Memories, Dreams, Reflections

by C. G. Jung

  I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology. When I pored over these old texts everything fell into place: the fantasy-images, the empirical material I had gathered in my practice, and the conclusions I had drawn from it. I now began to understand what these psychic contents meant when seen in historical perspective. My understanding of their typical character, which had already begun with my investigation of myths, was deepened. The primordial images and the nature of the archetype took a central place in my researches, and it became clear to me that without history there can be no psychology, and certainly no psychology of the unconscious. A psychology of consciousness can, to be sure, content itself with material drawn from personal life, but as soon as we wish to explain a neurosis we require an anamnesis which reaches deeper than the knowledge of consciousness. And when in the course of treatment unusual decisions are called for, dreams occur that need more than personal memories for their interpretation.

  I regard my work on alchemy as a sign of my inner relationship to Goethe. Goethe’s secret was that he was in the grip of that process of archetypal transformation which has gone on through the centuries. He regarded his Faust as an opus magnum or divinum. He called it his “main business,” and his whole life was enacted within the framework of this drama. Thus, what was alive and active within him was a living substance, a suprapersonal process, the great dream of the mundus archetypus (archetypal world).

  I myself am haunted by the same dream, and from my eleventh year I have been launched upon a single enterprise which is my “main business.” My life has been permeated and held together by one idea and one goal: namely, to penetrate into the secret of the personality. Everything can be explained from this central point, and all my works relate to this one theme.

  My real scientific work began with the association experiment in 1903. I regard it as my first scientific work in the sense of an undertaking in the field of natural science. Studies in Word Association was followed by two psychiatric papers whose origin I have already discussed: “The Psychology of Dementia Praecox” and “The Content of the Psychoses.” In 1912 my book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido was published, and my friendship with Freud came to an end. From then on, I had to make my way alone.

  I had a starting point in my intense preoccupation with the images of my own unconscious. This period lasted from 1913 to 1917; then the stream of fantasies ebbed away. Not until it had subsided and I was no longer held captive inside the magic mountain was I able to take an objective view of that whole experience and begin to reflect upon it. The first question I asked myself was, “What does one do with the unconscious?” “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”6 was my answer. In Paris I had delivered a lecture on this subject in 1916;7 it was, however, not published in German until twelve years later, in greatly expanded form. In it I described some of the typical contents of the unconscious, and showed that it is by no means a matter of indifference what attitude the conscious mind takes toward them.

  Simultaneously, I was busy with preparatory work for Psychological Types, first published in 1921. This work sprang originally from my need to define the ways in which my outlook differed from Freud’s and Adler’s. In attempting to answer this question, I came across the problem of types; for it is one’s psychological type which from the outset determines and limits a person’s judgment. My book, therefore, was an effort to deal with the relationship of the individual to the world, to people and things. It discussed the various aspects of consciousness, the various attitudes the conscious mind might take toward the world, and thus constitutes a psychology of consciousness regarded from what might be called a clinical angle. I worked a great deal of literature into this book. The writings of Spitteler occupied a special place, in particular his Prometheus and Epimetheus;8 but I also discussed Schiller, Nietzsche, and the intellectual history of the classical era and the Middle Ages. I was presumptuous enough to send a copy of my book to Spitteler. He did not answer me, but shortly afterward delivered a lecture in which he declared positively that his Prometheus and Epimetheus “meant” nothing, that he might just as well have sung, “Spring is come, tra-la-la-la-la.”

  The book on types yielded the insight that every judgment made by an individual is conditioned by his personality type and that every point of view is necessarily relative. This raised the question of the unity which must compensate this diversity, and it led me directly to the Chinese concept of Tao. I have already spoken of the interplay between my inner development and Richard Wilhelm’s sending me a Taoist text. In 1929 he and I collaborated on The Secret of the Golden Flower. It was only after I had reached the central point in my thinking and in my researches, namely, the concept of the self, that I once more found my way back to the world. I began delivering lectures and taking a number of journeys. The various essays and lectures formed a kind of counterpoise to the years of interior searching. They also contained answers to the questions that were put to me by my readers and patients.9

  A subject with which I had been deeply concerned ever since my book Wandlungen und Symbole was the theory of the libido. I conceived the libido as a psychic analogue of physical energy, hence as a more or less quantitative concept, which therefore should not be defined in qualitative terms. My idea was to escape from the then prevailing concretism of the libido theory—in other words, I wished no longer to speak of the instincts of hunger, aggression, and sex, but to regard all these phenomena as expressions of psychic energy.

