Transcript for:
Jungian Symbols and Dreams

man and his symbols by Carl Jung audio book created by log part one approaching the unconscious the importance of Dreams man uses the spoken or written word to express the meaning of what he wants to convey his language is full of symbols but he also often employs signs or images that are not strictly descriptive some are mere abbreviations or strings of initials such as un UNICEF or UNESCO others are familiar trademarks the names of patent medicines badges or Insignia although these are meaningless in themselves they have acquired a recognizable meaning through common usage or deliberate intent such things are not symbols they are signs and they do no more than denote the objects to which they are attached what we call a symbol is a term a name or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning it implies something vague unknown or hidden from us many monuments for instance are marked with the design of the double ads this is an object that we know but we do not know its symbolic implications for another example take the case of the Indian who after a visit to England told his friends at home that the English worship animals because he had found Eagles lions and oxen in Old churches he was not aware nor are many Christians that these animals are symbols of the evangelists and are derived from the vision of Ezekiel and that this in turn has an analogy to the Egyptian son god Horus and His Four Sons there are moreover such objects as the wheel and the cross that are known all over the world yet that have a symbolic significance under certain conditions precisely what they symbolize is still a matter for controversial speculation thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning it has a wider unconscious aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained nor can one hope to define or explain it as the Mind explores the symbol it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason the wheel may lead our thoughts toward the concept of a Divine son but at this point reason must admit its incompetence man is unable to define a Divine being when with all our intellectual limitations we call something Divine we have merely given it a name which may be based on a Creed but never on factual evidence because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding we constantly use symbolic terms to represent Concepts that we cannot Define or fully comprehend this is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images but this conscious use of symbols is only one aspect of a psychological fact of great importance man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously in the form of Dreams it is not easy to grasp this point but the point must be grasped if we are to know more about the ways in which the human mind works man as we realize if we reflect for a moment never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely he can see hear touch and taste but how far he sees how well he hears what his touch tells him and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses these limit his perception of the world around him by using scientific instruments he can partly compensate for the deficiencies of his senses for example he can extend the range of his vision by binoculars or of his hearing by electrical amplification but the most elaborate apparatus cannot do more than bring distant or small objects within range of his eyes or make faint sounds more audible no matter what instruments he uses at some point he reaches the edge of certainty Beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass there are moreover unconscious aspects of our perception of reality the first is the fact that even when our senses react to real phenomena sights and sounds they are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of the Mind within the mind they become psychic events whose ultimate nature is unknowable for the psyche cannot know its own psychical substance thus every experience contains an indefinite number of unknown factors not to speak of the fact that every concrete object is always unknown in certain respects because we cannot know the ultimate nature of matter itself then there are certain events of which we have not consciously taken note they have remained so to speak below the threshold of Consciousness they have happened but they have been absorbed subliminally without our conscious knowledge we can become aware of such happenings only in a moment of Intuition or by a process of profound thought that leads to a later realization that they must have happened and though we may have originally ignored their emotional and vital importance it later Wells up from the unconscious as a sort of afterthought it may appear for instance in the form of a dream as a general rule the unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image as a matter of History it was the study of dreams that first enabled psychologists to investigate the unconscious aspect of conscious psychic events it is on such evidence that psychologists assume the existence of an unconscious psyche though many scientists and philosophers deny its existence they argue naively that such an assumption implies the existence of two subjects or to put it in a common phrase two personalities within the same individual but this is exactly what it does imply quite correctly and it is one of the curses of modern man that many people suffer from this divided personality It Is by no means a pathological symptom it is a normal fact that can be observed at any time and everywhere it is not merely the neurotic whose right hand does not know what the left hand is doing this predicament is a symptom of a general unconsciousness that is the undeniable common inheritance of all mankind man has developed Consciousness slowly and laboriously in a process that took Untold ages to reach the Civilized state which is arbitrarily dated from the invention of script in about 4,000 BC and this evolution is far from complete for large areas of the human mind are still shrouded in darkness what we call the psyche is by no means identical with our Consciousness and its contents whoever denies the existence of the unconscious is in fact a assuming that our present knowledge of the psyche is total and this belief is clearly just as false as the assumption that we know all there is to be known about the natural Universe our psyche is part of Nature and its Enigma is as Limitless thus we cannot Define either the psyche or nature we can merely State what we believe them to be and describe as best we can how they function quite apart therefore from the evidence that medical research has accumulated there are strong grounds of logic for rejecting statements like there is no unconscious those who say such things merely Express an age-old misoneism a fear of the new and the unknown there are historical reasons for this resistance to the idea of an unknown part of the human psyche Consciousness is a very recent acquisition of Nature and it is still in an experimental state it is frail menaced by specific dangers and easily injured as anthropologists have noted one of the most common mental derangements that occur among primitive people is what they call the loss of a soul which means as the name indicates a noticeable disruption or more technically a dissociation of Consciousness among such people whose Consciousness is at a different level of development from ours the soul or psyche is not felt to be a unit many Primitives assume that a man has a bush Soul as well as his own and that this bush soul is Incarnate in a wild animal or a tree with which the human individual has some kind of psychic identity this is what the distinguished French ethnologist Lucien Ley Bru called a mystical participation he later retracted this term under pressure of adverse criticism but I believe that his critics were wrong it is a well-known psychological fact that an individual may have such an unconscious identity with some other person or object this identity takes a variety of forms among Primitives if the bush soul is that of an animal the animal itself is considered as some sort of brother to the man a a man whose brother is a crocodile for instance is supposed to be safe when swimming a crocodile infested River if the bush soul is a tree the tree is presumed to have something like parental authority over the individual concerned in both cases an injury to the bush soul is interpreted as an injury to the man in some tribes it is assumed that a man has a number of souls this belief expresses the feeling of some primitive individual ual that they each consist of several linked but distinct units this means that the individual psyche is far from being safely synthesized on the contrary it threatens to fragment only too easily under the onslaught of unchecked emotions while this situation is familiar to us from the studies of anthropologists it is not so irrelevant to our own Advanced civilization as it might seem we too can become dissociated and lose our identity we can be possessed and altered by moods or become unreasonable and unable to recall important facts about ourselves or others so that people ask what the devil has got into you we talk about being able to control ourselves but self-control is a rare and remarkable virtue we may think we have ourselves under control yet a friend can easily tell us things about ourselves of which we have have no knowledge Beyond doubt even in what we call a high level of civilization human consciousness has not yet achieved a reasonable degree of continuity it is still vulnerable and liable to fragmentation this capacity to isolate part of one's mind indeed is a valuable characteristic it enables us to concentrate upon one thing at a time excluding everything else that may claim our attention but there is a world world of difference between a conscious decision to split off and temporarily suppress a part of one's psyche and a condition in which this happens spontaneously without one's knowledge or consent and even against one's intention the former is a civilized achievement the latter A Primitive loss of a soul or even the pathological cause of a Neurosis thus Even in our day the unity of Consciousness is still a doubtful affair it can too easily be disrupted an ability to control one's emotions that may be very desirable from one point of view would be a questionable accomplishment from another for it would deprive social intercourse of variety color and warmth it is against this background that we must review the importance of Dreams those flimsy evasive unreliable vague and uncertain fantasies to to explain my point of view I would like to describe how it developed over a period of years and how I was led to conclude that dreams are the most frequent and universally accessible source for the investigation of man's symbolizing faculty Sigman Freud was the Pioneer who first tried to explore empirically the unconscious background of Consciousness he worked on the general assumption that dreams are not a matter of chance but are associated with conscious thoughts and problems this assumption was not in the least arbitrary it was based upon the conclusion of eminent neurologists for instance Pierre Janet that neurotic symptoms are related to some conscious experience they even appear to be split off areas of the conscious mind which at another time and under different conditions can be conscious before the beginning of this Century Freud and ysf Brer had recognized that neurotic symptoms hysteria certain types of pain and abnormal behavior are in fact symbolically meaningful they are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself just as it may in dreams and they are equally symbolic a patient for instance who is confronted with an intolerable situation may develop a spasm whenever he tries to swallow he can't swallow it under similar conditions of psychological stress another patient has an attack of asthma he can't breathe the atmosphere at home a third suffers from A peculiar paralysis of the legs he can't walk that is he can't go on anymore a fourth who vomits when he eats cannot digest some unpleasant fact I could cite many examples of this kind but such physical reactions are only one form form in which the problems that trouble us unconsciously May Express themselves they more often find expression in our dreams any psychologist who has listened to numbers of people describing their dreams knows that dream symbols have much greater variety than the physical symptoms of neurosis they often consist of elaborate and picturesque fantasies but if the analyst who is confronted by this dream material uses Freud's original technique of free association he finds that dreams can eventually be reduced to certain basic patterns this technique played an important part in the development of psychoanalysis for it enabled Freud to use dreams as the starting point from which the unconscious problem of the patient might be explored Freud made the simple but penetrating observation that if a dreamer is encouraged to go on talking about his dream images and the thoughts that these prompt in his mind he will give himself away and reveal the unconscious background of his ailments in both what he says and what he deliberately omits saying his ideas may seem irrational and irrelevant but after a time it becomes relatively easy to see what it is that he is trying to avoid what unpleasant thought or experience he is suppressing no matter how he tries to camouflage everything he says points to the core of his predicament a doctor sees so many things from the seamy side of life that he is seldom far from the truth when he interprets the hints that his patient produces as signs of an uneasy conscience what he eventually discovers unfortunately confirms his expectations thus far nobody can say anything against Freud's theory of repression and wish fulfillment as apparent causes of dream symbolism Freud attached particular importance to dreams as The Point of Departure for a process of free association but after a time I began to feel that this was a misleading and inadequate use of the rich fantasies that the unconscious produces in sleep my doubts really began when a colleague told me of an experience he had during the course of a long train journey in Russia though he did not know the language and could not even decipher the cilic script he found himself musing over the strange letters in which the railway notices were written and he fell into a revery in which he imagined all sorts of meanings for them one Idea LED to another and in his relaxed mood he found that this free association had stirred up many old memories among them he was annoyed to find some long buried disagreeable topics things had wished to forget and had forgotten consciously he had in fact arrived at what psychologist would call his complexes that is repressed emotional themes that can cause constant psychological disturbances or even in many cases the symptoms of a Neurosis this episode opened my eyes to the fact that it was not necessary to use a dream as The Point of Departure for the process of free association if one wished to discover the complexes of a patient it showed me that one can reach the center directly from any point of the compass one could begin from cilic letters from meditations upon a crystal ball a prayer wheel or a modern painting or even from casual conversation about some trivial event the dream was no more and no less useful in this respect than any other possible starting point nevertheless dreams have a particular significance even though they often arise from an emotional upset in which the habitual complexes are also involved the habitual complexes are the tender spots of the psyche which react most quickly to an external stimulus or disturbance that is why free association can lead one from any dream to the critical secret thoughts at this point however it occurred to me that if I was right so far it might reasonably follow that dreams have some special and more significant function of their own very often dreams have a definite evidently purposeful structure indicating an underlying idea or intention though as a rule the latter is not immediately comprehensible I therefore began to consider whether one should pay more attention to the actual form and content of a dream rather than allowing free association to lead one off through a train of ideas to complexes that could as easily be reached by other means this new thought was a turning point in the development of my psychology it meant that I gradually gave up following associations that led far away from the text of a dream I chose to concentrate rather on the associations to the dream itself believing that the latter expressed something specific that the unconscious was trying to say say the change in my attitude toward dreams involved a change of method the new technique was one that could take account of all the various wider aspects of a dream a story told by the conscious mind has a beginning a development and an end but the same is not true of a dream its dimensions in time and space are quite different to understand it you must examine it from every aspect just as you may take an unknown object in your hands and turn it over and over until you are familiar with every detail of its shape perhaps I have now said enough to show how I came increasingly to disagree with free association as Freud first employed it I wanted to keep as close as possible to the dream itself and to exclude all the irrelevant ideas and associations that it might evoke true these could lead one toward the complexes of a patient but had a more far-reaching purpose in mind than the discovery of complexes that cause neurotic disturbances there are many other means by which these can be identified the psychologist for instance can get all the hints he needs by using word association tests by asking the patient what he Associates to a given set of words and by studying his responses but to know and understand the psychic life process of an individual's whole personality it is important to realize that his dreams and their symbolic images have a much more important role to play almost everyone knows for example that there is an enormous variety of images by which the sexual act can be symbolized or one might say represented in the form of an allegory each of these images can lead by a process of Association to the idea of section ual intercourse and to specific complexes that any individual may have about his own sexual attitudes but one could just as well unearth such complexes by daydreaming on a set of indecipherable Russian letters I was thus led to the assumption that a dream can contain some message other than the sexual allegory and that it does so for definite reasons to illustrate this point a man may dream of inserting a key in a lock of wielding a heavy stick or of breaking down a door with a battering ram each of these can be regarded as a sexual allegory but the fact that his unconscious for its own purposes has chosen one of these specific images it may be the key the stick or the battering ram is also of major significance the real task is to understand why the key has been preferred to the stick or the stick to the RAM and sometimes this might even lead one to discover that it is not the sexual act at all that is represented but some quite different psychological point from this line of reasoning I concluded that only the material that is clearly and visibly part of a dream should be used in interpreting it the dream has its own limitation its specific form itself tells us what belongs to it and what leads away from it while free Association lures one away from that material in a kind of zigzag line the method I evolved is more like a circum ambulation whose Center is the dream picture I work all around the dream picture and disregard every attempt that the dreamer makes to break away from it time and time again in my professional work I have had to repeat the words let's get back to your dream what does the dream say for instance a patient of mine dreams of a drunken and disheveled vulgar woman in the dream it seemed that this woman was his wife though in real life his wife was totally different on the surface therefore the dream was shockingly untrue and the patient immediately rejected it as dream nonsense if I as his doctor had let him start a process of Association he would inevitably have tried to get as far away as possible from the unpleasant suggestion of his his dream in that case he would have ended with one of his staple complexes a complex possibly that had nothing to do with his wife and we should have learned nothing about the special meaning of this particular dream what then was his unconscious trying to convey by such an obviously untrue statement clearly it somehow expressed the idea of a degenerate female who was closely connected with the dreamer's life but since the ection of this image onto his wife was unjustified and factually untrue I had to look elsewhere before I found out what this repulsive image represented in the Middle Ages long before the physiologist demonstrated that by reason of our glandular structure there are both male and female elements in all of us it was said that every man carries a Woman Within himself it is this female element in every male that I have called called Thea this feminine aspect is essentially a certain inferior kind of relatedness to the surroundings and particularly to women which is kept carefully concealed from others as well as from oneself in other words though an individual's visible personality may seem quite normal he may well be concealing from others or even from himself the deplorable condition of the Woman Within that was the case with this particular patient his female side was not nice his dream was actually saying to him you are in some respects behaving like a degenerate female and thus gave him an appropriate shock an example of this kind of course must not be taken as evidence that the unconscious is concerned with moral injunctions the dream was not telling the patient to behave better but was simply trying to balance the sided nature of his conscious mind which was maintaining the fiction that he was a perfect gentleman throughout it is easy to understand why dreamers tend to ignore and even deny the message of their dreams Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call misoneism a deep and superstitious fear of novelty the Primitives manifest all the reactions of the wild animal against untour events but civilized man reacts to new ideas in much the same way erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new this can easily be observed in any individual's reaction to his own dreams when obliged to admit a surprising thought many pioneers in philosophy science and even literature have been victims of the innate conservatism of their contemporaries psychology is one of the youngest of the Sciences because it attempts to deal with the working of the unconscious it has inevitably encountered misoneism in an extreme form past and future in the unconscious so far I have been sketching some of the principles on which I approach the problem of dreams for when we want to investigate man's faculty to produce symbols dreams prove to be the most basic and accessible material for this purpose the two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these first the dream should be treated as a fact about which one must make no previous assumption except that it's somehow makes sense and second the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious one could scarcely put these principles more modestly no matter how low anyone's opinion of the unconscious may be he must concede that it is worth investigating the unconscious is at least on a level with the LA which after all enjoys the honest interest of the entomologist if somebody with little experience and knowledge of Dreams thinks that dreams are just chaotic occurrences without meaning he is at Liberty to do so but if one assumes that they are normal events which as a matter of fact they are one is bound to consider that they are either causal IE that there is a rational cause for their existence or in a certain way purposive or both let us now look a little more closely at the ways in which the conscious and unconscious contents of the Mind are linked together take an example with which everyone is familiar suddenly you find you can't remember what you were going to say next though a moment ago the thought was perfectly clear or perhaps you were about to introduce a friend and His Name Escapes you as you were about to utter it you say you can't remember in fact though the thought has become unconscious or at least momentarily separated from Consciousness we find the same Phenomenon with our senses if we listen to a continuous note on The Fringe Of audibility The Sound seems to stop at regular intervals and then start again such oscillations are due to a periodic decrease and increase in one's attention not to any change in the note but when something slips out of our Consciousness it does not cease to exist any more than a car that has disappeared round a corner has vanished Into Thin Air it is simply out of sight just as we may later see the car again so we come across thoughts that were temporarily lost to us thus part of the unconscious consists of a multitude of temporary rely obscured thoughts Impressions and images that in spite of being lost continue to influence our conscious Minds a man who is distracted or absent-minded will walk across the room to fetch something he stops seemingly perplexed he has forgotten what he was after his hands grope about among the objects on the table as if he were sleepwalking he is oblivious of his original purpose yet he is unconscious ly Guided by it then he realizes what it is that he wants his unconscious has prompted him if You observe the behavior of a neurotic person you can see him doing many things that he appears to be doing consciously and purposefully yet if you ask him about them you will discover that he is either unconscious of them or has something quite different in mind he hears and does not hear he sees yet is blind he knows and is ignorant such examples are so common that the specialist soon realizes that unconscious contents of the Mind behave as if they were conscious and that you can never be sure in such cases whether thought speech or action is conscious or not it is this kind of behavior that makes so many Physicians dismiss statements by hysterical patients as utter lies such persons certainly produce more untrue truths than most of us but lie is scarcely the right word to use in fact their mental state causes an uncertainty of behavior because their Consciousness is liable to unpredictable Eclipse by an interference from the unconscious even their skin Sensations May reveal similar fluctuations of awareness at one moment the hysterical person may feel a needle prick in the arm at the next it may pass unnoticed if his attention can be focused on a certain point the whole of his body can be completely anesthetized until the tension that causes this blackout of the senses has been relaxed sense perception is then immediately restored all the time however he has been unconsciously aware of what was happening The Physician can see this process quite clearly when he hypnotizes such a patient it is easy to demonstrate that the patient has been aware of every detail the prick in the arm or the remark made during an eclipse of Consciousness can be recalled as accurately as if there had been no anesthesia or forgetfulness I recall a woman who was once admitted to the clinic in a state of complete stuper when she recovered Consciousness next day she knew who she was but did not know where she was how or why she had come there or even the date yet after I had had hypnotized her she told me why she had fallen ill how she had got to the clinic and who had admitted her all these details could be verified she was even able to tell the time at which she had been admitted because she had seen a clock in the entrance hall under hypnosis her memory was as clear as if she had been completely conscious all the time when we discuss such matters we usually have to draw on evidence supplied by clinical observation for this reason many critics assume that the unconscious and all its subtle manifestations belong solely to the sphere of Psychopathology they consider any expression of the unconscious as something neurotic or psychotic which has nothing to do with a normal mental state but neurotic phenomena are by no means the products exclusively of disease they are in fact no more than pathological exaggerations of normal occurrences it is only because they are exaggerations that they are more obvious than their normal counterparts hysterical symptoms can be observed in all normal persons but they are so slight that they usually pass unnoticed forgetting for instance is a normal process in which certain conscious ideas lose their specific energy because one's attention has been deflected when interest turns elsewhere it leaves leaves in Shadow the things with which one was previously concerned just as a search light lights upon a new area by leaving another in darkness this is unavoidable for Consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time and even this Clarity fluctuates but the Forgotten ideas have not ceased to exist although they cannot be reproduced at will they are present in a subliminal State just beyond the threshold of Rec call from which they can Rise Again spontaneously at any time often after many years of apparently total Oblivion I am speaking here of things we have consciously seen or heard and subsequently forgotten but we all see hear smell and taste many things without noticing them at the time either because our attention is deflected or because the stimulus to our senses is too slight to leave a conscious impression the unconscious however has taken note of them and such subliminal sense perceptions play a significant part in our everyday lives without our realizing it they influence the way in which we react to both events and people an example of this that I found particularly revealing was provided by a professor who had been walking in the country with one of his pupils absorbed in serious conversation suddenly he noticed that his thoughts were being interruped rupted by an unexpected flow of memories from his early childhood he could not account for this distraction nothing in what had been said seemed to have any connection with these memories on looking back he saw that he had been walking past a farm when the first of these childhood Recollections had surged up in his mind he suggested to his pupil that they should walk back to the point where the fantasies had begun once there he noticed the smell of geese and instantly he realized that it was this smell that had touched off the flow of memories in his youth he had lived on a farm where geese were kept and their characteristic smell had left a lasting though forgotten impression as he passed the farm on his walk he had noticed the smell subliminally and this unconscious perception had called back long forgotten experiences of his childhood the perception was subliminal because the attention was engaged else W and the stimulus was not strong enough to deflect it and to reach Consciousness directly yet it had brought up the Forgotten memories such a q or trigger effect can explain the onset of neurotic symptoms as well as more benign memories when a sight smell or sound recalls a circumstance in the past a girl for instance may be busy in her office apparently in good health and spirits a moment later she develops a blinding headache and shows other signs of distress without consciously noticing it she has heard the fog horn of a distant ship and this has unconsciously reminded her of an unhappy parting with a lover whom she has been doing her best to forget aside from normal forgetting Freud has described several cases that involve the forgetting of disagreeable memories memories that one is only too ready to lose as NE remarked where pride is insistent enough memory prefers to give way thus among the Lost Memories We encounter not a few that owe their subliminal State and their incapacity to be voluntarily reproduced to their disagreeable and incompatible nature the psychologist calls these repressed contents a case in point might be that of a secretary who is jealous of one of her employer Associates she habitually forgets to invite this person to meetings though the name is clearly marked on the list she is using but if challenged on the point she simply says she forgot or was interrupted she never admits not even to herself the real reason for her Omission many people mistakenly overestimate the role of willpower and think that nothing can happen to their minds that they do not decide and intend but one must must learn to discriminate carefully between intentional and unintentional contents of the Mind the former are derived from the ego personality the latter however Ares from a source that is not identical with the ego but is its other side it is this other side that would have made the secretary forget the invitations there are many reasons why we forget things that we have noticed or experienced and there are just as many many ways in which they may be recalled to mind an interesting example is that of cryptomnesia or concealed recollection an author may be writing steadily to a preconceived plan working out an argument or developing the line of a story when he suddenly runs off at a tangent perhaps a fresh idea has occurred to him or a different image or a whole new subplot if you ask him what prompted the digression he will not be able to tell you he may not even have noticed the change though he has now produced material that is entirely fresh and apparently unknown to him before yet it can sometimes be shown convincingly that what he has written Bears a striking similarity to the work of another author a work that he believes he has never seen I myself found a fascinating example of this in n's book Thus Spoke zer thra where the author reproduces almost word for word an incident reported in a ship's log for the year 1686 by sheer chance I had read this Seaman's yarn in a book published about 1835 half a century before n wrote and when I found the similar passage in thus spake zarathustra I was struck by its peculiar style which was different from n's usual language I was convinced that n must also have seen the old book though he made no reference to it I wrote to his sister who was still alive and she confirmed that she and her brother had in fact read the book together when he was 11 years old I think from the context it is inconceivable that n had any idea that he was plagiarizing this story I believe that 50 years later it had unexpectedly slipped into focus in his conscious mind in this type of case there is genuine if unrealized recollection much the same sort of thing may happen to a musician who has heard a peasant tune or popular song in childhood and finds it cropping up as the theme of a symphonic movement that he is composing in adult life an idea or an image has moved back from the unconscious into the conscious mind what I have so far said about the unconscious is no more than a cursory sketch of the nature and functioning of this complex part of the human psyche but it should have indicated the kind of subliminal material from which the symbols of our dreams may be spontaneously produced this subliminal material can consist of all urges impulses and intentions all perceptions and intuitions all rational or irrational thoughts conclusions inductions deductions and premises and all variety of feeling any or all of these can take the form of partial temporary or constant unconsciousness such material has mostly become unconscious because in a manner of speaking there is no room for it in the conscious mind some of one's thoughts lose their emotional energy and become subliminal that is to say they no longer receive so much of our conscious attention because they have come to seem uninteresting or irrelevant or because there is some reason why we wish to push them out of sight it is in fact normal and necessary for us to forget in this fashion in order to make room in our conscious Minds for New Impressions and ideas if this did not happen everything we experienced would remain above the threshold of Consciousness and our minds would become impossibly cluttered this phenomenon is so widely recognized today that most people who know anything about psychology take it for granted but just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious new contents which have never yet been conscious can arise from it one may have an inkling for instance that something is on the point of breaking into Consciousness that something is in the air or that one smells a rat the discovery that the unconscious is no mere depository of the past past but is also full of germs of future psychic situations and ideas led me to my own new approach to psychology a great deal of controversial discussion has arisen around this point but it is a fact that in addition to memories from a long-distant conscious past completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also present themselves from the unconscious thoughts and ideas that have never been conscious before they grow up from the dark depths of the mind like a Lotus and form a most important part of the subliminal psyche we find this in everyday life where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions many artists philosophers and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to Inspirations that appear suddenly from the unconscious the ability to reach a rich vein of such material and to translate it effective ly into philosophy literature music or scientific discovery is one of the Hallmarks of what is commonly called genius we can find Clear Proof of this fact in the history of science itself for example the French mathematician pangare and the chemist koule owed important scientific discoveries as they themselves admit to sudden pictorial Revelations from the unconscious the so-called mystical experience of the French philosopher deart involved a similar sudden Revelation in which he saw in a Flash the order of all Sciences the British author Robert Lis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his strong sense of man's double being when the plot of Dr Jackal and Mr Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a dream later I shall describe in more detail how such material arises from the unconscious and I shall examine the form in which it is expressed at the moment I simply want to point out that the capacity of the human psyche to produce such new material is particularly significant when one is dealing with dream symbolism for I have found again and again in my professional work that the images and ideas that dreams contain cannot possibly be explained solely in terms of memory they express new thoughts that have never yet reached the threshold of Consciousness the function of dreams I have gone into some detail about the origins of our dream life because it is the soil from which most symbols originally grow unfortunately dreams are difficult to understand as I have already pointed out a dream is quite unlike a story told by the conscious mind in everyday life one thinks out what one wants to say selects the most telling way of saying it and tries to make one's remarks logically coherent for instance an educated person will seek to avoid a mixed metaphor because it may give a muddled impression of his point but dreams have a different texture images that seem contradictory and ridiculous crowd in on the dreamer the normal sense of time is lost and commonplace things can assume a fascinating or threatening aspect it may seem strange that the unconscious mind should order its material so differently from the seemingly disciplined pattern that we can impose on our thoughts in Waking Life yet anyone who stops for a moment to recall a dream will be aware of this contrast which is in fact one of the main reasons why the ordinary person finds dreams so hard to understand they do not make sense in terms of his normal waking experience and he therefore is inclined either to disregard them or to confess that they baffle him perhaps it may be easier to understand this point if we first realize the fact that the ideas with which we deal in our apparently disciplined Waking Life are by no means as precise as we like to believe on the contrary their meaning and their emotional significance for us becomes more imprecise the more closely we examine them the reason for this is that anything we have heard or experience can become subliminal that is to say can pass into the unconscious and even what we retain in our conscious mind and can reproduce at will has acquired an unconscious undertone that will color the idea each time it is recalled our conscious impressions in fact quickly assume an element of unconscious meaning that is physically significant for us though we are not consciously aware of the existence of this subliminal meaning or of the way in which it both extends and confuses the conventional meaning of course such psychic undertones differ from one person to another each of us receives any abstract or general notion in the context of the individual mind and we therefore understand and apply it in our individual ways when in conversation I use any such terms as state money health or Society I assume that my listeners understand more or less the same thing I do but the phrase more or less makes my point each word means something slightly different to each person even among those who share the same cultural background the reason for this variation is that a general notion is received into an individual context and is therefore understood and applied in a slightly individual way and the difference of meaning is naturally greatest when people have widely different social political religious or psychological experiences as long as concepts are identical with mere words the variation is almost imperceptible and plays no practical role but when an exact definition or a careful explanation is needed one can occasionally discover the most amazing variations not only in the purely intellectual understanding of the term but particularly in its emotional tone and its application as a rule these variations are subliminal and therefore never realized one may tend to dismiss such differences as redundant or expendable nuances of meaning that have little relevance to Everyday needs but the fact that they exist shows that even the most matter OFA contents of Consciousness have a penumbra of uncertainty around them even the most carefully defined philosophical or mathematical concept which we are sure does not contain more than we have put into it is nevertheless more than we assume it is a psychic event and as such partly unknowable the very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them to be they are at the same time mythological elements for the pythagoreans they were even Divine but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for a practical purpose every Concept in our conscious mind in short has its own psychic associations while such associations may vary in intensity according to the relative importance of the concept to our whole personality or according to the other ideas and even complexes to which it is associated in our unconscious they are capable of changing the normal character of that concept it may even become something quite different as it drifts below the level of Consciousness these subliminal aspects of everything that happens to us may seem to play very little part in our daily lives but in dream analysis where the psychologist is dealing with expressions of the unconscious they are very relevant for they are the almost invisible roots of our conscious thoughts that is why commonplace objects or ideas can assume such powerful psychic significance in a dream that we may awake seriously Disturbed in spite of having dreamed of nothing worse than a locked room or a Mis train the images produced in dreams are much more picturesque and Vivid than the concepts and experiences that are their waking counterparts one of the reasons for this is that in a dream such Concepts can express their unconscious meaning in our conscious thoughts we restrain ourselves within the limits of rational statements statements that are much less colorful because we have stripped them of most of their psychic associations I recall one dream of my own that I found difficult to interpret in this dream a certain man was trying to get behind me and jump on my back I knew nothing of this man except that I was aware that he had somehow picked up a remark I had made and had Twisted it into a grotesque travesty of my meaning but I could not see the connection between this fact and his attempts in the dream to jump on me in my professional life however it has often happened that someone has misrepresented what I have said so often that I have scarcely bothered to wonder whether this kind of misrepresentation makes me angry now there is a certain value in keeping a conscious control over one's emotional reactions and this I soon realized was the point the dream had made it had taken an Austrian colloquial ISM and translated it into a pictorial image this phrase common enough in ordinary speech is Duan often Bucklin you can climb on my back which means I don't care what you say about me an American equivalent which could easily appear in a similar dream would be go jump in the lake one could say that this dream picture was symbolic for it did not state the situation directly but expressed the point in indirectly by means of a metaphor that I could not at first understand when this happens as it so often does it is not deliberate disguise by a dream it simply reflects the deficiencies in our understanding of emotionally charged pictorial language for in our daily experience we need to state things as accurately as possible and we have learned to discard the trimmings of fantasy both in our language and in our thoughts thus losing a quality that is still characteristic of the Primitive mind most of us have consigned to the unconscious all the Fantastic psychic associations that every object or idea possesses the Primitive on the other hand is still aware of these psychic properties he endows animals plants or stones with powers that we find strange and unacceptable an African jungle dweller for instance sees a nocturnal creature by daylight and knows it to be a medicine man who has temporarily taken its shape or he may regarded as the bush Soul or ancestral Spirit of one of his tribe a tree may play a vital part in the life of a primitive apparently possessing for him its own soul and voice and the man concerned will feel that he shares its fate there are some Indians in South America who will assure you that they are arara parrots though they are well aware that they lack feathers wings and beaks for in The Primitives World things do not have the same sharp boundaries they do in our rational societies what psychologists call psychic Identity or mystical participation has been stripped off our world of things but it is exactly this Halo of unconscious associations that gives a colorful and fantastic aspect to The Primitives world we have lost it to such a degree that we do not recognize it when we meet it again with us such things are kept below the threshold when they occasionally reappear we even insist that something is wrong I have more than once been consulted by well-educated and intelligent people who have had peculiar dreams fantasies or even Visions which have shocked them deeply they have assumed that no one who is in a sound State of Mind could suffer from such things and that anyone who actually sees a vision must be pathologically disturbed a theologian once told me that ezekiel's Visions were nothing more than morbid symptoms and that when Moses and other prophets heard voices speaking to them they were suffering from hallucinations you can imagine the Panic he felt when something of this kind spontaneously happened to him we are so accustomed to the Apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by Common Sense the Primitive man confronted by a shock of this kind would not doubt his sanity he would think of fetishes Spirits or Gods yet the emotions that affect us are just the same in fact the Terrors that stem from our elaborate civilization may be far more threatening than those that primitive people attribute to Demons the attitude of modern civilized man sometimes reminds me of a psychotic patient in my clinic who was himself a doctor one morning I asked him how he was he replied that he had had a wonderful night disinfecting the whole of heaven with mercuric chloride but that in the course of this thoroughgoing sanitary process he had found no trace of God here we see a Neurosis or something worse in instead of God or the fear of God there is an anxiety Neurosis or some kind of phobia the emotion has remained the same but its object has changed both its name and nature for the worse I recall a professor of philosophy who once consulted me about his cancer phobia he suffered from a compulsive conviction that he had a malignant tumor although nothing of the kind was ever found in dozens of X-ray pictures oh I know there is nothing he would say but there might be something what was it that produced this idea it obviously came from a fear that was not instilled by conscious deliberation The Morbid thought suddenly overcame him and it had a power of its own that he could not control it was far more difficult for this educated man to make an admission of this kind than it would have been for a primitive to say that he was plagued by a goat the malign influence of evil spirits is at least an admissible hypothesis in a primitive culture but it is a shattering experience for a civilized person to admit that his troubles are nothing more than a foolish prank of the imagination the Primitive phenomenon of obsession has not vanished it is the same as ever it is only interpreted in a different and more obnoxious way I have made several comparisons of this kind between modern and primitive man such comparisons As I Shall show later are essential to an understanding of the symbl making propensities of man and of the part that dreams play in expressing them for one finds that many dreams present images and associations that are analogous to primitive ideas myths and rights these dream images were called archaic remnants by Freud the phrase suest suggest that they are psychic elements surviving in the human mind from ages long ago this point of view is characteristic of those who regard the unconscious as a mere appendix of Consciousness or more picturesquely as a trash can that collects all the Refuge of the conscious mind further investigation suggested to me that this attitude is untenable and should be discarded I found that associations and images of this kind are an inte part of the unconscious and can be observed everywhere whether the dreamer is educated or illiterate intelligent or stupid they are not in any sense lifeless or meaningless remnants they still function and they are especially valuable as Dr Henderson shows in a later chapter of this book just because of their historical nature they form a bridge between the ways in which we consciously express our thoughts and a more primitive primtive more colorful and pictorial form of expression it is this form as well that appeals directly to feeling and emotion these historical associations are the link between the rational World Of Consciousness and the world of instinct I've already discussed the interesting contrast between the controlled thoughts we have in Waking Life and the wealth of imagery produced in dreams now you can see another reason for this difference because in our civilized life we have stripped so many ideas of their emotional energy we do not really respond to them anymore we use such ideas in our speech and we show a conventional reaction when others use them but they do not make a very deep impression on us something more is needed to bring certain things home to us effectively enough to make us change our attitude and our Behavior that is what dream language does its symbolism has so much psychic energy that we are forced to pay attention to it there was for instance a lady who was well known for her stupid prejudices and her stubborn resistance to reasoned argument one could have argued with her all night to no effect she would have taken not the slightest notice her dreams however took a different line of approach one night she dreamed she was attending an an important social occasion she was greeted by the hostess with the words how nice that you could come all your friends are here and they are waiting for you the hostess then led her to the door and opened it and the dreamer stepped through into a cowshed this dream language was simple enough to be understood even by a blockhead the woman would not at first admit the point of a dream that struck so directly at her self-importance but its message never nevertheless went home and after a time she had to accept it because she could not help seeing the self-inflicted joke such messages from the unconscious are of Greater importance than most people realize in our conscious life we are exposed to all kinds of influences other people stimulate or depress US events at the office or in our social life distract us such things seduce us into following ways that are unsuitable to our individuality whether or not we are aware of the effect they have on our Consciousness it is disturbed by and exposed to them almost without defense this is especially the case with a person whose extroverted attitude of Mind lays all the emphasis upon external objects or who Harbors feelings of inferiority and doubt concerning his own innermost personality the more that Consciousness is influenced by prejudices errors fantasies and infantile Wishes the more the already existing Gap will widen into a neurotic dissociation and lead to a more or less artificial life far removed from healthy instincts nature and Truth the general function of Dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that reestablishes in a subtle way the total psychic equilibrium this is what I call the complimentary or compensatory role of Dreams in our psychic makeup it explains why people who have unrealistic ideas or too high an opinion of themselves or who make grandiose plans out of proportion to their real capacities have dreams of flying or falling the dream compensates for the deficiencies of their personalities and at the same time it warns them of the danger in their present course if the warnings of the dream are disregarded real accidents may take their place the victim may fall downstairs or may have a motor accident I remember the case of a man who was inextricably involved in a number of shady Affairs he developed an almost morbid passion for dangerous mountain climbing as a sort of compensation he was seeking to get above himself in a dream one night he saw himself stepping off the summit of a high mountain into empty space when he told me his dream I instantly saw his danger and tried to emphasize the warning and persuade him to restrain himself I even told him that the dream foreshadowed his death in a mountain accident it was in vain 6 months later he stepped off into space a mountain guide watched him and a friend letting themselves down on a rope in a difficult place the friend had found a temporary foothold on a Ledge and the dreamer was following him down suddenly he let go of the Rope according to the guide as if he were jumping into the air he fell upon his friend and both went down and were killed another typical case was that of a lady who was living above herself she was high and mighty in her daily life but she had shocking dreams reminding her of all sorts of unsavory things when I uncovered them she IND ly refused to acknowledge them the dreams then became menacing and full of references to the walks she used to take by herself in the woods where she indulged in Soulful fantasies I saw her danger but she would not listen to my many warnings soon afterwards she was savagely attacked in the Woods by a sexual pervert but for the intervention of some people who heard her screams she would have been killed there was no magic in this what her dreams had told me was that this woman had a secret longing for such an adventure just as the mountain climber unconsciously sought the satisfaction of finding a definite way out of his difficulties obviously neither of them expected the stiff price involved she had several bones broken and he paid with his life thus dreams may sometimes announce certain situations long before they actually happen this is not necessarily a miracle or a form of precognition many crises in our lives have a long unconscious history we move toward them step by step unaware of the dangers that are accumulating but what we consciously fail to see is frequently perceived by our unconscious which can pass the information on through dreams dreams may often warn Us in this way but just as often it seems they do not therefore any Assumption of a benevolent hand restraining Us in time is dubious or to State it more positively it seems that a benevolent agency is sometimes at work and sometimes not the mysterious hand may even point the way to predition dreams sometimes prove to be traps or appear to be so they sometimes behave like the delic Oracle that told King creus that if he crossed the Haley River he would destroy a large Kingdom it was only after he had been completely defeated in battle after the crossing that he discovered that the kingdom meant by the Oracle was his own one cannot afford to be naive in dealing with dreams they originate in a spirit that is not quite human but is rather a breath of nature a spirit of the beautiful and generous as well as of the cruel goddess if we want to characterize this Spirit we shall certainly get closer to it in the sphere of ancient myth ologies or the fables of the Primeval Forest than in the consciousness of modern man I'm not denying that great gains have resulted from the evolution of civilized society but these gains have been made at the price of enormous losses whose extent we have scarcely begun to estimate part of the purpose of my comparisons between the Primitive and the Civilized states of man has been to show the balance of these losses and gains primitive man was much more governed by his instincts than are his rational modern descendants who have learned to control themselves in this civilizing process we have increasingly divided our Consciousness from the deeper instinctive strata of the human psyche and even ultimately from the somatic basis of the psychic phenomenon fortunately we have not lost these basic instinctive strata they remain part of the unconscious even though they may Express themselves only in the form of dream images these instinctive phenomena one may not incidentally always recognize them for what they are for their character is symbolic play a vital part in What I have called the compensating function of dreams for the sake of mental stability and even physiological Health the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on Parallel Lines if they are split apart or dissociated psychological disturbance follows in this respect dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind and their interpretation enriches the poverty of Consciousness so that it learns to understand again the Forgotten language of the instincts of course people are bound to query this function since its symbols so often pass un noticed or uncomprehended in normal life the understanding of Dreams is often considered Superfluous I can illustrate this by my experience with a primitive tribe in East Africa to my amazement these tribesmen denied that they had any dreams but through patient indirect talks with them I soon found that they had dreams just like everyone else but that they were convinced their dreams had no meaning dreams of ordinary men mean nothing they told me they thought that the only dreams that mattered were those of Chiefs and medicine men these which concerned the welfare of the tribe were highly appreciated the only drawback was that the chief and the medicine man both claimed that they had ceased having meaningful dreams they dated this change from the time that the British came to their country the district commissioner the British official in charge of them had taken over the function of the great dreams that had hitherto guided the trib's behavior when these tribesmen conceded that they did have dreams but thought them meaningless they were like the modern man who thinks that a dream has no significance for him simply because he does not understand it but even a civilized man can sometimes observe that a dream which he may not even remember can alter his mood for better or worse the dream has been compr rended but only in a subliminal way and that is what usually happens it is only on the rare occasions when a dream is particularly impressive or repeats itself at regular intervals that most people consider an interpretation desirable here I ought to add a word of warning against unintelligent or incompetent dream analysis there are some people whose mental condition is so unbalanced that the interpretation of their their dreams can be extremely risky in such a case a very one-sided Consciousness is cut off from a correspondingly irrational or crazy unconscious and the two should not be brought together without taking special precautions and speaking more generally it is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol no dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of Any Dream each individual varies so much in the way that his unconscious compliments or compensates his conscious mind that it is impossible to be sure how far dreams and their symbols can be classified at all it is true that there are dreams and single symbols I should prefer to call them motifs that are typical and often occur among such motifs are falling flying being persecuted by dangerous animals or hostile men being insufficiently or absurdly clothed in public places being in a hurry or lost in a Milling crowd fighting with useless weapons or being wholly defenseless running hard yet getting nowhere a typical infantile Motif is the dream of growing infinitely itely small or infinitely big or being transformed from one to the other as you find it for instance in Lewis Carol's Alice in Wonderland but I must stress again that these are motifs that must be considered in the context of the dream itself not as self-explanatory ciphers the recurring dream is a noteworthy phenomenon there are cases in which people have dreamed the same dream from childhood into the later years of adult life a dream of this kind is usually an attempt to compensate for a particular defect in the dreamer's attitude to life or it may date from a traumatic moment that has left behind some specific Prejudice it may also sometimes anticipate a future event of importance I myself dreamed of a motif over several years in which I would discover a part of my house that I did not know existed sometimes it was the quarters where my long dead parents lived in which my father to my surprise had a laboratory where he studied the comparative anatomy of fish and my mother ran a hotel for ghostly visitors usually this unfamiliar guest Wing was an ancient historical building long forgotten yet my Inherited property it contained interesting antique furniture and toward the end of this series of dreams I discovered an old live Library whose books were unknown to me finally in the last dream I opened one of the books and found in it a profusion of the most marvelous symbolic pictures when I awoke my heart was palpitating with excitement sometime before I had this particular last dream of the series I had placed an order with an antiquarian book sell for one of the classic compilations of medieval Alchemist I had found a quotation in liter that I thought might have some connection with early Byzantine Alchemy and I wished to check it several weeks after I had had the dream of the unknown book a parcel arrived from the book seller inside was a parchment volume dating from the 16th century it was illustrated by fascinating symbolic pictures that instantly reminded me of those I had seen in my dream as the rediscovery of the principles of alchemy came to be an important part of my work as a pioneer of psychology the motif of my recurring dream can easily be understood the house of course was a symbol of my personality and its conscious field of interest and the unknown Annex represented the anticipation of a new field of interest and research of which my conscious mind was at that time unaware from that moment 30 years ago I never had the dream again the analysis of Dreams I began this essay by noting the difference between a sign and a symbol the sign is always less than the concept it represents while a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning symbols moreover are natural and spontaneous products no genius has ever sat down with a pen or a brush in his hand and said now I am going to invent a symbol no one can take a more or less rational thought reached as a logical conclusion or by deliberate intent and then give it symbolic form no matter what fantastic trappings one may put upon an idea of this kind it will still remain a sign linked to the conscious thought behind it not a symbol that hints at something not yet known in dreams symbols occur spontaneously for dreams happen and are not invented they are therefore the main source of all our knowledge about symbolism but symbols I must point out do not occur solely in dreams they appear in all kinds of psychic manifestations there are symbolic thoughts and feelings symbolic acts and situations it often seems that even inanimate objects cooperate with the unconscious in the arrangement of symbolic patterns there are numerous well authenticated stories of clock stopping at the moment of their owner's death one was the pendulum clock in the Palace of Frederick the great at s suusi which stopped when the Emperor died other common examples are those of a mirror that breaks or a picture that falls when a death occurs or minor but unexplained breakages in a house where someone is passing through an emotional crisis even if Skeptics refuse to credit such reports story of this kind are always cropping up and this alone should serve as ample proof of their psychological importance there are many symbols however among them the most important that are not individual but collective in their nature and origin these are chiefly religious images the believer assumes that they are of divine origin that they have been revealed to man The skeptic says flatly that they have been invented both both are wrong it is true as the skeptic notes that religious symbols and Concepts have for centuries been the object of careful and quite conscious elaboration it is equally true as the believer implies that their origin is so far buried in the mystery of the past that they seem to have no human Source but they are in fact Collective representations emanating from Primeval dreams and creative fantasies as as such these images are involuntary spontaneous manifestations and by no means intentional inventions this fact as I shall later explain has a direct and important bearing upon the interpretation of Dreams it is obvious that if you assume the dream to be symbolic you will interpret it differently from a person who believes that the essential energizing thought or emotion is known already and is merely disguised IED by The Dream in the latter case dream interpretation makes little sense for you find only what you already know it is for this reason that I have always said to my pupils learn as much as you can about symbolism then forget it all when you are analyzing a dream this advice is of such practical importance that I have made it a rule to remind myself that I can never understand somebody else's Dream well enough to inter pret it correctly I have done this in order to check the flow of my own associations and reactions which might otherwise Prevail over my patients uncertainties and hesitations as it is of the greatest therapeutic importance for an analyst to get the particular message of a dream that is the contribution that the unconscious is making to the conscious mind as accurately as possible it is essential for him to explore the content of a dream with the utmost most thoroughness I had a dream when I was working with Freud that illustrates this point I dreamed that I was in my home apparently on the first floor in a cozy Pleasant sitting room furnished in the manner of the 18th century I was astonished that I had never seen this room before and began to wonder what the ground floor was like I went downstairs and found the place was rather dark with panel walls and heavy Furniture dating from the 16th Century or even earlier my surprise and curiosity increased I wanted to see more of the whole structure of this house so I went down to The Cellar where I found a door opening onto a flight of stone steps that led to a large vaed room the floor consisted of large slabs of stone and the walls seemed very ancient I examined the mortar and found it was mixed with splinters of brick obviously the walls were of Roman origin I became increasingly excited in one corner I saw an iron ring on a stone slab I pulled up the slab and saw yet another narrow flight of steps leading to a kind of cave which seemed to be a prehistoric tomb containing two skulls some bones and broken shards of pottery then I woke up if Freud when he analyzed this dream had followed my method of exploring its specific associations and context he would have heard a far-reaching story but I'm afraid he would have dismissed it as a mere effort to escape from a problem that was really his own the dream is in fact a short summary of my life more specifically of the development of my mind I grew up in a house 200 years old our furniture consisted mostly of pieces about 300 years old and mentally my hitherto greatest spiritual Adventure had been to study the philosophies of Kant and show Hower the great news of the day was the work of Charles Darwin shortly before this I had been living with the still medieval concepts of my parents for whom the world and men were still presided over by Divine omnipotence and Providence this world had become Antiquated and obsolete my Christian faith had become relative through its encounter with Eastern religions and Greek philosophy it is for this reason that the ground floor was so still dark and obviously uninhabited my then historical interest had developed from an original preoccupation with comparative anatomy and paleontology while I was working as an assistant at the anatomical Institute I was fascinated by the bones of fossil man particularly by the much discussed neanderthalensis and the still more controversial skull of Dubois pithecanthropus as as a matter of fact these were my real associations to the dream but I did not dare to mention the subject of skulls skeletons or corpses to Freud because I had learned that this theme was not popular with him he cherished The Peculiar idea that I anticipated his early death and he drew this conclusion from the fact that I had shown much interest in the mummified corpses in the so-called black in bramman which we visited together in 1909 9 on our way to take the boat to America thus I felt reluctant to come out with my own thoughts since through recent experience I was deeply impressed by the almost unbridgeable gap between Freud's mental Outlook and background and my own I was afraid of losing his friendship if I should open up to him about my own inner World which I surmised would look very queer to him feeling quite uncertain about my own psychology I almost automatically told told him a lie about my free associations in order to escape the impossible task of enlightening him about my very personal and utterly different Constitution I must apologize for this rather lengthy narration of the Jam I got into through telling Freud my dream but it is a good example of the difficulties in which one gets involved in the course of a real dream analysis so much depends upon the personal differences between the analyst and the anal analyzed I soon realized that Freud was looking for some incompatible wish of mine and so I suggested tentatively that the skulls I had dreamed of Might refer to certain members of my family whose death for some reason I might desire this proposal met with his approval but I was not satisfied with such a phony solution while I was trying to find a suitable answer to Freud's questions I was suddenly confused by an in inition about the role that the subjective Factor plays in psychological understanding my intuition was so overwhelming that I thought only of how to get out of this impossible snarl and I took the easy way out by a lie this was neither elegant nor morally defensible but otherwise I should have risked a fatal row with Freud and I did not feel up to that for many reasons my intuition consisted of the sudden and most unexpected insight into the fact that my dream meant myself my life and my world my whole reality against a theoretical structure erected by another strange mind for reasons and purposes of its own it was not Freud's dream it was mine and I understood suddenly in a Flash what my dream meant this conflict illustrates a vital point about dream analysis it is not so much a technique that can be learned and applied according to the rules as it is a dialectical exchange between two personalities if it is handled as a mechanical technique the individual psychic personality of the dreamer gets lost and the therapeutic problem is reduced to the simple question which of the two people concerned the analyst or the dreamer will dominate the other I gave up hypnotic treatment for this very reason because I did not want to impose my will on others I wanted the healing processes to grow out of the patient's own personality not from Suggestions by me that would have only a passing effect my aim was to protect and preserve my patient's dignity and freedom so that he could live his life according to his own wishes in this exchange with Freud it dawned on me for the first time that before we construct General theories about man and his psyche we should learn a lot more about the real human being we have to deal with the individual is the only reality the further we move away from the individual toward abstract ideas about Homo sapiens the more likely we are to fall into error in these times of social upheaval and Rapid change it is desirable to know much more than we do about the individual human being for so much depends upon his mental and moral qualities but if we are to see things in their right perspective we need to understand the past of man as well as his present that is why an understanding of myths and symbols is of essential importance the problem of types in all other branches of science it is legitimate to apply a hypothesis to an impersonal subject psychology however inescapably confronts you with the living relations between two individuals neither of whom can be devestated of his subjective personality nor in indeed depersonalized in any other way the analyst and his patient may set out by agreeing to deal with a chosen problem in an impersonal and objective manner but once they are engaged their whole personalities are involved in their discussion at this point further progress is Possible only if mutual agreement can be reached can we make any sort of objective judgment about the final result only if we make a comparison between our conclusions and the standards that are generally valid in the social milu to which the individuals belong even then we must take into account the mental equilibrium or sanity of the individual concerned for the result cannot be a completely Collective leveling out of the individual to adjust him to the Norms of his Society this would amount to a most unnatural condition a sane and normal Society is one in which people habitually disagree because General agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities disagreement functions as a vehicle of mental life in society but it is not a goal agreement is equally important because psychology basically depends upon balanced opposites no judgment can be considered to be final in which its reversibility has not been taken into account the reason for this peculiarity lies in the fact that there is no standpoint above or outside psychology that would enable us to form an ultimate Judgment of what the psyche is in spite of the fact that dreams demand individual treatment some generalities are necessary in order to classify and clarify the material that the psychologist collects by studying many individuals it would obviously be impossible to formulate any psychological theory or to teach it by describing large numbers of separate cases without any effort to see what they have in common and how they differ any general characteristic can be chosen as a basis one can for instance make a relatively simple distinction between individuals who have extroverted personalities and others who are introverted this is only one of many possible General izations but it enables one to see immediately the difficulties that can arise if the analyst should happen to be one type and his patient the other since any deeper analysis of Dreams leads to the confrontation of two individuals