~Suzanne Gieser, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process
In 1936 and 1937, Jung delivered consecutive seminars in Bailey Island, Maine (see figure 1), and in New York City.
The seminars ran for a total of eleven days, six days on Bailey Island and five days in New York. Jung’s lecture series was titled “Dream Symbols of the Individuation
Process.”
The dreams presented were those of physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958).
Jung went into far greater detail concerning the personal aspects of Pauli’s dreams
than anywhere else in his published work.
Central to these seminars was showing how the mandala as an expression of the archetype of wholeness spontaneously emerged in the psyche of a modern man, and how this imagery reflects the healing process.
Jung defines archetypes as innate to man, having an invariable core of meaning that is “filled out” with experiential material conditioned by culture and environment.
Therefore it was important to him to provide evidence for this hypothesis by holding up examples from different cultures and epochs, especially from the sphere of religious symbolism.
The themes that Jung chooses to pick up in these seminars are all related to his quest to develop and expound his theories of the psyche.
In the lectures, Jung touches on a wide range of themes.
He presents his theory of dreams; mental illness; the individuation process; regression; the principles of psychotherapeutic treatment; masculine psychology and the importance of the anima, shadow, and persona; psychological types; and psychic energy.
He comments on the political currents of the time such as Nazism, communism, fascism, and mass psychology.
He reflects on modern physics, causality, and the nature of reality.
From the religious sphere, he chooses to illustrate his theories with examples from the Mithraic mysteries, Buddhism, Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, The I Ching, Kundalini Yoga, and ancient Egyptian concepts of body and soul.
From the Christian heritage, he focuses primarily on Catholicism and the symbolism of the Mass and the Trinity and also on the content of the newly discovered noncanonical gospels and Gnostic ideas.
He also mentions the Dreamtime concept of Aboriginal Australians and their beliefs in healing objects, the Apollonian and Dionysian cults of ancient Greece, Nordic mythology, Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, and the Khidr in the Koran.
From the world of literature, he refers to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Goethe’s Faust, and Meyrink’s The Golem.
He also discusses the Exercitia of Ignatius Loyola and the visions of Zosimos.
The connections to Jung’s further work on these topics is provided in the notes.
Figure 1. Jung at the Bailey Island seminars. [See Featured Image]
In summary, we see here many of the budding themes that germinated during the years 1937–57 in the ongoing development of Jung’s psychology of religion.
From his initial studies in mythology and religion from 1912 onward, in the early 1930s, Jung drew his comparison principally from Eastern esoteric practices, such as Kundalini Yoga and Daoism.
After this, his focus shifted to the Western tradition, principally medieval alchemy and Christian symbolism.
These themes were then deepened and further explored in the 1940s and 1950s.
WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT THESE SEMINARS?
Most of Jung’s preserved texts and seminars in English have been either translated from German, or, when they were given in English, professionally transcribed and thereafter edited.1
Moreover the translations of Jung’s written works into English have gone through many revisions and “rewritings.”2
As a result, today’s reader has been deprived of a valuable heritage, the fascinating
evidence of the author’s creative process.
These seminars comprise Jung’s most extensive oral presentations in spoken English in front of an American audience.
They were only very lightly edited, in order to, as stated in the introduction to the seminars by the Notes Committee, “keep the talks as nearly as possible as Dr.
Jung delivered them.”
The Notes Committee consisted of three pioneering women doctors and
Jungian analysts who lived in the United States: Kristine Mann, Eleanor Bertine, and Esther Harding.
Here in this almost verbatim transcript is a chance to “listen in” to the way in which
Jung spoke in English.
Here also is textual evidence of Jung’s intuitive, associative way of thinking, a style that would lead him to meander in many different directions, so much so that he
was unable to keep to his original plan of covering the complete dream material—the eighty-one unconscious visions and dreams that he had selected to illustrate Pauli’s individuation process— during his six days at Bailey Island.
Of these eighty-one, he managed to cover only thirty-four.
Just as important, here is a spontaneous survey of topics that were uppermost in Jung’s mind during September 1936 and October 1937.
As the audience was composed of benevolent followers, Jung could allow himself to be informal.
It was the explicit wish of the organizers that the seminars should be “as strictly private and informal as the [preceding] Harvard event had been prestigious and formal.”3
No newsmen were allowed.
The lectures contain spur-of-the-moment responses to questions from the
audience.
They were given in front of a limited audience of especially invited people, usually
Jung’s followers, analysts, students, and analysands.4
The seminars were turned into simple transcripts from shorthand notes made by a few selected seminar members, then copied, bound, and distributed before Jung had the chance to comment, change, or edit them.5
Jung actually wrote to ask for a copy of the Bailey Island notes to review and edit in connection with a request from the publishing house Harcourt Brace and Company to publish the seminars.
Jung requested that a note should be added to the introduction of the seminars that read: “Dr. Jung has consented to let these notes be distributed to those present at the talks without his final suggestions or corrections. Any errors or shortcomings that have occurred are the responsibility of the Notes Committee.”6
The second part of the seminars, those held in New York in 1937, were originally not planned for, so that, in a sense, the seminars given at Bailey Island were at the time considered “completed.”
But even as Jung sent his request for a copy to review, there were budding plans
for another trip to America for the autumn of 1937.7
These plans may have played a role in holding back the publication of the Bailey Island seminars.
In the end, these publication plans were never realized, but then, considering how much Jung disclosed in the seminars about Wolfgang Pauli’s personality and family, what would have remained in a publishable version of the seminars?
Instead, the seminars were (as was the case with many other seminar notes transcribed from Jung’s lectures and speeches) printed and circulated privately to a restricted list of subscribers.
