Jung lectures

 

1 Freud and his limitations

1.1 Questions

We are about to leave Freud behind. Let me first think of some questions you might want to ask about him, and try to answer them.

Is psychoanalysis real? Yes it is. There are about 200,000 practising psychoanalysts in the world, half in America, using a version of classic Freud, and half in Europe, mostly in France and Germany, also in South America, practising the version of Freud developed by Jacques Lacan. In England? It's not the main therapeutic technique, but if you want Freudian analysis, you can certainly get it; on the National Health, as a matter of fact. I have two friends who are full time practising Freudian analysts, working in Birmingham, using the couch: the whole works. I have a close friend who is a practising Lacanian analyst, working in England, and one of my closest friends was psychoanalysed for three years, using the classic Freudian technique. Did it work? He says so. He says it cured his psoriasis. Have I been analysed? No. Would I be? Under no circumstances.

Is it true? Well, that's the question. There is certainly truth in it, as I think some of my literary examples showed last week, but is it the whole truth? You must make up your own minds. What I would say myself is, yes, there is a Freudian unconscious, but I think there may be a lot more in the mind than that.

1.2 Dreams

One area where Freud has been seriously questioned in modern science is in the study of dreams: a lot of work has been done on this since 1900, when Freud published his dream book, the balance of that work casts some doubt on some of Freud's concepts. That is what the first part of this lecture is going to be about.

1.3 'The Medusa's head of his theory ...'

I say goodbye to Freud with this, as a summary, as an epitaph. It is from the 60's radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, paying homage to the master; for Freud, right or wrong, was certainly the father of psychiatry. Laing uses the image of Medusa's head: you'll remember that in the Greek legend Medusa is a monster, with hair made of live snakes, whose gaze turns living beings into stone. Freud, said Laing, was a hero: he was the first to go down into the cellar of the unconscious and confront the monsters that he found there. But he needed the Medusa's head of his theory in order to turn them into stone, so that he could survive to tell us about it.

What we need, this suggests, is a theory of the mind that does not freeze the monsters into stone: that meets and talks to them, values them as they are, without reducing them to a system.

2. Dreams

2.1 Dreams and stories (note)

Before I begin on the topic of this lecture, I want to ask a question, for you to think about. The question is this: why do people like to listen to stories? By people, I mean all people. All known human cultures like fiction. Children too: as soon as they have language, children can be pacified if you promise to tell them a story. Narrative fiction is universal, part of what it is to be human. Why? Stories, as Plato pointed out, are lies: what they tell is not the truth. Logically, therefore, he banned story-tellers from his ideal Republic.

It seems to me Plato has a point: it is very odd that all over the world, stories, which are lies, are given enormous value. Think of how much the most successful novelists are paid. Think of how many copies they sell. The very existence of the English Department, which is rather an expensive enterprise, when you think about it, is entirely dependent on this valuing of stories, of lies. Why? And why are we so absorbed by them? Anyone can pick up a novel and in a moment enter a world; can be completely wrapped in that world, absorbed in that fiction, suspending disbelief. It takes no effort: it is something, something very odd, that we do naturally. Why?

In this lecture, I want to suggest a possible answer. The answer is this: we value stories because stories are like dreams. The rest of this lecture will be devoted to making that answer make sense. So let us look more deeply at dreams.

2.2 Dreams and science

Dreams are private. I can't dream your dream. How then can science, which looks always to the objective, the demonstrable, begin to study dreams? The breakthrough came in the late fifties, with one single discovery: the strange discovery of what happens to us when we dream.

2.3 REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep

Laboratory sleep studies show that when we dream we move into a different kind of sleep. Supposing you dream of walking. In the dream, that's exactly what you're doing: to the dreamer, dreams are real. You are walking. But that mental walking doesn't translate into actual physical activity: the mind of the dreamer walks, the body of the dreamer remains completely relaxed. Something, some kind of cutoff, must be preventing the mental messages from getting through to the body. That cutoff mechanism exists, and the neural pathways that operate it have been specifically identified.

The cutoff mechanism causes the body to relax completely and disconnect from the messages of the brain. But the cutoff is not absolutely complete. When dogs sleep, sometimes they run, with little spasmodic paw movements; people too sometimes toss and turn and make noises in their sleep. But usually the cutoff is effective, except for just one part of the body, and that is the eyes. When you are dreaming, you are seeing things, and the eyes move in sleep just as they do in real life to track what you are seeing in the dream. These movements of the eyes in sleep are called Rapid Eye Movements, or REM, and many laboratory experiments have shown that if you wake someone up when they are in REM sleep, you will wake them from the middle of a dream. If you wake them up when they are not in REM sleep, they will not recall a dream. This is a really simple, reliable, and important scientific test: with it, we can know when a person, or an animal, is dreaming.

