Memories, Dreams, Reflections

by C. G. Jung

  The dream pointed out that there were further reaches to the state of consciousness I have just described: the long uninhabited ground floor in medieval style, then the Roman cellar, and finally the prehistoric cave. These signified past times and passed stages of consciousness.

  Certain questions had been much on my mind during the days preceding this dream. They were: On what premises is Freudian psychology founded? To what category of human thought does it belong? What is the relationship of its almost exclusive personalism to general historical assumptions? My dream was giving me the answer. It obviously pointed to the foundations of cultural history—a history of successive layers of consciousness. My dream thus constituted a kind of structural diagram of the human psyche; it postulated something of an altogether impersonal nature underlying that psyche. It “clicked,” as the English have it—and the dream became for me a guiding image which in the days to come was to be corroborated to an extent I could not at first suspect. It was my first inkling of a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche. This I first took to be the traces of earlier modes of functioning. Later, with increasing experience and on the basis of more reliable knowledge, I recognized them as forms of instinct, that is, as archetypes.

  I was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a “façade” behind which its meaning lies hidden—a meaning already known but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from consciousness. To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best it can. These forms of life, too, have no wish to deceive our eyes, but we may deceive ourselves because our eyes are shortsighted. Or we hear amiss because our ears are rather deaf—but it is not our ears that wish to deceive us. Long before I met Freud I regarded the unconscious, and dreams, which are its direct exponents, as natural processes to which no arbitrariness can be attributed, and above all no legerdemain. I knew no reasons for the assumption that the tricks of consciousness can be extended to the natural processes of the unconscious. On the contrary, daily experience taught me what intense resistance the unconscious opposes to the tendencies of the conscious mind.

  The dream of the house had a curious effect upon me: it revived my old interest in archaeology. After I had returned to Zürich I took up a book on Babylonian excavations, and read various works on myths. In the course of this reading I came across Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker9—and that fired me! I read like mad, and worked with feverish interest through a mountain of mythological material, then through the Gnostic writers, and ended in total confusion. I found myself in a state of perplexity similar to the one I had experienced at the clinic when I tried to understand the meaning of psychotic states of mind. It was as if I were in an imaginary madhouse and were beginning to treat and analyze all the centaurs, nymphs, gods, and goddesses in Creuzer’s book as though they were my patients. While thus occupied I could not help but discover the close relationship between ancient mythology and the psychology of primitives, and this led me to an intensive study of the latter.

  In the midst of these studies I came upon the fantasies of a young American altogether unknown to me, Miss Miller. The material had been published by my revered and fatherly friend, Théodore Flournoy, in the Archives de Psychologie (Geneva). I was immediately struck by the mythological character of the fantasies. They operated like a catalyst upon the stored-up and still disorderly ideas within me. Gradually, there formed out of them, and out of the knowledge of myths I had acquired, my book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido.

  While I was working on this book, I had dreams which presaged the forthcoming break with Freud. One of the most significant had its scene in a mountainous region on the Swiss-Austrian border. It was toward evening, and I saw an elderly man in the uniform of an Imperial Austrian customs official. He walked past, somewhat stooped, without paying any attention to me. His expression was peevish, rather melancholic and vexed. There were other persons present, and someone informed me that the old man was not really there, but was the ghost of a customs official who had died years ago. “He is one of those who still couldn’t die properly.” That was the first part of the dream.

  I set about analyzing this dream. In connection with “customs” I at once thought of the word “censorship.” In connection with “border” I thought of the border between consciousness and the unconscious on the one hand, and between Freud’s views and mine on the other. The extremely rigorous customs examination at the border seemed to me an allusion to analysis. At a border suitcases are opened and examined for contraband. In the course of this examination, unconscious assumptions are discovered. As for the old customs official, his work had obviously brought him so little that was pleasurable and satisfactory that he took a sour view of the world. I could not refuse to see the analogy with Freud.

  At that time Freud had lost much of his authority for me. But he still meant to me a superior personality, upon whom I projected the father, and at the time of the dream this projection was still far from eliminated. Where such a projection occurs, we are no longer objective; we persist in a state of divided judgment. On the one hand we are dependent, and on the other we have resistances. When the dream took place I still thought highly of Freud, but at the same time I was critical of him. This divided attitude is a sign that I was still unconscious of the situation and had not come to any resolution of it. This is characteristic of all projections. The dream urged upon me the necessity of clarifying this situation.

