Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process:
Notes of the Seminars given by Jung in Bailey Island and New York, 1936-7

C G Jung

Introduction

21. [Wolfgang] Pauli was one of the many great scientists of the twentieth century involved in the discovery of quantum physics.

23. [Pauli] formulated the exclusion principle, for which he would be awarded a Nobel Prize in 1945.

24. [Pauli] developed a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde duality: on the one hand, he was the brilliant, famous “conscience of physics”; on the other, an alcoholic ruffian frequenting bars and getting into fights. He felt lonely and paranoid.

29. In the seminars, Jung says that the presence of the doctor functions in the process as “a sympathetic audience” and that it does not matter so much what the psychotherapist says, only that he say something to show that he is present with the patient and to react spontaneously to what he hears. With regard to sanity, Jung says that the critical thing is to be able to explain yourself to your fellow beings, that is, he puts great weight on the human desire to communicate and to make oneself understood to one’s fellows.

31. In his letter Pauli reports that his depression abated and changed into a kind of unrest that lasted for a couple of days before something came of it, about which he becomes conscious. These periods were accompanied by dreams of waiting or messages that things were still too premature.

33. [Pauli] was particularly interested in new conceptions of the relationship between mind and matter and supported Jung in his formulation of an acausal and psychophysically neutral law expressed in the principle of synchronicity.

Lecture 1

66. in the unconscious everything merges with everything else, and under certain conditions anything may become anything else.

67. We can hear something but may not know that we have heard it. Yet it is in us and it really works in us as if we had heard it.

70. He had the gift of visualizing things, and so he had spontaneous fantasies. I count them as dreams—they are just as good as dreams. You can have your dreams in the daytime.

71. Dreams are particularly apt material because we do not interfere with them. We cannot interfere with dreams… We could say therefore just as well that dreams are not made by man. They are not made at all. They grow. They come up naturally like a spring.

77. This is what we call in psychology the individuation process, namely, when we become what we are, when we bring together everything we possess, and particularly all the complexities and contradictions of which we necessarily consist. Then we are what we are, and that is individuation. You see these conflicts are given by nature. They are a collision of instincts. If that were not so, if we had no conflict, then we would have no energy. Energy is only to be found where there is opposition. This is an absolutely necessary source of any energy.

79. So you see when the dreamer gets a strange hat it means he is not under his own ideas. A strange idea has caught hold of him.

80. We live so much in large crowds; but if we live alone, away from man and man’s accumulations called cities, then such a thing quite regularly happens—that we feel invisible presences.

81. At night many people become suspicious of invisible presences; they hear a little noise somewhere. That is an old instinct. It is due to the working of the archetypes in the unconscious, which come to life when there is silence.

84. The unconscious behaves as if it were not in you; it constellates your reaction as if it were outside of you. So you never suspect its presence; you assume it is somewhere else. Even if you know it is psychological, it actually appears as if it never happens in you, but always outside of you. It happens in your friends, it happens anywhere else but never in yourself. You are always convinced it is somewhere else; it is in this or that object… Your best enemy is always in someone else, naturally. You find, for instance, your own blackness always somewhere else.

86. You cannot tell people. You can tell them to give you a piece of bread or mail a letter for you. But you cannot tell them the Truth. That is out of the question. That you can is an old-fashioned idea. Fewer and fewer people believe you when you tell them something.

37. Jung struggled with this material and finally decided to come to grips with it by creating a lexicon of cross-references, a project that he named “treasure-hunting” #me

46. Indeed, this proved to be Jung’s last visit to America, although no one thought this at the time. Jung spoke about living one’s life as fully as possible and to “do just what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life.”

Lecture 1 – 9.20.1936

65. if the unconscious should prefer not to function on a certain day we should be absolutely unable to say a word because it would not come into our mind.

67. We can hear something but may not know that we have heard it. Yet it is in us as if we had heard it and really works in us as if we had heard it.

68. We are already acquainted with this world when we come into it; there is from the beginning a peculiar identity between the inner and the outer. #childhood

69. It unfortunately happens that such intellectual people pay no attention to their feeling life, and so they lose contact with a world that feels and live in a world that thinks: in a world of thoughts merely. #genius

70. “You can do the whole thing by yourself, and then you will be convinced. If I should do it for you, you would never be convinced, therefore I shall not even try.”

70. He had the gift of visualizing things, and so he had spontaneous fantasies. I count them as dreams—they are just as good as dreams. You can have your dreams in the daytime.

71. We can say therefore just as well that dreams are not made by man. They are not made at all. They grow. They come up naturally like a spring.

