Carl Jung | "Man and his Symbols" - Part 1 | Audiobook (Improved Audio)

man and his symbols by Carl G Yung and M L fun France Joseph L Henderson Yolanda yakobi and yela jaffy copyright 1964 JG Ferguson publishing accept chapter 2 entitled ancient myths and Modern Man by Dr Joseph El Henderson where copyright in this chapter within the United States of America is expressly disclaimed Nar ated by Dennis Rooney annotation this Layman's introduction to yung's psychology consists of five essays dealing with various aspects of his philosophy and thought for readers fascinated or puzzled by The Mysterious World of dreams and psychic symbols 1964 from the book jacket the first

and only work in which Carl G Yung the world famous twis psychologist explains to the general reader his greatest contribution to our knowledge of the human mind the theory of the importance of symbolism particularly as revealed in dreams but for a dream this book would never have been written that dream described by John Freeman in the forward convinced Yung that he could indeed should explain his ideas to those who have no special knowledge of psychology at the age of 83 Yong worked out the complete plan for this book including the sections that he wished his

four closest Associates to write he devoted the closing months of his life to editing the work and writing his own key section which he completed only 10 days before his death throughout the book Yung emphasizes that man can achieve wholeness only through a knowledge and acceptance of the unconscious a knowledge acquired through dreams and their symbols every dream is a direct personal and meaningful communication to the dreamer a communication that uses the symbols common to all mankind but uses them always in an entirely individual way which can be interpreted only by an entirely individual key

more than 500 illustrations complement the text and provide a unique running commentary on yung's thought they show the nature and function of Dreams explore the symbolic meaning of Modern Art and reveal the psychological meanings of the ordinary experiences of everyday life they are a reinforcement to yung's thought and an integral part of man and his symbols introduction John Freeman the origins of this book are sufficiently unusual to be of interest and they bear a direct relation to its contents and what it sets out to do so let me tell you just how it came to

be written one day in the spring of 1959 the British Broadcasting Corporation invited me to interview for British television Dr Carl Gustaf Yung the interview was to be done in depth I knew little enough at that time about Yung and his work and I at once went to make his acquaintance at his beautiful Lakeside home near Zurich that was the beginning of a friendship that meant a great deal to me and I hope gave some pleasure to Young in the last years of his life the television interview has no further place in this story except

that it was accounted successful and that this book is by an odd combination of circumstances an end product of that success One Man Who Saw Yung on the screen was forong Fus managing director of aldus books fogus had been keenly interested in the development of modern psychology since his childhood when he lived near the Freud in Vienna and as he watched Yung talking about his life and work and ideas fogus suddenly reflected what a Pity it was that while the general outline of Freud's work was well known to educated readers all over the Western World

Yung had never managed to break through to the general public and was always considered too difficult for popular reading fogus in fact is the creator of man and his symbols having sensed from the TV screen that a warm personal relation existed between Yung and myself he asked me whether I would join him in trying to persuade Yung to set out some of his more important and basic ideas in language and at a length that would be intelligible and interesting to non-specialist adult readers I jumped at the idea and set off once more to Zurich determined

that I could convince Yung of the value and importance of such a work Yung listened to me in his garden for 2 hours almost without interruption and then said no he said it in the nicest possible ible way but with great firmness he had never in the past tried to popularize his work and he wasn't sure that he could successfully do so now anyway he was old and rather tired and not keen to take on such a long commitment about which he had so many doubts yung's friends will all agree with me that he was

a man of most positive decision he would weigh up a problem with care and without hurry but when he did give his answer it was usually final I returned to London greatly disappointed but convinced that yungk refusal was the end of the matter so it might have been but for two intervening factors that I had not foreseen one was the pertinacity of fogus who insisted on making one more approach to Yung before accepting defeat the other was an event that as I look back on it still astonishes me the television program was as I have

said accounted successful it brought Yung a great many letters from all sorts of people many of them ordinary folk with no medical or psychological training who had been captivated by the commanding presence the humor and the modest charm of this very great man and who had glimpsed in his view of life and human personality something that could be helpful to them and young was very pleased not simply at getting letters his mail was enormous at all times but at getting them from people who would normally have no contact with him it was at this moment

that dreamed a dream of the greatest importance to him and as you read this book you will understand just how important that can be he dreamed that instead of sitting in his study and talking to the great doctors and psychiatrists who used to call on him from all over the world he was standing in a public place and addressing a multitude of people who were listening to him with wrapped attention and understanding what he said when a week or two later fogus renewed his request that Yung should undertake a new book designed not for the

clinic or the Philosopher's study but for the people in the marketplace Yung allowed himself to be persuaded he laid down two conditions first that the book should not be a single-handed book but the collective effort of himself and a group of his closest followers through whom he had attempted to perpetuate his methods and his teaching secondly that I should be entrusted with the task of coordinating the work and resolving any problems that might arise is between the authors and the Publishers lest it should seem that this introduction transgresses the bounds of reasonable modesty let me

say at once that I was gratified by this second condition but within measure for it very soon came to my knowledge that yung's reason for selecting me was essentially that he regarded me as being of reasonable but not exceptional intelligence and without the slightest serious knowledge of psychology thus I was dong the average reader of this book what I could understand would be intelligible to all who would be interested what I boggled at might possibly be too difficult or obscure for some not unduly flattered by this estimate of my role I have nonetheless scrupulously insisted

