The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

Marie-Louise von Franz, Honorary Patron

Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts

Daryl Sharp, General Editor

The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

Marie-Louise von Franz

Also by Marie-Louise von Franz in this Series:

Redemption Motifs in Fairy Tales

On Divination and Synchronicity

Alchemy: An Introduction

Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales

C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time

The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption

Canadian Cataloging in Publication Data

Franz, Marie-Louise von, 19151998

The problem of the puer aeternus

(Studies in Jungian psychology by Jungian analysts; 87)

3rd Edition. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-919123-88-0

1. Personality. 2. Jungian Psychology.

3. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 19001944. Petit prince.

I. Title. II. Series.

BF698.F7155 2000 155.2 ́32 C99-931698-2

Copyright © 2000 by Stiftung für Jung'sche Psychologie and Emmanuel Kennedy. All rights reserved.

INNER CITY BOOKS

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Telephone (416) 927-0355 / Fax (416) 924-1814

E-mail: icb@inforamp.net/ Web site: www.inforamp.net/~icb

Honorary Patron: Marie-Louise von Franz.

Publisher and General Editor: Daryl Sharp.

Senior Editor: Victoria Cowan.

INNER CITY BOOKS was founded in 1980 to promote the understanding and practical application of the work of C.G. Jung.

Cover: "Mater Aeterna," woodblock print by Vicki Cowan, © 1999.

Back Cover: Eros riding on a dolphin, archetypal image of the puer aeternus. (Relief medallion on Tarentine vase.)

Printed and bound in Canada by University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Acknowledgments

The substance of these chapters was presented as twelve lectures at the C.G. Jung Institute, Zürich, during the Winter Semester, 1959/60.

I wish to thank Una Thomas for her faithful transcript upon which the somewhat revised text has been based. I also wish to thank Patricia Berry and Valerie Donleavy for the final form in which this seminar appears.

MARIE-LOUISE VON FRANZ, ZÜRICH, JANUARY 1970

The illustrations in the text are from from the French edition of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, used with the kind permission of Editions Gallimard, Paris.

Publisher's Note to the Third Edition

In accordance with the wishes of Marie-Louise von Franz, the content of this edition of Puer Aeternus is faithful to the original edition published in 1970 by Spring Publications, Zürich. Typographical errors have been corrected and a Bibliography and Index have been added. Inner City is grateful to Alison Kappes for her research in compiling the Bibliography.

On a personal level, I can say that this book helped to save my life, in that it opened my eyes to my personal psychology at a time when I was on my knees. Dr. von Franz's analysis of the mother-bound man pierced my heart. Tough to take, but her cogent comments on men who sounded suspiciously like me, devastating as they were to my self-image, offered an implicit alternative to killing myself. Needless to say, I took the alternative - I went into analysis.

For many years it has been my dream to include Puer Aeternus in this series of Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts. And now, thanks to a fortuitous turn of events, here it is.

DARYL SHARP

Lecture 1

Puer aeternus is the name of a god of antiquity. The words themselves come from Ovid's Metamorphoses and are there applied to the child-god in the Eleusinian mysteries. Ovid speaks of the child-god Iacchus, addressing him as puer aeternus and praising him in his role in these mysteries. In later times, the child-god was identified with Dionysus and the god Eros. He is the divine youth who is born in the night in this typical mother-cult mystery of Eleusis and who is a kind of redeemer. He is a god of vegetation and resurrection, the god of divine youth, corresponding to such oriental gods as Tammuz, Attis and Adonis. The title puer aeternus therefore means eternal youth, but we also use it sometimes to indicate a certain type of young man who has an outstanding mother complex and who therefore behaves in certain typical ways which I would like to characterize as follows.

In general, the man who is identified with the archetype of the puer aeternus remains too long in adolescent psychology; that is, all those characteristics that are normal in a youth of seventeen or eighteen are continued into later life, coupled in most cases with too great a dependence on the mother. The two typical disturbances of a man who has an outstanding mother complex are, as Jung points out, homosexuality and Don Juanism. In the case of the former, the heterosexual libido is still tied up with the mother, who is really the only beloved object, with the result that sex cannot be experienced with another woman. That would make her a rival of the mother, and therefore sexual needs are satisfied only with a member of the same sex. Generally such men lack masculinity and seek that in the partner.

In Don Juanism there is another typical form of this same disturbance. In this case, the image of the mother-the image of the perfect woman who will give everything to a man and who is without any shortcomings is sought in every woman. He is looking for a mother goddess, so that each time he is fascinated by a woman he has later to discover that she is an ordinary human being. Once he has been intimate with her the whole fascination vanishes and he turns away disappointed, only to project the image anew onto one woman after another. He eternally longs for the maternal woman who will enfold him in her arms and satisfy his every need. This is often accompanied by the romantic attitude of the adolescent. Generally great difficulty is experienced in adaptation to the social situation and, in some cases, there is a kind of false individualism, namely that, being something special, one has no need to adapt, for that would be impossible for such a hidden genius, and so on. In addition there is an arrogant attitude toward other people due to both an inferiority complex and false feelings of superiority. Such people also usually have great difficulty in finding the right kind of job, for whatever they find is never quite right or quite what they wanted. There is always "a hair in the soup." The woman also is never quite the right woman: she is nice as a girlfriend, but. There is always a "but" which prevents marriage or any kind of definite commitment.

This all leads to a form of neurosis which H.G. Baynes has described as the "provisional life," that is, the strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life [1]. For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about. If this attitude is prolonged, it means a constant inner refusal to commit oneself to the moment. With this there is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a savior complex, or a Messiah complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to save the world; the last word in philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will be found. This can go so far as to be a typical pathological megalomania, or there may be minor traces of it in the idea that one's time "has not yet come." The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the singular human being that one is. There is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it may be impossible to slip out again. Every just-so situation is hell. At the same time, there is a highly symbolic fascination for dangerous sports-particularly flying and mountaineering-so as to get as high as possible, the symbolism being to get away from reality, from the earth, from ordinary life. If this type of complex is very pronounced, many such men die young in airplane crashes and mountaineering accidents.

They generally do not like sports which require patience and long training, for the puer aeternus, in the negative sense of the word, is usually very impatient by disposition, so that such sports do not appeal to them. I know a young man, a classical example of the puer aeternus, who did a tremendous amount of mountaineering but so much hated carrying a rucksack that he preferred to train himself even to sleep in the rain or snow and wrap himself up in a silk raincoat and, with a kind of Yoga breathing, was able to sleep out of doors. He also trained himself to go practically without food, simply in order not to have to carry any weight. He roamed about for years all over the mountains of Europe and other continents, sleeping under trees or in the snow. In a way he led a very heroic existence, just in order not to be bound to go to a hut or carry a rucksack. You might say that this was symbolic, for such a young man in real life does not want to be burdened with any kind of weight. The one thing he absolutely refuses is responsibility for anything, or to carry the weight of a situation.

In general, the positive quality of such youths is a certain kind of spirituality which comes from a relatively close contact with the unconscious. Many have the charm of youth and the stirring quality of a drink of champagne. Pueri aeterni are generally very agreeable to talk to. They usually have interesting things to talk about and have an invigorating effect upon one. They do not like conventional situations; they ask deep questions and go straight for the truth. Usually they are searching for genuine religion, a search that is typical for people in their late teens. Generally the youthful charm of the puer aeternus is prolonged through later stages of life, but there is another type of puer who does not display the charm of eternal youth, nor does the archetype of the divine youth shine through him. On the contrary, he lives in a continual sleepy daze, and that too is a typical adolescent characteristic: the sleepy, undisciplined, long-legged youth who merely hangs around, his mind wandering indiscriminately, so that sometimes one feels inclined to pour a bucket of cold water over his head. The sleepy daze is only an outer aspect, however, and if you can penetrate it, you will find that a lively fantasy life is being cherished within.

The above is a short summary of the main features of certain young men who are caught up in the mother complex and, with it, identified with the archetype of the puer. I have given a mainly negative picture of these people because that is what they look like if viewed superficially, but, as you will see, we have not explained what is really the matter. The question to which my lecture is directed is why the problem of this type, of the mother-bound young man, has become so pronounced in our time. As you know, homosexuality, I do not think Don Juanism is so widespread, is increasing more and more; even teenagers are involved. It seems to me that the problem of the puer aeternus is becoming increasingly actual. Undoubtedly mothers have always tried to keep their sons in the nest, and some sons have always had difficult in getting free and have rather preferred to continue to enjoy the pleasures of the nest. But one does not quite see why just now this in-itself natural problem should become such a time- problem. I think that is the important and deeper question we have to put to ourselves because the rest is more or less self-evident. A man who has a mother complex will always have to contend with his tendencies toward becoming a puer aeternus. You might ask what cure there is? If a man has a mother complex that is something which happened to him, he did not do that himself, but supposing he discovers the fact one day, what can he do about it?

In Symbols of Transformation Jung spoke of one cure: work, and having said that he hesitated for a minute and thought, ''Is it really as simple as all that? Is that just the one cure? Can I put it that way?" But work is the one disagreeable word which no puer aeternus likes to hear, and Jung came to the conclusion that it was the right answer. My experience also has been that if a man pulls out of this kind of youthful neurosis, then it is through work. There are, however, some misunderstandings in this connection, for the puer aeternus can work, as can all primitives or people with a weak ego complex, when fascinated or in a state of great enthusiasm. Then he can work twenty-four hours at a stretch or even longer, until he breaks down, but what he cannot do is to work on a dreary, rainy morning when work is boring and one has to kick oneself into it; that is the one thing the puer aeternus usually cannot manage and will use any kind of excuse to avoid. And analysis of a puer aeternus sooner or later always comes up against this problem, and it is only when the ego has become sufficiently strengthened that the problem can be overcome and there is the possibility of sticking to the work. Naturally, though one knows the goal, every individual case is different. Personally, I have not found that it is much good just preaching to people that they should work, for they simply get angry and walk off.

As far as I have seen, the unconscious generally tries to produce a compromise, namely, to indicate the direction in which there might be some enthusiasm or where the psychological energy would flow naturally, for it is of course easier to train oneself to work in a direction supported by one's instinct. That is not quite so hard as working completely uphill in opposition to your own flow of energy. Therefore it is usually advisable to wait a while and find out where the natural flow of interest and energy lies and then try to get the man to work there. But in every field of work there always comes the time when routine must be faced. All work, even creative, contains a certain amount of boring routine, and that is where the puer aeternus escapes and comes to the conclusion again that "this is not it!" In such moments, if one is supported by the unconscious, there are generally dreams which show that one should push on through the obstacle and if that succeeds then the battle is won.

In order to get into the deeper background of the whole problem, I want first to interpret The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry because it throws much light on this situation. This man, as you know, died during the last war in an airplane crash and he displays all the typical features of the puer aeternus, which, however, does not alter the fact that he was a great writer and poet. His life is difficult to trace, which in itself is typical, for when you try to follow the biography you can only collect very few facts here and there because, as is already clear, the puer aeternus never quite touches the earth. He never quite commits himself to any mundane situation but just hovers over the earth, touching it from time to time, alighting here and there, so that one has to follow such traces as there may be.

Saint-Exupéry came from an old aristocratic French family and grew up in a beautiful country house with its traditional atmosphere. He chose to become a professional aviator and acted for a time as a pilot for the Compagnie Aeropostale, which ran a service between Europe and South America. In about 1929, he flew over the line Toulouse-Dakar-Buenos Aires, and was also a collaborator in establishing new lines in South America. Later he was for a considerable time in command of a completely isolated aerodrome in the North African desert-Cape Julie. His main duty there was to rescue pilots who had crashed, from death in the desert or from falling into the hands of rebel Arab tribes. That was the kind of life such a man would like, and Saint-Exupéry preferred this isolated desert post to any other. In 1939, at the beginning of the war, he fought for France as a captain in the Air Force, and after the collapse of France he had intended to escape to Egypt, but for technical reasons that plan had to be abandoned. He was then demobilized and went to New York, where he finished his book Flight to Arras.

When later the Allies landed in Africa he wanted to return to the Air Force, and though he was refused on account of his age, he used every conceivable ruse and trick so as to be able to fly again. In July 1944, having left Algiers with his plane on a reconnaissance flight over France, he disappeared without leaving any trace either of his plane or of himself. Later-some time after the war had ended-a young German reported that he had probably been shot down over the sea by a German Fokker-Wolff plane. Out of a group of seven planes, one man said that a French machine had been shot down over the Mediterranean, and from the indications given it would seem to have been Saint-Exupéry's.

Saint-Exupéry's marriage was a very unhappy one. His wife seems to have been a very temperamental and difficult woman, and he usually did not stay with her for more than a week or two. When he was not allowed to fly he always became depressed and irritable and would walk up and down in his flat from morning till evening, desperate and irritated, but when he could fly he became his normal self again and felt all right. When he had to stay on the ground and be with his wife, or remain in some other situation, he fell back into these bad moods, so he always tried to get back into flying. His other books show how much he was concerned with present-day problems and with the Weltanschauung of our time. Those of you who have read them will have noticed that like many French people, especially those of the French nobility, he has quite a bit of Nazi psychology. The French are Franks, something one forgets because they hate the Germans so much, but the upper layers of society are often of German stock which immigrated into France not so very long ago. From an historical point of view and therefore especially in military circles and among the nobility, they have quite an affinity with Prussian mentality.

Undeniably this comes out in figures in Saint-Exupéry's novels: for instance, in Riviere, where he tries to outline the Führer type, the cold man who sends his young flyers to their death for a higher purpose. This is just a part of the local make-up in his milieu and not really relevant for his deeper problem, which is a search for? But for what is he searching? That is a question which I will not answer now but will try to find the answer to it with you.

One of his most popular works, as you know, is The Little Prince, which had a tremendous success and which many people make their Bible and worship. But if you talk to them about it, they generally adopt a slightly defiant attitude, insisting that they think it is a marvelous book. I have wondered about this defiant attitude a lot and think the only explanation can be that even those who like it so very much have a small question mark in their minds, and there is one question which I think one is allowed to put even to its worshipers-and that is about the slightly sentimental style, a sentimental touch which, although it causes a certain malaise, does not detract from its value in other ways, even if one enjoys the book very much.

Question: How would you account for this sentimental touch?

In general, where there is sentimentality there is also a certain amount of brutality. Goering was a wonderful example, for without a qualm he could sign the death sentence for three hundred people, but if one of his birds died, then that fat old man would cry. He was a classic example! Cold brutality is very often covered up by sentimentality. If you think of the figures of Riviere and of the Sheikh in Saint-Exupéry's books, there you see this cold masculine brutality at work.

When we have interpreted The Little Prince, we shall take some case material where this will become very clear, namely, in the shadow problem of the puer aeternus. That is where there is usually a very cold, brutal man somewhere in the background, which compensates the too unreal attitude of consciousness and which the puer aeternus cannot assimilate, or at least only involuntarily. For example, in the Don Juan type that cold brutality comes out every time he leaves the woman. When once his feeling has gone, out comes an ice-cold brutality with no human feeling in it, and the whole sentimental enthusiasm goes onto another woman. This brutality, or the cold realistic attitude, very often appears also in matters to do with money. As he does not want to adapt socially, or take on some regular job and work, but yet must get money somehow, the puer aeternus generally achieves his purpose behind his own back, with his left hand, so to speak. He gets the money, God knows from where, and in rather mean ways. If you touch that unconscious shadow problem, you get a complex-an emotional reaction.

Remark: Many of the aspects which you ascribe to the puer aeternus could also be ascribed to the psychopath. What distinction do you make between the two?

Quite a lot. But I would not say that the above is typical for the psychopath. For instance, the case I shall bring afterward, a schizoid borderline type, is another variety. My experience is that beside the puer aeternus there is the man who is either the psychopath or the schizoid or the hysteric, or just slightly neurotic, depending on the individual case and what additional form the problem takes on. Let's say somebody has a religious problem. That is a problem in itself, but, in addition, the person can be a psychopath, or a schizoid, or hysterical about it. The same applies to the problem of homosexuality, which can be combined with, or free from, other neurotic features and can be linked with the time-problem more or less closely. It seems to me to be a more and more paramount problem. Jung had a very interesting idea about that. He said that perhaps it is an unconscious compensation for overpopulation, namely, that Nature pushes this tendency in order to compensate overpopulation-so that a certain number of people refrain from producing children. Nature might possibly employ such a ruse, and overpopulation is just now our greatest problem. In former times there were no statistics, so it is difficult to prove anything by statistics here. We only know that homosexuality is now tremendously widespread. My father, who was an officer in the regular army in Austria and who spoke openly about such things, said that in his time it was not a problem in the army and that there were very few cases, while nowadays, as you know, among airmen particularly, it is a real problem and very general.

Remark: In America we find that about two-thirds of all the young patients are homosexual, at least that is my experience.

Statistics themselves present a great difficulty. For instance Freudians see latent homosexuality present everywhere and would include among semi- or latent homosexuals many cases which I would not. Also, in my own experience, a large proportion of what appears to be homosexuality among women is rather a mother-daughter affair. Such women act out the mother-goddess Kore myth, the Demeter-Persephone myth, and if you go into their fantasies you find that usually one of them is seeking rebirth through the other. It is not so much a lesbian affair in itself, for if you ask a woman who has a transference to another woman to let her fantasy run on about what she would like to have happen, there generally appears a strange rebirth fantasy, a rebirth through the other woman, due to extreme infantility. For instance, in the case Marguerite Sechehaye cites in her book Symbolic Realization, which some of you may have read, the patient Renée has a tremendous tie to the analyst Sechehaye, and the transference takes on the form which a Freudian would call lesbian, but if you examine it more closely it is a mother-daughter relationship, a rebirth affair. Thus, statistics do not give a reliable picture, for it depends on how the man who draws them up classifies them and whether he would count such a case homosexual or not.

In general, we might simply say that both homosexuality and the puer aeternus problem are spreading and that, I think, has to do with certain religious present-day problems. I do not want to anticipate here but would prefer to take the material from a typical case and find out what the problem is at bottom.

Remark: This seems to be the same concept that Strakker had following the Second World War, as far as the American Army is concerned, where the mother complex resulted in an inability to function appropriately in military service. Hundreds of thousands of young men had to be refused for the Service because they could not adapt to the requirements. The all were "mother's sons."

Yes, we have also been asked, officially, at the Jung Institute whether we could not send somebody to do something about the fact that most airmen do not want to fly after they have reached the age of thirty. That is a great problem, for it takes considerable time to train a man as a really good pilot. One could say that it would be just about when they are thirty and have become really good and experienced pilots that then, generally, there comes a crisis. There are sudden neurotic fears, or they do not want to continue flying and want to give it up, and if they are forced to continue, they crash, due to their resistance. The problem has reached such proportions that they have even thought of asking the assistance of psychologists and wanted to know if we could not do something! The Swiss have the same trouble. Swissair cannot get enough pilots and at present employ more foreigners than Swiss, not because there are not enough applicants, for there are large numbers, but the very severe tests prove that about forty to fifty per cent of the young men who want to become pilots are neurotic mother-complex people whom it would not be safe to employ. Since they take to flying on account of their neurotic condition, they would either be unreliable or would give up flying fairly soon. Therefore the Swiss do extensive testing and refuse such applicants, with the result that they do not have enough pilots. If they took the men on they would have the same problem as the Americans; that is, the men would work till thirty and then leave, just when all the money and time had been spent on their training. So this is a real problem of our time, which goes right into very practical issues.

I know someone who conducts tests for the Swiss pilots, and we have arranged that he shall try to make a word-association test with all the puer aeternus material in it and find out how the complex-reaction comes out on that, but unfortunately this has not yet been worked out; in a few years I may be able to tell you about it. Perhaps we shall get at the pilots' problem in that way, though it seems to me the picture is already fairly clear, namely, that the mother complex induces such men to choose a symbolic job they want to stay up in the air and not touch the earth. It is the symbolic impulse and on account of it all the difficulties arise. In fact, Americans should be quite happy that so many of their pilots want to give up flying at the age of thirty. It shows that at that age many of them pull out of the puer aeternus attitude; although it is bad for the Army, it is a good sign. I would never take on the job of trying to persuade those men that they should go on flying, because their not wanting to do so might be a healthy symptom. If anybody could ever give me really useful information on the point, I would like to know what the Russians do about it, how it works with them. I have no idea about that.

Remark: The moon pilots whom we are training in the United States are all in their late thirties, but the moon pilots whom the Russians are training are at least five and possibly ten years younger, so I would assume that they must begin their training earlier and make it more intensive than we do, just as they do most things more intensively.

Yes, I do not know how that works in general in their country. It would be interesting to know.

I have been asked to say something about the puer aeternus problem as seen in the animus in women. I have no material on that except for some single dreams; that is, I have no coherent material. I had thought that was something which we should discuss some time, but the question is whether you would like to do so now or first go into it deeper in masculine psychology. It is just a question of whether now or later. [A vote was taken and was in favor of continuing with the male problem now.] I must say that I think we shall get more out of it if we first go deeper on our present line, and then the other will also become more convincing when we go over to it. I can say in a few words that in its basic structure the problem is not different. It is just the same but one layer further in. You could say that with a woman the animus always anticipates what she has to do later in reality. So, if you have the problem of the puer aeternus having to come down to earth, this is what the woman's mind has to do later; it is only one step removed, and naturally the puer aeternus problem is always linked up with the creative problem, and that is paramount in a woman's psychology. If she has a puer aeternus animus, she generally has a creative problem, and the cure for women is unfortunately exactly the same as for men: it is also work.

When you say that, do you include having children?

Yes, that is sometimes the end of a puer aeternus problem. I remember the case of a woman who did not want to have children, and she always dreamt about puer animus figures and Nature pinning her down to earth, the dreams wanting her to have children. So that would be one of the main ways by which a woman comes down to earth and is committed definitely to something; she cannot toy around with this and that anymore. This applies especially to women who are more of the hetaera type, those who have a lot of affairs with a number of men and do not want to be pinned down. The child makes the relationship more definite. So that is one way which it takes with women. It is a lot of work to have children-very regular work and boring sometimes.

Now we will turn to the interpretation of The Little Prince, and you will see that the story falls into clearly defined parts, beginning with an introduction which is told by Saint-Exupéry in the first person, like part of a personal autobiography, after which comes the story of the little star prince. The autobiographical part begins:

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.

In the book it said: "Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion."

I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. And after some work with a coloured pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing. My Drawing Number One. It looked like this:

I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.

But they answered: "Frighten? Why should anyone be frightened by a hat?"

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained. My Drawing Number Two looked like this:

The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

So then I chose another profession, and learned to pilot airplanes. I have flown a little over all parts of the world; and it is true that geography has been very useful to me. At a glance I can distinguish China from Arizona. If one gets lost in the night, such knowledge is valuable.

In the course of this life I have had a great many encounters with a great many people who have been concerned with matters of consequence. I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn't much improved my opinion of them.

Whenever I met one of them who seemed to me at all clear-sighted, I tried the experiment of showing him my Drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I would try to find out, so, if this was a person of true understanding. But, whoever it was, he, or she, would always say:

"That is a hat."

Then I would never talk to that person about boa constrictors, or primeval forests, or stars. I would bring myself down to his level. I would talk to him about bridge, and golf, and politics, and neckties. And the grown-up would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man.

So I lived my life alone, without anyone that I could really talk to, until I had an accident with my plane in the Desert of Sahara, six years ago. Something was broken in my engine. And as I had with me neither a mechanic nor any passengers, I set myself to attempt the difficult repairs all alone. It was a question of life or death for me: I had scarcely enough drinking water to last a week.

The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a ship wrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus, you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by an odd little voice. It said:

"If you please draw me a sheep!"

"What!"

Then he meets the little prince. Now I want to ask what you conclude from this first part. It contains the whole problem in a nutshell.

Remark: We see a lack of interest in adults and more childhood fantasies.

Yes. We see here that he has never really got into the world of the adult. He speaks about its emptiness, its idiocy and its meaninglessness. There is the talk about bridge and politics and neckties, it is true, but that is the kind of adult world one rightly rejects - it is persona emptiness. But he omits other aspects of adult life as well. You see in the feeling-tone of this first part that he means that the childhood life is the fantasy life, the artist's life, and that is the true life and all the rest is empty persona running after money, making a prestige impression on other people, having lost one's true nature, so to speak. That is how he sees adult life, for he has not found a bridge by which he could take over what we would call the true life into adult life. That is the great problem, I think, in a nutshell; namely, how can one pull out of this fantasy life of youth and youthfulness without losing its value? How can one grow up without losing the feeling of totality and the feeling of creativeness and of being really alive, which one had in youth?

One can be cynical about it and say that one cannot have the penny and the cake-it has to be sacrificed-but from my experience I do not think that this is quite right. It is justifiable not to want to give up this other world. The question is, how can one grow up and not lose it? The great problem is that you can drive people out of this childhood paradise and fantasy life, in which they are in close connection with their true inner self on an infantile level, but then they are completely disillusioned and cynical.

I remember once that I had an analysand who was a typical puer aeternus and wanted to become a writer, but he lived in a completely fantasy world. He came over from the States with a friend, and the two made up their minds that the friend should have a Freudian and he a Jungian analysis and that after a year they would meet and compare notes. They went to different countries and met as arranged, and the young man who had had the Freudian analysis said that he was through with his problem and was cured and was going home. Everything was all right, and he understood his infantile attitude toward life; he had given up his mother complex and other nonsense. My analysand asked him what he was going to do, and the other said he did not know but that he must earn some money and find a wife. My analysand said that he was not cured at all; he still did not know where to go yet. He knew that he would become a writer and had started on that course, but he did not know where to settle, and so on. Then the one who had had the Freudian analysis said, ''Well, it is strange; they have driven out my devils, but with them they have also driven out my angels!"

So you see that is the problem! One can drive away devils and angels by saying that that is all infantile and part of the mother complex and, by a completely reductive analysis, put everything down to the childhood sentimentality which has to be sacrificed. There is something to be said for that. This man was in a way more cured than my analysand, but, on the other hand, it seems to me that such a terrific disillusionment makes one ask afterward whether it is worthwhile going on living? Is it worthwhile just to make money for the rest of one's life and get small bourgeois pleasures? It doesn't seem to me very satisfactory. At least the sadness with which the man who was cured remarked that with his devils his angels had also been driven out made me feel that he himself did not feel quite happy about his own cure. It had the tone of cynical disillusionment, which to my mind is no cure. But that is the problem.

It must not be forgotten that the atmosphere of a milieu such as Saint-Exupéry grew up in was very disillusioned and cynical and that he usually moved in circles which looked at life as being important when one talked of bridge and money and such things. Therefore, he, in a way rightly, protests against it and clings to his inner artistic and total view of life, and is resentful and revolutionary against such adult life. One sees quite well how, in a subtle way, he mocks at the adult world and how to the point that is. But at the same time he does not know how to pull out of his childhood world without falling into the disillusionment of what he sees as the only value in adult life. If you combine this with the symbolism of the picture, it becomes even worse because the boa constrictor obviously is an image of the devouring mother and, in a deeper sense, of the devouring aspect of the unconscious, which suffocates life and prevents the human being from developing. It is the swallowing or the regressive aspect of the unconscious, the looking-backward tendency, which grips one when one is overcome by the unconscious. You could even say that the boa constrictor represents a pull toward death.

The animal which is swallowed is an elephant, so we should look into its symbolism, As the elephant was not known in European countries until late antiquity, there is not much mythological material. However, in late antiquity the elephant had great significance. When Alexander the Great went to India he saw elephants, and they were afterward brought to Europe. The Romans later used elephants in the same manner as tanks are used in modern warfare. If we read what has been written about them we see that a great deal of mythological fantasy was spun around the elephant. It is said that "they are very chaste, that they only mate once in a lifetime and very secretly in order to produce their young and therefore," according to a medieval reporter, "they are an allegory of marital chastity. Like the unicorn, the elephant also loves a virgin and can only be tamed by one, a motif which points to the incarnation of Christ." The elephant is said to represent invincible fortitude and to be an image of Christ.

In antiquity it was thought that elephants were terribly ambitious and that if they were not accorded the honor due to them they would die from disappointment, for their feeling of honor was so great. Snakes love to drink the cool blood of elephants; they creep under the elephant and drink its blood, and suddenly the elephant collapses, which is why whenever an elephant sees a snake he goes for it and tries to trample it down. In the Middle Ages the elephant stood for a man who was generous but unstable and moody in character, for the elephant was said to be generous, intelligent, and therefore taciturn, but when he once gets into a rage he cannot be appeased by sensual pleasures but only by music.

This I have taken from a very amusing book,

Polyhistor Symbolicus, by a Jesuit Father, Nikolaus Caussinus. He gives such funny stories about the elephant, having summed up what the antique idiom says and then adding a little bit of medieval fantasy. "Elephants wash very often," he continues, "and use flowers to perfume themselves. Hence they represent purification, chastity, and pious worship of God." This shows that the same thing happened to the Europeans as to the Africans when they met up with an elephant for the first time: they projected the archetype of the hero onto it. In Africa it is considered a great honor if a person is given the title of lion, but the highest title anyone can be given is that of elephant. It is considered to be far above the lion, which is the image of a courageous man of the Chief type, for the elephant is the archetype of the medicine man, who also has courage but, in addition, wisdom and secret knowledge. So, in their hierarchy, the elephant represents the individuated personality.

Strangely enough, the European automatically projected the same thing onto the elephant and took him as the image of the divine hero, the image of Christ, outstanding in virtue, except for being moody and inclined to fits of rage. That is amazing, but those were two outstanding qualities in Saint-Exupéry, so that it could be said to be an exact picture of his character. He himself was subtle, chaste-to a certain extent, in the sense of being sensitive in his feelings-very ambitious and very sensitive about everything affecting his own honor. He was continually on the search for religious satisfaction-he did not worship God, for he had not found Him-but he was always on the search. He was generous and intelligent and taciturn but very irritable and inclined to terrible moods and fits of rage. So in the elephant there is an amazing self-portrait, and one sees the archetypal pattern illustrated in a simple individual, without even much difference. It can be said that the elephant is the model fantasy of the grown-up hero, and already this model fantasy-the image in his soul of what he wanted to become-is swallowed back by the devouring mother, and this first picture shows the whole tragedy. Very often childhood dreams anticipate the inner fate twenty or thirty years ahead. The first picture shows that Saint- Exupéry had a hero aspect, alive and constellated, and that this aspect would never quite come through but would be swallowed back by the regressive tendencies of the unconscious and, as we know from later events, by death.

The devouring-mother myth should naturally also be pinned down in connection with his own mother, but, as she is still alive and, in a way, in a conspicuous position, I hesitate to comment on her too much. I recently saw a photograph of her in a newspaper, which shows that whatever else she may be, she is a very powerful personage. She is a big, stout woman, about whom the newspaper article says that she has a tremendous amount of energy, in interested in all kinds of activities, and tries her hand at drawing and painting and writing. She is a very dynamic person and, in spite of the fact that she is now pretty old, is still going strong. Obviously, it must have been very difficult for a sensitive boy to pull away from the influence of such a mother. It is also said that she always anticipated her son's death. Several times she thought he was dead and very dramatically dressed herself in large black veils such as French women like to wear when they become widows, and then rather disappointedly had to take them off again as he was not yet dead. So the archetypal pattern of what we call the death-mother was alive in her psyche. In our layers of society the death-mother is something not so openly acknowledged, but I got the shock of my life when I had the following experience.

I had to go somewhere to meet someone, and at that place the house-owner had a puer aeternus son whom she had quite eaten up. They were very simple people. They had a bakery and the son did no work at all but went about in riding-kit and was a typical Don Juan type, very elegant and having a new girl about every four days, but that I only heard from the gossip around. This young man once went bathing and carried his girlfriend out into the Lake of Zürich and, in the classical situation, halb zog sie ihn, halb sank er hin ("half drew she him, half sank he down")as Goethe would have put it-and both went under. The girl was saved, but when he was brought out he was already dead. This I read in the paper, but when I came back to this house, I bumped into the mother, who was a widow, and expressed my condolences, saying how sorry I was when I heard of the terrible accident. She invited me in and took me to the sitting-room where there was a very big photograph of the son on his death-bed, surrounded by flowers, set up like a hero's tomb, and she remarked: "Look at him! How beautiful he looks in death." I agreed, and then she smiled and said: "Well, I'd rather have him like that than give him away to another woman."

Remark: In California we have a woman like that. She is about eighty years old, and she does plaque after plaque of the head of her son who died about thirty-five years ago. An older woman asked why she was always doing something so morbid, and, with tears rolling down her face, she said: "You know, I lost a son!" She never let him go; she constantly reproduced him.

Yes, she made a religious cult out of him and then he becomes the dead Tammuz, Adonis, Attis; he replaces the image of God. He is really also the crucified Christ and she is the Virgin Mary crying beside the Cross, and the great satisfaction is that one has an archetypal meaning in one's life. One is not just Mrs. So-and-So who has lost her son in an accident, but the Great Mother, the Virgin Mary who weeps at the foot of the Cross-and that elevates the mother herself and gives her sorrow some deeper meaning. If she turns to it in the wrong way, then it is like that. I was terribly shocked by what the woman said, but then told myself that this woman had had the naivete to say what many others have thought. Being a simple woman she said it right out: "It was better that way than to give him away to another woman." She was his wife! She just betrayed the fact. It seems to me that there must have been something similar in Saint-Exupéry's mother because otherwise why should she always anticipate his death and wear black veils ahead of time, as if she knew all along that it would end like that. Probably she not only knew it, but in some way wanted it, or we might say that it wanted it in her. We only know that this terrible impersonal pattern has penetrated her personal life too.

