 Part 3. The Process of Individuation by M. L. von Franz The Pattern of Psychic Growth At the beginning of this book, Dr. C. G. Jung introduced the reader to the concept of the unconscious, its personal and collective structures, and its symbolic mode of expression. Once one has seen the vital importance, that is, the healing or destructive impact of the symbols produced by the unconscious, there remains the difficult problem of interpretation. Dr. Jung has shown that everything depends on whether any particular interpretation clicks and is meaningful to the individual concerned. In this way, he has indicated the possible meaning and function of dream symbolism. But in the development of Jung's theory, this possibility raised another question. What is the purpose of the total dream life of the individual? What role do dreams play, not only in the immediate psychic economy of the human being, but in his life as a whole? By observing a great many people and studying their dreams, he estimated that he interpreted at least 80,000 dreams, Jung discovered not only that all dreams are relevant in varying degrees to the life of the dreamer, but that they are all parts of one great web of psychological factors. He also found that on the whole they seem to follow an arrangement or pattern. This pattern, Jung called the process of individuation. Since dreams produce different scenes and images every night, people who are not careful observers will probably be unaware of any pattern. But if one watches one's own dreams over a period of years and studies the entire sequence, one will see that certain contents emerge, disappear and then turn up again. Many people even dream repeatedly of the same figures, landscapes or situations, and if one follows these through a whole series, one will see that they change slowly but perceptibly. These changes can be accelerated if the dreamer's conscious attitude is influenced by appropriate interpretation of the dreams and their symbolic contents. Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth, the process of individuation. Gradually a wider and more mature personality emerges and by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others. The fact that we often speak of arrested development shows that we assume that such a process of growth and maturation is possible with every individual. Since this psychic growth cannot be brought about by a conscious effort of willpower but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolized by the tree whose slow, powerful, involuntary growth fulfills a definite pattern. The organizing center from which the regulatory effect stems seems to be a sort of nuclear atom in our psychic system. One could also call it the inventor, organizer, and source of dream images. Jung called this center the self and described it as the totality of the whole psyche in order to distinguish it from the ego, which constitutes only a small part of the total psyche. Throughout the ages men have been intuitively aware of the existence of such an inner center. The Greeks called it man's inner diamond. In Egypt it was expressed by the concept of the bas-soul and the Romans worshiped it as the genius native to each individual. In more primitive societies it was often thought of as a protective spirit embodied within an animal or a fetish. This inner center is realized in exceptionally pure unspoiled form by the Nascope Indians who still exist in the forests of the Labrador Peninsula. These simple people are hunters who live in isolated family groups so far from one another that they have not been able to evolve tribal customs or collective religious beliefs and ceremonies. In his lifelong solitude the Nascope hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and unconscious revelations. He has no religious teachers who tell him what he should believe, no rituals, festivals, or customs to help him along. In his basic view of life the soul of man is simply an inner companion whom he calls my friend or Mr. Pio meaning great man. Mr. Pio dwells in the heart and is immortal. In the moment of death or shortly before he leaves the individual and later reincarnates himself in another being. Those Nascope who pay attention to their dreams and who try to find their meaning and test their truth can enter into a deeper connection with the great man. He favors such people and sends them more and better dreams. Thus the major obligation of an individual Nascope is to follow the instructions given by his dreams and then to give permanent form to their contents in art. Lies and dishonesty drive the great man away from one's inner realm whereas generosity and love of one's neighbors and of animals attract him and give him life. Dreams give the Nascope complete ability to find his way in life not only in the inner world but also in the outer world of nature. They help him to foretell the weather and give him invaluable guidance in his hunting upon which his life depends. I mention these very primitive people because they are uncontaminated by our civilized ideas and still have natural insight into the essence of what Jung calls the self. The self can be defined as an inner guiding factor that is different from the conscious personality and that can be grasped only through the investigation of one's own dreams. These show it to be the regulating center that brings about a constant extension and maturing of the personality. But this larger, more nearly total aspect of the psyche appears first as merely an inborn possibility. It may emerge very slightly or it may develop relatively completely during one's lifetime. How far it develops depends on whether or not the ego is willing to listen to the messages of the self. Just as the Nascope have noticed that a person who is receptive to the hints of the great man gets better and more helpful dreams, we could add that the inborn great man becomes more real within the receptive person than in those who neglect him. Such a person also becomes a more complete human being. It even seems as if the ego has not been produced by nature to follow its own arbitrary impulses to an unlimited extent but to help to make real the totality, the whole psyche. It is the ego that serves to light up the entire system allowing it to become conscious and thus to be realized. If, for example, I have an artistic talent of which my ego is not conscious, nothing will happen to it. The gift may as well be nonexistent. Only if my ego notices it can I bring it into reality. The inborn but hidden totality of the psyche is not the same thing as a wholeness that is fully realized and lived. One could picture this in the following way. The seed of a mountain pine contains the whole future tree in a latent form but each seed falls at a certain time onto a particular place in which there are a number of special factors such as the quality of the soil and the stones, the slope of the land and its exposure to sun and wind. The latent totality of the pine in the seed reacts to these circumstances by avoiding the stones and inclining toward the sun with the result that the tree's growth is shaped. Thus an individual pine slowly comes into existence constituting the fulfillment of its totality, its emergence into the realm of reality. Without the living tree, the image of the pine is only a possibility or an abstract idea. Again, the realization of this uniqueness in the individual man is the goal of the process of individuation. From one point of view this process takes place in man as well as in every other living being by itself and in the unconscious. It is a process by which man lives out his innate human nature. Strictly speaking, however, the process of individuation is real only if the individual is aware of it and consequently makes a living connection with it. We do not know whether the pine tree is aware of its own growth, whether it enjoys and suffers the different vicissitudes that shape it. But man certainly is able to participate consciously in his development. He even feels that from time to time, by making free decisions, he can cooperate actively with it. This cooperation belongs to the process of individuation in the narrower sense of the word. Man, however, experiences something that is not contained in our metaphor of the pine tree. The individuation process is more than a coming to terms between the inborn germ of wholeness and the outer acts of fate. Its subjective experience conveys the feeling that some suprapersonal force is actively interfering in a creative way. One sometimes feels that the unconscious is leading the way in accordance with a secret design. It is as if something is looking at me, something that I do not see but that sees me. Perhaps that great man in the heart who tells me his opinions about me by means of dreams. But this creatively active aspect of the psychic nucleus can come into play only when the ego gets rid of all purposive and wishful aims and tries to get to a deeper, more basic form of existence. The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth. Many existentialist philosophers try to describe this state, but they go only as far as stripping off the illusions of consciousness. They go right up to the door of the unconscious and then fail to open it. People living in cultures more securely rooted than our own have less trouble in understanding that it is necessary to give up the utilitarian attitude of conscious planning in order to make way for the inner growth of the personality. I once met an elderly lady who had not achieved much in her life in terms of outward achievement, but she had in fact made a good marriage with a difficult husband and had somehow developed into a mature personality. When she complained to me that she had not done anything in her life, I told her a story related by a Chinese sage, Zhuang Zhu. She understood immediately and felt great relief. This is the story. A wandering carpenter called Stone saw on his travels a gigantic old oak tree standing in a field near an earth altar. The carpenter said to his apprentice, who was admiring the oak, This is a useless tree. If you wanted to make a ship, it would soon rot. If you wanted to make tools, they would break. You can't do anything useful with this tree, and that's why it has become so old. But in an inn that same evening when the carpenter went to sleep, the old oak tree appeared to him in his dream and said, Why do you compare me to your cultivated trees such as white thorn, pear, orange and apple trees, and all the others that bear fruit? Even before they can ripen their fruit, people attack and violate them. Their branches are broken, their twigs are torn, their own gifts bring harm to them, and they cannot live out their natural span. That is what happens everywhere, and that is why I have long since tried to become completely useless. You poor mortal. Imagine, if I had been useful in any way, would I have reached this size? Furthermore, you and I are both creatures, and how can one creature set himself so high as to judge another creature? You useless mortal man, what do you know about useless trees? The carpenter woke up and meditated upon his dream, and later, when his apprentice asked him why just this one tree he served to protect the earth altar, he answered, Keep your mouth shut. Let's hear no more about it. The tree grew here on purpose because anywhere else people would have ill treated it. If it were not the tree of the earth altar, it might have been chopped down. The carpenter obviously understood his dream. He saw that simply to fulfill one's destiny is the greatest human achievement, and that our utilitarian notions have to give way in the face of the demands of our unconscious psyche. If we translate this metaphor into psychological language, the tree symbolizes the process of individuation, giving a lesson to our short-sighted ego. Under the tree that fulfilled its destiny, there was, in Zhuangzi's story, an earth altar. This was a crude, unwrought stone upon which people made sacrifices to the local god who owned this piece of land. The symbol of the earth altar points to the fact that in order to bring the individuation process into reality, one must surrender consciously to the power of the unconscious, instead of thinking in terms of what one should do, or of what is generally thought right, or of what usually happens. One must simply listen in order to learn what the inner totality, the self, wants one to do here and now in a particular situation. Note, the local god to whom sacrifices were made on the stone earth altar corresponds in many respects to the antique genius loci. See Henri Mospero, La Chine Antique, Paris 1955, page 140 and following. This information is owed to the kindness of Miss Ariane Rump. End of note. Our attitude must be like that of the mountain pine mentioned above. It does not get annoyed when its growth is obstructed by a stone, nor does it make plans about how to overcome the obstacles. It merely tries to feel whether it should grow more toward the left or the right, toward the slope or away from it. Like the tree, we should give in to this almost imperceptible, yet powerfully dominating impulse. An impulse that comes from the urge toward unique, creative self-realization. And this is a process in which one must repeatedly seek out and find something that is not yet known to anyone. The guiding hints or impulses come not from the ego, but from the totality of the psyche, the self. It is moreover useless to castverted glances at the way someone else is developing, because each of us has a unique task of self-realization. Although many human problems are similar, they are never identical. All pine trees are very much alike, otherwise we should not recognize them as pines, yet none is exactly the same as another. Because of these factors of sameness and difference, it is difficult to summarize the infinite variations of the process of individuation. The fact is that each person has to do something different, something that is uniquely his own. Many people have criticized the Jungian approach for not presenting psychic material systematically. But these critics forget that the material itself is a living experience, charged with emotion, by nature, irrational and ever-changing, which does not lend itself to systematization except in the most superficial fashion. Modern depth psychology has here reached the same limits that confront microphysics. That is, when we are dealing with statistical averages, a rational and systematic description of the facts is possible. But when we are attempting to describe a single psychic event, we can do no more than present an honest picture of it from as many angles as possible. In the same way, scientists have to admit that they do not know what light is. They can say only that in certain experimental conditions it seems to consist of particles, while in other experimental conditions it seems to consist of waves. But what it is in itself is not known. The psychology of the unconscious and any description of the process of individuation encounter comparable difficulties of definition. But I will try here to give a sketch of some of their most typical features. The first approach of the unconscious. For most people, the years of youth are characterized by a state of gradual awakening in which the individual slowly becomes aware of the world and of himself. Childhood is a period of great emotional intensity, and a child's earliest dreams often manifest in symbolic form the basic structure of the psyche, indicating how it will later shape the destiny of the individual concerned. For example, Jung once told a group of students about a young woman who was so haunted by anxiety that she committed suicide at the age of 26. As a small child, she had dreamed that Jack Frost had entered her room while she was lying in bed and pinched her on the stomach. She woke and discovered that she had pinched herself with her own hand. The dream did not frighten her, she merely remembered that she had had such a dream. But the fact that she did not react emotionally to her strange encounter with the demon of the cold, of congealed life, did not augur well for the future and was itself abnormal. It was with a cold, unfeeling hand that she later put an end to her life. From this single dream it is possible to deduce the tragic fate of the dreamer, which was anticipated by her psyche in childhood. Sometimes it is not a dream but some very impressive and unforgettable real event that, like a prophecy, anticipates the future in symbolic form. It is well known that children often forget events that seem impressive to adults but keep a vivid recollection of some incident or story that no one else has noticed. When we look into one of these childhood memories, we usually find that it depicts, if interpreted as if it were a symbol, a basic problem of the child's psychic makeup. When a child reaches school age, the phase of building up the ego and of adapting to the outer world begins. This phase generally brings a number of painful shocks. At the same time, some children begin to feel very different from others and this feeling of being unique brings a certain sadness that is part of the loneliness of many youngsters. The imperfections of the world and the evil within oneself as well as outside become conscious problems. The child must try to cope with urgent but not yet understood inner impulses as well as the demands of the outer world. If the development of consciousness is disturbed in its normal unfolding, children frequently retire from outer or inner difficulties into an inner fortress. And when that happens, their dreams and symbolic drawings of unconscious material often reveal to an unusual degree a type of circular, quadrangular and nuclear motif which I will explain later. This refers to the previously mentioned psychic nucleus, the vital center of the personality from which the whole structural development of consciousness stems. It is natural that the image of the center should appear in an especially striking way when the psychic life of the individual is threatened. From this central nucleus, as far as we know today, the whole building up of ego consciousness is directed, the ego apparently being a duplicate or structural counterpart of the original center. In this early phase, there are many children who earnestly seek for some meaning in life that could help