One of the most difficult questions in the training of future analysts is that concerning their suitability for this profession. Even the most comprehensive training program that is limited to purveyance of the indispensable knowledge, as necessary as this doubtless is, cannot convey to people that “something” which creates in a person a healing emanation. It is true that moral integrity and the will to help are indispensable, but they alone cannot produce the result in question. In my experience, every person who has devoted effort over a long period of time in his analysis to the conscious recognition of his own problems has become attractive to the people around him. The others sense that he possesses something that draws them to him. They begin to present their own dreams and problems to the person in question outside the professional environment. Nevertheless, it seems to me that even this is not always sufficient evidence of the person’s suitability. Perhaps such a person has other duties of his own to fulfill for which he has a greater vocation than for passing along the relatively higher state of consciousness that he has achieved. I remember a woman who was in this situation. Although the necessary prerequisites had been fulfilled, her dreams did not seem to support her undertaking analytic work. Only after her two children had left home did she dream: “A voice said to me that now I could build a public pool in the forecourt of my house and work there as a pool attendant.” meant that now she could make it possible for others to enter the waters of the unconscious and make sure that they learned to swim in them and not drown. She became a gifted analyst. Evidently before this her family needed her too much for her to be able to expend her energy on others outside it.
A difficult problem is presented by those prospective trainees who are possessed by the healer archetype. The archetypal image of the healer is related to that of the puer aeternus, the creative son-god of the Great Mother. A considerable number of young people who have a mother complex tend to identify with this archetype. They themselves manifest a “motherly” quality toward all who are helpless or suffering and often also have a gift for teaching.1 From this point of view, they would be not unsuited for the profession of analyst; however, because of their identification with the archetype, these young people suffer from an inflation. In these cases it is helpful to compel them to undertake serious study, even possibly medical studies. For a person who is inflated does not like to work; he already knows everything better and more deeply than others. Hard work, then, together with the necessary clarifications through analysis, often makes it possible to overcome the inflation. For such people it is important to realize that it is the unconscious that ultimately brings about and directs the healing process and that the analyst is only a helper and supporter of this process, not its author. I would like to illustrate this through the vocational dream of a young colleague, who dreamed it on the night before his first analysis session. The evening before the dream he had been pondering over what “proper” dream interpretation and analysis in the Jungian sense really were. Then he dreamed:
This obviously 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 this skeleton begins to appear, which is made of nuts and bolts. I tell the youth that this shows how to expose the meaning of a dream—down to the nuts and bolts. Then it further 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 explain 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 shit. The peak is still radiating. I suddenly realize that the invisible peak is as though made visible by the 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 countenance of God.
Again the dream changes. Miss 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; in Jung’s language, an archetypal dream, which is of suprapersonal, universal human significance. Since I have already interpreted it in “Self-Realization in the Individual Therapy of C. G. Jung,” the first chapter in this book, I refer the reader to that discussion. In the present context, what is important is only the fact that in the dream the unconscious comes to the fore as the main point of treatment, that the hand of God is seen in the “human, all-too-human,” and that work on one’s own development continues. That seems to be what is crucial here.
This big dream leads far away from the dreamer’s fears and answers his questions with a philosophy of life, at the center of which lies the question of self-realization. The whole situation is presented as a happening that illuminates the dreamer. This should not, however, mislead us into thinking that analysis does not also require an effort on the part of the ego. We know from experience that analysis is hard work and requires lots of knowledge. This dream, which presents work as a mere happening, amounts to a compensation, for the dreamer in his broodings of the previous day took his ego and the role of the therapist too seriously. The actual patients who had been assigned to him, two young women, do not appear in the dream at all, but instead the patient, the “sufferer,” is an inner figure in the dreamer himself, a piece of his Self.
The dream shows that the main part of the inner development of the analyst is something that is purely between his ego and the Self (or in old-fashioned language, the God image within him). The dream also clearly means that for the dreamer, it is important to see the “hand of God” that governs human destiny, rather than wanting to “do something” himself.