It is interesting that Saint-Exupéry says that he always goes round with this picture and tries it out on people to make them understand. It looks as though he were not definitely doomed, as though there was still a hope, an attempt in him to find some understanding. If only he could find somebody who would ask him what on earth he was drawing, that it was dangerous and meant such and such a thing. He wanted understanding but he did not get it. I think that if he had got in touch-perhaps it is awfully optimistic-but if he had come into touch with psychology, something might have been done about his problem, because he was very near to finding the solution himself, but somehow, tragically enough, he lived in this kind of light French milieu where there is absolutely no psychological understanding yet at work, and in such an atmosphere it is very difficult to get near the unconscious. Modern French civilization, for different local and national reasons, is particularly cut off from the unconscious, so that he probably never met anyone who could give him a hint as to what was happening.

The story then goes over to the little prince, and I have already read you the part where Saint-Exupéry's airplane crashes in the Sahara, where he meets this little fellow. I will go on with the text. The voice said:

"Draw me a sheep!"

I jumped to my feet, completely thunderstruck. I blinked my eyes hard. I looked carefully all around me. And I saw a most extraordinary small person, who stood there examining me with great seriousness. Here you may see the best portrait that, later, I was able to make of him. [He drew him like a little Napoleon, by the way, which was a funny idea and typically French!] But my drawing is certainly very much less charming than its model. That, however, is not my fault. The grown-ups discouraged me . . . [and then he goes off in the old way].

Now I stared at this sudden apparition with my eyes fairly starting out of my head in astonishment. Remember, I had crashed in the desert a thousand miles from any inhabited region. And yet my little man seemed neither to be straying uncertainly among the sands nor to be fainting from fatigue or hunger or thirst or fear.

Nothing about him gave any suggestion of a child lost in the middle of the desert, a thous-and miles from any human habitation. When at last I was able to speak, I said to him:

"But-what are you doing here?"

And in answer he repeated, very slowly, as if he were speaking of a matter of great consequence: "If you please-draw me a sheep . . ."

When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey. Absurd as it might seem to me, a thousand miles from any human habitation and in danger of death, I took out of my pocket a sheet of paper and my fountain-pen. But then I remembered how my studies had been concentrated on geography, history, arithmetic and grammar, and I told the little chap (a little crossly, too) that I did not know how to draw. He answered me:

"That doesn't matter. Draw me a sheep . . ."

But I had never drawn a sheep. So I drew for him one of the two pictures I had drawn so often. It was that of the boa constrictor from the outside [his Number One drawing]. And I was astounded to hear the little fellow greet it with,

"No, no, no! I do not want an elephant inside a boa constrictor. A boa constrictor is a very dangerous creature, and an elephant is very cumbersome. Where I live, everything is very small. What I need is a sheep. Draw me a sheep."

So then I made a drawing.

He looked at it carefully, then he said:

"No. This sheep is already very sickly. Make me another."

So I made another drawing.

My friend smiled gently and indulgently.

"You see yourself," he said, "that this is not a sheep. This is a ram, it has horns."

So then I did my drawing over once more. But it was rejected too, just like the others.

"This one is too old. I want a sheep that will live a long time."

By this time my patience was exhausted, because I was in a hurry to start taking my engine apart. So I tossed off this drawing.

And I threw out an explanation with it.

"This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside."

I was very surprised to see a light break over the face of my young judge.

"That is exactly the way I wanted it! Do you think that this sheep will have to have a great deal of grass?" "Why?"

"Because where I live everything is very small . . ."

"There will surely be enough grass for him," I said. "It is a very small sheep that I have given you."

He bent his head over the drawing:

"Not so small that-look! He has gone to sleep . . ."

And that is how I made the acquaintance of the little prince.

Then Saint-Exupéry says that it took him a long time to learn where he came from because he always asked questions and did not answer them. Slowly he finds out that the little man has come down from the stars and that he lives on a very small planet.

The miraculous encounter in the desert is in one way linked up with Saint-Exupéry's personal life, for he once had had an airplane crash in the Sahara desert. He was not alone then, as in this book, but with his mechanic, Prevost, and they had had to walk endlessly and nearly died of thirst. They already had hallucinations and saw mirages and were practically dying when an Arab found them and gave them some water out of his gourd. Later they were rescued, but it was a very near thing. Naturally, therefore, he uses this recollection here in the story, but changes it very typically; namely, his shadow, the mechanic, is not with him and he is not rescued for the moment, but something supernatural happens. There you see how the archetypal fantasy comes into the memory of the real life, namely, the hopeless and impossible situation which in all myths and fairy tales, as you know, is the beginning situation where supernatural beings appear. In many fairy tales a man gets lost in the woods and then finds a little dwarf, and so on. It is typical that when someone is lost in the woods or on the sea, something numinous appears. It shows the psychologically typical situation where the conscious personality has come to the end of its wits and does not know how to go on any more. One feels completely disoriented, with neither goal nor outlook in life. In those moments, energy, blocked from a further flow into life, piles up and generally constellates something from the unconscious, which is why this is the moment of supernatural apparitions such as we have here.

It often happens even in concrete situations that people have hallucinations of some kind if the conflict and the blockage go far enough. On a minor scale, the dream life becomes highly activated and people are forced into paying attention to it, and then come the apparitions within the dreams. Generally that happens when the previous form of life has broken down. When he had this crash with his mechanic, Saint-Exupéry was already in the crisis of this life. He was in his thirties, and his flying was no longer satisfactory, but he could not switch over to any other occupation. He already had these spells of irritability and nervousness and broke through them by taking on another flying job. Originally for him flying had been a real vocation, but slowly it became an escape from something new to which he did not know how to adapt. Very often one chooses some activity in life which for the time being is absolutely right and could not be called an escape from life, but then suddenly the water of life recedes from it and slowly one feels that the libido wants to be reoriented to another goal. One perseveres in the old activity because one cannot change to the new one, and in such situations perseverance in the old activity means regression, or flight-and escape from one's own inner feeling, which says that one should now change to something else. Because one does not know how, nor wants, to go in a different direction, one perseveres. When Saint-Exupéry had his airplane crash, he was already beginning to enter the crisis stage of his aviator's life. Here the apparition shows what is meant.

There is a marked parallel to the meeting of the star prince in Islamic tradition. I think it is even possible that, having lived so long in the Sahara and having made friends with a number of Bedouins, Saint-Exupéry might have heard about it. In the 18th Sutra of the Koran there is the famous story, which Jung has interpreted in detail, of Moses in the desert with his servant Joseph, the son of Nun, who is carrying a basket with a fish in it for their meal. At a certain place the fish disappears, and Moses says that they will stay there because something will happen, and suddenly Khidr appears. (Khidr means "the verdant one.") He is supposed to be the first angel or the first servant of Allah. He is a kind of immortal companion who then goes along with Moses for some time, but tells him that he (Moses) will not be able to stand him and will doubt his deeds. Moses assures him that he will have enough confidence to go with him, but he fails miserably.

Most of you know the story of how Khidr first comes to a little village where there are boats on the water and of how he drills a hole in each so that they sink, and Moses remonstrates, asking Khidr how he could do such a thing. Khidr says that he had said that Moses would not understand, but then he explains that robbers would have stolen the boats and that by bringing about this minor calamity the fishermen will be able to repair their boats and still have them, whereas otherwise they would have been lost. So that really Khidr was doing them a service, but Moses naturally being too stupid had not understood. Then again Moses promises that he will not doubt again and will not have rational reactions. Next they meet a young man and Khidr kills him. Again Moses explodes and asks how he could do that, and Khidr smiles again and says he had told him that he would not be able to stand it. He then explains that the young man was on his way to murder his parents and that it was better for him to die before he became a criminal, and thereby save his soul. This time Moses is really willing to accept the explanation, but then a third time something similar happens when Khidr causes a wall to collapse, only to uncover the hidden treasure belonging to two orphans. As Moses rebels again, Khidr has to leave him.

The story illustrates the incompatibility of the conscious rational ego with the figure of the Self and its purposes. The rational ego with its well-meaning intentions and thoughts and so on, is absolutely off the track in relation to the greater inner personality, Khidr, and naturally this famous story serves to tell people that they should be able to doubt their conscious attitude and should always expect the miraculous thing from the unconscious to happen. There is the same situation here, for something happens which is absolutely contrary to Saint-Exupéry's conscious ideas, which tell him that he wants to repair his engine and has no time. He wants to save himself with the old airplane and is not willing to go on with the childish play with the little star prince. On the other hand it is very significant that the little star prince is the only one who at once understands the drawing. So Saint-Exupéry should be very pleased and see that it is his other side which really understands him, the first companion who belongs in his world. But he is impatient and just thinks it a nuisance and that he has to get his engine in order. And then something absolutely classic happens, namely, the gesture of impatience. That is typical for the puer aeternus! When he has to take something seriously, either in the outer or the inner world, he makes a few poor attempts and then impatiently gives up.

My experience is that it does not matter, if you analyze a man of this type, whether you force him to take the outer or the inner world seriously; that is really unimportant, though perhaps it depends on the type. The important thing is that he should stick something out. If it is analysis, then analyze seriously, take the dreams seriously, live according to them, or, if not, then take a job and really live the outer life. The important thing is to do something thoroughly, whatever it is. But the great danger, or the neurotic problem, is that the puer aeternus, or the man caught in this problem, tends to do what Saint-Exupéry does here: just put it in a box and shut the lid on it in a gesture of sudden impatience. That is why such people tell you suddenly that they have another plan, that this is not what they were looking for. And they always do it at the moment where things become difficult. It is the everlasting switching which is the dangerous thing, not what they do, and here unfortunately Saint-Exupéry switches at this crucial moment.

Notes

[1] See "The Provisional Life," in Analytical Psychology and the English Mind.

Lecture 2

Last time we spoke of the boa constrictor which ate up the elephant and of how Saint-Exupéry as a boy made the drawing and was always looking for somebody to understand it and never found anyone. We said that this short introduction foreshadowed the tragic end of the book and of Saint-Exupéry's life, since there was no lysis. In the hero myth, if the hero is swallowed by the dragon, or the big snake, or the sea monster, or the whale, he has to cut the heart or the stomach from the inside, or he dances inside the whale until the monster either dies or vomits the hero out. In our story, the hero animal-we interpreted the elephant as a kind of symbolic anticipation of the hero on the animal level is swallowed and does not come out again. We can, therefore, take this introduction, which has no lysis, symbolically, as a childhood dream, which would mean that the childhood fantasy of Saint-Exupéry has no lysis. This shows that there is something basically weak or broken in him from the very beginning. There is something which cannot escape the fatal aspect of the unconscious.

Saint-Exupéry, in a slightly ironical manner, speaks mockingly of the grown-up world and grown-up people who take themselves so seriously and are really occupied with such trifles. That he himself had such attributes is shown quite clearly in the biographies. General David, one of his military superiors, says of him:

He was a man of integrity with a taste for childish pleasures which were sometimes surprising, and he had unaccountable fits of shyness when faced with administrative stubbornness; the latter always remained his bête noir.

Other biographies state that he was a little bit disappointing to people who met him because he was a bit of a poseur; he gave the impression of always acting and of not being a completely genuine personality. This tendency to go off into surprisingly childish pleasures is not only a symptom of the puer aeternus problem, but also belongs to the creative personality. Creativeness presupposes a tremendous capacity for being genuine, for letting go, for being spontaneous for if one cannot be spontaneous one cannot really be creative-and therefore most artists and other creative people have a normal and genuine tendency to playfulness. That is also the great relaxation and means of recovery from an exhausting creative effort. Therefore we cannot ascribe this trait only to Saint- Exupéry's puer aeternus nature; it might also belong to the fact that he was an artist.

The remark made by General David that Saint-Exupéry never overcame his rage over administrative obstinacy, either of the State or the Military, and that, on the other hand, he was shy and afraid of those in administrative positions, is important in connection with the motif of the sheep, which we have now to discuss. To the man in an office other people are sheep, and as soon as we are faced with somebody in an official position we become sheep and he the shepherd. We are just number So-and-So to him, and naturally officials will make one feel like that. It is the modern problem of the overwhelming power of the State, of the devaluation of the individual, which on a minor scale is the problem of every puer aeternus whenever he has difficulty adapting, but it is also the problem of our time. The revolt which most people feel at being reduced to the level of a sheep in a flock is not confined to the puer aeternus, for there is something genuine and justifiable in it. Everyone who has not settled that problem within himself-namely, how far one has to accept the fact of being just one of a number and how much one is an individual with the right to individual treatment-has this complex reaction against what David describes as military stubbornness.

The problem is not only Saint-Exupéry's, but is the great problem of the whole Christian civilization. In France, however, it takes a specific turn, for the French tend to display exaggerated individualism, a kind of protest against all administration, though lately under de Gaulle's government there has been some change. Since the First World War there has been a tendency in France to revolt and be negative in connection with everything having to do with the pressure of the State, even to the extent that numbers of people voted for Communism, not because they were really Communists in their Weltanschauung but simply as a demonstration against the existing order. Such people would proclaim that since they did not like the lawyers and clowns in Paris who constituted the Government, they intended to vote Communist. This shows a completely infantile attitude toward the problem of social and collective responsibility. It is the attitude which we now see exploding in the behavior of the teenagers who challenge the police or overturn a row of cars or do some such thing as a protest against collectivity. That, however, is understandable on the part of very young people who explode like this without any reflection, but when grown-ups behave similarly, when they vote for Communism simply because they do not like those in the Government, that seems very immature. This is a very general complex and one which we all have in some form, for we have not decided how far we must accept being sheep shepherded by the State and how far we can reject such collective pressure and revolt against it. The puer aeternus naturally has this problem in an even more pronounced form.

Before we go into the symbolism of the sheep we should ask ourselves why Saint-Exupéry meets the little prince in the desert, In interpreting the story we have taken the airplane crash as illustrating, in one way, an incident of Saint- Exupéry's personal life and, on the other hand, a symbolic or archetypal situation with which every encounter with the unconscious begins, namely, the complex breakdown of the former activities, the goal in life and, in some form, the flow of the life energy. Suddenly everything gets stuck; we are blocked and stuck in a neurotic situation, and in this moment the life energy is dammed up and then generally breaks through in the revelation of an archetypal image. Last time I quoted the Islamic story of the 18th Sura of the Koran where, after having lost his only nourishment, the fish, Moses took Khidr, Allah's first angel, with him into the desert. It is not inevitable that after such a collapse a child image would emerge; any other kind of archetypal figure might turn up. We should therefore go into the symbol of the child-god, and I want first to read to you what Jung says. I want to subdivide this, the greatest symbol there is in the book, because part of what the little prince really represents only becomes clearer much later when we know more of the story. Now I will only read, as a general outline, what Jung says about the child-god:

This archetype of the ''child god" is extremely widespread and intimately bound up with all the other mythological aspects of the child motif. It is hardly necessary to allude to the still living "Christ Child," who, in the legend of Saint Christopher, also has the typical feature of being "smaller than small and bigger than big." In folklore the child motif appears in the guise of the dwarf or the elf as personifications of the hidden forces of nature. To this sphere also belongs the little metal man of late antiquity . . . who, till far into the Middle Ages, on the one hand inhabited the mine-shafts, and on the other represented the alchemical metals, above all Mercurius reborn in perfect form (as the hermaphrodite, filius sapientiae, or infans noster). Thanks to the religious interpretation of the "child," a fair amount of evidence has come down to us from the Middle Ages showing that the "child" was not merely a traditional figure, but a vision spontaneously experienced (as a so-called "irruption of the unconscious"). I would mention Meister Eckhart's vision of the "naked boy" and the dream of Brother Eustachius. Interesting accounts of these spontaneous experiences are also to be found in English ghost-stories, where we read of the vision of a "Radiant Boy" said to have been seen in a place where there are Roman remains. This apparition was supposed to be of evil omen. It almost looks as though we are dealing with the figure of the puer aeternus who had become inauspicious through "metamorphosis," or in other words had shared the fate of the classical and the Germanic gods, who have all become bugbears. The mystical character of the experience is also confirmed in Part II of Goethe's Faust, where Faust himself is transformed into a boy and admitted into the ''choir of blessed youths," this being the "larval stage" of Doctor Marianus [2].

I do not know whether Goethe was referring, with this peculiar idea, to the cupids on antique grave-stones. It is not unthinkable. The figure of the cucullatus points to the hooded, that is, the invisible one, the genius of the departed, who reappears in the childlike frolics of a new life, surrounded by the sea-forms of dolphins and tritons. [If I may interrupt Jung's quotation, cucullatus means "one who wears a hood," who has a coat with a hood, and I think it highly symbolic that Jean Cocteau, who wore this sort of coat, thereby instituted the fashion of youths wearing these hooded coats. They are pueri aeterni and even wear that costume! I wonder what Cocteau knew about that.] The sea is the favourite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives. Just as the "child" is, in certain circumstances (e.g., in the case of Hermes and the Dactyls), closely related to the phallus, symbol of the begetter, so it comes up again in the sepulchral phallus, symbol of a renewed begetting [3].

The great problem with which we are confronted in this general outline by Jung is the double aspect of the child archetype. Just as in one way it means a renewal of life, spontaneity, and a new possibility suddenly appearing within or without and changing the whole life situation in a positive way, so also does the child-god have a negative aspect, a destructive one; namely, where Jung alludes to the apparitions of a "radiant boy" and says that this must have to do with a pagan child-god who has been condemned to appear only in a negative form. The negative child-god leads us into very deep waters, but it is safe to say that whenever the child motif appears we are almost always confronted with the following problem.

The child motif when it turns up represents a bit of spontaneity, and the great problem in each case an ethical individual one is to decide whether it is now an infantile shadow which has to be cut off and repressed, or something creative moving toward a future possibility of life. The child is always behind and ahead of us. Behind us, it is the infantile shadow which must be sacrificed that which always pulls us backward into being infantile and dependent, lazy, playful, escaping problems and responsibility and life. On the other hand, if the child appears ahead of us, it means renewal, the possibility of eternal youth, of spontaneity and of new possibilities-the life flow toward the creative future. The great problem is always to make up one's mind in each instance whether it is an infantile impulse which only pulls backward, or an impulse which seems infantile to one's own consciousness but which really should be accepted and lived because it leads forward.

Sometimes the context of the dreams shows very clearly which is meant. Let us say a puer aeternus type of man dreams about a little boy; then we can tell from the story of the dream if the apparition of the child has a fatal effect, in which case I treat it as the infantile shadow still pulling backward. But if the same figure appears positive, then you can say that it is something which looks very childish and silly but which must be accepted because there is a possibility of new life in it. If it were always like that, then the analysis of this kind of problem would be very simple, but unfortunately, like all products of the unconscious, the destructive side and the constructive, the pull backward and the pull forward, are very closely intertwined. Such figures can be very difficult to understand, and sometimes it is practically impossible. That seems to me a part of the fatal situation with which we are confronted in this book and in Saint-Exupéry's problem, for one cannot (or at least I cannot) make up one's mind whether to treat the figure of the little prince as a destructive infantile shadow whose apparition is fatal and announces Saint-Exupéry's death, or to treat it as the divine spark of his creative genius.

One of our students has evolved the idea that there is something like a defective Self, that in certain people whose fate is very unfortunate the symbol of the Self appears defective, which would mean that such people have no chance in life because the nucleus of their psyche is incomplete and defective. So the whole process of individuation cannot develop from this kernel. I do not agree with this idea because I have never seen such symbols of a defective Self without an accompanying defective attitude of the ego. That means that wherever you find such a defective Self symbol, where it is ambiguous and incomplete and morbid, there is always at the same time an incomplete and morbid attitude of the ego, and therefore it could not be scientifically asserted that the cause of the whole thing lies in a defective Self. It could just as well be said that it was because the ego had such a wrong attitude that the Self cannot come into play positively. If you eat completely wrongly and your stomach consequently does not react properly, you can react one of two ways. You can decide that there is something wrong with your stomach, and go to numbers of doctors about it without telling them that you are eating all wrong, in which case the doctors will conclude that it is very tragic but that you have a defective stomach and it is not possible to find the cause. But, on the other hand, it can just as well be said that if one eats all the wrong things, or does not eat, or eats irregularly, then it is not the stomach which is at fault. Thus the defective Self always goes with an ego which does not function properly and therefore naturally the Self cannot function properly either. If the ego is lazy, inflated, not conscientious, does not perform the duties of the ego-complex, then it is clear that the Self cannot appear positively either.

If that man were here today he would certainly object and say, "No, it is the other way round, the ego cannot function because the Self is defective." There we are confronted with the age-old philosophical problem of free will: "Can I want the right thing?" That is the problem which the puer aeternus man will generally put to you. He will say that he knows that everything goes wrong because he is lazy, but that he cannot want not to be lazy! That perhaps that is his neurosis, that he is unable to fight his laziness, and therefore it is useless to treat him as a rascal for whom everything would go right if he were not so lazy. That is an argument which I have heard I don't know how many times! It is to a certain extent true, for the puer cannot make up his mind to work, so you can say that it is the defective Self, that something is wrong in the whole structure and cannot be saved.

This is a problem which comes up in many neuroses, not only in that of the puer aeternus. It goes very deep, and my attitude toward it is paradoxical: as long as I can, I behave as if the other could make up his or her mind because that is the only chance of salvation. If nevertheless the case goes wrong, then I turn around and say that it was not possible for things to have gone differently. Otherwise one falls into a wrong psychological superiority; namely, that if a person goes wrong, or dies as the result of a disease or an accident, and one concludes that this occurred because he did not realize his problem that it is his fault that he has this fate that I consider disgusting. One has not the right to decide that.

Nature has her own revenge. If an individual cannot solve his problems, he generally gets horribly punished with hellish diseases or accidents and it is not the business of others to point that out and make it a moral issue. There I think one should stop short and take the other hypothesis that the person could not do it, that the structure was defective and therefore it was not possible. However, as long as the catastrophe has not taken place, it is better to take the other attitude, to try to create a hopeful atmosphere and believe in the possibility of a certain amount of free will, because empirically there are many cases where suddenly people can make up their minds to fight their neurosis and can pull out. Then you can call it a miracle or that person's good deed, whichever you like, but it is also that which in theology is spoken of as an act of grace. Is it your good deeds which lead to salvation, or is it the grace of God? In my experience you can only stay in the contradiction and stick to the paradox. We are confronted with that problem in a specific form here because throughout the story there is this tragic question in our minds. Something is constantly going wrong through the book and one does not know whether it is Saint-Exupéry's fault or whether he could not help it. Was there some reason from the very beginning which prevented him from solving his problem?

Remark: But Jung says that there is no sickness in the collective unconscious and so, as the Self is an archetype, it does not seem to me that there can be anything defective.

I quite agree. I think that if it appears defective, it is because of the wrong ego attitude. Objectively, in itself, it cannot be defective, which is why I cannot accept the idea of the defective Self. If the ego is able to change, something else changes; if the ego-attitude changes, then the symbols of the Self become more positive. That is something we experience again and again. If the person can achieve a certain amount of insight, then the whole unconscious constellation changes. But my philosophical adversaries would say that the fact that one man can change and the other cannot is due to the Self and then one walks in a circle.

In this specific story I shall therefore try to interpret the child figure in a double way as the infantile shadow and the Self. Then we will try to find out which is which. That means we shall interpret all the material on a double rail and so try to find out more about this problem. The thesis that the star child whom Saint-Exupéry meets is the infantile shadow can very easily be proved, since he is the only one who understands the story of the boa constrictor and the elephant. That is a remnant of childhood, and we have a letter from Saint-Exupéry to his mother written in 1935, shortly before his death, where he says that the only refreshing source he finds is in certain memories of his childhood, for instance, the smell of the Christmas candles. His soul nowadays is completely dried up and he is dying of thirst. There is his nostalgia for his childhood, and one can say that the little prince represents this world of childhood and therefore is the infantile shadow. It is typical that he writes like that to his mother; one really sees that he is still involved in his mother complex. On the other hand, it can be said that the fact that this child appears on earth is not only negative. It is not the apparition of just the infantile shadow, because, as we shall hear later, the little prince comes down from a star, so one could say that an interesting parallel has taken place. Saint-Exupéry crashed, and from the stars above something else has come down, for the little prince comes from a planet. So for the first time two things meet on earth which hitherto were in the air: the star prince, who was far away in the cosmos, and Saint-Exupéry, who was constantly flying in the air. The moment the little prince lands on the earth he is not quite the infantile shadow any more because something has touched reality and is therefore now in an ambiguous position. If it could be realized, then it would become a part of the future, instead of a pull backward. It is no longer only an infantile shadow but a form of realization which goes on all the time, for to become more conscious means, practically, to grow more and more into the reality of things-it means disillusionment.

The greatest difficulty we drag along with us from our childhood is the sack of illusions which we carry on our backs into adult life. The subtle problem consists in giving up certain illusions without becoming cynical. There are people who become disillusioned early in life; you see it if you have to analyze orphans from either very low or very high layers of society, those who are nowadays called neglected children, which means either that they are just poor children who have grown up in slums and had a terrible family life and fate, or very rich children who had all the same miseries except lack of money-divorced parents, a bad atmosphere at home and so on that is, where the feeling atmosphere has been neglected, which is so important for children. Such people very often grow up quicker than others because at a very early stage they become very realistic and disillusioned and self-contained, and independent the hardships of life have forced them to this but you can generally tell from a rather bitter and falsely mature expression that something went wrong. They were pushed out of the childhood world too soon and crashed into reality.

If you analyze such people you find that they have not worked out the problem of childish illusions but have just cut it off, having assured themselves that their desire for love and their ideals simply hamper them like a sack of stones carried on their backs, so they must all be done away with. But that is an ego decision which does not help at all, and a deeper analysis shows that they are completely caught up in childhood illusions. Their longing for a loving mother or for happiness is still there, but in a repressed state, so that they are really much less grown-up than other people, the problem having simply been pushed into a corner. One then has the horrible task of reviving those illusions because life has stuck there. So the person has to be pushed back into them in order to emerge again properly. That is the problem one meets with in people who say that they can neither love nor trust anybody. For anyone stuck in that situation, life no longer has any meaning. Through the transference they begin to hope that perhaps they might trust or love again, but you can be sure that the love which first comes up is completely childish, and the analysand very often knows what will happen and that it will just mean disappointment again and be of no use. This is quite true, for such people bring out something so childish that it has to be rebuffed either by the analyst or by life itself. Such people are so immature in their feelings that if, for instance, the analyst is in bed with flu they experience that as a personal insult and a terrible let-down and disappointment. Quite grown-up people say that they know it to be absolutely unreasonable and idiotic but that that is how they feel. They ask quite rightly, "What does one do if one has such a child, such incorrigible infantilism within oneself?" Preaching does no more good that it would to a small furious child, who just does not listen.

How can one meet this tremendous problem? If one shelves it as something hampering in life, as a source of illusion and trouble, then one is no longer spontaneous, but disillusioned and grown-up in a wrong way, but if one lives it one is just impossible and reality hits one over the head all the time. That is the problem. People who have shelved their feelings, or their demands on other people, or their capacity for trust, always feel not quite real, not quite spontaneous or really themselves. They feel only half alive and they generally also do not take themselves as quite real. To shelve the divine child means not taking oneself completely seriously. One acts! One can adapt throughout life, but if one is honest with oneself, one knows that it is acting. Otherwise one would behave in such an infantile way that nobody could stand one. So what can one do?

That is the problem of the divine child when it appears in this in-between state.

One just does not know what to do. Theoretically the situation is clear: one should be able to cut away the childishness and leave the true personality. One should somehow be able to disentangle the two, and if an analysis goes right that is what slowly happens. One succeeds in disentangling and destroying what is really childish and in saving the creativity and the future life. But, practically, this is something which is immensely subtle and difficult to accomplish.

The divine child, or star prince, whom Saint-Exupéry meets in the desert, asks for a sheep, and we learn that he has come down to fetch a sheep to take back with him. Later in the story it is said that on the planet there is an overgrowth of baobab trees which are continually sprouting. The star prince wants a sheep to eat the shoots as they appear so that he does not constantly have to work at cutting them off. But this he does not explain to Saint-Exupéry, and the real reason only comes out later.

At first we have to look at the symbolism of the sheep in the personal life of Saint-Exupéry and then also in general mythology. In one of his books, Saint-Exupéry says himself:

There is no bad outer fate, only an inner one. There comes a moment when you are vulnerable and your own mistakes seize you and pull you down like a sort of whirlpool. [He naturally must be speaking with reference to flying. He means that there is no such thing as a chance crash: the one day you have an accident is the result of a whole inner and outer process.] It is not the big obstacles that count so much, but the little ones: three orange trees on the edge of an airfield, or thirty sheep which you fail to see in the grass and which suddenly emerge between the wheels of your plane.

You know that at one time in many places flocks of sheep were used to keep down the grass on the airfields, and it could happen that your plane by some mistake ran into them. One could say that he projects onto the sheep that fateful thing which one day kills the puer aeternus, or in this case himself. It is the fatal enemy.

The sheep has a very revealing name in Greek. It is called probaton, which comes from the verb "to walk forward," so it would mean "the walking forward animal." This is a marvelous name: the animal has no other choice and no other function than the capacity to walk forward! That is all it can do! The Greeks are even more witty, for they make the animal neuter and call it "the walking forward thing.'' That illustrates the most negative aspect of the sheep, which always follows the leading ram wherever it goes. You can read again and again in the papers that if a wolf or a dog chases the leading ram over a precipice, two or three hundred sheep will jump over after him. This happened about ten years ago at Lenzerheide on an Alp when a wolf-hound chased the leading ram over the precipice and afterward men had to go with their guns and knives and kill about two hundred sheep. They were not all dead, but they had just piled up one on top of the other. That is why one talks of a person as a "silly sheep." The instinct of walking and sticking together in the flock is so strong in them that they cannot pull out even to save their lives.

Those who have seen Walt Disney's film The White Wilderness have seen the same thing with lemmings, who wander into the sea. Once caught in such an instinctive move, the animal cannot pull out again. The sheep tends to a similar instinctual behavior and therefore stands-when it appears in a negative connection in dreamsfor that same thing in us, mass psychology, our tendency to be infected by mass movements and not to stand up for our own judgment and impulses. The sheep is the crowd-animal par excellence. Naturally, there is the crowd-man in each of us. For instance, you may hear that there are a lot of people at a lecture and you say, "Then it must be good." Or you hear that someone has an exhibition at the Art Gallery and you go, but you don't have the courage to say that you think the pictures are horrible. You first look round and see others, who you think ought to know, admiring them, and you daren't express your own opinion. Many people first look at the name of the artist before expressing an opinion. Such people are all sheep.

The sheep in mythology has a strange relationship to the world of the divine child. You all remember representations of the Madonna, very often together with her own mother and Christ and St. John the Baptist playing with a lamb, or sometimes there is only Christ and St. John the Baptist (these are mainly from the sixteenth century on) playing with the little lamb. Or there is the Christ-child with a lamb, holding a cross, and so on. Naturally the lamb is a representation of Christ himself, but in art it is exteriorized as something separate. He himself is the sacrificed lamb, the agnus dei, but in art the sheep is shown as the playmate which naturally means (as always when a god is depicted with the animal) that it is his totem animal, his animal nature. That is what he is when he appears as an animal. In German folklore there is a belief that the souls of children before they are born live as sheep in the realm of Mother Hollea kind of earth-mother goddess and those souls of unborn children are identical with what the Germans call Lämmerwölkchen (lamb-clouds)in English, "fleecy clouds." The peasants thought these "little sheep clouds" were the souls of innocent children. There was the idea that if on Innocents' Day there were many such clouds in the sky, that predicted the death of many male children.

Further, if you look up the traditional beliefs about sheep, you will find that they carry the symbolism of innocence, that they are easily influenced and affected by the evil eye and witchcraft. They can be bewitched more easily than almost any other animal and they can be killed by the evil eye. A sixth sense is also attributed to sheep, for by their behavior they are supposed to be able to predict the death of the owner, and so on. That to me is not so interesting because that sort of thing is projected onto many domestic animals. Horses are also supposed to have a sixth sense, as are bees, so that is not something confined to sheep. But to be easily bewitched and persecuted by witches and wolves is specific to sheep in folklore tradition.

Milk, another white substance, is also a symbol of innocence and purity but it can be bewitched at any time. One of the chief activities of wizards and witches in peasant countries is to spoil the neighbor's milk. Therefore innumerable precautions have to be taken: milk must not be carried across the street after seven o'clock in the evening, the bucket must be turned round before the cow is milked, three "Aves" have to be said, and so on. Our hygienic precautions are nothing compared with the precautions against witchcraft made in earlier times. They were infinitely more complicated, because if a witch even walks past in the street, the milk in the bucket will turn sour, or blue, at once. If an evil eye is cast onto the cowshed then the milk will be bluish from then on and an exorcist must be found. It is interesting that symbols of something especially pure and innocent are particularly exposed to infection or to attack by evil. This is because the opposites attract each other, for that is a challenge to the powers of darkness.

In the practical life of the puer aeternus, that is, of the man who has not disentangled himself from the eternal youth archetype, one sees the same thing: a tendency to be believing and naive and idealistic, and therefore automatically to attract people who will deceive and cheat such a man. I have often noticed in analyzing men of that kind how they are attracted in a fatal way to rather dubious women or pick friends about whom one has not a good feeling. It is as though their inexperienced naiveté and their wrong kind of idealism automatically call forth the opposite, and it is no use warning such people against such relationships. You will only be suspected of jealousy, or something similar, and not be listened to. Such naiveté or childish innocence can only be cured of these illusions by passing through disappointment and bad experiences. Warnings are no good-such men must learn by experience, without which they will never wake up from their innocence. It is as if the wolves-namely, the crooks and destructive people instinctively see such lambs as their legal prey. This naturally leads much deeper into the whole problem of our religious tradition.