them to deal with the chaos both within and outside themselves. There are others, however, who are still unconsciously carried along by the dynamism of inherited and instinctive archetypal patterns. These young people are not concerned about the deeper meaning of life because their experiences with love, nature, sport and work contain an immediate and satisfying meaning for them. They are not necessarily more superficial. Usually they are carried by the stream of life with less friction and disturbance than their more introspective fellows. If I travel in a car or train without looking out, it is only the stops, starts and sudden turns that make me realize I am moving at all. The actual process of individuation, the conscious coming to terms with one's own inner center, psychic nucleus or self, generally begins with a wounding of the personality and the suffering that accompanies it. This initial shock amounts to a sort of call, although it is not often recognized as such. On the contrary, the ego feels haphard in its will or its desire and usually projects the obstruction onto something external. That is, the ego accuses God or the economic situation or the boss or the marriage partner of being responsible for whatever is obstructing it. Or perhaps everything seems outwardly all right, but beneath the surface, a person is suffering from a deadly boredom that makes everything seem meaningless and empty. Many myths and fairy tales symbolically describe this initial stage in the process of individuation by telling of a king who has fallen ill or grown old. Other familiar story patterns are that a royal couple is barren, or that a monster steals all the women, children, horses and wealth of the kingdom, or that a demon keeps the king's army or his ship from proceeding on its course, or that darkness hangs over the lands, wells dry up and flood, drought and frost afflict the country. Thus it seems as if the initial encounter with the self casts a dark shadow ahead of time, or as if the inner friend comes at first like a trapper to catch the helplessly struggling ego in his snare. In myths, one finds that the magic or talisman that can cure the misfortune of the king or his country always proves to be something very special. In one tale, a white blackbird or a fish that carries a golden ring in its gills is needed to restore the king's health. In another, the king wants the water of life or three golden hairs from the head of the devil or a woman's golden plate, and afterward naturally the owner of the plate. Whatever it is, the thing that can drive away the evil is always unique and hard to find. It is exactly the same in the initial crisis in the life of an individual. One is seeking something that is impossible to find, or about which nothing is known. In such moments, all well meant, sensible advice is completely useless. Advice that urges one to try to be responsible, to take a holiday, not to work so hard, or to work harder, to have more or less human contact, or to take up a hobby. None of that helps, or at best only rarely. There is only one thing that seems to work, and that is to turn directly toward the approaching darkness without prejudice and totally naively, and to try to find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you. The hidden purpose of the oncoming darkness is generally something so unusual, so unique and unexpected, that as a rule one can find out what it is only by means of dreams and fantasies welling up from the unconscious. If one focuses attention on the unconscious without rash assumptions or emotional rejection, it often breaks through in a flow of helpful symbolic images. But not always. Sometimes it first offers a series of painful realizations of what is wrong with one's self and one's conscious attitudes. Then one must begin the process by swallowing all sorts of bitter truths. The Realization of the Shadow Whether the unconscious comes up at first in a helpful or a negative form, after a time the need usually arises to re-adapt the conscious attitude in a better way to the unconscious factors, therefore to accept what seems to be criticism from the unconscious. Through dreams one becomes acquainted with aspects of one's own personality that for various reasons one is preferred not to look at too closely. This is what Jung called the realization of the shadow. He used the term shadow for this unconscious part of the personality because it actually often appears in dreams in a personified form. The shadow is not the whole of the unconscious personality. It represents unknown or little known attributes and qualities of the ego, aspects that mostly belong to the personal sphere and that could just as well be conscious. In some aspects the shadow can also consist of collective factors that stem from a source outside the individual's personal life. When an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of and often ashamed of those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in other people such things as egotism, mental laziness and sloppiness, unreal fantasies, schemes and plots, carelessness and cowardice, inordinate love of money and possessions. In short, all the little sins about which he might previously have told himself that doesn't matter. Nobody will notice it and in any case other people do it too. If you feel an overwhelming rage coming up in you when a friend reproaches you about a fault, you can be fairly sure that at this point you will find a part of your shadow of which you are unconscious. It is, of course, natural to become annoyed when others who are no better criticize you because of shadow faults. But what can you say if your own dreams, an inner judge in your own being, reproach you? That is the moment when the ego gets caught and the result is usually embarrassed silence. Afterward, the painful and lengthy work of self-education begins. A work, we might say, that is the psychological equivalent of the labors of Hercules. This unfortunate hero's first task, you will remember, was to clean up in one day the Augean stables in which hundreds of cattle had dropped their dung for many decades. A task so enormous that the ordinary mortal would be overcome by discouragement at the mere thought of it. The shadow does not consist only of omissions. It shows up just as often in an impulsive or inadvertent act. Before one has time to think, the evil remark pops out, the plot is hatched, the wrong decision is made, and one is confronted with results that were never intended or consciously wanted. Furthermore, the shadow is exposed to collective infections to a much greater extent than is the conscious personality. When a man is alone, for instance, he feels relatively all right. But as soon as the others do dark primitive things, he begins to fear that if he doesn't join in, he will be considered a fool. Thus he gives way to impulses that do not really belong to him at all. It is particularly in contact with people of the same sex that one stumbles over both one's own shadow and those of other people. Although we do see the shadow in a person of the opposite sex, we are usually much less annoyed by it and can more easily pardon it. In dreams and myths, therefore, the shadow appears as a person of the same sex as that of the dreamer. The following dream may serve as an example. The dreamer was a man of forty-eight who tried to live very much for and by himself, working hard and disciplining himself, repressing pleasure and spontaneity to a far greater extent than suited his real nature. I owned and inhabited a very big house in town, and I didn't yet know all its different parts, so I took a walk through it and discovered, mainly in the cellar, several rooms about which I knew nothing and even exits leading into other cellars or into subterranean streets. I felt uneasy when I found that several of these exits were not locked and some had no locks at all. Moreover, there were some laborers at work in the neighborhood who could have sneaked in. When I came up again to the ground floor, I passed a backyard where again I discovered different exits into the street or into other houses. When I tried to investigate them more closely, a man came up to me laughing loudly and calling out that we were old pals from the elementary school. I remembered him too, and while he was telling me about his life, I walked along with him toward the exit and strolled with him through the streets. There was a strange chiaroscuro in the air as we walked through an enormous circular street and arrived at a green lawn where three galloping horses suddenly passed us. They were beautiful, strong animals, wild but well groomed, and they had no rider with them. Had they run away from military service? The maze of strange passages, chambers, and unlocked exits in the cellar recalls the old Egyptian representation of the underworld, which is a well-known symbol of the unconscious with its unknown possibilities. It also shows how one is open to other influences in one's unconscious shadow side and how uncanny and alien elements can break in. The cellar, one can say, is the basement of the dreamer's psyche. In the backyard of the strange building, which represents the still unperceived psychic scope of the dreamer's personality, an old school friend suddenly turns up. This person obviously personifies another aspect of the dreamer himself, an aspect that had been part of his life as a child, but that he had forgotten and lost. It often happens that a person's childhood qualities, for instance, gaiety, irascibility, or perhaps trustfulness, suddenly disappear and one does not know where or how they have gone. It is such a lost characteristic of the dreamer that now returns from the backyard and tries to make friends again. This figure probably stands for the dreamer's neglected capacity for enjoying life and for his extroverted shadow side. But we soon learn why the dreamer feels uneasy just before meeting this seemingly harmless old friend. When he strolls with him in the street, the horses break loose. The dreamer thinks they may have escaped from military service, that is to say from the conscious discipline that has hitherto characterized his life. The fact that the horses have no rider shows that instinctive drives can get away from conscious control. In this old friend and in the horses, all the positive force reappears that is lacking before and that was badly needed by the dreamer. This is a problem that often comes up when one meets one's other side. The shadow usually contains values that are needed by consciousness but that exist in a form that makes it difficult to integrate them into one's life. The passages and the large house in this dream also show that the dreamer does not yet know his own psychic dimensions and is not yet able to fill them out. The shadow in this dream is typical for an introvert, a man who tends to retire too much from outer life. In the case of an extrovert who is turned more toward outer objects and outer life, the shadow would look quite different. A young man who had a very lively temperament embarked again and again on successful enterprises while at the same time his dreams insisted that he should finish off a piece of private creative work he had begun. The following was one of those dreams. A man is lying on a couch and has pulled the cover over his face. He is a Frenchman, a desperado who would take on any criminal job. An official is accompanying me downstairs and I know that a plot has been made against me, namely that the Frenchman should kill me as if by chance. That is how it would look from the outside. He actually sneaks up behind me when we approach the exit but I am on my guard. A tall, portly man, rather rich and influential, suddenly leans against the wall beside me feeling ill. I quickly grab the opportunity to kill the official by stabbing his heart. One only notices a bit of moisture. This is said like a comment. Now I am safe for the Frenchman won't attack me since the man who gave him his orders is dead. Probably the official and the successful portly man are the same person, the latter somehow replacing the former. The desperado represents the other side of the dreamer, his introversion, which has reached a completely destitute state. He lies on a couch, that is, he is passive and pulls the cover over his face because he wants to be left alone. The official on the other hand and the prosperous portly man, who are secretly the same person, personify the dreamer's successful outer responsibilities and activities. The sudden illness of the portly man is connected with the fact that this dreamer had in fact become ill several times when he had allowed his dynamic energy to explode too forcibly in his external life. But this successful man has no blood in his veins, only a sort of moisture, which means that these external ambitious activities of the dreamer contain no genuine life and no passion, but are bloodless mechanisms. Thus it would be no real loss if the portly man were killed. At the end of the dream, the Frenchman is satisfied. He obviously represents a positive shadow figure who had turned negative and dangerous only because the conscious attitude of the dreamer did not agree with him. This dream shows us that the shadow can consist of many different elements. For instance, of unconscious ambition, the successful portly man, and of introversion, the Frenchman. This particular dreamer's association to the French, moreover, was that they know how to handle love affairs very well. Therefore, the two shadow figures also represent two well-known drives, power and sex. The power drive appears momentarily in a double form, both as an official and as a successful man. The official, or a civil servant, personifies collective adaptation, whereas the successful man denotes ambition. But naturally, both serve the power drive. When the dreamer succeeds in stopping this dangerous inner force, the Frenchman is suddenly no longer hostile. In other words, the equally dangerous aspect of the sex drive has also surrendered. Obviously, the problem of the shadow plays a great role in all political conflicts. If the man who had this dream had not been sensible about his shadow problem, he could easily have identified the desperate Frenchman with the dangerous communists of outer life, or the official, plus the prosperous man, with the grasping capitalists. In this way, he would have avoided seeing that he had within him such warring elements. If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a projection. Political agitation in all countries is full of such projections, as much as the backyard gossip of little groups and individuals. Projections of all kinds obscure our view of our fellow men, spoiling its objectivity, and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine human relationships. And there is an additional disadvantage in projecting our shadow. If we identify our own shadow with, say, the communists or the capitalists, a part of our own personality remains on the opposing side. The result is that we shall constantly, though involuntarily, do things behind our own backs that support this other side, and thus we shall unwittingly help our enemy. If, on the contrary, we realize the projection and can discuss matters without fear or hostility, dealing with the other person sensibly, then there is a chance of mutual understanding, or at least of a truce. Whether the shadow becomes our friend or enemy depends largely upon ourselves. As the dreams of the unexplored house and the French desperado both show, the shadow is not necessarily always an opponent. In fact, he is exactly like any human being with whom one has to get along, sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love, whatever the situation requires. The shadow becomes hostile only when he is ignored or misunderstood. Sometimes, though not often, an individual feels impelled to live out the worst side of his nature and to repress his better side. In such cases, the shadow appears as a positive figure in his dreams, but to a person who lives out his natural emotions and feelings, the shadow may appear as a cold and negative intellectual. It then personifies poisonous judgments and negative thoughts that have been held back. So whatever form it takes, the function of the shadow is to represent the opposite side of the ego and to embody just those qualities that one dislikes most in other people. It would be relatively easy if one could integrate the shadow into the conscious personality just by attempting to be honest and to use one's insight. But unfortunately, such an attempt does not always work. There is such a passionate drive within the shadowy part of oneself that reason may not prevail against it. A bitter experience coming from the outside may occasionally help. A brick, so to speak, has to drop on one's head to put a stop to shadow drives and impulses. At times, a heroic decision may serve to halt them, but such a superhuman effort is usually possible only if the great man within, the self, helps the individual to carry it through. The fact that the shadow contains the overwhelming power of irresistible impulse does not mean, however, that the drive should always be heroically repressed. Sometimes the shadow is powerful because the urge of the self is pointing in the same direction and so one does not know whether it is the self or the shadow that is behind the inner pressure. In the unconscious, one is unfortunately in the same situation as in a moonlit landscape. All the contents are blurred and merge into one another, and one never knows exactly what or where anything is or where one thing begins and ends. This is known as the contamination of unconscious contents. When Jung called one aspect of the unconscious personality the shadow, he was referring to a relatively well-defined factor. But sometimes everything that is unknown to the ego is mixed up with the shadow, including even the most valuable and highest forces. Who, for instance, could be quite sure whether the French desperado in the dream I quoted was a useless tramp or a most valuable introvert, and the bolting horses of the preceding dream? Should they be allowed to run free or not? In a case when the dream itself does not make things clear, the conscious personality will have to make the decision. If the shadow figure contains valuable, vital forces, they ought to be assimilated