by C. G. Jung
As a doctor I constantly have to ask myself what kind of message the patient is bringing me. What does he mean to me? If he means nothing, I have no point of attack. The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. “Only the wounded physician heals.” But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has no effect. I take my patients seriously. Perhaps I am confronted with a problem just as much as they. It often happens that the patient is exactly the right plaster for the doctor’s sore spot. Because this is so, difficult situations can arise for the doctor too—or rather, especially for the doctor.
Every therapist ought to have a control by some third person, so that he remains open to another point of view. Even the pope has a confessor. I always advise analysts: “Have a father confessor, or a mother confessor!” Women are particularly gifted for playing such a part. They often have excellent intuition and a trenchant critical insight, and can see what men have up their sleeves, at times see also into men’s anima intrigues. They see aspects that the man does not see. That is why no woman has ever been convinced that her husband is a superman!
It is understandable that a person should undergo analysis if he has a neurosis; but if he feels he is normal, he is under no compulsion to do so. Yet I can assure you, I have had some astonishing experiences with so-called “normality.” Once I encountered an entirely “normal” pupil. He was a doctor, and came to me with the best recommendations from an old colleague. He had been his assistant and had later taken over his practice. Now he had a normal practice, normal success, a normal wife, normal children, lived in a normal little house in a normal little town, had a normal income and probably a normal diet. He wanted to be an analyst. I said to him, “Do you know what that means? It means that you must first learn to know yourself. You yourself are the instrument. If you are not right, how can the patient be made right? If you are not convinced, how can you convince him? You yourself must be the real stuff. If you are not, God help you! Then you will lead patients astray. Therefore you must first accept an analysis of yourself.” That was all right, the man said, but almost at once followed this with: “I have no problems to tell you about.” That should have been a warning to me. I said, “Very well, then we can examine your dreams.” “I have no dreams,” he said. “You will soon have some,” I responded. Anyone else would probably have dreamt that very night. But he was unable to recall any dreams. So it went on for about two weeks, and I began to feel rather uneasy about the whole affair.
At last an impressive dream turned up. I am going to tell it because it shows how important it is, in practical psychiatry, to understand dreams. He dreamt that he was traveling by railroad. The train had a two-hour stop in a certain city. Since he did not know the city and wanted to see something of it, he set out toward the city center. There he found a medieval building, probably the town hall, and went into it. He wandered down long corridors and came upon handsome rooms, their walls lined with old paintings and fine tapestries. Precious old objects stood about. Suddenly he saw that it had grown darker, and the sun had set. He thought, I must get back to the railroad station. At this moment he discovered that he was lost, and no longer knew where the exit was. He started in alarm, and simultaneously realized that he had not met a single person in this building. He began to feel uneasy, and quickened his pace, hoping to run into someone. But he met no one. Then he came to a large door, and thought with relief: That is the exit. He opened the door and discovered that he had stumbled upon a gigantic room. It was so huge and dark that he could not even see the opposite wall. Profoundly alarmed, the dreamer ran across the great, empty room, hoping to find the exit on the other side. Then he saw—precisely in the middle of the room—something white on the floor. As he approached he discovered that it was an idiot child of about two years old. It was sitting on a chamber pot and had smeared itself with feces. At that moment he awoke with a cry, in a state of panic.
I knew all I needed to know—here was a latent psychosis! I must say I sweated as I tried to lead him out of that dream. I had to represent it to him as something quite innocuous, and gloss over all the perilous details.
What the dream says is approximately this: the trip on which he sets out is the trip to Zürich. He remains there, however, for only a short time. The child in the center of the room is himself as a two-year-old child. In small children, such uncouth behavior is somewhat unusual, but still possible. They may be intrigued by their feces, which are colored and have an odd smell. Raised in a city environment, and possibly along strict lines, a child might easily be guilty of such a failing.
But the dreamer, the doctor, was no child; he was a grown man. And therefore the dream image in the center of the room is a sinister symbol. When he told me the dream, I realized that his normality was a compensation. I had caught him in the nick of time, for the latent psychosis was within a hair’s breadth of breaking out and becoming manifest. This had to be prevented. Finally, with the aid of one of his other dreams, I succeeded in finding an acceptable pretext for ending the training analysis. We were both of us very glad to stop. I had not informed him of my diagnosis, but he had probably become aware that he was on the verge of a fatal panic, for he had a dream in which he was being pursued by a dangerous maniac. Immediately afterward he returned home. He never again stirred up the unconscious. His emphatic normality reflected a personality which would not have been developed but simply shattered by a confrontation with the unconscious. These latent psychoses are the bêtes noires of psychotherapists, since they are often very difficult to recognize.
