Carl Jung Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture
Carl Jung Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture III 6 February 1929
LECTURE III 6 February 1929
I want to call your attention again to the patient’s drawing, because it is very important in his analysis.
It is the first intimation of the whole course and purpose of analysis.
While I cannot go into every detail of the design I can give you some general ideas about it. There are two interwoven courses.
At a place where they meet another line starts, forming a spiral, which ends in the centre of the design.
The patient calls this a labyrinth and thinks the irrational path of the steamroller is like the course of analysis.
He has a sense of relief because he feels less confused about all the material which comes up in dreams.
The first dreams often do this.
He had had an idea about analysis [ a wrong one ]-that it was trying to get down to some root complex and then you could pull up that root.
His idea didn’t fit in with the analysis, so he was confused, and his feeling of confusion in the dream was expressed in the drawing.
This pattern of lines which makes a labyrinth leads to no goal.
It is just a criss-cross of irrational lines interwoven with no end.
I called his attention to the symmetry of the design, but he had no idea to what it ref erred.
If I had shown that design to an Eastern philosopher, he would have said, “Oh yes, we know all about that, it is a mandala.”
We in the West have no conception of such figures.
We might call it a magic circle.
There are a few examples in Western Europe.
There is one specimen in the British Museum from an English collection, and Prof. Wilhelm has shown me one recently from a Taoist monastery.
When you analyse this figure you see that it consists of four divisions; often the centre is a square with a circle inside and the four divisions may be subdivided making eight or more.
An Eastern mandala is used for meditation.
What we understand by meditation is a very different thing.
For instance, there are Loyola’s exercises in the Catholic Church.
People meditate on certain prescribed subjects, and a dogmatic image helps the mind to concentrate towards a certain goal.
Mandalas are not unknown in the West.
A frequent form is the mandala with Christ in the centre and the evangelists in the four corners-the angel, eagle, ox, and lion, arranged like the four sons of Horus.
The myth of Horus has played an extraordinary role, and has not yet been fully explained.
In the myth Horus gave his eye to his father who had become blind from having seen the evil one.
Horus gave his eye to restore the light of day, to restore his father’s sight; so he plays the role of a saviour.
The eye is also a mandala.
In Norman art there are manuscripts with mandalas; there is one in the treasury of the cathedral of Cologne dated about 1150.
There is a Mexican mandala, the famous Calendar Stone, which has a face in the centre with four tower-like forms grouped about it. The whole is surrounded by a circle and the calendar reckonings are in the intersections of the circle.
The design of the dreamer indicates the way in which his analysis will continue, and at the same time it is a means to concentrate him.
When a Taoist priest meditates on a mandala and gradually concentrates his libido on the centre, what is the meaning of the centre?
The centre of consciousness is the ego, but the centre represented in the mandala is not identical with the ego.
It is outside of consciousness, it is another centre. The nai:ve man projects it into space, he would say it is outside somewhere in the world.
The aim of the exercise is to shift the guiding factor away from the ego to a non-ego centre in the unconscious, and this is also the general aim of analytical procedure.
I did not invent it but found it to be so.
Ten years ago if I had seen that picture I would not have known what it meant.
Up to a certain point the conscious ego should be the centre, the guiding factor, but if we are in the second half of life, there seems to be a necessity for another centre.
The ego is only that field which is in my consciousness, but the psychic system is much vaster, it is the whole unconscious too, and we don’t know how far that reaches.
We can as little assume that the earth is in the centre of the solar system as that our ego is in the centre of the psyche.
If we create a centre outside of ego-consciousness it may be an even more real centre than our ego.
But we get into deep water if we go into this.
The Pueblo Indians make mandalas, sand-paintings,6 in the same fashion as the eastern mandalas.
Perhaps they are remnants of the Eastern origin of the Pueblos.
The next dream [4] of the next night.
The patient says: “I possess a sort of cage on a wagon, a cage which might be for lions or tigers.
