Then [Katy Cabot] told Onkel a dream I had:
Toni was giving a sort of class lecture in Charleston, West Virginia.
She stood behind a curtain which was only half pulled back, so that only half of the audience could see her, and with a rod she pointed to a big tree, in the trunk of which was a hole, and first [words missing] came out and crawled all over the tree.
Then a baby came out as in the picture by Luini, in the Brera in Milano, called the ‘Birth of Adonis.’
I stood where I could see Toni, but others sat behind the closed part of the curtain.
I wondered why they sat there seeing nothing, and being bored to death.
Toni was dressed in a pale, pink frilly dress. She was many years younger than she is today.
In fact she looked quite a young girl. She seemed also shy and awkward as she gave the lecture.
Those images of Toni are things that are going on – a perception of the happenings in the unconscious.
That tree trunk is a human being – all that is symbolism; it depicts something which happens in me – to bring one so far, so that I perceive what is going on.
She is young in me, shy and awkward.
Toni has no knowledge of the things within – in me, the same figure would be quite a young girl who is shy and awkward, because I haven’t acquired any certainty about these matters going on in me.
I then told him I was so self-conscious and striving for effect, and did not dare speak out in the seminar like Mrs. Baynes, who made an idiotic remark and did not seem to mind it.
He said that the person in Mrs. Baynes quietly risks it; it is a thought as any other thought and she talks of it even if it is idiotic.
That corresponding person in me would be shy, and whisper to me that whatever I say must be stupid.
Mrs. Baynes does not mind as that being in her is adult.
Mrs. Baynes thinks without feeling and is apt to make mistakes.
She has an animus that disregards feeling altogether, so she gets out of tune and sings the wrong note.
It is intellectual talk, absolutely without feeling.
She has no sense of consideration, and feelings do not disturb her.
Considerations do not exist in her, so she brings out an intellectual statement which is beside the point.
Intellectual people bring out such things and feeling types never open their mouths for they are too concerned with themselves.
They waste so much time thinking of themselves and how they appear, and what impression they are making.
Mrs. Baynes is just the opposite: she never thinks of how she appears, and she is then apt to make certain stupid remarks.
If we could be one person, her mind and my feeling, then we could say the appropriate thing and be a perfect being!
Then we went back to the Toni Wolff dream.
I am (in the dream) Toni Wolff as a young girl, the one who has knowledge, who is at the beginning of her intellectual interests and studies.
Toni Wolff is the expressive symbol of the state of my unconscious development; looked at from a certain angle it is indeed Miss Wolff at seventeen or eighteen.
Onkel went on to say that he and Toni would not become intimate friends of their pupils because if people are with them continually they do not feel the need to develop; for when you are with someone who understands things better than you, you don’t lift a finger.
Onkel said he traveled with a friend once, who got lazy and had a dream, and was utterly helpless in trying to solve it.
He had not seen that his presence was hindering the man. “My friendship for a patient is not good as it deprives him of his own development.”
He then said that Barbara got stuck [in her development] with Toni.
Never try to make a friendship, unless there is one. Take things as they are.
Toni was not aware that I was building a little Miss Wolff in me, which is idled and suffocated when I have the real Miss Wolff.
He said that people like himself, or Toni, suffocate developments. I asked how they both developed so far.
He said they were forced, by their patients, and by circumstances, to get on.
“The water of the great flood forced me up to a Jungfrau or an Everest.
I had to get up there. I had to be up to my task and the understanding of difficult cases.
My patients forced me by their neuroses, otherwise I would never have lifted a finger.
Some doctors hang behind and are below their patients.
A doctor who doesn’t allow himself to be forced along will be a damn fool after a while.”
He said that, as a young man, when he knew very little about the work, he asked Freud how many people stayed in order to go through a real analysis.
Freud answered that half of them break away.
“At that time I was working in the Klinik [Burgholzli] and wondered why, for it is very rare when they break away from me here.”
I then suggested Anne M., who came here a lot and then finally left in a huff and rage against him and Toni.
Onkel said that she was a half crazy person, who did not listen, and who really was convinced that she was Siegfried and that he was a woman Brunhilde.
I was astounded, and asked if she was really crazy, and Onkel said she was absolutely!
She is careful not to say these things to other people, but only to him.
That sort of case does not need to go to an insane asylum.
When she was shown that these ideas were morbid, she learnt that much was scared [sacred?] and doesn’t mention these ideas.
Her love for him turned to hatred as it leads her into her insanity.
Then I asked him about a certain woman in the Seminar, who, when I waved a fly off her nose, said, “Don’t do that. I love animals!”
He said the woman was a Frau Doktor who was born in the East, and had Buddhist ideas, and a fraction of Hindu blood.
Her grandmother was half-caste.
He went back to Anne M. again, and said that he tried to save her from the meanness of her psychosis, but because she could not have her way, he (Onkel) must be the devil.
To come to Kusnacht is a tremendous lure for crazy people.
All the time you have such cases.
They are on the border line and so destructive, for the devil is strong and crazy. ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 182-185
