Carl Jung: Dreams: The Symbols of the Self.
The vision of the “world clock” is neither the last nor the highest point in the development of the symbols of the objective psyche.
But it brings to an end the first third of the material, consisting in all of some four hundred dreams and visions.
This series is noteworthy because it gives an unusually complete description of a psychic fact that I had observed long before in many individual cases.
We have to thank not only the completeness of the objective material but the care and discernment of the dreamer for having placed us in a position to follow, step by step, the synthetic work of the unconscious.
The troubled course of this synthesis would doubtless have been depicted in even greater completeness had I taken account of the 340 dreams interspersed among the 59 examined here.
Unfortunately this was impossible, because the dreams touch to some extent on the intimacies of personal life and must therefore remain unpublished.
So I had to confine myself to the impersonal material.
I hope I may have succeeded in throwing some light upon the development of the symbols of the self and in overcoming, partially at least, the serious difficulties inherent in all material drawn from actual experience.
At the same time I am fully aware that the comparative material so necessary for a complete elucidation could have been greatly increased.
But, so as not to burden the exposition unduly, I have exercised the greatest reserve in this respect.
Consequently there is much that is only hinted at, though this should not be taken as a sign of superficiality.
I believe myself to be in a position to offer ample evidence for my views, but I do not wish to give the impression that I imagine I have said anything final on this highly complicated subject.
It is true that this is not the first time I have dealt with a series of spontaneous manifestations of the unconscious.
I did so once before, in my book Psychology of the Unconscious, but there it was more a problem of neurosis in puberty, whereas this is the broader problem of individuation.
Moreover, there is a very considerable difference between the two personalities in question.
The earlier case, which I never saw at first hand, ended in psychic catastrophe—a psychosis; but the present case shows a normal development such as I have often observed in highly intelligent persons.
What is particularly noteworthy here is the consistent development of the central symbol.
We can hardly escape the feeling that the unconscious process moves spiral-wise round a centre, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the centre grow more and more distinct.
Or perhaps we could put it the other way round and say that the centre—itself virtually unknowable—acts like a magnet on the disparate materials and processes of the unconscious and gradually captures them as in a crystal lattice.
For this reason the centre is (in other cases) often pictured as a spider in its web, especially when the conscious attitude is still dominated by fear of unconscious processes.
But if the process is allowed to take its course, as it was in our case, then the central symbol, constantly renewing itself, will steadily and consistently force its way through the apparent chaos of the personal psyche and its dramatic entanglements, just as the great Bernoulli’s epitaph says of the spiral: “Eadem mutata resurgo.”
Accordingly we often find spiral representations of the centre, as for instance the serpent coiled round the creative point, the egg.
Indeed, it seems as if all the personal entanglements and dramatic changes of fortune that make up the intensity of life were nothing but hesitations, timid shrinkings, almost like petty complications and meticulous excuses for not facing the finality of this strange and uncanny process of crystallization.
Often one has the impression that the personal psyche is running round this central point like a shy animal, at once fascinated and frightened, always in flight, and yet steadily drawing nearer.
I trust I have given no cause for the misunderstanding that I know anything about the nature of the “centre”—for it is simply unknowable and can only be expressed symbolically through its own phenomenology, as is the case, incidentally, with every object of experience.
Among the various characteristics of the centre the one that struck me from the beginning was the phenomenon of the quaternity.
That it is not simply a question of, shall we say, the “four” points of the compass or something of that kind is proved by the fact that there is often a competition between four and three.
There is also, but more rarely, a competition between four and five, though five-rayed mandalas must be characterized as abnormal on account of their lack of symmetry.
It would seem, therefore, that there is normally a clear insistence on four, or as if there were a greater statistical probability of four.
Now it is—as I can hardly refrain from remarking—a curious “sport of nature” that the chief chemical constituent of the physical organism is carbon, which is characterized by four valencies; also it is well known that the diamond is a carbon crystal.
Carbon is black—coal, graphite—but the diamond is “purest water.”
To draw such an analogy would be a lamentable piece of intellectual bad taste were the phenomenon of four merely a poetic conceit on the part of the conscious mind and not a spontaneous product of the objective psyche.
Even if we supposed that dreams could be influenced to any appreciable extent by auto-suggestion—in which case it would naturally be more a matter of their meaning than of their form—it would still have to be proved that the conscious mind of the dreamer had made a serious effort to impress the idea of the quaternity on the unconscious.
But in this case as in many other cases I have observed, such a possibility is absolutely out of the question, quite apart from the numerous historical and ethnological parallels.
Surveying these facts as a whole, we come, at least in my opinion, to the inescapable conclusion that there is some psychic element present which expresses itself through the quaternity.
No daring speculation or extravagant fancy is needed for this.
If I have called the centre the “self,” I did so after mature consideration and a careful appraisal of the empirical and historical data.
A materialistic interpretation could easily maintain that the “centre” is “nothing but” the point at which the psyche ceases to be knowable because it there coalesces with the body.
And a spiritualistic interpretation might retort that this “self” is nothing but “spirit,” which animates both soul and body and irrupts into time and space at that creative point.
I purposely refrain from all such physical and metaphysical speculations and content myself with establishing the empirical facts, and this seems to me infinitely more important for the advance of human knowledge than running after fashionable intellectual crazes or jumped-up “religious” creeds. ~C.G. Jung, Dreams, Page 317–320
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