It can also lead to the fact that such children do not really get into their bodies
[Carl Jung: “It can also lead to the fact that such children do not really get into their bodies, that many body zones are not connected at all.”]
If we may assume, then, that human dispositions are there in prototypical form, we are free—indeed it behooves us—to prove that these are ideas and images that can be found throughout the whole history of mankind.
The wedding couple in our dream, the carriage and its ritual use, the devil—these are ideas, images, which have had their clear impact on the history of peoples, and which are present again in potentia in every child.
They are particularly vivid in children, because children are still nearer the collective unconscious.
The mental state of the first years of life does not differ from the collective unconscious; it is a world rich of images.
There is nobody to look at them, because no consciousness exists.
It is a world ocean full of the strangest figures.
The child emerges from this sea.
Later in life, people sometimes still have a faint memory of this golden background.
The more memories of what had been exist, the more difficult the adjustment will seem. This can even have the effect that no real interest in questions of the present can be summoned.
It can also lead to the fact that such children do not really get into their bodies, that many body zones are not connected at all.
They know the body only from looking at it, they themselves are not in it, so as to feel through it.
The breathing teacher then says: the breathing does not go through at all. They are incapable of completely inhabiting the body.
This can be seen in the clumsy and stiff posture of such persons.
They walk around as if they pulled themselves on strings.
These are effects of the past that still projects out [into the present].
It is still too strong.
“That life which was before, and which is different from the life we are leading now”—this is a theme you will encounter more than once in the history of peoples.
The best example is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thödol.
The Bardo lifespan is forty-nine days.
The souls live, so to speak, in a collective world, and are confronted with spirits and other images of life, “images of all creatures,” as Goethe says in Faust. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Pages 182-183.