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LECTURE III 29 October 1930
We were dealing last time with that rather remarkable mythological dream of the four valleys that converge.
Unless you have had a good deal of routine experience in reading dreams, you have no special feeling of discrimination concerning their symbolism-they all look chaotic in that case, whether they have one form or another.
But anyone who was used to the language of dreams would feel immediately that the symbolism in this one was unusual.
Whenever something turns up in a dream which has little or no connection with ordinary life, when there are no railroads or streetcars or houses, no parents or relations, but instead dragons or temples or something which does not exist in one’s usual surroundings, then you can be sure that the unconscious has a tendency to convey the idea of something uncommon or extraordinary, its particular nature depending upon the nature of the symbolism.
To dream of a dragon, for example, would most obviously indicate a mythological idea.
And one feels that the symbolism is significant in this dream of our patient; one does well to contemplate such a picture.
One of the reasons why I let people make drawings is that it helps their imagination.
The picture in a dream leaves rather a fleeting impression which soon vanishes, but when you make a drawing of it, it
remains in your mind or in your field of vision, and that gives you a chance at more associations, more context.
It is surprising to see how much associative material comes out in that way.
Sometimes people who really cannot paint at all make a funny kind of picture which is peculiarly stimulating to their imagination just on account of the many mistakes they make.
It looks like something entirely different, and then they suddenly are aware of its real meaning; through their very mistakes, the unconscious contents are associated with the picture.
A drawing of a dream content makes no claim to be art, it is simply an aid; it is like making a diagram to explain a subject; it is a sort of visualization of your thoughts.
I did not suggest to the patient to make a drawing in this case.
It was not necessary because she is a woman of vivid imagination and great intelligence, and she felt at once that this dream was significant; in comparison with the dream before, it is obvious that it is on a decidedly deeper level.
Such a meaningful dream takes on an epic form, it sounds like a hieratic text.
To be with an unknown man in a boat is perhaps not uncommon, but that they must go to the very end of the lake makes it a sort of quest, an adventure.
Then at the place where the four valleys meet something exceedingly symbolical happens-the man finds a lame sheep and she finds a lamb that is pregnant.
The symmetrical quality of this vision shows in itself that it is highly symbolic.
When dreams have that symmetrical character, one can be sure that they refer to an archetypal pattern.
Ordinary dreams are just dynamic, a wavy line, a motif which moves like this:
The dreams which refer back to an archetypal pattern have a more static structure.
In this dream with the four converging lines and the water in the center, the figure on the left would
be the female and on the right the male-the dreamer and the animus or the unknown man, the guide.
Then she finds a little lamb and he finds a lame sheep, which is in a way an opposition, but at all events it is again symmetrical.
So one sees that the dream refers to a very definite archetypal idea.
It has the characteristics of a kind of dream which we in our Western ignorance would not notice particularly, but which Eastern
people or primitives would emphasize at once.
The primitives don’t call them by the ordinary word for dreams-they would hardly even speak of ordinary dreams-they call them great visions, and they assume that only great men have great visions.
And if a child has such a dream, he must have a great destiny. The ancients also believed that.
The mere citizen has no dreams, or his dreams don’t count.
Now this dream conveys the idea of greatness, it is superpersonal.
Small people are personal. Great people are more than one person, they are representatives, they are exponents, they reach beyond.
This dream would mean that greatness had been touched.
Here is size and width of horizon; one could assume that here would be destiny.
When such an archetypal pattern comes to the foreground, one can be sure that fate is on the way.
And fate is power, an instinctive power in man, for he creates his own fate.
It is often quite difficult to understand such dreams because they have a far-reaching meaning-far-reaching in the sense of time.
Such a dream might anticipate something which lies in the far future, and then one would call it prophetic, but that is not necessarily so, and it would not anticipate the future literally; it simply shows the apparent line or pattern of the future.
It is like a signpost on a road pointing out that it is four hundred miles to Paris, which means that Paris is potentially there; it is seen ahead.
Now, the man picked up a lame sheep. Have you an idea about that?
Dr. Schlegel: One associates the flocks of sheep with the Christian attitude.
Dr. Jung: Yes.
But to deal now with that one sheep, one could say in connection with the idea of symmetry that this might be the old philosophical idea of correspondentia, as between above and below or between right and left.
