1 February 1933 Visions Seminar LECTURE III
1 February 1933 Visions Seminar LECTURE III
The end of the last fantasy left us with the impression that our patient was passing too lightly over that peculiar vision, at least her words sound so.
She stepped over that barrier and went on as if it were a relatively simple and easy thing to do.
But, as a matter of fact, she leaves a considerable problem behind her; one would expect her to stop there, but she passed it like the wheel.
And I think I suggested a parallel between the hollow sound she heard when the hands were tapping the armor, and the particular way in which she passed beyond this obstacle.
Now what would one expect as the possible outcome of such an attitude?
Mrs. Crowley: That she had to face it again.
Dr: Jung: That is certain.
But what do you consider to be the result of the vision?
You see, the series of visions is a sort of unconscious piece of work, as if the unconscious were trying to digest or synthesize or elaborate something, and one feels definitely sometimes that a solution is produced, something rather satisfactory in the way of a symbol.
Naturally every result is symbolic and transitory, nothing will remain forever; we must accustom ourselves to the idea that we are not going to find anything of an absolutely final and definite nature.
We only get that impression from historical symbols, which are supposed to be eternal.
But they are by no means eternal, they have changed their meaning from time to time-sometimes in short periods and sometimes in longer ones-even within the Catholic church, which is tremendously rigid concerning the life of the dogma.
They hold that it is never dead, that it always lives and changes and develops.
But with our symbols the frequency, or the rate of change, is far more rapid, because it is a process of individual production.
So we cannot expect them to stand for a long time or to be wholly satisfactory; if they were, the process would come to an end.
In the course of these visions, however, we have found symbols that contained and expressed something most decidedly.
Now did you have the same feeling in this series? Is there anything here that appears
like a new thought or a new formula, something that seems to be satisfactory?
Mrs. Crowley: No, it did not to me.
Mrs. Sigg: The idea of the unconscious here seems to be that the animus represents one part of her being as it exercises an influence on two other parts, the women that are underneath and above. She first tries to pass the problem, and at the end has to send the animus back, so there seems to be a little progress.
Dr. Jung: You would emphasize this symbol of the phallic man? You see a particular value in that?
Mrs. Sigg: Not a value perhaps, but there seems to be too much libido of a certain kind in this Priapus figure. It is a hint.
Dr. Jung: I am quite satisfied with the fact that you emphasize that particular symbolism.
Now let us see what else there is in this vision which might be equally significant.
The opening of the egg, with the yolk pouring out and covering her up, seems to be the main content, and I must admit that this is not very important, it is an unsatisfactory
sort of rebirth symbolism.
But her discovery of that barrier is a decisive point, I should say.
That conveys something, and the particular symbolism contained in the barrier might be important.
In the drawing which I made of the three gods and the one goddess (p. 863), we touched upon the problem of the actual structure of our patient’s conscious and unconscious.
And here we have an allusion to two women and one man, but, as a matter of fact, there are three women because she is in the picture too. So she is here confronted with a new condition, but as it is not conspicuous she leaves it without seeing its importance.
I think, however, that we should pay particular attention to this symbolism, one man
and the two women plus herself.
Now on the ego side, we have just one female figure, herself.
On the non-ego side we have two women and one man.
The man is abnormal because he is a phallic Non-ego demon, he is somehow a bit overwrought, too much libido-there Mrs. Sigg was quite right.
The former constellation was entirely different, three gods and one goddess on the unconscious side, and the ego alone on the other.
But this time the number of the non-ego has been by one and the sex character has changed we have no longer three gods, only one; instead, we have two women, and one figure is lacking.
The unconscious functions are autonomous and therefore personified as independent beings.
Any unconscious trend, say a certain personal quality, has an autonomous life and is expressed in a personified way, as in the antique form of a demon or a god; therefore
the four functions were expressed in the vision as gods.
Now those two women have no divine or demoniacal attributes, but the man is a sort of demon.
Do you think that this is more normal than the other condition?
You remember, we said the three gods and one goddess was not quite what it should be.
Well, I should say the condition where the unconscious male figure is the animus would be rather more normal; for the animus is a very mixed figure, only partially human and partially an autonomous con tent of the collective unconscious, just as the persona is
only partially normal or human.