The cage consists of different compartments.
In one of them I have four small chickens.
I must watch them carefully because they are always trying to escape, but in spite of my frantic efforts they do escape near the hind wheel.
I catch them in my hand and put them in another compartment of the cage, the one I believe to be the safest. It has a window but it is secured by a fly-screen.
The lower end of the screen is not properly fastened, so I make up my mind to get some stones and put them on the lower edge of the screen to keep the animals from escaping.
Then I put the chickens in a basin with smooth, high sides, assuming that they will find it difficult to get out.
They are down at the bottom of the basin, and I see that one does not move and I think that it is because I have pressed it too hard.
I think that if the chicken is dead it cannot be eaten.
While I watch it, it begins to move, and I smell an aroma of roast chicken.”
His associations are very few. Cage: “Wild animals of a circus are kept in such cages.
We human beings are the keepers of our thoughts, and we ought to be careful that our thoughts do not run away, because if they do it would be very difficult to catch them again.”
He asks himself, are the birds thoughts or feelings, psychological factors which try to liberate themselves and which he tries to hold back even at the risk of pressing them too hard so that they die and are no longer eatable?
But the fact that they are animals seems to point to something instinctive.
Hind wheel: In an automobile this is a very important part because it is the motive part and indispensable to the car.
Dr. Jung: What occurs to you as especially important?
Dr. Binger: The number four. Had you discussed the mandala with him?
Dr. Jung: No, not particularly.
The number four plays a very important part in the philosophy of Pythagoras.
It is the mystic four, the essence of all existing things, the basic number.
Most mandalas are based on four.
What is the next thing? Why do these little animals always try to run away and make it very difficult for him to hold them together?
This would be especially strange if they represent the mandala.
Dr. Schlegel: They obviously represent the dissociation of his personality.
Dr. Jung: Individuality, not personality.
There is something in him that fights against concentration.
He is obviously sick of constraint,
This is the reason for his dissociation, he thinks he has had enough of concentration, and he would hate to hold himself together still more.
His unconscious is showing him in the actual process of holding these animals together, so the unconscious obviously wishes him to hold his individuality together.
His resistance is in the way of a false analogy.
We might conclude that this holding together is like his life, but there is nothing in the dream to show it.
He needs to concentrate on the centre of individuality.
I do not feel quite justified in saying that it is just like the constraint in his ordinary life, that would mean the ego centre.
The centre of individuality is not necessarily in the same place as the ego centre.
We should rather associate personality with persona, but we need another word for the actual individuality.
Individuality is the quality of the whole being which we call man, so the individual centre is the centre of the self, and these four chickens obviously belong to that centre; and the patient’s interference and his greatest care are needed or else the centre is always disintegrating and separating.
I am inclined to separate the problem of his conscious constraint and resistance from the problem of the constraint of the self; that is, the integration of the centre outside of the field of consciousness.
It might be that the patient has a resistance against the very word constraint or self-control because he has had enough of the problem of his conscious restraint.
The thing which is meant in the dream has nothing to do with the problem of his consciousness.
It has to do with the centre outside of consciousness.
It has to do with four chickens to be assembled in a basin, and also the idea of roast chickens.
It is a funny way of representing this centre.
In the I Ching there is a hexagram, No. 50, which is called “The Cauldron.”8 According to Prof.
Wilhelm, a cooking-pot with three legs signifies in yoga the technique for producing the new man.
There is something very good in the pot, it is the meal for the king, the fat of pheasants is in it.
There you have the chicken.
This part of the dream suggests that the non-ego centre does not really exist by itself, it has to be produced by the patient himself and with great care.
Part of the text of “The Cauldron” reads: “Fire over wood. / The image of the Cauldron. / Thus the superior man consolidates his fate I By making his position correct.” … “A ting with legs upturned.”
(Everything is thrown out, then it is ready to be used.)