it will obviously make a great difference whether their types of attitude are the same or not if both belong to the same type they may sail along happily for a long time but if one is an extrovert and the other an introvert their different and contradictory standpoints May Clash right away particularly when they are unaware of their own type of Personality or when they are convinced that their own is the only right type the extrovert for instance will choose the majority view the introvert will reject it simply because it is fashionable such a misund understanding is easy enough because the value of the one is the nonv value of the other Freud himself for instance interpreted the introverted type as an individual morbidly concerned with himself but introspection and self-naming it cannot be assumed that the analyst is a Superman who is above such differences just because he is a doctor who has acquired a psychological theory and a corresponding technique he can only imagine himself to be superior in so far as he assumes that his theory and technique are absolute truths capable of embracing the whole of the human psyche since such an assumption is more than doubtful he cannot really be sure of it consequently he will be assailed by secret doubts if he confronts the human wholeness of his patient with a theory or technique ique which is merely a hypothesis or an attempt instead of with his own living wholeness the analyst's whole personality is the only adequate equivalent of his patient's personality psychological experience and knowledge do not amount to more than mere advantages on the side of the analyst they do not keep him outside The Fray in which he is bound to be tested just as much as his patient thus it matters a good deal whether their personalities are Harmon ious in conflict or complimentary extroversion and introversion are just two among many peculiarities of human behavior but they are often rather obvious and easily recognizable if one studies extroverted individuals for instance one soon discovers that they differ in many ways from one another and that being extroverted is therefore a superficial and too General Criterion to be really characteristic that is why long ago I tried to find some further basic peculiarities peculiarities that might serve the purpose of giving some order to the Apparently Limitless variations in human individuality I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it and an equal number who do use their minds but in an amazingly stupid way I was also surprised to find many intelligent and wide awake people who lived as far as one could make out as if they had never learned to use their sense organs they did not see the things before their eyes hear the words sounding in their ears or notice the things they touched or tasted some lived without being aware of the state of their own bodies there are others who seem to live in a most curious condition of Consciousness as if the state they had arrived at today were final with no possibility of change or as if the world and the psyche were static and would remain so forever they seemed devoid of all imagination and they entirely and exclusively depended upon their sense perception chances and possibilities did not exist in their world and in today there was no real tomorrow the future was just the repetition of the past I'm trying here to give the reader a glimpse of my own First Impressions when I began to observe the many people I met it soon became clear to me however that the people who used their minds were those who thought that is who applied their intellectual faculty in trying to adapt themselves to people and circumstances and the equally intelligent people who did not think were those who sought and found their way by feeling feeling is a word that needs some explanation for instance one speaks of feeling when it is a matter of sentiment corresponding to the French term sentiment but one also applies the same word to Define an opinion for example a communication from the White House May begin the president feels furthermore the word may be used to express an intuition I had a feeling as if when I use the word feeling in contrast to thinking I refer to a judgment of value for instance agreeable or disagreeable good or bad and so on feeling according to this definition is not an emotion which as the word conveys is involuntary feeling as I mean it is like thinking a rational that is ordering function whereas intuition is an irrational that is perceiving function in so far as intuition is a hunch it is not the product of a voluntary act it is rather rather an involuntary event which depends upon different external or internal circumstances instead of an act of judgment intuition is more like a sense perception which is also an irrational event in so far as it depends essentially upon objective stimuli which owe their existence to physical and not to mental causes these four functional types correspond to the obvious means by which Consciousness obtains its or orientation to experience Sensation that is sense perception tells you that something exist thinking tells you what it is feeling tells you whether it is agreeable or not and intuition tells you when it comes and where it is going the reader should understand that these four criteria of types of human behavior are just four viewpoints among many others like willpower temperament imagination m memory and so on there is nothing dogmatic about them but their basic nature recommends them as suitable criteria for a classification I find them particularly helpful when I am called upon to explain parents to children and husbands to wives and vice versa they are also useful in understanding one's own prejudices thus if you want to understand another person's dream you have to sacrifice your own predilections and and suppress your prejudices this is not easy or comfortable because it means a moral effort that is not to everyone's taste but if the analyst does not make the effort to criticize his own standpoint and to admit its relativity he will get neither the right information about nor sufficient insight into his patient's mind the analyst expects at least a certain willingness on the patient's part to listen to his opinion and to take it seriously and the patient must be granted the same right although such a relationship is indispensable for any understanding and is therefore of self-evident necessity one must remind oneself again and again that it is more important in therapy for the patient to understand than for the analyst's theoretical expectations to be satisfied the patient's resistance to the analyst's interpretation is not necessarily wrong it is rather a sure sign that something does not click either the patient has not yet reached the point where he understands or the interpretation does not fit in our efforts to interpret the dream symbols of another person we are almost invariably hampered by our tendency to fill in the unavoidable gaps in our understanding by projection that is by the assumption that what the analyst perceives or thinks is equally perceived or thought by the dreamer to overcome this source of error I have always insisted on the importance of sticking to the context of the particular dream and excluding all theoretical assumptions about dreams in general except for the hypothesis that dreams in some way make sense it will be clear from all I have said that we cannot lay down general rules for interpreting dreams when I suggested earlier that the overall function of dream seems to be to compensate for deficiencies or distortions in the conscious mind I meant that this assumption opened up the most promising approach to the nature of particular dreams in some cases you can see this function plainly demonstrated one of my patients had a very high opinion of himself and was unaware that almost everyone who knew him was irritated by his air of moral superiority he came to me with a dream in which he had seen a drunken roll in a ditch a sight that evoked from him only the patronizing comment it's terrible to see how low a man can fall it was evident that the unpleasant nature of the dream was at least in part an attempt to offset his inflated opinion of his own merits but there was something more to it than this it turned out that he had a brother who was a degenerate alcoholic what the dream also revealed was that his Superior attitude was comp compensating the brother both as an outer and inner figure in another case I recall a woman who was proud of her intelligent understanding of psychology had recurring dreams about another woman when in ordinary life she met this woman she did not like her thinking her a Vain and dishonest intriguer but in the dreams the woman appeared almost as a sister friendly and likable my patient could not understand why she should drink dream so favorably about a person she disliked but these dreams were trying to convey the idea that she herself was shadowed by an unconscious character that resembled The Other Woman it was hard for my patient who had very clear ideas about her own personality to realize that the dream was telling her about her own power complex and her hidden motivations unconscious influences that had more than once led to disagreeable Rouse with her friends she had always blamed others for these not herself it is not merely the shadow side of our personalities that we Overlook disregard and repress we may also do the same to our positive qualities an example that comes to mind is that of an apparently modest and self-effacing man with charming manners he always seemed content with a back seat but discreetly insisted on being present when asked to speak he would offer a well-informed opinion though he never intruded it but he sometimes hinted that a given matter could be dealt with in a far superior way at a certain higher level though he never explained how in his dreams however he constantly had encounters with great historical figures such as Napoleon and Alexander the Great these dreams were clearly compensating for an inferiority complex but they had another implication what sort of man must I be the dream was asking to have such illustrious callers in this respect the dreams pointed to a secret megalomania which offset the dreamer's feeling of inferiority this unconscious idea of grandeur insulated him from the reality of his environment and enabled him to remain aloof from obligations that would be imperative for other people he felt no need to prove either to himself or to others that his Superior judgment was based on Superior Merit he was in fact unconsciously playing an insane game and the dreams were seeking to bring it to the level of Consciousness in a curiously ambiguous way hobnobbing with Napoleon and being on speaking terms with Alexander the Great are exactly the kind of fantasies produced by an inferiority complex but but why one asks could not the dream be open and direct about it and say what it had to say without ambiguity I have frequently been asked this question and I have asked it myself I am often surprised at the tantalizing way dreams seem to evade definite information or omit the decisive Point Freud assumed the existence of a special function of the psyche which he called the sensor this he supposed Twisted the dream images and made them unrecognizable or misleading in order to deceive the dreaming Consciousness about the real subject of the dream by concealing the critical thought from the dreamer the sensor protected his sleep against the shock of a disagreeable reminiscence but I am skeptical about the theory that the dream is a guardian of sleep dreams just as often disturb sleep it rather looks as if the approach to Consciousness has a blotting out effect upon the subliminal contents of the psyche the subliminal State retains ideas and images at a much lower level of tension than they possess in Consciousness in the subliminal condition they lose Clarity of definition the relations between them are less consequential and more vaguely analogous less rational and therefore more incomprehensible this can also be observed in all dreamlike conditions whether due to fatigue fever or toxins but if something happens to endow any of these images with greater tension they become less subliminal and as they come close to the threshold of Consciousness more sharply defined it is from this fact that one may understand why dreams often express themselves as analogies why one dream image slides into another and why neither the logic nor the time scale of our Waking Life seems to apply the form that dreams take is natural to the unconscious because the material from which they are produced is retained in the subliminal state in precisely this fashion dreams do not guard sleep from what Freud called the incompatible wish what he called disguise is actually the shape all impulses naturally take in the unconscious thus a dream cannot produce a definite thought if it begins to do so it ceases to be a dream because it crosses the threshold of Consciousness that is why dreams seem to skip the very points that are most important to the conscious mind and seem rather to manifest The Fringe Of Consciousness like the faint gleam of stars during a total eclipse of the sun we should understand that dream symbols are for the most part manifestations of a psyche that is beyond the control of the conscious mind meaning and purposefulness are not the prerogatives of the mind they operate in the whole of living nature there is no difference in principle between organic and psychic growth as a plant produces its flower so the psyche creates its symbols every dream is evidence of this process so by means of Dreams plus all sorts of intuitions impulses and other spontaneous events instinctive forces in infuence the activity of Consciousness whether that influence is For Better or For Worse depends upon the actual contents of the unconscious if it contains too many things that normally ought to be conscious then its function becomes twisted and Prejudiced motives appear that are not based upon true instincts but that owe their existence and psychic importance to the fact that they have been consigned to the unconscious by repression or neglect they overlay as it were the normal unconscious psyche and distort its natural tendency to express basic symbols and motifs therefore it is reasonable for a psychoanalyst concerned with the causes of a mental disturbance to begin by eliciting from his patient a more or less voluntary confession and realization of everything that the patient dislikes or fears this is like the much older confession of the church which in many ways anticipated modern psychological techniques at least this is the general rule in practice however it may work the other way round overpowering feelings of inferiority or serious weakness may make it very difficult even impossible for the patient to face fresh evidence of his own inadequacy so I have often found it profitable to begin by giving a positive look to the patient this provides a helpful sense of security when he approaches the more painful insights take as an example a dream of personal exaltation in which for instance one has tea with the Queen of England or finds oneself on intimate terms with the Pope if the dreamer is not a schizophrenic the Practical interpretation of the symbol depends very much upon his present state of mind that is the condition of his ego if the dreamer overestimates his own value it is easy to show from the material produced by association of ideas how inappropriate and childish the dreamer's intentions are and how much they emanate from Childish wishes to be equal to or Superior to his parents but if it is a case of inferiority where an all-pervading feeling of worthlessness has already overcome every positive aspect of theam dreamer's personality it would be quite wrong to depress him still more by showing how infantile ridiculous or even perverse he is that would cruy increase his inferiority as well as cause an unwelcome and quite unnecessary resistance to the treatment there is no therapeutic technique or doctrine that is of General application since every case that one receives for treatment is an individual in a specific condition I remember a patient I once had to treat over a period of 9 years I saw him only for a few weeks each year since he lived abroad from the start I knew what his real trouble was but I also saw that the least attempt to get close to the truth was met by a violent defensive reaction that threatened a complete rupture between us whether I liked it or not I had to do my best to maintain our relation and to follow his inclination which was supported by his dreams and which led our discussion away from the root of his Neurosis we ranged so wide that I often accused myself of leading my patient astray nothing but the fact that his condition slowly but clearly improved prevented me from confronting him brutally with the truth in the 10th year however the patient declared himself to be cured and freed from all his symptoms I was surprised because theoretically his condition was incurable noticing my astonishment he smiled and said in effect and I want to thank you above all for your unfailing tact and patience in helping me to circumvent the painful cause of my Neurosis I am now ready to tell you everything about it if I had been able to talk freely about it I would have told you what it was at my first consultation but that would have destroyed my rapport with you where should I have been then I should have been morally bankrupt in in the course of 10 years I have learned to trust you and as my confidence grew my condition improved I improved because this slow process restored my belief in myself now I am strong enough to discuss the problem that was destroying me he then made a devastatingly Frank confession of his problem which showed me the reasons for the peculiar course our treatment had had to follow the original shock had been such that alone he had been unable to face it he needed the help of another and the therapeutic task was the slow establishment of confidence rather than the demonstration of a clinical Theory from cases like this I learned to adapt my methods to the needs of the individual patient rather than to commit myself to General theoretical considerations that might be inapplicable in any particular case the knowledge of human nature that I have accumulated in the course of 60 years of practical experience has taught me to consider each case as a new one in which first of all I have had to seek the individual approach sometimes I have not hesitated to plunge into a careful study of infantile events and Fantasies at other times I have begun at the top even if this has meant soaring straight into the most remote metaphysical speculations it all depends on learning the language of the individual patient and following the gropings of his unconscious toward the light some cases demand one method and some another this is especially true when one seeks to interpret symbols two different individuals may have almost exactly the same dream this as one soon discovers in clinical experience is less uncommon than the Layman may think yet if for instance one dreamer is Young and the other is old the problem that Disturbed them is correspondingly different and it would be obviously absurd to interpret both dreams in the same way an example that comes to my mind is a dream in which a group of young men are riding on Horseback across a wide field the dreamer is in the lead and he jumps a ditch full of water just clearing this Hazard the rest of the party fall into the ditch now the young man who first told me this dream was a cautious introverted type but I also heard the same dream from an old man of Daring character who had lived an active and enterprising life at the time he had this dream he was an invalid who gave his doctor and nurse a great deal of trouble he had actually injured himself by his Disobedience of medical instructions it was clear to me that this dream was telling the young man what he ought to do but it was telling the old man what he actually was still doing while it encouraged the hesitant young man the old man was in no such need of encouragement the spirit of Enterprise that still flickered within him was indeed his greatest trouble this example shows how the interpretation of dreams and symbols largely depends upon the individual circumstances of the dreamer and the condition of his mind the archetype in dream symbolism I have already suggested that dreams serve the purpose of compens ation this assumption means that the dream is a normal psychic phenomenon that transmits unconscious reactions or spontaneous impulses to Consciousness many dreams can be interpreted with the help of the dreamer who provides both the associations to and the context of the dream image by means of which one can look at all its aspects this method is adequate in all ordinary cases such as those when a relative a a friend or a patient tells you a dream more or less in the course of conversation but when it is a matter of obsessive Dreaming or of highly emotional dreams the personal associations produced by the dreamer do not usually suffice for a satisfactory interpretation in such cases we have to take into consideration the fact first observed and commented on by Freud that elements often occur in a dream that are not individual and that cannot be derived from the dreamer's personal experience these elements as I have previously mentioned are what Freud called archaic remnants mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life and which seem to be Aboriginal innate and inherited shapes of the human mind just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs each with a long evolutionary history behind it so we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way it can no more be a product without history than is the body in which it exists by history I do not mean the fact that the Mind builds itself up by conscious reference to the Past through language and other cultural Traditions I am referring to the biological prehistoric and unconscious development of the Mind in archaic man whose psyche was still close to that of the animal this immensely old psyche forms the basis of our mind just as much as the structure of our body is based on the general anatomical pattern of the mammal the trained eye of the anatomist or the biologist finds many traces of this original pattern in our bodies the experienced investigator of the mind can similarly see the analogies between the dream pictures of modern man and the products of the primitive mind its Collective images and its mythological motifs just as the biologist needs the science of comparative Anatomy however the psychologist cannot do without a comparative anatomy of the psyche in practice to put it differently the psychologist must not only have a sufficient experience of dreams and other products of unconscious activity but also of Mythology in its widest sense without this equip nobody can spot the important analogies it is not possible for instance to see the analogy between a case of compulsion neurosis and that of a classical demonic possession without a working knowledge of both My Views about the archaic remnants which I call archetypes or primordial images have been constantly criticized by people who lack a sufficient knowledge of the psychology of dreams and of Mythology the term archetype is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs but these are nothing more than conscious representations it would be absurd to assume that such variable representations could be inherited the archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern there are are for instance many representations of the motif of the Hostile Brethren but the motif itself Remains the Same my critics have incorrectly assumed that I am dealing with inherited representations and on that ground they have dismiss the idea of the archetype as mere Superstition they have failed to take into account the fact that if archetypes were representations that originated in our Consciousness or were acquired by consciousness we should surely understand them and not be bewildered and astonished when they present themselves in our Consciousness they are indeed an instinctive Trend as marked as the impulse of birds to build nests or ants to form organized colonies here I must clarify the relation between instincts and archetypes what we properly call instincts are physiological urges and are perceived by the senses but at the same time they also manifest themselves in fantasies and often reveal their presence only by symbolic images these manifestations are what I call the archetypes they are without known origin and they reproduce themselves in any time or in any part of the world even where transmission by direct descent or cross fertilization through migration must be ruled out I can remember many cases of people who have consulted me because they were B led by their own dreams or by their children's they were at a complete loss to understand the terms of the dreams the reason was that the dreams contained images that they could not relate to anything they could remember or could have passed on to their children yet some of these patients were highly educated a few of them were actually psychiatrists themselves I vividly recall the case of a professor who had had a sudden vision and thought he was insane he came to see me in a state of complete panic I simply took a 4 year-old book from the shelf and showed him an old wood cut depicting his very Vision there's no reason for you to believe that you're insane I said to him they knew about your vision 400 years ago whereupon he sat down entirely deflated but once more normal a very important case came to me from a man who was himself a psychiatrist one day he brought me a handwritten booklet he had received as a Christmas present from his 10-year-old daughter it contained a whole series of Dreams she had had when she was eight they made up the weirdest series of dreams that I have ever seen and I could well understand why her father was more than just puzzled by them though childlike they were uncanny and they contained images whose origin was wholly incomprehensible to the father here are the relevant motifs from the dreams one the evil animal a snake-like monster with many horns kills and devours all other animals but God comes from the Four Corners being in fact four separate gods and gives rebirth to all the dead animals two an Ascent into heaven where Pagan dances are being celebrated and a descent into hell where angels are doing good deeds three a horde of small animals frightens the dreamer the animals increase to a tremendous size and one of them devours the little girl four a small Mouse is penetrated by worms snakes fishes and human beings thus the mouse becomes human this portrays the four stages of the origin of mankind five a drop of water is seen as it appears when looked at through a microscope the girl sees that the drop is full of tree branches this portrays the origin of the world six a bad boy has a cloud of Earth and throws bits of it at everyone who passes in this way all the passers by become bad seven a drunken woman falls into the water and comes out renewed and sober eight the scene is in America where many people are rolling on an ant Heap attacked by the ants the dreamer in a panic Falls into a river nine there is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell 10 in this dream the girl has a vision of a luminous ball she touches it Vapors emanate from it a man comes and kills her 11 the girl dreams she is dangerously ill suddenly Birds come out of her skin and cover her completely 12 swarms of gnats obscure the the Sun the moon and all the stars except one that one star falls upon the dreamer in the unbridge German original each dream begins with the words of the old fairy tale Once Upon a Time by these words the little dreamer suggests that she feels as if each dream were a sort of fairy tale which she wants to tell her father as a Christmas present the father tried to explain the dreams in terms of their context but he could not do so for there seemed to be no personal associations to them the possibility that these dreams were conscious elaborations can of course be ruled out only by someone who knew the child well enough to be absolutely sure of her truthfulness they would however remain a challenge to our understanding even if they were fantasies in this case the father was convinced that the dreams were authentic and I have no reason to doubt it I knew the little girl myself but this was before she gave her dreams to her father so that I had no chance to ask her about them she lived abroad and died of an infectious disease about a year after that Christmas her dreams have a decidedly peculiar character their leading thoughts are markedly philosophic in concept the first one for instance speaks of an evil monster killing other animals but God gives rebirth to them all through a Divine apocatastasis or restitution in the Western World this idea is known through the Christian tradition it can be found in the Acts of the Apostles 321 Christ whom the Heaven Must receive until the time of restitution of all things the early Greek fathers of the church for instance origin particularly insisted upon the idea that at the end of time everything will be restored by the Redeemer to its original and perfect state but according to St Matthew 1711 there was already an old Jewish tradition that Elias truly shall first come and restore all things Corinthians 15 22 refers to the same idea in the following words for as in Adam all die even so in Christ shall all be made alive one might guess that the child had encountered this thought in her religious education but she had very little religious background her parents were Protestants in name but in fact they knew the Bible only from hearsay it is particularly unlikely that the recondite image of apocatastasis had been explained to the girl certainly her father had never heard of this mythical idea nine of the 12 dreams are influenced by the theme of Destruction and restoration and none of these dreams shows tra es of specific Christian education or influence on the contrary they are more closely related to primitive myths this relation is corroborated by the other Motif the cosmogonic myth the creation of the world and of man that appears in the fourth and fifth dreams the same connection is found in Corinthians 1522 which I have just quoted In this passage too Adam and Christ death and Resurrection are linked together the general idea of Christ the Redeemer belongs to the worldwide and preist theme of the hero and rescuer who although he has been devoured by a monster appears again in a miraculous way having overcome whatever monster it was that swallowed him when and where such a motif originated nobody knows we do not even know how to go about investigating the problem the one apparent certainty is that every generation seems to have known it as a tradition handed down from some preceding time thus we can safely assume that it originated at a period when man did not yet know that he possessed a hero myth in an age that is to say when he did not yet consciously reflect on what he was saying the hero figure is an archetype which has existed since time immemorial the uction of archetypes by children is especially significant because one can sometimes be quite certain that a child has had no direct access to the tradition concerned in this case the girl's family had no more than a superficial acquaintance with the Christian tradition Christian themes May of course be represented by such ideas as God angels heaven hell and evil but the way in which they are treated by this child points to a totally non-Christian origin let us take the first Dream Of The God Who really consists of four Gods coming from the Four Corners the corners of what there is no room mentioned in the dream a room would not even fit in with the picture of what is obviously a cosmic event in which the universal being himself intervenes the quaternity or element of foress itself is a strange idea but one that play plays a great role in many religions and philosophies in the Christian religion it has been superseded by the Trinity a notion that we must assume was known to the child but who in an ordinary middle class family of today would be likely to know of a Divine quaternity it is an idea that was once fairly familiar among students of the hermetic philosophy in the Middle Ages but it petered out with the beginning of the 18th century and it has been entirely oppos obsolete for at least 200 years where then did the little girl pick it up from ezekiel's Vision but there is no Christian teaching that identifies the seraphim with God the same question may be asked about the horned serpent in the Bible it is true there are many horned animals in the Book of Revelation for instance but all these seem to be quad drooped although their Overlord is the dragon the Greek word for which dren also means serpent the horn serpent appears in 16th century Latin Alchemy as the quadri cor nudus serpents fourhorn serpent a symbol of mercury and an antagonist of the Christian Trinity but this is an obscure reference so far as I can Discover it is made by only one author and this child had no means of knowing it in the second dream a motif appears that is definitely non-Christian and that contains a reversal of accepted values for instance Pagan dances by men in heaven and Good Deeds by angels in hell this symbol suggests a relativity of moral values where did the child find such a revolutionary notion worthy of nich's Genius these questions lead us to another what is the compensatory meaning of these dreams to which the little girl obviously attributed so much importance that she presented them to her father as a Christmas present if the dreamer had been a primitive Medicine Man one could reasonably assume that they represent variations of the philosophical themes of death of Resurrection or restitution of the origin of the world the creation of man and the relativity of values dot but one might give up such dreams as hopelessly difficult if one tried to interpret them from a personal level they undoubtedly contain Collective images and they are in a way analogous to the doctrines taught to young people in primitive tribes when they are about to be initiated as men at such times they learn about what God or the gods or the founding animals have done how the world and man were created how the end of the world will come and the meaning of death is there any occasion when we in Christian civilization hand out similar instructions there is in adolescence but many people begin to think again of things like this in old age at the approach of death the little girl as it happened was in both these situations she was approaching puberty and at the same time the end of her life little or nothing in the symbolism of her dreams points to the beginning of a normal adult life but there are many Illusions to destruction and restoration when I first read her dreams indeed I had The Uncanny feeling that they suggested impending disaster the reason I felt like that was the peculiar nature of the compensation that I deduced from the symbolism it was the opposite of what one would expect to find in the consciousness of a girl of that age these dreams open up a new and rather terrifying aspect of life and death one would expect to find such images in an aging person who looks back upon life rather than to be given them by a child who would normally be looking forward their atmosphere recalls the old Romans saying life is a short dream rather than the joy and exuberance of its Springtime for this child's life was like a ver sacrum vendum the vow of a Vernal sacrifice as the Roman poet puts it experience shows that the unknown approach of death casts an Adam braio an anticipatory Shadow over the life and dreams of the victim even the altar in Christian churches represents on the one hand a tomb and on the other a place of Resurrection the transformation of death into eternal life such are the ideas that the dreams brought home to the child they were a preparation for death expressed through short stories like the tales told at primitive initiations or the coin of Zen Buddhism this message is unlike the Orthodox Christian doctrine and more like ancient primitive thought it seems to have originated outside historical tradition in the long forgotten psychic sources that since prehistoric times have nourished philosophical and religious speculations about life and death it was as if future events were casting their Shadow back by arousing in the child certain thought forms that though normally dormant describe or accompany the approach of a fatal issue although the specific shape in which they express themselves is more or less personal their General pattern is collective they are found everywhere and at all times just as animal instincts vary a good deal in the different species and yet serve the same general purposes we do not assume that each newborn animal creates its own instincts as an individual acquisition and we must not suppose that human individuals invent their specific human ways with every new birth like the instincts the collective thought patterns of the human mind are innate and inherited they function when the occasion arises in more or less the same way in all of us emotional manifestations to which such thought patterns belong are recognizably the same all over the Earth we can identify them even in animals and the Animals themselves understand one another in this respect even though they may belong to different species and what about insects with their complicated symbiotic functions most of them do not even know their parents and have nobody to teach them why should one assume then that man is the only living being deprived of specific instincts or that his psyche is devoid of all traces of its Evolution naturally if you identify the psyche with conscious ious you can easily fall into the erroneous idea that man comes into the world with a psyche that is empty and that in later years it contains nothing more than what it has learned by individual experience but the psyche is more than Consciousness animals have little Consciousness but many impulses and reactions that denote the existence of a psyche and Primitives do a lot of things whose meaning is unknown to them you may ask many civil Iz people in vain for the real meaning of the Christmas tree or of the Easter egg the fact is they do things without knowing why they do them I inclined to the view that things were generally done first and that it was only a long time afterward that somebody asked why they were done the medical psychologist is constantly confronted with otherwise intelligent patients who behave in a peculiar and unpredictable way and who have no no inkling of what they say or do they are suddenly caught by unreasonable moods for which they themselves cannot account superficially such reactions and impulses seem to be of an intimately personal nature and so we dismiss them as idiosyncratic behavior in fact they are based upon a performed and ever ready instinctive system that is characteristic of man thought forms universally under understandable gestures and many attitudes follow a pattern that was established long before man developed a reflective Consciousness it is even conceivable that the early origins of man's capacity to reflect come from the painful consequences of violent emotional clashes let me take purely as an illustration of this point the Bushman who in a moment of anger and disappointment at his failure to catch any fish strangles his much beloved only son and is then seized with immense regret as he holds the little dead body in his arms such a man might remember this moment of pain forever we cannot know whether this kind of experience was actually the initial cause of the development of human consciousness but there is no doubt that the shock of a similar emotional experience is often needed to make people wake up and pay attention to what they are doing there is the famous case of a 13th century Spanish hialgo Raymond LOL who finally after a long Chase suceeded in meeting the lady he admired at a secret rendevu she silently opened her dress and showed him her breast rotten with cancer the shock changed lol's life he eventually became an eminent Theologian and one of the church's greatest missionaries in the case of such a sudden change one can often prove that an archetype has been at work for a long time in the unconscious skillfully arranging circumstances that will lead to the crisis such experiences seem to show that archetypal forms are not just static patterns they are Dynamic factors that manifest themselves in impulses just as spontaneously as the instincts certain dreams Visions or thoughts can suddenly appear and however carefully one investigates one can not find out what causes them this does not mean that they have no cause they certainly have but it is so remote or obscure that one cannot see what it is in such a case one must wait either until the dream and its meaning are sufficiently understood or until some external event occurs that will explain the dream at the moment of the dream this event May still lie in the future but just as our conscious thoughts of often occupy themselves with the future and its possibilities so do the unconscious and its dreams there has long been a general belief that the chief function of Dreams is prognostication of the future in Antiquity and as late as the Middle Ages dreams played their part in medical prognosis I can confirm by a modern dream the element of prognosis or precognition that can be found in an old dream quoted by artemidorus of ddis in the 2 Century ad a man dreamed that he saw his father die in the Flames of a house on fire not long afterward he himself died in a fon fire or high fever which I presume was pneumonia it so happened that a colleague of mine was once suffering from a deadly gangrenous fever in fact a fon a former patient of his who had no knowledge of the nature of his doctor's illness dreamed that the doctor died in a great fire at that time the doctor had just entered a hospital and the disease was only beginning the dreamer knew nothing but the bare fact that his doctor was ill and in a hospital 3 weeks later the doctor died as this example shows dreams may have an anticipatory or prognostic aspect and anybody trying to interpret them must take this into consideration especially where an obviously meaningful dream does not provide a context sufficient to explain it such a dream often comes right out of the blue and one wonders what could have prompted it of course if one knew its ulterior message its cause would be clear for it is only our Consciousness that does not yet know the unconscious seems already informed and to have come to a conclusion that is expressed in the dream in fact the unconscious seems to be able to examine and to draw conclusions from Facts much as Consciousness does it can even use certain facts and anticipate their possible results just because we are not conscious of them but as far as one can make out from dreams the unconscious makes its deliberations instinctively the distinction is important logical analysis is the prerogative of Consciousness we select with reason and knowledge the unconscious however seems to be guided chiefly by instinctive Trends represented by corresponding thought forms that is by the archetypes a doctor who is asked to describe the course of an illness will use such rational Concepts as infection or fever the dream is more poetic it presents the diseased body as a man's Earthly house and the fever as the fire that is destroying as the above dream shows the archetypal mind has handled the situation in the same way as it did in the time of idoris something that is of a more or less unknown Nature has been intuitively grasped by the unconscious and submitted to an archetypal treatment this suggests that instead of the process of reasoning that conscious thought would have applied the archetypal mind has stepped in and taken over the task of of prognostication the archetypes thus have their own initiative and their own specific energy these Powers enable them both to produce a meaningful interpretation in their own symbolic style and to interfere in a given situation with their own impulses and their own thought formations in this respect they function like complexes they come and go very much as they please and often they obstruct or mod ify our conscious intentions in an embarrassing way one can perceive the specific energy of archetypes when we experience The Peculiar Fascination that accompanies them they seem to hold a special spell such a peculiar quality is also characteristic of the personal complexes and just as personal complexes have their individual history so do social complexes of an archetypal character but while personal complexes never produce more than a personal bias archetypes create myths religions and philosophies that influence and characterize whole Nations and epics of History we regard the personal complexes as compensations for one-sided or faulty attitudes of Consciousness in the same way myths of a religious nature can be interpreted as a sort of mental therapy for the sufferings and anxieties of mankind in general hunger War disease old age death the universal hero myth for example always refers to a powerful man or God man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons serpents monsters demons and so on and who liberates his people from destruction and death the narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies and the worship of such a figure with dances music hymns prayers and sacrifices grip the audience with numinous emotions as if with magic spells and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero if we try to see such a situation with the eyes of the believer we can perhaps understand how the ordinary man can be liberated from his personal impotence and misery and endowed at least temporarily with an almost superhuman quality often enough such a conviction will sustain him for a long time and give a certain style to his life it may even set the tone of a whole society a remarkable instance of this can be found in the ucini Mysteries which were finally suppressed in the beginning of the 7th Century of the Christian era they expressed together with the delic Oracle the essence and spirit of ancient Greece on a much greater scale the Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the Antique mystery of the god man which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris Horus myth of ancient Egypt it is commonly assumed that on some given occasion in prehistoric times the basic mythological ideas were invented by a clever old philosopher or prophet and ever afterward believed by a credulous and uncritical people it is said that stories told by a power seeking priesthood are not true but merely wishful thinking but the very word invent is derived from the Latin invenire and means to find and hence to find something by seeking it in the latter case the word itself hints at some forn knowledge of what you are going to find let me go back to the strange ideas contained in the dreams of the little girl it seems unlikely that she sought them out since she was surprised to find them they occurred to her rather as peculiar and unexpected stories which seemed noteworthy enough to be given to her father as a Christmas present in doing so however she lifted them up into the sphere of our still living Christian mystery the birth of our Lord mixed with the secret of the evergreen tree that carries the newborn light this is the reference of the fifth dream although there is ample historical evidence for the symbolic relation between between Christ and the tree symbol the little girl's parents would have been Gravely embarrassed had they been asked to explain exactly what they meant by decorating a tree with burning candles to celebrate the Nativity of Christ oh it's just a Christmas custom they would have said a serious answer would require a far-reaching dissertation about the antique symbolism of the Dying God and its relation to the cult of the great mother and her symbol the tree to mention only one aspect of this complicated problem the further we delve into the origins of a collective image or to express it in ecclesiastical language of a Dogma the more we uncover a seemingly unending web of archetypal patterns that before modern times were never the object of conscious reflection thus paradoxically enough we know more about mythological symbolism than did any generation before our own the fact is that in former times men did not reflect upon their symbols they lived them and were unconsciously animated by their meaning I will illustrate this by an experience I once had with The Primitives of Mount elgon in Africa every morning at dawn they leave their huts and breathe or spit into their hands which they then stretch out to the first rays of the Sun as if they were offering either their breath or their spittle to the rising God to mongu this Swahili word which they used in explaining the ritual Act is derived from a Polynesian root equivalent to Mana or mulangu these and similar terms designate a power of extraordinary efficiency and pervasiveness which we should call Divine thus the word mung is their equivalent for Allah or God when I asked them what they meant by this act or why they did it they were completely baffled they could only say we have always done it it has always been done when the Sun rises they laughed at the obvious conclusion that the sun is mung the sun indeed is not mung when it is above Horizon mung is the actual moment of the sunrise what they were doing was obvious to me but not to them they just did it never reflecting on what they did they were consequently unable to explain themselves I concluded that they were offering their souls to M because the breath of life and the spittle mean Soul substance to breathe or spit upon something conveys a magical effect as for instance when Christ used spittle to cure the blind or where a son inhales his dying father's last breath in order to take over the father's soul it is most unlikely that these Africans ever even in the remote past knew any more about the meaning of their ceremony in fact their ancestors probably knew even less because they were more profoundly unconscious of their motives and thought less about their doings Gus fa aptly says IM anang war datat in the beginning was the deed Deeds were never invented they were done thought on the other hand are a relatively late discovery of man first he was moved to Deeds by unconscious factors it was only a long time afterward that he began to reflect upon the causes that had moved him and it took him a very long time indeed to arrive at the Preposterous idea that he must have moved himself his mind being unable to identify any other motivating force than his own we should laugh at the idea of a plant or or an animal inventing itself yet there are many people who believe that the psyche or mind invented itself and thus was the creator of its own existence as a matter of fact the mind has grown to its present State of Consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak or as Sans developed into mammals as it has for so long been developing so it still develops and thus we are moved by forces from within as well as by stimuli from without these inner motives spring from a deep source that is not made by Consciousness and is not under its control in the mythology of earlier times these forces were called Mana or Spirits demons and gods they are as active today as they ever were if they conform to our wishes we call them happy hunches or impulses and Pat ourselves on the back for being smart fellows if they go against us then we say that it is just bad luck or that certain people are against us or that the cause of our misfortunes must be pathological the one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon powers that are beyond our control it is true however that in recent times civilized man has acquired a certain amount of willpower which he can apply where he pleases he has learned to do his work efficiently without having recourse to chanting and drumming to hypnotize him into the state of doing he can even dispense with a daily prayer for divine Aid he can carry out what he proposes to do and he can apparently translate his ideas into action without a hitch whereas the Primitive seems to be hampered at each step by fears superstitions and other unseen obstacles to action The Motto where there's a will there's a way is the Superstition of modern man yet in order to SU sustain his Creed contemporary man pays the price in a remarkable lack of introspection he is blind to the fact that with all his rationality and efficiency he is possessed by powers that are Beyond his control his gods and demons have not disappeared at all they have merely got new names they keep him on the run with restlessness vague apprehensions psychological complications an insatiable need for pills Alcohol Tobacco food and above all a large array of neurosis the soul of man what we call civilized Consciousness has steadily separated itself from the Basic Instincts but these instincts have not disappeared they have merely lost their contact with our Consciousness and are thus forced to assert themselves in an indirect fashion this may be by means of physical symptoms in the case of a neurosis or by means of incidents of various kinds like unaccountable moods unexpected forgetfulness or mistakes in speech a man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul but as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions or to be conscious of the Myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions he is certainly not his own master these unconscious factors owe their existence to the autonomy of the archetypes Modern Man protects himself against seeing his own split state by a system of compartments certain areas of outer life and of his own behavior are kept as it were in separate drawers and are never confronted with one another as an example of this so-called compartment psychology I remember the case of an alcoholic who had come under the laudable influence of a certain religion movement and fascinated by its enthusiasm had forgotten that he needed a drink he was obviously and miraculously cured by Jesus and he was correspondingly displayed as a witness to Divine Grace or to the efficiency of the said religious organization but after a few weeks of public confessions the novelty began to pale and some alcoholic refreshment seemed to be indicated and so he drank again but this time the helpful organization came to the conclusion that the case was pathological and obviously not suitable for an intervention by Jesus so they put him into a clinic to let the doctor do better than the Divine healer this is an aspect of the modern cultural mind that is worth looking into it shows an alarming degree of dissociation and psychological confusion if for a moment we regard mankind as one individ idual we see that the human race is like a person Carried Away by unconscious powers and the human race also likes to keep certain problems tucked away in separate drawers but this is why we should give a great deal of consideration to what we are doing for mankind is now threatened by self-created and deadly dangers that are growing beyond our control our world is so to speak dissociated like a neurotic with the Iron Curtain marking the symbolic line of division Western man becoming aware of the aggressive Will To Power of the East sees himself forced to take Extraordinary Measures of Defense at the same time as he Prides himself on his virtue and good intentions what he fails to see is that it is his own vices which he has covered up by good International manners that are thrown back in his face by the communist world shamelessly and methodically what the West has tolerated but secretly and with a slight sense of Shame The Diplomatic lie systematic deception veiled threats comes back into the open and in full measure from the East and ties us up in neurotic knots it is the face of his own evil Shadow that grins at Western man from the other side of the Iron Curtain it is this state of affairs that explains the peculiar feeling of helplessness of so many people in Western societ societies they have begun to realize that the difficulties confronting us are moral problems and that the attempts to answer them by a policy of piling up nuclear arms or by economic competition is achieving little for it cuts both ways many of us now understand that moral and mental means would be more efficient since they could provide us with psychic immunity against the ever increasing infection but all such attempts have proved singularly ineffective and we'll do so as long as we try to convince ourselves and the world that it is only they that is our opponents who are wrong it would be much more to the point for us to make a serious attempt to recognize our own shadow and its nefarious doings if we could see our Shadow the dark side of our nature we should be immune to any moral and mental infection and insinuation as matters now stand We Lay ourselves open to every infection because we are really doing practically the same thing as they only we have the additional disadvantage that we neither see nor want to understand what we ourselves are doing under the cover of good manners the Communist World it may be noted has one big myth which we call an illusion in the vain hope that our Superior judgment will make it disappear it is the Tim hallowed archetype Le dream of a golden age or Paradise where everything is provided in abundance for everyone and a great just and wise Chief rules over a human kindergarten this powerful archetype in its infantile form has grip them but it will never disappear from the world at the mere sight of our Superior points of view we even support it by our own childishness for our Western Civilization is in the grip of the same mythology unconsciously we cherish the same prejudices hopes and expectations we too believe in the welfare state in Universal peace in the equality of man in his eternal human rights in Justice truth and do not say it too loudly in the kingdom of God on Earth the sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites day and night birth and death happiness and misery good and evil we are not even sure that one will prevail against the other that good will overcome evil or Joy defeat pain life is a Battleground it always has been and always will be and if it were not so existence would come to an end it was precisely this conflict within man that led the early Christians to expect and hope for an early end to this world or the Buddhist to reject all Earthly desires and aspirations these basic answers would be frankly suicidal if they were not linked up with peculiar mental and moral ideas and practices that constitute the bulk of both religions and that to a certain extent modify their radical denial of the world I stress this point because in our time there are millions of people who have lost faith in any kind of religion such people do not understand their religion any longer while life runs smoothly without religion the loss remains as good as unnoticed but when suffering comes it is another matter that is when people begin to seek a way out and to reflect about the meaning of life and its bewildering and painful experiences it is significant that the psychological doctor within my experience is consulted more by Jews and Protestants than by Catholics this might be expected for the Catholic Church still feels responsible for the Kura anaram the care of the Soul's welfare but in this scientific age the psychiatrist is apt to be asked the questions that once belonged in the domain of the Theologian people feel that it makes or would make a great difference if only they had a positive belief in a meaningful way of life or in God and immortality the Spectre of approaching death often gives a powerful incentive to such Thoughts From Time immemorial men have had ideas about a Supreme Being one or several and about the land of the Hereafter only today do they think they can do without such ideas because we cannot discover God's throne in the sky with a radio telescope or establish for certain that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form people assume that such ideas are not true I would rather say that they are not true enough for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times and that still break through into Consciousness at any provocation Modern Man May assert that he can dispense with them and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth or he may even regret the loss of his convictions but since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things for God is beyond human understanding and there is no means of proving immortality why should we bother about evidence even if we did not know by reason our need for salt in our food we should nonetheless profit from its use we might argue that the use of salt is a mere illusion of taste or a superstition but it would still contribute to our well-being why then should we deprive ourselves of views that would prove helpful in crises and would give a meaning to our existence and how do we know that such ideas are not true many people would agree with me if I stated flatly that such ideas are probably Illusions what they fail to realize is that the denial is as impossible to prove as the assertion of religious belief we are entirely free to choose which point of view we take it will in any case be an arbitrary decision there is however a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never be proved it is that they are known to be useful man positively needs General ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe he can stand the most incredible heart ships when he is convinced that they make sense he is crushed when on top of all his misfortunes he has to admit that he is taking part in a tale told by an idiot it is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man the Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of fatherson and this belief endows their life with a perspective and a goal that goes far beyond their limited existence it gives them ample space for the unfolding of personality and permits them a full life as complete persons their plight is infinitely more satisfactory than that of a man in our own civilization who knows that he is and will remain nothing more than an underdog with no inner meaning to his life a sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending if he Lacks this sense he is lost and miserable had St Paul been convinced that he was nothing more than a Wandering Weaver of carpets he certainly would not have been the man he was his real and meaningful life lay in the inner certainty that he was the messenger of the Lord one may accuse him of suffering from megalomania but this opinion pales before the testimony of history and the Judgment of subsequent Generations the myth that took possession of him made him something greater than a mere Craftsman such a myth however consists of symbols that have not been invented consciously they have happened it was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god man it existed for many centuries before his birth he himself was seized by this symbolic idea which as St Mark tells us lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene Carpenter myths go back back to the Primitive Storyteller and his dreams to men moved by the stirring of their fantasies these people were not very different from Those whom later generations have called poets or philosophers primitive storytellers did not concern themselves with the origin of their fantasies it was very much later that people began to wonder where a story originated yet centuries ago in what we now call ancient Greece men's Minds were advanc aned enough to surmise that the tales of the gods were nothing but archaic and exaggerated traditions of long buried Kings or Chieftain men already took the view that the myth was too improbable to mean what it said they therefore tried to reduce it to a generally understandable form in more recent times we have seen the same thing happen with dream symbolism we became aware in the years when Psychology was in its infancy that dream had some importance but just as the Greeks persuaded themselves that their myths were merely elaborations of rational or normal history so some of the pioneers of psychology came to the conclusion that dreams did not mean what they appeared to mean the images or symbols that they presented were dismissed as bizarre forms in which repressed contents of the psyche appeared to the conscious mind it thus came to be taken for granted Ed that a dream meant something other than its obvious statement I've already described my disagreement with this idea a disagreement that led me to study the form as well as the content of Dreams why should they mean something different from their contents is there anything in nature that is other than it is the dream is a normal and natural phenomenon and it does not mean something it is not the talmud even says the dream is its own interpretation the confusion arises because the dream's contents are symbolic and thus have more than one meaning the symbols point in different directions from those we apprehend with the conscious mind and therefore they relate to something either unconscious or at least not entirely conscious to the scientific mind such phenomena as symbolic ideas are a nuisance because they cannot be formulated in a way that is satisfactory to intellect and logic they are by no means the only case of this kind in Psychology the trouble begins with the phenomenon of affect or emotion which evades all the attempts of the psychologist to pin it down with a final definition the cause of the difficulty is the same in both cases the intervention of the unconscious I know enough of the scientific point of view to understand that it is most annoying to have to deal with facts that cannot be completely or adequately grasped the trouble with these phenomena is that the facts are undeniable and yet cannot be formulated in intellectual terms for this one would have to be able to comprehend life itself for it is life that produces emotions and symbolic ideas the academic psychologist is perfectly free to dismiss the phenomenon of emotion or the concept of the unconscious or both from his consideration yet they remain facts to which the medical psychologist at least has to pay due attention for emotional conflicts and the intervention of the unconscious are the classical features of his science if he treats a patient at all he comes up against these irrationalities as hard facts irrespective of his ability to formulate them in intellectual terms it is therefore quite natural that people who have not had the medical psychologist's experience find it difficult to follow what happens when psychology ceases to be a tranquil Pursuit for the scientist in his laboratory and becomes an active part of the adventure of real life target practice on a shooting range is far from the battlefield the doctor has to deal with casualties in a genuine War he must concern himself with psychic realities even if he cannot embody them in scientific definitions that is why no textbook can teach psychology one learns only by actual experience we can see this point clearly when we examine certain well-known symbols the cross in the Christian religion for instance is a meaningful symbol that expresses a multitude of aspects ideas and emotions but a cross after a name on a list simply indicates that the individual is dead the phus functions as an all embracing symbol in the Hindu religion but if a street urchin draws one on a wall it just reflects an interest in his penis because infantile and Adolescent fantasies often continue far into adult life many dreams occur in which there are unmistakable sexual Illusions it would be absurd to understand them as anything else but when a Mason speaks of monks and nuns to be laid upon each other or an electrician of male plugs and female sockets it would be ludicrous to suppose that he is indulging in glowing adolescent fantasies he is simply using colorful descriptive names for his materials when an educated Hindu talks to you about the lingam the phace that represents the god SAA in Hindu mythology you will hear things we westerns would never connect with the penis the lingom is certainly not an obscene illusion nor is the cross merely a sign of death much depends upon the maturity of the dreamer who produces such an image the interpretation of dreams and symbols demands intelligence it cannot be turned into a mechanical system and then crammed into unimaginative brains it demands both an increasing knowledge of the dreamer's individuality and an increasing self-awareness on the part of The Interpreter no experienced worker in this field will deny that there are rules of thumb that can prove helpful but they must be applied with prudence and intelligence one may follow all the right rules and yet get bogged down in the most appalling nonsense simply by overlooking a seemingly unimportant detail that a better intelligence would not have missed even a man of high intellect can go badly astray for lack of Intuition or feeling when we attempt to understand symbols we are not only confronted with the symbol itself but we are brought up against the wholeness of the symbol producing individual this includes a study of his cultural background and in the process one fills in many gaps in one's own education I have made it a rule myself to consider every case as an entirely new proposition about which I do not even know the ABC routine responses may be practical and useful while one is dealing with the surface but as soon as one gets in touch with the vital problems life itself takes over and even the most brilliant theoretical premises become ineffectual words imagination and intuition are vital to our understanding and though the usual popular opinion is that they are chiefly valuable to poets and artists that in sensible matters one should mistrust them they are in fact equally vital in all the higher grades of science here they play an increasingly important role which supplements that of the rational intellect and its application to a specific problem even physics the strictest of all applied sciences depends to an astonishing degree upon intuition which works by way of the unconscious although it is possible to demonstrate afterward The Logical procedures that could have led one to the same result as intuition intuition is almost indispensable in the interpretation of symbols and it can often ensure that they are immediately understood by the dreamer but while such a lucky hunch may be subjectively convincing it can also be rather dangerous it can so easily lead to a false feeling of security it may for instance seduce both The Interpreter and the dreamer into continuing a cozy and relatively easy relation which may end in a sort of mutual dream the safe basis of real intellectual knowledge and moral understanding gets lost if one is content with the vague satisfaction of having understood by hunch one can explain and know only if one has reduced intuitions to an exact knowledge of facts and their logical connections an honest investigator will have to admit that he cannot always do this but it would be dishonest not to keep it always in mind even a scientist is a human being so it is natural for him like others to hate the things he cannot explain it is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself the role of symbols when the medical psychologist takes an interest in symbols he is primarily concerned with natural symbols as distinct from cultural symbols the former are derived from the unconscious contents of the psyche and they therefore represent an enormous number of variations on the essential archetypal images in many cases they can still be traced back to their archaic Roots I.E to ideas and images that we meet in the most ancient records and in primitive societies the cultural symbols on the other hand are those that have been used to express Eternal truths and that are still used in many religions they have gone through many Transformations and even a long process of more or less conscious development and have thus become Collective images accepted by civilized societies such cultural symbols nevertheless retain much of their original numinosity or spell one is a Ware that they can evoke a deep emotional response in some individuals and this psychic charge makes them function in much the same way as prejudices they are a factor with which the psychologist must reckon it is folly to dismiss them because in rational terms they seem to be absurd or irrelevant they are important constituents of our mental makeup and vital forces in the building up of human society and they cannot be eradicated without serious loss where they are repressed or neglected their specific energy disappears into the unconscious with unaccountable consequences the psychic energy that appears to have been lost in this way in fact serves to revive and intensify whatever is uppermost in the unconscious Tendencies perhaps that have hitherto had no chance to express themselves or at least have not been allowed an uninhibited existence in our Consciousness such Tendencies form an everpresent and potentially destructive Shadow to our conscious mind even tendencies that might in some circumstances be able to exert a beneficial influence are transformed into demons when they are repressed this is why many well-meaning people are understandably afraid of the unconscious and incidentally of psychology our times have demonstrated what it means for the gates of the underworld to be opened things whose enormity nobody could have imagined in the idilic harmlessness of the first decade of our Century have happened and have turned our world upside down ever since the world has remained in a state of schizophrenia not only has civilized Germany disgorged its terrible primitivity but Russia is also ruled by it and Africa has been set on fire no wonder that the Western World feels uneasy modern man does not understand how much his rationalism which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas has put him at the mercy of the psychic underworld he has freed himself from Superstition or so he believes but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree his moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated and he is now paying the price for this breakup in worldwide disorientation and dissociation anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization its people lose the meaning of their lives their social organization disintegrates and they themselves morally Decay we are now in the same condition but we have never really understood what we have lost for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present in my opinion Faith does not exclude thought which is man's strongest weapon but unfortunately many Believers seem to be so afraid of Science and incidentally of psychology that they turn a blind eye to the numinous psychic powers that forever control man's fate we have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity nothing is Holy any longer in earlier ages as instinctive Concepts welled up in the mind of man his conscious mind could no doubt integrate them into a coherent psychic pattern but the Civilized man is no longer able to do this his Advanced Consciousness has deprived itself of the means by which the auxiliary contributions of the instincts and the unconscious can be assimilated these organs of assimilation and integration were numinous symbols held wholly by Common consent today for instance we talk of matter we describe its physical properties we conduct laboratory experiments to demonstrate some of its aspects but the word matter remains a dry inhuman and purely intellectual con concept without any psychic significance for us how different was the former image of matter the great mother that could enccompass and express the profound emotional meaning of mother earth in the same way what was the spirit is now identified with intellect and thus ceases to be the father of all it has degenerated to The Limited ego thoughts of man the immense emotional energy expressed in the image of our father vanishes into the sand of an intellectual desert these two archetypal principles lie at the foundation of the contrasting systems of east and west the masses and their leaders do not realize however that there is no substantial difference between calling the world principle male and a father Spirit as the West does or female and a mother matter as the Communists do essentially we know as little of the one as of the other in earlier times these principles were worshiped in all sorts of rituals which at least showed the psychic significance they held for man but now they have become mere abstract Concepts as scientific understanding has grown so our world has become dehumanized man feels himself isolated in the cosmos because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional uncon icious identity with natural phenomena these have slowly lost their symbolic implications Thunder is no longer the voice of an Angry God nor is lightning his avenging missile no River contains a spirit no tree is the life principle of a man no snake the embodiment of wisdom no mountain cave the home of a great demon no voices now speak to man from Stones plants and animals nor does he speak to them believing they can hear