Confrontation with the Unconscious

Confrontation with the Unconscious

Carl Jung's "Confrontation with the Unconscious" recounts the period of inner disorientation that followed his break with Freud. Resolving to bring no theoretical premises to his patients, Jung let dreams speak for themselves, but grew troubled when he realized he could not answer the question of what myth he himself lived by. Around Christmas 1912 he dreamed of a loggia with an emerald table, where a white dove became a golden-haired girl who spoke of "the twelve dead" before flying off; he thought of the Tabula Smaragdina but found no solution. A recurring fantasy of the dead who were still alive culminated in a dream set in a lane of tombs like the Alyscamps, where each corpse he looked at stirred to life, down to a twelfth-century crusader whose finger began to move — an experience that later fed his theory of archetypes. Unable to resolve his disorientation through retrospection on his life, Jung resolved simply to do "whatever occurs to me," submitting to the unconscious. This revived a childhood memory of building with blocks, and he began compulsively constructing a village of stones by the lake, including a church whose altar became a red pyramidal stone he found by chance, recalling an "underground phallus" from a childhood dream. The game released a stream of fantasies he later wrote down; he traces later works, including "The Undiscovered Self," "Flying Saucers," "A Psychological View of Conscience," and sculptures made after his wife's death, back to this activity. In autumn 1913 Jung was seized by a vision of a monstrous flood between the North Sea and the Alps, with drowned bodies and a sea turning to blood; it recurred two weeks later, accompanied by an inner voice telling him it was real. He suspected psychosis rather than politics. In spring 1914 he had a thrice-repeated dream of an Arctic frost killing all green life, the third version ending with a tree whose leaves turned to healing grapes, which he distributed to a crowd. After lecturing in Aberdeen at the end of July, war broke out on August 1, and Jung understood his task: to probe his own psyche and see how it coincided with the general upheaval. He wrote down the fantasies from the building game under great inner pressure, comparing his ordeal to that of Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and used yoga exercises only to calm himself enough to resume the work, unlike the Indian use of yoga to extinguish such contents. He deliberately translated emotions into images, writing in the "high-flown language" he felt belonged to the archetypes. On December 12, 1913, Jung let himself "drop" and descended into a fantasy of a cave with a mummified dwarf, a glowing red crystal concealing a corpse, a scarab, and a newborn sun, followed by an unending gush of blood. Six days later he dreamed of shooting Siegfried with a brown-skinned savage companion; an inner voice threatened that he must understand the dream or shoot himself, and he concluded that Siegfried represented the heroic, willful attitude — his own included — that had to be sacrificed to something higher. Further descents brought him to Elijah and a blind girl named Salome, accompanied by a black serpent, whom he later understood as figures of Logos and Eros and forerunners of his concepts of anima and animus. From Elijah developed Philemon, a winged old man with bull's horns and a bunch of keys, seen in a dream and then, strikingly, as a dead kingfisher found in Jung's garden. Philemon taught him "psychic objectivity" — that thoughts arise autonomously, like birds or people one does not create. Years later an Indian visitor's mention of a "ghostly guru," Shankaracharya, reassured Jung that his experience was not unprecedented. A further figure, Ka, an earthbound, Mephistophelian counterpart to Philemon, later merged with Philemon through Jung's study of alchemy. An inner female voice repeatedly told Jung his fantasies were "art"; he resisted, insisting it was "nature," and came to identify this voice as the anima, the feminine figure of the unconscious (with animus as its counterpart in women). He recorded everything first in the Black Book, then the Red Book with mandala drawings, deliberately abandoning aesthetic elaboration for scientific understanding. Throughout, his family, his medical diploma, his address at 228 Seestrasse in Küsnacht, and his professional work anchored him to reality, in contrast to Nietzsche, whom he saw as having lost his footing entirely. In 1916 restlessness and apparent haunting phenomena — his daughter seeing a white figure, a blanket snatched away, his son's dream and drawing of "The Picture of the Fisherman," and a frantically ringing doorbell — culminated in spirits declaring, "We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought." Over three evenings Jung wrote the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, after which the haunting ceased. He also withdrew from his university lectureship, abandoning his academic career for this inner work, and endured extreme loneliness as a result. Toward the end of the First World War, Jung began emerging from this darkness: he broke with the woman insisting his fantasies were art, and while serving as Commandant de la Région Anglaise des Internés de Guerre at Château d'Oex in 1918–19, he drew a mandala each morning, coming to understand the mandala as an expression of the self and the goal of psychic development as circumambulation around a center rather than linear progress. A 1927 dream mandala, "Window on Eternity," and a 1928 painting of a golden castle with an unaccountably Chinese character coincided with Richard Wilhelm's sending him the manuscript of "The Secret of the Golden Flower" — an instance of what Jung called synchronicity that broke his isolation. He closes with a dream of a dark, rain-soaked Liverpool, its quarters arranged radially around a square with a pool and an island on which a single sunlit magnolia tree bloomed, unseen by his companions. Recognizing this as the goal and center — the self — he gave up drawing mandalas afterward, regarding the years of these inner images as the most important of his life and the prima materia for all his subsequent work.

By Carl Jung · First published 1953 · Genre: Psychology, Philosophy, Self-help · 13,622 words

First lines

After the parting of the ways with Freud, a period of inner uncertainty began for me. It would be no exaggeration to call it a state of disorientation. I felt totally suspended in mid-air, for I had not yet found my own footing. Above all, I felt it necessary to develop a new attitude toward my patients. I resolved for the present not to bring any theoretical premises to bear upon them, but to wait and see what they would tell of their own accord. My aim became to leave things to chance. The result was that the patients would spontaneously report their dreams and fantasies to me, and I would merely ask, "What occurs to you in connection with that? " or, "How do you mean that, where does that come from, what do you think about it? " The interpretations seemed to follow of their own accord from the patients' replies and associations. I avoided all theoretical points of view and simply helped the patients to understand the dream-images by themselves, without application of rules and theories.

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Psychoanalysis · Depth Psychology · Unconscious Mind · Collective Unconscious · Archetypes · Personal Growth · Self-Discovery · Psychological Development · Dream Analysis · Symbolism · Mythology · Philosophy of Mind

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