5

Seminar on Children’s Dreams
(Winter Term, 1940/41)

A. CHILDREN’S DREAMS

Further remarks on the interpretation of dreams1

(PROFESSOR JUNG)

Professor Jung: We are dealing here with children’s dreams of a particular kind, which are very often not understood correctly, because it is thought that these dreams are being observed in children—that is, are directly recorded by the father or the mother. We are not dealing with such dreams, however, but with children’s dreams that have been remembered by adults. So a selection of these dreams has already been made. These are dreams that have stood the test of time and persisted. If someone had written down the dreams of your childhood, for instance, and you read these notes again later, they would be completely foreign to you, and you yourself would not be able to remember them. But some of the dreams have lingered on, as fresh as on the first day. This is the kind of dreams we are dealing with here. Partly I have collected these dreams myself, partly they have been told to me by participants in the seminar. As soon as the problem of a dream is no longer acute, that is, it is solved and outgrown, the dream vanishes from memory. If it still persists in memory, however, the problem has not been solved, or the dream touched on something that one perhaps still hasn’t understood yet, or never will. Phenomena and contents are touched on that are completely unconscious for ordinary mortals. And these things exert an enormous influence on the shape of subsequent destiny and, therefore, get stuck in memory. Such dreams are of special importance, because in a way their content anticipates a problem of later life. These dreams in particular make us understand why the ancients attributed a pronounced prognostic meaning to their dreams. Throughout the whole of antiquity, and to a large extent still in the Middle Ages, it was believed that dreams foretell the future. Our consciousness is directed only outward, light only falls onto this world, but it throws no light backward, on the thinker of the thoughts and the doer of the deeds. If consciousness does do it, however, it throws light on the basis of consciousness, on the unconscious, and there things may be brought to life, just as we can enliven reality by observing it.

As far as the work with the dream is concerned, we first of all structure the dream as a story, as a course of events; the dream is a drama taking place on the inner stage, and a true drama of course always has—like any course of action—a beginning, a middle, and an end. So, to begin with, we determine the exposition of the dream, in which the specific place, the time, specific persons, and a specific problem are exposed. Usually you can already find it in the first sentence of the dream. For you have to break down the text into sentences and thus work out the problem—it is about this and that. This is the first part. The second part is the development of the problem. This means: the problem stated at the beginning starts to have an effect, it gets complicated, the plot thickens, a certain development occurs. This leads, in the third place, to the peripateia, a certain escalation that may become truly dramatic: it leads to a climax in which the turn of events then happens. The latter constitutes a change—it can be a decision, for example, or something occurs that throws a completely different light on the problem. This leads us to the fourth part, the lysis, the result of the dream that, of course, is not final or complete as in a conscious drama. Most of the time, the end is somehow enigmatic, not really satisfactory to our taste. But, in any case, this is the result for that moment. In series, the end usually presents a new problem. One is dead, or somebody else is dead, or something completely out of the way has happened. This then remains as a question. Some impossible situation presents itself, and then we have to ask ourselves: what will happen next? What can be done? An answer is given by the next dream, perhaps the same night, after a hiatus. The second dream takes the problem up again in a different form.

Once this structuring has been done, we can start to truly work on the dream, that is, to look for the corresponding context for each motif. This is not the same as free association, which just leads you from one thing to another; one doesn’t need a dream for that, but one might as well let someone associate about a button, and one will of course also arrive at the complexes. This does not prove at all that these complexes are also represented in the dream. By free association we won’t know yet what the dream means; because the dream does not consist of the complexes, but represents the way in which they are dealt with. It represents what the unconscious does with the complex and how it tries to solve the dilemma. Our look at the complex is a look at the associative connections to the dream image. We have to know what it means for somebody to dream of an elephant, not what I as an analyst think about an elephant, but what connections it has for the person who had the dream. Perhaps one had been to a zoo the evening before, the other had been in the wilderness and had an experience with an elephant, or a third had been told by his wife: you are such a clumsy elephant, and so on. For each of them the elephant means something different. You have to carefully inquire about the events of the previous day. In recording these contexts, you have to encourage the person whose dream you analyze not to make free associations, but always to stay with the image. For the dream image is nothing accidental, otherwise we’d have to say that anything in nature is accidental, a chaos, and that there is no explanation. We have to assume that the dreams take place in a world according to laws, that there exists a certain causality, not just pure arbitrariness. There are specific reasons why the dream is precisely what it is, and not something different. Now when you investigate the single dream images with regard to the context, you will find that certain contents—not in all dreams by far—are of an archetypal nature, meaning that these latter forms of ideas are of a collective nature and can be found everywhere. Naturally, you will not be able to recognize them if you aren’t already knowledgeable about such ideas. One has to have the corresponding material at one’s fingertips in order to recognize archetypal figures. This gives the dream an additional, very special character. You can then determine into which depths the dream reaches. The archetypes always appear as mythological figures or motifs.

The final act consists in the interpretation: one formulates a hypothesis about the possible meaning of the dream. This formulation has to be concise. You have to insert, in other words, the expressions you found into the dream text, to reformulate the dream, but this time with the found expressions. Then you will find the meaning of the dream.

1. Dreams of a Four- to Five-Year-Old Girl of Her Father as a Menacing Giant, of a Pergola and a Dachshund, and of Exercising in a Barn

PRESENTED BY DR. IGNAZ REICHSTEIN2

Text: 1. I’m lying in my bed and watch how the door to my parents’ bedroom slowly opens. My father appears in the opening, but it’s a mighty giant; he looks ferocious and threatens me with a club. I wake up frightened.

2. I’m standing in front of an endless pergola; a little dachshund jumps out of it and comes toward me. I am so scared that I wake up.

3. I am in a very big, high barn, and under the roof I climb from one beam to another.

Dr. Reichstein: In the first dream, the locale and the persons are: the dreamer’s bedroom beside the parental bedroom, the dreamer herself, and her father as a giant. Peripateia: the door to the parents’ bedroom opens, the father appears in the form of a giant and threatens the dreamer with a club. The lysis is missing.

The dreamer is in her bed next to the bedroom of the parents, usually a very protected, intimate place, in immediate proximity of the parents. We are in bed before or during sleep, thus in a state in which the unconscious is particularly activated.

Then the dreamer sees how the door to the parents’ bedroom slowly opens. She catches sight of the place where the unconscious of the parents is activated. Above all, this is the sphere of sexuality and the place of procreation.

From there the father comes in the form of a mighty giant, threatening her with a club. The giant is an archetypal figure. In German mythology, the giants are described as follows: they are primordial natural beings, mostly appearing in groups, displaying little individual character. In the Edda, Ymir, a primordial giant, develops out of the primordial waters, out of whose body parts the world was built. The giants stand in contrast to the gods; they are coarse creatures, indifferent to morality, who know only fleshly pleasures such as getting drunk and overeating. On the other hand, as the eldest beings, they possess a knowledge of primordial things, an uncreated and traditional wisdom. Utgard, their dwelling place, lies outside the circular earth, along the sea coast, or beyond the world ocean, which was thought of as a small strip—thus, in a place outside the world. According to another myth, they are underground, in the womb of the waters or of the hollow mountains. The gods had erected a protective barrier, the fortress Midgard (the land of man), against the attacks of the giants. Gods and giants constantly fight against each other, as is particularly evident in the Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods, in which giants and gods destroy each other in a final battle.

In ancient mythology, giants and dragons often turn into each other, and enforced human sacrifices had to be made to them. Later heroes, who took the place of the gods, put an end to these sacrifices by defeating the giants, freeing the treasures guarded by them, and saving the princesses who had been destined to be their victims.

In Greek mythology, the giants are also sons of the earth and adversaries of the gods. In the Gigantomachia, the battle between the gods and the giants, the latter can be defeated only with the help of a mortal, which task falls to Heracles.

The club is the primitive weapon of the giants, but often also of the gods. Grimm writes: “Stones and rocks are the weapons of the race of the giants; they use only stone clubs, stone shields, no swords.” The god Thor, too, the main opponent of the giants, is armed with a hammer or a club. It also corresponds to the thunderbolts and the flash of lightning, by which the club also assumes a fertilizing character, as can already be seen from its typically phallic form. In Frauenlob, Simrock mentions a passage in which a virgin says about God the Father: “the smith from the upper land threw a hammer into my lap/womb.”3 The lightning also throws wedge-shaped thunder stones as deep into the earth as church towers are high, “nine fathoms deep,” which rise again to the surface of the earth after seven or nine years.

To summarize, the giants can be characterized as follows: they are chaotic, untamed, natural, instinctual creatures; insatiable and destructive in their carnal greed, if they are not reined in by the gods to be more benevolent.

We can now see in what form the father approaches the girl. The figure of the father comes out of the sphere of the parental bedroom, with which all kinds of awakening ideas are associated in a child of this age, but he is very different from how he is during the day. Defenseless and undressed, she is lying in her bed, in precisely the place where she otherwise feels protected. The father, the person who alone could protect her, is no longer present, only the monster that threatens her with a club. It is remarkable, by the way, that the mother does not appear at all. Only the mention of the parents’ bedroom lets us think of the mother, and if we envisage the situation—the father, who comes out of the parents’ bedroom as a mighty giant with the club—we will involuntarily think: either the mother, too, is helpless against this brute, or he has killed her already. As the dream is not about just any giant, but precisely about the father, we may assume that the dream uncovers the father’s unconscious attitude toward the daughter. So the father places extreme demands on the daughter. As the dream has no lysis, we are all the more justified in concluding that the child is in an endangered position.

The second dream goes: I’m standing in front of an endless pergola; a little dachshund jumps out of it and comes toward me. I am so scared that I wake up.

Locale and persons:	In front of an endlessly long pergola, the dreamer, and a little dachshund.
Peripateia:	The little dachshund jumps toward her.
The lysis is missing.

The dreamer stands before a long pergola. A pergola is a walkway in an arbor, resting on pillars, which are often entwined by vine branches. The term is of Italian origin. It is a civilized setting, a cultivated piece of nature with a southern flair, where one goes for leisurely walks. If one is standing before such an endlessly long pergola, however, one’s gaze will necessarily be directed in a certain direction, into the endlessness out there. In temporal terms, we could interpret it as a look into the future. From there a little dachshund is jumping toward the dreamer. Ordinarily, a dachshund is a droll and cute animal, of which one is usually not supposed to be afraid. So why is the dreamer so scared by it?

As a dog, that is, as an instinctual animal, the dachshund represents the instinctual sphere of man. According to Brehm, it is the most peculiar and curious of all dogs. Despite its smallness, it is strong and courageous. It is intelligent, quick to learn, but also crafty and malicious. It is not afraid of other dogs, even bigger ones. It is single-minded when hunting, and with unequaled greed and determination pursues its way until it reaches its goal. It especially likes to rout out other animals that live underground, like the badger or the fox, which it drives out of their holes with unbridled ardor and hardly controllable hunting fever. Its body shape, nearly without legs like a worm or mole, is reminiscent of the shape of the club in the first dream. Again it is the natural instinct that confronts the girl from the outside, as if in the future. This time it takes a less threatening, more domesticated form, not monstrous and brutally destructive, but still eager to hunt, scenting out and inexorably chasing its prey. There is still another antagonist to the giants besides the gods: Tom Thumb, or the youngest child, who is always more than what he seems. The dachshund, the smallest among the dogs, can so be seen under this aspect with regard to the giants. Because of its quickness, craftiness, and smallness it can get into anything and seems to be everywhere. By this it compensates for the enormous dimensions of the giant. Under certain circumstances, Tom Thumb himself becomes a giant, as is the case in a Grimm fairy tale. So the anxiety of the girl would be understandable. While the giant represents the coarse and inert side of the instinct, the dachshund embodies the small, agile, and all-penetrating instinctual principle. It is impossible to get out of its way, therefore, which is symbolized in the dream by the arbor walk bordered on both sides, where one can move only forward or backward, just like in life itself. So she finds herself between these two opposites. Just like the first one, this dream also ends without a solution.

The third dream goes: I am in a very big, high barn, and under the roof I climb from one beam to another.

Locale and persons:	The barn, the dreamer.
Peripateia:	The dreamer climbs from one beam to another
	under the roof.
The lysis is missing.

The barn is where the crops are securely stored, it is part of every farm. Mostly it is a simple, plain building, where the corn is also threshed.

According to the Handbook of German Superstition, it is a place favored by demons. The beams, too, are favorite places of the spirits. The roof protects against rain, snow, and coldness, but not against the dreaded stroke of lightning. In Rheinische Volkskunde [Rhenish Folklore], Wrede describes various rituals to ward off strokes of lightning.

In this dream, the dreamer is alone in a place that is more primitive than, for instance, a pergola. In contrast to her previous passive behavior, she now moves from one beam to another. At first glance this activity seems to be pointless, because it resembles a swinging to and fro, which always takes one back to the starting point. Although she is in a relatively secure place, she is in a highly insecure position and, moreover, in constant motion, always in danger of falling down. The barn is incredibly high, maybe so high that not even a giant could reach the top. As near to the roof as possible, perhaps comparable to the firmament, she is in the sphere of the demons, far removed from the ground, in constant motion from one beam to another, in which ghosts dwell, as if she were forced forward and backward by them.

This dream also leaves the girl without lysis in a dangerous situation. If we interpret the barn as an anticipation of her own adulthood, however, we can conclude that she will prefer always to remain in the upper regions of her own person, and anxiously avoid descending into her instinctual sphere. This tense and labile state clearly shows us the dangerous aspect of the situation.

If we now have a look at the three dreams in context, we can state the following: The first dream reveals to the dreamer the unconsciously split-off, chaotic, instinctual nature of her own father, which frightens her very much without showing her a way out. In the second dream, she takes a look into the future, so to speak, from where the inevitable natural instinct comes toward her. Although this is seemingly less threatening (particularly expressed by the contrast between the little dachshund and the mighty giant), she herself has in the meantime become isolated from her parents and is afraid, again without finding a loophole. Finally, in the third dream, she has fled from the house and the well-kept pergola to the barn, where she seeks shelter from the menacing earth creatures high above the ground. We could possibly view the whole dream as an unsuccessful attempt at a lysis to the two previous dreams. She moves to higher regions, to the spirits, which, however, do not leave her alone either.

In short, the meaning of the three dreams is approximately the following: The dreamer is confronted with a conflict—which, as we may assume, stems from the unsolved problem of the parents, and particularly of the father—in such a way that she will subsequently not be able to assimilate her own instinctual sphere. She is forced to live in the upper regions, which might find an expression, for example, in a one-sided intellectual or social activity. This is a very insecure situation, however, in which one is constantly in danger of falling down into one’s instinctual sphere.

Professor Jung: What is interesting is that there is no lysis in any of these dreams. Now if we have a dream series without lysis, how would you interpret this?

Participant: The conflict persists.

Professor Jung: Yes, this is the case in this dream series. Although there are three dreams about the same topic, there is no lysis. What does this mean for the prognosis?

Participant: There is no solution.

Professor Jung: No, it means only that for a very long time there will be no lysis. This is a problem that will not be solved for a very long time. These are remembered dreams that got stuck, so to speak, and that are still valid; and from the fact that the lysis is missing, we know that no correct answer to this problem will be found for a long time. Have you noticed anything else?

Participant: I would perhaps stress even more the contrast between the father and the dachshund, and maybe say: the instinctual frightens her off; it seems to have become the same as the father to the dreamer, but with a different quality. The first dream is about the destructive problem in the father; then she shies away from something constructive, from something that lures foxes and badgers out of the underworld. This means that there is something extremely constructive in her, after all.

Professor Jung: Yes, absolutely. This proposition of the dream gives rise to high hopes. This confirms what Dr. Reichstein said: the following dreams are an attempt at a lysis. This is the example I mentioned before, in which the following dreams take up again what had been left unfinished by the previous one, but again without achieving a lysis themselves. So I definitely agree with Dr. Reichstein: what strikes us in the first dream is the menacing giant, and in the next the dachshund, which is such a cute little dog of which one really needn’t be afraid, and yet, strangely enough, it frightens her. I would have added in the third dream: here, too, there is the giant motif, that is, an enormous, high barn. I recommend that you keep these motifs clearly in mind. If the topic is a giant, we will look out for the motif of something too big or too small also in the following dreams, because archetypal ideas are always ambivalent, no Yes or No. What is right is also left; what is up is also down; what exists also does not exist. All statements about supernatural phenomena, therefore, have to be of a paradoxical nature, the biggest is also the smallest, and so on, which shows that we have reached a transhuman sphere. So the giant turns into a dachshund, which gives rise to hope.

Participant: The third dream represents progress. It is a barn, not a skyscraper. The barn is nature.

Professor Jung: Yes, you are quite right. The third dream further pursues the euphemistic course. Already the dachshund is a remarkable euphemism. It is a very significant change in the dream that the absolutely frightening and terrible is transformed. In the first dream it was still impossible to cope with the giant. Then it is exactly as if the unconscious said: let’s try it the other way around. How could we tell the child? With a dachshund. The dachshund contains everything the giant has, too: primordial nature, but it is also the animal that has gotten closer to man, a domesticated animal, and thus not dangerous.

Participants: This is reminiscent of the dream of the little boy who went into the robber’s den.4 There we find the same opposites: one giant has the power, the other, the thin one, has the wisdom of nature—as in our case the giant and the little dachshund. Both represented the two world powers that threatened the little boy from the world of the adults.

Professor Jung: In that dream there are two giants, which indicates: the giant is archetypal, which means oppositional. “Long and thin, devil within.”⁵

Participant: In the second dream, the motif of the very big is also there, in the long pergola. So in the first dream nature predominates, while in the second one time already plays a role.

Professor Jung: Yes, and with it also culture. You were right in pointing out that there is something positive in this dream: what had been destructive has turned into something harmless, into a little dog. Moreover, this scene is no longer nocturnal and uncanny, but it is about a pergola. We picture it in the green, with flowers and a garden, where there is no evil, wild, mythological, primordial nature at all. The dreamer noticed that, of course, because unfortunately she is frightened even here by the dachshund, which shows that she must have recognized the giant in the dachshund. Now what does the motif of a skillful euphemistic guise mean?

Participant: It aims at making the dreamer accept the giant.

Professor Jung: Yes, the giant is a mythological figure that represents chthonic nature, a purely natural being, against which one cannot protect oneself except by cunning. But the child is helplessly at his mercy, and yet this being, this exemplar of menacing nature, has to be accepted and has somehow to be translated into the child’s structure—because obviously the giant represents an impulse that is present in the child herself. Of course, we are inclined to think of the father, and a brutal father at that. But he need not be brutal at all. In the case of a given disposition in the child, he can impress her as frightening without actually being it. After all, there are idiosyncracies: a loud noise may frighten the one, but only tickle the other; the one is hurt by a certain remark, the other isn’t. I have already noticed that completely harmless things can frighten children, if there is a certain susceptibility or if something fateful is active. But we may assume that the father was very impetuous, which had a frightening effect. We would assume a causal relation with the father; the father would be to blame for the child’s having suffered this trauma. We would then have to suppose that something got into disorder. This is correct thinking, but we also have to take the child’s reaction into account. We have to take the child into consideration. We have to leave the blame on the individual, because it is more correct to say: unfortunately, wrongly, the child reacted to something that actually is also in her nature—because it was her nature, the child’s nature, that turned the father into the giant. The unconscious of the child did this. It turned the father into a giant, so to speak; for if we do not express it in this way, we actually say that the being into which the father was transformed was not accepted. But the child has to integrate precisely this impetuousness, something that is also in her own nature. It does not matter in the slightest whether this once came into her from the outside, or whether it was there from the beginning. If it is in her, it has also to be accepted. We can never avert such an effect by eliminating it. The dreamer will be truly healed only if this natural force is assimilated. This is what the unconscious tries to help with by the second dream. To this end, the second dream transforms the giant into something quite acceptable, because in reasonable anticipation we might suppose that one would not be frightened by a dachshund. But even this does not help, because the child has again sensed the dangerous natural force in the dachshund.