his contact with nature has gone and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied this enormous loss is compensated for by the symbols of our dreams they bring up our original nature its instincts and peculiar thinking unfortunately however they express their contents in the language of nature which is strange and incomprehensive prehensible to us it therefore confronts us with the task of translating it into the rational words and concepts of modern speech which has liberated itself from its primitive encumbrances notably from its mystical participation with the things it describes nowadays when we talk of ghosts and other numinous figures we are no longer Conjuring them up the power as well as the glory is drained out of such once potent words we have ceased to believe in magic formulas not many taboos and similar restrictions are left and our world seems to be disinfected of all such superstitious numina as witches warlocks and worry cows to say nothing of werewolves vampires Bush souls and all the other bizarre beings that populated the Primeval Forest to be more accurate the surface of our world seems to be cleansed of all super I ious and irrational elements whether however the real inner human world not our wish fulfilling fiction about it is also freed from primitivity is another question is the number of 13 not still taboo for many people are there not still many individuals possessed by irrational prejudices projections and childish Illusions a realistic picture of the human mind reveals many such primitive traits and survival s which are still playing their roles just as if nothing had happened during the last 500 years it is essential to appreciate this point modern man is in fact a curious mixture of characteristics acquired over the long ages of his mental development this mixed up being is the man and his symbols that we have to deal with and we must scrutinize his mental products very carefully indeed skepticism and scientific conviction exist in him side by side with old-fashioned prejudices outdated habits of thought and feeling obstinate misinterpretations and blind ignorance such are the Contemporary human beings who produce the symbols we psychologists investigate in order to explain these symbols and their meaning it is vital to learn whether their representations are related to purely personal experience or whether they have been chosen by a dream for its particular purpose from a store of General conscious knowledge take for instance a dream in which the number 13 occurs the question is whether the dreamer himself habitually Believes In The Unlucky quality of the number or whether the dream merely alludes to people who still indulge in such superstitions the answer makes a great difference to the interpretation in the former case you have to reckon with the fact that the individual is still still under the spell of The Unlucky 13 and therefore will feel most uncomfortable in room 13 in a hotel or sitting at a table with 13 people in the latter case the 13th of May not mean any more than a discourteous or abusive remark the superstitious dreamer still feels the spell of 13 the more rational dreamer has stripped 13 of its original emotional overtone this argument illustrates the way in which archetypes appear in Practical experience they are at the same time both images and emotions one can speak of an archetype only when these two aspects are simultaneous when there is merely the image then there is simply a word picture of little consequence but by being charged with emotion the image gains numinosity or psychic energy it becomes dynamic and consequences of some kind must flow from it I am aware that it is difficult to grasp this concept because I am trying to use words to describe something whose very nature makes it incapable of precise definition but since so many people have chosen to treat archetypes as if they were part of a mechanical system that can be learned by Road it is essential to insist that they are not mere names or even philosophical Concepts they are are pieces of life itself images that are integrally connected to the living individual by the bridge of the emotions that is why it is impossible to give an arbitrary or Universal interpretation of any archetype it must be explained in the manner indicated by the whole life situation of the particular individual to whom it relates thus in the case of a devout Christian the symbol of the Cross can be interpreted only in its Christian context unless the dream produces a very strong reason to look Beyond it even then the specific Christian meaning should be kept in mind but one cannot say that at all times and in all circumstances the symbol of the Cross has the same meaning if that were so it would be stripped of its numinosity lose its vitality and become a mere word those who do not realize the special feeling tone of the AR type end with nothing more than a jumble of mythological Concepts which can be strung together to show that everything means anything or nothing at all all the corpses in the world are chemically identical but living individuals are not archetypes come to life only when one patiently tries to discover why and in what fashion they are meaningful to a living individual the mere use of words is feudal when you do not know what they stand for this is particularly true in Psychology where we speak of archetypes like the anima and animus the wise man the great mother and so on you can know all about the Saints sages prophets and other Godly men and all the great mothers of the world but if they are mere images whose numinosity you have never experienced it will be as if you were talking in a dream for you will not know what you are talking about the mere words you use will be empty and valueless they gain life and meaning only when you try to take into account their numinosity I.E their relationship to the living individual only then do you begin to understand that their names mean very little whereas the way they are related to you is all important the symbol producing function of our dreams is thus an attempt to bring the original mind of man into advanced or differentiated Consciousness where it has never been before and where therefore it has never been subjected to critical self-reflection for in ages long past that original mind was the whole of man's personality as he developed Consciousness so his conscious mind lost contact with some of that primitive psychic energy and the conscious mind has never known that original mind for it was discarded in the process of evolving the very differentiated Consciousness that alone could be aware of it yet it seems that what we call the unconscious has preserved primitive characteristics that formed part of the original mind it is to these characteristics that the symbols of Dreams constantly refer as if the unconscious sought to bring back all the old things from which the Mind freed itself as it evolved illusions fantasies archaic thought forms fundamental instincts and so on this is what explains the resistance even fear that people often experience in approaching unconscious matters these Relic contents are not merely neutral or indifferent on the contrary they are so highly charged that they are often more than merely uncomfortable they can cause real fear the more they are repressed the more they spread through the whole personality in the form of a Neurosis it is this psychic energy that gives them such vital importance it is just as if a man who has lived through a period of unconsciousness should suddenly realize that there is a gap in his memory that important events seem to have taken place that he cannot remember in so far as he assumes that the psyche is an exclusively personal Affair and this is the usual assumption he will try to retrieve the apparently lost infantile memories but the gaps in his childhood memory are merely the symptoms of a much greater loss the loss of the Primitive psyche as the evolution of the embryonic body repeats its prehistory so the mind also develops through a series of prehistoric stages the main task of Dreams is to bring back a sort of recollection of the prehistoric as well as the infantile world right down to the level of the most primitive instincts such Recollections can have a remarkably healing effect in certain cases as Freud saw long ago this observation confirms The View that an infantile memory Gap a so-called Amnesia represents a positive loss and its recovery can bring a positive increase in life and well-being because a child is physically small and its conscious thoughts are scarce and simple we do not realize the far-reaching complications of the infantile mind that are based on its original identity with the prehistoric psyche that original mind is just as much present and still functioning in the child as The evolutionary stages of mankind are in its embryonic body if the reader remembers what I said earlier about the remarkable dreams of the child who made a present of her dreams to her father father he will get a good idea of what I mean in infantile Amnesia one finds strange mythological fragments that also often appear in later psychoses images of this kind are highly numinous and therefore very important if such Recollections reappear in adult life they may in some cases cause profound psychological disturbance while in other people they can produce miracles of healing or religious con verions often they bring back a piece of Life missing for a long time that gives purpose to and thus enriches human life the recollection of infantile memories and the reproduction of archetypal ways of psychic Behavior can create a wider Horizon and a greater extension of Consciousness on condition that one succeeds in assimilating and integrating in the conscious mind the lost and regained content since they are not neutral their assimilation will modify the personality just as they themselves will have to undergo certain alterations in this part of what is called the individuation process which Dr Von fron describes in a later section of this book the interpretation of symbols plays an important practical role for the symbols are natural attempts to reconcile and reunite opposites within the psyche naturally just seeing and then brushing aside the symbols would have no such effect and would merely reestablish the old neurotic condition and destroy the attempt at a synthesis but unfortunately those rare people who do not deny the very existence of the archetypes almost invariably treat them as mere words and forget their living reality when their numinosity has thus illegitimately been banished the process of Limitless substitution begins in other words one Glides easily from archetype to archetype with everything meaning everything it is true enough that the forms of archetypes are to a considerable extent exchangeable but their numinosity is and remains a fact and represents the value of an archetypal event this emotional value must be kept in mind and allowed for throughout the whole intellectual process of dream interpretation it is only too easy to lose this value because thinking and feeling are so diametrically opposed that thinking almost automatically throws out feeling values and vice versa psychology is the only science that has to take the factor of value that is feeling into account because it is the link between physical events and Life Psychology is often accused of not being scientific on this account but its critics fail to understand the scientific and practical necessity of giving due consideration to feeling healing the split our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature and has populated it with monstrous machines the latter are so indubitably useful that we cannot see even a possibility of getting rid of them or our subservience to them man is bound to follow The Adventurous promptings of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his Splendid achievements at the same time his genius shows The Uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide in view of the rapidly increasing Avalanche of world population man has already begun to seek Ways and Means of keeping the rising flood at Bay but nature May anticipate all our attempts by turning against man his own creative mind the hbomb for instance would put an effective stop to overpopulation in spite of our proud domination of nature we are still her victims for we have not even learned to control our own nature slowly but it appears inevitably we are courting disaster there are no longer any Gods whom we can invoke to help help us the great religions of the world suffer from increasing anemia because the helpful numina have fled from the woods rivers and mountains and from animals and the god men have disappeared underground into the unconscious there we fool ourselves that they lead an ignominious existence among the relics of our past our present lives are dominated by the goddess reason who is our greatest and most tragic Illusion by the aid of reasons so we assure ourselves we have conquered nature but this is a mere slogan for the so-called conquest of nature overwhelms us with the natural fact of overpopulation and adds to our troubles by our psychological incapacity to make the necessary political Arrangements it remains quite natural for men to quarrel and to struggle for superiority over one another how then have we conquered nature as any change must begin somewhere it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through the change must indeed begin with an individual it might be any one of us nobody can afford to look around and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loathed to do himself but since nobody seems to know what to do it might be worthwhile for each of us to ask himself whether by any chance his or her unconscious may know something that will help us certainly the conscious mind seems unable to do anything useful in this respect man today is painfully aware of the fact that neither his great religions nor his various philosophies seem to provide him with those powerful animating ideas that would give him the security he needs in face of the present condition of the world I know what the Buddhists would say things would go right if people would only follow the Noble eight-fold Path of the Dharma Doctrine law and had true insight into the self the Christian tells us that if only people had faith in God we should have a better world the rationalist insists that if people were intelligent and reasonable all our problems would be manageable the trouble is that none of them manages to solve these problems himself Christians often ask why God does not speak to them as he is believed to have done in former days when I hear such questions it always makes me think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him the rabbi replied nowadays there is no longer anybody who can Bow Low enough this answer hits the nail on the head we are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective Consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and Visions the Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless Illusions the Christian puts his church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his Consciousness is not his total psyche this ignorance persists today in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious psychological investigation we can no longer afford to be so God Almighty like as to set ourselves up as judges of the merits or demerits of natural phenomena we do not base our botney upon the old-fashioned division into useful and useless plants or our zoology upon the naive distinction between harmless and dangerous animals but we still complacently assume that Consciousness is sense and the unconscious is nonsense in science such an assumption would be laughed out of court do microbes for instance make sense or nonsense whatever the unconscious may be it is a natural phenomenon producing symbols that prove to be meaningful we cannot expect someone who has never looked through a microscope to be an authority on microbes in the same way no one who has not made a serious study of natural symbols can be considered a competent judge in this matter but the general undervaluation of the human soul is so great that neither the great religions nor the philosophies nor scientific rationalism have been willing to look at it twice in spite of the fact that the Catholic Church admits the occurrence of somnia a deoa dreams sent by God most of its thinkers make no serious attempt to understand dreams I doubt whether there is a Protestant Treatise or doctrine that would stoop so low as to admit the possibility that the Vox Dei might be perceived in a dream but if a theologian really believes in God by what Authority does he suggest that God is unable to speak through dreams I have spent more than half a century in investigating natural symbols and I have come to the conclusion that dreams and their symbols are not stupid and meaningless on the contrary dreams provide the most interesting information for those who take the trouble to understand their symbols the results it is true have little to do with such worldly concerns as buying and selling but the meaning of life is not exhaustively explained by one's business life nor is the Deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account in a period of human history when all available energy is spent in the investigation of nature very little attention is paid to the essence of man which is his psyche although many researches are made into its conscious functions but the really complex and unfamiliar part of the Mind from which symbols are produced is still virtually unexplored it seems almost incredible that though we receive signals from it every night deciphering these communication seems too tedious for any but a very few people to be bothered with it man's greatest instrument his psyche is little thought of and it is often directly mistrusted and despised it's only psychological too often means it is nothing where exactly does this immense Prejudice come from we have obviously been so busy with the question of what we think that we entirely forget to ask what the unconscious psyche thinks about us the ideas of Sigman Freud confirmed for most people the existing contempt for the psyche before him it had been merely overlooked and neglected it has now become a dump for moral Refuge This Modern standpoint is surely one-sided and unjust it does not even Accord with the known facts our actual knowledge of the unconscious shows that it is a natural phenomenon and that like nature herself it is at least neutral it contains all aspects of human nature light and dark beautiful and ugly good and evil profound and silly the study of individual as well as of collective symbolism is an enormous task and one that has not yet been mastered but a beginning has been made at last the early results are encouraging and they seem to indicate an answer to many so far unanswered questions of present day mankind part two ancient myths and Modern Man Joseph L Henderson the Eternal symbols the ancient history of man is being meaningfully rediscovered today in the symbolic images and myths that have survived ancient man as archaeologists dig deep into the past it is not the events of historical time that we learn to treasure but the statues designs temples and languages that tell of old beliefs other symbols are revealed to us by the philology and religious historians who can translate these beliefs into intelligible modern Concepts these in turn are brought to life by the cultural anthropologists they can show that the same symbolic patterns can be found in the rituals or myths of small tribal societies still existing unchanged for centuries on the outskirts of civilization all such researches have done much to correct the one-sided attitude of those modern men who maintain that such symbols belong to the peoples of antiquity or to backward modern tribes and are therefore irrelevant to the complexities of Modern Life in London or New York we may dismiss the fertility rights of Neolithic man as archaic Superstition if anyone claims to have seen a vision or heard voices he is not treated as a saint or as an oracle it is said he is mentally Disturbed we read the myths of the ancient Greeks or the folk stories of American Indians but we fail to see any connection between them and our attitudes to the heroes or dramatic events of today yet the connections are there and the symbols that represent them have not lost their relevance for mankind one of the main contributions of our time to the understanding and revaluing of such Eternal symbols has been made by Dr Jung School of analytical psychology it has helped to break down the arbitrary distinction between primitive man to whom symbols seem a natural part of everyday life and Modern Man For Whom symbols are apparently meaningless and irrelevant as Dr Young has pointed out earlier in this book the human mind has its own history and the psyche retains many traces left from previous stages of its development More Than This the contents of the uncom conscious exert a formative influence on the psyche consciously we may ignore them but unconsciously we respond to them and to the symbolic forms including dreams in which they express themselves the individual may feel that his dreams are spontaneous and disconnected but over a long period of time the analyst can observe a series of dream images and note that they have a meaningful pattern and by understanding this his patient may eventually acquire a new attitude to life some of the symbols in such dreams derive from what Dr Jung has called the collective unconscious that is that part of the psyche which retains and transmits the common psychological inheritance of mankind these symbols are so ancient and unfamiliar to modern man that he cannot directly understand or assimilate them it is here that the analyst can help possibly the patient must be freed from the encumbrance of symbols that have grown stale and inappropriate or possibly he must be assisted to discover the abiding value of an old symbol that far from being dead is seeking to be reborn in modern form before the analyst can effectively explore the meaning of symbols with a patient he must himself acquire a wider knowledge of their Origins and significance for the analogies between an icient myths and the stories that appear in the dreams of modern patients are neither trivial nor accidental they exist because the unconscious minds of modern man preserves the symbol making capacity that once found expression in the beliefs and rituals of the Primitive and that capacity still plays a role of vital psychic importance in more ways that we realize we are dependent on the messages that are carried by such symbols and both our attitudes and behavior are profoundly influenced by them in Wartime for instance one finds increased interest in the works of Homer Shakespeare or Tolstoy and we read with a new understanding those passages that give War its enduring or archetypal meaning they evoke a response from us that is much more profound than it could be from someone who has never known the intense emotional experience of war the battles on The Plains of Troy were utterly unlike the fighting at agin court or borodino yet the great writers are able to transcend the differences of time and place and express themes that are Universal we respond because these themes are fundamentally symbolic a more striking example should be familiar to anyone who has grown up in a Christian Society at Christmas we may express our inner feeling for the mythological birth of a semi divine child even though we may not believe in the doctrine of the Virgin birth of Christ or have any kind of conscious religious faith unknowingly we have fallen in with the symbolism of rebirth this is a relic of an immensely older Solstice Festival which carries the hope that the fading winter landscape of the northern hemisphere will be renewed for all our sophistication we find satisfaction in this symbolic Festival just as we join with our children at Easter in the pleasant ritual of Easter eggs and Easter rabbits but do we understand what we do or see the connection between the story of Christ's birth death and resurrection and the folk symbolism of Easter usually we do not even care to consider such things intellectually yet they complement each other Christ's crucifixion on Good Friday seems at first sight to belong to the same pattern of fertility symbolism that one finds in the rich uals of such other saviors as Osiris tamas orus and balder they too were of divine or semi Divine birth they flourished were killed and were reborn they belonged in fact to cyclic religions in which the death and Rebirth of the god king was an eternally recurring myth but the resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday is much less satisfying from a ritual point of view than is the symbolism of the cyclic religions for Christ ascends to sit at the right hand of God the Father his resurrection occurs once and for all it is this finality of the Christian concept of the Resurrection the Christian idea of the last judgment has a similar closed theme that distinguishes Christianity from other God King myths it happened once and the ritual merely commemorates it but this sense of finality is probably one reason why early Christians still influenced by pre-christian Traditions felt that Christianity needed to be supplemented by some elements of an older fertility ritual they needed the recurring promise of rebirth and that is what is symbolized by the egg and the rabbit of Easter I have taken two quite different examples to show how Modern Man continues to respond to profound psychic influences of a kind that consciously he dismisses as little more than the folk tales of superstitious and uneducated peoples but it is necessary to go much further than this the more closely one looks at the history of symbolism and at the role that symbols have played in the life of many different cultures the more one understands that there is also a recreative meaning in these symbols some symbols relate to Childhood and the transition to adolescence others to maturity and others again to the experience of old age when man is preparing for his inevitable death Dr Yung has described how the dreams of a girl of eight contain the symbols one normally Associates with old age her dreams presented aspects of initiation into life as belonging to the same archetypal pattern as initiation into death this progression of symbolic ideas may take place therefore within the unconscious mind of modern man just as it took place in the rituals of ancient societies this crucial link between archaic or primitive myths and the symbols produced by the unconscious is of immense practical importance to the analyst it enables him to identify and to interpret these symbols in a context that gives them historical perspective as well as psychological meaning I shall now take some of the more important myths of antiquity and show how and to what purpose they are analogous to the symbolic material that we encounter in our dreams Heroes and hero makers the myth of the hero is the most common and the best known myth in the world we find it in the classical mythology of Greece and Rome in the Middle Ages in the Far East and among contemporary primitive tribes it also appears in our dreams it has an obvious dramatic appeal and a less obvious but nonetheless profound psychological importance these hero myths vary enormously in detail but the more closely one examines them the more one sees that structurally they are very similar they have that is to say a universal pattern even though they were developed by groups or individuals without any direct cultural contact with each other by for instance tribes of Africans or North American Indians or the Greeks or the Incas of Peru over and over again one hears a tale describing a hero's miraculous but humble birth his early proof of superhuman strength his rapid rise to prominence or power his triumphant struggle with the forces of evil his fallibility to the sin of Pride hibris and his fall through betrayal or a heroic sacrifice that ends in his death I shall later explain in more detail why I believe that this pattern has psychological meaning both for the individual who is endeavoring to discover and assert his personality and for a whole society which has an equal need to establish its Collective identity but another important characteristic of the hero myth provides a clue in many of these stories the early weakness of the hero is balanced by the appearance of strong strong tutelary figures or Guardians who enable him to perform the Superhuman tasks that he cannot accomplish uned among the Greek Heroes Theus had Poseidon god of the sea as his deity persus had Athena Achilles had chyon the wise Centaur as his tutor these Godlike figures are in fact symbolic representatives of the whole psyche the larger and more comprehensive identity that supplies the strength that the personal ego lacks their special role suggests that the essential function of the heroic myth is the development of the individual's ego Consciousness his awareness of his own strengths and weaknesses in a manner that will equip him for the arduous tasks with which life confronts him once the individual has passed his initial test and can enter the mature phase of Life the hero myth loses its relevance the hero's symbolic Death Becomes as it were the achievement of that maturity I have so far been referring to the complete hero myth in which the whole cycle from birth to death is elaborately described but it is essential to recognize that at each of the stages in this cycle there are special forms of the hero story that apply to the particular Point reached by the individual in the development of his ego Consciousness and to the specific problem confronting him at a given moment that is to say the image of the hero evolves in a manner that reflects each stage of the evolution of the human personality this concept can be more easily understood if I present it in what amounts to a diagram I take this example from the Obscure North American tribe of Winnebago Indians because it sets out quite clearly four distinct stages in the evolution of the hero in these stories which Dr Paul Raiden published in 1948 under the title hero cycles of the winnabago we can see the definite progression from the most primitive to the most sophisticated concept of the hero this progression is characteristic of other hero Cycles though the symbolic figures in them naturally have different names their roles are similar and we shall understand them better once we have grasped the point made by this example Dr Raiden noted four distinct Cycles in the evolution of the hero myth he named them the trickster cycle the hair cycle the red horn cycle and the twin cycle he correctly perceived the psychology of this Evolution when he said it represents our efforts to deal with the problem of growing up aided by the illusion of an eternal fiction the trickster cycle corresponds to the earliest and least developed period period of Life trickster is a figure whose physical appetites dominate his behavior he has the mentality of an infant lacking any purpose beyond the gratification of his primary needs he is cruel cynical and unfeeling our stories of BR rabbit or rainard the fox preserve the essentials of the trickster myth this figure which at the outset assumes the form of an animal passes from one mischievous EXP exploit to another but as he does so a change comes over him at the end of his rogue's progress he is beginning to take on the physical likeness of a grown man the next figure is hair he like trickster whose animal traits are often represented among American Indians by a coyote also first appears in animal form he has not yet attained mature human stature but all the same he appears as the founder of human culture the Transformer the Winnebago believed that in giving them their famous medicine right he became their savior as well as their culture hero this myth was so powerful Dr Raiden tells us that the members of the Peyote were reluctant to give up hair when Christianity began to penetrate the tribe he became merged with the figure of Christ and some of them argued that they had no need of Christ since they already had hair this archetypal figure represents a distinct Advance on trickster one can see that he is becoming a socialized being correcting the instinctual and infantile urges found in the trickster cycle red horn the third of this series of hero figures is an ambiguous person said to be the youngest of 10 Brothers he meets the requirements of an archetypal Hero by passing such tests as winning a race and by proving himself self in battle his superhuman power is shown by his ability to defeat Giants by gu in a game of dice or by strength in a wrestling match he has a powerful companion in the form of a Thunderbird called storms as he walks whose strength compensates for whatever weakness red horn May display with red horn we have reached the world of man though an archaic World in which the aid of superhuman powers or tutelary Gods is needed to ensure man's victory over the evil forces that beset him toward the end of the story The Hero God departs leaving red horn and his sons on Earth the danger to man's happiness and security Now comes from man himself this basic theme which is repeated in the last cycle that of the twins raises in effect the vital question how long can human beings be successful without without falling victims to their own Pride or in mythological terms to the jealousy of the Gods though the twins are said to be the sons of the sun they are essentially human and together constitute a single person originally United in the mother's womb they were forced apart at Birth yet they belong together and it is necessary though exceedingly difficult to reunite them in these two children we see the two sides of man's nature one of them flesh is acquiescent mild and without initiative the other stump is dynamic and rebellious in some of the stories of the twin Heroes these attitudes are refined to the point where one figure represents the introvert whose main strength lies in his powers of reflection and the other is an extrovert a man of action who can accomplish great Deeds for a long time these two heroes are invincible whether they are presented as two separate figures or as two in one they carry all before them yet like the warrior gods of Navajo Indian mythology they eventually sicken from the abuse of their own power there are no monsters left in heaven or on Earth for them to overcome and their consequent wild Behavior brings retribution in its train the winnebagos say that nothing in the end was safe from them not even the supports on which the world rests when the twins killed one of the four animals that upheld the Earth they had overstepped all limits and the time had come to put a stop to their career the punishment they deserved was death thus in both the red horn cycle and that of the twins we see the theme of sacrifice or death of the hero as a necessary cure for hibris the pride that has overreached itself in the primitive societies whose levels of culture correspond to the red horn cycle it appears that this danger may have been forestalled by the institution of propitiatory human sacrifice a theme that has immense symbolic importance and recurs continually in human history the Winnebago like the iroy and a few Algonquin tribes probably ate human flesh as a totemic ritual that could tame their individualistic and destru Ive impulses in the examples of the hero's betrayal or defeat that occur in European mythology the theme of ritual sacrifice is more specifically employed as a punishment for hybris but the Winnebago like the Navajo do not go so far though the twins aired and though the punishment should have been death they themselves became so frightened by their irresponsible power that they consented to live in a state of permanent rest the conflicting sides of human nature were again in equilibrium I have given this description of the four types of hero at some length because it provides a clear demonstration of the pattern that occurs both in the historic myths and in the hero dreams of contemporary man with this in mind we can examine the following dream of a middle-aged patient the interpretation of this dream shows how the analytical psychologist can from his knowledge of of Mythology help his patient find an answer to what might otherwise seem an insoluble riddle this man dreamed he was at a theater in the role of an important spectator whose opinion is respected there was an act in which a white monkey was standing on a pedestal with men around him in recounting this dream the man said my guide explains the theme to me it is the ordeal of a young sailor who is exposed both to the wind and to being beaten up I begin to object that this white monkey is not a sailor at all but just at that moment a young man in Black stands up and I think that he must be the true hero but another handsome young man strides toward an altar and stretches himself out on it they are making marks on his bare chest as a preparation to offering him as a human sacrifice then I find myself on a platform with several other people we could get down by a small ladder but I hesitate to do so because there are two young toughs standing by and I think that they will stop us but when a woman in the group uses the ladder unmolested I see that it is safe and all of us follow the woman down now a dream of his kind cannot be quickly or simply interpreted we have to unravel it carefully in order to show both its relation to the dreamer's own life and its wider symbolic implication the patient who produced it was a man who had achieved maturity in a physical sense he was successful in his career and he had apparently done pretty well as a husband and father yet psychologically he was still immature and had not completed his youthful phase of development it was his psychic immaturity that expresses itself in his dreams as different aspects of the hero myth these images still exerted a strong attraction for his imagination even though they had long since exhausted any of their meaning in terms of the reality of his everyday life thus in this dream we see a series of figures theatrically presented as various aspects of a figure that the dreamer keeps expecting will turn out to be the true hero the first is a white monkey the second a sailor the third a young man in Black and the last a handsome young man in the early part of the performance which is supposed to represent the sailor's ordeal the dreamer sees only the white monkey the man in Black suddenly appears and as suddenly disappears he is a new figure who first contrasts with the white monkey and is then for a moment confused with the hero proper such confusion in dreams Is Not Unusual the dreamer is not usually presented with clear images by the unconscious he has to puzzle out a meaning from a succession of contrasts and paradoxes significantly these figures appear in the course of a theatrical performance and this context seems to be a direct reference by the dreamer to his own treatment by analysis the guide he mentions is presumably his analyst yet he does not see himself as a patient who is being treated by a doctor but as an important spectator whose opinion is respected this is the vantage point point from which he sees certain figures whom he Associates to the experience of growing up the white monkey for instance reminds him of the playful and somewhat Lawless behavior of boys between the ages of seven and 12 the Sailor suggests the adventurousness of early adolescence together with the consequent punishment by beating for irresponsible pranks the dreamer could offer no association to the young man in Black but in the hands some young man about to be sacrificed he saw a reminder of the self-sacrificing idealism of late adolescence at this stage it is possible to put together the historical material or archetypal hero images and the data from the dreamer's personal experience in order to see how they corroborate contradict or qualify each other the first conclusion is that the white monkey seems to represent trickster or at least those traits of Personality that the Winnebago attribute to trickster but to me the monkey also stands for something that the dreamer has not personally and adequately experiened for himself he in fact says that in the dream he was a spectator I found out that as a boy he had been excessively attached to his parents and that he was naturally introspective for these reasons he had never fully developed the boisterous qualities natural to late childhood nor had he joined in the games of his School Fellows he had not as the saying goes got up to Monkey tricks or practiced Monkey Shines the saying provides the clue here the monkey in the dream is in fact a symbolic form of the trickster figure but why should trickster appear as a monkey and why should it be white as I have already pointed out the Winnebago myth tells us that toward the end of the cycle trickster begins to emerge in the physical likeness of a man and here in the dream is a monkey so close to a human being that it is a laughable and not too dangerous caricature of a man the dreamer himself could offer no personal association that could explain why the monkey was white but from our knowledge of primitive symbolism we can conjecture that whiteness lends a special quality of godlikeness to this otherwise benol figure the albino is regarded as sacred in many primitive communities this fits in quite well with trickster's semi Divine or semi magical powers thus it seems the white monkey symbolizes for the dreamer the positive quality of childhood playfulness which he had insufficiently accepted at the time and which he now feels called upon to exalt as the dream tells us he places it on a pedestal where it becomes something more than a lost childhood experience it is for the adult man a symbol of creative experimentalism next we come to the confusion about the monkey is it a monkey or is it a sailor who has to put up with beatings the dreamer's own associations pointed to the meaning of this transformation but in any case the next stage in human development is one in which the irresponsibility of childhood gives way to a period of socialization and that involves submission to painful discipline one could say therefore that the Sailor is an advanced form of trickster who is being changed into a socially responsible person by means of an initiation ordeal drawing on the history of symbolism we can assume that the wind represents the natural elements in this process and the beatings are those which are humanly induced at this point then we have a reference to the process that the Winnebago describe in the hair cycle where the culture hero is a weak yet struggling figure ready to sacrifice childishness for the sake of further development once again in this phase of the dream the patient is acknowledging his failure to experience to the full an important aspect of childhood and early adolescence he missed out on the playfulness of the child and also on the rather more advanced pranks of the young teenager and he is seeking ways in which those lost experiences and personal qualities can be rehabilitated next comes a curious change in the dream the young man in Black appears and for a moment the dreamer feels that this is the true hero that is all we are told about the man in Black yet this fleeting Glimpse introduces a theme of profound importance a theme that occurs frequently in dreams this is the concept of the Shadow which plays such a vital role in analytical psychology Dr Yong has pointed out that the shadow cast by the conscious mind of the individual contains the hidden repressed and unfavorable or nefarious aspects of the personality but this darkness is not just the simple Converse of the conscious ego just as the ego contains unfavorable and destructive attitudes udes so the shadow has good qualities normal instincts and creative impulses ego and Shadow indeed although separate are inextricably linked together in much the same way that thought and feeling are related to each other the ego nevertheless is in conflict with the shadow in what Dr Yung once called the battle for deliverance in the struggle of primitive man to achieve Consciousness this conflict is expressed by the contest between the archetypal hero and the cosmic powers of evil personified by dragons and other monsters in the developing consciousness of the individual the hero figure is the symbolic means by which the emerging ego overcomes the inertia of the unconscious mind and liberates the mature man from a regressive longing to return to the Blissful state of infancy in a world dominating ated by his mother usually in mythology the hero wins his battle against the monster I shall say more about this in a moment but there are other hero myths in which the hero gives into to the monster a familiar type is that of Jonah and the whale in which the hero is swallowed by a sea monster that carries him on a night sea Journey from west to east thus symbolizing the supposed Transit of the Sun from Sunset to Dawn the hero goes into darkness which represents a kind of death I have encountered this theme in dreams presented in my own clinical experience the battle between the hero and the dragon is the more active form of this myth and it shows more clearly the archetypal theme of the ego's triumph over regressive trends for most people the dark or negative side of the personality remains unconscious the hero on the contrary must realize that the shadow exists and that he can draw strength from it he must come to terms with its destructive Powers if he is to become sufficiently terrible to overcome the dragon IE before the ego can Triumph it must master and assimilate the shadow one can see this theme incidentally in a well-known literary hero figure GTA's character of faou in accepting the wager of mephistophiles F put himself in the power of a shadow figure that GTA describes as part of that power which willing evil finds the good like the man whose dream I have been discussing fa had failed to live out to the full an important part of his early life he was accordingly an unreal or incomplete person who lost himself in a fruitless quest for metaphysical goals that failed to materialize he was still unwilling to accept life's challenge to live both the good and the bad it is to this aspect of the unconscious that the young man in Black in my patient dream seems to refer such a reminder of the Shadow side of his personality of its powerful potential and its role in preparing the hero for the struggles of life is an essential transition from the earlier parts of the dream to the theme of the sacrificial hero the handsome young man who places himself self on an altar this figure represents the form of heroism that is commonly associated to the ego building process of late adolescence a man expresses the ideal principles of his life at this time sensing their power both to transform himself and to change his relations with others he is so to speak in the bloom of Youth attractive full of energy and idealism why then does he willingly offer for himself as a human sacrifice the reason presumably is the same as that which made the twins of the Winnebago myth give up their power on pain of Destruction the idealism of Youth which drives one so hard is bound to lead to overconfidence the human ego can be exalted to experience Godlike attributes but only at the cost of overreaching itself and falling to disaster this is the meaning of the story of Icarus the youth who is carried up to heaven on his fragile humanly contrived wings but who flies too close to the Sun and plunges to his Doom all the same the youthful ego must always run this risk for if a young man does not strive for a higher goal than he can safely reach he cannot surmount the obstacles between adolescence and maturity so far I have been talking about the conclusions that at the level of his personal associations my patient could draw from his own dream yet there is an archetypal level of the dream The Mystery of the proferred human sacrifice it is precisely because it is a mystery that it is expressed in a ritual act that in its symbolism carries us a long way back into man's history here as the man lies stretched out on an altar we see a reference to an act even more primitive than those performed on The Altar Stone in the temple at Stonehenge there as on so many primitive altars we can imagine a yearly Solstice right combined with the death and Rebirth of a mythological hero the ritual has a sorrow about it that is also a kind of Joy an inward acknowledgement that death also leads to a new life whether it is expressed in the pros epic of the Winnebago Indians in a lament for the death of balder in the north sagas in Walt Whitman's poems of mourning for Abraham Lincoln or in the dream ritual whereby a man returns to his youthful hopes and fears it is the same theme the drama of New Birth through death the end of the dream brings out a curious epilogue in which the dreamer at last becomes involved in the action of the dream he and others are on a platform from which they have to descend he does not trust the latter because of the possible interference of hoodlums but a woman encourages him to believe he can go down safely and this is accomplished since I found out from his associations that the whole performance he witnessed was part of his analysis a process of interchange that he was experiencing he was presumably thinking of the difficulty of getting back to everyday reality again his fear of the toughs as he calls them suggests his fear that the trickster archetype may appear in a collective form the saving elements in the dream are the man-made ladder which here is probably a symbol of the rational mind and the presence of the woman who encourages the dreamer to use it her appearance in the final sequence of the dream points to a psychic need to include a feminine Principle as a complement to all this excessively masculine activity it should not be assumed from what I have said or from the fact that I have chosen to use the Winnebago myth to illuminate this particular dream that one must seek for complete and wholly mechanical parallels between a dream and the materials one can find in the history of Mythology each dream is individual to the dreamer and the precise form it takes is determined by his own situation what I have sought to show is the manner in which the UNC conscious draws on this archetypal material and modifies its patterns to the dreamer's needs thus in this particular dream one must not look for a direct reference to what the Winnebago describe in the red horn or Twin cycles the reference is rather to the essence of those two themes to the sacrificial element in them as a general rule it can be said that the need for hero symbols arises when the ego needs strengthening when that is is to say the conscious mind needs assistance in some task that it cannot accomplish unaided or without drawing on the sources of strength that lie in the unconscious mind in the dream I have been discussing for instance there was no reference to one of the more important aspects of the myth of the typical hero his capacity to save or protect beautiful women from terrible danger the Damsel in Distress was a favorite myth of medieval Europe this is one way in which myths or dreams refer to the Ana the feminine element of the male psyche that Gerta called The Eternal feminine the nature and function of this female element will be discussed later in this book by Dr Von France but its relation to the hero figure can be Illustrated here by a dream produced by another patient also a man of mature years he began by saying I had returned from a long hike through India a woman had equipped myself and a friend for the journey and on my return I reproached her for failing to give us Black Rain hats telling her that through this oversight we had been soaked by the rain this introduction to the dream it later emerged referred to a period in this man's youth when he was given to taking heroic walks through dangerous Mountain Country in company with a college friend as he had never been to India and and in view of his own associations to this dream I concluded that the dream Journey signified his exploration of a new region not that is to say a real place but the realm of the unconscious in his dream the patient seems to feel that a woman presumably a personification of hisa has failed to prepare him properly for this Expedition the lack of a suitable rain hat suggests that he feels in an unprotected State of Mind in which he is uncomfortably affected by exposure to new and not altogether Pleasant experiences he believes that the woman should have provided a rain hat for him just as his mother provided clothes for him to wear as a boy this episode is reminiscent of his early picaresque wanderings when he was sustained by the assumption that his mother the original feminine image would protect him against all dangers as he Grew Older he saw that this was a childish illusion and he now blames his Misfortune on his own anima not his mother in the next stage of the dream the patient speaks of participating in a hike with a group of people he grows tired and returns to an outdoor restaurant where he finds his raincoat together with the rain hat that he had missed earlier he sits down to rest and as he does so he notices a poster stating that a local high school boy is taking the part of pereus in a play then the boy in question appears who turns out to be not a boy at all but a husky young man he is dressed in gray with a black hat and he sits down to talk with another young man dressed in a black suit immediately after this scene the dreamer feels a new Vigor and finds that he is capable of rejoining his party they all then climb over the next Hill there below them he sees their destination it is a lovely Harbor Town he feels both heartened and rejuvenated by the discovery here in contrast to the Restless uncomfortable and lonely journey of the first episode The Dreamer is with a group the contrast marks a change from an earlier pattern of isolation and Youthful protest to the socializing influence of a relation to others since this implies a new capacity for relatedness it suggests that hisa must now be functioning better than it was before symbolized by his discovery of the missing hat that Thea figure had previously failed to provide for him but the dreamer is tired and the scene at the restaurant reflects his need to look at his earlier attitudes in a new light with the hope of renewing his strength by this regression and so it turns out what he first sees is a poster suggesting the enactment of a youthful hero role a high school boy playing the part of Perseus then he sees the boy now a man with a friend who makes a sharp contrast to him the one dressed in light gray the other in Black can be recognized from what I have previously said as a version of the twins they are hero figures expressing the Opposites of ego and alter ego which however appear here in a harmonious and unified relation the patients associations confirm this and emphasize that the figure in Gray represents a well adapted worldly attitude to life while the figure in Black represents the spiritual life in the sense that a clergyman wears black that they wore hats and he now had found his own points to their having achieved a relatively mature identity of a kind that he had felt to be severely lacking in his own earlier adolescent years when the quality of trixster ism still clung to him in spite of his idealistic self-image as a seeker of wisdom his Association to the Greek hero Perseus was a curious one which proved especially significant because it revealed a glaring inaccuracy it turned out that he thought Perseus was the hero who slew the minitor and rescued Ari Adney from the Creon Labyrinth as he wrote the name down for me me he discovered his mistake that it was Theus not Perseus who slew the minor and this mistake became suddenly meaningful as such slips often do by making him notice what these two Heroes had in common they both had to overcome their fear of unconscious demonic maternal powers and had to liberate from these Powers a single youthful feminine figure Perseus had to cut off the head of the Gorgon Medusa whose horrifying Visage and snaky locks turned all who gazed upon them to Stone he later had to overcome the dragon that guarded Andromeda Theus represented the young patriarchal Spirit of Athens who had to Brave the Terrors of the cre and Labyrinth with its monstrous inmate the Minotaur which perhaps symbolized the unhealthy decadence of matriarchal creit in all cultures the Labyrinth has the meaning of an entangling and confusing representation of the world of matriarchal Consciousness it can be traversed only by those who are ready for a special initiation into the Mysterious World of the collective unconscious having overcome this danger Theus rescued aradne a maiden in distress this rescue symbolizes the liberation of the Ana figure from the devouring aspect of the mother image not until this is accomplished can a man achieve his first true capacity for relatedness to women the fact that this man had failed adequately to separate the anima from the mother was emphasized in another dream in which he encountered a dragon a symbolic image for the devouring aspect of his attachment to his mother this Dragon pursued him and because he had no weapon he began to get the worst of the struggle significantly however his wife appeared in the dream and her appearance somehow made the dragon smaller and less threatening this change in the dream showed that in his marriage the dreamer was belatedly overcoming the attachment to his mother in other words he had to find a means of freeing the psychic energy attached to the motherson relationship in order to achieve a more adult relation to women and indeed to adult society as a whole the hero dragon battle was the symbolic expression of this process of growing up but the hero's task has an aim that goes beyond biological and marital adjustment it is to liberate the Ana as that inner component of the psyche which is necessary for any true creative achievement in this man's case we have to guess the probability of this outcome because it is not directly stated in the dream of the Indian Journey but I am sure he would confirm my hypothesis that his journey over the hill and the sight of his goal as a peaceful Harbor Town contained the rich promise that he would discover his authentic anima function he would thus be cured of his early resentment at not being given protection the rain hat by the woman for his journey through India in dreams significantly placed towns can often be anima symbols the man had won this promise of security for himself by his contact with the authentic hero archetype and had found a new cooperative and related attitude to the group his sense of Rejuvenation naturally followed he had drawn on the inner source of strength that the hero archetype represents he had clarified and developed that part of him which was symbolized by the woman and he had by his ego's heroic act liberated himself from his mother these and many other examples of the hero myth in modern dreams show that the ego as hero is always essentially a bearer of culture rather than a purely egocentric exhibitionist even trickster in his misguided or unpurposely as coyote he hurled the Stars into the sky as an Act of Creation he invented the necessary contingency of death and in the myth of emergency he helped lead the people through the hollow Reed whereby they escaped from one world to another above it where they were safe from the threat of flood we have here a reference to that form of Creative Evolution which evidently begins on a childlike preconscious or animal level of existence the ego's rise to effective conscious action becomes plain in the true cult culture hero in the same fashion the childish or adolescent ego frees itself from the oppression of Parental expectations and becomes individual as part of this rise to Consciousness the hero dragon battle may have to be fought and refa to liberate energy for the multitude of human tasks that can form a culture pattern out of chaos when this is successful we see the full hero image emerging as a kind of ego strength or if we are speaking in itive terms a tribal identity that has no further need to overcome the monsters and the Giants it has reached the point where these deep forces can be personalized the feminine Element no longer appears in dreams as a dragon but as a woman similarly the shadow side of the personality takes on a less menacing form this important point is Illustrated in the dream of a man nearing 50 all his life he had suffered from periodic attacks of anxiety associated with fear of failure originally engendered by a doubting mother yet his actual achievements both in his profession and in his personal relations were well above average in his dream his 9-year-old son appeared as a young man of about 18 or 19 dressed in The Shining Armor of a medieval night the young man is called upon to fight a host of Men In Black which he prepares at first to do then he suddenly removes his helmet and smiles at the leader of the menacing host it is clear that they will not engage in the battle but will become friends the son in the dream is the man's own youthful ego which had frequently felt threatened by the shadow in the form of self-doubt he had in a sense waged a successful Crusade against this adversary all his mature life now partly through the actual encouragement of seeing his son grow up without such doubts but mainly by forming a suitable image of the hero in the form closest to his own environmental pattern he finds it no longer necessary to fight the shadow he can accept it that is what is symbolized in the act of friendship he is no longer driven to a competitive struggle for individual Supremacy but is assimilated to the cultural task of forming a democratic sour sort of community such a conclusion reached in the fullness of life goes beyond the heroic task and leads one to a truly mature attitude this change however does not take place automatically it requires a period of transition which is expressed in the various forms of the archetype of initiation the archetype of initiation in a psychological sense the hero image is not to be regarded as identical with the ego proper it is better described as the symbolic means by which the ego separates itself from the archetypes evoked by the parental images in early childhood Dr Young has suggested that each human being has originally a feeling of wholeness a powerful and complete sense of the self and from the self the totality of the psyche the individualized ego Consciousness emerges as the individual grows up within the past few years The Works of certain followers of young have begun to document the series of events by which the individual ego emerges during the transition from infancy through childhood this separation can never become final without severe injury to the original sense of wholeness and the ego must continually return to reestablish its relation to the self in order to maintain a condition I of psychic Health it would appear from my studies that the hero myth is the first stage in the differentiation of the psyche I have suggested that it seems to go through a four-fold cycle by which the ego seeks to achieve its relative autonomy from the original condition of wholeness unless some degree of autonomy is achieved the individual is unable to relate himself to his adult environment but the hero myth does not Ensure sure that this Liberation will occur it only shows how it is possible for it to occur so that the ego May achieve Consciousness there Remains the problem of maintaining and developing that Consciousness in a meaningful way so that the individual can live a useful life and can achieve the necessary sense of self-d Distinction in society ancient history and the rituals of contemporary primitive societies have provided us with a wealth of material about myths and rights of initiation whereby young men and women are weaned away from their parents and forcibly made members of their Clan or tribe but in making this break with the childhood world the original Parent archetype will be injured and the Damage must be made good by a healing process of assimilation into the life of the group the identity of the group and the individual is often symbolized by a totem animal thus the group fulfills the claims of the injured archetype and becomes a kind of second parent to which the young are first symbolically sacrificed only to reemerge into a new life in this drastic ceremony which looks very like a sacrifice to the powers that might hold the young man back as Dr Young has put it we see how the power of the original archetype can never be permanently overcome in the manner in envisaged by the hero dragon battle without a crippling sense of alienation from the fruitful powers of the unconscious we saw in the myth of the twins how their hybris expressing excessive ego self-separation was corrected by their own fear of the consequences which forced them back into a harmonious ego self relation in tribal societies it is the initiation right that most effectively solves this problem the ritual takes the novice back to the deepest level of original mother child Identity or ego self identity thus forcing him to experience a symbolic death in other words his identity is temporarily dismembered or dissolved in the collective unconscious from this state he is then ceremonially rescued by the right of the new birth this is the First Act of true consolidation of the ego with the larger group expressed as totem Clan or tribe or all three combined the ritual whether it is found in tribal groups or in more complex societies invariably insists upon this right of death and rebirth which provides the novice with a right of passage from one stage of life to the next whether it is from Early Childhood or from early to late adolesence and from then to maturity initiatory events are not of course confined to the psychology of Youth every new phase of development throughout an individual's life is accompanied by a repetition of the original conflict between the claims of the self and the claims of the ego in fact this conflict may be expressed more powerfully at the period of transition from early maturity to middle age between 35 to 40 in our society than at any other time in life and the transition from age to old age creates again the need for affirmation of the difference between the ego and the total psyche the hero receives his last call to action in defense of ego Consciousness against the approaching dissolution of life in death at these critical periods the archetype of initiation is strongly activated to provide a meaningful transition that offers something more spiritually satisfying than the Adolescent rights with their strong secular flavor the archetypal patterns of initiation in this religious sense known since ancient times as the Mysteries are woven into the texture of all ecclesiastical rituals requiring a special manner of worship at the time of birth marriage or death as in our study of the hero myth so in the study of initiation we must look for examples in the subjective experiences of modern people and especially of those who have undergone analysis it is not surprising that there should appear in the unconscious of someone who is seeking help from a doctor specializing in psychic disorders images that duplicate the major patterns of initiation as we know them from history perhaps the commonest of these themes to be found in young people is the ordeal or trial of strength this might seem to be identical with we have already noticed in modern dreams illustrating the hero myth such as the sailor who had to submit to the weather and to beatings or that proof of Fitness represented in the hike through India of The Man Without a rain hat we can also see this theme of physical suffering carried to its logical end in the first Dream I discussed when the handsome young man became a human sacrifice on an altar this sacrifice resembled the approach to initi iation but its end was obscured it seemed to round off the hero cycle to make way for a new theme there is one striking difference between the hero myth and the initiation right the typical hero figures exhaust their efforts in achieving the goal of their Ambitions in short they become successful even if immediately afterward they are punished or killed for their hybris in contrast to this the novice for initiation is called upon to give up willful ambition and all desire and to submit to the ordeal he must be willing to experience this trial without hope of success in fact he must be prepared to die and though the token of his ordeal may be mild a period of fasting the knocking out of a tooth or tattooing or agonizing the infliction of the wounds of circumcision subincision or other mutilations the purpose remains always the same to create the symbolic mood of death from which may spring the symbolic mood of rebirth a young man of 25 dreamed of climbing a mountain on top of which there was a kind of altar near the altar he sees a sarcophagus with a statue of himself upon it then a veiled priest approaches carrying a staff on which there glows a living sundisk discussing the dream later the young man said that climbing a mountain reminded him of the effort he was making in his analysis to achieve self-mastery to his surprise he finds himself as it were dead and instead of a sense of achievement he feels deprivation and fear then comes a feeling of strength and Rejuvenation as he is bathed in the warm rays of the sundisk this dream shows quite succinctly the distinction we must make between initiation and the hero myth the act of climbing the mountain seems to suggest a trial of strength it is the will to achieve ego Consciousness in the heroic phase of adolescent development the patient had evidently thought that his approach to therapy would be like his approach to other tests of manhood which he had approached in the competitive manner characteristic of young men in our society but the scene by the altar corrected this mistaken assumption showing him that his task is rather to submit to a power greater than himself he must see himself as if he were dead and inent tuned in a symbolic form the sarcophagus that recalls the archetypal mother as the original container of all life only by such an act of submission can he experience rebirth an invigorating ritual brings him to life again as the symbolic son of a son father here again we might confuse this with a hero cycle that of the twins the children of the son but in this case we have no indication that the initiate will overreach himself instead he has learned a lesson in humility by experiencing a right of death and rebirth that marks his passage from youth to maturity according to his chronological age he should already have made this transition but a prolonged period of Arrested Development has held him back this delay had plunged him into a Neurosis for which he had come for treatment and the dream offers him the same wise counsel that he could have been given by any good tribal medicine man that he should give up scaling mountains to prove his strength and submit to the meaningful ritual of an initiatory change that could fit him for the new moral responsibilities of manhood the theme of submission as an essential attitude toward promotion of the successful initiation right can be clearly seen in the case of girls or women their right of passage initially emphasizes their essential passivity and this is reinforced by the physiological limitation on their autonomy imposed by the menstrual cycle it has been suggested that the menstrual cycle may actually be the major part of initiation from a woman's point of view since it has the power to awaken the deepest sense of obedience to Life's creative power over her her thus she willingly gives herself to her womanly function much as a man gives himself to his assigned role in the community life of his group on the other hand the woman no less than the man has her initial Trials of strength that lead to a final sacrifice for the sake of experiencing the new birth this sacrifice enables a woman to free herself from the entanglement of personal relations and fits her for a more conscious role as an IND individual in her own right in contrast a man's sacrifice is a surrender of his sacred Independence he becomes more consciously related to woman here we come to that aspect of initiation which acquaints man with woman and woman with man in such a way as to correct some sort of original male female opposition man's knowledge logos then encounters women's relatedness arrows and their Union is represented as that symbolic ritual of a sacred marriage which has been at the heart of initiation since its origins in the mystery religions of antiquity but this is exceedingly difficult for modern people to grasp and it frequently takes a special crisis in their lives to make them understand it several patients have told me dreams in which the motif of sacrifice is combined with the motif of the sacred marriage one of these was produced by a young man who had fallen in love but was unwilling to marry for fear that marriage would become a kind of prison presided over by a powerful mother figure his own mother had been a strong influence in his childhood and his future mother-in-law presented a similar threat would not his wife to be dominate him in the same way these mothers had dominated their children in his dream he was engaged in a ritual dance along with another man and two other women one of whom was his fiance the others were an older man and wife who impressed the dreamer because despite their closeness to each other they seemed to have room for their individual differences and did not appear to be possessive these two therefore represented to this young man a married state that did not impose undue constraint on the development of the individual nature of the two partners if it were possible for him to achieve this condition marriage would then become except acceptable to him in the ritual dance each man faced his woman partner and all four took their places at the corners of a square dancing ground as they danced it became apparent that this was also a kind of Sword dance each dancer had in his hand a short sword with which to perform a difficult Arabesque moving arms and legs in a series of movements that suggested alternate impulses of aggression and submission to each other in the final scene of the dance all four dancers had to plunge the swords into their own breasts and die only the dreamer refused to accomplish the final suicide and was left standing alone after the others had fallen he felt deeply ashamed of his cowardly failure to sacrifice himself with the others this dream brought home to my patient the fact that he was more than ready to change his attitude to life he had been self-centered seeking the illusory safety of personal Independence but inwardly dominated by the fears caused by childhood subjection to his mother he needed a challenge to his manhood in order to see that unless he sacrificed his childish state of mind he would be left isolated and ashamed the dream and his subsequent insight into its meaning dispelled his doubts he had passed through the symbol right by which a young man gives up his exclusive autonomy and accepts his shared life in a related not just heroic form and so he married and found appropriate fulfillment in his relationship with his wife far from impairing his Effectiveness in the world his marriage actually enhanced it quite apart from the neurotic fear that invisible mothers or fathers may be lurking behind the marriage Veil even the normal young man has good reason reason to feel apprehensive about the wedding ritual it is essentially a woman's initiation right in which a man is bound to feel like anything but a Conquering Hero no wonder we find in tribal societies such copobox of marriage but the theme of marriage is an image of such universality that it also has a deeper meaning it is an acceptable even necessary symbolic discovery of the feminine component of a man's own psyche just as much as it is the acquisition of a real wife so one may encounter this archetype in a man of any age in response to a suitable stimulus not all women however react trustingly to the married state a woman patient who had unfulfilled longings for a career which she had had to give up for a very difficult and short-lived marriage dreamed that she was kneeling opposite a man who was also kneeling he had a ring that he prepared to put on her finger but she stretched out her right- hand ring finger in a tense manner evidently resisting this ritual of marital Union it was easy to point out her significant error instead of offering the left-and ring finger by which she could accept a balanced and natural relation to the masculine principle she had wrongly assume that she had to put her entire conscience that is right-sided identity in the service of the man in fact marriage required her to share with him only that subliminal natural that is left-sided part of herself in which the principle of Union would have a symbolic not a literal or absolute meaning her fear was the fear of the woman who dreads to lose her identity in a strongly patriarchal marriage which this woman had good reason to resist nevertheless the sacred marriage as an archetypal form has a particularly important meaning for the psychology of women and one for which they are prepared during their