the world.” He does not see why something in him should work against it. But this dream gives him a warning that he should not be as stupid as this engine-driver who goes full steam ahead when the tail-end of the train is not yet out of the curve. That is what we always forget; we always forget that our consciousness is only a surface, our consciousness is the avant-garde of our psychological existence. Our head is only one end, but behind our consciousness is a long historical “tail” of hesitations and weaknesses and complexes and prejudices and inheritances, and we always make our reckoning without them. We always think we can make a straight line in spite of our shortcomings, but they will weigh very heavily and often we derail before we have reached our goal because we have neglected our tail-ends.

[169] I always say that our psychology has a long saurian’s tail behind it, namely the whole history of our family, of our nation, of Europe, and of the world in general. We are always human, and we should never forget that we carry the whole burden of being only human. If we were heads only we should be like little angels that have heads and wings, and of course they can do what they please because they are not hindered by a body that can walk only on the earth. I must not omit to point out, not necessarily to the patient but to myself, that this peculiar movement of the train is like a snake. Presently we shall see why.

[170] The next dream is the crucial dream, and I shall have to give certain explanations. In this dream we have to do with a peculiar animal which is half lizard and half crab. Before we go into the details of the dream, I want to make a few remarks about the method of working out the meaning of a dream. You know that there are many views and many misunderstandings as to the way in which you get at dreams.

[171] You know, for instance, what is understood by free association. This method is a very doubtful one as far as my experience goes. Free association means that you open yourself to any amount and kind of associations and they naturally lead to your complexes. But then, you see, I do not want to know the complexes of my patients. That is uninteresting to me. I want to know what the dreams have to say about complexes, not what the complexes are. I want to know what a man’s unconscious is doing with his complexes, I want to know what he is preparing himself for. That is what I read out of the dreams. If I wanted to apply the method of free association I would not need dreams. I could put up a signboard, for instance “Footpath to So-and-So,” and simply let people meditate on that and add free associations, and they would invariably arrive at their complexes. If you are riding in a Hungarian or Russian train and look at the strange signs in the strange language, you can associate all your complexes. You have only to let yourself go and you naturally drift into your complexes.

[172] I do not apply the method of free association because my goal is not to know the complexes; I want to know what the dream is. Therefore I handle the dream as if it were a text which I do not understand properly, say a Latin or a Greek or a Sanskrit text, where certain words are unknown to me or the text is fragmentary, and I merely apply the ordinary method any philologist would apply in reading such a text. My idea is that the dream does not conceal: we simply do not understand its language. For instance, if I quote to you a Latin or a Greek passage some of you will not understand it, but that is not because the text dissimulates or conceals; it is because you do not know Greek or Latin. Likewise, when a patient seems confused, it does not necessarily mean that he is confused, but that the doctor does not understand his material. The assumption that the dream wants to conceal is a mere anthropomorphic idea. No philologist would ever think that a difficult Sanskrit or cuneiform inscription conceals. There is a very wise word of the Talmud which says that the dream is its own interpretation. The dream is the whole thing, and if you think there is something behind it, or that the dream has concealed something, there is no question but that you simply do not understand it.

[173] Therefore, first of all, when you handle a dream you say, “I do not understand a word of that dream.” I always welcome that feeling of incompetence because then I know I shall put some good work into my attempt to understand the dream. What I do is this. I adopt the method of the philologist, which is far from being free association, and apply a logical principle which is called amplification. It is simply that of seeking the parallels. For instance, in the case of a very rare word which you have never come across before, you try to find parallel text passages, parallel applications perhaps, where that word also occurs, and then you try to put the formula you have established from the knowledge of other texts into the new text. If you make the new text a readable whole, you say, “Now we can read it.” That is how we learned to read hieroglyphics and cuneiform inscriptions and that is how we can read dreams.

[174] Now, how do I find the context? Here I simply follow the principle of the association experiment. Let us assume a man dreams about a simple sort of peasant’s house. Now, do I know what a simple peasant’s house conveys to that man’s mind? Of course not; how could I? Do I know what a simple peasant’s house means to him in general? Of course not. So I simply ask, “How does that thing appear to you?”—in other words, what is your context, what is the mental tissue in which that term “simple peasant’s house” is embedded? He will tell you something quite astonishing. For instance, somebody says “water.” Do I know what he means by “water”? Not at all. When I put that test word or a similar word to somebody, he will say “green.” Another one will say “H2O,” which is something quite different. Another one will say “quicksilver,” or “suicide.” In each case I know what tissue that word or image is embedded in. That is amplification. It is a well-known logical procedure which we apply here and which formulates exactly the technique of finding the context.

[175] Of course. I ought to mention here the merit of Freud, who brought up the whole question of dreams and who has enabled us to approach the problem of dreams at all. You know his idea is that a dream is a distorted representation of a secret incompatible wish which does not agree with the conscious attitude and therefore is censored, that is, distorted, in order to become unrecognizable to the conscious and yet in a way to show itself and live. Freud logically says then: Let us redress that whole distortion: now be natural, give up your distorted tendencies and let your associations flow freely, then we will come to your natural facts, namely, your complexes. This is an entirely different point of view from mine. Freud is seeking the complexes, I am not. That is just the difference. I am looking for what the unconscious is doing with the complexes, because that interests me very much more than the fact that people have complexes. We all have complexes: it is a highly banal and uninteresting fact. Even the incest complex which you can find anywhere if you look for it is terribly banal and therefore uninteresting. It is only interesting to know what people do with their complexes; that is the practical question which matters. Freud applies the method of free association and makes use of an entirely different logical principle, a principle which in logic is called reductio in primam figuram. reduction to the first figure. The reductio in primam figuram is a so-called syllogism, a complicated sequence of logical conclusions, whose characteristic is that you start from a perfectly reasonable statement, and, through surreptitious assumptions and insinuations, you gradually change the reasonable nature of your first simple or prime figure until you reach a complete distortion which is utterly unreasonable. That complete distortion, in Freud’s idea, characterizes the dream; the dream is a clever distortion that disguises the original figure, and you have only to undo the web in order to return to the first reasonable statement, which may be “I wish to commit this or that: I have such and such an incompatible wish.” We start, for instance, with a perfectly reasonable assumption, such as “No unreasonable being is free”—in other words, has free will. This is an example which is used in logic. It is a fairly reasonable statement. Now we come to the first fallacy, “Therefore, no free being is unreasonable.” You cannot quite agree because there is already a trick. Then you continue, “All human beings are free”—they all have free will. Now you triumphantly finish up, “Therefore no human being is unreasonable.” That is complete nonsense.

[176] Let us assume that the dream is such an utterly nonsensical statement. This is perfectly plausible because obviously the dream is something like a nonsensical statement; otherwise you could understand it. As a rule you cannot understand it; you hardly ever come across dreams which are clear from beginning to end. The ordinary dream seems absolute nonsense and therefore one depreciates it. Even primitives, who make a great fuss about dreams, say that ordinary dreams mean nothing. But there are “big” dreams; medicine men and chiefs have big dreams, but ordinary men have no dreams. They talk exactly like people in Europe. Now you are confronted with that dream-nonsense, and you say, “This nonsense must be an insinuating distortion or fallacy which derives from an originally reasonable statement.” You undo the whole thing and you apply the reductio in primam figuram and then you come to the initial undisturbed statement. So you see that the procedure of Freud’s dream-interpretation is perfectly logical, if you assume that the statement of the dream is really nonsensical.

[177] But do not forget when you make the statement that a thing is unreasonable that perhaps you do not understand because you are not God; on the contrary, you are a fallible human being with a very limited mind. When an insane patient tells me something, I may think: “What that fellow is talking about is all nonsense.” As a matter of fact, if I am scientific, I say “I do not understand,” but if I am unscientific, I say “That fellow is just crazy and I am intelligent.” This argumentation is the reason why men with somewhat unbalanced minds often like to become alienists. It is humanly understandable because it gives you a tremendous satisfaction, when you are not quite sure of yourself, to be able to say “Oh, the others are much worse.”

[178] But the question remains: Can we safely say that a dream is nonsense? Are we quite sure that we know? Are we sure that the dream is a distortion? Are you absolutely certain when you discover something quite against your expectation that it is a mere distortion? Nature commits no errors. Right and wrong are human categories. The natural process is just what it is and nothing else—it is not nonsense and it is not unreasonable. We do not understand: that is the fact. Since I am not God and since I am a man of very limited intellectual capacities, I had better assume that I do not understand dreams. With that assumption I reject the prejudiced view that the dream is a distortion, and I say that if I do not understand a dream, it is my mind which is distorted, I am not taking the right view of it.

[179] So I adopted the method which philologists apply to difficult texts, and I handle dreams in the same way. It is, of course, a bit more circumstantial and more difficult; but I can assure you that the results are far more interesting when you arrive at things that are human than when you apply a most dreadful monotonous interpretation. I hate to be bored. Above all we should avoid speculations and theories when we have to deal with such mysterious processes as dreams. We should never forget that for thousands of years very intelligent men of great knowledge and vast experience held very different views about them. It is only quite recently that we invented the theory that a dream is nothing. All other civilizations have had very different ideas about dreams.

