Victor White’s Dream of January 22nd(?) 1945 related to Dr. Jung
Dream of January 22nd(?) 1945.
PART 1. A group of elderly and ill-looking Dominicans are sitting on my right: it seems to be at Hawkesyard.
One of them says that he is eight times worse in health than anybody else!
PART 2. I am in the bathroom.
A very rubicund and robust young Irish or Irish-American priest comes in: his name is “Father Bendit”.
He says he has just been analysed by C.G. Jung: it was very good as far as it went, but he is now going off to look for another analyst.
I am surprised that he can think he can find a better analyst than Jung himself, that an Irish priest is so unsuspicious of psychologists, and that so very healthy and matter-of-fact a man can possibly need analysis.
PART 3. I am in Jung’s garden at Zurich.
The war is over. Jung is sitting in a deck chair, wearing (I think) a panama hat, and looking very peaceful and benign.
He beckons me to him and tells me he wants to give me a medal for all that I have done to spread and develop his work during the war when he could not get out of Switzerland.
He says there are very few who have really understood him correctly and seen the wider implications of his work as well.
He reaches to the ground where there is a small oval box; inside the box are about six or seven oval plaques fitting the box closely like hosts in an altar-bread box.
I know that these are for the “few”; I do not know who the others are, except that Toni Sussman is NOT one and that I must tell her about it when I get back to London! Jung takes one of the plaques and presses it warmly in my hand.
It is mostly of some white substance, but the border is somehow inlaid with a green and yellow pattern; in the centre are three nude female figures: one full face in the middle and the others flanking her and facing left and right (outwards). I wake glowing with pleasure and gratitude, and a feeling of assurance.
Notes.
PART I. Elderly, frustrated and hypochondriac priests are regular shadow figures of mine!
Hawkesyard is the place where I received the earlier part of my Dominican training, and doubtless developed many of the “complications” from which analysis from J. Layard, Toni Sussman – and a good deal of subsequent attempts at self-analysis – have (I hope) pretty thoroughly delivered me.
I cannot imagine why this particular (but unknown) Dominican was so emphatic that he was EIGHT times worse than anybody else!
But he is evidently a caricature of self-pity at other people’s expense.
PART 2. Bathrooms seem to be usually places of psychological cleansing in my dreams.
I incline to envy the generality of Irish priests for the fact that Catholicism is in their blood and so seldom presents problems or complications arising from heredity or upbringing (I am myself a convert, and have in the past had many such), but I incline also to resent and despise them for the same fact, and also for what seems to me their frequent complacence and narrowness.
I know nobody called “Father Bendit”, but I know the book of DR. Bendit on “Paranormal Cognition”.
I disagree with his plea for a fifth “Psi-Function” in addition to Jung’s Four (I don’t think he understands what Jung means by a Function), and I think he is very mistaken in thinking that alleged psi-phenomena upset the principles of therapy (it seems to me that what is important therapeutically is not so much where the material comes from, but what the unconscious does with it – though psi-dreams do seem often to prove to be particularly important ones.)
But I do think that psiphenomena raise important theoretical questions.
They seem to me to give empirical ground for asking whether we can limit the “unconscious” to the “personal unconscious” and the “collective unconscious” if we are to understand the latter only as the product of “inherited brain-structure”.
postulate either a re-definition of Jung’s “Collective Unconscious” as an absolute “Grenzbegriff” with no causal limitations whatever, or the addition of an “Absolute” unconscious to the “Personal” of Freud and the “Collective” of Jung.
If this be admitted, the synthesis of empirical psychology with theology and metaphysics will be enormously facilitated: indeed we shall be compelled to recognize extra-personal and even extra-temporal agency in the production of dreams, etc. in the manner of (for instance) Aristotle, St. Thomas and (for matter of that) the Bible.
Perhaps it may also help to obviate some of the “inflation” complications which are liable to arise in analysis.
PART 3. The War was not in fact over at the time of the dream; but it probably refers to the solution (which the dream helped me to reach) of a problem which was engaging me at the time.
I suppose the oval box and medal, with the three Graces (?) is an Anima symbol which Jung gives me.
Since his last letter to me, his words in the dream seem to have elements of “psi” themselves! The problem that was engaging me was in fact concerned with Toni Sussmann. ~Victor White, Jung-White Letters, Page 13-15