adolescence by many preliminary events of an initiatory character Beauty and the Beast girls in our society share in the masculine hero myths because like boys they must also develop a reliable ego identity and acquire an education but there is an older layer of the mind that seems to come to the surface in their feelings with the aim of making them into women not into imitation men when this ancient content of the psyche begins to make its appearance the modern young woman May repress it because it threatens to cut her off from the emancipated equality of friendship and opportunity to compete with men that have become her modern privileges this repression may be so successful that for a time she will maintain an identification with the masculine intellectual goals she learned at school or college even when she marries she will preserve some illusion of Freedom despite her ostensible Act of submission to the archetype of marriage with its implicit injunction F to become a mother and so there may occur as we very frequently see today that conflict which in the end forces the woman to ReDiscover her buried Womanhood in a painful but ultimately rewarding manner I saw an example of this in a young married woman who did not yet have any children but who intended to have one or two eventually because it would be expected of her meanwhile her sexual response was unsatisfactory this worried her and her husband though they were unable to offer any explanation for it she had graduated with honors from a good woman's college and enjoyed a life of intellectual companionship with her husband and other men while this side of her life went well enough much of the time she had occasional outbursts of temper and talked in an aggressive fashion that alienated men and gave her an intolerable feeling of dissatisfaction with herself she had a dream at this time that seemed so important she sought professional advice to understand it she dreamed she was in a line of young women like herself and as she looked ahead to where they were going she saw that as each came to the head of the line she was decapitated by a guillotine without any fear the dreamer remained in the line presumably quite willing to submit to the same treatment when her turn came I explained to her that this meant she was is ready to give up the habit of living in her head she must learn to free her body to discover its natural sexual response and the Fulfillment of its biological role in motherhood the dream expressed this as the need to make a drastic change she had to sacrifice the masculine hero role as one might expect this educated woman had no difficulty in accepting this interpretation at an intellectual level and she set about trying to change herself into a more submissive kind of woman she did then improve her love life and became the mother of two very satisfactory children as she grew to know herself better she began to see that for a man or the masculine trained mind in women life is something that has to be taken by storm as an act of the heroic will but for a woman to feel right about herself life is best realized by a process of Awakening a universal myth expressing this kind of Awakening is found in the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast the best known version of this story relates how Beauty the youngest of four daughters becomes her father's favorite because of her unselfish goodness when she asks her father only for a white rose instead of the more costly presence demanded by the others she is aware only of her inner sincerity of feeling she does not know that she is about to endanger her father's life and her ideal relation with him for he steals the white rose from the Enchanted Garden of Beast who is stirred to anger by the theft and requires him to return in three months for his punishment presumably death in allowing the father this reprieve to go home with his gift Beast behaves out of character especially when he also offers to send him a trunk full of gold when he gets home as Beauty's father comments the Beast seems cruel and kind at the same time Beauty insists upon taking her father's punishment and returns after three months to the Enchanted Castle there she is given a beautiful room where she has no worries and nothing to fear except the occasional visits of Beast who repeatedly comes to ask her if she will someday marry him she always refuses then seeing seeing in a magic mirror a picture of her father lying ill she begs Beast to allow her to return to comfort him promising to return in a week Beast tells her that he will die if she deserts him but she may go for a week at home her radiant presence brings joy to her father and envy to her sisters who plot to detain her longer than her promised stay at length she dreams that Beast is dying of Despair so realize ing she has overstay her time she returns to resuscitate him quite forgetting the dying BEAST's ugliness Beauty ministers to him he tells her that he was unable to live without her and that he will die happy now that she has returned but Beauty realizes that she cannot live without Beast that she has fallen in love with him she tells him so and Promises to be his wife if only he will not die at this the castle is filled with a blaze of light and the sound of music and Beast disappears in his place stands a handsome prince who tells beauty that he had been Enchanted by a witch and turned into the Beast the spell was ordained to last until a beautiful girl should love Beast for his goodness alone in this story if we unravel the symbolism we are likely to see that beauty is any young girl or woman who has entered into an emotional bond with her father no less binding because of its spiritual nature her goodness is symbolized by her request for a white rose but in a significant Twist of meaning her unconscious intention puts her father and then herself in the power of a principle that expresses not goodness alone but cruelty and kindness combined it is as if she wished to be rescued from a love holding her to an exclusively virtuous and unreal attitude by learning to love Beast she awakens to the power of human love concealed in its animal and therefore imperfect but genuinely erotic form presumably this represents an Awakening of her true function of relatedness enabling her to accept the erotic component of her original wish which had to be repressed because of a fear of incest to leave her father she had as it were to accept the incest fear to allow herself to live in its presence in fantasy until she could get to know the animal man and discover her own true response to it as a woman in this way she redeems herself and her image of the masculine from the forces of repression bringing to Consciousness her capacity to trust her love as something that combines spirit and nature in the best sense of the words a dream of an emancipated woman patient of mine represented this need to remove the incest fear a very real fear in this patient's thoughts because of her father's over close attachment to her following his wife's death the dream showed her being chased by a furious bull she fled at first but realized it was no use she fell and the bull was upon her she knew her only hope was to sing to the bull and when she did though in a quavering voice the bull calmed down and began licking her hand with its tongue the interpret showed that she could now learn to relate to men in a more confidently feminine way not only sexually but erotically in the wider sense of relatedness on the level of her conscious identity but in the cases of older women the Beast theme may not indicate the need to find the answer to a personal father fixation or to release a sexual inhibition or any of the things that the psychoanalytically minded rationalist may see in the myth it can be in fact the expression of a certain kind of woman's initiation which may be just as meaningful at the onset of the menopause as at the height of adolescence and it may appear at any age when the union of spirit and nature has been Disturbed a woman of menopausal age reported the following dream I am with several Anonymous women whom I don't seem to know we go downstairs in a strange house and are confronted Suddenly by some grotesque Apen with evil faces dressed in fur with gray and black rings with Tails horrible and learing we are completely in their power but suddenly I feel the only way we can save ourselves is not to panic and run or fight but to treat these creatures with Humanity as if to make them aware of their better side so one of the Apen comes up to me and I greet him like a dancing partner and begin to dance with him later I have been given Supernatural healing powers and there is a man who is at death's door I have a kind of quill or perhaps a bird's beak through which I blow air into his nostrils and he begins to Breathe Again during the years of her marriage and the raising of her children this woman had been obliged to neglect her creative gift with which she had once made a small but genuine reputation as a writer at the time of her dream she had been trying to force herself back to work again at the same time criticizing herself unmercifully for not being a better wife friend and mother the dream showed her problem in the light of other women who might be going through a similar transition descending as the dream puts it into the lower regions of a strange house from a too highly conscious level this we can guess to be the entrance to some meaningful aspect of the collective unconscious with its challenge to accept the masculine Principle as animal man that same heroic clown-like trickster figure we met at the beginning of the Primitive hero cycles for her to relate to this ape man and humanize him by bringing out what is good in him meant that she would first have to accept some unpredictable element of her natural creative spirit with this she could cut across the conventional bonds of her life and learn to write in a new way more appropr for her in the second part of life that this impulse is related to the creative masculine principle is shown in the second scene where she resuscitates a man by blowing air through a kind of bird's beak into his nose this pneumatic procedure suggests the need for a Revival of the spirit rather than the principle of erotic warmth it is a symbolism known all over the world the ritual act brings the creative Breath of Life to any new achievement the dream of another woman emphasizes the nature aspect of Beauty and the Beast something flies or is thrown in through the window like a large insect with whirling spiral legs yellow and black dot it then becomes a queer animal striped yellow and black like a tiger with beike Almost Human Paws and a pointed wolf-like face it may run loose and harm children it is Sunday afternoon and I see a little girl all dressed in white on her way to Sunday school I must get the police to help but then I see the creature has become part woman part animal it fawns upon me wants to be loved I feel it's a fairy tale situation or a dream and only kindness can transform it I try to embrace it warmly but I can't go through with it I push it away but I have the feeling I must keep it near and get used to it and maybe someday I'll be able to kiss it here we have a different situation from the previous one this woman had been too intensively Carried Away by the masculine creative function within herself which had become a compulsive mental that is Airborne preoccupation thus she has been prevented from discharging her feminine wiely function in a natural way in association to this dream she said when my husband comes home my creative side goes underground and I become the over organized housewife her dream takes this unexpected turn of transforming her spirit gone bad into the woman she must accept and cultivate in herself in this way she can harmonize her creative intellectual interest with the instincts that enable her to relate warmly to others this involves a new acceptance of the Dual principle of life in nature of that which is cruel but kind or as we might say in her case ruthlessly adventurous but at the same time humbly and creatively domestic these opposites obviously cannot be reconciled except on a highly sophisticated psychological level of awareness and would of course be harmful to that innocent child in her Sunday school dress the interpretation one could place on this woman's dream is that she needed to overcome some excessively naive image of herself she had to be willing to embrace the full polarity of her feelings just as Beauty had to give up the innocence of trusting in a father who could not give her the Pure White Rose of his feeling without Awakening the beneficent Fury of the Beast orfus and the son of man Beauty and the Beast is a fairy tale with the quality of a wildf flower appearing so unexpectedly and creating in such a natural sense of wonder that we do not notice for the moment that it belongs to a definite class genus and species of plant the kind of mystery inherent in such a story is given a universal application not only in a larger historical myth but also in the rituals whereby the myth is expressed or from which it may be derived the type of ritual and myth appropriately expressing this type of psychological experience experience is exemplified in the Greco Roman religion of dionis and in its successor the religion of orus both of these religions provided a significant initiation of the type known as Mysteries they brought forth symbols associated with a God man of androgynous character who was supposed to have an intimate understanding of the animal or plant world and to be the master of initiation into their secet the dionysiac religion contained orgiastic rights that implied the need for an initiate to abandon himself to his animal nature and thereby experience the full fertilizing power of the Earth Mother the initiating agent for this write of passage in the dionysiac ritual was wine it was supposed to produce the symbolic lowering of Consciousness necessary to introduce the novice into the closely guarded secrets of nature whose Essence was expressed by a symbol of erotic fulfillment the god dionis joined with ar Adney his consort in a sacred marriage ceremony in time the rights of dionisis lost their emotive religious power there emerged an almost Oriental longing for Liberation from their exclusive preoccupation with the purely natural symbols of life and love the DIC religion shifting constantly from spiritual to physical and Back Again perhaps proved too wild and turbulent for some more aesthetic Souls these came to experience their religious ecstasies inwardly in the worship of Orphus Orphus was probably a real man a singer prophet and teacher who was martyred and whose tomb became a shrine no wonder the early Christian Church saw in orus the Prototype of Christ both religions brought to the late helenistic world the promise of a future Divine life because they were men yet also mediators of the Divine for the multitudes of the dying Grecian culture in the days of the Roman Empire they held the longed for Hope of a future life there was however one important difference between the religion of orus and the religion of Christ though sublimated into a mystical form the orphic Mysteries kept alive the old dionysiac religion the spiritual impetus came from a demigod in whom was preserved the most significant quality of a religion rooted in the art of agriculture that quality was the old pattern of the fertility Gods who came only for the season in other words the eternally recurrent cycle of birth growth fullness and Decay Christianity on the other hand dispelled the Mysteries Christ was the prod and reformer of a patriarch nomadic pastoral religion whose prophets represented their Messiah as a being of absolutely divine origin the son of man though born of a human virgin had his beginning in heaven when he came in an act of God's incarnation in man after his death he returned to heaven but returned once and for all to Reign on the right hand of God until the second coming when the dead shall arise of course the asceticism of early Christianity did not last the memory of the cyclic Mysteries haunted its followers to the extent that the church eventually had to incorporate many practices from the Pagan past into its rituals the most meaningful of these may be found in the old records of what was done on Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday in celebration of the resurrection of Christ the baptismal service that the medieval Church made into a suitable and deeply meaningful initiation right but that ritual has scarcely survived into modern times and it is completely absent in protestantism the ritual that has survived much better and that still contains the meaning of a central initiation mystery for The Devout is the Catholic practice of the elevation of the Chalice it has been described by Dr Jung in his transformation symbolism in the mass the lifting up of the Chalice in the air prepares the spiritualization of the wine this is confirmed by the invocation to the holy ghost that immediately follows the invocation serves to infuse the wine with the Holy Spirit for it is the Holy Ghost who begets fulfills and transforms after the elevation The Chalice was in former times set down to the right of the host to correspond with the blood that flowed from the right side of Christ the ritual of communion is everywhere the same whether it is expressed by drinking of the cup of dionisis or of the Holy Christian chalice but the level of awareness each brings to the individual participant is different the dionesia participant looks back to the origin of things to the storm birth of the God who is blasted from the resistant womb of Mother Earth in the fres esos of the V de mystery in Pompei the enacted right evoked the God as a mask of Terror reflected in the cup of dionisis offered by the priest to the initiate later we find the winnowing basket with its precious fruits of the earth and the phus as creative symbols of the God's manifestation as the principle of breeding and growth in contrast to this backward look with its Central focus on Nature's eternal cycle of birth and death the Christian mystery points forward to the initiates ultimate hope of Union with a Transcendent god mother nature with all her beautiful seasonal changes has been left behind and the central figure of Christianity offers spiritual certainty for he is the Son of God in heaven yet the two somehow fuse in the figure of orus the God who remembers dionis but looks forward to Christ the psychological sense of this intermediate figure has been described by the Swiss author Linda fears David in her interpretation of the orphic right pictured in the villa de mystery Orpheus taught while he sang and played the liar and his singing was so powerful that it mastered all nature when he sang to his liar the birds flew about him the fish left the water and sprang to him the wind and the Sea became still the rivers flowed upward toward him it did not snow and there was no hail trees and the Very Stones followed after orus tiger and lion lay down near him next to the sheep and the Wolves next to the Stag and the row now what does this mean it surely means that through a Divine insight into the meaning of natural events Nature's happenings become harmoniously ordered from within everything becomes light and all creatures are appeased when the mediator in the act of worshiping represents the light of nature Orpheus is an embodiment of devotion and piety he symbolizes the religious attitude that solves all conflicts since thereby the whole soul is turned toward that which lies on the other side of all conflict and as he does this he is truly orus that is a good shepherd his primitive embodiment both As Good Shepherd and mediator Orpheus strikes the balance between the diania religion and the Christian religion since we find both dionis and Christ in similar roles though as I have said differently oriented as to time and direction in space one a cyclic religion of the Nether world the other Heavenly and eschatological or final this series of initiatory events drawn from the context of religious history is repeated endlessly and with practically every conceivable individual Twist of meaning in the dreams and fantasies of modern people in a state of heavy fatigue and depression a woman undergoing analysis had this fantasy I sit on the side of a long narrow table in a high vated room with no window my body is hunched over and shrunken there is nothing over me but a long white linen cloth that hangs from my shoulders to the floor something crucial has happened to me there is not much life left in me red crosses on gold discs appear before my eyes I recall that I have made some sort of commitment a long time ago and wherever I am now must be part of this I sit there a long time now I slowly open my eyes and I see a man who sits beside me who is to heal me he appears natural and kind and he is talking to me though I don't hear him he seems to know all about where I have been I am aware that I am very ugly and that there must be an odor of death around me I wonder if he will be repelled I look at him for a very long time he does not turn away I breathe more easily then I feel a cool breeze or cool water pour over my body I wrap the white linen cloth across me now and prepare for a natural sleep the man's Healing Hands are on my shoulders I recall vaguely that there was a time when there were wounds there but the pressure of his hand seems to give me strength and healing this woman had previously felt threatened by doubts about her original religious affiliation she had been brought up as a devout Catholic of the old school but since her youth she had struggled to free herself from the formal religious conventions followed by her family yet the symbolic events of the church year and the richness of her insight into to their meaning remained with her throughout the process of her psychological change and in her analysis I found this working knowledge of religious symbolism most helpful the significant elements she singled out of her fantasy were the white cloth which she understood as a sacrificial cloth the vaated room which she considered to be a tomb and her commitment which she associated with the experience of submission this commitment as she called it suggested a ritual of initiation with a perilous descent into the Vault of death which symbolized the way she had left church and family to experience God in her own fashion she had undergone an imitation of Christ in the true symbolic sense and like him she had suffered the wounds that preceded his death the sacrificial cloth suggests the winding sheet or shroud in which the crucified Christ was wrapped and then placed in the Tomb the end of the fantasy introduces the healing figure of a man loosely associated with me as her analyst but appearing also in his natural role as a friend fully aware of her experience he speaks to her in words she cannot yet hear but his hands are reassuring and give a sense of healing one senses in this figure the touch and the word of the Good Shepherd orus or Christ as mediator and also of course as healer he is on the side of life and has to convince her that she may now come back from the Vault of Death Shall we call this rebirth or Resurrection both perhaps or neither the essential right proclaims itself at the end the Cool Breeze or water flowing over her body is the primordial Act of purification or cleansing of the sin of death the essence of true baptism the same woman had another fantasy in which she felt that her birthday fell upon the day of Christ's Resurrection this was much more meaningful for her than the memory of her mother who had never given her the feeling of reassurance and renewal she so much wished for on her childhood birthdays but this did not mean she identified herself with the figure of Christ for all his power and Glory something was lacking and as she tried to reach him through prayer he and his cross were lifted up to heaven out of her human reach in this second fantasy she fell back upon the symbol of rebirth as a rising sun and a new feminine symbol began to make its appearance first of all it appeared as an embryo in a watery sack then she was carrying an 8-year-old boy through the water passing a danger point then a new movement occurred in which she no longer felt threatened or under the influence of death she was in a forest by a little spring waterfall green Vines grow all around in my hands I have a stone Bowl in which there is spring water some green moss and violets I bathe myself under the waterfall it is golden and silky and I feel like a child the sense of these events is clear though it is possible to miss the inner meaning in the cryptic description ion of so many changing images here we have it seems a process of rebirth in which a larger spiritual self is reborn and baptized in nature as a child meanwhile she has rescued an older child who was in some way her own ego at the most traumatic period of her childhood she then carried it through water past the danger Point thus indicating her fear of a paralyzing sense of guilt if she should depart too far from her family's conventional religion but religious symbolism is significant by its absence all is in the hands of nature we are clearly in the realm of the shepherd Orphus rather than the Risen Christ a dream followed this sequence which brought her to a church resembling the church in AI with giotto's frescos of St Francis she felt more at home here than she would in other churches because St Francis like orus was a religious man of nature this revived her feelings about the change in her religious affiliation that had been so painful to undergo but now she believes she could joyfully face the experience inspired by the light of nature the series of Dreams ended with a distant echo of the religion of dionis one could say that this was a reminder that even Orphus can at times be a little too far removed from the fecundating power of the animal God in man she dreamed that she was leading a fair-haired child by the hand we are happily participating in a festival that includes the sun and the forests and flowers all around the child has a little white flower in her hand and she places it on the head of a black bull the bull is part of the festival and is covered with festive decorations this reference recalls the ancient writs that celebrated dionisis in the guise of a bull but the dream did not end there the woman added sometime later the bull is pierced by a Golden Arrow now besides dionisis there is another pre-christian right in which the bull plays a symbolic role the Persian son God methis sacrifices a bull he like orus represents the longing for a life of the spirit that might triumph over the Primitive animal passions of man and after a ceremony of of initiation give him peace this series of images confirms a suggestion that is found in many fantasy or dream sequences of this type that there is no final peace no resting point in their religious Quest men and women especially those who live in modern Western christianized societies are still in the power of those early Traditions that strive within them for Supremacy it is a conflict of PAG or Christian beliefs or one might say of rebirth or Resurrection a more direct clue to the solution of this dilemma is to be found in This Woman's first fantasy in a curious piece of symbolism that could easily be overlooked the woman says that in her death Vault she saw before her eyes a vision of red crosses on gold discs as became clear later in her analysis she was about to experience a profound psychic change and to emerge out of this death into a new kind of life we might imagine therefore that this image which came to her in the depth of her despair of life should in some way Herald her future religious attitude in her subsequent work she did in fact produce evidence for thinking that the red crosses represented her Devotion to the Christian attitude while the gold discs represented her Devotion to the pre-christian mystery religions her provision had told her that she must reconcile these Christian and Pagan elements in the new life that lay ahead one last but important observation concerns the ancient rights in their relation to Christianity the initiation rights celebrated in the eleusinian Mysteries the rights of worship of the fertility goddesses demer and pranie was not considered appropriate merely for those who sought to live life more abundantly it was also used as a preparation for death as if death also required an initiatory WR of passage of the same kind on a funeral ear found in a Roman grave near the columbarium on the escaline hill we find a clear bass relief representing scenes of the final stage of initiation where the novice is admitted to the presence and Converse of the goddesses the rest of the design is devoted to two preliminary ceremonies of purification the sacrifice of the Mystic pig and a mystici zed version of the sacred marriage this all points to an initiation into death but in a form that lacks the finality of mourning it hints at that element of the later Mysteries especially of orphism which makes death carry a promise of immortality Christianity went even further it promised something more than immortality which in the old sense of the cyclic my Mysteries might merely mean reincarnation for it offered the faithful and everlasting life in heaven so we see again in Modern Life the tendency to repeat old patterns those who have to learn to face death may have to relearn the old message that tells us that death is a mystery for which we must prepare ourselves in the same Spirit of submission and humility as we once learned to prepare ourselves for Life symbols of transcendence the symbols that influence many vary in their purpose some men need to be aroused and experience their initiation in the violence of a dionesia thunder others need to be subdued and they are brought to submission in the ordered design of Temple Precinct or sacred cave suggestive of the apollonian religion of later Greece a full initiation Embraces both themes as we can see when we look either at the material drawn from ancient texts or at Living subjects but it is quite certain that the fundamental goal of initiation lies in taming the original trickster likee wildness of the juvenile nature it therefore has a civilizing or spiritualizing purpose in spite of the violence of the rights that are required to set this process in motion there is however another kind of symbolism belonging to the earliest known sacred Traditions that is also connected with the periods of transition in a person's life but these symbols do not seek to integrate the initiate with any religious Doctrine or secular group Consciousness on the contrary they point to man's need for Liberation from any state of being that is too immature too fixed or Final in other words they concern man's release from or Transcendence of any confining pattern of existence as he moves toward a superior or more mature stage in his development a child as I have said possesses a sense of completeness but only before the initial emergence of his ego Consciousness in the case of an adult a sense of completeness is achieved through a union of the Consciousness with the unconscious contents of the mind out of this Union arises what Jung called the trans Transcendent function of the psyche by which a man can achieve his highest goal the full realization of the potential of his individual self thus what we call symbols of transcendence are the symbols that represent man striving to attain this goal they provide the means by which the contents of the unconscious can enter the conscious mind and they also are themselves an active expression of those contents these symbols are manifold in form whether we encounter them in history or in the dreams of contemporary men in women who are at a critical stage in their lives we can see their importance at the most archaic level of this symbolism we again meet the trickster theme but this time he no longer appears as a lawless wouldbe hero he has become the shaman the medicine man whose magical practices and flights of intuition stand him as a primitive master of initiation his power resides in his supposed ability to leave his body and fly about the universe as a bird in this case the bird is the most fitting symbol of transcendence it represents the peculiar nature of intuition working through a medium that is an individual who is capable of obtaining knowledge of distant events or facts of which he consciously knows nothing by going into a trans-like state evidence of such powers can be found as far back as the Paleolithic period of prehistory as The American Scholar Joseph Campbell has pointed out in commenting upon one of the famous cave paintings recently discovered in France at Lasco he writes there is a shaman depicted lying in a trance wearing a bird mask with a figure of a bird perched on a staff beside him the shamans of Siberia wear such bird costumes to this day and many are believed to have been conceived by their mothers from The Descent of a bird the shaman then is not only a familiar denisen but even the favored Scion of those Realms of power that are invisible to our normal waking consciousness which all may visit briefly en Vision but through which he roams a master at the highest level of this type of initiat activity far from those tricks of the trade by which magic so frequently replaces true spiritual Insight we find the Hindu Master yogis in their trans States they go far beyond the normal categories of thought one of the commonest dream symbols for this type of release through Transcendence is the theme of The Lonely Journey or pilgrimage which somehow seems to be a spiritual pilgrimage on which the initiate becomes a acquainted with the nature of death but this is not death as a last judgment or other initiatory trial of strength it is a journey of release renunciation and atonement presided over and fostered by some Spirit of compassion this spirit is more often represented by a mistress rather than a master of initiation a supreme feminine that is anima figur such as Quan Yin in Chinese Buddhism Sophia in the Christian Gnostic Doctrine or the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom Palace Athena not only the flight of birds or the Journey Into the Wilderness represents this symbolism but any strong movement exemplifying release in the first part of life when one is still attached to the original family and social group this may be experienced as that moment of initiation at which one must learn to take the decisive step steps into life alone it is the moment that TS Elliott describes in the Wasteland when one faces the awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract at a later period of life one may not need to break all ties with the symbols of meaningful containment but nonetheless one can be filled with that Spirit of divine discontent which forces all free men to face some new discovery or to live their life lives in a new way this change may become especially important in the period between middle age and old age which is the time in life when so many people are considering what to do in their retirement whether to work or to play whether to stay at home or to travel if their lives have been adventurous insecure or full of change they may long for a settled life in the consolations of religious certainty but if they have lived chiefly within the social pattern in which they were born they may desperately need a liberating change this need may be filled temporarily by a trip around the world or by nothing more than a move to a smaller house but none of these external changes will serve unless there has been some inner Transcendence of old values in creating not just inventing a new pattern of Life a case of this latter sort is a woman who had lived in a style of life that she her family and friends had long enjoyed because it was so well rooted culturally nourishing and secure from transitory Fashions she had this dream I found some strange pieces of wood not carved but with natural beautiful shapes someone said Neanderthal man brought them then I saw at a distance these Neanderthal men looking like a dark Mass but I could not see one of them distinctly I thought I would take back from this place a piece of their wood then I went on as if on a journey by myself and I looked down into an enormous Abyss like an extinct volcano there was water in part of it and there I expected to see more Neanderthal men but instead I saw Black Water pigs that had come out of the water and were running in and out of the black volcanic rocks in contrast to This Woman's family attachments and her highly cultivated style of life the dream takes her to a prehistoric period more primitive than anything we can visualize she can find no social group among these ancient men she sees them as an embodiment of a truly unconscious Collective dark mass in the distance yet they are alive and she may carry away a piece of their wood the dream emphasizes that the wood is natural not carved therefore it comes from a primordial not a cult naturally conditioned lever of the unconscious the piece of wood remarkable for its great age links This Woman's contemporary experience to the distant origins of human life we know from many examples that an ancient tree or plant represents symbolically the growth and development of psychic life as distinct from instinctual life commonly symbolized by animals hence in this piece of wood this woman acquired a symbol of her link with the deepest layers of the collective unconscious next she speaks of continuing her journey alone this theme as I have already pointed out symbolizes the need for release as an initiatory experience so here we have another symbol of transcendence then in the dream she sees a huge Crater of an extinct volcano which has been the channel for a violent eruption of fire from the deepest layers of the earth we we can surmise that this refers to a significant memory Trace which leads back to a traumatic experience this she Associated to a personal experience early in her life when she had felt the destructive yet creative force of her passions to such an extent that she feared she would go out of her mind she had found in late adolescence a quite unexpected need to break away from her family's excessively conventional social pattern she had achieved this break without serious distress and had been able to return eventually to make her peace with the family but there lingered a profound wish to make a still greater differentiation from her family background and to find Freedom from her own pattern of existence this dream recalls another it came from a young man who had a totally different problem but who seemed to need a similar type of insight he too had the urge to achieve differentiation he dreamed of a volcano and from its crater he saw two birds Taking Flight as if in fear that the volcano was about to erupt this was in a strange lonely place with a body of water between him and the volcano in this case the dream represented an individual initiation Journey it is similar to cases reported among the simple food Gathering tribes which are the least family conscious groups we know in these societ ities the young initiate must take a lonely journey to a sacred place in Indian cultures of the North Pacific Coast it may actually be a Crater Lake where in a Visionary or trans-like state he encounters his Guardian spirit in the form of an animal a bird or natural object he closely identifies himself with this bush soul and thereby becomes a man without such an experience he is regarded as an achumawi medicine man put it as an ordinary Indian nobody the young man's dream came at the beginning of his life and it pointed to his future Independence and identity as a man the woman I have described was approaching the end of her life and she experienced a similar journey and seemed to need to acquire a similar Independence she could live out the remainder of her days in harmony with an eternal human law that by its Antiquity transcended the known symbols of culture but such independence does not end in a state of Yogi like Detachment that would mean a renunciation of the world with all its impurities in the otherwise dead and blasted landscape of her dream the woman saw signs of animal life These are water pigs unknown to her as a species they therefore would carry the meaning of a special type of animal one that can live in two environments in water or on the earth this is the universal quality of the animal as a symbol of transcendence these creatures figuratively coming from the depths of the ancient Earth Mother are symbolic Denis of the collective unconscious they bring into the field of Consciousness a special konic underworld message that is somewhat different from the spiritual as aspiration symbolized by the birds in the young man's dream other Transcendent symbols of the depths are rodents lizards snakes and sometimes fish these are intermediate creatures that combine underwater activity and the bird flight with an intermediate terrestrial life the wild duck or the swan are cases in point perhaps the commonest dream symbol of transcendence is the snake as represent presented by the therapeutic symbol of the Roman God of medicine escolapios which has survived to modern times as a sign of the medical profession this was originally a nonpoisonous tree snake as we see it coiled around the staff of the healing God it seems to embody a kind of mediation between Earth and Heaven A still more important and widespread symbol of cathic transcendence is the motif of the two entwined serpents these are the famous Naga serpents of ancient India and we also find them in Greece as the entwined serpents on the end of the staff belonging to the God Hermes an early Grecian Herm is a stone pillar with a bust of the God above on one side are the entwined serpents and on the other an erect phus as the serpents are represented in the act of sexual Union and the erect phus is unequivocally sexual we can draw certain conclusions about the function of the Herm as a symbol of fertility but we are mistaken if we think this only refers to biological fertility Hermes is trickster in a different role as a messenger a god of the crossroads and finally the leader of souls to and from the underworld his phus therefore penetrates from the known into the unknown World seeking a spiritual message of Deliverance and healing or originally in Egypt Hermes was known as the Ibis headed God tho and therefore was conceived as the bird form of the Transcendent principle again in the Olympian period of Greek mythology Hermes recovered attributes of the bird life to add to his chonic nature as serpent his staff acquired Wings above the serpents becoming the caduceus or winged staff of mercury and the God himself became the flying man with his winged hat and sandals here we see his full power of transcendence whereby the lower Transcendence from Underworld snake Consciousness passing through the medium of Earthly reality finally attains Transcendence to superhuman or transpersonal reality in its winged flight such a composite symbol is found in other representations as the winged horse or winged dragon or other creatures that abound in the artistic expressions of alchemy so fully Illustrated in Dr Jung's classic work on this subject we follow the innumerable vicissitudes of these symbols in our work with patients they show what our therapy can expect to achieve when it liberates the deeper psychic contents so that they can become part of our conscious equipment for understanding life more effectively it is not easy for Modern Man to grasp the significance of the symbols that that come down to us from the past or that appear in our dreams nor is it easy to see how the ancient conflict between symbols of containment and Liberation relates to our own predicament yet it becomes easier when we realize it is only the specific forms of these archaic patterns that change not their psychic meaning we have been talking of wild birds as symbols of release or Liberation but today we could as well speak of Deb planes and space rockets for they are the physical embodiment of the same Transcendent principle freeing us at least temporarily from gravity in the same way the ancient symbols of containment which once gave stability and protection now appear in modern man's search for Economic Security and social welfare any of us can see of course that there is a conflict in our lives between adventure and discipline or evil and virtue or freedom and security but these are only phrases we use to describe an ambivalence that troubles us and to which we never seem able to find an answer there is an answer there is a meeting point between containment and Liberation and we can find it in the rights of initiation that I have been discussing they can make it possible for individuals or whole groups of people to unite the opposing forces within themselves and Achieve an equ equilibrium in their lives but the rights do not offer this opportunity invariably or automatically they relate to particular phases in the life of an individual or of a group and unless they are properly understood and translated into a new way of life the moment can pass initiation is essentially a process that begins with a right of submission followed by a period of containment and then by a further right of Li Liberation in this way every individual can reconcile the conflicting elements of his personality he can strike a balance that makes him truly human and truly the master of himself part three the process of individuation ml Von France the pattern of psychic growth at the beginning of this book Dr Yong introduced the reader to the concept of the unconscious its person and Collective structures and its symbolic mode of expression once one has seen the vital importance that is the healing or destructive impact of the symbols produced by the unconscious there Remains the difficult problem of interpretation Dr Yong has shown that everything depends on whether any particular interpretation clicks and is Meaningful to the individual concerned in this way he has indicated the Poss meaning and function of dream symbolism but in the development of Jung's theory this possibility raised another question what is the purpose of the total dream life of the individual what role do dreams play Not only in the immediate psychic economy of the human being but in his life as a whole by observing a great many people and studying their dreams he estimated that he interpreted at least 880,000 dreams young discovered not only that all dreams are relevant in varying degrees to the life of the dreamer but that they are all parts of one great web of psychological factors he also found that on the whole they seem to follow an arrangement or pattern this pattern young called the process of individuation since dreams produce different scenes and images every night people who are not careful observers will probably be unaware of any pattern but if one watches one's own dreams over a period of years and studies the entire sequence one will see that certain contents emerge disappear and then turn up again many people even dream repeatedly of the same figures Landscapes or situations and if one follows these through a whole series one will see that they change slowly but perceptibly these changes can be accelerated if the dreamer's conscious attitude is influenced by appropriate interpretation of the dreams and their symbolic contents thus our Dream Life creates a Meandering pattern in which individual strands or Tendencies become visible then vanish then return again if one watches this Meandering design over a long period of time one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work creating a slow imperceptible process of psychic growth the process of individuation gradually a wider and more mature personality emerges and by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others the fact that we often speak of Arrested Development shows that we assume that such a process of growth and maturation is possible with every individual since this psychic growth cannot be brought about by a conscious effort of willpower but happens involuntarily and naturally it is in dreams frequently symbolized by the tree whose slow powerful involuntary growth fulfills a definite pattern the organizing center from which the regulatory effect stem seems to be a sort of nuclear atom in our psychic system one could also call it the inventor organizer and source of dream images Jung called this Center the self and described it as the totality of the whole psyche in order to distinguish it from the ego which constitutes only a small part of the total psyche throughout the ages men have been intuitively aware of the existence of such an inner Center the Greeks called it man's inner Damon in Egypt it was expressed by the concept of the bass soul and the Romans worshiped it as the genius native to each individual in more primitive societies it was often thought of as a protective Spirit embodied within an animal or a fetish this inner Center is realized in exceptionally pure unspoiled form by the nasapi Indians who still exist in the forest of the labrador Peninsula these simple people are Hunters who live in isolated family groups so far from one another that they have not been a able to evolve tribal customs or Collective religious beliefs and ceremonies in his lifelong Solitude the nasapi hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and unconscious Revelations he has no religious teachers who tell him what he should believe no rituals festivals or Customs to help him along in his basic view of Life the soul of man is simply an inner companion whom he calls my friend or mapo meaning great man mapo dwells in the heart and is Immortal in the moment of death or shortly before he leaves the individual and later reincarnates himself in another being those nasapi who pay attention to their dreams and who try to find their meaning and test their truth can enter into a deeper connection with the great man he favors such people and sends them more and better dreams thus the major obligation of an individual nasapi is to follow the instructions given by his dreams and then to give permanent form to their contents in art lies and dishonesty Drive the great man away from one's inner realm whereas generosity and love of one's neighbors and of animals attract him and give him life dreams give the nasapi complete ability to find his way in life not only in the inner world but but also in the outer World of Nature they help him to forell the weather and give him invaluable guidance in his hunting upon which his life depends I mention these very primitive people because they are uncontaminated by our civilized ideas and still have natural insight into the essence of what Yung calls the self the self can be defined as an inner guiding factor that is different from the conscious personality and that can be grasped only through the investigation of One's Own dreams these show it to be the regulating Center that brings about a constant extension and maturing of the personality but this larger more nearly total aspect of the psyche appears first as merely an inborn possibility it may emerge very slightly or it may develop relatively completely during one's lifetime how far it develops depends on whether or not the ego is willing to listen to the messages of the the self just as the nasapi have noticed that a person who is receptive to the hints of the great man gets better and more helpful dreams we could add that the inborn great man becomes more real within the receptive person than in those who neglect him such a person also becomes a more complete human being it even seems as if the ego has not been produced by nature to follow its own arbitrary impulses to an unlimited extent but but to help to make real the totality the whole psyche it is the ego that serves to light up the entire system allowing it to become conscious and thus to be realized if for example I have an artistic talent of which my ego is not conscious nothing will happen to it the gift may as well be non-existent only if my ego notices it can I bring it into reality the inborn but hidden totality of the psyche is not the same thing as a wholeness that is fully realized and lived one could picture this in the following way the seed of a mountain pine contains the whole future Tree in a latent form but each seed Falls at a certain time onto a particular place in which there are a number of special factors such as the quality of the soil and the stones the slope of the land and its exposure to Sun and wind the latent totality of the pine in the seed reacts to these circumstances by avoiding the stones and inclining toward the sun with the result that the tree's growth is shaped thus an individual Pine slowly comes into existence constituting the Fulfillment of its totality its emergence into the realm of reality without the living tree the image of the pine is only a possibility or an abstract idea again the realization of this uniqueness in the individual man is the goal of the process of individuation from one point of view this process takes place in man as well as in every other living being by itself and in the unconscious it is a process by which man lives out his innate human nature strictly speaking however the process of individuation is real only if the individual is aware of it and consciously makes a living connection with it we do not know whether the pine tree is aware of its own growth whether it enjoys and suffers the different vicissitudes that shape it but man certainly is able to participate consciously in his development he even feels that from time to time by making free decisions he can cooperate actively with it this cooperation belongs to the process of individuation in the narrower sense of the word man however experiences something that is not contained AED in our metaphor of the pine tree the individuation process is more than a Coming to Terms between the inborn germ of wholeness and the outer acts of Fate its subjective experience conveys the feeling that some suprapersonal force is actively interfering in a creative way one sometimes feels that the unconscious is leading the way in accordance with a secret design it is as if something is looking at me something that I do not see but that sees me perhaps that great man in the heart who tells me his opinions about me by means of dreams but this creatively active aspect of the psychic nucleus can come into play only when the ego gets rid of all purposive and Wishful aims and tries to get to a deeper more basic form of existence the ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself without any further design or purpose to that inner urge toward growth many existentialist philosophers try to describe this state but they go only as far as stripping off the illusions of Consciousness they go right up to the door of the unconscious and then fail to open it people living in cultures more securely rooted than our own have less trouble in understanding that it is necessary to give up the utilitarian attitude of conscious planning in order to make way for the inner growth of the personality I once met an elderly lady who had not achieved much in her life in terms of outward achievement but she had in fact made a good marriage with a difficult husband and had somehow developed into a mature personality when she complained to me that she had not done anything in her life I told her a story related by a Chinese Sage changu she understood immediately and felt great relief this is the story a Wandering Carpenter called Stone saw on his travels a gigantic old oak tree standing in a field near an earth altar the carpenter said to his Apprentice who was admiring the oak this is a useless tree if you wanted to make a ship it would soon rot if you wanted to make tools they would break you can't do anything useful with this tree and that's why it has become so old but in an inn that same evening when the carpenter went to sleep the old oak tree appeared to him in his dream and said why do you compare me to your cultivated trees such as white Thorn pear orange and apple trees and all the others that bear fruit even before they can ripen their fruit people attack and violate them their branches are broken their Twigs are torn their own gifts bring harm to them and they cannot live out their natural span that is what happens everywhere and that is why I have long since tried to become completely useless you poor mortal imagine if I had been useful in any way would I have reached this size furthermore you and I are both creatures and how can one creature set himself so high as to judge another creature you useless mortal man what do you know about useless trees the carpenter woke up and meditated upon his dream and later when his Apprentice asked him why just this one tree served to protect the Earth altar he answered keep your mouth shut let's hear no more about it the tree grew here on purpose because anywhere else people would have ill treated it if it were not the tree of the earth altar it might have been chopped down the carpenter obviously understood his dream he saw that simply to fulfill one's Destiny is the greatest human achievement and that our utilitarian Notions have to give way in the face of the demands of our unconscious psyche if we translate this metaphor into psychological language the tree symbolizes the process of individuation giving a lesson to our shortsighted ego under the tree that fulfilled its Destiny there was in Chang tsu's story an earth altar this was a crude unwrought Stone upon which people made sacrifices to the local God who owned this piece of land the symbol of the earth altar points to the fact that in order to bring the individuation process into reality one must surrender consciously to the power of the unconscious instead of thinking in terms of what one should do or of what is generally thought right or of what usually happens one must simply listen in order to learn what the inner totality the self wants one to do here and now in a particular situation our attitude must be like that of the mountain pine mentioned above it does not get annoyed when its growth is obstructed by a stone nor does it make plans about how to overcome the obstacles it merely tries to feel whether it should grow more toward the left or the right toward the slope or away from it like the tree we should give in to this almost imperceptible yet powerfully dominating impulse an Impulse that comes from the urge toward unique creative self-realization and this is a process in which one must repeatedly seek out and find something that is not yet known to anyone The Guiding hints or impulses come not from the ego but from the totality of the psyche the self it is moreover useless to cast furtive glances at the way someone else is developing because each of us has a unique task of self-realization although many human problems are similar they are never identical all pine trees are very much alike otherwise we should not recognize them as Pines yet none is exactly the same as another because of these factors of sameness and difference it is difficult to summarize the infinite variations of the process of individuation the fact is that each person has to do something different something that is uniquely his own many people have criticized the jungian approach for not presenting psychic material systematically but these critics forget that the material itself is a living experience charged with Emotion by Nature irrational and everchanging which does not lend itself to systematization except in the most superficial fashion modern depth psychology has reach the same limits that confront microphysics that is when we are dealing with statistical averages a rational and systematic description of the facts is possible but when we are attempting to describe a single psychic event we can do no more than present an honest picture of it from as many angles as possible in the same way scientists have to admit that they do not know what light is they can say only that in certain experimental conditions it seems to consist of particles while in other experimental conditions it seems to consist of waves but what it is in itself is not known the psychology of the unconscious and any description of the process of individuation encounter comparable difficulties of definition but I will try here to give a sketch of some of their most typical features the first approach of the unconscious for most people the years of Youth are characterized by a state of gradual Awakening in which the individual slowly becomes aware of the world and of himself childhood is a period of great emotional intensity and a child's earliest dreams often manifest in symbolic form the basic structure of the psyche indicating how it will later shape the destiny of the individual concerned for example young once told a group of students about a young woman who was so haunted by anxiety that she committed suicide at the age of 26 as a small child she had dreamed that Jack Frost had entered her room while she was lying in bed and pinched her on the stomach she woke and discovered that she had pinched herself with her own hand the dream did not frighten her she merely remembered that she had had such a dream but the fact that she did not react emotionally to her strange encounter with the demon of the cult old of congealed life did not augur well for the future and was itself abnormal it was with a cold unfeeling hand that she later put an end to her life from this single dream it is possible to deduce the tragic fate of the dreamer which was anticipated by her psyche in childhood sometimes it is not a dream but some very impressive and Unforgettable real event that like a prophecy anticipates the future in symbolic form it is well known that children often forget events that seem impressive to adults but keep a vivid recollection of some incident or story that no one else has noticed when we look into one of these childhood memories we usually find that it depicts if interpreted as if it were a symbol a basic problem of the child's psychic makeup when a child reaches school age the phase of building up the ego and of adapting to the outer world begins this phase generally brings a number of painful shocks at the same time some children begin to feel very different from others and this feeling of being unique brings a certain sadness that is part of the loneliness of many youngsters the imperfections of the world and The Evil Within oneself as well as outside become conscious problems the child must try to cope with urgent but not yet understood inner impulses as well as the demands of the outer world if the development of Consciousness is Disturbed in its normal unfolding children frequently retire from Outer or inner difficulties into an inner Fortress and when that happens their dreams and symbolic drawings of unconscious material often reveal to an unusual degree a type of circular quadrangular and nuclear Motif which I will explain later this refers to the previously mentioned psychic nucleus the Vital Center of the personality from which the whole structural development of Consciousness stems it is natural that the image of the center should appear in an especially striking way when the psychic life of the individual is threatened from this Central nucleus as far as we know today the whole building up of ego Consciousness is directed the ego apparently being a duplicate or structural counterpart of the original Center in this early phase there are many children who earnestly seek for some meaning in life that could help them to deal with the chaos both within and outside themselves there are others however who are still unconsciously carried Along by the dynamism of inherited and instinctive archetypal patterns these young people are not concerned about the deeper meaning of life because their experiences with love nature Sport and work contain an immediate and satisfying meaning for them they are not necessarily more superficial usually they are carried by the stream of life with less friction and disturbance than their more introspective fellows if I travel in a car or train without looking out it is only the stops starts and sudden turns that make me realize I am moving at all the actual processes of individuation the conscious coming to terms with one's own inner Center psychic nucleus or self generally begins with a wounding of the personality and the suffering that accompanies it this initial shock amounts to a sort of call although it is not often recognized as such on the contrary the ego feels hampered in its will or its desire and usually projects the obstruction onto something external that is the ego accuses God or the economic situation or the boss or the marriage partner of being responsible for whatever is obstructing it or perhaps everything seems outwardly all right but beneath the surface a person is suffering from a deadly boredom that makes everything seem meaningless and empty many myths and fairy tales symbolically describe this initial stage in the process of individuation by telling of a king who has fallen ill or grown old other familiar story patterns are that a royal couple is Barren or that a monster steals all the women children horses and wealth of the Kingdom or that a demon keeps the king's army or his ship from proceeding on its course or that Darkness hangs over the lands Wells dry up and flood drought and frost afflict the country thus it seems as if the initial encounter with the self casts a dark shadow ahead of time or as if the inner friend comes at first like a Trapper to catch the helplessly struggling ego in his snare in myths one finds that the magic or Talisman that can cure The Misfortune of the king or his country always proves to be something very special in one tale a white black bird or a fish that carries a golden ring in its gift bills is needed to restore the king's Health in another the king wants the Water of Life or three golden hairs from the head of the devil or a woman's golden plat and afterward naturally the owner of the plat whatever it is the thing that can drive away the evil is always unique and hard to find it is exactly the same in the initial crisis in the life of an individual one is seeking something that is is impossible to find or about which nothing is known in such moments all well- meant sensible advice is completely useless advice that urges one to try to be responsible to take a holiday not to work so hard or to work harder to have more or less human contact or to take up a hobby none of that helps or at best only rarely there is only one thing that seems to work and that is to turn directly toward the approaching Darkness without prejudice and totally naively and to try to find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you the hidden purpose of the oncoming darkness is generally something so unusual so unique and unexpected that as a rule one can find out what it is only by means of dreams and Fantasies welling up from the unconscious if one focuses attention on the unconscious without rash assumptions or emotional Rejection it often breaks through in a flow of helpful symbolic images but not always sometimes it first offers a series of painful realizations of what is wrong with oneself and one's conscious attitudes then one must begin the process by swallowing all sorts of bitter truths whether the unconscious comes up at first in a helpful or a negative form after a Time the need usually arises to readapt the conscious attitude in a better way to the unconscious factors therefore to accept what seems to be criticism from the unconscious through dreams one becomes acquainted with aspects of One's Own personality that for various reasons one has Preferred not to look at too closely this is what Jung called the realization of the Shadow he used the term Shadow for this unconscious part of the personality because actually often appears in dreams in a personified form the shadow is not the whole of the unconscious personality it represents unknown or little known attributes and qualities of the ego aspects that mostly belong to the personal sphere and that could just as well be conscious in some aspects the shadow can also consist of collective factors that stem from a source outside the individual's personal life when an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow he becomes aware of and often ashamed of those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in other people such things as egotism mental laziness and sloppiness unreal fantasies schemes and plots carelessness and cowardice inordinate love of money and possessions in short all the little sins about which he might previously have told told himself that doesn't matter nobody will notice it and in any case other people do it too if you feel an overwhelming rage coming up in you when a friend reproaches you about a fault you can be fairly sure that at this point you will find a part of your shadow of which you are unconscious it is of course natural to become annoyed when others who are no better criticize you because of Shadow faults but what can you say if your own dreams an inner judge in your own being reproach you that is the moment when the ego gets caught and the result is usually embarrassed silence afterward the painful and lengthy work of self-education begins a work we might say that is the psychological equivalent of the labors of Hercules this unfortunate Hero's first task you will remember was to clean up in one day The aan Stables in which hundreds of cattle had dropped their dung for many decades a task so enormous that the ordinary mortal would be overcome by discouragement at the mere thought of it the shadow does not consist only of omissions it shows up just as often in an impulsive or inadvertent act before one has time to think the evil remark pops out the plot is hatched the wrong decision is made and one is confronted with results that were never intended Ed or consciously wanted furthermore the shadow is exposed to Collective infections to a much greater extent than is the conscious personality when a man is alone for instance he feels relatively all right but as soon as the others do dark primitive things he begins to fear that if he doesn't join in he will be considered a fool thus he gives way to impulses that do not really belong to him at all it is particularly in contact with people of the same sex that one stumbles over both one Shadow and those of other people although we do see the shadow in a person of the opposite sex we are usually much less annoyed by it and can more easily pardon it in dreams and myths therefore the shadow appears as a person of the same sex as that of the dreamer the following dream may serve as an example the dreamer was a man of 48 who tried to live very much for and by himself working hard and disciplining himself repressing pleasure and spontaneity to a far greater extent than suited his real nature I owned and inhabited a very big house in town and I didn't yet know all its different parts so I took a walk through it and discovered mainly in the cellar several rooms about which I knew nothing and even exits leading into other cellers or into Subterranean streets I felt uneasy when I found that several of these exits were not locked and some had no locks at all moreover there were some laborers at work in the neighborhood who could have sneaked in when I came up again to the ground floor I passed a backyard where again I discovered different exits into the street or into other houses when I tried to investigate them more closely a man came up to me laughing loudly and calling out that we were old Pals from the El element school I remembered him too and while he was telling me about his life I walked along with him toward the exit and strolled with him through the streets there was a strange Kiara skuro in the air as we walked through an enormous circular Street and arrived at a green lawn where three galloping horses suddenly passed us they were beautiful strong animals wild but well- groomed and they had no Rider with them had they run away from military service the Maze of strange passages Chambers and unlocked exits in the cellar recalls the old Egyptian representation of the underworld which is a well-known symbol of the unconscious with its unknown possibilities it also shows how one is open to other influences in one's unconscious Shadow side and how uncanny and alien elements can break in the Sellar one can say is the basement of the dreamer's psyche in the backyard of the strange building which represents the still unperceived psychic scope of the dreamer's personality an old school friend suddenly turns up this person obviously personifies another aspect of the dreamer himself an aspect that had been part of his life as a child but that he had forgotten and lost it often happens that a person's childhood qualities for instance gayet irascibility or perhaps trustfulness suddenly disappear and one does not know where or how they have gone it is such a lost characteristic of the dreamer that now returns from the backyard and tries to make friends again this figure probably stands for the dreamer's neglected capacity for enjoying life and for his extroverted Shadow side but we soon learn why the dreamer feels uneasy just before meeting this seemingly harmless old friend when he strolls with him in the street the horses break loose the dreamer thinks they may have escaped from military service that is to say from the conscious discipline that has hitherto characterized his life the fact that the horses have no rider shows that instinctive drives can get away from conscious control in this old friend and in the horses all the positive force reappears that was lacking before and that was badly needed by by the dreamer this is a problem that often comes up when one meets one's other side the shadow usually contains values that are needed by Consciousness but that exists in a form that makes it difficult to integrate them into one's life the passages and the large house in this dream also show that the dreamer does not yet know his own psychic dimensions and is not yet able to fill them out the shadow in this dream is typical for an introvert a man who tends to retire too much from Outer life in the case of an extrovert who has turned more toward outer objects and outer life the shadow would look quite different a young man who had a very Lively temperament embarked again and again on successful Enterprises while at the same time his dreams insisted that he should finish off a piece of private creative work he had begun the following was one of those dreams a man is lying on a couch and has pulled the cover over his face he is a Frenchman a Desperado who would take on any criminal job an official is accompanying me downstairs and I know that a plot has been made against me namely that the Frenchmen should kill me as if by chance that is how it would look from the outside he actually sneaks up behind me when we approach the exit but I am on my guard a tall portly man rather rich and influential suddenly leans against the wall beside me feeling ill I quickly grabbed the opportunity to kill the official by stabbing his heart one only notices a bit of moisture this is said like a comment now I am safe for the Frenchmen won't attack me since the man who gave him his orders is dead probably the official and the successful portly man are the same person the latter somehow replacing the former the Desperado represents the other side of the dreamer his perversion which has reached a completely destitute State he lies on a couch that is he is passive and pulls the cover over his face because he wants to be left alone the official on the other hand and the prosperous portly man who are secretly the same person personify the dreamer's successful outer responsibilities and activities the sudden illness of the portly man is connected with the fact that this dreamer had in fact become ill several times when he had allowed his Dynamic energy to explode too forcibly in his external life but this successful man has no blood in his veins only a sort of moisture which means that these external ambitious activities of the dreamer contain no genuine life and no passion but are bloodless mechanisms thus it would be no real loss if the portly man were killed at the end of the dream the Frenchman is satisfied he obviously represents a positive shadow figure who had turned negative and dangerous only because the conscious attitude of the dreamer did not agree with him this dream shows us that the shadow can consist of many different elements for instance of unconscious ambition the successful portly man and of introversion the Frenchman this particular dreamer's Association to the French moreover was that they know how to handle love affairs very well therefore the two shadow figures also represent two well-known drives power and sex the power drive appears momentarily in a double form both as an official and as a successful man the official or civil servant personifies Collective adaptation whereas the successful man denotes ambition but naturally both serve the power drive when the dreamer succeeds in stopping this dangerous inner Force the Frenchman is suddenly no longer hostile in other words the equally dangerous aspect of the sex drive has also surrendered obviously the problem of the Shadow plays a great role in all political conflicts if the man who had this dream had not been sensible about his shadow problem he could easily have identified the desperate Frenchmen with the dangerous Communists of outer life or the official plus the prosperous man with the