[180] Now I will tell you the big dream of my patient: “I am in the country, in a simple peasant’s house, with an elderly, motherly peasant woman. I talk to her about a great journey I am planning: I am going to walk from Switzerland to Leipzig. She is enormously impressed, at which I am very pleased. At this moment I look through the window at a meadow where there are peasants gathering hay. Then the scene changes. In the background appears a monstrously big crab-lizard. It moves first to the left and then to the right so that I find myself standing in the angle between them as if in an open pair of scissors. Then I have a little rod or a wand in my hand, and I lightly touch the monster’s head with the rod and kill it. Then for a long time I stand there contemplating that monster.”

[181] Before I go into such a dream I always try to establish a sequence, because this dream has a history before and will have a history afterwards. It is part of the psychic tissue that is continuous, for we have no reason to assume that there is no continuity in the psychological processes, just as we have no reason to think that there is any gap in the processes of nature. Nature is a continuum, and so our psyche is very probably a continuum. This dream is just one flash or one observation of psychic continuity that became visible for a moment. As a continuity it is connected with the preceding dreams. In the previous dream we have already seen that peculiar snake-like movement of the train. This comparison is merely a hypothesis, but I have to establish such connections.

[182] After the train-dream the dreamer is back in the surroundings of his early childhood; he is with a motherly peasant woman—a slight allusion to the mother, as you notice. In the very first dream, he impresses the village boys by his magnificent appearance in the long coat of the Herr Professor. In this present dream too he impresses the harmless woman with his greatness and the greatness of his ambitious plan to walk to Leipzig—an allusion to his hope of getting a chair there. The monster crab-lizard is outside our empirical experience; it is obviously a creation of the unconscious. So much we can see without any particular effort.

[183] Now we come to the actual context. I ask him, “What are your associations to ‘simple peasant’s house’?” and to my enormous astonishment he says, “It is the lazar-house of St. Jacob near Basel.” This house was a very old leprosery, and the building still exists. The place is also famous for a big battle fought there in 1444 by the Swiss against the troops of the Duke of Burgundy. His army tried to break into Switzerland but was beaten back by the avant-garde of the Swiss army, a body of 1,300 men who fought the Burgundian army consisting of 30,000 men at the lazar-house of St. Jacob. The 1,300 Swiss fell to the very last man, but by their sacrifice they stopped the further advance of the enemy. The heroic death of these 1,300 men is a notable incident in Swiss history, and no Swiss is able to talk of it without patriotic feeling.

[184] Whenever the dreamer brings such a piece of information, you have to put it into the context of the dream. In this case it means that the dreamer is in a leprosery. The lazar-house is called “Siechenhaus,” sick-house, in German, the “sick” meaning the lepers. So he has, as it were, a revolting contagious disease; he is an outcast from human society, he is in the sickhouse. And that sick-house is characterized, moreover, by that desperate fight which was a catastrophe for the 1,300 men and which was brought about by the fact that they did not obey orders. The avant-garde had strict instructions not to attack but to wait until the whole of the Swiss army had joined up with them. But as soon as they saw the enemy they could not hold back and, against the commands of their leaders, made a headlong rush and attacked, and of course they were all killed. Here again we come to the idea of this rushing ahead without establishing a connection with the bulk of the tail-end, and again the action is fatal. This gave me a rather uncanny feeling, and I thought, “Now what is the fellow after, what danger is he coming to?” The danger is not just his ambition, or that he wishes to be with the mother and commit incest, or something of the kind. You remember, the engine-driver is a foolish fellow too; he runs ahead in spite of the fact that the tail-end of the train is not yet out of the curve; he does not wait for it, but rushes along without thinking of the whole. That means that the dreamer has the tendency to rush ahead, not thinking of his tail; he behaves as if he were his head only, just as the avant-garde behaved as if it were the whole army, forgetting that it had to wait; and because it did not wait, every man was killed. This attitude of the patient is the reason for his symptoms of mountain sickness. He went too high, he is not prepared for the altitude, he forgets where he started from.

[185] You know perhaps the novel by Paul Bourget, L’Étape. Its motif is the problem that a man’s low origin always clings to him, and therefore there are very definite limitations to his climbing the social ladder. That is what the dream tries to remind the patient of. That house and that elderly peasant woman bring him back to his childhood. It looks, then, as if the woman might refer to the mother. But one must be careful with assumptions. His answer to my question about the woman was “That is my landlady.” His landlady is an elderly widow, uneducated and oldfashioned, living naturally in a milieu inferior to his. He is too high up, and he forgets that the next part of his invisible self is the family in himself. Because he is a very intellectual man, feeling is his inferior function. His feeling is not at all differentiated, and therefore it is still in the form of the landlady, and in trying to impose upon that landlady he tries to impose upon himself with his enormous plan to walk to Leipzig.

[186] Now what does he say about the trip to Leipzig? He says, “Oh, that is my ambition. I want to go far, I wish to get a Chair.” Here is the headlong rush, here is the foolish attempt, here is the mountain sickness; he wants to climb too high. This dream was before the war, and at that time to be a professor in Leipzig was something marvellous. His feeling was deeply repressed; therefore it does not have right values and is much too naïve. It is still the peasant woman; it is still identical with his own mother. There are many capable and intelligent men who have no differentiation of feeling, and therefore their feeling is still contaminated with the mother, is still in the mother, identical with the mother, and they have mothers’ feelings; they have wonderful feelings for babies, for the interiors of houses and nice rooms and for a very orderly home. It sometimes happens that these individuals, when they have turned forty, discover a masculine feeling and then there is trouble.

[187] The feelings of a man are so to speak a woman’s and appear as such in dreams. I designate this figure by the term anima, because she is the personification of the inferior functions which relate a man to the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious as a whole presents itself to a man in feminine form. To a woman it appears in masculine form, and then I call it the animus. I chose the term anima because it has always been used for that very same psychological fact. The anima as a personification of the collective unconscious occurs in dreams over and over again.6 I have made long statistics about the anima figure in dreams. In this way one establishes these figures empirically.

[188] When I ask my dreamer what he means when he says that the peasant woman is impressed by his plan, he answers, “Oh, well, that refers to my boasting. I like to boast before an inferior person to show who I am; when I am talking to uneducated people I like to put myself very much in the foreground. Unfortunately I have always to live in an inferior milieu.” When a man resents the inferiority of his milieu and feels that he is too good for his surroundings, it is because the inferiority of the milieu in himself is projected into the outer milieu and therefore he begins to mind those things which he should mind in himself. When he says, “I mind my inferior milieu,” he ought to say, “I mind the fact that my own inner milieu is below the mark.” He has no right values, he is inferior in his feeling-life. That is his problem.

[189] At this moment he looks out of the window and sees the peasants gathering hay. That, of course, again is a vision of something he has done in the past. It brings back to him memories of similar pictures and situations; it was in summer and it was pretty hard work to get up early in the morning to turn the hay during the day and gather it in the evening. Of course, it is the simple honest work of such folk. He forgets that only the decent simple work gets him somewhere and not a big mouth. He also asserts, which I must mention, that in his present home he has a picture on the wall of peasants gathering hay, and he says, “Oh, that is the origin of the picture in my dream.” It is as though he said, “The dream is nothing but a picture on the wall, it has no importance, I will pay no attention to it.” At that moment the scene changes. When the scene changes you can always safely conclude that a representation of an unconscious thought has come to a climax, and it becomes impossible to continue that motif.

[190] Now in the next part of the dream things are getting dark; the crab-lizard appears, apparently an enormous thing. I asked, “What about the crab, how on earth do you come to that?” He said, “That is a mythological monster which walks backwards. The crab walks backwards. I do not understand how I get to this thing—probably through some fairytale or something of that sort.” What he had mentioned before were all things which you could meet with in real life, things which do actually exist. But the crab is not a personal experience, it is an archetype. When an analyst has to deal with an archetype he may begin to think. In dealing with the personal unconscious you are not allowed to think too much and to add anything to the associations of the patient. Can you add something to the personality of somebody else? You are a personality yourself. The other individual has a life of his own and a mind of his own inasmuch as he is a person. But inasmuch as he is not a person, inasmuch as he is also myself, he has the same basic structure of mind, and there I can begin to think, I can associate for him. I can even provide him with the necessary context because he will have none, he does not know where that crab-lizard comes from and has no idea what it means, but I know and can provide the material for him.

[191] I point out to him that the hero motif appears throughout the dreams. He has a hero fantasy about himself which comes to the surface in the last dream. He is the hero as the great man with the long coat and with the great plan; he is the hero who dies on the field of honour at St. Jacob; he is going to show the world who he is; and he is quite obviously the hero who overcomes the monster. The hero motif is invariably accompanied by the dragon motif; the dragon and the hero who fights him are two figures of the same myth.

[192] The dragon appears in his dream as the crab-lizard. This statement does not, of course, explain what the dragon represents as an image of his psychological situation. So the next associations are directed round the monster. When it moves first to the left and then to the right the dreamer has the feeling that he is standing in an angle which could shut on him like open scissors. That would be fatal. He has read Freud, and accordingly he interprets the situation as an incest wish, the monster being the mother, the angle of the open scissors the legs of the mother, and he himself, standing in between, being just born or just going back into the mother.

[193] Strangely enough, in mythology, the dragon is the mother. You meet that motif all over the world, and the monster is called the mother dragon.7 The mother dragon eats the child again, she sucks him in after having given birth to him. The “terrible mother,” as she is also called, is waiting with wide-open mouth on the Western Seas, and when a man approaches that mouth it closes on him and he is finished. That monstrous figure is the mother sarcophaga, the flesh-eater; it is, in another form, Matuta, the mother of the dead. It is the goddess of death.