If you have to deal with a so-called human being who is identical with his persona, you soon understand how inhuman such a thing is.
The persona is a functional system, and only apparently human.
The human being is rather crushed by the persona, smothered and concealed by it.
You will have the greatest difficulty in arriving at the human being behind that mask; to pierce the mask of the persona is quite a job.
And the equivalent of a persona in a woman on the unconscious side is the animus (p. 891).
On the conscious side we have a layer of psychical functioning which is caused through the contact of the individual psychical being with the world of concrete objects.
As the psychical being influences objects, so the objective world influences the psychical being, not changing it altogether-it retains its original laws, its original determinations-but its surface will be changed, and we call that adaptation.
In a foreign country, for instance, you take on new manners, you speak a different language, wear different clothes; your surface will be changed through the influence of the objective world on the outside and your subjective factors from the inside, and the layer thus produced is called the persona.
That layer is an objective thing. It is, as I said, a functional system and not human at all.
And the same happens towards the collective unconscious.
To objectify it, one could say the collective unconscious manifests in the unconsciousness of a situation.
For instance, the situation here is conscious inasmuch as we know that this is a seminar about analytical psychology, and that this is Mr. So-and-So and Mrs. So-and-So.
But hundreds of things are absolutely unconscious to everyone of us, and that creates an atmosphere which certain people feel; some are absolutely dull, but there are others who can be influenced by an atmosphere to the nth degree.
That atmosphere is the collective unconscious, or the unconscious of a group, and it causes a peculiar unconscious reaction in every one of us.
We all immediately create a certain kind of protective mechanism against it, or we adjust ourselves to it, according to circumstances.
When you come here you don’t wear a bathing costume, for example, you wear decent garments such as fit the situation.
You react to the situation by putting on a certain seminar persona; and you do the
same for or against the atmosphere, you put on a certain kind of animus or anima for the occasion.
In the women a certain animus is constellated here, which you can often see; and in the men a certain anima, which you can also see.
So the animus and anima correspond to the persona, they are the equivalent on the other side.
I give you this explanation so that you can understand what such a change means, for something has happened since the last vision.
The situation with which we were then concerned was the three male gods and the one female god over against the ego.
The ego may be more or less simple, or it may be identified at the same time with a function, or with a figure of the collective unconscious.
In other words, one can be more or less inflated or deflated. In that former case our patient was confronted with a picture of the totality of the human being, the four functions, but they were expressed in that very particular way.
We have already said that this was not correct because the masculine element was quite clearly predominating; there should not be so many male figures in her unconscious, it shows that the unconscious prevails.
So we may conclude that she was inflated, overcome by it.
There should be at least an equality, two men and two women.
Mrs. Sawyer: The hollow sound might indicate an inflation.
Dr. Jung: Yes, we have to deal here with a certain inflation.
Now in the fantasy we have just dealt with, we have an entirely different picture.
We have three feminine figures and one male figure. How would you designate
the process that has taken place in between?
Mrs. Crowley: It is an enantiodromia.
Dr. Jung: Exactly, it is the movement one sees in the sequence of the hexagrams of the I Ching, there is always a change into the contrary.
Therefore the word enantiodromia, meaning things running over into their own opposite-it is a transformation into the opposite.
That has happened here.
There was something exaggerated, too much in one case, and therefore too little in the opposite case.
We see that something is again wrong, not quite as it ought to be.
Then the masculine element is peculiarly distorted; it is a sort of phallic demon, one could say an antique figure, but not in the antique sense of the word.
It is an elemental, rather, hardly more than an organ, it is not even human-without speaking of the divine.
You might see such half-formed creatures in the underworld of Dutch painters, like Teniers or Breughel.
Such a monstrosity points to the fact that the new condition which she has reached
is not yet normal, the abnormality expressing itself in too many women; the feminine element is predominating and the male is practically excluded as a human factor.
An enantiodromia has occurred between the two visions, the result being that what has been wrong on one side is now wrong on the other.
Then there is another indication.
Do you remember the proper position for the animus?
Mrs. Crowley: The ego, then the shadow, then the animus, is the outline you gave us.
Dr. Jung: Yes, so this might be a case of an ego that does not see its own shadow.
The new members may still not understand what that means.
