25 October 1933 Visions Seminar LECTURE IV
Today Dr. Barker has brought us a contribution.
Dr. Barker: You spoke in the last seminar of the necessity of accepting the tragic side of life, and also of the necessity of living as if the individual were essential to the universal purpose.
I found those two themes well illustrated in a book called The Tragic Sense of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno.
The first one is: The cure for suffering-which is the collision of consciousness with unconsciousness-is not to be submerged in unconsciousness, but to be raised to consciousness and to suffer more.
The evil of suffering is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering.
Do not take opium, but put salt and vinegar in the soul’s wound, for when you sleep and no longer feel the suffering, you are not.
And to be, that is imperative.
Do not then close your eyes to the agonizing Sphinx, but look her in the face and let her seize you in her mouth and crunch you with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth and swallow you.
And when she has swallowed you, you will know the sweetness of the taste of suffering.
The second one is: Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make the theoretical fact-if the expression does not involve a contradiction in terms-the fact that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable, that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when we die, a practical truth.
These are just two out of many passages which have the same bearing.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that comes in very helpfully.
Well, we talked a lot about the bull last time, and we must say one
word more about it.
The fact of the bull being practically tied up into a parcel may have impressed you as a not altogether favorable state of affairs; one would rather wish that the bull were free.
Sure enough, this is not an ideal state of things, yet it is necessary and unavoidable, for no matter how divine that bull may be, it is sometimes better that it should be fettered.
There are certain times or milieus where the bull must be tied down.
That must be true for many people; otherwise they are unable to live.
You know there are two kinds of people: in the stratification of human society there is, as it were, a middle line, and at least one half of humanity is below this line, and the other half is above it.
What you call the normal man would be just on the line, the ideal average.
Of course nobody is absolutely normal, the normal man is a fiction, that simply expresses the probable average of humanity.
Now down below are those who are abnormal because they cannot adapt to the conditions of contemporary life, they have all the trouble in the world to keep up with the pace of events and the ordinary social demands; they are either stupid, or not stable enough, or too archaic.
At the bottom are very primitive people: cavemen who by mistake are still alive; you see them in the streets and can tell from their faces that they are cavemen, despite the fact that they wear modern clothes.
Then a bit higher up are not exactly cavemen, but lake dwellers.
And then comes those who have huts of straw or earth; if left to themselves they would
never build regular houses, their highest attainment would be an earth hut.
Somewhat higher up are people who belong to the time of Caesar, say.
And still higher, in ever increasing numbers, the people who belong to the early Middle Ages; this layer would be in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, and there are an enormous number of people of that type, the grocer or the butcher, for example; if you could compare their portraits with those of the people who were the ruling classes in 1500, you would see the similarity.
Then there are people who belong to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but most certainly not to 1933.
And then comes the layer where most people are, which would be in about 1933.
You see, all the people below the line have one urgent human problem, how to adapt, how to keep up to the conditions, how to eat properly or clothe themselves properly, for instance, so that they are thought to be nice people, how to fill a position with more or less success, how to be a successful postman, engineer, draftsman, lawyer, or doctor-just a decent average.
They have all the trouble in the world to be that, they cannot dream of improving upon it, the most they can manage is to do what is expected of them.
They have no other ambition than to be up to the mark of the man of 1933, and the unfortunate people who cannot get that far are envious of those who belong there.
Above that line come in decreasing numbers the people of the future, the people of 2000, 5000, or 7000, just as far ahead as the others are behind.
Now to the man beyond that level it is self-evident that he is in 1933, and to be there is no particular trouble; to be adapted is child’s play; how to clothe himself is no difficulty at all, and he knows very well how to eat, how to talk, how to deal with people.
The only trouble such people have is that those damned creatures down below have not their psychology, and they feel that as a terrible nuisance, a hindrance, and a bore.
And the further they go the more their troubles increase, the more they feel the weight of humanity; to be in 1933 is the minimum of life they could imagine, to put them below is misery to them, it is death.
