Carl Jung Dream Analysis Seminars
Seminar on Dream Analysis. C.G. Jung
LECTURE II 16 October 1929
We will continue our dream of last week. Are there any questions?
If too many people are afraid to ask questions, it produces a static atmosphere.
If you all join in, your co-operation creates a community of feeling, and this esprit de corps is exceedingly important.
An inhibited atmosphere is unfavourable.
We were talking last time, you remember, of that straight road on which the movement was easy.
When the unconscious produces such a favourable symbol as this beautiful road, the dreamer is agreeably impressed by it, his libido is attracted, the unconscious makes it easy for him.
But one must be distrustful in such a case; if one traces that symbol to its conscious counterpart, one may find that it is nothing agreeable.
It may be something that he is afraid of, something that he dislikes.
He is a conventional man, he is afraid of unconventionality, and that superb road may mean just the thing that he would not like in reality.
When such a symbol turns up, when something is made so agreeable, painted in such beautiful colours, it means that the unconscious is trying to make it acceptable.
But, beware-here we have to be careful.
One cannot trust the unconscious absolutely, one can only say this is what the unconscious would naturally choose.
It does not mean, when it states a condition, that it is necessarily good or advisable, it merely shows things as they are-important information as to the inclinations of one’s nature.
For example, I will tell you the dream of a man with doubtful qualities as to his business conduct.
His dealings were not permissible, they were even decidedly fraudulent.
From the following dream I drew my conclusions as to his real nature.
He was walking in the street, an ordinary street in his home town, when he noticed on the opposite sidewalk a very dignified and refined old lady beckoning to him.
He did not know her, but he crossed the road, and in a friendly and intimate way she invited him to walk with her and ied him to the gate of what was apparently a large garden.
The lady stopped there and, to his utter amazement, he saw that it was a tropical garden, full of trees and beauty.
She invited him to go in, but for some reason he was seized with fear and tried to withdraw; he had a peculiar feeling about it.
But finally he could not resist, she lured him in.
It was a nightmare, although it was not obvious why.
He associated the old lady with his own grandmother, whom he loved dearly, so why a nightmare?
Of course the garden is a dream garden (he lives in the north), a garden of
Paradise, the garden of desire, illusory, referring him to a fantastic world to which his unconscious is inviting him.
But why a grand-mother, not even the mother?
This dream is modelled on the old primitive idea that when the father dies and goes to ghostland, he is just an ordinary ghost; but when his son has a son and he becomes the grandfather, he is no longer an ordinary ghost but a sort of duke in ghostland, he is the grand-father ghost, and the son sacrifices a bull to him.
So grand-mother refers to the “great” unconscious, while the mother refers to the “little” unconscious.
It is as an ocean to a little bay, or a vast continent to a peninsula.
The man was being lured on to the collective unconscious, the land of dreams.
Shortly after this dream, he committed a terrible mistake that led him into prison.
So if one had told him that the dream was positive because of its good appearance, good-appearance, one would have helped him to disaster.
Such a dream can be terribly misleading.
One should say, rather: since this is an impossible place, a tropical garden in a non-tropical place, it should not be in reality; you should not live in a dream world that cannot be fulfilled; it is a psychic world, a happy island, but it is the inner world.
Then only would one give him the proper meaning.
So in this case the road is easy and agreeable, but we must look at the first part of the dream to decide whether the meaning is good or bad.
Perhaps it is doubtful. Also, let us see what happens on that road.
They stop, and when they want to start again the motor does not work, so they call a mechanic, who finds that the magneto has exploded.
One concludes that it would have been better not to have stopped.
It is a very awkward thing when the magneto does not work-to come to a standstill after travelling on that road.
So it seems to say, why don’t you keep right on, go ahead, because if you stop, you will not be able to go on again.
Now you remember he says in his associations that the magneto is the heart of the motor.
What is that?
Answer: The heart is the feeling, the feeling explodes.
Dr. Jung: But are we right in translating heart by feeling?
You see, it is more or less figurative, the heart is the central and essential thing.
He doesn’t mention the feeling.
One speaks of the heart of a thing, even the heart of a town, the central place, but that is not emotional.
Mrs. Fierz: It might be the ego.
Dr. Jung: Picture the situation.
You see, he is really driving on the right road. For a moment he doesn’t continue on the right way, the individual way, and at that moment the heart explodes.
It is a metaphor.
The heart may break, we say in German that it splinters, which naturally means an emotional fact.
But if you take heart as the central thing, it is not the ego.
Dr. Deady: The heart also means courage.
He associates the magneto with a rhythmic principle, integrating all the parts of the motor.
Mrs. Fierz: It is his individuality.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. In psychological terms, it is his individuality, his individual monad, from which all the regulating functions of life take their origin.