As you know, Christ is the shepherd and we are the sheep. This is a paramount image in our religious tradition and one which has created something very destructive, namely, that because Christ is the shepherd and we the sheep, we have been taught by the Church that we should not think or have our own opinions, but just believe. If we cannot believe in the resurrection of the bodysuch a mystery that nobody can understand it-then one must just accept it. Our whole religious tradition has worked in that direction, with the result that if now another system comes, say Communism or Nazism, we are taught that we should shut our eyes and not think for ourselves, that we should just believe the Führer or Kruschev. We are really trained to be sheep!

As long as the leader is a responsible person, or the leading ideal is something good, then it is okay. But the drawback of this religious education is now coming out very badly, for Western individuals of the Christian civilization are much more easily infected by mass beliefs than the Eastern. They are predisposed to believe in slogans, having always been told that there are many things they cannot understand and must just believe in order to be saved. So we are trained to be like sheep. That is a terrific shadow of the Christian education for which we are now paying. Saint-Exupéry's work shows that he was possessed by this idea. He says in The Citadel:

To build the peace is to build a stable big enough to embrace the whole flock, so that the whole flock can sleep in it. [What an ideal! Just to put mankind to sleep!] To build the peace is to borrow from God his shepherd's cloak so that all people can be accepted under it, under the divine cloak.

You see he identifies with God. He is the Godhead who accepts mankind under his cloak, the religious megalomania of the puer aeternus. And now comes another complex:

It is just like a mother who loves her sons, and one son is timid and full of tenderness, another burning to live, and another is perhaps a hunchback, another perhaps delicate, but all of them in all their differences move the heart of the mother, and all in the difference of their love serve the glory.

In French it is even more sentimental and more impressive:

Bâtir la paix, c'est bâtir l'étable assez grand pour que le troupeau entier s'y endors. Bâtir la paix, c 'est obtenir de Dieu qu'il prète son manteau de berger pour reçevoir les hommes dans tout l'éntendu de leur désir. Ainsi de la mère qui aime ses fils et celui-là est timide et tendre et l'autre ardent à vivre, et l'autre peutêtre bossu, chétif et malvenu, mais tous, dans leurs diversités eneuvent son coeur, et tous dans la diversité de leur amour servent la gloire.

There you see how the religious image of the divine shepherd and the sheep is mixed up with the mother-complex sentimentality in a very dangerous way. Suddenly it is the mother who is the shepherd and the children are the sheep. If a wolf comes and eats the shepherd and takes the cloak, then you see what happens to the sheep! It is just the opportunity for a wolf! In the religious situation the wolf may be the great dictators and leaders we have now, or any kind of person who lies and cheats in public life. In private life it is the animus of the devouring mother who takes the lead for the sheep-son. And then there are the decent, devoted sons who believe that they have to honor and be chivalrous to their mother, the elderly lady, and do not see that the animus of the mother has eaten them and just feeds on their innocence. The devouring animus of the mother feeds on the innocence and the best and most devoted feelings of the son. and there too the sheep have been eaten by the shepherd.

So the little star boy in our story wants a sheep and we learn that it is needed to eat up the over-prolific trees, which are obviously a symbol of the devouring mother. Wanting the sheep seems at first sight to have a positive meaning, since the asteroid is threatened by an overgrowth. As the overgrowth of trees is a mother symbol, the sheep would be something to help fight the mother complex. Now I have just illustrated it the other way round, with the sheep as part of the mother complex, and not as the right remedy against that overgrowth. So here again it seems to me that we are confronted with complete ambiguity. In what way does the sheep help combat the mother complex? Afterward we can see how it cooperates. The story says that it bites off the new shoots, which are the overgrowth of the mother complex, but what does that mean psychologically? How much does the crowd-man within us help against the mother complex?

Answer: The mother does not seem to be so devouring when he surrenders to her.

You mean that if the sheep walks into the wolf's mouth then the wolf gets less dangerous because he is well fed, in a way? I don't think that a son who gives in to his mother's devouring desire has ever succeeded in improving matters. That has not been my experience, for the devouring principle generally fattens and grows on every bite it gets.

Answer: I would say that everybody has to get free of the mother.

Yes, and what can help to free the man from the mother?

Answer: If a man follows his pattern, namely, frees himself from his mother, then he is doing the right thing.

You mean he hears a psychological saying that everybody has to free himself from the mother? If he does that he really follows the sheep mentality, he does it because "one says so," and by that he frees himself from the mother. That is quite correct. You can say that normally very few young men have a strong enough individuality to pull away from the mother of their own accord; they do it via collectivity. For instance, in our country it is military service which helps young men against their mother complexes. Many are improved or even cured of their attachment to the mother by military service. It is the sheep mentality, the crowd-man, which drives them into military service, but this collective adaptation can be a help to pull away, especially here in Switzerland. In the simpler layers of the population, military service still functions to a great extent like the male initiation rituals in primitive tribes; it is the moment to leave the mother. You can say that all kinds of very humble, not individualistic, collective adaptations help against the mother complex. As mentioned before, doing one's work, going to military service, trying to behave like everybody else, not having that kind of fancied individuality which is typical for the mother-complex man, and giving up the idea of being somebody special, all that helps against the poison of the mother complex. To accept being just somebody or nobody, in the crowd, is to a certain extent a cure, but only a temporary one and not the whole cure. It is only a first step in pulling away from the personal mother.

You see similia similibus curantur (like cures like)how dangerous situations are generally cured by dangerous situations. To become a crowd-man is psychologically a very dangerous thing, but it helps against the danger of the false individuality which one develops within a mother complex, Then one is up against another danger-the medicine used in such a case is dangerous. Therefore, that the star prince wants a sheep could be interpreted positively, for he wants in his ideal, divine isolation the company of the crowd-soul. That would enlarge his asteroid and his world. There are no animals up in his star world, and if he brings one, that is a bit of an earthly instinct which he has brought up there. That seems extremely positive. But you could interpret it negatively also, for it is not a conscious realization but only pitting one instinct against another. His unconsciousness is not changed. One instinct just pulls away from another, which is what is expressed in the story, and I think from that you can arrive at a definite judgment and say that it is completely negative.

Remark: The sheep in the box!

That adds to it. I would say rather that he wants to take the sheep up, instead of going down to it; he wants to pull the sheep up into the stars. A sheep is something which walks on the earth. So if, in order to have it, he would stay on the earth, then it would be the thing which pulled him down into reality. In the same way, a man gets pulled down onto the earth if he goes through military service and a lot of other painful adaptations. But if you take the sheep up into the fantasy world of childhood, then it is not an adaptation to reality, it is a pseudo-adaptation. That is something very subtle and I think is specific to Saint-Exupéry and not very widespread in other cases. For him it is a particular danger, but one which you can only judge if you know his generally literary work. There you can see that he did something very strange, for he praises clinging to the earth, social adaptation, submission to the earthly principle, acceptance of the bonds of love, and so on.

However, all that he praises he himself does not stand by, for he assimilates the whole thing intellectually and takes it back into his imaginary world. It is a trick which many pueri aeterni perform; the realization that they should adapt to reality is an intellectual idea to them which they fulfill in fantasy but not in reality. The idea is executed only in reflection and on a philosophical level, but not on the level of action. It looks as though they have quite understood, as if they have the right attitude, as if they know what is important and right. But they don't do it. If you read Saint-Exupéry's work you could attack me and say that he is not a puer aeternus. Look at the Sheikh in The Citadel, a mature man who would take responsibility on earth. Look at Riviere in Vol de Nuit; he is not a puer aeternus but a man who accepts his responsibilities. He is a grown-up, masculine man, not a mother-complex fellow. It is all there in his ideas, but Saint- Exupéry never lived either the Sheikh or Riviere; he fantasized them, and the idea of the down-to-earth, grown-up man, but he never lived his fantasy.

That, I think, is one of the trickiest problems in that specific neurotic constellation, that the puer aeternus always tends to grasp at everything which would be the right thing to do and then to draw it back into his fantasy-theory world. He cannot cross the very simple border from fantasy to action. It is also the dangerous curve in the analysis of such people, for unless the analyst constantly watches this problem like an alert fox, the analysis will progress marvelously, the puer aeternus will understand everything, will integrate the shadow and the fact that he has to work and come down to earth. But, unless you are like a devil's watchdog behind it, it is all a sham. The whole integration takes place up in the sky and not on the earth, not in reality, so that it comes down to having to play the governess and ask what time he gets up in the morning, how many hours have been worked in the day, and so on. It is a very tedious job, but that is what it boils down to because otherwise a fantastic self-deception occurs which can very easily catch the analyst.

We should now consider the sheep in the box. When you assimilate something intellectually, you put it into a box. A concept is a box. When Saint-Exupéry impatiently puts the sheep in a box, he accepts the idea, but as an idea. It exists, but only in his brain-box. The little prince thinks the design is as good as real sheep. Everything remains in the world of mental activity.

Question: lf Saint-Exupéry had been cured of his puer aeternus personality, would he have continued to be an artist?

Being "cured" of being a puer does not imply being "cured of being an artist." If we consider Goethe we can see that in his early writing there is evidence of a mother complex. He too felt that if he gave up the puer mentality there would be nothing left. But he pulled through this crisis, and although the puer in his book The Sorrows of Werther shot himself, Goethe himself survived.

In the really great artist there is always a puer at first, but it can go further. It is a question of the feeling judgment. If a man ceases to be an artist when he ceases to be a puer, then he was never really an artist. If analysis saves such pseudo-artists from being artists, then thank God! Saint-Exupéry might have been one of those if he had been in analysis! His art is very neurotic: he writes out his neurosis, and it is doubtful that he was a great artist. As such a fuss is made about him, his work might be looked upon as an expression of the neurosis of the present day. But he has displayed the situation in literature, and so beautifully; he has raised the question. There is a type of artist who cannot make the switch that Goethe made, and these have to die. One cannot say that they have not been artists, but they did not grow beyond that switch-over, In The Sorrows of Werther Goethe did not deal with the problem of the puer in a final way, and it went on into other works. In the next step, in his drama Torquato Tasso, Goethe represented it as a problem within himself. Simultaneously, by objectifying the puer Tasso and Antonio, the man who wants to live on earth, he detached from the problem. It then becomes a conflict that goes even further in Faust. One's feeling tells one when the writer does or does not extricate himself from this problem. Objectifying the puer is only the first step.

Question: Can you qualify the statement that laziness is a characteristic of the puer aeternus? Goethe and Saint-Exupéry both worked hard in their lives.

The puer aeternus has to learn to carry on with work he does not like, not only with the work where he is carried away by great enthusiasm, which is something that everybody can do. Primitive people who are said to be lazy can do that, for as soon as they are gripped by something they work, even to the point of exhaustion. I would not evaluate that as work but as being carried away by a festival of work. The work which is the cure for the puer aeternus is where he has to kick himself out of bed on a dreary morning and again and again take up the boring job-through sheer will power. Goethe took on a political position and served in Weimar, sitting in his office and reading little requests concerning taxation, and so on. That is what he experienced in his work as Antonio; that somehow all belonged in his life. Goethe lived what he wrote. He stayed in his office and gave his mind to the most boring questions when often he would have preferred to ride off somewhere. But somehow he had a deep insight into the necessity of that part of life. Being a feeling type he thus developed his inferior thinking, which showed very much in the rather boring and unexciting side of his maxims (his conversations with Eckermann are most disappointing).

Remark: Perhaps that throws light on Rousseau's statement that the greatest fault in his character was his laziness, but it is well known that he worked from morning to night and read a great many books.

Yes, but he must have escaped some other kind of work. People can cheat themselves by working themselves to death in order to avoid doing the work they should do. Rousseau had to keep his feet in a tub of water in order to get himself to work; he worked in a kind of trance with footbaths. His Confessions might have been more to the point and less sentimental without these baths!

Remark: To go back to the idea of an author writing out his neurosis-many people are celebrated for that and such an activity is taken for talent.

I do not think that it is mistaken for talent; I think it is something we would all like to be able to do. I would like very much to make money out of my neurotic spots. I think the problem comes after the thing has been written. I think what one writes does concern one's own problem-otherwise the writing dries up-but when you have written out the problem, or while you are writing it, you have to live it. Whenever I have lectured on a problem, it has always come back on me afterward. I have observed that with sensation types it goes the other way round: they live it first, and then write it. When you are writing on a problem, synchronistic events often happen to you at the same time, so that you have to live it concurrently. Jung told me that when he was writing on a special problem he would get letters from all sorts of places, Australia and elsewhere, which put to him the question he was then writing on. If you touch on an important and vital problem of your own, it generally happens that way, sometimes behind and sometimes ahead of you. That is the difference between only writing of your neurosis or going further. The problem will always tie in with you, and if you live it at the same time, then afterward what you next write will be a step further on. Otherwise you will again write of the same problem, which is what Saint-Exupéry did. Such writers always turn on the same gramophone record, whereas if you live it, the next thing will show progress.

Goethe lived what he wrote, and what he next wrote was always a step further on. The Romantic poets repeated themselves much more. They went round in a circle because they did not, or could not, live it at the same time. I do not mean to make accusations, but one should be prepared for what one writes being constellated. So many artists do not want their work to be analyzed because they are afraid that then they would have to live it, and that is the pseudo-resistance which many of them have against psychoanalysis, for they say that their creativity would be analyzed away. But genuine creativeness is so terribly strong that not even the most gifted analyst in the world could wipe it out. This resistance to putting their work to the test is therefore very suspect.

Notes

[2] "The Psychology of the Child Archetype," The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 268. [CW refers throughout to The Collected Works of C.G. Jung]

[3] Ibid., par. 298.

Lecture 3

I have been asked privately about the problem of the sheep being put in a box. This listener thought that I had been too hard on Saint-Exupéry, who in his life had shown courage and the capacity for substantial reaction, and that one could not accuse him of trying to escape reality, or at least not in this way. I think this simply shows that I have not made myself clear.

Putting the sheep in a box is not a gesture of escape but springs from what one might call a certain nervous weakness, a weakness in health and strength. One needs a certain vital strength in order to be able to stand a conflict. Saint-Exupéry wants to get back to work on his engine, and the star prince, instead of letting him quickly draw a sheep, bothers him, saying this drawing is not right, nor this, nor this. So Saint-Exupéry is torn between the child—whose importance he completely realizes and who in a typically childlike way bothers him, for he feels sure that even if he draws another sheep it won't be right, or there will be a lot of questions—and the urgent need to get his engine in order. If you take that symbolically, it means a conflict between the demands of the outer and the inner life which establishes a tremendous tension. How can you comply with the demands of outer reality, which reason tells you is right, and those of the inner life at the same time?

The difficulty is that the demands of the inner life need time. You cannot do active imagination for five minutes and then go off and do other things! If, for instance, one is in analysis, dreams have to be written down and this may mean two hours' work, just writing them down, which is only the beginning, for one has not yet done any work.

One should meditate on them. That is a full-time job, but very often there are also the urgent necessities of outer life, and this is one of the worst and most difficult tensions to stand-to be capable as far as possible of giving each claim what it needs. The weak personality-and I don't mean ''weak" as a moral criticism-would imply not being born strong physically. The weak personality reacts with a short-cut reaction, making a definite decision to do the one and put the other aside. Here there is an incapacity for standing the tension beyond a certain extent. This is relative, for nobody can stand tension beyond a certain point, but a weak personality has an impatient reaction, whereas a strong personality can continue in the tension for longer. In this case, one sees that Saint-Exupéry, after the third attempt to draw the sheep, gives up and devises a short-cut solution in order to get back to his engine. This is an indication of a weakness that shows in certain other elements of the story. For instance, the star prince's planet is very tiny, he himself is very delicate, or, to take the first dream, the hero does not come out of the devouring snake, that is, the mother. It is all a bit fatal and all a bit on the weak side. Also if you look at the photographs of Saint-Exupéry, you will see that he has a very strange "split" face: the lower part of it is like that of a boy of seven, the expression of the mouth is completely immature; it is a naive little child's mouth, and there is a thin little chin, whereas the upper part of the face gives the impression of a very intelligent and mature man. Something is weak and just like a child; there are certain tensions which he cannot stand. I do not mean my comment as a criticism, but a statement such as a doctor might make, saying that the person is not strong and would probably not survive pneumonia. There is no criticism but the statement of a tragic fact.

There are other men swallowed by the puer aeternus problem who would have the strength to stand more conflict, but who also react out of sheer impatience and not from a tragic weakness. It is a given fact in the mother complex that the sufferer does not want to stick out a situation. In Aion Jung says, for instance:

There is in him a desire to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field of the world. But he makes no more than a series of fitful starts, for his initiative as well as his staying power are crippled by the secret memory that the world and happiness may be had as a gift—from the mother. The fragment of world which he, like every man, must encounter again and agin is never quite the right one, since it does not fall into his lap, does not meet him half way, but remains resistant, has to be conquered, and submits only to force. It makes demands on the masculinity of a man, on his ardour, above all on his courage and resolution when it comes to throwing his whole being into the scales. For this he would need a faithless Eros, one capable of forgetting his mother [4].

So you see impatience is sometimes an effect of the mother complex. I think in the case of Saint-Exupéry it is that too, but on top of it there is something tragic, namely an inborn weakness for which he cannot be held responsible. That means that his very vitality was crushed by the mother; it is a tragic fate where nothing can be done.

Question: Did you say "a faithless Eros"?

Yes. That would mean the capacity to turn away from time to time from a relationship. That would lead to another great problem, namely, that the puer aeternus, in the negative sense of the word, very often tends to be too impressed and too weak and too much of a "good boy" in his relationships, without a quick self-defense reaction where required. For instance, he takes much too much from the animi of the women around him. If one of them makes a scene, finding fault with him about this or that, he accepts too much of it at first and then suddenly one day has had enough and just walks out of the whole situation, in a completely cruel and reckless manner. You could say that consciously he is too weak and yielding, and the unconscious shadow is too cruel, reckless and unfaithful. I have seen some who have taken practically everything from girlfriends (where one would have expected a woman to flare up long before), and then one day the puer aeternus just walks out on the situation and turns to another woman, not even answering the first one. There is no transition stage. The yielding "good boy," the man who gives in too much, is suddenly replaced by the cold gangster shadow without any human relatedness whatsoever.

The same thing happens in analysis: they accept everything, never come out with resistances or assert their own standpoint against that of the analyst, but out of the blue suddenly say that they are going to another analyst, or are giving up analysis altogether, and you fall out of the sky if you have not happened to notice that this was coming. There are no thanks, nothing at all. It is just finished. At first there was insufficient coldness and independence, or masculine aggressiveness, and afterward too much in a negative, inhuman and unrelated form. That is typical for many pueri aeterni. Much more strength would be required to have the thing out patiently with someone than just first to give in, and then walk out.

To continue with our story, there now comes a long conversation in which Saint-Exupéry learns that the little prince has fallen from heaven, from Asteroid B-612, and that he wants the sheep so that it may eat up the baobab trees up there. I have never discovered what the association is for the number of the asteroid—612. One can imagine from the way in which it is described that Saint-Exupéry is playing with his astronomical and mathematical knowledge and wants to express the idea of a little star X–Y. If there is a symbolic meaning, I don't know what it might be, or at least could not make a definite assertion.

The great danger comes from the baobab sprouts which grow into huge trees and whose roots, if allowed to grow, would split the planet. So the little prince is kept constantly busy pulling up the little plants before they grow too big. That is his constant worry, and his idea was to get a sheep from earth which would eat the shoots to relieve him of the constant fight with the baobab tree. (In German the trees are called Affenbrotbaum, the ape-bread-tree. They are big trees which grow in Africa.)

Saint-Exupéry says that it would take a great many elephants to eat such trees. The little prince says that if he needs a lot of elephants, he would have to put them one upon the other; they would not have space otherwise, and from such remarks Saint-Exupéry constructs the situation. He makes a drawing to give his idea of what it would look like if the elephants were put one on top of the other, since there is not sufficient space on the asteroid for enough elephants to eat enough of the trees. His sketch shows three elephants on one side, two on two other sides, standing upon each other, but the two elephants on the fourth side he draws from the back, so the fourth function is turned in another direction.

It is interesting that without knowing anything about Jungian psychology he makes three alike and the fourth function turning the other way. The three elephants—the main function and the auxiliaries have a bit of overweight and the fourth function is turned and looks in the other direction. Saint-Exupéry says:

So, as the little prince described it to me, I have made a drawing of that planet. I do not like to take the tone of a moralist. But the danger of the baobabs is so little understood, and such considerable risks would be run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid, that for once I am breaking through my reserve. "Children," I say plainly, "watch out for the baobabs!"

My friends, like myself, have been skirting this danger for a long time, without ever knowing it; and so it is for them that I have worked so hard over this drawing. The lesson which I pass on by this means is worth all the trouble it has cost me.

Perhaps you will ask me: "Why are there no drawings in this book as magnificent and impressive as this drawing of the baobabs?"

The drawings in the book, which are by Saint-Exupéry himself, are very light both in color and drawing, but the one of the baobab trees has much deeper colors and is done with much more care and accuracy. He says himself that he has worked on it, and you see that at once, for not only are the colors strong but a lot of trouble has been taken to draw the details of the tree.

The reply is simple. I have tried. But with the others I have not been successful. When I made the drawing of the baobabs I was carried beyond myself by the inspiring force of urgent necessity.

Here we touch the main problem. Saint-Exupéry says that when he made this drawing of the baobabs he felt the terrific danger. There are three big trees, but there is also a fourth figure, namely a small boy dressed in red with an axe in his hand. The little prince tells Saint-Exupéry that he had a neighbor on another asteroid who was too lazy to pull up the little roots of the baobab, so they grew to the size shown in the picture and then it was too late. There he stands with his axe but cannot cut down the trees and his asteroid perishes. The drawing shows the big trees and the helpless boy, and from the little axe and the size of the large trunks of the trees you see that there is no chance of cutting the trees down any more. That is the "urgent" drawing, the one which Saint-Exupéry drew with an enormous effort.

If we take first the problem of the elephants which have to be piled on top of each other on the asteroid, you see what I was driving at before. What would you say was the trouble in that picture?

Answer: The mother trouble is piling up more and more.

Yes, but the elephant is not the mother problem. The problem is the hero, the male hero-substance, the thing which is eaten up by the snake, that is, he himself. The trouble is not that the elephants are too big, but the earth is not strong enough to carry them. The elephants are okay, but there is not enough space for them. What would that mean?

Answer: The ego is not strong enough.

No, I am not sure that you could say the ego. I think that is the result perhaps. Well. we often say of people that they have not enough earth—that is a kind of intuitive way of talking—but what do we mean by that?

Answer: That they are not in touch with reality.

Yes, they can have earth, but they fly off it, though that is not so bad. Some people have a lot but are not in touch with it, while others have no earth, or not enough, even if they are in touch with it, which would mean that there isn't enough vitality. It is naturally an irrational concept, an intuitive concept. You could call earth psychological substance. You see that again and again. One of the great problems in psychotherapy is how much substance has that person? How much can he carry? You can only guess that with your feeling; have a feeling impression about it. It cannot be weighed scientifically, and sometimes one can misjudge the situation. Sometimes you think that a person hasn't much substance, and when it comes to a vital conflict suddenly a lot appears, surprisingly. About other people you have the feeling that they can carry a lot, but then, out of the blue, they break down. They have no strength. So it is something which is only seen by results. But if one has some experience of people, then one may be able to guess more or less correctly how much carrying substance there is.

As you know, in his theory of schizophrenia, Jung makes a difference between what he calls the asthenic type and the strong type. In the strong type the problem is that them is an overwhelming wealth of strength and fantasy in the unconscious, confronted with a relatively weak ego, and because of that the person can split. But you can say that in the strong type really it is a plus which makes them ill. In the asthenic type the minus makes the person ill. Somewhere neither the ego nor the unconscious has quite enough impetus. People in such a situation have no dreams. Where, in the greatest conflict, you would expect a vital reaction from the unconscious, the dreams are small and petty, or there are none. It is as though Nature does not react.

It is very important to know that, because naturally, in the strong type one can risk a kind of reckless therapy and, for instance, just confront the person with the problem and risk a terrific crisis, a healing crisis, and then they come through. With the asthenic type you can never do that. There one must adopt a nursing attitude, making constant blood transfusions, so to speak, never forcing the problem or pushing the person up against the wall because that would break them. One does not have to decide that oneself; in general, the unconscious decides. In the asthenic type the dreams themselves do not push the problem. I have often been amazed when people of this type who have the most urgent problem have dreams which only talk about this or that detail and do not poke into the main problem. Then I say to myself, "Well, it is not meant; the confrontation would not be possible. The unconscious knows better than I do and says that this problem cannot be touched. It is too hot; it would explode the person." One has to go along with the seemingly little dreams there are and take the advice contained in them. With the strong type you generally see that the dreams hit directly at the corn of the problem, with great dramatic structure, and then you see that the whole thing is driving to a climax and a healing crisis. After a situation of terrific conflict, the thing decides itself either for good or ill.

The same thing occurs to a certain extent in the physiological make-up of certain people, who, if they get pneumonia, have a tremendous reaction. There is a life-and-death fight with very high fever, but they get through and are cured. Others, and this is much more uncanny, don't get any fever, only a little increased temperature, and the illness drags on and does not come to a climax because the vital reaction in the body is not strong enough; there is not sufficient vitality. Sometimes there are combined cases. For instance, there may be strong people who in one corner are weak, so the situation is mixed. Someone may have a vital make-up, belong to the plus type with which risks can be taken, but somewhere there is a minus, a split in the make-up. Here the situation becomes even more difficult because one has to follow two lines, putting a lot of weight where it can be carried but never pressing on the one weak point which needs endless nursing, care and patience. That is a combination often to be found in very split personalities. There is an unusual capacity for life, but extreme vulnerability in one corner, which has to be fenced off and especially cared for. Such mixed types are not really difficult, for if one can only get them to realize the situation themselves, they can take care of their weak spots. It simply means making them realize their dangerous corner. But you have to do the nursing with patience, not force, and constant attention to the weak spot so that it may slowly recover.

I think Saint-Exupéry is a mixed type, neither weak nor strong. He has tremendous strength, courage, vitality, and the capacity to change difficult situations. But one corner of his personality is extremely weak and lacking in vitality, and that is what this planet personifies. Naturally that one corner is the essential corner in his case, and these symptoms of having no vital reactions where they are important go through the whole book. So you can say that the will to live is too small in comparison with his genius and capacities. The earth signifies the will to live and the acceptance of life, and that is his weak spot. The incongruity of the personality is the problem. This does not so much illustrate the puer aeternus problem in general, but is a specific problem in Saint-Exupéry, one often found combined with the other. While the person who has too little earth may be able to assimilate everything psychologically, he will have great difficulty realizing things in reality. Such people take everything in analysis with honesty and strength, but when you press them to do something about it in outer reality, then a terrific panic comes up. At the moment when the inner realization has to be put into life, strength collapses, and you are confronted with a trembling child, who exclaims, "Oh no! That I cannot do!" This is an exaggerated illustration of the introvert's attitude in which there is great strength in accepting the inner truths but very little when it comes to real life. That is when the trembling child appears.

We have now looked at the only two elephant drawings in the whole book, and it is interesting to compare them. They represent reverse situations: in the first, the elephant is overwhelmed by the snake; in the second the elephant is the overwhelming thing, and it has not enough earth, which shows that the situation can be regarded from two angles: namely, either that the greater personality, the hero, in Saint-Exupéry has been overwhelmed by the devouring unconscious—by the mother complex—or that the hero personality in Saint-Exupéry did not have enough foundation in order to become real. They are two aspects of the same tragedy. It is interesting that the little prince himself says that a boa constrictor is a very dangerous creature and an elephant is very cumbersome. Saint-Exupéry is between the devil and the deep blue sea, for he does not know how to accept either his greatness or his weakness. He does not know how to get on with either of them.

The baobab trees in the drawing are enormous and give the impression of overrunning the whole star with their luxuriant growth, so you can say that Mother Nature is overwhelming the field of human culture and consciousness. If you look at the picture you see that the roots of the trees are drawn exactly like snakes. I think also that it is not by chance that he chooses in the first drawing a boa and calls these trees baobab trees. There seems to be a play on the words. He seems to have associated the two factors: both boa constrictor and trees are overwhelming. We should therefore amplify the trees rather on the negative side. How would you interpret them in this drawing? Many of you are attending Rivkah Kluger's lectures [5].

Answer: Gilgamesh had to cut down the cedar tree.

Yes, Gilgamesh had to cut down the cedar tree in Ishtar's forest where the tree represents the power of Ishtar. Among other things, she is the tree goddess who has appointed Chumbaba as guardian to defend the tree. Here again the tree is linked up with the negative mother. What are other amplifications?

Answer: The tree is a symbol of life itself.

Yes, if you read Jung's essay, "The Philosophical Tree," there the tree is generally interpreted as the symbol of life, of inner growth, of the process of individuation and of maturing, but here that does not fit.

Remark: The tree is very often connected with mother goddesses, not only with Ishtar but Idunn in German mythology and in Greek mythology with Demeter and others.

Yes, the tree is frequently connected with the mother-goddess, who is often even worshiped as a tree, but there is an even closer relationship: for instance, Attis in the tree, or Osiris who hung in his coffin in a tree. There the tree is what one generally in mythology calls the death-mother. The coffin in the tree, and the dead person being put in the coffin, was interpreted as being given back to the mother, put back into the tree, the death-mother. At the Festival of Attis in Rome a fir tree was carried with an image of Attis at the top of the tree, generally only the torso. In Symbols of Transformation Jung quotes an old poem which says that the Christian cross has been looked upon as being the terrible stepmother who killed Christ. That would be the first association, namely, that the tree is the mother, the coffin, and has to do with the death of the puer aeternus god. How can you interpret that? We get into a contradiction, for symbolically the tree often represents the process of individuation, but here that same symbol is identified with death, a destructive factor.

Remark: In the drawing the tree is monstrous. It is too big for the star, which would indicate that the mother problem is too large and devouring.

Yes, but how do you connect it with the process of individuation? The process of individuation is a process of inner growth to which one is attached; one cannot get away from it. If one says no to it and does not accept it, then, since you are not in it, it grows against you. Then it is your own inner growth which kills you. If you refuse the growth, then it kills you, which means that if a person is completely infantile and has no other possibility, then not much will happen. But if the person has a greater personality within that is, a possibility of growth then a psychological disturbance will occur. That is why we always say that a neurosis is in a way a positive symptom. It shows that something wants to grow; it shows that that person is not right in his or her present state and if the growth is not accepted then it grows against you, at your expense, and produces what might be called a negative individuation. The process of individuation, of inner maturing and growth, goes on unconsciously and ruins the personality instead of healing it. That is how the death-tree, the death-mother tree and the life-tree are essentially connected. The inner possibility of growth in a person is a dangerous thing because either you say yes to it and go ahead, or you are killed by it. There is no other choice. It is a destiny which has to be accepted.

If you look at the puer aeternus in the negative sense, you can say that he does not want to outgrow the mother problem; he does not want to outgrow his youth, but the growth goes on all the same and it destroys him. He is killed by the very factor in his soul by which he could have outgrown his problem. If in actual life you have to contend with such a problem, then you see how people refuse to grow and become mature and tackle the problem, and more and more a destructive unconscious piles up. Then you have to say, ''For God's sake, do something, for the thing is growing against you and you will be hit over the head by it." But the moment may come, as the star prince says in the book, when it is too late, for the destructive growth has sucked up all the energy. The luxuriant growth is also an image of a rich fantasy life, of an inner creative richness. Very often you find in the puer such a rich fantasy life, but that wealth of fantasy is dammed back and cannot flow into life because the puer refuses to accept reality as it is. He dams up his inner life.

In actuality, for instance, he gets up at 10:30 a.m., hangs around till lunch time with a cigarette in his mouth, giving way to his emotions and fantasies. In the afternoon he means to do some work but first goes out with friends and then with a girl, and the evening is spent in long discussion about the meaning of life. He then goes to bed at one, and the next day is a repetition of the one before, and in that way the capacity for life and the inner riches are wasted. They cannot get into something meaningful but slowly overgrow the real personality so that the individual walks about in a cloud of fantasies, fantasies which in themselves are interesting and full of rich possibilities, full of unlived life. You feel that such a person has a tremendous wealth and capacity but there is no possibility of finding a means of realization, and then the tree—the inner wealth becomes negative, and in the end kills the personality. That is why the tree is frequently linked up with the negative mother symbol, for the mother complex has that danger. Because of it the process of individuation can become negative.

There is a parallel in the Finnish epic Kalevala, which describes the fight of the divine child and the tree [6].

A man rose out of the sea, a hero from the waves. He was not the hugest of the huge nor yet the smallest of the small: he was as big as a man's thumb, the span of a woman. His helmet was of copper, copper the boots on his feet, copper the gauntlets on his hands.

Väinamöinen asked the hero from the sea what he intended to do, and he replied,

"I am a man as you see—small, but a mighty water-hero. I have come to fell the oak-tree and splinter it to fragments!" Väinamöinen, old and wily, scoffed: "Why, you haven't the strength, you'll never be able to fell the magic oak-tree and splinter it to fragments."

But the little man took his axe.

He struck the tree with his axe and smote it with the polished blade, once, twice, and a third time. Sparks flew from the axe and flame from the oak as he tried to bend the magic tree to his will. At the third stroke the oak-true was shattered; the hundred boughs had fallen. The trunk stretched to the east, the top to the west, the leaves were scattered to the south and the branches to the north. . . Now that the oak-tree was felled and the proud trunk leveled [now comes the important part] the sun shone again and the dear moon glimmered pleasantly, the clouds sailed far and wide and a rainbow spanned the heavens.