So the lame sheep would correspond to that man’s figure, as the pregnant lamb would correspond to the woman’s figure.
In picking up the lame sheep, the man is picking up something that is in correspondence with himself, which expresses himself in a way, because these figures in the archetypal pattern are acting symbolically, exactly as the prophets in the Old Testament acted symbolically.
Those Old Testament prophets did the most astonishing things to catch the eye, so to speak, to symbolically express an idea.
The worst case was the prophet Hosea, who married a prostitute as a symbolic act because the Lord ordered him to do so, expressing in that way that the people had prostituted themselves to the heathen-he showed the people what they were by marrying a prostitute by divine order.
And in a dream of this kind, the actions or gestures are equally symbolical.
When these two figures take up those animals, their action is a manner of speech.
It is as if they would thereby convey a certain idea, as if they were saying: this I do in order to show you that one should feel compassion-or something like that.
I said last time that these sheep might be of Christian origin, because sheep, particularly the lamb, play a great role in Christian symbolism, and it is quite certain that Christian symbols would come up with our patient.
Her inherited Christian attitude is responsible for the standstill in which she found herself, when development came to an end.
She simply could not solve her problems with the typical Protestant point of view.
In natural conditions, there would be no standstill and life would simply flow on; only if consciousness interfered by imposing a certain attitude would life be stopped.
So naturally, it is our most developed attitude that accounts for our breakdowns.
I have often been asked why I bother about religion, because people cannot understand how a neurosis can have anything to do with religion.
It surely has nothing to do with religion as it is usually understood-an affair of the church.
We have such a foolish conception of religion nowadays.
People are Catholics or Jews or they belong to some other denomination, and they think that is religion, but that is only a sort of specialization of a certain creed which has nothing to do with the religious attitude.
The religious attitude is quite different, and above all it is not conscious.
You can profess whatever you like consciously while your unconscious attitude is totally different.
For instance, many good Protestants have not the faintest idea about Catholicism because they are ignorant, yet they have absolutely Catholic convictions in their unconscious, which come from the fact that their ancestors were Catholics.
So after a while, when the surface is more or less wiped off by the analytical treatment, one then has to do with the primitive Christian, and that is the problem here.
The patient was quite unaware of the meaning of those sheep-they meant nothing to her, they were just sheep, though of course she knew that in church hymns Christ was called a lamb.
Naturally, she wouldn’t hold the belief of the Hindu gentleman who traveled to Europe to study European customs and beliefs and was astonished to find in England an almost exclusively animal worship: he found everywhere in the churches a pigeon and a lamb.
He took it quite seriously and said they called themselves Christians but were really animal worshippers.
It is not taken seriously in these days, but formerly the lamb symbolism did play a tremendous role, as one sees in early Christian art.
So this is a piece of Catholicism in our patient which is quite unexpected.
Then what further analogy with Christian symbolism do you see?
Dr: Baynes: The shepherd.
Dt: Jung: Yes. The man in the dream guides the dreamer to the place of the four valleys and now assumes the role of the good shepherd; he comes to his flocks and picks up a lame sheep.
He may be likened to a very interesting figure in the early church called the poimen that has now vanished from ecclesiastical terminology.
The good shepherd has remained but the other figure has vanished, along with a book which was almost canonical at the time, called Hermas the Shepherd.
When the New Testament writings were gathered together, that was omitted. I use the Greek word poimen here because that was a pre-Christian figure.
It was a pagan invention and in direct historical relation to Orpheus, another figure that was related to Christ.
Orpheus was understood to be an anticipation
of Christ because he tamed wild animals-symbolizing wild passions-by his delicate music.
He also was regarded as a shepherd, but was called the Fisher as well, and as such played a great role in the Dionysian mysteries.
We thus find the Christ figure appearing in heathen cults.
In certain inscriptions Christ was almost identical with Bakcheus, on exactly the same level. Caligula, that famous perverted emperor, had a sanctuary where he kept the images of the Great Gods, and Christ was one of them.
In those days the figure of Christ was quite hazy-our idea of him is a later invention.
In very early times he was not personified at all, but was always referred to in symbols.
The form of the poimen, for instance, was a tremendous sort of angel of more than human dimensions, a great invisible spirit god, and that impersonal figure was never called Christ, that name was taboo.