But for those people from below to get up to 1933 is sheer heaven, the fulfillment of all their aspirations.
Those two kinds of people have an entirely different psychology.
For the people down below, the bull must be fettered, it cannot be otherwise, it would be much too dangerous.
But for people up above it should not be fettered. Now what is the truth?
You see it is extraordinarily difficult to make a definite statement.
To the one it is the greatest mistake, to the other it is an evident advantage.
That is the difficulty we are up against in psychology.
There is no one single psychological statement that would be valid for both kinds of people.
What is true for the one is not true for the other.
Of course, it is exceedingly important that each one should know his position, where he belongs, whether adaptation is a problem to him or not, and each has of course a certain difficulty.
One could say it was always the adaptation problem, because it is 1933, and for those who are not yet there it is very sad, for it is evident that they must suffer from the fact.
But to those who are beyond, it is a mistake that they are no longer there, they suffer also, to them it is also an adaptation problem.
Instead of the 1933 level being the most desired and unachievable goal, it is rather a question of curtailing, diminishing themselves, in order to be in 1933; that is really a task for them.
They must fetter themselves, cast a net over themselves, to keep them from flying off into the year 20,000 A.D.
So as this bull must be fettered for those who are below the line, it must also be fettered in a way for those who are above the line-only the bull is then identical with them, they ought to be fettered in order not to run ahead, forgetting that our time is 1933, no more and no less.
Even to our patient this problem of the bull is not a simple one.
The vision, or her unconscious, reacts to this picture immediately; suddenly the sky becomes dark, which means that now unconsciousness, the great darkness, begins [plate 36].
Something comes in which means to her a very unconscious problem.
She says: The sky became dark. I saw a black sun with fire coming out around it and a red outstretched arm on each side. I felt I could stand it no longer and sought to escape.
This must be an almost intolerable thought coming up. What does the black sun mean?
Mrs. Baumann: It seems to be an eclipse.
Dr: Jung: Exactly, with a corona round it.
When the moon passes before the sun and obscures it, the fiery halo of the sun’s atmosphere is called the corona.
What does the eclipse of the sun mean here?
Dr: Harding: The equivalent of the bull being tied.
Dr: Jung: It would be in a way the equivalent, the bull is incapacitated, the sun has been deprived of its power.
And do you know what the primitives do during the eclipse of the sun?
Dr: Harding: They make a noise to drive away the demons.
Dr: Jung: Yes, as in China they shoot off fireworks and guns to drive away evil spirits.
But they also fall into an absolutely hopeless panic, and then most astonishing things happen.
Primitives have very strict sex taboos, but when they are upset absolute promiscuity takes place; they fall out of their form, disintegrate instantly, because the unthinkable thing has happened.
It is as if their guarantee of life, their consciousness, had been extinguished, and they fall back into deepest unconsciousness.
So that the sun is obscured means that our patient’s consciousness is somehow obscured.
Then what are those outstretched arms?
Dr: Adler. They are the forces which try to draw her into unconsciousness.
Dr: Jung: Because the arms are attributes of the sun?
Dr: Barker: They may be her own arms, she is being consumed in the flames.
Dr.: Jung: You think, if she is being drawn into the unconscious, her outstretched arms would appear?
That is true, but here they seem to be attributes of the sun that is obscured, transformed into its own opposite; instead of emanating warmth it is taking it in.
I thought you would be reminded of an Egyptian symbol where arms appear as attributes of the sun. It is the specific symbol of Amenhotep IV, 2 who made important
reforms in religious symbology.
He introduced the idea of monotheism, and he took as a symbol the disc of the sun “rejoicing in its two horizons.”
The sun was represented as the emanating deity that bestows the divine power of life upon the believers, in the form of the sign of ankh, the crux ansata.
There are a number of representations, chiefly among the state archives excavated at Chut-Aten, the town which was newly built by Amenhotep IV and the site of his own palace.
At the end of each ray emanating from the disk of the sun is a little hand bestowing the sign ankh upon the king and his family.