71. we have evidence that makes it highly probable that the unconscious is a continuous process without beginning or end. In other words, we can’t apply categories like beginning, end, causality to it. We can imagine it to be a sort of stream that is always flowing past like the series of events in the physical world. It is a continuous stream that begins nowhere and ends nowhere; in other words, our mind has no means of determining a beginning or end.

72. That occurrence which is represented in a dream is just one event in the stream of psychic events that goes on all the time. So you can catch a dream even in the daytime, when you are conscious. #fantasy #daydream

72. when the conscious loses its intensity, then the unconscious can appear.

73. So it happens that in a time when you are happy during the day, you may have more or less disagreeable dreams containing conflict.

74. Usually, or at least very often, people cherish the idea that they are living at peace with God and man and that there is no trouble whatever, until they are disturbed by something—an uncomfortable symptom—and then they believe, of course, that it has to do with the body and with food. They develop a sort of phobia, become food fiends, eating only certain things. They believe the body is what they eat and try to eliminate the disturbance by changing the food. Now of course such a thing does not help. It may help some people for a while, as anything you believe in can help for a while.

Lecture 2

92. One should never seek it. It is much better to let it come to you and then see what you are going to do about it.

93. He had thoughts, but they had no body. The woman can unconsciously give body to his thought so that it comes to earth, becomes visible. That is the extraordinary effect a woman can have on a man.

94. The danger in any big collective movement is that it too often goes back on its own principles.

98. personality consists of a multitude of units appearing as personified in the mirror of the unconscious. It is as if he should look down into a well or into a lake, into quiet water, and see his own face transfigured and dissociated into many faces. That is the way in which the subconscious is personified. You can understand that the unconscious as a mirror reflects your unknown condition. Your unknown face is reflected in the unconscious. Or you can turn it round and say it is the unconscious that is in a condition of disintegration.

100. The concept of the soul has nothing to do with the Christian concept of a metaphysical soul, which is rather a philosophical notion than anything else. This term anima is more a primitive notion, namely, it is a soul, it is not the soul, it is a soul; and I call it a primitive notion because primitives hold that you have more than one soul. You have several, up to six, or perhaps more, and at times a soul can leave you and wander away in the night and get lost, and in the morning you discover that you have lost a soul, not the soul, but a soul, a part of yourself, a part of your personality.

100. She is representing something, and she appears on a staircase. Now that always suggests going up or going down… The staircase is a symbol which occurs in antique literature pretty often and played a considerable role, for instance, in the Mithraic and many other mysteries.

101. So we can make the hypothesis that perhaps the stairs mean a possible going up to the seventh place, a transformation of the individual into a divine form. You know that is the purpose of the mysteries, to transform man, to give him rebirth into another form of existence which means that his ego-personality ought to change.

103. You are not air, but heavy matter, therefore walk humbly below the rainbow, as everybody should do.

104. So one could say that the animal is the most pious of all creatures because it fulfills the will of God.

106. The green lad, as you now know, is the land of innocence, of childhood, and animal-like obedience, of utter docility, of which the sheep are characteristic.

106. He must return to a condition in which he cannot judge, in which he has to surrender to the instinctual basis of his personality, to the basic pattern that he is, and that is unknown to him. We all contain a pattern which neither we nor anyone else knows about. It is a basic pattern born with us, which only becomes known to us through what we do. Only in our deeds do we appear… We need many deeds, many actions, many aspects of life to know how we react. We learn to our utter amazement who we are by the reactions we make to our surroundings. Nobody can tell beforehand who he is; only afterwards does he come to know who he is. And then he will have some indestructible memories of how he has reacted. He is that person who has lived such and such a life, and whether he meant to live it or did not mean to live it, whether he wanted to live that type of life or not, he is that person.

107. This empirical personality is the pattern that is born with each one. It is the pattern of our fate no matter whether that fate is made by ourselves or has come to us. We cannot distinguish these two elements; things come to us because we are these things. Our fate comes to us because we are it, and the ultimate results of our lives will show quite clearly what we have always been, what we were when we were born.

108. You cannot jump away from the fact that you are still a child. Such a recognition is very important.

108. Here is the up-and-down motive [ladders]; climbing up and down means changing from one level to another, sometimes above, sometimes below.

108. The child is never its own; the child, to a great extent, is the father and mother. For many years he is a part of the parental atmosphere; he breathes the parental air, the parental psychological atmosphere.

109. The climbing up and down ladders is also a kind of practice, or exercise, in moving the heavy body.

109. We forget about our childhood; we forget what we have been; we forget many things that are disagreeable; we repress them, and that forms the personal subconscious… The subconscious is like a heavy stone around our necks; it does not allow us to identify with spirits and such light things.

