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symbolized by the Egyptian scarab. At the end, the dawn of the new
day should have fol owed, but instead came that intolerable
outpouring of blood--an altogether abnormal phenomenon, so it
seemed to me. But then I recal ed the vision of blood that I had had
in the autumn of that same year, and I abandoned al further attempt
to understand.
Six days later (December 18, 1913), I had the fol owing dream. I
was with an unknown, brown-skinned man, a savage, I in a lonely,
rocky mountain landscape. It was before dawn; the eastern sky was
already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard Siegfried's horn
sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had to kil him. We
were armed with rifles and lay in wait for him on a narrow path over
the rocks.
Then Siegfried appeared high up on the crest of the mountain, in
the first ray of the rising sun. On a chariot made of the bones of the
dead he drove at furious speed down the precipitous slope. When
he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck
dead.
Fil ed with disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so
great and beautiful, I turned to flee, impel ed by the fear that the
murder might be discovered. But a tremendous downfal of rain
began, and I knew that it would wipe out al traces of the dead. I had
escaped the danger of discovery; life could go on, but an
unbearable feeling of guilt remained.
When I awoke from the dream, I turned it over in my mind but was
unable to understand it. I tried therefore to fal asleep again, but a
voice within me said, "You must understand the dream, and must
do so at once!" The inner urgency mounted until the terrible moment
came when the voice said, "If you do not understand the dream, you
must shoot yourself!" In a drawer of my night table lay a loaded
revolver, and I became frightened. Then I began pondering once
again, and suddenly the meaning of the dream dawned on me.
"Why, that is the problem that is being played out in the world."
Siegfried, I thought, represents what the Germans want to achieve,
heroical y to impose their wil , have their own way. "Where there is a
wil there is a way!" I had wanted to do the same. But now that was
no longer possible. The dream showed that the attitude embodied
by Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me. Therefore it had to be
kil ed.
After the deed I felt an overpowering compassion, as though I
myself had been shot: a sign of my secret identity with Siegfried, as
wel as of the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice his
ideal and his conscious attitudes. This identity and my heroic
idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the
ego's wil , and to these one must bow.
These thoughts sufficed for the present, and I fel asleep again. The
smal , brown-skinned savage who accompanied me and had
actual y taken the initiative in the kil ing was an embodiment of the
primitive shadow. The rain showed that the tension between
consciousness and the unconscious was being resolved. Although
at the time I was not able to understand the meaning of the dream
beyond these few hints, new forces were released in me which
helped me to carry the experiment with the unconscious to a
conclusion.
In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep
descent. I even made several attempts to get to the very bottom.
The first time I reached, as it were, a depth of about a thousand
feet; the next time I found myself at the edge of a cosmic abyss. It
was like a voyage to the moon, or a descent into empty space. First
came the image of a crater, and I had the feeling that I was in the
land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world. Near
the steep slope of a rock I caught sight of two figures, an old man
with a white beard and a beautiful young girl. I summoned up my
courage and approached them as though they were real people,
and listened attentively to what they told me. The old man explained
that he was Elijah, and that gave me a shock. But the girl staggered
me even more, for she cal ed herself Salome! She was blind. What
a strange couple: Salome and Elijah. But Elijah assured me that he
and Salome had belonged together from al eternity, which
completely astounded me... They had a black serpent living with
them which displayed an unmistakable fondness for me. I stuck
close to Elijah because he seemed to be the most reasonable of
the three, and to have a clear intel igence. Of Salome was distinctly
suspicious. Elijah and I had a long conversation which, however, I
did not understand.
Natural y I tried to find a plausible explanation for the appearance of
Biblical figures in my fantasy by reminding myself that my father had
been a clergyman. But that real y explained nothing at al . For what
did the old man signify? What did Salome signify? Why were they
together? Only many years later, when I knew a great deal more
than I knew then, did the connection between the old man and the
young girl appear perfectly natural to me.
In such dream wanderings one frequently encounters an old man
who is accompanied by a young girl, and examples of such couples
are to be found in many mythic tales. Thus, according to Gnostic
tradition, Simon Magus went about with a young girl whom he had
picked up in a brothel. Her name was Helen, and she was regarded
as the reincarnation of the Trojan Helen. Klingsor and Kundry, Lao-
tzu and the dancing girl, likewise belong to this category.
