prophet. He made his tragic claim and demolished it at the same
time; That is how people usual y behave with numinosities, and
rightly so, for in one respect they are true, in another untrue.
Numinous experience elevates and humiliates simultaneously; If
Freud had given somewhat more consideration to the
psychological truth that sexuality is numinous--both a god and devil-
-he would not have remained bound within the confines of a
biological concept. And Nietzsche might not have been carried over
the brink of the world by his intel ectual excesses if he had only held
more firmly to the foundations of human existence.
Wherever the psyche is set violently oscil ating by a numinous
experience, there is a danger that the thread by which one hangs
may be torn. Should that happen, one man tumbles into an absolute
affirmation, another into an equal y absolute negation. Nirdvandva
(freedom from opposites) is the Orient's remedy for this. I have not
forgotten that. The pendulum of the mind oscil ates between sense
and nonsense, not between right an wrong. The numinosum is
dangerous because it lures men extremes, so that a modest truth is
regarded as the truth and a minor mistake is equated with fatal
error. Tout passe--yesterday's truth is today's deception, and
yesterday's false inference may be tomorrow's revelation. This is
particularly so in pschological matters, of which, if truth were told,
we stil know very little. We are stil a long way from understanding
what signifies that nothing has any existence unless some smal --
and oh, so transitory--consciousness has become aware of it.
My conversation with Freud had shown me that he feared that the
numinous light of his sexual insights might be extinguished by a
"black tide of mud." Thus a mythological situation had arisen: the
struggle between light and darkness. That explains its numinosity,
and why Freud immediately fel back on his dogma as a religious
means of defense. In my next book, Wandungen und Symbole der
Libido,[5] which dealt with the hero's struggle for freedom, Freud's
curious reaction prompted me to investigate further this archetypal
theme and its mythological background.
What with the sexual interpretation on the one hand and the power
drive of dogma on the other I was led, over the years, to give
consideration of the problem of typology. It was necessary to study
the polarity and dynamics of the psyche. And I also embarked upon
an investigation extending over several decades of "the black tide
of mud of occultism"--that is to say, I tried to understand the
conscious and unconscious historical assumptions underlying our
contemporary psychology.
It interested me to hear Freud's views on precognition and on
parapsychology in general. When I visited him in Vienna in 1909 I
asked him what he thought of these matters. Because of his
materialistic prejudice, he rejected this entire complex of questions
as nonsensical, and did so in terms of so shal ow a positivism that I
had difficulty in checking the sharp retort on the tip of my tongue. It
was some years before he recognized the seriousness of
parapsychology and acknowledged the factuality of "occult"
phenomena.
While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It
was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming
red-hot--a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud
report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both
started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us.
I said to Freud: "There, that is an example of a so-cal ed catalytic
exteriorization phenomenon.
"Oh come," he exclaimed. "That is sheer bosh."
"It is not," I replied. "You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove
my point I now predict that in a moment there wil be another such
loud report!" Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the
same detonation went off in the bookcase,
5 Published in 1912; English trans.; Psychology of the Unconscious (1917).
Rev.edn., Symbole der Wandlung (1952); English trans.: Symbols of
Transformation (CW 5. 1956)
To this day I do not know what gave me this certainty. But I knew
beyond al doubt that the report would come again. Freud only
stared aghast at me. I do not know what was in his mind, or what his
look meant. In any case, this incident aroused his mistrust of me,
and I had the feeling that I had done something against him. I never
afterward discussed the incident with him.[6]
The year 1909 proved decisive for our relationship. I had been
invited to lecture on the association experiment at Clark University
in Worcester, Massachusetts. Independently, Freud had also
received an invitation, and we decided to travel together. We met in
Bremen, where Ferenczi joined us. In Bremen the much-discussed
incident of Freud's fainting fit occurred. It was provoked--indirectly--
by my interest in the "peat-bog corpses." I knew that in certain
districts of Northern Germany; these so-cal ed bog corpses were to
be found. They are the bodies of prehistoric men who either
drowned in the marshes or were buried there. The bog water in
which the bodies lie contains humic acid, which consumes the
bones and simultaneously tans the skin, so that it and the hair are
perfectly preserved. In essence this is a process of natural
mummification, in the course of which the bodies are pressed flat
by the weight of the peat. Such remains are occasional y turned up
by peat diggers in Holstein, Denmark, and Sweden.