It is a very abstract expression, but it simply means, in practical life, a person who is not aware that he has a number of very disagreeable inferior qualities which form his shadow.
A shadow is negative, dark, so one uses the word in a sort of metaphoric way, in order to designate such shadowy qualities.
Anyone who is unaware of his shadow is too wonderful, too good, he has a wrong idea of himself, and to that extent such a person is possessed.
If a man, he is possessed by his anima, who insinuates a goodconscience, say, or a feeling of superiority.
If it is a woman, she is possessed by the animus, who proclaims her to be particularly righteous, a great light socially, most respectable, or something of the sort, because
she is not aware of her disreputable side that is also in existence somewhere.
In that case, next to the ego where the shadow ought to be, is the animus or the anima.
A man is separated from his shadow by that anima illusion, or the illusion the anima produces.
And a woman is separated from the shadow by the animus, by the opinion that she is marvelous; all the darkness which she ought to see close to her is hidden by the figure
of the animus.
So the anima or the animus are between the ego and the shadow, the unconscious.
Therefore this barrier our patient is passing over so lightly really informs her that she is split.
A phallic demon is standing between herself and her shadow, and she should realize that she ought not to pass over it lightly, because this is an important statement about her actual unconscious condition.
What does it mean practically?
Miss Hannah: I suppose it is because she does not see herself as an obscene being.
Dr. Jung: Well, it is not a person or any other dignified man standing in front of her shadowy inferior side; it is a most indecent, definitely obscene figure.
You see, usually the animus acts as a sort of conscience, so it is personified as the parson, or the father perhaps, and one doesn’t think of such people as being particularly obscene.
Women have perfectly respectable animi as a rule; that the animus should be represented by such a being is an almost unique instance, so it must be a very special case.
Mrs. Crowley: Could it also be compensatory for her own conscious attitude? Would her conscious attitude also be a bit monstrous in the sense of being abnormal?
Dr. Jung: We should be careful about judging, but we must always come back to the conscious attitude, because the last decisions take place in the conscious.
No matter how little and feeble an affair that flame of consciousness may be, it is the important thing, it is the condition of our world.
If there were no consciousness, there would be no world; the whole world, as far as it enters into our consideration, depends upon that little flame of consciousness, that is surely the decisive factor.
In the unconscious one cannot judge because of the great darkness there, but in the conscious there is light, and so there are differences; there is a criterion in consciousness which gives one a measure by which to judge.
Now take that figure into your own heart.
When do you assume that you have an obscene animus?-if that is not too indelicate a question. Or when do you assume that a man would have an obscene anima?
That is perhaps easier, one always knows better when one is speaking about other people.
Mrs. Crowley: In either case would it not be a repression, when one is trying to get on top of circumstances? An unconscious reaction?
Dr. Jung: It could be a sort of repression. But what would be the conscious attitude in such a condition?
Miss Hannah: That you just were not aware of it at all.
Dr. Jung: If one is not aware of sexuality, it is possible that the sexuality would be in the unconscious.
But would you assume that under those circumstances the animus would be obscene?
Mrs. Crowley: No.
Dr. Jung: No, just the contrary.
You see, a woman is unaware of her sexuality because she has an absolutely O.K. animus with a long black coat and white tie, a highly respectable individual who is doing his level best to prevent her from becoming aware of her unconscious sexuality.
So there is another condition.
Mrs. Baynes: Could it be connected with the fact that she had the three
pagan gods in the unconscious? That would show that she had not really
assimilated the pagan point of view, so it throws itself upon her very
violently in this figure.
Dr. Jung: That is an idea! You see, when the unconscious produces
such a picture in a fantasy or in a dream, one must always assume that it
really wanted to do so, that it did not make a mistake.
The old Freudian
theory is that the unconscious makes mistakes; to put it crudely, that a
certain species of animal should not have been, it should have been
something else.
Now we know that one cannot say one had a wrong
fantasy, or a wrong dream, that it ought not to be like that.
As a matter of fact, it is exactly what was intended; otherwise it would not have been at all, that species of animal would not exist.
No matter how outrageous and wrong a symbol seems to be, it must be the expression of a definite intention; the unconscious had the definite intention to produce such a phallic demon.