Those would be the arms of the sun when it is spending, giving life.
In our vision they are also the arms of the sun, but since it is a black sun it does not emanate or create.
On the contrary, darkness sucks in and swallows, so she is threatened by being
drawn into those arms of death.
Now why after this bull symbolism should such a thing be threatening her? What would it mean in reality to be swallowed by the darkness? By the black sun?
Dr. Bahadurji: Death?
Dr. Jung: Not necessarily, if understood as a phenomenon of consciousness; if the body were concerned, it would be death, but if it is the mind what would happen?
Dr. Harding: One would become very automatic, functioning as one member of a collective group, with no individual quality at all.
Dr. Jung: And what would that be called?
Dr. Harding: Normal?
Dr. Jung: By no means would they call you normal.
If I should suddenly become automatic at this moment, I would perform my unconscious, and you would marvel, I can tell you!
So what kind of people are swallowed by the unconscious?
Answer: Insane people.
Dr. Jung: Of course. You see the unconscious is thoroughly chaotic, chaotic and cosmic, it is the opposites; but the chaotic character is so impressive that anyone possessed by the unconscious is chaotic.
That is, he might be marvellously law abiding, but we would call him a lunatic, because we would see that his actions were most symbolic.
He would not be normal in any way, he would be in an unconscious delirious condition, irresponsible.
So this is a critical moment for our patient, she is threatened by a moment of insanity, and that is why she tries to escape.
Now what would drive her crazy?
Miss Hannah: She has not been able to understand the bull; therefore the animus has taken it over and possessed her again.
Dr.: Jung: That is a fair statement, but it does not explain the situation fully.
You remember the bull was brought into the market place as a sort of answer to all that suffering nonsense which was going on.
The unconscious says: But what about the bull, the power and the center of life,
consciousness? Why should people be so hellishly unconscious and behave like mad?
Let the blessed sunshine in, as the hymn says, and then we shall be all right.
But the sun is fettered and a net cast over him.
Yet something has happened; otherwise she would not be filled with unconscious
panic; there would be no threat of insanity if that vision of the bull did not mean a lot to her.
But can you see how insanity might be brought on here?
I admit it is not a good fantasy, it is like a bad dream, badly done.
Mrs. Fierz: If you take her actual situation into account, going back to America, she seems to me like one of those people who are ahead in the future, and she has now dropped down to the people below the line. The loss of the years ahead might be what would happen to her now. She is threatened with falling into the past again, into the situation in which she was before she was analyzed, which was for her something like a mad situation-I mean, she was probably neurotic and therefore came to analysis.
Dr.: Jung: Yes, and after a neurotic situation there is a greater chance of becoming psychotic.
If one regresses after analysis it is much worse than having an ordinary neurosis, that is mild in comparison.
The more one knows, the more dangerous it is-one can no longer play with fire.
What one could easily do five or six years ago one can do no longer.
The mechanism is this: You remember in a much earlier vision, I showed you the picture of the bull on a pedestal to which she was raising a goblet filled with blood [plate 18].
That was a sacrifice to the bull, and there the bull was of gold, it was the sun; she then realized the meaning of the worship of the bull, the cult of the sun.
And there the bull was not fettered, it was free.
She was then in analysis, where there were no skyscrapers and no relations and no public opinion, where she could just take her flight; she could move on according to the laws of the bull.
Now she returns to her former condition where that is not possible, where the bull must be fettered, but the thing which had always been crippled in her before is now living, the bull in the meantime has found a way into liberty; it has been in the open and is now brought back miserably into the stable.
Then it looks as if she had lost the meaning of her whole life.
What is the good of the whole thing?
And if you lose your point of view to the extent of saying,
What is the use of anything I have ever done or aspired to, you are likely to blow out your brains, or to become insane, or to die in black despair-as many people do.
You are then in a panic, you might do practically anything.
So that is the reason why she simply cannot stand it; she must do something about it, she must get out of that awful impression of a sun that has turned into blackness, of a life that has suddenly become empty and meaningless.
