by Ruth Snowden
THE IMPORTANCE OF MYTHOLOGY
Jung had been interested in mythology for many years. During his time working at Burghölzli, he began to realize that many myth-like themes emerged in the dreams and fantasies of the insane. Current thinking in psychiatry said that people carried daily ‘residues’ – images from normal day-to-day experiences that were consciously forgotten but were stored away in the unconscious. Much of the contents of a neurosis could be explained by looking at stored fragments of this kind which sprang from events that had occurred in the patient’s life. But many of Jung’s psychotic patients produced imagery that was strikingly universal, and difficult to explain away merely as a product of the person’s personal history and day-to-day experience. This imagery was often similar to that found in the kind of dream that people living in primal societies commonly called a ‘big dream’. Jung began to wonder whether it was possible that alongside all the information collected from their own everyday lives, people also carried ‘archaic residues’, by which he meant little snippets of inherited impressions and imagery, stored in myth-like forms. From this idea he began to develop his theories about the collective unconscious, which he saw as the deepest layer of the unconscious, extending beyond the individual psyche. He realized that myths are important to all humans and that they seem to express these unconscious ideas in accessible story form.
Many of the images contained in myths are what Jung called ‘archetypes’, which are recurring images or patterns of thinking that represent typical human experiences. Nowadays we are familiar with this idea – most people understand what is meant by an ‘archetypal father figure’, for example. Jung began to see how mythology, archetypes and the collective unconscious were all linked together. He realized that myths were stories that helped people to understand common psychic processes and the ways in which the human psyche develops on its journey through life. Such ideas appear worldwide in fairy stories, mythology, and in the dreams and fantasies of both ‘normal’ people and those suffering from mental illness. Myths are healing to the psyche in a way that intellectual thought cannot be, because they connect us to the deeper levels of our being: they connect us to what Jung called an ‘age-old animal power’, and they give us a sense of religious experience. Myths arise from archetypes, which are not intellectually invented but are always there, forming the structure of the primordial collective unconscious.
During his period of crisis, Jung found many references in literature to people who had undergone a similar confrontation with their own unconscious. He read about the shamanic soul quests of people in primal cultures, and stories of mythic heroes who went off on a ‘Nekyia’, or ‘night-sea journey’. This was a very dangerous form of quest where the hero was likely to be swallowed up by vast sea monsters or by an all-devouring female. For Jung, this female figure seemed to represent the mother to whom we are normally attached in our childhood and from whom we must eventually separate our own psyche. Sometimes the hero has to be swallowed up by a monster in order to find re-birth. This mythical idea corresponded very closely with what was going on in Jung’s own inner crisis. He seemed to live under a constant inner pressure, at times so strong that he thought he must have some serious psychic disturbance. But he also realized that the dreams and visions that were flooding through his troubled psyche were somehow connected to the ideas expressed in myths. They were the substance of what he called the mythopoeic imagination, which has tended to be overlooked in our rational age.
Such imaginative ideas are everywhere, but, as Jung had already discovered, they tend to be found mainly at the unconscious level and are often treated with dread and suspicion when they emerge into consciousness. Many people are scared of what goes on in their own unconscious and see any investigation as being dangerous – they are afraid that they might lose control. Indeed, Jung knew all too well from his clinical work how dangerous the unconscious could be, and at times he feared that he might become psychotic like his patients. He felt a huge resistance and an almost overwhelming sense of fear at the incessant flood of fantasies that was pouring out of his unconscious, but rather than trying to suppress them he surrendered himself to the process, trying desperately to understand what all the visions meant.
Jung noticed that mythical figures began to feature frequently in his dreams. One of these was Siegfried, a figure from Germanic myth. Siegfried was the archetypal hero who brandished a magical sword, slew dragons, discovered caves full of treasure and won the hand of a beautiful princess. Jung had long had a secret sense of identity with this hero, but in his dream he actually killed Siegfried. In the dream Jung found himself in a lonely, rocky landscape, with a brown-skinned stranger. It was early dawn and the eastern sky was already growing light. When Siegfried’s horn sounded over the mountains, Jung knew that he and the stranger had to kill him. They lay in ambush with rifles, and when Siegfried appeared, driving at furious speed in a chariot made from the bones of the dead, they shot at him and killed him. A ghastly feeling of guilt flooded through Jung, but there was an immediate downpour of rain that he knew would erase all trace of their heinous deed.
Jung was at first unable to understand this dream, but he knew that it was imperative for him to do so – in fact, an inner voice told him that he must understand its message or else shoot himself. At last he grasped what it meant: Siegfried represented the urge to achieve in a heroic way, imposing his will upon others; the dream showed Jung that he had to look beyond the will of his ego, sacrificing his conscious ideals and attitudes, in order to surrender to the powerful messages of the unconscious.
