quite intellectual
people are unable to admit the reality of psychical facts
LECTURE I
15 October 1930
Dr.Jung:
Ladies and Gentlemen: My plan was to go on with the series of dreams that we have been dealing with these last two years. 1
But I have just given a course of German lectures about unconscious pictures, 2 and as a consequence I have been asked to repeat that course here.
So I had to make up my mind to interrupt the Dream series and to give the same lectures in English which I have just given in German.
Now, naturally, I have been asked by only a few persons, and since we are living in a democratic country, I should much prefer to have you vote on this plan.
I must explain to you that the lectures are about the development, one might say, of the transcendent function out of dreams and visions, and the actual representations of those images which ultimately serve in the synthesis of the individual: the reconciliation of the pairs of opposites and the whole process of symbol formation.
( The Class voted for the pictures.)
I have not always applied that “picture method,” as it is now sometimes called.
People always try to make a method of everything that seems to work, but I much prefer to treat the subject not as a method, but as a series of events which we observe, without drawing too many and too far-reaching conclusions from it.
We don’t know enough about it to call it a method, a word which in natural science means an absolutely certain way which must yield certain results. It is not that.
It is a point of view, a sort.of hypothesis, and I don’t even want to give the impression that it is a usual procedure.
As I said, I prefer to deal with that subject as just a case which we observe and on which we pronounce no opinion or judgment, whether the thing is advisable or not advisable.
It is certainly
not a method in the sense of being a necessary procedure, that one
ought to draw pictures.
People take it up because it is a natural expression,
as when one’s words do not suffice to explain a point under discussion,
one makes a drawing or a diagram to explain it.
For there are certain happenings in the development of the human psyche where things become particularly confused and dark, and people become incoherent and cannot express themselves.
Situations come up in dreams which seemed to be very clear, but as soon as you are back in the conscious state, everything is blurred and you find it exceedingly
difficult to describe what you actually experienced; you have no words to explain those intricate situations.
There are many thoughts which cannot be thought clearly; and there are many inner experiences which are apparent only to the inner eye or heart-whatever you like to call that organ.
It seems perfectly simple there, but human language is inadequate, and then people take to drawing.
Also, certain experiences in dreams or visions are so expressive, so full of color and plastic life, that they recommend themselves to the dreamer, and he naturally yields to the temptation to reproduce what he has seen.
So there are all sorts of reasons why people take to it.
Of course, when I see that the quality of my patients’ experiences suggests representation, I encourage them, because I have learned through long experience-about fourteen yearswhen to encourage the people to whom it is useful.
It helps them to concretize inner events.
For most people are suffering from the prejudice that they are not real because they cannot be handled, or even talked about in a logical way.
In such a case the drawing is invaluable.
It concretizes; it makes a statement so that other people can see it.
It is there in reality as if painted on the wall; they begin to think that it does exist.
You see, we are still so foolish in our psychology that quite intellectual people are unable to admit the reality of psychical facts.
I see that in practical analysis all the time.
For instance, a person speaks reverently about a venerable old man though he has a grudge against him and thinks he is a damned fool.
But he denies the thought, he insists that he would never say such a thing. Then I ask: “But who has said it?”
We have not enough objectivity to admit that we have had a certain thought, that
it has been present.
I am not speaking of idiots and liars, but of perfectly reasonable everyday people with good and logical minds.
I have to train people with logical minds.
I remember a professor of psychiatry who had a dream in which he showed tremendous emotion about a certain man-he was beating him up-and when he told it to me, I remarked
th~t it was obvious from his dream that he had some personal emotion or resentment about Mr. So-and-So. “Oh no, I have not, I never had such a feeling.”
Then I said: “Now tell me, have !had that dream?”
But he could not acknowledge the fact that such a thought had been present.
It is as if a very strange bird should turn up in this room-a flamingo, for instance-and then fly out of the window again.
One might say that it was impossible that such a bird had been here; it was a hallucination.
But as a scientist I would say it was a fact that a certain vision had taken place, and there was no getting away from it.
People deny their thoughts and visions till they become so flimsy that they simply evaporate into thin air and it seems as if they had never existed.
Again and again, patients have had quite definite experiences, but they could not hold therri because they were inner experiences; they exposed them to conscious criticism, which poured in and lacerated those facts till after a while nothing
was left.
I remember a case of compulsion neurosis, a man who ought to have taken up his studies again at the University.
We had made the agreement, after long and tedious work, that he would do so if the analysis showed that it was necessary.
The moment came when I said: “This is what you are to do, provided you can make up your mind.”
And he acknowledged it, he said it was perfectly logical.
Next day he came and announced that he had had an interesting dream that night.
I was about to ask if he had registered his name at the University when he told me
the dream, which showed me that he had made a re-gression.
I said to him: “Tell me, are you not receding from something into the pci.5!?” “Not
at all,” he said, “I feel perfectly all right.”
I said: “But what about 0~ff plan-the plan we agreed to yesterday?” “What plan? I can’t remember.”
It was all gone-entirely gone! So I said: “Oh, if it goes as easily as that, then you go as easily as that-there is the door!”
That case was finished. No use continuing an analysis under such conditions.
What happened there was simply that he had submitted that psychological fact to the disintegrating process.
He allowed it to go on till no trace was left.
And that happens all the time with inner experiences; they are disintegrated by actual facts and criticism. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Lecture I,
15 October 1930, Page 3-5
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