sometimes I fear to the exasperation of the authors on having every paragraph written and if necessary Rewritten to a degree of clarity and directness that enables me to say with confidence that this book in its entirety is designed for for and addressed to the general reader and that the complex subjects it deals with are treated with a rare and encouraging Simplicity after much discussion the comprehensive subject of this book was agreed to be man and his symbols and Yung himself selected as his collaborators in the work Dr Marie Lise Fon France of Zurich perhaps his

closest professional Confidant and friend Dr Joseph El Henderson of San Francisco one of the most prominent and trusted of American unions Mrs anela jaffy of Zurich who in addition to being an experienced analyst was yung's confidential private secretary and his biographer and Dr Yolanda yakobi who after Yung himself is the most experienced author among yung's Zurich Circle these four people were chosen partly because of their skill and experience in the particular subjects allocated to them and partly because all of them were completely trust by Yung to work unselfishly to his instructions as members of a

team yung's personal responsibility was to plan the structure of the whole book to supervise and direct the work of his collaborators and himself to write the keynote chapter approaching the unconscious the last year of his life was devoted almost entirely to this book and when he died in June 1961 his own section was complete he finished it in fact only some days before his final illness and his colleagues chapters had all been approved by him in draft after his death Dr Fon France assumed overall responsibility for the completion of the book in accordance with yung's

Express instructions the subject matter of man and his symbols and its outline were therefore laid down and in detail by Yung the chapter that bears his name is his work and apart from some fairly extensive editing to improve it its intelligibility to the general reader nobody else's It Was Written incidentally in English the remaining chapters were written by the various authors to yung's Direction and under his supervision the final editing of the complete work after yung's death has been done by Dr Fon France with a patience understanding and good humor that leave the Publishers and

myself greatly in her debt finally as to the contents of the book itself yung's thinking has colored the world of modern psychology more than many of those with casual knowledge realized such familiar terms for instance as extrovert introvert and archetype are all yian Concepts borrowed and sometimes misused by others but his overwhelming contribution to psychological understanding is his concept of the unconscious not like the unconscious of Freud merely a sort of of repressed desires but a world that is just as much a vital and real part of the life of an individual as the conscious

cogitating world of the ego and infinitely wider and richer the language and the people of the unconscious are symbols and the means of communications dreams thus an examination of man and his symbols is in effect an examination of man's relation to his own unconscious and since in yung's view the unconscious is the great guide friend and adviser of the conscious this book is related in the most direct terms to the study of human beings and their spiritual problems we know the unconscious and communicate with it a two-way service principally by dreams and all through this

book above all in yung's own chapter you will find a quite remarkable emphasis placed on the importance of dreaming in the life of the individual it would be an impertinence on my part to attempt to interpret yung's work to readers many of whom will surely be far better qualified to understand it than I am my role remember was merely to serve as a sort of intelligibility filter and by no means As an interpreter nevertheless I venture to offer two general points that seem important to me as a Layman and that may possibly be helpful to

other non-experts the first is about dreams to yans the dream is not a kind of standardized cryptogram that can be decoded by a glossery of symbol meanings it is an integral important and personal expression of the individual unconscious it is just as real as any other phenomenon attaching to the individual the dreamer's individual unconscious is communicating with the dreamer alone and is selecting symbols for its purpose that have meaning to the dreamer and to nobody else thus the interpretation of Dreams whether by the analyst or by the dreamer himself is for the yian psychologist an

entirely personal and individual business and sometimes an experimental and very lengthy one as well that can by no means be undertaken by by rule of thumb the converse of this is that the communications of the unconscious are of the highest importance to the dreamer naturally so since the unconscious is at least half of his total being and frequently offer him advice or guidance that could be obtained from no other source thus when I described yon's dream about addressing the multitude I was not describing a piece of magic or suggesting that yung dabbled in fortunetelling I

was recounting in the simple terms of daily experience erience how Yung was advised by his own unconscious to reconsider an inadequate judgment he had made with the conscious part of his mind now it follows from this that the dreaming of Dreams is not a matter that the well adjusted yian can regard as simply a matter of chance on the contrary the ability to establish Communications with the unconscious is a part of the whole man and yans teach themselves I can think of no better term to be receptive to dreams when therefore Yung himself was faced

with the critical decision whether or not to write this book he was able to draw on the resources of both his conscience and his unconscious in making up his mind and all through this book you will find the dream treated as a direct personal and meaningful communication to the dreamer a communication that uses the symbols common to all mankind but that uses them on every occasion in an entirely individual way that can be interpreted only by an entirely individual key the second point I wish to make is about a particular characteristic of argumentative method that

is common to all the writers of this book perhaps to all uniion those who have limited themselves to living entirely in the world of the conscious and who reject communication with the unconscious bind themselves by the laws of conscious formal life with the infallible but often meaningless logic of the algebraic equation they argue from assumed premises to incontestably deduced conclusions Yung and his colleagues seem to me whether they know it or not to reject the limitations of this method of argument it is not that they ignore logic but they appear all the time to be

arguing to the unconscious as well as to the conscious their dialectical method is itself symbolic and often devious they convince not by means of the narrowly focused spot light of the syllogism but by skirting by repetition by presenting a recurring view of the same subject seen each time from a slightly different angle until suddenly the reader who has never been aware of a single conclusive moment of proof finds that he has unknowingly embraced and taken into himself some wider truth yong's arguments and those of his colleagues spiral upward over his subject like a bird circling

