Two Essays in Analytical Psychology

[160] The parallel with the hero-myth is very striking. More often than not the typical struggle of the hero with the monster (the unconscious content) takes place beside the water, perhaps at a ford. This is the case particularly in the Redskin myths with which Longfellow’s Hiawatha has made us familiar. In the decisive battle the hero is, like Jonah, invariably swallowed by the monster, as Frobenius has shown 8 with a wealth of detail. But, once inside the monster, the hero begins to settle accounts with the creature in his own way, while it swims eastwards with him towards the rising sun. He cuts off a portion of the viscera, the heart for instance, or some essential organ by virtue of which the monster lives (i.e., the valuable energy that activates the unconscious). Thus he kills the monster, which then drifts to land, where the hero, new-born through the transcendent function (the “night sea journey,” as Frobenius calls it), steps forth, sometimes in the company of all those whom the monster has previously devoured. In this manner the normal state of things is restored, since the unconscious, robbed of its energy, no longer occupies the dominant position. Thus the myth graphically describes the problem which also engages our patient.9

[161] I must now emphasize the not unimportant fact, which must also have struck the reader, that in the dream the collective unconscious appears under a very negative aspect, as something dangerous and harmful. This is because the patient has a richly developed, indeed positively luxuriant, fantasy life, possibly due to her literary gift. Her powers of fantasy are a symptom of illness in that she revels in them far too much and allows real life to slip by. Any more mythology would be exceedingly dangerous for her, because a great chunk of external life stands before her, still unlived. She has too little hold upon life to risk all at once a complete reversal of standpoint. The collective unconscious has fallen upon her and threatens to bear her away from a reality whose demands have not been adequately met. Accordingly, as the dream indicates, the collective unconscious had to be presented to her as something dangerous, otherwise she would have been only too ready to make it a refuge from the demands of life.

[162] In judging a dream we must observe very carefully how the figures are introduced. For example, the crab that personifies the unconscious is negative in that it “walks backwards” and, in addition, holds back the dreamer at the critical moment. Misled by the so-called dream mechanisms of Freudian manufacture, such as displacement, inversion, etc., people have imagined they could make themselves independent of the “façade” of the dream by supposing that the true dream-thoughts lay hidden behind it. As against this I have long maintained that we have no right to accuse the dream of, so to speak, a deliberate manoeuvre calculated to deceive. Nature is often obscure or impenetrable, but she is not, like man, deceitful. We must therefore take it that the dream is just what it pretends to be, neither more nor less.10 If it shows something in a negative light, there is no reason for assuming that it is meant positively. The archetypal “danger at the ford” is so patent that one is almost tempted to take the dream as a warning. But I must discountenance all such anthropomorphic interpretations. The dream itself wants nothing; it is a self-evident content, a plain natural fact like the sugar in the blood of a diabetic or the fever in a patient with typhus. It is only we who, if we are clever and can unriddle the signs of nature, turn it into a warning.

[163] But—a warning of what? Of the obvious danger that the unconscious might overpower the dreamer at the moment of crossing. And what would being overpowered mean? An invasion by the unconscious may very easily occur at moments of critical change and decision. The bank from which she approaches the river is her situation as known to us so far. This situation has precipitated her into a neurotic deadlock, as though she had come up against an impassable obstacle. The obstacle is represented by the dream as a perfectly passable river. So things do not seem to be very serious. But in the river, most unexpectedly, the crab is hiding, and this represents the real danger on account of which the river is, or appears to be, impassable. For had she only known beforehand that the dangerous crab was lurking at this particular spot, she might perhaps have ventured to cross somewhere else, or have taken other precautions. In the dreamer’s present situation it is eminently desirable that a crossing should be made. The crossing means in the first place a carrying over—a transference—of the earlier situation to the doctor. That is the new feature. Were it not for the unpredictable unconscious, this would not involve such a great risk. But we saw that through the transference the activity of archetypal figures is liable to be let loose, a fact we had not banked on. We have reckoned without our host, for we “forgot the gods.”

[164] Our dreamer is not a religious person, she is “modern.” She has forgotten the religion she was once taught, she knows nothing of those moments when the gods intervene, or rather she does not know that there are age-old situations whose nature it is to stir us to the depths. One such situation is love, its passion and its danger. Love may summon forth unsuspected powers in the soul for which we had better be prepared. “Religio” in the sense of a “careful consideration” of unknown dangers and agencies—that is what is in question here. From a simple projection love may come upon her with all its fatal power, some dazzling illusion that might throw her life off its natural course. Is it a good thing or a bad, God or devil, that will befall the dreamer? Without knowing which, she feels that she is already in its clutches. And who can say whether she will be able to cope with this complication! Until now she had managed to circumvent such an eventuality, but now it threatens to seize hold of her. That is a risk we should avoid, or, if we must take the plunge, we need a good deal of “trust in God” or “faith” in a successful issue. Thus, unsought and unexpected, the question creeps in of one’s religious attitude to fate.