He was called the Shepherd ofMen-Poimandros, the great leader of men, a mystery man, but directly related to the Shepherd of Hermas, which is a distinctly Christian figure and forms part of the early Christian literature until the
fifth or sixth century.
We have the pagan form in a very interesting Greek text, and the best idea I can give you of it is that it might have been written by an analytical patient about his visions.
It was obviously written by a man because the mysteries were then chiefly a man’s business (today they are a woman’s business), and it is a description of the way the poimen appeared to him, what his teaching was, and how he received guidance through that leader or shepherd of men.
Of course, our patient has not the least idea of what she is dreaming.
There is just an unknown man who picks up the sheep, but as a matter of fact she returns here to the archetypal pattern of the spirit-like leader of men.
It goes right back to the spirit-leaders of primitive tribes-where the medicine men are at times possessed by spirits, chiefly ancestral spirits, who tell them what is good for the people.
A marvellous example is in a book by Rasmussen about his experiences among the Eskimos in the north of Greenland.
A part of the Eskimos, foreseeing starvation if they stayed where they were, were led by a medicine man across Baffin
Bay to the North American continent, where they found food.
He had a vision that there was the Happy Land.
Now that man had never been there, and nobody knew that they could get across the sea; yet he succeeded in convincing the tribe.
In the winter when Baffin Bay was frozen over, they started to travel across.
Halfway over, part of the tribe began to doubt.
They decided that there was nothing ahead and returned, and they died of starvation.
The other half he led safely across.
This exactly describes what the shepherd or medicine man means under primitive circumstances: it is an intuitive mind possessed by a vision, or farsight.
That is the only function by which the life of a tribe can be safely led, there are no other possibilities or sources of guidance.
It cannot be done by thinking because thinking is not differentiated, so he must have a sort of far sight, in order to let the people know where the flocks are, for instance, or when there will be war.
The medicine man of the Elgonyis told us that he had no more dreams since the English were in the country. I asked him why, and he said it was because the chief man in power knew everything; he was in charge of the whole country and
knew exactly what to do, and since then, his own political function, the spirit-leading of the tribe, had come to an end.
Our raisonnement is done in a way by the primitive but only in his unconscious.
His functions are not yet developed out of the unconscious, so it manifests in the form of a revelation; it is as if a voice in the night told him what should be done.
There are countless examples of that in the Old Testament. The prophets were poimen, spirit-leaders.
Now such an archetype still exists in us in the form of dream-pictures.
We might dream of the spirit-teacher in many different forms, as an important person, a doctor or a professor or a managing director or even a board of directors.
A medium, for instance, is very often directed by a so-called control who is the spiritual guide, or it may be by a group.
In Hyslop’s book about his own and William James’s experiences with their medium Mrs. Piper, he describes her having a whole group of leaders, called the Imperator group.
They were a sort of board of invisible directors who, from the other side, were running the most important jobs in the land for the spiritual guidance of the people.
In normal circumstances people don’t know of the existence of the spiritual leader, but in the analysis of their dreams they come across them.
That man in the boat is one case; he says this woman must go through with her undertaking and reveals himself as a sort of good shepherd.
It is not very obvious in this dream, but he comes again later on; you will see that this figure slowly develops into the primitive spirit-leader, a seer, who foresees everything which she is meant to go through herself later on.
Exactly like that Eskimo who saw the way across to the mainland, who was there in spirit, experiencing the whole journey over the ice before it actually came off; only when he had succeeded in convincing his fellow beings, did the actual experience come.
That is the way it goes.
In this case the spirit-leader will foresee and experience by anticipation, and she will go the same way and will experience it in her own life.
Picking up one of the lame sheep denotes this man’s quality as a good shepherd.
There is something wrong with both those sheep; one is lame, and the lamb she picks up is pregnant, which is an abnormality, a thing which should not be, so both may die as the shepherd intimates: he says they are shivering, already quite cold.
So if we take that sheep symbolism as indicating a specific Christian attitude in solving the great problem of how to live, we might say that it was demonstrated here in a twofold way that that would not live in her much longer, despite the fact that she is trying to keep it warm.
It is quite possible that this specific Christian inheritance may die.
