SELF-REALIZATION IN THE INDIVIDUAL THERAPY OF C. G. JUNG

Self-realization is a word that is being used today by various psychological schools, for the most part in a way based loosely on Jung’s concept of individuation. Looking closely, we see, however, that they are using it in a different sense from Jung’s, namely, in the sense of discovering a certain ego identity. Such an identity, as we know, arises through the ego’s becoming more continuous and stable. The ego then knows something more about itself. Jung, by contrast, meant something entirely different, namely, consciously discovering and entering into relationship with another psychic content, which, drawing upon the Upanishads, he calls the Self. In this case also, a more continuous and stable ego identity develops, but of a rather different sort. It is less egocentric and has more human kindness. Here the ego does not so much realize itself, but rather helps the Self toward realization.

Initially, this certainly sounds a bit abstract. That is why, in what follows, I shall attempt to clarify this process through the interpretation of a dream that illuminates the principal aspects of our theme. I have chosen a dream because the dream is an expression of the unpreconceived, unconscious nature in human beings; thus it represents not a theory but rather a response on the part of the psyche itself to the question of self-realization.

Though the concepts of ego, Self, and the unconscious are known to most people in a theoretical way, many make use of them without knowing what they mean in terms of practical experience. That was the case also for the dreamer of our dream. He was a forty-year-old man of an English-speaking culture who had just passed his first examinations at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Theoretically, he was well informed about the concepts mentioned above. Now, however, the time had come to undertake, under supervision, his first treatment of patients. Understandably, he did not consider himself equal to this task and became frightened. His greatest fear was that he might be unable to understand his new analysands’ dreams. (As is well known, a Jungian analysis is to a great extent based on the interpretation of a patient’s dreams.) Everything seemed uncertain to him, and he began to ponder over what in fact a “correct” or “incorrect” dream interpretation was at all, and, even more generally, what in fact takes place in an analysis. One night, after having had a long discussion with a friend on this subject, he went to sleep and had the following dream:

I’m sitting in an open, rectangular square in an old city. I am joined by a young man clad only in a pair of trousers, who sits down in front of me with his legs crossed. His torso is powerful and full of vitality and strength. The sun shines through his blond hair. He recounts his dreams to me and wants me to interpret them for him. The dreams are like a kind of fabric that he is spreading out before me as he tells them to me. Each time he recounts a dream, a stone falls from the sky that strikes the dream a blow. This sets pieces of the dream flying off. As I take them in my hand, it becomes clear that they are made out of bread. As the pieces of the dream fly off, they lay bare an inner structure that resembles an abstract modern sculpture. With each dream that is recounted, a further stone falls on it, and thus more and more of the basic structure, which is made of nuts and bolts, begins to appear. I tell the youth that this shows how to expose the meaning of a dream—down to the nuts and bolts. Then it emerges that dream interpretation is the art of knowing what to throw away and what to keep, which is the way it is in life as well.

Then the dream scene changes. The youth and I are now sitting facing each other on the bank of a wonderfully beautiful broad river. He is still telling me his dreams, but the structure built up by the dreams has taken on a different shape. They do not form a pyramid made of nuts and bolts, but a pyramid made of thousands of little squares and triangles. It is like a Cubist painting by Braque, but it is three-dimensional and alive. The colors and shadings of the little squares and triangles are constantly changing. I explained that it is essential for a person to maintain the balance of the whole composition by always immediately countering a color change with a corresponding compensatory change on the other side. This business of balancing out the colors is incredibly complex, because the whole object is three-dimensional and in constant movement. Then I look at the peak of the dream pyramid. There, there is nothingness. That is indeed the only point where the whole structure holds together, but at that point there is empty space. As I look at it, this space begins to radiate white light.

Once more the dream scene changes. The pyramid remains there, but now it is made out of solidified fecal material. The peak is still radiating. I suddenly realize that the invisible peak is as though made visible by the solid shit, and that conversely the shit is also made visible by the peak. I look deep into the shit and recognize that I am looking at the hand of God. In an instant of enlightenment, I understand why the peak is invisible: it is the face of God.

Again the dream changes. Dr. von Franz and I are taking a walk along the river. She laughingly says: “I’m sixty-one years old, not sixteen, but both numbers add up to seven.”

I wake up abruptly with the feeling that someone has knocked loudly on the door. To my amazement, the apartment is completely quiet and empty.