grasping capitalists in this way he would have avoided seeing that he had within him such Waring elements if people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people this is called a projection political agitation in all countries is full of such projections just as much as the backyard gossip of little groups and individuals projections of all kinds obscure our view of our fellow men spoiling its objectivity and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine human relationships and there is an additional disadvantage in projecting our shadow if we identify our own shadow with say the communist or the capitalists a part of our own personality remains on the opposing side the result is that we shall constantly though involuntarily do things behind our own backs that support this other side and thus we shall unwittingly help our enemy if on the contrary we realize the projection and can discuss matters without fear or hostility dealing with the other person sensibly then there is a chance of mutual understanding or at least of a truce whether the shadow becomes our friend or enemy depends largely upon ourselves as the dreams of the unexplored house in the French Des Desperado both show The Shadow is not necessarily always an opponent in fact he is exactly like any human being with whom one has to get along sometimes by giving in sometimes by resisting sometimes by giving love whatever the situation requires the shadow becomes hostile only when he is ignored or misunderstood sometimes though not often an individual feels impelled to live out the worst side of his nature and to repress his better side in such cases the shadow appears as a positive figure in his dreams but to a person who lives out his natural emotions and feelings the shadow may appear as a cold and negative intellectual it then personifies poisonous judgments and negative thoughts that have been held back so whatever form it takes the function of the Shadow is to represent the opposite side of the ego and to embody just those qualities that one dislikes most in other people it would be relatively easy if one could integrate the shadow into the conscious personality just by attempting to be honest and to use one's Insight but unfortunately such an attempt does not always work there is such a passionate Drive within the shadowy part of oneself that reason may not Prevail against it a bitter experience coming from the outside May occasionally help a brick so to speak has to drop on one's head to put a stop to Shadow drives and impulses at times a heroic decision may serve to Halt them but such a superhuman effort is usually Possible only if the great man within the self helps the individual to carry it through the fact that the shadow contains the overwhelming power of irresistible impulse does not mean however that the drive should always be here heroically repressed sometimes the shadow is powerful because the urge of the self is pointing in the same direction and so one does not know whether it is the self or the shadow that is behind the inner pressure in the unconscious one is unfortunately in the same situation as in a moonlit landscape all the contents are blurred and merge into one another and one never knows exactly what or where anything is or where one thing begins and ends this is known as the contamination of unconscious contents when young called one aspect of the unconscious personality the shadow he was referring to a relatively well-defined Factor but sometimes everything that is unknown to the ego is mixed up with the shadow including even the most valuable and highest forces who for instance could be quite sure whether the French desper p in the dream I quoted was a useless or a most valuable introvert and the bolting horses of the preceding dream should they be allowed to run free or not in a case when the dream itself does not make things clear the conscious personality will have to make the decision if the shadow figure contains valuable vital forces they ought to be assimilated into actual experience and not repressed it is up to the ego to give up its pride and priggishness and to live out something that seems to be dark but actually may not be this can require a sacrifice just as heroic as the conquest of passion but in an opposite sense the ethical difficulties that arise when one meets one's Shadow are well described in the 18th book of the Quran in this tale Moses meets keeder the green one or first angel of God in the desert they wander along together and ker expresses his fear that Moses will not be able to witness his deeds without indignation if Moses cannot bear with him and trust him keer will have to leave presently ker scuttles the fishing boat of some poor villagers then before Moses eyes he kills a handsome young man and finally he restores the Fallen wall of a city of unbelievers Moses cannot help expressing his indignation and so keer has to leave him before his departure however he explains his reasons for his actions by scuttling the boat he actually saved it for its owners because Pirates were on their way to steal it as it is the fisherman can salvage it the handsome young man was on his way to commit a crime and by killing him ker saved his Pious parents from infamy by restoring the wall two highest young men were saved from ruin because their treasure was buried under it Moses who had been so morally IND digant saw now too late that his judgment had been too hasty Ker's doings had seemed to be totally evil but in fact they were not looking at this story naively one might assume that keer is the Lawless capricious evil Shadow of Pious law-abiding Moses but this is not the case keer is much more the personification of some secret creative actions of the godhead one can find a similar meaning in the famous Indian story of the king and the corpse as interpreted by Henry Zimmer it is no accident that I have not quoted a dream to illustrate this subtle problem I have chosen this well-known story from the Quran because it sums up the experience of a lifetime which would very rar be expressed with such Clarity in an individual dream when dark figures turn up in our dreams and seem to want something we cannot be sure whether they personify merely a shadowy part of ourselves or the self or both at the same time divining in advance whether our dark partner symbolizes a shortcoming that we should overcome or a meaningful bit of life that we should accept this is one of the most difficult problems that we encounter on the way to individuation moreover the dream symbols are often so subtle and complicated that one cannot be sure of their interpretation in such a situation all one can do is accept the discomfort of ethical doubt making no final decisions or commitments and continuing to watch the dreams this resembles the situation of Cinderella when her stepmother threw a heap of good and bad peas in front of her and asked her to sort them out although it seemed quite hopeless Cinderella began patiently to sort the peas and suddenly doves or ants in some versions came to help her these creatures symbolize helpful deeply unconscious impulses that can only be felt in one's body as it were and that point to a way out somewhere right at the bottom of One's Own being one generally does know where one should go and what one should do but but there are times when the clown we call I behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt sometimes all attempts to understand the hints of the unconscious fail and in such a difficulty one can only have the courage to do what seems to be right while being ready to change course if the suggestions of the unconscious should suddenly point in another Direction it may also happen although this is UN usual that a person will find it better to resist the urge of the unconscious even at the price of feeling warped by doing so rather than depart too far from the state of being human this would be the situation of people who have to live out a criminal disposition in order to be completely themselves the strength and inner Clarity needed by the ego in order to make such a decision stems secretly from the great man who apparently does not want to reveal himself self too clearly it may be that the self wants the ego to make a free choice or it may be that the self depends on human consciousness and its decisions to help him to become manifest when it comes to such difficult ethical problems no one can truly judge the Deeds of others each man has to look to his own problem and try to determine what is right for himself as an old zen Buddhist Master said we must follow the example Le of the cow herd who watches his Ox with a stick so that it will not graze on other people's Meadows these new discoveries of depth psychology are bound to make some change in our Collective ethical views for they will compel us to judge all human actions in a much more individual and subtle way the discovery of the unconscious is one of the most far-reaching discoveries of recent times but the fact that recognition of its unconscious ious reality involves honest self-examination and reorganization of one's life causes many people to continue to behave as if nothing at all has happened it takes a lot of courage to take the unconscious seriously and to tackle the problems it raises most people are too indolent to think deeply about even those moral aspects of their behavior of which they are conscious they are certainly too lazy to consider how the unconscious affects them Thea The Woman Within difficult and subtle ethical problems are not invariably brought up by the appearance of the Shadow itself often another inner figure emerges if the dreamer is a man he will discover a female personification of his unconscious and it will be a male figure in the case of a woman often this second symbolic figure turns up behind the shadow bringing up new and different problems young called its male and female forms animus Anda Thea is a personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man's psyche such as vague feelings and moods prophetic hunches receptiveness to the irrational capacity for personal love feeling for nature and last but not least his relation to the unconscious it is no mere chance that in olden times priestesses like the Greek syil were used to Fathom the Divine will and to make connection with the gods a particularly good example of how the anama is experienced as an inner figure in a man's psyche is found in the medicine men and Prophets shamans among the Eskimo and other Arctic tribes some of these even wear women's clothes or have breasts depicted on their garments in order to manifest their inner feminine side the side that enables them to connect with the ghost land that is what we call the unconscious one reported case tells of a young man who was being initiated by an older Shaman and who was buried by him in a snow hole he fell into a state of dreaminess and exhaustion in this coma he suddenly saw a woman who emitted light she instructed him in all he needed to know and later as his protective Spirit helped him to practice his difficult profession by relating him to the powers of the Beyond such an experience shows the anima as the personification of a man's unconscious in its individual manifestation the character of a man's anima is as a rule shaped by his mother if he feels that his mother had a negative influence on him his anima will often express itself in irritable depressed moods uncertainty insecurity and touchiness if however he is able to overcome the negative assaults on himself they can serve to reinforce his masculinity within the soul of such a man the negative mother anima figure will endlessly repeat this theme I am nothing nothing makes any sense with others it's different but for me I enjoy nothing these anima moods cause a sort of dullness a fear of disease of impotence or of accidents the whole of Life takes on a sad and oppressive aspect such dark moods can even lure a man to suicide in which case the anima becomes a death demon she appears in this role in to's film Ori the French call such an anima figure a fem fatal a milder version of this dark Ana is personified by the Queen of the Night in Mozart's Magic Flute the Greek Sirens or the German laureli also personify this dangerous aspect of Thea which in this form symbolizes destructive illusion the following Siberian tale illustrates the behavior of such a destructive Ana one day a Lonely Hunter sees a beautiful woman emerging from the deep forest on the other side of the river she waves at him and sings Oh Come lone hunter in the Stillness of dusk come come I miss you I miss you now I will embrace you embrace you come come my Nest is near my Nest is near come come Lonely Hunter now in the Stillness of dusk he throws off his clothes and swims across the river but suddenly she flies away in the form of an owl laughing mockingly at him when he tries to swim back to find his clothes he drowns in the cold River in this Tale the Ana symbolizes an unreal dream of love happiness and maternal warmth her nest a dream that lures men away from reality the hunter is drowned because he ran after a Wishful fantasy that could not be fulfilled another way in which the negative Ana in a man's personality can be revealed is in waspish poisonous effeminate remarks by which he devalues everything remarks of this sort always contain a cheap twisting of the truth and are in a subtle way destructive there are legends throughout the world in which a poison damsel as they call her in the orient appears she is a beautiful creature who has weapons hidden in her body or a Secret poison with which she kills her lovers during their first night together in this guise the anama is as cold and Reckless as certain uncanny aspects of nature itself and in Europe is often expressed to this day by the belief in witches if on the other hand a man's experience of his mother has been positive this can also affect his Ana in typical but different ways with the result that he either becomes a feminine or is prayed upon by women and thus is unable to cope with the hardships of Life an Ana of this sort can turn men into sentimentalists or they may become as touchy as old Maids or as sensitive as the fairy tale princess who could feel a pee under 30 mattresses a still more subtle manifestation of a negative anima appears in some fairy tales in the form of a princess who asks her suitors to answer a series of riddles or perhaps to hide themselves under her nose if they cannot give the answers or if she can find them they must die and she invariably wins Thea in this guys involves men in a destructive intellectual game we can notice the effect of this anima trick in all those neurotic pseudo intellectual dialogues that inhibit a man from getting into direct touch with life and its real decisions he reflects about life so much that he cannot live it and loses all his spontaneity and outgoing feeling the most frequent manifestations of the anima takes the form of erotic fantasy men may be driven to nurse their fantasies by looking at films and strip teas shows or by daydreaming over pornographic material this is a crude primitive aspect of the Ana which becomes compulsive only when a man does not sufficiently cultivate his feeling relationships when his feeling attitude toward life has remained infantile all these aspects of the Ana have the same tendency that we have observed in the shadow that is they can be projected so that they appear to the man to be the qualities of some particular woman it is the presence of the Ana that causes a man to fall suddenly in love when he sees a woman for the first time and knows at once that this is she in this situation the man feels as if he has known this woman intimately for all time he falls for her so helplessly that it looks to Outsiders like complete Madness women who are of fairy likee character especially attracts such anima projections because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her the projection of the anima in such a sudden and passionate form as a love affair can greatly disturb a man's marriage and can lead to the so-called human triangle with its accompanying difficulties a bearable solution to such a drama can be found only if Thea is recognized as an inner power the secret aim of the unconscious in bringing about such an entanglement is to force a man to develop and to bring his own being to maturity by integrating more of his unconscious personality and bringing it into his real life but I have said enough about the negative side of the anima there are just as many important positive aspects Thea is for instance resp responsible for the fact that a man is able to find the right marriage partner another function is at least equally important whenever a man's logical mind is incapable of discerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious the anima helps him to dig them out even more vital is the role that the Ana plays in putting a man's mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths it is as if an inner radio becomes tuned to a certain wavelength that excludes irrelevancies but allows the voice of the great man to be heard in establishing this inner radio reception the Ana takes on the role of guide or mediator to the world within and to the self that is how she appears in the example of the initiations of shamans that I described earlier this is the role of beatric and Dante Paradiso and also of the Goddess Isis when she appeared in a dream to appus the famous author of The Golden ass in order to initiate him into a higher more spiritual form of life the dream of a 45-year-old psychotherapist may help to make clear how the Ana can be an inner guide as he was going to bed on the evening before he had this dream he thought to himself that it was hard to stand alone in life lack the support of a church he found himself envying people who are protected by the maternal Embrace of an organization he had been born a Protestant but no longer had any religious affiliation this was his dream I am in the aisle of an old church filled with people together with my mother and my wife I sit at the end of the aisle in what seemed to be extra seats I am to celebrate the mass as a priest and I have a big Mass book in my hands or rather a prayer book or an anthology of poems this book is not familiar to me and I cannot find the right text I'm very excited because I have to begin soon and to add to my troubles my mother and wife disturb me by chattering about unimportant Trifles now the organ stops and everybody is waiting for me so I get up in a determined way and ask one of the nuns who is kneeling behind me to hand me her Mass book and point out the right place which she does in an obliging manner now like a sort of sexon this same nun precedes me to the altar which is somewhere behind me and to the left as if we are approaching it from a side aisle the mass book is like a sheet of pictures a sort of board 3 feet long and a foot wide and on it is the text with ancient pictures in columns one beside the other first the nun has to read a part of the Liturgy before I begin and I have still not found the right place in the text she has told me that it is number 15 but the numbers are not clear and I cannot find it with determination however I turned toward the congregation and now I have found number 15 the next to the last on the board although I do not yet know if I shall be able to decipher it I want to try all the same I wake up this dream expressed in a symbolic way an answer from the unconscious to the thoughts that the dreamer had had the evening before it said to him in effect you yourself must become a priest in your own inner Church in the Church of your soul thus the dream shows that the dreamer does have the helpful support of an organization he is contained in a church not an external church but one that exists inside his own soul the people all his own psychic qualities want him to function as the priest and celebrate the mass himself now the dream cannot mean the actual mass for its mass book is very different from the real one it seems that the idea of the mass is used as a symbol and therefore it means a sacrificial act in which the Divinity is present so that man can communicate with it this symbolic solution is of course not generally valid but relates to this particular dreamer it is a typical solution for a Protestant because a man who through real faith is still contained in the Catholic Church usually experiences his Ana in the image of the church herself and her sacred images are for him the symbols of the unconscious our dreamer did not have this ecclesiastical experience and this is why he had to follow an inner way furthermore the dream told him what he should do it said your mother boundness and your extroversion represented by the wife who is an extrovert distract you and make you feel insecure and by meaningless talk keep you from celebrating the inner Mass but if you follow the nun the introverted Ana she will lead you as both a servant and a priest she owns a strange Mass book which is composed of 16 4 Time 4 ancient pictures your mask consists of your contemplation of these psychic images that your religious anima reveals to you in other words if the dreamer overcomes his inner uncertainty caused by his mother complex he will find that his life task has the nature and quality of a religious service and that if he meditates about the symbolic meaning of the images in his soul they will lead him to this realization in this dream the Ana appears in her proper positive role that is as a mediator between the ego and the self the four time 4 configuration of the pictures points to the fact that the celebration of this inner mass is performed in the service of totality as Yung has demonstrated the nucleus of the psyche the self normally expresses itself in some kind of four-fold structure the number four is also connected with the Ana because as young noted there are four stages in its development the first stage is best symbolized by the figure of Eve which represents purely instinctual and biological relations the second can be seen in fa's Helen she personifies a romantic and aesthetic level that is however still characterized by sexual elements the third is represented for instance by the Virgin Mary a figure who raises love arrows to the heights of spiritual devotion the fourth type is symbolized by sapientia wisdom transcending even the most holy and the most pure of this another symbol is the shulamite in the Song of Solomon in the psychic development of modern man this stage is rarely reached the Mona Lisa comes nearest to such a wisdom Ana at this stage I am only pointing out that the concept of fourfold frequently occurs in certain types of symbolic material the essential aspects of this will be discussed later but what does the role of Thea as Guide to the inner world mean in Practical terms this positive function occurs when a man takes seriously the feelings moods expectations and Fantasies sent by his anima and when he fixes them in some form for example in writing painting sculpture musical composition or dancing when he works at this patiently and slowly other more deeply unconscious material Wells up from the depths and connects with the earlier material after a fantasy has been fixed in some specific form it must be examined both intellectually and ethically with an evaluating feeling reaction and it is essential to regard it as being absolutely real there must be no lurking doubt that this is only a fantasy if this is practiced with devotion over for a long period the process of individuation gradually becomes the single reality and can unfold in its true form many examples from literature show the Ana as a guide and mediator to the inner World Francesco kona's hypnerotomachia Ryder Haggard's she or the Eternal feminine in good as F in a medieval mystical text anima figure explains her own nature as follows I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys I am the mother of fair love and of fear and of knowledge and of holy hope I am the mediator of the elements making one to agree with another that which is warm I make cold and the reverse and that which is dry I make moist and the reverse and that which is hard I soften I am the law in the priest and the word in the prophet and the counsel in the wise I will will kill and I will make to live and there is none that can deliver out of my hand in the Middle Ages there took place a perceptible spiritual differentiation in religious poetical and other cultural matters and the fantasy world of the unconscious was recognized more clearly than before during this period the nightly Cult of the lady signified an attempt to differentiate the feminine side of man's nature in regard to the outer woman as well as in relation to the inner world the lady to whose service the Knight pledged himself and for whom he performed his heroic Deeds was naturally a personification of the Ana the name of the carrier of the Grail in volr Von eschenbach's version of The Legend is especially significant condu Amur guide in love matters she taught the hero to differentiate both his feelings and his Behavior toward women later however this individual and personal effort of developing the relationship with the Ana was abandoned when her Sublime aspect fused with the figure of the Virgin who then became the object of boundless devotion and praise when the Ana as virgin was conceived as being all positive her negative aspects found expression in the belief in witches in China the figure parallel to to that of Mary is the goddess Quan Yin a more popular Chinese anima figure is the Lady of the Moon who bestows the gift of poetry or music on her favorites and can even give them immortality in India the same archetype is represented by Shakti parva rati and many others among the mlims she is chiefly Fatima the daughter of Muhammad worship of the anama as an ially recognized figure brings the serious disadvantage that she loses her individual aspects on the other hand if she is regarded as an exclusively personal being there is the danger that if she is projected into the outer world it is only there that she can be found this latter State of Affairs can create endless trouble because man becomes either the victim of his erotic fantasies or compulsively dependent on one actual woman only the painful but essentially simple decision to take one's fantasies and feelings seriously can at this stage prevent a complete stagnation of the inner process of individuation because only in this way can a man discover what this figure means as an inner reality thus Thea becomes again what she originally was The Woman Within who conveys vital messages of the self the Animus the the man within the male personification of the unconscious in woman the Animus exhibits both good and bad aspects as does the anima in man but the animist does not so often appear in the form of an erotic fantasy or mood it is more apt to take the form of a hidden sacred conviction when such a conviction is preached with a loud insistent masculine Voice or imposed on others by means of brutal emot scenes the underlying masculinity in a woman is easily recognized however even in a woman who is outwardly very feminine the Animus can be an equally hard inexorable power one may suddenly find oneself up against something in a woman that is obstinate cold and completely inaccessible one of the favorite themes that the Animus repeats endlessly in the ruminations of this kind of woman goes like this the only thing in the world that I want is love and he doesn't love me or in this situation there are only two possibilities and both are equally bad the Animus never believes in exceptions one can rarely contradict an animous opinion because it is usually right in a general way yet it seldom seems to fit the individual situation it is apt to be an opinion that seems reasonable but beside the point just as the character of a man's anima is shaped by his mother so the Animus is basically influenced by a woman's father the father endows his daughter's animus with the special coloring of unarguable incontestably true convictions convictions that never include the personal reality of the woman herself as she actually is this is why the Animus is sometimes like the Ana a demon of death for example in a gypsy fairy tale a handsome stranger is received by a lonely woman in spite of the fact that she has had a dream warning her that he is the king of the dead after he has been with her for a time she presses him to tell her who he really is at first he refuses saying that she will die if he tells her she insists however and suddenly he reveals to her that he is death himself the woman immediately dies of fright viewed mythologically the beautiful stranger is probably a pagan father image or God image who appears here as king of the Dead like hades's Abduction of prapan but psychologically he represents a particular form of the Animus that lures women away from all human relationships and especially from all contacts with real men he personifies a cocoon of dreamy thoughts filled with desire and Jud judgments about how things ought to be which cut a woman off from the reality of Life the negative animist does not appear only as a death demon in myths and fairy tales he plays the role of robber and murderer one example is Blue Beard who secretly kills all his wives in a hidden chamber in this form the animist personifies all those semi-conscious cold destructive Reflections that invade a woman in the small hours ESP especially when she has failed to realize some obligation of feeling it is then that she begins to think about the family heritage and matters of that kind a sort of web of calculating thoughts filled with malice and Intrigue which get her into a state where she even wishes death to others when one of us dies I'll move to the Riviera said a woman to her husband when she saw the beautiful Mediterranean Coast a thought that was rendered relatively harmless by reason of the fact that she said it by nursing secret destructive attitudes a wife can drive her husband and a mother her children into illness accident or even death or she may decide to keep the children from marrying a deeply hidden form of evil that rarely comes to the surface of the mother's conscious mind a naive old woman once said to me while showing me a picture of her son who was drowned when he was 27 I prefer it this way it's better than giving him away to another woman a strange passivity and paralysis of all feeling or a deep insecurity that can lead almost to a sense of nullity May sometimes be the result of an unconscious animous opinion in the depths of the woman's being the Animus Whispers you are hopeless what's the use of trying there is no point in doing anything life will never change for the better unfortunately whenever one of these personifications of the unconscious takes possession of our mind it seems as if we ourselves are having such thoughts and feelings the ego identifies with them to the point where it is unable to detach them and see them for what they are one is really possessed by the figure from the unconscious only after The Possession has fallen away does one realize with horror that one has said and done things diametrically opposed to one's real thoughts and feelings that one has been the prey of an alien psychic Factor like the anima the Animus does not merely consist of negative qualities such as brutality recklessness empty talk and Silent obstinate evil ideas he too has a very positive and valuable side he too Can Build a Bridge to the self through his creative Activity The Following dream of a woman of 45 may help to illustrate this point two veiled figures climb onto the balcony and into the house they are SED in black hooded coats and they seem to want to torment me and my sister she hides under the bed but they pull her out with a broom and torture her then it is my turn the leader of the two pushes me against the wall making magical gestures before my face in the meantime his helper makes a sketch on the wall and when I see it I say in order to seem friendly oh but this is well drawn now suddenly my Tormentor has the noble head of an artist and he says proudly yes indeed and begins to clean his spectacles the sadistic aspect of these two figures was well known to the dreamer for in reality she frequently suffered bad attacks of anxiety during which she was haunted by the thought that people she loved were in great danger or even that they were dead but the fact that the animous figure in the dream is double suggests that the burglars personify a psychic factor that is dual in its effect and that could be something quite different from these tormenting thoughts the sister of the dreamer who runs away from the men is caught and tortured in reality this sister died when fairly young she had been artic artistically gifted but had made very little use of her Talent next the dream reveals that the veiled burglars are actually disguised artists and that if the dreamer recognizes their gifts which are her own they will give up their evil intentions what is the deeper meaning of the dream it is that behind the spasms of anxiety there is indeed a genuine and Mortal danger but there is also a creative possibility for the dreamer she like the sister had some Talent as a painter but she doubted whether painting could be a meaningful activity for her now her dream tells her in the most Earnest way that she must live out this Talent if she obeys the destructive tormenting animus will be transformed into a creative and meaningful activity as in this dream the Animus often appears as a group of men in this way the unconscious symbolizes the fact that the animus represents a collective rather than a personal element because of this Collective mindedness women habitually refer when their animus is speaking through them to one or they or everybody and in such circumstances their speech frequently contains the words always and should and ought a vast number of myths and fairy tales tell of a prince turned by witchcraft into a wild animal or Monster who is Redeemed by the love of a girl a process symbolizing the manner in which the animist becomes conscious Dr Henderson has commented on the significance of this Beauty and the Beast Motif in the preceding chapter very often the heroine is not allowed to ask questions about her mysterious unknown lover and husband or she meets him only in the dark and may never look at him the implication is that by blindly trusting and loving him she will be able to redeem her bridegroom but this never succeeds she always breaks her promise and finally finds her lover again only after a long difficult Quest and much suffering the parallel in life is that the conscious attention a woman has to give to her animous problem takes much time and involves a lot of suffering but if she realizes who and what her animus is and what he does to her and if she faces these realities instead of allowing herself to be possessed her animus can turn into an invaluable inner companion who endows her with the masculine qualities of initiative courage objectivity and spiritual wisdom the Animus just like Thea exhibits four stages of development he first appears as a personification of mere physical power for instance as an athletic champion or muscle man in the next stage he possesses initiative and the capacity for Planned action in the third phase the Animus becomes the word often appearing as a professor or clergyman finally in his fourth manifestation the Animus is the Incarnation of meaning on this highest level he becomes like the Ana a mediator of the religious experience whereby life acquires new meaning he gives the woman spirit spiritual firmness an invisible inner support that compensates for her outer softness the Animus in his most developed form sometimes connects the woman's mind with the spiritual evolution of her age and can thereby make her even more receptive than a man to new creative ideas it is for this reason that in earlier times women were used by many nations as divers and seers the creative boldness of their positive animus at times expresses thoughts and ideas that stimulate men to new Enterprises the Inner Man within a woman's psyche can lead to marital troubles similar to those mentioned in the section on Thea what makes things especially complicated is the fact that the possession of one partner by the Animus or Ana May automatically exert such an irritating effect upon the other that he or she becomes possessed to animus and anima always tend to drag conversation down to a very low level and to produce a disagreeable erasable emotional atmosphere as I mentioned before the positive side of the Animus can personify an enterprising Spirit courage truthfulness and in the highest form spiritual profundity through him a woman can experience the underlying processes of her cultural and personal objective situation and can find her way to an intensified spiritual attitude to life this naturally presupposes that her animus ceases to represent opinions that are above criticism the woman must find the courage and inner broad-mindedness to question the sacredness of her own convictions only then will she be able to take in the suggestions of the unconscious especially when they contradict her animous opinions only then will the manifestations of the self get through to her and will she be able consciously to understand their meaning the self symbols of totality if an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with Thea or animus problem so that he or she is no longer partially identified with it the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form representing the self the innermost nucleus of the psyche in in the dreams of a woman this Center is usually personified as a superior female figure a priestess sorceress Earth mother or goddess of nature or love in the case of a man it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian an Indian Guru a wise old man a spirit of Nature and so forth two folktales illustrate the role that such a figure can play the first is an Austrian tale a king has ordered soldiers to keep the night watch beside the corpse of a black princess who has been Bewitched every midnight she Rises and kills the guard at last one soldier whose turn it is to stand guard despairs and runs away into the woods there he meets an old guitarist who is our Lord himself this old musician tells him where to hide in the church and instructs him on how to behave so that the black princess cannot get him with this Divine help the soldier actually manages to redeem the princess and marry her clearly the old guitarist who is our Lord himself is in psychological terms a symbolic personification of the self with his help the ego avoids destruction and is able to overcome and even redeem a highly dangerous aspect of his anima in a woman's psyche as I have said the self assumes feminine personifications this is Illustrated in the Second Story an Eskimo tale a lonely girl who has been disappointed in love meets a wizard traveling in a copper boat he is the spirit of the Moon who has given all the animals to Mankind and who also bestows luck in hunting he abducts the girl to the Heavenly realm once when the spirit of the moon has left her she visits a little house near the moon ghost mansion there she finds a tiny woman clothed in the intestinal membrane of the bearded seal who warns the heroin against the spirit of the Moon saying that he plans to kill her it appears that he is a killer of women a sort of Blue Beard the tiny woman fashion a long rope by means of which the girl can descend to Earth at the time of the new moon which is the moment when the little woman can weaken the moon spirit the girl climbs down but when she arrives on Earth she does not open her eyes as quickly as the little woman told her to because of this she is turned into a spider and can never become human again as we have noted the Divine musician in the first tale is a representation of the wise old man a typical personification of the self he is akin to the sorcerer Merlin of medieval legend or to the Greek God Hermes the little woman in her strange membrane clothing is a parallel figure symbolizing the self as it appears in the feminine psyche the old musician saves the hero from the destructive anima and the little woman protects the girl against the Eskimo Blue Beard who is in the form of the Moon Spirit her animus in this case however things go wrong a point that I shall take up later the self however does not always take the form of a wise old man or Wise Old Woman these paradoxical personifications are attempts to express something that is not entirely contained in time something simultaneously young and old the dream of a middle-aged Man shows the self appearing as a young man coming from the street a youth rode down into our garden there were no bushes and no fence as there are in real life and the garden lay open I did not quite know if he came on purpose or if the horse carried him here against his will I stood on the path that leads to my studio and watched the arrival with great pleasure the sight of the boy on his beautiful horse impressed me deeply the horse was a small wild powerful animal a symbol of energy it resembled a boar and it had a thick bristly silvery gray coat the boy rode past me between the studio and house jumped off his horse and led him carefully away so that he would not trample on the flower bed with its beautiful red and orange tulips the flower bed had been newly made and planted by my wife a dream occurrence this youth signifies the self and with it renewal of Life a creative elen vital and a new spiritual orientation by means of which everything becomes full of life and Enterprise if a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious it can bestow this gift so that suddenly life which has been stale and dull turns into a rich unending inner Adventure full of creative possibilities in a woman's psychology this same youthful personification of the self can appear as a supernaturally gifted girl the dreamer in this instance is a woman in her late 40s I stood in front of a church and was washing the pavement with water then I ran down the street just at the moment when the students from the high school were let out I came to a stagnant River across which a board or tree trunk had been laid but when I was attempting to walk across a mischievous student bounced on the board so that it cracked and I nearly fell into the water idiot I yelled out on the other side of the river three little girls were playing and one of them stretched out her hand as if to help me I thought that her small hand was not strong enough to help me but when I took it she succeeded without the slightest effort in pulling me across and up the bank on the other side the dreamer is a religious person but according to her dream she cannot remain in the church Protestant any longer in fact she seems to have lost the possibility of entering it although she tries to keep the access to it as clean as she can according to the dream she must now cross a stagnant River and this indicates that the flow of life is slowed down because of the unresolved religious problem crossing a river is a frequent symbolic image for a fundamental change of attitude the student was interpreted by the dreamer herself as the personification of a thought that she had previously had namely that she might satisfy her spiritual yearning by attending High School obviously the dream does not think much of this plan when she dares to cross the river alone a personification of the self the girl small but supernaturally powerful helps her but the form of a human being whether youthful or old is only one of the many ways in which the self can appear in dreams or visions the various ages it assumes show not only that it is with us throughout the whole of life but also so that it exists beyond the consciously realized flow of life which is what creates our experience of time just as the self is not entirely contained in our conscious experience of time in our space-time Dimension it is also simultaneously omnipresent moreover it appears frequently in a form that hints at a special omnipresence that is it manifests itself as a gigantic symbolic human being who EMB braces and contains the whole Cosmos when this image turns up in the dreams of an individual we may hope for a creative solution to his conflict because now the vital psychic Center is activated that is the whole being is condensed into Oneness in order to overcome the difficulty it is no wonder that this figure of the cosmic man appears in many myths and religious teachings generally he is described as something helpful and positive he appears as Adam as the Persian gomard or as the Hindu perusia this figure may even be described as the basic principle of the whole world the ancient Chinese for instance thought that before anything whatever was created there was a colossal Divine man called Pon cou who gave Heaven and Earth their form when he cried his tears made the Yellow River and the Yony River when he breathed the wind Rose when he spoke Thunder was loosed and when he looked around lightning flashed if he was in a good mood the weather was fine if he was sad it clouded over when he died he fell apart and from his body the Five Holy mountains of China sprang into existence his head became the Thai mountain in the East his trunk became the song mountain in the center his right arm the Hang mountain in the North North his left arm the Hang mountain in the South and his feet the H mountain in the west his eyes became the Sun and Moon we have already seen that symbolic structures that seem to refer to the process of individuation tend to be based on the motif of the number four such as the four functions of Consciousness or the four stages of the Ana or animus it reappears here in the cosmic shape of ponu only under specific circumstances do other combinations of numbers appear in the psychic material the natural unhampered manifestations of the center are characterized by fourfold that is to say by having four divisions or some other structure deriving from the numerical series of 4 8 16 and so on number 16 plays a particularly important role since it is composed of 4 fours in our Western Civilization similar ideas of a cosmic man have attached themselves to the symbol of Adam the first man there is a Jewish legend that when God created Adam he first gathered red black white and yellow dust from the four corners of the world and thus Adam reached from one end of the world to the other when he bent down his head was in the East and his feet in the West according to another Jewish tradition the whole of mankind was contained in Adam from the beginning which meant the soul of everybody who would ever be born the soul of Adam therefore was like the wick of a lamp composed of innumerable strands in this symbol the idea of a total Oneness of all human existence beyond all individual units is clearly expressed in ancient Persia the same original first man called gomart was depicted as a huge figure emitting light when he died every kind of metal sprang from his body and from his soul came gold his seen fell upon the Earth and from it came the first human couple in the form of two rhubarb shrubs it is striking that the Chinese Pon cou was also depicted covered by leaves like a plant perhaps this is because the first man was was thought of as a self-grown living unit that just existed without any animal impulse or self-will among a group of people who live on the banks of the Tigress Adam is still at the present time worshiped as the hidden Super Soul or mystical protective Spirit of the entire human race these people say that he came from a date palm another repetition of the plant Motif in the East and in Gnostic circles in the west people soon recognize that the cosmic man was more an inner psychic image than a concrete outer reality according to Hindu tradition for instance he is something that lives within the individual human being and is the only part that is Immortal this inner great man redeems the individual by leading him out of creation and its sufferings back into his original Eternal sphere but he can do this only if man recognizes him and rises from his sleep in order to be led in the symbolic myths of old India this figure is known as the purusa a name that simply means man or person the perusia lives within the heart of every individual and yet at the same time he fills the entire Cosmos according to the testimony of many myths the cosmic man is not only the beginning but also the final goal of all life of the whole of creation all serial nature means wheat all treasure nature means gold all generation means man says the medieval Sage meister eckart and if one looks at this from a psychological standpoint it is certainly so the whole inner psychic reality of each individual is ultimately oriented toward this archetypal symbol of the self in Practical terms this means that the existence of human beings will never be satisfactorily explained in terms of isolated instincts or purposive mechanism such as hunger power sex survival perpetuation of the species and so on that is man's main purpose is not to eat drink Etc but to be human above and beyond these drives our inner psychic reality serves to manifest a living mystery that can be expressed only by a symbol and for its expression the unconscious often chooses the powerful image of the cosmic man in our Western Civilization the cosmic man has been identified to a great extent with Christ and in the East with Krishna or with Buddha in the Old Testament this same symbolic figure turns up as the son of man and in later Jewish mysticism is called Adam Cadman certain religious movements of late anti Antiquity simply called him anthropos the Greek word for man like all symbols this image points to an unknowable secret to the ultimate unknown meaning of human existence as we have noted certain Traditions assert that the cosmic man is the goal of creation but the achievement of this should not be understood as a possible external happening from the point of view of the Hindu for example it is not so much that the external world will one day dissolve into the original great man but that the ego's extroverted orientation toward the external world will disappear in order to make way for the cosmic man this happens when the ego merges into the self the ego's discursive flow of representations which goes from one thought to another and its desires which run from one object to another calm down when the great man within is encountered indeed we must never forget that for us outer reality exists only in so far as we perceive it consciously and that we cannot prove that it exists in and by itself the many examples coming from various civilizations and different periods show the universality of the symbol of the great man His Image is present in the minds of men as a sort of goal or expression of the basic mystery of our life because this symbol represents that which is whole and complete it is often conceived of as a bisexual being in this form the symbol reconciles one of the most important pairs of psychological opposites male and female this Union also appears frequently in dreams as a Divine Royal or otherwise distinguished couple the following dream of a man of 47 shows this aspect of the self in a dramatic way I am on a platform and below me I see a huge black beautiful she bear with a rough but well-groomed coat she is standing on her hind legs and on a stone slab she is polishing a flat oval Black Stone which becomes increasingly shiny not far away a lionist and her cub do the same thing but the stones they are polishing are bigger and round in shape after a while the she bear turns into to a fat naked woman with black hair and dark fiery eyes I behave in an erotically provocative way toward her and suddenly she moves nearer in order to catch me I get frightened and take refuge up on the building of scaffolding where I was before later I am in the midst of many women half of whom are primitive and have Rich black hair as if they are transformed from animals the other half are our women of the same National ity as the dreamer and have blonde or brown hair the Primitive women sing a very sentimental song in Melancholy high pitched voices now in a high elegant Carriage there comes a young man who wears on his head a royal Golden Crown set with shining rubies a very beautiful sight beside him sits a blonde young woman probably his wife but without a crown it seems that the Lioness and her cub have been transformed into this couple they belong to the group of Primitives now all the women The Primitives and the others in tone a solemn song and the Royal Carriage slowly travels toward the Horizon here the inner nucleus of the dreamer's psyche shows itself at first in a temporary vision of the royal couple which emerges from the depths of his animal nature and the Primitive layer of his unconscious the she bear in the beginning is a sort of mother goddess Artemis for instance was worshiped in Greece as a she bear the dark oval stone that she rubs and polishes probably symbolizes the dreamer's innermost being his true personality rubbing and polishing Stones is a well-known exceedingly ancient activity of man in Europe holy Stones wrapped in bark and hidden in caves have been found in many places as containers of divine Powers they were probably kept there by men of the Stone Age at the present time some of the Australian Aborigines believe that their dead ancestors continue to exist in Stones as virtuous and divine powers and that if they rub these Stones the power increases like charging them with electricity for the benefit of both the living and the dead the man who had the dream we are discussing had hitherto refused to accept a marital bond with a woman his fear of being caught by this aspect of life caused him in the dream to flee from the be woman to the spectator's platform where he could passively watch things without becoming entangled through the motif of the stone being rubbed by the bear the unconscious is trying to show him that he should let himself come into contact with this side of life it is through the frictions of married life that his inner being can be shaped and Polished when the the stone is polished it will begin to shine like a mirror so that the bear can see herself in it this means that only by accepting Earthly contact and suffering can the human soul be transformed into a mirror in which the Divine powers can perceive themselves but the dreamer runs away to a higher Place I.E into all sorts of Reflections by which he can escape the demands of Life the dream then shows him that if he runs away from the demands hands of life one part of his soul his anima will remain undifferentiated a fact symbolized by the group of nondescript women that splits apart into a primitive half and a more civilized one the Lioness and her son which then appear on the scene personify the mysterious urge toward individuation indicated by their work at shaping the round Stones a Roundstone is a symbol of the self the Lions a royal couple are in themselves a symbol of totality in medieval symbolism the philosopher stone a pre-eminent symbol of man's wholeness is represented as a pair of lions or as a human couple riding on lions symbolically this points to the fact that often the urge toward individuation appears in a veiled form hidden in the overwhelming passion one may feel for another person in fact in fact passion that goes beyond the natural measure of Love ultimately aims at the mystery of becoming whole and this is why one feels when one has fallen passionately in love that becoming one with the other person is the only worthwhile goal of one's life as long as the image of totality in this dream expresses itself in the form of a pair of lions it is still contained in some such overwhelming passion but when lion and lioness have turned turned into a king and queen the urge to individuate has reached the level of conscious realization and can now be understood by the ego as being the real goal of life before the Lions had transformed themselves into human beings it was only the Primitive women who sang and they did so In a Sentimental manner that is to say the feelings of the dreamer remained On A Primitive and sentimental level but in honor of the humanized Lions both the Primitive and the Civilized women chant a common hymn of praise their expression of their feelings in a United form shows that the inner split in the anima has now changed into Inner Harmony still another personification of the self appears in a report of a woman's so-called active imagination active imagination is a certain way of meditating imaginatively by which one may deliberately enter into contact with the UNC conscious and make a conscious connection with psychic phenomena active imagination is among the most important of Young's discoveries while it is in a sense comparable to Eastern forms of meditation such as the technique of Zen Buddhism or of tantric yoga or to Western techniques like those of the Jesuit exoria it is fundamentally different in that the meditator remains completely devoid of any conscious goal or program thus the meditation becomes the solitary experiment of a free individual which is the reverse of a guided attempt to master the unconscious this however is not the place to enter into a detailed analysis of active imagination the reader will find one of Young's descriptions of it in his paper on the Transcendent function in the woman's meditation the self appeared as a deer which said to the ego I am am your child and your mother they call me the connecting animal because I connect people animals and even stones with one another if I enter them I am your fate or the objective eye when I appear I redeem you from the meaningless hazards of Life the fire burning inside me Burns in the whole of nature if a man loses it he becomes egocentric lonely disoriented and weak the self is often symbol I ized as an animal representing our instinctive nature and its connectedness with one's surroundings that is why there are so many helpful animals in myths and fairy tales this relation of the self to all surrounding nature and even the cosmos probably comes from the fact that the nuclear atom of our psyche is somehow woven into the whole world both outer and inner all the higher manifestations of Life are somehow tuned to the surrounding SpaceTime Continuum animals for example have their own special Foods their particular homebuilding materials and their definite territories to all of which their instinctive patterns are exactly tuned and adapted time rhythms also play their part we have only to think of the fact that most grass-eating animals have their young at precisely the time of year when the grass is richest and most abundant with such considerations in mind a well-known zoologist has said that the inwardness of each animal reaches far out into the world around it and psychopy time and space in ways that are still completely beyond our comprehension our unconscious is similarly attuned to our surroundings to our group to society in general and Beyond these to the space-time Continuum and the whole of nature thus the great man of the nasapi Indians does not merely reveal inner truths he also gives hints about where and when to hunt and so from dreams the nasapi hunter evolves the words and Melodies of the magical songs with which he attracts the animals but this specific help from the unconscious is not given to primitive man alone Jung discovered that dreams can also give civilized man the guidance he needs in finding his way through the problems of both his inner and his outer life indeed many of our dreams are concerned with details of our outer life and our surroundings such things as the tree in front of the window one's bicycle or car or a stone picked up during a walk may be raised to the level of symbolism through our dream life and become meaningful if we pay attention to our dreams instead of living in a cold impersonal world of meaningless chance we may begin to emerge into a world of our own full of important and secretly ordered events our dreams however are not as a rule primarily concerned with our adaptation to Outer life in our civilized world most dreams have to do with the development by the ego of the right inner attitude toward the self for this relationship is far more Disturbed in Us by modern ways of thinking and behaving than is the case with primitive people they generally live directly from the inner Center but we with our uprooted Consciousness are so entangled with external completely foreign matters that it is very difficult for the messages of the self to get through to us our conscious mind continually creates the illusion of a clearly shaped rear outer world that blocks off many other perceptions yet through our unconscious nature we are inexplicably connected to our psychic and physical environment I've already mentioned the fact that the self is symbolized with special frequency in the form of a stone precious or otherwise we saw an example of this in the stone that was being Polished by the she bear and the lions in many dreams the nuclear Center the self also appears as a crystal the mathematically precise arrangement of a crystal evokes in us the intuitive feeling that even in so-called dead matter there is a spiritual ordering principle at work thus the crystal often symbolically stands for the union of extreme opposites of matter and spirit perhaps Crystals and Stones are especially AP symbols of the self because of the just soness of their nature many people cannot refrain from picking up stones of a slightly unusual will color or shape and keeping them without knowing why they do this it is as if the stones held a living mystery that fascinates them men have collected Stones since the beginning of time and have apparently assumed that certain ones were the containers of the life force with all its mystery the ancient Germans for instance believe that the spirits of the Dead continued to live in their tombstones the custom of placing stones on graves May spring partly from the symbolic idea that something Eternal of the dead person remains which can be most fittingly represented by a stone for while the human being is as different as possible from a stone yet man's innermost Center is in a strange and special way akin to it perhaps because the stone symbolizes mere existence at the farthest removed from the emotions feelings fantasies and discursive thinking of ego consciousness in this sense the stone symbolizes what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience the experience of something Eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels Immortal and unalterable the urge that we find in practically all civilizations to erect Stone monuments to famous men or on the site of important events probably also stems from this symbolic meaning of the stone the stone that Jacob placed on the spot where he had his famous dream or certain Stones left by simple people on the tombs of local Saints or Heroes show the original nature of the human urge to express an otherwise inexpressible experience by the stone symbol it is no wonder that Many religious cults use a stone to signify God or to Mark a place of worship the holiest sanctuary of the Islamic world is the Caba the black stone in Mecca to which which all Pious Muslims hope to make their pilgrimage according to Christian ecclesiastical symbolism Christ is the stone that the builders rejected which became the head of the corner Luke 2017 alternatively he is called the spiritual Rock from which the Water of Life Springs medieval Alchemists who searched for the secret of matter in a press scientific way hoping to find God in it or at Le least the working of divine activity believed that this secret was embodied in their famous philosopher stone but some of the Alchemists dimly perceive that their much sought after Stone was a symbol of something that can be found only within the psyche of man an old Arabian Alchemist morenus said this thing the philosopher stone is extracted from you you are its mineral and one can find it in you or to put it more clearly they the Alchemists take it from you if you recognize this the love and approbation of the stone will grow within you know that this is true without doubt the alchemical stone the lapis symbolizes something that can never be lost or dissolved something Eternal that some Alchemist compared to the mystical experience of God within one's own soul it usually takes prolonged suffering to burn away all the Superfluous psychic elements concealing the stone but some profound inner experience of the self does occur to most people at least once in a lifetime from the psychological standpoint a genuinely religious attitude consists of an effort to discover this unique experience and gradually to keep in tune with it it is relevant that a stone is itself something permanent so that the self becomes an inner partner toward whom one's attention is continually turned the fact that this highest and most frequent symbol of the self is an object of inorganic matter points to yet another field of inquiry and speculation that is the still unknown relationship between what we call the unconscious psyche and what we call matter a mystery with which psychosomatic medicine Endeavors to Grapple in studying this still undefined and unexplained connection it may prove to be that psyche and matter are actually the same phenomenon one observed from within and the other from without Dr Yung put forward A New Concept that he called synchronicity this term means a meaningful Coincidence of outer and inner events that are not themselves casually connected the emphasis lies on the word word meaningful if an aircraft crashes before my eyes as I am blowing my nose this is a coincidence of events that has no meaning it is simply a chance occurrence of a kind that happens all the time but if I bought a blue frock and by mistake the shop delivered a black one on the day one of my near relatives died this would be a meaningful coincidence the two events are not causally related but they are connected by the symbolic meaning that our society gives to the color black wherever Dr Yong observed such meaningful coincidences in an individual's life it seemed as the individual's dreams revealed that there was an archetype activated in the unconscious of the individual concerned to illustrate this by my example of the black frock in such a case the person who receives the black frock might also have had a dream on the theme of death it seems as if the underlying archetype is manifesting itself simultaneously in inner and external events the common denominator is a symbolically expressed message in this case a message about death as soon as we notice that certain types of event like to Cluster together at certain times we begin to understand the attitude of the Chinese whose theories of medicine philosophy and even building are based on a science of meaningful coincidences the classical Chinese text did not ask what causes what but rather what likes to occur with what one can see much the same underlying theme in astrology and in the way various civilizations have depended on Consulting oracles and paying attention to Omens all of these are attempts to provide an explanation of coincidence that is different from one that depends on straightforward cause and effect in creating the concept of synchronicity Dr Yung sketched a way in which we might penetrate deeper into the interrelation of psyche and matter and it is precisely towards such a relation that the symbol of the stone seems to point but this is still a completely open and insufficiently explored matter with which future generations of psychologists and physicists must deal it may seem that my discussion of synchronicity has led me away from my main theme but I feel it is necessary to make at least a brief introductory reference to it because it is a jungian hypothesis that seems to be pregnant with future possibilities of investigation and application synchronistic events moreover almost invariably accompany The crucial phases of the process of individuation but too often they pass unnoticed because the individual has not learned to watch for such coincidences and to make them meaningful in relation to the symbolism of his dreams the relation to the self nowadays more and more people especially those who live in large cities suffer from a terrible emptiness and boredom as if they are waiting for something that never arrives movies and television spectator sports and political excitements May divert them for a while but again and again exhausted and disenchanted they have to return to the Wasteland of their own lives the only Adventure that is still worthwhile for Modern Man Lies in the inner Realm of the unconscious psyche with this idea vaguely in mind many now turn to yoga and other Eastern practices but these offer no genuine new adventure for in them one only takes over what is already known to the Hindus or the Chinese without directly meeting one's own inner Life Center while it is true that Eastern methods serve to concentrate the mind and direct it Inward and that this procedure is in a sense similar to the introversion of an analytical treatment there is a very important difference young evolved a way of getting to one's inner Center and making contact with the living mystery of the unconscious alone and uned that is utterly different from following a well-worn path trying to get give the living reality of the self a constant amount of daily attention is like trying to live simultaneously on two levels or in two different worlds one gives one's mind as before to Outer duties but at the same time one remains alert for hints and signs both in dreams and in external events that the self uses to symbolize its intentions the direction in which the life stream is moving old Chinese texts that are concerned with this kind of experience often use the simile of the cat watching the mouse hole one text says that one should allow no other thoughts to intrude but one's attention should not be too sharp nor should it be too dull there is exactly the right level of perception if the training is undergone in this manner it will be effective as time goes on and when the cause comes to fruition like a ripe melon that automatically Falls anything it may happen to touch or make contact with Will suddenly cause the individual's Supreme Awakening this is the moment when the practitioner will be like one who drinks water and alone knows whether it is cold or warm he becomes free of all doubts about himself and experiences a great happiness similar to that one feels in meeting one's own father at the crossroads thus in the midst of ordinary outer life one is suddenly caught up in an exciting inner adventure and because it is unique for each individual it cannot be copied or stolen there are two reasons why man loses contact with the regulating center of his soul one of them is that some single instinctive drive or emotional image can carry him into a one-sidedness that makes him lose his balance this also happens to animals for example a sexually excited stag will completely forget hunger and security this one-sidedness and consequent loss of balance are much dreaded by Primitives who call it loss of Soul another threat to the inner balance comes from excessive daydreaming which in a secret way usually circles around particular complexes in fact Daydreams arise just because they connect a man with his complexes at the same time they threaten the concent ation and continuity of his Consciousness the second obstacle is exactly the opposite and is due to an overc consolidation of ego Consciousness although a disciplined Consciousness is necessary for the performance of civilized activities we know what happens if a railway signal man lapses into daydreaming it has the serious disadvantage that it is apt to block the reception of impulses and messages coming from the center this is why so many dreams of civilized people are concerned with restoring this receptivity by attempting to correct the attitude of Consciousness toward the unconscious Center or self among the mythological representations of the self one finds much emphasis on the four corners of the world and in many pictures the great man is represented in the center of a circle divided into four Jung used the Hindu word mandala magic circle to designate a structure of this order which is a symbolic representation of the nuclear atom of the human psyche whose Essence we do not know in this connection it is interesting that a nasapi hunter pictorially represented his great man not as a human being but as a Mandela whereas the nasapi experien the inner Center directly and naively without the help of religious rights or doctrines other communities use the Mandela Motif in order to restore a lost inner balance for instance the Navajo Indians Try by means of Mandela structured sand paintings to bring a sick person back into harmony with himself and with the cosmos and thereby to restore his health in eastern civilization similar pictures are used to consolidate the inner being or to enable one to plunge into deep meditation the contemplation of a Mandela is meant to bring an inner peace a feeling that life has again found its meaning and order the Mandela also conveys this feeling when it appears spontaneously in the dreams of modern men who are not influenced by any religious tradition of this sort and know nothing about it perhaps the positive effect is even greater in such cases because knowledge and tradition sometimes blur or even block the spontaneous experience an ex sample of a spontaneously produced Mandela occurs in the following dream of a 62-year-old woman it emerged as a Prelude to a new phase of life in which she became very creative I see a landscape in a dim light in the background I see the rising and then evenly continuing crest of a hill along the line where it rises moves a quadrangular disc that shines like gold in the foreground I see dark ploud earth that is beginning to sprout now I suddenly perceive a round table with a gry stone slab as its top and at the same moment the quadrangular disc suddenly stands upon the table it has left the hill but how and why it has changed its place I do not know landscapes in dreams as well as in art frequently symbolize an inexpressible mood in this dream the dim light of the landscape indicates that the clarity of daytime Consciousness is dimmed inner nature may now begin to reveal itself in its own light so we are told that the quadrangular disc becomes visible on the horizon hither to the symbol of the self the disc had been largely an intuitive idea on the dreamer's mental Horizon but now in the dream it shifts its position and becomes the center of the landscape of her soul a seed sewn long ago begins to sprout for a long time previously the dreamer had paid careful attention to her dreams and now this work bears fruit one is reminded of the relation between the symbol of the great man and plant life which I mentioned before now the Golden Disc suddenly moves to the right side the side where things become conscious among other things right often means psychological the side of consciousness of adaptation of being right while left signifies the sphere of unadapted unconscious reactions or sometimes even of something sinister then finally the Golden Disc stops its movement and comes to rest on significantly a Roundstone table it has found a permanent base as anela jaff observes later in this book roundness The mandala Motif generally symbolizes a natural wholeness whereas a quadrangular formation represents the realization of this in Consciousness in the dream the square disc and the round table meet and thus a conscious realization of the center is at hand the round table incidentally is a well-known symbol of wholeness and plays a role in methology for instance King Arthur's round table which itself is an image Direct arve from the table of the Last Supper in fact whenever a human being genuinely turns to the inner world and tries to know himself not by ruminating about his subjective thoughts and feelings but by following the expressions of his own objective nature such as dreams and genuine fantasies then sooner or later the self emerges the ego will then find an inner power that contains all the possibilities of renewal but there is a great difficulty that I have mentioned only indirectly up till now this is that every personification of the unconscious the Shadow the Ana the Animus and the self has both a light and a dark aspect we saw before that the shadow may be base or evil an instinctive drive that one ought to overcome it may however be an Impulse toward growth that one should cultivate and follow in the same way the anima and animus have dual aspects they can bring lifegiving development and creativeness to the personality or they can cause petrification and physical death and even the self the all embracing symbol of the unconscious has an ambivalent effect as for instance in the Eskimo tale this page when the little woman offered to save the heroin from the Moon Spirit but actually turned her into a spider the dark side of the self is the most dangerous thing of all precisely because the self is the greatest power in the psyche it can cause people to spin megalomanic or other delusory fantasies that catch them up and possess them a person in this state thinks with mounting excitement that he has grasped and solved the great Cosmic riddles he therefore loses all touch with human reality a reliable symptom of this condition is the loss of one's sense of humor and of human contacts thus the emerging of the self may bring great danger to a man's conscious