Yet animals always denote instinctive forces, and it would be bad for her if they died, so there is a possibility of their living.
But in that case those instinctive forces would need a different formula, or rather, a new spiritual guide.
For a formula is more like the word of power, like the Christian creed, or the mantra in India, a word of power that symbolizes the spiritual guidance, a word that will help us on our way.
Therefore we sometimes speak of the Word that has brought salvation instead of the actual spiritual leader.
A leader appears and leaves the Word behind, and so the function of spiritual guidance is often conveyed over to a word, a mantra; it becomes a form instead of the living spirit itself.
Such a word is symbolic, a form that can express the tendencies of the blind instinct.
Then the instinct quite naturally puts on that form, the spirit fits into it.
The medieval Christian formula was satisfactory to all the instincts of medieval man: it appealed to him, he was indubitably caught by that formula, and very little went off on side-tracks.
Therefore there was one universal Catholic church with the same form, the same style, from Norway down to Sicily.
Practically the whole known Western world was then one and the same civilization, one and the same mind, and in the
church one and the same language was spoken.
It is an extraordinary confirmation of the fact that all the instinctual cravings of the human beings at that time were sufficiently expressed in that form.
But of course such a word, or formula, only lasts for a while and then it no longer serves.
So when one compares the Christian of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries with the Christian of the second century, there is all the difference in the world.
Even if it were possible to confront Pius, the second Pope, with Professor Ritschl, the modern theologist, it would be impossible for them to understand one another.
Professor Ritschl is one of the originators of the idea that Jesus was a real person, while the primitive Christian had no such idea.
To them he was the poimen, a living presence, an invisible spiritual leader.
But Professor Ritschl said that Christianity was like an enormously long railroad train:
when an engine suddenly pushes against the last car, then that push goes through the whole chain of cars until it reaches the very first, the present.
So for two thousand years God has been irresponsible; he might have been locked up just as well.
Perhaps he has retired, quite satisfied with the fact that he once gave a push to that chain of cars and that we still feel the faint repercussion.
How could a man like Hermas, who knew of the great presence, understand such a point of view?
And the Professor went on to say-a particularly sad remark-that we could still see that push in the church as well as in the school and in family life.
The early Christian would call that paganism, because to him the family meant nothing, the family had to be broken up; when the Lord called him, he dropped all relations of the flesh.
There was no church, and the schools were heathen and had to do with the flesh.
There was only one school and that was God.
All that St. Paul knew was taught in ekstasis by God himself.
The family simply did not exist.
One of the reasons why the Romans persecuted the early Christians was that they interfered with the policies of the State which were based on the idea of the family. Jesus said: “I come not to bring peace but a sword. ”
He meant to break up the policies of the State.
One can understand that Pontius Pilate was not averse to handing him over to the Jews, for he was a political nuisance.
To the early Christians, the life of the spirit was the main thing, but to Professor Ritschl it is all the phenomena of the railway station.
So the formula changes from century to century, and now we need a new formulation.
Of course, Christianity is still functioning, but an unusual number of people nowadays are ex ecclesia, and they are naturally seeking a new formula.
In this dream, our patient is one of the sheep inasmuch as she is still an instinctual member of the Christian church.
Her mind is lame and she is pregnant.
She is still too young to carry, and yet she is pregnant with the future.
She is too young as a person, not mature; she is pregnant with the future but she cannot carry it.
That is a general truth for the whole present epoch, one could say. Most people cannot stand it.
Their minds are too lame and they just become neurotic, they cannot get up and bring it about.
That is expressed by these two symbolical sheep, inasmuch as the dreamer’s mind or psychology is still part of the Christian flock.
Now after this dream, she was attacked by an unusual feeling of lassitude and weariness which was quite inexplicable to her, but the reason is obvious in the dream.
The lameness and illness of the sheep is a living fact in her.
One has such a feeling of weariness, a sort of resignation, of despair, when one has lost a hope, a form in which one could live, for instance.
When that possibility is gone, one is overcome by that psychogenic fatigue; it is a direct consequence of the realization that has taken place in the dream.
And, mind you, this reaction came before we had analyzed it.
She did not know what the dream conveyed, but she felt the effect of it, as is often the case.
Now just at this time it happened that she came across a book by AE called The Candle of Vision, which interested her very much, it somehow made a deep impression upon her.
