Carl Jung, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process
Lecture 7
Ladies and gentlemen:
Those of you who were present at that more or less famous Bailey Island seminar may remember that we discussed there the case of a scientist.
I cannot give you the particulars in regard to his personal life because he is a famous man and his case might be recognized.
I have already with his complete consent published some of the facts, for naturally, in treating of his dreams, I have had to give you certain details about his life.
I always find it a little awkward to deal with individual medical cases as the material is for the most part confidential so that in my writing I have often felt these restrictions as a very difficult handicap.
I have seen so many things in my career about which I could talk, but the material is too delicate.
The people concerned are sometimes in high positions, in the limelight, and so I don’t care to say too much.
Now this case is exceptional since the man himself is a scientist and has given me permission to use at least a part of his material.
You remember he is about thirty-three or thirty-four years of age.
His neurosis, at the time of which I am writing, had extended over two years.
During this period he produced a series of about fifteen hundred dreams and made a record of them with very careful self-observation.
The unique fact is that he started his analysis all by himself; for when he came to consult me, I talked to him for only about twenty minutes, just long enough to tell him that I would not touch his case because at first he could just as satisfactorily observe himself, being a very intelligent man.
I added that later, when he had observed enough, I would tell him something about his case.
So he collected about four hundred dreams, all carefully observed and recorded, some of which I am using in these talks.
Out of those four hundred, I picked fifty-nine, all of which contain a certain motif which we call, as you know, the mandala motif.
This is a particularly important and central symbol in dreams.
I talked to you a good deal about it last year, so I won’t repeat what I said then.
But our next dream, which we will presently take up, contains that same symbol.
For this reason it is more or less unavoidable to say something further about the mandala.
We shall be concerned with this motif throughout these talks.
I want to state at the beginning, however, that the underlying processes which are demonstrated in these dreams and visions are quite general.
It is also not only my own patients who have manifested such phenomena.
Colleagues of mine who had no idea that such things existed have had similar instances of the appearance of the mandala in the dreams of their patients.
I have also found this symbol in literature, as well as in historical material.
The fact is we meet it practically everywhere in the profane and sacred literature of the whole world.
We have it, for instance, in certain Pueblo rites, as in the Mountain Chant of the Navajos.
But also we have it in the mosaic plaque discovered under the altar of the old Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza, and in the Calendar Stone of Mexico City, and I do not doubt that if we were in the possession of the texts of the old Mayan civilization we would see the same ideas expressed, with the same significance, as in the writings and art of the East.
This motif of the mandala is neither an invention nor a tradition, although in certain civilizations it has been handed down from generation to generation.
In Tibet they have special prescriptions in the sacred texts that describe exactly how such a mandala must be formed.
We find the same thing in other places.
For example, in the alchemy of the Middle Ages there was a traditional form for mandalas, very beautiful examples of which you may have seen in the famous church window of Chartres Cathedral.
Also in old illuminated texts you find beautiful representations of Christ and the symbols of the four Evangelists, often arranged in the four corners with the Rex Gloriae, the King of Glory, the Triumphant Christ, in the center.
We find it also in ancient Egypt, and—well, everywhere.
Now of course in the old civilizations the mandala had a traditional form, but we cannot say that the same is true now.
With us, as a rule people have never been taught of such motifs and have no idea that they exist.
They have been forgotten long ago.
Yet we find that they come up all by themselves, quite spontaneously, in dreams, in dreams of normal people and of morbid cases, even in psychoses, and when they appear, they always have the same meaning.
For the symbol of the mandala is always an attempt at self-cure, exactly as with the Pueblo mandala which was used in the Mountain Chant ceremony for healing, the sick man being placed in the center of the mandala to be made over.
To return now to the last dream with which we were concerned in the Bailey Island seminar, it was the dream of the church—that rather amusing dream—where, after the solemn part, there came a sort of second act which was quite funny, where wine was served.
That dream was again, one might say, the result of a peculiar situation which had preceded it.
In this earlier dream there had been a square room, and somebody had said that someone was going to reconstruct the gibbon in that place.
Now the gibbon is a monkey, an ape, and that thought was very disagreeable to the patient because he instantly had the feeling, “This is morbid; it is something awful”; and he tried to get away from it.
To understand this dream you must put yourself into the frame of mind of such a man.
He came to me in a more or less disintegrated state; he had lost his self-control, had taken to drink, was doing everything wrong under the sun.
He had lost himself completely.
Naturally he had the idea that there must be something fundamentally wrong with him.
Not being familiar with the structure of the neuroses, he had a suspicion that perhaps he might be crazy.
To him the square room was a sort of cell in a lunatic asylum in which he was made into a monkey—a sort of regression was to be produced in him so that he would be compelled to go back into the state of an anthropoid.
It was after this that he had the church dream, that crazy dream which clearly showed that his attempt to cover himself with a traditional religion was ineffective.
The dream is so ambiguous and ridiculous that it is quite obvious that it would not give him any protection against the threat of the monkey that looked to him so morbid and dangerous.
The next dream after the one of the church dream, as one might expect, is a return to the motif of self-cure, of course, coupled with the same uncanny idea of the remaking of the monkey.
Remember I told you then that this reconstruction of the anthropoid is merely a reconstruction of the instinctual personality, which ought to be made over, because when a man loses himself as he had, he has lost his guidance, his concept of himself.
He has no central idea anymore; he obeys every impulse.
He is really already the monkey who simply reacts to stimuli in his surroundings.