The individual monad is always contained in the inferior functions, therefore “heart” also means feeling.
And here the individuality explodes, giving dissociation.
You see, the constituents of personality can dissociate from each other; such and such a person in me can separate from me.
Someone with an artistic personality, for instance, who does not fit in with everyday life, has to adapt as best he can, the artistic temperament is just a nuisance; a constituent that is itself a person splits off, and that goes off by itself and forms a second personality which is more or less independent of the central government.
So the magneto, the central government principle, can be split into any number of factors, which correspond more or less to the Mendelian units.
One’s various physical characteristics are inherited from many different ancestors, perhaps from ancestors who lived two or three hundred years ago; certain traits may disappear and then reappear in families; the famous Hapsburg lip is such a unit.
And it is the same with the mental constitution. In the Spanish Hapsburgs, there were many cases of insanity, which disappeared entirely and then turned up again two hundred years later.
So an individual is a peculiar combination of mental units, ancestral traits, more or less loosely fitted together.
As a rule, one begins life thus scattered, and gradually through life one gathers these parts together.
People come to me with the greatest illusions concerning themselves, and only slowly do they become aware of their many sides, which are just as important but which are projected.
It is as though these constituents of their personality had exploded and were only recognizable through projections: what they see in that person is a part of themselves.
It is quite intangible, but during the course of analysis these different parts are reassembled, the object of analysis being to gather them together into one functioning centre.
Here we could say that the heart, the central point, is dissociated immediately when he stops going on the individual way.
As long as you go on the individual way, you function as an individual, but if you stop, you dissociate again, for you function only as part of yourself-you instantly drop back into the collective way.
This is a regression.
This explains why the magneto explodes when the motor is at a standstill; it seems perfectly irrational but psychologically it is true. The pairs of opposites fall asunder.
As soon as people come to a standstill, that which has carried them falls apart.
Through the stope it becomes visible; that the thing is put together from incompatible parts.
Often the standstill comes to pass because the parts can hold together no longer, but also, as in this dream, the thing may split because it no longer functions.
That is the case in schizophrenia, which comes about like this: A person has learned a certain way of functioning, and then he comes up against something that he is not up to, though it may be quite easy for another person.
For instance, he may have to do military service, or perhaps buy a house.
No one would ordinarily go crazy over that, but he does, for the situation demands something that is beyond his level of functioning.
He goes to pieces, he instantly dissociates into constituents that become definite people and begin to talk, he then hears voices and has hallucinations.
This condition in the dream must be helped, so an expert is called in, a mechanic, a small, corpulent man who speaks in the South German dialect.
The dreamer assures me that the expert would be .myself, who must put the magneto together, but the qualities do not apply to me, and he was puzzled that the unconscious should give me such a form.
Here again is a case of importance for dream interpretation.
Freud would not hesitate to say that this is of course the doctor, disguised by the censor.
But he is not disguised.
Why should the unconscious take the trouble to invent a disguise that doesn’t work?
Freud would understand that it was an attempt, an indirect way, with the purpose of making me obscure.
But why should the unconscious want to conceal the fact?
We have absolutely no evidence that the dream tries to disguise the doctor.
Rather, the unconscious is emphatic in creating a mechanic who has nothing to do with the doctor.
He is just ·a fellow from South Germany, a man one would find in a garage, who would say, “The Germans know much more than the Swiss!”
The obvious conclusion is that the unconscious is trying to convey the idea that the man who puts the magneto together has nothing whatever to do with Dr. Jung, right in the face of the patient’s conscious conviction that I am the one who can put him together.
Dr. Deady: He ought to do the job himself.
Dr. Jung: Of course.
That man in the dream refers to nobody in the outside world, that is a factor within himself.
One of his faculties, his mind for instance, might help him to put his machine together, but this he does not want to see.
He always hides behind the fact of his ignorance, he says he is a business man, not a learned man like Dr. Jung.
He has shielded himself behind me for a long time.
Naturally many things would happen which wouldn’t happen to a man like Dr. Jung: he favours that kind of psychology, to let things happen for which he need take no responsibility.
He can allow himself so many little indulgences in that penumbra of ignorance.
If he admitted that he had the knowledge, he would have to admit the responsibility-make his own efforts to pull himself out of an awkward situation.
This part of the dream strengthens his self-confidence, the intimation that he has within himself the man to fix himself.
Dr. Harding: There is one part left out, the third man.
Dr. Jung: Yes, a third whom he doesn’t remember, so we must conclude that that constituent also is a dark figure.
Dr. Deady: It would be his shadow, the other side of the dreamer.
Dr. Jung: We cannot be too sure of that.
