Marie-Louise von Franz, Dreams, The Inner Eye
The equation of this light or fish’s eye that exists in man’s unconscious with the eye of God is a widespread archetypal image.
This eye looks at us from within.
In its light lies the only nonsubjective source of self-knowledge.
It is described as a bodiless inner eye in the human being.
It is surrounded by light or is itself a light.
Plato and many Christian mystics call it the eye of the soul.
Others have called it the eye of intelligence.
Others have called it the intuition of faith.
Others have called it the eye of simplemindedness.
Only through this eye can man see himself.
Only through this eye can man see the nature of God.
The nature of God is itself an eye.
Synesius of Cyrene speaks of God as the “eye of yourself.”
Insofar as man opens his inner eye, he participates in God’s light.
When man closes his physical eyes in sleep, his soul sees the truth in a dream.
Aeschylus says that when we sleep the soul is lit up completely by many eyes.
With these eyes we can see everything we could not see in the daytime.
A Hermetic philosopher declares that the sleep of his body created illumination of the soul.
His closed eyes saw the truth.
This eye which looks at us from within is related to what we usually call conscience.
Victor Hugo describes this eye in a poem.
When Cain killed Abel, he fled from God.
He rested near a mountain with his family but could not sleep.
He saw an eye wide open in the darkness staring at him.
“I am still too close,” he cried out and continued his flight.
He fled for thirty days and nights until he reached the seashore.
When he settled there, he saw the eye in the heavens again.
He pleaded with his family to hide him from God.
They pitched a tent for him.
Still Cain saw the eye.
His family dug a deep grave for him.
He sat on a stool inside the grave.
They pushed a tombstone over him.
When the grave was closed and he sat in the dark, the eye was in the grave and looked at Cain.
This eye is not always perceived to be God’s eye.
It can also be the dark god who stares at us.
A legend from St. Gallen tells of a bishop who broke his fast before Easter.
A beggar came to him for help.
When the bishop touched the beggar, he saw a huge eye on the man’s breast.
Terrified, he crossed himself.
The beggar, who was the Devil, dissolved in smoke.
As he disappeared, he cried out that the eye had observed the bishop eating meat during Lent.
Many gods and demons have a large eye on their breast.
They see everything that takes place on earth.
This motif points to a fact observed in dream analysis.
The unconscious often seems to possess knowledge of things previously inexplicable.
Rationally, we cannot know these things.
Terms like telepathy do not explain the phenomenon.
Dreams speak to people of things they cannot consciously know.
The unconscious seems to have diffuse intuitive knowledge.
This knowledge reaches into our surroundings.
Jung called it “absolute knowledge.”
Jung also called it the “luminosity” of the unconscious.
Sometimes we experience the unconscious as if we are being observed by a personified being.
Other times it feels like we are observed in a nonpersonified background.
It can feel like a mirror that reflects our nature.
The eye itself can reflect us impersonally.
It does not always act like the eye of a living being.
Jung says the eye motif or mandala motif represents a reflection of insight into ourselves.
This can be illustrated with a dream example from Jung.
A cautious, introverted youth dreamed he was riding on horseback with two other young men.
They crossed a wide field.
The dreamer was in the lead.
They jumped over a ditch full of water.
The two companions fell into the ditch.
The dreamer jumped across unhurt.
An old man in a hospital had the same dream.
He was very enterprising and troubled his doctor and nurses.
In the youth’s case, the dream encouraged him to take the lead.
In the old man’s case, the dream showed what he still does but should no longer be doing.
Strictly speaking, however, these are conclusions which we draw from the dream image.
The image itself does not encourage nor does it warn.
It simply represents a psychic fact—as impersonally as a mirror.
In that way dreams are simply like nature.
If a doctor finds sugar in the urine of a patient, nature does not choose to comment on this in any way.
The doctor must draw the conclusion that there is diabetes and prescribe the diet and advise the patient to exercise discipline in order to keep the diet—otherwise the doctor cannot help him.