110. That is all we can do, and it is enough for any man to carry himself. He cannot carry more, only himself.

112. It is a paradox. That is what the traditional intellect cannot stand; it cannot stand a paradox.

114. When you think a road, you make it straight, when you live a road, walk a road, it is never straight. It is as a snake goes, as a river goes. This is a rule of nature.

116. Have your intellect, but as a servant; yet he is a dangerous one with a pointed beard, a devil.

Lecture 3.

117. You should never rely upon a fixed meaning; such a thing practically does not exist.

119. You are, strictly, not even born of your mother; that is, you don’t repeat your mother; you are not made by your mother, but by the tribe of the mother, and by the tribe of the father… Children may be very different from their parents, exceedingly different, and very often you don’t really know where certain qualities came from. Often children don’t even look like the parents. Then the individual pattern is also influenced by partly known, partly unknown considerations… Many things, unknown influences, contribute to the fashioning of a definite pattern.

122. Thus we see bachelors living with their sisters, repeating father and mother together in platonic form, and they make a life of it.

123. the mother is the darkness, the original unconsciousness. Out of the mother came individual consciousness.

128. The idea never enters their heads that in every situation they are themselves and if there is a devil in that situation, they have brought it in.

128. Now when he is able to come to the realization that he is the cause of all the mischief around himself, then the question arises in him, “Who then? If I don’t do it with my conscious intention, who is then the author of all the evil?”

132. You do not make thoughts; they come to you. If the unconscious chooses to interfere with things, it can do anything it likes to do. It can make you forget things, or put things in your mind you don’t want there, disagreeable things. It fills you with emotions you haven’t made, and things happen to you which you have not chosen. Every night you have dreams you have not created. You are all the time surrounded by peculiar psychological conditions over which you have no control.

132. Seven is the highest number, the highest stair of the staircase. It would be the sun step, the step of completion.

139. regression

Lecture 4.

142. Scholasticism was a form of education which enabled thinkers to detach their spiritual ideas from objects… The moment the object was mentioned, it was no longer the object that was of importance, but the thought. And so they invented perfectly absurd problems which had no connection with reality, merely hypothetical questions which would exercise their thought, quite apart from any object… they had to deal with such things in order to release the mind from its attachment to objects.

143. So the standpoint of science is quite valid as far as it goes; but it causes a certain attachment to the object which makes us peculiarly unfit to understand psychology. You see in psychology you have an invisible object, for thoughts themselves are the object of psychology, and when you deal with invisible things which you cannot touch, then you easily begin to imagine that you are dealing with mere inventions.

148. As long as man has the desire to explain himself, he is not crazy.

151. If you tell somebody, “It is your duty,” he will go to work in a most hesitant way, for he hates to perform duties all the time. But if he is convinced there is some bun about it, then he works willingly.

161. You can only contain a very small amount, and even if you read and read and heap up knowledge, only a few things remain of all you have read; it has influenced you, but you could not for the world reproduce it, though you might get it back in a dream, or in the fantasy of a pathological condition. But to your consciousness it is extinct.

163. We can use this word temenos as a technical term to designate the motif of the delimited space, which often occurs in dreams. It can be a hall, a room, a certain place, a garden, a square in a town, a theater, or a circus. If the space delimited is emphasized at all, it most probably has the meaning of that place in which something is going to happen, the place where the pairs of opposites are being put together

165. If you are intuitive, you do not perceive reality. Possibilities can never be perceived at the same time as reality.

168. Our shadow, out incompleteness, our somewhat negative qualities, you know, are very much of the earth. It is the remnant of the earth which makes the whole mixture a bit doubtful, somewhat dirty.

Lecture 5

172. Those people who are always telling other people what they should do are unaware of their own shadow.

175. But when something comes from within that is what we usually do; we think, “I have done it.” It is a foolish idea that we made the psyche, or that it is our own invention.

175. but if one is careful enough and observes critically, then one can make a distinction between the thoughts that are really our own and the thoughts that are intrusions. Certain thoughts occur within our reach; other thoughts are intrusions; we don’t know exactly where they came from. They might come from the surroundings. That is quite possible because we are all living in the same physical atmosphere, and then it is quite possible that certain thoughts in us or certain dreams come from the people with whom we happen to be living. Therefore in different surroundings, with different people, we get different dreams. Our dreams contain the problem of our surroundings, and we may dream the problems of others instead of our own.

182. It may be dangerous, but if you run away, you do not realize the nature of the danger, and that is much worse.

182. When you are very much afraid of a thing then you can be sure it will happen. There is a secret fascination about things you are afraid of.

186. You see this means that God, this source of life, can take any form, and this is also true in psychology.

186. When man has lost his soul, he does not live; he suffers from a condition of low tension and feels perhaps ill and that he ought to recover the lost part of himself, the lost soul, which is the treasure.

