Marie-Louise von Franz: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche [The Self]
When a person has inwardly struggled with his anima or with her animus for a sufficiently long time and has reached the point where he or she is no longer identified with it in an unconscious fashion, the unconscious once again takes on a new symbolic form in relating with the ego.
It then appears in the form of the psychic core, that is, the Self.
In the dreams of a woman, the Self, when it personifies itself, manifests as a superior female figure, for example, as a priestess, a sorceress, an earth mother, or a nature or love goddess.
In the dreams of a man, it takes the form of someone who confers initiations (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a nature spirit, a hero, and so forth.
An Austrian fairy tale recounts the following:
A king posts a soldier to keep watch on the coffin of a cursed black princess who has been bewitched.
It is known that every night she comes to life and tears the guard to pieces.
In despair, not wanting to die, the soldier runs away into the forest.
There he meets an “old zither player who was, however, the Lord God himself,” and this old musician advises him how to hide in different places in the church and what to do so that the black princess cannot find him.
With the help of this miraculous old man, the soldier succeeds in evading the princess’s attack and in this way is able to redeem her.
He marries her and becomes the king.
The old zither player who is really God himself, expressed in psychological language, is a symbol of the Self.
He helps the soldier, that is, the ego, to overcome the destructive anima figure and even to redeem it.
In a woman, as we have said, the Self takes on a feminine form.
The following Eskimo tale may serve as an example:
A solitary maiden, who has been disappointed in matters of love, is carried off to heaven by a sorcerer who travels about in a copper boat.
He is actually the spirit of the moon, to whom men are accustomed to pray for success in the hunt.
Once, when the moon spirit has gone out, the maiden visits a little house that stands next to that of the moon sorcerer, and in it she finds a “little woman,” who wears bizarre clothing made of “the sewed-together guts of the bearded seal.”
This little woman, who also still has a little daughter living with her, warns the heroine of the story about the moon spirit, saying that his real intention is to kill her.
She says he is a wife murderer, a kind of Bluebeard.
In order to save her, the little woman weaves a long rope, on which the maiden will be able to climb back down from heaven to earth.
This she does on the new moon when the little woman is able to make the moon spirit unconscious.
The maiden lets herself down on the rope, but when she reaches the earth, she does not reopen her eyes fast enough, although the little woman has explicitly told her to.
As a result she is turned into a spider and can never become a human being again.
The “old zither player who is the Lord God” in the first tale is a typical manifestation of the Self as the “wise old man” as he appears in the psyche of a man.
The sorcerer Merlin appears in similar fashion in ancient stories, as does the god Hermes among the Greeks.
The “little woman” with the gut-skin clothes in the above story is something similar, a figure of the Self in a woman.
The old musician saved the hero from his destructive anima, and the little woman here saves the heroine from an Eskimo Bluebeard animus in the form of the spirit of the moon.
However, afterward, through the fault of the maiden, things still manage to go wrong.
We will discuss this later.
A Self figure may appear in dreams not only as a wise old man or a wise woman, but just as frequently as a young even childlike figure, for the Self is something relatively timeless that is at once young and old.
The following dream of a man provides an example of the Self as a youthful figure:
From across the road, a boy came riding down into our garden.
(There were no fence and bushes there as in reality. The boundary lay open.)
I couldn’t be sure whether he came on purpose or whether the horse brought him here against his will.
Standing on the path to the studio, I watched his arrival with great pleasure and feasted my eyes on the sight of the boy on his beautiful beast.
It was a very small but extremely powerful wild horse, the very soul of energy (it resembled a boar).
It had a thick, silver gray, long-haired, bristly coat.
The boy rode by me past the space between the house and the studio, and then dismounted to lead his animal carefully past the new flower border to keep it from treading on any of the red and yellow tulips that bloomed there in glorious profusion.
In my dream this bed had just been newly put in by my wife.
Here’s your passage reformatted to your exact specification — each sentence stands alone, separated by a single vertical break for clarity and accessibility:
This youth stands for the Self and the potentiality for a renewal of life, for the creative élan and fresh mental orientation that his appearance produces, in which everything is once more full of life and a spirit of enterprise.
Turning to the unconscious can in fact really give this to a person.
Suddenly a life that up to that point seemed boring and unfree becomes a rich adventure that never seems to want to end, rich with potential for new directions.
For a woman, this same figure often takes the form of a miraculous girl.
An example is the following dream of a forty-eight-year-old woman:
I was standing in front of a church and cleaning the pavement with a broom.
Then I suddenly had to cross a river, across which a heavy plank had been laid.
A student was there, and I wanted him to help me.
But then I saw that all he wanted was to make things hard for me by making the plank sway.
Then suddenly on the other bank there was a little girl who reached out her hand to me.
I thought she would never have the strength to support me, but when I took hold of her hand, she smilingly pulled me to the other bank, effortlessly, with supernatural force.
This dreamer was a religiously inclined person.
In the dream, however, she is obviously no longer able to remain in the Protestant church.
She has lost access to it, but she is still making an effort to keep the way to the church clean.
However, it seems she now has to cross a river instead.
This is a common symbol for a fundamental change of attitude.
The motif of the student was associated by the dreamer herself with the fact that the evening before she had been thinking that perhaps she could satisfy her inner spiritual search through some course of study—something that the dream clearly advised against.
She dares to try to cross the river by herself, and a Self figure, the little girl, comes miraculously to her aid.
She is little, but supernaturally strong. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 291-294
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
psyche psyche psyche psyche psyche psyche psyche psyche psyche psyche psyche psyche
