Marie-Louise von Franz, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption – Introduction
Introduction
When you have analysands, you will notice they often have important archetypal dreams which they don’t recognize as such.
Sometimes people wake up from an archetypal dream deeply shaken and you needn’t say anything about it.
They themselves feel and know that something essential has happened. The whole transforming emotion has come through.
But other times you get dreams where people have very important archetypal motifs and tell them to you in a completely flippant voice.
They don’t realize in any way that there is something more than the usual in them. The only reaction they have, perhaps, is that instead of being shaken they are a bit puzzled.
They laugh a bit and say, “I had a funny dream last nightthe kind that doesn’t connect to anything I know.”
In that case, if you don’t realize it is an archetypal dream, if you don’t notice the depth of it, you miss an enormous chance because, as Jung pointed out, an archetypal experience is the only healing factor in therapy.
All the techniques we use help people to open up to the archetypal experience.
But only the unconscious sends an archetypal experience and that is an act of grace which we cannot force; we can only wait and prepare for it and hope it will happen.
If it doesn’t happen, you can’t do much.
You might see some improvement with good counseling and so on, but there will be no real cure, no real help.
Sometimes this helpful archetypal thing happens inconspicuously, so to
speak.
There’s a sneaky little dream people tell with a funny little grin and then you ask, “Any associations?” and they say, “No,” or tell you something they already knew, long ago . . . that’s something you must be aware of.
More and more I see that people have not learned how to fish for the right associations. Many patients tend to jump at an interpretation instead of giving an association.
They have a dream and say, “Oh, it’s the negative mother getting me again,” or something similar.
You must just brush that aside.
It is a conscious opinion; it might be right but ninety-five per cent of the time it can be wrong. And it is generally even a warding-off gesture of consciousness”Oh, I know all about that”in order to put it in the wastebasket.
So you have to say, “No, no, come. Look at it.
What do you associate to . . .”whatever is in the dream, and then you will find that with archetypal dreams, if people are not shaken by them, they generally have very few associations or very flat or poor ones.
“Fire?” you ask. “Fire burns,” they say, or “I once saw a fire,” something trivial like that.
In other words, the experience doesn’t come through, and in that case you have to know the depth and the emotional weight of what is happening, and you have to express it in some form.
Now, it is no use to flood people in therapy with mythological associations.
You must know them yourself, but you must not fire them at your patient like a machine gun.
You have to know them in order to be amazed and shaken yourself, moved by the motif, and then somehow you will find the right words or the right context to convey what you feel.
That can only be done on the spur of the moment.
You cannot learn it ahead of time.
But you can learn how to deal with archetypal material, to recognize it, to know its depth, and through that be ready for the right reaction. And that is why we practice fairy tale interpretation.
Fairy tales are much more difficult to deal with than local sagas, where the hero or heroine of the story is an ordinary human being.
In a saga, a man goes into a destroyed castle at night, say, and suddenly a snake turns up with a golden crown, asks to be kissed and turns into a
beautiful maiden and so on.
The man who experiences that is an ordinary human being.
He is you or me. And the story tells all his reactions, for instance that he thinks, “No, I don’t want to kiss such a disgusting cold animal,” and he is shivering with fear and then he thinks, “Oh, after all, the poor thing,” or whatever else he feels. All that is described. He has human reactions.
The folklorist Max Lüthi has written a book on the differences between a fairy tale and a saga that he has worked out very clearly.
You can say that a saga is the tale of a conscious human being who has a numinous experience of the unconscious. And the numinous experience
meeting a snake with a golden crown, sayis described as if it were also reality, but that is because all mythology deals with gods and ghosts
and demons as if they were as real as we are.
There is always this description of coming to a threshold, an ego that meets something shocking, unusual, exciting, dramatic, and then there’s a happy ending, or a failure and/or a dangerous threat; the hero has to escape and
return home.
I would say that these sagas closely parallel what still happens today.
In primitive and agricultural societies, people still have numinous
experiences. In so-called civilized life we chase away the night with electric lights and think we are “enlightened,” inwardly and outwardly protected against such things, but as soon as you live in the country where you have a long walk home in the dark, and the trees are rustling and it is completely pitch black, and you have drunk a glass or two too many, then everything can still happen!
Just as it always did in the past.
And so in sagas you have encounters with the unconscious that are told exactly as they happened. If they are exciting and interesting then the people tell them over and over.
“There was once a man in our village and he went up in the night, up there to that old derelict mill, and when he approached it there were lights and he heard a noise and he went in,” and so on.
Fairy tales, on the other hand, are an abstraction, as Lüthi calls them.