a tree at First near the ground it sees only a confusion of leaves and branches gradually as it circles higher and higher the recurring aspects of the tree form a wholeness and relate to their surroundings some readers may find this spiraling method of argument obscure or even confusing for a few pages but not I think for long it is characteristic of yong's method and very soon the reader will find it carrying him with it on a persuasive and profoundly absorbing Journey the different sections of this book speak for themselves and require little introduction from me

yung's own chapter introduces the reader to the unconscious to the archetypes and symbols that form its language and to the Dreams by which it communicates Dr Henderson in the following chapter illustrates the appearance of several archetypal patterns in ancient mology folk Legend and primitive ritual Dr fun fans in the chapter entitled the process of individuation describes the process by which the conscious and the unconscious within an individual learn to know resp and accommodate one another in a certain sense this chapter contains not only the Crux of the whole book but perhaps the essence of yung's

philosophy of Life man becomes whole integrated calm fertile and happy when and only when the process of individuation is complete when the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and to complement one another Mrs Daffy like Dr Henderson is concerned with demonstrating in the familiar fabric of the conscious man's recurring interest in almost obsession with the symbols of the unconscious they have for him a profoundly significant almost a nourishing and sustaining inner attraction whether they occur in the myths and fairy tales that Dr Henderson analyzes or in the visual arts which as

Mrs jaffy shows satisfy and Delight Us by a constant appeal to the unconscious finally I must say a brief word about Dr yobi's chapter which is somewhat separate from the rest of the book it is in fact an abbreviated case history of one interesting and successful analysis the value of such a chapter in a book like this is obvious but two words of warning are nevertheless necessary first as Dr Fon France points out there is no such thing as a typical yian analysis there can't be because every dream is a private and individual communication and

no two dreams use the symbols of the unconscious in the same way so every yian analysis is unique and it is misleading to consider this one taken from Dr yobi's clinical files or any other one there has ever been as representative or typical all one can say of the case of Henry and his sometimes lurid dreams is that they form one true example of the way in which the yian method may be applied to a particular case secondly the full history of even a comparatively uncomplicated case would take a whole book to recount inevitably the

the story of Henry's analysis suffers a little in compression the references for instance to the eing have been somewhat obscured and lent an unnatural and to me unsatisfactory flavor of the occult by being presented out of their full context nevertheless we concluded and I am sure the reader will agree that with the warnings duly given the clarity to say nothing of the human interest of Henry's analysis greatly enriches this book I began by describing how Yung came to write man and his symbols I end by reminding the reader of what a remarkable perhaps unique publication

this is Carl Gustaf Yol was one of the great doctors of all time and one of the great thinkers of this Century his object always was to help men and women to know themselves so that by self- knowledge and thoughtful self-use they could lead full rich and happy lives at the very end of his own life which was as full rich and happy as any I have encountered he decided to use the strength that was left him to address his message to A Wider public than he had ever tried to reach before he completed his

task and his life in the same month this book is his legacy to the broad reading public side One Tone one contents side One Tone two part one approaching the unconscious by Carl G Yong side three tone one part two ancient myths and Modern Man by Joseph El Henderson side five tone one part three the process of individuation by ml Fon France side seven tone one part four symbolism in the visual arts by anela jaffy side nine tone one part five symbols in an individual analysis by Yolanda yakui side 10 Town one conclusion science and

the unconscious by ml fun France narrators note the five pages of reference notes found in the print edition are not included in this recording explanatory notes have been retained end of note part one approaching the unconscious by Carl G Yung the importance of Dreams man uses the spoken or written word to express the meaning of what he wants to convey his language is full of symbols but he also often employs signs or images that are not strictly descriptive some are mere abbreviations or strings of initials such as un UNICEF or UNESCO others are familiar trademarks

the names of patent medicines badges or Insignia although these are meaningless in themselves they have acquired a recognizable meaning through common usage or deliberate intent such things are not symbols they are signs and they do no more than denote the objects to which they are attached what we call a symbol is a term a name or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning it implies something vague unknown or hidden from us many monuments for instance are marked with the design

of the double ads this is an object that we know but we do not know its symbolic implications for another example take the case of the Indian who after a visit to England told his friends at home that the English worship animals because he had found Eagles lions and oxen in Old churches he was not aware nor are many Christians that these animals are symbols of the evangelists and are derived from the vision of Ezekiel and that this in turn has an analogy to the Egyptian sun god Horus and His Four Sons there are moreover

such objects objects as the wheel and the cross that are known all over the world yet that have a symbolic significance under certain conditions precisely what they symbolize is still a matter for controversial speculation thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning it has a wider unconscious aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained nor can one hope to define or explain it as the Mind EXP or is the symbol it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason the wheel

may lead our thoughts toward the concept of a Divine son but at this point reason must admit its incompetence man is unable to define a Divine being when with all our intellectual limitations we call something Divine we have merely given it a name which may be based on a Creed but never on factual evidence because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding we constantly use symbolic terms to represent Concepts that we cannot Define or fully comprehend this is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images but this conscious use of

symbols is only one aspect of a psychological fact of great importance man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously in the form of Dreams it is not easy to grasp this point but the point must be grasped if we are to know more about the ways in which the human mind works man as we realize if we reflect for a moment never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely he can see hear touch and taste but how far he sees how well he hears what his touch tells him and what he tastes depend upon the number

