Carl Jung, part 1: Taking inner life seriously

Achieving the right balance between what Jung called the ego and self is central to his theory of personality development

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• • Mark Vernon
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 May 2011 11.00 BST
  • Article history

As a child, Carl Jung believed he had two personalities, which he later identified as the ego and the self. Photograph: Dmitri Kessel/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

If you have ever thought of yourself as an introvert or extrovert; if you've ever deployed the notions of the archetypal or collective unconscious; if you've ever loved or loathed the new age; if you have ever done a Myers-Briggs personality or spirituality test; if you've ever been in counselling and sat opposite your therapist rather than lain on the couch – in all these cases, there's one man you can thank: Carl Gustav Jung.

The Swiss psychologist was born in 1875 and died on 6 June 1961, 50 years ago next week. His father was a village pastor. His grandfather – also Carl Gustav – was a physician and rector of Basel University. He was also rumoured to be an illegitimate son of Goethe, a myth Carl Gustav junior enjoyed, not least when he grew disappointed with his father's doubt-ridden Protestantism. Jung felt "a most vehement pity" for his father, and "saw how hopelessly he was entrapped by the church and its theological teaching", as he wrote in his autobiographical book,Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Jung's mother was a more powerful figure, though she seems to have had a split personality. On the surface she came across as a conventional pastor's wife, but she was "unreliable", as Jung put it. She suffered from breakdowns. And, differently again, she would occasionally speak with a voice of authority that seemed not to be her own. When Jung's father died, she spoke to her son like an oracle, declaring: "He died in time for you."

In short, his childhood was disturbed, and he developed a schizoid personality, becoming withdrawn and aloof. In fact, he came to think that he had two personalities, which he named No 1 and No 2.

No 1 was the child of his parents and times. No 2, though, was a timeless individual, "having no definable character at all – born, living, dead, everything in one, a total vision of life". (At school, his peers seem to have picked this up, as his nickname was "Father Abraham".)

Jung was perhaps not so unusual, as many children indulge similar internal fantasies. Where Jung differed was in taking his inner life seriously. "I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come from within," he noted. Later he renamed and generalised No 1 and No 2, calling them the ego and the self. Achieving the right balance between the two aspects of the psyche is central to his theory of personality development, called individuation.

Jung finally came into his own at university. He proved himself a brilliant student, developing "a tremendous appetite on all fronts", graduating in medicine and natural science in double-quick time. His first public paper was entitled On the Limits of the Exact Sciences, in which he questioned an inflexible philosophy of materialism. His doctorate was On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, and laid the foundations for two key ideas in his thought. First, that the unconscious contains part-personalities, called complexes. One way in which they can reveal themselves is in occult phenomena. Second, most of the work of personality development is done at the unconscious level.

He first made a name for himself in the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich, working with Eugen Bleuler, the doctor who coined the word "schizophrenia". Jung developed the word association test of Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin.

A patient was read a list of words and asked to respond to each one with the first word that comes into their mind. The response, and the time taken to produce it, is recorded.

Previous research had already demonstrated that prolonged response times indicate that the stimulus word unconsciously troubles the patient. Sometimes, it is possible to identify a group of such words. Jung's contribution was to link these groups with the unconscious part-personalities and show how the test provides a window into the distressed world of the mentally ill. People are not simply mad, he concluded. Rather, there is a method in their madness. In one case, Jung showed that a patient who for 50 years had been fixated on the apparently meaningless task of making illusory shoes, had been abandoned by a lover who was a cobbler.

Jung was becoming quite well known, with his fame in Zürich prompting the first of several questions that subsequently came to dog his reputation. It concerns his alleged womanising.

At university, he discovered that he could sway an audience with the force of his character and ingenuity of his ideas. In Zürich, he gave public talks. "Clusters of women formed a phalanx around him before and after each of his lectures," writes Deidre Bair in her seminalbiography. Then, a woman called Sabina Spielrein became his patient and, it was rumoured, his lover – perhaps just one of many. Later, he certainly formed a ménage à trois with Toni Wolff, to which his wife Emma only slowly became reconciled. Sleeping with patients is now the unforgivable sin among psychotherapists. Had Jung committed it?

After examining the evidence over several chapters, Bair concludes that it is impossible to discover the truth of what happened, though the rumours and speculation appear wildly exaggerated. After all, this was an age in which husbands and wives would greet each other with a chaste shake of the hand, even in private.

Jung had an electric personality. It is hardly surprising that such charisma was interpreted as erotically unsettlingly.