Using the REM test, some strange discoveries have been made about dreams, and I'm going to simply list these, one after another.

3. Dream discoveries

3.1. Everyone dreams.

Everyone dreams. You may not remember your dreams, but every night, everyone dreams: there is no doubt about this.

3.2. We need to dream

If you're prevented from dreaming, if someone wakes you up whenever you move into REM sleep, but allows you as much non-REM sleep as you want, then strange things happen. You become more and more desperate to dream, until, eventually, dreams start to break in to your waking life. There seems to be a necessity to dream: it seems for some reason to be essential. If you are prevented from dreaming, you get sick.

Now, here, note, is a real problem for Freud: he thought you dreamed in order to sleep. It seems that the opposite may be true: that you sleep in order to dream. He thought dreams were there to protect sleep, to change the monsters of the unconscious into acceptable forms so that you could stay asleep. But it seems that sleep is there to enable dreaming. The opposite of what Freud thought.

3.3. All mammals dream

All warm-blooded animals, all mammals, dream. It is a universal phenomenon. This means that it must be extremely important. Nature does not waste time. Nothing that is so universal can be redundant. There must be a serious reason for dreaming.

3.4. Animal dreams

What do animals dream about? Well, it's reasonable to assume that they don't have disguised dreams about wanting to kill their fathers and go to bed with their mothers. They might, I suppose, but it does seem extremely unlikely. This is a problem for Freud.

In fact we do know something of what some animals dream about. Anyone who has owned a dog knows what dogs' dreams are like: they dream about hunting and fighting. They snarl, they run, they whine, in their sleep. What they are dreaming about is the work of being a dog: what dogs do: hunting, running, fighting. And that is what their play is like, as puppies: they play at the work of being a dog. There seems to be a strong connection between dreams and play.

We know what cats dream about, because there is a disgusting experiment that has been done: the cutoff mechanism was removed from some cats. The result was that when they dreamed, while sleeping, they acted out their dreams. You could actually watch them dreaming. What do they dream about? They dream about hunting and fighting and running and hiding. They dream about what cats do: the work of being a cat. And that is what kittens play at, too: they play to prepare themselves for being a cat: to develop hunting and fighting skills, in the safety of play, in order to learn how to do the work of a cat. Is this a clue as to the function of dreams? Dreams are a hundred percent real, to the dreamer, and are completely safe. They are virtual reality. Are they a safe arena, like play, but more real-seeming, where cats can practice at being cats?

What do human beings dream about? Logically, they should dream about the much more complex work of being human, in the safety of the dream.

3.5. We dream before we are born

Here is a strange thing. The human foetus, in the womb, dreams. It is indisputable that in the womb we do REM sleep. What are we dreaming about? What can we possibly be dreaming about--we have no experiences, no memories, no sight, no language. If no experience, then no images: surely we have nothing to dream about in the womb. So what is the nature of these dreams? Some of them are quite pleasant, it seems: very small babies, before they can focus their eyes, before they can see their mother, and before they have learned to smile, nonetheless smile in their dreams. The folk name for this is smiling at the angels. It's a common phenomenon.

3.6 Inbuilt images

In fact, it seems that we may have inbuilt images after all: that we may bring them with us. Consider this. There is a well-known, well-established, behaviour pattern in young geese. Here is the gosling, straight out of the egg. It chips its way out, and sees the world for the first time, entirely and utterly new. It has never seen anything before in its life. But the world, apparently, is not quite unknown to it. If a hawk goes overhead, in the first minute of the gosling's life, then the gosling goes into a quite definite behaviour pattern, which is basically to get its head down and run like hell. Any other kind of bird produces no response: it has to be a hawk. A hawk shape made of cardboard has the same effect. Straight out of the egg, the newly born bird recognises the hawk shape. If that's so, then it must come with with images already built in. We can assume that it dreams in the egg, and we can guess very reasonably that it dreams of hawks, because this will be part of what it has to do, when it is born: an important part of the work of being a gosling, to recognise the hawk shape, and run like hell.

Do we also come into the world with images already built in, like the baby goose? If so, images of what?

3.7 Children's dreams

Well, what do children dream about? All sorts of things, but one odd thing. They have a tendency to dream, and play, about monsters. Wild animals. Fear of darkness. Falling from trees. Jungles. Fighting. Being eaten. And traditional children's stories reflect these dreams. Why? My children were brought up in Moseley, Birmingham. No monsters, no jungles, no serious danger of being eaten by wild animals. This is not part of the work of being human now, not for most of us. But of course it was, a very long time ago. Are these ancient fears and survival skills part of the package of images that we are born with? Do we inherit our dream images, like the goose inherits the hawk image?