Dr. Harding: There is the man himself, the ego, on the way; the bon viveur (perhaps a shadow figure); No. 3; and the mechanic makes the fourth, the completed individual.
Dr. Jung: How would you translate that?
Dr. Deady: The four functions.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the four functions, let us assume.
That would give us a clue. Some of you will remember having dreams where the 3 and 4 play a role.
It is almost an archetypal situation.
There is an example in the second part of Faust, a very peculiar passage where the Kabiri appear, bringing from the depths of the sea a strange symbol, “a severe shape.”
Goethe does not say what it is.
The passage is: “There are three, where has the fourth remained?”
The Kabiri are identical with the Hindu concept of the unconscious creative forces, the samsaras. And they would be the third and the fourth.
In conscious psychology, we know that we can speak of the four functions, ways in which we adapt to a given situation, and we know by experience that people as a rule possess one function that is
really differentiated, and that they have some disposition towards an auxiliary function.
For instance, take a thinking-sensation type.
Such a man knows what he hears and sees. (Not everybody knows that!)
Then besides these functions, there is also some consciousness of a third which might serve the superior function; in this case it would be intuition.
But what doesn’t appear among the conscious functions, or only occasionally as phenomena that one can’t control, is in this case feeling. It is the last, the unreliable thing, the sore spot, where such a man is inferior, where he receives his shocks and wounds.
For thinking and feeling exclude each other because of their contrary nature.
When thinking, it is better not to feel, and vice versa, in order that the two shall not upset each other.
Here we have those three, and the fourth that is missing.
It is quite possible that the four functions should be represented by four people, like the four sons of Horus, only one having a human head, the other three wholly animal, which would indicate that in
the days of the old Egyptians only one function was conscious and three were missing.
According to our philosophy intellect is the human-headed one. In our philosophical writings, only thinking has been allowed. Bergson3 accepts intuition, however, and there is also a philosophy built up on observed facts, that allows sensation.
In the progress of civilization, the periphery of consciousness has widened out and gradually included more functions.
Goethe, being a modern man, was already aware of three, and asked where is the fourth?
In Christianity, there is the Trinity, the three in heaven, and the other missing one is the devil in hell. It is terribly upsetting when he comes up.
All these psychological facts express themselves in dogma.
The Church says: there are three, and where is the fourth? But please keep away from him!
Therefore it is a problem in dreams to know what to do with No. 4.
But here No. 4 is very helpful.
When one comes to a standstill with the three, and it is important to know what is going to happen, then intuition is very necessary.
Thinking tells you what things mean, feeling tells you what they are worth, sensation tells you what they really are, and intuition tells you the possibilities of a situation. So one can travel ahead with certainty.
Here his inferior man, on whom he naturally would look down, comes in as exceedingly helpful. Of course, we can’t just say that this mechanic is the devil, and I don’t know how the dreamer might feel if I should say that in order to accept this little fellow he must give up certain prejudices.
He might feel it to be quite immoral.
It would wound his pride to descend to such a level, so he is prevented from assimilating his inferior function.
He is navigating in heaven with the three, and No. 4 is in the hot belly of the earth.
Now we have the necessary material to interpret this dream as a whole and to place it in the sequence of dreams.
His story, as those of you who have been in the previous seminar know, is the process of individuation.
This is, of course, always the object of analysis.
The goal is the same but the way is exceedingly different.
This is one of the dreams on his way that shows him his lack or mistake.
The dream before this showed him that he was not up to his goal.
He saw his goal and wanted to get at it but didn’t succeed; he used ways and means that are too cheap.
So he has to return.
He has been in Africa, in the hot sun of the South; now he goes north.
As I said, these directions have to do with the mandala.
The four cardinal points of the horizon are often associated with the four functions, or they may be indicated by special colours.
Sensation is often identified with the South, and intuition with the North.
Or the functions may be personified by people as in a drama.
In the case of our dreamer, we have indications that South is to him associated with something spiritual-at any rate, it is full of spiritual symbols for him-and the North with sensuality, the bon viveur, the cheap cocottes.
This is not usual, rather the reverse, but the man is not a born European, he was born in Africa, which may perhaps account for it.
This dream starts in the North, then, with the figure of the bon viveur indicating sensuality.
The dreamer had made the mistake of going too far south.
He is travelling with two others-they are three in all-personifications of constituents of the individuality that can be represented as people, or the four cardinal points, or four demons, or four gods, etc.
The functions are often taken as characterological figures rather than as functions of consciousness, for these are more or less identical with characterological factors.
If you are a thinking type, everything that is decent in you is linked up with that; in your thinking you are a decent fellow.
In your feeling you show another character.
Inasmuch as the actual problem of the dreamer would be a moral one, this character is emphasized, and the four are shown as persons.