ego the double aspect of the self is beautifully illustrated by this old Iranian fairy tale called The Secret of the bath Badger the great and Noble Prince hatim Thai receives orders from his King to investigate the mysterious bath Badger castle of non-existence when he approaches it having gone through many dangerous Adventures he hears that nobody ever returned from it but he insists on going on he is received at a round building by a barber with a mirror who leads him into the bath but as soon as the prince enters the water a thunderous noise breaks out it gets completely dark the barber disappears and slowly the water begins to rise Haim swims desperately round until the water finally reaches the top of the round Cupa which forms the roof of the bath now he fears he is lost but he says a prayer and grabs the Center Stone of the ca again a thunderous noise everything changes and Haim stands alone in a desert after long and painful wandering he comes to a beautiful garden in the middle of which is a circle of stone statues in the center of the statues he sees a parrot in it cage and a voice from above says to him oh hero you probably will not Escape alive from this bath once guyomar the first man found an enormous Diamond that Shone more brightly than sun and moon he decided to hide it where no one can find it and therefore he built this magical bath in order to protect it the parrot that you see here forms part of the magic at its feet lie a golden bow and arrow on on a Golden Chain and with them you may try three times to shoot the parrot if you hit him the curse will be lifted if not you will be petrified as were all these other people Haim tries once and fails his legs turned to stone he fails once more and is petrified up to his chest the third time he just shuts his eyes exclaiming God is great shoots blindly and this time hits the parrot an outbreak of thunder clouds of dust when all this has subsided in place of the parent is an enormous beautiful diamond and all the statues have come to life again the people thank him for their Redemption the reader will recognize the symbols of the self in this story the first man gomar the round Mandela shaped building the Center Stone and the diamond but this diamond is surrounded by danger the Demonic parrot signifies the evil Spirit of imitation that makes one miss the Target and petrify psychologically as I pointed out earlier the process of individuation excludes any parrot-like imitation of others time and again in all countries people have tried to copy in outer or ritualistic behavior the original religious experience of their great religious teachers Christ or Buddha or some other master and have therefore become petrified to follow in the steps of a great spiritual leader does not mean that one should copy and act out the pattern of the individuation process made by his life it means that we should try with a sincerity and devotion equal to his to live our own lives the barber with the mirror who vanishes symbolizes the gift of reflection that Haim loses when he wants it most the rising Waters represent the risk that one may drown in the unconscious and get lost in one's own emotions in order to understand the symbolic indications of the unconscious one must be careful not to get outside oneself or beside oneself but to stay emotionally within oneself indeed it is vitally important that the ego should continue to function in normal ways only if I remain an ordinary human being conscious of my incompleteness can I become receptive to the significant contents and processes of the unconscious but how can a human being stand the tension of feeling himself at one with the whole universe while at the same time he is only a miserable Earthly human Creature if on the one hand I despise myself as merely a statistical Cipher my life has no meaning and is not worth living but if on the other hand I feel myself to be part of something much greater how am I to keep my feet on the ground it is very difficult indeed to keep these inner opposites United within oneself without toppling over into one or the other extreme the social aspect of the self today the enormous growth of population especially obvious in large cities inevitably has a depressing effect on us we think oh well I am only so and so living at such and such an address like thousands of other people if few of them get killed what difference can it make there are far too many people in any case and when we read in the paper about the deaths of innumerable Unknown People Who personally mean nothing to us the feeling that our lives count for nothing is further increased this is the moment when attention to the unconscious brings the greatest help for dreams show the dreamer how each detail of his life is interwoven with the most significant realities what we all know theoretically that everything depends on the individual becomes through dreams a palpable fact that everyone can experience for himself sometimes we have a strong feeling that the great man wants something from us and has set us very special tasks our response to this experience can help us to acquire the strength to swim against the stream of collective Prejudice by taking our own Souls seriously into account naturally this is not always an agreeable task for instance you want to make a trip with friends next Sunday then a dream forbids it and demands that you do some creative work instead if you listen to your unconscious and Obey it you must expect constant interference with your conscious plans your will is crossed by other intentions intentions that you must submit to or at any rate must seriously consider this is partly why the obligation attached to the process of individuation is often felt to be a burden rather than an immediate blessing St Christopher the patron of all travelers is a fitting symbol for this experience according to the legend he felt an arrogant pride in his tremendous physical strength and was willing to serve Only the strongest first he served a king but when he saw that the king feared the devil he left him and became the devil servant then one day he discovered that the devil feared the crucifix and so he decided to serve Christ if he could find him he followed the advice of a priest who told him to wait for Christ at a Ford in the years that passed he carried many people across the river but once on a dark stormy night a small child called out that he wanted to be carried over the river with the greatest ease stain Christopher lifted the child on onto his shoulders but he walked more slowly with every step for his burden became heavier and heavier when he arrived in Midstream he felt as if he carried the whole universe he realized then that he had taken Christ upon his shoulders and Christ gave him remission of his sins and eternal life this miraculous child is a symbol of the self that literally depresses the ordinary human being even though it is the only thing that can redeem him in many works of art the Christ child is depicted as or with the sphere of the world a motif that clearly denotes the self for a child and a sphere are both Universal symbols of totality when a person tries to obey the unconscious he will often as we have seen be unable to do just as he pleases but equally he will often be unable to do what other people want him to do it often happens for instance that he must separate from his group from his family his partner or other personal Connections in order to find himself that is why it is sometimes said that attending to the unconscious makes people anti-social and egocentric as a rule this is not true for there is a little known factor that enters into this attitude the collective or we could even say social aspect of the self from a practical angle this Factor reveals itself in that an individual who follows his dreams for a considerable time will find that they are often concerned with his relationships with other people his dreams may warn him against trusting a certain person too much or he may dream about a favorable and agreeable meeting with someone whom he may previously have never consciously noticed if a dream does pick up the image of another person for us in some such fashion there are two possible interpretations first the figure may be a projection which means that the dream image of this person is a symbol for an inner aspect of the dreamer himself one dreams for instance of a dishonest neighbor but the neighbor is used by The Dream as a picture of One's Own dishonesty it is the task of dream interpretation to find out in which special areas one's own dishonesty comes into play this is called dream interpretation on the subjective level but it also happens at times that dreams genuinely tell us something about other people in this way the unconscious plays a role that is far from being fully understood like all the higher forms of life man is in tune with the living beings around him to a remarkable degree he perceives their sufferings and problems their positive and negative attributes of and values instinctively quite independently of his conscious thoughts about other people our Dream Life allows us to have a look at these subliminal perceptions and shows us that they have an effect upon us after having an agreable dream about somebody even without interpreting the dream I shall involuntarily look at that person with more interest the dream image may have deluded me because of my projections or it may have given me objective information to find out which is the correct interpretation requires an honest attentive attitude and careful thought but as is the case with all inner processes it is ultimately the self that orders and regulates one's Human Relationships so long as the conscious ego takes the trouble to detect the delusive projections and deals with these inside himself instead of outside it is in this way that spiritually attuned and similarly oriented people find their way to one another to create a group that cuts across all the usual social and organizational affiliations of people such a group is not in conflict with others it is merely different and independent the consciously realized process of individuation thus changes a person's relationships The Familiar bonds such as kinship or common interests are replaced by by a different type of unity a bond through the self all activities and obligations that belong exclusively to the outer world do definite harm to the secret activities of the unconscious through these unconscious ties those who belong together come together that is one reason why attempts to Influence People by advertisements and political propaganda are destructive even when inspired by idealistic motives this raises the important question of whether the unconscious part of the human psyche can be influenced at all practical experience and accurate observation show that one cannot influence one's own dreams there are people it is true who assert that they can influence them but if you look into their dream material you find that they do only what I do with my disobedient dog I order him to do those things I notice he wants to do anyhow so that I can preserve my illusion of authority only a long process of interpreting one's dreams and confronting himself with what they have to say Can gradually transform the unconscious and conscious attitudes also must change in this process if a man who wants to influence public opinion misuses symbols for this purpose they will naturally impress the masses in so far as they are true symbols but whether or not the mass unconscious will be emotionally gripped by them is something that cannot be calculated in advance something that remains completely irrational no music publisher for instance can tell in advance whether a song will become a hit or not even though it may draw on popular images and Melodies no deliberate attempts to influence the unconscious have yet produced any significant results and it seems that the mass unconscious preserves its autonomy just as much as the individual unconscious at times in order to express its purpose the unconscious may use a motif from our external world and thus may seem to have been influenced by it for instance I have come across many dreams of modern people that have to do with Berlin in these dreams Berlin stands as a symbol of the psychic weak spot the place of danger and for this reason is the place where the self is apt to appear it is the point where the dreamer is torn by conflict and where he might therefore be able to unite the inner opposites I have also encountered an extraordinary number of dream reactions to the film Hiroshima monamore in most of these dreams the idea was expressed that either the two lovers in the film must unite which symbolizes the union of inner opposites or there would be an atomic explosion a symbol of complete dissociation equivalent to Madness only when the manipulators of public opinion ADD commercial pressure or acts of violence to their activities do they seem to achieve a temporary success but in fact this merely causes a repression of the genuine unconscious reactions and mass repression leads to the same result as individual repression that is to neurotic dissociation and psychological illness all such attempts to repress the reactions of the unconscious must fail in the long run for they are basically opposed to our instincts we know from studying the social behavior of the higher animals that small groups from approximately 10 to 50 individuals create the best possible living conditions for the single animal as well as for the group and man seems to be no exception in this respect his physical well-being his spiritual psychic health and Beyond the animal realm his cultural efficiency seemed to flourish best in such a social formation as far as we at present understand the process of individuation the self apparently tends to produce such small groups by creating at the same time sharply defined ties of feeling between certain individuals and feelings of relatedness to all people only if these connections are created by the self can one feel any assurance that Envy jealousy fighting and all manner of negative projections will not break up the group thus an unconditional Devotion to one's own process of individuation also brings about the best possible social adaptation this does not mean of course that there will not be collisions of opinion and conflicting obligations or disagreement about the right way in the face of which one must constantly withdraw draw and listen to one's inner voice in order to find the individual standpoint that the self intends one to have fanatical political activity but not the performance of essential duties seems somehow incompatible with individuation a man who devoted himself entirely to freeing his country from foreign occupation had this dream with some of my compatriots I go up a Stairway To The Attic of a museum where there is a hall painted black in looking like a cabin on a ship a distinguished looking middle-aged lady opens the door her name is X daughter of x x was a famous national hero of the dreamer's country who attempted some centuries ago to free it he might be compared to Joan of Arc or William Tell in reality ex had no children in the hall we see the portraits of two aristocratic ladies dressed in Flowery brocaded garments while miss X is explaining these pictures to us they suddenly come to life first the eyes begin to live and then the chest seems to breathe people are surprised and go to a lecture room where Miss X will speak to them about the phenomenon she says that through her intuition and feeling these portraits came alive but some of the people are indignant and say that Miss X is mad some even leave the lecture room the important feature of this dream is that Thea figure Miss X is purely a creation of the dream she has however the name of a famous national hero Liberator as if she were for instance vilhelmina tell the daughter of williamt by the implications contained in the name the unconscious is pointing to the fact that today the dreamer should not try as X did long ago to free his country in an outer way now the dream says liberation is accomplished by the Ana by the dreamer's soul who accomplishes it by bringing the images of the unconscious to life dot that the hall in the Attic of the museum looks partly like a Ship's Cabin painted black is very meaningful the black color hints at Darkness night a turning Inward and if the hall is a cabin then the museum is somehow also a ship this suggests that when the mainland of collective Consciousness becomes flooded by unconsciousness and barbarism this museum ship filled with living images may turn into a saving Arc that will carry those who enter it to another spiritual Shore portraits hanging in a museum are usually the dead remains of the past and often the images of the unconscious are regarded in the same way until we discover that they are alive and meaningful when Thea who appears here in her rightful role of Soul guide contemplates the images with intuition and feeling they begin to live the indignant people in the dream represent the side of the dreamer that is influenced by Collective opinion something in him that distrusts and rejects the bringing to life of psychic images they personify a resistance to the unconscious that might Express itself something like this but what if they begin dropping atom bombs on us psychological insight won't be much help then this resistant side is unable to free itself from statistical thinking and from extroverted rational prejudices the dream however points out that in our time genuine Liberation can start only with a psychological transformation to what end does one liberate one's country if afterward there is no meaningful goal of life no goal for which it is is worthwhile to be free if man no longer finds any meaning in his life it makes no difference whether he wastes away under a communist or a capitalist regime only if he can use his freedom to create something meaningful is it relevant that he should be free that is why finding the inner meaning of life is more important to the individual than anything else and why the process of individuation must be given priority attempts to influence public opinion by means of newspapers radio television and advertising are based on two factors on the one hand they rely on sampling techniques that reveal the trend of opinion or wants that is of collective attitudes on the other they express the prejudices projections and unconscious complexes mainly the power complex of those who manipulate public opinion but statistics do no Justice to the individual although the average size of stones in a heap may be 5 cm one will find very few stones of exactly this size in the Heap that the second Factor cannot create anything positive is clear from the start but if a single individual devotes himself to individuation he frequently has a positive contagious effect on the people around him it is as if a spark leaps from one to another and this usually occurs when one has no intention of influencing others and often when one uses no words it is on to this Inner Path that Miss X tried to lead the dreamer nearly all religious systems on our planet contain images that symbolize the process of individuation or at least some stages of it in Christian countries the self is projected as I said before onto the second adom Christ in the east the relevant figures are those of Krishna and Buddha for people who are contained in a religion that is who still really believe in its content and teachings the psychological regulation of their lives is affected by religious symbols and even their dreams often revolve around them when the late Pope Pas the sattin issued the Declaration of the Assumption of Mary a Catholic woman dreamed for instance that she was a Catholic Priestess her unconscious seemed to extend the Dogma in this way if Mary is now almost a goddess she should have priestesses another Catholic woman who had resistances to some of the minor and outer aspects of her Creed dreamed that the Church of her home City had been pulled down and rebuilt but that the Tabernacle with the consecrated host and the statue of the Virgin Mary were to be transferred from the old to the new church the dream showed her that some of the man-made aspects of her religion needed renewal but that its basic symbols God's having become man and the great mother the Virgin Mary would survive the change such dreams demonstrate the living interest that the unconscious takes in the conscious religious representations of an individual this raises the question whether it is possible to detect a general Trend in all the religious dreams of contemporary people in the manifestations of the unconscious found in our modern Christian culture whether Protestant or Catholic Dr Jung often observed that there is an unconscious tendency at work to round off our trinitarian formula of the godhead with a fourth element which tends to be feminine dark and even evil actually this fourth element has always existed in the realm of our religious representations but it was separated ated from the image of God and became his counterpart in the form of matter itself or the Lord of matter I.E the devil now the unconscious seems to want to reunite these extremes the light having become too bright and the Darkness too somber naturally it is the central symbol of religion the image of the godhead that is most exposed to unconscious Tendencies toward transformation a Tibetan Abbot once told Dr Jung that the most impressive mandalas in Tibet are built up by imagination or directed fantasy when the psychological balance of the group is Disturbed or when a particular thought cannot be rendered because it is not yet contained in the sacred Doctrine and must therefore be searched for in these remarks two equally important basic aspects of mandala symbolism emerge the mandala serves a conservative purpose namely to restore a previously existing order but it also serves the creative purpose of giving expression and form to something that does not yet exist something new and unique the second aspect is perhaps even more important than the first but does not contradict it for in most cases what restores the old order simultaneously involves some element of New Creation in the New Order the older pattern Returns on a higher level the process is that of the ascending spiral which grows upward while simultaneously returning again and again to the same point a painting by a simple woman who was brought up in Protestant surroundings shows a mandala in the form of a spiral in a dream this woman received an order to paint the godhead later also in a dream she saw it in a book of God himself she saw only his wafting cloak the drapery of which made a beautiful display of light and Shadow this contrasted impressively with the stability of the Spiral in the deep blue sky fascinated by the cloak and the spiral the dreamer did not look closely at the other figure on the Rocks when she awoke and thought about who these Divine Figures were she suddenly realized that it was God himself this gave her a frightful shock which she felt for a long time usually the Holy Ghost is represented in Christian art by a fiery wheel or a dove but here it has appeared as a spiral this is a new thought not yet contained in the doctrine which has spontaneously Arisen from the unconscious that the Holy Ghost is the power that works for the further development of our religious understanding is not a new idea of course but its symbolic representation in the form of a spiral is new the same woman then painted a second picture also inspired by a dream showing the dreamer with her positive animus standing above Jerusalem when the wing of Satan descends to darken the city the satanic Wing strongly reminded her of the wafting cloak of God in the first painting but in the former dream The Spectator is high up somewhere in heaven and sees in front of her a terrific split between the Rocks the movement in the cloak of God is an attempt to reach Christ the figure on the right but it does not quite succeed in the second painting the same thing is seen from below from a human angle looking at it from a higher angle what is moving and spreading is a part of God above that rises the spiral as a symbol of possible further development but seen from the basis of our human reality this same thing in the air is the dark uncanny wing of the devil in the dreamer's life these two pictures became real in a way that does not concern us here but it is obvious that they also contain a collective meaning that reaches beyond the personal they may prophesy The Descent of a Divine Darkness upon the Christian hemisphere a darkness that points however toward the possibility of further Evolution since the axis of the Spiral does not move upward but into the background of the picture the further Evolution will lead neither to Greater spiritual height nor down into the realm of matter but to another dimension probably into the background of these Divine figures and that means into the unconscious when religious symbols that are partly different from those we know emerge from the unconscious of an individual it is often feared that these will wrongfully alter or diminish the officially recognized religious symbols this Fe fear even causes many people to reject analytical psychology and the entire unconscious if I look at such a resistance from a psychological point of view I should have to comment that as far as religion is concerned human beings can be divided into three types first there are those who still genuinely believe their religious doctrines whatever they may be for these people the symbols and doctrines click so satisfy in L with what they feel deep inside themselves that serious doubts have no chance to sneak in this happens when the views of Consciousness and the unconscious background are in relative Harmony people of this sort can afford to look at new psychological discoveries and facts without prejudice and need not fear that they may be caused to lose their faith even if their dreams should bring up some relatively unorthodox details these can be integrated into their General View the second type consists of those people who have completely lost their faith and have replaced it with purely conscious rational opinions for these people depth psychology simply means an introduction into newly discovered areas of the psyche and it should cause no trouble when they embark on the new adventure and investigate their dreams to test the truth of them then there is a third group of people who in one part of themselves probably the head no longer believe in their religious Traditions whereas in some other part they still do believe the French philosopher voler is an illustration of this he violently attacked the Catholic church with rational argument a lam but on his deathbed According to some reports he begged for extreme unction whether this is true or not his head was certainly unreligious whereas his Fe feelings and emotions seem still to have been Orthodox such people remind one of a person getting stuck in the automatic door of a bus he can neither get out into free space nor re-enter the bus of course the dreams of such persons could probably help them out of their dilemma but such people frequently have trouble turning toward the unconscious because they themselves do not know what they think and want to take the unconscious seriously is ultimately a matter of personal courage and integrity the complicated situation of those who are caught in a no man's land between the two states of mind is partly created by the fact that all official religious doctrines actually belong to the collective Consciousness what Freud called the super ego but once long ago they sprang from the unconscious this is a point that many historians of religion and theologians challenge they choose to assume that there was once some sort of Revelation I have searched for many years for concrete evidence for the jungian hypothesis about this problem but it has been difficult to find because most rituals are so old that one cannot Trace their origin the following example however seems to me to offer a most important clue Black Elk a medicine man of the ogalala Sue who died not long ago tells us in his autobiography Black Elk speaks that when he was nine years old he became seriously ill and during a sort of coma had a tremendous Vision he saw four groups of beautiful horses coming from the four corners of the world and then seated within a cloud he saw the six grandfathers The ancestral spirits of his tribe the grandfathers of the whole world they gave him six healing symbols for his people and showed him new ways of life but when he was 16 years old he suddenly developed a terrible phobia whenever a thunderstorm was approaching because he heard thunder beings calling to him to make haste it reminded him of the Thundering noise made by the approaching horses in his vision an old medicine man explained to him that his fear came from the fact that he was keeping his vision to himself and said that he must tell it to his tribe he did so and later he and his people acted out the vision in a ritual using real horses not merely Black Elk himself but many other members of his tribe felt infinitely better after this play some were even cured of their diseases Black Elk said even the horses seem to be healthier and happier after the dance the ritual was not repeated because the tribe was destroyed soon afterward but here is a different in which a ritual still survives several Eskimo tribes living near the keville river in Alaska explained the origin of their Eagle Festival in the following way a young Hunter shot dead a very unusual eagle and was so impressed by the beauty of the dead bird that he stuffed and made a fetish of him honoring him by sacrifices one day when the hunter had traveled far inland during his hunting two animal men suddenly appeared in the role of Messengers and led him to the land of the Eagles there he heard a dark drumming noise and The Messengers explained that this was the heartbeat of the Dead Eagle's mother then the eagle Spirit appeared to the hunter as a woman clothed in black she asked him to initiate an eagle Festival among his people to honor her dead son after the eagle people had shown him how to do this he suddenly found himself exhausted back in the place where he had met The Messengers returning home he taught his people how to perform the Great Eagle Festival as they have done faithfully ever since from such examples we see how a ritual or religious custom can spring directly from an unconscious Revelation experienced by a single individual out of such Beginnings people living in cultural groups developed their various religious activities with their enormous influence on the entire life of the society during a long process process of evolution the original material is shaped and reshaped by words and actions is beautified and acquires increasingly definite forms this crystallizing process however has a great disadvantage more and more people have no personal knowledge of the original experience and can only believe what their elders and teachers tell them about it they no longer know that such happenings are real and they are of course ignorant about how one feels during the experience in their present forms worked over and exceedingly aged such religious Traditions often resist further creative Alterations by the unconscious theologians sometimes even defend these true religious symbols and symbolic doctrines against the discovery of a religious function in the unconscious psyche forgetting that the values they fight for owe their existence to that very same function without a human psyche to receive Divine Inspirations and utter them in words or shape them in art no religious symbol has ever come into the reality of our human life we need only think of the prophets and the evangelists if someone objects that there is a religious reality in itself independent of the human psyche I can only answer such a person with this question who says this if not a human psyche no matter what we assert we can never get away from the existence of the psyche for we are contained within it and it is the only means by which we can grasp reality thus the modern discovery of the unconscious shuts one door forever it definitely excludes the illusory idea so favored by some individuals that a man can know spiritual reality in itself in modern physics too a door has been closed by Heisenberg's principle of of indeterminacy shutting out the delusion that we can comprehend an absolute physical reality the discovery of the unconscious however compensates for the loss of these beloved Illusions by opening before us an immense and unexplored New Field of realizations within which objective scientific investigation combines in a strange new way with personal ethical Adventure but as I said at the outset it is practically impossible to impart the whole reality of one's experience in the new field much is unique and can be only partially communicated by language here too a door is shut against the illusion that one can completely understand another person and tell him what is right for him once again however one can find a compensation for this in the new realm of experience by the discovery of the social function of the self which works in a hidden way to unite separate individuals who belong together intellectual chitchat is thus replaced by meaningful events that occur in the reality of the psyche hence for the individual to enter seriously into the process of individuation in the way that has been outlined means a completely new and different orientation toward life for scientists it also means a new and different scientific approach to Outer facts how this will work out in the field of human knowledge and in the social life of human beings cannot be predicted but to me it seems certain that Jung's discovery of the process of individuation is a fact that future Generations will have to take into account if they want to avoid drifting into a stagnant or even regressive Outlook part four symbolism in the visual arts anela jaf sacred symbols the Stone and the animal the history of symbolism shows that everything can assume symbolic significance natural objects like stones plants animals men mountains and valleys sun and moon wind water and fire or man-made things like houses boats or cars or even abstract forms like numbers or the triangle the square and the circle in fact the whole Cosmos is a potential symbol man with his symbol making propensity unconsciously transforms objects or forms into symbols thereby endowing them with great psychological importance and expresses them in both his religion and his visual art the intertwined history of religion and art reaching back to prehistoric times is the record that our ancestors have left of the symbols that were meaningful and moving to them even today as modern painting and sculpture show the interplay of religion and art is still alive for the first part of my discussion of symbolism in the visual arts I intend to examine some of the specific motifs that have been universally sacred or mysterious to man then for the remainder of the chapter I wish to discuss the phenomenon of 20th century art not in terms of its use of symbols but in in terms of its significance as a symbol itself a symbolic expression of the psychological condition of the modern world in the following pages I have chosen three recurring motifs with which to illustrate the presence and nature of symbolism in The Art of many different periods these are the symbols of the stone the animal and the circle Each of which has had enduring psychological significance from the earliest expressions of human consciousness to the most sophisticated forms of 20th century art we know that even unhoned Stones had a highly symbolic meaning for ancient and primitive societies rough natural stones were often believed to be The Dwelling Places of spirits or gods and were used in primitive cultures as tombstones boundary stones or objects of religious veneration their use may be regarded as a primeval form of sculpture a first attempt to invest the stone with more expressive power than chance and nature could give it the Old Testament story of Jacob's dream is a typical example of how thousands of years ago man felt that a living God or a Divine Spirit was embodied in the stone and how the stone became a symbol and Jacob went toward Haron and he lighted upon a certain place and carried there all night because the sun was set and he took of the stones of the place and put them for his pillows and lay down in that place to sleep and he dreamed and behold a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it and behold the Lord stood above it and said I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father and the god of Isaac the land whereon thou liest to thee will I give it and to thy seed and Jacob awake out of his sleep and he said surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not and he was afraid and said how Dreadful is this place this is none other but the house of God and this is the Gate of Heaven and Jacob rose up early in the morning and took the stone that he had put for his pillows and set it up for a pillar and poured oil upon the top of it and he called the name of that place Place Bethel for Jacob the stone was an integral part of the Revelation it was the mediator between himself and God in many primitive Stone sanctuaries the deity is represented not by a single Stone but by a great many UNH Stones arranged in distinct patterns the geometrical Stone alignments in Britney and the Stone Circle at stonehinge are famous examples Arrangements of rough natural stones also play a considerable part in the highly civilized Rock Gardens of Zen Buddhism their Arrangement is not geometrical but seems to have come about by pure chance in fact however it is the expression of a most refined spirituality very early in history men began trying to express what they felt to be the soul or Spirit of a rock by working it into a recognizable form in many cases the form was a more or less definite approximation to the human figure for instance the ancient menhir with their crude outlines of faces or the Herm that developed out of boundary stones in ancient Greece or the many primitive Stone Idols with human features the animation of the stone must be explained as the projection of a more or less distinct content of the unconscious into the stone the Primitive tendency to give merely a hint of a human figure and to retain much of the Stone's natural form can also be seen in modern sculpture many examples show the artist's concern with the self-expression of the stone to use the language of myth the stone is allowed to speak for itself this can be seen for instance in the work of the Swiss sculptor Hans asbacher the American sculptor James Rosati and the german-born artist m ma Ernst in a letter from mosia in 1935 erst wrote Alberto the Swiss artist jacometti and I are afflicted with sculptus we work on granite Boulders large and small from the Marine of the Forno Glacier wonderfully Polished by th Frost and weather they are in themselves fantastically beautiful no human hand can do that so why not leave the Spade work to the elements and conf fine ourselves to scratching on them the Runes of our own Mystery what erns meant by mystery is not explained but later in this chapter I shall try to show that The Mysteries of the modern artist are not very different from those of the Old Masters who knew the spirit of the stone the emphasis on this spirit in much sculpture is one indication of the shifting indefinable borderline between religion and art sometimes S one cannot be separated from the other the same ambivalence can also be seen in another symbolic Motif as it appears in age-old works of art the symbol of the animal animal pictures go back to the ice age that is between 60,000 and 10,000 BC they were discovered on the walls of caves in France and Spain at the end of the last century but it was not until early in the present Century that archaeologists began to realize their extreme importance and to inquire into their meaning these inquiries revealed an infinitely remote prehistoric culture whose existence had never even been suspected even today A Strange Magic seems to haunt the caves that contain the rock Engravings and paintings according to the German art historian Herbert inhabitants of the areas in Africa Spain France and scand Navia where such paintings are found could not be induced to go near the caves a kind of religious awe or perhaps a fear of spirits hovering among the rocks and the paintings held them back passing Nomads still lay their vo of offerings before the old rock paintings in North Africa in the 15th century pope kius the second prohibited religious ceremonies in the cave with the horse pictures which cave the pope meant is not known but there can be no doubt that it was a cave of the Ice Age containing animal pictures all this goes to prove that the caves and rocks with the animal paintings have always been instinctively felt to be what they originally were religious places the Newman of the place has outlived the centuries in a number of caves the modern visitor must travel through low dark and damp passages till he reaches the point where the Great painted Chambers suddenly open out this arduous approach May Express the desire of the Primitive men to safegard from common sight all that was contained and went on in the caves and to protect their mystery the sudden and unexpected sight of the paintings in the chambers coming after the difficult and awe inspiring approach must have made an overwhelming impression on primitive man the Paleolithic cave paintings consist almost entirely of figures of animals whose movements and postures have been observed in nature and rendered with great artistic skill there are however many details that show that the Figures were intended to be something more than naturalistic reproductions writes the strange thing is that a good many primitive paintings have been used as targets at montespan there is an engraving of a horse that is being driven into a trap it is p with the marks of missiles a clay model of a bear in the same cave has 42 holes these pictures suggest a hunting magic like that still practiced today by hunting tribes in Africa the painted animal has the function of a double by its symbolic Slaughter the hunters attempt to anticipate and ensure the death of the real animal this is a form of sympathetic magic which is based on the reality of a a double represented in a picture what happens to the picture will happen to the original the underlying psychological fact is a strong identification between a living being and its image which is considered to be the being Soul this is one reason why a great many primitive people today will shrink from being photographed other cave pictures must have served magic fertility rights they show animals at the moment of mating an example can be seen in the figures of a male and female bison in the tuque L duar cave in France thus the realistic picture of the animals was enriched by overtones of magic and took on a symbolic significance it became the image of the living essence of the animal the most interesting figures in the cave paintings are those of semi-human beings in animal disguise which are sometimes to be found besides the animals in the twah frer cave in France a man wrapped in an animal hide is playing A Primitive flute as if he meant to put a spell on the animals in the same cave there is a dancing human being with antlers a horse's head and Bear's Paws this figure dominating a medley of several hundred animals is unquestionably the lord of the animals the customs and usages of some primitive African tribes today can throw some light on the meaning of these mysterious and doubtless symbolic figures in initiations secret societies and even the institution of monarchy in these tribes animals and animal disguises often play an important part the king and chief are animals too generally lions or leopards vestiges of this custom may still be discerned in the title of the Emperor of Ethiopia H salassi the lion of Judah or the honorific name of Dr Hastings Bond the lion of nyasaland the further back we go in time or the more primitive and close to Nature the society is the more literally such titles must be taken a primitive Chief is not only disguised as the animal when he appears at initiation rights in full animal disguise he is the animal still more he is an animal spirit a terrifying demon who performs circumcision at such moments he incorporates or represents the ancestor of the tribe and the clan and therefore the Primal God himself he represents and is the totem animal thus we probably should not go far wrong in seeing in the figure of the dancing Animal Man in The chah Fray cave a kind of Chief who has been transformed by his disguise into an animal demon in the course of time the complete animal disguise was superseded in many places by animal and Demon masks primitive men lavished all their artistic skill on these masks and many of them are still unsurpassed in the power and intensity of their expression they are often the objects of the same veneration as the god or demon himself animal masks play a part in the folk Arts of many modern countries like Switzerland or in the magnificently expressive mass of the ancient Japanese no drama which is still performed in modern Japan the symbolic function of the Mask is the same as that of the original animal disguise individual human expression is submerged but in its place the wearer assumes the dignity and the beauty and also the horrifying expression of an animal demon in psychological terms The Mask transforms its wearer into an archetypal image danc which was originally nothing more than a completion of the animal disguise by appropriate movements and gestures was probably supplementary to the initiation or other rights it was so to speak performed by demons in honor of a demon in the soft clay of the tuque dodu bear cave Herbert found footprints that led round animal figures they show that dancing was part of even the Ice Age rights only he prints can be seen cun writes the dancers had moved like bison they had danced a bison dance for the fertility and increase of the animals and for their Slaughter in his introductory chapter Dr Yung has pointed out the close relation or even identification between the native and his totem animal or bush Soul there are special Ceremonies for the establishment of this relationship especially the initiation rights for both boys the boy enters into possession of his animal soul and at the same time sacrifices his own animal being by circumcision this dual process admits him to the totem Clan and establishes his relationship to his totem animal above all he becomes a man and in a still wider sense a human being East Coast Africans describe the uncircumcised as animals they have neither received an animal Soul nor sacrificed their animality in other words since neither the human nor the animal aspect of an uncircumcised boy's Soul has become conscious his animal aspect was regarded as dominant the animal Motif is usually symbolic of man's primitive and instinctual nature even civilized men must realize the violence of their instinctual drives and their powerlessness in face of the autonomous emotions erupting from the unconscious this is still more the case with primitive men whose Consciousness is not highly developed and who are still less well equipped to weather the emotional storm in the first chapter of this book when Dr Jung is discussing the ways in which man developed the power of reflection he takes an example of an African who fell into a rage and killed his beloved little son when the man recovered himself he was overwhelmed with greed and remorse for what he had done in this case a negative impulse broke loose and did its deadly work regardless of the conscious will the animal demon is a highly expressive symbol for such an Impulse the vividness and concreteness of the image enables man to establish a relationship with it as a representative of the overwhelming power in himself he fears it and seeks to propitiate it by sacrifice and ritual a large number of myths are concerned with a primal animal which must be sacrificed in the cause of fertility or even creation one example of this is the sacrifice of a bull by the Persian son God methas from which sprang the Earth with all wealth and fruitfulness in the Christian Legend of St George slaying the dragon the Primal right of sacrificial Slaughter again appears in the religions and religious art of practically every race animal attributes are ascribed to the Supreme gods or the gods are represented as animals the ancient Babylonians translated their gods into the heavens in the shape of the ram the bull the crab the lion the Scorpion the fish and so on the signs of the zodiac the Egyptians represented the godess haor as cow headed the god Aon as RAM headed and Thoth as Ibis headed or in the shape of a baboon ganish the Hindu god of Good Fortune has a human body but the head of an elephant Vishnu is a boar hanu man is an ape God Etc the Hindus incidentally do not assign the first place in the hierarchy of being to man the elephant and lion stand higher Greek mythology is full of animal symbolism Zeus the father of the Gods often approaches a girl whom he desires in the shape of a swan a bull or an eagle in Germanic mythology the cat is sacred to the goddess Freya while the boar The Raven and the horse are sacred to won even in Christianity animal symbolism plays a surprisingly great part three of the evangelists have animal emblems St Luke has the ox St Mark the lion and St John The Eagle only only one St Matthew is represented as a man or as an angel Christ himself symbolically appears as the Lamb of God or the fish but he is also the serpent exalted on the cross the lion and in rarer cases the Unicorn these animal attributes of Christ indicate that even the Son of God the Supreme personification of man can no more dispense with his animal nature than with his higher spiritual nature nature the subhuman as well as the Superhuman is felt to belong to the realm of the Divine the relationship of these two aspects of man is beautifully symbolized in the Christmas picture of the birth of Christ in a stable among animals the boundless profusion of animal symbolism in the religion and art of all times does not merely emphasize the importance of the symbol it shows how vital it is for men to integrate into their lives the symbol's psychic content Instinct in itself an animal is neither good nor evil it is a piece of nature it cannot desire anything that is not in its nature to put this another way it obeys its instincts these instincts often seem mysterious to us but they have their parallel in human life the foundation of human nature is Instinct but in man the animal being which lives in him him as his instinctual psyche may become dangerous if it is not recognized and integrated in life man is the only creature with the power to control Instinct by his own will but he is also able to suppress distort and wounded and an animal to speak metaphorically is never so wild and dangerous as when it is wounded suppressed instincts can gain control of a man they can even destroy him The Familiar dream in which the dreamer is pursued by an animal nearly always indicates that an instinct has been split off from the Consciousness and ought to be or is trying to be readmitted and integrated into life the more dangerous the behavior of the animal in the dream the more unconscious is the Primitive and instinctual soul of the dreamer and the more imperative is its integration into his life if some irreparable evil is to be forestalled suppressed and wounded instincts are the dangers threatening civilized man uninhibited drives are the dangers threatening primitive man in both cases the animal is alienated from its true nature and for both the acceptance of the animal soul is the condition for wholeness and a fully lived life primitive man must tame the animal in himself and make it his helpful companion civilized man must heal the the animal in himself and make it his friend other contributors to this book have discussed the importance of the stone and animal motifs in terms of dream and myth I have used them here only as general examples of the appearance of such living symbols throughout the history of Art and especially religious art let us now examine in the same way a most powerful and universal symbol the circle the symbol of the circle Dr m dasl Von frons has explained the circle or sphere as a symbol of the self it expresses the totality of the psyche in all its aspects including the relationship between man and the whole of nature whether the symbol of the circle appears in primitive Sun worship or modern religion in myths or dreams in the mandalas drawn by Tibetan Monks in the ground plans of cities or in the spherical concepts of early astronomers it always points to the single most vital aspect of life its ultimate wholeness an Indian creation myth relates that the god Brahma standing on a huge thousand pedal Lotus turned his eyes to the Four Points of the compass this four-fold survey from the circle of the lotus was a kind of preliminary orientation an indispensable taking of bearings before he began his work of creation a similar story story is told of Buddha at the moment of his birth a lotus flower rose from the earth and he stepped into it to gaze into the 10 directions of space the lotus in this case was eight raid and Buddha also gazed upward and downward making 10 directions this symbolic gesture of survey was the most concise method of showing that from the moment of his birth the Buddha was a unique personality predestined to receive illumination his personality and his further existence were given the imprint of wholeness the spatial orientation performed by Brahma and Buddha may be regarded as symbolic of the human need for psychic orientation the four functions of Consciousness described by Dr Jung in his chapter thought feeling intuition and sensation equip man to deal with the impressions of the world he receives from within and without it is by means of these functions that he comprehends and assimilates his experience it is by means of them that he can respond brahma's four-fold survey of the universe symbolizes the necessary integration of these four functions that man must achieve in art the circle is often eight raay this expresses a reciprocal overlapping of the four functions of Consciousness so that four further intermediate functions come about for instance thought colored by feeling or Intuition or feeling tending toward sensation in the visual art of India and the Far East the four or eight ra circle is the usual pattern of the religious images that serve as instruments of meditation in tibetan lism especially richly figured mandalas play an important part as a rule these mandalas represent the cosmos in its relation to divine power Powers but a great many of the Eastern meditation figures are purely geometrical in design these are called yantas aside from the circle a very common yantra Motif is formed by two interpenetrating triangles one point upward the other point downward traditionally this shape symbolizes the union of Shiva and Shakti the male and female divinities a subject that also appears in sculpture in countless variations in terms of psychological symbolism it expresses the union of opposites the union of the personal temporal world of the ego with the non-personal Timeless world of the non-ego ultimately this Union is the Fulfillment and goal of all religions it is the union of the Soul with God the two interpenetrating triangles have a symbolic meaning similar to that that of the more common circular mandala they represent the wholeness of the psyche or self of which Consciousness is just as much apart as the unconscious in both the triangle yantas and the sculptural representations of the Union of Shiva and Shakti the emphasis lies on a tension between the Opposites hence the marked erotic and emotional character of many of them this Dynamic quality implies a process the creation or coming into being of wholeness while the four or eight raid Circle represents holess as such as an existing entity the abstract Circle also figures in Zen painting speaking of a picture entitled The Circle by the famous Zen priest Sanai another zen master writes in the Zen sect the circle represents Enlightenment it symbolizes human perfection abstract mandalas also appear in European Christian art some of the most Splendid examples are the rose Windows of the cathedrals these are representations of the self of man transposed onto the cosmic plain a cosmic mandala in the shape of a shining White Rose was revealed to Dante in a vision we may regard as mandalas the Halos of Christ and the Christian Saints in religious paintings in in many cases the Halo of Christ is alone divided into four a significant illusion to his sufferings as the son of man and his death on the cross and at the same time a symbol of his differentiated wholeness on the walls of early Romanesque churches abstract circular figures can sometimes be seen they may go back to Pagan Originals in non-Christian art such circles are called Sun Wheels they appear in rock Engravings that date back to the Neolithic epic before the wheel was invented as young has pointed out the term Sun wheel denotes only the external aspect of the figure what really mattered at all times was the experience of an archetypal inner image which Stone AG man rendered in his art as Faithfully as he depicted Bulls gazel or Wild Horses many pictorial mandelas are to be found in Christian art for example the rather rare picture of the virgin in the center of a circular tree which is the god symbol of the burning bush the most widely current mandalas in Christian art are those of Christ surrounded by the four evangelists these go back to the ancient Egyptian representations of the god Horus and His Four sons in architecture the mandala also plays an important part but one that often passes unnoticed it forms the ground plan both of secular and sacred buildings in nearly all civilizations it enters into classical medieval and even modern town planning a classical example appears in plutarch's account of the foundation of Rome according to Plutarch ramulus sent for Builders from aturia who instructed him by sacred usages and written rules about all the ceremonies to be observed in the same way as in the Mysteries first they dug a round pit where the chissum or Court of assembly now stands and into this pit they threw symbolic offerings of the fruits of the earth then each man took a small piece of Earth of the land from which he came and these were all thrown into the pit together the pit was given the name of Mundus which also meant the cosmos round it Romulus drew the boundary of the city in a circle with a plow drawn by a bull and a cow wherever a gate was planned the plow share was taken out and the plow carried over the city founded in this solemn ceremony was circular in shape yet the old and famous description of Rome is herbs quadrada the square City according to one theory that attempts to reconcile this contradiction the word quadrada must be understood to mean quadripartite that is the circular city was divided into four parts by two main arteries running from north to south and west to east the point of intersection coincided with the Mundus mentioned by plutar according to another theory the contradiction can be understood only as a symbol namely as a visual representation of the mathematically insoluble problem of the squaring of the circle which had greatly preoccupied the Greeks and was to play so great A Part in Alchemy strangely enough before describing the circle ceremony of the foundation of the City by Romulus Plutarch also speaks of Rome as Roma quadrada a square City for him Rome was both a circle and a square in each Theory a true Mandela is involved and that links up with plutarch's statement that the foundation of the city was taught by the atrans as in the Mysteries as a secret right it was more than a mere outward form by its Mandela ground plan the city with its inhabitants is exalted above the purely secular realm this is further emphasized by the fact that the city has a center the Mundus which established the city's relationship to the other realm the Abode of the ancestral Spirits the Mundus was covered by a great stone called The Soul Stone on certain days the stone was removed and then it was said the spirits of the Dead Rose from the shaft a number of medieval cities were founded on the ground plan of a Mandela and were surrounded by an approximately circular wall in such a city as in Rome two main arteries divided it into quarters and led to the four Gates the church or Cathedral stood at the point of intersection of these arteries the inspiration of the medieval city with its quarters was the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Revelations which had a square ground plan in walls with three times four Gates but Jerusalem had no Temple at its Center for God's immediate presence was the center of it the Mandela ground plan for a city is by no means outmoded a modern example is the city of Washington DC whether In classical or in primitive foundations the mandala ground plan was never dictated by consider ations of Aesthetics or economics it was a transformation of the city into an ordered Cosmos a sacred Place Bound by its Center to the other world and this transformation accorded with the vital feelings and needs of religious man every building sacred or secular that has a Mandela ground plan is the projection of an archetypal image from within the human unconscious onto the outer world the city the Fortress and the temple become symbols of psychic wholeness and in this way exercise a specific influence on the human being who enters or lives in the place it need hardly be emphasized that even in architecture the projection of the psychic content was a purely unconscious process such things cannot be thought up Dr Young has written but must grow again from the forgotten Depths if they are to express the deepest ins sites of Consciousness and the loftiest intuitions of the spirit thus amalgamating the uniqueness of present-day Consciousness with the age-old past of humanity the central symbol of Christian art is not the Mandela but the cross or crucifix up to carolingian times the equilateral or Greek cross was the usual form and therefore the Mandela was indirectly implied but in the course of time the Center moved upward until the cross took on the Latin form with the stake and the Cross Beam that is customary today this development is important because it corresponds to the inward development of Christianity up to the high Middle Ages in simple terms it symbolized the tendency to remove the center of man and his faith from the earth and to elevate it into the spiritual sphere this tendency sprang from the desire to put into action Christ saying my kingdom is not of this world Earthly life the world and the body were therefore forces that had to be overcome medieval man's hopes were thus directed to the beyond for it was only from Paradise that the promise of fulfillment beckoned this endeavor reached its climax in the Middle Ages and in medieval mysticism the hopes of the Beyond found expression not only in the raising of the center of the cross it can also be seen in the increasing height of the gothic Cathedrals which seem to set the laws of gravity at Defiance their cruciform ground plan is that of the elongated Latin cross though the baptistries with the font in the center have a true mandala ground plan with the dawning of the Renaissance a revolutionary change began to occur in man's conception of the world the upward movement which reached its climax in the late Middle Ages went into reverse man turned back to the Earth he rediscovered the beauties of Nature and the body began the first circumnavigation of the globe and proved the world to be a sphere the laws of mechanics and causality became the foundations of science the world of religious feeling of the irrational and of mysticism which had played so great A Part in medieval times was more and more submerged by the triumphs of logical thought similarly Art became more realistic and sensuous it broke away from the religious subjects of the Middle Ages and embraced the whole visible world it was overwhelmed by the manifoldness of the Earth by its Splendor and horror and became what gothic art had been before it a true symbol of the spirit of the age thus it can hardly be regarded as accidental that a change also came over Ecclesiastes iCal building in contrast to The Soaring Gothic Cathedrals there were more circular ground plans the circle replac the Latin cross this change in form however and this is the important point for the history of symbolism must be attributed to aesthetic and not to religious causes that is the only possible explanation for the fact that the center of these round churches the truly holy place is empty and that the altar stands in a recess in a wall away from the center for that reason the plan cannot be described as a true mandala an important exception is St Peter's in Rome which was built to the plans of brante and Michaelangelo here the altar stands in the center one is tempted however to attribute this exception to the genius of The Architects for great genius is always both of and Beyond its time in spite of the far-reaching changes in art philosophy and science brought about by the Renaissance the central symbol of Christianity remained unchanged Christ was still represented on the Latin cross as he is today that meant that the center of religious man remained anchored on a higher more spiritual plane than that of Earthly man who had turned Back To Nature thus a rift arose between man's traditional Christian ity and his rational or intellectual mind since that time these two sides of modern man have never been brought together in the course of the centuries with man's growing insight into nature and its laws this division has gradually grown wider and it still splits the psyche of the Western Christian in the 20th century of course the brief historical summary given here has been oversimplified moreover it omits the secret religious movements within Christianity that took account in their beliefs of what was usually ignored by most Christians the question of evil the cathic or Earthly Spirit such movements were always in a minority and seldom had any very visible influence but in their way they fulfilled the important role of a contrapuntal accompaniment to Christian spirituality among the many sects and movements that arose about a D 1000 the Alchemists played a very important part they exalted the mysteries of matter and set them alongside those of the Heavenly Spirit of Christianity what they sought was a wholeness of man encompassing mind and body and they invented a thousand names and symbols for it one of their Central symbols was the quadratura circuli the squaring of the circle which is no more than the true Mandela The Alchemist not only recorded their work in their writings they created a wealth of pictures of their dreams and Visions symbolic pictures that are still as profound as they are baffling they were inspired by the Dark Side of nature evil the dream the spirit of Earth the mode of expression was always fabulous dreamlike and unreal both in word and picture the great 15th century Flemish painter herous Bosch may be regarded as the most important representative of this kind of imaginative art but at the same time more typical Renaissance painters working in the full light of day so to speak were producing the most Splendid works of sensuous art their fascination with Earth and nature went so deep that it practically determined the development of visual art for the next five centuries the last great representatives of sensuous art the art of the passing moment of life and air were the 19th century Impressionists we may here discriminate between two radically different modes of artistic representation many attempts have been made to Define their characteristics recently Herbert cun whose work on the cave paintings I've already mentioned has tried to draw a distinction between what he calls the imaginative and the sensory style the sensory style generally depicts a direct reproduction of nature or of the picture subject the imaginative on the other hand presents a fantasy or experience of the artist in an unrealistic even dreamlike and sometimes abstract manner C's two conceptions seem so simple and so clear that I'm glad to make use of them the first beginnings of imaginative art go back very far in history in the Mediterranean Basin its efflorescence dates from the third millennium BC it has only recently been realized that these ancient works of art are not the results of incompetence or ignorance they are modes of expression of a perfectly definite religious and spiritual emotion and they have a special appeal today for during the last half century art has been passing once more through a phase that can be described by the term imaginative today the geometrical or abstract symbol of the circle has again come to play a considerable role in painting but with few exceptions the traditional mode of representation has undergone a characteristic transformation that corresponds to the Dilemma of modern man's existence the circle is no longer a single meaningful figure that Embraces a whole world and dominates the picture sometimes the artist has taken it out of its Domin position replacing it by a Loosely organized group of circles sometimes the plane of the circle is asymmetrical an example of the asymmetrical circular plane may be seen in the famous Sun diss of the French painter Robert Del a painting by the Modern English painter Siri Richards now in Dr Jung's collection contains an entirely asymmetrical circular plane while far to the left there appears a very much smaller and empty circle in the French painter HRI matis is still life with vas of nerum the focus of vision is a green sphere on a slanting black beam which seems to gather into itself the manifold Circles of the nestum leaves the sphere overlaps a rectangular figure the top left hand corner of which is folded over given the artistic Perfection of the painting it is easy to forget that in the past these two abstract figures the circle and the square would have been United and would have expressed a world of thoughts and feelings but anyone who does remember and raises the question of meaning will find food for thought the two figures that from the beginning of time have formed a hole are in this painting torn apart or incoherently related yet both are there and are touching each other in a picture painted by the Russian born artist wasley Kandinsky there is a loose assembly of colored balls or circles that seem to be drifting like soap bubbles they too are tenuously connected with a background of one large rectangle with two small almost Square rectangles contained in it in another picture that he called a few circles a dark cloud or is it a swooping bird again Bears a Loosely arranged group of bright balls or circles circles often appear in unexpected Connections in the mysterious compositions of the British Artist Paul Nash in the Primeval Solitude of his landscape event on the Downs a ball lies in the right foreground though it is apparently a tennis ball the design on its surface forms the taiu the Chinese symbol of Eternity thus it opens up a new dimension in the lonely of the landscape something similar happens in Nash's landscape from a dream balls are rolling out of sight in an infinitely wide mirrored landscape with a huge Sun visible on the horizon another ball lies in the foreground in front of the roughly Square mirror in his drawing limits of understanding the Swiss artist Paul CLE places the simple figure of a sphere or a circle above a complex structure of ladders and lines Dr Jung has pointed out that a true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought Cann not think or what is only divined or felt that is the purpose of C's simple figure at the limits of understanding it is important to note that the square or groups of rectangles and squares or rectangles and rhomboids have appeared in modern art just as often as the circle the master of harmonious indeed musical compositions with squares is the Dutch born artist pet mandrian as a rule there is no actual Center in any of his pictures yet they form an ordered hole in their own strict almost aesthetic fashion still more common are paintings by other artists with irregular quinary compositions or numerous rectangles combined in more or less loose groups the circle is a symbol of the psyche even play described the psyche as a sphere the square and often the rectangle is a symbol of Earthbound matter of the body and reality in most modern art the connection between these two primary forms is either non-existent or loose and Casual their separation is another symbolic expression of the psychic state of 20th century man his soul has lost its roots and he is threatened by dissociation even in the world situation of today as Dr Jung pointed out in his opening chapter this split has become evident the Western and Eastern Hales of the Earth are separated by an iron curtain but the frequency with which the square and the circle appear must not be overlooked there seems to be an uninterrupted psychic urge to bring into Consciousness the basic factors of life that they symbolize also in certain abstract pictures of our time which merely represent a colored structure or a kind of Primal matter these forms occasionally appear as if they were germs of New Growth the symbol of the circle has played a curious part in a very different phenomenon of the life of our day and occasionally still does so in the last years of the second world war there arose the Visionary rumor of round flying bodies that became known as flying sauc ERS or UFOs unidentified flying objects Jung has explained the UFOs as a projection of a psychic content of wholeness that has at all times been symbolized by the circle in other words this Visionary rumor as can also be seen in many dreams of our time is an attempt by the unconscious Collective psych to heal the split in our apocalyptic age by means of the symbol of the circle modern painting as a symbol the terms Modern Art and modern painting are used in this chapter as the Layman uses them what I will be dealing with to use cun's term is modern imaginative painting pictures of this kind can be abstract or rather non-figurative but they need not always be so there will be no attempt to distinguish among such various forms as favism cubism expressionism futurism suprematism constructivism orphism and so on any specific illusion to one or the other of these groups will be quite exceptional and I am not concerned with an aesthetic differentiation of modern paintings nor above all with artistic evaluations modern imaginative painting is here taken simply as a phenomenon of our time that is the only way in which the question of of its symbolic content can be justified and answered in this brief chapter it is possible to mention only a very few artists and to select a few of their Works more or less at random I must content myself with discussing modern painting in terms of a small number of its Representatives my starting point is the psychological fact that the artist has at all times been the instrument and spokesman of the spirit of his age his work can be only partly understood in terms of his personal psychology consciously or unconsciously the artist gives form to the nature and values of his time which in their turn form him the modern artist himself often recognizes the interrelation of the work of art and its time thus the French critic and painter Jean bazay writes in his notes on contemporary painting nobody paints as he likes all a painter can do is to Will with all his might the painting his age is capable of the German artist fron Mark who died in the first world war said the great artists do not seek their forms in the midst of the past but take the deepest soundings they can of the genuine profoundest center of gravity of their age and as far back as 1911 Kandinsky wrote in his famous essay concerning the spiritual in art every epic is given its own measure of artistic freedom and even the most creative genius may not leap over the boundary of that freedom for the last 50 years modern art has been a general bone of contention and the discussion has lost none of its heat the ye are as passionate as the Nay yet the reiterated prophecy that Modern Art is finished has never come true the new way of expression has been triumphant to an unimagined degree if it is threatened at all it will be because it has degenerated into mannerism and modishness in the Soviet Union where non-figurative art has often been officially discouraged and produced only in private figurative art is threatened by a similar degeneration the general public in Europe at any rate is still in the heat of the battle the violence of the discussion shows that feeling runs high in both camps even those who are hostile to Modern Art cannot avoid being impressed by The Works they reject they are irritated or repelled but as the violence of their feeling shows they are moved as a rule the negative Fascination is no less strong than the positive the stream of visitors to exhibitions of Modern Art wherever and whenever they take place testifies to something more than curiosity curiosity would be satisfied sooner and the Fantastic prices that are paid for