For all the significant things above the line are simply put out, changed into nonsense by the aspect of the year 1933.
Think of the people who have hoped for the future of the League of Nations, or any other great and wonderful thing man has invented-some system to preserve peace, for instance.
If such a person looks at his work now and takes it to heart he might easily seizehis gun and blow out his brains.
Why make any effort when everything isgoing directly to hell?
So the next move in the fantasy is that she says: “I entered the door of a house and descended into a dark cellar.”
This is very typical symbolism.
Dr. Shaw: I would say that she voluntarily went into the unconscious in order to get a rebirth.
Dr.: Jung: You take the cellar for the unconscious.
That is correct-only there is the little difficulty that we just said the black sun was the unconscious.
Mr. Allemann: It is a sheltering mandala.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. In this condition it would not be sufficient to say she was entering the unconscious.
For the unconscious here is symbolized by the obscuration of that black sun; it is a cosmic fact, it is the collective unconscious in its vast universal aspect, and that threatens to suck her in and depersonalize her completely.
Now against that she descends as if she were going into the unconscious; to say it is the unconscious is correct, yet it is a very peculiar unconscious.
Mr. Allemann says it is again the mandala. That is true.
The mandala is man-made, it is the sacred furrow made round one, and that would be a house.
So the primitive houses, the first houses built by man, really have the mandala form.
When I entered a Negro hut the first time-one of those circular thatched huts-it made a tremendous impression upon me.
They are built low, the roof is only about four feet above the ground, they have no
windows and you enter through a low door, so low that the cattle cannot enter; only the smaller animals can enter, the goats and the calves or whatever is running about.
So you must creep in practically, which has the inevitable effect of making you feel humble and awkward.
Therefore certain places of devotion in old Catholic churches have such low entrances that they make you bow down, you must not stand up, you must go down on all fours.
In Bologna, for example, there is an old church with a facsimile of a sepulcher, a medieval fantasy of the sacred tomb, and in order to worship there you must creep in through a very low door; it gives you at once the feeling that you are a dog, an animal, you can’t help feeling small and ridiculous.
As you couldn’t help feeling very humble if you should be forced to creep into this room on your knees, you wouldn’t cut any figure at all.
That position helps you to feel the atmosphere.
Then the interior of a Negro hut is dark, you dimly discern benches or beds along the walls, and in the center are dark stones in a circle around glowing embers-the glow of the fire with a little smoke rising is right in the center. It is extraordinarily impressive and solemn.
Now this is the ordinary dwelling place of a primitive Negro; it is built like a mandala and it looks like a sanctuary; you feel at once the sacredness of the hearth, for everything surrounds that center in which the flame of life is glowing.
Such a place gives you an almost magical feeling, on account of its extreme simplicity and significance.
It seems to say: “This is the place of refuge, a sanctuary, here is peace; here you are sheltered against the dangers outside, against the fierce sun and the rain and against all specters and wild animals.”
So everyone turns their face to that one center, the fire from which comes warmth and food and security.
As long as they see the smoke no wild animals will come in, the door can even be left open.
In a country infested with lions, for instance, a contrivance of little glowing sticks is put in the entrance hole-you could kick it away with no trouble-and that is enough.
Or if there is no fire a lantern is placed there and that makes it quite safe; even a man-eating lion would go around it very carefully, it would be a very bold beast indeed that would dare to jump over a lighted lantern.
The house in its primitive meaning, then, is a mandala, the symbol for a man-made sheltered place, the sacred precincts within the surrounding walls of the temple.
Therefore when our patient enters that place, it means that she returns to herself, to that small living unit she represents; she is that manmade house, where she is cut off and protected against all the surrounding horrors.
Outside you don’t really touch life; you only touch results, the product of life, the volcanic outbursts of life, but you never touch the source of life which makes you live; that you only touch within yourself, within the mandala.
And there this woman goes into the depths, into a dark cellar.
Now there is no cellar in primitive houses, but it appears in later periods.