[194] But these parallels still do not explain why the dream chooses the particular image of the crab. I hold—and when I say I hold I have certain reasons for saying so—that representations of psychic facts in images like the snake or the lizard or the crab or the mastodon or analogous animals also represent organic facts. For instance, the serpent very often represents the cerebro-spinal system, especially the lower centres of the brain, and particularly the medulla oblongata and spinal cord. The crab, on the other hand, having a sympathetic system only, represents chiefly the sympathicus and para-sympathicus of the abdomen; it is an abdominal thing. So if you translate the text of the dream it would read: if you go on like this your cerebro-spinal system and your sympathetic system will come up against you and snap you up. That is in fact what is happening. The symptoms of his neurosis express the rebellion of the sympathetic functions and of the cerebro-spinal system against his conscious attitude.

[195] The crab-lizard brings up the archetypal idea of the hero and the dragon as deadly enemies. But in certain myths you find the interesting fact that the hero is not connected with the dragon only by his fight. There are, on the contrary, indications that the hero is himself the dragon. In Scandinavian mythology the hero is recognized by the fact that he has snake’s eyes. He has snake’s eyes because he is a snake. There are many other myths and legends which contain the same idea. Cecrops, the founder of Athens, was a man above and a serpent below. The souls of heroes often appear after death in the form of serpents.

[196] Now in our dream the monstrous crab-lizard moves first to the left, and I ask him about this left side. He says, “The crab apparently does not know the way. Left is the unfavourable side, left is sinister.” Sinister does indeed mean left and unfavourable. But the right side is also not good for the monster, because when it goes to the right it is touched by the wand and is killed. Now we come to his standing in between the angle of the monster’s movement, a situation which at first glance he interpreted as incest. He says, “As a matter of fact, I felt surrounded on either side like a hero who is going to fight a dragon.” So he himself realizes the hero motif.

[197] But unlike the mythical hero he does not fight the dragon with a weapon, but with a wand. He says, “From its effect on the monster it seems that it is a magical wand.” He certainly does dispose of the crab in a magical way. The wand is another mythological symbol. It often contains a sexual allusion, and sexual magic is a means of protection against danger. You may remember, too, how during the earthquake at Messina8 nature produced certain instinctive reactions against the overwhelming destruction.

[198] The wand is an instrument, and instruments in dreams mean what they actually are, the devices of man to concretize his will. For instance, a knife is my will to cut; when I use a spear I prolong my arm, with a rifle I can project my action and my influence to a great distance; with a telescope I do the same as regards my sight. An instrument is a mechanism which represents my will, my intelligence, my capability, and my cunning. Instruments in dreams symbolize an analogous psychological mechanism. Now this dreamer’s instrument is a magic wand. He uses a marvellous thing by which he can spirit away the monster, that is, his lower nervous system. He can dispose of such nonsense in no time, and with no effort at all.

[199] What does this actually mean? It means that he simply thinks that the danger does not exist. That is what is usually done. You simply think that a thing is not and then it is no more. That is how people behave who consist of the head only. They use their intellect in order to think things away; they reason them away. They say, “This is nonsense, therefore it cannot be and therefore it is not.” That is what he also does. He simply reasons the monster away. He says, “There is no such thing as a crab-lizard, there is no such thing as an opposing will; I get rid of it, I simply think it away. I think it is the mother with whom I want to commit incest, and that settles the whole thing, for I shall not do it.” I said, “You have killed the animal— what do you think is the reason why you contemplate the animal for such a long time?” He said, “Oh, well, yes, naturally it is marvellous how you can dispose of such a creature with such ease.” I said, “Yes, indeed it is very marvellous!”

[200] Then I told him what I thought of the situation. I said, “Look here, the best way to deal with a dream is to think of yourself as a sort of ignorant child or ignorant youth, and to come to a two-million-year-old man or to the old mother of days and ask, ‘Now, what do you think of me?’ She would say to you, ‘You have an ambitious plan, and that is foolish, because you run up against your own instincts. Your own restricted capabilities block the way. You want to abolish the obstacle by the magic of your thinking. You believe you can think it away by the artifices of your intellect, but it will be, believe me, matter for some afterthought.’ “And I also told him this: “Your dreams contain a warning. You behave exactly like the engine-driver or like the Swiss who were foolhardy enough to run up against the enemy without any support behind them, and if you behave in the same way you will meet with a catastrophe.”

[201] He was sure that such a point of view was much too serious. He was convinced that it is much more probable that dreams come from incompatible wishes and that he really had an unrealized incestuous wish which was at the bottom of this dream; that he was conscious now of this incestuous wish and had got rid of it and now could go to Leipzig. I said, “Well then, bon voyage.” He did not return, he went on with his plans, and it took him just about three months to lose his position and go to the dogs. That was the end of him. He ran up against the fatal danger of that crablizard and would not understand the warning. But I do not want to make you too pessimistic. Sometimes there are people who really understand their dreams and draw conclusions which lead to a more favourable solution of their problems.
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Re: The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of An

Postby admin » Fri Apr 26, 2019 5:52 am

Part 2 of 2

Discussion

Dr. Charles Brunton:

[202] I do not know whether it is fair to ask about the dreams of someone who is not here, but I have a small daughter five and a half years old who has recently had two dreams which awakened her at night. The first dream occurred in the middle of August, and she told me this: “I see a wheel, and it is rolling down a road and it burns me.” That was all I could get out of her. I wanted her to draw a picture of it the next day, but she did not want to be bothered, so I left it. The other dream was about a week ago, and this time it was “a beetle that was pinching me.” That was all I could get about it. I do not know whether you would like to comment on them. The only thing I would like to add is that she knows the difference between a beetle and a crab. She is very fond of animals.

Professor Jung:

[203] You have to consider that it is very difficult and not quite fair to comment on dreams of someone one does not know; but I will tell you as much as one can see from the symbolism. The beetle would, according to my idea, have to do with the sympathetic system. Therefore I should conclude from that dream that there are certain peculiar psychological processes going on in the child, which touch upon her sympathetic system, and this might arouse some intestinal or other abdominal disorder. The most cautious statement one could make would be to say that there is a certain accumulation of energy in the sympathetic system which causes slight disturbances. This is also borne out by the symbol of the fiery wheel. The wheel in her dream seems to be a sun-symbol, and in Tantric philosophy fire corresponds to the socalled manipura chakra, which is localized in the abdomen. In the prodromal symptoms of epilepsy you sometimes find the idea of a wheel revolving inside. This too expresses a manifestation of a sympathetic nature. The image of the revolving wheel reminds us of the wheel upon which Ixion was crucified. The dream of the little girl is an archetypal dream, one of those strange archetypal dreams children occasionally have.

[204] I explain these archetypal dreams of children by the fact that when consciousness begins to dawn, when the child begins to feel that he is, he is still close to the original psychological world from which he has just emerged: a condition of deep unconsciousness. Therefore you find with many children an awareness of the contents of the collective unconscious, a fact which in some Eastern beliefs is interpreted as reminiscence of a former existence. Tibetan philosophy, for instance, speaks of the “Bardo” existence and of the condition of the mind between death and birth.9 The idea of former existence is a projection of the psychological condition of early childhood. Very young children still have an awareness of mythological contents, and if these contents remain conscious too long, the individual is threatened by an incapacity for adaptation; he is haunted by a constant yearning to remain with or to return to the original vision. There are very beautiful descriptions of these experiences by mystics and poets.

[205] Usually at the age of four to six the veil of forgetfulness is drawn upon these experiences. However, I have seen cases of ethereal children, so to speak, who had an extraordinary awareness of these psychic facts and were living their life in archetypal dreams and could not adapt. Recently I saw a case of a little girl of ten who had some most amazing mythological dreams.10 Her father consulted me about these dreams. I could not tell him what I thought because they contained an uncanny prognosis. The little girl died a year later of an infectious disease. She had never been born entirely.

Dr. Leonard F. Browne:

[206] I should like to ask Professor Jung a question with regard to the interpretation of the dreams he told us today. In view of the fact that the patient was unable to accept the interpretation, I should like to know whether that difficulty could have been overcome by some variation in the technique.

Professor Jung:

[207] If I had had the intention of being a missionary, or a saviour, I should have used a clever trick. I should have said to the patient, “Yes, that is the mother complex all right,” and we would have gone on talking that kind of jargon for several months and perhaps in the end I would have swung him round. But I know from experience that such a thing is not good; you should not cheat people even for their good. I do not want to cheat people out of their mistaken faith. Perhaps it was better for that man to go to the dogs than to be saved by wrong means. I never hinder people. When somebody says, “I am going to commit suicide if—,” I say, “If that is your intention, I have no objection.”

Dr. Browne:

[208] Did you have any evidence that the symptoms of mountain sickness were cured?

Professor Jung:

[209] The patient lost his neurosis in going down in life. That man did not belong at a height of 6,000 feet; he belonged lower down. He became inferior instead of being neurotic. Once I talked to the head of a great institution in America for the education of criminal children, and was told about a very interesting experience. They have two categories of children. The majority of them, when they come to the institution, feel ever so much better, they develop very nicely and normally and they eventually grow out of whatever their original evil was. The other category, the minority, become hysterical when they try to be nice and normal. Those are the born criminals whom you cannot change. They are normal when they do wrong. We also do not feel quite right when we are behaving perfectly, we feel much better when we are doing a bit of wrong. That is because we are not perfect. The Hindus, when they build a temple, leave one corner unfinished; only the gods make something perfect, man never can. It is much better to know that one is not perfect, then one feels much better. So it is with these children, and so it is with our patients. It is wrong to cheat people out of their fate and to help them to go beyond their level. If a man has it in him to be adapted, help him by all means; but if it is really his task not to be adapted, help him by all means not to be adapted, because then he is all right.

