Carl Jung,Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process
Lecture 7
Ladies and gentlemen:
Those of you who were present at that more or less famous Bailey Island seminar may remember that we discussed there the case of a scientist.1
I cannot give you the particulars in regard to his personal life because he is a famous man and his case might be recognized.
I have already with his complete consent published some of the facts, for naturally, in treating of his dreams, I have had to give you certain details about his life.
I always find it a little awkward to deal with individual medical cases as the material is for the most part confidential so that in my writing I have often felt these restrictions as a very difficult handicap.
I have seen so many things in my career about which I could talk, but the material is too delicate.
The people concerned are sometimes in high positions, in the limelight, and so I don’t care to say too much.
Now this case is exceptional since the man himself is a scientist and has given me permission to use at least a part of his material.
You remember he is about thirty-three or thirty-four years of age.
His neurosis, at the time of which I am writing, had extended over two years.
During this period he produced a series of about fifteen hundred dreams and made a record of them with very careful self-observation.2
The unique fact is that he started his analysis all by himself; for when he came to consult me, I talked to him for only about twenty minutes, just long enough to
tell him that I would not touch his case because at first he could just as satisfactorily observe himself, being a very intelligent man.
I added that later, when he had observed enough, I would tell him something about his case.
So he collected about four hundred dreams, all carefully observed and recorded, some of which I am using in these talks.
Out of those four hundred, I picked fifty-nine, all of which contain a certain motif which we call, as you know, the mandala motif.
This is a particularly important and central symbol in dreams.
I talked to you a good deal about it last year, so I won’t repeat what I said then.
But our next dream, which we will presently take up, contains that same symbol.
For this reason it is more or less unavoidable to say something further about the
mandala.
We shall be concerned with this motif throughout these talks.
I want to state at the beginning, however, that the underlying processes which are
demonstrated in these dreams and visions are quite general.
It is also not only my own patients who have manifested such phenomena.
Colleagues of mine who had no idea that such things existed have had similar instances of the appearance of the mandala in the dreams of their patients.
I have also found this symbol in literature, as well as in historical material.
The fact is we meet it practically everywhere in the profane and sacred literature of the whole world.
We have it, for instance, in certain Pueblo rites, as in the Mountain Chant of the Navajos.
But also we have it in the mosaic plaque discovered under the altar of the old Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza, and in the Calendar Stone of Mexico City, and I do not doubt that if we were in the possession of the texts of the old Mayan civilization we would see the same ideas expressed, with the same significance, as in the writings and art of the East.
This motif of the mandala is neither an invention nor a tradition, although in certain civilizations it has been handed down from generation to generation.
In Tibet they have special prescriptions in the sacred texts that describe exactly how such a mandala must be formed.
We find the same thing in other places.
For example, in the alchemy of the Middle Ages there was a traditional form for mandalas, very beautiful examples of which you may have seen in the famous church window of Chartres Cathedral.
Also in old illuminated texts you find beautiful representations of Christ and the
symbols of the four Evangelists, often arranged in the four corners with the Rex Gloriae, the King of Glory, the Triumphant Christ, in the center.
We find it also in ancient Egypt, and—well, everywhere.
Now of course in the old civilizations the mandala had a traditional form, but we cannot say that the same is true now.
With us, as a rule people have never been taught of such motifs and have no idea that they exist.
They have been forgotten long ago.
Yet we find that they come up all by themselves, quite spontaneously, in dreams, in dreams of normal people and of morbid cases, even in psychoses, and when they appear, they always have the same meaning.
For the symbol of the mandala is always an attempt at self-cure, exactly as with the Pueblo mandala which was used in the Mountain Chant ceremony for healing, the sick man being placed in the center of the mandala to be made over.
To return now to the last dream with which we were concerned in the Bailey Island seminar, it was the dream of the church—that rather amusing dream—where, after the solemn part, there came a sort of second act which was quite funny, where wine was served.3
That dream was again, one might say, the result of a peculiar situation which had preceded it.
In this earlier dream there had been a square room, and somebody had said that someone was going to reconstruct the gibbon in that place.
Now the gibbon is a monkey, an ape, and that thought was very disagreeable to the patient because he instantly had the feeling,
“This is morbid; it is something awful”; and he tried to get away from it.
To understand this dream you must put yourself into the frame of mind of such a man.
He came to me in a more or less disintegrated state; he had lost his self-control, had taken to drink, was doing everything wrong under the sun.
He had lost himself completely.
Naturally he had the idea that there must be something fundamentally wrong with him.
Not being familiar with the structure of the neuroses, he had a suspicion that perhaps he might be crazy.
To him the square room was a sort of cell in a lunatic asylum in which he was made into a monkey—a sort of regression was to be produced in him so that he would be compelled to go back into the state of an anthropoid.
It was after this that he had the church dream, that crazy dream which clearly showed that his attempt to cover himself with a traditional religion was ineffective.
The dream is so ambiguous and ridiculous that it is quite obvious that it would not give him any protection against the threat of the monkey that looked to him so morbid and dangerous.
The next dream after the one of the church dream, as one might expect, is a return to the motif of self-cure, of course, coupled with the same uncanny idea of the remaking of the monkey.4
Remember I told you then that this reconstruction of the anthropoid is merely a
reconstruction of the instinctual personality, which ought to be made over, because when a man loses himself as he had, he has lost his guidance, his concept of himself.
He has no central idea anymore; he obeys every impulse.
He is really already the monkey who simply reacts to stimuli in his surroundings.
After his futile attempt then to protect himself by a religion that simply did not work anymore in his case, he is put again into the same situation as before, namely, in that square room so the dream begins with the statement: “I am in the square room again.”
All sorts of complicated ceremonies are going on which have the purpose of transforming animals into human beings.,
That is very much the same idea as in dream eleven only in reverse order.
There the idea was that a monkey should be made; nothing was said about the transformation.
Now in this case, in dream thirteen, the idea is that animals, presumably monkeys or any other sort of animals, should be transformed into human beings. ~Carl Jung,Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process, Page 174-176