When the Romans built a new town, a military station, for instance, they drove a pair of oxen with a plough round the place where it was to be, thus making the sulcus primigenius, the primordial furrow, which meant, this is taboo, this is sacred from the outside world.
The enclosed place was characterized by certain sacred images, sort of fetishes;
phallic emblems were often put up near that furrow, the boundary line, to designate that there the sacred place began.
In Basel, there used to be a Roman gate-it was destroyed sometime in the nineteenth
century-and on the wall inside of the gate was a phallus.
And close by the gate of Nuremberg, at the corner of Di’trer’s house, there is also a phallus, marking the place of shelter.
That is probably derived from the almost universal antique custom of marking the boundary lines of fields by a Priapus, a phallus.
One still sees those figures in Egypt where they are fertility charms, they look like scarecrows.
I saw one in upper Egypt which was absolutely classical.
The old Latins had such Priapus figures to mark the corners of a field; they also were fertility charms and they always had to be made of the wood of the fig tree.
Then in the center of the space enclosed by those primordial furrows, the Romans made a hollow in the ground and built a cellar, the so-called fundus, the French fond, where they sacrificed the fruits of the field. In other words, they concentrated their libido in a symbolic form in the center, and that was the beginning of the town.
There is an example not very far from Zurich, the remains of a Roman military castle at Irgenhausen.
The foundations are still fairly well preserved and it is not far away, just off the highway near the lake of Pfaffikon.
It is a square fortification with towers at the corners and in the center one can still see the fundus, in exactly the right place.
Later on, an official building, or a temple, was usually erected over the fundus, and in certain old Greek or Roman temples the almsbox, which in our churches is near the entrance, was in the center of the floor; there was a slit in the stone and coins were dropped down into that hole underneath.
That is again the type of the primitive houses.
Then the fire of the Vestal Virgins in Rome, a tremendously ancient symbol, was guarded in a circular temple, which consisted of a circle of columns round the center
where the fire was always burning on the altar.
You see that is like the primitive wattle hut, with sticks or with sort of menhirs, longish stones put upright into the ground, such as I have seen in southern Sudan-at about five degrees above the equator.
They are mostly small circles, and the natives there told me that they do not now build their huts in this way, but that there had been a people who put stones in a circle and then covered them with wattle; the stones were about four feet high, up to the roof, so they strengthened the wattle walls.
That was the form of primitive dwelling place which later took on the quality of the temenos, like the sacred circle at Stonehenge.
Or like the enormous circle of stones which was recently discovered by a French expedition in Wyoming, the so-called Medicine Wheel.
It is a perfect wheel with twenty-eight spokes, the hub in the center and the rim outside.
There are seven altars and several mysterious stone figures which have an astronomical meaning.
The spaces between the twenty-eight spokes of the wheel represent the lunar month, and the seven altars the seven days of the week.
But the crowning mystery of the Medicine Wheel consists of two smaller monuments which are thought to represent the constellations of the Southern Triangle and the Southern Cross.
Wyoming is rather far north, and the astronomers found out that the last time the Southern Cross had been visible up there was exactly 12,939 years B.C.
So the theory is that this monument was built at that date.
It is something like Stonehenge which has also an astronomical bearing, but that points only to about 1900 B.C., which would be the culmination of the neolithic age in England.
At that time, the sun would have risen at the summer solstice in a direct line with a certain tall menhir, thus casting a shadow upon the horseshoe-shaped altar which is believed to have stood in the center.
Both these ancient temples are examples of the house of the horizon, with the four doors or windows, the gates of morning, of midday, of sunset, and of midnight.
And you remember, the Navajo Indians, in their ceremonies, build little sweat houses, medicine lodges, at the four points of the compass.
The horizon marks the walls of our house, our roof is the sky, the earth is our sheltered place, and the four directions of the horizon are our doors.
You see that already expressed man’s heightened feeling of security on earth.
Now our patient continues: “Sitting around a fire was a circle of old men.”