After his futile attempt then to protect himself by a religion that simply did not work anymore in his case, he is put again into the same situation as before, namely, in that square room so the dream begins with the statement: “I am in the square room again.”
All sorts of complicated ceremonies are going on which have the purpose of transforming animals into human beings.
That is very much the same idea as in dream eleven only in reverse order.
There the idea was that a monkey should be made; nothing was said about the transformation.
Now in this case, in dream thirteen, the idea is that animals, presumably monkeys or any other sort of animals, should be transformed into human beings.
That is soothing; it is just as if the unconscious were trying to introduce the same idea that had been so upsetting in the former dream, in a different way, a less offensive way.
Of course this is only an introduction.
Whenever the unconscious tries to introduce a new theme in such a nice soothing way, we can be sure that soon afterwards the same unconscious will say something that is very disagreeable.
It is a sort of capitatic benevolentiae, a capturing of your goodwill before saying something very disagreeable.
It sounds quite all right, that animals should be transformed into human beings, which means that the animal reactions, the animal instincts, should be transformed into human reactions.
That is what we all wish, and every well-meaning person would say that is just the thing we should work for.
Now two snakes suddenly appear and try to run away to opposite sides, and the dream says they must be removed at once.
You see snakes are relatively low animals.
They usually represent the lower part of our psychology, that part which presumably reaches down into the spinal cord.
Snakes are chiefly spinal cord animals; their brains amount to very little.
So whenever snakes appear it must refer to a very deep-rooted instinct.
This is a statement you will just have to accept.
To give any proof of it would lead us much too far afield.
These two snakes represent a split, a dissociation.
There should be one snake, as there is one spinal cord.
There should not be a split; there should be a unified something.
But in the case of our dreamer there is a split, a disagreement shown by the movement to the opposite sides.
Also these snakes are obviously trying to escape.
The dreams say they should be at once removed, which means there must be no split, no dissociation about it; nothing must be allowed to run away.
The dreamer has an instinctive impulse to run away, just as anyone, faced with a situation which he feels to be impossible, looks around and asks himself, “Where is a hole, through which I can slip out?”
That is the meaning of the two snakes.
Instinctively you look to the right and to the left to find out where you can escape.
And, it is for this reason, as the dream says, that they must be removed.
Such an interpretation sounds as if it might be a mere invention, a wild idea, and I make it tentatively for the present.
We are playing with the material; later we shall see if the hypothesis is applicable to all.
We have more material in the dream and perhaps we shall find a justification.
The text continues: There are animals present, like foxes and dogs.
That is a new form of animal.
These are higher animals.
When you speak of dogs you speak of creatures with a kind of domesticated instinct.
Foxes of course are wild animals, not domesticated, difficult to tame, but when you dream of a dog it always means a form of instinctual psyche that goes with you, obeys you, is under your control, not against you.
So also with horses.
The horse has, however, a different meaning in that it is a working animal and so represents that instinctual psyche which produces work.
It represents the energy you can apply to work.
While the dog does not actually produce work, he is used for many other things, as, for example, for his particularly refined senses.
He smells, he has a keen ear, he is watchful; and so dogs frequently stand for acute sensitivity in man, and often, in particular for intuition.
A dog in a dream may represent the quality you refer to when you say, “You should follow your nose” or “Somebody has a good nose.”
Now he simply notices the presence of such animals.
Then something happens, namely, that many people who were there as in the former dream walk around the square anticlockwise.
You remember perhaps that we spoke of this as the circumambulation motif.
Circumambulation is not usually anticlockwise, a turning from right to left, which is of course different from the clockwise movement.
These two movements are clearly differentiated both in Buddhism and Lamaism; one is the right kind, and the other is the wrong kind.
For instance, the stupa (which is a sort of sacred building usually containing some relics or saints or of Buddha himself) must be circumambulated but always to the right, never to the left.
This latter would be most unfortunate.
The movement to the left means to the sinister side, to the unconscious, while the movement to the right would be towards consciousness, because movement to the right expresses consciousness.
The right hand is the conscious hand, the left the unconscious—that is, if you are not left-handed.
As these people move around the square in anticlockwise way, the animals that are stationed at the four corners show a disagreeable tendency to bite their calves.
It seems, indeed, to be necessary for the people to expose themselves to that injury because if they tried to run away then everything would be lost—that is what the text says.
So it seems to be all important that the people circulating around the square should not run away.
Now you see that is the answer to our question about the snakes.
The snakes ran away; they tried to escape, and here it is stated that one should not run away in spite of the fact that one may be bitten; in spite of the pain.
These animals get at you; they put their teeth into your flesh; and that is painful.
So the dream suggested that one can’t avoid a certain painful interval; it has to happen.
These animals must get at you, and that is exactly what the dreamer tried to escape.
He did not know that he was already completely swallowed by the animal, by an unconscious condition.
He was afraid of becoming conscious of the fact that he had already been bitten, so he had to learn to expose himself consciously to the assault of the animal.
The dreamer needs to learn to expose himself to the knowledge and to the understanding that he is emotional in a certain way; that he has certain instinctual impulses.
He should confess that he is a victim of his own condition.
He should see it consciously, and that is painful.
If he could say, “I am just rotten; I am completely degenerate,” he would have gained something.
That is the great value of the confession of sin which the Catholic Church has known for a long time.
You must be able to distinguish where you are wrong and to confess it, in order to maintain your human condition.
