Then I walk into the welcoming house where Izdubar should find healing.
I come to a quiet dark garden and a secluded house.
I hide Izdubar under the drooping branches of a tree, go up to the door of the house, and knock.
An old maid opens.
I ponder the door, it is much too small.
Izdubar will never go through it.
Yet a fantasy takes up no space!
Why did this excellent thought not occur to me earlier?
I hurry back and with no difficulty squeeze Izdubar into the size of an egg and put him in my pocket.
Then I walk into the welcoming house where Izdubar should find healing. ~Carl Jung, Vol. III, Page 129
For Jung’s commentary on this entry, see LN, pp. 295-98.
He said the following to Aniela Jaffe concerning these sections:
“You will also recognize that which is driven by fear in my imaginations, namely in my attempts to depict how one can elude such a dreadful entanglement.
You can see this most clearly in the chapter on the devil.
Or, for example, in the chapter featuring Gilgamesh-Izdubar.
It is really quite stupid; why do I need to rack my brains how the dead giant might be helped.
But I a fantasy.
But I would still know that I had failed.
have gone to great lengths to find a solution, quite unperturbed about how ridiculous this was.
I had to find a formula through which this fantasy could assume its full significance, and yet set me free at the same time.
In a sense I paid for the ridiculous solution I found with the insight that I had captured a God, so to speak.
These imaginations are a virtually hellish mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime.
It cost me so very much that I was trapped like a mouse by such ridiculous unrealities, and that I could then free myself with utmost courage and my victim’s goodwill.
It is like fooling a person who is drowning in a bathtub that it is actually the ocean” (MP, pp. 147- 48) . ~The Black Books, Vol. III, Page 130-131, fn 120