This agrees with what we have been talking about; it is a mandala, and here the people are sitting in a circle gazing into the fire.
They said to me: “Have you seen the birds?” I said: “Yes, they wounded me but I was healed. Is there no healing fire in the city? All seems blood and destruction.”
Who are these old men?
Mrs. Baumann: An animus committee.
Dr.: Jung: Yes, a court of justice or something of the sort, holding their meeting down in the depths.
You see, that situation means entering the unconscious, or entering the mandala.
For not everything within the mandala represents consciousness; that is only a part of it; the mandala represents the greater circle, the unconscious included; it is the Self, not the conscious only.
Therefore the animus is there, or in a man’s case an anima.
Can you remember a good example of this symbolism, but in a man’s case?
Dr. Barker: Christ in the circle of wise men when he went up to the temple?
Dr.: Jung: There was no anima there, she came afterwards in the form of his mother, and he cast her out.
He said: “What have I to do with you?”
This is a woman’s case, but we have a parallel in a man’s psychology.
Dr. Harding: When Leo penetrated into the caves of Kor he found She with the circle of mummies round her.
Dr. Jung: Yes, and where is the land of Kor in reality? And what is the geology of the place?
Mrs. Crowley: In the center of Africa.
Mr. Allemann: That pillar, the fire of life, is in a volcano in the mountains.
Dr. Jung: And the characteristic of a volcano is the fire in the middle of circular walls.
When Leo and Holly went to the land of Kor, they had to pass through that outer wall; they entered the mandala and inside was She.
That is an exact analogy, that is also a mandala.
Now each one of these old men is an animus, this is a typical collection.
And the animus-we can speak of them, the whole group, in the singular-asks her: “Have you seen the birds?”
Why does he ask this?
Mr. Allemann: Could the birds, being thoughts, come from them?
Dr. Jung: Well, there is a peculiar unconscious connection between the animus and those birds; birds are thoughts, air beings, and the animus produces, or consists of, such thoughts; he is on the wing himself occasionally, a sort of bird.
So we learn here that these thought-birds are animus products, or at all events the animus has something to do with them.
Then she says: “Yes, they wounded me, but I was healed.” What does that convey?
Dr. Harding: If it refers to the birds in the vision of the skyscrapers, was it not the birds that were injured?
Dr. Jung: But they wounded her also, their blood fell on her and injured her.
That animus thoughts can hurt one is well known and a woman having animus thoughts is always wounding herself.
For the animus is ever beside the mark, he is always against life in a peculiar way; it is not the expression of life, it is often directly against the feeling.
So those birds must be animus thoughts which have wounded her; but she was able to protect herself, she was healed by the fire.
Mrs. Baumann: I thought she was healed by the water from the blue rock.
Dr. Jung: That is true, but also by the fire; she identifies now with the idol that was made strong in the fire.
It refers here to the fire that produces the pure gold; therefore she asks: “Is there no healing fire in the city?”
And those animi are sitting round a fire.
Here we can again bring in the Tantric symbolism.
The animus and the birds are air beings, they belong to the anahata center, above the diaphragm, and below is manipura, the emotional fire center.
Now in anahata there is a peculiar division of thought and feeling.
Thought would be practically identical with the air, the pneuma, the breath of life, with the lungs, in other words, while feeling would mean the heart.
The organs are divided though close together, so there is the possibility of a conflict.
And consciousness begins there, and wherever there is objective consciousness, discernment, there is division.
Therefore you discover in anahata for the first time the possibility of conflict, that you can have a conflict in yourself.
There is no conflict in manipura because you are the conflict itself, you simply flow along like water or fire.
You may be exploded in ten thousand pieces yet you are one with yourself because there is no center from which to judge, there is nothing in between the pairs of opposites.
You are everything, in a strong emotion you are also the pairs of opposites, you are both this and that.
It is not you who realize, it is the emotion that realizes.
There are people who are always in search of emotions; they have almost a mania to arouse emotions, because without them they feel dead.