[165] The dream as it stands leaves the dreamer no alternative at present but to withdraw her foot carefully; for to go on would be fatal. She cannot yet leave the neurotic situation, because the dream gives her no positive indication of any help from the unconscious. The unconscious powers are still inauspicious and obviously expect more work and a deeper insight from the dreamer before she can really venture across.

[166] I certainly do not wish, by this negative example, to convey the impression that the unconscious plays a negative role in all cases. I will therefore add two further dreams, this time of a young man, which illuminate another and more favourable side of the unconscious. I do this the more readily since the solution of the problem of opposites can be reached only irrationally, by way of contributions from the unconscious, i.e., from dreams.

[167] First I must acquaint the reader in some measure with the personality of the dreamer, for without this acquaintance he will hardly be able to transport himself into the peculiar atmosphere of the dreams. There are dreams that are pure poems and can therefore only be understood through the mood they convey as a whole. The dreamer is a youth of a little over twenty, still entirely boyish in appearance. There is even a touch of girlishness in his looks and manner of expression. The latter betrays a very good education and upbringing. He is intelligent, with pronounced intellectual and aesthetic interests. His aestheticism is very much in evidence: we are made instantly aware of his good taste and his fine appreciation of all forms of art. His feelings are tender and soft, given to the enthusiasms typical of puberty, but somewhat effeminate. There is no trace of adolescent callowness. Undoubtedly he is too young for his age, a clear case of retarded development. It is quite in keeping with this that he should have come to me on account of his homosexuality. The night preceding his first visit he had the following dream: “I am in a lofty cathedral filled with mysterious twilight. They tell me that it is the cathedral at Lourdes. In the centre there is a deep dark well, into which I have to descend.”

[168] The dream is clearly a coherent expression of mood. The dreamer’s comments are as follows: “Lourdes is the mystic fount of healing. Naturally I remembered yesterday that I was going to you for treatment and was in search of a cure. There is said to be a well like this at Lourdes. It would be rather unpleasant to go down into this water. The well in the church was ever so deep.”

[169] Now what does dream tell us? On the surface it seems clear enough, and we might be content to take it as a kind of poetic formulation of the mood of the day before. But we should never stop there, for experience shows that dreams are much deeper and more significant. One might almost suppose that the dreamer came to the doctor in a highly poetic mood and was entering upon the treatment as though it were a sacred religious act to be performed in the mystical half-light of some awe-inspiring sanctuary. But this does not fit the facts at all. The patient merely came to the doctor to be treated for that unpleasant matter, his homosexuality, which is anything but poetic. At any rate we cannot see from the mood of the preceding day why he should dream so poetically, if we were to accept so direct a causation for the origin of the dream. But we might conjecture, perhaps, that the dream was stimulated precisely by the dreamer’s impressions of that highly unpoetical affair which impelled him to come to me for treatment. We might even suppose that he dreamed in such an intensely poetical manner just because of the unpoeticalness of his mood on the day before, much as a man who has fasted by day dreams of delicious meals at night. It cannot be denied that the thought of treatment, of the cure and its unpleasant procedure, recurs in the dream, but poetically transfigured, in a guise which meets most effectively the lively aesthetic and emotional needs of the dreamer. He will be drawn on irresistibly by this inviting picture, despite the fact that the well is dark, deep, and cold. Something of the dream-mood will persist after sleep and will even linger on into the morning of the day on which he has to submit to the unpleasant and unpoetical duty of visiting me. Perhaps the drab reality will be touched by the bright, golden after-glow of the dream feeling.

[170] Is this, perhaps, the purpose of the dream? That would not be impossible, for in my experience the vast majority of dreams are compensatory.11 They always stress the other side in order to maintain the psychic equilibrium. But the compensation of mood is not the only purpose of the dream picture. The dream also provides a mental corrective. The patient had of course nothing like an adequate understanding of the treatment to which he was about to submit himself. But the dream gives him a picture which describes in poetic metaphors the nature of the treatment before him. This becomes immediately apparent if we follow up his associations and comments on the image of the cathedral: “Cathedral,” he says, “makes me think of Cologne Cathedral. Even as a child I was fascinated by it. I remember my mother telling me of it for the first time, and I also remember how, whenever I saw a village church, I used to ask if that were Cologne Cathedral. I wanted to be a priest in a cathedral like that.”