If you cannot, you are identified with your sin which is an animal condition.
You lose the human rapport.
You see, that is the great difficulty with this particular patient.
He didn’t try—he didn’t dare—to expose himself to a complete understanding of his condition, and if he can’t stand the pain of seeing himself, well, everything is lost.
This means that whatever he tried to accomplish hitherto, whatever happened in his dreams, whatever he understood and learned will be lost if he can’t overcome himself to this extent.
Now after this, nobler animals appear in the dream, namely, bulls and goats.
Then four snakes, I should rather say serpents, arranged themselves in the four corners of the mandala.
I cannot go into every detail of such a dream; it would need much closer research to take up all the nuances; but at least you get the general idea, that through his submission, he comes to understand or accept the fact that he should look at himself and that he should be conscious of his condition.
This change of attitude has a differentiating effect upon him or his instincts.
These animal instincts symbolized at first by snakes transform into a higher class of animals.
Then suddenly four snakes appear as if he were going back to a former condition in which there were two snakes that had to be removed.
Now, however, there are four.
This symbol of the snake has many surprising aspects.
It is a very primitive, and at the same time a very complicated and highly sophisticated, symbol.
As you know, the serpent may represent the devil himself, or the lowest form of sinfulness, and yet the serpent may also represent the Savior, so-called Agathodaemon, God or the Redeemer, and this is true not only of Gnosticism, but also of certain Christian sects, as, for example, the Ophites.
The snake also, curiously enough, often represents a perfectly abstract idea; for example, the idea of the famous so-called ouroboros, that is, the tail-eater, the snake that bites its tail.
That is really a philosophical idea.
The same is true of these four snakes in the dream which symbolize four abstract notions.
They are in the four corners of the square.
This mandala is similar to the one which was discovered in the Temple of the Warriors by the American expedition to Chichen Itza.
There you find the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl also in the four corners.
Now, as you may know, the plumed serpent is a symbol of the Redeemer.
But in the dream the snakes merely designate the importance of the four points of that peculiar square room.
They would convey the meaning of four different living entities which designate the four corners of a mandala.
These four different living entities, which we consider as being functions, are represented in the Lamaistic mandala as the four different ways to reach an orientation in psychological space.
The square room with the four snakes is the primitive form, the scheme or diagram, one could say, of the psychological functions, which are not yet, however, differentiated from each other.
They are only indicated as different psychological and living entities.
That they are presented as living entities is because of the fact that the psychological functions have specific energy.
This simply means that you cannot deplete a psychological function.
For example, you cannot get along without thinking.
Of course, it is quite possible that you live by feeling only, that you forget about thinking; but thinking nevertheless exists.
It goes on without you because it has the specific energy which cannot be disposed of.
An intellectual type can get detached in his thinking; he can handle his world by mere intellect, and he can suppress or repress or forget about feeling altogether, but nevertheless feeling is going on and manifests itself indirectly in certain attacks he suffers from, such as violent emotions and bad moods; or perhaps he falls in love with his housekeeper or such things.
The same holds true with the other functions.
But it may be truly said that the forgotten function is always just the one that plays the most disturbing role on account of the fact that it has energy which cannot be disposed of.
It has its specific energy which always works.
So you see, no matter whether you dismiss your thinking or your feelings or your intuition or your sensation, their specific energy is always there, and it works against you insofar as you don’t consciously make use of it.
So, if you see only one snake in one corner, well, that doesn’t mean that the other corners are not occupied by other snakes; for they are.
After this the crowd of people that has made the circumambulation leaves the room, and two priests enter carrying an enormous reptile, presumably again, a serpent.
And in the center of the room now is a sort of substance which the dreamer calls a living mass, a mass of living substance, whatever that may mean.
The priests next touch the unformed mass with the snake, and it immediately begins to take on a definite shape.
It becomes like a human head, but in a sort of exalted form.
The dreamer uses the German term verklärt, which means enlightened, exalted, illuminated.
At this same moment he hears a voice.
You remember the phenomenon of the voice which always makes absolutely irrefutable statements has appeared in previous dreams.
The voice now says: “Those are the attempts of the becoming,” which if translated literally, would mean, those are attempts at the creation of something.
That is the final statement.
Then the dream comes to an end.
In this dream the priests are bringing in one snake which is no longer split, but is an integrated, instinctual being.
This means, that by the proceeding ceremony, through the creation of a complete mandala, his instinct had been caught, concentrated, organized, synthesized, and is now a unified thing of magic importance.
The magic character is indicated by the priests.
The whole process is demonstrated as in a mystery play, which is of course very mysterious in this case, for he is a scientist and knows nothing of mystery plays or such things.
However, he might easily have known that there were Gnostic cults, for example, that of Sabazious, in which a ritual of initiation was practiced for the creation of a divine condition, the making of the initiant into a being designated as entheos, that is, a being filled with the God, containing the God.
This was done in a way similar to that in the dream.
The priests brought in a golden snake and put it into the garment of the initiant under the upper part of the clothing.
It was then pushed down and pulled out from below.
This was also the act of adoption by the god, according to antique adoption rites.
When a child was adopted by a woman, he was put under her garment and drawn out below.
Then he was fed with milk, and the woman was obliged to give her breast to the child in order to complete the act.
There is a famous picture by an Italian painter—it is somewhere in this country—which really represents “the Adoption of Heracles by Juno,” or Hera.
It is mistakenly called a love scene between Mars and Venus, which comes from a lack of historical knowledge.