  In physics, too, we speak of energy and its various manifestations, such as electricity, light, heat, etc. The situation in psychology is precisely the same. Here, too, we are dealing primarily with energy, that is to say, with measures of intensity, with greater or lesser quantities. It can appear in various guises. If we conceive of libido as energy, we can take a comprehensive and unified view. Qualitative questions as to the nature of the libido—whether it be sexuality, power, hunger, or something else—recede into the background. What I wished to do for psychology was to arrive at some logical and thorough view such as is provided in the physical sciences by the theory of energetics. This is what I was after in my paper “On Psychic Energy” (1928). I see man’s drives, for example, as various manifestations of energic processes and thus as forces analogous to heat, light, etc. Just as it would not occur to the modern physicist to derive all forces from, shall we say, heat alone, so the psychologist should beware of lumping all instincts under the concept of sexuality. This was Freud’s initial error which he later corrected by his assumption of “ego-instincts.” Still later he brought in the superego, and conferred virtual supremacy upon it.

  In “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” I had discussed only my preoccupation with the unconscious, and something of the nature of that preoccupation, but had not yet said anything much about the unconscious itself. As I worked with my fantasies, I became aware that the unconscious undergoes or produces change. Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. In individual cases that transformation can be read from dreams and fantasies. In collective life it has left its deposit principally in the various religious systems and their changing symbols. Through the study of these collective transformation processes and through understanding of alchemical symbolism I arrived at the central concept of my psychology: the process of individuation.

  An essential aspect of my work is that it soon began to touch on the question of one’s view of the world, and on the relations between psychology and religion. I
went into these matters in detail first in “Psychology and Religion” (1938) and then, as a direct offshoot of this, in Paracelsica (1942). The second essay in this book, “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon,” is of particular importance from this point of view. The writings of Paracelsus contain a wealth of original ideas, including clear formulations of the questions posed by the alchemists, though these are set forth in late and baroque dress. Through Paracelsus I was finally led to discuss the nature of alchemy in relation to religion and psychology—or, to put it another way, of alchemy as a form of religious philosophy. This I did in Psychology and Alchemy (1944). Thus I had at last reached the ground which underlay my own experiences of the years 1913 to 1917; for the process through which I had passed at that time corresponded to the process of alchemical transformation discussed in that book.

  It is only natural that I should constantly have revolved in my mind the question of the relationship of the symbolism of the unconscious to Christianity as well as to other religions. Not only do I leave the door open for the Christian message, but I consider it of central importance for Western man. It needs, however, to be seen in a new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the contemporary spirit. Otherwise, it stands apart from the times, and has no effect on man’s wholeness. I have endeavored to show this in my writings. I have given a psychological interpretation of the dogma of the Trinity and of the text of the Mass—which, moreover, I compared with the visions described by Zosimos of Panopolis, a third-century alchemist and Gnostic.10 My attempt to bring analytical psychology into relation with Christianity ultimately led to the question of Christ as a psychological figure. As early as 1944, in Psychology and Alchemy, I had been able to demonstrate the parallelism between the Christ figure and the central concept of the alchemists, the lapis, or stone.

  In 1939 I gave a seminar on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. At the same time I was occupied on the studies for Psychology and Alchemy. One night I awoke and saw, bathed in bright light at the foot of my bed, the figure of Christ on the Cross. It was not quite life-size, but extremely distinct; and I saw that his body was made of greenish gold. The vision was marvelously beautiful, and yet I was profoundly shaken by it. A vision as such is nothing unusual for me, for I frequently see extremely vivid hypnagogic images.

  I had been thinking a great deal about the Anima Christi, one of the meditations from the Spiritual Exercises. The vision came to me as if to point out that I had overlooked something in my reflections: the analogy of Christ with the aurum non vulgi and the viriditas of the alchemists.11 When I realized that the vision pointed to this central alchemical symbol, and that I had had an essentially alchemical vision of Christ, I felt comforted.

  The green gold is the living quality which the alchemists saw not only in man but also in inorganic nature. It is an expression of the life-spirit, the anima mundi or filius macrocosmi, the Anthropos who animates the whole cosmos. This spirit has poured himself out into everything, even into inorganic matter; he is present in metal and stone. My vision was thus a union of the Christ-image with his analogue in matter, the filius macrocosmi. If I had not been so struck by the greenish-gold, I would have been tempted to assume that something essential was missing from my “Christian” view—in other words, that my traditional Christ-image was somehow inadequate and that I still had to catch up with part of the Christian development. The emphasis on the metal, however, showed me the undisguised alchemical conception of Christ as a union of spiritually alive and physically dead matter.

  I took up the problem of Christ again in Aion.12 Here I was concerned not with the various historical parallels but with the relation of the Christ figure to psychology. Nor did I see Christ as a figure stripped of all externalities. Rather, I wished to show the development, extending over the centuries, of the religious content which he represented. It was also important to me to show how Christ could have been astrologically predicted, and how he was understood both in terms of the spirit of his age and in the course of two thousand years of Christian civilization. This was what I wanted to portray, together with all the curious marginal glosses which have accumulated around him in the course of the centuries.