Keeping his grip on reality was a real struggle for Jung at this time, and he realized that it was essential to maintain a normal life in the outer world in order to counterbalance his excursions into his inner world. His health suffered during his mental crisis and he went through periods of insomnia and stomach trouble. Fortunately, his family and his work acted as anchors, reminding him that he was a real person and preventing him from becoming totally ungrounded. Jung was determined that he would remain somehow in control, and began to study his own crisis almost as if he were both patient and doctor at the same time. He felt lost, without a frame of reference, and so he began to look around for ways to chart his journey.
Creative play
Jung tried going over all the details of his childhood in order to find a cause for his disturbances. He went through this process twice, but it seemed to get him nowhere, so in the end he decided that the only thing to do was to be less analytical and try submitting to the impulses of his own unconscious. This had interesting results. The first thing that came into his head seemed to be a memory of a passionate interest he had had when he was about ten years old. He had endlessly used building blocks to construct little houses, castles and villages. Later on he had used ordinary stones, with mud for mortar. As the memory welled up, he felt very emotional and excited, and he realized that the small boy he had once been was still inside him somewhere, and possessed a creative life that his adult self lacked. He decided to re-enact the childish phase by indulging in similar games. In doing this, Jung was one of the first to recognize the existence of the ‘inner child’ that is often encountered in modern therapies. At first he felt self-conscious and humiliated to be playing like a child, but he soon found that it was a good way of getting back in touch with the true essence of himself at that age.
Jung collected suitable stones and began to build. He made cottages, a castle, a village and a church, but he hesitated to add an actual altar within the church. Then, one day, walking by the lake, he found a perfect little red stone pyramid, about 4 cm high. He was delighted, realizing that this must be the altar for his church. As he put it in position he was reminded of the phallus dream he had had when he was very young – the strange god seated upon his underground throne. He felt immensely satisfied by this.
Figure 3.1 Jung would play every afternoon until his patients arrived.
Every afternoon Jung would play until his patie
nts arrived, and then again in the evening. Gradually, his thoughts clarified and he found that he was able to understand far more about his own psychic world. He developed an inner certainty that what he was doing was discovering his own myth. The building work acted like a trigger, releasing a whole stream of fantasies that he carefully wrote down. For the rest of his life, he used such creative play as an invaluable therapeutic tool. Whenever he came up against a mental block, he would paint or work in stone, and he always found that this would get his ideas flowing again so that he could begin to write. Creative play was also to become a very important aspect of Jungian analysis.
Dreams, visions and fantasies
Jung found that patients would often report their dreams and fantasies to him spontaneously, and he would then ask them questions in order to try to unravel what they meant. Interpretations of the dreams and fantasies seemed to follow of their own accord, from the patients’ replies and associations. Jung deliberately avoided all theoretical rules – he simply tried to help people to understand their own imagery.
Meanwhile, he was also fascinated by his own dreams and he spent a lot of time trying to interpret them, although this was sometimes very difficult. For example, he dreamed of a long row of corpses, each dressed in different clothes going back through the ages to a twelfth-century crusader dressed in chain mail. Each corpse in turn stirred and began to come to life as he looked at it. Jung realized that this particular dream was speaking to him about aspects of the unconscious that are handed down from the ancestors and can still stir and come to life in our own psyches. He felt that the dream tied in with the ideas that he was developing about archetypes and the collective unconscious.
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Insight
Generally speaking, the word archetype means an original model (sometimes called a prototype), or typical specimen. Jung used the word to refer to commonly recurring images or patterns of thinking that represent typical human experiences.
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In 1913, Jung began to feel his own immense inner pressure moving outwards, ‘as though there were something in the air’. The very atmosphere seemed darker, as if his inner oppression was becoming a concrete reality. During a journey, he had an overpowering vision of a huge flood that rose up and covered the whole of Northern Europe. The mountains rose higher to protect Switzerland, but all around he saw the rubble of civilization and drowned bodies in a vast sea that turned to blood. The whole vision lasted an hour and made him feel quite ill. Two weeks later it returned, with even more intensity.
This gruesome experience was followed by a recurring dream that began in the spring of 1914. In his dream, Jung saw the land frozen to ice in summer time. The First World War broke out in August, and Jung knew then that he had to try to understand how his own inner experiences had coincided with the outer experiences of mankind. He realized that the only way to approach this question was to begin to record carefully and study his own fantasies and dreams. He began by writing down ideas that came to him in the course of his creative play. A huge stream of fantasies began to be released and Jung felt that he ‘stood helpless before an alien world’. This was hard to cope with and he felt as if he was enduring an endless series of inner thunderstorms. He knew that he was strong, however, and that he had to find meaning in it all, not only for his own sake, but also for the sake of his patients, so that he might better understand their problems. He went on struggling with his visions and writing everything down, often having to resort to yoga exercises to try to control his overwrought emotions. He knew that this work was of paramount importance and had to take precedence over everything else. He only did yoga until he felt calm, and then once more he would allow the visions and fantasies to have free reign. He realized that what he was actually doing was allowing himself to find imagery that expressed his emotions – had he not done this, then he might have fallen into a neurosis or even ultimately a full-blown psychosis.