In the language of primitive peoples, this is a “big dream” or, in Jung’s language, an archetypal dream, which is of suprapersonal, universal human significance. We must now attempt to understand it more precisely. It is composed of four sections. The location of the first set of events is a rectangular square in an old city, which suggests tradition and human culture, in contrast to the river in the next part of the dream. This is presumably related to the fact that the dreamer has been tormenting himself with the question, “What are we doing, what would I actually be doing, in an analysis?” The answer is that the telling and interpreting of dreams is an ancient cultural tradition, which formerly used to take place in public. Already the first patient who wants to have his dreams interpreted has come. He is, however, markedly vital and healthy, not sick. His blond, sun-illuminated hair perhaps even indicates that he is a solar hero of some kind. This healthiness emphasizes that dreams, even in sick patients, arise out of the healthy level of the psyche, but it says more than that: the solar hero in mythology is a bringer of new light, new consciousness. He is already an aspect of what Jung called the Self, a still-unknown aspect of the dreamer himself that will bring him illumination.

The dreams that this man recounts have a kind of substance. They are not something frothy, airy-fairy, but something real, a piece of matter, so to speak. Stones fall on them from heaven. In that, somehow, lies their interpretation. The dreamer was very apprehensive about whether he would be able to interpret dreams correctly. In compensatory fashion, the dream image here indicates clearly that a correct dream interpretation is something that strikes the mark. Rather than being something one has contrived, it is an impersonal psychic event. The stones fall from the sky; they must be meteorites. If something comes from above, this means in mythic language that it derives from the unknown spiritual sphere of the collective unconscious. Thus, since ancient times meteorites have been highly venerated objects; they have been regarded as containing a divine spirit, as messengers of the gods. For example, the North American Arikara tribe tell us that the supreme god Nesaru sent them a black meteorite as an emissary, which taught them the ritual of the sacred pipe, the peace pipe. The famous Kaaba, the goal of the pilgrimage to Mecca, is also a black meteoric stone. Since the stones come from the sky, we see that dreams, on the one hand, and the interpretation of dreams, on the other,—the right idea that “strikes” you—both come from the unconscious. Both ultimately come from the same source, but only when the therapist and the analysand work together on the dream do the stones “strike.”

The dream pieces that fly off when the stones strike turn out, upon closer examination, to be made out of bread, that is, something that one can eat, or in psychological terms integrate. It is in fact true, as we can all experience, that a successful dream interpretation, one that strikes the mark, is somehow nourishing for consciousness. A synthetic, constructive interpretation—one that does not attempt to reduce the dream content to “nothing but wish-fulfillment” or to some other “nothing but,” and that instead follows the constructive thread of the dream, enriching its motifs—works like the “bread of life.” Actually, in the Lord’s Prayer, we are not asking for “daily bread,” as the usual wrong translation runs. In the Greek text we find hyperousion, “supersubstantial bread.”

That which cannot be eaten, or directly integrated, is the part of the dream that is left over. It is made of nuts and bolts, which gradually build up into an entire pyramid. These are, as the dream account says, the basic structure of the dream, what is left after the flesh, in this case, the bread, has been taken away. Later on we are told that we must do the same thing as we must do in life—lay bare the skeleton. This means that we must penetrate through to the deeper meaning that lies behind the dream images.

People often say, “Last night I had such a ridiculously stupid, absurd dream.” They remain hung up on the surface of the dream, that combination of absurd images, without being able to penetrate through to the meaning. Jung often responded in such cases, “There are no stupid dreams, only stupid people who don’t understand them.”

The purpose of bolts is to hold two things together and to fasten things together, for example, tracks onto cross-ties. The sexual analogy is obvious.¹ By using bolts, things are joined. Every time a dream interpretation hits the mark, a piece of the unconscious is joined with consciousness, or else an autonomous complex is joined with the rest of the personality. In this way a continuously repeating process of coniunctio takes place. And from this, the strange pyramid that the rest of the dream deals with takes shape. Thus we must take a closer look at the symbolism of the pyramid.

The most important function given to the pyramid is certainly that given by the ancient Egyptians—the shape for the tombs of their kings. The pyramid was the house of the dead. The stone that crowned it shut was so placed that the first rays of the sun struck it.² Now, in Egypt, the supreme god, the universal god Atum, was originally represented as a cone-shaped stone, as the so-called “unknown ben-ben stone.”³ This name is connected with wbn, meaning “rise, illuminate.” The same radical is found in the Egyptian word bnw, meaning “bird, phoenix.” The phoenix symbolized the rising sun and resurrection. The most sacred temple in Heliopolis was alternately called the House of the Stone or the House of the Phoenix. The same ben-ben stone was also considered to be the primordial hill that rose out of the primordial waters at the beginning of the world. Also, the same phoenix was identified in later Egyptian history with the ba bird. This bird is the immortal guide of the soul of every human being, his individuality, which after death becomes one with the universal god without losing its quintessence of an individual earthly human being.