into actual experience and not repressed. It is up to the ego to give up its pride and prigishness and to live out something that seems to be dark but actually may not be. This can require a sacrifice just as heroic as the conquest of passion, but in an opposite sense. The ethical difficulties that arise when one meets one's shadow are well described in the eighteenth book of the Quran. In this tale, Moses meets Hider, the green one, or first angel of God, in the desert. They wander along together, and Hider expresses his fear that Moses will not be able to witness his deeds without indignation. If Moses cannot bear with him and trust him, Hider will have to leave. Presently, Hider scuttles the fishing boat of some poor villagers. Then, before Moses' eyes, he kills a handsome young man, and finally he restores the fallen wall of a city of unbelievers. Moses cannot help expressing his indignation, and so Hider has to leave him. Before his departure, however, he explains the reasons for his actions. By scuttling the boat, he actually saved it for its owners because pirates were on their way to steal it. As it is, the fishermen can salvage it. The handsome young man was on his way to commit a crime, and by killing him, Hider saved his pious parents from infamy. By restoring the wall, two pious young men were saved from ruin because their treasure was buried under it. Moses, who had been so morally indignant, saw now, too late, that his judgment had been too hasty. Hider's doings had seemed to be totally evil, but in fact they were not. Looking at this story naively, one might assume that Hider is the lawless, capricious evil shadow of pious law abiding Moses. But this is not the case. Hider is much more the personification of some secret creative actions of the Godhead. One can find a similar meaning in the famous Indian story of the King and the Corpse, as interpreted by Henry Zimmer. It is no accident that I have not quoted a dream to illustrate this subtle problem. I have chosen this well-known story from the Quran because it sums up the experience of a lifetime, which would very rarely be expressed with such clarity in an individual dream. When dark figures turn up in our dreams and seem to want something, we cannot be sure whether they personify merely a shadowy part of ourselves, or the self, or both at the same time. Divining in advance, whether our dark partner symbolizes a shortcoming that we should overcome, or a meaningful bit of life that we should accept, this is one of the most difficult problems that we encounter on the way to individuation. Moreover, the dream symbols are often so subtle and complicated that one cannot be sure of their interpretation. In such a situation, all one can do is accept the discomfort of ethical doubt, making no final decisions or commitments, and continuing to watch the dreams. This resembles the situation of Cinderella when her stepmother threw a heap of good and bad peas in front of her and asked her to sort them out. Although it seemed quite hopeless, Cinderella began patiently to sort the peas and suddenly doves, or ants in some versions, came to help her. These creatures symbolize helpful, deeply unconscious impulses that can only be felt in one's body, as it were, and that point to a way out. Somewhere, right at the bottom of one's own being, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call I behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt. Sometimes all attempts to understand the hints of the unconscious fail, and in such a difficulty one can only have the courage to do what seems to be right while being ready to change course if the suggestions of the unconscious should suddenly point in another direction. It may also happen, although this is unusual, that a person will find it better to resist the urge of the unconscious even at the price of feeling worked by doing so rather than depart too far from the state of being human. This would be the situation of people who had to live out a criminal disposition in order to be completely themselves. The strength and inner clarity needed by the ego in order to make such a decision stems secretly from the great man who apparently does not want to reveal himself too clearly. It may be that the self wants the ego to make a free choice, or it may be that the self depends on human consciousness and its decisions to help him to become manifest. When it comes to such difficult ethical problems, no one can truly judge the deeds of others. Each man has to look to his own problem and try to determine what is right for himself. As an old Zen Buddhist master said, we must follow the example of the cowherd who watches his ox with a stick so that it will not graze on other people's meadows. These new discoveries of depth psychology are bound to make some change in our collective ethical views, for they will compel us to judge all human actions in a much more individual and subtle way. End of SIDE 5 To continue, turn the cassette over. SIDE 6 Man and His Symbols by Carl G. Jung Continuing with the process of individuation on page 176, the discovery of the unconscious is one of the most far-reaching discoveries of recent times, but the fact that recognition of its unconscious reality involves honest self-examination and reorganization of one's life causes many people to continue to behave as if nothing at all has happened. It takes a lot of courage to take the unconscious seriously and to tackle the problems it raises. Most people are too indolent to think deeply about even those moral aspects of their behavior of which they are conscious. They are certainly too lazy to consider how the unconscious affects them. The Anima The Woman Within Difficult and subtle ethical problems are not invariably brought up by the appearance of the shadow itself. Often another inner figure emerges. If the dreamer is a man, he will discover a female personification of his unconscious, and it will be a male figure in the case of a woman. Often this second symbolic figure turns up behind the shadow, bringing up new and different problems. Jung called its male and female forms animus and anima. The anima is a personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man's psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature, and, last but not least, the unconscious. It is no mere chance that in olden times priestesses, like the Greek Sibyl, were used to fathom the divine will and to make connection with the gods. A particularly good example of how the anima is experienced as an inner figure in a man's psyche is found in the medicine men and prophets, shamans, among the Eskimo and other Arctic tribes. Some of these even wear women's clothes or have breasts depicted on their garments to manifest their inner feminine side, the side that enables them to connect with the ghost land, that is, what we call the unconscious. One reported case tells of a young man who was being initiated by an older shaman and who was buried by him in a snow hole. He fell into a state of dreaminess and exhaustion. In this coma he suddenly saw a woman who emitted light. She instructed him in all he needed to know, and later, as his protective spirit, helped him to practice his difficult profession by relating him to the powers of the beyond. Such an experience shows the anima as the personification of a man's unconscious. In its individual manifestation, the character of a man's anima is as a rule shaped by his mother. If he feels that his mother had a negative influence on him, his anima will often express itself in irritable, depressed moods, uncertainty, insecurity and touchiness. If, however, he is able to overcome the negative assaults on himself, they can even serve to reinforce his masculinity. Within the soul of such a man, the negative mother anima figure will endlessly repeat this theme. I am nothing. Nothing makes any sense. With others it's different, but for me, I enjoy nothing. These anima moods cause a sort of dullness, a fear of disease, of impotence, or of accidents. The whole of life takes on a sad and depressive aspect. Such dark moods can even lure a man to suicide, in which case the anima becomes a death demon. She appears in this role in Kokto's film, Orphe. The French call such an anima figure a femme fatale. A milder version of this dark anima is personified by the queen of the night in Mozart's magic flute. The Greek sirens, or the German Lorelai, also personify this dangerous aspect of the anima, which in this form symbolizes destructive illusion. The following Siberian tale illustrates the behavior of such a destructive anima. One day, a lonely hunter sees a beautiful woman emerging from the deep forest on the other side of the river. She waves at him and sings, oh, come, lonely hunter, in the stillness of dusk, come, come, I miss you, I miss you. Now I will embrace you, embrace you. Come, come, my nest is near, my nest is near. Come, come, lonely hunter, now in the stillness of dusk. He throws off his clothes and swims across the river, but suddenly she flies away in the form of an owl, laughing mockingly at him. When he tries to swim back to find his clothes, he drowns in the cold river. In this tale, the anima symbolizes an unreal dream of love, happiness, and maternal warmth, her nest. A dream that lures men away from reality. The hunter is drowned because he ran after a wishful fantasy that could not be fulfilled. Another way in which the negative anima in a man's personality can be revealed is in waspish, poisonous, effeminate remarks by which he devalues everything. Remarks of this sword always contain a cheap twisting of the truth and are in a subtle way destructive. There are legends throughout the world in which a poison damsel, as they call her in the Orient, appears. She is a beautiful creature who has weapons hidden in her body, or a secret poison with which she kills her lovers during their first night together. In this guise, the anima is as cold and reckless as certain uncanny aspects of nature itself, and in Europe is often expressed to this day by the belief in witches. If, on the other hand, a man's experience of his mother has been positive, this can also affect his anima in typical but different ways with the result that he either becomes a feminist, or is preyed upon by women, and thus is unable to cope with the hardships of life. An anima of this sort can turn men into sentimentalists, or they may become as touchy as old maids, or as sensitive as the fairy-tale princess who could feel a pee under mattresses. A still more subtle manifestation of a negative anima appears in some fairy tales in the form of a princess who asks her suitors to answer a series of riddles, or perhaps to hide themselves under her nose. If they cannot give the answers, or if she can find them, they must die, and she invariably wins. The anima in this guise involves men in a destructive intellectual game. We can notice the effect of this animatric in all those neurotic pseudo-intellectual dialogues that inhibit a man from getting into direct touch with life and its real decisions. He reflects about life so much that he cannot live it, and loses all his spontaneity and outgoing feeling. The most frequent manifestation of the anima takes the form of erotic fantasy. Men may be driven to nurse their fantasies by looking at films and striptease shows, or by daydreaming over pornographic material. This is a crude primitive aspect of the anima, which becomes compulsive only when a man does not sufficiently cultivate his feeling relationships when his feeling attitude toward life has remained infantile. All these aspects of the anima have the same tendency that we have observed in the shadow. That is, they can be projected so that they appear to the man to be the qualities of some particular woman. It is the presence of the anima that causes a man to fall suddenly in love when he sees a woman for the first time and knows at once that this is she. In this situation the man feels as if he has known this woman intimately for all time. He falls for her so helplessly that it looks to outsiders like complete madness. Women who are a fairy-like character especially attract such anima projections because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her. The projection of the anima in such a sudden and passionate form as a love affair can greatly disturb a man's marriage and can lead to the so-called human triangle with its accompanying difficulties. A bearable solution to such a drama can be found only if the anima is recognized as an inner power. The secret aim of the unconscious in bringing about such an entanglement is to force a man to develop and to bring his own being to maturity by integrating more of his unconscious personality and bringing it into his real life. But I have said enough about the negative side of the anima. There are just as many important positive aspects. The anima is for instance responsible for the fact that a man is able to find the right marriage partner. Another function is at least equally important. Whenever a man's logical mind is capable of discerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious, the anima helps him to dig them out. Even more vital is the role that the anima plays in putting a man's mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths. It is as if an inner radio becomes tuned to a certain wavelength that excludes your relevances but allows the voice of the great man to be heard. In establishing this inner radio reception, the anima takes on the role of guide or mediator to the world within and to the self. That is how she appears in the example of the initiations of shamans that I described earlier. This is the role of Beatrice in Dante's Paradiso and also of the goddess Isis when she appeared in a dream to Apuleus, the famous author of the Golden Ass, in order to initiate him into a higher, more spiritual form of life. A five-year-old psychotherapist may help to make clear how the anima can be an inner guide. As he was going to bed on the evening before he had this dream, he thought to himself that it was hard to stand alone in life, lacking the support of a church. He found himself envying people who are protected by the maternal embrace of an organization. He had been born a Protestant but no longer had any religious affiliation. This was his dream. I am in the isle of an old church filled with people. Together with my mother and my wife I sit at the end of the isle in what seemed to be extra seats. I am to celebrate the mass as a priest, and I have a big mass book in my hands or rather a prayer book or an anthology of poems. This book is not familiar to me and I cannot find the right text. I am very excited because I have to begin soon and to add to the troubles my mother and wife disturbed me by chattering about unimportant trifles. Now the organ stops and everybody is waiting for me so I get up in a determined way and ask one of the nuns who is kneeling behind me to hand me her mass book and point out the right place, which she does in an obliging manner. Now, like a sort of sexton, this same nun precedes me to the altar which is somewhere behind me to help. The mass book is like a sheet of pictures, a sort of board, three feet long and a foot wide, and on it is the text with ancient pictures in columns one beside the other. First, the nun has to read a part of the liturgy before I begin and I have still not found the right place in the text. She has told me that it is number 15 but the numbers are not clear and I cannot find it. With determination, however, I turn to the congregation and now I have found number 15, the next to the last on the board, although I do not yet know if I shall be able to decipher it. I want to try all the same. I wake up. This dream expressed in a symbolic way an answer from the unconscious to the thoughts that the dreamer had had the evening before. It said to him in effect, you yourself must become a priest in your own inner church, in the church of your soul. Thus the dream shows that the dreamer does have the helpful support of an organization. He is contained in a church, not an external church, but one that exists inside his own soul. The people, all his own psychic qualities, want him to function as the priest and celebrate the mass himself. Now the dream cannot mean the actual mass, for its mass book is very different from the real one. It seems that the idea of the mass is used as a symbol and therefore it means a sacrificial act in which the divinity is present so that man can communicate with it. This symbolic solution is of course not generally valid, but relates to this particular dreamer. It is a typical solution for a protestant because a man who through real faith is still contained in the Catholic church usually experiences his anima in the image of the church herself and her sacred images are for him the symbols of the unconscious. Our dreamer did not have this ecclesiastical experience, and this is why he had to follow an inner way. Furthermore the dream told him what he should do. It said, your mother boundness and your extraversion represented by the wife who is an extravert distract you and make you feel insecure and by meaningless talk keep you from celebrating the inner mass. But if you follow the nun, the introverted anima, she will lead you as both a servant and a priest. She owns a strange mass book which is composed of 16 four times four ancient pictures. Your mass consists of your contemplation of these psychic images that your religious anima reveals to you. In other words, if the dreamer overcomes his inner uncertainty caused by his mother complex he will find that his life task has the nature and quality of a religious service, and that if he meditates about the symbolic meaning of the images in his soul they will lead him to this realization. In this dream the anima appears in her proper positive role, that is, as a mediator between the ego and the self. The four times four configuration of the pictures points to the fact that the celebration of this inner mass is performed in the service of totality. As Jung has demonstrated, the nucleus of the psyche, the self, normally expresses itself in some kind of fourfold structure. The number four is also connected with the anima because, as Jung noted, there are four stages in its development. The first stage is best symbolized by the figure of Eve which represents purely