Therefore we may assume the obscenity’ must be impressed upon her, it must become obvious to her that such obscenity exists.
Now Mrs. Baynes suggests an idea which really ought to be taken into consideration, that in this woman’s vision of the three pagan gods the Osiris, the Mexican god, and presumably a Hindu god-obscenity was not mentioned.
But we know those faraway heathen gods were often obscene.
This woman may have quite forgotten that in heathen religions and cultures the fact of sexuality was treated in an entirely different way,
it was not subject to the same moral judgment as in our Christian era.
So
it is possible that the unconscious has really the tendency to impress
upon her that those heathen gods, with whom she seems to be flirting,
have also that phallic aspect, which means practically a sort of sensuality and licentiousness that is absolutely strange to our ideas of a deity.
As a matter of fact, it was also offensive to the taste of later antiquity.
Those scandalous qualities of the Olympian gods did much to destroy their authority; they became ridiculous by their innumerable offenses.
Even the people of that time began to make jokes about them, about Zeus, for instance, who performed the most amazing stunts in order to seduce certain semidivine girls.
Those animal transformations-the swan, the bull, and the famous rain, for instance-are really ridiculous.
If one had heard those stories and seen them painted on the walls everywhere, one would finally see that that sort of god ought to disappear, that one must have something more decent.
And so the soil was finally prepared for a spiritual conception of god.
It might be quite possible to defend this emphasis on the phallic element, but we must have the actual reason why it should be impressed upon her now.
It sounds like a historical dissertation upon the morality of the gods, and why should that be particularly emphasized in her case?
Mrs. Baynes: You said that in her conscious point of view she was rather unusually Christian, so that would be a reason why she should be impressed.
Being a Christian means that she has overcome the idea of the phallic quality of the gods. From the point of view of history she would be a good Christian, but from the point of view of the development of her conscious she would not have assimilated this phallic quality, because it is not allowed to come in.
Dr. Jung: But she is a rotten Christian.
Mrs. Baynes: She was a good Christian, but she has now revolted, and it
is the revolution that is now being brought to consciousness.
Dr. Jung: That is true. She has a Christian attitude as everybody has,
whether they confess any particular creed or not; it is the outcome of two thousand years of Christianity. In that sense she is a good Christian.
But she is also not a good Christian at all because she has the scientific training and ideas of our days, she is very enlightened and rational.
Therefore that flirtation with antique gods.
For as soon as you drop out of the authority of the real Christian dogma, you are no longer living by the Christian symbol; if you are outside the walls of the church, you are outside the saving taboo of the symbol, and then you are again in the immediate neighborhood of nature demons, etc.
You get into a mental sphere where the Christian authority is no longer valid, and it remains to be seen what you encounter there; it is a particular adventure, and people go into it without knowing what they are doing.
Within the dogma of the church you are upheld, whatever you encounter is taken care of somehow, there is nothing which is absolutely incalculable or inhuman, everything is more or less reasonable.
But the moment you get out of it, you live in a world that makes no sense whatever.
You fall into chaos, and you don’t even know where you are going because you are walking backwards away from the church, you get away always looking at the church, the dogma, like the famous ass in
that most idiotic book, Swiss Family Robinson, which has been translated into English and very much enjoyed there.
You remember, that family was shipwrecked, but anything that could be used was rescued from the ship; always when they needed anything, a hammer, tongs, nails, it came floating in from the wreck, and then they always thanked God and wept.
So when they needed an ass, God sent the ass from the wreck.
But he was a disobedient ass, he became more and more unruly because they were
so good to him-you see the influence of good people-and one day they called him and he would not come, and then they saw in the distance
an enormous python-mind you, on a South Sea island where there were crocodiles and every animal under the sun that never exist together.
This great python was just waiting, but the disobedient ass, turning his back, did not see it; the more they called to him, the more the ass laughed and refused to come, and when they went to get him the ass walked backwards right into the python.
That is an excellent picture of the man who walks out of the church.
He walks out of it backwards, not seeing into what he is going, he only sees the church he is leaving. It is the psychology of the so-called atheists, who live entirely on the revolt from theism; if it were not for theism, they wouldn’t know what kind of condition to express.
And it is the same with Protestants; they live upon the protest against the Catholic church and do not see that it leads into endless dissociation.