Now comes the third dream, of the enormous, high barn. This dream has taken up the second one: the motif of bigness, but no longer in the active form. We can presume, therefore, that the third dream, too, is trying to get her acquainted with the gigantic, which is also represented by the barn. The barn roof has something protective. The barn is a dry place for storing supplies. It is part of the stable where the cattle are. Many barns have big roofs, something quite homey, protective, which covers them. So absolutely nothing aggressive remains to be seen, and the giant motif has turned into a building that accommodates the dreamer. So what happened with the natural creature?

Participant: It has become a protection.

Professor Jung: Yes, it already represents a pact with the giant: Help me, protect me! That’s how far the dream goes in the euphemistic transformation of what causes fear and is dangerous. Now, however, one would expect that she has a nice roof and feels secure. But then it happens that she climbs under the roof beams. Dr. Reichstein explained this by the secrets of the roof timberwork. Who dwells there?

Participant: Bats.

Professor Jung: Yes, bats, something secret, nocturnal, spiritual. “The wind is sighing through the roof, the voices of the spirits” (Ossian). In the house of the spirits of the primitives, in the tribes of the headhunters and similar ones, the heads of the killed are hung on the roof beams, because the spirits rise into the air as smoke and “subtle bodies.”6

Participant: In Barlach, in Der tote Tag [The Dead Day], the evil spirit of the mother also sits on the beam.

Professor Jung: Yes, Steissbart. So what does it mean to climb on the roofs?

Participant: If she cannot come down to the ground, she will remain a spirit herself.

Professor Jung: The attempt of the unconscious failed, because instead of a solution of the problem she is climbing in the beams.

Participant: Don’t we have to take into account that all children would love to do that, but aren’t allowed to? There is some mischief in this.

Professor Jung: What do we call this mischief? Who does this? Who climbs in the roofs? Haven’t you ever seen this?

Participant: The apes.

Professor Jung: The lysis is in the ape house! Where did the dachshund go, the life that was in the dachshund?

Participant: It went into herself. It is a gradual assimilation of what had been terrible and frightening. It is assimilated like a shell shock, that is, only step by step.

Participant: The roof is something constructive.

Professor Jung: Certainly, the giant, the dangerous, has turned into the protective roof. But through this the life of the giant has disappeared, and also the life of the dachshund, and so what happens to it? It has to be somewhere: it has gone into herself. She is changed; she now climbs like an ape, so to speak, in the timberwork.

Participant: She gets to know the giant from the inside.

Professor Jung: Yes, at first in the form of a dachshund. The giant is a superhuman being, but we can understand a dachshund. The ape is the next stage, which one could use for a comparison. In many respects, humans are like apes. I have recently read of an ape that looks after a whole dog kennel of English foxhounds. When the dogs want to fight, it keeps them apart; it behaves like a servant, so one can easily let the ape be in charge of the dogs. So in a way man approaches the dog’s nature via the medium of the ape. For this he needs a kind of atavistic memory. He is nearest to the ape where he best understands the dog. That is why it is so very satisfying to keep an animal, because our animal nature is constantly warmed and sustained a bit by this. This is the secret of the love of animals.

Participant: But the ape is still removed from the ground of reality.

Professor Jung: This dream is more positive than the other dreams, but the fact that the ape nature emerges is not yet a solution.

Participant: It is a regression to the animal stage.

Professor Jung: But into which stage?

Participant: It is unconscious.

Professor Jung: Yes, a certain unconsciousness regarding this problem sets in.

Participant: This dream is more dangerous, because the dreamer may fall to her death.

Professor Jung: No, not with the ape nature. She does have the ape nature, doesn’t she, the strength and the skill to hold on to these beams and climb on them? Others would fall down, but not she.

Participant: The barn is also not the house in which people live, it is an unconscious situation. It is actually there where the animals are, where the bats live, and so on.

Professor Jung: Yes, it is nearer to nature, something between farmstead, stable, and barn, and from there it leads out into nature. So it is primitive, too.

Participant: Perhaps she enters the intellectual sphere with the libido.

Professor Jung: Exactly. When a house appears in a dream, it plays an important role anyway, regardless if one is in the basement, on the uppermost floor, or on the roof. Here you must always think of the stories of the human body. Bats that live in the roof, for example, have given rise to a proverbial saying: “bats in the belfry,”7 for someone who is “bonkers.” He then has bats, so to speak, up there in the attic. Attic and roof are the uppermost parts of the house and of the body. The stomach is often compared to the kitchen; Paracelsus said: Everybody has an alchemist in his belly. The digestive organ is the alchemical kitchen in us. So in our case the inevitable conclusion would be that instinct, which had been triggered in the child by the effect of the fright, is a head instinct, a spiritual instinct. The girl is pulled upward, unconsciously pulled upward, into the sphere of the head; this is by no means done deliberately, because this is an unconscious state. Unconsciously, instinctually, she is pulled upward. And she simply prefers to wander around in the timberwork, to enter into the intellectual sphere; all this because of that first shock.

Participant: The father already had this problem.

Professor Jung: Was he intellectual?

Participant: No.

Professor Jung: Not at all, he lived on the emotional level. The club, the shattering instrument, had to do with an emotion that had caused the shock and had a shattering effect.

Participant: Perhaps the father suppressed the instinctual nature in particular?

Professor Jung: Not necessarily. What we can see from the dream is only that some emotionality has to be present, which has a shattering and crushing effect.

Participant: Isn’t it so great precisely because it is split off?

Professor Jung: Yes, that could be. Or the emotionality is unnaturally exaggerated by being mixed with a thinking that does not differentiate; if someone, for instance, should think, but does not, this energy passes into the emotions. Emotions are always there where we are not adjusted. They are always a sign of maladjustment. At the point where we fail, we have emotions.

Participant: So he is intellectual after all?

Professor Jung: No, he needn’t be, if he does not think. We will leave the question open whether this is a case of repressed emotionality, which acts like an explosion, or of a secondary emotion due to a non-differentiation of a necessary function. In this case, if such an intellectual course manifests itself in the child, we rather have to assume that the latter is the case. This is shown by the hidden solution: if the emotionality had been repressed in the father, it would have surfaced in the child, as her task. This I have often observed in families. I know generations! I really had to struggle with the emotions of children of people with repressed emotionality; these children had been given the task to live these emotions. But here this does not seem to be the case; here the result is an intellectualizing effect, even the destiny of an intellectual activity that is inescapable and fateful, a legacy taken over from the father. We have to infer this causa from the effect.

Participant: Couldn’t the causa lie in the patient herself? For instance, because of an ambivalent attitude toward the father: she loves the father, but at the same rejects the giant father?

Professor Jung: It is indeed good always to take the patient herself into account, not only the ascendancy,8 and not to constantly blame the latter for having caused anything that’s wrong with the child. If we did that, we would have gone much too far. This girl, however, is a four- to five-year-old child. For therapeutic reasons we have to consider the father, because at this age the relation with the father is of vital importance. The child still lives in participation mystique with the parents and is exposed to the effects they have. Let us suppose that a young girl who comes to me for analysis is still living in the house of the father: in this case I would consider the father by all means. So if the dream says, “father,” and the child lives with the father, we, too, normally have to say, “father.” We must not assume that nobody had said anything about the father. He is mentioned. Here too. The father appears; it doesn’t just say: the giant.

And it makes perfect sense that the father has precisely such an intellectualizing effect and can provoke, with this shock, an intellectual reaction. An intellectual talent has to be present, because otherwise the girl could not react as she did. A father’s legacy for the daughter is always a spiritual one; that is why fathers have such an enormous responsibility for the spiritual life of their daughters. If they give them a political philosophy, this is a crime against the spirit, because this will go to their head. But here the result was an effect that we have to consider constructive.

Participant: So the last dream would be the only resort, at least for the next ten years? One would have to see dreams from puberty, then.

Professor Jung: You may think of an even longer time period.

Participant: So if this is a remembered dream, and one remembers a certain time period, the problem is not yet solved?

Professor Jung: It is still active.

Participant: Would this mean that it is still active at the moment of remembering?

Professor Jung: It could also be the case that one had lived this consciously. Then one remembers dreams even when the situation has already been solved. We have to expect that this content remained below the threshold of consciousness. What will be the effect, if it has subliminally remained unsolved for such a long time?

Participant: Consciousness will be detached from the world.

Professor Jung: Not necessarily. We can put the question as follows: What will result if a content is constellated? What can happen then?

Participant: There can be complex-related reactions.

Professor Jung: Yes, dissociative phenomena.

Participant: Slips of the tongue, forgetting.

Professor Jung: But emotionally?

Participant: Anxiety.

Professor Jung: Yes, symptoms of anxiety neurosis in general, mood swings, bad temper, not being at one with oneself. This is the root. This comes because one feels two things in oneself: above, one is one thing, and below, something else. One is not able to be identical with oneself; there is a second one rumbling below the threshold. One is discontented with oneself, with the mother, with the old man, with the Good Lord, and with the political situation. Nothing suits one, because one doesn’t suit oneself. The situation in the last dream is the condition under which a certain discontentment may arise, whereas the dream itself occurs quite fatefully. It is a fateful situation. Nothing can be argued against it. There are different tasks in life. Everybody is one-sided, and one has to live with one’s one-sidedness and accept it.

2. Dream of a Five-Year-Old Girl of a Tiger

PRESENTED BY WALTER HUBER9

Text: I am standing on the porch of a pile house. Then a tiger jumps over the balustrade and wants to attack me, but he gets caught in the jump and is torn into two pieces (like in The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen).

Mr. Huber: I made the following classification:

Dramatis personae:	Child, tiger.
Locale:	The porch of a pile house.
Peripateia:	The tiger jumps over the balustrade and wants to
	attack the child.
Lysis:	1. The tiger gets stuck; 2. the tiger is torn into
	two pieces.

The beginning of the dream shows us a situation with which we are familiar from the very frequent persecutory dreams. The dreamer is to be attacked and killed by an overwhelming being. Very often in such dreams there is a process that turns the terrible monster into a milder form, or some help appears, a miracle happens: the dreamer is given some magic with which he can face the enormous monster. If this is not the case, the feeling of anxiety usually increases to a state of horror, and the dreamer awakes from the excessive oppression. But none of this happens in our dream. The association of the girl, “like in The adventures of Baron Munchhausen,” gives us a clue which is very appropriate for this persecutory situation. A great number of his travel adventures show Munchhausen in a dangerous situation, in which an ordinary mortal would be at a complete loss, and then he emerges as a deus ex machina,10 and magically and in the most incredible way brings about the far-fetched, lucky ending. Munchhausen is a show-off and braggart with a sense of humor. He saves himself from danger in a way one would never anticipate. Let me say at this point that a similar magical ending will occur in our dream: the persecuting animal gets stuck and disintegrates.

The beginning of the dream shows us the little girl on the porch of a pile house. We may conclude that such a house is not unfamiliar to the child, as she grew up in India. She also knows about the tiger from conversations in her environment. In India houses are often built that way, because it is advantageous not to be too near the ground. Various dangers are lurking there; one can never be sure what will sneak up at night from the jungle or the rain forest. Usually one keeps the domestic animals there. So this locale has the features of an environment familiar to the child.

“The tiger,” says Brehm,

shows all the customs and habits of cats; but in its case they are in correlation to its bigness. Its movements are as graceful as those of little cats, at the same time extremely fast, deft, and persevering. Prowling soundlessly, in its predatory pursuits it easily covers hourlong distances, moves very fast at a gallop, and is an excellent swimmer. It can jump a distance of about five meters.11 With the exception of the strongest mammals (elephants, rhinoceroses, wild buffalo), no animal of its class is safe from it. The natives of India say that young tigers are trained in the predatory craft by their mothers, and have to creep up to the clever, watchful apes and peacocks under her guidance. In whole regions of India the tiger is regarded as a god, and the natives, when talking about it, commonly call it by all kinds of names, but never by its real one. We distinguish three kinds of tigers: hunters of wild animals, hunters of domesticated animals, and man-eaters. The strongest point of its attack is the moment of surprise. It is extraordinarily strong. It is said that eyewitnesses have observed a tiger pull an ox of 1,800 pounds through the bush for a couple of hundred meters.

In the mythological context, the natives regard it as an animal with an extraordinarily strong mana. Warneck, who closely studied the religion of the Batak tribe, writes about this:

It is the task of the wise man to conserve his tondi (that is, his mana), to strengthen it, to enrich it by supplying additional soul content, and to keep it in good humor. The tondi is a kind of man within man, with its own will and its own wishes, which it can enforce against man, causing the most unpleasant feelings in him. Man’s fortune depends on it. It inhabits all parts of the body, but unevenly; most of the tondi is found in the head, the blood, and the liver. It can make the body ill by leaving it; according to the Batak, in death it is even said to turn to the begu, the death spirit. Tondi is found not only in man, but also in animals and plants, and most of all in the most feared animals, such as the tiger, and in the most useful and nutritious plants, such as rice.

The belief in werewolves also belongs in this context. A human can turn into a rapacious animal—a wolf in our regions, a tiger in South Asia, a leopard in Africa—and in this form can kill his neighbor’s animals or a personal enemy. A similar view is reported by Ivor Evans in Studies in Religion, Foklore and Customs of British North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula:

As far as I could establish, the Sakai on the Malayan peninsula consider all tigers to be human beings who have taken animal form. The Mantra of Johore (even those converted to Christianity) believe that a tiger they encounter can only be a human being who had sold himself to the evil spirits and was bewitched to take the form of the predator, to give free rein to his cravings for revenge or his malice. They claim that whenever one encounters a tiger, one would have seen a human being disappear in the direction from which the beast attacks, or at least could have seen one.

In his book The “Soul” of the Primitive,12 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl gives a number of examples as evidence of the mystical view of primitives that certain humans and animals are actually one and the same. All of the Naga people (a people living in the northeast of India), at least those belonging to the western group, claim that humans and tigers have a common origin. When the village people of Angami killed a tiger, the chief ordered a day of rest in mournful memory of the death of an elder brother. All Nagas are very afraid of tigers. They all view it as a being that is very different from the other cats of prey, and particularly closely related to humankind.

The figure of the tiger in our dream is an eastern symbol, assigned to the yin principle. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thödol, the tiger symbol appears twice to the departed during his Bardo existence, on the thirteenth day, when he is in samsara and the eight wrathful deities appear to him, the kerimas and the htamemnas: “from the south, [there appears] a red, tiger-headed [goddess], crossing her arms downward, staring hypnotically and gnashing her fangs,” and, again on the fourteenth day: “from the south dawns the yellowish-black, tiger-headed Rakshasi, a blood-filled skull in her hand.”13

In the ancient Japanese religious traditions, in Shinto, the tiger is deferentially worshipped as a sacred animal.

In summarizing, I would like to describe the figure of the tiger in our dream as follows: it is the devouring, bloodthirsty, man-eating beast of prey, which soundlessly prowls out of the dark thicket of the rain forest or the jungle into the well-guarded areas of human civilization, by which it is attracted, exposes its mauling paw out of its velvet enclosure, and gets ready for its terrible strike. It is the insatiable animal, sparing nothing, mercilessly lunging in devilish craving at the five-year-old child on the porch.

The child stands on the porch. So she is no longer fully in the house, but in a somewhat exposed place. One can see things from the porch; there is a view of the environment, the wildness of the rain forest, in our example. Maybe the girl, curious as children are, is lured by the manifold magical attractions of the tropical landscape. We could also say that she met the tiger halfway. The girl is helpless. Let us consider for a moment the developmental stage in which the child is. She is in the stage of the very first phase of consciousness. We know from many children’s dreams, which we already discussed here, that it is not the attitude of the young child to bear the labors of becoming conscious readily and willingly; basically, this runs counter to nature. Rather, there are resistances to adapting to real life. The unconscious of the child instinctually senses the painful process that lies ahead of her after having left the paradise of childhood. Now if the process of becoming conscious and adapting is painful and difficult for the child in the first place, the child’s environment will make this process a particularly tricky problem. Why? Although she has been raised in a European way by Western parents, the surrounding air, the psychical space, so to speak, is pregnant with the magical, demonic atmosphere of the Indian belief in the supernatural and its effects. The world of the unconscious thus appears to be like a reality whose effect is also felt from the outside. Europeans often have native wet nurses for their children, who have to take care of them; they tell them their legends and fairy tales, so the children get in ever closer touch with this primitive world, are fascinated by it, and get stuck in this fascination. This is what standing on the porch means. As we know from numerous examples, it is difficult even for adults to resist the magic and the demonic attraction of the foreign earth.

Participant: In the chapter “Mind and Earth” of Civilization in Transition,14 Professor Jung says the following (although this passage deals with America, it follows the same psychological laws):

Thus the American presents a strange picture: a European with Negro behavior and an Indian soul. He shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil. Certain Australian primitives assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor-spirits who reincarnate themselves in the newborn. There is a great psychological truth in this. The foreign land assimilates its conqueror. . . . Everywhere the virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the level of its indigenous inhabitants.

Mr. Huber: Woe betide the European who is not safeguarded against the onslaught of demonic, magical forces! He has no inner “skeleton” with which he could withstand the gravity that pulls him down, and no “muscles” that would enable him to maintain his equilibrium in the face of these forces. Little wonder, then, if he is attacked in this state by that world as if by a mauling tiger. He simply seems to be doomed. In our dream something extraordinary happens. Evidently something should be demonstrated to the child. I frankly confess my embarrassment and difficulty when I search for an interpretation that would sufficiently explain the fact that the attacking beast gets stuck and disintegrates. The rescuing hero who undoes the force of the attacker and dissolves its devouring might is completely missing in our dream. What could it be? To tackle this riddle, the association “Munchhausen” may be illuminating. You remember that in his adventurous tales there is a horse that breaks into two parts. The rider notices this when he lets the horse drink and sees the drunk water run out again at the back without refreshing the animal, because the horse had been severed from its hind quarters. The disintegration into two halves calls to mind the creation myths in which we are told that the world was created when the creator divided a primeval state or being into two halves, by which the pairs of opposites came into existence.15

So if we may relate the archetypal symbol of the dismembering of the tiger to the creation myth, we may further assume that the annihilation of the attacker, the complete undoing of its potency, is caused by its being fragmented into its opposites. The dream does not tell this directly; as already mentioned, there is no visible light god who would divide the beast of prey coming out of the darkness of the jungle. Or could it be that, precisely because he is invisible in the dream, his real nature is revealed, namely, ubiquitous and nowhere, as in the well-known circle symbol?¹⁶

Let us now come to the end of the dream’s message. It roughly says the following: the child is in a dangerous situation. The danger appears in the form of the tiger that symbolizes the alien earth with all its demonic reality. In this situation a rescue appears. It is expressed by an act of creation, or, psychologically speaking, a development of consciousness. What does this mean for our case in practical terms? In the further course of her development the child will have to consciously confront the problem of this world, with which she is living, so as not to be devoured by it. This confrontation will presumably last for a whole developmental period; it is a process in whose course, so to speak, two opposite religious principles come up against each other and collide, and in which one is overcome by the other. It is as if the rescue by the invisible god, as it is manifest in the dream, will have to be realized by the life of the child. Here the dream has a meaning very similar to religious visual language in general. It may be understandable that this language speaks in the past tense and gives an historical account, so to speak, as if an act of creation had indeed taken place, but needed the human willingness to develop consciousness for its realization, and for manifesting itself anew over and over again.

