Bess Bolton: Memory of Toni Wolff
Bess Bolton: Memory of Toni Wolff
I went to Zurich to study at the C. G. Jung Institute.
It was in one of the lectures that I heard about using active imagination, as well as one’s dreams , to get in touch with the unconscious.
With Miss Wolff’s support and encouragement I was able to seek guidance from this introverted activity. It was in following this activity that I first met the tortoise.
Ever since he has served as a meaningful reminder of that significant experience.
These excerpts are statements of Dr. Jung’s from a seminar, “Dream Analysis.”
“There is a high mythical symbolism connected with the tortoise . . . a tortoise is a most fundamental being- the basic instinct that carries our whole psychological world, because the world is our psychology, our view .. . .
“The characteristics of the tortoise are the characteristics of the transcendent function, the one that unites the pairs of opposites.
“It is the reconciliation of the pair of opposites. From this reconciliation, there is always a new thing created, a new thing realized.
That is the transcendent function, and that is the tortoise. And the new thing is always strange to the old thing …. So the result of the transcendent function is as strange to us as the turtle is.” When I stopped dreaming of the tortoise I felt bereft.
How fortunate I was to have worked with Toni Wolff. She was dignified and quiet.
My original image of her was a rather tall, very serious, erect, straight-backed woman-the way she always sat in her chair.
Later I saw her as a comforting, warm, gentle, relating person.
The maid would bring a cup of tea-just one, for Miss Wolff but never two. I was wilting, but there was no tea for me. Bess Bolton, J.E.T., Page 10
Carl Jung on a memory hallucination.
To Dieter Meyer
Dear Herr Meyer, 26 January 1959
The symptom you describe is a particularly pronounced instance of the sentiment du defa-vu.
It is usually explained as a sort of memory hallucination.
It is true that such cases do occur in states of fatigue, but considering the nature of the symptom, and especially when it happens habitually, it seems to me to be something else, namely an actual fore-vision, whether in a dream or simply when one is asleep, of situations which in themselves are completely trivial and which one no longer remembers afterwards although one has a sentiment du defa-vu.
This interpretation seems to me particularly appropriate where an actual and conscious fore-vision has occurred.
These ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception) phenomena are much more common than is generally assumed.
They point to a quality of the unconscious which is outside the categories of time and space.
Rhine’s experiments, conducted with large numbers of people, offer irrefutable proof of this.
There is nothing uncanny about it, since experiences like yours come within the range of the normal.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 479