Further, the phenomenon of patients developing powerful feelings for their therapists – part of what is called transference – was then new. Freud's earliest collaborator, Josef Breuer, dropped the "talking cure" when one of his patients didn't just fall in love with him but developed a phantom pregnancy, naming him as the father. Freud first thought that transference was unhelpful and should be circumvented. Then, he came to believe that it was the cornerstone of psychodynamic therapy because it brings back to life otherwise buried feelings and affections.

But that brings us to Jung's encounter with the founder of psychoanalysis. We will explore that transformative experience next week.

Carl Jung, part 7: The power of acceptance Like the AA movement, Jung believed that acceptance and spiritual interconnectedness were crucial to a person's recovery

In 1931, one of Jung's patients proved stubbornly resistant to therapy. Roland H was an American alcoholic whom he saw for many weeks, possibly a year. But Roland's desire for drink refused to diminish. A year later Roland returned to Zürich still drinking, and Jung concluded that he probably wouldn't be cured through therapy.

But ever the experimenter, Jung had an idea.

Roland should join the Oxford Group, an evangelical Christian movement that stressed the necessity of total surrender to God. Jung hoped that his patient might undergo a conversion experience, which, as his friend William James had realised, is a transformative change at depth, brought about by the location of an entirely new source of energy within the unconscious. That might tame the craving.

It worked. Roland told another apparently hopeless alcoholic, Bill W, about the experience. Bill too was converted, and had a vision of groups of alcoholics inspiring each other to quit. The Society of Alcoholics Anonymous was formed. Today it has more than 2 million members in 150 countries.

I spoke to a friend of mine who attends meetings of Narcotics Anonymous to understand more about the element of conversion. "It's hugely important," he said.

His addictions had been fuelled by a surface obsession with career and money, and a deeper anxiety that nothing was right. "It's the first time I'd been prompted seriously to consider something bigger than myself."

Calling the experience "spiritual" seems accurate too, because a meeting is about more than gaining a circle of supportive friends. "I have friends," my friend remarks, before continuing that the focused intention of a meeting is about something else: their connection to a very powerful force. "I can't picture it, I can't name it," he says, before adding, "I've never given much thought to church." Narcotics Anonymous literature expresses it more formally: "For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority – a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience."

The result is an overwhelming sense that things will be OK because they are as they are meant to be. Though clean, my friend is not cured, and life can still be difficult. But he has the strength to accept what is, to reach out to others, and to trust life. It is moving to see.

Jung believed that we are psychosomatic creatures who must attend to matters of the spirit as well as the body. Further, our psyche is not just our own. It is connected to others, both those with whom we visibly interact, and those who have come before us, via the dynamic he called the collective unconscious. Life goes well when these links are open. Flow brings a sense of purpose. Conversely, blockages can lead to ill-health with possibly physical and psychological manifestations. "A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning," Jung wrote, in an essay wittily entitled "Psychotherapists or the Clergy".

Other observers of the human condition make similar remarks. Bertrand Russell, who could hardly be different from Jung in terms of his spiritual outlook, nonetheless averred that the happy individual feels himself "part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision". Such a person knows themselves as a "citizen of the universe".

Jung preferred overtly religious language – instead of the universe talking of the "soul of the world" or anima mundi – and this was more than a question of taste. He believed spiritual connectedness was fundamental to being human and that, wary of religiosity, modern consciousness was struggling to take it seriously. The default image of secular individuality was, indeed, the billiard ball. Notions such as the stream of life, let alone the soul or the collective unconscious, tend to be treated as poetic fictions, at best, with damaging implications for human wellbeing.

But from his earliest days as a psychiatrist, Jung had noticed that "a suitable explanation or a comforting word to the patient can have something like a healing effect". He explained the efficacy as arising from what the doctor conveys, not only what the doctor does. "The doctor's words, to be sure, are 'only' vibrations in the air, yet their special quality is due to a particular psychic state in the doctor." It connects with the other. The patient finds that which "will take possession of him and give meaning and form to … his soul". It's not supernatural but conscious exposure to "a deeper dimension of the real".

Religious traditions have been the custodians of this source, though Jung thought the crucial aspect was to have a religious attitude to life, rather than a particular faith. Like my friend and the AA movement, he argued that the goal is best thought of not as a cure, but as acceptance. "They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events," he wrote of his patients in his Terry Lectures of 1937. "This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God." It sounds passive, though in reality, such acceptance releases a new zest for life because the individual is no longer struggling alone, and is instead tapping "the meaning that quickens".