I have mentioned that there was a third figure in my fantasy besides
Elijah and Salome: the large black snake. In myths the snake is a
frequent counterpart of the hero. There are numerous accounts of
their affinity. For example, the hero has eyes like a snake, or after
his death he is changed into a snake and revered as such, or the
snake is his mother, etc. In my fantasy, therefore, the presence of
the snake was an indication of a hero-myth. Salome is an anima
figure. She is blind because she does not see the meaning of
things. Elijah is the figure of the wise old prophet and represents the
factor of intel igence and knowledge; Salome, the erotic element.
One might say that the two figures are personifications of Logos
and Eros. But such a definition would be excessively intel ectual. It
is more meaningful to let the figures be what they were for me at the
time--namely,--events and experiences.
Soon after this fantasy another figure rose out of the unconscious.
He developed out of the Elijah figure. I cal ed him Philemon.
Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hel enistic
atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration. His figure first appeared to
me in the fol owing dream.
There was a blue sky, like the sea, covered not by clouds but by flat
brown clods of earth. It looked as if the clods were breaking apart
and the blue water of the sea were becoming visible between them.
But the water was the blue sky. Suddenly there appeared from the
right a winged being sailing across the sky. I saw that it was an old
man with the horns of a bul . He held a bunch of four keys, one of
which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock. He had the
wings of the kingfisher with its characteristic colors.
Since I did not understand this dream-image, I painted it in order to
impress it upon my memory. During the days when I was occupied
with the painting, I found in my garden, by the lake shore, a dead
kingfisher! I was thunderstruck, for king- fishers are quite rare in the
vicinity of Zurich and I have never since found a dead one. The body
was recently dead--at the most, two or three days-and showed no
external injuries.
Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the
crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not
produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.
Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies
I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not
consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who
spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them
myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or
people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, "If you should see
people in a room, you would not think that you had made those
people, or that you were responsible for them." It was he who taught
me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the
distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my
thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood
that there is something in me which can say things that I do not
know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against
me.
Psychological y, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a
mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if
he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden
with him, and to me he was what the Indians Cal a guru.
Whenever the outlines of a new personification appeared, I felt it
almost as a personal defeat. It meant: "Here is something else you
didn't know until now!" Fear crept over me that the succession of
such figures might be endless, that I might lose myself in bottomless
abysses of ignorance. My ego felt devalued--although the
successes I had been having in worldly affair might have reassured
me. In my darknesses (horridas nostrae mentis purga tenebras--
"cleanse the horrible darknesses of mind"--the Aurora Consurgens
[4] says) I could have wished for nothing better than a real, live guru,
someone possessing superior knowledge and ability, who would
have disentangled for me the involuntary creations of my
imagination. This task undertaken by the figure of Philemon, whom
in this respect I had wiIly-nil y to recognize as my psychagogue. And
the fact was that he conveyed to me many an il uminating idea.
More than fifteen years later a highly cultivated elderly Indian visited
me, a friend of Gandhi's, and we talked about Indian education--in
particular, about the relationship between guru and chela. I
hesitantly asked him whether he could tel me anything about the
person and character of his own guru, whereppon he replied in a
matter-of-fact tone, "Oh yes, he was shankaracharya."
"You don't mean the commentator on the Vedas who died centuries
ago?" I asked.
"Yes, I mean him," he said, to my amazement.
"Then you are referring to a spirit?" I asked.
"Of course it was his spirit," he agreed.
At that moment I thought of Philemon.
"There are ghostly gurus too," he added. "Most people have living
gurus. But there are always some who have a spirit for teacher."
This information was both il uminating and reassuring to me.
Evidently, then, I had not plummeted right out of the human world,
but had only experienced the sort of thing that could happen to
others who made similar efforts.
Later, Philemon became relativized by the emergence of yet
another figure, whom I cal ed Ka. In ancient Egypt the "king's ka"
was his earthly form, the embodied soul. In my fantasy the ka-soul
came from below, out of the earth as if out of a deep shaft. I did a
painting of him, showing him in his earth-bound form, as a herm
with base of stone and upper part of bronze.