There are about four hundred Protestant denominations; it is a tree that branches out most tremendously, but it is fast decaying.
Moreover a church without priests is no church-never before was there a church without priests.
For what is a Protestant parson? He is a private individual who sometimes has something to say on Sundays.
We do not realize into what we are going when we walk backward like the Swiss Family Robinson’s ass.
We get into the primeval world where anything is still possible, where no order has
yet been established, into the spiritual world of cavemen who have only just begun to have spiritual experiences.
We saw that in the beginning of our visions, where the patient went back through the ages right down to the primitive man; then only did she begin to move forward.
She increased, as it were, her spiritual experiences, and reached finally the
condition of the antique man-we are now meeting the antique gods.
And there for the time being she got stuck, and here is a piece of realization for her, namely, here she realizes what antique gods really are compared with the Christian concept of the deity.
As I said, then, when man steps back out of the protective walls of the dogma, he still sees that picture from which he is receding, but he does not see the future; it is as if he were going into the future with averted eyes.
As a matter of fact, it is the peculiarity of our consciousness that we always look back, we only see the past, we do not see the future.
Occasionally, as if by mistake, we get a glimpse of the future, but nothing in
comparison with that fully colored picture of the past.
You see, in whatever direction we develop we usually make the mistake of being fully
conscious-unnecessarily conscious-of what we come from, and we are hardly able to construct a picture of where we shall land in the future.
But the unconscious goes a very different way.
The mistake of our consciousness lies in assuming that the unconscious works in the same way.
It is just the contrary, the unconscious does not look back.
Despite the fact that it speaks the language of the past exclusively, it tries to foresee and portray the future.
It is always several lengths ahead in the future, but speaking the language of the past.
You see, we like to talk about the future, about what will happen tomorrow, or in ten years, but we are singularly unable to foresee or construct the future; we only see
the past, though our interest seems to be in the future.
While our unconscious, on the other hand, talks of the past and actually means the
future, it is always anticipating and constructing the future.
The theory that dreams really foresee the future is correct, that is the nature of dreams.
You will realize that as soon as you get out of a sort of neurotic condition in which you leave too many of your conscious problems to the unconscious, overburdening it with the problems which you could deal with consciously just as well.
You fail to do so because it is too difficult, you do not feel sure enough, you are afraid. Therefore the unconscious is impeded and smothered by matter really belonging to the conscious, so it naturally cannot work in the proper way.
Under these conditions you cannot expect any anticipation of the future.
Nevertheless anticipatory dreams turn up now and again despite all that rubbish.
It is not that you consciously repress such problems, it is just neglect, as when one is
rather glad when a disagreeable letter disappears somewhere between newspapers so one doesn’t have to think of it; that is the way one gets rid of disagreeable things.
But if you can keep all these annoying matters in your conscious, you relieve the unconscious, and you will see that it more and more develops the faculty of anticipating the future.
But mind you, not as was assumed in the antique theory of dreams, when they literally portrayed the future, so that such and such an event was surely going to happen.
The unconscious is not concerned with our interests really, it is not concerned with what we are going to eat and drink, or what Mrs. So-and-So is going to do, inasmuch as it is not spiritually important; but it is tremendously concerned with the regulative principles of our lives.
For instance, our physical health plays a role in the unconscious, and our psychological attitude is all-important.
Why that is so is a matter for philosophical questioning.
As a matter of fact, the unconscious portrays the psychological future, prepares the attitudes you will later assume, that is its main functioning.
In following up the dreams of people in whom the unconscious has assumed its proper role, one finds very interesting ones which were preparing a future attitude when one did not know at all why such an attitude would be needed.
Only later on, after certain events have occurred, sometimes even of a very objective nature, does one discover why that attitude was prepared in the individual.
It is exceedingly interesting to watch how the unconscious works in that respect.
Miss Wharton: Would you call those prophetic dreams?
Dr. Jung: You can call them prophetic, but with that peculiar psychological
inflection naturally. In the so-called prophetic dreams of antiquity,
if you dreamt, for instance, that your house or the house of your
father had collapsed, it meant that it was really going to collapse, it was a
concrete event.
But if we dream that a house collapses, once in thousands of cases it might mean a real house, but as a rule it does not.