3.8 Big dreams

The Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung can add two more elements to this. He made a distinctions between two kinds of dreams: big dreams and little dreams. He found that many cultures made this distinction: normal dreams, that may be interesting but are not awe-inspiring, and big dreams, which leave you shaking, appalled, amazed, when you wake up. Traditional cultures normally pay a great deal of attention to big dreams, and value them very highly.

3.9 Shared images

Jung noticed something about the big dreams: he said that there were common elements in these dreams. The same images and items recurred in the big dreams of all his patients; and moreover he found these same images recur in myths and stories from all over the world: he thought these images were universal. If so, they must come from a common source: they must be, these archetypal images, the package, the ancient package, that we are born with. Coded in the chromosomes, advice on how to live.

3.10 Summary

What do we have so far? Dreams are useful, they are universal, they are important for survival, they help us to practice at the work of being human. They provide a safe arena, a theatre in the mind, a virtual reality, in which we can learn the work of being us. Apparently we don't need to remember them, because we don't on the whole remember them; it is enough to have had the experience they offer, which presumably we remember and use at some deep level. However it is also certainly true that most cultures value big dreams very highly, and spend a great deal of time and effort in remembering and interpreting them; and that many people make an effort to remember their own dreams and find the result rewarding and important.

3.11 Dreaming in language

Where we differ from animals is that we have language, and one of the things that we do with language is, we make up stories. I would like to suggest that dreams are so important, so useful, that we use this incredible skill of language to make up dreams of our own. We call them fictions, stories, novels. Perhaps we are so easily absorbed in these fictions, even as children, because we are so practised at it: because we enter into fiction every night, many times.

If this is true, then two extremely interesting things follow from it. The first is this. Some people think that art is a luxury; that what we do in the English Department is not important. But if fiction is a kind of dream, then fiction, like the dream, is very important. It is not a luxury, or an option; it's a necessity. Fiction is necessary for us to learn how to do the work of being us. If this theory is true, it means that fiction has important biological backing, a survival skill, precisely because it is a dream, a game. It is virtual reality role playing, but more powerful than any computer game, because, like the dream, ltierature operates at the level of the mind itself; it works on and with the imagination, inside the head.

The second consequence is this. If literature is a kind of dream, then it follows that learning to read dreams would be a useful way learning to read literature. Now, we've looked at Freud's way of reading dreams, and there is no doubt that this way works for some dreams, and for some texts; but usually only for those fictions that have a heavily repressed sexual content. Is there a larger theory of the dream, that doesn't reduce everything to the unbearable?

Perhaps such a theory is to be found in the work of Jung, and this is what I am now going to summarise for you.

4. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

4.1 Jung and Freud: sexuality and religion

C.G. Jung was born in Switzerland, the son of a vicar. He was an earthy, extremely strong man, 6 foot four inches tall, built like a barrel, with an extremely strong personality. He read medicine at University and specialised in psychiatry, which at that point was an extremely immature discipline. He graduated, and went to work in a mental hospital: interestingly, he worked with psychotics, which Freud never really encountered. What he began to learn to do in this work was to listen to them, to their madness, to try to learn from what it had to say. In 1907 he read Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams and realised immediately its extreme importance: that here was someone who had listened to irrationality and found a way of making sense of it. He went to see Freud and they talked, almost without stopping, for for many many hours.

It was a momentous meeting. Jung became Freud's student, follower, closest friend: the crown prince of psychoanalysis. Freud groomed him carefully to take over when he Freud died, to carry on the work. However, trouble arose between them. Jung could not accept that everything had to be reduced to the sexual. What he said was that he had been brought up in a farming community, where the sexual was taken for granted: putting animals to mate is what farmers do all the time, and it had no mystery for him. He also said this. He was extremely widely read, and aware as perhaps Freud was not of the vast range of human culture. He knew that in some cultures the sexual act was itself used as a symbol: a symbol of religion. In Freud, this is impossible: religion is a repression of the sexual, not the other way round.

I will give you an example. In Malta there are these pre-historic temples: extremely ancient. No-one knows what specifically they were for, but it is known that the culture that built them was matriarchal: the woman were in charge. The temples were built in the shape of women's bodies. Here is one. There are two temples here side by side, over three thousand years old, each representing a woman with enormous breasts and thighs, hugely fertile: here is a statuette from the same culture. Now: the entry to the temple was through the vagina of the woman: here it is, the main entrance. That is a vagina. The sexual is used to symbolise the religious. If that is true, then Freud must be wrong.

Jung and Freud argued. Freud accused Jung of Oedipal jealousy, of wishing to kill him, the father of psychoanalysis, so that he Jung could take over. Needless to say, Jung disagreed, and, in 1913, only six years after the first meeting, they became bitterly estranged. Jung founded his own school of psychology, known not as psychoanalysis but as analytical psychology. They never spoke again.

Let us examine the nature of their disagreement.