In the picture, Ercole, Heracles, is lying on the floor in front of the queen or the deity, Hera.
Because he looks like Mars, the picture was thought to represent a peculiar love play between Mars and Venus—people have such fantastic notions.
But, it is the same adoption scene that is in the initiations of the Sabazios mysteries, in which the divine snake representing the healing God, the famous snake of the ouroboros, entered man and filled him with divine power, thus making him entheos.
After this he is supposed to be cured, which means that he is lifted up in a different condition.
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Now in this dream you have exactly the same idea, only it is not a human being that is to be transformed or exalted or filled; it is an unformed shapeless mass of living substance, which might easily represent the dreamer himself.
At the time of the dream he was in a dissociated, disintegrated psychological condition which could be compared to a heap of living matter which ought to be given shape.
He himself, of course, has shape.
He is a man of remarkable mind, so that nobody would think that such a one could be symbolized by a shapeless heap; but when you look at him from another side, from the standpoint of feeling, you can easily see how completely disintegrated he was.
He had a very powerful mind, but on the other side he was threatened with utter destruction.
Now, inasmuch as he is only a heap of living matter, completely dissociated, having no human shape, he needs that contact with the unified instinct.
That was originally the purpose of creating the ape, namely, creating the instinctive man, which is a unity.
That would heal him because it would give him a backbone.
He has no backbone any more.
Therefore he needs more snake, to be more centered, and that is represented in the dream exactly in the same way as has always been done throughout all centuries and in very different civilizations.
But this, of course, doesn’t come from any tradition; this is a genuine re-creation of an archetypal image.
That is why we speak of archetypes.
They exist in the blood, that is, in the very structure of the brain, so that he produces the same ideas that were always made use of under such conditions.
The interesting thing is that this transformation is represented as a sort of sacred ceremonial.
It is just as if the unconscious were trying to give it a particular flavor or a sort of mystical character.
The unconscious is, however, only presenting it in this way because it actually has such an aspect.
This type of transformation has always been called a magical or mystical performance, which means an inexplicable, almost superhuman, process, because it is done beyond man.
He doesn’t do it; I don’t do it; it happens; it is done as if by a superhuman agency or a superhuman consciousness.
I say “as if”—it is just as if there were priests who knew about his psychological state and were doing the right thing to cure it.
Now, this is surely a most upsetting idea, that, when I am seemingly in a bad neurotic condition, a magic performance or ceremony is performed somewhere in order to cure me against my will, against my understanding, and against, indeed, every bit of common sense.
But, you know, that is the thing that always has happened in history.
Look at the primitives—how they cure their patients.
The primitive medicine man performs his mysteries and his magical ceremonies, which appear to us as a mere play on ignorance.
But they rise from a psychological activity which is very meaningful and beyond consciousness.
It is this activity which is portrayed in the dream, and if you can see something positive in it, if you can say, “Well, I accept the fact that such a thing happens,” then, it has a good effect upon you.
You know man has really been cured through just such performances.
To show him that there is some intelligent agency at work, the voice explains to him, “And those are the attempts at becoming,” which means, attempts at the re-creation of the individual.
Remember that I haven’t influenced him in the least.
I simply helped him to understand the ceremonies that were carried out on him, in his dreams; and through this process he came together and became a perfectly normal being.
For those among you who believe that no real solution to life is reached until one is happily married, I can tell you that he is happily married.
[Laughter]
The patient drew his own conclusions from the dreams without any analysis from me.
He saw, for instance, that in this dream there were allusions which contained something terrifying to him.
He saw that something strange which hadn’t been in this world hitherto was approaching him.
You see, you must put yourself into his frame of mind.
He was a hardboiled scientist in whose world such things do not exist.
When he came to me, we went through some very critical moments when such dreams as these brought this strange world to his consciousness.
Again and again he tried to escape because he simply couldn’t cope with it.
He felt that these things had some reality, but he didn’t know where to locate them in his physical world.
So whenever he had such a dream, he had a pretty bad reaction afterwards because he couldn’t accept its peculiar content.
I have to admit that the assimilation of such a dream really is a very difficult problem.
How can we integrate it with our empirical world?
We thought that we had overcome long ago that kind of thinking which we still call “superstition.”
But while we call it by fresh names we really cannot permit such things to exist.
I wish I knew how to formulate them differently.
I can only formulate them in the way in which I have tried to do it tonight.
But the formulation of the meaning of such a dream has something offensive to our scientific mind.
It sounds strange, and I shouldn’t wonder if some of my audience would ask, “But do you really believe that there are agencies that apparently, all by themselves, try to improve such a man in an intelligent and purposive way? I can’t believe it, and I don’t believe it.”
To these objections I would answer: “These happenings are facts.
Facts don’t need to be believed.
One knows about them, or one doesn’t.
It is just a fact that things developed within the dreamer in such a way.
We can only try to formulate these happenings, and if by chance they do not coincide with our philosophy, tant pis pour elle, the fault is with our Weltanschauung.
We cannot explain those facts away.”
This dreamer often asked me, “What do you think about it?”
I said, “What do you think about it?”
I simply handed the question back to him: “I wonder how you are going to deal with it,” and I also wonder how I am going to explain those facts.
Now, of course, he had more and more dreams of the same kind.
He had already had, as you know, quite a series, and they always aroused a conflict in him.
The next dream pictured a wild battle between two primitive peoples—that was the entire content of the dream.
This is again a conflict like the two snakes that parted from each other; it is again a dissociation.