In Professor Jung’s lecture we learned how tremendously important the development of consciousness is. If the rescue from the mauling beast is to take place in our dream, the act of becoming conscious will be inevitable. It will become a requirement, we could say the essential task as such. It is true that we could shirk this task if we wanted, but we would then have to bear all the consequences of this avoidance with inexorable logic. An exceptionally good description of this task, with which I would like to close my talk, was given by Nietzsche:

The hidden imperious something, for which we for long have no name until at last it proves itself to be our task—this tyrant in us exacts a terrible price for every attempt that we make to escape it or give it the slip, for every premature act of self-constraint, for every reconciliation with those to whom we do not belong, for every activity, however respectable, that turns us aside from our main purpose, even indeed for every virtue that would like to protect us from the severity of our most personal responsibility. “Illness” is always the answer when we begin to doubt our right to our task—every time we begin to make things easier for ourselves. How strange and how terrible! It is our alleviations for which we have to make the severest atonement! And if we afterward want to return to health, we have no choice—we must burden ourselves more heavily than we have ever been burdened before.17

Professor Jung: In this paper you were fascinated by the material. You have read interesting things concerning it. But this is a temptation. If you present all that, we will get completely dizzy. We will drift away and move too far away from the dream. Therefore, you have to restrict the material to the bare essentials; we have to think of the poor audience that will get completely drunk. It goes too far when you read us such seductive texts. This is dangerous. In the case of such a simple dream, we have to stay as near the material as possible. Otherwise we will have an enormous balloon that will take us over countries and peoples, until we finally no longer know where we took off and how to find our way back home. I recommend that you use a hydraulic press to condense the material. You have presented too much, although we may include it as a sous-entendu. But when you present it you have to withhold the best and give us only the juice. There is still much too much cover, and too little core.

Now as regards the dream itself: the essential thing, which Mr. Huber has quite correctly stressed, is that the child was born and raised in India. He has rightly pointed to the fact that these children absorb the atmosphere, and when they also have an Indian wet nurse they will take it in with the breast milk. Very often there will be serious disturbances. Adults, too, get under this influence when they live there for a longer time. This is so well known there that everybody will tell you. Europeans in India are much more interesting than the natives, because their primitivity emerges. The primitive is also still in us. If I want to meet “negroes,” I can go to the Lötschen valley.18

The tiger is, of course, part of the atmosphere in these regions. The tiger is the personification of the night horror, the night anxiety, as is the leopard in Africa, for example. Because this is what is always on the prowl. If you pitch a camp in the bush in Africa, the leopard will come every night and eat the bones you have thrown out. The next day you can see the imprints of the paws, and if a man eater is among them, which is fortunately not the rule, you can even be devoured. When you go to the countryside in India, the tiger will be what is talked about. And if it is a man-eater,19 a werewolf or a were-tiger, it will be the talk of all the villages. Nobody living under these circumstances can escape this local atmosphere. And naturally this is absorbed by the children—thus, this dream. I was surprised that Mr. Huber did not draw this analogy. What would it be in our regions?

Participant: A bear.

Participant: The wolf.

Participant: Little Red Riding Hood.

Professor Jung: Yes, Little Red Riding Hood would be the appropriate analogy. The child is in the situation of a Little Red Riding Hood who is eaten by the wolf, which is simply replaced by the tiger here. For us the wolf has the same meaning. Of course only in fairy tales, because we no longer know what wolves are. We no longer know the horror of the winter night, when no human dared to go outside because wolves were at large. But that is the experience of our ancestors. And the tiger is the corresponding animal in the East. You drew a parallel to Mephistopheles, but there I’d have rather said: the dog gets bigger and bigger, and swells behind the oven.²⁰ What does that mean?

Participant: That it gets more dangerous.

Professor Jung: That is exactly the representation of ever-growing anxiety; one gets more and more oppressed. One is completely driven to the wall. A typical childhood dream is, for instance, of a light or an object or a ball, which gets bigger and bigger and eventually so big that the child wakes up in horror.

Participant: In Gottfried Keller’s dream, it is a snake.

Professor Jung: Right. So the swelling of the dog makes it suddenly expose itself; and what does Faust say?

Participant: “So this then, was the kernel of the brute!”

Professor Jung: Yes, the disguise vanishes, and Mephistopheles appears. Here you also have the motif of division: the anxiety suddenly gets divided, and out comes a different figure. The other motif is division. This is an archetypal motif that you encounter in various forms. Mr. Huber has quite correctly taken into account the cosmogonic parallels.

Participant: The pile house stands in contrast to the rain forest, as the boundary of consciousness. The tiger wants to jump there.

Professor Jung: We will come back to that. For the moment, let us stay with the division: we can actually observe division most clearly in the cosmogonic myths, for instance, in Genesis.

Participant: The division of the light from the darkness.

Participant: The division of the waters under the firmament from the waters above.

Professor Jung: This is a typical division, such as the division into heaven and earth by Tiamat, for example. In Egypt, Geb, the earth god, is below; Nuth, the firmament, the star woman, above. In between is the air god Shu. This is the most primitive idea of division; we find such a division, for instance, in a myth of the Yorubas on the [African] west coast. Frobenius mentions the myth of the primeval parents Obatala, heaven, and Odudua, earth.21 They live in a gourd, squeezed close to each other. Suddenly they feel that they are forced apart and are actually two: a son was created between them who forced them apart. He is the analogy to Shu in Egypt. In the Babylonian myth there is more violence. Marduk, the god of light, kills Tiamat. How does he kill her?

Participant: He inflates her with wind.

Professor Jung: He blows the power of the storm into her, so that she swells; then he can kill her. He kills her by inspiration, so to speak.²² This is the inspiration of consciousness. It is always the god of light who kills the dragon. The dragon is always cut open in other contexts too, and then everything he had devoured comes to light again: at first, usually father and mother, then the treasures and whatever else time had devoured. By this the hero restores what had been destroyed by time. This division is connected to the development of consciousness, and the dream says: the moment the seemingly destructive force of the unconscious reaches the threshold of consciousness, the latter is forced to disengage from its base.

Participant: The tiger wants to get in.

Professor Jung: In psychological terms, please. What is the tiger?

Participant: The unconscious.

Professor Jung: Yes, that which it devours. Of course it also possesses motherly qualities, but that is not important. This is mere decoration. It is the unconscious tout bonnement.23 What does it do?

Participant: It jumps up. It wants to eat up the child.

Professor Jung: Yes, the house is the child’s region of consciousness. The tiger wants to eat the child. The unconscious is overcome by desire to eat the child. You have also drawn a parallel between the unconscious and the devil, who goes around, “like a roaring lion and looks whom he will devour.” The unconscious is overcome by desire for the light of consciousness. There is a Gnostic view, according to which the devil is hungry for and desirous of light. He thinks he will get the light if he devours man. Isn’t that what we also think? There are people who want to gain knowledge. They eat from a cultured person, marry a cultured woman or a clever man. This is still primitive. One thinks that something will rub off. The primitives simply kill you and spoon out the brain or eat the heart to give them courage. One thinks that if one had the object, one would have “it.” With the piano you have music in the house. We desire somebody to get his qualities, and think we will have them if we succeed in taking him in. The tiger is also bitterly mistaken: that it would fall onto the balustrade—this it didn’t reckon with! This is a miracle, of course. Usually when it jumps it knows where it will land.

Participant: The interpretation has to start before, with the pile house. It is built in a way that animals cannot intrude.

Professor Jung: It is not that high; a tiger could jump five times higher. This is meant only as space of consciousness above the primitive earth, a space one gets only indirectly through Aja²⁴ or the jungle. It makes an enormous impression to see how little white people touch the earth in the tropics. Whenever possible they behave as if they were in the English countryside. The etiquette is much stricter than at home. One speaks and thinks about nothing but what is happening in England, and unconsciously one is completely eaten up by the earth. A woman I had to treat suffered from anxiety states, which simply expressed that she wanted to protect herself against India. I told her: please read a book about India, invite Indian ladies and let them tell you about it, then you needn’t be afraid of it any longer. The anxiety stems only from the fact that people do not confront themselves with the ground on which they live. But they are not able to, for if they touched the ground they would be pervaded by the psychology of the ground. The ground poisons them in a way. There, of course, thoughts completely different from ours have developed. In India we are at a total loss with our Christian ideas. We can only defend ourselves, but if we touch the Indian ground, we have to know why Shiva and similar gods exist. And such contents are then absorbed by the children, and that is the dangerous thing.

The balustrade is what establishes the child’s border; on the other hand, it is also the magical barrier, so to speak, for anything that comes from the outside.

Participant: In alchemy one has to divide the dragon, or it will eat its own tail; then it disintegrates into its opposites. This is like the splitting of the tiger. The opposites dissolve into each other once they reach consciousness.

Professor Jung: Yes, Mr. Huber has rightly asked himself why there is no hero who splits this lion. This really poses a question. It does not look as if the tiger would disintegrate all by itself. Which means: we simply have to accept this as a fact, it just so happens in the dream. When the unconscious intrudes into spaces of consciousness, it is automatically split into its pairs of opposites. When it appears, it becomes two. The motif of two-ness, the motif of two of the same, which appears here, is of general importance: the Dioscuri, the Açvins,25 two fruits, objects, and so on. These notions are always on the border of consciousness, in statu nascendi; they are about to be perceived. Then they are two, that is, they dissolve into a pair of opposites: bright and dark, right and left; because we cannot identify anything without its opposite. It is a conditio sine qua non of knowledge. We can see white only if we also know black. Thus, no statement about a content of consciousness can dispense with pairs of opposites. This is the meaning of the fact that the tiger sort of breaks into pieces the moment it reaches consciousness. The remarkable thing here is that this disintegration takes places spontaneously. Mr. Huber has rightly dwelt on this. In our case, some help would have to appear, a hero who would kill the monster. In India, however, it happens by itself. How do you explain this?

Participant: The girl has received the right instruction. It is the fence, the balustrade, on which the tiger breaks apart.

Professor Jung: Obviously, she is well protected. But what is really magical is that the tiger disintegrates by itself.

Participant: The Indians are more familiar with the magical powers.

Professor Jung: One could also say the opposite. But we have to understand that this child was under a favorable influence in India, that the same processes occur in this child as in the Indians. For that’s how it is in the East—there the unconscious can enter into consciousness without disturbance. You will see in the dream of the young Indian, which we will discuss later on, in how positive a way the unconscious flows into consciousness. In contrast, the dream of the big snake—what an affair this is for us!

Participant: Is it because the archetypes are concretized?

Professor Jung: In India everything spiritual has grown out of nature. The unconscious flows absolutely freely into consciousness. Indians have no thoughts that would prevent consciousness from functioning, no devils that could devastate consciousness.

Participant: It is strange that the tiger, which jumps into consciousness, is no longer a tiger the moment it is in it. The whole story is harmless, with a touch of Munchhausen.

Professor Jung: This is, after all, a remembered dream. Munchhausen is a later association.

Participant: For us, an analogy would be Rumpelstiltskin: if one gets to know his name, the enraged dwarf is torn in two.

Professor Jung: In India they already have the names that make things burst; we don’t.

At a Later Meeting of the Seminar

Professor Jung: We are still discussing the dream of the tiger. Mr. Huber, could you please tell us in two words what the dream says.

Mr. Huber: It is a situation of persecution: the tiger wants to attack the girl, but gets stuck and breaks into two pieces.

Professor Jung: You should not tell the dream, but describe the situation. What did you find with regard to the house and the child and the balustrade and the tiger, or to the breaking apart? Please insert this into the dream, in the dreamer’s words if possible, only already interpreted.

When you have accumulated material, you will then have to think and insert what you found as if into an equation. The result has to be that you are able to repeat the dream, but now with the interpreted expressions. You have to do that now; then I will know if you have understood the dream.

Mr. Huber: The tiger is a symbol of the dangerous aspect.

Professor Jung: Now you’re already talking about the dream. Talk in the dream, but in the interpreted terms. You have to begin with: a child is in the bungalow . . .

Mr. Huber: A child is sitting there in her consciousness or her spiritual state, which corresponds to the bungalow.

Professor Jung: Let us abbreviate this and simply say: the child’s “consciousness.” The child in the dream stands for the child’s consciousness, her ego-consciousness. When I dream, for instance, that I go down the stairs, this means: my consciousness goes down the stairs in the dream. Now what does that mean, “down the stairs”? My consciousness goes down into the depths of the unconscious. Now continue!

Mr. Huber: The child’s consciousness is attacked by a tigerlike unconscious.

Professor Jung: I would also leave out the “tiger.”

Mr. Huber: By the devouring, destructive aspect of the unconscious.

Professor Jung: This is a crucial point: the destructive, the devouring. Well, the unconscious with its destructive quality—with this we recapitulate a great area of experience. What do you call this in a few words? What motif is touched on?

Mr. Huber: The mother.

Professor Jung: Yes, the maternal aspect too. And what is the maternal in Chinese philosophy?

Mr. Huber: The yin.

Professor Jung: Yes, this is the most abstract term we have for this. It is the maternal, the specifically feminine; besides, it is, of course, also a philosophical principle that applies to physics and all sorts of other things.

So we may say: this tiger represents the devouring aspect of the feminine. Now go on!

Mr. Huber: If this unconscious, with this quality, reaches consciousness, it will automatically become bipolar and thus be deprived of its devouring tendency.

Professor Jung: Yes, it therefore loses its dangerousness. Well, have you got any further questions about this interpretation, which is quite perfect in its shortness?

Participant: The child is standing on the porch, isn’t she?

Professor Jung: This is not absolutely essential, but it greatly helps to illustrate the situation, in that the child’s consciousness is represented twice: first by the presence of the ego (as the center of consciousness, the ego is a conditio sine qua non of consciousness as such), and, second, by the fact that the consciousness occupies a space, in most cases represented by a room or a house. This is the range of consciousness; a dog’s olfactory field, for instance, is its world of consciousness, and so for the child the inner rooms of the bungalow naturally represent her world of consciousness. The porch with the balustrade is the place where children play. In Africa you can’t let the children go outside in the blazing sun, because there is the danger that they might pull off their topees26 and get a sunstroke. So that’s why they are on the porch. This is a kind of garden, a playground, the space of consciousness of the child. So when they go outside and come to the balustrade, they about reach the border of their world. And that is a significant detail. Formulated more precisely, it would read about as follows: consciousness is nearing the extent of its range, its boundary. At the border comes the dangerous moment when something different and completely alien, namely, a devouring, feminine, instinctual unconscious, comparable to the animal because of these features, comes to the child in a threatening manner.

Participant: Why must this destructive and devouring quality a priori be feminine?

Professor Jung: This I don’t know.

Participant: It is the tiger, after all. Is the tiger feminine in Chinese?

Professor Jung: Yes, it is a cat; in the whole of the East, the tiger is feminine. The cat is the symbol of female deities. Of which?

Participant: Sekhmet is lion-headed.²⁷

Participant: But you said it would be the wolf in our regions. The wolf is not the representative of the feminine.

Professor Jung: Not under all circumstances, but still—think of Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf. It does appear as something feminine. We have no big cats, otherwise we would surely use cats. In Chinese, the tiger is a symbol of yin, and the dragon a symbol of the masculine. So what would you say about this division? As Mr. Huber saw it, the division in Genesis is a quite appropriate image. A division into two always means capability of consciousness. In this capacity we find the division in many places, in the cosmogonic myths and also in Hermetic philosophy, whenever it deals with the development of consciousness. But now a further question: why does the child have this dream? What does this mean? So far we determined the content, but now we must address ourselves to the meaning.

Participant: Something has to be shown to her.

Professor Jung: Here you have to be careful. You must not off-handedly ascribe the parental role, the role of the godfather or -mother, or certain intentions, to the unconscious. It is pure nature. It just happens this way; whether these events are of a benevolent nature is another question. But there has to be a sufficient reason for this dream.

Participant: There is a concrete danger; the child is surrounded by threatening powers.

Professor Jung: What would be the danger then? It would be an unconscious danger, of course.

Participant: The nanny.

Professor Jung: Yes, or the mother. We see such dreams, for instance, when the mother is devouring, eats the children up, and thinks the children are there to feed her own sensations.

Participant: But would it be the eastern symbol in that case?

Professor Jung: There is no talk about the mother at all here. Therefore, I would think that it is not the mother. If the tiger came out of the house, I’d say: the source of destruction is within the house. But when the tiger comes out of the darkness, of the jungle, we may not assume it to be the mother.

Participant: Another possibility would be that this is a common developmental stage. The child is five years old, at an age when the unconscious has to be made conscious. So it would simply represent progress in her development. Something could have been dammed up that is discharged in the form of this dream, illustrating the inner process in the dream.

Professor Jung: You are justified in thinking that this could be a developmental phase. But why must it still be dreamed? Why doesn’t it simply happen?

Participant: The dream is a compensation for conscious processes.

Participant: There is a factor in the conscious situation of the child that has an inhibiting effect and brings about the tension, so the tiger has to jump, as if over an obstacle.

Professor Jung: This is correct. It lies in the nature of infantile consciousness, and of consciousness in general, that it always lags behind. As a rule, consciousness is late. Therefore, something violent has to happen. If consciousness were fast enough, it would already have a certain readiness to contain those tensions and integrate them. This can be proven. We often see this in analytic treatments. As a rule, at the beginning there come dreams full of tension, followed by banal and undramatic ones. When one anticipates the unconscious by descending into the unconscious on one’s own, one could spare onself dreams altogether. There’s no need for them. In case of a far-reaching familiarity with the unconscious, dreams will mostly be rare and undramatic. The beautiful, great dreams, however, mostly occur only when something lies completely outside of consciousness. The tensions of the unconscious can then smoothly flow into consciousness. There is no longer a need for dreams.

Participant: Perhaps this child has not yet developed in her structure the readiness to accept the tiger image?

Professor Jung: This is the necessary boundary of the space of consciousness, only a bit more accentuated than in our regions. We would say: “You may go as far as the garden hedge,” then comes the street. In the tropics, of course, this is much more pronounced; most often there is only a tiny little door leading to the outside, because there naturally is the danger of reptiles, particularly snakes. I remember an incident that I was told of by Englishmen in Guinea: their two-year-old child was on the porch. They heard tender noises. When they went there, a puff adder was lying in front of the child, a very dangerous animal, thick as a salami, with strong teeth. But these are extremely inert critters. You have to step on them for them to bite. They then carefully removed the child and killed the animal. So if the dream really represents a developmental process, what developmental process is it?