instinctual and biological relations. The second can be seen in Faust's Helen. She personifies a romantic and aesthetic level that is, however, still characterized by sexual elements. The third is represented, for instance, by the Virgin Mary, a figure who raises love, eros, to the heights of spiritual devotion. The fourth type is symbolized by sapientia, wisdom, transcending even the most holy and the most pure. Of this another symbol is the Shulamite in the song of Solomon. In the psychic development of modern man this stage is rarely reached. The Mona Lisa comes nearest to such a wisdom anima. At this stage I am only pointing out that the concept of fourfoldness frequently occurs in certain types of symbolic material. The essential aspects of this will be discussed later. But what does the role of the anima as guide to the inner world mean in practical terms? This positive function occurs when a man takes seriously the feelings, moods, expectations, and fantasies sent by his anima, and when he fixes them in some form, for example in writing, painting, sculpture, musical composition, or dancing. When he works at this patiently and slowly, other more deeply unconscious material wells up from the depths and connects with the earlier material. After a fantasy has been fixed in some specific form, it must be examined both intellectually and ethically with an evaluating feeling reaction. And it is essential to regard it as being absolutely real. There must be no lurking doubt that this is only a fantasy. If this is practiced with devotion over a long period, the process of individuation gradually becomes the single reality and can unfold in its true form. Many examples from literature show the anima as a guide and mediator to the inner world. Francesco Colonna's Hippnerotomachia, writer and she, or the eternal feminine in Goethe's Faust. In a medieval mystical text, an anima figure explains her own nature as follows. I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys. I am the mother of fair love and of fear and of knowledge and of holy hope. I am the mediator of the elements, making one to agree with another. That which is warm, I make cold and the reverse, and that which is hard, I soften. I am the law in the priest and the word in the prophet and the counsel in the wise. I will kill and I will make to live and there is none that can deliver out of my hand. In the Middle Ages there took place a perceptible spiritual differentiation in religious, poetical and other cultural matters and the fantasy world of the unconscious was recognized more clearly than before. During this period, the nightly cult of the lady signified an attempt to differentiate the feminine side of man's nature in regard to the outer woman as well as in relation to the inner world. The lady to whose service the knight pledged himself and for whom he performed his heroic deeds was naturally a personification of the anima. The name of the carrier of the grail involved from Eschenbach's version of the legend is especially significant. The name of the carrier was a woman named Laudmire, a woman from the city of Mour, guide in Love Matters. She taught the hero to differentiate both his feelings and his behavior toward women. Later however, this individual and personal effort of developing the relationship with the anima was abandoned when her sublime aspect fused with the figure of the virgin who then became the object of boundless devotion and praise. expression in the belief in witches. In China, the figure parallel to that of Mary is the goddess Kuan Yin. A more popular Chinese anima figure is the Lady of the Moon, who bestows the gift of poetry or music on her favorites and can even give them immortality. In India, the same archetype is represented by Shakti, Parvati, Rati, and many others. In the Moslems, she is chiefly Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad. Worship of the anima as an officially recognized religious figure brings the serious disadvantage that she loses her individual aspects. On the other hand, if she is regarded as an exclusively personal being, there is the danger that if she is projected into the outer world, it is only there that she can be found. This latter state of affairs can create endless trouble because man becomes either the victim of his erotic fantasies or compulsively dependent on one actual woman. Only the painful but essentially simple decision to take one's fantasies and feelings seriously can at this stage prevent a complete stagnation of the inner process of individuation because only in this way can a man discover what this figure means as an inner reality. Thus, the anima becomes again what she originally was, the woman within, who conveys the vital messages of the self, the animus, the man within. The male personification of the unconscious in woman, the animus, exhibits both good and bad aspects, as does the anima in man. But the animus does not so often appear in the form of an erotic fantasy or mood. It is more apt to take the form of a hidden sacred conviction. When such a conviction is preached with a loud, insistent, masculine voice or imposed on others by means of brutal emotional scenes, the underlying masculinity in a woman is easily recognized. However, even in a woman who is outwardly very feminine, the animus can be an equally hard, inexorable power. One may suddenly find oneself up against something in a woman that is obstinate, cold, and completely inaccessible. One of the favorite themes that the animus repeats endlessly in the ruminations of this kind of woman goes like this. The only thing in the world that I want is love, and he doesn't love me. Or in this situation there are only two possibilities, and both are equally bad. The animus never believes in exceptions. One can rarely contradict an animus' opinion because it is usually right in a general way, yet its seldom seems to fit the individual situation. It is apt to be an opinion that seems reasonable, but beside the point. The animus says the character of a man's anima is shaped by his mother, so the animus is basically influenced by a woman's father. The father endows his daughter's animus with the special coloring of unarguable, incontestably true convictions, convictions that never include the personal reality of the woman herself as she actually is. This is why the animus is sometimes, like the anima, a demon of death. For example, in a gypsy fairy tale, a handsome stranger is received by a lonely woman in spite of the fact that she has had a dream warning her that he is the king of the dead. After he has been with her for a time, she presses him to tell her who he really is. At first he refuses, saying that she will die if he tells her. She insists, however, and suddenly he reveals to her that he is death himself. The woman immediately dies of fright. But mythologically, the beautiful stranger is probably a pagan father image or god image who appears here as king of the dead, like Hades' abduction of Persephone. But psychologically, he represents a particular form of the animus that lures women away from all human relationships and especially from all contacts with real men. He personifies a cocoon of dreamy thoughts filled with desire and judgments about how things ought to be which cut a woman off from the reality of life. The negative animus does not appear only as a death demon. In myths and fairy tales, he plays the role of robber and murderer. One example is Bluebeard, who secretly kills all his wives in a hidden chamber. In this form, the animus personifies all those semi-conscious, cold, destructive reflections that invade a woman in the small hours, especially when she has failed to realize some obligation of feeling. It is then that she begins to think about the family heritage and matters of that kind, a sort of web of calculating thoughts filled with malice and intrigue which get her into a state where she even wishes death to others. When one of us dies, I'll move to the Riviera, said a woman to her husband when she saw the beautiful Mediterranean coast, a thought that was rendered relatively harmless by reason of the fact that she said it. By nursing secret destructive attitudes, a wife can drive her husband and a mother, her children, into illness, accident, or even death. Or she may decide to keep the children from marrying, a deeply hidden form of evil that rarely comes to the surface of the mother's conscious mind. A naive old woman once said to me, while showing me a picture of her son, who was drowned when he was twenty-seven, I prefer it this way. It's better than giving him away to another woman. A strange passivity and paralysis of all feeling or a deep insecurity that can lead almost to a sense of nullity may sometimes be the result of an unconscious, animus opinion. In the depths of the woman's being, the animus whispers, you are hopeless. What's the use of trying? There is no point in doing anything. Life will never change for the better. Unfortunately, whenever one of these personifications of the unconscious takes possession of our mind, it seems as if we ourselves are having such thoughts and feelings. The ego identifies with them to the point where it is unable to detach them and see them for what they are. One is really possessed by the figure from the unconscious. Only after the possession has fallen away does one realize with horror that one has said and done things diametrically opposed to one's real thoughts and feelings that one has been the prey of an alien psychic factor. Like the anima, the animus does not merely consist of negative qualities such as brutality, recklessness, empty talk, and silent, obstinate, evil ideas. He too has a very positive and valuable side. He too can build a bridge to the self through his creative activity. The following dream of a woman of 45 may help to illustrate this point. Two veiled figures climb onto the balcony and into the house. They are swathed in black hooded coats, and they seem to want to torment me and my sister. She hides under the bed, but they pull her out with a broom and torture her. Then it is my turn. The leader of the two pushes me against the wall, making magical gestures before my face. In the meantime, his helper makes a sketch on the wall, and when I see it, I say, in order to seem friendly, Oh, but this is well drawn. Now suddenly my tormentor has the noble head of an artist, and he says proudly, Yes indeed, and begins to clean his spectacles. The sadistic aspect of these two figures was well known to the dreamer, for in reality she frequently suffered bad attacks of anxiety, during which she was haunted by the thought that people she loved were in great danger, or even that they were dead. But the fact that the animus figure in the dream is double suggests that the burglars personify a psychic factor that is dual in its effect, and that could be something quite different from these tormenting thoughts. The sister of the dreamer, who runs away from the men, is caught and tortured. In reality, this sister died when fairly young. She had been artistically gifted, but had made very little use of her talent. Next the dream reveals that the veiled burglars are actually disguised artists, and that if the dreamer recognizes their gifts, which are her own, they will give up their evil intentions. What is the deeper meaning of the dream? It is that behind the spasms of anxiety, there is indeed a genuine and mortal danger. But there is also a creative possibility for the dreamer. She like the sister, had some talent as a painter, but she doubted whether painting could be a meaningful activity for her. Now her dream tells her in the most earnest way that she must live out this talent. If she obeys, the destructive tormenting animus will be transformed into a creative and meaningful activity. As in this dream, the animus often appears as a group of men. In this way, the unconscious symbolizes the fact that the animus represents a collective rather than a personal element. Because of this collective mindedness, women habitually refer, when their animus is speaking through them, to one, or they, or everybody. But in such circumstances, their speech frequently contains the words always and should and ought. A vast number of myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, turned by witchcraft into a wild animal or monster, who is redeemed by the love of a girl, a process symbolizing the manner in which the animus becomes conscious. Dr. Henderson has commented on the significance of this beauty and the beast motif in the preceding chapter. Very often, the heroine is not allowed to ask questions about her mysterious, unknown lover and husband, or she meets him only in the dark and may never look at him. The implication is that by blindly trusting and loving him, she will be able to redeem her bridegroom. But this never succeeds. She always breaks her promise and finally finds her lover again only after a long difficult quest and much suffering. The parallel in life is that the conscious attention a woman has to give to her animus problem takes much time and involves a lot of suffering. But if she realizes who and what her animus is and what he does to her, and if she faces these realities instead of allowing herself to be possessed, her animus can turn into an invaluable inner companion who endows her with the masculine qualities of initiative, courage, objectivity, and spiritual wisdom. The animus, just like the anima, exhibits four stages of development. He first appears as a personification of mere physical power, for instance, as an athletic champion or muscle man. In the next stage, he possesses initiative and the capacity for planned action. In the third phase, the animus becomes the word, often appearing as a professor or clergyman. Finally, in his fourth manifestation, the animus is the incarnation of meaning. On this highest level, he becomes, like the anima, a mediator of the religious experience whereby life acquires new meaning. He gives the woman spiritual firmness, an invisible inner support that compensates for her outer softness. The animus in his most developed form sometimes connects the woman's mind with the spiritual evolution of her age and can thereby make her even more receptive than a man to new creative ideas. It is for this reason that in earlier times, women were used by many nations as diviners and seers. The creative boldness of their positive animus at times expresses thoughts and ideas that stimulate men to new enterprises. The inner man within a woman's psyche can lead to marital troubles similar to those mentioned in the section on the anima. What makes things especially complicated is the fact that the possession of one partner by the animus or anima may automatically exert such an irritating effect upon the other that he or she becomes possessed too. Animus and anima always tend to drag conversation down to a very low level and to produce a disagreeable, irascible, emotional atmosphere. As I mentioned before, the positive side of the animus can personify an enterprising spirit, courage, truthfulness, and in the highest form, spiritual profundity. Through him, a woman can experience the underlying processes of her cultural and personal objective situation and can find her way to an intensified spiritual attitude to life. This naturally presupposes that her animus ceases to represent opinions that are above criticism. The woman must find the courage and inner broad-mindedness to question the sacredness of her own convictions. Only then will she be able to take in the suggestions of the unconscious, especially when they contradict her animus opinions. Only then will the manifestations of the self get through to her, and will she be able consciously to understand their meaning. The Self, Symbols of Totality If an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with the anima or animus problem so that he or she is no longer partially identified with it, the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form representing the self, the innermost nucleus of the psyche. In the dreams of a woman, this center is usually personified as a superior female figure, a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In the case of a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian, an Indian guru, a wise old man, a spirit of nature, and so forth. Two folktales illustrate the role that such a figure can play. The first is an Austrian tale. A king has ordered soldiers to keep the night watch beside the corpse of a black princess who has been bewitched. Every midnight she rises and kills the guard. At last one soldier, whose turn it is to stand guard, despairs and runs away into the woods. There he meets an old guitarist who is our Lord Himself. This old musician tells him where to hide in the church and instructs him on how to behave so that the black princess cannot get him. With this divine help, the soldier actually manages to redeem the princess and marry her. Clearly, the old guitarist who is our Lord Himself is, in psychological terms, a symbolic personification of the self. With his help, the ego avoids destruction and is able to overcome and even redeem a highly dangerous aspect of his anima. In a woman's psyche, as I have said, the self assumes feminine personifications. This is illustrated in the second story, an Eskimo tale. A lonely girl who has been disappointed in love meets a wizard traveling in a copper boat. He is the spirit of the moon who has given all the animals to mankind and who also bestows luck in hunting. He abducts the girl to the heavenly realm. Once when the spirit of the moon has left her, she visits a little house near the moon ghost's mansion. There she finds a tiny woman clothed in the intestinal membrane of the bearded seal who warns the heroine against the spirit of the moon, saying that he plans to kill her. It appears that he is a killer of women, a sort of bluebeard. The tiny woman fashions a long rope, by means of which the girl can descend to earth at the time of the new moon, which is the moment when the little woman can weaken the moon spirit. The girl climbs down, but when she arrives on earth, she does not open her eyes as quickly as the little woman told her to. Because of this, she is turned into a spider and can never become human again. As we have noted, the divine musician in the first tale is a representation of the wise old