“There is food in the ting. I My comrades are envious,/ But they cannot harm me.” … “The handle of the ting is altered./ One is impeded in his way of life. / The fat of the pheasant is not eaten. / Once rain falls, remorse is spent.” … “The legs of the ting are broken./ The prince’s meal is spilled.”.; . “The ting has yellow handles, golden carrying rings.” … “The ting has rings of jade.”
(This means great good luck.) “Nothing would not act to further.”
This idea of the pot comes from a sort of sacrificial vessel used in the Taoist ancestor-cult.
It is a symbol of the spiritual womb in which the new being is formed.
It is the same as the krater of the early Christians, or the retort of the alchemists, in which the new being is made.
Fragments of things are thrown together which do not ordinarily mix, but they unite in the fire and produce the gold, the new man.
So the pot gets ears of gold and even of jade, the most valuable, the lapis lapidum, stone of stones.
Here we have the same idea as in mediaeval alchemy, the lapis lapidum is the philosophers’ stone.
The idea that pheasants are cooked in the pot as a meal for the prince is used because that whole cooking procedure refers to the fifth line of the hexagram, the place of the Ruler.
The fifth line is the gold, the prince to be made, the new man.
But first one has to get the pheasant, it has to be shot.
There is much hunting symbolism in the I Ching.
It all means that the bundle of instincts of man, his chaotic ensemble of instincts, is not integrated at all.
Instincts are most contradictory, and man is torn by them.
They are like animals in a zoo, they do not love each other at all, they bite each other and try to run away.
So if you want to do anything for that bundle of instincts which you are, you must hunt down your instincts, get them together and transform them.
It suggests that you must collect rare things from all over the world, cook them together in the pot, and something may appear, perhaps the gold.
That is the idea in the dream.
There are four animals which try to escape, and they must be hunted and put into the pot.
It seems to the patient that one of them is all ready to eat.
The meal is ready for the perfect man.
Instincts are the food to be held and transformed over the fire.
This is the preparation of the prince’s food.
After such a process one is no longer torn by the pairs of opposites, but is at one with himself-the old desideratum.
Nothing is said of all this in the former dream.
The design suggests that the dreamer shall go about everywhere, according to the pattern, into all four corners of the world, not only once but twice.
He must make the great voyage of error in the world of illusion in order to experience everything.
Everything that happens to him is himself.
This voyage is the hunting, and when that is accomplished, the cooking process takes place and the making of the being who is one.
Important parts of ourselves are waiting for us in the world and we must meet a particular fate in order to experience that quality.
If we experience it, it is caged, we taste that chicken.
Fate is to be lived in this sense in order that we may experience other aspects of ourselves and then be integrated.
The patient had almost no associations with “chicken” except for eating.
Chickens are animals for which we can have no great respect.
They are usually panicky, blind, dumb creatures which run into the road just as an automobile comes along.
They are an excellent simile for fragmentary tendencies repressed or never come across by us, living autonomous lives quite apart from our knowledge.
These bits of fragmentary soul, like the chickens, are working up terrible nonsense, all the foolish things wise people do, or like the spendthrift who saves his matches.
You know any number of examples of people who have something absolutely inconsistent with their characters.
All the things which escape our control and observation are “chickens.”
Mr. Roper: Why does he feel that the chicken he pressed is the one roasted?
Dr. Jung: He had no associations with that. Sometimes people have no associations because of resistances but sometimes because they are quite baffled.
Had the patient’s attitude towards dreams been different he would have had associations.
Sometimes I have no associations because a thing seems such nonsense that it makes me angry, so my emotions prevent associations.
So this man is angry with the silly chicken dream after the beautiful previous dream and has no associations.
Why is he pressing the chicken so violently that it seems dead?
This chicken is obviously one of his functions which tried to escape, so we may assume that it is his inferior function, the one most out of control.
He is an intellectual type and his inferior function is feeling.
He has squeezed his feeling too much; he has been squeezing it to please his wife, but the apparent gain is not worth it.