4 An alchemical treatise ascribed to Thomas Aquinas.
High up in the painting appears a kingfisher's wing, and between it
and the head of Ka floats a round, glowing nebula of Stars. Ka's
expression has something demonic about it--one might also say,
Mephistophelian. In one hand he holds something like a colored
pagoda, or a reliquary, and in the other a stylus with which he is
working on the reliquary. He is saying, "l am he who buries the gods
in gold and gems."
Philemon had a lame foot, but was a winged spirit, whereas Ka
represented a kind of earth demon or metal demon. Philemon was
the spiritual aspect, or "meaning." Ka, on the other hand, was a
spirit of nature like the Anthroparion of Greek alchemy--with which
at the time I was stil unfamiliar? Ka was he who made everything
real, but who also obscured the halcyon spirit, Meaning, or replaced
it by beauty, the "eternal reflection."
In time I was able to integrate both figures through the study of
alchemy.
When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself,
"What am I real y doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with
science. But then what is it?" Whereupon a voice within me said, "It
is art." I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I
was writing had any connection with art. Then I thought, "Perhaps
my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is
insisting on coming through to expression." I knew for a certainty
that the voice had come from a woman. I recognized it as the voice
of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference
to me. She had become a living ligure within my mind.
Obviously what I was doing wasn't science. What then could it be
but art? It was as though these were the only alternatives in the
world. That is the way a woman's mind works. I said very
emphatical y to this voice that my fantasies had
5 The Anthroparion is a tiny man, a kind of homunculus. He is found, for
example, in the visions of Zosimos of Panopolis, an important alchemist of
the third century. To the group which includes the Anthroparion belong the
gnomes, the Dactyls of Classical antiquity, and the homunculi of the
alchemists. As the spirit of quick-silver, the alchemical Mercurius was also
an Anthroparion.--A. J.
nothing to do with art, and I felt a great inner resistance. No voice
came through, however, and I kept on writing. Then came the next
assault, and again the same assertion: "That is art." This time I
caught her and said, "No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature,"
and prepared myself for an argument. When nothing of the sort
occurred, I reflected that the "woman within me" did not have the
speech centers I had. And so I suggested that she use mine. She
did so and came through with a long statement.
I was greatly intrigued by the fact that a woman should interfere with
me from within. My conclusion was that she must be the "souI," in
the primitive sense, and I began to speculate on the reasons why
the name "anima" was given to the soul. Why was it thought of as
feminine? Later I came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a
typical, or archetypal, role in the unconscious of a man, and I cal ed
her the "anima." The corresponding figure in the unconscious of
woman I cal ed the "animus."
At first it was the negative aspect of the anima that most impressed
me. I felt a little awed by her. It was like the feeling of an invisible
presence in the room. Then a new idea came to me: in putting
down al this material for analysis I was in effect writing letters to the
anima, that is, to a part of myself with a different viewpoint from my
conscious one. I got remarks of an unusual and unexpected
character. I was like a patient in analysis with a ghost and a woman!
Every evening I wrote very conscientiously, for I thought if I did not
write, there would be no way for the anima to get at my fantasies.
Also, by writing them out I gave her no chance to twist them into
intrigues. There is a tremendous difference between intending to
tel something and actual y tel ing it. In order to be as honest as
possible with myself, I wrote everything down very careful y,
fol owing the old Greek maxim: "Give away al that thou hast, then
shalt thou receive."
Often, as I was writing, I would have peculiar reactions that threw
me off. Slowly I learned to distinguish between myself and the
interruption. When something emotional y vulgar or banal came up, I
would say to myself, "It is perfectly true that I have thought and felt
this way at some time or other, but I don't have to think and feel that
way now. I need not accept this banality of mine in perpetuity; that is
an unnecessary humiliation."
The essential thing is to differentiate oneself from these
unconscious contents by personifying them, and at the same time to
bring them into relationship with consciousness. That is the
technique for stripping them of their power. It is not too difficult to
personify them, as they always possess a certain degree of
autonomy, a separate identity of their own. Their autonomy is a
most uncomfortable thing to reconcile oneself to, and yet the very
fact that the unconscious presents itself in that way gives us the
best means of handling it.
What the anima said seemed to me ful of a deep cunning. If I had
taken these fantasies of the unconscious as art, they would have
carried no more conviction than visual perceptions, as if I were
watching a movie. I would have felt no moral obligation toward
them. The anima might then have easily seduced me into believing
that I was a misunderstood artist, and that my so-cal ed artistic
nature gave me the right to neglect reality. If I had fol owed her
voice, she would in al probability have said to me one day, "Do you
imagine the nonsense you're engaged in is real y art? Not a bit."