Usually it would be a psychological dream meaning that an attitude or a certain
mental condition was going to collapse, because a house symbolizes a man’s psychical structure, his attitude, his beliefs, the way in which he lives, and so on.
For example, pieces of furniture mean contents, either of the conscious or of the unconscious.
And baggage, pieces of luggage, very often mean complexes; therefore those dreams where you are hurrying to change trains and discover you have a great pile of luggage
and no time to carry it to the other train mean that you are not getting over your complexes, there are too many and the unconscious is overburdened.
Such dreams are not to be understood literally, they are not prophetic in that sense, but they have that quality of psychological anticipation.
Or suppose someone is going to die.
The death is not necessarily anticipated because in the unconscious it is not so terribly important whether a man is alive or dead, that seems to make very little impression
upon the unconscious.
But your attitude to it matters, how you will take it, whether you believe in immortality or not, how you react to such and such an event, that matters to the unconscious.
One could say the whole psychological side of human life was the thing that is chiefly anticipated or constructed by the dreams.
Now to return to that person moving backwards out of the church: he is so fascinated by the fact that he can get away from it that he does not see into what he is getting, going back in time.
To turn round and see where he is going is, as I said, exactly what the conscious cannot do, because it always conceives in the way of its past.
But the unconscious looks out into the future and says, now take care, something is approaching which you don’t realize.
Therefore it is so important that we study dreams, or these unconscious visions which are built in exactly the same way, they also construct and anticipate.
You see, our patient’s descent into the ages to primitive man, even to the animal, was not foreseen at all.
She was still looking at the church, while saying to herself with a certain satisfaction: “Now I am two miles away from it, now three miles, it is getting smaller and smaller, it has almost disappeared, and now I am quite enlightened,” and so on.
And the unconscious says: you will soon be in the year 2000 B.C., and now it is 6000
B.C.-like the time machine-and now this is the animal.
Then she gets a shock and can go no further back, because there consciousness comes to an end. So in order not to lose consciousness, she must now look at the way she has come.
For while she was receding to the animal, there were not only Christian churches in front of her, there were Latin and Greek temples, she saw all that.
And then she began to move forward, and she has now arrived in the antique sphere where Christianity is beginning.
She is now in a tremendous struggle whether to discover Christianity anew, or whether
to proceed on the antique line.
That is really a tremendous problem, one might say an entirely historical problem, but no, it is a problem of the future.
Enormous numbers of people are now leaving the church, and they will unconsciously follow that same way.
In Russia the church is even persecuted.
And millions of people are absolutely indifferent to the church.
Confucianism also, the most revered and strongest educational system in China, is now fading away.
All these people are giving up the historical forms, and they will take the same way, apparently back into history.
But that going back into history, into the unconscious, symbolizes what is waiting in the future.
So on the way back this woman learns what the primitive religions and the
antique gods were in reality, what they meant.
Now this is not merely historical fantasy, because she actually experiences it; it dawns upon her that she cannot flirt with antique gods without being caught.
For the antique gods, as you know, were great frauds and had any amount of
scandalous affairs, and if she gets into touch with them, she will naturally pay the penalty.
So her unconscious is trying to make her realize the phallic demon that is hidden in those gods, for this was the intrinsic element of an antique cult.
You know about that flirtation with antiquity which began after the French Enlightenment, about 1730 or 1740, with the Encyclopedists, and continued from that time on, producing the classical period; it expressed itself also in the Georgian style of architecture in England, and the Empire style in France, and it influenced literature to a great extent all over Europe.
Now that was apparently within the Christian sphere, but naturally they came up against the fact that antiquity contained a certain element which was not to be trifled with.
That led to the famous educational letters of Schiller, in which for the first time he began to worry with the problem of the opposites, with the question: “How can I
assimilate the primitive man, what does he mean, or what does antique civilization really mean?”
But he did not arrive at a full realization because he was still in the Christian sphere, despite the fact that he admired the beauty of the antique.
Goethe came much nearer to it, one sees the conflict in Faust, but the solution was put into the life of the hereafter; Faust had to die to answer that problem.
And Nietzsche came nearer still because he was more modern; his idea of the superman was his attempt to construct a solution of the conflict.