5 Maps of the mind

5.1 The Freudian map

Here is a rather unkind version of Freud's map of the mind.

Everything above the surface of the cone is conscious: fluffy, and rather unreal. Everything below, the further down you get, becomes increasingly simplified, turns only into one thing. That one thing is the sexual, specifically the incestuous sexual desire between parent and child. It may be that ultimately Freud thought that all of our actions, every one, are at the deepest level actings out of this archetypal sexual desire.

5.2 The Jungian map

Here is Jung's map of the mind. This model of the mind accounts for many of the things that I have mentioned in describing dreams. Here is an interesting thing: Jung developed this model long before the investigation of REM sleep, which only began right at the end of his life. So you could say that his theories, which are fairly wild, are now being to some extent at least substantiated by scientific research.

In Jung's model the mind is like an island. The ego, the part that we are aware of, just breaks the surface of the water. Everything below that surface is unconscious. First point: the ego is not all there is that can come into consciousness. You can see that there are other peaks, jutting up and almost above water level. Jung was interested in the phenomenon of multiple personality disorders, and in fact did his PhD on a woman who manifested a number of different personalities, some of which seemed to have entirely independent knowledge that her normal self did not have. So he imagined that under some circumstances different parts of the buried, unconscious island could break the surface of consciousness, and perhaps take over.

Immediately beneath the surface is the personal unconscious. In here, we find first the trivial repository of things we can easily access: your mother's maiden name, for instance. A little deeper, and we find a version of the Freudian unconscious: everything about ourselves that we resist, that we don't like, that we repress. Our hangups, if you like. Jung thought that Freud was true to this extent, and in fact Jung was prepared to practise Freudian analysis, offering it to clients that he thought needed it: he would lend to a beginning patient some books by Freud, and some of his own books, and ask which they preferred.

But what he was really interested in was what he thought was deeper than that. In Jung's model, the deeper you go, the more universal, the more ancient, the more collective the mind becomes. He called this deep level of the mind the collective unconscious, and suggested that at that level we share the contents of our minds with the whole human race, present and past: coded in the chromosomes. The parallel with the gosling and the image of the hawk is important at this point.

What are these images that we inherit from the past? Jung called them the archetypes of the collective unconscious. He felt that by analysing what he found in the dreams--the big dreams--of his patients, and comparing them with material from myths and legends from all over the world, he could build up a description of what they had in common, which, he said, must be what the mind contained at this deep level. What it inherited from the past of the human race. He said that we cannot experience the archetypes directly: that they will rise into the personal unconscious and take on forms that will be familiar to us; so although they are common across cultures, they will differ in actual realisation from culture to culture.

5.3 Archetypes and the Numinous

Why are the archetypes unconscious? Well, the answer is somewhat the same as for Freud: because they are unbearable. But not because they are appalling; because they are too much. For Jung the unconscious is unconscious because it is so big, so powerful, so extraordinary, that we can't take it in. It is ancient, mysterious, amazing. It speaks in dreams, in symbols, and images, because that is naturally the way it communicates, and we can't immediately understand these images because we are too stupid. The unconscious is vastly wiser than we are, and wants to get in touch, to tell us what it has to say, but we repress it because we are rather trivial, compared to its majesty and austerity. It takes work, to communicate with the Jungian unconscious. The archetypes, for one thing, can be terrifying. If you have a big dream, what you experience is what Jung called the Numinous: a sense of awe, of fear, of being in the presence of something a lot bigger than you are. If you find this in a dream, which is after all a product of your own mind, then this is an extraordinary experience. Where did it come from? Jung suggests it comes from the collective experience of mankind, and that it has something important to tell us.

So what are the archetypes like? I will give you some examples.

6 The Archetypes: autonomous complexes

6.1 The Shadow

Most cultures have a legend or myth of the devil. The adversary, the wicked one, the enemy of mankind. Jung called this archetype the Shadow. He thought that when you examine your own unconscious the Shadow is the first archetype that you meet. On the archetypal level this will be experienced as a terrifying being, full of power; on the personal level, what the Shadow will embody is everything about you that you dislike. Since you dislike this stuff in yourself so much, you repress it, just as in the Freudian model, and since it is repressed, it has power over you. One of the ways it uses this power is that in real life, Jung suggested, if you examine honestly what your worst enemy is like, you will find that he or she is like you; or rather, like your Shadow; you dislike this person so much, because they are like that aspect of yourself that you don't like. What you have done is to project the Shadow on to someone else, and hate them for it.