This time it is the people, who had appeared before in the dream of the crowd.
When this particular motif arises, it refers to the collective man in us; we feel ourselves to be one of the crowd like everybody else.
In this case it means also that he is a multiplicity.
He is not one; he is many.
He is to a certain extent disintegrated.
The fact that he had had a previous dream, in which he couldn’t cope at all, produced this effect on him.
The earlier dream had come to him as a shock, and this had led to the present dream of conflict: two peoples engaged in battle, a wild war.
Whenever there occurs in the dream a situation in which the active figure is represented by a crowd, it refers to a disintegrated condition; with a preponderance of the unconscious you see when the unconscious gets on top of you, and you lose your self-control; you become merely like the rest of humanity; you develop a morbid psychology.
For you are like the many, and you consist also of many.
The conscious has lost energy.
It is what Janet called an abaissement du niveau mental.
The fight in the dream was on dual terms, which means that his conscious is no more on top of the unconscious or, in other words, that his unconscious instinctual personality is no more controlled by the conscious personality, for there are now two peoples fighting each other on equal terms.
It is a dissociation between his conscious and his unconscious attitudes.
Whatever the unconscious is after is clearly shown in the dream before, namely, a peculiar attempt at a self-cure.
In this case you could represent his personality by this diagram.
You remember, the square with the four snakes occurring in an earlier dream.
That is now divided.
There is a war between the two sides on equal terms.
Let C represent the conscious side and U the unconscious, with a line making an equal division in between.
In diagram II, it might be that consciousness is here (C) in just one function.
When one function is conscious, three are unconscious.
In this second case there would be an absolute preponderance of the unconscious, and the conscious would be overwhelmed.
However, his actual condition is that there is a war on equal terms taking place, with a disintegration of consciousness, shown by the presence of the many.
You will see how that develops in the next dream.
In the next dream he says, “There is a cave.
In that cave there are two boys, and there is something like a tube in the ceiling of the cave.
A third boy falls from above through the tube into the cave where there are already two.”
Now, we haven’t heard of the boys before.
Since the boys are little boys, he regards them as children.
These little boys in the dream belong to the so-called dwarf motif or little men motif.
The little men are, for instance, those mysterious forces in the house which do the housework for the housewife—the little dwarfs whose feet you shouldn’t see.
Or they appear in mines as the so-called Heinzelmännchen, or in Greek, the homunculi anthroparia.
They appear also in alchemy as the personification of the vapors arising from the melted metal.
The old texts contain drawings or pictures of these little men jumping out of the fire or out of the melting metal, personifying the spirit of the metal.
They are also supposed to live in mines, where the miners often see them.
In old tales and folklore, they appear on ships at sea, where they are of bad omen, indicating danger or disaster.
They represent part of our psyche—split-off parts, autonomous elements.
They always indicate a certain dissociation.
In this case of the patient they derive from the fact that the dream consciousness has become aware of this condition, and instead of seeing snakes, it seems it sees now little human beings.
And as you may know, these anthroparion homunculi have always been understood to have no human souls.
There is a very beautiful Danish story, which you may know, of a parson who, late in the night, was returning home from a visit to a sick man.
He was very tired, and as he went over that is [sic], they suddenly heard faint music coming from the morass where it was humanly impossible for anybody to walk without getting drowned.
Then he discerned in the distance, in the moonlight, two little figures coming across the moor, playing the fiddle.
They came nearer to him until he saw they were elves.
They asked, “Who are you?”
He replied that he was the parson.
They then asked him what a parson was, and when he told them they began to complain that they didn’t have any souls and asked him what to do about it.
And the parson said, “Well, you should pray.”
And they asked him what they should pray.
He replied: “Our Father who art in Heaven,” and so forth.
And they said: “Teach us.”
He tried then to teach it to them, saying: “Our Father who art in Heaven,” but they always repeated after him: “who are not in Heaven.”
They couldn’t say, “art in Heaven,” only “not in Heaven.”
You see, they must deny that prayer by which he hoped to give them souls, because they are partial souls only.
You see, folklore knows.
Now, these partial or fragmentary souls, these fragments of human personality are also functions.
So anybody who identifies with only one function is necessarily a fragmentary personality, only a part of himself and all the other parts are missing.
Naturally they are there, but they are unconscious; they function on account of their specific energy, but they are nonetheless unconscious.
To return to the dream: the two boys in the cave are the two functions in the darkness, in the unconscious, and he sees how a third one falls into the darkness, too.
That means that the unconscious increases: two functions were already there, and now a third one is dropping into it.
The threshold of consciousness (in diagram II) rises up to (X), and consciousness then consists of one function only.
In other words, he has withdrawn into that function which is most differentiated, into his intellect.
He tries to shield himself by his intellect and to keep out all that threatens the rational.
Before that he had tried to rescue himself by adopting the traditional religion, but that didn’t work.
This time he tries to rescue himself by means of his intellect.
If he could talk in his dream he would say, “What is this all about? It is all nonsense. The world is thus and so, you see.”
He would use our magic, scientific language, in order to explain it away.
Well, after such a dream, which shows him that he consists of one-fourth of himself, only one quarter, giving a preponderance to the unconscious, which amounts to a sort of disintegration, we should expect a new attempt at a wholeness, an integration, a synthesis.
The next dream is he sees a great globe, containing many small globes.
You see, here is the idea; there should be a wholeness.
The globe is a perfect form; it is the perfect form of the soul.