Therefore he had to destroy “the tablets of value”; he needed, he said, a hammer in order to philosophize.
You see, morality, or the moral aspect of a truth, is always that aspect of truth which leads into action.
A truth that remains nothing but a truth which you have in your pocket, means nothing; you can have a lie in your pocket just as well.
But if that truth begins to work in you, if perchance it induces you to act accordingly, that is the modern aspect.
In the early admiration of antiquity, the moral problem was no bother with the exception of the Renaissance, of course.
In the classical period of which I am speaking, from 1790 to 1830, it was a truth that was in a box, a truth that did not bother them or go back on them.
Then later Schiller and Goethe were real prophets; having insight, eyes to look into the future, they were dimly bothered with that problem; and more and more with the advancing years the truth began to behave very pragmatically.
As Mr. Dooley says, a truth begins to be a truth when it begins to work.
So the truth that had been kept in a box suddenly took on an uncanny life, it began to work, and then it did become a moral problem.
And the next effect was that Nietzsche took a hammer and went after the Mosaic law and the principle of Christian morality.
In that respect Nietzsche was also a prophet of the future.
That thing is now finding expression, you see what is already happening in Europe. Russia is an example.
By removing yourself from the dogma you get into a world which is increasingly chaotic and primitive, in which you must find or create a new orientation.
You must create a new cosmos out of the chaos into which you fall when you leave the
Christian church.
The church has been a cosmos, but it is no longer, we are living in chaos; therefore the general confusion and disorientation.
We are profoundly bewildered through this experience which we cannot put into the frame of things that we have hitherto known.
Take such visions, for example.
Formerly they would have been called the morbid fantasies of a hysterical woman, but now I really puzzle my head off trying to see and understand something in them.
And formerly, to give
meaning to dreams was called superstition, but we now begin to consider them very seriously.
That is merely an expression of the primitive world in which we find ourselves, we step into the primeval forest and there we rediscover the science of the jungle, namely, dream interpretation, visions-antiquated stuff.
But, mind you, it is not antiquated stuff, it is the intuitive sense which we must develop in order to find the means to produce a new order of things, to get a new orientation in this bewildering and most adventurous world into which we have dropped.
The vision of our patient is very important in so far as it gives us a hint at least of those aspects which one must realize when one penetrates the primitive world. In a primitive world where one is not acquainted, one must realize the nature of the actually existing powers.
It would be preposterous, insane, to be afraid of herds of elephants here, but in central
Africa it is very reasonable to be afraid because there are such things.
So in our foreground rational world nothing happens, there are no herds of elephants or poisonous snakes or anything of the sort.
But the primitive world into which we are going is full of them, and we must learn this
function again which was unnecessary when we were in the church.
We did not need any particular intuition then; before the nineteenth century nobody spoke of intuition; only in the late nineteenth century was it discovered that there was such a thing.
Behind the walls of the church, one had better not have it, or one got into hot water with the priests.
But nowadays we have an intuitive philosophy, because critical systematic philosophy won’t work any longer.
It uses only the old means, and therefore even philosophers find it necessary to produce something new, a faculty or function which helps them to see behind corners or in the
dark.
We even speak of an intuitive basis of knowledge.
And therefore I speak of dream interpretation, a thing absolutely forbidden by the church, and that is all because we stepped out of the church.
We would not need to bother about these things if the adventures with which we were concerned were not real; if they were only empty play or fantasy, we would not need analysis.
But since the adventures which are threatening us are very real, we do need such an orientation; we must try very earnestly to understand the hints we get from dreams and fantasies.
So our patient has to learn that this phallic aspect of those primitive gods is a very serious thing really, and if she does not realize it those ancient gods will reach her just by that-by sexuality, she will be possessed by a phallic demon.
As a matter of fact, we are all now possessed by sexual matters, we have the Freudian theory, which expresses that possession by the sexual demon, as an answer to our blindness.
When we left the church, we got into a realm where those gods lived, with the result that we suddenly became possessed by a primitive sex theory.
The same with the power theory, that is another side of primitive life that possesses us, as an answer to the fact that we did not see that we were getting within the reach of the powers of primitive psychology.
For in primitive psychology there are certain psychical contents which are autonomous and exceedingly powerful, impulsive, and serious, and man is their victim. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 893-907