The Girl who never noticed her body
People with an over development of intuition which leads them to scorn objective reality, and so finally to a conflict such as I have described above, have usually characteristic dreams.
I once had as a patient a girl of the most extraordinary intuitive powers, and she had pushed the thing to such a point that her own body even was unreal to her.
Once I asked her half-jokingly if she had never noticed that she had a body, and she answered quite seriously that she had not—she bathed herself under a sheet! When she came to me she had ceased even to hear her steps when she walked—she was just floating through the world.
Her first dream was that she was sitting on top of a balloon, not even in a balloon, if you please, but on top of one that was high up in the air, and she was leaning over peeping down at me.
I had a gun and was shooting at the balloon which I finally brought down.
Before she came to me she had been living in a house where she had been impressed with the charming girls.It was a brothel and she had been quite unaware of the fact.
This shock brought her to analysis.
I cannot bring such a case down to a sense of reality through sensation directly, for to the intuitive, facts are mere air; so then, since thinking is her auxiliary function, I begin to reason with her in a very simple way till she becomes willing to strip from the fact the atmosphere she has projected upon it. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 90 – 91