Every psychological truth can be, and even must be, reversed: no analyst should be without a solid fund of knowledge, as comprehensive as possible. It has often rightly been pointed out that psychologists without medical training easily overlook psychosomatic conditions. Although I am in favor of non-medically-trained psychologists, I would like to stress this point. It is of indubitable importance for the nonphysician thoroughly to learn the symptomology of psychosomatic illnesses, so as to be able to refer patients who require physical treatment to a doctor. But there are also other areas of which thorough knowledge seems to me indispensable. Here I am reminded of a Mexican student who was in his training analysis. I had the feeling that I did not really understand him, and he also seemed unable to make much out of what I had to say. The cause of this was completely mysterious to me, for I liked him a great deal. Then he came to me with the following dream:
He saw in the fork of the branches of a tree a big obsidian stone. As he came toward it, the stone leaped down from the tree and began to follow him. He sensed that it was very dangerous. As he was fleeing, he came upon some workers who had dug a quadrangular hole in the ground. They indicated to him with signs that he should climb into this hole and stand still in the middle of it. When he did this, the obsidian stone following him became smaller and smaller and finally lay down at his feet as a tame little pebble.
When I had heard this dream, I exclaimed, “What have you got to do with the god Tetzcatlipoca?” Then he came out with it. He told me that he was three-quarters Aztec. He had not mentioned this in his anamnesis, because in Mexico, it seems, racial prejudice is still quite prevalent. Suddenly I understood him. Inwardly, without knowing it, he lived in the spiritual tradition of the Aztecs but had denied this within himself. With this dream his individuation began and also his intellectual creativity. Tetzcatlipoca, the supreme Aztec deity, became his inner guru in active imagination.
But what would have happened to this analysis if I had not known that obsidian was a symbol of the god Tetzcatlipoca? Naturally an experienced analyst cannot be acquainted with all the mythological motifs there are, which number in the hundreds of thousands. Therefore it is important to educate the prospective analyst so that he does not interpret dreams off the cuff but continually takes the trouble to look things up in the specialist literature on symbols, and he must be trained so that he knows where to look. Afer all, a doctor also has manuals in which he can look up details about medicaments and symptoms. In a Jungian analysis, mythological knowledge is significantly more important than in the analysis of other schools. Other schools usually base their approach on an existing theory of dreams that suggests certain interpretations right from the beginning. According to the Jungian approach, it is a principle that every dream expresses something still unknown, something new for the patient. As long as one is dealing with dream images from the personal unconscious, painstakingly recording the dreamer’s associations will often be enough. But with archetypal images, people often have very little to say by way of association. In this case what is necessary is to seek out objectively comparable mythological material.
Whereas this problem mostly concerns intellectual training and the knowledge of a prospective analyst, we must also not forget feeling, that is, the heart. As intelligent as a heartless analyst might be, I have never seen anyone of this type heal anyone! And “heart” cannot be instilled. Someone who does not have one, in my view, is the very least suited to this profession. However, there are also people who really have feeling and the capacity for compassion but do not dare to express it. These people can be helped through training to become good analysts.
In fact, ideally speaking, an analyst must have trained all four functions of consciousness. He needs the sensation function, because he has to be realistic and be able to see inner and outer facts in order to function. It should never happen (though I have witnessed it) that an analyst knows nothing of a patient’s financial situation, or overlooks the fact that the patient is not eating enough. Intuition is also, of course, indispensable, because without it, it is impossible to grasp the prospective and prognostic function of dreams and also to guess all the things that the analysand has not told, which is generally of particular importance.
Of course it is hardly possible in practical terms for all analysts to be so well rounded and complete as to have integrated all four of their consciousness functions. One must frequently be content with making the future analyst aware of what his undeveloped functions are, so that he knows his weaknesses and is on the alert for them and, in cases of uncertainty, when there are grounds for suspecting that something in the analysis is not going right, will call in a colleague for consultation.
