Memories, Dreams, Reflections

by C. G. Jung

  It is remarkable that the study of fish was attributed to my father. In the dream he was a caretaker of Christian souls, for, according to the ancient view, these are fish caught in Peter’s net. It is equally remarkable that in the same dream my mother was a guardian of departed spirits. Thus both my parents appeared burdened with the problem of the “cure of souls,” which in fact was really my task. Something had remained unfinished and was still with my parents; that is to say, it was still latent in the unconscious and hence reserved for the future. I was being reminded that I had not yet dealt with the major concern of “philosophical” alchemy, the coniunctio, and thus had not answered the question which the Christian soul put to me. Also the major work on the Grail legend, which my wife had made her life’s task, was not completed.16 I recall how often the quest for the Grail and the fisher king came to my mind while I was working on the ichthys symbol in Aion. Had it not been for my unwillingness to intrude upon my wife’s field, I would unquestionably have had to include the Grail legend in my studies of alchemy.

  My memory of my father is of a sufferer stricken with an Amfortas wound, a “fisher king” whose wound would not heal—that Christian suffering for which the alchemists sought the panacea. I as a “dumb” Parsifal was the witness of this sickness during the years of my boyhood, and, like Parsifal, speech failed me. I had only inklings. In actuality my father had never interested himself in theriomorphic Christ-symbolism. On the other hand he had literally lived right up to his death the suffering prefigured and promised by Christ, without ever becoming aware that this was a consequence of the imitatio Christi. He regarded his suffering as a personal affliction for which you might ask a doctor’s advice; he did not see it as the suffering of the Christian in general. The words of Galatians 2:20: “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,” never penetrated his mind in their full significance, for any thinking about religious matters sent shudders of horror through him. He wanted to rest content with faith, but faith broke faith with him. Such is frequently the reward of the sacrificium intellectus. “Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given.… There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” (Matthew 19:11 f.) Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation.

  The theriomorphic attributes of the gods show that the gods extend not only into superhuman regions but also into the subhuman realm. The animals are their shadows, as it were, which nature herself associates with the divine image. The “pisciculi Christianorum” show that those who imitate Christ are themselves fish—that is, unconscious souls who require the cura animarum. The fish laboratory is a synonym for the ecclesiastical “cure of souls.” And just as the wounder wounds himself, so the healer heals himself. Significantly, in the dream the decisive activity is carried out by the dead upon the dead, in the world beyond consciousness, that is, in the unconscious.

  At that stage of my life, therefore, I was still not conscious of an essential aspect of my task, nor would I have been able to give a satisfactory interpretation of the dream. I could only sense its meaning. I still had to overcome the greatest inner resistances before I could write Answer to Job.

  The inner root of this book is to be found in Aion. There I had dealt with the psychology of Christianity, and Job is a kind of prefiguration of Christ. The link between them is the idea of suffering. Christ is the suffering servant of God, and so was Job. In the case of Christ the sins of the world are the cause of suffering, and the suffering of the Christian is the general answer. This leads inescapably to the question: Who is responsible for these sins? In the final analysis it is God who created the world and its sins, and who therefore became Christ in order to suffer the fate of humanity.

  In Aion there are references to the bright and dark side of the divine image. I cited the “wrath of God,” the commandment to fear God, and the petition “Lead us not into temptation.” The ambivalent God-image plays a crucial part in the Book of Job. Job expects that God will, in a sense, stand by him against God; in this we have a picture of God’s tragic contradictoriness. This was the main theme of Answer to Job.

  There were outside forces, too, which impelled me to write this book. The many questions from the public and from patients had made me feel that I must express myself more clearly about the religious problems of modern man. For years I had hesitated to do so, because I was fully aware of the storm I would be unleashing. But at last I could not help being gripped by the problem, in all its urgency and difficulty, and I found myself compelled to give an answer. I did so in the form in which the problem had presented itself to me, that is, as an experience charged with emotion. I chose this form deliberately, in order to avoid giving the impression that I was bent on proclaiming some eternal truth. My Answer to Job was meant to be no more than the utterance of a single individual, who hopes and expects to arouse some thoughtfulness in his public. I was far from wanting to enunciate a metaphysical truth. Yet the theologians tax me with that very thing, because theological thinkers are so used to dealing with eternal truths that they know no other kinds. When the physicist says that the atom is of such and such a composition, and when he sketches a model of it, he too does not intend to express anything like an eternal truth. But theologians do not understand the natural sciences and, particularly, psychological thinking. The material of analytical psychology, its principal facts, consist of statements—of statements that occur frequently in consistent form at various places and at various times.

  The problem of Job in all its ramifications had likewise been foreshadowed in a dream. It started with my paying a visit to my long-deceased father. He was living in the country—I did not know where. I saw a house in the style of the eighteenth century, very roomy, with several rather large outbuildings. It had originally been, I learned, an inn at a spa, and it seemed that many great personages, famous people and princes, had stopped there. Furthermore, several had died and their sarcophagi were in a crypt belonging to the house. My father guarded these as custodian.