Here is another problem, if you repress the Shadow. In Jung there is no black and white: for him, the mind is more complex than that. So the archetype of the Shadow, as well as being evil, devilish, is also creative, wicked, mischievous, energetic. In Literature, think of Iago, in Othello: a completely evil man, but witty, energetic, active, successful. We laugh at his jokes. Why is he so attractive? Or think of Shakespeare's Richard III: again, wicked, appalling, but very successful and very funny. Satan is the most interesting character in Paradise Lost. Why do we have this attraction to wickedness? Jung would say, because all these characters are embodiments of the Shadow: they have the Shadow's energy and vividness. So if we repress the Shadow, we lose that creativity, that fierce energy. A writer who has writer's block, says Jung, usually is not in touch with her Shadow. In Doris Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook, which many people think is one of the best, if not the best, English novels written since 1945, the heroine is a writer with writer's block, and the resolution of the novel is when she meets a man called Saul, who embodies her Shadow.

The first part of the process of Jungian analysis is to enter the unconscious, and meet the Shadow, in dreams, or in ones imagination: to meet and to own this being as part of oneself. To incorporate him: to eat the Shadow, some say.

You will notice that I talk of the archetypes as if they were alive. In Jung's view, they are. They are what he calls autonomous complexes; a complex is a gathering or collection of psychic material, and the word 'autonomou's stresses the fact that these complexes are independent of the conscious mind: just as, in a dream, although it appers to be entirely the product of our own mind, we don't know what's going to happen next; so, if we meet an archetype, they can and will surprise us, tell us things we don't know: they seem to have a mind of their own.

One more thing about the Shadow. He manifests as the same in different cultures, recognisably as the adversary, the enemy, the mischievous one; but different cultures see him differently. For instance in this culture white people have seen him as black, because this for white people is a symbol of extreme difference: black is held to be the opposite of white. In China, he is seen as white. This is because the healthy normal colour of Chinese skin becomes pale only in death, and so they associate whiteness with death. They think white people are like ghosts, corpses. For them, the devil is white.

So you can see, if you think again of the Jungian model of the mind, how the archetype arises from the collective unconscious and manifests in a form that the personal unconscious can recognise: for instance, white, or black. And how it rises in each individual, and its energy takes hold of whatever personal stuff about him or herself that that individual doesn't like, attracts it, allows it to coalesce, and shapes it into a powerful, active, and autonomous image.

6.2 Anima / Animus

Here is another example of an archetype. In all males there is a female element; in all females, a male. Some people repress this more than others. A very masculine man, says Jung, will have repressed the female inside him, and so it will engage with and gain power from the female archetype, dominate him, and cause him harm. Similarly a woman who can't cope with machines or maps or anything logical and precise is, says Jung, repressing the masculine. The female inside men is called the Anima; the male inside women is called the Animus. Being male, I know more about the Anima. In dreams, she manifests in many forms. She may represent wisdom, sometimes divine wisdom: the soul. She may be a beautiful young woman. In Dante's Divine Comedy she is Beatrice, who showed him the way through purgatory to God. She is the Virgin Mary, the Duchess in The Book of the Duchess, Gretchen in Goethe's Faust, Cordelia in King Lear, wise, uncompromising, the way forward. But if she is repressed she may split, become spiteful and destructive. Delilah, perhaps, who destroyed Sampson; Eve, who destroyed Adam. The wicked witch; the evil stepmother of the fairy stories. Or it is common, says Jung, for a man to project the repressed Anima on to some woman, and then, without knowing, to marry it. This makes for disaster, since the wife will be unaware of the projection, and be unable to live up to it. In the Jungian system you must meet the Anima, respect her, learn from her, and recognise her as part of yourself.

7 Learning from the unconscious

7.1 Free association works with anything

This learning is the most important thing in the Jungian system. The unconscious is wise, says Jung, and it has much to teach you. Learn from it. For Jung the dream is not an attempted disguise, it is a truth that we are a little too stupid to understand. There is no trickery, no deceitfulness in the dream: it means what it says. It speaks in images and symbols, because that is the natural language of the unconscious, and the images it uses will be yours, meaningful to you, because it speaks through your personal unconscious. If a child with a toy elephant dreams about an elephant, it means one thing; if a zoo-keeper dreams about an elephant, it means another. There can be no dictionary of dreams.

This is a little similar to Freud, but a big difference, one which works rather well for literary critics, is that Jung did not use free association. He said that free association will tell you, perhaps, things about yourself, but will tell you nothing about the dream. He tells the story of a friend of his who was interested in psychoanalysis, and was in a train, travelling across Europe. The train stopped at a station in a country whose language the friend didn't speak. He was half-asleep, and as he looked out of the window he saw the name of the station, and, in the half-asleep state, started to free-associate on it. Soon all sorts of material, mostly sexual, came into his head: stuff about himself and his hangups; the contents of his Freudian unconscious. But, Jung says, the important thing is this: he learned nothing at all about the placename or the place he was looking at, only about himself. Free association works with anything, but tells you only about yourself. It ignores the meaning of the dream. For Jung the unconscious is a foreign country, rich, mysterious, readily available to anyone, existing right inside ones own mind. Much more interesting than ones own personal hangups and fantasies. If you hook your computer up to the Internet, you will learn a lot more than if you don't.