There you see that when the wrong inner overgrowth of fantasy is pulled down and recognized as being simply the mother complex, then another dimension of consciousness appears-the sky is seen again, the clouds can sail far, and the sun and the moon can shine. It is not a narrowing of the horizon, for pulling down that wrong growth of fantasy means a widening of the human horizon. I think that it is an infinitely important text because one of the objections which the puer aeternus always brings up when you want to encourage him to fell the tree is that he does not want such a narrowing of the horizon. What would be left if he had to give up his wishful fantasies, his masturbating, and such stuff? He would be just a petty little bourgeois who goes to his office, and so on. He could not stand such narrowing! But it is not true! If one has the courage to cut down this wrong kind of inner greatness, it comes again, but in a better form—the horizon and life are widened and not narrowed. I think this myth should always be told when the hero has to cut the tree, because that is always what he does not want to realize, or believe. If he only knew how much wider life would be if he could give up that wrong kind of inner life, then he might perhaps do it.

The little prince's asteroid has not yet been destroyed by the baobab tree, whose shoots he wants the sheep to eat, but his neighbor's asteroid has been. How would you interpret this fact? The only drawing by which Saint-Exupéry admits that he was carried beyond himself, "by the inspiring force of urgent necessity," is the one which describes the lost situation, where there is no more hope. Into that drawing he put his whole love and energy. How would you interpret the doubling of the asteroids psychologically? The one which is not yet lost and the other which is?

Answer: The one is the shadow's star.

Yes, you could say that. The lazy fellow who let the trees grow too big is a shadow of our little prince, which is why the latter speaks of him so negatively, calling him the lazy neighbor who did not cut the trees. And now see what has happened! But what does that mean for Saint-Exupéry psychologically, if the divine child motif doubles and falls apart into a divine child and his shadow?

Answer: One part has already been swallowed up by the mother complex.

Yes, that's right. It is already half eaten but that would not yet be hopeless. On the contrary, it could also turn out well.

Remark: It is a very serious warning if he could understand it. He puts himself into the drawing.

Yes, but I am driving at something slightly different. First a general question. What does it mean if a motif doubles into a Yes and a No?

Answer: That something is on the edge of consciousness.

Yes, you can say that doubling is a symptom that something is beginning to touch the edge of consciousness, but why does it then fall apart into the opposites?

Answer: We are unable to perceive the opposites united—as one (the state they are in in the unconscious)—so when we see them simultaneously, we see them as two. Then, as they come closer to consciousness, it seems as if one part recedes into the unconscious and the other side comes forward.

Yes, it comes forward if things go right. In what way can you now prove that theory? How would you apply it to the material? In what way is the star prince a yes and a no, before he falls apart? What is the yes and no in this divine child?

Answer: One side of the child is infantile and the other a symbol of the Self.

Yes, exactly. You could say that the star prince figure is the infantile shadow, or a symbol of the Self. Up till now that figure appeared double; you could never quite know which way to take it, whether negatively, and call it the infantile shadow, or positively, and call it the Self. Hitherto we were always in trouble as to how to interpret the child figure: was it infantilism or was it the future life? It was and is both, and that is the terrible difficulty. I want to remind you briefly of what Jung says in his essay on "The Psychology of the Child Archetype":

The "child" is . . . renatus in novam infantiam [reborn into a new childhood]. It is thus both beginning and end, an initial and a terminal creature. The initial creature existed before man was, and the terminal creature will be when man is not. Psychologically speaking, this means that the "child" symbolizes the pre-conscious and the post-conscious essence of man. His pre-conscious essence is the unconscious state of earliest childhood; his post-conscious essence is an anticipation by analogy of life after death. In this idea the all-embracing nature of psychic wholeness is expressed. Wholeness is never comprised within the compass of the conscious mind-it includes the indefinite and indefinable extent of the unconscious as well. . . .[And now comes the really important sentence:] The "eternal child" in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative [in more poetic and better language that expresses what we are driving at: the incongruity or the handicap is the childish shadow and a divine prerogative]; an imponderable that determines the ultimate worth or worthlessness of a personality [7].

It is quite clear that Saint-Exupéry's genius is that divine child in him. He would not be such a genius or artist if he had not that capacity of being absolutely naive and absolutely spontaneous. That is the source of his creativity and at the same it is a little close to being something worthless, something which devalues his personality, which is why in my interpretation I am always skating between a negative and a positive evaluation. It is both-in-one, and one does not quite know how to judge it. One cannot judge it but must simply take it as a contradictory factor, an imponderable thing. Here one could say that there is an attempt by the unconscious to disentangle the two motifs. The one would be definitely the infantile shadow, the lazy one who just misses fighting the mother complex until it is too late. The other, the star prince, would be the Self, something which tries to flow toward the future, toward the possibility of being reborn, of finding a new possibility of life after a crisis, of finding a renewal. Here the unconscious attempts to show the two aspects separately so that consciousness can realize it, because consciousness is too stupid to realize a mixtum compositum. It generally needs to have it taken apart first so that it can be put together again, because our consciousness is made in such a way that it wants to separate things.

In my first lecture I spoke of the problem of the neurosis of the provisional life, namely, that people live in the expectation of being able one day (not yet, but one day) which is very often linked up with the savior complex. René Malamud has given me a copy of a paper by Erich Fromm in which he speaks of this problem in detail. I am taking only an extract. He says:

If one believes in Time then one has no possibility of sudden change, there is a constant expectation that "in time" everything will come all right. If one is not capable of solving a conflict one expects that "in time" the conflicts will solve themselves, without one having to risk a decision. You find that very often, especially in believing in Time as far as one's own achievements are concerned. People comfort themselves, not only because they do not really do something but also for not making any preparation for what they have to do, because for such things there is plenty of time and therefore there is no need to hurry. Such a mechanism is illustrated by the case of a very gifted writer who wanted to write a book which he thought would be the most important book in world literature, but he did not do more than have a few ideas as to what he would write and enjoy in fantasy what the effect of his book would be and tell his friends that he had not nearly finished it. In reality he had not even written a single line, not a single word; though, according to him, he had already worked for seven years on it. The older such people get, the more they cling to the illusion that one day they will do it. In certain people the reaching of a certain age, generally at the beginning of the forties, brings a sobering effect so that they then begin to use their own forces, or there is a neurotic breakdown which is based upon the fact that one cannot live if one does not have that comforting time illusion [8].

That is a vivid description of what I tried to express. H.G. Baynes wrote about this long ago in his paper on the provisional life, as I have mentioned.

The next part of the book I am going to read in detail.

Oh, little prince! Bit by bit I came to understand the secrets of your sad little life. . . . For a long time you had found your only entertainment in the quiet pleasure of looking at the sunset. I learned that new detail on the morning of the fourth day, when you said to me:

"I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset now."

"But we must wait," I said.

"Wait? For what?"

"For the sunset. We must wait until it is time."

At first you seemed to be very much surprised. And then you laughed to yourself. You said to me:

"I am always thinking that I am at home!"

Just so. Everybody knows that when it is noon in the United States the sun is setting over France. If you could fly to France in one minute, you could go straight into the sunset, right from noon. Unfortunately, France is too far away for that. But on your tiny planet, my little prince, all you need do is move your chair a few steps. You can see the day and the twilight falling whenever you like...

"One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"

And a little later you added:

"You know-one loves the sunset, when one is so sad . . ."

"Were you so sad, then," I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"

But the little prince made no reply.

How would you interpret that?

Answer: Is it a preview of his own early death?

Yes, you could say so—with the symbolic forty-four days. It is a foreboding of his own death, and what else? It is the romantic way of always thinking of death which is to be found in early youth. How does that connect up with the rest of the problem?

Answer: There is nothing realistic about it. The thing keeps receding; he sees the sunset over and over again.

Yes, it is a form of egotism, of narcissism, and that is the kind of mood people get into when life is not flowing, when time is not filled out, for when you are involved in inner or outer adventure you have no time to look at the sunset, which might, however, be a restful momentary beautiful experience, after a full day—the moment when the peace of the evening comes to you. But then one does not generally feel sad; then the sunset is something beautiful and restful. If it makes you sad it is because it has not been preceded by enough adventure. Again, I think, it has to do with this tragedy of youth. People, especially when they are young, are very much tortured by a kind of boredom. I remember myself that between fourteen and eighteen I was very often bored, but since then never. Outwardly it was because one had to stay for hours and hours in school instead of doing what one liked. As soon as I was able to do what I liked, the boredom disappeared. But the boredom goes deeper than that. I have seen that, strangely enough, very often it is a neurotic disease among young people which lessens as they grow older. It has to do with the fact that they cannot yet do what they would really like to do, but always a lot of things that they don't want to do. Therefore they do not feel that they are in life. Boredom is simply a subjective feeling of not being in life. Actually there is no real boredom. At the University I still had to follow boring courses, but then I learned how to amuse myself at the same time. If you are inventive enough you can always avoid boredom if you know how to put yourself into reality. One puts one's spontaneous fantasy into reality, and then boredom is forever gone. Then life can be agreeable or disagreeable, exciting or not, but it is certainly not boring any more.

So boredom is a symptom of life being dammed up, that one does not know how to get what one has within oneself into reality. If one knows how to play, boredom goes. But there are children, and adults also, who don't know what to do, don't know how to draw on their inner resources. In youth this is not so much a negative symptom because, to some extent, it is a part of the situation, for they cannot yet fulfill themselves.

The suffering of normal young people consists partly in the fact that inwardly they are already very efficient, intelligent and grown-up, but outwardly are not given the opportunity to use these capacities. They are held back by society with the result that they are bored. I have taught in schools myself, with pupils mainly between fourteen and eighteen years old. I have often seen that many of the problems there were due to the fact that many pupils were capable of reasonable judgment and were inwardly rich and intelligent, but in the outer situation, both at home and at school, they were treated as children and did not have a chance. Naturally then life was dammed up, which causes a kind of bored resistance against everything, with bad moods and poor work. Generally, if one succeeded in getting those students onto a higher level by giving them more, and more intelligent, work and more responsibility, the thing righted itself. They were artificially kept below their level, with the result that a sulky boredom came up.

So one should always say, "Just because you are bored, and just because you are lazy, now you have to do a double amount of work, but good stuff!" That puts an end to the boredom! You know that between the ages of sixteen and twenty, suicide is very frequent and less so afterward. People at that age often have that strange kind of melancholy sadness, and they feel like old people. They have an expression on their faces as if they knew all about life and felt very, very old, so what would be the use of playing about with the others, of dancing with girls or with boys. They retire into a kind of grandfatherly and grandmotherly attitude toward life. This is only a symptom and simply means that they have not found the clue to the water of life, where they could find an issue for themselves, so they drift on in this way. At that age it is technically difficult for people who are a bit different from others to find out what would be their possibilities in life, and then life gets dammed up. Obviously we have the same situation here with the child who constantly and sadly looks at the sunset.

Next we learn that life on B-612 was not quite as boring as we had imagined, for Saint-Exupéry hears from the little prince that there is a rose on the planet, that one day the seed of a rose came through space and landed on the little planet and has slowly grown, until a lovely rose has unfolded its beauty. Saint-Exupéry finds this out because the little prince is suddenly terribly upset and constantly asks him if a sheep will eat roses? If it does, then he can't have a sheep because it must eat the baobab trees but not the rose! So, indirectly, through this anxiety, the little prince gives away the fact that he has such a rose on his planet. Then the description goes on:

But the shrub soon stopped growing, and began to get ready to produce a flower. The little prince, who was present at the first appearance of a huge bud, felt at once that some sort of miraculous apparition must emerge from it. But then the flower was not satisfied to complete the preparations for her beauty in the shelter of her green chamber. She chose her colors with the greatest care. She dressed herself slowly. She adjusted her petals one by one. She did not wish to go out into the world all rumpled, like the field poppies. It was only in the full radiance of her beauty that she wished to appear. Oh, yes! She was a coquettish creature! And her mysterious adornment lasted for days and days.

Then one morning, exactly at sunrise, she suddenly showed herself.

And, after working with all this painstaking precision, she yawned and said:

"Ah! I am scarcely awake. I beg that you will excuse me. My petals are still all disarranged . . ."

But the little prince could not restrain his admiration:

"Oh! How beautiful you are!"

"Am I not?" the flower responded, sweetly. "And I was born at the same moment as the sun . . ."

The little prince could guess easily enough that she was not any too modest—but how moving—and exciting—she was!

"I think it is time for breakfast," she added an instant later. "If you would have the kindness to think of my needs"

And the little prince, completely abashed, went to look for a sprinkling-can of fresh water. So, he tended the flower.

So, too, she began very quickly to torment him with her vanity—which was, if the truth be known, a little difficult to deal with. One day, for instance, when she was speaking of her four thorns, she said to the little prince:

"Let the tigers come with their claws!"

"There are no tigers on my planet, the little prince objected. "And, anyway, tigers do not eat weeds."

"I am not a weed," the flower replied, sweetly.

"Please excuse me . . ."

"I am not at all afraid of tigers," she went on, "but I have a horror of drafts. I suppose you wouldn't have a screen for me?"

"A horror of drafts—that is bad luck, for a plant," remarked the little prince, and added to himself, "This flower is a very complex creature . . ."

"At night I want you to put me under a glass globe. It is very cold where you live. In the place where I came from"

But she interrupted herself at that point. She had come in the form of a seed. She could not have known anything of any other worlds. Embarrassed over having let herself be caught on the verge of such a naive untruth, she coughed two or three times, in order to put the little prince in the wrong.

"The screen?"

"I was just going to look for it when you spoke to me . . ."

Then she forced her cough a little more so that he should suffer from remorse just the same.

So the little prince, in spite of all the good will that was inseparable from his love. had soon come to doubt her. He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.

"I ought not to have listened to her," he confided to me one day. "One never ought to listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. Mine perfumed all my planet. But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace. This tale of claws, which disturbed me so much, should only have filled my heart with tenderness and pity."

And he continued his confidences:

"The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her. . . .

I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her . . ."

You see very clearly that he alludes here to his experience of woman and of the first anima projection and how difficult it was for him.

He gives away the fact that he was not up to the vanity and moods as well as the charm and beauty of the rose. One of his wife's names was Rosa, and he married her in a very romantic mood himself. Because he suffers too much from the moodiness of the rose he decides to leave the planet, and seeing the migration of a flock of wild birds he decides to catch hold of one and let himself be carried away, which is how he came to earth. So now we learn suddenly that he came to earth because he could not stand the flower any longer. The moodiness and all the difficulties with the haughty princess in this rose drove him away from his planet. The rose is a bit sad too when he leaves, but she does not show it. The book says:

On the morning of his departure he put his planet in perfect order. He carefully cleaned out his active volcanoes. He possessed two active volcanoes, and they were very convenient for heating his breakfast in the morning. He also had one volcano that was extinct. But, as he said, "One never knows!" So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney.

On our earth we are obviously much too small to clean out our volcanoes. That is why they bring no end of trouble upon us.

The little prince also pulled up, with a certain sense of dejection, the last little shoots of the baobabs. He believed that he would never want to return. But on this last morning all these familiar tasks seemed very precious to him. And when he watered the flower for the last time, and prepared to place her under the shelter of her glass globe, he realized that he was very close to tears.

"Good-bye," he said to the flower.

But she made no answer.

''Good-bye," he said again.

The flower coughed. But it was not because she had a cold.

"I have been silly," she said at last. "I ask your forgiveness. Try to be happy . . ."

He was surprised by this absence of reproaches. He stood there all bewildered, the glass globe held arrested in mid-air. He did not understand this quiet sweetness.

"Of course I love you," the flower said to him. "It is my fault that you have not known it all the while. That is of no importance. But you - you have been just as foolish as I. Try to be happy . . . Let the glass globe be. I don't want it any more."

"But the wind"

"My cold is not so bad as all that . . . The cool night air will do me good. I am a flower."

"But the animals—"

"Well, I must endure the presence of two or three caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies. It seems that they are very beautiful. And if not the butterflies—and the caterpillars—who will call upon me? You will be far away . . .As for the large animals—I am not at all afraid of any of them. I have my claws."

And, naively, she showed her four thorns. Then she added:

"Don't linger like this. You have decided to go away. Now go!"

For she did not want him to see her crying. She was such a proud flower . . .

That is an absolutely perfect description of a lover's relationship where each tortures the other. Both suffer in their inner hearts and are too proud to make a gesture of reconciliation, or don't know how to—negatively, animus and anima opposed to each other. On account of lack of human feeling and lack of experience of life, such young people often don't know how to bridge the momentary difficulty but run apart because of a momentary quarrel. That is the fate of many early love affairs. It is also a magnificent description of the vanity and moodiness of the typical anima. The anima woman generally has a certain amount of infantile moodiness, that kind of irrational behavior, and especially male men like this type of woman. She is a compensation for the continuity of their conscious life, but there is an intolerable kind of childishness in such behavior. The rose here is, in other ways, as infantile as the little prince, and therefore they have to be separated.

In antiquity the rose belonged to the cult of the goddess Venus and of her divine child Eros (Cupid). Roses were also used in the Dionysian mysteries, for Dionysus too is naturally an image of the early dying youth. In the cult of Isis, Venus and Isis are the main goddesses. In Christianity, therefore, the symbol of the rose became split into two aspects: it became a symbol of the Virgin Mary and heavenly love and, on the other hand, of earthly lust—the Venus aspect. There is one medieval author who says of the thorns "thus the pleasures of love never lack a bitter sting." The Christian assimilation of antique symbolism generally goes this way: it is cut into two, one part being ascribed to the devil and the negative aspect, and the other to the positive aspect. Whereas in antiquity and in pre-Christian times the positive and negative aspects were more closely linked together, in the light of Christian consciousness the two have been separated. This is why most symbols in medieval books are contradictory: the lion is a symbol of the devil, the lion is a symbol of Christ; the rose is a symbol of the Virgin Mary, the rose is a symbol of earthly lust; the dove is a symbol of the Holy Ghost, the dove is a symbol of lust, etc.

You can go through the whole list of symbols and find the opposite in them all.

The rose has four thorns and is in the form of a mandala and therefore is also a symbol of the Self and very often, in mythological symbolism, the place of an inner mystical transformation. But here, like the star child, the rose represents a too undeveloped and too infantile aspect of the anima, and therefore the two have to be separated from each other in order to become mature. At present they are only an anticipation of the inner totality, not yet the realization.

There are many fairy tales in which a pair of children are persecuted by a stepmother. This occurs in "Little Red Riding-Hood" and the fairy tale entitled "Little Brother and Little Sister," and others. Generally, one of the two is killed and then transformed by a spell and redeemed by the other partner. There is this same type of child-myth also in classical Greek mythology. For instance, there is the story of the two children of Nephele (cloud). Mrs. Cloud, so to speak, has two children, Phrixos and Helle. Cloud's two children are persecuted by their stepmother, and they fly away through the air on a golden ram, but Helle falls into the sea and dies. The brother, Phrixos, escapes and later sacrifices the ram whose fleece is fastened to a tree. This is the original myth of the Golden Fleece. Nowadays members of the Maltese Order wear the fleece as a golden chain around their necks. The golden ram whose fleece was nailed to a tree was compared to Christ sacrificed and nailed to the cross, which explains why the Golden Fleece was looked on as a symbol of Christ and why it came to play such a special role in the Maltese Order.

One could say that all these motifs of a couple of children, a little brother and sister, who are always partly killed and partly restored to life, are images of the inner totality of man which in its infantile pre-formation has to be cut away so that ego consciousness may mature. The two are later reunited in a higher form, which explains why the rose drives the little prince away from the planet. If we look at it as a portrait of Saint-Exupéry, then it can be said that his inner genius (that would be the little prince) was tormented by his anima moods, and that the aim of this suffering is to mature the too infantile nucleus of his personality. It could be expressed even more simply by saying that if someone is infantile then he will suffer from terrific emotional moods—ups and downs—being constantly hurt, and that is right, because as long as one is childish there is only one cure, that of suffering. When one has suffered long enough, one develops; there is no way around this problem. The childish nucleus is inevitably tortured.

Question: If the rose had cried, instead of trying to hide her tears from him, would there have been a possibility of both maturing?

Yes. If they could have talked over the trouble and exchanged their sorrow and not hidden it by a wrong kind of pride, then they could have matured together. But if you are not mature then you cannot talk about it. Again and again one sees that every time the childish spot is touched, people begin to cry. For years people hide their childish spot in analysis, not out of dishonesty or because they repress it, but when in the end it comes out they say that they knew they would start to cry, so what was the good of mentioning it, because crying would end every conversation. Because they know this, they shelve the problem all the time, but that way it does not develop.

That is the great difficulty, for the sore spot has to come out, and has to be tortured; that is the only way by which it can mature. It is even more dangerous when the childish side is cut off. Such people do not show it, but you always have the feeling when with them that they are not quite genuine, and when you have established sufficient contact to talk to them and can tell them they are never really quite themselves, that there is something not quite genuine, then come the tears! They don't know what to do about it because they would be genuine only if they cried, and they naturally do not want to cry. That is a form in which infantitism comes up, or the infantile shadow always makes exaggerated feeling demands on the partner.

Repression does not solve the problem, for the repressed child continues to cry or be angry in the corner. So it must not be split off. One should keep close to it and not lose contact with it for that would be losing contact with one's genuine personality. But one cannot let it out either. In my experience, it has simply to be tortured and suffer on and on until suddenly it grows up. If a man has an infantile anima, he has to go through a tremendous amount of feeling trouble and disappointments. When he has gone through them enough he begins to know women and himself and then he is really emotionally grown up. But if he pretends to be reasonable and represses his childish feelings, then there is no development. So it is even better to expose one's childishness so that it may be tortured than to be too reasonable and hide it away, because then it only gets stuck. It is better to behave like a child and be hit over the head by one's surroundings and those people with whom one is in touch all the time, because then one suffers and the prima materia slowly transforms. That is the great problem which the infantile shadow—the divine child—puts upon one.

Remark: In The Visions Seminars, Jung expressed the same thing when he said that people who have difficulty in getting near their center only really experience themselves when they suffer, when they come to the experience of their real self and it does not seem possible for them to get there any other way.

Yes. I would therefore say that the child in the adult is the source of suffering; it is that which suffers because with the grown-up part of oneself one can take life as it is and therefore one does not suffer so much. The sufferings of childhood are the worst—that is the real suffering—though they may be over minor trifles, perhaps because the child has to go to bed just when it wants to go on playing. We can all remember the catastrophic disappointments one had as a child. Looking back they appear to be trifles, but in childhood, in that moment, it was an agony of suffering, because a child is whole, and total in its reactions. Therefore, even if only a toy is taken away, it is as though the whole world were destroyed. Thank God, there is the compensation that five minutes later the child can be distracted and laugh again and has forgotten it all. But in childhood there are such terrific tragedies, which shows that the child within is the genuine part, and the genuine part is that thing which suffers, that thing which cannot take reality, or which still reacts in the grown-up person like a child, saying, "I want it all, and if I don't get it then it is the end of the world. Everything is lost." And that is what the genuine kernel of the person remains like and that is the source of suffering. So one could say that what is genuine in a person and what is naive like a child in them is the source of suffering. Many grown-ups split off this part and thereby miss individuation, for only if one accepts it and the suffering it imposes on one, can the process of individuation go on. Saint-Exupéry's wife seems to have been a relatively hysterical person with tremendous moods, so that he quarreled with her so badly that he left her for quite a while and lived with another woman who taught him how to take opium. It is also remarkable, and sheds some light, from the personal angle, on the tragedy expressed in the book, that Saint-Exupéry's mother disliked his wife and took a tremendous liking to the woman who taught him to smoke opium. Even though she poisoned her son with opium his mother preferred her to the wife! Now that is quite revealing!

Notes

[4] Aion, CW 9ii, par. 22.

[5] This is a reference to Dr. Kluger's lectures on the Gilgamesh Epic, which have been published as The Archetypal Significance of Gilgamesh: A Modern Ancient Hero.Ed.

[6] See C.G. Jung and Carl Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, pp. 41f.

[7] "The Psychology of the Child Archetype," The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, pars. 299f.

[8] "Zum Gefühl der Ohnmacht" (The Feeling of Being Incapable of Doing Anything), p. 65.

Lecture 4

There is a little intermezzo in the book which gives us further information about Asteroid B-612, namely, that on it there are three volcanoes, two active and one extinct. Every morning when the little prince gets up he cleans the three because, he says, "One never knows." In the picture he is just cleaning one of the volcanoes, while on another, where there is a pan with a handle, he is cooking his breakfast. Then there is the flower under its glass and on the extinct volcano a little cap, because it does not work. Thus there are four landmarks on his asteroid: three volcanoes and a flower. It is a mandala. How would you interpret this extinct volcano? One speaks of people sometimes as being like a volcano.

Answer: They have emotional eruptions.

Yes, it would be someone inclined to emotional eruptions, someone with a hot temperament and a lot of emotion which bursts out at any time. So if one of the volcanoes is extinct, how would you interpret that?

Answer: Perhaps he has overcome one comer of his emotions.

You are an optimist! I think if he had overcome it, it would not look like that. When a volcano becomes extinct, crust upon crust has formed within, so that the fiery kernel of the earth is covered over with material and its activity does not burst out in the same way. Therefore this does not look to me as though something had been overcome but as if the possibility of expression and of the emergence of the inner fire were closed up. The central fire of the asteroid has faded out in that particular corner. What would that mean in reality? It is a very catastrophic picture.

Answer: The libido has gone!

Yes, there is no way for the energy to come out, not even by a negative eruption. You could also say that if the volcano dies out on a heavenly body that would mean that the central fire was slowly burning down and fading away, that the earth was in a process of dying or getting colder, and that the inner process of transformation of the material which is within is slowing down and becoming less intense. I think we have to look at it in conjunction with the small size of the planet, the smallness of the earth on which the elephants cannot stand. There is again a hint of vital weakness, of the vitality which is giving out in some corner, and with that the capacity for a direct emotional reaction. The image of an extinct volcano often appears in psychiatric material, illustrating what might be described as a post-psychotic state. People in a psychosis have tremendous emotional explosions after which there comes the regressive restoration of the persona [9], when such people are literally comparable to a burnt out volcano. They are reasonable, adapted, back in life, but the fire has gone. Something has been burnt out by the previous destructive explosion. If you treat such post-psychotic cases you notice that when certain really important problems are touched upon, there is no reaction. Usually, if one gets close to a person's vital problem, things get hot: people get excited and nervous, and they begin to lie, to blush, or to become aggressive—there is some sort of emotional reaction. With a post-psychotic state this is not so, for just when one might expect things to get really hot, there is a matter of fact: "Yes, yes, I know!" There is no reaction exactly when it might be expected to be really painful. That could be expressed by the simile of the burn tout fire. The destruction has been so great that the fire has disappeared. The dreams then may show a burnt out volcano, symbolic of the post-destruction condition.

On a minor scale, one experiences the same thing after expressing strong affect. You have all probably experienced the awful come-down after letting out a very strong affect: fatigue and indifference. All reaction has been exhausted and one is burnt out. Here the destruction is only partial, for only one of the four things, one of the three volcanoes, is extinct. We might compare these with the four functions and then it would mean that one function has given out. The flower would probably stand for feeling, in which case the opposite would be thinking, where the volcano is the biggest and is well drawn. Then we have to find out which of the others is burnt out. From his type, I would say that it is probably sensation and the touch with reality. However, I do not think that explanation through the functions is very relevant. It alludes probably to another problem.

Saint-Exupéry had a little brother of whom he was very fond and who died between the ages of six and seven. That was a great shock to him which he never quite got over. This child is very much mirrored in the whole story of the little prince, and I think that Saint-Exupéry consciously had him in mind when he wrote it. For him the child who came to earth and then left it again was associated with the trauma of the death of the little brother, with whom he had a very good contact and who died. That, I think, probably has to do with the shock which burnt out part of his personality and from which he did not quite recover. It is as though a part of his infantile personality had died at the same time as the child who died in real life. Afterward Saint-Exupéry was only a half, so that the dead little brother is a picture, probably, of a part of his masculinity, of his capacity for reaction, which died at the same time. The little prince would thus be an exterior image of what happened within himself, a projection of something which is dead and split off in Saint-Exupéry.

Question: How old was he when his brother died?

Saint-Exupéry died at the age of forty-four and was born in 1900. I believe he was two or three years older than his brother, so he must have been about eight or nine at the time. He was still a boy, but old enough fully to realize the catastrophe of the death of the child who probably succumbed under the pressure of the unfavorable family situation. From Saint-Exupéry's standpoint he would be the one who could not stand the atmosphere and had to leave the earth because he could not come down into this world. The fact that the little prince always cleans the dead volcano because "one never knows" shows that there is a faint hope that it might become active again. I think this confirms our idea that there is a basic vital weakness, or destruction, in the deeper layers of the psychological earth in Saint-Exupéry, which ultimately was responsible for the fact that he could not get over the crisis of the middle of life, an inability which is normal for the puer aeternus.

The little prince leaves Asteroid B-612 and, holding onto a flock of birds, travels through space. He does not come to earth directly, but visits six neighboring asteroids, which he explores. This does not seem to me to be a very important part so I will only discuss it briefly. On the first asteroid there is a king who gives silly and completely ineffectual orders which nobody obeys. To save face, he finds out what is about to happen, such as when the sun is about to set and then orders the sun to set. (I do the same thing with my dog, who never obeys me. so if I want to show how obedient he is I tell him to do something which he is going to do anyway and then say, "See how well he obeys me!") This king is very clever in doing this. Obviously Saint-Exupéry is here making fun of the inefficiency of the power complex and of those false pretensions which are up against reality as it is. You could call these six figures which the little prince now meets shadow figures, or some of his inner possibilities of adaptation to the reality of Saint-Exupéry, but we will go into that later.

On the next planet is a man who only wants admiration—he is a personification of vanity. On the third planet is a drunkard who drinks because he is so ashamed of being a drunkard and tries to drown his sorrows in this way. On the fourth asteroid is a businessman who does nothing but count his star coins; the stars represent coins to him and he counts them all day long. The fifth is, to my mind, the most interesting. This asteroid is very small, and on it is a lamplighter who has to light his lamp every evening and put it out in the morning, as was formerly the case in big cities. (In London they have now stopped budgeting for lamplighters—something quite typically English—it having been discovered recently that the allocation was still being made, though for many years there had not been any lamps that needed lighting!) By some unfortunate development, this particular planet has become much smaller and rotates much more quickly so that when the little prince sees him he has to light and extinguish his lamp once every minute. On the sixth planet is a geographer who tells the little prince about the earth and says he should visit it.

The idea that the little prince should visit a number of planets before he goes down to earth is interesting because it is a variation of an archetypal motif. In some gnostic philosophical systems influenced by Platonic ideas it was believed that the soul was a

spark which lived in heaven and that when born it had to descend through all the spheres of the planet, each of which invested it with some quality. Afterward the soul was born in a human body on earth, where it lived an earthly life with the fortunate and unfortunate inherited dispositions which it had received from the planets on the way down. The idea was linked up with astrology, for in heaven the soul spark was beyond astrology, and it was only during the descent from heaven to earth that the human soul acquired its horoscope: from Venus an attribute of Venus in a certain constellation, from Mars a quality of that planet in a certain constellation, and so on, with the result that on reaching the earth each human had a specific horoscope. On death the soul returned upward, giving back the qualities (sometimes symbolized as clothes) which it had received on the way down. Thus it arrived naked at the heavenly gates and returned into the eternal light. So the soul after death had to get rid of the planetary influences.

It can therefore be said that the soul spark is a symbol of the Self and the different planetary qualities are the inherited psychological and instinctual disposition with which the human being is born, having received aggressive instincts from Mars and sexual instinct from Venus, in all their aspects, etc., as well as psychological and spiritual qualities. Later on I shall bring material in which the same idea is seen in the dreams of a typical puer aeternus who has to come down to earth and first goes through the region of the stars. This illustrates the idea that Saint-Exupéry has not yet entered the just-so-ness of his personality, his earthly disposition, but keeps away from his own body and his own emotional disposition. In that way is not really himself in the mundane sense of the word, but spiritually he is more himself.

One could thus understand the king, the vain man, the drunkard, and the businessman, I think, in a parallel way and call them all different possibilities of the future grown man. He describes them all in a rather mocking way, again making fun of adult life. He says that one prays to money, another to nonexistent power, and a third indulges in a quixotic activity, maintaining old values which are no longer valid. The king could be said to represent something which he could have lived, also the vain man, for Saint-Exupéry was very vain, as has been confirmed by several reporters who met him and who said he was a bit of a poseur—he had a certain amount of self-reflecting vanity. He could also have taken to drink. The businessman I cannot quite imagine, but perhaps that was possible too. So, with the exception of the lamplighter, the different planet dwellers represent ordinary possibilities of becoming grown-up in a wrong way, or an endeavor to find a pseudo-style of grown-up existence.

I think the lamplighter is most interesting because, if Saint-Exupéry had followed the family tradition, he could have turned into such a Don Quixote personality. There are many such types in the higher French nobility; they simply live on the past glories of France, having got stuck in the eighteenth century with all the ideals of the gentleman and chivalry and a solid Catholic background. They are peculiarly out of step as regards present-day life. The poet Lavarande, a contemporary and colleague of Saint-Exupéry, obviously suffered such a fate. He wrote novels in praise of the "good old times" of chivalry and nobility. But I think Saint-Exupéry was too sensitive and intelligent and, in a way, too much of a modern man to accept such a regressive form of life. As he shows in the lamplighter, the pace of life has accelerated too much and does not allow for the gentleman-farmer or the nobility-officer ideal any more; such roles have become ridiculous and an illusion. This shows how difficult is the position of the poet, for he cannot find any given form of life which would suit him and offer him a collective pattern in which to fulfill himself. A more positive figure is the geographer. Saint-Exupéry was very fond of geography, something which a pilot must know very well. This geographer could be described as a psychological function of orientation, a capacity for finding and mapping the way on earth, so he is a more positive figure than the others. Power, money, public applause and drink symbolize four things which Saint-Exupéry cannot make his god, or to which he cannot pray. There remains the lamplighter, of whom he says, ''That man is the only one of them all whom I could have made my friend. But his planet is indeed too small. There is no room on it for two people." That was something which tempted him for a minute but he rejected that also. Then comes the relatively positive figure of the geographer.