Having read about these peat-bog corpses, I recal ed them when
we were in Bremen, but, being a bit muddled, confused them with
the mummies in the lead cel ars of the city. This interest of mine got
on Freud's nerves. "Why are you so concerned with these
corpses?" he asked me several times. He was inordinately vexed
by the whole thing and during one such conversation, while we were
having dinner together, he sudden fainted. Afterward he said to me
that he was convinced that al this chatter about corpses meant I
had death--wishes toward him. I was more than surprised by this
interpretation. I was alarmed by the intensity of his fantasies--so
strong that, obviously, they could cause him to faint.
In a similar connection Freud once more suffered a fainting
6 For Freud's reaction to the incident, see Appendix I, pp. 361-63.
7 See Appendix II, pp. 365-68.
fit in my presence. This was during the Psychoanalytic Congress in
Munich in 1912. Someone had turned the conversation to
Amenophis IV (Ikhnaton). The point was made that as a result of his
negative attitude toward his father he had destroyed his father's
cartouches on the steles, and that at the back of his great creation
of a monotheistic religion there lurked a father complex. This sort of
thing irritated me, and I attempted to argue that Amenophis had
been a creative and profoundly religious person whose acts could
not be explained by personal resistances toward his father. On the
contrary, I said, he had held the memory of his father in honor, and
his zeal for destruction had been directed only against the name of
the god Amon, which he had everywhere annihilated; it was also
chiseled out of the cartouches of his father Amon-hotep. Moreover,
other pharaohs had replaced the names of their actual or divine
forefathers on monuments and statues by their own, feeling that they
had a right to do so since they were incarnations of the same god.
Yet they, I pointed out, had inaugurated neither a new style nor a
new religion.
At that moment Freud slid off his chair in a faint. Everyone clustered
helplessly around him. I picked him up, carried him into the next
room, and laid him on a sofa. As I was carrying him, he half came
to, and I shal never forget the look he cast at me. In his weakness
he looked at me as if I were his father. Whatever other causes may
have contributed to this faint--the atmosphere was very tense--the
fantasy of father-murder was common to both cases.
At the time Freud frequently made al usions indicating that he
regarded me as his successor. These hints were embarrassing to
me, for I knew that I would never be able to uphold his views
properly, that is to say, as he intended them. On the other hand I
had not yet succeeded in working out my criticisms in such a
manner that they would carry any weight with him, and my respect
for him was too great for me to want to force him to come final y to
grips with my own ideas.--I was by no means charmed by the
thought of being burdened, virtual y over my own head, with the
leadership of a party. In the first place that sort of thing was not in
my nature; in the second place I could not sacrifice my intel ectual
independence; and in the third place such luster was highly
unwelcome to me since it would only deflect me from my real aims. I
was concerned with investigating truth, not with questions of
personal prestige.
The trip to the United States which began in Bremen in 1909 lasted
for seven weeks. We were together every day, and analyzed each
other's dreams. At the time I had a number of important ones, but
Freud could make nothing of them. I did not regard that as any
reflection upon him, for it sometimes happens to the best analyst
that he is unable to unlock the riddle of a dream. It was a human
failure, and I would never have wanted to discontinue our dream
analyses on that account. On the contrary, they meant a great deal
to me, and I found our relationship exceedingly valuable. I regarded
Freud as an older, more mature and experienced personality, and
felt like a son in that respect. But then something happened which
proved to be a severe blow to the whole relationship.
Freud had a dream--I would not think it right to air the problem it
involved. I interpreted it as best I could, but added that a great deal
more could be said about it if he would supply me with some
additional details from his private life. Freud's response to these
words was a curious look--a look of the utmost suspicion. Then he
said, "But I cannot risk my authority!" At that moment he lost it
altogether. That sentence burned itself into my memory; and in it the
end of our relationship was already foreshadowed. Freud was
placing personal authority above truth.
As I have already said, Freud was able to interpret the dreams I
was then having only incompletely or not at al . They were dreams
with col ective contents, containing, a great deal of symbolic
material. One in particular was important to me, for it led me for the
first time to the concept of the "col ective unconscious" and thus
formed a kind of prelude to my book, Wendlungen and Symbole der
Libido.[8]
This was the dream. I was in a house I did not know, which had two
stories. It was "my house." I found myself in the upper
8 Psychology of the Unconscious; rev. edn.: Symbols of Transformation
(CW 5).
story, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old Pieces
in rococo style. On the wal s hung a number of precious old
paintings. I wondered that this should be my house, and thought,
"Not bad." But then it occtured to me that I did not know what the
lower floor looked like. Descending the stairs, I reached the ground
floor. There everything was much older, and I realized that this part
of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
The furnishings were medieval; the floors were of red brick.