7.2 Learning from the oracle: The I Ching

Jung's readiness to learn from the unconscious can be very disconcerting. I remember my first encounter with Jung, which was when I was a student. I had just read a novel by Philip K. Dick, a very brilliant science fiction novel called The Man in the High Castle. I strongly recommend this book, by the way. Anyway, in it the hero spends quite a lot of time using a strange Chinese fortunetelling book called the I Ching, the Book of Changes. This oracle is very powerfully depicted in the novel, it's almost another character, and I thought I would check it out. So I looked it up in the University Library Catalogue, and, rather bizarrely, there it was. So I ordered it up from the stacks, and sat there, in the reading room, reading it. The introduction was very strange. It was very intelligent, and rather scholarly, and impressive; but after a bit, it went crazy: what the author did, in order to write an introduction to the Book of Changes, was to ask the book, as an oracle, what he ought to say in the introduction. I looked at this, and I thought, this man is mad. So I checked the end, to see who it was, and it said "C.G. Jung". I was so disturbed by this that I put the book back in the library, and didn't look at it, or Jung, again for another four years.

You have to get used to this kind of thing, if you want to study Jung. He is a kind of very rational mystic. He considered himself to be a scientist; but his object of study was the human mind and all its products. However weird. Especially the weird, in fact. And he was prepared to let this strangeness have its voice, and to listen to it. He was prepared to take any mental event as the voice of the unconscious, pay attention to it, hear what it says, see if it works. Astrology. Mediums, spirit voices, flying saucers, any and every religion; anything. For him, anything could be the voice of the unconscious, and should be given the benefit of the doubt, in case it had something important to say.

7.3 The benefit of the doubt

Here is a very characteristic story about Jung. In his autobiography he tells us that a friend of his had just died. That night, the friend appeared to Jung in a dream. Jung thought, this is an illusion; I am a scientist; I will dismiss it. Then he thought, supposing this is in fact my friend coming to visit; it would be extremely discourteous not to listen, not to give him the benefit of the doubt. So, disbelieving, he listened, and the friend told him to look for something, which he did, and found it, and learned. You can read the story yourselves--it's in Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Experiences; see what you think. If you have a sceptical mind, then dismiss it: feel free. You must make up your own minds.

8 Reading the dream

8.1 The satisfaction of narrative

So: how do you read a dream, in Jung's system? First, let me remind you of Freud's method, because Jung's contrasts quite sharply with it. In Freud, you take each element of the dream and use free association, until the unconscious meaning, the latent content, of that element is revealed. Now, what this does is to produce a fragmentary interpretation. In Freud, dreams do not have coherent underlying narratives, but reveal a patchwork of sometimes conflicting wishes and desires. Freud denies us the satisfaction of narrative: narrative, for him, is itself disguise: it is secondary elaboration. So for instance the narrative of Alice's experience underground reveals in Empson's Freudian analysis a rather incoherent set of allusions to conception and the act of birth.

Jung's view of the dream is different. In his view, the dream is trying to communicate. What it has to say makes sense, just as it says it; it is not trying to trick us. If the dream has a narrative, then it is for us to understand that narrative. Jung's method produces coherent readings of dreams.

8.2 The child and the doctor

I will give you an example. Jung had a new patient, a physician. An extremely strait-laced and respectable person. Very tight and controlled. He came to Jung because his life felt empty of meaning. Jung told him, as he normally did, to go away and pay careful note to the dream he would have that night, and to come back and tell him about it. Jung thought that often the dream at the beginning of analysis would accurately predict how the analysis would go. The Doctor said, I never dream. Jung, who, was a rather powerful individual, said, you will. So the Doctor went away and sure enough came back next day with a dream. Here is the Doctor's dream.

He dreamed that he was standing in front of a house: a fine middle class house with a beautiful facade, a clean and expensive building. He admired it for a while, then went inside. Inside the front hall was equally pleasant, expensive, well-decorated. But as he went further into the house, it got shabbier and shabbier. The rooms, which were many, were less and less well decorated, peeling wallpaper, dirt and mess. Eventually, he came to a very small room right in the middle of the house. He opened it, and went in. In the middle of this room he found a baby, covered in shit.

The meaning of the dream that Jung gave to the Doctor was this: you don't need psychoanalysis, it will not help you; you must go and pay careful attention to your way of life, and live well. The meaning of the dream that Jung actually interpreted was this: inside this man is a psychosis, kept under control. Analysis would activate the psychosis. Analysis, for the Doctor, would be a very bad thing indeed, which is why, without telling him why, Jung sent the Doctor away.