The problems of knowledge and of the development of the consciousness functions are related to the state of normalcy of the prospective therapist, to his adjustment to the outer world and society. But the word vocation is related to something still deeper and more essential—the connection to God or the gods, that is, to the powers that manifest within the psyche. If we look at this historically, we see that in the Middle Ages it was not particularly the “normal” person who was considered to have a vocation as helper for the psyche or soul (although he had to be relatively normal too), but rather the priest; or people even sought help at the graves of the martyrs or saints, thinking that the supernatural influence of their personalities might heal the psychologically disturbed. If we look back even further in history, the specifically Christian split between religion and medicine comes into view. Then, still further back, we come to the figure of the physician-priest, who worked, for example, in the places sacred to Asclepius (Kos, Epidaurus, etc.).2 What vocation meant in those days, we learn, for example, from Apuleius, who as a katochos (voluntary internee)3 lived in the service of the goddess Isis.
The priest-healer of late antiquity is an archetypal variant of the type of medicine man or shaman found throughout the world. For him vocation remains what was originally meant by this word: a call from the gods or spirits to become a healer. Shamans (as well as many medicine men and women of other peoples) go through a specific period of training and development. They are called by clan spirits or other spirits, often against their will. “Before a shaman makes his appearance, the soul of the person destined for this function is taken by spirits and drawn into the underworld or the upper world.”4 The souls of shamans-to-be are then put in nests on different levels of the branches of a big tree and usually incubated and reared by an animal mother in the form of a raven or some other bird or by a winged elk or deer, etc. This animal mother is his alter ego, his double, his protecting spirit, and his vital principle. Sometimes she devours the shaman and gives birth to him anew, or she sits on him while he is in the egg. Beyond that, the shamanic initiation generally consists also, as we know, in the candidate’s being mutilated and reduced to a skeleton. The skeleton stands for the imperishable basic substance from which the renewed shaman can be remade. Not always is the new shaman in control of his new form; sometimes he meets it only in crucial moments, during initiation or at the time of death, but it is through this inner alter ego that he accomplishes his healing.5
From the standpoint of modern depth psychology, this shamanic experience amounts to undergoing an invasion of the collective unconscious and dealing with it successfully. When the training analysis of a future analyst remains hung up in discussion of personal problems, in my experience, that person never turns out to be an effective analyst later on. Only when he has experienced the infinite in his own life, as Jung formulated it, has his life found a meaning. Otherwise it loses itself in superficialities.6 And, we might add, then such a person can only offer others something superficial: good advice, intellectual interpretations, well-meaning recommendations for normalization. It is important that the analyst dwell inwardly in what is essential; then he can lead the analysand to his own inner center. A shaman said aptly to a piece of wood which he wanted to turn into a drum: “Make your mind free from quarrelsomeness and discord, larch, you’re going to become a drum.”7
The symbols of the animal-mother spirit, of the drum, of the tree, and many others, all of which I cannot go into here, are, in Jungian terms, all symbols of the Self. In the shamanic tradition, the future healer must not only have experienced an invasion of the collective unconscious, but he must also have penetrated through to its core, to that which Jung termed the Self. Oddly enough, the Self often first confronts a person in a hostile manner, as something explosive that might even cause madness.8 The Siberian Tungus are aware of this. They even say that before a person can become a shaman, he must suffer the harassment of the spirits for a period of years. These are the souls of dead shamans who are causing him to have delusions. They are often the ones who mutilate him during the initiation.9
For example, there was a Buryat who was sick for fifteen years. He ran around naked in the winter and “behaved like a fool.”10 Then he found his helping spirit, who said to him: “Why are you carrying on like that? Don’t you know us? Be a shaman. Depend on us, your utcha [ancestors = helping spirits]. Do you agree?” He consented, went through the initiation rites, and began to act as a shaman: “Everywhere he does good and heals.” It is strictly forbidden to act as a shaman until the initiation time is over and the initiate has been healed from his initiatory illness.11
Everything we have said here about the shamanism of circumpolar peoples is surprisingly applicable to the vocational problematic of modern therapists. Someone who has not acceded to the depths of the unconscious and seen there “the ways of all spirits of sickness” can hardly possess enough real empathy for the serious psychic suffering of his fellow human beings. He will only treat them by the textbook, without ever being able to empathize with them, and this is often the key factor for patients. Also someone beginning prematurely to act as a shaman, before he has overcome his initiatory illness, is an all too familiar sight. Many enthusiastic young people want to begin treating others from the very beginning of their training analysis, before they have come to terms with their own problems and unconscious contents. In doing this, in participation mystique with a patient, they usually end up in the latter’s blind spot. The result of this is a folie à deux and not a cure; or else the patient is smart enough to detect that his would-be “doctor” is on none too certain ground himself. “That fellow is more depressed than I am,” I was once told by an analysand on whom a not yet fully fledged “healer” was trying himself out.