  Under the impress of Freud’s personality I had, as far as possible, cast aside my own judgments and repressed my criticisms. That was the prerequisite for collaborating with him. I had told myself, “Freud is far wiser and more experienced than you. For the present you must simply listen to what he says and learn from him.” And then, to my own surprise, I found myself dreaming of him as a peevish official of the Imperial Austrian monarchy, as a defunct and still walking ghost of a customs inspector. Could that be the death-wish which Freud had insinuated I felt toward him? I could find no part of myself that normally might have had such a wish, for I wanted at all costs to be able to work with Freud, and, in a frankly egotistic manner, to partake of his wealth of experience. His friendship meant a great deal to me. I had no reason for wishing him dead. But it was possible that the dream could be regarded as a corrective, as a compensation or antidote for my conscious high opinion and admiration. Therefore the dream recommended a rather more critical attitude toward Freud. I was distinctly shocked by it, although the final sentence of the dream seemed to me an allusion to Freud’s potential immortality.

  The dream had not reached its end with the episode of the customs official; after a hiatus came a second and far more remarkable part. I was in an Italian city, and it was around noon, between twelve and one o’clock. A fierce sun was beating down upon the narrow streets. The city was built on hills and reminded me of a particular part of Basel, the Kohlenberg. The little streets which lead down into the valley, the Birsigtal, that runs through the city, are partly flights of steps. In the dream, one such stairway descended to Barfüsserplatz. The city was Basel, and yet it was also an Italian city, something like Bergamo. It was summertime; the blazing sun stood at the zenith, and everything was bathed in an intense light. A crowd came streaming toward me, and I knew that the shops were closing and people were on their way home to dinner. In the midst of this stream of people walked a knight in full armor. He mounted the steps toward me. He wore a helmet of the kind that is called a basinet, with eye slits, and chain armor. Over this was a white tunic into which was woven, front and back, a large red cross.

  One can easily imagine how I felt: suddenly to see in a modern city, during the noonday rush hour, a crusader coming toward me. What struck me as particularly odd was that none of the many persons walking about seemed to notice him. No one turned his head or gazed after him. It was as though he were completely invisible to everyone but me. I asked myself
what this apparition meant, and then it was as if someone answered me—but there was no one there to speak: “Yes, this is a regular apparition. The knight always passes by here between twelve and one o’clock, and has been doing so for a very long time [for centuries, I gathered] and everyone knows about it.”

  The knight and the customs official were contrasting figures. The customs official was shadowy, someone who “still couldn’t die properly”—a fading apparition. The knight, on the other hand, was full of life and completely real. The second part of the dream was numinous in the extreme, whereas the scene on the border had been prosaic and in itself not impressive; I had been struck only by my reflections upon it.

  In the period following these dreams I did a great deal of thinking about the mysterious figure of the knight. But it was only much later, after I had been meditating on the dream for a long time, that I was able to get some idea of its meaning. Even in the dream, I knew that the knight belonged to the twelfth century. That was the period when alchemy was beginning and also the quest for the Holy Grail. The stories of the Grail had been of the greatest importance to me ever since I read them, at the age of fifteen, for the first time. I had an inkling that a great secret still lay hidden behind those stories. Therefore it seemed quite natural to me that the dream should conjure up the world of the Knights of the Grail and their quest—for that was, in the deepest sense, my own world, which had scarcely anything to do with Freud’s. My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.

  To me it was a profound disappointment that all the efforts of the probing mind had apparently succeeded in finding nothing more in the depths of the psyche than the all too familiar and “all-too-human” limitations. I had grown up in the country, among peasants, and what I was unable to learn in the stables I found out from the Rabelaisian wit and the untrammeled fantasies of our peasant folklore. Incest and perversions were no remarkable novelties to me, and did not call for any special explanation. Along with criminality, they formed part of the black lees that spoiled the taste of life by showing me only too plainly the ugliness and meaninglessness of human existence. That cabbages thrive in dung was something I had always taken for granted. In all honesty I could discover no helpful insight in such knowledge. “It’s just that all of those people are city folks who know nothing about nature and the human stable,” I thought, sick and tired of these ugly matters.

  People who know nothing about nature are of course neurotic, for they are not adapted to reality. They are too naïve, like children, and it is necessary to tell them the facts of life, so to speak—to make it plain to them that they are human beings like all others. Not that such enlightenment will cure neurotics; they can only regain their health when they climb up out of the mud of the commonplace. But they are only too fond of lingering in what they have earlier repressed. How are they ever to emerge if analysis does not make them aware of something different and better, when even theory holds them fast in it and offers them nothing more than the rational or “reasonable” injunction to abandon such childishness? That is precisely what they cannot do, and how should they be able to if they do not discover something to stand on? One form of life cannot simply be abandoned unless it is exchanged for another. As for a totally rational approach to life, that is, as experience shows, impossible, especially when a person is by nature as unreasonable as a neurotic.