man, a typical personification of the self. He is akin to the sorcerer Merlin of medieval legend or to the Greek god Hermes. The little woman in her strange membrane clothing is a parallel figure, symbolizing the self as it appears in the feminine psyche. The old musician saves the hero from the destructive anima, and the little woman protects the girl against the Eskimo bluebeard who is, in the form of the moon spirit, her animus. In this case, however, things go wrong, a point that I shall take up later. The self, however, does not always take the form of a wise old man or wise old woman. These paradoxical personifications are attempts to express something that is not entirely contained in time, something simultaneously young and old. The dream of a middle-aged man shows the self appearing as a young man. Coming from the street, a youth rode down into our garden. There were no bushes and no fence, as there are in real life, and the garden lay open. I did not quite know if he came on purpose or if the horse carried him here against his will. I stood on the path that leads to my studio and watched the arrival with great pleasure. The sight of the boy on his beautiful horse impressed me deeply. The horse was a small, wild, powerful animal, a symbol of energy. It resembled a boar, and it had a thick, bristly, silvery gray coat. The boy rode past me between the studio and house, jumped off his horse and led him carefully away so that he would not trample on the flower bed with its beautiful red and orange tulips. The flower bed had been newly made and planted by my wife, a dream occurrence. This youth signifies the self, and with it renewal of life, a creative élan vital, and a new spiritual orientation by means of which everything becomes full of life and enterprise. If a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift so that suddenly life, which has been stale and dull, turns into a rich, unending inner adventure full of creative possibilities. In a woman's psychology, this same youthful personification of the self can appear as a supernaturally gifted girl. The dreamer in this instance is a woman in her late forties. I stood in front of a church and was washing the pavement with water. Then I ran down the street just at the moment when the students from the high school were let out. I came to a stagnant river, across which a board or tree trunk had been laid. But when I was attempting to walk across, a mister of a student bounced on the board so that it cracked, and I nearly fell into the water. Idiot, I yelled out. On the other side of the river, three little girls were playing, and one of them stretched out her hand as if to help me. I thought that her small hand was not strong enough to help me, but when I took it, she succeeded without the slightest effort in pulling me across and up the bank on the other side. The dreamer is a religious person, but according to her dream, she cannot remain in the church, Protestant any longer. In fact, she seems to have lost the possibility of entering it, although she tries to keep the access to it as clean as she can. According to the dream, she must now cross a stagnant river, and this indicates that the flow of life is slowed down because of the unresolved religious problem. Crossing a river is a frequent symbolic image for a fundamental change of attitude. The student was interpreted by the dreamer herself as the personification of a thought that she had previously had, namely that she might satisfy her spiritual yearning by attending high school. Obviously, the dream does not think much of this plan. When she dares to cross the river alone, a personification of the self, the girl, small but supernaturally powerful, helps her. But the form of a human being, whether youthful or old, is only one of the many ways in which the self can appear in dreams or visions. The various ages it assumes show not only that it is with us throughout the whole of life, but also that it exists beyond the consciously realized flow of life, which is what creates our experience of time. Just as the self is not entirely contained in our conscious experience of time, in our space-time dimension, it is also simultaneously omnipresent. Moreover, it appears frequently in a form that hints at a special omnipresence. That is, it manifests itself as a gigantic, symbolic human being who embraces and contains the whole cosmos. When this image turns up in the dreams of an individual, we may hope for a creative solution to his conflict because now the vital psychic center is activated, that is, the whole being is condensed into oneness in order to overcome the difficulty. It is no wonder that this figure of the cosmic man appears in many myths and religious teachings. Generally, he is described as something helpful and positive. He appears as Adam, as the Persian Gayomart, or as the Hindu Purusa. This figure may even be described as the basic principle of the whole world. The ancient Chinese, for instance, thought that before anything whatever was created, there was a colossal divine man called Pan-ku who gave heaven and earth their form. When he cried, his tears made the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. When he breathed, the wind rose. When he spoke, thunder was loosed, and when he looked around, lightning flashed. If he was in a good mood, the weather was fine. If he was sad, it clouded over. When he died, he fell apart, and from his body the five holy mountains of China sprang into existence. His head became the Tai mountain in the east, his trunk became the Song mountain in the center, his right arm the Hong mountain in the north, his left arm the Hong mountain in the south, and his feet the Wa mountain in the west. His eyes became the Sun and Moon. We have already seen that symbolic structures that seem to refer to the process of individuation tend to be based on the motif of the number four, such as the four functions of consciousness, or the four stages of the anima or animus. It reappears here in the cosmic shape of Pan-ku. Only under specific circumstances do other combinations of numbers appear in the psychic material. The natural unhampered manifestations of the center are characterized by fourfoldness, that is to say by having four divisions or some other structure deriving from the numerical series of four, eight, sixteen, and so on. Number sixteen plays a particularly important role, since it is composed of four fours. In our western civilization, similar ideas of a cosmic man have attached themselves to the symbol of Adam, the first man. There is a Jewish legend that when God created Adam, he first gathered red, black, white, and yellow dust from the four corners of the world, and thus Adam reached from one end of the world to the other. When he bent down, his head was in the east and his feet in the west. According to another Jewish tradition, the whole of mankind was contained in Adam from the beginning, which meant the soul of everybody who would ever be born. The soul of Adam, therefore, was like the wick of a lamp composed of innumerable strands. In this symbol, the idea of a total oneness of all human existence, beyond all individual units, is clearly expressed. In ancient Persia, the same original first man, called Guyomart, was depicted as a huge figure emitting light. When he died, every kind of metal sprang from his body, and from his soul came gold. His semen fell upon the earth, and from it came the first human couple in the form of two rhubarb shrubs. It is striking that the Chinese Pankhu was also depicted covered by leaves like a plant. Perhaps this is because the first man was thought of as a self-grown living unit that just existed without any animal impulse or self-will. Among a group of people who live on the banks of the Tigris, Adam is still, at the present time, worshiped as the hidden Supersoul or mystical protective spirit of the entire human race. These people say that he came from a date palm, another repetition of the plant motif. In the East, and in some Gnostic circles in the West, people soon recognized that the cosmic man was more an inner psychic image than a concrete outer reality. According to Hindu tradition, for instance, he is something that lives within the individual human being and is the only part that is immortal. This inner great man redeems the individual by leading him out of creation and its sufferings back into his original eternal sphere. But he can do this only if man recognizes him and rises from his sleep in order to be led. In the symbolic myths of old India, this figure is known as the Purusa, a name that simply means man or person. The Purusa lives within the heart of every individual, and yet at the same time he fills the entire cosmos. According to the testimony of many myths, the cosmic man is not only the beginning, but also the final goal of all life, of the whole of creation. All serial nature means wheat. All treasure nature means gold. All generation means man, says the medieval sage Meister Eckhart. If one looks at this from a psychological standpoint, it is certainly so. The whole inner psychic reality of each individual is ultimately oriented toward this archetypal symbol of the self. In practical terms, this means that the existence of human beings will never be satisfactorily explained in terms of isolated instincts or purposive mechanisms such as hunger, power, sex, survival, perpetuation of the species, and so on. That is, man's main purpose is not to eat, drink, etc., but to be human. Above and beyond these drives, our inner psychic reality serves to manifest a living mystery that can be expressed only by a symbol, and for its expression the unconscious often chooses the powerful image of the cosmic man. In our western civilization, the cosmic man has been identified to a great extent with Christ, and in the East with Krishna or with Buddha. In the Old Testament, this same symbolic figure turns up as the Son of Man, and in later Jewish mysticism is called Adam Kadmon. Certain religious movements of late antiquity simply called him Anthropos, the Greek word for man. Like all symbols, this image points to an unknowable secret, to the ultimate unknown meaning of human existence. As we have noted, certain traditions assert that the cosmic man is the goal of creation, but the achievement of this should not be understood as a possible external happening. From the point of view of the Hindu, for example, it is not so much that the external world will one day dissolve into the original great man, but that the ego's extroverted orientation toward the external world will disappear in order to make way for the cosmic man. This happens when the ego merges into the self. The ego's discursive flow of representations, which goes from one thought to another, and its desires, which run from one object to another, calm down when the great man within is encountered. Indeed, we must never forget that for us outer reality exists only in so far as we perceive it consciously, and that we cannot prove that it exists in and by itself. The many examples coming from various civilizations and different periods show the universality of the symbol of the great man. His image is present in the minds of men as a sort of goal or expression of the basic mystery of our life. Because this symbol represents that which is whole and complete, it is often conceived of as a bisexual being. In this form, the symbol reconciles one of the most important pairs of psychological opposites, male and female. This union also appears frequently in dreams as a divine, royal, or otherwise distinguished couple. The following dream of a man of forty-seven shows this aspect of the self in a dramatic way. I am on a platform, and below me I see a huge black beautiful she-bear with a rough but well-groomed coat. She is standing on her hind legs, and on a stone slab she is polishing a flat oval black stone, which becomes increasingly shiny. Not far away, a lioness and her cub do the same thing, but the stones they are polishing are bigger and round in shape. After a while, the she-bear turns into a fat naked woman with black hair and dark fiery eyes. I behave in an erotically provocative way toward her, and suddenly she moves nearer in order to catch me. I get frightened and take refuge up on the building of scaffolding where I was before. Later, I am in the midst of many women, half of whom are primitive and have rich black hair as if they are transformed from animals. The other half are our women of the same nationality as the dreamer, and have blonde or brown hair. The primitive women sing a very sentimental song in melancholy high-pitched voices. Now in a high elegant carriage there comes a young man who wears on his head a royal golden crown set with shining rubies, a very beautiful sight. Beside him sits a blond young woman, probably his wife, but without a crown. It seems that the lioness and her cub have been transformed into this couple. They belong to the group of primitives. Now all the women, the primitives and the others, intone a solemn song, and the royal carriage slowly travels toward the horizon. Here the inner nucleus of the dreamer's psyche shows itself at first in a temporary vision of the royal couple which emerges from the depths of his animal nature and the primitive layer of his unconscious. The she-bear in the beginning is a sort of mother goddess. Artemis, for instance, was worshiped in Greece as a she-bear. The dark oval stone that she rubs and polishes probably symbolizes the dreamer's innermost being, his true personality. Rubbing and polishing stones is a well-known, exceeding the ancient activity of man. In Europe holy stones, wrapped in bark and hidden in caves, have been found in many places. As containers of divine powers they were probably kept there by men of the Stone Age. At the present time some of the Australian Aborigines believe that their dead ancestors continue to exist in stones as virtuous and divine powers, and that if they rub these stones the power increases, like charging them with electricity, for the benefit of both the living and the dead. The man who had the dream we are discussing had hitherto refused to accept a marital bond with a woman. His fear of being caught by this aspect of life caused him, in the dream, to flee from the bear woman to the spectator's platform where he could passively watch things without becoming entangled. Through the motif of the stone being rubbed by the bear, the unconscious is trying to show him that he should let himself come into contact with this side of life. It is through the frictions of married life that his inner being can be shaped and polished. When the stone is polished it will begin to shine like a mirror so that the bear can see herself in it. This means that only by accepting earthly contact and suffering can the human soul be transformed into a mirror in which the divine powers can perceive themselves. But the dreamer runs away to a higher place, that is, into all sorts of reflections by which he can escape the demands of life. The dream then shows him that if he runs away from the demands of life, one part of his soul, his anima, will remain undifferentiated, a fact symbolized by the group of non-descript women that splits apart into a primitive half and a more civilized one. The lioness and her son, which then appear on the scene, personify the mysterious urge toward individuation, indicated by their work at shaping the round stones. A round stone is a symbol of the self. The lions, a royal couple, are in themselves a symbol of totality. In medieval symbolism, the philosopher's stone, a preeminent symbol of man's wholeness, is represented as a pair of lions, or as a human couple riding on lions. Symbolically, this points to the fact that often the urge toward individuation appears in a veiled form, hidden in the overwhelming passion one may feel for another person. In fact, passion that goes beyond the natural measure of love ultimately aims at the mystery of becoming whole, and this is why one feels when one has fallen passionately in love that becoming one with the other person is the only worthwhile goal of one's life. As long as the image of totality in this dream expresses itself in the form of a pair of lions, it is still contained in some such overwhelming passion. But when lion and lioness have turned into a king and queen, the urge to individuate has reached the level of conscious realization, and can now be understood by the ego as being the real goal of life. Before the lions had transformed themselves into human beings, it was only the primitive women who sang, and they did so in a sentimental manner. That is to say, the feelings of the dreamer remained on a primitive and sentimental level. But in honor of the humanized lions, both the primitive and the civilized women chant a common hymn of praise. Their expression of their feelings in a united form shows that the inner split in the animal has now changed into inner harmony. Still another personification of the self appears in a report of a woman's so-called active imagination. Active imagination is a certain way of meditating imaginatively, by which one may deliberately enter into contact with the unconscious and make a conscious connection with psychic phenomena. Active imagination is among the most important of Jung's discoveries, while it is in a sense comparable to eastern forms of meditation such as the technique of Zen Buddhism or of Tantric yoga, or to western techniques like those of the Jesuit Exerchitia, it is fundamentally different in that the meditator remains completely devoid of any conscious goal or program. Thus the meditation becomes the solitary experiment of a free individual, which is the reverse of a guided attempt to master the unconscious. This however is not the place to enter into a detailed analysis of active imagination. The reader will find one of Jung's descriptions of it in his paper on the transcendent function. In the woman's meditation the self appeared as a deer, which said to the ego, I am your child and your mother. They call me the connecting animal because I connect people, animals, and even stones with one another if I enter them. I am your fate or the objective I. When I appear, I redeem you from the meaningless hazards of life. The fire burning inside me burns in the whole of nature. If a man loses it, he becomes egocentric, lonely, disoriented, and