Participant: An expansion of consciousness.

Professor Jung: By what?

Participant: By incorporation.

Professor Jung: What enters into consciousness?

Participant: The primitive unconscious.

Professor Jung: This is much, much too vague.

Participant: There is a realization that what is feared is not so terrible after all.

Participant: It is something female.

Professor Jung: Yes, the female instinctual world, that’s what begins there. There the child starts to become a female, so to speak. In later life, too, whenever something is about the female instinctual world, these feline animals reappear, or bears, or snakes. In Switzerland, after all, we had a bear goddess. In the Historical Museum you can see a dea arcto.28 Long before the Berne Zofingia, there was a Gallic-Roman bear cult in Berne. The believers of Artemis call themselves arktoi, the bears. The bear represents the female instinctual world. Well, how would you formulate the purpose of the dream? How does the dream function in the psychic balance?

Participant: From the tension that something should appear in consciousness.

Professor Jung: Wouldn’t this be expressed much more clearly if the tiger jumped in and knocked the child over ?

Participant: The dream wants to say: there is more to this dangerous thing, an insight. This is what lies hidden behind it.

Professor Jung: Without doubt, this intrusion of the tiger is an intrusion of the female instinctual world, with a frightening aspect. This could prompt the child to flee the female instinctual world, but that would be a danger for the child’s consciousness. The dream is comforting in that it says: although the tiger jumps at you, it breaks into two parts. This expresses a basic, fundamental truth. Which?

Participant: You are a human being, a woman, but there are also men, because everything is bipolar.

Professor Jung: There are polarities in the dream. Which is the first one?

Participant: Inside and outside.

Professor Jung: The first polarity is the ego and the instinctual world. The second polarity is what? The divided tiger. It has a front-side and a backside. And the front and the back of the tiger is a wonderful polarity, which couldn’t be conceived in a better way. It says: the instinctual world has a front and a back, for it is an animal. If it is split, it will be deprived of its potency. This means that it is still together, but shows that the instinctual world has a double aspect. This is a wisdom of the dream, a particular finesse. What is the double aspect of the instinctual world?

Participant: A physical and a spiritual aspect.

Professor Jung: Yes, exactly, for there is also a spiritual aspect to the instinctual world. It has a head, a tiger-head, just as man is also actually split into an above and a below. In vulgar terms, the spiritual aspect is above, and the instinctual one below. Man himself is a double, split animal. He is no animal, but a human being, but as such he is actually split. He is no longer an animal, but—what does he foolishly do?

Participant: He thinks.

Professor Jung: Yes, he reflects. It is better to say: reflect, because we also feel in a reflecting way. Thinking is too specific. Above there is the anima rationalis, to use the medieval term, and below the anima vegetativa, only life as such. The moment it becomes conscious, the two aspects will reveal themselves. So what enters into the soul of the child? A whole tiger or a half tiger?

Participant: Two halves.

Professor Jung: Yes, two halves. What consequence does this have for the child’s consciousness?

Participant: It is not dangerous.

Professor Jung: Well, to have eaten two tiger halves—that’s quite something. What would happen, for instance, if the child ate one half, the half of the head? What does that mean? This half is assimilated to the head, the lower or rear half is assimilated from below. What has happened by this? Well, look: for us the child is actually unity par excellence. With the eaten tiger, however, conflict moves into the soul of the child. The conflict had hitherto still been in the unconscious, but now it jumps at the child’s consciousness. If she assimilates the tiger, the split will be transferred into consciousness. From that point there will be the Yes and the No. Here the moral conflict comes into being, the distinction between good and evil.

Participant: But wouldn’t there be a rescue in this case?

Professor Jung: This is not about rescue, just that something happens. An image happens, and the image tells what is really going on. This means: “From now on you are divided. Now the instinctual, the female instinctual world has penetrated into you, and so you are now a divided being, that is, a human being.” Before it was just a dream, an infantile paradise. If I knew what later became of the child, we would see many more things in her later life, for this was the first dream that foretold her later destiny.

3. Dream of a Five-Year-Old Girl of the Devil in the Garden Shaft29

PRESENTED BY DR. EMMA STEINER³⁰

Text: I am seeing my father at a shaft in the garden. The earth moves, and I think: there’s the devil down there. And I call my father for help. But my father laughs and pushes me down. I land in a tool shed with a cold frame full of seedlings.

Professor Jung: What is the difference between this and the previous dream?

Participant: Here the child must go down, in the other dream she had to go up.

Professor Jung: Both are girls five years of age. Now here you see a very different picture. What do you think about the situation of this girl’s consciousness?

Participant: The child thinks too much like her father.

Participant: There the child has no premonition of what will come; here she has.

Professor Jung: Yes, isn’t that so? In the first case, in the dream of the tiger, consciousness is quite childlike and completely paradisial, and then something suddenly comes. In this case, the moment the earth moves, it already knows that this is the devil. What does that mean? In any case this consciousness is much better prepared. What does this mean in practical terms?

Participant: She is not an anxiously well-cared-for child; she is a precocious child.

Participant: She is healthier.

Professor Jung: First of all, I’d say that she is not that naive, but has already sensed quite a few things with her five years; she is not all that stupid. She already more or less knows how things go. In this respect, a prepared consciousness is better than an unprepared one, and such an important fall into the instinctual world can be much better absorbed. But there are difficulties here, too. What is the conflict in this case? This is a state of consciousness already characterized by conflicts. This is a child who already has a premonition of conflicts; the tiger episode already lies behind her.

Participant: There are already typical projections onto the father, for example, his connection to the devil.

Professor Jung: Yes, sure, but what is the conflict?

Participant: The difficulty in really accepting the devil.

Professor Jung: No, the conflict is stated in the dream itself. In what does it consist?

Participant: That the father is in cahoots with the devil.

Professor Jung: She calls the father for help, but the father does not give it to her, quite the contrary: with diabolical laughter he pushes the poor child into the abyss. Well, isn’t this a conflict? If the dream took a different course, for instance, something we’d quite naturally expect—that the father would hurry toward her to rescue the poor little thing from the devil—what would this be then?

Participant: A regression.

Professor Jung: Then the father would be the all-good one. According to consciousness, he would be perfectly alright. He would be the one who gives protection, who nurtures and holds. And the child would be completely contained in the father. What would then show in later life?

Participant: There would be more conflicts.

Professor Jung: There would be a father complex as high as a house, a fille à papa.”31 What psychology does such a girl have?

Participant: She turns against the mother.

Professor Jung: An anima type would probably develop, a woman who always knows how to twist the father round her little finger so that he opens his fatherly arms and protects the poor little soul from the world. Naturally, there would be a number of complications with the mother, and so on. What happens in the dream is the normal process, namely, that the father already stops an attempt at a father complex at the outset; because in this dream a rudiment of a father complex is visible. The child’s plea is: I want you to protect me. How do you conceive of the shaft into which the father pushes her?

Participant: As a descent into the unconscious.

Professor Jung: But a shaft?

Participant: It is reminiscent of birth, a precipitate delivery, so to speak.

Participant: It reminds me of a mine.

Participant: Something has been arranged so that something can go up or down.

Professor Jung: Yes, something has been prepared. So there already exists a shaft, as if a mine were down there. What does this indicate?

Participant: We would have to assume that the father is in possession of the communication with the unconscious.

Participant: It indicates that this, too, has been arranged in the garden, a shaft into the unconscious, that is.

Participant: A helpful force is present.

Professor Jung: Yes, above there is the garden. How would you interpret it?

Participant: As the state of the child’s consciousness.

Professor Jung: Yes, this is a certain state of the child’s consciousness. This is already a space of consciousness. And what is the garden? It is not the woods, the open countryside, but a garden of all things. What does that mean?

Participant: This is culture.

Professor Jung: Yes, there exists a cultural atmosphere in the child’s space of consciousness. And characterized by what? Something very specific.

Participant: That the father is working in it.

Professor Jung: Well, isn’t that nice. But it is a prerequisite that the father has something to do with culture. That’s why the daughters take over the father’s spirit, the animus, but here there is something special.

Participant: The garden is not only above ground, but also cultivated subterraneously.

Professor Jung: Yes, but what would you otherwise expect to find in the underworld, where the devil dwells?

Participant: Hell and fire.

Professor Jung: Yes, seething chaos; but there is only a tool shed down there, and a cold frame with seedlings to boot. What has happened here?

Participant: There is order in it.

Professor Jung: Exactly, there are shovels, axes down there, anything you need to cultivate the garden in preparation for cultural work. And what is a cold frame, exactly?

Participant: Again a preparation.

Professor Jung: Of course, there you grow the seedlings. Thus a preparation again. But there the devil is in a very strange place indeed. What place is it actually? Where is room for the devil there, where can he spend the night? What’s the matter with the devil?

Participant: He isn’t in the right place.

Professor Jung: Yes, if he is indeed the devil, he is completely out of place. So we cannot but assume that this is no longer a real devil at all. He is so out of place that he has no hell, and thus can’t do anything, and so we have to presume that he is a modified devil.

Participant: He is a vegetation demon.

Professor Jung: Yes, this is absolutely correct. His hell consists of a garden, and later of a cold frame. Who appears in a cold frame?

Participant: Osiris.

Professor Jung: Yes, this is a classical figure. In the British Museum you see the figure of Osiris stretched on a canvas, covered by wet sand in which grass was planted; then Osiris sprang up in the form of grass. Thus, every year Osiris sprang up again from the earth. He was also depicted as wheat springing up from his sarcophagus. He himself reappears as young corn, as its first green seedlings. He was really a vegetation god, and as master of the underworld he actually bears a certain resemblance to our god of the underworld, the devil. Although he is the good one, his brother Seth-Typhon is the bad one, the brother who was born with Osiris as his opposite in the same pregnancy. He is simply the shadow of Osiris, and by virtue of this shadow he has a relation to the underworld and consequently is a chthonios. One can actually no longer correctly classify this devil that appears here, because he has become a vegetation god. And the initial horror of the devil, where does that come from? Why the horror? The cry for help to the father?

Participant: The devil has been condemned by the Christian Church.

Professor Jung: There is a Christian influence that speaks of the evil, which naturally gives consciousness an infernal fright. But the dream saves the dreamer from this shock in showing her: if you do fall down to the devil, there will be a tool shed where one is prepared for cultural work: there is a cold frame with seedlings. Then one will lie amidst the seedlings. The child falls down into a cold frame with seedlings; she herself is planted like a seedling into the fertile earth. The cold frame is a kind of incubator. The whole aspect of these images of hell has changed, not in the Christian sense, but in the antique one.

Participant: We can then view the underworld as some sort of realm of the blessed spirits.

Professor Jung: The dream says: what impresses you as evil is the fertility of earth and nature.

Participant: But isn’t the earthquake something threatening after all?

Professor Jung: The child is in a secure place. Instead of intruding from the outside, the disturbance comes from out of the earth, and the child also knows already: this is the devil. An earthquake always means that one’s standpoint is shaken. “The earth is trembling under my feet” means that one is confronted with something one cannot cope with. So it is as if the earth were shaken. It is assumed [by the girl] that this is the devil. This interpretation comes from a consciousness influenced by Christianity, for the child does not know that a shaft has already been provided. And who made this shaft?

Participant: The same people who made the garden. The tools are there anyway. The person who made the garden even took his tools from that tool shed.

Professor Jung: Yes, the father provided that, and uses this room as a tool shed. How do you understand that?

Participant: It is a well analyzed father who treats his daughter properly.

Professor Jung: Exactly. Everything has been provided so that the children will immediately fall into the fertile earth in case of an earthquake.

Participant: As a counterpart, a dream of a child comes to mind in which a witch comes out of a chimney and gets the little girl out of a crowd.

Professor Jung: This means that the child is possessed by the unconscious for a longer period of time, that she is dissolved in an unconscious state. You know the story of Jimmy, who was killed in a tiger hunt. The bagged animal was then brought to his relatives with the remark: “Jimmy inside the tiger!”32—This is a case in which no lysis occurs. The child is “inside the witch.” The child is gotten by the devil. You know, there are children who live in hell for years, who are preternaturally bad or feel themselves that they are in a hellish state, who are terribly unhappy and tormented, children for whom childhood is one big hell. These are children who are captured in the unconscious. This child, for example, is a child who for a long time is not herself, but something evil and enigmatic. Such children are “inside the tiger.” They are surrounded by a cloak of demonism. I remember such a boy: he was an evil spirit who tormented everybody else. But once during a school outing, when by chance the two of us were alone, he told me: “I know I’m really bad, but here, where there are no people, here I’m completely alright.” He was fourteen years old. There it vanished—anything vanished, that is, that had been imposed on him by the environment. Such events do not take place naturally, but are caused by the atmosphere resulting from the unresolved unconscious of the parents. A thick wall separates these persons from their own souls, and the child then falls into it, is born out of this atmosphere and then bewitched by it, possessed by the darkness of which the parents have never wanted to be aware—and also have not been able to. Such dreams result from such conditions.

Participant: Here the devil is a gardener in the garden of God.

Professor Jung: The devil is not the gardener, the father is the gardener. The devil here is the vegetation god, dweller in the prepared earth. He is the one who lives in the cold frame. He is the life demon of the budding, future life, quite like an old Osiris.

Participant: I once read of a Roman goddess, Lavinia, the terrible mother. Just like Kali, she is present at each birth of a child to prevent the decision to lay the child quickly onto the earth, by which it would be saved from her.

Professor Jung: You see, this is actually the planting into the earth, the being brought in touch with the earth as an inhabitant of the earth. One falls down to the earth, where one becomes fertile oneself. “Be fruitful, and multiply,”33 for we are planted into the earth like a tree. The image is so clear and simple that there is no need to further abstract the dream.

Participant: I wonder what happened to the child at the time?

Professor Jung: Nothing special; after this dream nothing special at all was to happen, for everything is perfectly alright.

4. Dream of a Six-Year-Old Boy of Rotating Grids

PRESENTED BY DR. KENOWER W. BASH³⁴

Text: We, that is, me and a boy of the same age, have been captured by the witch into a middle-sized cave with her. The cave has a round form and blood-red walls. The only exit is a narrow and low passage, a kind of tube. The passage starts on the ground of the cave; at first, it slopes gently down, and then gently ascends again. In its last part, two interlocking rows of iron bars protrude from the wall; these two grids rotate, so that for one moment they open the exit and then block it again. Going, or better creeping, through the exit is particularly dangerous here. I wake up with very great anxiety, so I wake up the nanny sleeping beside me to tell me that it is just a dream.

Dr. Bash: The locale here is the witch’s cave, middle-sized, round, with blood-red walls, whose only exit is a narrow, low, tubelike passage that starts on the ground, at first slopes down and then ascends. This passage is blocked by rotating grids that alternately lock and open it. The persons are the dreamer, a boy of the same age, and the witch by whom these two are captured. I think that in this case I will have to dispense with the usual dramatic structuring of the dream events, because not only is there no lysis, but also no real action. The dream is more like a vision; frightened by this vision, the boy awakes with a cry of fear. We will later come back to the meaning of this fact.

The symbolism of the cave is generally known. It is the breeding ground, the womb, the place of birth, rebirth, and change. Its middle size is conspicuously stressed: conspicuous, so to speak, precisely because it is not conspicuous. As a rule, the extremes are eye-catching, not the middle, which is not mentioned in particular. That the cave is middle-sized must, therefore, have a special meaning. An enormous cave would suggest the underworld of the dwarfs or gnomes, or maybe the shadowy underworld in which Pluto sits enthroned, the hidden, spacious treasure chambers of the fairy tales, in which immense riches are kept, in short, what is uncanny, monstrous, supernatural, and hardly known about the unconscious as such, should it once reveal itself directly. The hollows of such a cave would lie in the shadows that veil the inscrutable. Man would, then, stand there either as a presumptuous intruder or as a captive of chthonic powers, on foreign soil before the last secrets that transcend anything personal, beyond the individual and the temporal. A small, narrow cave, on the other hand, would remind us of the incubation caves or huts of the Greek mysteries and various primitive religions, in which a candidate has to await a dream, or at least stay there for some time until he has been filled by the spirit. In contrast to the previous example, he searched for, and found there, a personal confrontation with the unconscious. For him as an accomplished but still undeveloped personality, the main problem was his position, his relation to the unconscious, whereas his individual personality hardly mattered in the gigantic dimensions of the enormous cave. Our dreamer now stands between these two possibilities. To interpret his position we have to take his age into account. At the age of six, he is beyond early infantile unconsciousness, which feels carefree and sheltered in the collective, but still far from the complexity of the adult, in which one firm point, so to speak,35 a core personality, has been developed, with reference to which he can confront the collective. It is exactly the transition that is a main problem at this age, in which the child first learns to venture out of the shelter of the house and the parents, goes to school, begins to adjust to organized society, and starts to enter into relations with the foreign object world. His world is no longer completely within himself. Hetzer³⁶ draws attention to this change, which can be easily ascertained by the Vienna Development Tests, edited by herself and Charlotte Bühler, and writes:

Subjectivity and objectivity . . . are partly a criterion of development. Until the fifth year, subjectivity is normal. It shows in the fact that children are not really willing to comply with the circumstances: they arbitrarily interpret the content of a picture, their own drawings and constructions; they do not exactly repeat or draw what has been said or done before, but willfully make additions or alterations; they do not accept the fact that the examiner has won in the competitive game, but claim the victory for themselves, regardless of their obvious loss. Children at the age of five and older have a certain objectivity and are capable of assimilation, which is, for instance, shown by the fact that they tell stories about pictures that correspond to their contents, or that they build a copy of the model building. It corresponds to their stage of development that they comply with given tasks. If they do not show this objectivity we may conclude that there is very little willingness to submit to given facts, an inadequate awareness of reality, and an overemphasis on instinctuality, which cannot be reconciled in a normal way with the demands of the outer world.

The child leaves the inner collective and now has to differentiate himself in order not to lose himself in the outer collective. His psychical perimeter, daily expanded by new contacts with the environment, is restricted at least quantitatively, if I may say so, on the other side in that the collective contents recede into the background. It becomes middle-sized. The problems occurring there have their roots in the collective, on the one hand, and in the personal, on the other.

The cave is round, which gives the problem a certain contour. It does not reach immeasurable dimensions. The content of the situation is directly given and apparent. The hidden things are outside, not in the causal situation itself. Insofar as they are inhibitions (as indicated by the confinement), they are on all sides and concern the whole individual. They are also self-made—a natural cave is not so well-rounded.

In addition, this cave has blood-red walls. Here, too, we are rather inclined to think of something artificial than of a natural color. There are indeed red rocks, but hardly blood-red ones. Red is the color of passion, of excitement, of aggressiveness, of fire and anything fiery in general. The devil—who also lives underground and embodies the evil powers of the unconscious—is almost always depicted as dressed in red. Blood stands for pulsating, pushing life: blood-red is thus the color of the vital instincts and of the overwhelming emotional turmoil they bring about. From what we have said about this scene we may probably conclude this: the child is in a highly affect-laden situation, which probably lies in the normal way of psychological development, but which has not been caused by the normal inner developmental processes alone.