  He was, as I soon discovered, not only the custodian but also a distinguished scholar in his own right—which he had never been in his lifetime. I met him in his study, and, oddly enough, Dr. Y.—who was about my age—and his son, both psychiatrists, were also present. I do not know whether I had asked a question or whether my father wanted to explain something of his own accord, but in any case he fetched a big Bible down from a shelf, a heavy folio volume like the Merian Bible in my library. The Bible my father held was bound in shiny fishskin. He opened it at the Old Testament—I guessed that he turned to the Pentateuch—and began interpreting a certain passage. He did this so swiftly and so learnedly that I could not follow him. I noted only that what he said betrayed a vast amount of variegated knowledge, the significance of which I dimly apprehended but could not properly judge or grasp. I saw that Dr. Y. understood nothing at all, and his son began to laugh. They thought that my father was going off the deep end and what he said was simply senile prattle. But it was quite clear to me that it was not due to morbid excitement, and that there was nothing silly about what he was saying. On the contrary, his argument was so intelligent and so learned that we in our stupidity simply could not follow it. It dealt with something extremely important which fascinated him. That was why he was speaking with such intensity; his mind was flooded with profound ideas. I was annoyed and thought it was a pity that he had to talk in the presence of three such idiots as we.

  The two psychiatrists represented a limited medical point of view which, of course, also infects me as a physician. They represent my shadow—first and second editions of the shadow, father and son.

  Then the scene changed. My father and I were in front of the house, facing a kind of shed where, apparently, wood was stacked. We heard loud thumps, as if large chunks of wood were being thrown down or tossed about. I had the impression that
at least two workmen must be busy there, but my father indicated to me that the place was haunted. Some sort of poltergeists were making the racket, evidently.

  We then entered the house, and I saw that it had very thick walls. We climbed a narrow staircase to the second floor. There a strange sight presented itself: a large hall which was the exact replica of the divan-i-kaas (council hall) of Sultan Akbar at Fatehpur Sikri. It was a high, circular room with a gallery running along the wall, from which four bridges led to a basin-shaped center. The basin rested upon a huge column and formed the sultan’s round seat. From this elevated place he spoke to his councilors and philosophers, who sat along the walls in the gallery. The whole was a gigantic mandala. It corresponded precisely to the real divan-i-kaas.

  In the dream I suddenly saw that from the center a steep flight of stairs ascended to a spot high up on the wall—which no longer corresponded to reality. At the top of the stairs was a small door, and my father said, “Now I will lead you into the highest presence.” Then he knelt down and touched his forehead to the floor. I imitated him, likewise kneeling, with great emotion. For some reason I could not bring my forehead quite down to the floor—there was perhaps a millimeter to spare. But at least I had made the gesture with him. Suddenly I knew—perhaps my father had told me—that that upper door led to a solitary chamber where lived Uriah, King David’s general, whom David had shamefully betrayed for the sake of his wife Bathsheba, by commanding his soldiers to abandon Uriah in the face of the enemy.

  I must make a few explanatory remarks concerning this dream. The initial scene describes how the unconscious task which I had left to my “father,” that is, to the unconscious, was working out. He was obviously engrossed in the Bible—Genesis?—and eager to communicate his insights. The fishskin marks the Bible as an unconscious content, for fishes are mute and unconscious. My poor father does not succeed in communicating either, for the audience is in part incapable of understanding, in part maliciously stupid.

  After this defeat we cross the street to the “other side,” where poltergeists are at work. Poltergeist phenomena usually take place in the vicinity of young people before puberty; that is to say, I am still immature and too unconscious. The Indian ambience illustrates the “other side.” When I was in India, the mandala structure of the divan-i-kaas had in actual fact powerfully impressed me as the representation of a content related to a center. The center is the seat of Akbar the Great, who rules over a subcontinent, who is a “lord of this world,” like David. But even higher than David stands his guiltless victim, his loyal general Uriah, whom he abandoned to the enemy. Uriah is a prefiguration of Christ, the god-man who was abandoned by God. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” On top of that, David had “taken unto himself” Uriah’s wife. Only later did I understand what this allusion to Uriah signified: not only was I forced to speak publicly, and very much to my detriment, about the ambivalence of the God-image in the Old Testament; but also, my wife would be taken from me by death.

  These were the things that awaited me, hidden in the unconscious. I had to submit to this fate, and ought really to have touched my forehead to the floor, so that my submission would be complete. But something prevented me from doing so entirely, and kept me just a millimeter away. Something in me was saying, “All very well, but not entirely.” Something in me was defiant and determined not to be a dumb fish: and if there were not something of the sort in free men, no Book of Job would have been written several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom? And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not threaten Him who threatens it?