The story goes on:

So then the seventh planet was the Earth.

The Earth is not just an ordinary planet! One can count, them, 111 kings (not forgetting, to be sure, the Negro kings among them), 7,000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 tipplers, 311,000,000 conceited men—that is to say, about 2,000,000,000 grown-ups.

There he states quite clearly what he thinks about grown-up people on the earth, where he now arrives. The first thing he meets is a snake.

When the little prince arrived on the Earth, he was very much surprised not to see any people. He was beginning to be afraid he had come to the wrong planet, when a coil of gold, the color of the moonlight, flashed across the sand.

"Good evening," said the little prince courteously.

"Good evening," said the snake.

"What planet is this on which I have come down?" asked the little prince.

"This is the Earth; this is Africa," the snake answered.

"Ah! Then there are no people on the Earth?"

"This is the desert. There are no people in the desert. The Earth is large," said the snake.

The little prince sat down on a stone, and raised his eyes toward the sky.

"I wonder," he said, "whether the stars am set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own way again. . . . Look at my planet. It is right there above us. But how far away it is!"

"It is beautiful," the snake said. "What has brought you here?"

"I have been having some trouble with a flower," said the little prince.

"Ah!" said the snake.

And they were both silent.

"Where are the men?" The little prince at last took up the conversation again. "It is a little lonely in the desert . . ."

"It is also lonely among men," the snake said.

The little prince gazed at him for a long time.

"You are a funny animal," he said at last. "You are no thicker than a finger . . ."

"But I am more powerful than the finger of a king," said the snake.

The little prince smiled. "You are not very powerful. You haven't even any feet. You cannot even travel . . ."

"I can carry you farther than any ship could take you," said the snake.

He twined himself around the little prince's ankle, like a golden bracelet.

"Whomever I touch, I send back to the earth from whence they came," the snake spoke again. "But you are innocent and true, and you come from a star . . ."

The little prince made no reply.

"You move me to pity—you are so weak on this Earth made of granite," the snake said. "I can help you, some day, if you grow too homesick for your own planet. I can—"

"Oh! I understand you very well," said the little prince. "But why do you always speak in riddles?"

"I solve them all," said the snake.

And they were both silent.

How would you interpret the golden snake? What does it offer the little prince?

Answer: Help.

Yes, and in what form?

Answer: Death.

Yes, it is the temptation to die; it offers help in the form of a way in which to commit suicide. The snake says that he can send people back to the earth from whence they came. He suggests that the earth is too hard for the little prince, that he will not be able to stand it, but that he, the snake, can help, meaning the snake can send him back. The snake says that he can solve all riddles, for death solves all problems. It is a death temptation; it offers a way by which to get out of life, an ultimate solution to an insoluble problem. The offer is quite clear: the snake would kill with its poison, which is what happens at the end of the book. Before we go into the specific quality of the snake here, namely, as the temptation of death or the helpfulness of death, we should see what it represents in general.

Like all animals, the snake represents a part of the instinctive psyche, a part far removed from consciousness. Jung says this about the snake:

The lower vertebrates have from earliest times been favourite symbols of the collective psychic substratum, which is localized anatomically in the sub-cortical centres, the cerebellum and the spinal cord. These organs constitute the snake. Snake-dreams usually occur, therefore, when the conscious mind is deviating from its instinctual basis [10].

When a snake dream occurs, it is a signal that consciousness is especially far away from instinct. It shows that the conscious attitude is not natural and that there is an artificial dual personality which appears to be, in some ways, too well adapted and too much fascinated by the outer world and, at the same time, inclined to fail hopelessly in decisive moments. In such a case, Jung continues, we find that there always exists a sort of secret attraction to the missing inner double, which one both fears and loves as the thing that could make one whole. That is why the snake in mythology is essentially double. It arouses fear, brings death, and poisons; it is an enemy of light and at the same time a savior in animal form—a symbol of the Logos and of Christ. When it appears in the latter form, it represents the possibility of becoming conscious and whole. Instead of intellectual understanding, it promises knowledge born from immediate inner experience: insight, secret wisdom—gnosis.

You can see that the snake in our story has the same double role. It offers to kill the little prince and free him from the weight of the earth, which can be understood in two ways—as suicide, or the good fortune of getting rid of life. It is this ultimate philosophical attitude which says that death is not a catastrophe or a misfortune but an escape at last from an intolerable reality, which may be looked upon as something unimportant that yet hampers one's innermost being.

The snake appears very often in ancient mythology combined with the motif of the child. For instance, the mythical god of the Athenians was King Erechteus, who was the son of Athene. As a little child he was kept in a basket into which one should not look, for one saw a child surrounded by snakes. Quite what it means one cannot be sure, but in southern France coffrets gnostiques have been found (probably material from the Middle Ages and not earlier) in which naked children are playing with snakes. So the child-god and the snake-god are often combined. Also the child-god is the archetype of the poisoner, so to speak.

You know that Cupid of antiquity has a very poisonous arrow with which he can even subdue—as the poets say—the great god Zeus, for if Cupid shoots an arrow at him, Zeus may have to pursue without hope an earthly woman though he may not even like the situation. So Cupid has the capacity to poison people. Many late poems of antiquity, so-called anakreontika, in a light way make fun of this little boy who, with his poisonous arrow, can subdue the whole world to his will. If Cupid shoots an arrow at you and you fall in love, whether you like it or not depends to a certain extent on your own reaction. If you do, you will be happy and say that you have fallen in love. But if you do not, then you will say that you have been poisoned and are made to do something you do not like, forced into a situation which to the ego feels like subjection or poison. So there is a secret connection between the snake and the eternal child.

The snake is the shadow of the little prince himself, his dark side. In a way, therefore, if the snake offers to poison him, it means an integration of the shadow, but unfortunately it takes place in the Self and not in Saint-Exupéry. This means that the whole thing happens in the unconscious and moves the psychological nucleus away from reality again. It is really Saint-Exupéry who should have been poisoned; that would have detached him from the little prince. It is likely that when his little brother died, he was told that his brother was now an angel in heaven and quite happy not to have to live on this earth, and so on, and that Saint-Exupéry believed this more than others might have done. He took it in and realized that death was only partly a misfortune and that possibly created in him his very detached and philosophical attitude toward life.

The puer aeternus very often has this mature, detached attitude toward life, which is normal for old people but which he acquires prematurely—the idea that life is not everything, that the other side is valid too, that life is only part of the whole of existence. Here the death-temptation prevents the little prince from going right into the earth. Before he has even touched it the snake comes in and says, "If you don't like it, you know a way out." So before he has gone down to earth, he has already had the offer of death. I have met many people with a similar difficult constellation who do that: they live only "on condition," which means that secretly they constantly flirt with the idea of suicide. At every step of their lives they think they will try something or other and that if it does not work they will kill themselves. The puer aeternus always keeps his revolver in his pocket and constantly plays with the idea of getting out of life if things get too hard. The disadvantage of this is that he is never quite committed to the situation as a whole human being; there is a constant Jesuitical mental reservation: "I will go into this, but I reserve my right as a human being to kill myself if I can't stand it any more. I shall not go through the whole experience to the bitter end if it becomes too insufferable, for if it does I shall walk out of it." And therefore the person does not become whole. If one cuts off the wholeness of the experience, one cuts oneself into bits and remains split because transformation can only take place if one gives oneself completely to the situation.

On a minor scale this can be found when people have been in analysis for years, but with a lot of mental reservations tucked away in some overcoat pocket which are never put on the table, never brought into the analytical process. Therefore it remains always slightly conditional and not quite "it." You wonder why it does not go further. If there is such a sticking place you generally find that in a woman it is made by the animus and in a man by the anima, who just kept something out. For example, "Oh well, this is just analysis, but life is something different," or ''This is an analytical relationship. One has to stand by one's transference, but it does not quite count; it is different from other relationships," and so on. Such secret detaching thoughts prevent the whole thing from ever being quite whole. One plays the role of the analysand and goes through the process seemingly honestly, but one secret is not given up, and with some people it is actually the idea of suicide. Until this idea is revised through some inner process, nothing is quite real. If you live with the idea that you might escape life, then the possibility of total living is lamed, for one needs to be totally involved with all one's feelings.

The snake is very clever, for just when the little prince arrives on earth and might get involved with reality, it sneaks up and says, "Oh, you see, life is hard and it is very lonely on earth. I have a secret, I can help you out of it." It is very ambiguous. I think the most poisonous aspect of this problem is that one does not notice that one has such a mental reservation: it "has" one; one is possessed by it. Sometimes one can only notice it indirectly if one asks oneself why one is not living completely. "Why am I cut off from life? Why is everything not quite real all the time?" Then you can be pretty sure that either the animus or the anima has put something between you and reality in a very clever way. In a man, it is generally through the mother complex, for that is like a plastic envelope between him and reality so that he is never really quite in touch; nothing quite counts at the present moment. With a woman, it is the animus who whispers something at the back of her mind, some kind of "nothing but" remark.

Question: How does the animus work in a woman?

Suppose you get in touch with a woman toward whom you feel warmly, to which she seems to respond, but all the time you have the feeling that you can't quite get through to her feeling. It might be your fault, but perhaps you are quite sure that is not the reason. It is difficult for me to describe because I am a woman myself, so I am not in the situation of a man who is wooing a woman. But it may happen that a woman comes to me who seems to have a positive attitude. She does not appear to lie but hands me her whole material and seems to have confidence in me. But all the time I have an uncanny impression that the thing is not sticking together somehow. I then feel that if a catastrophe happened, if there should be a chance of this woman snapping or committing suicide, that—to express it symbolically—we are not attached to each other. Such a person might suddenly write to say she was interrupting the analysis for some reason—because she was going away, or for lack of money, or some other reason, or pseudo-reason—and then you are just left completely nonplussed.

Question: But how do you account for that?

It is the father complex plus an animus possession. I remember the case of a young girl with whom I had a very good contact, but one day she came and attacked me in a most horrible way. When I broke through it she collapsed and it came out that she had made up her mind to commit suicide and this was to be a good-bye quarrel. She wanted to kill her feeling for me so that she could commit suicide. That came absolutely out of the blue. The contact the day before had been very good, nothing had happened in our relationship, but for some reason she had had enough of her difficulties in life and secretly made up her mind to commit suicide. But then she thought that her feeling for me was something which stood between her and suicide, so she made up her mind to behave so nastily to me that I would have enough of her and then she would be free to go. That was an idea which had suddenly stung her like a snake-bite.

Question: But would that have been conscious to her?

I had warned her. She had had a dream which said that an old man was rattling autonomously around on a child's red bicycle. This old man was a suicidal drunkard. So I knew she had a father-animus figure who was linked up with childish emotion—the child's red bicycle—and that was rattling around autonomously at the back of her psyche. Though I interpreted the dream and told her that something in her was like that, she could not get it; she looked at me blankly, but then one day it broke through. That is what happens when there are snake dreams. Then one has to expect that people will act out of the blue.

A man who had a lot of snake dreams, after fifteen years of marriage suddenly made up his mind from one minute to another to divorce his wife without even talking to her about it first. He might perhaps have done such a thing after one year's marriage, but not after fifteen! I had met him the week before when everything was okay, and the next week the whole thing was done and the lawyer was in charge! For fifteen years he had lived with her, and apart from animus-anima trouble, which was not worse than in many other cases, it had been all right. But there was the snake in him! I had always warned him to watch out for either committing suicide or something else when such ideas got hold of him. The snake indicates the capacity for cold fits in which some instinctive action can be taken. I think that in that case the divorce was not wrong in itself, or possibly not, or at least it was something to be seriously considered, but what was absolutely inhuman was the sudden cold fit. The idea had not occurred to him before, and then he made up his mind and arranged the whole thing with his lawyer within twenty-four hours! Naturally, his wife could rightly complain that this was inhuman, for it was. He could have discussed it with her, saying that their marriage had become a habit without any meaning in it any more, or something like that, so as to prepare her emotionally for the shock, but he did not even do as much as that.

The girl who wanted to commit suicide did do something more, for she had at least wanted a good-bye quarrel. She was more related, for she did not just go and commit suicide but tried first to ruin our relationship; that was a gesture of relatedness. If someone even rings up and says, "I am going to commit suicide, but I just wanted to say good-bye," that is human; one part of the personality is still outside the snake. What really had got her was the old man on the child's bicycle, and that is why I said that with a woman it was connected with the animus, and in that case also with the father-image, which was very negative. The old man showed the unrelatedness. He ran along autonomously and she was doing the same thing. I told her I thought that if she committed suicide, her ghost would hover over her corpse and be very sorry! It would have been a suicide motivated by an affect.

Remark: Such a situation would bring the problem of life and death into consciousness, and the committal would have to take place then in order to resolve that, would it not?

Yes, if that comes up, then one has to make up one's mind consciously. I did not tell her not to commit suicide; I told her not to do it so rashly and under the compulsion of an affect. It was not a mature decision. She should just think it over, and if she had really made up her mind to commit suicide then it would not matter if she waited another week, when she could do it after having come to a definite decision. That would be a reasonable mature decision, but she should not do it in the middle of an affect and then regret it after—if that is possible! The immaturity of the sudden decision for self-destruction was wrong; a week's delay would have caused her to question whether she really wanted to die or not.

Many people live involuntarily and have never made up their minds about that question; that is very dangerous. When you get in touch with such people, you realize a constant secret mental reservation. If you tell them, they do not understand and just shake their heads, for it is completely autonomous. The person never seems to be quite present. There is always something evasive. In the case of the girl when the crisis came, she and I then caught the man on the bicycle. He had always worked at the back of her mind, always making everything not quite true. With men the mother complex has exactly the same effect, except that in a way it is even more difficult to catch because it does not form itself in the man's mind as an idea. The girl had the definite idea of killing herself and that life was not worth while; it was a kind of reflection. But the mother complex form of that is manifested in a depressive mood, a "nothing but" mood, something completely vague and intangible. Especially men with a negative mother complex have it, particularly when something goes well (say that they find a girlfriend who suits them or are successful in their professional life). You might expect them to look a bit happier, instead they look pale and say, "Yes, but . . ." But they cannot express the mood in words. There is a childish state of constant dissatisfaction with themselves and the whole of reality. That is something very difficult to catch, and it is very infectious; one gets depressed oneself by it and cannot even react. It is like a wet blanket over everything.

Saint-Exupéry is an example of the irritated bad mood. He had moods where he just paced up and down his flat the whole day, smoking one cigarette after another and just feeling annoyed, annoyed with himself and everything else in the world. That is how the mother complex comes out in a man, in those snarling disagreeable moods, or in flat depression. It is an anti-life reaction and has to do with the mother.

With Saint-Exupéry there is also the tendency to take opium. As a member of the class has just pointed out to me, the whole psychology of the drug taker is connected with the idea of flirting with death, getting away from reality and its hardships. Generally, people who take drugs have quite a lot of snake dreams. The poisonous snakes make them poison themselves, which is because they do not know, or do not see, how to get out of their split in some other way. Alcohol also sometimes goes along with this problem, for that also acts as a drug. You will remember that I told you that Saint-Exupéry had a relationship with a woman who taught him to smoke opium and that his mother especially liked this woman. So there one sees a direct connection between the negative mother and the tendency to poison oneself. To Saint-Exupéry, flying, or drugs, represented the two possibilities of getting rid of those irritated depressive moods, but he never got through the mood. He tried to switch out of it, either by drugs or by flying again. He never got to the bottom of the trouble, namely, a suicidal tendency due to this deepest weakness which he could not overcome.

When the little prince goes on, he meets with a number of astonishing things. His first discovery is that there are hundreds of roses exactly like his own.

And he was overcome with sadness. His flower had told him that she was the only one of her kind in all the universe. And here were five thousand of them, all alike, in one single garden!

"She would be very much annoyed," he said to himself, "if she could see that. . . She would cough most dreadfully, and she would pretend that she was dying, to avoid being laughed at. And I should be obliged to pretend that I was nursing her back to life—for if I did not do that, to humble myself also, she would really allow herself to die . . ."

Then he went on with his reflections: "I thought that I was rich, with a flower that was unique in all the world; and all I had was a common rose. A common rose, and three volcanoes that come up to my knees—and one of them perhaps extinct forever . . . That doesn't make me a very great prince . . ."

And he lay down in the grass and cried.

You probably all know examples among the Romantic writers, such as, for instance, E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Golden Pot," about which Aniela Jaffé has written a very good paper, or the novel Aurelia by Gerard de Nerval. They show what a great problem it was, especially for the Romantic authors, to accept the paradox that the anima could be a goddess and at the same time an ordinary person. Actually, Gerard de Nerval fell in love with a little midinette in Paris. Perhaps his having some German blood in him was responsible for the fact that when he fell in love he was carried away by deep and overwhelming romantic feelings, for that girl seemed to him to be the goddess herself and at least meant as much to him as Beatrice had for Dante. He was completely overwhelmed by his feelings of romantic love, and then the French cynical side, the Gaulois side in him, could not stand it, and spoke of her as une femme ordinaire de notre siècle—an ordinary woman of our time! The result was that he ran away from her and then had a very catastrophic dream, namely, he came into a garden where there was the statue of a beautiful woman which had fallen from its pedestal and broken into two parts. The dream says: if you judge her like that, you break your soul-image into two—an upper and a lower part. The upper part is the romantic goddess and the other part is just an ordinary woman—any other girl would do—and she is a statue and no longer alive.

Afterward came the whole catastrophic development of his schizophrenia, which ended in his hanging himself by his braces. The catastrophe was that he could not stand the paradox that to him this woman was divine and everything unique; his reasonable personality had to say she was just one pretty little midinette among hundreds in Paris, and he a young man who had fallen in love with her, and there were hundreds of others like him too! It is the paradox of being human—that we are one specimen among three billion other specimens of the same kind plus the fact that each one of us is unique.

To think of oneself in a statistical way is most destructive to the process of individuation, because it makes everything relative. Jung says that Communism is less dangerous than the fact that we are all more and more penetrated by our habit of thinking statistically about ourselves. We believe in scientific statistics which say that in Switzerland so and so many couples marry per year and find no flat, or that there are so and so many in each town, etc. You do not realize what it does to you when you read statistics. It is completely destructive poison, and what is worse is that it is not true; it is a falsified image of reality. If we begin to think statistically, we begin to think against our own uniqueness. But it is not only thinking but a way of feeling. If you go up and down the street, you see all those stupid faces and then look into a window and see that you look just as stupid as the others, if not worse! And then comes the thought that if an atom bomb destroyed all that, who would regret it? Thank God, those lives have come to an end, including my own! That is the statistical mood in which one is overwhelmed by the manifoldness and ordinariness of life. This is wrong, because statistics are built up on probability, which is only one way of explaining reality, and as we know, there is just as much uniqueness and irregularity.

The fact that this table does not levitate, but remains where it is, is only because the billions and billions and billions of electrons which constitute the table tend statistically to behave like that. But each electron in itself could do something else. Or, suppose put a lion into a room into which you introduced one person at a time. You would see that each individual would behave differently. One would stand petrified and exclaim, "Oh!" Another would dash out of the room, the third might not be frightened at all or have a delayed reaction and afterward say he had not believed it. As a test, it would be quite revealing, for each person would react typically and differently. But if you brought a lion into this room now, I bet that everyone would retire to the back of the room, for then the unique reaction prevails. That is why statistics are only half right. They give a completely false picture because they only give the average probability. When we walk through the woods we step on a certain number of ants and snails and kill them, but if we could write the life history of each ant or snail we would see that its death was a very meaningful end at a typical moment of its life.

That was really the basic philosophical problem Thornton Wilder raised when he wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The bridge collapsed at a certain moment and five people were drowned—you read of such things every day in the paper. But Thornton Wilder asked whether that was just chance. He tried to show that each of those five had a typical inner development in their lives and that being drowned when the bridge collapsed was the finale to a very meaningful moment in the lives of each one. But the statistician would say that it was quite probable, since every day two hundred people crossed the bridge, so anytime it fell there would be about five who would be drowned, and they would be there by chance. That is a falsified view of reality, but we are all poisoned through and through by it. It is something that has to be faced. Gerard de Neval, for instance, could not face the problem that the woman he loved was absolutely unique to him, for his statistical reasoning told him that she was just one of the many thousands—which in a way was true too. But it was a half truth, and a half truth is worse than an absolute lie. This is what causes so much difficulty for the puer aeternus and why he does not want to go to an office and do some ordinary job, or be with a woman, because he is always inwardly toying with a thousand possibilities of life and cannot choose just one. It seems to him that that would mean a statistical-average situation. Recognition of the fact that one is among thousands and that there is nothing special about that is an intellectual insight against which there stands the feeling function.

The inner battle between the feeling of uniqueness and statistical thinking is generally a battle between intellectualism and allowing feeling its own place in life, because feeling evaluates what is important to me, and my own importance is the counterbalance. If you have real feeling you can say certainly that this is an ordinary woman (for if you see her walking along the street she is not very different from any other), but to me she is of the highest value. That would mean the ego makes up its mind to defend and stand up for its own feeling without denying the other aspect: "Yes, that may be so from the statistical point of view, but in my life there are certain values, and to me this woman has this value." For that an act of loyalty is required toward one's own feeling. Otherwise one is split off from it by statistical thinking, which is why intellectual people tend toward Communism and such ways of thought. They cut themselves off from the feeling function. The feeling function makes your life and your relationships and deeds feel unique and gives them a definite value.

When the statistical way of thinking gets people, it means they have no feeling, or weak feeling, or that they tend to betray their own feeling. You can say that the man who does not stand for his feelings is weak on the eros side, for he cannot take his own feelings and stand by them: "That is how I intend to live, for that is the way I feel." Admittedly, that is more difficult for a man than for a woman, which is expressed when we say that the man is weak on the eros side. For example, if you say to a mother that her children are not unique, that there are such brats all over the place, she will reply that to her they are unique, for they are her children. A woman is more likely to have a personal attitude.

The man has to think impersonally and objectively and, if he is a modern type, also statistically, and then it turns like a poison against him. This is especially true for men who have a military career and have to sign papers which decide the life and death or fate of many people. A high-ranking officer has to decide what battalion to send to a certain place, knowing that some of those men will probably not come back, that some have to be sacrificed. He must detach his feeling in order to be able to act, for if at such a moment he were to think personally and with feeling about those men in the battalion whom he is sending to their death he would not be able to do it. The same applies to a surgeon who, when he has to perform an operation, must not reflect and remember that this is such and such a person. He has to perform a technical operation which will result in life or death, and this is why most surgeons do not operate on members of their own family. Experience has proved that it is much better not to do so. I know of many accidents which have happened (just an awkwardness on the part of a surgeon who never makes a mistake, but if it is his own wife or daughter he may), so it is better that the operation should be performed by the colleague in whom he has the most confidence.

To be able to detach from feelings is an essential part of a man's life, for he has to have a cold, scientific, objective standpoint. But if he does not relate to the anima and try to deal with his eros problems, then he cuts his soul in two. That is why men, in general, have more trouble in Jungian psychology than women. Because of our insistence on the acceptance of the unconscious, men have to accept feeling and relatedness—eros—and to a man that is just disgusting; it is as if from now on he must nurse babies. It feels like that to him—it is against nature. But if men wish to develop further—just as women must now learn to share the man's world by becoming more objective and less personal—they have to make the counter-gesture of taking their own feelings and their own eros problems more seriously. It is an unavoidable part of human development that we have to integrate the other side—the undeveloped side—and if we do not, then it catches us against our will. Indeed, the more a man takes his eros problems seriously, the less effeminate he becomes, although it may look to him like the opposite. If he stiffens and does not take his feeling problems seriously, he will involuntarily become effeminate. In general it can be said that the puer who has a tendency to become effeminate has a better chance if only he will take his feeling seriously and not fall into the pitfall of statistical thinking—if he does not suddenly think, "Oh, Lord! Hundreds and thousands!—and me too!"

The story continues very logically. The next creature the little prince meets is a fox, who tells him that he wants the little prince to tame him.

It was then that the fox appeared.

"Good morning," said the fox.

"Good morning," the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw nothing.

"I am right here," the voice said, "under the apple tree."

"Who are you?" asked the little prince, adding, "You are very pretty to look at."

"I am a fox," the fox said.

"Come and play with me," proposed the little prince. "I am so unhappy."

"I cannot play with you," the fox said. "I am not tamed."

"Ah! Please excuse me," said the little prince.

But, after some thought, he added: "What does that mean—'tame'?"

"You do not live here," said the fox. "What is it that you are looking for?"

"I am looking for men," said the little prince. "What does that mean—'tame'?"

"Men," said the fox. "They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?"

"No," said the little prince. "I am looking for friends."

So you see Saint-Exupéry knows what projection is!

"What does that mean—'tame'?"

"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."

"To establish ties?"

"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys."

Now he is going to say how you get out of statistical thinking.

"And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . ."

"I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower . . . I think she has tamed me . . ."

"It is possible," said the fox. "On the Earth one sees all sorts of things."

"Oh, but this is not on the Earth!" said the little prince.

The fox seemed perplexed, and very curious.

"On another planet?"

"Yes."

"Are there hunters on that planet?"

"No."

"Ah, that is interesting! Are there chickens?"

''No."

"Nothing is perfect," sighed the fox.

But he came back to his idea.

"My life is very monotonous," he said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat . . ."

The fox gazed at the little prince for a long time.

"Please—tame me!" he said.

"I want to, very much," the little prince replied. "But I have not much time."

A little later he says:

"What must I do, to tame you?"

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me—like that—in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day . . ."

So they become closer friends and when the hour for the little prince's departure comes, the fox tells his secret, as he had promised he would.

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

"It is the time I have wasted for my rose—" said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . ."

"I am responsible for my rose," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

It can be said that the fox teaches the little prince the important value of the here-and-now and, with it, of feeling. Feeling gives value to the present, for without it one has no relationship to the here-and-now situation, and with it comes responsibility and, through that, a formed individual. Here again we have the frequent motif of the helpful animal which teaches man how to become human or, in other words, teaches the process of individuation.

In his article "The Primordial Child in Primordial Times," Professor Kerényi gives a Tatar poem which runs:

Once upon a time, long ago,

There lived an orphan boy,

Created of God,

Created of Pajana.

Without food to eat,

Without clothes to wear:

So he lived.

No woman to marry him.

A fox came;

The fox said to the youth:

"How will you get to be a man?" he said.

And the boy said:

"I don't know myself how I shall get to be a man !" [11]

And then, exactly like the fox in our story, this fox teaches the orphan boy how to become human. So you can say that like the snake the fox represents an instinctual power in man himself which, though it is represented as an animal, really belongs to humanity. In mythology and also in medieval allegories, the fox plays a very paradoxical role. For instance, Picinellus says in his Mundus Symbolicus: "The fox represents sly cruelty; he is a bad flatterer. He represents lust. He is extremely cautious and moves along in crooked paths." Gregory the Great says, "Foxes are false animals, they always use crooked ways and therefore represent cunning sly demons." This fits with the fact that in Southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, foxes are supposed to be the souls of witches. In our local stories it is believed that when a witch goes out, her body lies in bed half dead and her soul goes out as a fox and causes damage. There are a lot of stories where a hunter meets a fox who causes a storm, so that the hay which has just been brought in gets blown away—or something of that kind. Or, there is a fox near an avalanche and the avalanche comes down, and then the hunter shoots but only wounds the fox, and the next morning when he goes through the village he sees an old woman limping, or with a bandaged arm, and he says: "Aha! That was the fox!"

Strangely enough, in China and Japan there is the same belief that a fox is the exteriorized soul of the witch or the hysterical woman, and is also the cause of hysteria and psychological trouble in women. A Geman psychiatrist called Baelz was in Tokyo about 1910 and he saw such a fox case and described it, without knowing any of the mythology which I have been telling you. What happened was that a Japanese peasant woman who had fits was brought in. When she was normal, she was absolutely stupid—a fat, unintelligent, very dumb woman. Then she got what could be called "fox fits" and became quite different. She herself said that she felt a pain in her chest and then she had a nervous need to bark and would bark like a fox. Afterward, as Baelz says, she went into a trance-like state and became clairvoyant. She told the psychiatrists in the ward all about their private lives and their marriage problems and everything else. She was just a medium. She was highly witty and intelligent at such times and very cunning. After a while she would get tired and pale and would bark a little again, and then fall asleep. When she woke up she would again be the stupid woman with whom you could not do much. It was a typical case of a dual personality: she was either the fox-witch or a stupid peasant. In conjunction with the belief in this country that foxes are witch-souls, it is a very interesting story.

In medieval symbolism, the fox has not only this negative meaning but is also an animal of the god Dionysus, who has, among others, the name Bassareus, which is connected with the word "fox." In Christian allegory this idea continued. As Picinellus says, "The fox is a symbol of faith and foresight because a fox investigates things by his hearing, and thus also the Christian can perceive the divine mysteries only with his ears and not penetrate them with his eyes." Here the fox is the one who knows about the invisible. This is interesting because in our story (quite independently, for I do not think Saint-Exupéry read anything as strange as Picinellus) the fox also says, "Only the things seen by the heart which are invisible outwardly are the real things." The fox believes in that which is not obvious but is known to feeling—that which is opposed to statistical reality.

If the little prince had understood what the fox said, if he had really understood it and had not just repeated it mechanically without apparently taking it in, what would have happened to him? He does suddenly understand why the rose back on his planet is meaningful, for he says, "Oh, I have wasted a lot of time. So that is why she is unique to me! And that is why I have to be responsible for her and not take her as one of the many." That realization looks as though he had understood the fox, but what is lacking?

Answer: He wants to go back to the planet.

That helps him to go back to the rose later, perhaps to choose death. But what he does not notice is that he has one friend on the planet, the rose, and one friend down here, the fox! If he had really understood, he would not only have made up his mind to go back to the rose, but he should have fallen into a conflict and asked himself what he was going to do? The fox is here on earth and that friendship must last, for otherwise it is meaningless, but now the fox makes him realize that at the same time he has an obligation to the rose. There is again a fatal constellation! He should not have concluded that he has to go back to his rose; he should have fallen into a conflict because now he has a friend on each of the planets. But it does not even occur to him that through the fox he has got into a conflict! His only conclusion is that he has to go back to his rose.

So the fox's teaching, which really would be something to tie him to the earth, operates just the opposite way in him: it liberates him from the earth and makes him long to go back to the asteroid. That shows how deep and fatal the death-pull is in Saint-Exupéry. It would have meant a conflict if he had realized that he had to say yes to the fox here, and also yes to the rose over there. And what about that? Then he would have fallen into an adult psychological stage where one is constantly in that conflict, with obligations to the figures of the Beyond, that is, to the unconscious, and obligations to human reality on this side.

For instance, if a man has an obligation to his anima and also to the woman with whom he made friends or married, then he gets into the typical duality situation of life where one always has a real conflict and a double pull, and is always torn between obligations to this side of life and to the inner or other side. That would be the realization, or the crucifixion, the basic truth of life, that life is double and is a double obligation. Life itself is a conflict because it always means the collision of two tendencies. That is what makes up life, but that realization escapes the little prince completely or he escapes the realization. It is one more of those little, but fatal, turns in the story which point toward the tragic end.

Notes

[9] See Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7, pars. 254ff, 471ff.

[10] "The Psychology of the Child Archetype," The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par, 282.

[11] Jung and Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, p. 29

Lecture 5

Last time we ended with the problem of the fox, namely, that when the fox taught the little prince that the feeling function establishes ties and changes statistical thinking (for feeling thereby makes one's own situation and one's own relationships unique and breaks the spell of statistical thinking, which works against one), then the little prince at once made up his mind to go back to the rose without it ever occurring to him that he has now also some tie to the fox. Later he says to Saint-Exupéry:

"You must return to your engine. I will be waiting for you here. Come back tomorrow evening . . ."

But I was not reassured. I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed . . ."

You see, he only feels some slight sorrow at leaving the fox. It does not occur to him, as I pointed out last time, that he could get into a conflict and take that conflict seriously, asking himself to whom he was now bound. The decision is in favor of a return to the rose and the Beyond.

Then follows one of the most poetic episodes of the book. Saint-Exupéry begins to suffer from thirst and runs away into the desert. The little prince goes with him and suddenly causes him to find an imaginary well whose water refreshes him and fills him with joy—it is a fata morgana. They walk and walk, and the little prince always says that there is a well somewhere. And then they see one. Saint-Exupéry begins to doubt if this can be true, knowing that where there is a well in the desert there is also a village, but with this well there is no village, so he is very doubtful. But the little prince runs toward it and tries to work the pulley and the two drink from this imaginary well. In Terre des Hommes, one of his other novels, Saint-Exupéry says of the water:

Oh water, thou hast no colour and no taste. Thou canst not be defined. One tasteth thee without knowing thee. Thou dost penetrate us with a joy which cannot be explained by the senses. Through thy blessing all the dried-up sources of our heart begin to flow afresh. Thou art the greatest treasure on earth. Thou dost not suffer any mixture or brook any alteration. Thou art a dark divinity but thou dost impart an infinitely simple joy.

This episode in the book goes back to the time when he was lost with his mechanic, Prevost. They walked and walked and had the experience of a fata morgana, and then finally, as I told you before, at the last minute they met a Bedouin who gave them a drink of water from his bottle and so rescued them. At that moment he probably had the experience which he described in Terre des Hommes, and here he has it again. It was one of his deepest experiences and therefore repeats itself in his books.

Since the divine child, whom the little prince represents, is a symbol of the Self, he is also the source of life. Like many mythological saviors, or child-gods, he has the source. How can you explain that? Why is the motif of the source of life, the water of life, so often combined with the motif of the divine child? What are the practical links?