Let us now turn to the persons of the dream. First of all, we come across a not clearly specified “we.” Of the unknown person we only know that he is as old as the dreamer and completely shares the latter’s fate, as it seems. Therefore this figure cannot be interpreted with certainty; I am most inclined, however, to see it as a kind of double or twin who establishes a connection to the collective for the dreamer, and at the same time provides him with a possibility to differentiate himself from it. The fact that the dreamer is almost two, the same and yet not the same, very probably indicates that the problems concerning this double figure are of a collective nature; all the more so as the resembling boy stands in no distinct contrast to the dreamer, characterologically or otherwise, as is so often the case when this double is to represent the shadow side. That this indication of the collective is restricted to a mere duplication, instead of a multiplicity, probably corresponds to the mid-sized cave, that is to say that neither the personality of the dreamer, nor the impersonal forces of the unconscious, necessarily prevail in the present problem. At the same time, the fact that the comrade is undoubtedly experienced as a different person makes the dreamer realize his individuality and so provides him with a starting point for further individualization.

The second figure is the witch, who also is not described in more detail. We need not go into the symbolism of the witch at length. She is a force of the unconscious that exerts a magical pressure here. The boy is captured here as part of a collective, with which he does not feel completely identical, however. If we may attempt to interpret the dream on a personal level, it seems reasonable to suppose that this is about the mother. As is so often the case in fairy tales, the mother is replaced at least temporarily by an evil stepmother or a witch, who is nobody else but a mother that insufficiently fulfills, or willfully neglects, her duty and obligation toward her children. And who else would be in a such a position to hold back the child in a primitive developmental phase and in the womb of the collective? As we have already mentioned, there is evidence that the child was forced by something from the outside, that the situation he is in was created by someone from the outside, and this could most likely be achieved by a maybe all-too-loving mother. This is also confirmed by the round form and the red color (the color of the intestines) of the cave, which might indicate the uterus, and also by the winding path, first sloping downward, then ascending, and the especially stressed “creeping through,” reminiscent of the birth canal and of birth. We need not interpret these factors in this restricted sense at all, however, because they could equally well, on a general level, stand for rebirth and for coming to a developmental stage yet to be reached. The subterranean cave and the red color, which was spilled around the child, remind us a bit of the Mithraic taurobolium,37 which was expressly conceived of as a rebirth. So we roughly have the following situation: the child is at an age in which he should normally begin to differentiate himself, and to go out into the world as a budding individual. This means stepping out of, on the one hand, the vegetative-collective existence of the infant, and, on the other hand, also the permanent care of the parents and the identification with them. A first step toward that has already been made; nevertheless, the child is still detained by a force effective in the unconscious, which probably does not originate in the child’s own soul alone, but creates an oppressive situation around him. This corresponds to remaining in the maternal womb, as seems to be indicated by the condition of the cave. The most probable assumption may be that it is indeed the mother who inhibits the boy in his development in such a way.

We have not yet dealt with the most peculiar and most characteristic part of the dream, the blocking of the exit by the rotating iron grids. Iron grids are the usual barriers in prisons and mental institutions—in any place where one is held against one’s will. On the other hand, they also offer a view of the outside, of possibilities lying beyond the barrier. This confirms our assumption that the child’s situation was not created by him alone, and that he tries, more or less, to fight against it, or at least senses that he should not be content with it. The specific feature, however, is that creeping through is only possible at a certain, well-chosen moment. Here we encounter a motif that is well known in mythology and literature, although it has not appeared very frequently in the dreams we have discussed so far in the seminar. Thus, I’d like to give you a few pertinent examples. Most likely we will probably think of the passage of Aeneas between Scylla and Charybdis, or of that of the Argonauts between the Symplegades, the gigantic rock formations at the entrance to the Black Sea, which clashed without warning and crushed the poor seafarer. The doves, which bring ambrosia to Zeus, have to fly between two rocks that suddenly clash and regularly crush the last of the consecrated birds. In later times we find something similar in Dante’s ascent from hell, when he has to go with his guide Vergil under the flapping wings of Satan at the moment in which they are raised. Frobenius offers a great deal of material on this motif of the clashing rocks in his book Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes [The Age of the Sun God], from which I quote:

When Maui descends into the underworld, he has to pass the rising and falling rocks, and only repeating the saying he learned from the mother keeps the god from being crushed. When Bogda Gesser Chan travels to the ogres to visit his wife, he will have to pass the clashing rocks. The rock gate closes in North Korea and in ancient Mexico, and for the North Indians the clashing rocks thunderously smash together behind the blessed spirits that levitate into the beyond. Sometimes this motif may be varied; in Northwest America, a biting door replaces the clashing rocks, and the collapsing tree trunk—which can be found there as well as in Japan as one of the hero’s ordeals—may also belong to this group. Moreover, it is interesting that the motif is split into groups in Samoa and by the Navahos in America. On his journey into the underworld, Tiitii has to pass the reeds; his magic spell makes the reeds part. Then he has to pass the rocks, and the rocks open upon his spell. For the Navahos, those wandering toward the sun first have to pass through the rocks, then over the cutting reed, then across the field of cactuses that tear everything to shreds, then over the boiling barren land of sand; and only then do they pass the various gate wardens who face each other with their mouths wide open in trembling rage: two bears, two snakes, two winds, and two flashes of lightning. All these they have to pass, and in this sense this is the highest evolution of this motif.

In almost every case, therefore, this is a journey into the beyond, or the quest for a precious treasure that is difficult to obtain, and which assumes a value of immortality. It is a rebirth, as is unambiguously intimated by the whole present dream situation. Frobenius goes on to say:

The climax of interest in this myth is only reached, however, when the motif is amplified by a little addition, when it is told how the hero gets through the clashing rocks by a hair’s breadth, while the back part of his vehicle is crushed. . . . Although the famous ship in the journey of the Argonauts luckily succeeds in gliding through between the equally famous rocks, a little accident occurs, however. For not even birds were able to fly through, and so Phineus gave the advice to let a dove fly before them and, if it came through, to follow with all their might—otherwise they would have to abandon their journey altogether. And really the dove passed through; only its tail feathers were crushed when the rocks smashed together. So the Greeks waited until the gate opened again, rowed with all their might and shot through, and only the ornamental tip of the rudder was crushed. When Maui flies into the underworld on Mangaia to visit his parents and to get the fire, on an ogre journey, that is, he also has to pass the clashing rocks. Maui has borrowed the red dove Tanes, and on it he rides into the beyond. To his delight, the rocks open upon the magic words that Maui had learned from the mother, only to close again when Maui passes through. He luckily succeeds in getting through but, alas, the resplendent tail of the beautiful dove has been crushed.

This means: for the goal to be attained and the transformation to be completed, a sacrifice has to be made. To achieve the new, the old has at least partly to be abandoned. This is the age-old “die and become”!38 Here the boy has to leave the mother’s protection to differentiate himself in accordance with his age. Above all, it is important that he seize the right moment that must not be missed; because already he is a bit past the point at which he ordinarily should have found his way into the objective world in a normal development. Hesitation is dangerous. If he gains insight into the line of life, however, into the rhythm of life as symbolized by the alternating closing and reopening of the gates, into events dictated by time, then he will be offered the possibility to pass through successfully without severe losses, although not without paying the indispensable tribute.

[Here Dr. Bash quotes another dream of a female schizophrenic patient, which is compared to the present case.]39

It remains to be discussed how the seemingly missing lysis in the boy’s dream has to be conceived. As mentioned at the beginning, the dream is rather a vision. No action takes place, but there is a confrontation, a juxtaposition, that does not directly call for a lysis. Or we could interpret his waking up with a cry of fear as a kind of lysis. We may well expect that his successive dreams will deal with the facts given here. It would probably be most salutary for the dreamer to try and bring about a solution of the conflict straight away, that he summon his courage and go through, instead of flinching from it as he does here. That he does not do it, however, is by no means a bad or even fatal omen, all the more so in that the possibility of slipping through is repeatedly offered in the dream.

In summarizing the psychological meaning of the dream, we may say: the six-year-old boy already has a partial consciousness of his situation, the transition from early infantile unconsciousness, collectivity, subjectivity, love and security within the family, and attachment to the mother, to a stage of budding consciousness, differentiation, objectivity, stepping out into the world, and disengagement from the family. In all this he is hindered by forces that are partly effective in his unconscious, but which he has not been completely unaware of. These forces rather confront him from the outside than develop out of his inside. It stands to reason that it is the mother who wants to hold him back in a primitive phase, in utero, so to speak. There is a way out of this danger, but it is not without risks. It is not practical just like that, because the right moment has passed. It requires a certain insight, above all the realization and use of the fateful moment in which, and in which alone, rescue is possible. This moment, however, recurs over and over again for the time being. The child is not yet condemned to a necessarily pathological escalation of the situation, as we have seen it in the dream of the schizophrenic patient.

Professor Jung: So this is a dream that contains no activity but, as Mr. Bash has rightly mentioned, is actually an image, a confrontation. The dream is only an image that has been presented to him, so to speak. And this image now represents his situation, his critical situation, in which he is. Mr. Bash has quite correctly shown that the age between the fifth and the sixth year is a critical age, and I am glad that Mr. Bash has also consulted other psychological literature. Today there are very many objective descriptions of infantile psychology. Our furor paedagogicus, which we have chiefly directed at the child, has indeed been useful, although the interest is a bit pathological, generated so that the teacher need not deal with his own psychology. The human soul is something we only educate, but we are not interested at all in what it is!—Well, this is a critical age insofar as the child approaches school between the age of five and six. The child is no longer in the former unconscious atmosphere, but feels that he is approached by a world to which he has to adapt. Naturally, it is understandable at such a moment that a dream, which clearly shows the specific handicap, will appear, if the child is somehow not ready for this adaptational work. And this is what the present dream does. It shows the specific handicap of this person. Because we can say it in a few words: he is not yet born. He is still in utero. Mr. Bash has had the quite correct idea to interpret the boy of the same age as someone identical. However, this duplication does have a specific meaning in such a case: first of all, there is a mythological foundation of this duplication in utero. The primitives, for example, see the afterbirth as the “other.” He is the brother, the twin, who is also treated like a child, because he is simply a differently shaped twin. He actually is one, only looks a bit different. That the placenta is the other is only a rationalization. The fact is that a human being always feels himself as two; the other is the shadow. We could also say: he still has a placenta with him, still has an umbilical cord to his placenta, because the shadow is what connects him to the dark world, that is, the unconscious.

We have to assume a considerable shadow, which, however, will show only when he steps into the light; otherwise, the shadow is invisible. In that case, the dreamer is the man without a shadow. As long as this dream is valid, he is the man without a shadow. Because he is not yet born, his main figure is still in the womb, in his shadow. Although he does exist on the outside, he is not the real one at all; he is half or something like that. The reason why he cannot come out is given in the dream: the grids. Now what could such grids be in reality, for a person who has not yet come out of the mother, but lives in complete darkness? What is described by two rotating grids? What can this mean to us? The grid of course is always something that prevents entering or exiting; teeth or clashing rocks would also make it awkward to slip through. So what is specific about the grids?

Participant: Probably it is the family itself?

Professor Jung: Yes, sure, but what are the grids? First of all: grids do not grow naturally; grids have been placed by somebody. Somebody has willfully played this devilish trick. If you think of the mother, you are absolutely correct. A witch, an evil power, has ingeniously placed these grids. But in what do they consist?

Participant: In prohibitions.

Professor Jung: Yes, instead of saying: “It is forbidden to climb through the window,” we make a grille. This is a possible explanation. These are very concrete prohibitions, concrete obstacles; thus there is a positive resolve to block this passage. What can a mother do in this respect? What is the most favored means of a mother to block the birth canal?

Participant: To make you aware of threatening dangers.

Participant: To bring up moral pairs of opposites, good and bad.

Professor Jung: This is correct. But this is not so in our case. These grids have been placed by the witch, so that Hansel cannot get out of the oven; and if he gets out, she will pinch off his feet. The grids rotate, so that one could possibly go through, which is questionable, however. So the mother has to do something, which is expressed by the rotating grids. This is an opposition, in that you are quite right, a strange opposition. What kinds of opposites does the mother make?

Participant: She encourages him, and when he wants to do it she holds him back.

Professor Jung: Yes, it’s along these lines.

Participant: Perhaps, on the one hand, she makes a special hero out of him, and, on the other, there is still the nanny in the room.

Participant: Or she can show him the world, but when he wants to get out, she’ll say: you’re still too little for that.

Professor Jung: Well, yes, on the one hand, a mother has a normal interest that the child grows up, develops, wants to get out, and becomes an honest and capable child; on the other hand, all this is forbidden in, oh, so many words. So, for instance, she gives him a long lecture that this and that is forbidden, yet she provokes him to do it after all. She slips him the opportunity. We can often see this when boys have become a little older. Then the mother might say: “Don’t you ever dare to kiss a girl!” And then: “Don’t you want to go to the party? Don’t you see that all the others also go to the party?” This game is played thousands of times, with incitements and prohibitions. These are all mothers who do not think, but just hope, wish, and fear; they are always in the emotional state. They allure and seduce. But then it is crushed. One naturally can’t get out in such a situation. I think that there is a specific agenda in this case, namely, that the mother wants a development as soon as possible, but then does not want precisely this because of the inherent dangers. These are obstacles a mother can erect to keep a child with her. Eventually a psychological attitude will develop in the boy that the only chance to get out is to catch the right moment. There are very well-behaved boys who only wait for the right moment, when the mother turns her back. Then something happens, but really something! Very often the children hurt themselves, even literally, by pulling down boiling water, or by playing tricks; to get the mother going, they climb on the highest trees and hope the mother will see them, but then they might fall to death.

Now this cave is clearly described as a uterus. And it is perfectly possible that this boy already knew that he had been in the mother’s belly. The dream describes the inside of the belly. It says: hey, you are still in the belly of the mother. The rest is completely correct anatomically. There’s one strange little detail: the way slopes down at first and then goes up. What does this mean for the mother, the one who has the belly? What does this mean for the whole situation? In which situation is the mother?

Participant: She is lying down.

Professor Jung: He is enclosed in the lying mother. When somebody is lying down, he or she is usually sleeping. He is simply enclosed in the mother. It is only a little detail. It could mean: the mother goes on lying down, meaning that she sleeps. The mother is unconscious.

Participant: This would prove that the mother makes the whole situation unconscious.

Professor Jung: This is the whole trick the mother plays. It is based on her unconsciousness.

At a Later Meeting of the Seminar

Professor Jung: We are still discussing the dream of the boy who is in his mother’s belly and can’t get out. One could speak of a rebirth, although it is not really a rebirth, but a second birth. What is the difference?

Participant: A second birth is not something new, but a prolongation of the first one.

Professor Jung: Yes, the first one was incomplete, and thus has somehow to be completed later. What is the actual rebirth?

Participant: A transformation.

Professor Jung: Yes, a total guarantee that all requirements have been met. Man is completely transformed by this rebirth. Where does it occur?

Participant: In the mysteries.

Professor Jung: Yes, we encounter it whenever we are dealing with mysteries. And of course it is also found in myths, and in which myths in particular?

Participant: In heroic myths.

Professor Jung: Yes, in most cases of heroic myths we find the rebirth symbolism, and why?

Participant: The hero has to be born twice in order to be a hero.

Participant: As a hero he is superhuman.

Professor Jung: Yes, at first he is a man, but because it is his fate to become a superman he has to be reborn as such.

And where is this idea demonstrated technically?

Participant: In the initiation rites.

Participant: In baptism.

Professor Jung: Yes, there the idea of the birth of the hero is once again realized. We also find the idea of rebirth in the form of a political institution. In Egypt the kings had to be born twice. In many temples there was a birth chamber,40 in which the king was procreated again by the gods. There is an indirect indication for this. For Heracles, the two mothers are Alkmene and Hera. In the case of the latter it is an adoption. Hera offers him her breast and feeds him. He sucks so hard that the milk spurts out, thus creating the milky way. There is a painting by an Italian painter of the adoption of Heracles, on the occasion of the birthday of a duke of Ferrara, in the sycophantic, Byzantine style of the tyrannical courts. It shows the duke as Heracles, lying under the skirts of Hera. It has been seen as an Aphroditian amorous play. But it is the adoption of Heracles. The second mother stands for the great destiny, which can be favorable or unfavorable, just as in our case.

Participant: The godparents also belong here.

Professor Jung: Yes, “godfather” and “godmother”⁴¹ are gods. There is a connection with the English word [to] beget.⁴² They are already present at birth, to demonstrate that this child was born not only bodily and carnally, but was also procreated by the gods—for baptism itself is already the second birth. In former times adults were baptized.

Participant: In the Orthodox Church, the real parents are strictly forbidden to be present at baptism.

Professor Jung: This is very logical.

Participant: There also is a canon law that godfather and godchild must not marry.

Participant: Achilles is secretly brought to be baptized by fire.

Professor Jung: In Plutarch, too, Isis puts the child into the fire every night to make him immortal. Then the mother cries out, and Isis says: Now the whole rebirth is kaput.

In our case, too, this second birth shows the mythological motifs of a difficult passage. Mr. Bash has quite correctly compared this difficulty with difficult passages in mythology, as, for example, in the motif of the clashing rocks, which is found in several variations. It is also situated in the right place, although it is not a mythological rebirth. What is interesting about this passage is that there is obviously only one right moment at which it is possible. As you know, such right moments can also be found in fairy tales.

Participant: For instance, the search for mysterious caves that open only during Midsummer Night. Then one can enter, then it is possible.

Professor Jung: There are also revolving doors, where the door opens only once.

Participant: Another example is the dream of the “swinging ax.”43

Professor Jung: Yes, there, too, it is one precise moment at which the passage is possible.

Participant: Midnight is also such a special time.

Professor Jung: Yes, such conditions exist, for example, for digging up treasures. The treasure blossoms every nine years, nine months, and nine days; in this night the treasure can be simply picked up from the ground. Then, the following night, it again falls into the earth, fourteen fathoms deep. This is called the blossoming of the treasure. It is a kairós, the appropriate, right moment at which this is possible. What does this mean psychologically?

Participant: To be constantly awake.

Professor Jung: Yes, if you do not want to miss the moment, you have to be absolutely attentive. You constantly have to be alert. This means that a constant devotion is necessary, a particular exertion of consciousness. If something happens only at one particular moment, one has to be damn careful not to miss this moment. This is important for the healing of an unborn state. By exerting one’s consciousness, by reflecting and paying attention, it is possible to get through at one particular point. It is a consciousness that is captured, and then at one point finds an advantageous moment to break through somewhere. Therefore, the kairós is stressed.

Another thing has still to be mentioned: Mr. Bash has drawn a connection between the blood-red color of the cavity and the symbol of the red color as such. This is always about something emotional. So he would be captured in an emotional state. Now it is generally a characteristic feature that a consciousness that is not yet born is always under the spell of emotions. How is this expressed in the teachings of the chakras?

Participant: The Kundalini is still below the diaphragm.

Professor Jung: Yes, where?

Participant: In the Manipura.