The day after we analyzed this dream-when I gave her some general ideas about it without going so far into the interpretation as I have n here-she still felt rather tired, so in the afternoon she saw this sort of hypnogogic vision.
It is the first picture I lay down, and just as she was falling asleep she suddenly and it sums up all that is to come, it is the whole truth in a nutshell-an amazing fact.
Then another figure appeared-a human head but dark as if in shadow, and around it a halo.
What is that?
Answer: An early Christian nimbus.
Dr. Jung: Yes. You find that particular form in early Christian art and archeology, in the basilicas, etc., and also in the late Romanesque and early Norman styles.
It is like the sun halo of the gods of the Mithraic cult.
And it is like the nimbus of the old emperors, but in that case it was often blue or green, while for the saints and angels it was always golden or yellow.
I had said nothing to this woman about the poimen, but this is a head one might find in the catacombs.
That the poimen interpretation is right is confirmed by the visions that follow.
The patient did not recognize this cross form as a halo, she thought it was just a wheel; and she had never heard of a
sun-wheel, which is one of the most ancient forms of sun symbol.
Behind the head of a god or an emperor, it means that his head is like the sun.
The next vision is a double goblet. What do you make of that?
Prof Eaton: It might refer to the Christian sacrament.
Dr. Jung: But a double goblet is not used there.
Mrs. Jaeger: In very old Greek times, such goblets were given as presents to guests.
Dr. Jung: Was that not a goblet which was intercommunicating?
A very primitive form of goblet was based on this principle, two cups or bowls connected in this way: one person drank from one cup and another person from the other.
That was done to be sure there was no poison in it. In order that the guest should have no fear that his hospitality might be poisonous, the host drank out of such an arrangement; it was to give the guest assurance.
The primitive gesture of greeting is to hold out their open hands in such a way that it shows that they are not going to stab one another.
It is bad form to hold one hand in one’s pocket in shaking hands, because there might be a knife concealed there.
Our polite forms were originally compensations for the contrary.
This picture is highly symbolical-when the top is filled, the lower bowl is empty. It is paradoxical.
Only one part at a time can be filled.
It might mean that what is poured in from above is poured out from below.
At the time I took it as symbolizing the transition from above to below; one could expect that what had been above would now be below.
The next symbol is rather unrecognizable.
It is a wig. This is the dwelling place of the leader; in the next picture you see that the leader is the primitive seer.
The good shepherd, the poimen, above, is the primitive seer below.
What is poured into the goblet of the Christian idea above becomes the instinct of the earthly seer below.
There is a primitive idea of the sacrament poured on the earth as a libation.
That interpretation would seem quite arbitrary if we had not the chance to look at it retrospectively.
At first I could not imagine what this picture could mean or how it was related to the former one.
Nor could I make out what that arrow-or spear as she called it-shot at the moon might indicate.
But in the light of subsequent events that all became clear.
These initial visions anticipate the events which follow.
After these visions she fell asleep and had the following dream: I was motoring to my native town, terribly anxious for fear I had not enough oil or petrol.
I had great difficulty in finding the road.
At last when I found it, a man said, “You should have known this was the way for there are other cars on this road, and you have been going along l@ely lanes.”
This was repeated in the same night in exactly the same form, which means that it expresses something particularly important for the dreamer.
When you are in doubt whether someone has understood a thing, you say it twice, and in the same way the unconscious repeats this dream a second time to make it more impressive, less liable to be forgotten.
Now the dream says that she is on the road to her native town, the place where she came from and where she is at home.
That is symbolical.
She is returning to the home place, which is right, and one immediately associates this with the place where the four valleys meet.
That is not particularly indicated in the dream, but you remember that the association with the four valleys was the town built on the number four, the heavenly Jerusalem in Revelations, which is of course the home of everybody.
In this case it is her individual town where she belongs, not just the heavenly Jerusalem which belongs to all.
This is a symbol for herself, her symbol of individuation; she is going home to herself.
And that it is a goal explains why she is so terribly anxious about getting there.
But she is in doubt whether she has enough oil and petrol, the means of getting there; oil and petrol are absolutely necessary for the life of the car.