weak. The self is often symbolized as an animal, representing our instinctive nature and its connectedness with one's surroundings. That is why there are so many helpful animals in myths and fairy tales. This relation of the self to all surrounding nature and even the cosmos probably comes from the fact that the nuclear atom of our psyche is somehow woven into the whole world both outer and inner. All the higher manifestations of life are somehow tuned to the surrounding space-time continuum. Animals, for example, have their own special foods, their particular home-building materials, and their definite territories, to all of which their instinctive patterns are exactly tuned and deducted. Time rhythms also play their part. We have only to think of the fact that most grass-eating animals have their young at precisely the time of year when the grass is richest and most abundant. With such considerations in mind, a well-known zoologist has said that the inwardness of each animal reaches far out into the world around it and psychifies time and space. In ways that are so completely beyond our comprehension, our unconscious is similarly attuned to our surroundings, to our group, to society in general, and beyond these to the space-time continuum and the whole of nature. Thus the great man of the Nazcape Indians does not merely reveal inner truths, he also gives hints about where and when to hunt, and so from dreams the Nazcape Hunter evolves the words and melodies of the magical songs with which he attracts the animals. But this specific help from the unconscious is not given to primitive man alone. Jung discovered that dreams can also give civilized man the guidance he needs in finding his way through the problems of both his inner and his outer life. Indeed, many of our dreams are concerned with details of our outer life and our surroundings. Such things as the tree in front of the window, one's bicycle or car, or a stone picked up during a walk may be raised to the level of symbolism through our dream life and become meaningful. If we pay attention to our dreams instead of living in a cold, impersonal world of meaningless chants, we may begin to emerge into a world of our own, full of important and secretly ordered events. Our dreams, however, are not as a rule primarily concerned with our adaptation to outer life. In our civilized world, most dreams have to do with the development by the ego of the right inner attitude toward the self, for this relationship is far more disturbed in us by modern ways of thinking and behaving than is the case with primitive people. They generally live directly from the inner center, but we, with our uprooted consciousness, are so entangled with external, completely foreign matters that it is very difficult for the messages of the self to get through to us. Our conscious mind continually creates the illusion of a clearly shaped real outer world that blocks off many other perceptions. Yet through our unconscious nature, we are inexplicably connected to our psychic and physical environment. I have already mentioned the fact that the self is symbolized with special frequency in the form of a stone, precious or otherwise. We saw an example of this in the stone that was being polished by the she-bear and the lions. In many dreams, the nuclear center, the self, also appears as a crystal. The mathematically precise arrangement of a crystal evokes in us the intuitive feeling that even in so-called dead matter, there is a spiritual ordering principle at work. Thus, the crystal often symbolically stands for the union of extreme opposites of matter and spirit. Perhaps crystals and stones are especially apt symbols of the self because of the justsoneness of their nature. Many people cannot refrain from picking up stones of a slightly unusual color or shape and keeping them without knowing why they do this. It is as if the stones held a living mystery that fascinates them. Men have collected stones since the beginning of time, and have apparently assumed that certain ones were the containers of the life force with all its mystery. The ancient Germans, for instance, believed that the spirits of the dead continued to live in their tombstones. The custom of placing stones on graves may spring partly from the symbolic idea that something eternal of the dead person remains, which can be most fittingly represented by a stone. For while the human being is as different as possible from a stone, yet man's innermost center is in a strange and special way akin to it, perhaps because the stone symbolizes mere existence at the farthest remove from the emotions, feelings, fantasies, and discursive thinking of ego consciousness. In this sense, the stone symbolizes what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience, the experience of something eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels immortal and unalterable. The urge that we find in practically all civilizations to erect stone monuments to famous men or on the site of important events probably also stems from this symbolic meaning of the stone, the stone that Jacob placed on the spot where he had his famous dream, where certain stones left by simple people on the tombs of local saints or heroes show the original nature of the human urge to express an otherwise inexpressible experience by the stone symbol. It is no wonder that many religious cults use a stone to signify God or to mark a place of worship. The holiest sanctuary of the Islamic world is the Kaaba, the black stone in Mecca to which all pious Muslims hope to make their pilgrimage. According to Christian ecclesiastical symbolism, Christ is the stone which the builders rejected, which became the head of the corner, Luke 20.17. Alternatively, he is called the spiritual rock from which the water of life springs, 1 Corinthians 10.4. Medieval alchemists who searched for the secretive matter in a pre-scientific way, hoping to find God in it, or at least the working of divine activity, believed that this secret was embodied in their famous philosopher's stone. But some of the alchemists dimly perceived that their much sought-after stone was a symbol of something that can be found only within the psyche of man. An old Arabian alchemist, Morienis, said, This thing, the philosopher's stone, is extracted from you. You are its mineral, and one can find it in you, or to put it more clearly, they, the alchemists, take it from you. If you recognize this, the love and approbation of the stone will grow within you. Know that this is true without doubt. The alchemical stone, the lapis, symbolizes something that can never be lost or dissolved, something eternal that some alchemists compared to the mystical experience of God within one's own soul. It usually takes prolonged suffering to burn away all the superfluous psychic elements concealing the stone, but some profound inner experience of the self does occur to most people at least once in a lifetime. From the psychological standpoint, a genuinely religious attitude consists of an effort to discover this unique experience and gradually to keep in tune with it. It is relevant that a stone is itself something permanent, so that the self becomes an inner partner toward whom one's attention is continually turned. The fact that this highest and most frequent symbol of the self is an object of lifeless matter points to yet another field of inquiry and speculation, that is, the still unknown relationship between what we call the unconscious psyche and what we call matter, a mystery with which psychosomatic medicine endeavors to grapple. In studying this still undefined and unexplained connection, it may prove to be that psyche and matter are actually the same phenomenon, one observed from within and the other from without. Dr. Jung put forward a new concept that he called synchronicity. This term means a meaningful coincidence of outer and inner events that are not themselves causally connected. The emphasis lies on the word meaningful. If an aircraft crashes before my eyes as I am blowing my nose, this is a coincidence of events that has no meaning. It is simply a chance occurrence of a kind that happens all the time. But if I bought a blue frock and, by mistake, the shop delivered a black one, on the day one of my near relatives died, this would be a meaningful coincidence. The two events are not causally related, but they are connected by the symbolic meaning that our society gives to the color black. Wherever Dr. Jung observed such more coincidences in an individual's life, it seemed, as the individual's dreams revealed, that there was an archetype activated in the unconscious of the individual concerned. To illustrate this by my example of the black frock, in such a case the person who receives the black frock might also have had a dream on the theme of death. It seems as if the underlying archetype is manifesting itself simultaneously in inner and external events. The common denominator is a symbolically expressed message, in this case a message about death. As soon as we notice that certain types of event like to cluster together at certain times, we begin to understand the attitude of the Chinese, whose theories of medicine, philosophy, and even building are based on a science of meaningful coincidences. The classical Chinese texts did not ask what causes what, but rather what likes to occur with what. One can see much the same underlying theme in astrology and in the way various civilizations have depended on consulting oracles and paying attention to omens. All of these are attempts to provide an explanation of coincidence that is different from one that depends on straightforward cause and effect. In creating the concept of synchronicity, Dr. Jung sketched a way in which we might penetrate deeper into the interrelation of psyche and matter. And it is precisely toward such a relation that the symbol of the stone seems to point. But this is still a completely open and insufficiently explored matter with which future generations of psychologists and physicists must deal. It may seem that my discussion of synchronicity has led me away from my main theme, but I feel it is necessary to make at least a brief introductory reference to it because it is a Jungian hypothesis that seems to be pregnant with future possibilities of investigation and application. Synchronicity events, moreover, almost invariably accompany the crucial phases of the process of individuation. But too often they pass unnoticed because the individual has not learned to watch for such coincidences and to make them meaningful in relation to the symbolism of his dreams. The relation to the self. Nowadays, more and more people, especially those who live in large cities, suffer from a terrible emptiness and boredom as if they were waiting for something that never arrives. Movies and television, spectator sports and political excitement may divert them for a while, but again and again, exhausted and disenchanted, they have to return to the wasteland of their own lives. The only adventure that is still worthwhile for modern man lies in the inner realm of the unconscious psyche. With this idea vaguely in mind, many now turn to yoga and other Eastern practices, but these offer no genuine new adventure, for in them one only takes over what is already known to the Hindus or the Chinese without directly meeting one's own inner life center. While it is true that Eastern methods serve to concentrate the mind and directed inward and that this procedure is in a sense similar to the introversion of an analytical treatment, there is a very important difference. Jung evolved a way of getting to one's inner center and making contact with the living mystery of the unconscious, alone and unaided. That is utterly different from following a well-worn path. Trying to give the living reality of the self a constant amount of daily attention is like trying to live simultaneously on two levels or in two different worlds. One gives one's mind, as before, to outer duties, but at the same time one remains alert for hints and signs, both in dreams and in external events, that the self uses to symbolize its intentions, the direction in which the life stream is moving. Old Chinese texts that are concerned with this kind of experience often use the simile of the cat watching the mousehole. One text says that one should allow no other thoughts to intrude, but one's attention should not be too sharp, nor should it be too dull. There is exactly the right level of perception. If the training is undergone in this manner, it will be effective as time goes on, and when the cause comes to fruition, like a ripe melon that automatically falls, anything it may happen to touch or make contact with will suddenly cause the individual's awakening. This is the moment when the practitioner will be like one who drinks water and alone knows whether it is cold or warm. He becomes about himself and experiences a great happiness, similar to that one feels in meeting one's own father at the crossroads. Thus, in the midst of ordinary outer life, one is suddenly caught up in an exciting inner adventure, and because it is unique for each individual, it cannot be copied or stolen. There are two main reasons why man loses contact with the regulating center of his soul. One of them is that some single instinctive drive or emotional image can carry him into a one-sidedness that makes him lose his balance. This also happens to animals. For example, a sexually excited stag will completely forget hunger and security. This one-sidedness and consequent loss of balance are much dreaded by primitives who call it loss of soul. Another threat to the inner balance comes from excessive daydreaming, which in a secret way usually circles around particular complexes. In fact, daydreams arise just because they connect a man with his complexes. At the same time, they threaten the concentration and continuity of his consciousness. The second obstacle is exactly the opposite and is due to an over-consolidation of ego consciousness. Although a disciplined consciousness is necessary for the performance of civilized activities, we know what happens if a railway signalman lapses into daydreaming. It has the serious disadvantage that it is apt to block the reception of impulses and messages coming from the center. This is why so many dreams of civilized people are concerned with restoring this receptivity by attempting to correct the attitude of consciousness toward the unconscious center or self. Among the mythological representations of the self, one finds much emphasis on the four corners of the world, and in many pictures the great man is represented in the center of a circle divided into four. Jung used the Hindu word mandala, magic circle, to designate a structure of disorder, which is a symbolic representation of the nuclear atom of the human psyche, whose essence we do not know. In this connection, it is interesting that a nascopy hunter pictorially represented his great man not as a human being, but as a mandala, whereas the nascopy experienced the inner center directly and naively without the help of religious rites or doctrines. Other communities use the mandala motif in order to restore a lost inner balance. For instance, the Navajo Indians try by means of mandala-structured sand paintings to bring a sick person back into harmony with himself and with the cosmos, and thereby to restore his health. In eastern civilizations, similar pictures are used to consolidate the inner being or to enable one to plunge into deep meditation. The contemplation of a mandala is meant to bring an inner peace, a feeling that life has again found its meaning and order. The mandala also conveys this feeling when it appears spontaneously in the dreams of modern men who are not influenced by any religious tradition of this sort and know nothing about it. Perhaps the positive effect is even greater in such cases, because knowledge and tradition sometimes blur or even block the spontaneous experience. An example of a spontaneously produced mandala occurs in the following dream of a 62-year-old woman. It emerged as a prelude to a new phase of life in which she became very creative. I see a landscape in a dim light. In the background, I see the rising and then evenly continuing crest of a hill. Along the line where it rises moves a quadrangular disc that shines like gold. In the foreground, I see dark plowed earth that is beginning to sprout. Now I suddenly perceive a round table with a gray stone slab at its top, and at the same moment the quadrangular disc suddenly stands upon the table. It has left the hill, but how and why it has changed its place I do not know. Landscapes in dreams as well as in art frequently symbolize an inexpressible mood. In this dream, the dim light of the landscape indicates that the clarity of daytime consciousness is dimmed. Inner nature may now begin to reveal itself in its own light, so we are told that the quadrangular disc becomes visible on the horizon. Here, too, the symbol of the self, the disc had been largely an intuitive idea on the dreamer's metal horizon, but now in the dream it shifts its position and becomes the center of the landscape of her soul. A seed sown long ago begins to sprout. For a long time previously, the dreamer had paid careful attention to her dreams, and now this work bears fruit. One is reminded of the relation between the symbol of the great man and plant life, which I mentioned before. Now the golden disc suddenly moves to the right side, the side where things become conscious. Among other things, right often means psychologically the side of consciousness, of adaptation, of being right, while left signifies the sphere of unadapted, unconscious reactions, or sometimes even of something sinister. Then finally, the golden disc stops its movement and comes to rest on, significantly, a round stone table. It has found a permanent base. As Anjala Jaffee observes later in this book, roundness, the Mandala motif, generally symbolizes a natural wholeness, whereas a quadrangular formation represents the realization of this in consciousness. In the dream, the square disc and the round table meet, and thus a conscious realization of the center is at hand. The round table, incidentally, is a well-known symbol of wholeness and plays a role in mythology, for instance, King Arthur s round table, which itself is an