Toni Wolff: …one would often not live in the body in analysis…
Miss Wolff: Would it be going too far to say that one would often not live in the body in analysis, that one has to be back in one’s own reality in order to experience it absolutely?
Analysis is never in itself a real situation; it is an anticipation as an initiation is an anticipation.
One has to be in one’s own place, as she is when she is back in America.
Dr. Jung:
That is always more or less the case, but even in analysis one can be more in the body than she was.
Certain people are quite outside; at the slightest provocation they jump out of their skins, and it is impossible to prevent them; sometimes they go on in a very dangerous way, they are flooded by the unconscious, they get drowned in it.
One such patient was sent to me by a colleague who besought me to take the case, but it was too late.
That was a man who had been tapped by analysis and out flowed the whole river of the unconscious, there was no stopping it.
I tried to build dams but the water was always rising over everything and the fellow went crazy.
One cannot make the doctor responsible for it, it is just a misfortune, as for instance, in so many thousand chloroform cases, one case reacts with instantaneous death and it cannot be prevented; that may happen to the most skillful operator.
I hope I have made myself clear about this admittedly difficult piece of psychology, the paradoxical role of the Self.
The Self is here leading the patient back to the tangible reality.
You know in the psychology of the unconscious the body is always something like earth, it is heavy, dense, a thing which cannot be removed, a real obstacle.
It is the here and now, for to be really in the here and now, one must be in the body.
But we have a peculiar faculty of stepping out of the body, which is again like the primitive. Instead of saying: “I dreamt of my neighbor’s Kraal,” he would say:
“In the night when I was sleeping I left my couch and went across to my neighbor’s Kraal.”
He describes it as if it were his own activity, while we know it is not. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1315-1316