That means you don’t have a human ego encountering the world of the unconscious.
You have fantasy stories in which fantasy beings or archetypal images of the unconscious deal with each other.
That’s one way to put it. In a saga there is our world-light of consciousness and the hero, who goes somewhere and meets an archetype or several
archetypes.
In a saga there is always this going over the threshold and sometimes the fearful running back.
Now in a fairy tale, you have a storytellerthat’s an egowho tells about the dance of archetypes happening in the unconscious.
The hero in fairy tales is not a normal human being and has no human reaction.
He is not frightened when he meets the dragon. He doesn’t run away
when a snake begins to talk to him.
He doesn’t get the jitters when the princess turns up at night by his bed and tortures him, or whatever happens.
He is either intelligent or a Dummlinga stupid, dumb person.
He’s courageous, quick-witted or clever, or something of the kind in
a very schematic way.
And he just acts through the storybang, bang, bang, according to his nature. If he is courageous he fights everything.
If he is witty he always makes a trick out of everything.
He has absolutely no psychology, so to speak.
He is a schematic figure. And if we look at him closely, we see a purely archetypal figure.
The only ego in fairy tales is the storyteller, who turns up sometimes at the beginning and sometimes at the end, but not in all stories.
In certain countries, for instance in Romania, the storyteller might begin, “I once . . . ,” a kind of conventional formula, or, “At the end of the world, where there is no time and no space, behind the seven mountains and the blind dog, where the world is cluttered up with boards, there was once a king. . . ,” etcetera. And the storyteller recites that same little verse before every story: “At the end of the world, where the world is cluttered up with boards . . .”
That’s a sort of little verse.
He makes a kind of rite d’entrée, and at the end you have a rite de sortie, like ”I was at the wedding and I was in the kitchen and I stole some of the meat and the wine but the cook gave me a kick in the arse and that’s why I’ve now flown here and told you the story.”
Or, for instance, the gypsies say, “There was a beautiful wedding and they
ate and drank in happiness and I am the poor devil who has nothing to eat,” and then go around with a hat collecting money.
That is a rite de sortie.
The storyteller shows first that we are now going into another world and at the end describes coming out of it, generally in a slightly joking way.
And in between we hear about something that happened in the other world. So especially with these stories you must not project your own personal psychology and experience into them.
You really have to go at them like a naturalist who observes fishes or
treesas objectively as possible.
It is very important to learn this because when confronted with a dream, there’s always the danger that the analyst will project his or her opinion.
For instance, in comes a most effeminate young man who is not married and still lives at home with mama, and then you jump to the conclusion, perhaps even the right conclusion, “Oh, he is a mama’s boy.”
And then he dreams about being eaten by a big snake and you think, “He has a mother complex.” But that’s not an interpretation.
That is really just projecting what you think into the unconscious image.
It may be goes in a straight way. It always makes the most amazing detours.
You think, for instance, “Here is somebody who should detach from mama,” but then perhaps there comes a whole series of dreams
pushing him to improve his relationship to his mother.
And you must be agile enough, and at the same time objective enough, to say, “This is strange. This doesn’t suit me at all.
But that is where the unconscious is leading so let’s go with it.” And you can only do that if you don’t project your own opinion.
Then in the end there comes a very clever turn of the unconscious, and you see that all the time it was leading up to detaching the young man from his mother, but by an unexpected detour which you would never have been clever enough to think of yourself.
That’s why you have to try to be objective and not jump to conclusions. You can learn that lesson best from fairy tales.
You can read all about psychology but then you just have to look at what is there. What does the story tell apart from my opinion? That’s the crucial
thing to practice and to learn.
I once had a patient who had a negative mother complex. He came with many dreams, and was very often in a depressive, negative mood.
He, as a person, wasn’t like that but when he was in the anima he was always pessimistic.
He would come to the hour with such a face and say, “The unconscious has criticized me again.” And I would say, “Well, let’s hear it!”
And then he’d tell me a very good dream but with some negative motifs.
He just picked on the negative ones. “There, it says again I’m nothing. I’m lost, I am on the wrong track,” and on and on. I always just had to brush that aside and say, ”Come now, let’s begin at the beginning. Let’s look at it objectively.
Don’t have your awful black anima pouring her black stuff on it again before you’ve even looked at it.”
So even the patient may want to seduce you to twist the material according to your own opinions.
Ultimately, of course, objectivity is only an approximation.
We are bound to project our personality into a fairy tale; we see the things that appeal to us and we overlook things that are not in our makeup.
So even a so-called objective interpretation is far from completely objective, but at least one can fight those very primitive ways of projecting and make an attempt in that direction. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption, Page 9-13
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