Thus the insinuations of the anima, the mouthpiece of the
unconscious, can utterly destroy a man. In the final analysis the
decisive factor is always consciousness, which can understand the
manifestations of the unconscious and take up a position toward
them.
But the anima has a positive aspect as wel . It is she who
communicates the images of the unconscious to the conscious
mind, and that is what I chiefly valued her for. For decades I always
turned to the anima when I felt that my emotional behavior was
disturbed, and that something had been constel ated in the
unconscious. I would then ask the anima: "Now what are you up to?
What do you see? I should like to know." After some resistance she
regularly produced an image. As soon as the image was there, the
unrest or the sense of oppression vanished. The whole energy of
these emotions was transformed into interest in and curiosity about
the image. I would speak with the anima about the images she
communicated to me, for I had to try to understand them as best I
could, just like a dream.
Today I no longer need these conversations with the anima, for I no
longer have such emotions. But if I did have them, I would deal with
them in the same way. Today I am directly conscious of the anima's
ideas because I have learned to accept the contents of the
unconscious and to understand them. I know how I must behave
toward the inner images. I can read their meaning directly from my
dreams, and therefore no longer need a mediator to communicate
them.
I wrote these fantasies down first in the Black Book; later, I
transferred them to the Red Book, which I also embel ished with
drawings? It contains most of my mandala drawings. In the Red
Book I tried an esthetic elaboration of my fantasies, but never
finished it. I became aware that I had not yet found the right
language, that I stil had to translate it into something else.
Therefore I gave up this estheticizing tendency in good time, in
favor of a rigorous process of understanding. I saw that I so much
fantasy needed firm ground underfoot, and that I must first return
whol y to reality. For me, reality meant scientific comprehension. I
had to draw concrete conclusions from the insights the unconscious
had given me--and that task was to become a life work.
It is of course ironical that I, a psychiatrist, should at almost every
step of my experiment have run into the same psychic material
which is the stuff of psychosis and is found in the insane. This is the
fund of unconscious images which fatal y confuse the mental
patient. But it is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which
has vanished from our rational age. Though such imagination is
present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even
appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to
entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the
unconscious. It is considered the path of error, of equivocation and
misunderstanding. I am reminded of Goethe's words: "Now let me
dare to open wide the
6 The Black Book consists of six blackbound, smallish leather notebooks.
The Red Book, a folio volume bound in red leather, contains the same
fantasies couched in elaborately literary form and language, and set down in
calligraphic Gothic script, in the manner of medieval manuscripts.--A. J.
gate / Past which men's steps have ever flinching trod."[7] The
second part of Faust, too, was more than a literary exercise. It is a
link in the Aurea Catena [8] which has existed from the beginnings
of philosophical alchemy and Gnosticism down to Nietzsche's
Zarathustra. Unpopular, ambiguous, and dangerous, it is a voyage
of discovery to the other pole of the world. Particularly at this time,
when I was working on the fantasies, I needed a point of support in
"this world," and I may say that my family and my professional work
were that to me. It was most essential for me to have a normal life in
the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world. My
family and my profession remained the base to which I could always
return, assuring me that I was an actual y existing, ordinary person.
The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But
my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma from a
Swiss university, I must help my patients, I have a wife and five
children, I live at 228 Seestrasse in Kusnacht--these were
actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again
and again that I real y existed, that I was not a blank page whirling
about in the winds of the spirit, like Nietzsche. Nietzsche had lost
the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than
the inner world of his thoughts--which incidental y possessed him
more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and
therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality. For me, such
irreality was the quintessence of horror, for I aimed, after al , at this
world and this life. No matter how deeply absorbed or how blown
about I was, I always knew that everything I was experiencing was
ultimately directed at this real life of mine. I meant to meet its
obligations and fulfil its meanings. My watchword was: Hic Rhodus,
hic salta!
Thus my family and my profession always remained a joyful reality
and a guarantee that I also had a normal existence. Very gradual y
the outlines of an inner change began making their appearance
within me. In 1916 I felt an urge to give shape
7 Faust, Part One.
8 The Golden (or Homeric) Chain in alchemy is the series of great wise