We are pretty safe in assuming that he caught his feeling, squeezed it, nearly killed it, and then he looked at it.Now comes in a piece of old magic.
Through looking at a thing, concentrating or meditating on it, you make it grow or hatch it out.
He is in the act of brooding over himself.
When the gods want to bring something about they brood over it, make tapas, contemplate it. So in this case when the patient begins to look at the chicken which he thinks is dead, it comes to life again.
Feeling will come to life however hard it has been squeezed if you meditate over it.
Dr. Schlegel: We understood that it was a question of principle, that it was a good thing to get the chickens together and roast them?
Dr. Jung: I must repeat that the unconscious has no moral intention; it is just Nature, it says what is happening, as an objective event.
The dream never says what ought to be or what ought notto be. We have to draw our own conclusions.
We cannot say the unconscious wants us to do things or not; we say, “Some things are happening like that-we had better look out” or “It is nice they are happening like that.”
The dream is merely a statement of things which are actually going on.
We may assume that it is good or bad that this chicken escapes or that one is roasted.
Everything is possible.
We speak of the “chickens” as fragmentary souls or tendencies without brains which are outside in the world, in other people.
All the fragmentary things in us, inasmuch as they are unconscious, are to be met with in other people outside.
This man has not completed the sum of his errors.
He is forty-seven, but there is still much time for errors.
One never knows, perhaps this chicken is a fragmentary soul which should escape; I cannot say.
Some may escape, some may not escape; because they are not strong enough.
There- are certain people who are just too weak to be bad, they have no particular gift for it; for it is a gift to be bad.
Some people have it and their goal is the jail, just as the Royal Academy is the goal for others.
Some time ago I heard of a man, a pillar of the church, a most respectable citizen.
He grew more and more dissatisfied with his life, until once he woke up in the middle of the night and said, “Now I know what kind of a man I am.
I belong to the devil,” and after that he was converted to Evil.
So the chicken may be just a fragmentary soul which might run away and escape.
I could only say, “Well, it has succeeded in escaping, what can you do about it?”
I once met a chance acquaintance, who had a dream in which he was in the police department and had been given control of a house in a sort of convict settlement.
There were no really bad criminals in this house, just tramps, and swindlers, etc.
He thought he had locked the door, but while he was away all the “birds” got out.
He told me the dream and thought it was very funny that they all got out.
I thought, “That is queer, something is wrong with that man,” and my idea was right.
About a year later he went to the bad.
He had a bankruptcy and collapsed completely.
That was no chicken.
That was serious, his unconscious had said to him, “Now look out-your unconscious is full of vagabonds and they will get out.”
This man had a peculiar interest in tramps and queer people.
He would talk to them and enjoyed being with them.
It was odd to me, for his life did not seem to fit in with it, but his unconscious was full of vagabondage and irresponsibility.
This is like the clergyman who took a similar interest in prostitutes.
He even travelled to Paris and went into all sorts of brothels to rescue them.
There seemed something odd about that, and the upshot of it was that the man got syphilis and was very ill.
So with these chickens, it is a question whether they ought to run away or should be rescued.
Here comes the whole art of the doctor.
Suppose I have some swans or even eagles in a cage.
I could say, “Of course they must be allowed to get loose, eagles should fly,” but it is absurd to talk in the same terms of chickens.
It is good for an eagle to be free, but it is ridiculous for the chickens to escape and run all over the place.
This is a wonderful opportunity for an analyst who is not sure of himself.
If the analyst felt that the patient was a man full of worries, it might be better that the chickens should get away.
One could say he makes himself ridiculous in the dream trying to keep them in.
Better he should kill an ordinary little hen and eat it, it is only a chicken.
But I am not yet sure of this man.
He has a very complex nature and I am not sure that he is not a chicken. He has no neurosis, but great intellectual interest.
If he had lions or tigers behind the bars they would roar.
We have heard no roars and I have known him for two years.