image derived from the table of the Last Supper. In fact, whenever a human being genuinely turns to the inner world and tries to know himself, not by ruminating about his subjective thoughts and feelings, but by following the expressions of his own objective nature, such as dreams and genuine fantasies, then sooner or later the self emerges. The ego will then find an inner power that contains all the possibilities of renewal. But there is a great difficulty that I have mentioned only indirectly up till now. This is that every personification of the unconscious, the shadow, the anima, the animus and the self, has both a light and a dark aspect. We saw before that the shadow may be base or evil, an instinctive drive that one ought to overcome. It may, however, be an impulse toward growth that one should cultivate and follow. In the same way, the anima and animus have dual aspects. They can bring life-giving development and creativeness to the personality, or they can cause petrification and physical death. And even the self, the all-embracing symbol of the unconscious, has an ambivalent effect, as for instance in the Eskimo tale, when the little woman offered to save the heroine from the moon spirit, but actually turned her into a spider. The dark side of the self is the most dangerous thing of all, precisely because the self is the greatest power in the psyche. It can cause people to spin megalomaniac or other delusory fantasies that catch them up and possess them. A person in this state thinks with mounting excitement that he has grasped and solved the great cosmic riddles. He therefore loses all touch with human reality. A reliable symptom of this condition is the loss of one's sense of humor and of human contacts. Thus the emerging of the self may bring great danger to a man's conscious ego. The double aspect of the self is beautifully illustrated by this old Iranian fairy tale called The Secret of the Both-Bodgird. The great and noble prince Hatim Tai receives orders from his king to investigate the mysterious Both-Bodgird, Castle of Non-Existence. When he approaches it, having gone through many dangerous adventures, he hears that nobody ever returned from it, but he insists on going on. He is received at a round building by a barber with a mirror who leads him into the bath. But as soon as the prince enters the water, a thunderous noise breaks out, it gets completely dark, the barber disappears, and slowly the water begins to rise. Hatim swims desperately round until the water finally reaches the top of the round cupola which forms the roof of the bath. Now he fears he is lost, but he says a prayer and grabs the center stone of the cupola. Again a thunderous noise, everything changes, and Hatim stands alone in a desert. After long and painful wandering, he comes to a beautiful garden in the middle of which is a circle of stone statues. In the center of the statues he sees a parrot in its cage, and a voice from above says to him, O hero, you probably will not escape alive from this bath. Once Skyomart, the first man, found an enormous diamond that shone more brightly than sun and moon. He decided to hide it where no one can find it, and therefore he built this magical bath in order to protect it. The parrot that you see here forms part of the magic. At its feet lie a golden bow and arrow on a golden chain, and with them you may try three times to shoot the parrot. If you hit him, the curse will be lifted. If not, you will be petrified, as were all these other people. Hatim tries once and fails. His legs turn to stone. He fails once more and is petrified up to his chest. The third time he just shuts his eyes, exclaiming, God is great, shoots blindly, and this time hits the parrot. An outbreak of thunder, clouds of dust. When all this has subsided, in place of the parrot is an enormous beautiful diamond, and all the statues have come to life again. The people thank him for their redemption. The reader will recognize the symbols of the self in this story. The first man, Skyomart, the round, mandala-shaped building, the center stone, and the diamond. But this diamond is surrounded by danger. The demonic parrot signifies the evil spirit of imitation that makes one miss the targets and petrify psychologically. As I pointed out earlier, the process of individuation excludes any parrot-like imitation of others. Time and again in all countries, people have tried to copy in outer or ritualistic behavior the original religious experience of their great religious teachers, Christ or Buddha or some other master, and have therefore become petrified. To follow in the steps of a great spiritual leader does not mean that one should copy and act out the pattern of the individuation process made by his life. It means that we should try with a sincerity and devotion equal to his to live our own lives. The barber with the mirror, who vanishes, symbolizes the gift of reflection that Hathim loses when he wants it most. The rising waters represent the risk that one may drown in the unconscious and get lost in one's own emotions. In order to understand the symbolic indications of the unconscious, one must be careful not to get outside oneself or beside oneself, but to stay emotionally within oneself. Indeed, it is vitally important that the ego should continue to function in normal ways. Only if I remain an ordinary human being, conscious of my incompleteness, can I become receptive to the significant contents and processes of the unconscious. But how can a human being stand the tension of feeling himself at one with the whole universe, while at the same time he is only a miserable earthly human creature? If, on the one hand, I despise myself as merely a statistical cipher, my life has no meaning and is not worth living. But if, on the other hand, I feel myself to be part of something much greater, how am I to keep my feet on the ground? It is very difficult indeed to keep these inner opposites united within oneself without toppling over into one or the other extreme. The social aspect of the self. Today, the enormous growth of population, especially obvious in large cities, inevitably has a depressing effect on us. We think, oh well, I am only so and so living at such and such an address, like thousands of other people. If a few of them get killed, what difference can it make? There are far too many people in any case. And when we read in the paper about the deaths of innumerable unknown people who personally mean nothing to us, the feeling that our lives count for nothing is further increased. This is the moment when attention to the unconscious brings the greatest help for dreams show the dreamer how each detail of his life is interwoven with the most significant realities. What we all know theoretically, that everything depends on the individual, becomes through dreams a palpable fact that everyone can experience for himself. Sometimes we have a strong feeling that the great man wants something from us and has set us very special tasks. Our response to this experience can help us to acquire the strength to swim against the stream of collective prejudice by taking our own soul seriously into account. Naturally, this is not always an agreeable task. For instance, you want to make a trip with friends next Sunday, then a dream forbids it and demands that you do some creative work instead. If you listen to your unconscious and obey it, you must expect constant interference with your conscious plans. Your will is crossed by other intentions, intentions that you must submit to or at any rate must seriously consider. This is partly why the obligation attached to the process of individuation is often felt to be a burden rather than an immediate blessing. St. Christopher, the patron of all travelers, is a fitting symbol for this experience. According to the legend, he felt an arrogant pride in his tremendous physical strength and was willing to serve only the strongest. First he served a king, but when he saw that the king feared the devil, he left him and became the devil's servant. Then one day he discovered that the devil feared the crucifix, and so he decided to serve Christ if he could find him. He followed the advice of a priest who told him to wait for Christ at a ford. In the years that passed, he carried many people across the river, but once on a dark, stormy night, a small child called out that he wanted to be carried over the river. With the greatest ease, St. Christopher lifted the child onto his shoulders, but he walked more slowly with every step for his burden became heavier and heavier. When he arrived in midstream, he felt as if he carried the whole universe. He realized then that he had taken Christ upon his shoulders, and Christ gave him remission of his sins and eternal life. This miraculous child is a symbol of the self that literally depresses the ordinary human being, even though it is the only thing that can redeem him. In many works of art, the Christ child is depicted as or with the sphere of the world, a motif that clearly denotes the self, for a child and a sphere are both universal symbols of totality. When a person tries to obey the unconscious, he will often, as we have seen, be unable to do just as he pleases, but equally he will often be unable to do what other people want him to do. It often happens, for instance, that he must separate from his group, from his family, his partner, or other personal connections in order to find himself. That is why it is sometimes said that attending to the unconscious makes people anti-social and egocentric. As a rule, this is not true, for there is a little known factor that enters into this attitude—the collective, or we could even say social aspect of the self. From a practical angle, this factor reveals itself in that an individual who follows his dreams for a considerable time will find that they are often concerned with his relationships with other people. His dreams may warn him against trusting a certain person too much, or he may dream about a favorable and agreeable meeting with someone whom he may previously have never consciously noticed. If a dream does pick up the image of another person for us in some such fashion, there are two possible interpretations. First, the figure may be a projection, which means that the dream image of this person is a symbol for an inner aspect of the dreamer himself. One dreams, for instance, of a dishonest neighbor, but the neighbor is used by the dream as a picture of one's own dishonesty. It is the task of dream interpretation to find out in which special areas one's own dishonesty comes into play. This is called dream interpretation on the subjective level. But it also happens at times that dreams genuinely tell us something about other people. In this way, the unconscious plays a role that is far from being fully understood. Like all the higher forms of life, man is in tune with the living beings around him to a remarkable degree. He perceives their sufferings and problems, their positive and negative attributes and values, instinctively, quite independently, of his conscious thoughts about other people. End of Side Six. To continue, change side selector, switch and turn the cassette over. Side Seven. Man and His Symbols by Carl G. Jung. Continuing with the process of individuation on page 220. Our dream life allows us to have a look at these subliminal perceptions and shows us that they have an effect upon us. After having an agreeable dream about somebody, even without interpreting the dream, I shall involuntarily look at that person with more interest. The dream image may have deluded me because of my projections, or it may have given me objective information. To find out which is the correct interpretation requires an honest, attentive attitude and careful thought. But, as is the case with all inner processes, it is ultimately the self that orders and regulates one's human relationships, so long as the conscious ego takes the trouble to detect the delusive projections and deals with these inside himself instead of outside. It is in this way that spiritually attuned and similarly oriented people find their way to one another, to create a group that cuts across all the usual social and organizational affiliations of people. Such a group is not in conflict with others. It is merely different and independent. The consciously realized process of individuation thus changes a person's relationships. The familiar bonds such as kinship or common interests are replaced by a different type of unity—a bond through the self. All activities and obligations that belong exclusively to the outer world do definite harm to the secret activities of the unconscious. Through these unconscious ties, those who belong together come together. That is one reason why attempts to influence people by advertisements and political propaganda are destructive even when inspired by idealistic motives. This raises the important question of whether the unconscious part of the human psyche can be influenced at all. Practical experience and accurate observation show that one cannot influence one's own dreams. There are people, it is true, who assert that they can influence them, but if you look into their dream material, you find that they do only what I do with my disobedient dog. I order him to do those things I notice he wants to do anyhow, so that I can preserve my illusion of authority. Only a long process of interpreting one's dreams and confronting oneself with what they have to say can gradually transform the unconscious, and conscious attitudes also must change in this process. If a man who wants to influence public opinion misuses symbols for this purpose, they will naturally impress the masses in so far as they are true symbols. But whether or not the mass unconscious will be emotionally gripped by them is something that cannot be calculated in advance, something that remains completely irrational. No music publisher, for instance, can tell in advance whether a song will become a hit or not, even though it may draw on popular images and melodies. No deliberate attempts to influence the unconscious have yet produced any significant results, and it seems that the mass unconscious preserves its autonomy just as much as the individual unconscious. At times, in order to express its purposes, the unconscious may use a motif from our external world and thus may seem to have been influenced by it. For instance, I have come across many dreams of modern people that have to do with Berlin. In these dreams Berlin stands as a symbol of the psychic weak spot, the place of danger, and for this reason is the place where the self is apt to appear. It is the point where the dreamer is torn by conflict and where he might therefore be able to unite the inner opposites. I have also encountered an extraordinary number of dream reactions to the film Hiroshima Monomor. In most of these dreams, the idea was expressed that either the two lovers in the film must unite, which symbolizes the union of inner opposites, or there would be an atomic explosion, a symbol of complete dissociation equivalent to madness. Only when the manipulators of public opinion add commercial pressure or acts of violence to their activities do they seem to achieve a temporary success, but in fact this merely causes a repression of the genuine unconscious reactions, and mass repression leads to the same result as individual repression, that is, to neurotic dissociation and psychological illness. All such attempts to repress the reactions of the unconscious must fail in the long run, for they are basically opposed to our instincts. We know from studying the social behavior of the higher animals that small groups, from approximately 10 to 50 individuals, create the best possible living conditions for the single animal as well as for the group, and man seems to be no exception in this respect. His physical well-being, his spiritual psychic health, and beyond the animal realm, his cultural efficiency, seem to flourish best in such a social function. As far as we at present understand the process of individuation, the self apparently tends to produce such small groups by creating at the same time sharply defined ties of feeling between certain individuals and feelings of relatedness to all people. Only if these connections are created by the self can one feel any assurance that envy, jealousy, fighting, and all manner of negative projections will not break up the group. Thus, an unconditional devotion to one's own process of individuation also brings about the best possible adaptation. This does not mean, of course, that there will not be collisions of opinion and conflicting obligations or disagreement about the right way, in face of which one must constantly withdraw and listen to one's inner voice in order to find the individual standpoint that the self intends one to have. Fanatical political activity, but not the performance of essential duties, seems somehow incompatible with individuation. A man who devoted himself entirely to freeing his country from foreign occupation had this dream. With some of my compatriots, I go up a stairway to the attic of a museum where there is a hall painted black and looking like a cabin on a ship. A distinguished-looking middle-aged lady opens the door. Her name is X, daughter of X. X was a famous national hero of the dreamers' country who attempted some centuries ago to free it. He might be compared to Joan of Arc or William Tell. In reality, X had no children. In the hall, we see the portraits of two aristocratic ladies dressed in flowery, brocaded garments. While Miss X is explaining these pictures to us, they suddenly come to life. First, the eyes begin to live and then the chest seems to breathe. People are surprised and go to a lecture room where Miss X will speak to them about the phenomenon. She says that through her intuition and feeling, these portraits came alive, but some of the people are indignant and say that Miss X is mad. Some even leave the lecture room. The important feature of this dream is that the anima figure, Miss X, is purely a creation of the dream. She has, however, the name of a famous national hero liberator, as if she were, for instance, Wilhelmina Tell, the daughter of William Tell. By the implications contained in the name, the unconscious is pointing to the fact that today the dreamers should not try, as X did long ago, to free