[171] In these associations the patient is describing a very important experience of his childhood. As in nearly all cases of this kind, he had a particularly close tie with his mother. By this we are not to understand a particularly good or intense conscious relationship, but something in the nature of a secret, subterranean tie which expresses itself consciously, perhaps, only in the retarded development of character, i.e., in a relative infantilism. The developing personality naturally veers away from such an unconscious infantile bond; for nothing is more obstructive to development than persistence in an unconscious—we could also say, a psychically embryonic—state. For this reason instinct seizes on the first opportunity to replace the mother by another object. If it is to be a real mother-substitute, this object must be, in some sense, an analogy of her. This is entirely the case with our patient. The intensity with which his childish fantasy seized upon the symbol of Cologne Cathedral corresponds to the strength of his unconscious need to find a substitute for the mother. The unconscious need is heightened still further in a case where the infantile bond could become harmful. Hence the enthusiasm with which his childish imagination took up the idea of the Church; for the Church is, in the fullest sense, a mother. We speak not only of Mother Church, but even of the Church’s womb. In the ceremony known as the benedictio fontis, the baptismal font is apostrophized as “immaculatus divini fontis uterus”—the immaculate womb of the divine font. We naturally think that a man must have known this meaning consciously before it could get to work in his fantasy, and that an unknowing child could not possibly be affected by these significations. Such analogies certainly do not work by way of the conscious mind, but in quite another manner.

[172] The Church represents a higher spiritual substitute for the purely natural, or “carnal,” tie to the parents. Consequently it frees the individual from an unconscious natural relationship which, strictly speaking, is not a relationship at all but simply a condition of inchoate, unconscious identity. This, just because it is unconscious, possesses a tremendous inertia and offers the utmost resistance to any kind of spiritual development. It would be hard to say what the essential difference is between this state and the soul of an animal. Now, it is by no means the special prerogative of the Christian Church to try to make it possible for the individual to detach himself from his original, animal-like condition; the Church is simply the latest, and specifically Western, form of an instinctive striving that is probably as old as mankind itself. It is a striving that can be found in the most varied forms among all primitive peoples who are in any way developed and have not yet become degenerate: I mean the institution or rite of initiation into manhood. When he has reached puberty the young man is conducted to the “men’s house,” or some other place of consecration, where he is systematically alienated from his family. At the same time he is initiated into the religious mysteries, and in this way is ushered not only into a wholly new set of relationships, but, as a renewed and changed personality, into a new world, like one reborn (quasimodo genitus). The initiation is often attended by all kinds of tortures, sometimes including such things as circumcision and the like. These practices are undoubtedly very old. They have almost become instinctive mechanisms, with the result that they continue to repeat themselves without external compulsion, as in the “baptisms” of German students or the even more wildly extravagant initiations in American students’ fraternities. They are engraved on the unconscious as a primordial image.

[173] When his mother told him as a little boy about Cologne Cathedral, this primordial image was stirred and awakened to life. But there was no priestly instructor to develop it further, so the child remained in his mother’s hands. Yet the longing for a man’s leadership continued to grow in the boy, taking the form of homosexual leanings—a faulty development that might never have come about had a man been there to educate his childish fantasies. The deviation towards homosexuality has, to be sure, numerous historical precedents. In ancient Greece, as also in certain primitive communities, homosexuality and education were practically synonymous. Viewed in this light, the homosexuality of adolescence is only a misunderstanding of the otherwise very appropriate need for masculine guidance. One might also say that the fear of incest which is based on the mother-complex extends to women in general; but in my opinion an immature man is quite right to be afraid of women, because his relations with women are generally disastrous.

[174] According to the dream, then, what the initiation of the treatment signifies for the patient is the fulfilment of the true meaning of his homosexuality, i.e., his entry into the world of the adult man. All that we have been forced to discuss here in such tedious and long-winded detail, in order to understand it properly, the dream has condensed into a few vivid metaphors, thus creating a picture which works far more effectively on the imagination, feeling, and understanding of the dreamer than any learned discourse. Consequently the patient was better and more intelligently prepared for the treatment than if he had been overwhelmed with medical and pedagogical maxims. (For this reason I regard dreams not only as a valuable source of information but as an extraordinarily effective instrument of education.)

[175] We come now to the second dream. I must explain in advance that in the first consultation I did not refer in any way to the dream we have just been discussing. It was not even mentioned. Nor was there a word said that was even remotely connected with the foregoing. This is the second dream: “I am in a great Gothic cathedral. At the altar stands a priest. I stand before him with my friend, holding in my hand a little Japanese ivory figure, with the feeling that it is going to be baptized. Suddenly an elderly woman appears, takes the fraternity ring from my friend’s finger, and puts it on her own. My friend is afraid that this may bind him in some way. But at the same moment there is a sound of wonderful organ music.”