The man is a very quiet soul and I don’t know where he got the fleas that irritate him.
It may be that these chickens are like fleas and they should “come off.”
His feeling in the dream was that they should not escape, so that makes me doubtful.
I am rather inclined to assume that there is no voice in that man for liberation.
Sometimes with some of you I don’t know whether it is a lion or a chicken.
These are the qualms of an analyst. This man is absolutely respectable.
When he dies the parson will say that he lived a blameless life and was a model husband, yet he has picked some fleas on the way, the high-class cocotte (100 Frs. so that he does not get an infection).
Slowly he becomes aware that this does not work.
He has some feeling for such a girl.
Perhaps he has a vision of how she may look when she is old, when she is fifty, like those terrible old cocottes one sees in Paris.
Such things may begin to come up in him and cause very disagreeable feelings.
He has been blind like a boy, and the running away of the chickens may mean the blind escapades of his life.
Dr. Binger: Do you see anything of a compensatory nature in this?
Dr. Jung: It depends on how he takes it. If that man, for instance were an innocent boy living in paradise with his sweet little girl wife it might be necessary that his chickens should run away so that he could realize what the world really is.
But this man is not naive, he is a hard-boiled business man, yet he is something of an idealist.
He has a human streak, so he continues with his analysis.
Mrs. Sigg: Who is the “I” in his dream? Isn’t he the domesticated man?
Dr. Jung: The chicken-catcher is not the conventional man.
It is the conventional man who chases prostitutes.
His conventional outside has gone with prostitutes, this is convention.
The chickens are fragmentary unconscious souls which organize escapades.
This man has a philosophy and is well read; he does not provide for escapades but-given a bottle of wine, etc., there is no longer a philosophy.
This is a convention and many people do not mind does not provide for escapades.
This is convention and many people do not mind as it is not found out.
Many women even say they do not mind if their husbands go with cocottes, or if they are homosexual and entice boys and do all sorts of ugly things.
They only mind if the husband falls in love with a decent woman.
This man thought that prostitutes were all right; except occasionally a mist arose, a question.
Once a very conventional man said to me “Don’t you think I can divorce my wife?
We have been married twenty-two years and I like her well enough, but I have seen a younger woman and I would like . to marry her.
I was legally married to my wife and I see no reason why I cannot be legally divorced.”
That man was quite logical but he had no feeling at all.
My idea in summing up this dream is that it gives the ingredients for the making of the new man.
Therefore we have the parallel to the I Ching.
Whether he lets the chickens run or whether he kills them and roasts them is practically the same thing.
If the chickens run away he will have a series of chicken adventures out in the open and he will return from the play and have to integrate them.
Or if it is not worth while to have such adventures then he must integrate these tendencies.
For example, suppose I am walking along the Bahnhofstrasse and I see a particularly beautiful cane and I think, that is just what I want, and then I think, why do I wish for that?
It is not like me, I have too great an accumulation of objects already and I would just throw it away.
I think it is foolish, but I buy it and pay a hundred frs. for it and then I throw it away.
Then I think, well, I bought it and threw it away, there is an experience.
I can book that in my favour, or I can say what a fool I am to do that, how inconsistent of me to wish for that cane; but I can book that realization also in my favour.
So with this man, if he has some experiences with prostitutes it may make things more clear to him; or he may say, “It is all just an illusion,” so he cages the chickens and roasts them; it has the same result.
The main thing is that he should see himself and learn to hold himself together for he is quite scattered. I am not sure, he may be quite charming in his family and with his relatives and friends, but possibly in his business he may be capable of playing a dirty trick.
I don’t know, but I have an impression that he may be a bit of a scattered character.
He must learn to see himself, no matter by what technique and hold himself together.
Some people become acquainted with themselves by spreading out all over the world, others by locking themselves in.
It all depends on temperament.
There are many reasons for this, extraversion, introversion, tradition in the family, etc. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 103-113