and quality of his senses these limit his perception of the world around him by using scientific instruments he can partly compensate for the deficiencies of his senses for example he can extend the range of his vision by binoculars or of his hearing by electrical amplification but the most elaborate apparatus cannot do more than bring distant or small objects within range of his eyes or make faint sounds more audible no matter what instrument he uses at some point he reaches the edge of certainty Beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass there are moreover unconscious aspects of our

perception of reality the first is the fact that even when our senses react to real phenomena sights and sounds they are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of the Mind within the mind they become psychic events whose ultimate nature is unknowable for the psyche cannot know its own psychical substance thus every experience contains an indefinite number of unknown factors factors not to speak of the fact that every concrete object is always unknown in certain respects because we cannot know the ultimate nature of matter itself then there are certain events of which we

have not consciously taken note they have remained so to speak below the threshold of Consciousness they have happened but they have been absorbed subliminally without our conscious knowledge we can become aware of such happenings only in a moment of Intuition or by a process of profound thought that leads to a later realization that they must have happened and though we may have originally ignored their emotional and vital importance it later Wells up from the unconscious as a sort of afterthought it may appear for instance in the form of a dream as a general rule the

unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image as a matter of History it was the study of dreams that first enabled psychologists to investigate the unconscious aspect of conscious psychic events it is on such evidence that psychologists assume the existence of an unconscious psyche though many scientists and philosophers deny its existence they argue naively that such an assumption implies the existence of two subjects or to put it in a common phrase two personalities within the same individual but this is

exactly what it does imply quite correctly and it is one of the curses of modern man that many people suffer from this divided personality It Is by no means a pathological symptom it is a normal fact that can be observed at any time and everywhere it is not merely the neurotic whose right hand does not know what the left hand is doing this predicament is a symptom of a general unconsciousness that is the undeniable common inheritance of all mankind man has developed Consciousness slowly and laboriously in a process that took Untold ages to reached the

Civilized state which is arbitrarily dated from the invention of script in about 4,000 BC and this evolution is far from complete for large areas of the human mind are still shrouded in darkness what we call the psyche is by no means identical with our Consciousness and its contents whoever denies the existence of the unconscious is in fact assuming that our present knowledge of the psyche is total and this belief is clearly just as false as the assumption that we know all there is to be known about the natural Universe our psyche is part of Nature

and its Enigma is as Limitless thus we cannot Define either the psyche or nature we can merely State what we believe them to be and describe as best we can how they function quite apart therefore from the evidence that medical research has accumulated there are strong grounds of logic for rejecting statements like there is no unconscious those who say such things merely Express an age-old meninism a fear of the new and the unknown there are historical reasons for this resistance to the idea of an unknown part of the human psyche Consciousness is a very recent

acquisition of Nature and if is still in an experimental state it is frail menaced by specific dangers and easily injured as anthropologists have noted one of the most common mental derangements that occur among primitive people is what they call the loss of a soul which means as the name indicates a noticeable disruption or more technically a dissociation of Consciousness among such people whose Consciousness is at a different level of development from ours the soul or psyche is not felt to be a unit many Primitives assume that a man has a bush Soul as well as

his own and that this bush soul is Incarnate in a wild animal or a tree with which the human individual has some kind of psychic identity this is what the distinguished French ethnologist V de called a mystical participation he later retracted this term under pressure of adverse criticism but I believe that his critics were wrong it is a well-known psychological fact that an individual may have such an unconscious identity with some other person or object this identity takes a variety of forms among Primitives if the bush toll is that of an animal the animal itself

is is considered as some sort of brother to the man a man whose brother is a crocodile for instance is supposed to be safe when swimming a crocodile infested River if the bush soul is a tree the tree is presumed to have something like parental authority over the individual concern in both cases an injury to the bush soul is interpreted as an injury to the man in some tribes it is assume that a man has a number of souls this belief expresses the feeling of some primitive individuals that they each consist of several linked but

distinct units this means that the individual psyche is far from being safely synthesized on the contrary it threatens to fragment only too easily under the onslaught of unchecked emotions while this situation is familiar to us from the studies of anthropologists it is not so irrelevant to our own Advanced civilization as it might seem we too can become dissociated and lose our identity we can be possessed and altered by moods or become unreasonable and unable to recall important facts about ourselves or others so that people ask what the devil has got into you we talk about

being able to control ourselves but self-control is a rare and remarkable virtue we may think we have ourselves under control yet a friend can easily tell us things about ourselves of which we have no knowledge Beyond doubt even in what we call a high level of civilization human conscious has not yet achieved a reasonable degree of continuity it is still vulnerable and liable to fragmentation this capacity to isolate part of one's mind indeed is a valuable characteristic it enables us to concentrate upon one thing at a time excluding everything else that may claim our attention

but there is a world of difference between a conscious decision to split off and temporarily suppress a part of one's psyche and a condition in which this happens spontaneously without one's knowledge or consent and even against one's intention the former is a civilized achievement the latter A Primitive loss of a soul or even the pathological cause of a Neurosis thus Even in our day the unity of Consciousness is still a doubtful Affair it can too easily be disrupted unability to control one's emotions that may be very desirable from one point of view would be a