Petrol is condensed energy, it is liquid energy, and translated into psychological language there naturally might be doubt in her mind whether she will have enough patience or realization, enough will power or energy, to get there, whether her supply will be sufficient for that long road to herself.
And besides that doubt, she apparently had great difficulty in finding the road to her native town.
There are many ways and she might be side-tracked.
She is inclined to lose her way, either because of the many opportunities to go the wrong way, or because she likes to go the wrong way and so avoid the main road to herself.
If you feel yourself into her situation, you will understand.
The way to oneself is the longest and the hardest way, and everyone would pay anything, his whole fortune, to avoid it.
Most people hate themselves, despise themselves, and for nothing in the world would they go to their native town.
Mind you, the Christian idea is that man is bad from the beginning and the place of his origin is hell, so why should he care to go there?
That teaching has been the highest formula for the conduct of our lives; we may think we are not influenced by it, but it is still our creed.
Even if a man thinks the New Testament is all bunk, it seems to him quite bad and morbid to be alone with himself.
If I ask him to spend even one hour by himself daily, he thinks I am crazy, for he considers himself a sort of dung heap or a wastepaper basket inside, and why spend time on that?
According to the Christian teaching, man needs the intercession of the saints and the grace of God to get anywhere at all; left to himself he is a miserable worm just ready to go down to the eternal fires that he came from.
The idea of a terrible punishment in hell does not appeal to us, but for seventeen or eighteen hundred years our lives
have been part of that formula, and we naturally suffer from the psychological effects of such an education.
There is no escape.
We may be quite liberal in our point of view, atheists perhaps, but we cannot get away from it because it is in our blood. In our heads we may be liberated, but go a little farther down and we are right in the Middle Ages.
So the way to the self is most painful and shocking, and one does not wonder at these difficulties in the road of my dreamer, these many desires not to find the road.
Therefore she hears the voice of the spiritual guide-he always appears as a man-admonishing her, “You should have known this was the way.”
She half knows that, yet she would so much have preferred not to know.
He tells her that she could have seen that other people were traveling the same way, so she had no excuse for going off on lonely lanes. She has taken to all sorts of other possibilities,
bypaths, instead of sticking to the main road.
Here that voice appears in its true form as a spirit-guide, a shepherd.
There was a great storm at sea.
I entered the cabin and saw a young boy in the arms of a nurse. He looked very ill.
I walked to the window to watch the waves, thinking to myself that it was the first time I had been on the water without being sick.
This dream comes after the one in which she is told that her uncertainty as to the right road is mere pretext; it might be disagreeable, but that does not prove that it is wrong.
So one would assume that she would now choose the direct way.
But then, naturally, she gets into trouble that is why she avoids the right road.
This is symbolized by the great storm at sea, a tremendous chaos of wind and waves, a passionate upheaval of elemental nature.
In the unconscious, wind means mind or spirit, so it is a real brain storm, which is exactly what she has always been
afraid of.
No sooner is she forced to take the right road than she encounters the brain storm, and then she enters the cabin and sees a young boy who is gravely seasick.
She had been on deck, which is obviously dangerous, for if the brain storm is outside, it means that she projects it and is in a panic.
There is then no difference between herself and the object of her emotion.
She will say that other people are making the trouble, she will attribute it to the mana or magic power of someone else, and then the affect will be out of her hands, and that is the beginning of funk.
If one thinks those people are animals with horns, one is just crazy, one is projecting one’s own brain storm upon the surroundings.
While if one realizes that they are very nice people and that the brain storm is one’s own, one will presently come to oneself.
When a child is in that state, he is put into a room alone, where he won’t say someone else is to blame because there is nobody to listen, and after a while he discovers: it is I who am naughty, not mother or brother or sister.
So for our patient to recognize her own condition is tremendous progress.
Hitherto she had thought it was her husband or the devil or circumstances.
People always have some scapegoat.
Perhaps it is the parents who died twenty years before but are still working against one: if only twenty years ago such and such a thing had not been said!
That is exteriorizing oneself, seeing the brain storm outside.
Therefore she goes inside, realizing that the storm is in the inner sea, and there makes the discovery that somebody else is sick.
She had always been sick before in a storm herself and lost her morale completely.
In this case seasickness means demoralization through the wrong psychology, the projection of one’s psychology into other people, for one then has no point of view naturally; one doesn’t exist, one is scattered.