works of Modern Art are a measure of the status conferred upon them by Society Fascination arises when the unconscious has been moved the effect produced by works of Modern Art cannot be explained entirely by their visible form to the eye trained in classic or sensory art they are new and alien nothing in works of non-figurative art reminds The Spectator of his own world no objects in their own everyday surroundings no human being or animal that speaks a familiar language there is no welcome no visible Accord in the cosmos created by the artist and yet without any question there is a human Bond it may be even more intense than in works of sensory art which make a direct appeal to feeling and empathy it is the aim of the modern artist to give expression to his inner vision of man to the spiritual background of life and the world the modern work of art has abandoned not only the realm of the concrete natural sensuous world but also that of the individual it has become highly Collective and therefore even in the abbreviation of the pictorial hieroglyph touches not only the few but the many what remains individual is the manner of representation the style and quality of the modern work of art art it is often difficult for the Layman to recognize whether the artist's intentions are genuine and his expression spontaneous neither imitated nor aimed at effect in many cases he must accustom himself to new kinds of line and color he must learn them as he would learn a foreign language before he can judge their expressiveness and quality the pioneers of Modern Art have apparently understood how much they were asking of the public never have artists published so many manifestos and explanations of their aims as in the 20th century it is however not only to others that they are striving to explain and justify what they are doing it is also to themselves for the most part these manifestos are artistic confessions of Faith poetic and often confused or self-contradictory attempts to give Clarity to the strange outcome of today's artistic activities what really matters of course is and always has been the direct encounter with the work of art yet for the psychologist who is concerned with the symbolic content of Modern Art the study of these writings is most instructive for that reason the artists wherever possible will be allowed in the following discussion to speak for themselves the beginnings of Modern Art appeared in the early 1900s one of the most impressive personalities of that initiatory phase was Kandinsky whose influence is still clearly traceable in the paintings of the second half of the century many of his ideas have proved prophetic in his essay concerning form he writes the art of today embodies the spiritual mature to the point of Revelation the forms of this embodiment may be arranged between two polls one great abstraction two great realism these two poles open two paths which both lead to one goal in the end these two elements have always been present in art the first was expressed in the second today it looks as if they were about to carry on separate existences art seems to have put an end to the pleasant completion of the abstract by the concrete and vice versa to illustrate kandinsky's point that the two elements of art the abstract and the concrete have parted company in 1913 the Russian painter Casmir malovich painted a picture that consisted only of a black Square on a white ground it was perhaps the first purely abstract picture ever painted he wrote of it in my desperate struggle to liberate art from the ballast of the world of objects I took refuge in the form of the square a year later the French painter Marcel Duchamp set up an an object chosen at random a bottle rack on a pedestal and exhibited it Jean bazan wrote of it this bottle rack torn from its utilitarian context and washed up on the beach has been invested with the lonely Dignity of the derel good for nothing there to be used ready for anything it is alive it lives on The Fringe of existence its own disturbing absurd life the disturbing object that is the first step to art in its weird dignity and abandonment the object was immeasurably exalted and given significance that can only be called magical hence its disturbing absurd life it became an idol and at the same time an object of mockery its intrinsic reality was annihilated both malevich's square and du's bottle rack were symbolic gestures that had nothing to do with art in the strict sense of the word yet they Mark the two extremes great abstraction and great realism between which the imaginative art of the succeeding decades may be aligned and understood from the psychological standpoint the two gestures toward the naked object matter and the naked non-ob Spirit point to a collective psychic Rift that created its symbolic expression in the years before the catastrophe of the first World War four this Rift had first appeared in the Renaissance when it became manifest as a conflict between knowledge and Faith meanwhile civilization was removing man further and further from his instinctual foundation so that a gulf opened between nature and mind between the unconscious and Consciousness these opposites characterize the psychic situation that is seeking expression in modern art the secret soul of things as we have seen the starting point of the concrete was du's famous or notorious bottle rack the bottle rack was not intended to be artistic in itself Duchamp called himself an anti- artist but it brought to light an element that was to mean a great deal to artists for a long time to come the name they gave to it was objet truve or readymade the Spanish painter Joan mooe for instance goes to the beach every Dawn to collect things washed up by the tide things lying there waiting for someone to discover their personality he keeps his finds in his studio now and then he assembles some of them and the most curious compositions result the artist is often surprised himself at the shapes of his own creation as far back as 1912 the Spanish born artist Pablo p Caso and the French artist George Brock made what they called collages from scraps of rubbish Max erst cut clippings from The Illustrated papers of the so-called age of big business assembled them as the fancy took him and so transformed the stuffy solidity of the Bourgeois age into a demonic dreamlike unreality the German painter Kurt schwitters worked with the contents of his Ash can he used Nails brown paper ragged scraps of newspaper Railway tickets and remnants of cloth he succeeded in assembling this rubbish with such seriousness and freshness that surprising effects of strange Beauty came about in schwitters obsession with things however this manner of composition occasionally became merely absurd he made a construction of rubbish that he called a cathedral built for things schwitters worked on it for 10 years and three stories of his own house had to be demolished to give him the space he needed schwitters his work and the Magical exaltation of the object give the first hint of the place of Modern Art in the history of the human mind and of its symbolic significance they reveal the tradition that was being unconsciously perpetuated it is the tradition of the Hermetic Christian brotherhoods of the Middle Ages and of the Alchemists who conferred even on matter the stuff of the Earth the Dignity of their religious contemplation schwitter is exaltation of the grossest material to the rank of art to a cathedral in which the rubbish would leave no room for a human being Faithfully followed the old alchemical tenant According to which the sought for precious object is to be found in filth Kandinsky expressed the same ideas when he wrote everything that is dead Quivers not only the things of poetry stars moon wood flowers but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street everything has a secret Soul which is silent more often than it speaks what the artists like the Alchemists probably did not realize was the psychological fact that they were projecting part of their psyche into matter or inanimate objects hence the mysterious animation that entered into such things and the Great Value attached even to rubbish they projected their own Darkness their Earthly Shadow a psychic content that they and their time had lost and abandoned unlike The Alchemist however men like schwitters were not contained in and protected by the Christian order in one sense schwitter his work is opposed to it a kind of monomania binds him to matter while Christianity seeks to Vanquish matter and yet paradoxically it is schwitters monomania that robs the material in his creations of its inherent significance as concrete reality in his pictures matter is transformed into an abstract composition therefore it begins to discard its substantiality and to dissolve in that very process these pictures become a symbolic expression of our time which has seen the concept of the absolute concreteness of matter undermined by modern Atomic physics painters began to think about the magic object and the secret soul of things the Italian painter Carlo Kar wrote it is common things that reveal those forms of Simplicity through which we can realize that higher more significant condition of being where the whole Splendor of art resides Ides Paul C said the object expands beyond the bounds of its appearance by our knowledge that the thing is more than its exterior presence to our eyes and Jean bazay wrote an object awakens our love just because it seems to be the bearer of powers that are greater than itself sayings of this kind recall the old alchemical concept of a spirit in matter believed to be the spirit in and behind behind inanimate objects like metal or stone psychologically interpreted this spirit is the unconscious it always manifests itself when conscious or rational knowledge has reached its limits and mystery sets in for man tends to fill the inexplicable and mysterious with the contents of his unconscious he projects them as it were into a dark empty vessel the feeling that the object was more than met the eye which was shared by many artists found a most remarkable expression in the work of the Italian painter Georgio deiro he was a Mystic by temperament and a tragic Seeker who never found what he sought on his self- portrit 1908 he wrote quid amabo Enigma EST and what am I to love if not the Enigma chero was the founder of the so-called pitura metap physica every object he wrote has two aspects the common aspect which is the one we generally see and which is seen by everyone and the Ghostly and metaphysical aspect which only rare individuals see at moments of Clairvoyance and metaphysical meditation a work of art must relate something that does not appear in its visible form Cho's Works reveal this ghostly aspect of things they are dreamlike transpositions of reality which arise as Visions from the unconscious but his metaphysical abstraction is expressed in a panic-stricken rigidity and the atmosphere of the pictures is one of nightmare and of fathomless melancholy the city squares of Italy the towers and objects are set in an over acute perspective as if they were in a vacuum illuminated by a merciless Cold Light from an unseen Source antique heads or statues of gods conjure up the classical past in one of the most terrifying of his pictures he has placed beside the marble head of a goddess a pair of red rubber gloves a magic object in the modern sense a green ball on the ground acts as a symbol uniting the crass opposites without it there would be more than a hint of psychic disintegration this picture was clearly not the result of over sophisticated deliberation it must be taken as a dream picture KIRO was deeply influenced by the philosophies of nche and schopenhauer he wrote schopenhauer and nche were the first to teach the Deep significance of the senselessness of life and to show how this senselessness could be transformed into art the Dreadful void they discovered is the very soulless and untroubled beauty of matter it may be doubted whether chero succeeded in transposing the Dreadful void into untroubled Beauty some of his pictures are extremely disturbing many are as terrifying as nightmares but in his effort to find artistic expression for the void he penetrated to the core of the existential dilemma of contemporary man n whom chero quotes as his authority has given a name to the Dreadful void in his saying God is dead without referring to nche Kandinsky wrote in on the spiritual in art Heaven is empty God is dead a phrase of this kind may sound abominable but it is not new the idea of the death of God and its immediate Consequence the metaphysical void had troubled the minds of 19th century poets especially in France and Germany it was a long development that in the 20th century reached the stage of open discussion and found expression in art the cleavage between Modern Art and Christianity was finally accomplished Dr Jung also came to realize that this strange and mysterious phenomenon of the death of God is a psychic fact of our time in 1937 he wrote I know and here I am expressing what countless other people know know that the present time is the time of God's disappearance and death for years he had observed the Christian God image fading in his patient dreams that is in the unconscious of Modern Men the loss of that image is the loss of the Supreme factor that gives life a meaning it must be pointed out however that neither nich's assertion that God is dead nor chiro's metaphysical void nor Young's deductions from from unconscious images have anything final to say about the reality and existence of God or of a transcendental being or not being they are human assertions in each case they are based as Yung has shown in Psychology and religion on contents of the unconscious psyche that have entered Consciousness in tangible form as images dreams ideas or intuitions the origin of these contents and the cause of such a transformation from a living to a dead God must remain unknown on the frontier of mystery Jericho never came to a solution of the problem presented to him by the unconscious his failure may be seen most clearly in his representation of the human figure given the present religious situation it is man himself to whom should be accorded a new if impersonal dignity and resp responsibility Jung described it as a responsibility to Consciousness but in chiro's work man is deprived of his soul he becomes a manichino a puppet without a face and therefore also without Consciousness in the various versions of his great metaphysician a faceless figure is enthroned on a pedestal made of rubbish the figure is a consciously or unconsciously ironical representation of the man who strives to discover the truth about metaphysics and at the same time a symbol of ultimate loneliness and senselessness or perhaps the man cheni which also haunt The Works of other contemporary artists are a premonition of the faceless Mass man when he was 40 chero abandoned his pitura metaphysica he turned back to traditional modes but his work lost depth here is certain proof that there is no back to where you came from for the creative mind whose unconscious has been involved in the fundamental dilemma of modern existence a counterpart to chero might be seen in the Russian born painter Mark shagal his quest in his work is also a mysterious and lonely poetry and the Ghostly aspect of things that only rare individuals may see but sagal's Rich symbolism is rooted in the iety of Eastern Jewish hassidism and in a warm feeling for life he was faced with neither the problem of the Void nor the death of God he wrote everything may change in our demoralized world except the heart man's love and his striving to know the Divine painting like all poetry has its part in the Divine people feel this today just as much as they used to the British author sir Herbert Reed once wrote a shagal that he never quite crossed the threshold into the unconscious but has always kept one foot on the earth that had nourished him this is exactly the right relation to the unconscious it is all the more important that as Reed emphasizes shagal has remained one of the most influential artists of our time with the contrast between chagal and chero a question arises that is important for the understanding of symbolism in modern art how does the relationship between Consciousness and the unconscious take shape in the work of modern artists or to put it another way where does man stand one answer may be found in the movement called surrealism of which the French poet Andre Breton is regarded as the founder chero too may be described as a surrealist as a student of medicine Breton had been introduced to the work work of Freud thus dreams came to play an important part in his ideas can dreams not be used to solve the fundamental problems of life he wrote I believe that the apparent antagonism between dream and reality will be resolved in a kind of absolute reality insur reality Breton grasped the point admirably what he sought was a Reconciliation of the Opposites Consciousness and the UN conscious but the way he took to reach his goal could only lead him astray he began to experiment with Freud's method of free association as well as with automatic writing in which the words and phrases arising from the unconscious are set down without any conscious control Breton called it thoughts dictation independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation but that process simply means that the way is open to the stream of un conscious images and the important or even decisive part to be played by Consciousness is ignored as Dr Jung has shown in his chapter it is consciousness that holds the key to the values of the unconscious and that therefore plays the decisive part Consciousness alone is competent to determine the meaning of the images and to recognize their significance for man here and now in the concrete reality of the present only in an interplay of Consciousness and the unconscious can the unconscious prove its value and perhaps even show a way to overcome The Melancholy of the Void if the unconscious Once In Action is left to itself there is a risk that its contents will become overpowering or will manifest their negative destructive side if we look at surrealist pictures like Salvador doll's the burning giraffe with this in mind we may feel the wealth of their fantasy and the overwhelming power of their unconscious imagery but we realize the horror and the symbolism of the end of all things that speaks from many of them the unconscious is pure nature and like nature pours out its gifts in profusion but left to itself and without the human response from Consciousness it can again like nature destroy its own gifts and sooner or later sweep them into Annihilation the question of the role of Consciousness in modern painting also arises in connection with the use of chance as a means of composing paintings in Beyond painting Max Ernst wrote The Association of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a surgical table he is quoting from the poet L Trion is a familiar example which has now become classical of the phenomenon discovered by the realists that the association of two or more apparently alien elements on a plane alien to both is the most potent ignition of poetry that is probably as difficult for the Layman to comprehend as the comment Braton made to the same effect The Man Who Cannot visualize a horse Galloping on a tomato is an idiot we might recall here the chance Association of a marble head and red rubber gloves in Che io's picture of course many of these associations were intended as jokes and nonsense but most modern artists have been concerned with something radically different from jokes chance plays a significant part in the work of the French sculptor Jean or Hans ARP his wood cuts of leaves and other forms thrown together at random were another expression of the Quest for as he put it a secret Primal meaning slumbering beneath the world of appearances he called them leaves arranged according to the laws of chance and squares arranged according to the laws of chance in these compositions it is chance that gives depth to the work of art it points to an unknown but active principle of order and meaning that becomes manifest in things as their secret Soul it was above all the desire to make chance essential in Paul C's words that underlay the surrealist efforts to take the grain of wood cloud formations and so on as a starting point for their Visionary painting Max Ernst for instance went back to Leonardo da Vinci who wrote an essay on belli's remark that if you throw a paint soaked sponge at a wall in the splashes it makes you will see heads animals Landscapes and a host of other configurations Ernst has described how a vision pursued him in 1925 it forced itself on him as he was staring at a tiled floor marked by thousands of scratches in order to give Foundation to my powers of meditation and hallucination I made a series of drawings of the tiles by laying sheets of paper on them at random and then taking graphite rubbings when I fixed my eyes on the result I was astounded by a suddenly sharpened sense of a hallucinatory series of contrasting and superposed pictures I made a collection of the first results obtained from these fages and called it histoire natural it is important to note that Ernst placed over or behind some of these fages a ring or Circle which gives the picture A peculiar atmosphere and depth here the psychologist can recognize the unconscious drive to oppose the chaotic hazards of the image's natural language by the symbol of a self-contained psychic hole thus establishing equilibrium the ring or Circle dominates the picture psychic wholeness rules nature itself meaningful and giving meaning in Max er's efforts to pursue the secret pattern in things we may detect an affinity with the 19th century Romantics they spoke of Nature's handwriting which can be seen everywhere on wings eggshells in clouds snow ice crystals and other strange conjunctions of chance just as much as in dreams or visions they saw everything as the expression of one and the same pictorial language of nature thus it was a genuinely romantic gesture when Max Ernst called the pictures produced by his experiments natural history and he was right for the unconscious which had conjured up the pictures in the chance configuration of things is nature it is with ernst's natural history or arp's compositions of chance that the reflections of the psychologists begin he is faced with the question of what meaning a chance Arrangement wherever and whenever it comes about can have for the man who happens on it with this question man and Consciousness come into the matter and with them the possibility of meaning the chance created picture may be beautiful or ugly harmonious or discordant rich or poor in content well or ill painted these factors determine its artistic value but they cannot satisfy the psychologist often to the distress of the artist or of anyone who finds Supreme satisfaction in the contemplation of form the psychologist seeks further and tries to understand the secret code of chance arrangement in so far as man can decipher it at all the number and form of the objects thrown together at random by ARP raise as many questions as any detail of er's fantastic frontages for the psychologist they are symbols and therefore they cannot only be felt but up to a certain point can also be interpreted the apparent or actual Retreat of man from many modern works of art the lack of reflection and the predominance of the unconscious over Consciousness offer critics frequent points of attack they speak of pathological art or compare it with pictures by the insane for it is characteristic of psychosis that Consciousness and the ego personality are submerged and drowned by floods of contents from the unconscious regions of the psyche it is true that the comparison is not so odious today as it was even a generation ago when Dr Jung first pointed out a connection of this kind in his essay on Picasso 1932 it provoked a storm of indignation today the catalog of a well-known Zurich Art Gallery speaks of the almost schizophrenic Obsession of a famous artist and the German writer Rudolph castner described gorg trocal as one of the greatest German poets continuing there was something schizophrenic about him it can be felt in his work there is a touch of schizophrenia in it too yes trle is a great poet it is now realized that a state of schizophrenia and the artistic Vision are not mutually exclusive to my mind the famous experiments with mesculin and similar drugs have contributed to this change of attitude these drugs create a condition accompanied by intense visions of colors and forms not unlike schizophrenia more than one artist of today has sought inspiration in such a drug The Retreat from reality France Mark once said the art that is coming will give formal expression to our scientific conviction this was a truly prophetic saying we have traced the influence on artists of Freud's psychoanalysis and of the discovery or rediscovery of the unconscious in the early years of the 20th century another important point is the connection between Modern Art and the results of research in nuclear physics to put it in simple nonscientific terms Nuclear Physics has robbed the basic units of matter of their absolute concreteness it has made matter mysterious paradoxically mass and energy wave and particle have proved to be interchangeable the laws of cause and effect have become valid only up to a certain point it does not matter at all that these relativities discontinuities and paradoxes hold good only on the margins of our world only for the infinitely small the atom and the infinitely great the cosmos they have caused a revolutionary change in the concept of reality for a new totally different and irrational reality has dawned behind the reality of our natural world which is ruled by the laws of classical physics corresponding relativities and paradoxes were discovered in the domain of the psychi here too another world dawned on the margin of the world of Consciousness governed by new and hither two unknown laws that are strangely akin to the laws of nuclear physics the parallelism between nuclear physics and the psychology of the collective unconscious was often a subject of discussion between Yung and Wolf Gang poy the Nobel Prize winner in physics the space-time Continuum of physics and the collective unconscious can be seen so to speak as the outer and inner aspects of one and the same reality behind appearances the relationship between physics and psychology will be discussed by Dr .- elvon frons in her concluding essay it is a characteristic of this one World Behind the worlds of physics and the Psy that its laws processes and contents are unimaginable that is a fact of outstanding importance for the understanding of the art of our time for the main subject of Modern Art is in a certain sense unimaginable too therefore much modern art has become abstract the great artists of this Century have sought to give visible form to the life behind things and so their works are a symbolic expression of a World Behind Consciousness or indeed behind dreams for dreams are only rarely non-figurative thus they point to the one reality the one life which seems to be the common background of the two domains of physical and psychic appearances only a few artists realize the connection between their form of expression and physics and psychology Kandinsky is one of the Masters who expressed the Deep deep emotion he felt at the early discoveries of modern physical research in my mind the collapse of the atam was the collapse of the whole world suddenly the stoutest walls fell everything turned unstable insecure and soft I would not have been surprised if a stone had melted Into Thin Air before my eyes science seemed to have been annihilated what resulted from this disillusion was the arst withdrawal from the realm of nature from the populous foreground of things it seemed Kandinsky added as if I saw art steadily disengaging itself from nature this separation from the world of things happened more or less at the same time to other artists too fron Mark wrote have we not learned from a thousand years of experience that things cease to speak the more we hold up to them the visual mirror of their appearance appearance is eternally flat for Mark the goal of art was to reveal unearthly life dwelling behind everything to break the mirror of life so that we may look being in the face Paul CLE wrote The Artist does not ascribe to the natural form of appearance the same convincing significance as the realists who are his critics he does not feel so intimately bound to that reality because he cannot see in the formal products of nature the essence of the creative process he is more concerned with formative Powers than with formal products pet mandrian accused cubism of not having pursued abstraction to its logical end the expression of pure reality that can only be attained by the creation of pure form unconditioned by subjective feelings and ideas behind changing natural forms there lies changeless pure reality a great number of artists were seeking to get past appearances into the reality of the background or the spirit in matter by a transmutation of things through fantasy surrealism dream pictures the use of chance Etc the abstract artists however turned their backs on things their paintings contained no identifiable concrete objects they were in andrean's words simply pure form but it must be realized that what these artists were concerned with was something far greater than a problem of form and the distinction between concrete and Abstract figurative and non-figurative their goal was the center of life and things their changeless background and an inward certitude art had become mysticism the spirit in whose mystery art was submerged was an Earthly Spirit which the medieval Alchemists had called mercurious he is a symbol of the spirit that these artists divined or sought behind nature in things behind the appearance of nature their mysticism was alien to Christianity for that Mercurial spirit is alien to a Heavenly Spirit indeed it was Christianity's dark adversary that was forging its way in art here we begin to see the real historical and symbolic significance of Modern Art like the Hermetic movements in the Middle Ages it must be understood as a mysticism of the spirit of Earth and therefore as an expression of our time compensatory to Christianity no artist sensed this Mystic background of art more clearly or spoke of it with greater passion than Canden Sky the importance of the great works of art of all time did not lie in his eyes on on the surface in externals but in the root of all roots in the mystical content of art therefore he says the artist's eye should always be turned in upon his inner life and his ear should be always alert for the voice of inward necessity this is the only way of giving expression to what the Mystic Vision commands Kandinsky called his pictures a spiritual expression of the cosmos a music of of the Spheres a Harmony of colors and forms form even if it is quite abstract and geometrical has an inward clang it is a spiritual being with effects that coincide absolutely with that form the impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle is actually as overwhelming in effect as the Finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo in 1914 France Mark wrote in his aphorisms matter is a thing that man can at best tolerate he refuses to recognize it the contemplation of the world has become the penetration of the world there is no mystic who in his moments of sublimest rapture ever attained the perfect abstraction of modern thought or took his soundings with a deeper plummet Paul CLE who may be regarded as the poet among modern painters says it is the art arest mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where Primal law feeds growth which artist would not wish to dwell at the central organ of all Motion in SpaceTime be it the brain or the heart of creation from which all functions derive their life in the womb of nature in the Primal ground of creation where the secret key to All Things lies hidden our Beating Heart drives us downward far down to the Primal ground what is encountered on this journey must be taken most seriously when it is perfectly fused with the appropriate artistic means inv visible form because as CLE adds it is not a question of merely reproducing what is seen the secretly perceived is made visible C's work is rooted in that Primal ground my hand is entirely the instrument of a more distant sphere nor is it my head that functions in my work it is something else in his work the spirit of Nature and the spirit of the unconscious became Inseparable they have drawn him and draw us the onlookers into their magic circle C's work is the most complex expression now poetic now demonic of the chonic spirit humor and bizarre ideas build a bridge from the realm of the dark underworld to the human world the bond between his fantasy and the Earth is the careful observation of the laws of nature and the love for All Creatures for the artist he once wrote the dialogue with nature is the condicio quanon of his work a different expression of the Hidden unconscious Spirit can be found in one of the most notable of the younger abstract painters Jackson Pollock the American who was killed in a car accident when he was 44 his work has had a great influence on the younger artists of our time in my painting he revealed that he painted in a kind of Trance when I am in my painting I am not aware of what I'm doing it is only after a sort of get acquainted period that I see what I have been about I have no fears about making changes destroying the image Etc because the painting has a life of its own I try to let it come through it is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess otherwise there is pure Harmony and easy give and take and the painting comes out well Pollock's pictures which were painted practically unconsciously are charged with boundless emotional vehs in their lack of structure they are almost chaotic a glowing lava stream of colors lines planes and points they may be regarded as a parallel to what The Alchemist called the Massa confusa the Prima Materia or chaos all ways of defining the precious Prime matter of the alchemical process the starting point of the Quest for the essence of being Pollock's pictures represent the nothing that is everything that is the unconscious itself they seem to live in a time before the emergence of Consciousness and being or to be fantastic Landscapes of of a time after the extinction of Consciousness and being in the middle of our Century the purely abstract picture without any regular order of forms and colors has become the most frequent expression in painting the deeper the dissolution of reality the more the picture loses its symbolic content the reason for this lies in the nature of the symbol and its function the symbol is an object of the Known World hinted at something unknown it is the known expressing the life and sense of the inexpressible but in merely abstract paintings the world of the known has completely vanished nothing is left to form a bridge to the unknown on the other hand these paintings reveal an unexpected background a hidden sense they often turn out to be more or less exact images of nature itself showing an astounding similarity with the molecular structure of organic and inorganic elements of nature this is a perplexing fact pure abstraction has become an image of concrete nature but young may give us the key to understanding the deeper layers of the psyche he has said lose their individual uniqueness as they Retreat farther and farther Into Darkness lower down that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional system systems they become increasingly Collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality that is in chemical substances the body's carbon is simply carbon hence at bottom the psyche is simply World a comparison of abstract paintings and microphotographs show that utter abstraction of imaginative art has in a secret and surprising way become naturalistic its subject being elements of matter the great abstraction and the great realism which parted at the beginning of our Century have come together again we remember kandinsky's words the polls open two paths which both lead to one goal at the end this goal the point of Union is reached in modern abstract paintings but it is attained completely unconsciously the art artist's intention plays no part in the process this point leads to a most important fact about Modern Art the artist is as it were not so free in his creative work as he may think he is if his work is performed in a more or less unconscious way it is controlled by laws of nature that on the deepest level correspond to the laws of the psyche and vice versa the great pioneers of Modern Art gave clearest expression to its true aims and to the depths from which the spirit rose that left its imprint on them this point is important though later artists who may have failed to realize it did not always Plum the same depths yet neither Kandinsky nor CLE nor any other of the early masters of modern painting was ever aware of the Grave psychological danger he was undergoing with the mystical submersion in the cathic spirit and the Primal ground of nature nature that danger must now be explained as a starting point we may take another aspect of abstract art the German writer vilhelm waringer interpreted abstract art as the expression of a metaphysical unease and anxiety that seemed to him to be more pronounced among Northern peoples as he explained they suffer from reality the naturalness of the Southern peoples is denied to them and they long for a super real and super sensual world to which they give expression in imaginative or abstract art but as Sir Herbert Reed remarks in his concise history of Modern Art metaphysical anxiety is no longer only Germanic and Northern it now characterizes the whole of the modern world Reed quotes CLE who wrote in his diary at the beginning of 1915 the more horrifying this world becomes as it is in these days the more art becomes abstract while a world at peace produces realistic art to Fran's Mark abstraction offered a refuge from the evil and ugliness in this world very early in life I felt that man was ugly the animals seemed to be more lovely and pure yet even among them I discovered so much that was revolting and hideous that my painting became more and more schematic and abs ract a good deal may be learned from a conversation that took place in 1958 between the Italian sculptor Marino Marini and the writer Edward roodi the dominant subject that Marini treated for years in many variations is the nude figure of a youth on a horse in the early versions which he described in the conversation as symbols of Hope and gratitude after the end of the second world war the rider HS his horse with outstretched arms his body bending slightly backward in the course of years the treatment of the subject became more abstract the more or less classical form of the rider gradually dissolved speaking of the feeling underlying this change Marini said if you look at my equestrian statues of the last 12 years in order of time you will notice that the animals Panic steadily increases but that it is frozen with Terror and stands paralyzed rather than rearing or taking flight that is all because I believe that we are approaching the end of the world in every figure I strove to express a deepening fear and despair in this way I am attempting to symbolize the last stage of a Dying myth the myth of the individual Victorious hero of the humanists man of virtue in fairy tale and myth the Victorious hero is a symbol of Consciousness his defeat as Marini says himself means the death of the individual a phenomenon that appears in a social context as the submergence of the individual in the mass and in art as the decline of the human element when roodi asked whether Marini's style was abandoning the classical cannon on its way to becoming abstract Marini replied as soon as art has to express fear it must of itself depart from the classical ideal he found subjects for his work in the bodies excavated at Pompei roditi called Marini's art a hirosima style for it conjures up visions of the end of a world Marini admitted it he felt he said as if he had been expelled from an Earthly Paradise until recently the sculptor aimed at full sensual and Powerful form forms but for the last 15 years sculpture prefers forms in disintegration the conversation between Marini and roodi explains the transformation of sensory art into abstraction that should be clear to anyone who has ever walked open eyed through an exhibition of Modern Art however much he may appreciate or admire its formal qualities he can scarcely fail to sense the fear despair AG ression and mockery that sounds like a cry from many works the metaphysical anxiety that is expressed by the distress in these pictures and sculptures may have Arisen from the despair of a doomed world as it did with Marini in other cases the emphasis May lie on the religious Factor on the feeling that God is dead there is a close connection between the two at the root of this inner distress lies the defeat or rather The Retreat of Consciousness in the upsurge of mystical experience everything that once bound man to the human world to Earth to time and space to matter and the natural living of life has been cast aside or dissolved but unless the unconscious is balanced by the experience of Consciousness it will implacably reveal its contrary or negative aspect the wealth of creative sound that made the Harmon of the Spheres or the wonderful Mysteries of the Primal ground have yielded to destruction and despair in more than one case the artist has become the passive victim of the unconscious in physics 2 the world of the background has revealed its paradoxical nature the laws of the inmost elements of nature the newly discovered structures and relations in its basic unit the atom have become the scientific foundation for unprecedented weapons of Destruction and open the way to Annihilation ultimate knowledge and the destruction of the world are the two aspects of the discovery of the Primal ground of nature young who was as familiar with the dangerous dual nature of the unconscious as with the importance of human consciousness could offer mankind only one weapon against catastrophe the call for individual Consciousness which seems so simple and yet is so arduous Consciousness is not only indispensable as a counterpoise to the unconscious and not only gives the possibility of meaning to life it has also an eminently practical function the evil witnessed in the world outside in neighbors or neighboring peoples can be made conscious as evil contents of our own psyche as well and this Insight would be the first step to a radical change in our attitude to our neighbors Envy lust sensuality lies and all known vices are the negative dark aspect of the unconscious which can manifest itself in two ways in the positive sense it appears as a spirit of nature creatively animating man things and the world it is the cathic spirit that has been mentioned so often in this chapter in the negative sense the unconscious that same Spirit manifests itself as a spirit of evil as a drive to destroy as has already been pointed out the Alchemist personified this Spirit as the spirit mercurious and called it with good reason mercurious duplex the two-faced dual mercurious in the religious language of Christianity it is called the devil but however improbable it may seem the devil too has a dual aspect in the positive sense he appears as Lucifer literally the lightbringer looked at in the light of these difficult and paradoxical ideas Modern Art which we have recognized as symbolic of the konic spirit also has a dual aspect in the positive sense it is the expression of a mysteriously profound nature mysticism in the negative it can only be interpreted as the expression of an evil or destructive Spirit the two sides belong together for the Paradox is one of the basic qualities of the unconscious and its contents to prevent any misunderstanding it must once more be emphasized that these considerations have nothing to do with artistic and aesthetic values but are solely concerned with the interpretation of Modern Art as a symbol of our time Union of opposites there is one more point to be made the spirit of the age is in constant movement it is like a river that flows on invisibly but surely and given the momentum of life in our Century even 10 years is a long time about the middle of this Century a change began to come over painting it was nothing revolutionary nothing like the change that happened about 1910 which meant the Reconstruction of art to its very foundations but there were groups of artists who formulated their AIMS in ways not heard before this transformation is going on within the frontiers of abstract painting the representation of concrete reality which Springs from the Primal human need of catching the passing moment on the wing has become a truly concrete sensuous art in the photography of such men as Fran's enri Cartier Bron Switzerland's verer bishof and others we can therefore understand why artists continued on their own way of inwardness and Imagination for a good many of the young artists however abstract art as it had been practiced for many years offered no Adventure no field of Conquest seeking the new they found it in what lay nearest yet had been lost in nature and man they were and are not concerned with the reproduction of nature in pictures but with the expression of their own emotional experience of nature the French painter Alfred manessier defined the aims of his art in these words what we have to reconquer is the weight of lost reality we must make for ourselves a new heart a new spirit a New Soul in the measure of man the painter's true reality lies neither in abstraction nor in realism but in the reconquest of his weight as a human being at present not figurative art seems to me to offer the one opportunity for the painter to approach the inward reality of himself and to grasp the consciousness of his essential self or even of his being it is only by the reconquest of his position I believe that the painter will be able in the time to come to return slowly to himself to ReDiscover his own weight and so to strengthen it that it can even reach the outward reality of the world Jean baz Zain speaks in similar terms it is a great Temptation for the painter of today to paint the pure rhythm of his feeling the most secret pulse of his heart instead of embodying it in a concrete form that however leads only to a desiccated mathematics or a kind of abstract expressionism which ends in monotony and a progressive impoverishment of form but a form that can reconcile man with his word is an art of Comm communion by which man at any moment can recognize his own unformed countenance in the world what in fact artists now have at heart is a conscious reunion of their own inward reality with the reality of the world or of nature or in the last resort a new Union of body and soul matter and spirit that is their way to the reconquest of their weight as human beings only now is the Great Rift that set in with modern artart between great abstraction and great realism being made conscious and on the way to being healed for the onlooker this first becomes evident in the changed atmosphere in the works of these artists there radiates from the pictures of such artists as Alfred manessier or the Belgian born painter Gustav saner in spite of all abstraction a belief in the world and in spite of all in intensity of feeling a Harmony of forms and colors that often attains Serenity in the French painter Jean Lura famous tapestries of the 1950s the exuberance of nature pervades the picture his art could be called sensuous as well as imaginative we find a Serene Harmony of forms and colors also in the work of Paul CLE this harmony was what he had always been striving for above all he had realized Iz the necessity of not denying evil even evil must not be a triumphant or degrading enemy but a power collaborating in the whole but C's starting point was not the same he lived near the dead and The Unborn at an almost Cosmic distance from this world while the younger generation of painters can be said to be more firmly rooted in Earth an important point to notice is that modern painting just when it has advanced far enough to discern the union of the Opposites has taken up religious themes the metaphysical void seems to have been overcome and the utterly unexpected has happened the church has become patron of Modern Art we need only mention here All Saints at Bassel with Windows by Alfred manessier aie church with pictures by a large number of modern artists The matis Chapel At V and the church at OD en which has works by Jean bazen and the French artist Fernand Le the admission of Modern Art to the church means more than an act of broad-mindedness on the part of its patrons it is symbolic of the fact that the part played by Modern Art in relation to Christianity is changing the compensatory function of the old hermetic movements has made way for the possibility of collaboration in discussing the an symbols of Christ it was pointed out that the light and the cathic spirits belong to each other it seems as if the moment had come today when a new stage in the solution of this Millennial problem might be reached what the future will yield we cannot know whether the bridging of the Opposites will give positive results or whether the way will lead through yet more unimaginable catastrophes there is too much anxiety and too much dread at work in the world and this is still the predominant factor in art and Society above all there is still too much unwillingness on the part of the individual to apply to himself and his life the conclusions that can be drawn from art although he might be ready to accept them in art the artist can often express many things unconsciously and without Awakening hostility which are resented when they are expressed by a psychologist a fact that could be demonstrated even more conclusively in literature than in the visual arts confronted by the statements of the psychologist the individual feels directly challenged but what the artist has to say particularly in our Century usually remains in an impersonal sphere and yet it seems important that the suggestion of a more whole and therefore more human form of expression should have become visible in our time it is a glimmer of hope symbolized for me at the time of writing 1961 by a number of paintings by the French artist Pierre sulage behind a cataract of huge black Rafters there glimmers a clear pure blue or a radiant yellow light is Dawning behind Darkness part five symbols in an individual analysis jolanda jacobe the beginning of the analysis there is a widespread belief that the methods of yian psychology are applicable only to middle-aged people true many men and women reach middle age without achieving psychological maturity and it is therefore necessary to help them through the neglected phases of their development they have not completed the first part of the process of individuation that doct Von France has described but it is also true that a young person can encounter serious problems as he grows up if a young person is afraid of life and finds it hard to adjust to reality he might prefer to dwell in his fantasies or to remain a child in such a young person especially if he is introverted one can sometimes discover unexpected Treasures in the unconscious and by bringing them into Consciousness strengthen his ego and give him the psychic energy he needs to grow into a mature person that is the function of the powerful symbolism of our dreams other contributors to this book have described the nature of these symbols and the role they play in man's psychological nature I wish to show how analysis can Aid the individuation process by taking the example of a young engineer aged 25 whom I shall call Henry Henry came from a rural District in eastern Switzerland his father of protestant peasant stock was a general practitioner Henry described him as a man with high moral standards but a rather withdrawn person who found it difficult to relate to other people he was more of a father to his patients than to his children at home Henry's mother was the dominant personality we were raised by the strong hand of our mother he said on one occasion she came from a family with an academic background and wide artistic interests she herself in spite of her strictness had a broad spiritual Horizon she was impulsive and romantic she had a great love for Italy though she was by birth a Catholic her children had been brought up in the protestantism of their father Henry had a sister older than himself with whom he had a good relationship Henry was introverted shy finely drawn and very tall with light hair a high pale forehead head and blue eyes with dark shadows he did not think that a Neurosis the most usual reason had brought him to me but rather an inner urge to work on his psyche a strong mother tie however and a fear of committing himself to life were hidden behind this urge but these were only discovered during the analytical work with me he had just completed his studies and taken a position in a large Factory and he was facing the many problem s of a young man on the threshold of manhood it appears to me he wrote in a letter asking for an interview that this phase of my life is particularly important and meaningful I must decide either to remain unconscious in a well protected security or else to venture on a yet unknown way of which I have Great Hopes the choice thus confronting him was whether to remain a lonely vacillating and unrealistic youth or to become a self-sufficient and responsible adult Henry told me that he preferred books to society he felt inhibited among people and was often tormented by doubts and self-criticism he was well read for his age and had a leaning toward aesthetic intellectualism after an earlier atheistic stage he became rigorously Protestant but finally his religious attitude became completely neutral he had chosen a technical education because he felt his talents lay in mathematics and geometry he possessed a logical mind trained in the Natural Sciences but he also had a propensity toward the irrational and mystical that he did not want to even admit to himself about two years before his analysis began Henry had become engaged to a Catholic girl from the French part of Switzerland he described her as Charming efficient and full of initiative never nevertheless he was uncertain whether he should undertake the responsibility of marriage since he had so little acquaintance with girls he thought it might be better to wait or even to remain a bachelor dedicated to a scholarly life his doubts were strong enough to prevent his reaching a decision he needed a further step toward maturity before he could feel sure of himself although qualities of both his parents were combined in Henry he was markedly Mother Bound in his Consciousness he was identified with his real or light mother who represented high ideals and intellectual Ambitions but in his unconscious he was deeply in the power of the dark aspects of his mother bound condition his unconscious still held his ego in a strangle hold all his clear-cut thinking and his efforts to find a firm standpoint in the purely rational remain nothing more than an intellectual exercise The Need to Escape From This Mother prison was expressed in hostile reactions to his real mother and a rejection of the inner mother as a symbol of the feminine side of the unconscious but an inner power sought to hold him back in the condition of childhood resisting everything that attracted him to the outside world even the attractions of his fiance were not enough to free him from his mother ties and thus help him find himself he was not aware that his inner urge for growth which he felt strongly included the need to detach himself from his mother my analytical work with Henry lasted nine months altto together there were 35 sessions in which he presented 50 dreams so short an analysis is rare it is only possible when energy Laden dreams like Henry's speed up the process of development of course from the jungian point of view view there is no rule for the length of time required for a successful analysis all depends on the individual's Readiness to realize inner facts and on the material presented by his unconscious like most introverts Henry led a rather monotonous outer life during the day he was completely involved in his job in the evenings he sometimes went out with his fiance or with friends with whom he liked to have literary discussions quite often he sat in his lodgings absorbed in a book or in his own thoughts though we regularly discuss the happenings of his daily life and also his childhood and youth we usually got fairly quickly to the investigation of his dreams and the problems his inner life presented to him it was extraordinary to see how strongly his dreams emphasized his call to Spiritual Development but I must make it clear that not everything described here was told to Henry in analysis one must always remain conscious of how explosive the dreamer's symbols may be for him the analyst can hardly be too careful and reserved if too bright a light is thrown on the dream language of symbols the dreamer can be driven into anxiety and thus led into rationalization as a defense mechanism or he can no longer assimilate them and can fall into a severe psychic crisis also the dream dreams reported and commented on here are by no means all the dreams that Henry had during his analysis I can discuss only an important few that influenced his development in the beginning of our work childhood memories with important symbolic meanings came up the oldest dated back to Henry's fourth year he said one morning I was allowed to go with my mother to the baker's shop and there I received a crescent roll from the baker's wife I did not eat the Ro but carried it proudly in my hand only my mother and the baker's wife were present so I was the only man such crescents are popularly called Moon teeth and this symbolic illusion to the moon underlines the dominating power of the feminine a power to which the little boy may have felt exposed in which as the only man he was proud of being able to confront another childhood memory came from his fth year it concerned Henry's sister who came home after her examinations at school and found him constructing a toy barn the barn was made with blocks of wood arranged in the form of a square and surrounded with a kind of hedge that looked like the battlements of a castle Henry was pleased with his achievement and said teasingly to his sister you have started school but you're already on holiday her reply that he was on holiday all year upset him terribly he felt deeply hurt that his achievement was not taken seriously even years later Henry had not forgotten the bitter hurt and Injustice that he had felt when his construction was rejected his later problems concerning the assertion of his masculinity and the conflict between rational and fantasy values are already visible in this early experience and these problems are also to be seen in the images of his first Dream the initial dream the day after Henry's first visit to me he had the following dream I was on an Excursion with a group of people I did not know we were going to the zenal rothorn we had started from samadan we only walked about an hour because we were to camp and have some theatrical I was not given an active part I especially remember one performer a young woman in a pathetic role wearing a long flowing robe it was Midday and I wanted to go on to the pass as all the others preferred to remain I went up alone leaving my equipment behind however I found myself right back in the valley and completely lost my orientation I wanted to return to my party but did not know which mountain side I should climb I was hesitant about asking finally an old woman showed me the way I must go then I ascended from a different starting point than our group had used in the morning it was a matter of making a turn at the right altitude and then following the mountain slope to return to the party I climbed along a cog wheel Mountain Railway on the right side on my left little cars constantly passed me each containing one hidden bloated little man in a blue suit it is said they are dead I was afraid of other cars coming from behind and kept turning around to look so as not to be run over my anxiety was needless at the point where I had to turn off to the right there were people awaiting me they took me to an inn a cloud burst came up I regretted that my equipment my ruck sack and my motorbike were not there but I was told not to get them till next morning I accepted the advice Dr Jung assigned great importance to the first Dream in an analysis for according to him it often has anticipatory value a decision to go into a analysis is usually accompanied by an emotional upheaval that disturbs the Deep psychic levels from which archetypal symbols arise the first dreams therefore often present Collective images that provide a perspective for the analysis as a whole and can give the therapist insight into the dreamer's psychic conflicts what does the above dream tell us of Henry's future development we must first examine some of the associ ations that Henry himself supplied the village of saden had been the home of yurg yach a famous 17th century Swiss Freedom Fighter the theatricals called up the thought of GTA's vilhelm meisters Lara which Henry liked very much in the woman he saw a resemblance to the figure in a painting called the island of the Dead by the 19th century Swiss artist Arnold buckin the wise old woman as he called seemed to be Associated on the one hand to his analyst on the other to the charwoman in JB priestley's play they came to a city the Cog wheel Railway reminded him of the barn with battlements that he had built as a child the dream describes an Excursion a sort of walking tour which is a striking parallel to Henry's decision to undertake analysis the individuation process is often symbolized by a voyage of Discovery to unknown lands such a voyage takes place in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress or in Dante's deina Comedia the traveler in Dante's poem searching for a way comes to a mountain that he decides to climb but because of three strange animals a motif that will also appear in one of Henry's later dreams he is forced to descend into the valley and even into hell later he ascends again to perg atory and finally reaches Paradise from this parallel one could deduce that there might be a similar period of disorientation and lonely seeking in store for Henry the first part of this life Journey represented as climbing a mountain offers Ascent from the unconscious to an elevated point of view of the ego I.E to an increased Consciousness samadan is named as the starting point of the Excursion this is where gach whom we may take as embodying the freedom seeking sense within Henry's unconscious started his campaign for the liberation of the veltan region of Switzerland from the French janat had other characteristics in common with Henry he was a Protestant who fell in love with a Catholic girl and like Henry whose analysis was to free him from his mother ties and from fear of life jenich also fought for Liberation one could interpret this as a favorable augury for the success of Henry's own Fight For Freedom the goal of the Excursion is the zenel rothorn a mountain in Western Switzerland that he did not know the word rot red in zenel Roth Thorne touches on Henry's emotional problem red is usually symbolic of feeling or passion here it points to the value of the feeling function which was insufficiently developed in Henry and the word horn reminds one of the Crescent role in the baker's shop of Henry's childhood after a short walk a halt is called and Henry can return to a state of passivity this also belongs to his nature the point is underlined by the theatricals attending the theater which is an imitation of real life is a popular way of evading an active part in life's drama The Spectator can identify with the play yet continue to Pander to his fantasies this kind of identification permitted the Greeks to experience catharsis much as the Psycho Drama initiated by the American psychiatrist JL Moreno is now used as a therapeutic Aid some such process may have enabled Henry to undergo an inner development when his associations raised memories of vilhelm Meister GTA's story of the maturing of a young man that Henry should have been impressed by the Romantic appearance of a woman is also not surprising this figure resembles Henry's mother and is at the same time a personification of his own unconscious feminine side the connection Henry makes between her and buckland's island of the Dead points to his depressive mood so well expressed by the painting which shows a white robed priest-like figure steering a boat bearing a coffin toward an island we have here a significant double Paradox the Keel of the boat seems to suggest a contrary course away from the island and the priest is a figure of Uncertain sex in Henry's associations this figure is certainly hermaphroditic the double Paradox coincides with Henry's ambivalence the Opposites in his soul are still too undifferentiated to be clearly separated after this interlude in the dream Henry suddenly becomes aware that it is noon and he must go on so he again starts for the pass a mountain pass is a well-known symbol for a situation of transition that leads from an old attitude of mind to a new one Henry must go alone it is essential for his ego to surmount the test unaided thus he leaves his kit behind an action that signifies that his mental equipment has become a burden or that he must change his normal way of going about things but he does not reach the pass he loses his bearings and finds himself back in the valley this failure shows that while Henry's ego decides on activity his other psychic entities represented by the other members of the party remain in the Old State of passivity and refuse to accompany the ego when the dreamer himself appears in a dream he usually represents only his conscious ego the other figures stand for his more or less unknown unconscious qualities Henry is in a situation where he is helpless yet ashamed to admit it at this moment he meets an Old Woman Who indicates the right way to him he can do nothing but accept her advice The Helpful old woman is a well-known symbol in myths and fairy tales for the wisdom of the Eternal female nature the rationalist Henry hesitates to accept her help because such acceptance requires a sacrificium intellectus a sacrifice or discarding of a rational way of thought this demand will often be made of Henry in later dreams such a sacrifice is unavoidable it applies to his relationship with the analysis as well as with everyday life he Associated the figure of the old woman to the charwoman in Priestly play about a new Dream City perhaps an analogy to the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse into which the characters can enter only after a kind of initiation this Association seems to show that Henry had intuitively recognize this confrontation as something decisive for him the charwoman in priestley's play says that in the city they have promised me a room of my own there she will be self-reliant and independent as Henry seeks to be if such a technically minded young man as Henry is consciously to choose the way of psychic development he must be prepared for a reversal of his old attitudes therefore on the advice of the woman he must start his climb from a different spot only then will it be possible for him to judge at what level he must deviate to reach the group the other qualities of his psyche that he had left behind he climbs a Cog wheeel Railway track a motif perhaps reflecting his technical education and keeps to the right side of the track which is the conscious side in the history of symbolism the right side generally represents the realm of Consciousness the left the unconscious from the left little cars are coming down and in each a little man is hidden Henry is afraid that an unnoticed Upward Bound car might hit him from the rear his an xiety proves groundless but it reveals that Henry is afraid of what so to speak lies behind his ego the bloated blue clothed men might symbolize sterile intellectual thoughts that are being brought down mechanically blue often denotes the function of thinking thus the men might be symbols of ideas or attitudes that have died on the intellectual Heights where the air is too thin they could also represent lifeless inner parts of Henry psyche a comment on these men is made in the dream it is said they are dead but Henry is alone who makes the statement it is a voice and when a voice is heard in a dream it is a most meaningful occurrence Dr Young identified the appearance of a voice in dreams with an intervention of the self it stands for a knowledge that has its roots in the collective fundamentals of the psyche what the voice says cannot be disputed the Insight Henry has gained about the dead formulas to which he has been too committed marks a turning point in the dream he has at last reached the right place for taking a new direction to the right the conscious Direction toward the conscious and the outer World there he finds the people he left behind waiting for him and thus he can become conscious of pre previously unknown aspects of his personality since his ego has surmounted the dangers it confronted alone and accomplishment that could make him more mature and stable he can rejoin the group or Collective and get shelter and food then comes the rain a cloud burst that relaxes tension and makes the Earth fertile in mythology rain was often thought to be a love Union Between Heaven and Earth in the El linian mysteries for instance after everything had been purified by water the call went up to heaven let it rain and down to earth be fruitful this was understood as a sacred marriage of the Gods in this way rain can be said to represent a solution in the literal sense of the word coming down Henry again meets the collective values symbolized by the ruck sack and motorcycle he has passed through a phase in which he has strengthened his ego Consciousness by proving he can hold his own and he has a renewed need for social contct however he accepts the suggestion of his friends that he should wait and fetch his things the next morning thus he submits for the second time to advice that comes from elsewhere the first time to the advice of the old woman to a subjective power an archetypal figure the second time to a collective pattern with this step Henry has passed a milestone on the road to maturity as an anticipation of the inner development that Henry could hope to achieve through analysis this dream was extraordinarily promising the conflicting opposites that kept Henry's sole intention were impressively symbolized on the one hand there was his conscious urge to ascend and on the other his tendency to passive contemplation also the image of the pathetic young woman in her white robes representing Henry's sensitive and romantic feelings contrast with the bloated corpses in blue suits representing his sterile intellectual World however to overcome these obstacles and bring about a balance between them would be possible for Henry only after the most severe trials fear of the unconscious the problems we encountered in Henry's initial dream showed up than many others problems like vacillation between masculine activity and feminine passivity or a tendency to hide behind intellectual asceticism he feared the world yet was attracted to it fundamentally he feared the obligations of marriage which demanded that he form a responsible relationship with a woman such an ambivalence is not unusual for someone on the threshold of manhood though in terms of age Henry had left that phase behind him his inner maturity did not match his years this problem is often met in the introvert with his fear of reality and outer life the fourth dream that Henry recounted provided a striking illustration of his psychological state it seems to me that I have had this dream endless times military service longdistance race alone I go on my way I never reach the goal will I be the last the course is well known to me all of it Deja Vu the start is in a little wood and the ground is covered with dry leaves the terrain slopes gently to an idilic Little Brook that invites one to T later there is a Dusty Country Road it leads toward hon a small Village near the Upper Lake of Zurich a brook bordered by Willows similar to a painting of bucklands in which a dreamy female figure follows the course of the water night falls in a village I ask for directions to the road I am told the road leads on for 7even hours over a pass I gather myself together and go on however this time the end of the dream differs after the willow bordered Brook I get into a wood there I discover a dough that runs away I am proud of this observation the dough has appeared on the left side and now I turn to the right here I see three strange creatures half pig half dog with the legs of a kangaroo the faces are quite undifferentiated with large drooping dog ears maybe they are costume people as a boy I once masqueraded in the circus costume of a donkey the beginning of the dream is conspicuously like Henry's initial dream a dreamlike female figure again appears and the setting of The the dream is associated with another painting by buckin this painting called Autumn thoughts and the dry leaves mentioned earlier in the dream underline the autumnal mood a romantic atmosphere also reappears in this dream apparently this inner landscape representing Henry's Melancholy is very familiar to him again he is in a collective of people but this time with military comrades on a long dist race this whole situation as the military service also suggests might be regarded as a representation of an average man's fate Henry himself said it's a symbol of life but the dreamer does not want to adjust to it he goes on alone which was probably always the case with Henry that is why he has the impression that everything is deja vu his thought I never reach the goal indicates strong feelings of inferiority and a belief that he cannot win the longdistance race his way leads to h reticon a name that reminds him of his secret plans to break away from home but because his breaking away does not occur he again as in the initial dream loses his sense of orientation and must ask for directions dreams compensate more or less explicitly for the dreamer's conscious attitude of mind the Romantic maidenly figure of Henry's conscious ideal is balanced by the appearance of the strange femal likee animals Henry's world of instincts is symbolized by something feminine the wood is a symbol of an unconscious area a dark place where animals live at first a do a symbol of shy fugitive innocent womanliness emerges but only for a moment then Henry sees three mix up animals of a strange and repulsive appearance they seem to represent undifferentiated instinctual A sort of confused mass of his instincts containing the raw material for a later development their most striking characteristic is that they are all virtually faceless and thus without the slightest glimmerings of Consciousness in the minds of many people the pig is closely associated to dirty sexual ity Cersei for example changed the men who desired her into swine the dog may stand for loyalty but also for promiscuity because it shows no discrimination in its choice of Partners the kangaroo however is often a symbol for motherliness and tender carrying capacity all these animals present only rudimentary traits and even these are senselessly contaminated in Alchemy the prime material was often represented by such monstrous and fabulous creatures mixed forms of animals in psychological terms they would probably symbolize the original Total unconsciousness out of which the individual ego can rise and begin to develop toward maturity Henry's fear of the monsters becomes evident by his attempt to make them seem harmless he wants to convince himself that they are only dressed up people like himself in a Boyhood masquerade his anxiety is natural a man discovering such inhuman monsters in his inner self as symbols of certain traits of his unconscious has every reason to be afraid another dream also shows Henry's fear of the depths of the unconscious I am a cabin boy in a Sailing Boat paradoxically the Sails are spread though there is a complete calm my task consists of holding a rope that serves to fasten a mast strangely enough the railing is a wall covered with stone slabs this whole structure lies exactly on the border between the water and the Sailing Boat that floats there alone I hold fast to the Rope not to the Mast and I am forbidden to look into the water in this dream Henry is in a psychological borderline situation the railing is a wall that protects him but at the same time obstruct his view he is forbidden to look into the water where he might discover unknown Powers all these images reveal his doubt and fear the man who fears the communications of his inner depths like Henry is as much afraid of the feminine element in himself as he is of real women at one moment he is fascinated by her at another he tries to escape fascinated and terrified he flees so as not to become her prey he does not dare to approach a beloved and therefore idealized partner with his animall likee sexuality as a