questionable accomplishment from another for it would deprive social intercourse of variety color and warmth it is against this background that we must review the importance of Dreams those flimsy evasive unreliable vague and uncertain fantasies to explain my point of view I should like to describe how it developed over a period of years and how I was led to conclude that dreams are the most frequent and universally accessible source for the investigation of man's symbolizing faculty Sigman Freud was the the Pioneer who first tried to explore empirically the unconscious background of Consciousness he worked on the

general assumption that dreams are not a matter of chance but are associated with conscious thoughts and problems this assumption was not in the least arbitrary it was based upon the conclusion of eminent neurologists for instance Pierre Jan that neuronic symptoms are related to some conscious experience they even appear to be split off areas of the conscious mind which at another time and under different conditions can be conscious before the beginning of this Century Freud and user warer had recognized that neurotic symptoms hysteria certain types of pain and abnormal behavior are in fact symbolically meaningful they

are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself just as it may in dreams and they are equally symbolic a patient for instance who is confronted with an intolerable situation may develop a spasm whenever he tries to swallow he can't swallow it under similar conditions of psychological stress another patient has an attack of asthma he can't breathe the atmosphere at home a third suffers from A peculiar paralysis of the legs he can't walk that is he can't go on anymore a forest who vomits when he eats cannot digest some unpleasant fact I could cite

many examples of this kind but such physical reactions are only one form in which the problems that trouble us unconsciously May Express themselves they more often find expression in our dreams any psychologist who has listened to numbers of people describing their dreams knows that dream symbols have much greater variety than the physical symptoms of neurosis they often consist of elaborate and picturesque fantasies but if the analyst who is confronted by this dream material uses Freud's original technique of free association he finds that dreams can eventually be reduced to certain basic patterns this technique played an

important part in the development of psychoanalysis for it enabled Freud to use dreams as the starting point from which the unconscious problem of the patient might be explored Freud made the simple but penetrating observation that if a dreamer is encouraged to go on talking about his dream images and the thoughts that these prompt in his mind he will give himself away and reveal the unconscious background of his ailments in both what he says and what he deliberately omits saying his ideas may seem irrational and irrelevant but after a time it becomes relatively easy to see

what it is that he is trying to avoid what unpleasant thought or experience he is suppressing no matter how he tries to camouflage it everything he says points to the core of his predicament a doctor sees so many things from the seamy side of life that he is seldom far from the truth when he interprets the hints that his patient produces as signs of an uneasy conscience what he eventually discovers unfortunately confirms his expectations thus far nobody can say anything against Freud's theory of repression and wish fulfillment as apparent causes of dream symbolism Freud attached

particular importance to dreams as The Point of Departure for a process of free association but after a time I began to feel that this was a misleading and inadequate use of the rich fantasies that the unconscious produces in sleep my doubts really began when a colleague told me of an experience he had during the course of a long train journey in Russia though he did not know the language and could not even decipher the cilic script he found himself musing over the strange letters in which the railway notices were written and he fell into a

Ry in which he imagined all sorts of meanings for them one Idea LED to another and in his relaxed mood he found that this free association had stirred up many old memories among them he was annoyed to find some long buried disagreeable topics things he had wished to forget and had forgotten consciously he had in fact arrived at what psychologists would call his complexes that is repressed emotional themes that can cause constant psychological disturbances or or even in many cases the symptoms of neurosis this episode opened my eyes to the fact that it was not

necessary to use a dream as The Point of Departure for the process of free association if one wished to discover the complexes of a patient it showed me that one can reach the center directly from any part of the compass one could begin from cerlic letters from meditations upon a crystal ball a prayer wheel or a modern painting or even from casual convers ation about some quite trivial event the dream was no more and no less useful in this respect than any other possible starting point nevertheless dreams have a particular significance even though they often

arise from an emotional upset in which the habitual complexes are also involved the habitual complexes are the tender spots of the psyche which react most quickly to an external stimulus or disturbance that is why free association can lead From Any Dream to the critical secret thoughts at this point however it occurred to me that if I was right so far it might reasonably follow that dreams have some special and more significant function of their own very often dreams have a definite evidently purposeful structure indicating an underlying idea or intention though as a rule the latter

is not immediately comprehensible I therefore began to consider whether one should pay more attention to the ACT actual form and content of a dream rather than allowing free association to lead one off through a train of ideas to complexes that could as easily be reached by other means this new thought was a turning point in the development of my psychology it meant that I gradually gave up following associations that led far away from the text of a dream I chose to concentrate rather on the associations to the dream itself believing that the latter expressed something

specific that the unconscious was trying to say the change in my attitude toward dreams involved a change of method the new technique was one that could take account of all the various wider aspects of a dream a story told by the conscious mind has a beginning a development and an end but the same is not true of a dream its dimensions in time and space are quite different to understand it you must examine it from every aspect just as you may take an unknown object in your hands and turn it over and over until you

are familiar with every detail of its shape perhaps I have not said enough to show how I came increasingly to disagree with free association as Freud first employed it I wanted to keep as close as possible to the dream itself and to exclude all the irrelevant ideas and associations that it might evoke true these could lead one toward the complexes of a patient but I had a more far-reaching purpose in mind than the disc discovery of complexes that cause neurotic disturbances there are many other means by which these can be identified the psychologist for instance