[210] What would the world be like if all people were adapted? It would be boring beyond endurance. There must be some people who behave in the wrong way; they act as scapegoats and objects of interest for the normal ones. Think how grateful you are for detective novels and newspapers, so that you can say, “Thank heaven I am not that fellow who has committed the crime, I am a perfectly innocent creature.” You feel satisfaction because the evil people have done it for you. This is the deeper meaning of the fact that Christ as the redeemer was crucified between two thieves. These thieves in their way were also redeemers of mankind, they were the scapegoats.

Question:

[211] I would like to ask a question about the psychological functions, if that is not going too far back. In answering a question last night you said that there was no criterion for considering either of the four functions as being superior in itself and you further said that all the four functions would have to be equally differentiated in order to obtain full and adequate knowledge of the world. Do you mean, therefore, that it is possible in any given case for all the four functions to be equally differentiated or to be arrived at by education?

Professor Jung:

[212] I do not believe that it is humanly possible to differentiate all four functions alike, otherwise we would be perfect like God, and that surely will not happen. There will always be a flaw in the crystal. We can never reach perfection. Moreover, if we could differentiate the four functions equally we should only make them into consciously disposable functions. Then we would lose the most precious connection with the unconscious through the inferior function, which is invariably the weakest; only through our feebleness and incapacity are we linked up with the unconscious, with the lower world of the instincts and with our fellow beings. Our virtues only enable us to be independent. There we do not need anybody, there we are kings; but in our inferiority we are linked up with mankind as well as with the world of our instincts. It would not even be an advantage to have all the functions perfect, because such a condition would amount to complete aloofness. I have no perfection craze. My principle is: for heaven’s sake do not be perfect, but by all means try to be complete—whatever that means.

Question:

[213] May I ask what it means to be complete? Will you enlarge upon that? Professor Jung:

[214] I must leave something to your own mental efforts. It is surely a most amusing enterprise, for instance, to think on your way home what it possibly means to be complete. We should not deprive people of the pleasure of discovering something. To be complete is a very great problem, and to talk of it is amusing, but to be it is the main thing.

Question:

[215] How do you fit mysticism into your scheme?

Professor Jung:

[216] Into what scheme?

Reply:

[217] The scheme of psychology and the psyche.

Professor Jung:

[218] Of course you should define what you mean by mysticism. Let us assume that you mean people who have mystical experience. Mystics are people who have a particularly vivid experience of the processes of the collective unconscious. Mystical experience is experience of archetypes.

Question:

[219] Is there any difference between archetypal forms and mystical forms?

Professor Jung:

[220] I make no distinction between them. If you study the phenomenology of mystical experience you will come across some very interesting things. For instance, you all know that our Christian heaven is a masculine heaven and that the feminine element is only tolerated. The Mother of God is not divine, she is only the arch-saint. She intercedes for us at the throne of God but she is not part of the Deity. She does not belong to the Trinity.

[221] Now some Christian mystics have a different experience. For instance we have a Swiss mystic, Niklaus von der Flüe.11 He experienced a God and a Goddess. Then there was a mystic of the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Digulleville, who wrote the Pèlerinage de l’âme de Jésus Christ.12 Like Dante, he had a vision of the highest paradise as “le ciel d’or,” and there upon a throne one thousand times more bright than the sun sat le Roi, who is God himself, and beside him on a crystal throne of brownish hue, la Reine, presumably the Earth. This is a vision outside the Trinity idea, a mystical experience of an archetypal nature which includes the feminine principle. The Trinity is a dogmatic image based on an archetype of an exclusively masculine nature. In the Early Church the Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as feminine was declared a heresy.

[222] Dogmatic images, such as the Trinity, are archetypes which have become abstract ideas. But there are a number of mystical experiences inside the Church whose archetypal character is still visible. Therefore they sometimes contain a heretical or pagan element. Remember, for instance, St. Francis of Assisi. Only through the great diplomatic ability of Pope Boniface VIII could St. Francis be assimilated into the Church. You have only to think of his relation to animals to understand the difficulty. Animals, like the whole of Nature, were taboo to the Church. Yet there are sacred animals like the Lamb, the Dove, and, in the Early Church, the Fish, which are worshipped.

Question:

[223] Will Professor Jung give us his view on the psychological differences between the dissociation in hysteria and the dissociation in schizophrenia?

Professor Jung:

[224] In hysteria the dissociated personalities are still in a sort of interrelation, so that you always get the impression of a total person. With a hysterical case you can establish a rapport, you get a feeling reaction from the whole person. There is only a superficial division between certain memory compartments, but the basic personality is always present. In the case of schizophrenia that is not so. There you encounter only fragments, there is nowhere a whole. Therefore, if you have a friend or a relative whom you have known well and who becomes insane, you will get a tremendous shock when you are confronted with a fragmentary personality which is completely split up. You can only deal with one fragment at a time; it is like a splinter of glass. You do not feel the continuity of the personality any longer. While with a hysterical case you think: if I could only wipe away that sort of obscuration or that sort of somnambulism then we should have the sum-total of the personality. But with schizophrenia it is a deep dissociation of personality; the fragments cannot come together any more.

Question:

[225] Are there any more strictly psychological conceptions by which that difference can be expressed?

Professor Jung:

[226] There are certain borderline cases where you can stitch the parts together if you can reintegrate the lost contents. I will tell you of a case I had. A woman had been twice in a lunatic asylum with a typical schizophrenic attack. When she was brought to me she was better, but still in a state of hallucination. I saw that it was possible to reach the split-off parts. Then I began to go through every detail of the experiences which she had had in the lunatic asylum with her; we went through all the voices and all the delusions, and I explained every fact to her so that she could associate them with her consciousness. I showed her what these unconscious contents were that came up during her insanity, and because she was an intelligent person, I gave her books to read so that she acquired a great deal of knowledge, chiefly mythological knowledge, by which she herself could stitch the parts together. The breaking lines were still there, of course, and whenever afterwards she had a new wave of disintegration I told her to try to draw or paint a picture of that particular situation in order to have a picture of the whole of herself which objectified her condition, and so she did. She brought me quite a number of pictures she had made, which had helped her whenever she felt she was falling apart again. In this way I have kept her afloat for about twelve years, and she has had no more attacks which necessitated her seclusion in an asylum. She could always manage to ward off the attacks by objectifying their contents. She told me, moreover, that when she had made such a picture she went to her books and read a chapter about some of its main features, in order to bring it into general connection with mankind, with what people know, with the collective consciousness, and then she felt right again. She said she felt adapted and she was no longer at the mercy of the collective unconscious.

[227] All cases are not as accessible as that one, as you will realize. I cannot cure schizophrenia in principle. Occasionally by great good chance I can synthetize the fragments. But I do not like to do it because it is frightfully difficult work.

_______________

Notes:

1 [Cf. “On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology,” and “On Psychological Understanding,” both delivered in 1914 (C.W., vol. 3).]  

2 For example, the figures of anima and animus. [See Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (C.W., vol. 7), pars. 296ff.]  

3 “The Familial Constellations” (C.W., vol. 2) and “The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual” (C.W., vol. 4), pars. 698–702.  

4 “On the Practical Use of Dream Analysis” (C.W., vol. 16). [Also “General Aspects of Dream Psychology” and “On the Nature of Dreams” (C.W., vol. 8).]  

5 [The reference is to Wilhelm Wundt, of Leipzig (1832–1920).]  

6 Psychological Types, Def. 48. See also Two Essays, pars. 296ff. [Also Aion (C.W., vol. 9, ii), ch. 3.]  

7 [E.g., Symbols of Transformation, Part II, ch. V, especially par. 395.]  

8 [The reference is to the disaster of 1908, when 90 per cent of the Sicilian city was destroyed, with a loss of 60,000 lives.]

9 Cf. W. Y. Evans-Wentz. The Tibetan Book of the Dead.  

10 [Cf. infra, pars. 525ff. The case is also discussed in Jacobi, Complex/Archetype Symbol, pp. 139ff.]  

11 [“Brother Klaus” (C.W., vol. 11).]  

12 [Psychology and Alchemy (C.W., vol. 12), pars. 315ff.]
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Re: The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of An

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Part 1 of 2

LECTURE IV

The Chairman (Dr. Emanuel Miller):

[228] I shall not take any of Professor Jung’s time away from you but will merely express my great pleasure at the opportunity of being Chairman this evening. Only I am put to a grave disadvantage: I have not been able to attend the previous lectures and therefore I do not know to what depths of the unconscious Professor Jung has already led you, but I think he is going to continue tonight the presentation of his method of dream-analysis.

Professor Jung:

[229] The interpretation of a profound dream, such as our last one was, is never sufficient when it is left in the personal sphere. This dream contains an archetypal image, and that is always an indication that the psychological situation of the dreamer extends beyond the mere personal layer of the unconscious. His problem is no more entirely a personal affair, but something which touches upon the problems of mankind in general. The symbol of the monster is an indication of this. This symbol brings up the hero myth, and furthermore the association with the battle of St. Jacob, which characterizes the localization of the scene, appeals also to a general interest.