In the view of Helmuth Jacobsohn, the pyramid-shaped capstone of an obelisk also represents the ben-ben stone. It is called a benbenet. When the king ritually greeted the god of the rising sun from the base of the obelisk, the sun’s first rays fell on the obelisk’s pinnacle, which in those days was gilded.⁴ At that point the ba, the soul guide of the god, was seen. Benbenet, however, also meant the peak of the pyramid, which resembled the peak of the obelisk.⁵ At the moment of his resurrection, a deceased person who had become the ha beheld the sun god from that point. Later such stones were also provided for ordinary people as part of their burial equipment.

As Jacobsohn points out, the ben-ben stone in Egypt represents a parallel to the “philosopher’s stone” of Western alchemy. The philosopher’s stone also symbolized the immortal soul guide and a kind of resurrectional body of the dead. The pyramid in our dream constitutes an amazing parallel to this, since the dreamer demonstrably knew none of the Egyptian associations we have been describing. All the same, the pyramid he dreamed of was also something divine; its radiant peak was even the manifestation of God, and in its worthless garb of matter, the hand of God could even be seen.

Perhaps it is worthwhile to remark in passing that pyramids actually exhibit strange physical properties that have yet to be explained.⁶ Experiments with models of the Cheops pyramid made from cardboard showed that cadavers placed inside did not decay; dull razor blades placed inside regained their edge. This must have to do with the geometry of the internal space, but nothing precise is known. In any case, this is not essential for us in this context. What is important for us is only the psychological significance of the pyramid in the dream as a symbol of the Self.

Perhaps it has become somewhat clearer in the course of our discussion what Jung meant by the Self. It is not the ego, but a more embracing or eternal inner personality that is hinted at by this symbol. Jung also defined it as the conscious-unconscious wholeness of the person. Though this Self is already present in every person as his basic makeup, it is only realized in practice through understanding dreams or through active imagination.⁷ Through being realized, it “incarnates” itself, so to speak, in the mortal life of the ego. If I had a gift for music like Beethoven’s but never discovered or made use of it, it might as well not exist. Only the conscious ego is capable of realizing psychic contents. Even something as great, even divine, as the Self can only be realized by the ego. That is self-realization from a Jungian perspective.

Now let us return to the beginning of the first part of the dream, to the rectangular square in the city. As one can read in the work of Mircea Eliade, such a square in a city is a symbol of the center of the world, the place where heaven and earth, eternity and temporality, come together.⁸ This square is thus really a symbol of the Self, but in the function of a maternal temenos, or protective space. And the blond dream teller is the aspect of the Self that strives toward becoming conscious, just as all mythical heroes are bearers of a new vision of the world.

At this point it becomes easier to understand why Jung always required of analysts that they should ultimately work the most on continuing to make progress in their own individuation. In so doing, they take their analysands along with them on their journey, without trying to influence them directly (which would be an abuse of power). In an early letter, Jung even goes so far as to say that the therapist should only analyze the pathological aspect of the patient’s psyche.⁹ This is because intellectual understanding is destructive. Understanding (Latin comprehendere), after all, means “taking hold of,” “grasping,” and thus corresponds to an exercise of power. When the patient’s being and destiny are at stake, one should relate to his unique mystery with wordless respect. As Jung said, “We must understand the divine in us, but not in another insofar as he is capable of getting on and understanding on his own.” Our dreamer, as we will recall, was apprehensive about his encounter with patients. His dream points him back to working on himself.

Now the image changes and the scene of the action becomes the bank of a broad river. In mythology, a river is usually associated with the stream of time, the flow of life. Thus, for example, for the Greeks, time is the god Kronos/Chronus and also the current Oceanus that encircles the earth like a ring, or that girdles the cosmos as a celestial current, with the animals of the zodiac riding upon it.

The river is also an image of eternal change. We may recall Heraclitus’s statement that we can never step into the same river twice. The technical and abstract pyramidal skeleton made of nuts and bolts has now become a pyramid of infinitely numerous, mutually attuned colored squares and triangles, whose nuances of hue must continually be compensatorily balanced. This describes an advanced aspect of dream analysis. Initially every successful dream interpretation is an individual “Aha!” experience. But now everything comes into closer contact with each other through the continuity of life, the river. One not only begins to understand individual dreams but lives with them continually. It also now becomes clear that the pyramid, in spite of its many individual facets, represents a balanced whole in which everything coheres with everything else. Colors stand for the participation of emotions and feelings. It is no longer merely a matter of seeing individual pieces, but also of relating to all the nuances of feeling in a more living way—always with an eye on the state of balance of the mysterious whole.