Professor Jung: Yes, in the solar plexus. This is an emotional center, because diaphragm and stomach are affected. The emotions affect stomach and liver. In case of anger, icterus, jaundice, can ensue. The emotional center is in the upper part of the belly, therefore, and if someone is still in the belly, not yet born, he is captured in an emotional state. And all persons who are still captured in emotions, and whose life is influenced and guided by emotion, are actually not yet born and still under the Heimarmene,44 under the force of the astrological condition. Rebirth has not yet been achieved. Such a person is completely bound by fate; he is a victim of fate. Such a person then says: “But that’s how I feel,” or “I’m scared,” or “I’m sad,” or “I’m not in the mood”—and then there’s nothing one can do about it. We can only achieve something if we put him into the mood for action, just like the primitives. We have to lead off the dance, so to speak, so that they get into the mood for doing something. You cannot treat emotional people other than by emotional means. Consciousness has not yet risen above the diaphragm. As we know, there are still some three positions above the diaphragm. Let us dismiss the last one; one actually has to be half dead to reach it.

Participant: Couldn’t the dream also be about the problem of a rebirth?

Participant: But this dream is actually about a neurosis.

Professor Jung: Rebirth means birth into another world. This birth in the dream, however, is a birth into the outer world.

Participant: What should we do with children who are so dependent on emotions?

Professor Jung: You have to remove them into an environment that exerts a different pedagogical influence, because you can’t speak psychologically to the child at all. I remember a thirty-five-year-old doctor with a mother complex. I had to fight for two months with the man to convince him that he simply wouldn’t get out of the mother if he remained at home any longer. After two months, he came and said he had been thinking and had to ask me something. And then he asked: “Do you really believe that I should live at another place?” Eventually he believed it. As a result, the mother fractured her femur. Then he had a dream: He climbs on slippery grass, climbs up; the mother also wants to go up, she also wants to reach the top of the hill, as stubborn as ever. She slips and fractures the femur.

Here you can see how things are connected. So this story took a very dramatic course. And when it took him so long to realize it, this was due to the fact that he could not risk the death of the mother. Because it could have taken the mother’s life if he had gone away. It is a fact that mothers say: If you marry, I will do myself in. Such sons then feel responsible when the old witch has to beat it. He does love his mother, and if he has but the faintest idea that she risks her life, he won’t be able to get away. It takes a desecrating move backward, a look away from the mother’s Medusa head. But this is not nice.

Participant: Could it be the case that the upcoming school triggered this dream in the five- to six-year-old boy?

Professor Jung: Yes, of course. It then turns out that such an attachment is extremely inexpedient, because he will be insufficiently prepared for facing the exigencies of the outer world. If such a child is intelligent, he may cope with all the intellectual exigencies in school, but still won’t achieve anything; he does not have the independence of personality. He is totally undermined by the mother. In the case of the doctor, the mother demanded that he tell her all about the analysis. He wrote down every word for the mother, so she always had him in her grip. Then I said: “This has to stop.” And of course this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Fortunately, she didn’t die. One gets so furious with such parents!

Participant: Even if she dies, she will still be living. It’s completely useless. The mother will still always be there.

Professor Jung: Yes, dying is completely useless. As the mother of God, she will always crouch there and brood over the child. He will never get out. It’s the same, of course, with the fathers. We must by no means think that it would end with death. What the other has done to us, we’ll then do ourselves later. Everything remains in the same place, and one lives exactly as before. Many a bachelor is sitting in his apartment and nurses the Manes45 of his parents, and is as constricted and inhibited as ever.

5. Dream of a Ten-Year-Old Boy of a Red Ball

PRESENTED BY PROFESSOR C. G. JUNG

Text: I was playing in the room with my brother Meinrad. Suddenly a red ball appeared in the sky that came nearer to our house. I looked through the window. When the ball had come into the house, it opened and “God” came out. It was a shining triangle with rays, and in the middle there was a figure that looked like “God.” But it was someone young, not an old man, and also not the Savior. He looked a bit like the picture in my Bible: the torso of a body with blessing hands in the triangle.

Then I was playing in the garden. There I saw the end of the world. I was standing by in a meadow. The moon and the stars fell down on the earth. I watched that. Then I saw Jesus alone in the sky. There were no people. Then I came into heaven. It was a theater. There was a stage. Above, there was a floating cloud. And then there was a throne on the stage. I saw the Trinity on it (just like it is usually portrayed, as an old man, the Holy Spirit, and Christ). Then God had disappeared. A “spirit” came. He had a green face. He scared me. I was still on the stage with him. It was winter. I lunged out at the devil and dumped him into the snow. Then I woke up.

Professor Jung: Personally, I have to remark that this child has been brought up as a Catholic. He lives in a city that is bombarded every now and then at the present time, so he is suffering from the horrors of war. Otherwise I know of nothing detrimental. Obviously, he has been brought up very religiously. There is no exaggerated religious atmosphere, however, but simply the ordinary Catholic one. And so the boy has this dream.

Now to the beginning: he is in the room with his brother. Suddenly this red ball appears and comes near the house. What would you conclude from that?

Participant: Shouldn’t one think of bombs?

Professor Jung: Yes, one could think of a danger when the red ball appears. The whole thing is not described like an air raid, however, but like something completely different.

Participant: Martin Buber mentions the visions of a nun. There the soul was seen as a shining globe.

Professor Jung: Yes, this is the deity. Ignatius of Loyola, too, had such visions in which a globe appeared. This is the all-round, cosmic being, the world soul, the rotundum, the round one. And what would you say about the fact that the ball in the dream is red?

Participant: It is the emotional state in puberty that is approaching him.

Participant: Isn’t the red connected to what is devilish in the cosmos? Typhon is red. The cosmos approaches him red and bloody. A bewilderment about the world is expressed by this. Then the meaning of the dream develops in the further course of the dream.

Professor Jung: This is absolutely correct. The color red is crucial here. Red is the emotional color par excellence, the hot color. It is the blood. Thus we may also assume that this approaching red ball is something frightening.

Participant: There are fireballs, ball lightnings, also in reality.

Professor Jung: But this the boy does not know. It is a very rare phenomenon. What happens in this dream is something completely different. What imposes itself is portrayed as a ball, and this is a dubious, problematic phenomenon, something unknown. It is by no means a conventional appearance. The ball rather looks like a celestial body approaching earth. It is unusual, supernatural. Such a thing doesn’t happen every day. The dream then says: God comes out; so this globe contains God. It contains the religious center that naturally emerges as God at first in the dream of this boy. From the following dream images you see that they really refer to his religious ideas, that is, the religious ideas serve to explain the strange phenomena to him.

In Ignatius of Loyola we find visions in which Christ allegedly appears to him. In one vision he also sees a snake with many eyes, which actually is not dogmatic at all. These are primordial images, which then are perceived in the religious images one happens to have. What follows next in the dream are all dogmatic images. First of all: God comes out. But it is not the figure of an old man at all, but of a shining triangle. This quite clearly is the ecclesiastical image: rays and the eye of God within. Here there is no eye within, however, nor an old man, but someone young. It is also not the Savior. What does that indicate?

Participant: It is a new religious image showing itself.

Professor Jung: We have to assume that the unconscious—in accordance with the undogmatic solution (ball) that is then perceived dogmatically—contains something undogmatic. Thus, this is not the old man and not the Savior, but a young man. The unconscious says: well, please, this is something different than what you think, not the eye of God, all-embracing consciousness, but a young man, a stranger. With this the unconscious prevails, as it has already shown with the help of the red ball: now comes something different. Although the young man in the triangle resembles the picture in his Bible—a torso with blessing hands—it is expressly stated that is not the Savior, but another religious figure.

Now a peripateia occurs in the dream. We can assume, can’t we, that the unconscious has asserted itself so much that he can no longer ignore it. He has to face it. And now he runs into the garden. What can we say about that?

Participant: He goes out of the house, out of the construction made by humans, into the garden, into nature.

Professor Jung: In any case, he runs away from the place of the vision, into a completely different environment. He leaves the consciousness of the vision and enters into a completely different situation. The view is now enclosed. And what does this enclosed consciousness refer to?

Participant: To the previous view.

Professor Jung: Yes, quite right: an inhabited house in which one is contained. It has separate rooms that contain something. This is the dogmatic form within which he perceives this new phenomenon. But then he is not able to perceive it completely. He can only roughly approximate it to Christ, and is now confronted, so to speak, with the unbearable fact that he has something new in these rooms that does not fit at all. It is now understandable that he leaves this room; one has to abandon it. The unconscious relocates him to the garden. What is the difference?

Participant: He is freer.

Professor Jung: Yes, but he is also fenced in.

Participant: He is freer toward the sky.

Professor Jung: Yes, there is no lid on top up there. Things can still develop further up until Sirius; if nothing can be done right and left, and backward and forward, there is still room upward until heaven. And now he sees the end of the world there. What does that mean?

Participant: If he accepted it, it would mean the end of what had existed until then. It is tantamount to the end of the world; it is a twilight of the gods.

Professor Jung: It is further elaboration of the novelty, of the new figure. This young man who appears here is the messenger of the end of the world. And what occurs outside is the end of the world. So who is this young man?

Participant: The Antichrist.

Professor Jung: Yes, in the end he could be the Antichrist. He comes at the end. He comes just before closing time. Now the boy is already no longer in the garden, but on a meadow, again a bit farther away. Moon and stars fall down on the earth. Where does this image come from?

Participant: From the Apocalypse.

Professor Jung: Yes, obviously. You did hear that he has an illustrated Bible.

Participant: Aren’t they thrown down from the tail of an animal in the Apocalypse?

Professor Jung: Yes, absolutely. The angel of destruction throws the stars onto the earth. “Then I saw Jesus alone in the sky. There were no people.” What does that mean?

Participant: The people have defected.

Professor Jung: Yes, of course, all the people are gone. This means that the Lord Jesus is now left alone. The whole glory has disappeared.

Now the boy is further transported away. In a way, he has been removed from the room, from the narrow, defined place, into the garden, from there into the meadow, and now even into heaven. Now he is elevated into the heights. And this heaven appears as a theater.

Participant: It is a devaluation of the previous image.

Professor Jung: Yes, the old image of heaven is only that of a theater. Then the floating clouds and the throne: this goes back to the Holy Trinity as it is usually depicted. And finally God has disappeared. It is a devaluation. The theatrical tricks don’t work. Then it says: “a spirit came.” Now things really get going. And this spirit has a green face.

Participant: It is the spirit of the earth.

Participant: It is reminiscent of Meyrink’s The Green Face.

Professor Jung: Which he hasn’t read. It simply means that the spirit has a green face. Therefore we are free to take a further step: he is Al-Khidr, the Green One.46 Who is this?

Participant: An angel of God.

Professor Jung: He is the angel of the face, the visible Allah, the deuteros theos, the second god, a concrete god. As a human being, he enters into all things; therefore, he is also called the green one, because he is also in the vegetation.

During my journey in Africa, my headman47 was a Sufi. He had been initiated by a sheikh. He explained the nature of Khidr to me: “You are walking on the street. There goes a man, and you know it is Khidr. How do you know that? Well, you read the Koran, and you will know it. Then you greet him: ‘Salaam aleikum.’ Then all your wishes will be fulfilled. At night you are sleeping, and then you see a white light. It does not smoke, it does not burn. It is no star, and you know: it is Khidr.” And then he took a little blade of grass and said: “He can also appear as this.”

He is a real Dionysus, an undivided and divided spirit, a life spirit in all living beings, which is always present and can assume all forms. The boy says in the report of his dream: “He scared me.” What is frightening is the direct presence of God; this is frightening. “I was still on the stage with him”—thus, where the Holy Trinity is sitting, where Christian dogmatism is played, there he is with him. “It was winter.”

Participant: Winter comes before spring.

Professor Jung: Yes, where Khidr sits there is no winter. The ground is covered by spring flowers. Where Khidr sits it is green, there the earth turns green. But here it is winter, because Khidr has just arrived. “I lunged out at the devil and dumped him into the snow.” So, if it is not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, it has to be the devil! This is the same argument as in St. Anthony: he saw a great light at night, and spirits who said: “We have come to enlighten you.” But he concluded that they were demons who tested him. So he packed his suitcase⁴⁸ and left. This is a story by Anatole France, by the way, not from the Acta Sanctorum.⁴⁹

So the boy of this dream also comes to the conclusion: this has to be the devil. This dream has been dreamed at this very time: January 1940.

At a Later Meeting of the Seminar

Professor Jung: Last time we analyzed the dream of the ten-year-old boy and discussed various religious problems. I also told you a bit about that boy. Naturally, we cannot assume that this boy knew anything about the figure of Khidr, who is a not very well-known figure. I have also looked up the subject of “Islam” in Hastings, and “Chadir” is mentioned nowhere. From this you can see how little this figure is known. Coincidentally, in our regions he is known from the poem by Rückert about Chidher, the eternally young one who returns every five hundred years. Rückert took this story from the translation of a legend that was published in the 1820s.50 It is by Al Qaswini, a Persian poet who lived around the year 900. He was a cosmographer who described the whole cosmology. So this Al Qaswini gives an account of Chadir, who is actually called the “Green One.” He tells the story of a young man who has a friend, and this friend is Chadir or Khidr. (The pronunciation varies according to the various Arabic dialects; as you know, in the Semitic languages the vowels, but not the consonants, vary.) Now this young man loves his friend Khidr very much; the king hears about this friend, who tells such wonderful stories, and lets Khidr come to tell him a story. The result is that the king is so impressed that he tells him that he, the king, wants to be taught by him and follow him. Then Khidr says that he cannot do that.

There is a legend in the Koran in which Khidr appears, without being named. It is supposed that Khidr does not go back to a pre-Islamic figure, but is a purely Islamic one. It is not impossible, however, even likely, that this figure, as also stressed by Volz, comes from the Arabic syncretism,⁵¹ that spiritual movement which has absorbed all the remains of antiquity. So there are Christian, Jewish, Greek, and certain Gnostic influences, as well as Persian and doubtlessly also Indian ones. In Islam in particular, where this figure belongs, in Islamic mysticism, many Indian influences can be found. So this figure comes from this ambience. It is not impossible, therefore, that Khidr is modeled on various other figures that we may then find under one name or another. We know, for example, of the connection to a pre-Islamic figure; the interpretation is that he is Elijah, who goes back to late Jewish syncretism. Moreover, there is a connection to Alexander the Great. Iskander (Arabic for Alexander) has a great tradition. The Alexander novel also appears in the Middle Ages. There are numerous legends about his great deeds. In the form of Dhulqarnein, the two-horned one,52 he is the classical friend of Khidr, and is identified with him. This refers to the identification of Alexander with Jupiter Ammon, portrayed with two ram horns, and Dionysus, who also was two-horned. Khidr was seen as a vegetation god, as the green of the earth, which is revived after winter. In the dream of the boy, Khidr is also the green one who appears in the winter, and who is dumped into the snow by the boy because he believes him to be the devil. So here he is a slightly premature appearance of spring. The Koran does not mention Khidr by name, but contains his legend, which is the first version we have of it. The Koran places the story in the first decade of the seventh century. The Hidjra took place in the year 622.⁵³ Not long afterward, the suras came into existence. In the eighteenth sura, “The Cave” [Al-Kahf], you find the Khidr legend in a highly significant connection. There the legend of the Seven Sleepers is told, which essentially contains the idea that the seven gods, the planet gods, the ancient star gods, the seven Archons of the Gnosis,54 have come to rest and sleep in the earth. They sleep for a long time, for many centuries, until they awaken to new life in a completely different time. The whole story, the whole content of the eighteenth sura, is quite dreamlike and strangely incoherent, just as the Koran as a whole is strangely incoherent. These are psychological stories that are interrupted by long moralistic reflections. Thus, the eighteenth sura is a conglomerate of all kinds of things.

There it says:

Moses once said to his servant, “I will not rest until I reach the point where the two rivers meet, no matter how long it takes.” When they reached the point where they met, they forgot their fish, and it found its way back to the river, sneakily. After they passed that point, he said to his servant, “Let us have lunch. All this traveling has thoroughly exhausted us.” He said, “Remember when we sat by the rock back there? I paid no attention to the fish. It was the devil who made me forget it, and it found its way back to the river, strangely.” (Moses) said, “That was the place we were looking for.” They traced their steps back. They found one of our servants, whom we blessed with mercy, and bestowed upon him from our own knowledge. Moses said to him, “Can I follow you, that you may teach me some of the knowledge and the guidance bestowed upon you?” He said, “You cannot stand to be with me. How can you stand that which you do not comprehend?”⁵⁵

You see, this is the motif of teaching knowledge and not being able to follow.

What we learn from this and from the further course the story takes in the Koran, is that Khidr does things that are amazing and shocking,⁵⁶ but later find their explanation. This should indicate that Khidr, as an executive authority, is completely informed about the plans of God, and thus, with foresight and knowledge about things that are still going to happen, takes anticipatory measures, which are seemingly immoral, yet correspond to the plans of God.

Now this story continues in a certain way, and in a very strange one at that. For the talk moves on to Dhulqarnein, so to speak, who actually is a friend of Khidr, but who also appears to be identified with him. Quite abruptly, the text in the Koran says, still in the eighteenth sura: “The Jews will ask you about Dhulqarnein,” which presupposes that a legend already existed, which saw Dhulqarnein and Khidr as one, or made Dhulqarnein a friend of Khidr.

We granted him authority on earth, and provided him with all kinds of means. Then, he pursued one way. When he reached the far west, he found the sun setting in a vast ocean, and found people there. We said, “O Zul-Qarnain, you can rule as you wish; either punish, or be kind to them.” He said, “As for those who transgress, we will punish them; then, when they return to their Lord, He will commit them to more retribution. As for those who believe and lead a righteous life, they receive a good reward; we will treat them kindly.” Then he pursued another way. When he reached the far east, he found the sun rising on people who had nothing to shelter them from it. Naturally, we were fully aware of everything he found out. He then pursued another way. When he reached the valley between two palisades, he found people whose language was barely understandable. They said, “O Zul-Qarnain, Gog and Magog are corruptors of the earth. Can we pay you to create a barrier between us and them?” He said, “My Lord has given me great bounties. If you cooperate with me, I will build a dam between you and them. Bring to me masses of iron.” Once he filled the gap between the two palisades, he said, “Blow.” Once it was red hot, he said, “Help me pour tar on top of it.” Thus, they could not climb it, nor could they bore holes in it. He said, “This is mercy from my Lord. When the prophecy of my Lord comes to pass, He will cause the dam to crumble. The prophecy of my Lord is truth.” At that time, we will let them invade with one another, then the horn will be blown, and we will summon them all together. We will present Hell, on that day, to the disbelievers. They are the ones whose eyes were too veiled to see My message. Nor could they hear.57

So this is the final word in the Koran on the essence of Khidr. This final part is interesting insofar as he appears in the role of a protector of the people, by building a dam against Gog and Magog. In the Old Testament (Genesis 10:2), Magog is mentioned as the name of a northern tribe. In Ezekiel (38:2ff.), Gog appears as the chief prince of the country of Magog. The Revelation speaks of “Gog and Magog” as if they were two peoples. In the first revelation it says: “And [Satan] shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city” (20:8–9). This place between two paths is obviously the place of the center; the place of the center is Jerusalem. There is the center of the earth. And it is this center that he protects, and the two paths are those that enclose a valley and thus constitute a center. So this is a further contribution to the characterization of Khidr. Vollers gives the following summary on Khidr: “He is the never-tiring wanderer and teacher and counselor of pious people, the sage in things divine, the unexpected visitor who, however, denies unworthy people his visit, the immortal one.”