[230] The ability to apply a general point of view is of great therapeutic importance. Modern therapy is not much aware of this, but in ancient medicine it was well known that the raising of the personal disease to a higher and more impersonal level had a curative effect. In ancient Egypt, for instance, when a man was bitten by a snake, the priest-physician was called in, and he took from the temple library the manuscript about the myth of Rā and his mother Isis, and recited it. Isis had made a poisonous worm and hidden it in the sand, and the god Rā had stepped on the serpent and was bitten by it, so that he suffered terrible pain and was threatened with death. Therefore the gods caused Isis to work a spell which drew the poison out of him.1 The idea was that the patient would be so impressed by this narrative that he would be cured. To us this sounds quite impossible. We could not imagine that the reading of a story from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for instance, would cure typhoid fever or pneumonia. But we only take into account our rational modern psychology. To understand the effect we have to consider the psychology of the ancient Egyptians, which was quite different. And yet those people were not so very different. Even with us certain things can work miracles; sometimes spiritual consolation or psychological influence alone can cure, or at least will help to cure an illness. And of course it is all the more so with a person on a more primitive level and with a more archaic psychology.

[231] In the East a great amount of practical therapy is built upon this principle of raising the mere personal ailment into a generally valid situation, and ancient Greek medicine also worked with the same method. Of course the collective image or its application has to be in accordance with the particular psychological condition of the patient. The myth or legend arises from the archetypal material which is constellated by the disease, and the psychological effect consists in connecting the patient with the general human meaning of his particular situation. Snakebite, for instance, is an archetypal situation, therefore you find it as a motif in any number of tales. If the archetypal situation underlying the illness can be expressed in the right way the patient is cured. If no adequate expression is found, the individual is thrown back upon himself, into the isolation of being ill; he is alone and has no connection with the world. But if he is shown that his particular ailment is not his ailment only, but a general ailment—even a god’s ailment—he is in the company of men and gods, and this knowledge produces a healing effect. Modern spiritual therapy uses the same principle: pain or illness is compared with the sufferings of Christ, and this idea gives consolation. The individual is lifted out of his miserable loneliness and represented as undergoing a heroic meaningful fate which is ultimately good for the whole world, like the suffering and death of a god. When an ancient Egyptian was shown that he was undergoing the fate of Ra, the sun-god, he was immediately ranked with the Pharaoh, who was the son and representative of the gods, and so the ordinary man was a god himself, and this brought such a release of energy that we can understand quite well how he was lifted out of his pain. In a particular frame of mind people can endure a great deal. Primitives can walk on glowing coals and inflict the most terrible injuries on themselves under certain circumstances without feeling any pain. And so it is quite likely that an impressive and adequate symbol can mobilize the forces of the unconscious to such an extent that even the nervous system becomes affected and the body begins to react in a normal way again.

[232] In the case of psychological suffering, which always isolates the individual from the herd of so-called normal people, it is also of the greatest importance to understand that the conflict is not a personal failure only, but at the same time a suffering common to all and a problem with which the whole epoch is burdened. This general point of view lifts the individual out of himself and connects him with humanity. The suffering does not even have to be a neurosis; we have the same feeling in very ordinary circumstances. If for instance you live in a well-to-do community, and you suddenly lose all your money, your natural reaction will be to think that it is terrible and shameful and that you are the only one who is such an ass as to lose his money. But if everybody loses his money it is quite another matter and you feel reconciled to it. When other people are in the same hole as I am I feel much better. If a man is lost in the desert or quite alone on a glacier, or if he is the responsible leader of a group of men in a precarious situation, he will feel terrible. But when he is a soldier in a whole battalion that is lost, he will join the rest in cheering and making jokes, and will not realize the danger. The danger is not less, but the individual feels quite differently about it in a group than when he has to face it alone.

[233] Whenever archetypal figures appear in dreams, especially in the later stages of analysis, I explain to the patient that his case is not particular and personal, but that his psychology is approaching a level which is universally human. That outlook is very important, because a neurotic feels tremendously isolated and ashamed of his neurosis. But if he knows his problem to be general and not merely personal, it makes all the difference. In the case of our dreamer, if I had been going on with the treatment I would have called the patient’s attention to the fact that the motif in his last dream was a general human situation. He himself in his associations had realized the hero-dragon conflict.

[234] The hero’s fight with the dragon, as the symbol of a typical human situation, is a very frequent mythological motif. One of the most ancient literary expressions of it is the Babylonian Creation Myth, where the herogod Marduk fights the dragon Tiamat. Marduk is the spring-god and Tiamat is the mother-dragon, the primordial chaos. Marduk kills her and splits her in two parts. From one half he makes the heavens and from the other he makes the earth.2

[235] A more striking parallel to our case is the great Babylonian epos of Gilgamesh.3 Gilgamesh is really an arriviste par excellence, a man of ambitious plans, like our dreamer, and a great king and hero. All the men are working for him like slaves to build a town with mighty walls. The women feel neglected and complain to the gods about their reckless tyrant. So the gods decide that something has to be done about it. Translated into psychological language this means: Gilgamesh is using his consciousness only, his head has wings and is detached from the body, and his body is going to say something about it. It will react with a neurosis, that is, by constellating a very opposite factor. How is this neurosis described in the poem? The gods decide to “call up,” that is to make, a man like Gilgamesh. They create Enkidu; yet he is in some ways different. The hair of his head is long, he looks like a cave-man, and he lives with the wild animals in the plains and drinks from the water-wells of the gazelles. Gilgamesh, being normal so far, has a perfectly normal dream about the intention of the gods. He dreams that a star falls down on his back, a star like a mighty warrior, and Gilgamesh is wrestling with him but cannot shake himself free. Finally he overcomes him and puts him down at his mother’s feet, and the mother “makes him equal” to Gilgamesh. The mother is a wise woman and interprets the dream for Gilgamesh so that he is ready to meet the danger. Enkidu is meant to fight Gilgamesh and bring him down, but Gilgamesh in a very clever way makes him his friend. He has conquered the reaction of his unconscious by cunning and will-power and he persuades his opponent that they are really friends and that they can work together. Now things are going worse than ever.

[236] Although right in the beginning Enkidu has an oppressive dream, a vision of the underworld where the dead live, Gilgamesh is preparing for a great adventure. Like heroes, Gilgamesh and Enkidu start out together to overcome Humbaba, a terrible monster whom the gods have made guardian of their sanctuary on the cedar mountain. His voice roars like the tempest, and everybody who approaches the wood is overcome by weakness. Enkidu is brave and very strong, but he is nervous about the enterprise. He is depressed by bad dreams and pays a lot of attention to them, like the inferior man in ourselves whom we ridicule when that inferior part of ourselves feels superstitious about certain dates, and so on; the inferior man nevertheless continues to be nervous about certain things. Enkidu is very superstitious, he has had bad dreams on the way to the forest and has forebodings that things will go wrong. But Gilgamesh interprets the dreams optimistically. Again the reaction of the unconscious is cheated, and they succeed in bringing back Humbaba’s head triumphantly to their city.

[237] Now the gods decide to interfere, or rather it is a goddess, Ishtar, who tries to defeat Gilgamesh. The ultimate principle of the unconscious is the Eternal Feminine, and Ishtar, with true feminine cunning, makes wonderful promises to Gilgamesh if he will become her lover: he would be like a god and his power and wealth would increase beyond measure. But Gilgamesh does not believe a word of it, he refuses with insulting words and reproaches her for all her faithlessness and cruelty towards her lovers. Ishtar in her rage and fury persuades the gods to create an enormous bull, which descends from the heavens and devastates the country. A great fight begins, and hundreds of men are killed by the poisonous breath of the divine bull. But again Gilgamesh, with the help of Enkidu, slay him, and the victory is celebrated.

[238] Ishtar, overcome by rage and pain, descends to the wall of the city, and now Enkidu himself commits an outrage against her. He curses her and throws the member of the dead bull in her face. This is the climax, and now the peripeteia sets in. Enkidu has more dreams of an ominous nature and becomes seriously ill and dies.

[239] This means that the conscious separates from the unconscious altogether; the unconscious withdraws from the field, and Gilgamesh is now alone and overcome with grief. He can hardly accept the loss of his friend, but what torments him most is the fear of death. He has seen his friend die and is faced with the fact that he is mortal too. One more desire tortures him—to secure immortality. He sets out heroically to find the medicine against death, because he knows of an old man, his ancestor, who has eternal life and who lives far away in the West. So the journey to the underworld, the Nekyia, begins, and he travels to the West like the sun, through the door of the heavenly mountain. He overcomes enormous difficulties, and even the gods do not oppose his plan, although they tell him that he will seek in vain. Finally he comes to his destination and persuades the old man to tell him of the remedy. At the bottom of the sea he acquires the magic herb of immortality, the pharmakon athanasias, and he is bringing the herb home. Although he is tired of travelling he is full of joy because he has the wonderful medicine and does not need to be afraid of death any more. But while he is refreshing himself by bathing in a pool, a snake smells out the herb of immortality and steals it from him. After his return, he takes up new plans for the fortification of his city, but he finds no peace. He wants to know what happens to man after death and he finally succeeds in evoking Enkidu’s spirit, which comes up from a hole in the earth and gives Gilgamesh very melancholy information. With this the epos ends. The ultimate victory is won by the cold-blooded animal.

[240] There are quite a number of dreams recorded from antiquity with parallel motifs, and I will give you a short example of how our colleagues of old—the dream interpreters of the first century A.D.—proceeded. The story is told by Flavius Josephus in his history of the Jewish war,4 where he also records the destruction of Jerusalem.