Therefore the entire philosophical world has always assumed that the anima mundi, the soul of the world, is the human soul and has the perfect form, that is, is perfectly round.
Certain heretics in early Christianity assumed that at the day of resurrection the soul with its glorified body would be spherical.
According to the Symposium of Plato, the original man was round, spherogenous, meaning perfect.
And then the dream continues: From the top of the globe that contains many small globes, a green leaf appears.
This means that if that wholeness which contains the parts is reached then life, one could say, begins to sprout again.
This idea of the globe comes after the dissociation, to compensate it, and to overcome that very one-sided condition where he is only one function, where he has lost three-quarters of himself.
The dream presents the idea that you ought to be, or the ideal thing is to be, like a globe that contains many units.
These units shouldn’t split off by themselves; they should all be contained in one wholeness.
That would be a new spring, a new life, symbolized by the green shoot.
This dream is, of course, a bit abstract.
It probably didn’t touch him profoundly.
It was a vague general idea which possibly left him in a dissatisfied condition.
I know nothing about that, whether it was so or not, but I should assume that it was, because the next dream, which is pretty long and complicated, is again occupied with functions.
The place or the country in which this next dream takes place is America.
He is in an American hotel, and there he goes up in the lift to the third or the fourth story.
There the lift comes to a stop, and he finds himself waiting with many other people.
A friend, a man whom he knows very well, appears and says that the dreamer has left a dark and unknown woman on the ground floor and that he should not have made her wait so long.
He should have taken care of her.
The friend had given the woman into the dreamer’s care.
There was a sort of reproach, an offensive reproach in his remark: “You should have taken care of her. You left her alone too long, and you made her wait.”
He now gives him a letter, which probably, as he says, is meant for that dark and unknown woman.
He reads the letter, which says, “Redemption does not come from not going with it.”
(That means, from not accompanying, or from running away.)
“Redemption also does not come from a state in which one allows oneself to be merely driven.
Redemption comes from a complete devotion, during which, or connected with which, the eye should always be concentrated upon the middle, upon the center.”
And as if that idea should be made clearer there was a diagram on the edge of the letter, consisting of a sort of wheel or a wreath, which looked about like this—a wheel with eight spokes.
Now, we haven’t heard of the boys before.
Since the boys are little boys, he regards them as children.
These little boys in the dream belong to the so-called dwarf motif or little men motif.
The little men are, for instance, those mysterious forces in the house which do the housework for the housewife—the little dwarfs whose feet you shouldn’t see.
Or they appear in mines as the so-called Heinzelmännchen, or in Greek, the homunculi anthroparia.
They appear also in alchemy as the personification of the vapors arising from the melted metal.
The old texts contain drawings or pictures of these little men jumping out of the fire or out of the melting metal, personifying the spirit of the metal.
They are also supposed to live in mines, where the miners often see them.
In old tales and folklore, they appear on ships at sea, where they are of bad omen, indicating danger or disaster.
They represent part of our psyche—split-off parts, autonomous elements.
They always indicate a certain dissociation.
In this case of the patient they derive from the fact that the dream consciousness has become aware of this condition, and instead of seeing snakes, it seems it sees now little human beings.
And as you may know, these anthroparion homunculi have always been understood to have no human souls.
There is a very beautiful Danish story, which you may know, of a parson who, late in the night, was returning home from a visit to a sick man.
He was very tired, and as he went over that is [sic], they suddenly heard faint music coming from the morass where it was humanly impossible for anybody to walk without getting drowned.
Then he discerned in the distance, in the moonlight, two little figures coming across the moor, playing the fiddle.
They came nearer to him until he saw they were elves.
They asked, “Who are you?”
He replied that he was the parson.
They then asked him what a parson was, and when he told them they began to complain that they didn’t have any souls and asked him what to do about it.
And the parson said, “Well, you should pray.”
And they asked him what they should pray.
He replied: “Our Father who art in Heaven,” and so forth.
And they said: “Teach us.”
He tried then to teach it to them, saying: “Our Father who art in Heaven,” but they always repeated after him: “who are not in Heaven.”
They couldn’t say, “art in Heaven,” only “not in Heaven.”
You see, they must deny that prayer by which he hoped to give them souls, because they are partial souls only.
You see, folklore knows.
Now, these partial or fragmentary souls, these fragments of human personality are also functions.
So anybody who identifies with only one function is necessarily a fragmentary personality, only a part of himself and all the other parts are missing.
Naturally they are there, but they are unconscious; they function on account of their specific energy, but they are nonetheless unconscious.
To return to the dream: the two boys in the cave are the two functions in the darkness, in the unconscious, and he sees how a third one falls into the darkness, too.
That means that the unconscious increases: two functions were already there, and now a third one is dropping into it.
The threshold of consciousness (in diagram II) rises up to (X), and consciousness then consists of one function only.
In other words, he has withdrawn into that function which is most differentiated, into his intellect.
He tries to shield himself by his intellect and to keep out all that threatens the rational.
Before that he had tried to rescue himself by adopting the traditional religion, but that didn’t work.
This time he tries to rescue himself by means of his intellect.
I
f he could talk in his dream he would say, “What is this all about? It is all nonsense. The world is thus and so, you see.”
He would use our magic, scientific language, in order to explain it away.
Well, after such a dream, which shows him that he consists of one-fourth of himself, only one quarter, giving a preponderance to the unconscious, which amounts to a sort of disintegration, we should expect a new attempt at a wholeness, an integration, a synthesis.