  As I delved into all these matters the question of the historical person, of Jesus the man, also came up. It is of importance because the collective mentality of his time—one might also say: the archetype which was already constellated, the primordial image of the Anthropos—was condensed in him, an almost unknown Jewish prophet. The ancient idea of the Anthropos, whose roots lie in Jewish tradition on the one hand and in the Egyptian Horus myth on the other, had taken possession of the people at the beginning of the Christian era, for it was part of the Zeitgeist. It was essentially concerned with the Son of Man, God’s own son, who stood opposed to the deified Augustus, the ruler of this world. This idea fastened upon the originally Jewish problem of the Messiah and made it a world problem.

  It would be a serious misunderstanding to regard as “mere chance” the fact that Jesus, the carpenter’s son, proclaimed the gospel and became the savior of the world. He must have been a person of singular gifts to have been able so completely to express and to represent the general, though unconscious, expectations of his age. No one else could have been the bearer of such a message; it was possible only for this particular man Jesus.

  In those times the omnipresent, crushing power of Rome, embodied in the divine Caesar, had created a world where countless individuals, indeed whole peoples, were robbed of their cultural independence and of their spiritual autonomy. Today, individuals and cultures are faced with a similar threat, namely of being swallowed up in the mass. Hence in many places there is a wave of hope in a reappearance of Christ, and a visionary rumor has even arisen which expresses expectations of redemption. The form it has taken, however, is comparable to nothing in the past, but is a typical child of the “age of technology.” This is the worldwide distribution of the UFO phenomenon (unidentified flying objects).13

  Since my aim was to demonstrate the full extent to which my psychology corresponded to alchemy—or vice versa—I wanted to discover, side by side with the religious questions, what special problems of psychotherapy were treated in the work of the alchemists. The main problem of medical psychotherapy is the transference. In this matter Freud and I were in complete agreement. I was able to demonstrate that alchemy, too, had something that corresponded to the transference— namely, the concept of the coniunctio, whose pre-eminent importance had been noted already by Silberer. Evidence for this correspondence is contained in my book, Psychology and Alchemy. Two years later, in 1946, I pursued the matter further in “Psychology of the Transference,”14 and finally my researches led to the Mysterium Coniunctionis.15

  As with all problems that concerned me personally or scientifically, that of the coniunctio was accompanied or heralded by dreams. In one of these dreams both this and the Christ problem were condensed in a remarkable image.

  I dreamed once more that my house had a large wing which I had never visited. I resolved to look at it, and finally entered. I came to a big double door. When I opened it, I found myself in a room set up as a laboratory. In front of the window stood a table covered with many glass vessels and all the paraphernalia of a zoological laboratory. This was my father’s workroom. However, he was not there. On shelves along the walls stood hundreds of bottles containing every imaginable sort of fish. I was astonished: so now my father was going in for ichthyology!

  As I stood there and looked around I noticed a curtain which bellied out from time to time, as though a strong wind were blowing. Suddenly Hans, a young man from the country, appeared. I told him to look and see whether a window were open in the room behind the curtain. He went, and was gone for some time. When he returned, I saw an expression of terror on his face. He said only, “Yes, there is something. It’s haunted in there!”

  Then I myself went, and found a door which led to my mother’s room. There was no one in it. The atmosphere was unc
anny. The room was very large, and suspended from the ceiling were two rows of five chests each, hanging about two feet above the floor. They looked like small garden pavilions, each about six feet in area, and each containing two beds. I knew that this was the room where my mother, who in reality had long been dead, was visited, and that she had set up these beds for visiting spirits to sleep. They were spirits who came in pairs, ghostly married couples, so to speak, who spent the night or even the day there.

  Opposite my mother’s room was a door. I opened it and entered a vast hall; it reminded me of the lobby of a large hotel. It was fitted out with easy chairs, small tables, pillars, sumptuous hangings, etc. A brass band was playing loudly; I had heard music all along in the background, but without knowing where it came from. There was no one in the hall except the brass band blaring forth dance tunes and marches.

  The brass band in the hotel lobby suggested ostentatious jollity and worldliness. No one would have guessed that behind this loud façade was the other world, also located in the same building. The dream-image of the lobby was, as it were, a caricature of my bonhomie or worldly joviality. But this was only the outside aspect; behind it lay something quite different, which could not be investigated in the blare of the band music: the fish laboratory and the hanging pavilions for spirits. Both were awesome places in which a mysterious silence prevailed. In them I had the feeling: Here is the dwelling of night; whereas the lobby stood for the daylight world and its superficiality.

  The most important images in the dream were the “reception room for spirits” and the fish laboratory. The former expresses in somewhat farcial fashion the coniunctio; the latter indicates my preoccupation with Christ, who himself is the fish (ichthys). Both were subjects that were to keep me on the go for more than a decade.