You see that Khidr is a very strange figure; we actually cannot draw a direct parallel with any other figures. It is a very peculiar figure. What I told you last time about the contemporary religious practice of Muslims indicates that Khidr is probably most closely related to the widespread views on Dionysus in antiquity. For Dionysus is that vegetation god, that life god, life spirit, who is nothing but spirit, a whole, who appears in everything, however. This is how the dismemberment of Dionysus by the Titans was interpreted. By being torn to pieces by the Titans, Dionysus diffused into all things, so that all things contain Dionysus. Now, in the mystical view Khidr is able to appear in every form, and this naturally brings him closer to other views of a Gnostic nature, namely, that the Savior Himself is such a mutabilis, one who is able to change, one who goes through the heavens and takes one form or another, who goes up, unrecognized, through the orbits of the planets, and is not recognized by the Archons. Recently I read Le Conte du Saint Gral, a French account of the Grail legend. There it also says that Christ was so poor that the devil did not recognize him. This is also such a motif, because the Gnostics believed that Christ, too, had changed his appearance so that he was not recognized by the ruling planetary orbits. Now Khidr is also someone who can appear in many different forms; in particular he appears as a wanderer in various places, appears all of a sudden and causes all kinds of situations. For you can imagine that good old Moses really hit the roof when Khidr played such tricks. All that approximately describes the peculiar psychological factor represented by Khidr. For obviously he is an unconscious figure that causes all kinds of frightening things, that makes you think: “Now this goes awry, this goes all wrong,” but then it turns out to have been exactly the right thing. So this is about all we can say about the essence of Khidr. I could still mention that, according to the commentaries, he also appears when Moses and Joshua ben Nun58 return to the source of life. There they discover that somebody sits there on the ground, covered in a burnoose,⁵⁹ and all around him the ground turns green and is covered with flowers. There it also says: he sits on a green carpet, on the ocean. Again this is something that appears from the unconscious. In another version, the place on the ground or earth where he had sat is said to have turned into gold. All this expresses a sudden appearance from the unconscious, not understood at first, but then revealing itself as something of the highest value. As a matter of fact, this motif is already there earlier in the story, for they come to the source of life without knowing what it is. Only later, when they are already much more advanced, do they realize it. When Moses gets hungry and wants to eat fish, a drop falls from the source onto the fish, by which the fish comes to life again, jumps out of the basket into the brook, and from there goes to the sea again. There is a mysterious connection between Joshua ben Nun, the fisherman’s son, and the fish who jumps into the sea. This, however, would lead us into an analysis of this myth. This goes too far.

Now we come to the question: what does this mean for the boy, who is suddenly confronted with this strange dream vision by which his religious, dogmatic views are actually devalued?

Participant: One could imagine that the dream wants to say that now a great deal of incomprehensible things are happening. But somehow it would be the right thing.

Professor Jung: Well, only if this were indicated. But this is not indicated in the dream. We know it only from the Khidr legend. That is precisely why he defends himself against Khidr. He thinks he is the devil. And this could well be the case; if we didn’t know anything about Khidr, we, too, might think this. Decent people don’t have a green face. It still seems reasonable to suppose that this points to a natural spirit.

Participant: Does this spirit have anything to do with the devil?

Professor Jung: All natural spirits are devilish! Therefore, all things of nature have to be exorcized before sacred rituals so that the admixtio diabolicae fraudis60 evaporates. Thus, for example, when an altar is consecrated, it has to be oiled with a spoonful of benediction oil, and then censed, sterilized in psychological terms, because evil spirits could be everywhere, and they have to be removed. Each thing of nature is false in a way. Even humans themselves are actually no good from the start. What dogma does the Church have on general corruption?

Participant: The dogma of original sin.

Professor Jung: Yes, the creation is mixed up with evil; it is corrupt. The pure cannot die; it is incorruptible; therefore, everything has first to be disinfected. Therefore man is distorted by original sin. If a child is not baptized, it will not be saved. What happens with these children?

Participant: They do not go into heaven, but into a preheaven. They do not see the face of God.

Professor Jung: Yes, that’s correct. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t rot in hell. But they are deprived of the visio dei,61 and are in the hands of God’s all-clement mercy. He certainly knows what can be done about these undeveloped human beings.

Participant: I know a man, half-Spanish, half-Swiss, whose two children are Catholic. They had been born in the hospital and were very weakly, and they were quickly baptized as Catholics so that they would not be buried outside the cemetery walls.

Participant: Should the figure of Khidr be understood as a compensation for the too-spiritual view of the Christ figure?

Professor Jung: This is a question one may really ask. Khidr is a natural spirit. He has a green face. But because of his relation to Dhulqarnein and Dionysus, as well as to Moses, who also has horns, he can also be seen as the devil. It is quite possible to see him as the devil; and due to the dogma of original sin, and also the whole relation with decayable nature, he is, as a natural spirit, something that corrupts. The devil, as we know, is a great corruptor; now, when this phenomenon appears in place of a devalued dogmatism, we have to conceive this as a compensatory relation. For he takes the place of the dogma that has become lifeless. The dogma no longer contains the pneuma zoés, the spirit of life, and then inevitably the natural spirit appears. As a matter of fact, what appears is always what had been discarded before; “The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.”⁶² That is why the alchemists quoted this sentence over and over again, because they knew that something did not work out in the whole story, and that something still had to be found, that unknown healing motif which brings nature, the world, to perfection—and that perfection can only come out of nature. Thus the worship of nature and the mysterious statement about the philosopher’s stone, which is also marked. In it the benedicta viriditas appears, the green spirit. This is Khidr.

Obviously, we have to assume that this boy, despite—or because of—his religious, very Catholic education, unconsciously already senses something inanimate, so that something remains that attacks him now, and which, of course, he cannot but interpret as the devil. A child of this age, however, is naturally not yet a critic of the dogma; it just happens to him so. So, when this happens to a child, what else would you also take into account in such a dream?

Participant: Probably the criticism is already there in the environment.

Professor Jung: Yes, something has to be in the air, which this boy visualizes. So, this dream is a real war dream, isn’t it, from serious times, and we may expect that the unconscious reaction to all these impressions will be quite faithfully reproduced in such a dream. And because the dreamer is actually still a child—a ten-year-old boy is actually still a child—we have to suppose that there is also something collective contained in this dream, that it is not merely individualistic, but a dream from which we could say that it is also true for many other people. We could say: just as this child simply reacts, this might perhaps happen everywhere; in other words, that similar dreams have been dreamed in many other places. So when the question is answered by the unconscious, well, what comes next, after this dogmatic image has withered?

Participant: A Khidr-like figure.

Participant: Isn’t there a parallel with Faust, who had studied and yet feels empty, and then Mephistopheles comes, who also is a natural spirit?

Professor Jung: He studied what?

Participant: All existing sciences, and everything has become empty and futile; and then Mephistopheles comes just like that, who after all is a natural spirit. He loves to dance around with the witches.

Professor Jung: This is a primordial experience in alchemy. Mephistopheles is a natural demon, but a demon that has been distorted in a medieval way. He has taken over the role of the devil, although in fact he is simply a natural spirit.

Participant: He says, after all, that he always wants evil, but always creates good.63

Professor Jung: Exactly.

Participant: Couldn’t we interpret this in a way that Christ has been abandoned by the humans, that the dogma is no longer human, that the relation has been lost?

Professor Jung: There is something to this, of course there is. Man has fallen a bit, and the Trinity is so far away. Think of the modern Protestantism in Karl Barth, in which God is totaliter aliter,64 so that we cannot understand how a relationship could exist. If something is completely different, it can also no longer have an effect on me. The two of them have nothing to do with each other any longer. God has nothing to do with mankind, and mankind nothing with God.

A madman once thought that God would understand only the dead, and not the living. He then came closer to the world, but was so surrounded by miracles that it began to “wonder” in the world. The sun split in two and things unheard of happened. In the case of Schreber, too, we find the same idea, that God understands only something about the dead, but nothing about the living.

Participant: It is a reaction to the revival of paganism, to Wotan who was resurrected.

Professor Jung: Well, Wotan is another parallel. Wotan is a cousin of Dionysus. He also is the wanderer. Well, enjoy!

6. Dream of a Girl of Little Pigs and of Lice⁶⁵

PRESENTED BY MARGRIT OSTROWSKI-SACHS⁶⁶

Text: I step out of the house and see two little pigs in a square, fenced-in little garden. They are very lean. “Oh, my poor little pigs; they nearly let you starve!” I cry out, take them on my lap, sit down at a table, and feed them with a spoon until they get all round. Then I see that the little animals are full of lice and begin to pick the bugs from them, but in the end I’m covered all over with them myself.

Mrs. Ostrowski: The dream can be structured as follows:

Exposition:	The dreamer steps out of the house and sees the lean little pigs.
Development:	The little pigs are taken onto her lap and fed until they are all round.
Peripateia:	She sees that the little animals are full of lice, which she wants to pick from them.
Lysis:	In the end, the dreamer herself is completely covered with them.
Dramatis personae:	The dreamer, the little pigs, the lice.
Time:	No age is given. According to the notes, this is a dream that has frequently occurred since childhood, at least twice a year; so we have to assume that this dream occurred until adulthood. Thus it would accentuate a problem, which was already important for the child, and has remained active and unsolved for many years.

As to the exposition: “I step out of the house and see two little pigs in a square, fenced-in little garden.” The situation happens in front of the house, that is, in the place where contact with the outer world is made. So this will be about a process that did not develop out of the specific dispositions of the child, but rather out of the conditions of the milieu, probably not out of an external, open conflict, but out of unconscious tendencies or wrong attitudes in the educators. When we hear about a square, fenced-in little garden, we all naturally think what kinds of wonders might happen there, because inadvertently we think of the meaning of the rectangle in a mandala. Ample evidence has been given in the paper of Dr. Steiner that the garden is also “the place where something meaningful and important happens, the place where the task is found.” Now the task seems to consist in taking care of the lean little pigs. Psychologically, this could mean to provide these little animals with the food they are entitled to in the menagerie of infantile psychic life. Before we determine this more precisely, we have to look at the amplifications for the little pigs. These are by no means only negative—as we experience in the age of fat rationing anyway. The young, rosy little pigs can actually be an appetizing sight; they are also considered to bring good luck and are, with a four-leaf clover in their snout, the bearers of the most hearty wishes for the New Year on the greeting cards; and the expression “he really is a lucky pig”67 also means to be very fortunate. I will still go into the specific nuances of luck, as represented by the little pigs, in more detail.

Preller writes that the pigs symbolically indicate a sexual relationship and the idea of rut and lustful fertility. The pig was sacrificed to Aphrodite in Greece and Cyprus and, according to Roscher, was also the sacrificial animal of Demeter and Persephone, particularly of the chthonic Demeter, in Hermione. There exists a relief in Eleusis with the pictures of the two goddesses and the Eleusinian pig sacrifice. In the Hermitage in Leningrad⁶⁸ there is a Cumaeic relief vase, on which a priest sacrifices a little pig. According to Preller, the constellation of the Hyads—their Greek name indicates humid rain stars—was also depicted as a herd of little pigs, because pigs love puddles. Something similar is reported by Scheffer in his legends of the stars around the antique world, namely, that the Hyads were represented by little piglets—just like the Pleiades—instead of delicate nymphs.

In his book Das Tier in der Religion [Animals in Religion], Fuhrmann reports that in some places in China it is believed that sluggish women are turned into wild pigs that ravage the rice fields. The peasant then puts some part of a handloom in his field (the sluggishness of the women was with regard to weaving), and the pigs no longer return. In Deuteronomy, pork is declared forbidden food: “ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcasse” (14:8). The Koran also adopted the prohibition. From the Gospel you will remember the passage, in Mark 5:2–13, in which Jesus sent the unclean spirit of the possessed man—who said, “My name is Legion”—into a great herd of swine, which then ran violently down a steep place into the sea. Matthew 7:6, admonishes: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” Something similar to this statement of the Bible happened to the dreamer.

According to Brehm, the most important features of swine that bear on this dream are their great fertility—they have ten to twenty young pigs—and their voracity! They have the teeth of a true omnivore. “Their voice,” says Brehm, “is a special grunt, which expresses much sedateness, complacency, and coziness.” Of the young pigs, he writes: “They are lovely, agile creatures that can enchant everybody.” Jung writes in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido: “It is a particularly precious invention of Christian fantasy that the animal assigned to St. Antony is the swine, because the good old saint was one of those who were subject to the worst temptations by the devil.”69

In summarizing this material, the main characteristics of the pig are: extreme fertility, laziness, rooting through the dirt, enormous voracity, obsessiveness, rut, grunting, coziness, and pleasure; in short: the primitive, instinctual world. Thus it is sung in Auerbach’s basement: “We’re feeling terribly fine, just like five hundred swine.” These characteristics may be true for the little pigs of our dream to a somewhat lesser extent, because after all they are not fully grown swine, but piglets. The fact that there are only two little pigs seems to stress this more strongly.

Depending on the age of the dreamer, these little pigs are of a more or less harmless nature. It can often be heard how a child is told: “You’re really a little pig,”⁷⁰ e.g., when the child spilled some cocoa on her dress or the tablecloth. When adults are given that name, its meaning can be less harmless.

The dreamer cries out: “Oh, my poor little pigs; they nearly let you starve!” Thus all the characteristics of swine are too little accentuated in the dreamer, it was not she, but “they,” who let them starve—probably her environment, her parents, her educators. She did not know the delight to be allowed once to lick a plate with her tongue; she was not allowed to play with water and clay, nor to let off steam to her heart’s content. On the street she certainly had to dutifully “hold hands,” and was never allowed to step into the middle of the most beautiful puddles, even if they attracted her with almost magnetic force. We can often observe how children stride through the dirtiest ditches with the greatest pleasure, grind their boots into the dirt—that this work is highly important to them and, in any case, fulfills a deep-seated need. And because a well-behaved, sheltered, and dutiful child must not do any of this, because anything instinctual has been neglected and despised in her education, the characteristics of little pigs were nearly dead of starvation in our dreamer. It is surely her duty to feed the little pigs, to take care, that is, of these very primitive needs, or, in other words: sacrifices have to be made also to Aphrodite and the chthonic gods in the hierarchy of the soul powers, because otherwise they can make themselves felt in a very unpleasant way.

In the Institute for Child Psychology in London there is a special ward in which children, apparently without supervision, can play with clay and water; there not only babies, but also nervous children of ten to fourteen years, are allowed to secretly make up for what a mother had denied the child at the right time, out of a wrong attitude and her exaggerated love of cleanliness, order, and hygiene. In his book Schwierige Schüler [Difficult Students], Hans Zulliger, the Bernese teacher and psychologist, writes of a girl from a good family, who underwent a considerable change at the age of about nine, and showed a more than usual slovenliness and a striking indifference toward any cleaning procedures. Added to these peculiarities was an extreme craving for food, which made the girl devour amounts of food that stood in absolutely no relation to her stomach. She binge ate and then vomited pots of preserves, craved sweet as well as sour things, ate the leftovers in the fridge, stole cheese and sausages; her ravenous appetite was even satisfied with boiled potatoes as if they were delicacies. In a similar way, our dreamer may have tried to satisfy her needs. It may be assumed from her exclamation, however, that outwardly she used seemingly utterly harmless, sanctimonious methods. Usually the pig food is thrown into the trough or before the swine. But our girl takes the animals on her lap and treats them like her peers. She grossly exaggerates her care for the little animals. She does not care for her little pigs in a normal way, but behaves as if she were full of loving care for the little animals, feigning a very special sympathy for them. Perhaps she also blotches her exercise books in a seemingly harmless way—“it just so happened”; she seems to have made use of that veil of harmlessness. During puberty she would perhaps be offered other possibilities, perhaps she would show a special interest in books and would voraciously read certain bad literature, or look for certain passages in Schiller’s plays that might satisfy her requirements. As an adult she might perhaps gloat over the little scandals in her immediate or larger neighborhood, or she might even be on a committee for fallen girls and there get the food for her own swine in social activity. Of course, her interest in these animals could also have taken more extreme forms, but this seems hardly to be the case here. After all, the pigs get all round. The tension in the dream increases: she sees that the animals are full of lice, and starts to pick the bugs from them, with the result that in the end she herself is completely covered with them. In the Brockhaus71 it says among other things: “Lice are ectoparasitic, i.e., they live on their host, they are living blood-feeding insects, their mouth parts are pricking and sucking, the legs endowed with clinging organs. In the case of insufficient cleanliness they get out of hand, and there can be thousands of them in repulsive masses on a single victim. The constant itchiness can highly interfere with the general well-being, the frequent scratching may cause purulent spots on the skin, gateways for all kinds of germs.”

In the context of our dream, it is particularly characteristic of lice that they occur in cases of insufficient cleanliness, and that they are blood-feeding, constantly itch, and bring germs to the body. If positive sides could still be found in the swine, none of them can be detected in the lice. The dreamer, however, even goes as far as to pick the lice from the pigs. Psychologically speaking, by being interested so instinctively, with such obstinacy, in such an abnormal way, in uncleanliness, in voracity, in muckraking, in dirt, grunting well-being, and in the primitive instinctual world, and so on, by all this she falls victim to ordinary parasites that proliferate in the case of such defects or such features. She is deprived of her strength and her tranquility, is exposed to all pathogenic influences, and is constantly plagued; the blood, the lifeblood, is sucked out of her; she is completely covered with bugs, she herself has become bugs, a parasite. Professor Jung writes in Analytical Psychology and Education: “Wherever an important instinct has been underestimated, an enormous overestimation has to be the result.”72

The final result is very negative and unsatisfactory. The dreamer experiences what some proverbs say: she made her bed, and now has to lie in it. She jumped out of the frying pan into the fire; the apparently harmless affair got out of control. She gave the devil an inch, and he took a mile. She played with the fire and now is burning herself. Her fate is the same as that of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: the spirits that she’s cited her commands ignore.⁷³

The problem that awaited her was solved in the wrong way, and she was more and more entrapped in guilt and misery by the invisible, powerful laws. The carefully sheltered child, the well-educated daughter, notices this and that in her environment, at first quite savory, harmless, unclean things, some little “pigsties.”⁷⁴ Precisely because she knows nothing or too little about them, she is much too interested in them. She is fascinated by them in such an uncanny way, so to speak, that she affectionately concerns herself with them, until she herself is completely possessed by the effects of this constant decline, as a result of the constant sustenance of these fantasies or activities. She has probably slipped into a neurosis, whose psychology completely corresponds to the Freudian model, and which has to be broken down for a longer period of time, until it will be possible, as Professor Jung has expressed it, to tackle constructively a new solution of the task, a correct integration of these animals into the balance of the human soul.

Professor Jung: This reminds us of the fairy tale of the frog and the princess.⁷⁵ Unfortunately, we do not know at what age this dream was first dreamed. It is one that recurred. The recurrence happened over many years. Mrs. Sachs has quite correctly assumed that this is about a difficulty that was triggered by a special environment. As far as I know this doesn’t seem to be a neurosis; but the peculiar way of treating the little pigs exhibited by the dreamer points to something special. It is a bit exaggerated, this sympathy for these poor little pigs. True, it is not right to let these little animals famish, but it’s a bit much to embrace them in such a way. The mother would probably say: You mustn’t do such a terrible thing! The dreamer treats these piglets a bit too well in the dream. We have to assume that it is probably not so in consciousness, but that the attitude is perhaps a bit more careful there. We may perhaps surmise that the child is very well educated. So she has to compensate for this by dreaming of these little pigs. In the dream she then goes a bit too far. Eventually this can lead into some secret infantile misdeeds. In any case, this dream contains a very clear warning. Because what will happen to her if she cares so much for these little pigs that are covered with lice? She herself will become a little pig. Like the pigs, she is covered with lice, with parasites. The piglets actually then turn into parasites. What she cares for in these animals will become a habit in her, a vampire, a parasite, which sits on her and sucks her dry. But what do you make of the fact that the little pigs are in that fenced-in little garden?