[241] There was a Tetrarch of Palestine by the name of Archelaos, a Roman governor who was very cruel and who, like practically all of those provincial governors, regarded his position as an opportunity to enrich himself and steal what he could lay his hands on. Therefore a delegation was sent to the emperor Augustus to complain about him. This was in the tenth year of Archelaos’ governorship. About this time he had a dream in which he saw nine big ripe ears of wheat which were eaten up by hungry oxen. Archelaos was alarmed and instantly called in his court psychoanalyst. But the psychoanalyst did not know what the dream meant, or he was afraid to tell the truth and wriggled out of it. Archelaos called in other psychoanalysts for consultation, and they in the same way refused to know anything about the dream.

[242] But there was a peculiar sect of people, the Essenes or Therapeutai, with more independent minds. They lived in Egypt and near the Dead Sea, and it is not impossible that John the Baptist as well as Simon Magus belonged to such circles. So as a last resort a man called Simon the Essene was sent for, and he told Archelaos: “The ears of wheat signify the years of your reign, and the oxen the change of things. The nine years are fulfilled and there will be a great change in your fate. The hungry oxen mean your destruction.” In those countries such a dream-image would be perfectly understandable. The fields have to be guarded carefully against foraging cattle. There is little grass, and it is a catastrophe when during the night the oxen break through the fence into the field and trample down and eat the growing grain, so that in the morning the whole bread of a year is gone. Now for the confirmation of the interpretation. A few days later a Roman ambassador arrived to investigate, dismissed Archelaos, took all his property from him, and exiled him to Gaul.

[243] Archelaos was married, and his wife, Glaphyra, also had a dream. Naturally she was impressed by what had happened to her husband. She dreamt of her first husband—Archelaos was her third marriage—who had been disposed of in a very impolite way: he had been murdered, and Archelaos was most probably the murderer. Things were a bit rough in those days. This former husband, Alexandros, appeared to her in the dream and blamed her for her conduct and told her that he was going to take her back into his household. Simon did not interpret this dream, so the analysis is left to our discretion. The important fact is that Alexandros was dead, and that Glaphyra saw the dead husband in her dream. This, of course, in those days, meant the ghost of that person. So when he told her that he was going to take her back to his household it signified that he was going to fetch her to Hades. And indeed, a few days later she committed suicide.

[244] The way the dream-interpreter proceeded with the dream of Archelaos was very sensible. He understood the dream exactly as we would, although these dreams are of a much simpler nature than most of our dreams. I have noticed that dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer is himself, only they are always a little bit ahead of the dreamer’s consciousness. I do not understand my own dreams any better than any of you, for they are always somewhat beyond my grasp and I have the same trouble with them as anyone who knows nothing about dreaminterpretation. Knowledge is no advantage when it is a matter of one’s own dreams.

[245] Another interesting parallel to our case is the story you all know in the fourth chapter of the Book of Daniel.5 When the king Nebuchadnezzar had conquered the whole of Mesopotamia and Egypt, he thought he was very great indeed because he possessed the whole known world. Then he had the typical dream of the arriviste who has climbed too high. He dreamed of an enormous tree growing up to heaven and casting a shadow over the whole earth. But then a watcher and holy one from heaven ordered the tree to be hewn down, and his branches cut off, and his leaves shaken, so that only his stump remained; and that he should live with the beasts and his human heart be taken from him and a beast’s heart given to him.

[246] Of course all the astrologers and wise men and dream-interpreters refused to understand the dream. Only Daniel, who already in the second chapter had proved himself a courageous analyst—he even had a vision of a dream which Nebuchadnezzar could not remember—understood its meaning. He warned the king to repent of his avarice and injustice, otherwise the dream would come true. But the king went on as before, very proud of his power. Then a voice from heaven cursed him and repeated the prophecy of the dream. And it all happened as foretold. Nebuchadnezzar was cast out to the beasts and he became like an animal himself. He ate grass as the oxen and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, his hair grew long like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws. He was turned back into a primitive man and all his conscious reason was taken away because he had misused it. He regressed even further back than the primitive and became completely inhuman; he was Humbaba, the monster, himself. All this symbolized a complete regressive degeneration of a man who has overreached himself.

[247] His case, like our patient’s, is the eternal problem of the successful man who has overreached himself and is contradicted by his unconscious. The contradiction is first shown in the dreams and, if not accepted, must be experienced in reality in a fatal way. These historical dreams, like all dreams, have a compensatory function: they are an indication—a symptom, if you prefer to say so—that the individual is at variance with unconscious conditions, that somewhere he has deviated from his natural path. Somewhere he has fallen a victim to his ambition and his ridiculous designs, and, if he does not pay attention, the gap will widen and he will fall into it, as our patient has.

[248] I want to emphasize that it is not safe to interpret a dream without going into careful detail as to the context. Never apply any theory, but always ask the patient how he feels about his dream-images. For dreams are always about a particular problem of the individual about which he has a wrong conscious judgment. The dreams are the reaction to our conscious attitude in the same way that the body reacts when we overeat or do not eat enough or when we ill-treat it in some other way. Dreams are the natural reaction of the self-regulating psychic system. This formulation is the nearest I can get to a theory about the structure and function of dreams. I hold that dreams are just as manifold and unpredictable and incalculable as a person you observe during the day. If you watch an individual at one moment and then at another you will see and hear the most varied reactions, and it is exactly the same with dreams. In our dreams we are just as many-sided as in our daily life, and just as you cannot form a theory about those many aspects of the conscious personality you cannot make a general theory of dreams. Otherwise we would have an almost divine knowledge of the human mind, which we certainly do not possess. We know precious little about it, therefore we call the things we do not know unconscious.

[249] But today I am going to contradict myself and break all my rules. I am going to interpret a single dream, not one out of a series; moreover I do not know the dreamer, and further, I am not in possession of the associations. Therefore I am interpreting the dream arbitrarily. There is a justification for this procedure. If a dream is clearly formed of personal material you have to get the individual associations; but if the dream is chiefly a mythological structure—a difference which is obvious at once—then it speaks a universal language, and you or I can supply parallels with which to construct the context as well as anybody else, always provided we possess the necessary knowledge. For instance, when the dream takes up the hero-dragon conflict, everybody has something to say about it, because we have all read fairytales and legends and know something of heroes and dragons. On the collective level of dreams there is practically no difference in human beings, while there is all the difference on the personal level.

[250] The main substance of the dream I am going to speak of is mythological. Here we are confronted with the question: Under what conditions does one have mythological dreams? With us they are rather rare, as our consciousness is to a great extent detached from the underlying archetypal mind. Mythological dreams therefore are felt by us as a very alien element. But this is not so with a mentality nearer to the primordial psyche. Primitives pay great attention to such dreams and call them “big dreams” in contradistinction to ordinary ones. They feel that they are important and contain a general meaning. Therefore in a primitive community the dreamer feels bound to announce a big dream to the assembly of men, and a palaver is held over it. Such dreams were also announced to the Roman Senate. There is a story of a senator’s daughter in the first century B.C. who dreamed that the goddess Minerva had appeared to her and complained that the Roman people were neglecting her temple. The lady felt obliged to report the dream to the Senate, and the Senate voted a certain sum of money for the restoration of the temple. A similar case is told of Sophocles, when a precious golden vessel had been stolen from the temple of Herakles. The god appeared to Sophocles in a dream and told him the name of the thief.6 After the third repetition of the dream, Sophocles felt obliged to inform the Areopagus. The man in question was seized, and in the course of the investigation he confessed and brought back the vessel. These mythological or collective dreams have a character which forces people instinctively to tell them. This instinct is quite appropriate, because such dreams do not belong to the individual; they have a collective meaning. They are true in themselves in general, and in particular they are true for people in certain circumstances. That is the reason why in antiquity and in the Middle Ages dreams were held in great esteem. It was felt that they expressed a collective human truth.

[251] Now I will tell you the dream. It was sent to me by a colleague of mine years ago with a few remarks about the dreamer. My colleague was an alienist at a clinic, and the patient was a distinguished young Frenchman, twenty-two years of age, highly intelligent, and vesy aesthetic. He had travelled in Spain and had come back with a depression which was diagnosed as manic-depressive insanity, depressive form. The depression was not very bad, but bad enough for him to be sent to the clinic. After six months he was released from confinement, and a few months later he committed suicide. He was no longer under the depression, which was practically cured; he committed suicide apparently in a state of calm reasoning. We shall understand from the dream why he committed suicide. This is the dream, and it occurred at the beginning of the depression:

Underneath the great cathedral of Toledo there is a cistern filled with water which has a subterranean connection with the river Tagus, which skirts the city. This cistern is a small dark room. In the water there is a huge serpent whose eyes sparkle like jewels. Near it there is a golden bowl containing a golden dagger. This dagger is the key to Toledo, and its owner commands full power over the city. The dreamer knows the serpent to be the friend and protector of B— C—, a young friend of his who is present. B— C— puts his naked foot into the serpent’s jaws. The serpent licks it in a friendly way and B— C— enjoys playing with the serpent; he has no fear of it because he is a child without guile. In the dream B— C— appears to be about the age of seven; he had indeed been a friend of the dreamer’s early youth. Since this time, the dream says, the serpent has been forgotten and nobody dared to descend into its haunts.


[252] This part is a sort of introduction, and now the real action begins.