Everywhere it was rather dark. I went from one room to another,
thinking, "Now I real y must explore the whole house." I came upon a
heavy door, and opened it. Beyond it, I discovered a stone stairway
that led down into the cel ar. Descending again, I found myself in a
beautiful y vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient.
Examining the wal s, I discovered layers of brick among the
ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I
saw this I knew that the wal s dated from Roman times. My interest
by now was intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of
stone slabs, and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pul ed
it, the stone slab lifted, and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone
steps leading down into the depths. These, too, I descended, and
entered a low cave cut into the rock. Thick dust lay on the floor, and
in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains
of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skul s, obviously very
old and half disintegrated. Then I awoke.
What chiefly interested Freud in this dream were the two skul s. He
returned to them repeatedly, and urged me to find a wish in
connection with them. What did I think about these skul s? And
whose were they? I knew perfectly wel , of course, what he was
driving at: that secret death-wishes were concealed in the dream.
"But what does he real y expect of me?" I thought to myself. Toward
whom would I have death wishes? I felt violent resistance to any
such interpretation. I also had some intimation of what the dream
might real y mean. But I did not then trust my own judgment, and
wanted to hear Freud's opinion. I wanted to leam from him.
Therefore I submitted to his intention and said, "My wife and my
sister-in-law"--after al , I had to name someone whose death was
worth the wishing!
I was newly married at the time and knew perfectly wel that there
was nothing within myself which pointed to such wishes. But I would
not have been able to present to Freud my own ideas on an
interpretation of the dream without encountering incomprehension
and vehement resistance. I did not feel up to quarreling with him,
and I also feared that I might lose friendship if I insisted on my own
point of view. On the other, hand, I wanted to know what he would
make of my answer, and what his reaction would be if I deceived
him by saying something that suited his theories. And so I told him a
lie.
I was quite aware that my conduct was not above reproach, but a la
guerre, comme a la guerre! It would have been impossible for me to
afford him any insight into my mental world. The gulf between it and
his was too great. In fact Freud seemed greatly relieved by my
reply. I saw from this that he was completely helpless in dealing with
certain kinds of dreams and had to take refuge in his doctrine. I
realized that it was up to me to find out the real meaning of the
dream.
It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the
psyche--that is to say, of my then state of consciousness, with
hitherto unconscious additions. Consciousness was represented by
the salon. It had an inhabited atmosphere, in spite of its antiquated
style.
The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The
deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene came. In the
cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of
the primitive man within myself--a world which can scarcely be
reached or il uminated by consciousness. The primitive psyche of
man borders on the life of the animal soul, just as the caves of
prehistoric times were usual y inhabit by animals before men laid
claim to them.
During this period I became aware of how keenly I felt the difference
between Freud's intel ectual attitude and mine. I had grown up in the
intensely historical atmosphere of Basel at the end of the nineteenth
century, and had acquired, thanks reading the old philosophers,
some knowledge of the history of Psychology. When I thought about
dreams and the contents of the unconscious, I never did so without
making historical comparisons; in my student days I always used
Krug's old dictionary of philosophy. I was especial y familiar with the
writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Theirs was
the world which had formed the atmosphere of my first-story salon.
By contrast, I had the impression that Freud's intel ectual history
began with Buchner, Moleschott, Du Bois-Reymond, and Darwin.
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 cel ar, and final y 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 col ective 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 "facade"
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 intentian 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 al 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 experience 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 Zurich 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 Volker[9]--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 al 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 Mil er. 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.
9 The Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples (Leipzig and
Darmstadt, 1810-23).
They operated like a catalyst upon the stored-up and stil disorderly
ideas within me. Gradual y, 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 real y
there, but was the ghost of a customs official who had died years
ago. "He is one of those who stil 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 al usion 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 stil
meant to me a superior personality, upon whom I projected the
father, and at the time of the dream this projection was stil 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 stil thought highly of Freud, but at the
same time I was critical of him. This divided attitude is a sign that I
was stil unconscious of the situation and had not come to any
resolution of it. This characteristic of al 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 col aborating 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 stil
walking ghost of a custom inspector. Could that be the death-wish
which Freud had insinuated I felt toward him? I coul