Jung frequently said, he had no method of reading dreams: he paid attention to what the dream said, and let it speak its own meaning.

8.3 A little dream about teeth

Here is another dream, a simple little dream. I dreamed that the teeth on the upper right hand side of my mouth were rotting. Just that. I woke up, and for a moment the dream was still real: the dream had given me an actual bodily feeling, as real as can be, of what it's like to have rotting teeth. Then I realised it was a dream, with some relief. Then I remembered that a few days before I had lost a filling, and had been putting off going to the dentist. The meaning of the dream is very simple: the unconscious is giving me, in the clearest possible way, a wake-up call.

Here is a dream that took place in the course of an actual psychoanalytic session between a Jungian therapist and his client.

8.4 The sun, the clock, the mountain

A man whose wife had left him for another man, taking their young daughter with her, dreamt that he was watching the sunrise from a mountain resort in Switzerland. As he watched, the sun developed the face of a huge clock, with large Roman numerals and hands which revolved rapidly and steadily, like a radar scanner.

There was a lot of affect for him from this dream: it was a big dream. The analyst and he spent a long time working on it. What they came up with was this. Although he had lost everything when his wife and daughter left, a new life would happen (the sunrise), his analysis would be really helpful (Switzerland = the home of Jung) and time, the clock, would help, and would develop his vision (the radar scanner). He was very moved by this interpretation, and from it found the courage to carry on with his life. (Private Myths, p. 218).

Now, you can say, there is no arguing with that: it was his dream, and he got from it what he needed: it helped him to learn how to do the work of being him. A Freudian would disagree: he would say that if you get from the dream what you want, you are not getting the real meaning, which must be precisely what you don't want: it must be unbearable. This is quite attractive, in its way: we instinctively feel that the medicine must taste nasty, if it is to do us good. A Jungian would say to that, the dream gave his life meaning, and that's what matters. There is no way the Jungian and the Freudian would agree, and you must simply choose between them.

For Jung, the encounter with the unconscious is a dialogue, in which you learn what you need to know. In each of the dreams the unconscious is offering a message, from which the dreamer can learn something useful, if only he respects the dream, pays attention to it, and works at the interpretation.

9 Jung's analytic practice: Individuation

9.1 Creative imagination

The analytic technique that Jung used was to encourage the client to do just that: to encounter and learn from the unconscious. The analysis for Jung was a journey into the intererior, to find what can be found, to learn what can be learned. One of the principal techniques that he used was what he called Creative Imagination. He asked his patients to do homework: to sit in a comfortable chair, relax, and go into a kind of waking or lucid dream. For instance, he would say: sit comfortably, close your eyes, and imagine a house: the house of the self, your house. What's it like? Examine it. Is it in good repair? Does anything need fixing or painting? How is the garden? And so on. Apparently with a little practice this becomes quite easy, and Jung reports that his clients' lives would become amazingly enriched by this extra experience. You tidy up the imaginary house, and your life improves.

9.2 The journey within

The process of Jung's analytic process is twofold. First, there is the clearing up of the problem which the patient is immediately presenting. Here a Freudian analysis, at least to begin with, may be appropriate. Or the solution may be very simple. Once a young girl was brought to Jung by her worried parents, who were Swiss peasants. The problem was that the girl could not sleep, and hadn't slept for many nights: it was a really severe problem. Jung looked at the girl, and then asked her to come and sit on his knee. He put his arm round her, held her, and sang her a peasant lullaby. She fell asleep straight away. End of problem.

What Jung was really interested in, however, was the second stage of the analysis. He called this process individuation. If you look at the Jungian map of the mind again, you see that the personal unconscious and the ego are surrounded by what Jung called the Self. The Self is the larger self, the realised entity, the result of individuation. The idea is to encounter and integrate the unconscious elements, in a journey towards wholeness, integration, unity. To this end he would encourage his patients to meet the unconscious in any way they could: creative writing, active imagination, dreams, paintings, music: whatever. The point is to use the resources of your mind, to bring into your life a sense of mystery, wholeness, meaning. That was his aim.

9.3 The mid-life crisis

His view was that life has a two part pattern. In the first part of your life you are concerned with making yourself, finding a way in the world, working through relationships, establishing yourself. Getting an education. Establishing yourself in the material world. In the middle of life, this comes to seem insufficient. Material goods no longer satisfy. What one had pursued previously no longer seems worth pursuing. Life begins to lack meaning. This is the famous mid-life crisis. It is associated, says Jung, with a sudden realisation that one is, after all, really and truly going to die. In that perspective, everything gets rather shaken up.

As always Jung turned to literature and myth for analogues of this process: archetypes. He called it the descent to Hell.