The dreamer is alone with the serpent. He talks to it respectfully, but without fear. The serpent tells the dreamer that Spain belongs to him as he is B— C—’s friend, and asks him to give back the boy. The dreamer refuses to do this and promises instead that he himself will descend into the darkness of the cave to be the friend of the serpent. But then he changes his mind, and instead of fulfilling his promise he decides to send another friend, a Mr. S—, to the serpent. This friend is descended from the Spanish Moors, and to risk the descent into the cistern he has to recover the original courage of his race. The dreamer advises him to get the sword with the red hilt which is to be found in the weapons factory on the other bank of the Tagus. It is said to be a very ancient sword, dating back to the old Phocaeans.7 S— gets the sword and descends into the cistern, and the dreamer tells him to pierce his left palm with the sword. S— does so, but he is not able to keep his countenance in the powerful presence of the serpent. Overcome by pain and fear, he cries out and staggers up the stairs again without having taken the dagger. Thus the dreamer cannot hold Toledo, and he could do nothing about it and had to leave his friend there as a mere wall decoration.


[252a]. That is the end of the dream. The original of course is in French. Now for the context. We have certain hints as to these friends. B— C— is a friend of the dreamer’s early youth, a little bit older than himself, and he projected everything that was wonderful and charming into this boy and made him a sort of hero. But he lost sight of him later; perhaps the boy died. S— is a friend of more recent date. He is said to be descended from the Spanish Moors. I do not know him personally, but I know his family. It is a very old and honourable family from the South of France, and the name might easily be a Moorish name. The dreamer knew this legend about the family of S—

[253] As I told you, the dreamer had recently been to Spain and of course had seen Toledo, and he had the dream after he got back and had been taken to the clinic. He was in a bad state, practically in despair, and he could not help telling the dream to his doctor. My colleague did not know what to do with it, but he felt an urge to send me the dream because he felt it to be very important. But at the time I received the dream I could not understand it. Nevertheless I had the feeling; that if I had known something more about such dreams, and if I could have handled the case myself, I might have been able to help the young man and his suicide might not have occurred. Since then I have seen many cases of a similar nature. Often one can turn a difficult corner by a real understanding of dreams like this one. With such a sensitive, refined individual who had studied the history of art and was an unusually artistic and intelligent person, one must be exceedingly careful. Banalities are no use in such a case; one has to be serious and enter into the real material.

[253a] We make no mistake when we assume that the dreamer has picked out Toledo for a particular reason—both as the object of his trip and of his dream; and the dream brings up material which practically everybody would have who had seen Toledo with the same mental disposition, the same education and refinement of aesthetic perception and knowledge. Toledo is an extremely impressive city. It contains one of the most marvellous Gothic cathedrals of the world. It is a place with an immensely old tradition; it is the old Roman Toletum, and for centuries has been the seat of the Cardinal Archbishop and Primate of Spain. From the sixth to the eighth century it was the capital of the Visigoths; from the eighth to the eleventh it was a provincial capital of the Moorish kingdom; and from the eleventh to the sixteenth century it was the capital of Castile. The cathedral of Toledo, being such an impressive and beautiful building, naturally suggests all that it represents: the greatness, the power, the splendour, and the mystery of medieval Christianity, which found its essential expression in the Church. Therefore the cathedral is the embodiment, the incarnation, of the spiritual kingdom, for in the Middle Ages the world was ruled by the Emperor and by God. So the cathedral expresses the Christian philosophy or Weltanschauung of the Middle Ages.

[254] The dream says that underneath the cathedral there is a mysterious place, which in reality is not in tune with a Christian church. What is beneath a cathedral of that age? There is always the so-called under-church or crypt. You have probably seen the great crypt at Chartres; it gives a very good idea of the mysterious character of a crypt. The crypt at Chartres was previously an old sanctuary with a well, where the worship of a virgin was celebrated—not of the Virgin Mary, as is done now—but of a Celtic goddess. Under every Christian church of the Middle Ages there is a secret place where in old times the mysteries were celebrated. What we now call the sacraments of the Church were the mysteria of early Christianity. In Provençal the crypt is called le musset, which means a secret; the word perhaps originates from mysteria and could mean mystery-place. In Aosta, where they speak a Provençal dialect, there is a musset under the cathedral.

[255] The crypt is probably taken over from the cult of Mithras. In Mithraism the main religious ceremony took place in a vault half sunk into the earth, and the community remained separated in the main church above. There were peepholes so that they could see and hear the priests and the elect ones chanting and celebrating their rites below, but they were not admitted to them. That was a privilege for the initiates. In the Christian church the separation of the baptistry from the main body of the building derives from the same idea, for baptism as well as the communion were mysteria of which one could not speak directly. One had to use a sort of allegorical allusion so as not to betray the secrets. The mystery also attached to the name of Christ, which therefore was not allowed to be mentioned; instead, he was referred to by the name of Ichthys, the Fish. You have probably seen reproductions of very early Christian paintings where Christ appears as the Fish. This secrecy connected with the holy name is probably the reason why the name of Christ is not mentioned in an early Christian document of about A.D. 140 known as The Shepherd of Hermas,8 which was an important part of the body of Christian literature recognized by the Church till about the fifth century. The writer of this book of visions, Hermas, is supposed to have been the brother of the Roman bishop Pius. The spiritual teacher who appears to Hermas is called the Poimen, the Shepherd, and not the Christ.

[256] The idea of the crypt or mystery-place leads us to something below the Christian Weltanschauung, something older than Christianity, like the pagan well below the cathedral at Chartres, or like an antique cave inhabited by a serpent. The well with the serpent is of course not an actual fact which the dreamer saw when he travelled in Spain. This dream-image is not an individual experience and can therefore only be paralleled by archaeological and mythological knowledge. I have to give you a certain amount of that parallelism so that you can see in what context or tissue such a symbolical arrangement appears when looked at in the light of comparative research work. You know that every church still has its baptismal font. This was originally the piscina, the pond, in which the initiates were bathed or symbolically drowned. After a figurative death in the baptismal bath they came out transformed quasi modo geniti, as reborn ones. So we can assume that the crypt or baptismal font has the meaning of a place of terror and death and also of rebirth, a place where dark initiations take place.

[257] The serpent in the cave is an image which often occurs in antiquity. It is important to realize that in classical antiquity, as in other civilizations, the serpent not only was an animal that aroused fear and represented danger, but also signified healing. Therefore Asklepios, the god of physicians, is connected with the serpent; you all know his emblem which is still in use. In the temples of Asklepios, the Asklepieia, which were the ancient clinics, there was a hole in the ground, covered by a stone, and in that hole lived the sacred serpent. There was a slot in the stone through which the people who came to the place of healing threw down the fee for the doctors. The snake was at the same time the cashier of the clinic and collector of gifts that were thrown down into its cave. During the great pestilence in the time of Diocletian the famous serpent of the Asklepieion at Epidaurus was brought to Rome as an antidote to the epidemic. It represented the god himself.

[258] The serpent is not only the god of healing; it also has the quality of wisdom and prophecy. The fountain of Castalia at Delphi was originally inhabited by a python. Apollo fought and overcame the python, and from that time Delphi was the seat of the famous oracle and Apollo its god, until he left half his powers to Dionysus, who later came in from the East. In the underworld, where the spirits of the dead live, snakes and water are always together, as we can read in Aristophanes’ The Frogs. The serpent in legend is often replaced by the dragon; the Latin draco simply means snake. A particularly suggestive parallel to our dream symbol is a Christian legend of the fifth century about St. Sylvester:9 there was a terrible dragon in a cave under the Tarpeian rock in Rome to whom virgins were sacrificed. Another legend says that the dragon was not a real one but artificial, and that a monk went down to prove it was not real and when he got down to the cave he found that the dragon had a sword in his mouth and his eyes consisted of sparkling jewels.

[259] Very often these caves, like the cave of Castalia, contain springs. These springs played a very important role in the cult of Mithras, from which many elements of the early Church originated. Porphyry relates that Zoroaster, the founder of the Persian religion, dedicated to Mithras a cave containing many springs. Those of you who have been to Germany and seen the Saalburg near Frankfurt will have noticed the spring near the grotto of Mithras. The cult of Mithras is always connected with a spring. There is a beautiful Mithraeum in Provence which has a large piscina with wonderful crystal-clear water, and in the background a rock on which is carved the Mithras Tauroktonos—the bull-killing Mithras. These sanctuaries were always a great scandal to the early Christians. They hated all these natural arrangements because they were no friends of nature. In Rome a Mithraeum has been discovered ten feet below the surface of the Church of San Clemente. It is still in good condition but filled with water, and when it is pumped out it fills again. It is always under water because it adjoins a spring which floods the interior. The spring has never been found. We know of other religious ideas in antiquity, for instance of the Orphic cult, which always associate the underworld with water.

[260] This material will give you an idea that the serpent in the cave full of water is an image that was generally known and played a great role in antiquity. As you have noticed, I have chosen all my examples exclusively from antiquity; I could have chosen other parallels from other civilizations, and you would find it was the same. The water in the depths represents the unconscious. In the depths as a rule is a treasure guarded by a serpent or a dragon; in our dream the treasure is the golden bowl with the dagger in it. In order to recover the treasure the dragon has to be overcome. The treasure is of a very mysterious nature. It is connected with the serpent in a strange way; the peculiar nature of the serpent denotes the character of the treasure as though the two things were one. Often there is a golden snake with the treasure. Gold is something that everyone is seeking, so we could say that it looks as if the serpent himself were the great treasure, the source of immense power. In early Greek myths, for instance, the dweller in the cave is a hero, such as Cecrops, the founder of Athens. Above he is half man and half woman, a hermaphrodite, but the lower part of his body is a serpent; he is clearly a monster. The same is said of Erechtheus, another mythical king of Athens.