In this dream for the first time she is not seasick, because she recognizes, as her action shows, that the storm is in herself.
So the evil consequences do not touch her but a little boy in the arms of a nurse.
A little lamb was in her arms before, a female lamb, but now it is a little boy, and since the patient really has a little boy, he would symbolize what she has achieved or brought forth so far. It is something new, and that attempt at a new form of life is seasick, which means that she is shocked, demoralized.
She attempts to go to her own town, and on the way she receives a severe shock which makes the boy, her honest attempt, seasick.
For a while he is disintegrated; but she is not disintegrated.
She knows that she is simply checked for the moment, and that is the beginning of objectivity, of a higher quality of
consciousness.
Therefore Schopenhauer says that the only divine quality in man is humor, because humor is a consciousness behind consciousness, an ego behind the ego, an observer on a different level who sees what you see and thinks what you think.
And she makes the hopeful statement that this is the first time that she has not been seasick in such weather-the first time she has not been demoralized in a brain storm-which means, as I said, tremendous progress.
Now I don’t know exactly what caused the brain storm, I can only say that it is generally very difficult and disagreeable to come to oneself.
But that is in a way an academic statement; we can understand it theoretically but we have no specific reason here.
I should have asked her: “But tell me, what did you encounter, what kind of monster was blocking your way when going to your city?”-and then perhaps she would have told me.
People don’t know the worst obstacles, however, and anyway, before I could ask her, she had a further bit of dream on the same night which gives us the exact answer: “I was motoring round the wall of a large estate, and I heard the voice of an unknown man saying, ‘This is a lunatic asylum.’ ”
That is what caused the brain storm.
That voice says: “Look out!”
On your way home you pass by the lunatic asylum.
People often have to realize that the way may be close to it, and that is the cause of the worst brain storms.
Nearly all the people who have to go that way are nowadays threatened with the lunatic asylum.
That comes from our rational assumptions, from the fact that we are so convinced that the world is quite reasonable, just as it ought to be, that it consists of nice families and perfectly good organizations and lawbooks and police, everything on rails.
And then they realize on their way home that that is not quite true.
In this connection I should recommend you to read for your edification a book by Daudet, which I have quoted before, Tartarin sur les Alpes.
It is a most marvelous example of the man of today.
Tartarin went off to the Rigi with tremendous equipment, thinking he was going to get into a dangerous wilderness, and then he landed on a dancing floor, a fine hotel, with a railway to take him up, and every comfort.
So he concluded that it was just a joke, that the Compagnie Anglo-Suisse had bought it up, organized it like Coney Island, and there was no danger at all.
So he went up the Jungfrau with two guides and was congratulated on his tremendous courage, and he smiled and bowed, all the time convinced that he was perfectly safe, the whole thing a fake.
But of course he went back to his own country and boasted: /have been there, frightful danger, etc.
Then he brought another fellow back with him from his town who thought it was all real.
Tartarin took him up to the mer de glace in the region of Chamonix, walking ahead with the other fellow tottering behind in a hell of a blue funk.
Pretty soon it began to get somewhat slippery, and mists and crevasses, and slowly it dawned upon him that it was not a fake, that the Compagnie Anglo-Suisse had no hand in it.
At that moment there was a jerk on the rope and he thought: by God, that man is in a crevasse, and quick, he whipped out his knife and cut the rope!
Then he was in an abject panic, and on all fours he crept out of that glacier and didn’t even look for his companion.
So he went home and told about it: tremendous accident, he had tried to rescue his friend, but impossible!
And he was celebrated as a great hero of the Alps.
A few days later the other fellow turned up, also a great man-lost in the snow!
Then the report came from a rescue party that\had been sent out.
The only thing they had found was a piece of rope· cut at both ends!
That is the funk, the panic, which seizes people when they get away from their suppositions of perfect safety, and that is our dreamer’s fear.
Things take on the most fearful proportions and she is overwhelmed, and then the voice says to her in the most tactless way: this is a lunatic asylum, which is just the thing she is afraid of and would have avoided.
If a doctor had told her she was going to a lunatic asylum, she would have gotten the shock of her life. And here is that calm voice saying exactly that, not sparing her in the least. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 38-52