Lecture 6

194. This dream shows us that for the time being the dreamer is three to one, which means that on his side are three figures of the conscious, with only one figure representing the unconscious. *reminds me of the violent dream with me, dad, ryan and little girl trying to murder us

194. One part of the consciousness, and only the part with which the dreamer has no contact, is personified by an individual who is more or less strange to him.

194. following the line of potential energy, the path of least resistance. There is no particular effort about it; the boat is carried along by the movement of the water. This corresponds to a psychological condition in which there is no resistance to the normal development of things. #tao #river

197. When you follow the river you might think that you would get nowhere, that you would be in a state of confusion; but that is only the case if you get into a panic. If you can hold to yourself you will land at that place where everything comes to rest. You will reach that center which is you or in which you are contained.

198. The three go together, but the number four is difficult.

198. The right hand executes the conscious will, the left, the contrary. The left side is dark, as a rule, of dark omen. It is as if by an anticlockwise movement, toward the unconscious, something is produced in the conscious.

199. whenever you give your exclusive attention to something, that something, whatever it is, develops a tendency to change, to transform, to move.

211. The weakness of the Catholic standpoint is that it can never grant that anything else might also be true.

212. Naturally when you are in such an uncertain, restless, peaceless condition, then the unconscious will most likely say something.

Lecture 7

227. [The horse] represents the energy you can apply to work.

230. So you see, no matter whether you dismiss your thinking or your feelings or your intuition or your sensation, their specific energy is always there, and it works against you insofar as you don’t consciously make use of it.

locality

240. Everybody contains much of the other sex, both in his body and his mental makeup.

Lecture 8

243. You see we always turn up our noses at things we do not understand and think they are very stupid, projecting our own idiocy, which is of course easier than to grapple with such a problem.

243. it would be so much easier if there were some simple scheme so that we could tell people exactly what these dream contents are about. But nature isn’t simple. Nature has always been the greatest problem to man, and we never shall arrive at the complete truth about it; still we have to cope with it.

245. Whenever a man is in such a predicament then helpful powers arrive from the unconscious.

245. Observe your dreams and see what happens.

246. Therefore, every big dream he had produced an evil impression on him because he could not understand it.

246. Psychology can function without the individual knowing how. Psychology is not what a man knows of his own psychology. That is only his conscious point of view. Yet his conscious is a little speck of light on this or that point, a little lighted up area; that is all, and the rest is complete darkness.

247. That is exactly what I am trying to do, namely, to acquire knowledge of the objective mind or the objective psychology of the human mind, which is not what people think of themselves. That would be a psychology of human illusions and childishness, and this is exactly what everybody suffers from. If you want to have a sane mind you must get away from these very incomplete things; you must not turn round and round in them.

249. we should understand such historical origins in order to know where we are now, for without understanding this we shall never understand what the origin and conditions of our neuroses and mental disturbances are.

250. It doesn’t help at all to say, “This is all nonsense, or it is infantile, or something like that.” He himself feels that the material contains gold no matter how ugly it looks.

255. and mind you, emotions are not feelings. It is a great mistake to think that feeling consists of emotions. Emotions are states that have you, but if you have feeling, you have the feeling; the feeling does not have you. If it has you, it is an emotion. Mark that difference.

258. Whatever is in the unconscious is contaminated with everything that is in the unconscious, and that is, of course, a tremendous mix-up.

262. You know the statements of alchemy shift a great deal, but the thing which is invariably there is the same peculiar contradiction between the three and the four; that never varies.

264. The fourth function is the Redeemer because if you succeed in getting up the fourth function and you can stand it, then you are cured, because the fourth function brings up everything of which you are afraid. If you want to find the fourth function, go where you are the most afraid. Follow your fear to find your destiny, and there you will find your fourth function. It is destiny; it is fate; and it is real life.

268. He projected that image into the mother, so the mother became the all-powerful one; this is the reason why mothers, who are, as a rule, perfectly harmless beings, attain such enormous power over their boys, because boys have an archetypal figure of the woman. It is the same, of course, with the father; the father is, as a rule, a relatively unimportant being, but a daughter can make a god of him. But she can only do it by way of the projection of that powerful image which is formed by her and with her. It is a structural element of her mind, and later on when that image becomes detached or autonomous, there is a chance of realizing it as it is in itself, but so long as it is projected into other human beings she is not aware of its existence; she is only aware of the person who carried the image.

269. So when in his dream reports he writes “the unknown woman,” he always means this figure whom he knew quite well.

269. So you see to draw the portrait is a sort of metaphor which means, “Realize that figure; have an idea of that figure.”

272. Now you see, the tree is an archaic symbol which always designates a process of inner growth.