The next dream is he sees a great globe, containing many small globes.
You see, here is the idea; there should be a wholeness.
The globe is a perfect form; it is the perfect form of the soul.
Therefore the entire philosophical world has always assumed that the anima mundi, the soul of the world, is the human soul and has the perfect form, that is, is perfectly round.
Certain heretics in early Christianity assumed that at the day of resurrection the soul with its glorified body would be spherical.
According to the Symposium of Plato, the original man was round, spherogenous, meaning perfect.
And then the dream continues: From the top of the globe that contains many small globes, a green leaf appears.
This means that if that wholeness which contains the parts is reached then life, one could say, begins to sprout again.
This idea of the globe comes after the dissociation, to compensate it, and to overcome that very one-sided condition where he is only one function, where he has lost three-quarters of himself.
The dream presents the idea that you ought to be, or the ideal thing is to be, like a globe that contains many units.
These units shouldn’t split off by themselves; they should all be contained in one wholeness.
That would be a new spring, a new life, symbolized by the green shoot.
This dream is, of course, a bit abstract.
It probably didn’t touch him profoundly.
It was a vague general idea which possibly left him in a dissatisfied condition.
I know nothing about that, whether it was so or not, but I should assume that it was, because the next dream, which is pretty long and complicated, is again occupied with functions.
The place or the country in which this next dream takes place is America.
He is in an American hotel, and there he goes up in the lift to the third or the fourth story.
There the lift comes to a stop, and he finds himself waiting with many other people.
A friend, a man whom he knows very well, appears and says that the dreamer has left a dark and unknown woman on the ground floor and that he should not have made her wait so long.
He should have taken care of her.
The friend had given the woman into the dreamer’s care.
There was a sort of reproach, an offensive reproach in his remark: “You should have taken care of her. You left her alone too long, and you made her wait.”
He now gives him a letter, which probably, as he says, is meant for that dark and unknown woman.
He reads the letter, which says, “Redemption does not come from not going with it.”
(That means, from not accompanying, or from running away.)
“Redemption also does not come from a state in which one allows oneself to be merely driven.
Redemption comes from a complete devotion, during which, or connected with which, the eye should always be concentrated upon the middle, upon the center.”
And as if that idea should be made clearer there was a diagram on the edge of the letter, consisting of a sort of wheel or a wreath, which looked about like this—a wheel with eight spokes.
A little boy appears and says that the dreamer’s room is on the eighth story.
So he goes up in the lift again to about the seventh or the eighth story, with the same uncertainty as before when he did not know whether it was the third or the fourth floor.
Now there is some doubt as to whether it is the seventh or the eighth, but his room was definitely on the eighth floor.
Arriving there, though still not sure whether he has reached the seventh or the eighth story, he meets an unknown man, a red-haired man, who greets him in a very friendly way.
Suddenly the whole scene changes.
We shall take up the first part now and deal with the second part later.
The situation is an American hotel.
It is always important in dreams to pay attention to locality.
Very often, or indeed, usually, in the beginning of a dream, you have a suggestion of the locality as in a drama.
America means something definite to the dreamer, as I had already learned from him.
To him it is a sort of exalted commonsense country which consists chiefly of straight lines and quick movement, a place where only reasonable things happen—nothing else.
As you see, he has a very perfunctory knowledge of America, but that is his impression—a place where everything is organized and working smoothly.
Nothing happens that is untoward; everything is explicable and reasonable.
You see, that is also a sort of description of his own world which, curiously enough, is projected by the dreamer into America.
If the scene were laid in Europe, then he would have to be concerned with his situation, with his reaction as a European, and then, you see, he would find himself in that mixed-up situation where he would be unable to deny the existence of the unconscious.
In Europe you can’t say, “There is no unconscious.”
But in America you might be able to say it, because here the head is cut off from the body so that most people are entirely unaware of the deeper layers of the irrational and the instinctive.
You can’t go up beyond a certain point in Europe; but here you can go up indefinitely, leaving something below yourself.
That was his idea of America.
Of course, it isn’t so in reality.
In this dream then he is going up, which means that he is trying to pull himself out of the European situation, where he cannot deny the presence of these awful things.
His idea was that if he were in America, he could go up and leave all that below.
So it comes about that he goes up; but he gets stuck.
He doesn’t reach the fourth floor, or at least one doesn’t know whether he has reached it or not.
Perhaps he stopped at the third.
Here again are the ominous numbers four and three suggesting the question, Is it three or is it four?
In the diagram the question would be: have we all the four together, or is one missing?
He would be sure to have his differentiated function.
He might know that he had his two auxiliary functions, but the question is: Has he got his fourth function, too?
For his problem is the very anxious question of whether or not the totality has been established.
Does the globe contain all the other units?
He might have left out something, and that omission would be symbolized in this dream by his doubt as to whether he had reached the third or the fourth floor.
He was stopped for an unknown reason and then comes the explanation, brought him by his friend.
This man is a very positive figure.
He is a learned and very nice man, who is older than the dreamer and has often in reality played a sort of paternal role so that the dreamer used to talk to him when he was in difficulties.
When that friend appears in the dream it means that his advice will presumably be good and sound advice.
He explains, “Well, naturally you got stuck because you have left that dark and unknown woman down below.”
Now, who is that dark and unknown woman?
Well, we have encountered her several times before.
It is the female side of the man.