Answer: He has the force of renewal and is the symbol of the Self.

Yes, but how does that work out in life, practically? Why does the child side represent the flow of life and the possibility of renewal?

Answer: Because the child has a naive view.

Yes, because the child has a naive view of life, and if you remember your own childhood, it is when you are intensely alive. The child, if it is not already neurotic, is constantly interested in something. Whatever else the child may suffer from, it does not suffer from remoteness from life, normally—only if it is thoroughly poisoned by the neuroses of its parents. Otherwise it is fully alive, and that is why people, thinking back to their own childhood, long to have that naive vitality which they have lost in becoming grown-up. The child is an inner possibility, the possibility of renewal, but how does that get into the actual life of an adult? What does it mean, for instance, if an adult person dreams about a girl or a boy? What does that mean practically?

Answer: A new venture, or a new relationship.

A new relationship perhaps. I would simply say a new adventure on the level of those functions that have remained naive. It has to do with the inferior function, through which the renewal comes, which has remained childlike and completely naive. It therefore conveys a new view and experience of life when the worn-out superior function comes to its end. It imparts all those naive pleasures which one has lost in childhood. That is why we have to learn to play again, but on the line of the fourth or inferior function. It does not help if, for instance, an intellectual person starts some kind of intellectual play. If a thinking type were to quote the Bible, saying that unless you become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven, and then would go to a club to play chess, that would not help at all, for it would again involve the main function. There is a great temptation to do that, namely, to accept the idea of play and of turning to something else, something noncommittal, but to do it within the field of the main function. I have often seen feeling types whose feeling function has run out, but if I tell them that they must do something which has no purpose, something playful, then they propose going and working in a kindergarten, or something like that. But that is nonsense, for that would again be on the feeling side, that would be a half-way acceptance and an escape at the same time.

The really difficult thing is to turn directly to the inferior function and play there. For this the ego has to give up its control. If you touch your inferior function it decides on the kind of play, you cannot decide on it. The inferior function, just like an obstinate child, will insist that it wants to play at something or other, though you may say that that is not suitable and would not work well. For example, in an intuitive, the inferior function may want to play with clay and the person lives in a hotel room and would much prefer something clean because that makes a lot of dirt in a hotel room! But you cannot dictate to the inferior function! If you are an intuitive and your inferior function wants to play with stones or clay, then you have to make the effort to find a place where that would be possible. That is exactly the difficulty; the ego always has thousands of objections to turning to the inferior side. It is always something very difficult to arrange practically.

The inferior function is a real nuisance, just as children are, for you cannot put it in a box and take it out when it suits you. It is a living entity with its own demands, and it is a nuisance to the ego which wants to have its own way. The half concession of giving the enemy something so as to be left alone, which most people try when they see they have to turn to the inferior function, always reminds me of the Greeks who went about with their pockets full of honeycakes. Whenever they saw an abyss, or a chasm, or something like that, they quickly threw in a honeycake, for if one threw something to the dark powers they would leave you alone, a kind of buying oneself off by throwing a sacrifice. Or, for instance, in the descent to the underworld, the Greek heroes always had honeycakes to throw to Cerberus so that he fell asleep and they could slip by. That can work sometimes but for the main conflict it does not work. You cannot appease these demands by throwing them something. But if you accept the humiliating experience which makes the ego submit to the demands of the inferior or childish part of the personality, then the divine child becomes a source of life. Then life has a new face and one discovers new experiences. Everything changes. Also, naturally, the child is a uniting symbol and brings together the separated or dissociated parts of the personality, which again has to do with the quality of being naive. If I trust my naive reaction, then I am whole; I am wholly in the situation and wholly in life. But most people do not dare do this because one exposes oneself too much. However, one just needs the courage, being somewhat shrewd at the same time, so that one does not expose oneself to those people who do not understand. One should be clever and not just childish.

When you begin to play with the inferior function you touch uniqueness, which is at the bottom of all the tests! In the tree test, or the Rorschach test, you tell people to do whatever comes into their minds, and they give themselves away at once, because play is genuine and therefore also unique. That is why child therapists let children play, and in two minutes they reveal their whole problem, for in that way they are themselves. I often suggest to feeling types that they should take some striking motif in a dream, a numinous motif, and try to do some real thinking on that, not to look up the indexes in Jung's books, but really to try to find out what they think about the symbols themselves. And then very often they suddenly get quite passionate and have the most amazing thoughts— sometimes what to a thinking type seem to be very naive thoughts.

I often notice that when feeling types begin to think, they do so exactly as did the early Greek philosophers, the pre-Socratics. They have thoughts like those of Heraclitus or Democritus and such people, and are as fired by these ideas as were the early Greeks. If you read Empedocles or Heraclitus, there is an eternal youth in the way they think, and that is why I love them so much. To us nowadays it seems like mythological thinking and not very scientific. For instance, the atomic theories of Democritus are awfully naive if looked at according to modern theories, but there is a kind of wholeness and enthusiasm about them, together with the idea that now they see the whole picture. Naturally, the material is full of projections of the symbol of the Self, so one gets quite carried away when reading it. There is a kind of springtime of the spirit; early Greek philosophy is like the blossoming spring of philosophy. Very often if a feeling type gets down to his own thinking, he comes to this kind of experience. When that happens the thinking type must retire to his own estate and not say that one knew that twenty thousand years ago! The same thing applies to the thinking type if you once get such a type to bring up naive real feeling and not something organized. Usually the thinking type is so much a thinker that he even organizes his feelings appropriately, and because he does not get on with his real feelings, because they are unadapted, he generally has a pseudo-adaptation to feeling.

I would say that the main thing in getting to the playfulness of the inferior function is to scratch away the pseudo-adaptation with which we all cover the inferior function. The feeling type, for instance, is usually full of school and university theories and imagines that those are his thoughts. But they are not; they are pseudo-thinking adaptations to cover up the fact that his real thinking is awfully embryonic and naive. The same holds good for the thinking type who has very naive feelings; for instance, "I love you, I hate you." If he went round the world saying that to everyone, or saying, "I can't stand you," you can imagine what a stumbling-block he would be! It would not work for two minutes! Even in school you cannot tell your teacher that you cannot stand him! I am a thinking type myself and I loved certain teachers and hated others. I could never dissimulate my feelings sufficiently and always showed what I felt, though I knew it would have been much more diplomatic not to show too clearly how much I despised a certain teacher. But it was always quite obvious.

When you become adult you hide these reactions and then acquire a pseudo-feeling adaptation. Thinking types are often quite amiable and seem to have balanced feeling reactions, but never trust that! That is just a pseudo-adaptation because the other is so painful and helpless and childish that one cannot show it. But if you do have to go to it then you must again dig up the naiveté of your thinking or your feeling and get the crust off the pseudo-adaptation.

Intuitives very often have no relationship to the body and are likely to dress badly or be dirty. Since that does not work they learn to wash and put on nice clothes, and so on, but although they may be quite correctly dressed, there is no personal style. If they would dig up their real sensation, their taste would be artistic, but weird and very much out of the ordinary. Intuitives who get down to their sensation cannot buy ready-made clothes; everything has to be made for them. Neither can they eat hotel food; they either have to have a cook or cook for themselves, and it has to be very special. It gives them a lot of trouble to discover this, and, what is worse, it is a nuisance and expensive both in money and time. You can have the tailor and the cook, but that is not quite genuine, or you can go down to the inferior function, but that is the greatest time-thief in existence because it is primitively slow.

You know that in primitive countries it is impossible to hurry people. If you travel in Egypt it is no good ordering the cars for 9 a.m. and expecting to be beyond the Nile at 10, or in the Kings' Tombs. Everyone who travels in the Orient knows that one has to put up with being two or three hours late and not arrive on time as Europeans do. But once you have made the adaptation, life is much nicer because you have all kinds of experiences: one's car breaks down and causes a lot of fun, and instead of arriving at the Kings' Tombs you get into the desert and have a lot of swearing, and so forth, but that's life too! You can't organize the inferior function. It is awfully expensive and needs a lot of time, and that is one reason why it is such a cross in our lives, because it makes us so inefficient if we try to act through it. It has to be given whole Sundays and whole afternoons and nothing may come out—except that the inferior function comes to life. But that is the whole point. A feeling type will only bring up his thinking if he begins to think about something he can't use in this world, neither for examinations nor study, but if he will think about something that interests him in itself, that is how to get going because it is not possible to yoke inferior playfulness to utilitarian motives.

The essence of play is that it has no meaning and is not useful. I would tell a feeling type to learn by heart what he needs for exams, and not try to think, because he won't be able to do so. He should make pseudo-adaptations, and if a thinking type gets into a situation where he has to behave—say he has to attend a funeral—then he must on no account pull out his personal feelings. He must just behave and do the conventional thing with flowers and condolences; that is the right pseudo-adaptation. To get at his real feeling, the thinking type must find a situation where he can play, and then it will be quite different. So the first thing to do is to take it out of the adaptation field and keep the pseudo-adaptation for those cases where it is necessary. I think nobody can really develop the inferior function before having first created a temenos, namely, a sacred grove, a hidden place where he can play. The first thing is to find a Robinson Crusoe playground, and then when you have got rid of all onlookers you can begin! As a child, one needed a place and time and no interfering adult audience.

To return to our book—after this climax of happiness where they have found a well—the tragic end follows relatively quickly. The little prince asks Saint-Exupéry to draw him a muzzle for the sheep in order that it may not eat the rose on his asteroid, and by that Saint-Exupéry guesses that the little prince intends to leave the earth again. Saint-Exupéry continues working on the repair of his engine and has accomplished it just on the evening when he hears the little prince arranging a nocturnal rendezvous with somebody. He rushes to see whom the little prince is talking to.

Beside the well there was the ruin of an old stone wall. When I came back from my work, the next evening, I saw from some distance away my little prince sitting on top of this wall, with his feet dangling. And I heard him say:

''Then you don't remember. This is not the exact spot."

Another voice must have answered him, for he replied to it:

"Yes, yes! It is the right day, but this is not the place."

I continued my walk toward the wall. At no time did I see or hear anyone. The little prince, however, replied once again:

"—Exactly. You will see where my track begins, in the sand. You have nothing to do but wait for me there. I shall be there" tonight.

I was only twenty meters from the wall, and I still saw nothing.

After a silence the little prince spoke again:

"You have good poison? You am sure that it will not make me suffer too long?"

I stopped in my tracks, my heart torn asunder; but still I did not understand.

"Now go away," said the little prince. "I want to get down from the wall."

I dropped my eyes, then, to the foot of the wall—and I leaped into the air. There before me, facing the little prince, was one of those yellow snakes that take thirty seconds to bring your life to an end.

Even as I was digging into my pocket to get out my revolver I made a running step back. But, at the noise I made, the snake let himself flow easily across the sand like the dying spray of a fountain, and, in no apparent hurry, disappeared, with a light metallic sound, among the stones.

I reached the wall just in time to catch my little man in my arms; his face was white as snow.

"What does this mean?" I demanded. "Why are you talking with snakes?"

I had loosened the golden muffler that he always wore. I had moistened his temples, and had given him some water to drink. And now I did not dare ask him any more questions. He looked at me very gravely, and put his arms round my neck. I felt his heart beating like the heart of a dying bird, shot with someone's rifle . . .

"I am glad that you have found what was the matter with your engine," he said. "Now you can go back home—"

"How do you know about that?"

I was just coming to tell him that my work had been successful, beyond anything that I had dared to hope.

He made no answer to my question, but he added:

"I, too, am going back home today . . ."

Then, sadly—

"It is much farther . . . It is much more difficult . . ."

I realized clearly that something extraordinary was happening. I was holding him close in my arms as if he were a little child; and yet it seemed to me that he was rushing headlong toward an abyss from which I could do nothing to restrain him . . .

His look was very serious, like someone lost far away.

"I have your sheep. And I have the sheep's box. And I have the muzzle . . ."

And he gave me a sad smile.

I waited a long time. I could see that he was reviving little by little.

"Dear little man," I said to him. "You are afraid . . ."

He was afraid, there was no doubt about that. But he laughed lightly.

"I shall be much more afraid this evening . . ."

Once again I felt myself frozen by the sense of something irreparable.

The little prince trembles when Saint-Exupéry rushes toward him and takes him in his arms and scolds him. But Saint-Exupéry feels that he cannot hold him back, that it is too late and nothing will help him. The experience of helplessness, of not being able to save someone from death, has been impressed on him through the death of his little brother. I have now been able to look up the age at which this brother died. I had thought it was when he was six or seven, but it was much later, for François died when he was fifteen. Saint-Exupéry was seventeen at the time, so there is no doubt that he experienced the death of his brother consciously and that the experience shocked him deeply. In his novels if he describes somebody's death, he always describes this terrific feeling of helplessness. One stands there with the feeling that the person is slowly slipping away, floating away from you, and that you are utterly helpless and cannot do anything. You cannot hold them back, and here is the same experience, for he realizes that the little prince has arranged a meeting with the snake in order to be killed by the sand-viper, but he feels that he cannot do anything.

The little prince then tries to comfort him instead of being comforted or helped by Saint-Exupéry. He says:

"All men have the stars . . . but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You—you alone—will have the stars as no one else has them—"

"What are you trying to say?"

"In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night . . . You—only you—will have stars that can laugh!"

And he laughed again.

"And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend, You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you . . ."

And he laughed again.

"It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh . . ."

And he laughed again. Then he quickly became serious:

"Tonight—you know . . . Do not come."

"I shall not leave you," I said.

"I shall look as if I were suffering. I shall look a little as if I were dying. It is like that. Do not come to see that. It is not worth the trouble . . ."

"I shall not leave you."

But he was worried.

"I tell you—it is also because of the snake. He must not bite you.

Snakes—they are malicious creatures. This one might bite you just for fun . . ."

"I shall not leave you."

But a thought came to reassure him:

"It is true that they have no more poison for a second bite."

Though Saint-Exupéry promises not to leave the little prince, he misses going with him. The text runs:

That night I did not see him set out on his way. He got away from me without making a sound. When I succeeded in catching up with him he was walking along with a quick and resolute step. He said to me merely:

"Ah! You are there . . ."

And he took me by the hand. But he was still worrying.

"It was wrong of you to come. You will suffer. I shall look as if I were dead; and that will not be true . . ."

I said nothing.

"You understand . . . It is too far. I cannot carry this body with me. It is too heavy."

I said nothing.

"But it will be like an old abandoned shell. There is nothing sad about old shells . . ."

I said nothing.

He was a little discouraged. But he made one more effort: "You know, it will be very nice. I, too, shall look at the stars. All the stars will be wells with a rusty pulley. All the stars will pour out fresh water for me to drink . . ."

I said nothing.

"That will be so amusing! You will have five hundred million little bells, and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water .

And he too said nothing more, because he was crying . . .

"Here it is. Let me go on by myself."

And he sat down, because he was afraid. Then he said, again: "You know—my flower . . . I am responsible for her. And she is so weak! She is so naive! She has four thorns, of no use at all, to protect herself against all the world . . ."

I too sat down. because I was not able to stand up any longer.

"There now—that is all . . ."

He still hesitated a little: then he got up. He took one step. I could not move.

Saint-Exupéry sat down, and then suddenly the little prince got up and took one step—and now comes the decisive sentence: "I could not move." Saint-Exupéry cannot do a thing. He remains sitting.

There was nothing there but a flash of yellow close to his ankle. He remained motionless for an instant. He did not cry out. He fell as gently as a tree falls. There was not even any sound, because of the sand.

After a while Saint-Exupéry remembers with horror that he had forgotten to draw the strap for the sheep's muzzle, so that the little prince will never be able to fasten it on, and from now on every time he looks up at the stars he is tormented as to whether the sheep has eaten the rose or not. Then follows the last picture. He says:

This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world. . . It is here that the little prince appeared on Earth, and disappeared.

Look at it carefully so that you will be sure to recognize it in case you travel some day to the African desert. And, if you should come upon this spot, please do not hurry on. Wait for a time, exactly under the star. Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back.

We have to discuss this part at some length because it is full of symbolism. First it must be said that the little prince has to be killed like a mortal human being in order to return to his star. He says that his body would be too heavy for that. This is a very strange motif because if you think of the little prince as an inner figure, a psychological inner figure, a symbol of the Self within Saint-Exupéry, then he certainly would not need to be deprived of his body. He would already be in the psychological realm and could return whenever he wanted—could come to earth and go back to the star again. He came down holding onto a flock of birds, and at that time he had already a certain amount of body. He could not fly through the air or fall down through it to the earth, but needed the help of the birds. It is strange that this idea does not occur to him again, but the only point I want to stress is that he consists of psyche and body. What does that show?

Answer: He has got into the human realm.

Yes, he has incarnated to a certain extent. He is not a content of the unconscious which has remained in the Beyond, in the unconscious.It has already incarnated in the human realm; it has become physically real, so to speak, and shows in a nutshell that this symbol is a mixture of a childish shadow and an aspect of the Self. That is the impurity of the symbol. The little prince is an impure symbol; that is, it is partly the childish shadow, which is already incarnated, and it is a symbol of the Self, which is not incarnated. As a symbol of the Self it is in the Beyond and is eternal, and there is no such thing as death; there is only an appearing and a disappearing into and out of this realm—just as an experience of the Self comes to us, and then we lose it again. If we look at it from the Self, it means that it sometimes touches the realm of our human consciousness and then disappears. But in so far as it has a body, it has incarnated in us, in our realm. That means that it has become audible and visible through our own actions; it has become a part of ourselves, and then the problem is difficult. The snake kills the shadow, for the snake can only poison this body and thereby free the symbol of the Self again from this wrong body it got into. The other possibility would have been that the incarnation would have gone on, and then the symbol of the little prince would have evolved, on a more adult and different level, but in this in-between situation the development is suddenly interrupted by the poison of the snake.

Saint-Exupéry describes the coincidence very artistically. At the very moment when he can repair his engine and return to the human world and his fellow beings, just then the little prince makes up his mind to leave. Saint-Exupéry departs toward a human world and the other departs to the Beyond. Because from the very beginning this story is such a mixture of right and wrong symbolism, one does not know at this moment if this departure of the two is really a positive development. You could say that now, after this experience of the Self and the Beyond, Saint-Exupéry can return to his normal adaptation in this world, and the symbol of the Self, which was only meant to meet him at this crucial moment, can return to the place it came from. That would be a positive aspect of this tragic moment, but at the same time somehow one feels that this is negative, in so far as Saint-Exupéry, in his own life, did not return to his adaptation to this world but soon after followed the little prince to the Beyond. So we can say the departure has not really happened or was not quite carried through; they were not cut apart. The human part, namely Saint-Exupéry, followed the other, and thus the departure of the little prince becomes an anticipation of Saint-Exupéry's death. With this goes the fact that Saint-Exupéry had not accepted the departure, as you see from the last few words:

Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back.

Saint-Exupéry had not given up. He cannot accept the departure as such, though it is quite unlikely that the little prince will ever return. He has not sacrificed the relationship. That is another fatal hint because if one does not sacrifice such an experience after having had it, then there remains a constant pull toward death and unconsciousness in the hope of finding it again.

That is a very dangerous and typical experience. It belongs to the neurosis of the puer aeternus who generally, because he is so close to the unconscious, has overwhelming experiences of it which convey to him a positive feeling of life. But then he cannot let them go. He just sits there, waiting and hoping for the experience to come back, and the more one sits and waits the less it can approach consciousness again because it is the essence of these experiences that they always come in a new form. The experience of the Self does not repeat itself, but generally turns up again at those desperate moments when one does not look for it any more. It has turned completely in another direction and suddenly again stands before you in a different form. Because it is life and the renewal of life itself and the flow of life, it cannot repeat itself. That would be a contradiction of its very essence. Therefore, if ever one has an experience of the Self, the only way afterward not to get poisoned and on the wrong track is to leave it alone, turn away—turn to the next duty and even try to forget about it. The more the ego clings to it and wants it back, the more one chases it away with one's own ego desire. It is the same, for instance, with positive love or feeling experiences. People who make childish demands on other people every time they have a positive love experience, or feeling experience, with another human being, always want to perpetuate it, to force it to happen in the same way again. They say, "Let's take the same boat trip because of the magical Sunday when it was so beautiful." You can be quite sure that it will be the most awful failure. You may try it, just to show that it does not work. It never works. It always shows that the ego has not been able to take the experience of the Self in an adult way, but that something like childish greed has woken up. The positive experience has called up this childish attitude—that this is the treasure that should be kept! If you have that reaction, you chase it away forever and it will never come back. The more you long for and the more you seek, the more you get into a cramped state of conscious desire, the more hopeless it is.

The same thing applies to an artist's work when, through an inspiration from the unconscious, he produces something really outstandingly beautiful, and then wants to go on in the same style. It has been a success and the work has been admired, and he just feels that now he has got it and that something of value has been produced. He wants to repeat it, to repaint or rewrite in the same manner, but it's gone! The second, third and fourth draft are just nothing—the divine essence has disappeared—the spirit is out of the bottle and he can't put it back again. It often happens that young people produce something that is a big hit and then become sterile for a long time, for they cannot go back; ego greed has got into it, and that is the downfall of the Wunderkinder, the outstandingly gifted children who are sterile afterward because they cannot get out of this difficulty. The only way is to turn away and not look back one minute. But Saint-Exupéry looks back here: "Tell me, send me word that he has come back," as though he were constantly hoping to recapture the experience. That is fatal.

The snake bites the little prince on the heel, which is obviously where a snake would bite. This is also a mythological motif. You know of the Achilles heel, the only place where Achilles could be wounded, and many other savior gods were often wounded in the feet. For instance, Philoctetes, written about by Kerényi in his paper "Heros Iatros," which means the healing hero. There he has collected all the Greek material on the healing gods and demons: Asclepius, Chiron, and so on, all of whom are, according to certain versions, wounded and therefore healing. One has to be wounded in order to become a healer. This is the local image of a universal mythological motif, which is described in Eliade's book about the initiation of medicine men and shamans. Nobody becomes either one or the other without first having been wounded, either cut open by the initiator and having certain magical stones inserted into his body, or a spear thrown at his neck, or some such thing. Generally the experiences are ecstatic—stars, or ghostlike demons, hit them or cut them open—but always they have to be pierced or cut apart before they become healers, for that is how they acquire the capacity for healing others. How would you interpret that psychologically?

Answer: He would know the whole process of suffering and of being wounded and healed.

Yes, but many people have the experience of suffering and do not become healers. Everyone could become a healer if it depended only on the experience of suffering, for we have all suffered. At that rate everybody would be a shaman.

Answer: By overcoming suffering and having been wounded.

Yes, the natives in the circumpolar regions, for instance, say that the difference between an ordinary person who suffers and the healer is that the healer finds a way to overcome and get out of his trouble without technical help. He can overcome his own suffering; he finds the creative way out, and that means he finds his own cure, which is unique. Eliade tells of a very successful reindeer hunter, a provider of food and therefore a big man in his tribe, who has no thought of becoming a shaman. However, he gets a nervous disease which keeps him from going hunting, and then he discovers that as soon as he learns to drum like a shaman, his disease disappears. As soon as he begins to "shamanize" by drumming, calling ghosts and making cures, he is all right. But once he is cured, he has had enough of being a shaman and goes back to hunting. Then the illness gets him again. So, in the end, he sulkily puts up with it and becomes a healer since it is the only way he can keep himself fit. Against his wish and his will, reindeer hunting is finished forever. This is a striking illustration of a man's having to find his own cure after having been wounded by a neurotic disease and forced into a healing activity. Naturally, at first, when he was confined by his illness, he got a shaman to try to cure him. But no shaman could. He had to cure himself; he had to shamanize, and then he was cured. The healing hero, therefore, is the one who finds some creative way out, a way not already known, and does not follow a pattern. Ordinary sick people follow ordinary patterns, but the shaman cannot be cured by the usual methods of healing. He has to find the unique way—the only way that applies to him. The creative personality who can do that then becomes a healer and is recognized as such by his colleagues.

That, I think, is the most convincing explanation of this motif and the simplest. But you can also see it differently and that comes into our story. When the Self and the ego get in touch with each other, who is wounded? As soon as they come together both are wounded because to get in touch with the ego is a partial damage to the Self, just as it is a partial damage to the ego to be in touch with the Self. The two cannot meet without damaging each other. For the Self, you could say that one way in which it is damaged is that instead of being a potential wholeness it becomes a partial reality; in part it becomes real within the individuated person—in the realizing actions and words of the person. That is a restriction for the Self and its possibilities. The ego, however, is wounded because something greater breaks into its life. We generally think of that part, which is why Jung says that it means tremendous suffering to get in touch with the process of individuation. It causes a great wound because, put simply, we are robbed of the capacity for arranging our own lives according to our own wishes.

If we take the unconscious and the process of individuation seriously, we can no longer arrange our own lives. For instance, we think we would like to go somewhere and the dream says No, so we have to give up the idea. Sometimes it is all right, but sometimes such decisions are very annoying. To be deprived of an evening out, or a trip, is not so bad, but there are more serious matters where we greatly want something which is suddenly vetoed by the unconscious. We feel broken and crucified, caught in a trap or imprisoned, nailed against the cross. With your whole heart and mind you want to do something, and the unconscious vetoes it. In such moments there is naturally an experience of intense suffering, which is due to the meeting of the Self, but the Self suffers just as much because it is suddenly caught in the actuality of an ordinary human life.

That is why, in this connection, Jung refers to the saying of Christ in the Acts of John, in the Apocrypha: Christ stands in the middle of the dancing apostles and says, "It is your human suffering that I want to suffer." That is the most simple way to put it. If it is not in touch with a human being, the divine figure has no suffering. It longs to experience human suffering—not only longs for human suffering but causes it. Man would not suffer if he were not connected with something greater, or he would suffer as an animal does: he would just accept fate and die from it. If you submit to everything that happens like an animal, you do not suffer intensely but in a kind of dumb way. Animals accept things as they happen: a leg is lost in an accident, and they hobble along on three legs; they are blinded and try to carry on without eyes and will probably starve. That is what happens all the time in Nature, but man feels what happens to him. He has a greater capacity for suffering because he is more conscious. If his legs are cut off or he is blinded, the feeling is deeper and more intense because there is more ego and therefore the ability to rebel against fate. If you have ever had to do with people who have met a horrible fate, you will have seen what a terrific revolt can mean. Such people say, ''I cannot accept it! I cannot! Why has this happened to me? It is irreversible, but I cannot accept it!" The animal does not show such intensity of suffering. It tries to carry on until it dies; even if its hind legs are paralyzed, it tries to move, and usually ends by being eaten—a quick and merciful end. For us it is worse, because with modern medicine a human being is not killed quickly. We are preserved in hospitals, and then comes the problem: what does this mean?—why do I have to go on living? In such cases the suffering becomes intense and terrible and a real religious problem.

One can say, therefore, that we are more open to real and intense suffering, and this has to do with the fact there is something within us which thinks that this should not be; if it is a part of my life and inescapable, then I must know what it means. If I know its meaning I can accept the suffering, but if I do not, then I cannot. I have seen people who could take what had happened to them with a certain acceptance and composure when they saw a meaning in it. Although the suffering continued, they had a kind of quiet island within because they had the relief of feeling that they knew why they suffered. But to discover the reason for such suffering we have to follow the way of our own individuation process because the reason is something unique and different in each individual (there is no general meaning), and one has therefore to find that unique meaning. That is why in seeking for the meaning of your suffering you seek for the meaning of your life. You are searching for the greater pattern of your own life, which indicates why the wounded healer is the archetype of the Self—one of its most widespread features—and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures.

Question: Would you say that suffering, if accepted, could become a medium of communication with the Self?

That depends on whether it is accepted in the right way, because if it is accepted with resignation, it does not work. Many people accept their suffering, but with a tinge of resignation. They put up with it, and then it does not help. It must be a positive acceptance, and I would say that you can only get the meaning if you accept. So really it generally works out as an endless struggle and then a moment of grace, where suddenly one can accept it and the meaning dawns upon one. One could not even say which comes first. Sometimes it is the meaning and then the acceptance, or one makes up one's mind to accept it and then at that moment the meaning becomes clear. But it is strangely interwoven.

Remark: Christians have an idea that suffering is of value, but as a rule there is too much resignation, is there not?

That is what I have been trying to describe. If they have a living faith, then they accept suffering without resignation because they already have understanding, and then it is all right. But if you have a kind of cramped faith, such as people have who try to believe, saying, "I must believe because Christ suffered on the cross. I must accept this suffering"—which is what is preached to them—that does not help at all. The person is merely preaching to his own consciousness, and since it is not an experience, it does not help.

How do you interpret the fact that this last picture, which is the most tragic of them all, has no color? Could you analyze the picture? There is nothing but the star and the two lines.

Answer: It is lifeless. Life is receding.

The feeling experience, yes, emotional participation is receding. Now what would that mean? In what way do you mean that life is receding?

Answer: When the little prince and Saint-Exupéry came together there was a possibility of something real happening.

Yes. I only want to know from what life is receding? At the beginning there were very highly colored pictures, there was the one which Saint-Exupéry himself called the "urgent picture." That was the one of the baobab trees, which he says he has drawn much better and which has much more color. And now there is this—quite without color.

Answer: It is a picture of his microcosm at the moment, a kind of mandala.

No. I would say that it is a picture of the loneliness left after the departure. The picture shows the crossing point of two sand dunes and there is the star, the idea being that the prince returned to that star. It is a picture of the loneliness and lifelessness which is left, but what is bad about it? It would be normal to feel lonely and lifeless after the little prince had departed; that is natural.

Answer: It is a desert and there is no life in it, there is nothing growing at all.

Yes, but that is how it would feel. If the divinity left, that is exactly how one would feel. I would say that it is the drawing which expresses his disappointment, and therefore its sadness and emptiness are right, but what is objectionable about it is that the disappointment is not more intense. It is a poor and inadequate drawing of a disappointment and of loneliness. You have to think about it; you cannot get the feeling of it. Try to make a picture of how you feel when you are deserted by the gods; try to draw that, and you will see, or I hope so for your sakes, that your imagination will run in a more vivid way than this. It would take some artistic effort—but after all Saint-Exupéry was an artist—to depict the loneliness of the desert. But draw a wide, wide plain, and get the feeling of the atmosphere into it, its nothingness, and try to express the sad coldness of a sky which has only one star looking down on the earth, with its cold light. You have all seen paintings of being lost, of despair, which wring your heart, in which you feel all the lostness and despair and emptiness, but here you don't. You have to imagine what he is trying to express. Then you think it must be the loneliness, but it doesn't hit you or wring your heart, because there is no color. Why not have made it all gray? If it had been a sad gray, you might have got the feeling of it. Why not make the sky so that it appears as a vast cold orb overhead, so that it chills you to look at the picture? Here you feel neither sad nor chilled. You have to replace that reaction by your own thinking. There is something lacking.

Remark: It is just dead.

Yes, it's dead—it's not even a disappointment! It does not even express sadness.

Remark: But the description in the book is full of nostalgia!

Yes, the description is, but not the drawing, and though the description is nostalgic, it is very childish. There is just the hope to get it back again: "Please send me word." It suggests a postcard, the cheapest means, just public help—just like a radio announcement for some missing person—a request that the next police station be informed. But, except for the greedy child who wants to have his toy back and the poor expression of it, it is a very weak good-bye.

Remark: Perhaps he did not realize that it was a god. Otherwise he would never have asked to be sent word like that!

Quite right! Fancy appealing to the world to send you word—"if you find my god!"

Remark: You can see the incongruity between his thoughts and his emotions.

Yes, there you are again confronted with the extinct volcano. The emotional intensity is not great enough, and that is the dangerous thing. It is typical of the person who in such tragic situations simply reacts by saying, "Oh yes, yes!" Sometimes it is pretense, an understatement. They pretend to have no emotion, but then you can tell by the cold hands and other symptoms that emotion is there, and then it does not matter, for it is just pretense. But if they really have no emotion—when the volcano is burnt out—then it is dangerous.

Remark: I think that Saint-Exupéry himself was quite intuitive and he thought that it was an episode which had to come to an end, just as when he crashed in the desert. Throughout the book you have the feeling that the experience is only meant to last for a short time and then will be over, and the flatness in his picture, together with the experience itself, makes me feel that there is no disappointment because he knew that it would have to come to an end and he could do nothing about it.

That would place too much weight on the intellect. I think you are quite right, but that is a morbid reaction. Suppose there is someone you love and that person dies from an incurable disease, your intellect knows too! It knows that the experience has to come to an end, the relationship has to end, the doctor has warned you, saying that the patient will last another three weeks, but that does not mean that you have no other reaction. Even if you know that the relationship has inexorably to come to an end, that doesn't stop your feeling. That is exactly it! It is clear that such an experience as Saint-Exupéry had in the desert with the little prince had to come to an end; it belongs to the experience that it must do so. But that is exactly the weakness of a personality such as Saint-Exupéry's. People who cut themselves off from their feelings and the emotional layer in order to avoid suffering, or because they are incapable of feeling and suffering, replace all that by reflection; they simply say, "All right, that had to come to an end. Let's be matter of fact about it." If you are able to do that, there is something wrong. If you can write off an experience just because reason tells you that it must come to an end, that is an intellectual argument. Reason has a point and writes off the experience, but for the individual to be able to do so is a sign of morbidity; it is abnormal. Normal people can see with their reason that a relationship has to be given up, but they are sad all the same. Feeling as well as reason has its rights.

Remark: Saint-Exupéry, has really been preparing himself for this all along. There has always been a borderline, but by always preparing himself for it, it is almost humorous at the end because "it is just another experience to be gone through and which will come to an end." That expresses basically his whole life.