It has been asserted that shamans and medicine men have a great deal in common with the mentally ill, or at least with the psychologically unstable, but Eliade has pointed out, for example, that the Eskimos can clearly distinguish between a “shamanic” illness and an ordinary case of mental disorder.12 In the course of the shamanic initiatory illness, the initiate succeeds in finding his own cure, which is precisely what the ordinary mentally ill person cannot do. Moreover, the shamans are the creative individuals, the poets and artists, of their communities. This touches upon a question that is also significant for modern therapists—popular humor is quite familiar with the figure of the psychiatrist who is crazy himself.13 In this connection, I would like to associate myself with the view of the Eskimos: The person who is able to heal himself is not the sick one but the one who can help others. For such a person is intact in his innermost core and possesses ego strength, two indispensable prerequisites for the profession of therapist. He undergoes his initiatory illness not out of weakness, but rather in order to become acquainted with “all the ways of sickness,” to know from his own experience what possession, depression, schizoid dissociation, and so on, mean.
Nor is his initiatory dismemberment schizophrenia. In accordance with the mythological description, it is a reduction to the skeleton. But what this means according to the peoples who made these myths is the indestructible, the eternal in the human being, and also that which is perpetuated through the continuity of the generations. Transposed into modern language, this means that the initiate undergoes an “analysis” in the sense of a dissolution of all his inauthentic—e.g., conventional or infantile—traits in order to win his way through to that which he is in his true being. In Jungian language this means he becomes individuated, becomes a solid personality who is no longer a football of inner affects and projections or of external societal trends and fashions.
In the ethnological context, however, the healer also has a specific shadow; that is, this vocation also has a dark counter-aspect. This is the figure of the demonic shaman or medicine man. The most superficial form of this is the therapist who is ruled by a power complex. It is of course evident that in this profession, in which one is one’s own lord and master and in which others often cling to one in a childishly naive fashion, the abuse of power represents a great temptation. For example, one might be tempted to take over the role of the parent or of the wise man, the one who knows what is right. As repugnant as this is, it is, in my opinion, not all that dangerous, since such therapists are usually duly plagued by equally power-possessed patients, or punished through the fact that they tend to assemble about them a tedious kindergarten of patients who badger them with demands.
The “demonic” healer is something on a greater scale, something more dangerous. The Yakuts, for example, believe that at the time of his initiation a shaman has the choice of being initiated by the spirits of the “source of ruination and death” or by the spirits “of healing and salvation.”14 The confusing thing here is that someone initiated by the evil spirits may also be considered a great shaman.15 But for such a person to become a shaman, many people (often from his clan) have to die,16 whereas the clan of a shaman from the side of the light flourishes.17 Therefore, the first kind of shaman is called “bloodthirsty.” From a psychological point of view, the dark shamans are those who have found the access to the unconscious and shown themselves strong enough not to be overthrown by it, but who, as it were, intentionally yield to the dark impulses of the unconscious.
Jung described the “demonic,” which could also be called “black magic,” in the following terms.”18 Whereas “white magic strives to drive out the forces of disorder in the unconscious, “black magic exalts the destructive impulses as the only valid truth in opposition to the order hitherto prevailing, and moreover bends them to the service of the individual as opposed to that of the whole community. The means used for this are primitive, fascinating or frightful ideas, images, utterances incomprehensible to the ordinary understanding, strange words,” and so on. “The demonic . . . is based on the fact that there are unconscious powers of negation and destruction and that evil is real.” A person who exercises such forces of black magic is usually himself possessed by an unconscious content. Jung mentions here the example of Hitler as negative savior or destroyer. In the sphere of shamanic tradition, dangerous shamans of this sort, of whom everyone is profoundly frightened, are known. Mircea Eliade gives many examples of the arrogance of shamans, which is often seen as the real source of evil and is believed to explain the current deteriorated state of shamanism:19 In my opinion, this arrogance also exists among modern therapists, and therapists marked by it are, in my view, more dangerous than those with inadequate professional training. I suppose there is no organizational or rational means for keeping such individuals out of the profession of analysis. One can only hope that the general public has enough instinct to avoid them.