For many years they were kept in Jungian libraries, accessible only to readers on approval, for instance, if the reader had completed a certain number of hours of Jungian analysis.8
THE CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING THE SEMINARS AT BAILEY ISLAND
In 1935 Jung celebrated his sixtieth birthday and was appointed titular professor of psychology at the ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Zurich.
Two years before, in 1933, he had started to give lectures at the ETH that were open to the public, lectures that became so popular that it was difficult to find a seat.9
In August 1935 Jung decided to give a lecture at the Eranos conference on a selection of Wolfgang Pauli’s dreams, called “Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process,” without disclosing the identity of the dreamer.10
The lecture on Pauli’s dreams was held less than a year after Pauli had ended analytical contact with Jung in October 1934.11
This was Jung’s third lecture at the Eranos conferences, a yearly event held in Ascona, Switzerland, on the shores of Lago Maggiore.
The Eranos meetings were initiated by Mrs. Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, a Dutch woman with a strong interest in Jung’s psychology, symbolism, art, and religion, especially the encounter between Eastern and Western religions and philosophies.12
In August 1935, Jung had already received an invitation to Harvard University to participate in the tercentenary celebrations that were scheduled to take place from September 16 to 18, 1936, at the occasion.
He was also to receive the honorary degree of doctor of science.13
Once the news about his coming to the United States was released, he was swamped with requests for different kinds of engagements, social as well as professional. Kristine Mann, Eleanor Bertine, and Esther Harding invited him to come and give lectures to their circle.
Apparently Jung gave them a choice of topics for the subject of the seminars, and they chose “the individuation process traced through a series of dreams or fantasies.”14
During the early months of 1936 they made plans for Jung and Emma Jung’s visit.
They arrived on August 30 in New York.
The Jungs had received many invitations and started their sojourn by spending the weekend at the home of Anglican bishop James De Wolf Perry, in Providence, Rhode Island.15 (His son, John Weir Perry, was twenty-two at the time and later
became a Jungian analyst and psychiatrist.)16 During the Harvard celebration, the Jungs stayed with Stanley Cobb, professor of neurology.17
After the tercentenary events, at which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a featured speaker, Jung was interviewed and made statements about Roosevelt and world politics that he later may have regretted.
He said: “Before I came here, I had the impression that one might get from Europe, that he was an opportunist, perhaps even an erratic mind. Now that I have seen him and heard him when he talked at Harvard, however, I am onvinced that here is a strong man, a man who is really great.”
In the newspaper article, Jung was quoted as saying that he “paid his respects to dictators, explaining their rise as due to the effort of peoples to delegate to others the complicated task of managing their collective existence so that individuals might be free to engage [in] ‘individuation.’ ”18
The seminars on Pauli’s dreams were given at the small Library Hall at Bailey Island, off the oast of Maine, where Kristine Mann had her ancestral home.
Her father, a Swedenborgian minister, had purchased a cottage on the island where Mann had spent her childhood summers, a location that was reminiscent of her mother’s native Denmark.
Beginning in 1926, during the summer months the three women had their analytical practices in Dr. Mann’s house on the bank overlooking the ocean (otherwise, they had their practices in New York).
The house, known locally as the “the Trident,” had a posted sign at the doorbell advising, “Ring once for Dr. Mann; Ring twice for Dr. Bertine; Ring thrice for Dr. Harding.”19
In January 1936 already more than a hundred people had applied to attend the seminars.
Harding wrote to Jung that they would have to impose “drastic restrictions” to keep the number to what the Bailey Island Hall could handle.20
There were also many requests for private sessions during his stay, and it seems that Jung at first declined but changed his mind, perhaps giving in to “clamorous” requests.21
These sessions would have been given in the afternoons, while the seminars were held each morning for two hours.
The lectures began with replies to written questions to the preceding lecture, if any had been handed in.
The seminar event at Bailey Island was framed by festivities, all kinds of parties, where everybody had the chance to contribute and to meet and talk with the Jungs.22
A film called The Mountain Chant was shown to the participants of the seminar, made by Laura May Adams Armer.
Mrs. Armer was almost certainly among the participants of the seminar.
The film portrays the sacred Mountain Chant ceremony of the Navajo Indians.23
There were also charades, dramatic sketches, singing, and folk dancing.
Claire Dewsnap remembers participating in a charade representing the four psychological types, in which she took the part of intuition.
Jung, who entered heartily into all these activities, guessed rightly and said, “That must be ‘intuition’ jumping up and down recklessly from the chair to the top of the piano.”
Those who got to be his partner in the folk dancing were especially elated.
On the evening of the final seminar there was a snake dance.24
The weather was rather cool, around seventeen degrees Celsius, with a light rain, and thick fog covered the island during the whole event; only at the very end, when they were leaving the island, a glorious sun appeared.
Despite the fog, the Jungs seemed to have immensely enjoyed the Maine coast,
exploring it by sailboat.25
Sadly, no list of participants has been found.26 Of the hundred or so participants, only a few are identifiable.
A great help in this regard has been the preserved photographs taken by Francis
B. Bode at the occasion.27
There is also a short silent movie made by Dr. Eugene Henley capturing Jung and the participants gathering at Bailey Island Library Hall.28
Henrietta Bancroft was one of four note takers; the others were Natalie Evans, Ruth Conrow, and Ruth Magoon.29
Three of them took down Jung’s words in shorthand during the first hour and transcribed the work in the afternoon.
The fourth, who was a court stenographer, preferred to work alone and did
the second hour of the lecture.30
Afterward, all the notes were given to Sallie Pinckney, who edited and bound them and provided copies to the attendees of the seminar. ~Suzanne Gieser, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process, Introduction, Page 9-13
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