Yes, that is exactly the lack of intensity of feeling. Constant awareness of the transitoriness of life, and a sense of always preparing for an end before you get there, is typical of the puer aeternus. For instance, when he makes friends with a girl he knows that the end will be a disappointment and a parting, so he does not give himself wholeheartedly to the experience. Instead, he is always getting ready to say good-bye. As far as reason is concerned, he is right, but then he does not live; reason has too much say in his life. He does not allow for the unreasonable human side which does not always prepare for the retreat because there will be a disappointment. That shows a lack of generosity. Why can one not say, "Of course there will be disappointment because all experiences in life are transient and may end in disappointment, but let's not anticipate it. Let us give ourselves with full love to the situation as long as it is there." The one does not exclude the other. One need not be the fool who believes in nothing but happiness and then falls from the clouds, but if one always retreats at the beginning in anticipation of the suffering, that is a typical pathological reaction. It is something many neurotic people do. They try to train themselves not to suffer by always anticipating suffering. One person said, "I always think ahead of the suffering to come and like that I am trained against it. I try to anticipate it in fantasy all the time." But that is typically morbid and completely prevents you from living. A double attitude is required: that of knowing how things are likely to turn out, and that of giving oneself completely to the experience all the same. Otherwise there is no life. Reason organizes it ahead of time so that one may be protected against suffering—in order that one shall not get the full experience, naively—just when one does not expect it. In that case, reason and consciousness have taken too much away from life—exactly what the puer aeternus tries to do all the time. He does not want to give himself to life and tries to block it off by organizing it with his reason. That is precisely the morbid disease.

Remark: When you think of the pictures of van Gogh, even the most melancholy are full of energy and force and emotion.

Yes, even desolation is fully experienced and even what is lost is fully expressed, in contrast to this. One thinks sometimes how much more alive such people would be if they suffered! If they can't be happy let them at least be unhappy, really unhappy for once, and then they would become human. But the puer aeternus cannot even be quite unhappy! He has not even the generosity and the courage to expose himself to a situation which could make him unhappy. Already, like a coward, he builds bridges by which to escape—he anticipates the disappointment in order not to suffer the blow, and that is a refusal to live.

Question: Isn't it possible to say how the locked-up feeling tends to express itself, because I suppose it must express itself somehow, the feeling that is refused must be there?

Here I do not see it, except in the temperamental spontaneity of the rose.

Question: Is it because the volcano is burnt out that there is none?

I think there is none in him, but you have it in the very temperamental outbursts of the rose, where there is a certain amount of feeling. She is fully in what she is doing. When she boasts, she boasts thoroughly, and when she is angry she is thoroughly angry, and when she is haughty she is thoroughly haughty. So she has a certain totality of expression. She is right in her momentary mood, one could say, and that at least is something. Apparently that was the case with Saint-Exupéry's wife. She was amazingly spontaneous, even to a shocking extent—she threw herself into instantaneous reactions.

Remark: I think in a more negative way it goes through the whole book in the slight sentimentality.

Yes, that always indicates a lack of feeling, for sentimentality replaces real feeling. That is another aspect of the picture.

How would you interpret the fact that the little prince wants a muzzle for the sheep so that it should not eat the rose? You see how the thing has to work: he wants a sheep to eat the baobab shoots, and, naturally, if he just lets the sheep loose on the asteroid it will not be able to distinguish between rose and shoots and will eat everything. So the little prince probably plans to put the glass shade over his rose and then let the sheep eat up all the baobab shoots; then put a muzzle on the sheep and take the shade off the rose, and in that way keep sheep and rose naively apart! So he needs the muzzle, and as drawing is a form of creation in his world, he wants Saint-Exupéry to draw the muzzle which he can put in the box with the drawing of the sheep and thereby prevent the rose from being eaten. But the strap for the muzzle gets forgotten in the upset of the departure, and when Saint-Exupéry suddenly thinks of it afterward he says, "Now what will happen?" And then he thinks that he will be tortured to the end of his life by wondering whether the sheep has now eaten the rose or not? To that question he gets no answer, but it is a thought which will torture him from now on. How would you interpret this?

Remark: His animal side is not assimilated and there is a danger that it may become destructive.

Yes, but the important thing is to remember that you are dealing with this earth and the Beyond. You will remember that when we talked of the sheep I spoke of it as being possibly the little mistake which causes a deadly accident, as, for instance, when there are sheep on the airfield and the plane lands on one of them and crashes. We have already spoken of it as representing the mass-man, the crowd soul. The sheep's negative aspect is the collectivity of its instinctual make-up. Formerly there were always a few goats among the sheep because if wolves attacked, the goats did not lose their heads and the sheep might get away, whereas if a ram were the leader, it would panic and the whole flock after him. So to compensate for the stupidity of the sheep, goats were kept, but the wolves learned to kill the goats first and then make the sheep panic. If the sheep is the collective thing that destroys the process of individuation by its collectiveness, it would not be surprising if it ate the rose.

Psychologically, as a mandala, the rose is also the nucleus of the process of individuation, and in the book the terrible thing is that it is destroyed on the other side—in the Beyond. On this earth the sheep is not wholly negative; the puer aeternus does need collective adaptation. He is usually a wrong kind of individualist and does not adapt sufficiently to collectivity; for instance, most puer i funk their military service because of not wanting to be sheep. In such cases, it sometimes does them a lot of good to be sheep and to have to adapt to the collective. But in this case the collective extends to the star, where there should not be any sheep. This is a mechanism which is tragic: if one is too extreme in one's refusal to adapt, then one gets collectivized from behind and within; if you pretend to be more individual than you are and avoid adaptation by thinking you are someone special—with all the neurotic vanity of being unique and misunderstood by everybody, and so lonely because so misunderstood, because all the others are such tough, insensitive, stupid sheep, while oneself is such a delicate soul—if you have these false pretensions and because of them do not adapt to humanity, then you will be just the person who is actually not at all individual.

I have already spoken of the fact that when I talk of the puer aeternus, people always say they know many of them. They can recall a whole crowd of such men, which goes to show that the puer aeternus is not at all original! He is really a very collective type—the collective type of the puer aeternus, and nothing else. That is, the more he plays the part of the prince, with the idea that he is something special, the more he is really an ordinary type of neurotic—a type you could describe clinically and cover almost the entire personality with such a description. Precisely because the puer entertains false pretensions, he becomes collectivized from within, with the result that none of his reactions are really very personal or very special. He becomes a type, the type of the puer aeternus. He becomes an archetype, and if you become that, you are not at all original, not at all yourself and something special, but just an archetype. This is why sometimes, when you are confronted with a puer aeternus, you are able to say to him, "Isn't that, and that, and that, your philosophy? And haven't you trouble there, and there, and there? And isn't this the case with girls?" And then he replies, "But heavens! How do you know? How can you know me?"

If you are identical with an archetype, I can describe all your reactions because an archetype is a definite set of reactions. One can foretell what a puer aeternus will look like and how he will feel. He is merely the archetype of the eternal youth god, and therefore he has all the features of the god: he has a nostalgic longing for death, he thinks of himself as being something special, he is the one sensitive being among all the other tough sheep. He will have a problem with an aggressive, destructive shadow which he will not want to live and generally projects, and so on. There is nothing special whatsoever. The greater the identification with the youthful god, the less individual the person although he himself feels so special. If people are really schizophrenic and mad and think they are Jesus Christ, then they all say the same thing.

Jung once had two Jesus Christs in the asylum. He put them together and introduced them saying, "Here is Mr. Miller. He thinks he is Jesus Christ, and this is Mr. Meyer and he thinks he is Jesus Christ." Then he went out of the room and left them alone, and after a while he found one sitting in a corner drumming with his finger on the table, and the other was standing drumming on the window. So he asked them if they had made out who was the real Jesus Christ, and both turned to him and said, "He is completely megalomaniac? In the other each saw it clearly! The diagnosis was correct as far as the other was concerned.

Lecture 6

In order to illustrate The Little Prince, I would like to go into some practical material. I cannot call it case material because, as you will see, my contact with this puer aeternus was rather strange; one could not call it therapy.

It is the case of a young man who, when I first met him, was thirty-one years old. He came from a central European country, and his father had had a small florist's shop and had been a decorator, but he had committed suicide, shot himself when the boy was six years old. I could not find out why the father had killed himself, and the boy did not know. The marriage apparently was very unsatisfactory, and the boy remembered that there had been constant quarrels. The mother had brought him up and continued to run the florist's shop after the father's death. The boy himself wanted to become a painter. Actually, I think he was quite gifted in this way. From the age of about eighteen he had suffered from a prison phobia to such an extent that he could hardly go into any town, for as soon as he saw a policeman he became so frightened that he ran away, thinking he would be arrested and put into prison. This made life very difficult for him; he was always running away and sneaking round the corner as if he were a persecuted criminal. He was also very much afraid of the night, and every dusk was agony to him. He was frightened at the approach of evening, and at night he couldn't sleep, and lying awake through the night terrified him. He also masturbated, one might say, naturally. Another phobia, which came out much later, was that he could not cross a frontier or a border of any kind, and it is pretty disagreeable to live in Europe if you cannot cross a frontier! It was in connection with this difficulty that I first heard of him.

I had gone abroad somewhere and had lectured on some Jungian theme and afterward received a postcard saying that there were a few things about my lecture which he would like to discuss with me, and he also had a personal problem and that he would arrive at such and such a time and date. Nothing happened. I kept some time for him, but nobody came! Later I received another postcard, with no apology, simply saying, "This is me again, and I am coming at such and such a time." Again nobody appeared! I found out later that he always got to the Swiss frontier and then couldn't cross it, and so returned home. As he didn't want to explain this in writing, he simply didn't turn up. Then I received a third postcard, again without apology, and again saying he would be coming, but this time I decided not to keep any time for him. Then, suddenly, a young man stood at my door and explained, quite politely, that he had written twice and not come because he had been afraid. The only explanation he could give of his phobia was that once he had been painting very near the frontier somewhere without knowing that he was practically on the border and had been arrested by a frontier guard who had asked him for a passport. Since he did not have one, he had been locked up, but only for two or three hours while the guards telephoned his home town to make inquiries, after which he was let out with many apologies. He said that the experience had not really frightened or upset him, and later he confessed that he had had this fear of crossing the frontier before, so that we cannot take this very seriously; the incident just reinforced the existing phobia. He also told me vaguely that he had once had some shock treatments and had been in an asylum, but I was never able to find out any details, as he did not want to talk about that. In a way, you could probably call it a post- psychotic case. He had also tried several Freudian analysts but had always run out on them after two or three visits. He did not say anything either positive or negative about that, but simply alluded to the fact. As soon as I tried to ask more, he would not say anything.

When he appeared at my house he had a tent with him because he had practically no money, and he wanted to live nearby and consult me. He was very tall with golden locks and blue eyes. He looked just like a beautiful young sun-god, and he wore a Jean Cocteau coat and hood in a heavenly blue, which suited him very well. I talked to him for a few hours that afternoon and found out what I have told you above. Then he took his tent to sleep in a field nearby, but in the nightit was summertime-a thunderstorm came up, and he got so frightened of the night and the storm that he had to rush into a hotel, and so spent the little money he had. He left the next day, and I never saw him in person again.

In that one short discussion I told him a few things about the puer aeternus and outlined a few of his problems, which he did not like at all. I did not expect ever to hear of him again, thinking be would be just like a meteor in my life, coming and disappearing forever. But after a fortnight, I received a letter in which he said that he had very much disliked what I had told him, and had been angry with me and disappointed that the heroic expenditure to meet me had ended so badly. Then, afterward, he had thought it over and had come to the conclusion that after all I was not quite so wrong about the things I had told him, and, moreover, something had happened which proved that I was putting my finger on the right spot. Then he told me the story which I will tell later. He asked if he might write from time to time and if I would answer his letters. That went on for about a year, during which time we exchanged only about flame letters. Then the correspondence lapsed. That was about ten years ago, and I knew no more until about five years ago when I met someone who knew him and said that he was all right and working at his painting. Since then I heard that he married and that later he died from cancer at the age of forty-five.

At the end of his first letter, he wrote, in a very challenging kind of way, that he had had a dream shortly after he had left me. He said he could not make anything of it and he wondered what I would say. The dream was as follows:

I was on the crest of a mountain and was walking with a girl along the ridge. I did not know the girl. Two men jumped up from below and attacked me. During a wild wrestling match with them they took me and threw me down into the gorge below. I had the feeling that I was lost, but there was a lonely fir tree in which I got caught and so did not fall to the bottom of the gorge.

This shows the problem of the puer aeternus in a nutshell. He is too high up, and that was his attitude. He always wanted the cream of every experience. He was the Don Juan type and had been with any number of girls with whom he usually lived for about a fortnight or three weeks before walking out on them. As soon as things became a bit too personal and too binding or too committing, he just walked off. He did not know, or had not realized, that this was an unsatisfactory way of behaving. He thought everybody behaved like that, that that was the way for a man to live. He was, in a way, completely innocent about this. The valleys in which people live, jammed together, but also rooted, held problems about which he knew nothing. For example, he had never dealt with the money problem. He got some money from his mother and lived on that somehow, I must say very modestly, saving money by living in a tent and so on, but he never thought of earning any himself, in spite of the fact that he was thirty-one. When I suggested that a sexual relationship with a woman might also be a human relationship with some feeling and some commitment in it, he stared at me in amazement, for such a thing had honestly never occurred to him. He did not like the idea, but at least was quite innocent about it. That would be the crest of the mountain; if you walk along the ridge, whichever way you go, you have to go downyou cannot go higher up, all four sides lead downwhich shows his situation very clearly. He was in a psychological situation where he could either only get stuck or in some way come down from his height, which is what I wrote him. It is, however, very dangerous to have a dream analysis by correspondence with someone whom you do not know at all, so I kept to vague generalities such as, ''You are too high up. To go on like that will simply mean that somewhere, or somehow, you will have to go down," and I left it to him to make the practical application, for I did not know what possibilities he had.

He was afraid of the night because, when he was lying awake in the dark, he often had the hallucination of a big, very strong, primitive type of man who stood near his bed and stared at him. He said he was like a boxer, and he would stand and stare steadily at him. This terrified him. It is obvious that the man represented a split-off part of his masculinity. He did not look very feminine, but he was quite nervous and anxious and did not go in for any kind of sport. It was clear that this other man represented a part of the instinctive masculinity which was lacking. This type of shadow is very common among pueri aeterni. On account of the mother complex they are usually split off from the physical spontaneity of masculinity. In the present case, the shadow is relatively harmless, and I thought that the prospect was not too bad because such a type is not very dangerous, whereas a really cruel gangster-type is a highly dangerous shadow.

It is this physical spontaneity that the animus of the mother tends to split off. Masculine spontaneity is what the mother who intends to keep, or destroy, her son, instinctively fights. I had an amazing illustration of this once. A woman in my neighborhood had a little boy of four to whom the parents gave a watering-can as a Christmas present. Because it was winter he naturally could not use it, and when he was given the can he was told not to use it in the sitting-room. The boy probably would not have thought of this, but now, of course, as soon as the mother was out, he took the can and sprinkled the carpet. The mother blew up, ranted and raved, beat the child terribly, making a fuss out of all proportion. I heard the noise and decided to interfere. The boy was screaming at the top of his voice. When I asked the mother what was the matter and she told me the story, I could not help laughing. I told her that she had put the idea in his head and that of course he could not wait until spring. She said, "Perhaps not, but this behavior must be stopped because otherwise, when he is sixteen, he will go out and kiss girls." That was literally her answer! The child had shown a little bit of spontaneity, of independence and disobedience-the wish to enjoy life and do something on his own-and the mother realized that this was the little man in the boy, which must be crushed at once. Naturally, there is also the symbolism of the watering-can-the obvious onewhich would later lead him into kissing girls in the dark at the age of sixteen. The mother's fantasy had already anticipated that; she felt the little man standing up and being spontaneous-and she could not tolerate that.

There you see how the mother's animus pounces on these manifestations, such as coming in with dirty shoes, spitting, using bad language, or the phase that young boys go through of speaking of women in a belittling way, as though women were God-knows-what-despised because one is attracted. Such things are primitive-one could even say ape- likemanifestations of masculinity. A certain wildness is natural in a boy, a certain lack of adaptation, and while one has to oppose such behavior to a certain extent, some of it should be allowed to live. Every mother who has a healthy instinct just shrugs her shoulders and says, "Oh well, boys are impossible," or something like that. But she leaves them alone and tries to ignore what they do, although she swears a little because it is a nuisance. This mother, however, revealed exactly what the fantasy was about; she felt the germ of future independence in her little boy's action. That is why, when the mother has "eaten" the son, she has largely destroyed with her animus such physical manifestations of masculinity as being dirty, wild, aggressive, and slamming doors. But such things strengthen the boy's feeling of being alive.

Probably in your youth you have been to Bacchanalian, Dionysian festivals of wildness where you felt on top of the world and completely alive, when you felt you could smash up the whole world. This feeling of vitality is typical in a healthy young person. It makes one feel alive and enterprising, and that is what the devouring mother hates most. She hates it in the son because that is the impulse of life which will lead him away from her, unconsciously, as it were. It will make him forget her which is why, in such a son, one usually finds this split-off shadow of a gorilla, or a big strong boxer, or a criminal, who represents the shut-off masculinity. It also compensates for the weakness of the ego.

In the dream, the shadow figure which turns up is double. Two men spring at the dreamer and wrestle with him. In general, as I have pointed out before, when a figure appears in a dream in a double form it means that it is approaching the threshold of consciousness. In this case it also means something else, namely, that the shadow has a double aspect, a dangerous and a positive one, for instance a regressive and a progressive aspect, which in this case is only too obvious. For example, the shadow figure could come into the life of the dreamer in the form of homosexual seduction; he could easily have been seduced by a homosexual man of that strong type. Actually, as we shall find out later, he had a friend of that type, although nothing homosexual ever happened between them, but the fascination was rather tinged in this way. One could say, therefore, that this boxer-shadow is now in a double constellation in the unconscious. It is either something which can blend with him and in that case will add to his consciousness and strengthen the lacking masculinity, or it can remain outside and be projected, and in that case he will probably become homosexual and run after this shadow in an outer projected form. So this split-off content can either destroy him, or can get him into a wrong way of realizing it, or can help him. From its behavior, one can see also how ambiguous this double shadow figure is: the two men throw him down the side of the mountain. If there had been no fir tree he would have fallen to his death. If this kind of shadow suddenly attacks ego-consciousness, that is what is responsible for the sudden death, or the crashes, of the puer aeternus type. This shadow can save him or possibly destroy him. I have seen cases where the latter happened.

I remember the case of a young man who was completely eaten up by his mother and was half a girl. He was also a kind of artist, and terribly unreal. When his parents died and he was left in a difficult financial situation, a very cynical, realistic type of cousin turned up and gave him the opportunity of joining in a scheme to cheat the insurance company. The young man had never worked before, had never faced reality, and was suddenly stranded. Then this cousin appeared and said everybody behaved in a certain way and that he should just sign the paper and he would get the insurance. He did so, without quite realizing, morally, what he was doing. He soon landed in prison. The cynical, realistic cousin had carefully arranged that he should not appear in it, but the puer aeternus boy sat in prison for having tried to cheat the insurance company.

Another case where the shadow produced a sudden crash was also of a mother-bound boy who hitherto, having been kept completely away from life under a plastic cover, got away from his home for the first time in his life. He went to a big town and, having never had any kind of freedom, sexual or otherwise, and having always had to be so over-civilized at home, ran completely wild for a time. He went to the Friends-of-Nature huts (Natur Freunde)a communistically inclined group of young people who live a very free life in the hutsand there he drank too much and ran completely wild and had a different girl every night. He switched right over to the shadow side. There would have been nothing wrong in it, except that he overdid it in a kind of nervous, hectic way. I only met him once in my life and then saw that he was absolutely worn out, and his health completely run down. I warned him, saying that I did not mind what he did, but that he should not overdo it to such an extent, that he would ruin his health and was running a great risk. He looked at me mockingly as if I were a kind of clucking aunt, and that was all the response I got. Three weeks later he rang me up. He had caught polio and was lame for the rest of his life. I am sure that the fact that he was in such a poor state of health had added to the bad outcome of his illness. That is how the shadow, in practical life, hits the puer aeternus: he either crashes to his death in an airplane, or dies in a mountain accident, or in a car crash, or he lands in prison half-innocently in many cases. Those are all examples of what falling down the mountain means or what it means to be thrown into the abyss. So you see this shadow has a double aspect: it contains the necessary vitality and masculinity but, in addition to that, a possible destruction-something which might really destroy the conscious part.

In the boy's dream, the two shadow figures (he had no associations to them) fling him down. He has to come down and go deeper, and that might be the right or the wrong thing for him. If he goes too far, it is wrong, and if, as here, some saving force comes along, it turns out well. In this dream you can see for the second time what I have already pointed out to you in The Little Prince material, that in the puer aeternus the material is very often in a strange way double: the healing and the destructive factors are close together, and you can interpret everything almost on a double line. An optimist might say that the puer aeternus was too high up and thank God the shadow seizes him and brings him lower; there is the tree, a symbol of growth, and that is how it must go. But the tree can mean death just as much as life. It could be said that the puer aeternus was too high up and that an ambiguous shadow overwhelms him and throws him down, involuntarily, instead of his going of his own free will. It looks like an accident. Actually, this man, in the state I saw him and when he had this dream, was in great danger of death. He could have died any moment, and therefore, to myself, I gave the dream a fifty-fifty interpretation, which can also be seen in the double figure of the shadow. We cannot say how it may come out, but we do know that there is a lysis, a solution, namely, that he does not fall down the whole slope of the mountain, which would probably have killed him, but that something stops him half wayan isolated fir tree which stands just where he falls and in which he is caught.

As you know, there were several mother-cults in Asia Minor and Syria whose center was the mother-goddess Cybele. She was also later identified with the goddess Aphrodite. Her son, her lover in some versions, or her priest-lover, was the beautiful youth Attis. When he became attracted to a nymph and was no longer interested in the mother-goddess, out of jealousy she drove him into madness so that he castrated himself. He did this under a fir tree. According to other versions he was also persecuted by Ares, the lover of the mother-goddess Cybele. We could say that it was the aggressive animus of the mother-goddess which killed or castrated the young god. In Rome, and in several towns in Asia Minor, there was a spring festival in which fir trees were carried in the streets with an image of Attis, generally only his upper part, hanging in the top of the tree. There are also mythological versions according to which, after his death, he was changed into a fir tree himself. All this naturally belongs to the mythological cycle of the young dying sun-god, and the mourning and the spring ceremonies connected with the cult of this god. Here the great problem is the tree. Attis is suspended in the maternal tree, and Christ suspended in the tree of life, or of death, portrays the same idea.

One could say that Attis regressed into a pre-human form; he became a tree numen, the vegetable spirit in a tree. He has grown out of the tree; that is, his life comes only from his mother complex, or from his connectedness with the collective unconscious, and he has no living system in himself. He is like a parasite living on the tree. That is a very serious thing to consider. There are cases of mother-bound young men where it is not advisable to try to detach them too much from their mother complex because they would die. You could say that they can only survive in that parasitic connection with the maternal tree. If you put them on the earth as an independent living system, a fruit of the tree, they cannot survive. They don't have the vitality to become an independent individual-which shows that one should approach such problems without prejudice. If such a man goes about with an elderly woman, many people say that he is just going about with his mother and should be thrown into life, and so on. But one should never go on such common-sense general opinions, which are absolutely destructive, but follow the dream and the unconscious material, for only that can show if the detachment from the maternal tree is possible. If it is not, one is just working for the death of that individual.

The suspended youth in the tree is an ambiguous figure. You can interpret the dream positively and say that the tree is a symbol of life, that it is something rooted, which grows, and has a place on the earth. Taking it in this way, we can say that through the clash with the shadow the young man is forced into being rooted, into having a place in life, and into beginning to grow or mature. But if you interpret it negatively, with the tree (the mother) as a coffin and death, you can say that through the clash with the shadow the young man is thrown back into the symbol of the death-mother and returns to the source of life, namely, into the motherin this case into death. The puer aeternus is, in a way, the opposite of a tree, because he is a creature who flies and roams about. He always refuses to be in the present and to fight in the here-and-now for his life, which is why he avoids attempting to relate to a woman. Woman represents the tie to the earth for a man, particularly if she wants to have children, and a family would tie him forever to the earth. For the bird that flies about, the puer, the woman is the tree principle. In accepting this side of life, he accepts the just-so situation of life, which he tries constantly to avoid. The tree shows clearly that being tied inevitably means losing one's freedom to roam about. The puer aeternus and the tree symbol belong together. The tree fixates him, fastens him to earth, either in a coffin or in life.

On the afternoon when I met the dreamer, he told me principally of his outer life in a superficial way, without relationship to the unconscious, and then in the middle of the conversation he pointed out that when he was in a certain town of his home country he once suddenly lost all his symptoms. He complained that he was afraid of the night, that he had border and police phobias and how intolerable his life was for that reason, but when he stayed in this place he had no symptoms: he did not masturbate, his prison fear vanished, and he had no fear of the police. Then he looked at me very sadly and said that three weeks later it started again and even worse. I said that we should look at those three weeks more closely, that it was always very interesting when someone temporarily lost their symptoms, because it means that for a short time the person must have been in a situation where things were right, which was very important. So I asked him what he had done during that time. He seemed to ascribe the beneficial influence to the town and its atmosphere, but then it came out that he had lived with a girl there, then left her after three weeks and went somewhere else. I asked him if that was not strange and if he had never made any connection between the fact that while he was with the girl all his symptoms had disappeared. Such a thought had never occurred to him. I asked him why he had left, but he said he had just gone. After furher questioning, I got from him the following story, to which I referred previously.

He had known the girl since his boyhood. She was the daughter of a rich neighbor, and he had always admired her from afar. She was introverted and very unapproachable and respectable, and he had always looked upon her as the beautiful girl whom one admires and can never get. From his early twenties he had been friends with a very strong masculine type of man, a sculptor, who in a way resembled the man of his nightmare. The two were always in contact, and one evening in the sculptor's atelier they began talking about this girl and whether it would be possible to seduce her. The sculptor, who was a Don Juan type, was quite sure that he could do it-one could get any woman if one only knew how to set about it. But the dreamer said in this case it would be impossible, and while they were a bit drunk they had a bet on it. The dreamer then arranged a meeting. He introduced her and helped in the situation, and somehow the poor girl got caught in the plot and the sculptor succeeded in getting her for one night. The girl must somehow have felt unconsciously that she had stepped into an intrigue. She realized while with the sculptor that he did not love her and that the thing was a cold, devilish plot, so after that night she ran away terrified and completely avoided both men.

The young man got a terrific shock from the fact that the sculptor had succeeded with the girl, not only because he had lost his bet. He did not understand his reaction, and did not trouble to think much about it. He never tried to contact the girl until later when he met her again and was with her for three weeks. And that was the time when he lost his symptoms, which returned after leaving her.

In the conversation we had that one afternoon I tried to explain how I saw the situation, namely, that actually it was he who wanted the girl, that he was interested in her but didn't have the courage or the virility to approach her himself, and so made his shadow friend do what he should have done. It was so much a projection that he had not realized that if the shadow friend succeeded in getting the girl, he himself got nothing out of it! He was so identified with the sculptor that, at the time of the bet, under the influence of drink, it had seemed as though he were to get the girl himself. Then, when the sculptor triumphantly showed the scalp, it dawned on him that he was out of the picture, that the other fellow had won out and he had made the other live his split-off shadow. To me that was the simple explanation of the shock. Then again swimming along in his unconsciousness-he started once more with the girl and lost his symptoms, but again did not wonder what that meant.

The girl seemed to me to be a very important factor in his life, for with her he had once been happy in the normal way, but when I suggested this he saw me as a match-maker and a witch, so I had to retreat and say that I did not want to push a relationship with her, but that I did think it would not be bad if he perhaps carried on the contact, or tried to think about the possibility of a relationship. But even that very careful kind of advice made him so mad that he left. He wrote telling me that it was the one part of our afternoon's conversation which finished me for him apart from the fact that he had no money.

He sadly returned to his studio and thought that it had not been worthwhile to see me and waste all that money. But after a fortnight he decided that perhaps after all there might be something in it, that he might write to the girl suggesting a meeting nothing more. At that time she lived in another town. He wrote in the evening but did not mail the letter, for he wanted to think it over a little longer. The next morning when he opened his own letters there was a letter from her! She had never written to him before and was so introverted that she had never taken the initiative in any way, so it struck him tremendously that he, the evening before, had made up his mind to write to her but had not mailed the letter and that very morning had received a letter from her. Both made the same proposition in their letters that they should meet once more. As there was a national festival day during the next week, why shouldn't they spend it together? The girl put it in practically the same words as those he had written. That was a typical synchronistic event. Of course he knew nothing about synchronicity, but that hit him and clicked and had a very convincing effect. That is when he thought that perhaps I not been quite so wrong. He forgave me and wrote me about the whole thing. If this event had not taken place, he would never have resumed contact with me because he was disgusted with what I had said.

The two met on this summer day and went on a bicycle trip. They stopped at the edge of a wood and lay down in the grass. He put his head on her arm and, strangely enough, while actually lying in her arms, he had a little nap during which he had the following big archetypal dream:

He was standing at the edge of a cliff. [He made a drawing in the letter, showing himself standing at the edge of the cliff looking down into the valley below it is much the same as in the Grand Canyon with the plain on either side.] He looked down: there were white cliffs on both sides of the valley; at the bottom of the valley were the heavens with the sky and the stars, not water or earth but the sky and the stars. He crawled down very slowly toward the valley, making movements with his legs as though he were bicycling in order to slow up the slow descent still more and [he had bicycled quite a while before, so in part it is the continuation of a physical stimulus when he bicycles in his dream, but there is a deeper meaning] to keep his balance. There is a certain amount of anguish, and he is a little afraid of what is happening, but he is still in control of the situation. He has the feeling that there is something near him but it is very bluffed; it might be a dog. Suddenly below, there is a sort of explosion, the welling up of an enormous outburst of light. The light spot is quite flat and he has the feeling that he is absorbed in it, but he continues to fall down through the air.

Then there comes a change in the dream when the whole thing disappears and below him he no longer sees the sky but rather a quadrangular pattern as you see a landscape from an airplane, with the fields in rectangular patterns. There are no trees. Then there comes another shift when he is again in the same landscape and at the bottom of the valley there is stagnant water. It is gray and dirty, and does not reflect. He wakes up and says to himself: "I am not afraid, but this water is a symbol of the mother and I don't want to fall into that. [He had had some Freudian analysis so he knew that he had a mother complex, and so on, but only in a narrow Freudian sense of the word.] It is like ice at the bottom of the valley and it does not mirror." [He repeats that twice.] He is a bit afraid. Suddenly there is again this spark of light appearing at the bottom of the valley. It is quite round, but the borders are a bit blurred. It explodes like a soap bubble, and in the spot he sees a skull and thinks to himself, "How funny! What does death mean in all this? What does death mean here?" He is not terribly afraid but is still falling slowly at the same spot [which means that he is falling and not falling; it is a dream paradox]. Then the whole thing disappears and is replaced by a floor covered with linoleum at the bottom of the valley. It is yellow with brown spots. [At first it was the sky with light stars, and now there is a yellow linoleum with brown spots on it.] The landscape has completely lost its gigantic proportions, and he asks himself what a piece of linoleum is doing at the bottom of the valley? [This is really surrealistic.] He can see it all very clearly. He laughs a little about the idea of the linoleum.

He then added, in his letter, that he did not like linoleum; he thought it cold and not aesthetic. It was very difficult to get the associations. Those he did not write voluntarily I could not get, so I had to make do with what he gave in his rather superficial letters, and that was all he said about linoleum.

This dream contains in a nutshell the problem of the drama of the puer aeternus who has to come down into life. Usually a landscape in dreams, especially if it is worked out with so much detail and love as in this case, can be said to be a soul-landscape. It mirrors an aspect of the dreamer's psyche. This is seen in the paintings of the Romantic period in which the landscape takes on the qualities of the temperament of the paintera storm coming up or the peace of evening or a dark, threatening forest. These typical landscapes are attractive and, in a way, mirror certain moods or convey a certain psychological atmosphere. Therefore, where there is a worked-out description of a landscape in a dream, it can always be taken as a description of the psychological situation. Here again, as with the dream of the crest of the mountain, he has come to the edge, to the end. He cannot go farther in the way he is now going, which is why he alighted so briefly in my neighborhood-really like a bird lighting on a tree and flying off again. He felt he had come to an end and could not go on as before. He has one split in his psyche, a very deep one. But from a clinical viewpoint it is important to note that his is not a typical schizophrenic landscape. In the landscapes made by schizophrenics there are several splits: there will be canyons here and there, indicating that the earth of conscious reality is falling apart. In one way, the case of this young man is not psychotic because there is only one split-the earth is not falling apart. I have often seen this type of split in compulsion neuroses, which are frequently diagnosed as being borderline psychosis. There you often find the very deep split, but only one, and naturally that is more hopeful because there is only one problem. In this case, you can say that there is one big problem behind his border-frontier phobia but that the whole structure is not dissolving.

I have naturally not commented on the symbolism of this man's phobia because I thought it obvious: the policeman putting him in prison, and the frontier. When he has to go over the border into another country, then he projects the idea that now he is going to fall into the hole in his psyche. The prison phobia is very obvious too. He is like a birdhe never gets pinned down to earth anywhere; he never stays anywhere, either with a girl or in his profession or anywhere else. He doesn't even stay in the same town all the time but wanders around with his tent. So the prison is the negative symbol of the mother complex (in which he sits all the time anyhow), or it would be prospectively just exactly what he needs, for he needs to be put into prison, into the prison of reality. But if he runs away from the prison of reality, he is in the prison of his mother complex, so it is prison anyway, wherever he turns. He has only the choice of two prisons, either that of his neurosis or that of his reality; thus he is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. That is his fate, and that is the fate of the puer aeternus altogether. It is up to him which prison he prefers: that of his mother complex and his neurosis, or of being caught in the just-so story of earthly reality.