can get all the hints he needs by using word association tests by asking the patient what he Associates to a given set of words and by studying his responses but to know and understand the psychic life process of an individual's whole personality it is important to realize that his dreams and their symbolic images have a much more important role to play almost everyone knows for example that there is an enormous variety of images by which the sexual act can be symbolized or one might say represented in the form of an allegory each of these images

can lead via process of Association to the idea of sexual intercourse and to specific complexes that any individual may have about his own sexual attitudes but one could just as well unearth such complexes by daydreaming on a set of indecipherable Russian letters I was thus led to the assumption that a dream can contain some message other than the sexual allegory and that it does so for definite reasons to illustrate this point a man may dream of inserting a key in a lock of wielding a heavy stick or of breaking down a door with a battering

ram each of these can be regarded as a sexual allegory but the fact that his unconscious for its own purposes has chosen one of these specific images it may be the key the stick or the battering ram is also of major significance the real task is to understand why the key has been preferred to the stick or the stick to the RAM and sometimes this might even lead one to discover that it is not the sexual act at all that is represented but some quite different psychological point from this line of reasoning I concluded that

only the material that is clearly and visibly part of a dream dream should be used in interpreting it the dream has its own limitation its specific form itself tells us what belongs to it and what leads away from it while free association lures one away from that material in a kind of zigzag line the method I evolved is more like a circumambulation whose s is the dream picture I work all around the dream picture and disregard every attempt that the dreamer makes to break away from it time and time again in my profession work I

have had to repeat the words let's get back to your dream what does the dream say for instance a patient of mine dreamed of a drunken and disheveled vulgar woman in the dream it seemed that this woman was his wife though in real life his wife was totally different on the surface therefore the dream was shockingly untrue and the patient immediately rejected it as dream nonsense if I as his doctor had let him start a process of Association he would inevitably have tried to get as far away as possible from the unpleasant suggestion of his

dream in that case he would have ended with one of his staple complexes a complex possibly that had nothing to do with his wife and we should have learned nothing about the special meaning of this particular dream what then was his unconscious trying to convey by such an obviously untrue statement clearly it somehow expressed the idea of a degenerate female who was closely connect Ed with the dreamer's life but since the projection of this image onto his wife was unjustified and factually untrue I had to look elsewhere before I found out what this repulsive image

represented in the Middle Ages long before the physiologists demonstrated that by reason of our glandular structure there are both male and female elements in all of us it was said that every man carries a Woman Within himself it is this female element in every male that I have called the anima this feminine aspect is essentially a certain inferior kind of relatedness to the surroundings and particularly to women which is kept carefully concealed from others as well as from oneself in other words though an individual's visible personality may seem quite normal he may well be concealing

from others or even from himself the deplorable condition of the woman within that was the case with this particular patient his his female side was not nice his dream was actually saying to him you are in some respects behaving like a degenerate female and thus gave him an appropriate shock an example of this kind of course must not be taken as evidence that the unconscious is concerned with moral injunctions the dreamer was not telling the patient to behave better but was simply trying to balance the lopsided nature of his conscious mind which was maintaining the

fiction that he was a perfect gentleman throughout it is easy to understand why dreamers tend to ignore and even deny the message of their dreams Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call minism a deep and superstitious fear of novelty The Primitives manifest all the reactions of the wild animal against unored events but civilized man reacts to new ideas in much the same way erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new this can easily be observed in any

individual's reaction to his own dreams when obliged to admit a surprising thought many pioneers in philosophy science and even literature have been victims of the innate conservatism of their contemporaries psychology is one of the youngest of the Sciences because it attempts to deal with the working of the unconscious it is inevitably encountered minism in an extreme form past and future in the unconscious so far I have been sketching some of the principles on which I approached the problem of dreams for when we want to investigate man's faculty to produce symbols dreams proved to be the

most basic and accessible material for this purpose the two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these first the dream should be treated as a fact about which one must make no previous assumption except that it somehow makes sense and second the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious one could scarcely put these principles more modestly no matter how low anyone's opinion of the unconscious may be he must concede that it is worth investigating the unconscious is at least on a level with the LA which after all enjoys the honest interest of the emology

if somebody with little experience and knowledge of Dreams thinks that dreams are just chaotic occurrences without meaning he is at Liberty to do so but if one assumes that they are normal events which as a matter of fact they are one is bound to consider that they are either causal that is that there is a rational cause for their existence or in a certain way purposive or both let us now look a little more closely at the ways in which the conscious and unconscious contents of the Mind are linked together take an example with which

everyone is familiar suddenly you find you cannot remember what you were going to say next though a moment ago the thought was perfectly clear or perhaps you were about to introduce a friend and his name escaped you as you were about to utter it you say you cannot remember in fact though the thought has become unconscious or at least momentarily separated from Consciousness we find the same Phenomenon with our senses if we listen to a continuous note on The Fringe Of audibility The Sound seems to stop at regular intervals and then start again such oscillations

are due to a periodic decrease and increase in one's attention not to any change in the note but when something slips out of our Consciousness it does not cease to exist any more than a car that has disappeared around a corner has vanished Into Thin Air it is simply out of sight just as we may later see the car again so we come across thoughts that were temporarily lost to us thus part of the unconscious consists of a multitude of temporarily obscured thoughts Impressions and images that in spite of being lost continue to influence our