So here, the objectionable fellow, the bon viveur, is himself, for he does not distinguish him from himself except by a feeble protest that he is not so bad.
Inasmuch-as-the bon viveur would be a contrast to his superior man, he would be the feeling man, but we are not sure whether in his feeling he is like that.
The third figure is unknown but must necessarily be either intuition or sensation. He might be sensation, but I wouldn’t go too far in such an interpretation.
Looked at theoretically, the dreamer is a thinking type with sensation as his secondary function, a man of reality.
He has intuition to a certain extent.
Obviously his blind spot is feeling; there he is paralysed, awkward, with no self-confidence, he envies anyone who has any certainty in feeling, so we obviously infer that that is his inferior function, No. 4, in this case the mechanic.
This is a guess, a working hypothesis.
No one would expect feeling under the guise of a mechanic, but he might engineer the ultimate reunion of all the constituents for it is always the inferior function that dots the i, that brings completion-as no man is complete without his shadow.
Until one knows about his inferior function, one knows nothing about a man.
So it is quite possible that No. 4, represented as a mechanic who puts the whole thing together, might be the feeling that would give him the right values.
The dreamer is always getting into difficulties because of his lack of understanding of right values.
His feelings fool him.
He is always thinking that people are very nice and then finding that they are terrible bores.
As for living the grand life in Poland, in his mind he knows it is all bunk, but his feelings give him the wrong values about it.
If they were reliable, if only they would not play such jokes on him, that man would be all right.
It would be the thing that would make him complete, safe, adapted, and there he falls down.
But often our greatest weakness is just our last chance for redemption.
If No. 4 puts the heart in order, his most central essence, then he can move on.
Let us see how he moves on.
Make a guess at the next dream; one should get used to that continual flow so that one could almost guess the next.
Mr. Henderson: He goes south.
Dr. Harding: He might go back to the chickens and put them in the cauldron.
Dream [20]
He finds himself in a hut in Africa, somewhere in the upper part of Egypt. In a corner he comes upon a crocodile and tries to chase it out, astonished to find such a beast, and somehow it disappears.
Then his youngest son brings him a kettle containing all sorts of peculiar old things. He takes up a whole bundle of small scythes made, not of steel, but of sheet iron-simulacra, not the real thing.
Below that in the kettle he finds handles of old swords, made of metal and other material, some made even of glass, but the blades were all broken off. Below that was a statue of Christ, made of
sheet iron, with a sword as long as the figure, and he notices that one can easily remove it from the statue. He wants to carry the kettle away with all its contents, but a native suddenly appears and
declares that one would use all those scythes, banked up on the wall of the hut between small lamps in a sort of ceremonial. Then it dawns upon him that the hut is by no means ordinary but a kind
of mosque, and the scythes are crescent moons, and he also realizes that the handles of the swords are Coptic cross symbols.
So Mr. Henderson’s guess that he would go south is right.
So is Dr. Harding’s suggestion concerning the thicken dream, which was closely linked up with the alchemical cauldron, because the chickens were boiled in it to bring the constituents together.
It didn’t succeed, because the chickens escaped by the hind wheel.
In this case we again have the cauldron, and I think your guess has to do with the same idea here, because all these peculiar obsolete remnants thrown together in a kettle suggest raw materials to be cooked, melted together.
Associations: The upper part of Egypt (which, of course, means the more southern part) is to him a symbol of his own upper region, his most spiritual part, his superior man.
About the crocodile, he says that it is a remnant of prehistoric times. The dream itself emphasizes that it is an ancient prehistoric creature, a saurian. It must have to do with deep animal instincts,
and it should not be in the hut in the upper regions, it should be chased out.
About his youngest son, he says that he has often dreamed of him and has taken him for a symbol of rejuvenation, his hope for the future. It was he who found the kettle.
Concerning the contents of the kettle, he says that scythes symbolize crops, production; and swords symbolize destruction.
The crescent moon would be productive while the cross, the sword, would be destructive. Within the last years, he has often thought of the extraordinary intolerance of the Christian Church, suppressing even destroying everyone who didn’t share the same opinion.
But he never consciously credited Islam with a great productivity.
On the contrary, owing to its dogma of Kismet, the domination of fatality, he thought that Islam belonged to the old iron, something to be thrown away.
He had a feeling in the dream that he was attributing an archeological value to those contents.
The lamps in the hut he associates with those you see in Islamic countries, in the mosques at the feast of Ramadan and other nocturnal ceremonies.
He is astonished that this house is a mosque, a house of God, with different religious symbols that seem to be of more archeological value than materials for a cult.
They are as if out of use, thrown together in a pot, regardless of their origin; the cross and crescent would not be found together naturally, they exclude each other, but here they do not hurt each other through their incongruity. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 309-318