his country in an outer way. Now, the dream says, liberation is accomplished by the anima, by the dreamer's soul, who accomplishes it by bringing the images of the unconscious to life. That the hall in the attic of the museum looks partly like a ship's cabin painted black is very meaningful. The black color hints at darkness, night, a turning inward, and if the hall is a cabin, then the museum is somehow also a ship. This suggests that when the mainland of collective consciousness becomes flooded by unconsciousness and barbarism, this museum ship filled with living images may turn into a saving ark that will carry those who enter it to another spiritual shore. Portraits hanging in a museum are usually the dead remains of the past, and often the images of the unconscious are regarded in the same way until we discover that they are alive and meaningful. When the anima, who appears here in her rightful role of soul guide, contemplates the images with intuition and feeling, they begin to live. The indignant people in the dream represent the side of the dreamer that is influenced by collective opinion, something in him that distrusts and rejects the bringing to life of psychic images. They personify a resistance to the unconscious that might express itself something like this. But what if they begin dropping atom bombs on us? Psychological insight won't be much help then. This resistant side is unable to free itself from statistical thinking and from extroverted rational prejudices. The dream, however, points out that in our time genuine liberation can start only with a psychological transformation. To what end does one liberate one's country if afterward there is no meaningful goal of life, no goal for which it is worthwhile to be free? If man no longer finds any meaning in his life, it makes no difference whether he wastes away under a communist or a capitalist regime. Only if he can use his freedom to create something meaningful is it relevant that he should be free. That is why finding the inner meaning of life is more important to the individual than anything else and why the process of individuation must be given priority. Attempts to influence public opinion by means of newspapers, radio, television, and advertising are based on two factors. On the one hand, they rely on sampling techniques that reveal the trend of opinion or wants, that is, of collective attitudes. On the other, they express prejudices, projections, and unconscious complexes, mainly the power complex of those who manipulate public opinion. But statistics do no justice to the individual. Although the average size of stones in a heap may be five centimeters, one will find very few stones of exactly this size in the heap. But the second factor cannot create anything positive is clear from the start. But if a single individual devotes himself to individuation, he frequently has a positive contagious effect on the people around him. It is as if a spark leaps from one to another, and this usually occurs when one has no intention of influencing others and often when one uses no words. It is onto this inner path that Miss X tried to lead the dreamer. Nearly all religious systems on our planet contain images that symbolize the process of individuation, or at least some stages of it. In Christian countries, the self is projected, as I said before, on to the second atom, Christ. In the East, the relevant figures are those of Krsna and Buddha. For people who are contained in a religion, that is, who still really believe in its content and teachings, the psychological regulation of their lives is affected by religious symbols, and even their dreams often revolve around them. When the late Pope Pius XII issued the declaration of the assumption of Mary, a Catholic woman dreamed, for instance, that she was a Catholic priestess. Her unconscious seemed to extend the dogma in this way. If Mary is now almost a goddess, she should have priestesses. Another Catholic woman, who had resistances to some of the minor and outer aspects of her creed, dreamed that the church of her home city had been pulled down and rebuilt, but that the tabernacle with the consecrated host and the statue of the Virgin Mary were to be transferred from the old to the new church. The dream showed her that some of the man-made aspects of her religion needed renewal, but that its basic symbols, gods having become man and the great mother, the Virgin Mary, would survive the change. Such dreams demonstrate the living interest that the unconscious takes in the conscious religious representations of an individual. This raises the question whether it is possible to detect a general trend in all the religious dreams of contemporary people. In the manifestations of the unconscious found in our modern Christian culture, whether Protestant or Catholic, Dr. Jung often observed that there is an unconscious tendency at work to round off our Trinitarian formula of the Godhead with a fourth element which tends to be feminine, dark, and even evil. Actually, this fourth element has always existed in the realm of our religious representations, but it was separated from the image of God and became His counterpart in the form of matter itself, or the Lord of matter, that is, the devil. Now the unconscious seems to want to reunite these extremes, the light having become too bright and the darkness too somber. Naturally, it is the central symbol of religion, the image of the Godhead that is most exposed to unconscious tendencies toward transformation. A Tibetan abbot once told Dr. Jung that the most impressive mandalas in Tibet are built up by imagination or directed fantasy when the psychological balance of the group is disturbed or when a particular thought cannot be rendered because it is not yet contained in the sacred doctrine and must therefore be searched for. In these remarks, two equally important basic aspects of mandala symbolism emerge. The mandala serves a conservative purpose, namely to restore a previously existing order, but it also serves the creative purpose of giving expression and form to something that does not yet exist, something new and unique. The second aspect is perhaps even more important than the first, but does not contradict it, for in most cases, what restores the old order simultaneously involves some element of new creation. In the new order, the older pattern returns on a higher level. The process is that of the ascending spiral, which grows upward while simultaneously returning again and again to the same point. A painting by a simple woman who was brought up in Protestant surroundings shows a mandala in the form of a spiral. In a dream, this woman received an order to paint the Godhead. Later, also in a dream, she saw it in a book. Of God Himself, she saw only His wafting cloak, the drapery of which made a beautiful display of light and shadow. This contrasted impressively with the stability of the spiral in the deep blue sky. Fascinated by the cloak and the spiral, the dreamer did not look closely at the other figure on the rocks. When she awoke and thought about who these divine figures were, she suddenly realized that it was God Himself. This gave her a frightful shock, which she felt for a long time. Usually, the Holy Ghost is represented in Christian art by a fiery wheel or a dove, but here it has appeared as a spiral. This is a new thought, not yet contained in the doctrine, which has spontaneously arisen from the unconscious. That the Holy Ghost is the power that works for the further development of our religious understanding is not a new idea, of course, but its symbolic representation in the form of a spiral is new. The same woman then painted a second picture, also inspired by a dream, showing the dreamer with her positive animus standing above Jerusalem when the wing of Satan descends to darken the city. The satanic wing strongly reminded her of the wafting cloak of God in the first painting, but in the former dream the spectator is high up somewhere in heaven and sees in front of her a terrific split between the rocks. The movement in the cloak of God is an attempt to reach Christ, the figure on the right, but it does not quite succeed. In the second painting, the same thing is seen from below, from a human angle. Looking at it from a higher angle, what is moving and spreading is a part of God. Above that rises the spiral as a symbol of possible further development, but seen from the basis of our human reality, this same thing in the air is the dark uncanny wing of the devil. In the dreamer's life, these two pictures became real in a way that does not concern us here, but it is obvious that they also contain a collective meaning that reaches beyond the personal. They may prophesy the descent of the divine darkness upon the Christian hemisphere, a darkness that points, however, toward the possibility of further revolution. Since the axis of the spiral does not move upward but into the background of the picture, the further revolution will lead neither to greater spiritual height nor down into the realm of matter, but to another dimension, probably into the background of these divine figures, and that means into the unconscious. When religious symbols that are partly different from those we know emerge from the unconscious of an individual, it is often feared that these will wrongfully alter or diminish the officially recognized religious symbols. This fear even causes many people to regenerate political psychology and the entire unconscious. If I look at such a resistance from a psychological point of view, I should have to comment that as far as religion is concerned, human beings can be divided into three types. First, there are those who still genuinely believe they're religious doctrines, whatever they may be. For these people, the symbols and doctrines click so satisfyingly with what they feel deep inside themselves that serious doubts have no chance to sneak in. This happens when the views of consciousness and the unconscious background are in relative harmony. People of this sort can afford to look at new psychological discoveries and facts without prejudice and need not fear that they may be caused to lose their faith. Even if their dreams should bring up some relatively unorthodox details, these can be integrated into their general view. The second type consists of those people who have completely lost their faith and have replaced it with purely conscious, rational opinions. For these people, depth psychology simply means an introduction into newly discovered areas of the psyche, and it should cause no trouble when they embark on the new adventure and investigate their dreams to test the truth of them. Then there is a third group of people who, in one part of themselves, probably the head, no longer believe in their religious traditions, whereas in some other part they still do believe. The French philosopher Voltaire is an illustration of this. He violently attacked the Catholic Church with rational argument, a cause l'enfant, but on his deathbed, according to some reports, he begged for extreme unction. Whether this is true or not, his head was certainly unreligious whereas his feelings and emotions seem still to have been orthodox. Such people remind one of a person getting stuck in the automatic doors of a bus. He can neither get out into free space nor re-enter the bus. Of course, the dreams of such persons could probably help them out of their dilemma, but such people frequently have trouble turning toward the unconscious because they themselves do not know what they think and want. To take the unconscious seriously is ultimately a matter of personal courage and integrity. The complicated situation of those who are caught in a no-man's land between the two states of mind is partly created by the fact that all official religious doctrines actually belong to the collective consciousness, what Freud called the super ego. But once, long ago, they sprang from the unconscious. This is a point that many historians of religion and theologians challenge. They choose to assume that there was once some sort of revelation. I have searched for many years for concrete evidence for the Jungian hypothesis about this problem, but it has been difficult to find because most rituals are so old that one cannot trace their origin. The following example, however, seems to me to offer a most important clue. Black Elk, a medicine man of the Oglala Su who died not long ago, tells us in his autobiography Black Elk Speaks that when he was nine years old he became seriously ill and during a sort of coma had a tremendous vision. He saw four groups of beautiful horses coming from the four corners of the world and then seated within a cloud. He saw the six grandfathers, the ancestral spirits of his tribe, the grandfathers of the whole world. They gave him six healing symbols for his people and showed him new ways of life. But when he was sixteen years old, he suddenly developed a terrible phobia whenever a thunderstorm was approaching because he heard thunder beings calling to him to make haste. It reminded him of the thundering noise made by the approaching horses in his vision. An old medicine man explained to him that his fear came from the fact that he was keeping his vision to himself and said that he must tell it to his tribe. He did so and later he and his people acted out the vision in a ritual using real horses. Not merely Black Elk himself but many other members of his tribe felt infinitely better after this play. Some were even cured of their diseases. Black Elk said, even the horses seemed to be healthier and happier after the dance. The ritual was not repeated because the tribe was died soon afterward. But here is a different case in which a ritual still survives. Several Eskimo tribes living near the Coalville River in Alaska explained the origin of their eagle festival in the following way. A young hunter shot dead a very unusual eagle and was so impressed by the beauty of the dead bird that he stuffed and made a fetish of him honoring him by sacrifices. One day when the hunter had traveled far inland during his hunting two animal men suddenly appeared in the role of messengers and led him to the land of the eagles. There he heard a dark drumming noise and the messengers explained that this was the heartbeat of the dead eagle's mother. Then the eagle spirit appeared to the hunter as a woman clothed in black. She asked him to initiate an eagle festival among his people to honor her dead son. After the eagle people had shown him how to do this, he suddenly found himself exhausted back in the place where he had met the messengers. Returning home, he taught his people how to perform in the great eagle festival, as they have done faithfully ever since. From such examples, we see how a ritual or religious custom can spring directly from an unconscious revelation experienced by a single individual. Out of such beginnings, people living in cultural groups develop their various religious activities with their enormous influence on the entire life of the society. During a long process of evolution, the original material is shaped and reshaped by words and actions, is beautified, and acquires increasingly definite forms. This crystallizing process, however, has a great disadvantage. More and more people have no personal knowledge of the original experience and can only believe what their elders and teachers tell them about it. They no longer know that such happenings are real, and they are, of course, ignorant about how one feels during the experience. In their present forms, worked over and exceedingly aged, such religious traditions often resist further creative alterations by the unconscious. Theologians sometimes even defend these true religious symbols and symbolic doctrines against the discovery of a religious function in the unconscious psyche, forgetting that the values they fight for owe their existence to that very same function. Without a human psyche to receive divine inspirations and utter them in words or shape them in art, no religious symbol has ever come into the reality of our human life. We need only think of the prophets and the evangelists. If someone objects that there is a religious reality in itself, independent of the human psyche, I can only answer such a person with this question. Who says this if not a human psyche? No matter what we assert, we can never get away from the existence of the psyche, for we are contained within it, and it is the only means by which we can grasp reality. Thus the modern discovery of the unconscious shuts one door forever. It definitely excludes the illusory idea so favored by some individuals that a man can know spiritual reality in itself. In modern physics too, a door has been closed by Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy, shutting out the delusion that we can comprehend an absolute physical reality. The discovery of the unconscious, however, compensates for the loss of these beloved illusions by opening before us an immense and unexplored new field of realizations within which objective scientific investigation combines in a strange new way with personal ethical adventure. But as I said at the outset, it is practically impossible to impart the whole reality of one's experience in the new field. Much is unique and can be only partially communicated by language. Here too, a door is shut against the illusion that one can completely understand another person and tell him what is right for him. Once again, however, one can find a compensation for this in the new realm of experience by the discovery of the social function of the self, which works in a hidden way to unite separate individuals who belong together. Intellectual chit-chat is thus replaced by meaningful events that occur in the reality of the psyche. Hence, for the individual to enter seriously into the process of individuation in the way that has been outlined, means a completely new and different orientation toward life. For scientists, it also means a new and different scientific approach to outer facts. How this will work out in the field of human knowledge and in the social life of human beings cannot be predicted. But to me, it seems certain that Jung's discovery of the process of individuation is a fact that future generations will have to take into account if they want to avoid drifting into a stagnant or even regressive outlook.