With this, we come to the question of lay analysis. I am in favor of non-medical men studying psychotherapy and practicing it; but in dealing with latent psychoses there is the risk of their making dangerous mistakes. Therefore I favor laymen working as analysts, but under the guidance of a professional physician. As soon as a lay analyst feels the slightest bit uncertain, he ought to consult his mentor. Even for doctors it is difficult to recognize and treat a latent schizophrenia; all the more so for laymen. But I have repeatedly found that laymen who have practiced psychotherapy for years, and who have themselves been in analysis, are shrewd and capable. Moreover, there are not enough doctors practicing psychotherapy. For such practice, long and thorough training is necessary, and a wide culture which very few possess.
The relationship between doctor and patient, especially when a transference on the part of the patient occurs, or a more or less unconscious identification of doctor and patient, can lead to parapsychological phenomena. I have frequently run into this. One such case which was particularly impressive was that of a patient whom I had pulled out of a psychogenic depression. He went back home and married; but I did not care for his wife. The first time I saw her, I had an uneasy feeling. Her husband was grateful to me, and I observed that I was a thorn in her side because of my influence over him. It frequently happens that women who do not really love their husbands are jealous and destroy their friendships. They want the husband to belong entirely to them because they themselves do not belong to him. The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.
The wife’s attitude placed a tremendous burden on the patient which he was incapable of coping with. Under its pressure he relapsed, after a year of marriage, into a new depression. Foreseeing this possibility, I had arranged with him that he was to get in touch with me at once if he observed his spirits sinking. He neglected to do so, partly because of his wife, who scoffed at his moods. I heard not a word from him.
At that time I had to deliver a lecture in B. I returned to my hotel around midnight. I sat with some friends for a while after the lecture, then went to bed, but I lay awake for a long time. At about two o’clock—I must have just fallen asleep—I awoke with a start, and had the feeling that someone had come into the room; I even had the impression that the door had been hastily opened. I instantly turned on the light, but there was nothing. Someone might have mistaken the door, I thought, and I looked into the corridor. But it was still as death. �
�Odd,” I thought, “someone did come into the room!” Then I tried to recall exactly what had happened, and it occurred to me that I had been awakened by a feeling of dull pain, as though something had struck my forehead and then the back of my skull. The following day I received a telegram saying that my patient had committed suicide. He had shot himself. Later, I learned that the bullet had come to rest in the back wall of the skull.
This experience was a genuine synchronistic phenomenon such as is quite often observed in connection with an archetypal situation—in this case, death. By means of a relativization of time and space in the unconscious it could well be that I had perceived something which in reality was taking place elsewhere. The collective unconscious is common to all; it is the foundation of what the ancients called the “sympathy of all things.” In this case the unconscious had knowledge of my patient’s condition. All that evening, in fact, I had felt curiously restive and nervous, very much in contrast to my usual mood.
I never try to convert a patient to anything, and never exercise any compulsion. What matters most to me is that the patient should reach his own view of things. Under my treatment a pagan becomes a pagan and a Christian a Christian, a Jew a Jew, according to what his destiny prescribes for him.
I well recall the case of a Jewish woman who had lost her faith. It began with a dream of mine in which a young girl, unknown to me, came to me as a patient. She outlined her case to me, and while she was talking, I thought, “I don’t understand her at all. I don’t understand what it is all about.” But suddenly it occurred to me that she must have an unusual father complex. That was the dream.
For the next day I had down in my appointment book a consultation for four o’clock. A young woman appeared. She was Jewish, daughter of a wealthy banker, pretty, chic, and highly intelligent. She had already undergone an analysis, but the doctor acquired a transference to her and finally begged her not to come to him any more, for if she did, it would mean the destruction of his marriage.
The girl had been suffering for years from a severe anxiety neurosis, which this experience naturally worsened. I began with an anamnesis, but could discover nothing special. She was a well-adapted, Westernized Jewess, enlightened down to her bones. At first I could not understand what her trouble was. Suddenly my dream occurred to me, and I thought, “Good Lord, so this is the little girl of my dream.” Since, however, I could detect not a trace of a father complex in her, I asked her, as I am in the habit of doing in such cases, about her grandfather. For a brief moment she closed her eyes, and I realized at once that here lay the heart of the problem. I therefore asked her to tell me about this grandfather, and learned that he had been a rabbi and had belonged to a Jewish sect. “Do you mean the Chassidim?” I asked. She said yes. I pursued my questioning. “If he was a rabbi, was he by any chance a zaddik?” “Yes,” she replied, “it is said that he was a kind of saint and also possessed second sight. But that is all nonsense. There is no such thing!”
With that I had concluded the anamnesis and understood the history of her neurosis. I explained to her, “Now I am going to tell you something that you may not be able to accept. Your grandfather was a zaddik. Your father became an apostate to the Jewish faith. He betrayed the secret and turned his back on God. And you have your neurosis because the fear of God has got into you.” That struck her like a bolt of lightning.