This is perhaps a peculiar notion for many people, but if you were in the Middle Ages, you would understand what I am talking about because people then knew that man carries his female part in himself.
It is the feminine minority that every man has within him (as women have a masculine minority and sometimes it isn’t even in the minority; at least it doesn’t look like that when it gets on top of a woman).
So you see, a man’s feminine side can be a very obnoxious thing.
If it gets on top of him it makes him moody.
We call that state “animosity.”
We aren’t 100 percent masculine.
If we are men, we have so much in common with women that during a certain period in our embryonic life as far as any outward evidence would show, we might have turned into females.
Everybody contains much of the other sex, both in his body and in his mental makeup.
This minority of the other sex present in each one of us is always a typical personification of the unconscious.
This is most clearly demonstrable in literature, as in Benoit’s L’Atlantide, and Rider Haggard’s She.
I could give plenty of other illustrations.
A wonderful anima story is to be found in a recent novel by William Sloane, To Walk the Night.
The anima of a man is characterized in a very typical way, and most men, when they have once grasped what is meant by the term anima, can recognize that figure in themselves right away.
It is just as if every man had a definite idea of the woman that is in himself.
That woman personifies the unconscious, and the friend who gives the good advice simply tells the dreamer, “Well, you have again left your unconscious behind you, below you. You went to America, and you tried to jump into the air in order to escape that other side of yourself.”
It was simply too difficult for the dreamer to recognize or accept it, or to digest it, and therefore he tried to jump into the air in order to escape.
I remember the case of a compulsion neurosis which began at the age of about sixteen or seventeen.
I saw the patient only when he was forty-five; obviously he was absolutely incurable.
His mental disturbance began with the following dream, which occurred twice:
He dreamt that he was going home pretty late at night when the streets were deserted.
Suddenly he heard steps coming up behind him.
It seemed somehow uncanny to him, and he walked faster; but then the steps also went faster.
Then he began to run, and he heard somebody running after him.
Suddenly he turned around to see who it was; and when he saw he was overcome with terror; for it was the devil.
He jumped right into the air, and there he remained suspended while the devil stood underneath waiting for him to come down.
He said, “I can’t come down. I can’t afford to be cured. For if I should be cured, I should have to admit the fact that I have lost twenty-five of the most precious years of my life. I can’t admit that. Therefore I prefer ‘Happy Neurosis Island.’ ”
Those were his words, “Happy Neurosis Island”—his happy condition.
His main symptom was that he always felt himself to be in a state of suspension.
He called that state, “the state number one of decontamination.”
In that state he always had to wear an absolutely white suit and to sit on a chair with his arms held out, so that he didn’t touch anything.
He had no clock in his room; that was absolutely taboo.
He wouldn’t shake hands with me because I was a doctor and a doctor has to do with death and with sick people.
He couldn’t bear to see anybody dressed in black because that meant death, which suggested “time.”
This state of mind was what he meant by “condition number one.”
He spent all his time trying to “decontaminate.”
Yet, on the other hand, he felt compelled to keep touching something that reminded him of time and decay, thus torn in his mind he was held in a state of complete suspension.
That was his life, a very unusual condition indeed.
Our dreamer in a similar suspended condition gets a suggestion of the way out from his friend who symbolizes an intelligent agency in his own unconscious.
This says to him: “Well, what are you doing? You are simply leaving behind your female side,” which is, of course, the inferior function.
As he is an intellectual type the opposite function would be, of course, feeling.
He has left his feeling side below, downstairs on the ground floor.
His friend had trusted him with her, and he should have taken care of her, of the feeling point of view.
It would be by means of this function that he could understand his dreams.
The intellect doesn’t help him to understand such dreams.
Only his feeling can tell him, “Well, but after all, I am influenced by these subjective states, the psychological facts. I think this dream is perfectly marvelous.”
That is feeling.
That is the reason why you have to exclude thinking, when you are a feeling type, because you mustn’t think too much about things that you believe to be beautiful or dear.
You might discover a flaw in the crystal or a hair in the soup or something like that.
The advice this intelligent agency is giving to him is expressed in the dream through a very remarkable observation, namely, that “redemption does not come from not going with it.”
The German word used for “redemption” is Erlösung, which isn’t exactly “redemption.”
It means rather a “liberation,” also a “liberation from.”
This doesn’t mean refusing to share an experience or keeping away from it, or running away even.
Neither does it mean that one should surrender completely to one’s impulses without self-control and without reason, which would be the other side.
Rather does “redemption,” in the sense of Erlösung, consist in a complete devotion, in a conscious submission to the facts as they are, to that which you are.
If you can do this, if you can submit in this way, then it would surely not be mere blind acceptance.
You also should keep your eye directed upon the center.
Now, here you have the very idea of the mandala.
The mandala is a circle with a center, and the center is usually characterized by the highest values, usually by divine attributes.
As a rule the mandala is used as a so-called yantra for contemplation.
You see, the circle and the center should catch your attention.
It both expresses and produces a state of concentration.
If you have that concentration, then you can fuse everything together into that one act of devotion, and this is the thing that transforms.
Then it is just as if you were contained in the center, or in the circle, and as if you had been made over in the act of devotion, which the old East Indians called tapas, meaning “brooding” or “hatching.”
It is what the hen does with the egg.
It is a term taken from Yoga, where it means a concentration within oneself which causes such a warmth that you become hatched, that the Self develops in you.
And that is what his friend means in the dream. ~Carl Jung, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process, Pages 223-242