typical result of his mother tie Henry had difficulty in giving both feeling and sensuality to the same woman again and again his dreams brought proof of his desire to free himself from this dilemma in one dream he was a monk on a secret mission in another his instincts tempted him into a brothel together with a military comrade who has had many erotic adventures I find myself waiting in front of a house on a dark Street in an unknown City entrance is permitted only to women therefore in the hall my friend puts on a little Carnival mask of a woman's face and goes up the stairs possibly I did the same as he but I do not remember clearly what this dream proposes would satisfy Henry's curiosity but only at the price of of a fraud as a man he lacks the courage to enter the house which is obviously a brothel but if he divest himself of his masculinity he might gain an insight into this Forbidden World Forbidden by his conscious mind the dream however does not tell us whether he decides to enter Henry had not yet overcome his inhibitions an understandable failure if we consider the implications of going into the brothel the above dream seemed to me to reveal a homoerotic strain in Henry he appeared to feel that a feminine mask would make him attractive to men this hypothesis was supported by the following dream I find myself back in my fifth or sixth year my playmate of those days tells me how he participated in an obscene act with the director of a factory my friend laid his right hand on the man's penis to keep it warm and at the same time to warm his own hand the director was an intimate friend of my fathers whom I venerated for his broad and varied interests but he was laughed at by us as an eternal youth for children of that age homoerotic play Is Not Unusual that Henry still came to it in his dream suggests that it was loaded with guilt feelings and therefore strongly repressed such feelings were linked to his deep fear about forming a lasting tie with a woman another dream and its associations Illustrated this conflict I take part in the wedding of an unknown couple at 1 in the morning the little wedding party returns from the festivities the bridal couple the best man and the maid of honor they enter a large Courtyard where I await them it seems that the newlyweds have already had a quarrel as well as the other couple they finally find the solution by having the two men and the two women retire separately Henry explained you see here the war of the Sexes as Ziro du describes it and then he added the palace in Bavaria where I remember seeing this dream Courtyard has until lately been disfigured by emergency housing for poor people when I visited there I asked myself if it would not be preferable to eek out a poor existence in the ruins of classic Beauty than to lead an active life surrounded by the ugliness of a great City I also asked myself when I was a witness at the wedding of a comrade whether his marriage would last for his bride made an unfavorable impression on me the longing to withdraw into passivity and introversion the fear of an unsuccessful marriage the dreams separation of the Sexes all these are unmistakable symptoms of the secret doubts hidden beneath Henry's Consciousness the saint and The Prost itute Henry's psychic condition was most impressively depicted in the following dream which exposed his fear of primitive sensuality and his desire to escape into a kind of asceticism in it one can see the direction his development was taking for this reason the dream will be interpreted at greater length I find myself on a narrow Mountain Road on the left going down there is a deep Abyss on the right a wall of rock along the road there are several caves shelters cut out of the rock as protection from the weather for lonely Wanderers in one of these caves half hidden a prostitute has taken Refuge Strangely I see her from behind from The Rock side she has a formless spongy body I look at her with curiosity and touch her buttocks perhaps it suddenly seems to me she is not a woman but a kind of male prostitute this same creature comes then to the four as a saint with a short Crimson coat thrown around his shoulders he strides down the road and goes into another much larger cave fitted with rough HED chairs and benches with a hoty look he drives out all those already present also me then he and his followers move in and establish themselves the personal association that Henry contributed to The Prostitute was the Venus of vill andorf a little carved figure from the Paleolithic Age of a fleshy woman probably a nature or fertility goddess then he added I first heard that touching the buttocks is a fertility right when I was on a tour through the Wallace a Canton in French Switzerland where I visited ancient Celtic Graves and excavations there I was told that there was once a smooth sloping surface of tiles smeared with all kinds of substances infertile women had to slide down on their bare buttocks in order to cure their sterility to the coat of the Saint Henry Associated this my fiance owns a jacket of similar shape but it's white on the evening before the dream we were out dancing and she was wearing this white jacket another girl who is her friend was with us she had a crimson jacket that I liked better if dreams are not wish fulfillments as Freud taught but rather as young assumed self-representations of the unconscious then we must admit that Henry's psychic condition could hardly be better represented than in the description given in the Saint dream Henry is a Lonely Wanderer on the Narrow Path but perhaps thanks to analysis he is already on his way down from inhospitable Heights to the left on the side side of the unconscious his road is bordered by the terrifying depths of an abyss on the right side the side of Consciousness the way is blocked by the rigid rock wall of his conscious views however in the caves which might represent so to speak unconscious areas in Henry's field of Consciousness there are places where Refugee can be found when bad weather comes in other words when outside tensions become too threatening the caves are the result of purposeful human work cut into the Rock in a way they resemble the gaps that occur in our Consciousness when our power of concentration has reached its limits and is broken so that the stuff of fantasy can penetrate without restraint at such times something unexpected can reveal itself and allow a deep insight into the background of the psyche a glimpse into the unconscious regions where our imagination has free play moreover Rock caves may be symbols of the womb of Mother Earth appearing as mysterious caverns in which transformation and rebirth can come about thus the dream seems to represent Henry's introverted withdrawal when the world becomes too difficult for him into a cave within his Consciousness where he can succumb to subjective fantasies this interpretation would also explain why he sees the female figure figure a replica of some of the inner feminine traits of his psyche she is a formless spongy half-hidden prostitute representing the repressed image in his unconscious of a woman who Henry would have never approached in conscious life she would always have been strictly taboo to him in spite of the fact that as the opposite of a too much venerated mother The Prostitute would have a secret Fascination for him as for every son with a mother complex the idea of restricting a relationship with a woman to a purely animall likee sensuality excluding all feelings is often enticing to such a young man in such a union he can keep his feelings split off and thus can remain true to his mother in an ultimate sense thus in spite of everything the taboo set by the mother against every other woman remains inflexibly effective in the psyche of the sun Henry who seems to have withdrawn totally to the background of his fantasy cave sees the prostitute only from behind he dares not look her in the face but from the back also means from her least Human Side her buttocks that is the part of her body that will stimulate the sensual activity of the male by touching the buttocks of the prostitute Henry unconsciously carries out a kind of fertility right similar to the rights that are practic practiced in many primitive tribes the laying on of hands and healing often go together in the same way touching with the hand can be either a defense or a curse immediately the idea arises that the figure is not a woman after all but a male prostitute the figure thus becomes hermaphroditic like many mythological figures and like the priest figure of the first Dream insecurity concerning his own self can often be observed in a pubescent individual and for this reason homosexuality in adolescence is not considered unusual nor is such uncertainty exceptional for a young man with Henry's psychological structure he had already implied this in some of his earlier dreams but repression as well as sexual uncertainty may have caused the confusion about the sex of the prostitute the female figure that has both both attracted and repelled the dreamer is transformed first of all into a man and then into a saint the second transformation eliminates everything sexual from the image and implies that the only means of escape from the reality of Sex Lies in the adoption of an aesthetic and holy life denying the flesh such dramatic reversals are common in dreams something turns into its opposite as The Prostitute becomes becomes a saint as if to demonstrate that by transmutation even extreme opposites can change into each other Henry also saw something significant in the Saint's coat a coat is often a symbol of the protective cover or mask which Jung called the Persona that an individual presents to the world it has two purposes first to make a specific impression on other people second to conceal the individual inner self from their prying eyes the Persona that Henry's dream gives the saint tells us something about his attitude to his fiance and her friend the Saint's coat has the color of the friend's jacket which Henry had admired but it also had the shape of his fiance's coat this may imply that Henry's unconscious wanted to confer the quality of saintliness on both women in order to protect himself against their womanly attractiveness all also the Cod is red which as has been noted before is traditionally the symbolic color of feeling and passion it thus gives the saint figure a kind of eroticized spirituality a quality that is frequently found in men who repress their own sexuality and try to rely solely on their Spirit or Reason such an escape from the world of the flesh however is unnatural in a young person in the first half of life we should learn to accept our sexuality it is essential to the preservation and continuation of our species the dream seems to be reminding Henry of just this point when the saint leaves the cave and walks down the road descending from the heights toward the valley he enters a second cave with rough HED benches and chairs which reminds one of the early Christians places of worship and refuge from persecution this cave seems to be a healing holy place a place of meditation and of the mystery of transformation from the Earthly to the Heavenly from the carnal to the spiritual Henry is not permitted to follow the saint but is turned out of the cave with all those present that is with his unconscious entities seemingly Henry and all the others who are not followers of the saint are being told that they must live in the outside world the dreams seems to say that Henry must first succeed in outer life before he will be able to immerse himself in a religious or spiritual sphere the figure of the saint also seems to symbolize in a relatively undifferentiated anticipatory fashion the self but Henry is not yet mature enough to stay in the immediate vicinity of this figure how the analysis developed in spite of an initial skepticism and resistance Henry began to take a lively interest in the inner happenings of his psyche he was obviously impressed by his dreams they seemed to compensate for his conscious life in a meaningful way and to give him valuable insights into his ambivalence his vacillation and his preference for passivity after a time more positive dreams appeared that showed that Henry was already well on his way two months after his analysis had begun he reported this dream in the harbor of a little place not far from my home on the shore of a lake in the neighborhood locomotives and Freight cars are being raised from the bottom of the lake where they had been sunk in the last war first a large cylinder like a locomotive boiler is brought up then an enormous Rusty freight car the whole picture presents a horrible yet romantic sight the recovered pieces have to be transported away under the rails and CA of the nearby railway station then the bottom of the lake changes into a Green Meadow here we see what a remarkable inner Advance Henry has made locomotives probably symbols of energy and dynamism have been sunk I.E repressed into the unconscious but are now being brought into the light of day with them are freight cars in which all kinds of valuable cargo psychic qualities can be transported reported now that these objects have again become available for Henry's conscious life he can begin to realize how much active power could be at his disposal the transformation of the dark Lake Bottom into a meadow underlines his potential for positive action sometimes on Henry's lonely journey toward maturity he also received help from his feminine side in his 24th dream he meets a humpbacked girl I'm on the way to a school together with an unknown young lady of small and dainty appearance but disfigured by a hump many other people also go into the schoolhouse while the others disperse to different rooms for singing lessons the girl and I sit at a little square table she gives me a private singing lesson I feel an Impulse of pity for her and therefore kiss her on the mouth I'm conscious however that by this act I am unfaithful to my fiance even though it may be excusable singing is one of the immediate expressions of feelings but as we have seen Henry is afraid of his feelings he knows them only in an idealized adolescent form nevertheless in this dream he is taught singing the expression of feelings at a square table the table with its four equal sides is a representation of the fourfold Motif usually a symbol of completeness thus the relation between singing and the square table seems to indicate that Henry must integrate his feeling side before he can achieve psychic wholeness in fact the singing lesson does move his feelings and he kisses the girl on the mouth thereby he has in a sense espoused her otherwise he would not feel Unfaithful he has learned to relate to The Woman Within another dream demonstrates the part that this little humpbacked girl had to play in Henry's inner development I am in an unknown boy school during the instruction period I secretly force my way into the house I don't know for what purpose I hide in the room behind a little square closet the door to the corridor is half open I fear being detected an adult goes by without seeing me but a little humpbacked girl comes in and sees me at once she pulls me out of my Hiding Place Not only does the same girl appear in both dreams but both appearances take place in a Schoolhouse in each instance Henry must learn something to assist his development seemingly he would like to satisfy his desire for knowledge while remaining unnoticed and passive the figure of a deformed little girl appears in numerous fairy tales in such Tales the ugliness of the hump usually conceals great Beauty which is revealed when the right man comes to free the girl from a magic spell Often by a kiss the girl in Henry's dream may be a symbol of Henry's Soul which also has to be released from the spell that has made it ugly when the humpbacked girl tries to awaken Henry's Feelings by song or pulls him out of his dark Hiding Place forcing him to confront the light of day she shows herself as a helpful guide Henry can and must in a sense belong simultaneously to both his fiance and the little humpbacked girl to the first as a representative of the real outer woman and to the second as the embodiment of the inner psychic anima the Oracle dream people who rely totally on their rational thinking and dismiss or repress every manifestation of their psychic life often have an almost inexplicable inclination to Superstition they listen to oracles and prophecies and can be easily Hoodwinked or influenced by magicians and conjurers and because dreams compensate one's outer life the emphasis such people put in their intellect is offset by dreams in which they meet the irrational and cannot Escape it Henry experienced this phenomenon in the course of his analysis in an impressive way four extraordinary dreams based on such irrational themes represented decisive mind milestones in his Spiritual Development the first of these came about 10 weeks after the analysis began as Henry reported the dream alone on an adventurous journey through South America I feel at last the desire to return home in a foreign city situated on a mountain I try to reach the railway station which I instinctively suspect to be in the center of the town at its highest level I fear I may be too late fortunately however a vaated passage breaks through the row of houses on my right built closely together as in the architecture of the Middle Ages forming an impenetrable wall behind which the station is probably to be found the whole scene offers a very picturesque aspect I see the sunny painted facades of the houses the dark Archway in whose shadowy obscurity four ragged figures have settled down on the pavement with a sigh of relief I hurry toward the passage when suddenly a stranger a Trapper type appears ahead of me evidently filled with the same desire to catch the train at our approach the four Gatekeepers who turn out to be Chinese jump up to prevent our passage in the ensuing fight my left leg is injured by the long nails on the left foot of one of the Chinese an oracle has to decide now whether the way could be open to us or whether Our Lives must be forfeited I am the first to be dealt with while my companion is bound and led aside the Chinese consult the Oracle by using little Ivory sticks the Judgment goes against me but I am given another chance I am fettered and led aside just as my companion was and he now takes my place in his presence the Oracle has to decide my fate for the second time on this occasion it is in my favor I am saved one immediately notices The Singularity and the exceptional meaning of this dream its wealth of symbols and its compactness however it seemed as if Henry's conscious mind wanted to ignore the dream because of his skepticism toward the products of his unconscious it was important not to expose the dream to the danger of rationalization but rather to let it act on him without interference so I refrained at first from my interpretation instead I offered only one suggestion I advised him to read and then to consult as did the Chinese figures in his dream the famous Chinese Oracle book The I Ching the I Ching the soall book of changes is a very ancient book of wisdom its roots go back to mythical times and it comes to us in its present form from 3000 BC according to Richard vilhelm who translated it into German and provided an admirable commentary both of the two main branches of Chinese philosophy taoism and Confucianism have their common origin in the iing the book is based on the hypothesis of the Oneness of man and the surrounding Cosmos and of the complimentary pairs of opposites Yang and Yin that is the male and female principles it consists of 64 sign signs each represented by a drawing made up of six lines in these signs are contained all the possible combinations of Yang and Yin the straight lines are looked upon as male the broken lines as female each sign describes changes in the human or Cosmic situation and each prescribes in a pictorial language the course of action to be followed at such times the Chinese consulted this Oracle by means that indicated which of the signs was relevant at a given moment they did so by using 50 small sticks in a rather complicated way that yielded a given number incidentally Henry said that he had once read probably in Young's commentary on the secret of the Golden Flower of a strange game sometimes used by the chines to find out about the future today the more usual method of Consulting the iing is to use three coins each throw of the three coins yields one line heads which stand for a male line count as three Tails a broken female line count as two the coins are thrown six times and the numbers that are produced indicate the sign or hexagram that is the set of six lines to be consulted but what significance has such fortune telling for our own time even though those who accept the idea that the I Ching is a storehouse of wisdom will find it hard to believe that consultation of the Oracle is anything more than an experiment in the occult it is indeed difficult to grasp that more is involved for the ordinary person today consciously dismisses all divining techniques as archaic nonsense yet they are not nonsense as Dr J has shown they are based on what he calls the principle of synchronicity or more simply meaningful coincidence he has described this difficult new idea in his essay synchronicity and a causal connecting principle it is based on the Assumption of an inner unconscious knowledge that links a physical event with a psychic condition so that a certain event that appears May accidental or coincidental can in fact be physically meaningful and its meaning is often symbolically indicated through dreams that coincide with the event several weeks after having studied the I Ching Henry followed my suggestion with considerable skepticism and through the coins what he found in the book had a tremendous impact on him briefly the Oracle to which he referred bore several startling references to his dream and to his psychological condition generally by a remarkable synchronistic coincidence the sign that was indicated by the coin pattern was called Ming or youthful Folly in this chapter there are several parallels to the dream motifs in question according to the text of the I Ching the three upper lines of this hexagram symbolize a mountain and have the meaning of keeping still they can also be interpreted as a gate the three lower lines symbolize water the abyss and the moon all these symbols have occurred in Henry's previous dreams among many other statements that seemed to apply to Henry was the following warning for youthful Folly it is the most hopeless thing to entangle itself in empty imaginings the more obstinately it clings to such unreal fantasies the more certainly will humiliation overtake it in this and other complex ways the oracle seemed to be directly relevant to Henry's problem this shook him at first he tried to suppress its effect by willpower but he could not Escape it or his dreams the message of the I Ching seemed to touch him deeply in spite of the puzzling language in which it was expressed he became overpowered by the very irrationality whose existence he had so long denied sometimes silent sometimes irritated reading the words that seemed to coincide so strongly with the symbols in his dreams he said I must think all this over thoroughly and he left before our session was up he cancelled his next session by telephone because of influenza and did not reappear I waited keeping still because I supposed that he might not yet have digested the Oracle a month went by finally Henry reappeared excited and disconcerted and told me what had happened in the meantime time initially his intellect which he had until then relied upon so much had suffered a great shock and one that he had at first tried to suppress however he soon had to admit that the communications of the Oracle were pursuing him he had intended to consult the book again because in his dream the Oracle had been consulted twice but the text of the chapter youthful Folly expressly forbids the putting of of a second question for two nights Henry had tossed sleeplessly in his bed but on the third a luminous dream image of great power had suddenly appeared before his eyes a helmet with a sword floating in empty space Henry immediately took up the I Ching again and opened it at random to a commentary on chapter 30 where to his great surprise he read the following passage the clinging is fire it means coats of maale helmets it means lances and weapons now he felt that he understood why a second intentional Consulting of the Oracle was forbidden for in his dream the ego was excluded from the second question it was the Trapper who had to consult the Oracle the second time in the same way it was Henry's semi unconscious action that had unintentionally asked the second question of the iing by opening the book at random and coming upon a symbol that coincided with his nocturnal Vision Henry was clearly so deeply stirred that it seemed time to try to interpret the dream that had sparked the transformation in view of the events of the dream it was obvious that the dream elements should be interpreted as contents of Henry's inner personality and the six dream figures as personification of his psychic qualities such dreams are relatively rare but when they do occur their After Effects are all the more powerful that is why they could be called dreams of transformation with dreams of such pictorial power the dreamer seldom has more than a few personal associations all Henry could offer was that he had recently tried for a job in Chile and had been refused because they would not employ unmarried men he also knew that some Chinese let the nails of their left hand grow as a sign that instead of working they have given themselves over to meditation Henry's failure to get a job in South America was presented to him in the dream in it he is transported into a hot southern world a world that in contrast to Europe he would call primitive uninhibited and sensual it represents an excellent symbolic picture of the realm of the unconscious this realm was the opposite of the cultivated intellect and swiss puritanism that ruled Henry's conscious mind it was in fact his natural Shadow land for which he had longed but after a while he did not seem to feel too comfortable there from the cathic dark maternal Powers symbolized by South America he is drawn back in the dream to the light personal mother and to his fiance he suddenly realizes how far he has gone away from them he finds himself alone in a foreign city this increase in Consciousness is symbolized in the dream as a higher level the city was built on a mountain so Henry climbed up to a greater Consciousness in the shadow land from there he hoped to find his way home this problem of ascending a mountain had already been put to him in his initial dream and as in the dream of the saint and the prostitute or in many mythological Tales a mountain often symbolizes a place of Revelation where transformation and change may take place the city on the mountain is also a well-known archetypal symbol that appears in the history of our culture in many variations the city corresponding in its ground plan to a Mandela represents that region of the soul in the middle of which the self the psyche's innermost Center and totality has its Abode surprisingly the seat of the self is represented in Henry's dream as a traffic center of the human Collective a railway station this may be because the self if the dreamer is Young and has a relatively low level of Spiritual Development is usually symbolized by an object from the realm of his personal experience often a BAL object which compensates the dreamers High aspirations only in the mature person acquainted with the images of his soul is the self realized in a symbol that corresponds to its unique value even though Henry does not actually know where the station is he nevertheless supposes it to be in the center of the city on its highest point here as in earlier dreams he receives help from his unconscious Henry's conscious mind was identified with his profession as an engineer so he would also like his inner world to relate to rational products of civilization like a railway station the dream however rejects this attitude and indicates a completely different way the way leads under and through a dark Arch an arched Gateway is also a symbol for a threshold a place where dangers lurk a place that at the same time separates and unites instead of the Railway Station that Henry was looking for which was to connect uncivilized South America with Europe Henry finds himself before a dark arched Gateway where four ragged Chinese stretched on the ground block the passage the dream makes no distinction between them so they may be seen as four still undifferentiated aspects of a male totality the number four a symbol of wholeness and completeness rep represents an archetype that Dr Jung has discussed at length in his writings the Chinese thus represent unconscious male psychic parts of Henry that he cannot pass because the way to the self that is to the psychic Center is barred by them and must still be open to him until this issue has been settled he cannot continue his journey still unaware of the impending danger Henry hurries to the Gateway expecting at last to reach the station but on his way he meets his shadow his unlived primitive side which appears in the guise of an earthy rough Trapper the appearance of this figure probably means that Henry's introverted ego has been joined by his extroverted compensatory side which represents his repressed emotional and irrational traits this shadow figure pushes itself past the cont ious ego into the foreground and because it personifies the activity and autonomy of unconscious qualities it becomes the proper carrier of Fate through whom everything happens the dream moves toward its climax during the fight between Henry the Trapper and the four ragged Chinese Henry's left leg is scratched by the long nails on the left foot of one of the four here it seems the European character of Henry's conscious ego has collided with a personification of the ancient wisdom of the East with the extreme opposite of his ego the Chinese come from an entirely different psychic continent from an other side that is still quite unknown to Henry and that seems dangerous to him the Chinese can also be said to stand for the yellow Earth for the Chinese people are related to the Earth as few people are and it is just this earthy chonic quality that hry had to accept the unconscious male totality of his psyche which he met in his dream had a cathic material aspect that his intellectual conscious side lacked thus the fact that he recognized the four ragged figures as Chinese shows that Henry had gained an increase of inner awareness concerning the nature of his adversaries Henry had heard that the Chinese sometimes let the nails of their left hands grow long but in the dream the nails are on the left foot they are so to speak claws this may indicate that the Chinese have a point of view so different from Henry's that it injures him as we know Henry's conscious attitude toward the cathic and feminine toward the material depths of his nature was most uncertain and ambivalent this attitude symbolized by his left leg the point of view or standpoint of his feminine unconscious side of which he is still afraid was harmed by the Chinese this injury however did not itself bring about a change in Henry every transformation demands as its precondition the ending of a world the collapse of an old philosophy of life as Dr Henderson has pointed out earlier in this book at ceremonies of initiations a youth must suffer a symbolic death before he can be reborn as a man and be taken into the tribe as a full member thus the scientific logical attitude of the engineer must collapse to make room for a new attitude in the psyche of an engineer everything irrational may be repressed and therefore often reveals itself in the dramatic paradoxes of the dream world thus the irrational appeared in Henry's dream as an oracle game of foreign origin with a fearful and inexplicable power to decide human Destinies Henry's rational ego had no alternative but to surrender unconditionally in a real sacrificium intellectus yet the conscious mind of such an inexperienced immature person as Henry is not sufficiently prepared for such an act he loses the turn of Fortune and his life is forfeit he is caught unable to go on in his accustomed way or to return home home to escape his adult responsibilities it was this insight for which Henry had to be prepared by this great dream next Henry's conscious civilized ego is bound and put aside while the Primitive Trapper is allowed to take his place and to consult the Oracle Henry's life depends on the result but when the ego is imprisoned in isolation those contents of the unconscious that are personified in the shadow figure may bring help and solution this becomes possible when one recognizes the existence of such contents and has experienced their power they can then become our consciously accepted constant companions because the Trapper his shadow wins the game in his place Henry is saved facing the irrational Henry's subsequent Behavior clearly showed that the dream and the fact that his dreams and the Oracle book of the I Ching had brought him to face deep and irrational Powers within himself had a very deep effect on him from then on he listened eagerly to the communications of his unconscious and the analysis took on a more and more agitated character the tension that until then had threatened the depths of his psyche with disruption came to the surface nevertheless he courageously held to the growing hope that a satisfactory conclusion would be reached barely 2 weeks after the Oracle dream but before it was discussed and interpreted Henry had another dream in which he was once again confronted with the disturbing problem of the irrational alone in my room a lot of disgusting black beetles crawl out of a hole and spread out over my drawing table I try to drive them back into their Hole by means of some sort of magic I am successful in this except for four or five Beatles which leave my table again and spread out into the whole room I give up the idea of following them further they are no longer so disgusting to me I set fire to the hiding place a tall column of flame Rises up I fear my room might catch fire but this fear is unfounded by this time Henry had become relatively skillful in the interpretation of his dreams so he tried to give this dream an explanation of his own he said the Beatles are my dark qualities they were awakened by the analysis and come up now to the surface there is a danger that they may overflow my professional work symbolized by the drawing table yet I did not dare to crush The Beetles which reminded me of a kind of black Scarab with my hand as I first intended and therefore had to use magic in setting fire to their hiding place I so to speak call for the collaboration of something Divine as the upsh shooting column of flame makes me think of the fire that I associate with the Ark of the Covenant to go deeper into the symbolism of the dream we must first of all note that these Beatles are black which is the color of Darkness depression and death in the dream Henry is alone in his room a situation that can lead to introversion and corresponding states of Gloom in meth ology scarab beetles often appear golden in Egypt they were sacred animals symbolizing the Sun but if they are black they symbolize the opposite side of the sun something devilish therefore Henry's instinct is quite correct in wanting to fight The Beatles with magic though four or five of The Beatles remain alive the decrease in the number of Beatles is enough to free Henry from his fear and disgust he then tries to destroy their breeding ground by fire this is a positive action because fire can symbolically lead to transformation and rebirth as for instance it does in the ancient myth of the Phoenix in his Waking Life Henry now seemed full of enterprising Spirit but apparently he had not yet learned to use it to the right effect therefore I want to consider another later dream that throws an even clearer light on his problem the this dream presents in symbolic language Henry's fear of a responsible relationship with a woman and his tendency to withdraw from the feeling side of life an old man is breathing his last he is surrounded by his relatives and I am among them more and more people Gather in the large room each one characterizing himself through precise statements there are a good 40 persons present The Old Man groans and mutters about unlived life his daughter who wants to make his confession easier asks him in what sense unlived is to be understood whether cultural or moral the old man will not answer his daughter sends me to a small adjoining room where I am to find the answer by telling a fortune with cards the nine that I turn up will give the answer according to the color I expect to turn up a nine at the very beginning but at first I turn up various kings and queens I am disappointed now I turn up nothing but scraps of paper that don't belong to the game at all finally I discover that there are no more cards in the deck but only envelopes and other pieces of paper together with my sister who is also present I look everywhere for the cards finally I discover one under a textbook or a notebook it is nine a nine of Spades it seems to me that this can only mean one thing that it was moral chains that prevented the old man from living his life the essential message of this strange dream was to warn Henry what awaited him if he failed to live his life the old man probably represents the dying ruling principle the principle that rules Henry's Consciousness but whose nature is unknown to him the 40 people present symbolize the totality of Henry's psychic traits 40 is a number of totality an elevated form of the number four that the old man is dying could be a sign that part of Henry's male personality is on the verge of a final transformation the daughter's query about the possible cause of death is the unavoidable and decisive question there seems to be an implication that the old man's morality has prevented him from Living out his natur natur feelings and drives yet the dying man himself is silent therefore his daughter the personification of the mediating feminine principle Thea has to become active she sends Henry to discover the answer from the fortunetelling cards the answer that will be given by the color of the first nine turned up the fortune telling has to take place in an unused remote room revealing how far away such a happening is from hen Henry's conscious attitude he is disappointed when at first he uncovers only kings and queens perhaps Collective images of his youthful veneration for power and wealth this disappointment becomes intense when the picture cards run out for this shows that the symbols of the inner world have also been exhausted only scraps of paper are left without any images thus the source of pictures dries up in the dream Henry then has to accept the help of his feminine side this time represented by his sister to find the last card together with her he finally finds a card the nine of Spades it is this card that must serve to indicate by its color what the phrase unlived life meant in the dream and it is significant that the card is hidden under a textbook or notebook which probably represents the aid intellectual formulas of Henry's technical interest the nine has been a magic number for centuries according to the traditional symbolism of numbers it represents the perfect form of the perfected Trinity in its three-fold elevation and there are endless other meanings associated with the number nine in various ages and cultures the color of the nine of Spades is the color of death and of lifelessness also the Spade image strongly brings to mind the form of a leaf and therefore its Blackness emphasizes that instead of being green vital and natural it is now dead furthermore the word Spade derives from the Italian spot which means sword or spear such weapons often symbolize the penetrating cutting function of the intellect thus the dream makes it clear that it was the moral bonds rather than cultural that did not allow the old old man to live his life in Henry's case these bonds probably were his fear of surrendering fully to life of accepting responsibilities to a woman and thereby becoming unfaithful to his mother the dream has declared that the unlived life is an illness of which one can die Henry could no longer disregard the message of this dream he realized that one needs something more than reason as a helpful compass in the entanglements of life it is necessary to seek the guidance of the unconscious powers that emerge as symbols out of the depths of the psyche with this recognition the goal of this part of his analysis was reached he now knew that he was finally expelled from the paradise of an uncommitted life and that he could never return to it the final dream a further Dream came to confirm irrevocably the insights Henry had given gained after some unimportant short dreams that concerned his everyday life the last dream the 50th in the series appeared with all the wealth of symbols that characterizes the so-called great dreams four of us form a friendly group and we have the following experiences evening we are sitting at a long raw Lumber table and drinking out of each of three different vessels from a lure glass a clear yellow sweet lure from a wine glass dark red Campari from a large classically shaped vessel tea in addition to us there is also a girl of reserved delicate nature she pours her lure into the tea night we have returned from a big drinking bout one of us is the president de la republ Fran we are in his Palace walking out onto the balcony we perceive him beneath us in the snowy Street as he in his drunken condition urinates against a mound of snow his bladder content seems to be inexhaustable now he even runs after an old spinster who carries In Her Arms a child wrapped in a brown blanket he sprays the child with his urine the spinster feels the moisture but ascribes it to the child she hurries away with long steps morning through the street which glistens in the winter sun goes a negro a gorgeous figure completely naked he walks toward the East toward Baron that is the Swiss Capital we are in French Switzerland we decide to go to pay him a visit noon after a long automobile trip through a lonely snowy region we come to a city and into a dark house where the Negro is said to have put up we are very much afraid that he might be frozen to death however his servant who is just as dark receives us negro and servant are mute we look into The Ruck sacks we have brought with us to see what each could give the Negro as a gift it must be some sort of object characteristic of civilization I am the first to make up my mind and I take a package of matches from the floor and offer it to the Negro with deference after all have presented their gifts we join with the Negro in a happy Fe Feast a joyous Revel even at first glance the dream with its four parts makes an unusual impression it encompasses a whole day and moves toward the right in the direction of growing Consciousness the movement starts with the evening goes over into the night and ends at noon when the sun is at its Zenith thus the cycle of the day appears as a totality pattern in this dream the four friends seem to symbolize the unfolding masculinity of Henry psyche and their progress through the four acts of the dream has a geometric pattern that reminds one of the essential construction of the mandala as they first came from the East then from the West moving on toward the capital of Switzerland that is the center they seem to describe a pattern that tries to unite the Opposites in a center and this point is underlined by the movement in time the asent Into the Night of the unconsciousness following the sun circuit which is followed by an Ascent to the bright Zenith of Consciousness the Dream Begins in the evening a time when the threshold of Consciousness is lowered and the impulses and images of the unconscious can pass across it in such a condition when the feminine side of man is most easily evoked it is natural to find that a female figure joins the four friends she is the anima figure that belongs to them all reserved and delicate reminding Henry of his sister and connects them all to each other on the table stand three vessels of different character which by their concave form accentuate the receptiveness that is symbolic of the feminine the fact that these vessels are used by all present indicates a mutual and Clos relatedness among them the vessels differ in form lure glass wine glass and a classically formed container and in the color of their contents the Opposites into which these fluids divide sweet and bitter red and yellow intoxicating and sobering are all intermingled through being consumed by each of the five persons present who sink into an unconscious communion the girl seems to be the secret agent the Catalyst who precipitates events for it is the role of the animal to lead a man into his unconscious and thus to force him to deeper recollection and increase Consciousness it is almost as though with the mixing of lure and tea the party would approach its climax the second part of the dream tells us more of the happenings of this night the four friends suddenly find themselves in Paris which for the Swiss represents the town of sensuality of uninhibited joy and love here a certain differentiation of the four takes place especially between the ego in the dream which is to a great extent identified with the leading thinking function and the presidant de la republi who represents the undeveloped and unconscious feeling function the ego Henry and two friends who may be considered as representing his semiconscious functions looks down from the heights of a balcony on the president whose char characteristics are exactly what one would expect to find in the undifferentiated side of the psyche he is unstable and has abandoned himself to his instincts he urinates on the street in a drunken State he is unconscious of himself like a person outside civilization following only his Natural Animal urges thus the president symbolizes a great contrast to the consciously accepted standards of a good middle class Swiss scientists only in the darkest night of the unconscious could this side of Henry reveal itself however the president figure also has a very positive aspect his urine which could be the symbol of a stream of psychic libido seems inexhaustible it gives evidence of abundance of creative and vital strength Primitives for instance regard everything coming from the body hair excrement urine or saliva as creative as having magical powers this unpleasant president image therefore could also be a sign of the power and plenty that often adheres to the shadow side of the ego not only does he urinate without embarrassment but he runs after an old woman who is holding a child this old spinster is in a way the opposite or complement of the shy fragile Ana of the first part part of the dream she is still a virgin even though old and seemingly a mother in fact Henry Associated her to the archetypal image of Mary with the Child Jesus but the fact that the baby is wrapped in a brown Earth colored blanket makes it seem to be the chonic Earthbound counter image of the Savior rather than a Heavenly child the president who sprinkles the child with his urine seems to perform a travesty of baptism if we take the child as a symbol of a potentiality within Henry that is still infantile then it could receive strength through this ritual but the dream says nothing more the woman hurries away with the child this scene marks the turning point of the dream it is morning again everything that was dark black primitive and Powerful in the last episode has been gathered together and symbolized by a magnificent negro who appears naked I.E Real and True just as darkness and bright morning or hot urin and cold snow are opposites so now the black man and the white landscape form a sharp antithesis the four friends now must Orient themselves Within These New Dimensions their position has changed the way that led through Paris has brought them unexpectedly into French Switzerland where Henry's fiance came from a transformation has taken place in Henry during the earlier phase when he was overpowered by unconscious contents of his psyche now for the first time he can begin to find his way forward from a place that was his fiance's home showing that he accepts her psychological background at the beginning he went from Eastern Switzerland to Paris from the East to the west where the way leads into darkness the unconsciousness he has now made a turn of 180° toward the Rising Sun and the ever increasing Clarity of Consciousness this way points to the middle of Switzerland to its capital burn and symbolizes Henry's striving toward a center that would unite the Opposites within him the Negro is for some people the archetypal image of the dark Primal creature and thus a personification of certain contents of the conscious perhaps this is one reason why the Negro is so often rejected and feared by people of the white race in him the white man sees his living counterpart his hidden Dark Side brought before his eyes this is just what most people try to avoid they want to cut it off and repress it white men project onto the Negro the Primitive drives the archaic Powers the uncontrolled instincts that they do not want to ad MIT in themselves of which they are unconscious and that they therefore designate as the corresponding qualities of other people for a young man of Henry's age the Negro May stand on the one hand for the sum of all dark traits repressed into unconsciousness on the other hand he may represent the sum of his primitive masculine strength and potentialities his emotional and physical power that Henry and his friends intend consciously to confront the Negro signifies therefore a decisive step forward on the way to manhood in the meantime it has become noon when the sun is at its highest and Consciousness has reached its greatest Clarity we might say that Henry's ego has continued to become more and more compact that he has enhanced his capacity consciously to make decisions it is still winter which may indicate a lack of feeling and warmth in Henry his psychic landscape is still wintry and apparently intellectually very cold the four friends are afraid that the naked negro being accustomed to a warm climate might be frozen but their fear turns out to be groundless for after a long drive through deserted snow covered country they stop in a strange city and enter a dark house this drive and the desolate country is symbolic of the long and wearisome search for self-development a further complication awaits the four friends here the Negro and his servant are mute therefore it is not possible to make verbal contact with them the four friends must seek other means to get in touch with the Negro they cannot use intellectual means words but rather a feeling gesture to approach him they offer him a present as one gives an offering to the gods to win their interest and their affection and it has to be an object of our civilization belonging to the values of the intellectual white man again a sacrificium intellectus is demanded to win the favor of the Negro who represents nature and Instinct Henry is the first to make up his mind what to do this is natural since he is the bearer of the ego whose proud Consciousness or hybris has to be humbled he picks up a box of matches from the floor and presents it with difference to the Negro at first glance it may seem absurd that a small object lying on the floor and probably thrown away should be the proper gift but this was the right choice matches are stored and controlled fire a means by which a flame can be lit and put out at any time fire and Flame symbolize warmth and love feeling and passion they are qualities of the the heart found wherever human beings exist in giving the Negro such a present Henry symbolically combines a highly developed civilized product of his conscious ego with the center of his own primitivity and male strength symbolized by the Negro in this way Henry can come into the full possession of his male sides with which his ego must remain in constant touch from now on this was the result the six male persons the four friends the Negro and his servant are now together in a gay Spirit at a communal meal it is clear that here Henry's masculine totality has been rounded out his ego seems to have found the security it needs to enable him consciously and freely to submit to the greater archetypal personality within himself which foreshadows the emergence of the self what happened in the dream had its par parallel also in Henry's Waking Life now he was sure of himself deciding quickly he became serious about his engagement exactly nine months after his analysis had begun he married in a little Church of Western Switzerland and he left the following day with his young wife for Canada to take up an appointment that he had received during the decisive weeks of his last dreams since then he has been living an active creative life life as the head of a little family and holds an executive position in a great industry Henry's case reveals so to speak an accelerated maturation to an independent and responsible manliness it represents an initiation into the reality of outer life a strengthening of the ego and of his masculinity and with this a completion of the first half of the individuation process the second half which is the EST establishment of a right relationship between the ego and the self still lies ahead of Henry in the second half of his life not every case runs such a successful and stirring course and not every case can be handled in a similar way on the contrary every case is different not only do The Young and the old or the man and the woman call for different treatment so does every individual in all these categories even the same Sy sys require different interpretation in each case I have selected this one because it represents an especially impressive example of the autonomy of the unconscious processes and shows by its abundance of images the untiring symbol creating power of the psychic background it proves that the self-regulating action of the psyche when not disturbed by too much rational explanation or dissection can support the developmental process of the Soul conclusion science and the unconscious ml Von France science and the unconscious in the preceding chapters Yun and some of his associates have tried to make clear the role played by the symbol creating function in man's unconscious psyche and to point out some fields of application in this newly discovered area of life we are still far from understanding the unconscious or the archetypes those Dynamic nuclei of the psyche in all their implications all we can see now is that the archetypes have an enormous impact on the individual forming his emotions and his ethical and mental Outlook influencing his relationships with others and thus affecting his whole Destiny we can also see that the arrangement of archetypal symbols follows a pattern of wholeness in the individual and that an appropriate understanding of the symbols can have a healing effect and we can see that the archetypes can act as creative or destructive forces in our mind creative when they Inspire new ideas destructive when these same ideas stiffen into conscious prejudices that inhibit further discoveries young has shown in his chapter how subtle and differentiated all attempts at interpretation must be in order not to weaken the specific individual and cultural values of archetypal ideas and symbols by leveling them out IE by giving them a stereotyped intellectually formulated meaning Jung himself dedicated his entire life to such investigations and interpretative work naturally this book sketches only an infinitesimal part of his vast contribution to this new field of psychological Discovery he was a Pioneer and remained fully aware that an enormous number of further questions remained unanswered and call for further investigation this is why his Concepts and hypotheses are conceived on as wide a basis as possible without making them too vague and all embracing and why his views form a so-called open system that does not close the door against possible new discoveries to Young his Concepts were mere tools or heuristic hypotheses that might help us to explore the vast new area of reality opened up by the discovery of the unconscious a discovery that has not merely widened our whole view of the world but has in fact doubled it we must always ask now whether a mental phenomenon is conscious or unconscious and also whether a real outer phenomenon is perceived by conscious or unconscious means the powerful forces of the unconscious most certainly appear not only in clinical material but also in the mythological religious artistic and all the other cultural activities by which man expresses himself obviously if all men have common inherited patterns of emotional and mental Behavior which Jung called the archetypes it is only to be expected that we shall find their products symbolic fantasies thoughts and actions in practically every field of human activity important modern investigations of many of these fields have been deeply influenced by Jung's work for instance this influence can be seen in the study of literature in such books as JB priestley's literature and Western Man Godfrey deer's fa veg zuh Helena or James ises Shakespeare's Hamlet similarly jungian psychology has contributed to the study of art as in the writings of Herbert Rad or of anela jaff Eric Newman's examination of Henry Moore or Michael tippet studies in music Arnold toin be's work on history and Paul Raiden's on anthropology have benefited from Young's teachings as have the contributions to sonology made by Richard velm Enwin Rell and Manfred porker of course this does not mean that the special features of art and literature including their interpretations can be understood only from their archetypal Foundation these fields all have their own laws of activity like all really creative achievements they cannot ultimately be rationally explained but within their areas of action one can recognize the archetypal patterns as a dynamic background activity and one can often decipher in them as in dreams the message of some seemingly purposive evolutionary tendency of the unconscious the fruitfulness of Young's ideas is more immediately understandable within the area of the cultural activities of man obviously if the archetypes determine our mental Behavior they must appear in all these fields but unexpectedly Young's Concepts have all also opened up new ways of looking at things in the realm of the Natural Sciences as well for instance in biology the physicist Wulf gang poy has pointed out that due to new discoveries our idea of the evolution of Life requires a revision that might take into account an area of interrelation between the unconscious psyche and biological processes until recently it was assumed that the mutation of species happened at random and that a selection took place by means of which the meaningful well-adapted variety survived and the others disappeared but modern evolutionists have pointed out that the selections of such mutations by pure chance would have taken much longer than the known age of our planet allows Jung's concept of synchronicity may be helpful here for it could throw light upon the occurrence of certain rare border phenomena or exceptional events thus it might explain how meaningful adaptations and mutations could happen in less time than that required by entirely random mutations today we know of many instances in which meaningful chance events have occurred when an archetype is activated for example The History of Science contains many cases of simultaneous invention or Discovery one one of the most famous of such cases involved Darwin and his theory of the Origin of Species Darwin had developed the theory in a lengthy essay and in 1844 was busy expanding this into a major Treatise while he was at work on this project he received a manuscript from a young biologist unknown to Darwin named a Wallace the manuscript was a shorter but otherwise parallel exposition of Darwin's theory at the time Wallace was in the maluca islands of the Malay archipelago he knew of Darwin as a naturalist but had not the slightest idea of the kind of theoretical work on which Darwin was at the time engaged in each case a creative scientist had independently arrived at a hypothesis that was to change the entire development of the science and each had initially conceived of the hypothesis in an intuitive flash later backed up by documentary evidence the archetypes thus seem to appear as the agents so to speak of a creatio continua what Jung calls synchronistic events are in fact something like acts of Creation in time similar meaningful coincidences can be said to occur when there is a vital necessity for an individual to know about say a relative's death or some lost possession in a great many cases such information has been revealed by means of extrasensory perception this seems to suggest that abnormal random phenomena may occur when a vital need or urge is aroused and this in turn might explain why a species of animals under great pressure or in great need could produce meaningful but a causal changes in its outer material structure but the most promising field for future studies seems as Jung saw it to have unexpectedly opened up in connection with the complex field of microphysics at first sight it seems most unlikely that we should find a relationship between psychology and microphysics the interrelation of these Sciences is worth some explanation the most obvious aspect of such a connection lies in the fact that most of the basic concepts of physics such as space time matter energy Continuum or field particle Etc were originally intuitive semi mythological archetypal ideas of the old Greek philosophers ideas that then slowly evolved and became more accurate and that today are mainly expressed in abstract mathematical terms the idea of a particle for instance was formulated by the 4th Century BC Greek philosopher Lucius and his pupil democratus who called it the atom I.E the indivisible unit though the atom has not proved indivisible we still conceive matter ultimately as consisting of waves and particles or discontinuous quanta the idea of energy and its relationship to force and movement was also formulated by early Greek thinkers and was developed by stoic philosophers they posture UL ated the existence of a sort of lifegiving tension tonos which supports and moves all things this is obviously a semi mythological germ of our modern concept of energy even comparatively modern scientists and thinkers have relied on half mythological archetypal images when building up new Concepts in the 17th century for instance the absolute validity of the law of causality seemed Pro proved to Renee deart by the fact that God is immutable in his decisions and actions and the great German astronomer Johannes Kepler asserted that there are not more and not less than three dimensions of space on account of the Trinity these are just two examples among many that show how even our more modern and basic scientific Concepts remained for a long time linked with archetypal ideas that originally came from the unconscious they do not necessarily Express objective facts or at least we cannot prove that they ultimately do but spring from innate mental tendencies in man tendencies that induce him to find satisfactory rational explanatory connections between the various outer and inner facts with which he has to deal when examining nature and the universe instead of looking for and finding objective qualities man encounters himself in the phrase of the physicist verer Heisenberg because of the implications of this point of view Wulf gang poy and other scientists have begun to study the role of archetypal symbolism in The Realm of scientific Concepts poy believed that we should parallel our investigation of outer objects with a psychological investigation of the inner origin of our scientific Concepts this investigation might shed new light on a far-reaching concept to be introduced later in this chapter the concept of a oness between the physical and psychological spheres quantitative and qualitative aspects of reality besides this rather obvious link between the psychology of the unconscious and physics there are other even more fascinating connections Jung working closely with po discovered that analytical psychology has been forced by investigations in its own field to create Concepts that turned out later to be strikingly similar to those created by the physicists when confronted with microphysical phenomena one of the most important among the physicist Concepts is Neil's B's idea of complimentarity modern microphysics has discovered that one can only describe light by means of two logically opposed but complimentary Concepts the ideas of particle and wave in grossly simplified terms it might be said that under certain experimental conditions light manifests itself as if it were composed of particles under others as if it were a wave also it was discovered that we can accurately observe either the position or the velocity of a subatomic particle but not both at once the Observer must choose his experimental setup but by doing so he excludes or rather must sacrifice some other possible setup and its results furthermore the measuring apparatus has to be included in the description of events because it has a decisive but uncontrollable influence upon the experimental setup Paulie says the science of microphysics on account of the basic complimentary situation is faced with the impossibility of eliminating the effects of the Observer by determinable correctives and has therefore to abandon in principle any objective understanding of physical phenomena where classical physics still saw determined causal natural laws of nature we now look only for statistic laws with primary possibilities in other words in microphysics the Observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated no natural laws can be formulated saying such and such will happen in every case all the microphysics can say is such and such is according to statistical probability likely to happen this naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking it requires a consideration in a scientific experiment of the mental Outlook of the participant Observer it could thus be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent objective manner most modern physicists have accepted the fact that the role played by the conscious ideas of an observer in every microphysical experiment cannot be eliminated but they have not concerned themselves with the possibility that the total psychological condition both conscious and unconscious of the Observer might play a role as well as Paulie points out however we have at least no a priori reasons for rejecting this possibility but we must look at this as a still unanswered and an unexplored problem B's idea of complimentarity is especially interesting to jungian psychologists for Jung saw that the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind also forms a complimentary pair of op opposites each new content that comes up from the unconscious is altered in its basic Nature by being partly integrated into the conscious mind of the Observer even dream contents if noticed at all are in that way semiconscious and each enlargement of the observer's Consciousness caused by dream interpretation has again an immeasurable repercussion and influence on the unconscious thus the unconscious can only be approximately described like the particles of microphysics by paradoxical Concepts what it really is in itself we shall never know just as we shall never know this about matter to take the parallels between psychology and microphysics even further what Young calls the archetypes or patterns of emotional and mental behavior in man could just as well be called to use Po's term primary possibilities of psychic reactions as has been stressed in this book there are no laws governing the specific form in which an archetype might appear there are only tendencies that again enable us to say only that such and such is likely to happen in certain psychological situations as the American psychologist William James once pointed out the idea of an unconscious could itself be compared to the field Concept in physics we might say that just as in a magnetic field the particles entering into it appear in a certain order psychological contents also appear in an ordered way within that psychic area which we call the unconscious if we call something rational or meaningful in our conscious mind and accept it as a satisfactory explanation of things it is probably due to the fact that our conscious explanation is in harmony with some preconscious constellation of contents in our unconscious in other words our conscious representations are sometimes ordered or arranged in a pattern before they have become conscious to us the 18th century German mathematician Carl Friedrich gaus gives an example of an experience of such an unconscious order of ideas he says that he found a certain rule in the theory of num not by painstaking research but by the grace of God so to speak the riddle solved itself as Lightning Strikes and I myself could not tell or show the connection between what I knew before what I last used to experiment with and what produced the final success the French scientist HRI pangare is even more explicit about this phenomenon he describes how during a sleepless night he actually watched his mathematical rep representations colliding in him until some of them found a more stable connection one feels as if one could watch one's own unconscious at work the unconscious activity partially becoming manifest to Consciousness without losing its own character at such moments one has an intuition of the difference between the mechanisms of the two egos as a final example of parallel developments in microphysics and psychology we can consider Jung's concept of meaning where before men looked for causal that is rational explanations of phenomena young introduced the idea of looking for the meaning or perhaps we could say the purpose that is rather than ask why something happened that is what caused it young asked what did it happen for this same tendency appears in physics many modern physicists are now looking more for Connections in nature than for causal laws determinism Paulie expected that the idea of the unconscious would spread beyond the narrow frame of therapeutic use and would influence all natural sciences that deal with General Life phenomena since Paulie suggested this development he has been echoed by some physicists who are concerned with the new science of cybernetics the comparative study of the control system formed by the brain and nervous system system and such mechanical or electronic information and control systems as computers in short as the modern French scientist Oliver Costa De borgar has put it science and psychology should in future enter into an active dialogue the unexpected parallelisms of ideas in Psychology and physics suggest as Jung pointed out a possible ultimate Oneness of both fields of reality that physics and psychology study I.E a psychophysical Oneness of all life phenomena Jung was even convinced that what he calls the unconscious somehow links up with the structure of inorganic matter a link to which the problem of soall psychosomatic illness seems to point the concept of a Unitarian idea of reality which has been followed up by POI and Eric nyman was called by Yung the UNIS unus the one world within which matter and psyche are not yet discriminated or separately actualized he paved the way toward such a Unitarian point of view by pointing out that an archetype shows a psychoid that is not purely psychic but almost material aspect when it appears within a synchronistic event for such an event is in effect a meaningful arrangement of inner psychic and outer facts in other words the archetypes not only fit into outer situations as animal patterns of behavior fit into their surrounding nature at bottom they tend to become manifest in a synchronistic Arrangement that includes both matter and psyche but these statements are just hints at some directions in which the investigation of Life phenomena might proceed young felt that we should first learn a great deal more about the interrelation of these two areas as matter and psyche before rushing into too many abstract speculations about it the field that young himself felt would be most fruitful for further investigations was the study of our basic mathematical axioma which poy calls primary mathematical intuitions and among which he especially mentions the ideas of an infinite series of numbers in arithmetic or of a Continuum in geometry Etc as the german-born author Hannah arant has said with the rise of modernity mathematics do not simply enlarge their content or reach out into the infinite to become applicable to the immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing expanding universe but cease to be concerned with appearance at all they are no longer the beginnings of philosophy or the Sciences of being in its true appearance but become instead the science of the structure of the human mind a jungian would at once add the question which mind the conscious or the unconscious mind as we have seen with reference to the experiences of gaus and po carare the mathematicians also discovered the fact that our representations are ordered before we become aware of them BL van deren who cites many examples of essential mathematical insights arising from the unconscious concludes the unconscious is not only able to associate and combine but even to judge the Judgment of the unconscious is an intuitive one but it is under favorable circumstances completely sure among the many mathematical primary intuitions or a priori ideas the natural numbers seem psychologically the most interesting not only do they serve our conscious everyday measuring and Counting operations they have for centuries been the only existing means for reading the meaning of such ancient forms of divination as astrology numerology geomancy Etc all of which are based on arithmetical computation and all of which have been investigated by Jung in terms of his theory of synchronicity furthermore the natural numbers viewed from a psychological iCal angle must certainly be archetypal representations for we are forced to think about them in certain definite ways nobody for instance can deny that two is the only existing even primary number even if he has never thought about it consciously before in other words numbers are not Concepts consciously invented by men for purposes of calculation they are spontaneous and autonomous products of the unconscious as are other archetypal symbols but the natural numbers are also qualities adherent to Outer objects we can assert and count that there are two stones here or three trees there even if we strip outer objects of all such qualities as color temperature size Etc there Still Remains their many or special multiplicity yet these same numbers are also just as indisputably parts of our own mental setup abstract Concepts that we can study without looking at outer objects numbers thus appear to be a tangible connection between the Spheres of matter and psyche according to hints dropped by Jung it is here that the most fruitful field of further investigation might be found I mentioned these rather difficult Concepts briefly in order to show that to me Jung's ideas do not form a Doctrine but are the beginning of a new outlook that will continue to evolve and expand I hope they will give the reader a glimpse into what seems to me to have been essential to and typical of Jung's scientific attitude he was always searching with unusual freedom from conventional prejudices and at the same time with great modesty and accuracy to understand the phenomenon of life he did not go further into the ideas mentioned above because he felt that he had not yet enough facts in hand to say anything relevant about them just as he generally waited several years before publishing his new insights checking them again and again in the meantime and himself raising every possible doubt about them therefore what might at First Sight strike the reader as a certain vagueness in his ideas comes in fact from this scientific attitude of intellectual modesty an attitude that does not exclude by rash superficial pseudo explanations and oversimplifications new possible discoveries and that respects the complexity of the phenomenon of life for this phenomenon was always an exciting mystery to Young it was never as it is for people with closed minds an explained reality about which it can be assumed that we know everything creative ideas in my opinion show their value in that like key they help to unlock hitherto unintelligible connections of facts and thus enable man to penetrate deeper into the mystery of life I am convinced that Jung's ideas can serve in this way to find and interpret new facts in many fields of Science and also of everyday life simultaneously leading the individual to a more balanced more ethical and wider conscious Outlook if the reader should feel stimulated to work further on the investigation and assimilation of the unconscious which always Begins by working on oneself the purpose of this introductory book would be fulfilled