The following night I had another dream. A reception was taking place in my house, and behold, this girl was there too. She came up to me and asked, “Haven’t you got an umbrella? It is raining so hard.” I actually found an umbrella, fumbled around with it to open it, and was on the point of giving it to her. But what happened instead? I handed it to her on my knees, as if she were a goddess.
I told this dream to her, and in a week the neurosis had vanished.6 The dream had showed me that she was not just a superficial little girl, but that beneath the surface were the makings of a saint. She had no mythological ideas, and therefore the most essential feature of her nature could find no way to express itself. All her conscious activity was directed toward flirtation, clothes, and sex, because she knew of nothing else. She knew only the intellect and lived a meaningless life. In reality she was a child of God whose destiny was to fulfill His secret will. I had to awaken mythological and religious ideas in her, for she belonged to that class of human beings of whom spiritual activity is demanded. Thus her life took on a meaning, and no trace of the neurosis was left.
In this case I had applied no “method,” but had sensed the presence of the numen. My explaining this to her had accomplished the cure. Method did not matter here; what mattered was the “fear of God.”7
I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. For that reason the idea of development was always of the highest importance to me.
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep. Even in this day and age the believer has the opportunity, in his church, to live the “symbolic life.” We need only think of the experience of the Mass, of baptism, of the imitatio Christi, and many other aspects of religion. But to live and experience symbols presupposes a vital participation on the part of the believer, and only too often this is lacking in people today. In the neurotic it is practically always lacking. In such cases we have to observe whether the unconscious will not spontaneously bring up symbols to replace what is lacking. But then the question remains of whether a person who has symbolic dreams or visions will also be able to understand their meaning and take the consequences upon himself.
There is, for example, the case of the theologian which I described in “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.”8 He had a certain dream which was frequently repeated. He dreamt that he was standing on a slope from which he had a beautiful view of a low valley covered with dense woods. In the dream he knew that in the middle of the woods there was a lake, and he also knew that hitherto something had always prevented him from going there. But this time he wanted to carry out his plan. As he approached the lake, the atmosphere grew uncanny, and suddenly a light gust of wind passed over the surface of the water, which rippled darkly. He awoke with a cry of terror.
At first this dream seems incomprehensible. But as a theologian the dreamer should have remembered the “pool” whose waters were stirred by a sudden wind, and in which the sick were bathed—the pool of Bethesda. An angel descended and touched the water, which thereby acquired curative powers. The light wind is the pneuma which bloweth where it listeth And that terrified the dreamer. An unseen presence is suggested, a numen that lives its own life and in whose presence man shudders. The dreamer was reluctant to accept the association with the pool of Bethesda. He wanted nothing of it, for such things are met with only in the Bible, or at most on Sunday mornings as the subjects of sermons, and have nothing to do with psychology. All very well to speak of the Holy Ghost on occasions—but it is not a phenomenon to be experienced!
I knew that the dreamer should have overcome his fright and, as it were, got over his panic. But I never force the issue if a patient is unwilling to go the way that has been revealed to him and take the consequences. I do not subscribe to the facile assumption that the patient is blocked merely by ordinary resistances. Resistances—especially when they are stubborn—merit attention, for they are often warnings which must not be overlooked. The cure may be a poison that not everyone can take, or an operation which, when it is contraindicated, can prove fatal.
Wherever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality
, most people are overcome by fright, and many run away. Such was the case with this theologian. I am of course aware that theologians are in a more difficult situation than others. On the one hand they are closer to religion, but on the other hand they are more bound by church and dogma. The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them. All very well if it has a supernatural or at least a “historical” foundation. But psychic? Face to face with this question, the patient will often show an unsuspected but profound contempt for the psyche.
In contemporary psychotherapy the demand is often made that the doctor or psychotherapist should “go along” with the patient and his affects. I don’t consider that to be always the right course. Sometimes active intervention on the part of the doctor is required.
Once a lady of the aristocracy came to me who was in the habit of slapping her employees—including her doctors. She suffered from a compulsion neurosis and had been under treatment in a sanatorium. Naturally, she had soon dispensed the obligatory slap to the head physician. In her eyes, after all, he was only a superior valet de chambre. She was paying the bills, wasn’t she? This doctor sent her on to another institution and there the same scene was repeated. Since the lady was not really insane, but evidently had to be handled with kid gloves, the hapless doctor sent her on to me.
She was a very stately and imposing person, six feet tall—and there was power behind her slaps, I can tell you! She came, then, and we had a very good talk. Then came the moment when I had to say something unpleasant to her. Furious, she sprang to her feet and threatened to slap me. I, too, jumped up, and said to her, “Very well, you are the lady. You hit first—ladies first! But then I hit back!” And I meant it. She fell back into her chair and deflated before my eyes. “No one has ever said that to me before!” she protested. From that moment on, the therapy began to succeed.