Just what therapy should provide – cure or acceptance – is still hotly contested. The psychiatrist Anthony Storr agreed with Jung: "I prefer this interpretation of healing to those advanced by other schools of psychotherapy because I believe that it corresponds more closely to what actually takes place in long-term analytic psychotherapy." The success of the philosophy embodied in the family of organisations that has sprung from the Society of Alcoholics Anonymous must weigh in its favour too.

Jung and Mandala

Mandala is a graphical representation of the center (the Self for Jung). It can appear in dreams and visions or it can be spontaneously created as a work of art. It is present in the cultural and religious representations. Jungian Mandala - click the picture to enlarge Examples of mandala can be found in all the ancient cultures. We find it in Christianity under the form of frescos with animal images representing apostles (and the zodiac). The astrologic zodiac and its versions are examples of mandala. Also, in the Indian spiritual practices we find fascinating examples of mandala, with symbols of the local pantheon. In the yoga practices mandala can be a support for meditation or an image that must be internalized through mental absorption. This image organizes the inner energies and forces of the practitioner and puts them in relationship with his ego. Generally speaking a mandala is a geometrical form - a square or a circle - abstract and static, or a vivid image formed of objects and/or beings. In our dreams the mandala indicates the phenomenon of centering the individual psychic in which the ego reconsiders its (dominant) position through the assimilation of the collective unconscious contents (symbols or archetypal images). In modern dreams mandala can be a sophisticated electronic device - an electronic watch or a sophisticated circular machinery. Often the UFOs seen on the sky are also mandala symbols. Christian Mandala - click the picture to enlarge Other mandala images can be circular fountains, parks and their radial alleys, square market places, obelisks, buildings with a circular or square shape, lakes, rivers (radial water networks). In the Jungian therapy, which includes the living experience of the collective unconscious contents, the spontaneous drawing of mandalas is used. There are a lot of illustrations that testify this technique practiced by Jung himself. --

© Carl Jung Resources, 2011.

Animus

Animus is the archetype of reason and spririt in women. This is the male aspect of the female psyche, as the anima is the female aspect of male psyche.

This archetype is projected in various male images and characters like great artists, heroes, warriors, sportsmen, philosopher, and so forth. When identified with the animus (animus-inflated), women develop an excessive rational drive which may end up in excessive criticism and stubbornness.

In animus-inflated women with strong interest in intellectual matters we find the need to impose and maintain a rigurosus and schematic list of values judged the most important. There's no reflection as regard the tenues of these values, nor any aim at discussing about them. Only the urge to impose them to others.

But how should women deal with the animus archetype inside them? There is a very important study on the animus written by Jung's wife Ema. She wrote: "What we women have to overcome in our relation to the animus is not pride but lack of self-confidence and the resistance of inertia. For us, it is not as though we had to demean ourselves, but as if we had to lift ourselves" (Animus and Anima, Spring Publications, Dallas, Texas, 1978).

Jung about Animus (quotes)Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit. (From The Syzygy: Anima and Animus, Collected Works, 9ii, par. 28f.)

The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman's ancestral experiences of man - and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being, not in the sense of masculine creativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might call... the spermatic word. (From Anima and Animus , Collected Works 7, par. 336.)

 

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© Carl Jung Resources, 2008

What Is a Shadow?by Susan Reynolds

Your shadow is that part of your psyche that contains unconscious, unexpressed aspects of your personality that you either strongly dislike (negative shadow) or don't know you possess (positive shadow). Shadows grow in intensity inversely proportional to your knowledge of it — the less you know the denser it becomes. If you have a weak or ineffective ego, the shadow may muscle its way into prominence. People often project their shadow material onto someone else — viewing your husband as controlling when in fact you are the controlling partner; or viewing your husband as brilliant when in fact you are brilliant but almost completely unaware of it. A large part of unveiling your essence, or true self, involves claiming your negative and your positive shadow and all of its projections. You have to first claim your shadow to change it. Oddly enough, particularly if you came from a dysfunctional, destructive family, you may have greater difficulty owning your positive shadow.

How does projection work?

Projection occurs when rather than acknowledge or accept negative traits or positive virtues, your ego projects these traits onto other people. Falling in love occurs when you project your hidden, positive qualities onto another person. And when you vehemently dislike someone, whatever it is that drives you crazy about another person is likely to be a quality you possess. Projection offers you opportunities to recognize messages from your unconscious about who you really are.