The basic components are triangles and squares, just as the whole itself is composed of a square base and four triangles. Those who are familiar with the work of Jung know that symbols of the Self are nearly always quaternary, more rarely triadic, structures. The models of the universe of the ancient cosmologies are quaternary, as are all natural symbols of the divine. The Catholic Church even augmented the Christian Trinity into a quaternity through the heavenly Ascension of Mary. Seen in terms of numerical symbolism, three and the triangle are masculine-dynamic, while the four and the square are feminine-static. The composition of the pyramid out of both is an indication that here the opposites are united, which indeed was already hinted at by the image of the nuts and bolts. This entire structure is in a state of ongoing transformational change of color. It is a living thing that must continually be understood anew by whoever contemplates it, in this case, the dream interpreter.

Now the dreamer discovers that the peak, the focal point of the whole structure, is empty, is empty space. Later we learn that this is the case because it is the face of God. As is well known, no human being can gaze upon the face of God and live! In many mandalas—that is, circular and rectangular religious images of the Self—in the middle there is the figure of Christ or Buddha or some other Godhead, or perhaps a symbol like the thunderbolt (Tibetan dorje), or a crystal, a flower, a golden ball, etc. But particularly in recent times, as Jung pointed out, there are more and more cases where the center is empty. It is, as he says, as though many modern people are no longer capable of projecting the divine image—as, for example, onto Christ or Buddha.¹⁰ As a result, they run the risk of identifying themselves with the center, which would lead to a dissolution of the personality. The boundaries of the mandala exist in order to prevent this and to reinforce a concentration on an inner center, the Self, that is not identified with the ego. The image of the human being does not replace the deity but rather symbolizes it. In this way, the deity remains the mystery that dwells in the depths of the individual psyche.

It is the danger of any kind of atheism that the human being might place himself as the ego in the center and thus undergo an inflation that might catapult him into a psychic catastrophe. Our dreamer is not in this danger, but he still takes himself as the analyst too seriously; therefore, this image arises. When he looks at the peak, it begins to radiate. One is reminded of the nirvana or satori experience of the Far East. This is an emptiness that is not negative emptiness but rather the full power of enlightenment.

In the third part of the dream, a surprising reversal takes place, a so-called enantiodromia.¹¹ The beautiful pyramid is now composed of solidified shit. This makes the point of enlightenment in the emptiness visible and vice versa. The ancient and medieval alchemists never got tired of repeating that the philosopher’s stone in stercore invenitur (“is discovered amid excrement”) and that amid this refuse, the people of this world heedlessly tread it down. How many modern rationalists even today are of the opinion that dreams are “refuse,” anal and genital fantasies and the like. It is true that what an analyst has to sit in his office and listen to all day is not purely edifying. One has to hear about marital strife, mad jealousies, outbreaks of repressed resentment, sexual fantasies, money needs, and endless “then he said . . . and then I said. . . .” It is horrible shit that the patients and all of us are stuck in. But when one takes a closer look, one can see the hand of God in it!

That was perhaps the greatest art of Jung himself: he could listen to such garbage and remain strangely unmoved, and then with a word or a gesture suddenly point out the hand of God that became visible in it, that is, the deeper meaning of the present crisis that made it possible to accept it. He was able to do this because he was not so much looking for the why—the personal history of the neurotic symptoms that explained how they originated—but rather for the purpose, the telos, or meaning of the phenomena at hand. “What does it mean for me that I have gotten myself into this slimy muck?” Through this, the peak of the pyramid becomes visible, that pinnacle that the ancient Egyptians so placed that it would be struck every morning by the first rays of the sun. In the East, particularly in Persia, the oriens, the sunrise, is still today a symbol of mystical enlightenment, the point where the enlightened one sees God and becomes one with Him.

The fourth part is a descent or return to everyday life. I appear (I was his analyst) and say laughingly that I am sixty-one, not sixteen, but the internal sum of both numbers is seven. Let us first examine the concrete situation. I was sixty-one, the dreamer was forty, and the women who were his new analysands were around twenty. Thus the dreamer was in the middle, about on the verge of the second half of life. Until the age of forty, he had practiced another profession, and now he was in danger of becoming frightened of his new task, like a schoolboy facing exams. The experience of life he had already accumulated, the difficult marriage he had successfully come to terms with, his three already grown children—all this he had forgotten.