Reflecting on the points presented here so far, we see that the profession of analyst makes outstandingly high demands, demands that hardly anyone can entirely satisfy. Thank heavens the native peoples are also aware that it is not only the rare great shamans, but also the lesser and minor shamans who nevertheless can help people. The greatness or importance of a shaman depends on how often and how deeply he has penetrated into the unconscious and how much suffering he has taken upon himself in so doing. That is why, in my opinion, what is absolutely necessary is not to become a great healer but rather to know one’s own limits. For it can happen—and it is not at all that rare—that a patient grows beyond one, that is, progresses further in the inner process than one has gone oneself.
The instinctive tendency of the analyst is then to try to bring the patient back down in reductive fashion to his own level of consciousness. Only when he is conscious of his own limits can he avoid this danger and not demean the meaningful and growing element in others through a “nothing-more-than” style of interpretation. When the analyst remains conscious of his own limits, he can sometimes even help a patient who is beyond him by being honest and contenting himself with contributing strictly what help he is capable of, and by entrusting the rest to the patient. Where he has weak points, he must admit this to the patient and, turning the tables, ask him for understanding. At this point, the process is no longer a “treatment” but becomes a relationship of mutual give and take. This of course should be taken into account in the financial arrangements.
A special problem in the profession of analysis is creativity. The best analysts are without a doubt those who, alongside their profession, are involved in some creative activity. It is not for nothing that in primitive societies the medicine men are also the poets, painters, and the like, of their peoples. The creative and the healing elements are very close. “The uprushing chaos,” Jung explains, “seeks new symbolic ideas which will embrace and express not only the previous order but also the essential contents of the disorder. Such ideas would have a magical effect by holding the destructive forces of disorder spellbound, as has been the case in Christianity and in all other religions.”20
What Jung is expressing here in connection with the general collective level is applicable also to smaller groups and to the individual. In all contexts it remains a matter of finding in one’s own depths the ordering influence of the Self and expressing it in symbols, in art, in deeds. If the analyst, in addition to his consultations, is not working on this task as well, he falls prey, as Jung pointed out, to routine, and with time becomes a drab analyst. I have noticed that in this difficult work, sourness and a certain contempt toward one’s fellow beings easily tends to creep in. Only continuing to work on one’s own inner creative task can prevent this deterioration. And here it is not enough once to have experienced a sense of vocation; the right to practice this profession must be earned again and again within oneself.
NOTES
1. See Jung, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” in CW 9/i.
2. See C. A. Meier, Der Traum als Medizin (The Dream as Medicine) (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag, 1985).
3. Cf. G. Preusschen, Mönchtum und Serapiskult (Monasticism and the Serapis Cult) (Giessen, 1903), passim.
4. Cited in A. Friedrich and L. G. Budruss, Schamanengeschichten aus Siberien (Siberian Shaman Stories) (Munich, 1955), p. 45.
5. Ibid., p. 48.
6. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 325.
7. Friedrich and Budruss, Schamanengeschichten, p. 80.
8. See Jung, “The Philosophical Tree,” in CW 13.
9. Cf. Friedrich and Budruss, Schamanengeschichten, pp. 212–13.
10. Ibid., p. 209.
11. Ibid., p. 159.
12. See Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series, 1964), pp. 23ff.
13. More or less as in the following joke: What is the difference between a mentally disturbed person and the psychiatrist? Answer: The psychiatrist is the one who has the key to the office.
14. Friedrich and Budruss, Schamanengeschichten, p. 171.
15. Cf. ibid., p. 158.
16. Ibid., p. 154.
17. Ibid., pp. 150, 147.
18. Jung, letter to Horst Scharschuch, 1 September 1952, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 81–82.
19. Eliade, Shamanism, p. 72.
20. Jung, Letters, vol. 2, p. 81.