Shadows are generally seen as the dark side of your personality that your ego goes to great lengths to keep under control and safely hidden. The positive shadow harbors qualities of your idealized, or self-actualized, self that you have yet to discover and that you usually project onto loved objects. One must face the negative shadow and reclaim the positive shadow to find a healthy balance based on consciousness rather than repression. Repressing your negative shadow often leads to neurosis or psychosis, while failing to acknowledge your positive shadow dilutes full expression of your true self. Claiming and learning to live with your shadow is both empowering and crucial to progression toward the self. When you are in the grips of a shadow trait or behavior, you may say, “I am not feeling like myself,” or “It was so unlike me to do such and such.”

The Elements of Personalityby Susan Reynolds

Psyche is a Greek word meaning “soul,” and psychology is basically a theory or method of understanding the science of the soul — what comprises your soul, how your soul functions, and what changes your soul. Carl Jung was a disciple of Sigmund Freud who then branched off and formulated his own theories. According to Jung, your psyche, or self, encompasses everything that is you — your genetic heritage including sensory, intuitive, cognitive, or emotional proclivities or tendencies; your physical or emotional components; your primary and secondary environments, that is, your family and your culture; and your dreams. Within your psyche, your unique qualities of, ego, shadow, persona, and complexes formulate a distinctive personality that arises out of all these various elements.

What Is My Self?

The basic concept is that self is your whole personality, including the conscious and unconscious aspects of a psyche. Jung believed that you were born with a true self, or essence, and that your unique ego, or personality, emerged as a result of your heredity traits and your early childhood development — your need to function in your primary environment and your culture — working in tandem with your hereditary, genetic, or unique inborn qualities. He believed the self's one true purpose was to transcend — rise above or resolve — all of the opposites contained within your personality and create a balanced, whole psyche that is far closer to your true self, or essence. Because your ego arises out of the self, you cannot have a healthy ego without a healthy self. Jung defined the self as transcendent and transpersonal and regarded it as the most important aspect of the psyche.

According to Enneagram theory, you can liberate your true self by weakening and dissolving the rigid patterns that keep your ego state (personality) fixated to known perceptions, beliefs, or behaviors within the parameters of your Enneatype. When you gradually free yourself from these rigid patterns, you are finally capable of being fully present to the moment and responsive to the demands of the present in accordance with your essence or true self. Your Enneagram style is actually a distortion of your true personality and is only a small portion of your true self. The more fully actualized you are, the less obvious and influential your Enneagram style becomes.

What Is My Ego?

Jung believed that your ego is the center of consciousness that creates your identity. The ego's primary purpose is to help you function in society by organizing and balancing the conscious and unconscious aspects of your psyche to form an integrated, stable personality. A balanced, healthy ego achieves equilibrium between the conscious and unconscious aspects of a person's psyche that integrates all the various qualities of self and results in a fully self-actualized personality. An inflated, or exaggerated, ego creates an imbalance that often results in a narrowly defined, rigid, and intolerant personality. At the far end of the spectrum, an overly inflated, deluded ego results in a psyche that feels godlike and can become increasingly dangerous to the self and to others (because a person with an overly inflated ego will project his or her negative unconscious onto others, such as Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and other radical fundamentalists). Jung defined the ego as the mediator and protector of the self whose purpose is to observe, receive, and interpret information about the self and others.

Like most crises, a midlife crisis results from an inflexible, entrenched ego or system of beliefs that has excluded large portions of a person's psyche. In a midlife crisis, people often make an abrupt turn, behave like a child, or simply change their beliefs and personality in an unconscious attempt to rebalance their ego. This crisis resolves itself when you break free of rigidity and redefine who and what you are and how you behave.

In regard to the Enneagram of Personality, your ego is a grouping of conscious and unconscious behaviors, opinions, truths, and thoughts that developed as a way for you to comprehend and live within your childhood environment. Your ego becomes a pattern of beliefs, habits, and behavior that you have, consciously or unconsciously, chosen to present to the world; it's the personality you use to navigate life's challenges. Generally, a healthy ego not only functions well in society but allows for a relatively uncomplicated unveiling and blossoming of your essence. An unhealthy ego creates self-designed roadblocks or impediments that hinder your ability to grow or even begin to function anywhere near your peak potential within society.

Your Enneagram ego, or personality, is the way you have learned to express yourself in the world and the way you communicate who you are to others. These personality traits become your most enduring way of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the world and your place in it. A healthy person develops and sustains a flexible ego. An ego-driven personality functions, but it is often too reliant on reactionary impulses or behaviors or too restrictive to express your true self. An unhealthy ego may become pathological — rigid, inflated, or deflated — and definitely does not serve its owner well.