Such people must always have a sensation or cause a sensation, have an emotion or cause an emotion, or they simply don’t exist.
I have known women like that: they say disagreeable things just in order to rouse one’s emotions, and if they don’t succeed they are disappointed, lifeless, they have missed the goal.
The fire here, then, has the meaning of the manipura center, and that has a healing effect because the things which were separate and contradictory are there fused together; it is like the idea of the alchemical pot in which substances are mixed or melted together.
So you can either descend into the abysmal water to be healed, the baptismal water being the uterus resurrection is where you are made whole again; or you can pass through the fire.
Therefore John the Baptist said of Christ: “He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.”
The two forms of baptism refer to the two lower centers; in the fire you can be made whole, and the water is still more efficacious because it is deeper down.
To go further would mean getting into the earth and there you would be practically dead.
Death has been understood as the absolute cure; when Socrates was about to die, for example, he said a cock should be sacrificed to Aesculepius, the god of the doctors, for curing him.
But the figurative death in the water, and death or being burnt in the fire also mean regeneration, because in going back into any state where there is no ego consciousness, there is regeneration.
You realize that when, after feeling depressed and stale and fed up, you suddenly have a fine powerful emotion; you swear and rage, and feel ever so much better afterwards.
Naive people realized that long ago, they know that it is a great relief, the healing of an intolerable situation perhaps.
That was part of the old cathartic method; it was thought at first that each neurosis came from the fact of repressed emotions and if you only let them off, you would be all right.
Sure enough, when people start on their analysis and can blow off all their emotional steam, they feel very much better afterwards, and the doctor, if an optimist, will consider the patient healed, and he takes up his bed and walks.
But then he comes back again and it is not so easy to blow off steam this time, because it is always the same kind of steam and there is no pressure any longer.
So that is not the only difficulty, though it is a great thing from the therapeutic point of view; it is true that one is healed to a certain extent in the fire.
But the next thing is that one gets into the water which is deeper down.
Here our patient feels that the fire would be healthy, it might heal the wounds received from such animus thoughts if all the pent up emotions could be let loose telles quelles.fi
For instance, if the people in New York could follow that advice, nothing but the truth, for twenty-four hours, it would be helpful, the world would feel ever so much better.
She feels all the stored-up secrecy, the social lies, the things that are never told, everybody marvelling at everybody else, false pretensions and illusions. “Oh, what a marvellous woman!”
But she is not marvellous at all. “What a great man!”
But he is not great at all. You see people make wrong assumptions about each other.
Let them tell each other what they think or what they are, let them come out with their emotion, and it will heal the wounds made by the animus.
That is what this woman wants; therefore the old men sitting round that fire of emotions, hidden deep down in the bowels of New York as if it were a great danger. “And the old men answered: ‘In many caves beneath the earth there are fires such as this.’ ”
In other words, there are such centers of glowing emotions but they are not let out; there might be healing, were they not so secret.
“‘There is much blood, but it is necessary. The fires are fed by lumps of blood brought in from the market place.'” That is clear.
Naturally, this emotional fire is fed by the blood from the wounds people receive through their emotions, and that there are many such fires is equally true.
We forget that somewhere there is such a place, a fire that could give healing if it were only known.
Now this is the end of this particular vision, but the next one is a continuation of the same thought. It has a strange title: “Procession of the Dead.”
And here comes in an entirely new situation, indicated in Rider Haggard’s conception of Kor, where the tombs of the dead are always associated with She.
Why should the dead be associated with the anima or the animus? What have the dead to do with those two figures?
Dr. Harding: They represent the dead past. The things that have been built up in the unconscious through the past ages are presented to us through the anima or the animus.
Dr. Jung: That is the collective past, but you can include the individual past as well, all our relations with people, what we have lived and what we have heard; all those are empty husks, carcasses which once were alive, which functioned for a while and then withered away.
And that is still truer for the collective past, which is like a nation of ghosts; it contains
the thoughts and the lives of the ancestors down through the ages or what remains of those lives, the quintessence of experiences.