[176] Here I will only bring out briefly those points which continue and supplement the dream of the preceding day. The second dream is unmistakably connected with the first: once more the dreamer is in church, that is, in the state of initiation into manhood. But a new figure has been added: the priest, whose absence in the previous situation we have already noted. The dream therefore confirms that the unconscious meaning of his homosexuality has been fulfilled and that a further development can be started. The actual initiation ceremony, namely the baptism, may now begin. The dream symbolism corroborates what I said before, namely that it is not the prerogative of the Christian Church to bring about such transitions and psychic transformations, but that behind the Church there is a living primordial image which in certain conditions is capable of enforcing them.

[177] What, according to the dream, is to be baptized is a little Japanese ivory figure. The patient says of this: “It was a tiny, grotesque little manikin that reminded me of the male organ. It was certainly odd that this member was to be baptized. But after all, with the Jews circumcision is a sort of baptism. That must be a reference to my homosexuality, because the friend standing with me before the altar is the one with whom I have sexual relations. We belong to the same fraternity. The fraternity ring obviously stands for our relationship.”

[178] We know that in common usage the ring is the token of a bond or relationship, as for example the wedding ring. We can therefore safely take the fraternity ring in this case as symbolizing the homosexual relationship, and the fact that the dreamer appears together with his friend points in the same direction.

[179] The complaint to be remedied is homosexuality. The dreamer is to be led out of this relatively childish condition and initiated into the adult state by means of a kind of circumcision ceremony under the supervision of a priest. These ideas correspond exactly to my analysis of the previous dream. Thus far the development has proceeded logically and consistently with the aid of archetypal images. But now a disturbing factor comes on the scene. An elderly woman suddenly takes possession of the fraternity ring; in other words, she draws to herself what has hitherto been a homosexual relationship, thus causing the dreamer to fear that he is getting involved in a new relationship with obligations of its own. Since the ring is now on the hand of a woman, a marriage of sorts has been contracted, i.e., the homosexual relationship seems to have passed over into a heterosexual one, but a heterosexual relationship of a peculiar kind since it concerns an elderly woman. “She is a friend of my mother’s,” says the patient. “I am very fond of her, in fact she is like a mother to me.”

[180] From this remark we can see what has happened in the dream: as a result of the initiation the homosexual tie has been cut and a heterosexual relationship substituted for it, a platonic friendship with a motherly type of woman. In spite of her resemblance to his mother, this woman is not his mother any longer, so the relationship with her signifies a step beyond the mother towards masculinity, and hence a partial conquest of his adolescent homosexuality.

[181] The fear of the new tie can easily be understood, firstly as fear which the woman’s resemblance to his mother might naturally arouse—it might be that the dissolution of the homosexual tie has led to a complete regression to the mother—and secondly as fear of the new and unknown factors in the adult heterosexual state with its possible obligations, such as marriage, etc. That we are in fact concerned here not with a regression but with a progression seems to be confirmed by the music that now peals forth. The patient is musical and especially susceptible to solemn organ music. Therefore music signifies for him a very positive feeling, so in this case it forms a harmonious conclusion to the dream, which in its turn is well qualified to leave behind a beautiful, holy feeling for the following morning.

[182] If you consider the fact that up to now the patient had seen me for only one consultation, in which little more was discussed than a general anamnesis, you will doubtless agree with me when I say that both dreams make astonishing anticipations. They show the patient’s situation in a highly remarkable light, and one that is very strange to the conscious mind, while at the same time lending to the banal medical situation an aspect that is uniquely attuned to the mental peculiarities of the dreamer, and thus capable of stringing his aesthetic, intellectual, and religious interests to concert pitch. No better conditions for treatment could possibly be imagined. One is almost persuaded, from the meaning of these dreams, that the patient entered upon the treatment with the utmost readiness and hopefulness, quite prepared to cast aside his boyishness and become a man. In reality, however, this was not the case at all. Consciously he was full of hesitation and resistance; moreover, as the treatment progressed, he constantly showed himself antagonistic and difficult, ever ready to slip back into his previous infantilism. Consequently the dreams stand in strict contrast to his conscious behaviour. They move along a progressive line and take the part of the educator. They clearly reveal their special function. This function I have called compensation. The unconscious progressiveness and the conscious regressiveness together form a pair of opposites which, as it were, keeps the scales balanced. The influence of the educator tilts the balance in favour of progression.