What Is My Essence?

Your essence is you, stripped of your ego. It's your authentic, fully integrated true self. Moving toward your essence doesn't eliminate your personality or ego, it merely frees you to make choices rather than succumb to fixated behavior. It expands your vision of yourself.

When you regress, you move farther away from your true essence; when you progress, you move closer to your true essence. Your essence is more than the sum of everything in your psyche, of which your core personality is only a part. It's the point at which the restrictions imposed upon your core personality are truly liberated, allowing the other elements of your unencumbered true self to emerge. In other words, your core personality or Enneatype contains methods of coping or adaptive responses that allow you to function in the world. Your ego boundaries within your core personality determine the degree of compulsion or rote response that define your life. These behaviors are the fixations that shape your core personality. As you integrate, you free yourself from the fixations that have shaped your life and increasingly learn to live from your essence.

Father Hunger: Jung’s Dreams of His Father by Susan Olson

In his book Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men (1994), Jungian analyst and author James Hollis defines eight “great secrets” that “bedevil the male soul.” The seventh of these is “father hunger,” a man’s “deep longing for his father and for his tribal fathers.” The eighth has to do with healing this hunger, which requires men to “activate within what they did not receive from without.” These words, written to address “the collective experience of men,” might well have been written about Jung’s relationship with his father, a Swiss reform pastor. Jung’s “father hunger” began in child- hood and was not filled until he found within himself the spiri- tual wisdom that his father could not provide. The spiritual food came in the form of dreams that occurred after Paul Jung’s death, in which he finally became his son’s spiritual teacher, mentor, and guide.

C. G. Jung had the misfortune (or perhaps the good fortune) to be born to parents who were often at odds about religious matters. His father espoused a traditional form of Christianity that did not satisfy the spiritual curiosity of his intuitive, imagi- native son. Jung’s mother, with her dark “No. 2 personality,” came from a family that regarded “paranormal” experiences such as séances and communication with the dead as a natural part of life. Jung was keenly aware of the conflict between his parents and tried as a young man to reconcile it within himself. He looked to his father to help him interpret his own profound spiritual experiences, especially his dreams, but Paul Jung could provide only trite, conventional responses. In his autobi- ography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Jung describes his many frustrating attempts to engage his father in conversa- tion about theological issues. At last he realized that his father “suffered from religious doubts” himself and could offer “nothing but the same old lifeless theological answers” to his questions. (MDR, p. 112) When Paul Jung died in 1896, his 21- year-old son was left without a strong father to guide him into psychological and spiritual maturity. The spiritual wisdom that Jung did not receive from his father would have to come from within.

The first hint of inspiration came six weeks after Paul Jung’s death, when he came to his son in a dream and told him that he had recovered from his final illness and was on his way home. Two days later the dream came again, leaving Jung feeling ashamed for thinking that his father was dead. “What does it mean,” he asked himself, “that my father

returns in dreams and that he seems so real?” (MDR, p. 117) Although his outer father had died, the image of a healthy father was already being activated from within and was coming “home” to live in his inner world.

In 1907 Jung met Sigmund Freud, who became his surrogate father for the next five years. Jung must have told Freud the dream of his father, for it appears in a paper, “Formulations Regarding Two Principles in Mental Functioning,” given by Freud in 1911. As we might expect, Freud interpreted the dream as a wish-fulfillment with an Oedipal twist. Assuming that Jung had wanted his father to die and then blamed himself for harboring such thoughts, Freud viewed the dream as a compensation for Jung’s repressed Oedipal guilt. But this is not how Jung understood his dream. To him it was “an unforgetta- ble experience” that “forced [him] for the first time to think about life after death.” (MDR, p. 117) Already his dream father was becoming an inner guide and inviting him to explore a spiritual question that fascinated him for the rest of his life.