What helps us here is numerical symbolism. The number one stands for divinity and cosmic unity, six for the union of the sexes and marriage. At the age of sixteen one definitively leaves behind the unconscious wholeness of childhood and turns toward sexuality and the “ten thousand things” of the world. At the age of sixty-one one has crossed the threshold toward old age, in which one turns away from the many and moves toward inner unity. But the internal sum of both numbers is seven. Seven is the number of evolution, of development.¹² We have only to think of the seven days of creation. In the number eight, the goal, differentiated wholeness, is attained. The emphasis lies here on seven, on the fact that life is development, in youth as in old age. “Everything is a transition,” or “Habentibus symbolum facilis est transitus,” as the ancient alchemists said.

This big dream leads far away from the dreamer’s fear and answers his question with an entire philosophy of life, in the center of which is self-realization. The whole is represented as purely a series of events that enlighten the dreamer. However, this should not mislead one into thinking that being an analyst does not require an achievement on the part of the ego. We know from experience that it is hard work, difficult work, and requires a lot of knowledge. The dream, which represents this work purely as something that happens by itself, indicates a compensation, because the dreamer in his ruminations of the previous day took his ego, the role of the analyst, too seriously.

The actual patients who had been assigned to him, two young women, do not appear in the dream at all. Rather the patient, the “sufferer,” is an inner figure in the dreamer himself. The patient is a part of his Self.

Perhaps this dream conveys an inkling of why we of the Jungian school are skeptical of group therapy. This dream shows that the main process of inner development takes place between the ego and the Self—or, in old-fashioned language, the image of God within one. Others and their opinions have no business there. It even comes to a point where even the analyst as one’s partner is too much. Ultimately, as Jung points out, a person has to “be alone if he is to find out what it is that bears him when he cannot bear himself anymore. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation.”¹³

Such an attitude has nothing at all to do with narcissism or with egoistic individualism. These are no more than a preoccupation on the part of the ego with “the dear ego,” not the Self, which is ultimately an inner mystery of the individual. The relationship between a person and the Self is not egoistic, far from it—a person can never really relate properly to other people until he has found himself, that is, his Self. All the same, Jung admitted that his position was one-sided. In reality, the extraverted path of social adaptation and the introverted path of relationship to the Self constitute a pair of complementary opposites, both justified and yet at the same time exclusive of each other. But under the pressure of overpopulation and increasing urbanization, and with the influence of Communism and of the extraverted orientation of most psychological schools, we are in great danger of focusing on just the one pole and thus of crushing the individual in his uniqueness.

Failing to take account of this could bring an unconscious counterreaction marked by unrestrained egoism and, in the extreme case, even asocial criminality. For this reason, according to Jung’s view, the time has come to pay more heed to the inner path of the individual on the way to the Self. For only he who is anchored in the Self can truly act ethically. Only such a person will no longer uncritically follow the currents of fashions and fads and political “isms.” He can then also, as the dream beautifully expresses it, perceive the hand of God amid all the slime and muck of life—of course, only, as the dream also indicates, if he takes a closer look.

NOTES

1. At this point the author refers to the sexual connotation of the German word Mutter, which usually means “mother” but is also the word for the kind of nut that a bolt screws into.—Translator

2. Cf. Helmuth Jacobsohn, “Das göttliche Wort und der göttliche Stein im alten Ägypten” (The Divine Word and the Divine Stone in Ancient Egypt), Eranos Jahrbuch, vol. 39 (1970): 217ff.

3. Ibid., pp. 233–34

4. Ibid., p. 236.

5. This was a solid, precisely pyramid-shaped stone.

6. Cf. S. Ostrander and L. Schroeder, Psi (Bern, Munich & Vienna: Scherz Verlag, 1970), pp. 308ff. (Karel Drbal).

7. See the chapters on active imagination in this volume.

8. Mircea Eliade, Kosmos und Geschichte (Cosmos and History) (Rowohlt, 1966), pp. 11ff.

9. C. G. Jung, letter to Hans Schmid, 6 November 1915 is, in Letters, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 31.

10. See C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), para. 156, p. 95.

11. See C. G. Jung, CW 8 (1960) p. 219.

12. See R. Allendy, Le symbolisme des nombres (The Symbolism of Numbers) (Paris, 1928).

13. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12 (1953), para. 32, p. 28.