Discovering archetypes
Jung found that as he wrote about his dreams and visions he was often using ‘high-flown language’. He found this pomposity rather embarrassing, and often felt strong resistance to his fantasies, but he tried to treat the whole thing as a sort of scientific experiment. He knew all too well the dangers of becoming prey to his own fantasies, and how easy it would be to slide into psychosis. Frequently, he imagined himself going down a steep descent, until he reached levels as deep as 300 m. After that, he felt himself in a cosmic abyss of empty space. He felt as if he was entering the land of the dead, and there he began to encounter strange beings.
In one vision he met two figures: a beautiful young girl, accompanied by an old man with a beard. These figures were examples of what Jung called archetypes – recurring images or patterns of thinking that represent a typical human experience. These form the basic content of religion, myth, art and legend. They are part of the collective unconscious and they emerge in the individual psyche through dreams and visions. Encounters with archetypal figures are often accompanied by a feeling of a numinous presence, and the language they use is often the ‘high-flown’ language that Jung referred to.
Jung felt that the old man in his vision corresponded to Elijah, an Old Testament prophet, and the young girl to Salome, the archetypal seductress found in the New Testament. He thought that they made a strange couple, but to his astonishment Elijah assured him that they had belonged together for all eternity. Years later, he came to realize that this odd couple indeed appeared frequently together in myths. Jung’s Elijah character is the wise old prophet who represents intellect and knowledge, while Salome represents the erotic element. In Jung’s vision they were also accompanied by a large black snake, which Jung explains is a frequent counterpart to the mythic hero.
After a while, Jung discovered another archetypal figure, which seemed to evolve out of the Elijah figure. This was Philemon, a pagan sage with Gnostic ideas.
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Insight
Gnostic means relating to knowledge, especially occult, mystical knowledge. Philemon’s insights were related to Gnosticism, which is an ancient esoteric practice. (You can read more about this in Chapter 8.)
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Philemon first appeared to Jung in a dream, as an old man flying out of a blue sky with clods of earth floating in it. He had the horns of a bull and the wings of a kingfisher. He carried a bunch of four keys, one of which he held as if ready to open a lock. Jung painted a picture of this apparition and, to his great astonishment, shortly afterwards found a newly dead kingfisher in his garden by the lakeshore. This was most odd, as kingfishers were rare in the area. Jung saw the incident as an example of the kind of meaningful coincidence that he called synchronicity (see Chapter 8).
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Insight
Causality is the idea that related events are connected by cause and effect. Synchronicity is the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events.
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He said that coincidences of this sort provide a crucial insight that there are things in the psyche that we do not produce – they produce themselves and have their own life. He began to have lengthy conversations with Philemon and even went for walks with him in the garden. Philemon explained to Jung that we do not generate our own thoughts – they have an external reality of their own, just like birds in the air, or people in a room.
Figure 3.2 Our thoughts have an external reality of their own.
Jung commented that it was Philemon who taught him ‘psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche’. He realized that there was something within him that could talk about matters that he did not consciously know about, and which might even act against him. Archetypal encounters were very important because they enabled Jung to give a personal form to aspects of his unconscious. Because they were in some way ‘separate’ from himself, he was able to bring them into relationship with his conscious mind and not get too bogged down in some of their more disturbing utterances.
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hilemon became an important guru to Jung – psychologically he seemed to have superior insight. Years later, Jung met a very cultivated Indian who was a friend of Gandhi. He was pleased when he found that this man had no problem with the idea of a spirit guru, and indeed said that many people have them.
Another archetypal fantasy figure called Ka arose in Jung’s mind. Ka seemed to come from deep in the earth. Jung painted a picture of him as a herm – a stone pillar with a head on top – with his upper part made of bronze. Philemon was a winged spirit and represented the spiritual aspect, whereas Ka was the spirit of nature, a kind of earth demon who could obscure the halcyon spirit of meaning, or replace it with beauty.
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Insight
Halcyon means calm, peaceful and happy; the word also refers to kingfishers.
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Jung saw it as ironic that he, a psychiatrist, was encountering the same kind of imagery in his own unconscious that he observed emerging from the minds of the insane. But he realized that the sea of unconscious imagery which confused his mental patients was also the matrix of the collective unconscious – the mythopoeic imagination. Eventually he was able to understand the archetypal figures of Philemon and Ka much better and integrate them through his study of alchemy.