C. G. Jung did not find the time, in the midst of writing his immense body of work, to review the four seminar reports assembled here for their scientific correctness. He was convinced, however, that such editing would be necessary; he considered his own statements, as well as those of the participants of the seminars, to be, above all, oral contributions to the discussion, which would need to be elaborated more carefully and precisely when printed, in order to stand up to criticism. The most subjective factors may often influence the spoken word, and the inevitably subjective recording of the statements does not ensure that what is recorded is in fact always exactly what was originally meant. Despite these reservations, much later, toward the end of his life, he agreed to have the numerous seminars on various subjects published as an appendix to his Gesammelte Werke (GW). On 24 May 1956, he wrote to Gerhard Adler, a member of the Anglo- American editorial team of the Collected Works: “I completely agree to have the ‘seminar notes’1 published as an appendix to the complete edition of my works, and I ask you . . . to see to it that the necessary excisions, or corrections, of any possible factual mistakes be made. . . . If possible, however, the style should not be altered.” On another occasion, he wished to have the following note printed at the beginning of the seminar notes:
I am well aware of the fact that the text of these seminars contains a certain number of errors and other shortcomings, which would make corrections necessary. Unfortunately, I was not able to carry out this work myself. I therefore ask the reader to read these reports with the necessary critical eye, and to use them with caution. Apart from that, thanks to the representational art [of the chroniclers], they give a lively and faithful image of reality as it was at that time. (May 1954)
C. G. Jung may have been prompted to make these remarks by his wish to enable the reader to form an independent judgment, and at the same time to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that some of the statements should not be generalized, but rather scrutinized with benevolent criticism.
Our present edition of the seminars on children’s dreams is in accordance with C. G. Jung’s wish to leave the texts as much as possible in their original straightforwardness. A completely verbatim report of the discussions, however, is neither possible, for the reasons mentioned earlier, nor was it aimed at; we rather tried to eliminate some of the obvious mistakes and misunderstandings in the records that were made after the fact. Whenever possible, the illustrations used at the time were used as the templates for those in this book.
In what follows we will briefly discuss the history of the four seminar reports. At the beginning of each of the meetings of the seminar, which lasted for about two academic (fifty-minute) hours, a dream interpretation or a book report was presented. These materials had been assigned to the participants by C. G. Jung at the beginning of the semester. Then the topic was amplified in a sometimes circuitous discussion. Some participants took down more or less accurate notes of the discussion, which were compiled at the end of the semester. In later years, the stenographic records by Rivkah Kluger- Schärf were of inestimable value for the editorial work. Even if the exact wording could not always be established, the style of the spoken word could be preserved to a very great extent.
We learn from the preface to the first recorded seminar, given in 1936/37, written and edited by Hans H. Baumann, Kurt Binswanger, Marie-Louise von Franz, Liliane Frey, and Rivkah Schärf, that the publication “was decided on by the collaborators only at the end of the semester, with Professor C. G. Jung’s assent”: “It was made at the request of numerous friends of his psychology. The text is based, therefore, on notes in long- and shorthand, which were not meant to be used for a proper publication. Nevertheless, we think we have given, together with Professor Jung, a complete and faithful rendition of the commentaries.” In 1935/36, before this class, the dream series of a boy had been discussed, which is reprinted in the appendix of the present edition, because there are repeated references to it in the following texts. Unfortunately, no further notes about those discussions are extant. We have also included a number of papers on the dream literature from antiquity up to modern times.2 They provide an overview of the prevalent ideas on the topic of dreams in different epochs. We also include the discussion of a work that has still not been translated from Latin, De Somniis by Caspar Peucer.
The second seminar, given in 1938/39, was edited by Liliane Frey and Rivkah Schärf. That semester C. G. Jung presented a detailed introduction to the method of dream interpretation. We consider it to be so fundamental that we have placed it, disregarding chronology, at the beginning of the present volume. Although C. G. Jung repeatedly talked about dream interpretation at the beginnings of the subsequent seminars, no such introduction is extant from the first semester.
Liliane Frey and Aniela Jaffé edited the third seminar, given in 1939/40, on the basis of the notes of Rivkah Schärf. Here, as in the seminars of the other years, we added the missing papers of the participants whenever they were available.
The fourth and last report was written as late as 1975, and was privately printed by Rivkah Kluger-Schärf and Marie-Louise von Franz, in keeping with the original restrictions. In the foreword to their extraordinarily precise edition, the editors write:
For a long time already, the undersigned have had the desire to publish this seminar, which contains, apart from the discussion and interpretation of children’s dreams, the interpretation of dreams of the Renaissance scholar Girolamo Cardano, the visions of St. Perpetua, and the well-known dream of the ‘Swinging Ax’ of Dr. Hubbard. . . .
To be able to present the texts by Cardanus and their interpretation with as much unity as possible, we had to sacrifice the chronological sequence of the seminar meetings. . . . A difficulty was presented by the papers of the participants of the seminar, some of which were no longer available. In these cases, the dreams on which the papers were based were replaced by short summaries or reconstructions with the help of the commentaries.
For reasons of unity and textual consistency, in the present edition we had to rearrange and make certain adaptations in the four original sets of seminar notes. Where changes in chronology were made, this is duly noted. All dates of the seminars, whenever extant, were added. All of the original footnotes were included; we have added notes of our own whenever this seemed useful for a better understanding. In these, the most important concepts of analytical psychology are briefly explained, although for a deeper understanding of the exact meaning of such terms we refer the reader to the numerous added cross-references to C. G. Jung’s Collected Works (CW) or his memoirs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (MDR). References to the volumes of CW are not by page numbers, but by the paragraph numbers of the passage in question. Whenever additional changes or omissions imposed themselves, they are indicated and explained at the place they were made, either by “ed.” or by square brackets “[ . . . ].” For these corrections, and for many doubtful phrases, it was partly possible, in the interest of faithfulness to the original, to make use of the original notes of the seminar. For better recognizability, all dreams and longer quotations are italicized. An index has been added to facilitate work with this volume.
Without doubt, the four seminars on children’s dreams are of great importance within the scope of Jung’s complete works because they offer a rich introduction to the practice of Jungian dream interpretation. We find a particularly impressive application of the theory of the archetypes, because the personal context largely fades into the background in children’s dreams, most of them remembered only in adulthood, and because archetypal images and situations come to the fore, owing to the child’s greater proximity to the collective unconscious. In addition, the views expressed in the seminars are an important contribution, not only to the psychology of the individual, but also to the problems of modern society and to the questions of the basic religious needs of human beings. Finally, these records—snapshots, we might call them—are of interest for the history of science, because they bear witness to the development of important ideas and notions of Jung’s analytical psychology.
1 This expression in English in the original (trans.).
2 All papers and discussions on the dream literature are collected in volume 2 of the English edition (see Note to the English Edition in this volume) (trans.).