  Uriah, then, lives in a higher place than Akbar. He is even, as the dream said, the “highest presence,” an expression which properly is used only of God, unless we are dealing in Byzantinisms. I cannot help thinking here of the Buddha and his relationship to the gods. For the devout Asiatic, the Tathagata is the All-Highest, the Absolute. For that reason Hinayana Buddhism has been suspected of atheism—very wrongly so. By virtue of the power of the gods man is enabled to gain an insight into his Creator. He has even been given the power to annihilate Creation in its essential aspect, that is, man’s consciousness of the world. Today he can extinguish all higher life on earth by radioactivity. The idea of world annihilation is already suggested by the Buddha: by means of enlightenment the Nidana chain—the chain of causality which leads inevitably to old age, sickness, and death—can be broken, so that the illusion of Being comes to an end. Schopenhauer’s negation of the Will points prophetically to a problem of the future that has already come threatingly close. The dream discloses a thought and a premonition that have long been present in humanity: the idea of the creature that surpasses its creator by a small but decisive factor.

  After this excursion into the world of dreams, I must once more come back to my writings. In Aion I embarked upon a cycle of problems that needed to be dealt with separately. I had attempted to explain how the appearance of Christ coincided with the beginning of a new aeon, the age of the Fishes. A synchronicity exists between the life of Christ and the objective astronomical event, the entrance of the spring equinox into the sign of Pisces. Christ is therefore the “Fish” (just as Hammurabi before him was the “Ram”), and comes forth as the ruler of the new aeon. This led to the problem of synchronicity, which I discussed in my paper “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.”17

  The Christ problem in Aion finally led me to the question of how the phenomenon of the Anthropos—in psychological terms, the self—is expressed in the experience of the individual. I attempted to give an answer to this in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins (1954).18 There I was concerned with the interplay between conscious and unconscious, with the development of consciousness from the unconscious, and with the impact of the greater personality, the inner man, upon the life of every individual.

  This investigation was rounded out by the Mysterium Coniunctionis, in which I once again took up the problem of the transference, but primarily followed my original intention of representing the whole range of alchemy as a kind of psychology of alchemy, or as an alchemical basis for depth psychology. In Mysterium Coniunctionis my psychology was at last given its place in reality and established upon its historical foundations. Thus my task was finished, my work done, and now it can stand. The moment I touched bottom, I reached the bounds of scientific understanding, the transcendental, the nature of the archetype per se, concerning which no further scientific statements can be made.

  The survey I have given here of my work is, of course, only a brief summary. I really ought to say a great deal more, or a great deal less. It is an improvisation, like everything I am relating here. It is born of the moment. Those who know my work may possibly profit by it; others perhaps will be impelled to look into my ideas. My life is what I have done, my scientific work; the one is inseparable from the other. The work is the expression of my inner development; for commitment to the contents of the unconscious forms the man and produces his transformations. My works can be regarded as stations along my life’s way.

  All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within; their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out. I have never counted upon any strong response, any powerful resonance, to my writings. They represent a compensation for our times, and I have been impelled to say what no one wants to hear. For that reason, and especially at the beginning, I often felt utterly forlorn. I knew that what I said would be unwelcome, for it is difficult for people of our times to accept the counterweight to the conscious world. Today I can say that it is truly astonishing that I have had as much success as has been accorded me—far more than I ever could have expected. I have the feeling that I have done all that it was possible for me to do. Without a doubt that life work could have been larger, and could have been done better; b
ut more was not within my power.

  1 In the writings of Poimandres, a pagan Gnostic, the krater was a vessel filled with spirit, which the Creator-god sent down to earth so that those who strove for higher consciousness might be baptized in it. It was a kind of uterus of spiritual renewal and rebirth, and corresponded to the alchemical vas in which the transformation of substances took place. The parallel to this in Jung’s psychology is the inner transformation process known as individuation (see glossary).—A. J.

  2 This refers to the Papal Bull of Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus (1950), promulgating the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The new dogma affirms that Mary as the Bride is united with the Son in the heavenly bridal chamber, and as Sophia (Wisdom) she is united with the Godhead. Thus the feminine principle is brought into immediate proximity with the masculine Trinity. Cf. Jung, “Answer to Job,” in Psychology and Religion: West and East (CW 11), pp. 458 ff.—A. J.

  3 The shells falling from the sky were, interpreted psychologically, missiles coming from the “other side.” They were, therefore, effects emanating from the unconscious, from the shadow side of the mind. The happenings in the dream suggested that the war, which in the outer world had taken place some years before, was not yet over, but was continuing to be fought within the psyche. Here, apparently, was to be found the solution of problems which could not be found in the outer world.—C. G. J.

  4 Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism (New York, 1917; German edn., Vienna, 1914).

  5 Silberer committed suicide.

  6 In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW 7).

  7 “La Structure de l’inconscient,” Archives de psychologie, XVI (Geneva, 1916), 62, 152-79. See CW 7, Appendix 2, “The Structure of the Unconscious.”

  8 Carl Spitteler (1845-1924) was a Swiss writer whose best-known works, besides Prometheus and Epimetheus, include the epic Der Olympische Frühling and the novel Imago. In 1919 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.