This is also how it is with dreams.
They show us a psychic fact.
It is up to us to interpret it correctly and draw the moral conclusions.
Sometimes, however, we find the opposite, namely that a dream gives advice like a well-meaning person.
I had a rich elderly woman analysand who had been alcoholic and had given up drinking.
But the neurotic problems which lay behind her alcoholism, especially a general demoralization and slovenliness, still had to be worked out.
Once she dreamed that a voice told her, “You need a breakfast corset.”
I asked her in great detail what time she ate breakfast, what kind of corset she wore, when she put it on, etc.
I discovered then that out of vanity she wore a very tight corset but never put it on in the morning.
Rather, she breakfasted in her dressing gown, then dawdled around the apartment in her negligée the rest of the morning and put her corset on around noon.
Only then did her day actually begin.
After this information, the dream no longer needed interpretation.
We both laughed heartily.
In view of these facts, it is understandable that the unconscious or the dream spirit that creates the dreams appears to us at times rather like a conscious being full of intentions and at other times rather like an impersonal mirror.
The eye motif lies, as it were, in the middle.
It is both something personal and at the same time a mirror.
The fact that almost all the religions of the earth include a partly personified god-image or a nonpersonified world order (such as the Chinese Tao) and the fact also that in historical periods of the same culture the emphasis at some times was more on a personal god-image and at other times on an impersonal world principle—these facts are probably connected with the above experiences.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition we have a predominantly personal god-image.
But the definition of God as “an intelligible Sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” has played a paramount role in the thinking of many great Western theologians, mystics, and philosophers.
In this connection I would like to refer the reader to Dietrich Mahnke’s excellent book, Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt (Darmstadt, 1966).
The appearance of a personified inner being, that is, a personified god-image, looking at or speaking to us, supports the development of feeling and of ethical behavior.
In the case of that woman it was indeed a question of a moral problem.
The image of an impersonal soul-center or cosmic psychograph, as Giuseppe Tucci calls the mandala, satisfies rather the knowledge or intuition of man as an image of a great divine unified world-center, or of a supra-personal meaning behind the world of appearances.
However, one must not become excited by supposing that this provides any proof concerning the existence of God.
It is rather a question of God’s images manifesting spontaneously in the soul of man.
These images are therefore anthropomorphic and do not say anything definite about an ultimate metaphysical existence of the soul or of the divinity.
These images are simply the only ones we can observe empirically in our daily work and whose effect on the personality of the dreamer can be recognized.
In Jungian psychotherapy we use dreams for the most part to guide the analysand to certain insights or self-knowledge.
There is no psychic healing and no progress without self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge, however, in the sense of recognizing what one is (as Gerhard Dorn describes it), not in the superficial notion which the ego has about itself or in taking over the analyst’s idea about one’s self.
This is also the reason that, in actual practice, we do not give the analysand a diagnosis.
For the most part, we say only, “Let us see how your own soul views your situation”—namely what the dreams say.
In this way any personal interference of the analyst in the life of the analysand is restricted, at least as much as possible.
I once had an analysand who had to give up alcohol, which he did bravely for a couple of months.
Then he said to me, “Listen, don’t you think I could dare now to have one glass of beer in the evening at the Sternen Hotel with Betty? Just one glass? I am always so lost in the evenings, so lonely.”
Although I knew this was not advisable, I just said, “I don’t know; I don’t want to be your governess. Try it and we will see how the unconscious reacts.”
He did this, drank his glass of beer and went home.
That night he dreamed of driving his car up a mountain, all the way to the top.
But when he got there he did not brake properly and the car rolled backward all the way down the mountain until he was back where he started.
I merely said, smiling, “Tableau!”
He immediately realized that “only one glass of beer” would not work.
His “inner eye” had seen the situation of the previous evening in that way and not in any other. Marie-Louise von Franz, Dreams, Page 18-22
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