[261] That prepares us a little for understanding the golden bowl and the dagger in our dream. If you have seen Wagner’s Parsifal you know that the bowl corresponds to the Grail and the dagger to the spear and that the two belong together; they are the male and the female principle which form the union of opposites. The cave or underworld represents a layer of the unconscious where there is no discrimination at all, not even a distinction between the male and the female, which is the first differentiation primitives make. They distinguish objects in this way, as we still do occasionally. Some keys, for instance, have a hole in the front, and some are solid. They are often called male and female keys. You know the Italian tiled roofs. The convex tiles are placed above and the concave ones underneath. The upper ones are called monks and the under ones the nuns. This is not an indecent joke to the Italians, but the quintessence of discrimination.

[262] When the unconscious brings together the male and the female, things become utterly indistinguishable and we cannot say any more whether they are male or female, just as Cecrops came from such a mythical distance that one could not say whether he was man or woman, human or serpent. So we see that the bottom of the cistern in our dream is characterized by a complete union of opposites. This is the primordial condition of things, and at the same time a most ideal achievement, because it is the union of elements eternally opposed. Conflict has come to rest, and everything is still or once again in the original state of indistinguishable harmony. You find the same idea in ancient Chinese philosophy. The ideal condition is named Tao, and it consists of the complete harmony between heaven and earth. Figure 13 represents the symbol for Tao. On one side it is white with a black spot, and on the other it is black with a white spot. The white side is the hot, dry, fiery principle, the south; the black side is the cold, humid, dark principle, the north. The condition of Tao is the beginning of the world where nothing has yet begun—and it is also the condition to be achieved by the attitude of superior wisdom. The idea of the union of the two opposite principles, of male and female, is an archetypal image. I once had a very nice example of its still-living primitive form. When on military duty with the army during the war, I was with the mountain artillery, and the soldiers had to dig a deep hole for the position of a heavy gun. The soil was very refractory, and they cursed a good deal while they were digging up the heavy blocks. I was sitting hidden behind a rock, smoking my pipe and listening to what they said. One man said: “Now, damn it all, we have dug into the depths of this blooming old valley where the old lake-dwellers lived and where father and mother are still sleeping together.” That is the same idea, very naïvely expressed. A Negro myth says that the primordial man and the primordial woman were sleeping together in the calabash; they were quite unconscious until they found they were torn asunder and what was in between was the son. Man was in between, and from that time they were separated, and then they knew each other. The original condition of absolute unconsciousness is expressed as a completely restful condition where nothing happens.

Image
FIG. 13. Tao

[263] When the dreamer comes to these symbols he reaches the layer of complete unconsciousness, which is represented as the greatest treasure. It is the central motif in Wagner’s Parsifal that the spear should be restored to the Grail because they belong eternally together. This union is a symbol of complete fulfilment—eternity before and after the creation of the world, a dormant condition. That is probably the thing which the desire of man is seeking. That is why he ventures into the cave of the dragon, to find that condition where consciousness and the unconscious are so completely united that he is neither conscious nor unconscious. Whenever the two are too much separated, consciousness seeks to unite them again by going down into the depths where they once were one. Thus you find in Tantric Yoga or Kundalini Yoga an attempt to reach the condition where Shiva is in eternal union with Shakti. Shiva is the eternally unextended point, and he is encircled by the female principle, Shakti, in the form of a serpent.

[264] I could give you many more instances of this idea. It played a great role in the secret tradition of the Middle Ages. In medieval alchemical texts there are pictures of the process of the union of Sol and Luna, the male and the female principle. We have traces of an analogous symbolism in Christian reports about the ancient mysteries. There is a report by a Bishop Asterios about Eleusis, and it says that every year the priest made the katabasis or descent into the cave. And the priest of Apollo and the priestess of Demeter, the earth mother, celebrated the hierosgamos, the sacred nuptials, for the fertilization of the earth. This is a Christian statement which is not substantiated. The initiates of the Eleusinian mysteries were sworn to the strictest secrecy; if they betrayed anything, they were punished with death. So we have practically no knowledge of their rites. We know, on the other hand, that during the mysteries of Demeter certain obscenities took place because they were thought good for the fertility of the earth. The distinguished ladies of Athens assembled, with the priestess of Demeter presiding. They had a good meal and plenty of wine and afterwards performed the rite of the aischrologia. That is, they had to tell indecent jokes. This was considered a religious duty because it was good for the fertility of the next season.10 A similar rite took place in Bubastis in Egypt at the time of the Isis mysteries. The inhabitants of the villages on the upper Nile came down in parties, and the women on the barges used to expose themselves to the women on the banks of the Nile. It was probably done for the same reason as the aischrologia, to ensure the fertility of the earth. You can read about it in Herodotus.11 In southern Germany as late as the nineteenth century, in order to increase the fertility of the soil, the peasant used to take his wife to his fields and have intercourse with her in a furrow. This is called sympathetic magic.

[265] The bowl is a vessel that receives or contains, and is therefore female. It is a symbol of the body which contains the anima, the breath and liquid of life, while the dagger has piercing, penetrating qualities and is therefore male. It cuts, it discriminates and divides, and so is a symbol of the masculine Logos principle.

[266] In our dream the dagger is said to be the key to Toledo. The idea of the key is often associated with the mysteries in the cave. In the cult of Mithras there is a peculiar kind of god, the key god Aion, whose presence could not be explained; but I think it is quite understandable. He is represented with the winged body of a man and the head of a lion, and he is encoiled by a snake which rises up over his head.12 You have a figure of him in the British Museum. He is Infinite Time and Long Duration; he is the supreme god of the Mithraic hierarchy and creates and destroys all things, the durée créatrice of Bergson. He is a sun-god. Leo is the zodiacal sign where the sun dwells in summer, while the snake symbolizes the winter or wet time. So Aion, the lion-headed god with the snake round his body, again represents the union of opposites, light and darkness, male and female, creation and destruction. The god is represented as having his arms crossed and holding a key in each hand. He is the spiritual father of St. Peter, for he too holds the keys. The keys which Aion is holding are the keys to the past and future.

[267] The ancient mystery cults are always connected with psychopompic deities. Some of these deities are equipped with the keys to the underworld, because as the guardians of the door they watch over the descent of the initiates into the darkness and are the leaders into the mysteries. Hecate is one of them.

[268] In our dream the key is the key to the city of Toledo, so we have to consider the symbolic meaning of Toledo and of the city. As the old capital of Spain, Toledo was a very strong fortification and the very ideal of a feudal city, a refuge and stronghold which could not easily be touched from outside. The city represents a totality, closed in upon itself, a power which cannot be destroyed, which has existed for centuries and will exist for many centuries more. Therefore the city symbolizes the totality of man, an attitude of wholeness which cannot be dissolved.

[269] The city as a synonym for the self, for psychic totality, is an old and well-known image. We read for instance in the Oxyrhynchus sayings of Jesus:13 “A city built upon the top of a high hill and stablished, can neither fall nor be hid.” And: “Strive therefore to know yourselves, and ye shall be aware that ye are the sons of the almighty Father; and ye shall know that ye are in the city of God and ye are the city.” There is a Coptic treatise in the Codex Brucianus in which we find the idea of the Monogenes, or only son of God, who is also the Anthropos, Man.14 He is called the city with the four gates. The city with the four gates symbolizes the idea of totality; it is the individual who possesses the four gates to the world, the four psychological functions, and so is contained in the self. The city with the four gates is his indestructible wholeness—consciousness and the unconscious united.

[270] So these depths, that layer of utter unconsciousness in our dream, contain at the same time the key to individual completeness and wholeness, in other words to healing. The meaning of “whole” or “wholeness” is to make holy or to heal. The descent into the depths will bring healing. It is the way to the total being, to the treasure which suffering mankind is forever seeking, which is hidden in the place guarded by terrible danger. This is the place of primordial unconsciousness and at the same time the place of healing and redemption, because it contains the jewel of wholeness. It is the cave where the dragon of chaos lives and it is also the indestructible city, the magic circle or temenos, the sacred precinct where all the split-off parts of the personality are united.

[271] The use of a magic circle or mandala, as it is called in the East, for healing purposes is an archetypal idea. When a man is ill the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico make a sand-painting of a mandala with four gates. In the centre of it they build the socalled sweat-house or medicinelodge, where the patient has to undergo the sweat-cure. On the floor of the medicine-lodge is painted another magic circle—being thus placed in the centre of the big mandala—and in the midst of it is the bowl with the healing water. The water symbolizes the entrance to the underworld. The healing process in this ceremony is clearly analogous to the symbolism which we find in the collective unconscious. It is an individuation process, an identification with the totality of the personality, with the self. In Christian symbolism the totality is Christ, and the healing process consists of the imitatio Christi. The four gates are replaced by the four arms of the cross.

[272] The serpent in the cave in our dream is the friend of B— C—, the hero of the dreamer’s early days, into whom he projected everything he wanted to become and all the virtues to which he was aspiring. That young friend is at peace with the serpent. He is a child without guile, he is innocent and knows as yet of no conflict. Therefore he has the key to Spain and the power over the four gates.15
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