So these old men also represent the living storehouse of the tribal memories, as
the Council of the Elders in a primitive tribe functions as their library, or the archives, because they preserve the secret traditions, the mystical teaching, as well as the history of the tribe.
Those are the affairs of the old men and their function.
In the anima also, one sees that relation to a remote past. It is very beautifully portrayed where She is nursing a love story which is two or three thousand years old.
And in Benoit’s Atlantide, there is a funny librarian who found marvellous documents, old manuscripts by Plato among them, in the same mandala-like place in which Atlantide lived; the old Greek tradition was still preserved there, as if there had been an absolute continuity of tradition.
The structure of the animus is the same; he represents the collective wisdom, one could say, as the anima represents the collective feeling, what has always been felt about certain things.
So a man can be remarkably free in his mental conceptions, he can fly to any place in the world, assume any kind of new life he likes, as long as he identifies himself with his intellect; but when it comes to his feeling, he feels exactly as everyone else has always felt, and then he collapses quite miserably.
And women get very enthusiastic with their feeling-as if they could live-but then their thought comes up and breaks them down and they fall back on what is called natural mind.
There is apparently an incorruptible voice in women that says, “Oh well, that is all right, but we know exactly what you are up to.”
And feeling works that way in man.
Now the text goes on: I said to the old men: “You are old and you do nothing but wait. You seem to have no life. I will leave and go again into the market place.” I went forth.
What is her attitude to her animus? Is that as it should be?
Dr. Barker: She has had enough of them.
Dr. Shaw: But should she have left them? They represent a sort of wisdom too, don’t they? She leaves what she has learned in the past and goes out again into the collective.
Dr. Jung: Ah yes, would it not be much wiser if she should stay and learn?
Dr. Shaw: She should not have left so hastily, she might be overwhelmed; she should learn wisdom.
Dr. Jung: I think you are right, but perhaps somebody has another idea?
Mr. Allemann: I think she is quite right to go again into collectivity and try to create a new life.
Dr. Shaw: Should she not take wisdom with her? She appears to be taking none, what she has learned in her work here is lost to her. She should get hold of it again and then she can go out into collectivity.
Dr. Jung: That is a possibility.
She says they are just old things. But they may not be really dead.
Mrs. Zinno: I think that was impertinent even.
Dr. Jung: It was a mistake, but is there no justification for it?
Dr. Barker: The animus has so misguided her before that she is going to see if she cannot do without him.
Dr. Jung: I will tell you something: If we could divide our voices in this case, you would find that the young are more on the side of Dr. Barker, and the older people more on the side of Dr. Shaw.
You see it all depends upon the standpoint from which you judge her.
People who have had experience and exposed themselves enough to the foolishness of the world will say: “Why does she not at least take some wisdom with her?”
Of course she cannot stay forever in the temenos and shelter herself against reality, but she must understand what is waiting for her outside.
But the young people are below, and they want to come up and to put every grain of wisdom they can find into use, to turn it to their advantage.
Therefore one can say that only the young learn wisdom; old people never do, although they may already have acquired it.
The young people don’t want to enter life like fools.
And when they come upon the kind of wisdom which is a bit strong, a bit dangerous, they leave it behind because it might prevent them from living.
I have seen more than one case who got stuck in too much wisdom and were unable to live, and what is the use of wisdom when it stands in the way of life?
The young want to learn whatever there is to learn, and then go out into life and experience more.
People sometimes think that analysis will take the place of life, they protect themselves in that way against much nonsense that might be lived.
But mind you, if you don’t live your nonsense you will never have lived at all, and the meaning of life is surely that it is lived, not avoided.
Dr. Shaw: But she could still live if provided with a little more experience.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. That is what you feel, your intention is most benevolent, you want to prevent people from being too nonsensical.
But that is not the point of view of this young woman, she wants to earn her spurs, to have her own experience.
If she is too wise she won’t live, that is the drawback. Nobody should be protected against life. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1032-1147