conscious Minds a man who is distracted or absent-minded will walk across the room to fetch something he stops seemingly perplexed he is forgotten what he was after his hands grope about among the objects on the table as if he were sleepwalking he is oblivious of his original purpose yet he is unconsciously Guided by it then he realizes what it is that he wants his unconscious has profited him if You observe the behavior of a neurotic person you can see him doing many things that he appears to be doing consciously and purposefully yet if you ask

him about them you will discover that he is either unconscious of them or have something quite different in mind he hears and does not hear he sees yet is blind he knows and is ignorant such examples are so common that the specialist soon realizes that unconscious contents of the Mind behave as if they were conscious and that you can never be sure in such cases whether thought speech or action is conscious or not it is this kind of behavior that makes so many Physicians dismiss statements by hysterical patients as utter lies such persons certainly produce

more untruths than most of us but lie is scarcely the right word to use in fact their mental state causes an uncertainty of behavior because their Consciousness is liable to unpredictable Eclipse by an interference from the unconscious even their skin Sensations May reveal similar fluctuations of awareness at one moment the hysterical person may feel a needle prick in the arm at the next it may pass unnoticed if his attention can be focused on a certain point the whole of his body can be completely anesthetized until the tension that causes this blackout of the senses has

been relaxed sense perception is then immediately restored all the time however he has been unconsciously aware of what was happening The Physician can see this process quite clearly when he hypnotizes such a patient it is easy to demonstrate that the patient has been aware of every detail the prick in the arm where the remark made during an eclipse of Consciousness can be recalled as accurately as if there had been no anesthesia or forgetfulness I recall a woman who was once admitted to the clinic in a state of complete stuper when she recovered Consciousness next day

she knew who she was but did not know where she was how or why she had come there or even the date yet after I had hypnotized her she told me why she had fallen ill how she had got to the clinic and who had admitted her all these details could be verified she was even able to tell the time at which she had been admitted because she had seen a clock in the entrance hall under hypnosis her memory was as clear as if she had been completely conscious all the time when we discuss such

matters we usually have to draw on evidence supplied by clinical observation for this reason many critics assume that the unconscious and all its subtle manifestations belong solely to the sphere of Psychopathology they consider any expression of the unconscious as something neurotic or psychotic which has nothing to do with a normal mental state but neuronic phenomena are by no means the products exclusively of disease they are in fact no more than pathological exaggerations of normal occurrences it is only because they are exaggerations that they are more obvious than their normal counterparts hysterical symptoms can be observed

in all normal persons but they are so slight that they usually pass unnoticed forgetting for instance is a normal process in which certain conscious IDE is lose their specific energy because one's attention has been deflected when interest turns elsewhere it leaves in Shadow the things with which one was previously concerned just as a search light lights up a new area by leaving another in darkness this is unavoidable for Consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time and even this Clarity fluctuates but the Forgotten ideas have not ceased to exist although

they cannot be reproduced at will they are present in a subliminal State just beyond the threshold of recall from which they can Rise Again spontaneously at any time often after many years of apparently total Oblivion I am speaking here of things we have consciously seen or heard and subsequently forgotten but we all see hear smell and taste many things without noticing them at the time either because our attention is deflected or because the stimulus to our senses is too slight to leave a conscious impression the unconscious however has taken note of them and such subliminal

sense perceptions play a significant part in our everyday lives without our realizing it they influence the way in which we react to both events and people an example of this that I found particularly revealing was provided by a professor who had been walking in the country with one of his pupils absorbed in serious conversation suddenly he noticed that his thoughts were being interrupted by an unexpected flow of memories from his early childhood he could not account for this distraction nothing in what had been said seemed to have any connection with these memories on looking back

he saw that he had been walking past a farm when the first of these childhood Recollections had surged up in his mind he suggested to his pupil that they should walk back to the point where the fantasies had begun once there he noticed the smell of geese and instantly he realized that it was this smell that touched off the flow of memories in his youth he had lived on a farm where geese were kept and their characteristic smell had left a lasting though forgotten impression as he passed the farm on his walk he had noticed

the smell subliminally and this unconscious perception had called back long forgotten experiences of his childhood the perception was subliminal because the attention was engaged elsewhere and the stimulus was not strong enough to deflect it and to reach Consciousness directly yet it had brought up the Forgotten memories such a cue or trigger effect can explain the onset of neurotic symptoms as well as more benign memories when a sight smell or sound recalls a circumstance in the past a girl for instance may be busy in her office apparently in good health and spirits a moment later she

develops a blinding headache and shows other signs of distress without consciously noticing it she has heard the fog horn of a distant ship and this has unconsciously reminded her of an unhappy parting with a lover whom she has been doing her best to forget aside from normal forgetting Freud has described several cases that involve the forgetting of disagreeable memories memories that one is only too ready to lose as n remarked where pride is insistent enough memory prefers to give way thus among the Lost Memories We encounter not a few that owe their subliminal State and

their incapacity to be voluntarily reproduced to their disagreeable and incompatible nature the psychologist calls these repressed contents a case in point might be that of a secretary who is jealous of one of her employer Associates she habitually forgets to invite this person to meetings though the name is clearly marked on the list she is using but if challenged on the point she simply says she forgot or was interrupted she never admits not even to herself the real reason for her Omission many people mistakenly overestimate the role of willpower and think that nothing can happen to

their minds that they do not decide and intend but one must learn to discriminate carefully between intentional and unintentional contents of the Mind the former are derived from the ego personality the latter however arise from a source that is not identical with the ego but is its other side it is this other side that would have made the secretary forget the invitations there are many reasons why we forget things that we have noticed or experienced and there are just as many ways in which they may be recalled to mind an interesting example is that of