9.4 The descent into Hell: Jesus, the Buddha, Dante

In the middle of his life Jesus of Nazareth went into the desert for forty days and nights. There he met the devil, and talked with him. This is what he had to do before he could do his real work, his ministry. In the middle of his life the Buddha, who was a prince, and had been protected from life by his father, saw a corpse for the first time, and realised, with devastating shock, that all beings die. He vowed to find an answer to the problem of suffering, and he left home and wandered as a mendicant until, Buddhists say, sitting for three days and three nights in deep meditation, he found the answer. In the Divine Comedy of Dante, the poem begins like this:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a dark forest
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

God, how hard a thing it is to talk
About this forest: savage, rough, and wild,
To think of it makes me afraid again.

So bitter was it, death is hardly worse;
But, I found good in it, and of that I will speak.

And he tells the story of how from that forest he descended into hell.

Joseph Conrad was a Polish master mariner, a licensed sea captain. In the middle of his life he undertook an actual voyage to the heart of Africa. During that voyage he fell ill. When he returned, and recovered, he entirely gave up his life as a sea captain, retired to England, lived in poverty, and wrote novels, in his third language: not Polish, not French, but English. These include some of the greatest novels in the language. One of them is the story of his trip to Africa: he called it Heart of Darkness. It seems to be the story of a middle-aged man's spiritual crisis.

10. Jung and literature

10.1 Dreams and myths, and Middlemarch

In literary criticism Jung works best for narratives that are most like dreams. Fairy stories, legends, mythical or fantastic tales: stories that derive most from the collective unconscious. Novels that deal with the surface, the comedy of manners, the pattern of human behaviour, and social life, don't usually work well if you try to use Jung on them. There are exceptions: for instance, Middlemarch, the tale of Provincial life, is the classic realistic novel, the picture of how people live in their conscious lives. But it is very easy to see Casaubon, dry, intellectual, impotent, as a projection of Dorothea's Animus, leading to a disastrous marriage; and Ladislaw, the rather disreputable journalist, with his vitality and creativity, as an encounter, a successful encounter, with her Shadow.

But the easiest novels to work on with Jung are those that are like dreams.

10.2 Into the darkness

Here is a quotation from Heart of Darkness.

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream -making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams....

"Captured by the incredible". I don't know of a better description of the Jungian concept of the numinous, of the feeling of the big dream.

Marlow's journey into the darkness of Africa is a journey into hell. Nothing makes sense. There is no meaning. It becomes a search for the man who, it is universally agreed, has meaning: for Kurtz. What does Marlow want from Kurtz? To talk to him. Kurtz is an expert at words: at consciousness. He is the supremely rational man, and Marlow wants to meet him because he thinks Kurtz will make sense of the madness of Africa. But even as he realises that is what he wants, he also realises that it won't work:

10.3

[I] became aware that that was exactly what I had been looking forward to -- a talk with Kurtz. I made the strange discovery that I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. ... The man presented himself as a voice. ... The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words -- the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.

Kurtz is the supreme intellectual: "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz". But the intellect is not enough. He is symbolic of the way that Europe has repressed the unconscious, the Africa within.

10.4

I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think.

And, since he has repressed the Africa within, it has power over him, and destroys him.

What he has particularly repressed, Jung would say, is the Anima. Here is how Marlow first hears about Kurtz.

10.5

Then I noticed a small sketch in oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre -- almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister. To my question he said Mr. Kurtz had painted this -- in this very station more than a year ago -- while waiting for means to go to his trading-post. 'Tell me, pray,' said I, 'who is this Mr. Kurtz?'

The woman in the picture is the Anima: blindfolded, because she is repressed, and therefore sinister, though stately: she has wisdom, insight, a torch, but because she is blindfolded the torch is no use. In Kurtz's life this split in the Anima, between the stately and the sinister, is represented by two people: the intended, his fiancée, who is civilised and sentimental and completely unable to understand, having no insight at all. And the dark side of the Anima is represented by the black woman who becomes Kurtz's lover.

In Jungian terms Kurtz has entered the unconscious and found a psychosis inside that his reason, his intelligence, will not help him with, and so he is overcome by it.

10.6

...the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude -and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core....

And so all he finds within is what his last words express: the horror. However, Kurtz as a hero:

10.7

He had summed up -he had judged. "The horror!" He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best -- a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things -- even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.

Stepping over the threshold of the invisible: this is the essence of Jung.

So for Jung to read literature is to read a dream, to learn from the darkness of the unconscious mind, to recognise the universal symbols that we may find there, to share in the universal experience of dreaming, and finding meaning. Here is the poem I ended with last week:

10.8

A man and a woman
are one
A man and a woman and a blackbird
are one.

There seems to be wisdom there, perhaps, but there are no universal symbols, nothing that one can recognise. The words still resist interpretation. Next week, Lacan.