Participant: In the fairy tale of the princess and the frog, the frog is in the well—but not as constricted as the piglets in the rectangular garden.

Professor Jung: Quite correct. It is a rectangular garden. These things are so trivial that we do not pay much attention to them. But the dream would not emphasize it if there weren’t anything to it. What does it mean that she goes out of the house?

Participant: That she goes away from the parents’ care.

Professor Jung: From her room. From her existence, where her parents are, from the area of human beings. People live there, and the world of her consciousness is also there. When she goes out of this, she goes into another area, where the pigs live. So there is a piece of nature, the garden, but it is fenced in and is real. One always has to prick up one’s ears a bit when something is rectangular and fenced in, a fenced-in place.

Participant: It is a culturally important place.

Professor Jung: I’d say that now it is meant for the little pigs. Why are they fenced in?

Participant: So that they stay within their boundaries.

Professor Jung: Yes, of course. What disagreeable characteristics do they have?

Participant: They nuzzle the ground.

Professor Jung: Yes, just let your swine into your garden, and you will get a nasty surprise. The pig is an animal that can be allowed to run around a bit, but not too often; otherwise your garden will be devastated beyond recognition. So that’s why pigs are fenced in, because they have such ravaging features, such messy eating habits. Now this is a completely natural image—a house in the country, a little garden, but there is also some exaggeration. Pigs are never in a little garden. Where they are, everything is churned up, dirty, and eaten up. Here the sentimentality already starts in the dream. Reality is different. Where pigs are there is a dark place.

Participant: When it says “in a little garden,” then it probably will be indeed a little garden. They simply have been put there already.

Professor Jung: Yes, but in reality it simply can’t be a garden. This is precisely the sentimentality in the dream—that it is a little garden. This is something incommensurable, a pig and a garden. Because then you will have a pigsty. This is what also happens in the dream. In the end she, too, is the louse. So, what is wrong about this?

Participant: The swine should be in the pigpen.

Professor Jung: Yes, of course; the pigs have broken into her garden. What does that mean?

Participant: The garden, that is flowers, feeling.

Professor Jung: Yes, the beautiful feelings; and then something stupid happened. You see, in the garden there are the beautiful roses and the little flowers, and now the little pigs are in it, so good-bye, little garden! What happened here is that a “pigsty” has sneaked into precisely the place where there should be nice feelings. What can that probably be? What psychological situation exists at home, as an educational influence? How come, instead of a little flower garden, the image of a little pig garden has risen in a child?

Participant: In this milieu the flowers, the feelings, are not cared for.

Professor Jung: Yes. In this milieu there is probably something that is responsible for the fact that, in the child, the little pigs have to secretly come into that place. Most of the time this happens when, as Dr. Fierz has correctly pointed out, a probably very emotional atmosphere prevails, an atmosphere of differentiated feelings, in which the rather unclean side is too heavily repressed. Naturally, this side then has to break into the emotional world more than ever, but unconsciously, from the backside, so that the feelings are all the more beautiful, more differentiated, the more a little “pigsty” is behind this.

Participant: Perhaps it is a puritan milieu?

Professor Jung: Yes, probably. Simply an increased, differentiated feeling. These are probably terribly orderly, nice people, who even exaggerate a bit, and bring up the child in a somewhat too clean way. As a boy I observed in school, for example, that the boys who were the greatest rascals had been raised terribly strictly at home. Usually these were boys from overly distinguished families. And they did the craziest things. When I went to school in the country, none of this happened. Nobody would have thought, for instance, of eating a live toad; the country boys never thought of anything sadistic. They got plenty of dirt on their shoes and hands, and the smell of the pigpen and cattle manure. They didn’t need this.

Well, the little pigs ran into the garden because they also wanted to eat something. The first impulse of the child, to feed the little pigs, is perfectly okay, just a normal action to somehow satisfy that unclean side, and also to please it. In the English Löwenfeld Institute the children are given paint; they put their hands into it and smear it around with great delight. They also get paper that they may besmear completely. I saw the paintings they made. We can vividly imagine what a big relief it is for these children when they once are allowed to make a real mess with the paint. The child, however, has already been made a bit sentimental and makes a virtue out of necessity, because naturally the little pigs now have to be raised with very special loving care. It becomes a task, it becomes something ethical, somehow beautiful; this, however—that it now has to be nice and be made lovingly—is too disciplined. And so that’s why she gets the lice; she is stuck in the dirt more than ever because of her distortion of the feeling. For then the dirt has to prove to her how dirty it really is. And in the end she herself turns into such a little pig, so to speak. Now this is the transformation that shows what comes out of getting involved with pigs in this distorted way. For when she behaves nicely, she can’t ever be nice enough, can she? For then it even becomes a virtue. And she can’t ever be virtuous enough, can’t ever be concerned about the little pigs, and that’s precisely why she herself also becomes a pig.

Participant: In many dreams, it is witches who have got the lice, who are contaminated, and he who delouses them has to eat the lice and is then contaminated himself.

Professor Jung: Yes, the lice are vampires, often also spirits. When a child is born in the Caucasus Mountains, they take a louse from the grandfather’s head and plant it on the head of the grandchild. By this the soul has been transferred, because in the primitive view the spirits always accompany us, buzz around us like bats or like vampires; they suck the blood from us. So when we get lice from pigs, for example, we have absorbed the pig spirits into us. The lice are the familiares76 of the pig. If we concern ourselves too much with them, we take over the familiares and get the animal spirits ourselves. Now we come to the fact that there are two pigs. Why exactly two?

Participant: It is a special accentuation of the moment.

Participant: Like in the dream of the two giants. It means a development of consciousness.

Professor Jung: The double appearance of a symbol means “unconscious”; because two of the same cannot be distinguished from each other, and this means that one does not know if there is one or if there are two. It is indistinguishable. We can only discern that there are two of them, but not which two. When an unconscious content is about to become conscious, a part of it is conscious and a part unconscious, like something visible and something invisible. The motif always appears in the case of psychic contents that are about to become conscious. Therefore we always encounter the motif of the two in the case of such figures that stand at the border between two worlds. Messengers of the underworld mostly come in two. This of course is also the case at the border of consciousness. Actually, it is simply the dreamer’s shadow in the form of an animal. But we still have to deal with the story of this little garden into which the pigs have come. We have already mentioned its naive meaning.

Participant: It could really be a mandala.

Professor Jung: It could really be a temenos. This can be a symbol of the self, that specially fenced-in place in which one should actually be contained. This is unconscious, of course, and projected onto a perhaps really existing little garden. In this garden there are living creatures. So this fenced-in place is apparently only an enclosure for animals. And this is now the unsightly aspect of something extremely important, because it is the self in the unconscious, in the form of an animal; the animal is still in it. You can find the same motif in my text in the Eranos Yearbook 1937, in which I have described the symbols of individuation,77 where, for instance, a bulky living mass can be found. Also snakes and other animals are in it. This is also a kind of enclosure for animals.

Participant: The paradise is a rectangular zoo.

Professor Jung: Yes, the paradise is a zoo, and the humans are unconsciously in it. There is still another important symbolism in connection with the self. It has repeatedly been illustrated.

Participant: Buddha with a boar’s head.

Professor Jung: This is a bit far-fetched. Nobody knows about that. True, in one of his avatars⁷⁸ Buddha has a boar’s head, but I am thinking of something much more familiar to us.

Participant: The Evangelists.

Professor Jung: No, something very concrete. The birth of Christ, with the ox and the donkey in the barn—this is the enclosure. Because in reality the caves in Bethlehem are goat barns, cow barns. The birth cave is such a barn, as miserable a hole as all the others that can still be seen there, full of goats and all kinds of poultry. Christ is the symbol of the self and was born in the barn. So here we have the animal enclosure, and here of course we are coming to a deeper level of the dream. A collective symbol is thus behind it, and suddenly we begin to understand how much more there is actually hidden behind all that. It is a legitimate attempt to feed this animal in the temenos and thus lead it toward its development. But this is a problem that is not suited for childhood. It is an archetypal problem, as you can see, one that can’t possibly be addressed in childhood. It is an archetype that comes nearer here, and which, by virtue of its fascination, can provoke—and has perhaps already provoked here—something that can have, or has already had, deleterious and harmful effects. Which?

Participant: A disintegration.

Professor Jung: Yes, a falling apart into a multiplicity of small elements. This multiplicity of small elements always indicates processes in the sympathetic nervous system. This is a slight dissociation, caused by the autonomy of the instincts. Thus, if animal instincts awaken and take possession of the personality, those elements, which should compose the human personality, drop to the level of the animal instincts, resulting in a disorder of the sympathetic nervous system, which often expresses itself in these multiplicities.

In the dream of a child that died young many of these dissociative phenomena can be found,79 which were originally caused by a strong and inopportune appearance of the archetype.

Participant: It could also be a problem of the parents.

Professor Jung: Quite right. There is something in the milieu that does not correspond with nature, for example, a high-handedness, an exaggerated false distinction. This does not correspond to nature, and, therefore, the archetype of the unclean animal is constellated, and this appearance then brings about such a difficulty. For the child cannot answer the problem of this archetype. She is simply assailed by it, and this is the secret reason why the little pigs then appear in the garden. Well, such a constellation can bring about the most incredible things in children, perversities or even very dangerous things, when they hurt themselves terribly or get into dangerous situations, because archetypes are constellated at the wrong time.

Participant: This is already contained in the symbol of the pig. The pig is the darkest and, in the Chinese zodiacal system, the last sign. There really has to be a big problem in the environment.

Professor Jung: In the East the pig means Avidya, the state of being unconscious. It also is a chthonic sacrificial animal. So there is a plethora of connections that confer special meaning on the pig. Although we naturally have to take all this into account, this brings us to an archetype a young child can’t possibly deal with. The whole problem is impossible, and often possessions or strange perversion, which then assume a mythological character, result from such situations. So this is what lies behind the dream and is hinted at in it. What is interesting, however, is to know, in terms of the therapy, how strange archetypal connections underlie a simple dream. This is the basis that shows how important it is that nature be given its due, that an attitude or an educational method that does not force nature prevail in the parents. Otherwise certain archetypes will emerge out of nature, which take possession of the children and subsequently completely distort them. The children can, for example, develop into real devils, which means that they identify with the repressed contents.

1 Meeting of 29 October 1940.

² Session of 29 October 1940.

³ On lap/womb, see seminar 4 (trans.).

⁴ Cf. seminar 3, § 4 (ed.).

⁵ Original: Lang und dünn steckt der Teufel drin; German saying (trans.).

⁶ This expression in English in the original (trans.).

⁷ This phrase in English in the original (trans.).

⁸ I.e., the parents and the relatives (ed.).

⁹ Session of 5 November 1940.

¹⁰ Latin, “god from the machine.” In some ancient Greek drama, an apparently insoluble crisis was solved by the intervention of a god, often brought on stage by an elaborate piece of equipment. The phrase has been extended to refer to any resolution to a story that does not pay due regard to the story’s internal logic and is so unlikely that it challenges suspension of disbelief (trans.).

¹¹ Actually up to ten meters (cf. www.tiger-online.org) (14 March 2007) (trans.).

¹² Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The “Soul” of the Primitive, chapter 4 (trans.).

¹³ See reluctant-messenger.com/Tibetan-Book-Dead_Houston1.htm (trans.).

¹⁴ CW 10, § 103 (ed.).

¹⁵ Here follow detailed comments on the Babylonian creation myth from the library of Assurbanipal (ed.).

¹⁶ Deus est sphaera infinita, cuius centrum est ubique, circumferentia nusquam [God is an infinite circle, whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere] (ed.).

¹⁷ Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1879). English text at www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/mom.htm (14 March 2007) (trans.).

¹⁸ A Swiss valley in the mountains between the Valais and the Bernese Oberland, still very isolated at that time (trans.).

¹⁹ This expression in English in the original (trans.).

²⁰ Jung refers to a passage in the seminar that is missing (ed.). “But what’s this I see! / Can this happen naturally? / Is it a phantom or is it real? / The dog’s growing big and tall. / He rises powerfully, / It’s no doglike shape I see!” (Goethe, Faust 1, lines 1247–52) (trans.).

²¹ Cf. Leo Frobenius, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes, p. 269.

²² From the Latin inspiratio (n.), inspirare (v.); “to breathe into” (trans.).

²³ French, “pure and simple” (trans.).

²⁴ In Yoruba mythology, Aja is an Orisha, patron of the forest, the animals within it, and the herbal healers, whom she taught their art (trans.).

²⁵ Twin horsemen, helpers of men in distress on land or sea, in Greek mythology identical with the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux); also in Hindu mythology (trans.).

²⁶ This word in English in the original (trans.).

²⁷ Sekhmet (“She who is powerful”) is a powerful ancient Egyptian goddess (trans.). Cf. the Egyptian cat goddess Bast (or Bastet) (ed.).

²⁸ Latin, Arctos (sing.), Arctoe (pl.), the two Bears in the northern sky (trans.).

²⁹ Session of 12 November 1940.

³⁰ The text of the paper is missing. The dream text is roughly the one given in the text (ed.).

³¹ French, “daddy’s girl” (trans.).

³² “Jimmy inside the tiger” and “inside the witch” in English in the original (trans.).

³³ Genesis 1:22 (trans.).

³⁴ Session of 3 December 1940.

³⁵ Allusion to Archimedes, who used to demand just one firm and immovable point in order to shift the entire earth (trans.).

³⁶ Hildegard Hetzer, Psychologische Untersuchung der Konstitution des Kindes.

³⁷ “The sacrifice of a bull, usually in connection with the worship of the Great Mother of the Gods, though not limited to this. Of oriental origin, its first known performance in Italy occurred in a.d. 134, at Puteoli, in honor of Venus Caelestis.” Prudentius describes it in Peristephanon (x, 1066ff): “the priest of the Mother, clad in a toga worn cinctu Gabino, with golden crown anti fillets on his head, takes his place in a trench covered by a platform of planks pierced with fine holes, on which a bull, magnificent with flowers and gold, is slain. The blood rains through the platform on to the priest below, who receives it on his face, and even on his tongue and palate, and after the baptism presents himself before his fellow-worshippers purified and regenerated, and receives their salutations and reverence” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taurobolium; accessed 14 March 2007) (trans.).

³⁸ “And as long as you lack this / True word: Die and Become! / You’ll be but a dismal guest / In Earth’s darkened room” (Goethe, “Blissful Yearning,” West-Eastern Divan) (trans.).

³⁹ Square brackets in original (trans.).

⁴⁰ This expression in English in the original (trans.).

⁴¹ In the original: “Gotte” and “Götti,” Swiss German for “godfather” and “godmother.” In standard German (Pate, Patin; derived from the Latin pater = father) this connection is lost (trans.).

⁴² This word in English in the original (trans.).

⁴³ See volume 2 of the English edition (trans.).

⁴⁴ Greek, “fate”; Stoic concept (trans.).

⁴⁵ Latin, the spirits of the deceased in ancient Rome (trans.).

⁴⁶ Khidr, literally “The Green One,” represents freshness of spirit and eternal liveliness, green symbolizing the freshness of knowledge “drawn out of the living sources of life.” Khidr is associated with the Water of Life. Because he drank the water of immortality, he is described as the one who has found the source of life, “eternal youth.” He is the mysterious guide and immortal saint in popular Islamic lore and the hidden initiator of those who walk the mystical path. He is a symbol of changeability, as further explained later (trans.).

⁴⁷ This word in English in the original (trans.).

⁴⁸ This word in English in the original (trans.).

⁴⁹ Cf. Oeuvres complètes illustrées de Anatole France, ed. Calman Lévy, vol. 4, pp. 526ff.

⁵⁰ Deutscher Musenalmanach, pp. 39ff (1830).

⁵¹ Syncretism is the attempt to reconcile disparate, even opposing, beliefs and to meld practices of various schools of thought. It is especially associated with the attempt to merge and analogize several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, and thus assert an underlying unity. In Islam, the Druzes integrated elements of Ismaili Islam with Gnosticism and Platonism. Several of the Jewish Messiah claimants ended up mixing Cabalistic Judaism with Christianity and Islam. Sikhism blends Hinduism and Islam. The Bahá’ís follow a prophet whom they consider a successor to Muhammad, and recognize Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and Zoroaster, among others, as earlier prophets. Some have therefore considered it a syncretic faith (trans.).

⁵² The aspect of Khidr-as-Friend is evident in the episode of Dhul-qarnein (or Zulqarnain), who in Islamic mysticism is equated with Alexander the Great (“The Two-Horned One”) (trans.).

⁵³ The Hijra (also Hijrah or Hegira), or withdrawal, is the emigration of Muhammad and his followers to the city of Medina (trans.).

⁵⁴ In late antiquity some variants of Gnosticism used the term Archon to refer to several servants of the Demiurge, the “creator god” who stood between the human race and a transcendent God who could be reached only through gnosis. In this context, Archons have the role of the angels and demons of the Old Testament (trans.).

⁵⁵ Sura 18:60–68 (trans.).

⁵⁶ This word in English in the original (trans.).

⁵⁷ Sura 18:84–101 (trans.).

⁵⁸ Joshua ben Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, successor of Moses, was the second person to lead the Jewish people in their early history (trans.).

⁵⁹ A hooded cloak worn especially by Arabs and Berbers (trans.).

⁶⁰ Latin, “the admixture of devilish deceit, fraud” (trans.)

⁶¹ Latin, “the sight of God” (trans.).

⁶² Psalm 118:22 (trans.).

⁶³ Goethe, Faust 1, verses 1335–36 (trans.)

⁶⁴ Latin, “totally other” (trans.).

⁶⁵ Age of the girl unknown.

⁶⁶ Session of 10 December 1940.

⁶⁷ Original: der hat aber Schwein—he really is a lucky devil (trans.).

⁶⁸ Now St. Petersburg (trans.).

⁶⁹ Not included in Symbols of Transformation (trans.).

⁷⁰ In the original in Swiss German: “Du bisch es rächts Säuli” (trans.).

⁷¹ Authoritative German encyclopedia (trans.).

⁷² C. G. Jung, The Development of Personality, CW 17, § 157 (ed.).

⁷³ From Goethe’s poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1779) (trans.)

⁷⁴ Original: “kleine Sauereien”—some little mess or obscenity (trans.).

⁷⁵ The Grimm fairy tale “The Frog King or Iron Heinrich” (trans.).

⁷⁶ Latin, “belonging to the family, close” (trans.).

⁷⁷ An enlarged version in C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, dream 18, in CW 12, §§ 183ff (ed.).

⁷⁸ Incarnations (trans.).

⁷⁹ Cf. C. G. Jung, Der Mensch und seine Symbole, pp. 69ff, where Jung discusses such dreams (ed.).