  I now realized why Freud’s personal psychology was of such burning interest to me. I was eager to know the truth about his “reasonable solution,” and I was prepared to sacrifice a good deal in order to obtain the answer. Now I felt that I was on the track of it. Freud himself had a neurosis, no doubt diagnosable and one with highly troublesome symptoms, as I had discovered on our voyage to America. Of course he had taught me that everybody is somewhat neurotic, and that we must practice tolerance. But I was not at all inclined to content myself with that; rather, I wanted to know how one could escape having a neurosis. Apparently neither Freud nor his disciples could understand what it meant for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis if not even the master could deal with his own neurosis. When, then, Freud announced his intention of identifying theory and method and making them into some kind of dogma, I could no longer collaborate with him; there remained no choice for me but to withdraw.

  When I was working on my book about the libido and approaching the end of the chapter “The Sacrifice,” I knew in advance that its publication would cost me my friendship with Freud. For I planned to set down in it my own conception of incest, the decisive transformation of the concept of libido, and various other ideas in which I differed from Freud. To me incest signified a personal complication only in the rarest cases. Usually incest has a highly religious aspect, for which reason the incest theme plays a decisive part in almost all cosmogonies and in numerous myths. But Freud clung to the literal interpretation of it and could not grasp the spiritual significance of incest as a symbol. I knew that he would never be able to accept any of my ideas on this subject.

  I spoke with my wife about this, and told her of my fears. She attempted to reassure me, for she thought that Freud would magnanimously raise no objections, although he might not accept my views. I myself was convinced that he could not do so. For two months I was unable to touch my pen, so tormented was I by the conflict. Should I keep my thoughts to myself, or should I risk the loss of so important a friendship? At last I resolved to go ahead with the writing—and it did indeed cost me Freud’s friendship.

  After the break with Freud, all my friends and acquaintances dropped away. My book was declared to be rubbish; I was a mystic, and that settled the matter. Riklin and Maeder alone stuck by me. But I had foreseen my isolation and harbored no illusion about the reactions of my so-called friends. That was a point I had thoroughly considered beforehand. I had known that everything was at stake, and that I had to take a stand for my convictions. I realized that the chapter, “The Sacrifice,” meant my own sacrifice. Having reached this insight, I was able to write again, even though I knew that my ideas would go uncomprehended.

  In retrospect I can say that I alone logically pursued the two problems which most interested Freud: the problem of “archaic vestiges,” and that of sexuality. It is a widespread error to imagine that I do not see the value of sexuality. On the contrary, it plays a large part in my psychology as an essential—though not the sole—expression of psychic wholeness. But my main concern has been to investigate, over and above its personal significance and biological function, its spiritual aspect and its numinous meaning, and thus to explain what Freud was so fascinated by but was unable to grasp. My thoughts on this subject are contained in “The Psychology of the Transference”10 and the Mysterium Coniunctionis.11 Sexuality is of the greatest importance as the expression of the chthonic spirit. That spirit is the “other face of God,” the dark side of the God-image. The question of the chthonic spirit has occupied me ever since I began to delve into the world of alchemy. Basically, this interest was awakened by that early conversation with Freud, when, mystified, I felt how deeply stirred he was by the phenomenon of sexuality.

  Freud’s greatest achievement probably consisted in taking neurotic patients seriously and entering into their peculiar individual psychology. He had the courage to let the case material speak for itself, and in this way was able to penetrate into the real psychology of his patients. He saw with the patient’s eyes, so to speak, and so reached a deeper understanding of mental illness than had hitherto been possible. In this respect he was free of bias, courageous, and succeeded in overcoming a host of prejudices. Like an Old Testament prophet, he undertook to overthrow false gods, to rip the veils away from a mass of dishonesties and hypocrisies, mercilessly exposing the rottenness of the contemporary psyche. He did not falter in the face of the unpopularity such an enterprise entailed. The impetus which he gave to our civilization sprang from his discovery of an avenue to the unconscious. By evaluating dreams as the most important
source of information concerning the unconscious processes, he gave back to mankind a tool that had seemed irretrievably lost. He demonstrated empirically the presence of an unconscious psyche which had hitherto existed only as a philosophical postulate, in particular in the philosophies of C. G. Carus and Eduard von Hartmann.

  It may well be said that the contemporary cultural consciousness has not yet absorbed into its general philosophy the idea of the unconscious and all that it means, despite the fact that modern man has been confronted with this idea for more than half a century. The assimilation of the fundamental insight that psychic life has two poles still remains a task for the future.

  1 This chapter should be regarded as a supplement to Jung’s numerous writings on Freud. The most important of these are contained in Freud and Psychoanalysis (CW 4). Cf. also “Sigmund Freud in His Historical Setting” (1934) and “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939), in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (CW 15).

  2 In his obituary on Freud (1939), Jung calls this work “epoch-making” and “probably the boldest attempt that has ever been made to master the riddles of the unconscious psyche upon the apparently firm ground of empiricism. For us, then young psychiatrists, it was … a source of illumination, while for our older colleagues it was an object of mockery.”—A. J.