cryptomnesia or concealed recollection an author may be writing steadily to a preconceived plan working out an argument or developing the line of a story when he suddenly runs off at a tangent perhaps a fresh idea has occurred to him or a different image or a whole new subplot if you ask him what prompted the degression he will not be able to tell you he may not even have noticed the change though he has now produced material that is entirely fresh and apparently unknown to him before yet it can sometimes be shown convincingly that what he

has written Bears a striking similarity to the work of another author a work that he believes he has never seen I myself found a fascinating example of this in n's book thus spake zarathustra where the author reproduces almost word for word an incident reported in a shift log for the year 1686 by sheer chance I had read this Seaman's yarn in a book published about 1835 half a century before n wrote and when I found the similar passage in nusp zaratustra I was struck by its peculiar style which was different from n's usual language I

was convinced that n must also have seen the old book though he made no reference to it I wrote to his sister who was still alive and she confirmed that she and her brother had in fact read the book together when he was 11 years old I think from the context it is inconceivable that n had any idea that he was plagiarizing this story I believe that 50 years later it had unexpectedly slipped into focus in his conscious mind note n's cryptomnesia is discussed in yung's on the psych ology of so-called occult phenomena in collected

works volume 1 the relevant passage from the ship's log and the corresponding passage from n are as follows from J kerer blet Alor volume 4 page 57 headed an extract of all inspiring import originally 1831 to 37 the four captains and a merchant Mr Bell went ashore on the island of Mount stroli to shoot rabbits at 3:00 they mustered the crew to go aboard when to their in expressable astonishment they saw two men flying rapidly toward them through the air one was dressed in black the other in Gray they came past them very closely in

greatest haste and to their utmost dismay descended into the crater of the terrible volcano Mount strully they recognized the fair as acquaintances from from FN thus speak zarathustra chapter 40 great events translated by Common page 180 slightly modified originally 1883 now about the time that zarathustra sojourned on the halfy aisles it happened that a ship anchored at the aisle on which the smoking Mountain stands and the crew went ashore to shoot rabbits about the noontide hour however when the captain and his men men were together again they suddenly saw a man coming toward them through

the air and a voice said distinctly it is time it is highest time but when the figure Drew close to them flying past quickly like a shadow in the direction of the volcano they recognized with the greatest dismay that it was zarathustra behold said the old Helmsman zarathustra goes down to Hell end of note in this type of case there is genuine if unrealized recollection much the same sort of thing may happen to a musician who has heard a peasant tune or popular song in childhood and finds it cropping up as the theme of a

symphonic movement that he is composing in adult life an idea or an image has moved back from the unconscious into the conscious mind what I have so far said about the unconscious is no more than a cursory sketch of the nature and functioning of this complex part of the human psyche but it should have indicated the kind of subliminal material from which the symbols of our dreams may be spontaneously produced this subliminal material can consist of all urges impulses and intentions all perceptions and intuitions all rational or irrational FRS conclusions inductions deductions and premises and

all varieties of feeling any or all of these can take the form of partial temporary or con St an unconsciousness such material has mostly become unconscious because in a manner of speaking there is no room for it in the conscious mind Sal one's thoughts lose their emotional energy and become subliminal that is to say they no longer receive so much of our conscious attention because they have come to seem uninteresting or irrelevant or because there is some reason why we wish to push them out of sight it is in fact normal and necessary for us

to forget in this fashion in order to make make room in our conscious Minds for New Impressions and ideas if this did not happen everything we experienced would remain above the threshold of Consciousness and our minds would become impossibly cluttered this phenomenon is so widely recognized today that most people who know anything about psychology take it for granted but just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious new contents which have never yet been conscious can arise from it one may have an inkling for instance that some something is on the point of breaking into

Consciousness that something is in the air or that one smells a rat the discovery that the unconscious is no mere depository of the past but is also full of germs of future psychic situations and ideas led me to my own new approach to psychology a great deal of controversial discussion has arisen around this point but it is a fact that in addition to memories from a long-distant conscious past completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also present themselves from the unconscious thoughts and ideas that have never been conscious before they grow up from the dark

depths of the mind like a Lotus and form a most important part of the subliminal psyche we find this in everyday life where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions many artists philosophers and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to Inspirations that appear suddenly from the unconscious the the ability to reach a rich vein of such material and to translate it effectively into philosophy literature music or scientific discovery is one of the Hallmarks of what is commonly called genius we can find Clear Proof of this fact in the history of

science itself for example the French mathematician Pon Cafe and the chemist kulle owed important scientific discoveries as they themselves admit to sudden pictorial Revelations from the unconscious the so-called Mystic experience of the French philosopher de cart involved a similar sudden Revelation in which he saw in a frash the order of all Sciences the British author Robert Lewis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his strong sense of man's double being when the plot of Dr Jackal and Mr Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a dream later I shall describe in

more detail how such material arises from the unconscious and I shall examine the form in which it is expressed at the moment I simply want to point out that the capacity of the human psyche to produce such new material is particularly significant when one is dealing with dream symbolism for I have found again and again in my professional work that the images and ideas that dreams contain cannot possibly be explained solely in terms of memory they express new thoughts that have never yet reached the threshold of consciousness