Twenty-six years later, at the age of 47, Jung was married with five children, well established in his career, and past the break with Freud that had created a crisis in his life from 1912- 1918. Then, late in 1922, Paul Jung made another dream ap- pearance. In this dream Jung wants to show his father around his house, introduce his wife and children, and tell him about the book he has just written on psychological types. But before he can do so, his father says that he wants to consult him on the subject of marital psychology. At this point Jung awoke, feeling perplexed and asking himself why his father should be inter- ested in that particular topic. It was not until his mother’s sud- den death four months later that he wondered if the dream might have been a warning or a premonition. Perhaps, he thought, his father knew that his wife was about to join him in the afterlife and was worried that their marriage, which had been “full of trials and difficulties and tests of patience,” was about to resume. (MDR, p. 347) Jung was not able to answer his father’s questions in the dream, but in 1925 he wrote “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship,” in which he began to explore the psychological underpinnings of marriage. Once again a dream “activated from within what he did not receive from without” in the figure of a father who respected his son’s pro- fession, sought his advice, and inspired him to explore a new area of study.

By the early 1940’s, Jung was in his mid-sixties and at the height of his career as an analyst, writer, and teacher. Now his father appeared again in two important dreams and invited him to venture into uncharted psychological waters. In the first dream, Jung is exploring a large wing of his house that he has never seen before. He finds a laboratory with shelves full of bottles containing “every imaginable sort of fish” and realizes that it is his father’s workroom. (MDR, p. 240f.) Next door is his mother’s room, in which she has set up beds for “ghostly

Susan Olson is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Atlanta and is on the faculty of the Memphis Jungian Seminar, affiliated with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. Her article on The Phantom of the Opera appears in Spring Journal 73 (2005), and her book on the function of dreams in the mourning process will be published by Spring in 2009.

© 2008 C.G. Jung Society of Atlantamarried couples” to sleep. In his comments on the dream, Jung interpreted the fish as a Christ symbol and the beds as a “somewhat farcical” symbol of the coniunctio, the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine principles. Although his parents were not seen in the dream, he felt their presence strongly and understood the dream to mean that “something had remained unfinished and was still with my parents; that is to say, it was still latent in the unconscious and hence reserved for the future.” Again Jung’s father (and in this case his mother) appeared “from within” as guiding figures who led him to his work on Christian symbolism in Aion (1951) and his study of alchemy and the sacred marriage in Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955).

In the next dream, Jung’s father is living in a large house in the country and working as the custodian of the tombs of several famous people. To his son’s great surprise, he is now a distinguished Biblical scholar. In his study he opens a large Bible bound in shiny fishskin and begins a learned exege- sis of an Old Testament passage. Then he leads Jung up a narrow staircase to a mandala-shaped room and points to an- other flight of stairs and a small door leading to the chamber of “the highest presence.” (MDR, p. 245f.) As his father kneels and touches his forehead to the ground in a gesture of rever- ence, Jung imitates him but confesses that he “could not bring my forehead quite down to the floor—there was perhaps a millimeter to spare.” At the end of the dream he realizes that the room at the top of the stairs is the chamber of Uriah, whom King David had betrayed to the enemy in order to marry his wife Bathsheba.

Jung interpreted this dream as another indication of “the things that awaited me, hidden in the unconscious.” The fish- skin, the Biblical passage, and the Old Testament figures indi- cated the work yet to be done on the Christ symbol, the Book of

Job, and the coniunctio. Now that his dream father had become a scholar in his own right, he could finally address his son’s theological questions. But when they bowed before the highest presence, the father touched his forehead all the way to the ground while the son did not. This meant to Jung that he needed to preserve a measure of “mental reservation” for his work, but I wonder if the dream might also have been hinting that his father’s spiritual development had now surpassed his own. In any case, his dream father had finally become the spiritual

guide that he was not able to be in his lifetime. Perhaps his own father hunger—his unsatisfied longing for a genuine relation- ship with God the Father—made it impossible for him to under- stand his son’s unorthodox religious experience. But what he did not provide in life he provided in death, by taking the form of a vivid dream figure and becoming Carl Jung’s psychopomp, or guide of souls. For all we know, satisfying his son’s father hunger may have also have done much to satisfy his own.

In my analytic practice and my own experience, I am aware every day of the ways in which the deep connection between parent and child shapes our consciousness and determines our outlook on life. Our parents become “inner objects” whose influence (for better and for worse) remains powerful long after we have left the nest, and our relationship with our children (with whom we try, and often fail, to be better parents) contin- ues to evolve long after they have flown. Jung’s dreams of his father offer the hope that even after death it is possible for unsettled conflicts to be resolved and open wounds to heal. In the realm of dreams, which Jung honored all his life and taught us to honor, the images of the dead appear and offer us the gift of a lively and ongoing connection with them. If we accept this gift, our own deep hunger for what we did not and cannot receive from without can be filled by what is given to us from within ¦

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© 2008 C.G. Jung Society of Atlanta