He now comes into a situation where he is confronted with his inner split. He is slowly falling, and while doing so, in order to stop the rate at which he is falling, he makes bicycling movements with his legs. There might be a sexual implication in this too, but there may also be a physical stimulus because he was cycling before for several hours. Beyond that, there is also something positive in the sense that he keeps moving. He does not just passively sink into the situation-he maintains a certain amount of movement himselfand in that way his fall is slowed down. That is very important, for whenever an individual falls into the inner splita depression or an inner accident, so to speak-if the ego complex can keep a certain amount of activity, can keep moving, the danger is less. This is often done instinctively by people when they are going off into a psychotic episode. One of the last attempts to save themselves I have seen it in several casesis that they try feverishly to write all their fantasies. They write day and night and keep on and on until they snap, which seems rather crazy, but it is really a last attempt to keep a certain amount of initiative, to keep going with the ego complex and to do something about the flood of unconscious material by separating it and putting it down on paper. The ego complex is drowning, but still has an instinctive need to struggle and keep moving.

If one can encourage that, it is sometimes possible to bridge the dangerous moment, for as long as the ego keeps a certain amount of initiative it does not just sink completely and inertly into the unconscious. If we link this with the actual situation, the very fact that this man went on a bicycle trip with the girl was such a movement. Instead of waiting till his bad fate caught up with him, for once he met the relationship half-way and showed some enterprise by making a contact with the girl on a feeling level. That was exactly the movement which kept him from falling completely into his split. You will notice that during the whole dream he keeps on repeating that he is not afraid, or that he is only a bit afraid. Such insistence always means that people are afraid. The very fact that he has to keep asserting that he is not afraid shows his tremendous fear of falling into the split, but, with a kind of auto-suggestion, he tries to keep his head.

This is a great improvement on the other dream in which he was thrown down into the gorge by the shadow and was saved by sheer chance. This time he keeps a certain amount of movement himself, and that slows the fall. You see how important it is not to push a man caught in this kind of constellation too abruptly into reality, because that might constellate being thrown down by the shadow. It is as if an airplane, too high up, were running out of fuel, and to avoid a crash had to land slowly. That is the great difficulty in dealing with such caseson the one hand helping them to approach reality and on the other not pushing them too much because there is the danger of crashing. The dream shows it very delicately, how one can fall slowly, like a parachutist, but also shows that this man has such a severe split that he needs very careful handling.

The crash-landing means what I explained before when speaking of the young man who had polio, or the young man who landed in prison. It can also happen completely inwardly, not visibly and physically outside. Then, instead of being a brilliant puer, such a man suddenly becomes a cynical, disappointed old man. The brilliance has turned into cynicism and the man is too old for his age. He has neither belief nor interest in anything any longer. He is absolutely and thoroughly disillusioned and thereby loses all creativeness and élan vital, all contact with the spirit. Then money, ambition, and the struggle with colleagues become paramount, and everything else disappears with the romanticism of youth. There is very often an embittered expression on the face of such a man. Here I might give you a dream which illustrates that situation very clearly.

A very romantic young man of the Don Juan type, with a positive mother complex, married and built up a profession. He decided to go back with his wife and children to the town where his parents lived. Naturally, as had to happen, there were the usual quarrels between wife and parents-in-law. The man had a good sexual relationship with his wife but not much human contact with her, and he did not really know her. He had also tremendous illusions about his own mother, whom, because of his positive mother complex, he had idealized, as he idealized his wife. When he unfortunately got into the situation where the two women started fighting, he couldn't help but be very disappointed by the way in which quarreling women behave: lies and slander and outbursts of affect, both of them pulling him apart and telling him poisonous things about the other-the usual weapons which women use in such situations. He fell literally out of the clouds and wrote everything off, drowned himself in work and just tried to ignore the fighting cats who made his life a hell. Instead of shouting from time to time at one or the other, he took very little stand himself and when I met him again I was absolutely shocked at the change in him. He was a disappointed, pale-faced old man with a bitter expression. I asked him how his work was, and he said it was going well and that he had a lot to do. Then the whole story came out. Consciously he was not disappointed. He thought that was just life and that he had dealt with the situation quite all right, but he had not realized the shock to his feelings. Then he told me the following absolutely archetypal dream:

He came into a strange town where there was a prince who had loved a beautiful woman, but she had become a film-star and left him, and he was now engaged to a second woman. It was doubtful, however, whether he loved her as much. It looked as if he still loved the film- star, to whom he had given, as a kind of farewell present, a jewel he had made for hera huge diamond in the form of a tear. Then suddenly the dreamer was standing in the street of this strange town, and he saw the prince walking away with the second woman, with his arm around her. A lot of cars were racing by, and the dreamer thought the couple would be run over, but they succeeded in crossing the street. Then, in a rather slummy part of the town, they went into a dark backyard. Dark men jumped out of a nearby building, intending to attack the prince. But there came a shift in the story, and the dreamer himself was lying sprawled on the pavement, knocked out but not dead, and wondering if the attackers were still around or whether help would come.

There you see that the prince is the archetype of the puer aeternus with whom the dreamer is no longer identified. He has fallen out of identification with the prince and is no longer a puer aeternus; now the prince is an autonomous figure within him. Let us say that ten years before he had been a prince himself, a typical puer aeternus, but now he has come into reality, has dis-identified with that archetype. However, it is still alive in his psyche, independent from the ego. When the ego has dis-identified, then the figure which before was a mixture of the infantile shadow and the Self becomes a symbol of the Self. The association he gave me was that the prince had loved a beautiful woman who had now become an American film-star and gone completely into cheap extraversion.

This is a normal development where one part of the anima seduces the man into life-that was the part which had seduced him into marriage, into a career and into getting involved with life, founding a family, finding a big flat, and so on. With a part of his will-to-live he had been fascinated into life, so to speak. That was all right, but it left out the romantic prince within him, who could not follow into this part of life. So the prince chose another woman as his fiancée, which would mean that now another part of the anima-probably not the exogamous but the endogamous aspectis linking itself with the Self.

Often, in the development of the anima, youths, perhaps when at school, have a girlfriend they admire but can't marry because they are not yet of an age to do so. Subsequently they marry another type. Then later in life-say between forty and fifty-this admired anima-imago frequently turns up again and generally plays the symbolic inner role of being the one who leads to the Self. This aspect of the anima takes on the role of Dante's Beatrice, namely, that of the leader into the inner secret. The other part of the anima which gets projected onto a real woman is what seduces the man into marriage and into life. So you can say that there is an aspect of the mother-image of the anima which leads into exogamous marriage and with that, generally, into involvement with outer life, and there is an endogamous aspect of the same image which remains within and later becomes the guide toward the realization of the inner life. The new fiancée of this disappointed man would be this endogamous aspect of the anima, but she is nondescript, not yet clear, and he has not yet grasped what she means.

The prince gives a diamond in the form of a tear to the film-star, who is leaving. This clearly expresses his sorrow at her departure and also alludes to the fact that he still values her highly and is tragically upset by her departure. Probably he would still cling to her if she had not left. Although this man had an expression of deep sadness and bitter disappointment, he had not realized how profoundly he was hit by the disappointment in his past life, how much he felt betrayed by the fact that he was now involved in the human, all too human, ordinary life of this planet. The prince in him was, in a way, still longing for that lost élan vital which had seduced him into life and which had now faded. Then the prince has to cross a street, which means that now, when he connects with this new form of the anima, an inner one, he is nearly run over by a lot of cars.

In our civilization we still have a Weltanschauung that approves of the young man who leaves his parents and goes off and starts a family. In the present case, the mother resists that, but the collective attitude approves of this kind of development. When a man turns to the inner life, however, then the pace of outer life works against him because it demands that he should go on building up a career, seeking more money and a better position, striving to become the Boss and super-Boss. Here, however, the dreamer in the middle of life ought to give that up and turn to another sphere of life. He is not supported in this, but threatened by the speed and demands of outer life. In reality the dreamer was in a situation where he was completely overworked. He was very successful, and it was hard for him to see that he nevertheless had the face of an embittered old man.

The prince is not destroyed by the mechanical speed (that is, the dreamer's occupation, indicated by the traffic in the dream). He has the courage to go into the darkness of a city backyard, which means into his inferiority and human misery, to the inferior function-to poverty and dirt, where dogs eat out of dustbins, cats mate, women gossip, and so on. The backyard represents the hidden life of the big citya beautiful image of the neglected unconscious. As if in a fairy tale the prince must now enter the darkness of this aspect of life, and in this moment the gangster-shadow attacks the archetypal prince.

This shows the great danger within the psyche of the dreamer, the danger that he will cynically throw away his secret longing for a sense of meaning. Actually, he had already begun to do that. His cynicism is now attacking his inner prince and he is in danger of giving up the search for an inner ideal or truth, or for what he once had felt was the aim and meaning of his life. And then, suddenly, he is in the situation of the prince himself and lies helplessly on the ground. I told him then that he was just awfully ''down," depressed. He could not answer for about five minutes, surprised by the idea. I said, "Well, you are lying on the ground, just knocked down by the situation and don't know what to do. You feel helpless and you had better realize it because then you might do something about it. You might get up and call for help or find people who would pick you up, or something like that." That clicked with him at once, and he saw it. The dream really wanted him to realize that nothing could happen until he saw how deeply disappointed and depressed he was by the situation as it had developed.

That is a typical midlife situation and crisis of a puer aeternus who has successfully moved out of his puer neurosis but is now confronted by a second difficulty. It is always like that, for once you feel you have solved a problem, just wait! The other comes round the corner at once. So this man had not pulled out for more than about two years when the wheel was turned around by the unconscious, and he had again to reevaluate the whole thing and do just the opposite. He was very angry when he heard this interpretation, but it clicked. There you see the danger of crashing, of falling down: if you have succeeded in falling down, you are not at the end of the story, you just have to get up again. Falling down is only one rhythm in life. First the glorious spark is like a star falling from heaven into the mud. But then it has to rise out of the mud.

Now we come to the abnormal theme of the young man's other dream, the theme of the stars below. However, this is such a complicated subject that I would rather discuss it next time. You can take it simply as the old image of the earth being flat instead of a sphere. At one time it was supposed that the earth was like a pancake, or something shaped like that, and when there was a split in it you could see the stars below. From the dream you can draw one conclusion, namely, that the dreamer had a flat world. His reality was not round but flat, which was true. There were no dimensions and no polarities in his psyche, as can be seen by the way in which he walked into and out of situations and into and away from relationships with girls, never wanting to waste a thought on them. Naturally his life lacked any kind of conflict or polarity and was just flat.

Lecture 7

We stopped last time at the motif of the stars below. He looked down into the valley below and saw that much was being transformed there, but what he first noticed was the stars. I mentioned that his world of consciousness was not round but flat. Just as a matter of synchronicity, I might tell you that I read in the paper the other day of a Member of Parliament who said that there were still people in England who thought that the world was flat. This man had received a letter stating that there was a Club consisting of twenty-four people who still believed this! From the photograph in the paper you could see that that man's world certainly was flat. Our dreamer's world is also flat, so to speak: his personality is not rounded and his field of consciousness is like thin ice over the abyss of the collective unconscious. He has not yet built up any solid reality of his own. You could also call it the picture of his ego-weakness. In the middle of this flat world there is this huge split, and he sees the stars below, as if you could see through the firmament below.

There is a famous alchemical dictum which says:

Heaven above,

Heaven below,

Stars above,

Stars below.

All that is above

Also is below.

Grasp this

And rejoice. [12]

I was at once reminded of this saying, whose origin we do not know-only that it comes from an antique Hermetic writing-but we have to try to find out what it means. In general, the stars can be interpreted as the archetypes of the collective unconscious, as nuclei in the dark sky of the psyche. We see them as luminosities, as single lights, and usually they are interpreted as gods or archetypal contents. For instance, the Lord of Sabaoth is the Lord of Hosts (that is, of the heavenly army) because it was thought that the stars were his army, the soldiers of God, and that God led this heavenly army.

Then there is the theory of the stars as the individual gods; the order in which they are constellated would then represent the secret order of the contents of the collective unconscious. In mythology there are also the motifs of the many eyes or the many stars. The dragon Argos, for example, is covered with eyes, and that is also sometimes projected onto the sky. The Zodiac was thought of as a huge snake, a kind of Uroboros biting its own tail, and was represented as being covered with stars. In a Gnostic treatise, the oldest representation of the Uroboros is that of a snake eating its own tail, the head part speckled with stars and the rest black, thus illustrating the double nature of the unconscious totality with a dark, nefarious aspect and a light aspect characterized by the stars. Exactly the same representation is to be found in the alchemical treatise of the so-called Codex Marcianus, in which there are drawings that characterize the "whole in one."

The tail of the Uroboros is the material and dangerous end and is very often the seat of the poison (quite in contrast to a real snake). The head part is the light, spiritual aspect. That was projected onto the sky because the Uroboros always appeared at the borders of human knowledge. In antiquity, for instance, it was believed that the ball of the sky was this huge Uroboros snake; on it constellated the signs of the Zodiac. In the flat form of the world the ocean circled the earth in the form of a round snake biting its own tail. In old maps the Uroboros stood for the outermost circle, and whenever man reached the end of his field of consciousness, he projected that type of snake. Whenever he came to the point where he could say that he did not know what was beyond, there would be the picture of the snake with the stars on it. You see how much the star motif has to do with unconsciousness, especially with the collective unconscious.

Why do the alchemists say:

Heaven above,

Heaven below,

Stars above,

Stars below.

All that is above

Also is below.

Grasp this

And rejoice?

If we look at this naively, we see that it must have to do with a double aspect of the collective unconscious which is above and below us, as though it surrounds us in two forms. Again and again in the interpretation of dreams and mythological material, people make the mistake of identifying what is above with consciousness and what is below with the unconscious, the Unterbewusstseinthat which is below consciousness implying that consciousness is what is above. If in a dream one goes downstairs, that is taken as going into the unconscious, and going upstairs is going into consciousness. That is superficial nonsense. If you look at the mythological maps of the world, you see that above there is a realm consisting of the mysterious, the unattainable for human beings, where the gods live. In Greece there is Mount Olympus, with the gods above and below. In Sumer and Babylon there is a myth about a man who tries to fly up to heaven with the eagles, but he is incapable of transcending a certain barrier above. He is hit by the gods and falls down, and he encounters the same difficulties and obstacles in going to the gods below.

Speaking in spatial terms, if we are objective we have to admit that there is a field of the unconscious both above and below us. This same duality applies to the symbolism of the house. The cellar often represents the unconscious in some form, the area of the drives, the instincts; there are innumerable dreams in which coal is in the cellar and there is a fire, or awful animals are in the cellar or burglars have broken in. But exactly the same things happen in the attic. For instance, a crazy person, overwhelmed by the unconscious, has "bats in the belfry" or "mice in the attic." Ghosts usually rattle their chains in the attic and walk about over our heads. So up in the attic, where it is dark and full of cobwebs and we are a bit crazy, there is just as much a realm of unconsciousness as in the cellar. People frequently dream of thieves getting in from the roof or of demons sitting up there and taking off the tiles, and so on.

We must therefore look at the above and the below from a different standpoint and see if there is any kind of qualitative difference between representations of the unconscious powers above and the unconscious powers below. There are exceptions, but it can be said that in general the above is associated with what is masculines-ordered, light and sometimes spiritual and the below with the feminine-fertile, dark (not evil; there are no moral designations in the original mythological counter-positions), chaotic, and the realm of the animals. The sphere above is connected with birds and angels with winged beings which have to do with the spiritual world. For instance, if in a dream something comes from below, you might expect it to come up in the form of an emotion or a physical symptom such as sleeplessness, or some affective disturbance of the sympathetic nervous system. Or it comes in the form of synchronistic occurrences in the outer world. If an invasion from the unconscious comes from above, it can take the form of an enthusiasm for Communism or Nazism; such an "above" unconsciousness erupts into the system in the form of a collective idea. If it is characterized as positive, then it can be said to be the Holy Ghost; if it is considered negative, then there are the winged demons, bats in the belfry, and other pernicious winged creatures that is, destructive ideas. Whether constructive or destructive, such ideas have a strong collective energy of their own. Dynamic representations belong to the "above" aspect of the unconscious and the emotional, instinctive representations to its "below'' aspect.

Egyptian mythology is an exception to this formulation because in it certain aspects are inverted: thus, as far as sexual symbolism is concerned, the heavens above are feminine and the earth below is masculine. This probably has to do with the Egyptian concept of life being inverted: the main value was placed on life after death and little value on life in this world. For instance, the amazing pyramids were built in connection with life after death, but until the very end of the Syncretistic Period, except for the king's palace, no decent houses existed for the living. To the Egyptians ideas were concrete and real, while actual life-forms were abstract and therefore masculine. Studying Egyptian religion, one is struck by what could be called the concretism of ideas. For example, the idea of immortality had to be realized by the chemical treatment of the corpse so as to preserve it for the longest time. We consider immortality as being symbolic, but to the Egyptians it was not (as in very primitive magic), and the preparation of the mummy was meant to establish immortality. This shows the concreteness of the idea. To the ancient Egyptian, the earth was masculine, whereas the spirit and the idea were concrete. While these conceptions were specific to Egypt, there are traces of this reversed constellation in some other civilizations. Therefore, whenever above and below appear, we have to think in a qualitative way and study the context carefully, not simply identify what is above with consciousness and what is below with the unconscious.

In his paper "On the Nature of the Psyche," Jung compares the psyche to a color spectrum, with the infrared at one end and the ultraviolet at the other [13]. He uses this simile to explain the connection between psyche and body-the archetypes and the instincts. Our consciousness is like a ray of light, with a nucleus in it to represent the ego, a kind of field of light that can shift along the spectrum. The infrared end would be where things become psychosomatic and finally end in physical reactions. At the infrared end, the psyche is somewhat connected (we do not yet know exactly how) with physical processes, so that its activity loses itself, or slowly enters, physical processes of some kind-psychosomatic and then somatic. This would be the end representing the body. At the other end, the ultraviolet end, would be the archetypes. From within we do not know what the body in itself is-or from without either except to a certain extent. Here there is a big question: the mystery of the living organism. At the ultraviolet end is the mystery of that same thing expressed in the representations, realized as ideas, emotions, fantasies and so on, of which it is the source.

As you know, the origin of dynamic fantasies and ideas that come up in our psyche is unknown, but we ascribe such fantasies to the activity of the archetypes. Probably these two poles are in some way connected, although we do not know how. Possibly they are two aspects of the same reality. At one end there is the body, and at the other are the ideas and representations that suddenly seize upon the human mind. Our consciousness generally shifts between the two poles. We know that somatic processes and physical behavior are directed by the instincts. To name a few of the most ordinary: the sexual instinct, with its play of hormones in the body and its physical aspects; the instinct of self-defense-automatic fighting gestures; the instinct of running away, a part of the instinct of self-preservation, which takes over automatically in certain life situations, as when we run away from danger or the reflex action of withdrawal on contacting a burning objectan automatism of the body that we could call instinct.

The difference between instinct and archetype is the following: instinct is represented by physical behavior, similar in all human beings, while archetypes are represented by a mental form of realization, similar in all human beings. Thus, homo sapiens mate in the same way, die more or less in the same way, run away, and stand erect, all over the world. But there are certain patterns of behavior which characterize us as different from other animals. Homo sapiens also tend to have emotions of the same kind, ideas of the same kind, religious reactions of the same kind, seen best in the dream mythological motifs which are similar all over the world. So at the one end are the instincts and at the other the corresponding inner experiences connected with the instincts.

Jung does not assert it with certainty, but he says he has not yet met an archetypal constellation which does not have a corresponding instinct. Take the archetype of the coniunctio, which appears in all the myths of the origin of the world the mating of a male and a female god and the creation of the world, or being together in an eternal embrace, as Shiva and Shakti. It appears in the mystical experience of the union of the soul with God as a coniunctio in a feminine or masculine form, and exists in most religious symbolism. The corresponding physical instinct would be the sexual instinct. Self-preservation in the form of fighting is connected with the archetypal idea of the shadow or the enemy, the dangerous counterpart, the figure which appears in dreams as the attacker or the person from whom one runs. On the physical side that would be represented by the instinct to hit, or to run away, which is physically inborn in us.

It seems, therefore for so far we have not met with any exceptions that every archetypal content has a counterpart in some form of instinct. This is a way of looking at things; that is, instincts are what we see from the outside, while representations, ideas and dream fantasies and images are what we observe from within. If we observe the human being from the outside (we can photograph it in all its actions) then we get the infrared aspect. Nowadays anthropology concentrates on what the human being does in contrast to other animals; how it mates, builds its abode, fights and survives, and so on. Some writers try to describe humans objectively, as though we were just one species of animal, as compared with elephants, tigers and other creatures. In this way one obtains a scientific photograph of instinctual human behavior which is absolutely correct. But if one follows up the same thing from within, which is what we do, we observe what wells up in the human being ideas and representations and we thus have an anatomy of the human being photographed from within, an introspective picture, by which we discover the realm of the archetypes. In an unknown way, the two are probably one, the same reality observed from outside and from within. If we now adopt the idea presented in mythology of human consciousness and the unconscious as being between two poles-the heavenly pole above and the underworld pole below we might compare this to the scientific model of the psyche and call the infrared end of the spectrum the "heavens below" and the other end the "heavens above."

Our dreamer is in the middle field of consciousness, and through the break he can see the heavens below. The movement of the dream is to make him sink down into that. One should also remember how the little prince had to come down onto the earth, investigating, or rather rejecting, certain qualities on his way down. Usually, the puer aeternus is too caught up in the realm of archetypal representation. Through his mother complex he is generally possessed by it, which means that he underestimates living experiences, the infrared realm. It is quite a different thing if I think about a steak or if I eat it: the thought of the steak and sauce béarnaise can be delightful, but if you eat it you will have still other experiences. The same is true for the archetype of the coniunctio. It is certainly one thing to fantasize about a love affair and try to imagine every detail of the experience, but the actual living experience is different.

The puer generally tends to avoid the immediate friction of realization. He does not go into the heavens below, which he underestimates, and along with that the instinctual realization of life. That is why the little prince meets the fox on earth and needs the sheep, but, as you know, in that case the realization of the heavens below did not work out. This is a generalization, however, and the puer does sometimes live a certain amount of instinctual life, but he blocks off the psychological realization, so to speak. He lives his experience automatically, as a split-off shadow affair. In that form his archetypal fascination with the idea of the great love and the coniunctio remains a wishful fantasy-one day he will meet the woman who will bring perfect love, perfect warmth, perfect harmony, a lasting relationship, and so onclearly a mother-image illusion. In the meantime he does not abstain from sexual contacts, for that would frustrate him too much, so he has twenty or thirty affairs with women, as in this case, but he does not let himself be affected by them. He does not live the thing through. You could say of such people that they are as innocent, in the wrong kind of way, as though they had not lived at all, because they live it without being in it. They make a mental reservation, saying to themselves that this isn't it but that meantime they need a woman. Then they have the physical union, but it does not count mentally or in the inner aspect of fantasy, in the feeling of the man himself. If it is not taken seriously, if one does not let the impact of the experience touch the psyche, then it is as though it had not been lived.

I once analyzed a professional prostitute who was exactly like an old maid. Her dreams always showed untouched little girls or women who had never had any sexual experience. This was completely true! She shut herself off from what she lived. She just wanted the money, she was not in it-for she admitted to herself neither the pleasure of certain contacts nor her disgust over others. She made a rational decision that she needed the dollars and said to hell with the rest of it. Thus she was, in a way, untouched by life. Though she had rather severe psychic symptoms, she was not miserable. One of the results of the analysis was that she suddenly realized her own miserable condition, which she had not seen before. It was all carried on by intellectual decision, and she never admitted that certain men disgusted her and others attracted her, for that would have disturbed business. Therefore, though she was really a very emotional woman, she did not allow herself to have the emotional experience of what was happening, for if she had done so she would have earned less money by refusing certain men.

The same thing happens sometimes with the puer aeternus. Although he lives the instinctual side, he does so in a cut-off way. He makes an artificial emotional barrier, separating what he is living from his real self. In such a case the stars below are not realized, so the dream says to take them and enjoy them. Life is incomplete if you live it in its fantasy aspect; it has to be lived through on the instinctual level. But that means really accepting it, letting yourself be hit by the experience and not limiting it by living it in a conditional way. To have a mental reservation about it means that it is not lived at all, and that is why the puer aeternus is sometimes cut off from the stars below, and why the solution for the dreamer is that he should sink into that world.

Remark: H.G. Baynes once told me that a friend of his made a psychological investigation of Parisian prostitutes. He discovered that, without exception, they all had major father complexes and that they made a condition; they "cut" in some way, perhaps that the man should not kiss them on the lips, or something like that, but they had this reservation.

Yes, so as to cut off feeling and the emotional experience of what was happening. Like that you can have the most adventurous life, but it doesn't count.

I think, therefore, that the stars below mean the living experience of the instinctual or archetypal pattern. One has to live life through before one is able either to know oneself or to realize what the thing is.

Remark: So often it happens that people such as this man you mention, who are regarded as pueri aeterni by their associates, are very much envied as being able, instead of cutting themselves off from life, of throwing themselves into life with great vigor so that they appear to be living successful lives. We could say that was the shadow and say that we know they are really cut off. But how do they achieve this appearance of so vigorous a life?

They can act! Many people are actors, and to act something simply means to play a part. Those people, as far as I have come to know them, play a part even to themselves, so as to convince themselves that they are living. Then they land in analysis and have to confess that this is not the case and that they are not happy. Others may consider them successful, but they themselves do not feel so. The criterion is simple: Do you feel that you are living? Those who do not feel alive describe it as being as though they were acting, even for themselves.

Remark: Or wearing costumes!

Yes, and people fall for that, unless they know some psychology and look at the eyes to see the real expression. Then one can tell that something is wrong, even though such people seem to be so successful.

Remark: If one were fixed at the ultraviolet end and had numerous experiences at the other end, then I suppose the ultraviolet end would be too beautiful for the infrared end. Even though there might be nineteen experiences, they would be sordid and miserable because one would always be looking for the ultraviolet?

Yes, exactly. That is a good way to put it. You can say that if you live one end in a split-off way, then one end cannot communicate with the other. Put quite simply, you have the experience but it is not meaningful, and an experience which one does not feel meaningful is nothing. It only becomes real when it is connected with an emotional perception of meaning. Without that one is just bored. I knew of one man who, with his shadow, had a lot of affairs, but was so much not in it that in the middle of the sex act he would look at his watch to see how much time he had! Obviously it meant nothing to him, or else it was purely narcissistic, for all he experienced was his role as a male.

Questions: And what would be wrong with the woman who would go into a relationship with such a man?

She generally makes the same "cut" with the animus. For example, in the case of that prostitute, her idea was that if she tried to earn her living by typing in an office, she would have to be at the office at 9 a.m. and work till 6 in the evening for weeks and weeks on end and would never be able to do anything else. As she was very undisciplined and quite childish, that was unacceptable to her. Her animus said that that would go on forever, which was animus opinion number one, for she could just as well have started an office job and found a boyfriend all the same. But her animus logic was that if she worked in an office she would have to submit to discipline-which she hatedand never have a love affair. Why one excluded the other one does not know, but her animus thought so, and then at fifty she would be an ugly old woman still typing in an office! She wanted to live and did not want an office life, but she needed the money for food and could not afford to live freely with a lot of men whom she may have chosen, so the animus said that she should combine the two things and to hell with her moral prejudices. One could say that in her case she just resigned herself to it because she had no faith in the irrational. She had landed in New York as an immigrant, and when she saw that immense city she felt she would be lost in it. She had no faith either in herself or in life, not in her own personality and not in God. So she mapped it all out and thought that being a prostitute was the thing to do. In the case of a woman, it is the animus who engineers things, and he is always a professional pessimist who excludes the tertium quod non datur [14]. The animus says to the woman that he knows there are only so many possibilities; he says the thing can only go in such and such a way, thereby blocking off any possibility of life producing something itself.

Question: Do you mean that a woman who had a good relation to her instincts would not fall for such a man?

Yes, I think that is correct, or she might start a relationship on this unreal level, but then she would try to pull the man into a definite or meaningful relationship. I can give you an illustration, though it does not quite fit because in this case the man took the initiative. It is the case of a woman who had rather too many affairs which she ran in accordance with her animus decisions. But then she met a man who really loved her and whose instincts were more sound than had been the case with the others. He was very sensitive and felt that very often she went to bed with him without being there herself or in feeling-tune with him. He felt the autonomy of her sexuality and revolted against it. He got nasty with her because it hurt him. He said that was how she was with all her other lovers-of whom he was jealous, feeling himself to be just one of them. He knew nothing about psychology so he was rather clumsy and nasty, calling her a "cheap" woman, and such things, which was not just, for she was not that at all, only her feeling had been cut off. But through his strong, emotional, instinctual reactions, and the fact that he was a mature man who had had much experience and had great physical self-control, he was able to get her feeling back-naturally a very difficult task. Usually the man is sexually so impulsive that he cannot hold himself back, but this man said that he would not go on unless they were on a feeling level. She had a dream that there was a dirty, poisonous muddy hole in the ground into which he dived and brought up a golden key to her. I think we can say that he really rescued her feeling because he loved her as an individual and did not just make use of her. He wanted her as a whole person with her feeling, and resented it when that did not function. Through his resentment and after a lot of quarreling and trouble he brought up her feeling personality.

One can naturally go on discussing and expanding this problem endlessly because it is really the key to the whole dream. In my lecture on evil, I gave a motif from a Russian fairy tale which illustrates this. In this story the Czar says, at a dinner party, that none of his sons had yet picked his flowers, so the three sons ask for his blessing and set out on the search. Each takes a horse from the stable and sets forth and all three come to a signpost which says: "He who goes to the right will have enough to eat, but his horse will be hungry; he who goes to the left will have enough for his horse but will himself remain hungry; and the one who goes straight ahead will die." The first brother would be robbed of the instinctual experience and therefore his horse would be hungry. The brother who goes that way finds a copper snake on a mountain. When he brings it home his father is furious and says he has brought back something dangerous and demonic and puts him in prison; that is, he only finds a kind of petrified life and falls back into the prison of the traditional spirit, that is, the father. The next brother goes to the left and finds a whore who has a mechanical bed to which she invites him. Jumping out of it herself, she presses a button and the bed turns over and he falls into the cellar where there are a lot of other menall waiting in the dark. That's the fate of the one who goes to the left!

Then comes the Great Ivan, the hero of Russian fairy tales. When he gets to the signpost he begins to cry and says that a poor fellow who has to go to death will find neither honor nor glory, but he gives his horse the whip and goes ahead. Then his horse dies and comes to life again, and he finds the witch and conquers her and then finds the princess and comes back and becomes Czar, etc. He has a normal, successful fairy tale career. He chooses to remain in the conflict, which seems death to the ego, for ego-consciousness wants to know what is ahead. If this woman who arrived in New York had had the strength and the psychological courage to accept the fact that she faced nothing but misery whatever she did and that she could not see a glimmer of light or life ahead, if she could have faced moral death and still have remained herself, then the fairy tale, the path of individuation, would have begun. But she couldn't, and in her case she chose the path to the left. Others choose the path to the right.

It can therefore be said that human consciousness must always be crucified between the pull of the two poles: if you fall too much into either one, you die.

Life, in its essence, means crucifixion. To the rational ego it seems to be death, and that is what this Russian motif expresses in a most beautiful and clear form. The third son chose what seemed to his ego to be the road to death, but in fact, as the story says, he chose the road of life. The others, who wanted to be clever and chose the relatively lesser evilone the way on the right and the other that on the lefthad not the nervous strength or the guts to face the unknown and so rationalized the situation. Apparently for a human being to face the unknown-not to know in advance what is coming and yet be able to keep steady in the darkis the most difficult thing. Man's most ancient fear and cause of panic seems always to have been the unknown. The first time a primitive sees an airplane or a car, he runs away, for everything unknown is inevitably terrible! That is the old pattern and it is the same thing in analysis. When people are confronted with a situation where they cannot, by their own inner reason, see what is coming, they panic. That is painful, but it would not matter so much, if then they did not rashly come to some decisionto turn to the left or the right-and thereby fall into the unconscious because they have not been able to stand the tension of not knowing what is ahead.

If the puer goes too much to the right or the left, that would not be so bad because sometimes one must first find the copper snake and then land in the whore's cellar and only afterward make up one's mind that it would be better to go on the road that leads to death. But in reality the puer does something much worse: he risks neither way completely but ventures a little both ways, so as to be on the safe side. He bets on the one horse but puts a little on the other too, and that is his self-destructive act. That is worse than going too much either way, for that gets punished and one has to wake up and pull out. The natural interplay of psychological opposites corrects the one-sided business. Life forces one into the middle path. But in order to avoid suffering the puer plays a dirty trick which boomerangs back onto him. He splits himself by throwing a sop to the dragon, but remains on the other side inwardly. He has illusions about himself, and so he arrests the process of life and gets stuck, for even the interplay of the opposites is thwarted. That is what his weak personality tricks him into in order that he may escape suffering.

As the match-making witch that the young man considered me to be, I had tried to push him into taking up a relationship with a woman whom he had already had his Don Juan affair with and cast aside. But when, after he had planned and written his letter saying that he wanted to see her again, this synchronistic event took place: she wrote a letter similar to his own, which he had not mailed. Then, for the first time, with this woman he got a whiff of meaningfulness. After this strange event he couldn't avoid naively thinking that this woman must stand for something beyond what had already passed between them, and that the relationship must have some meaning. Thus, for the first time, he accepted something unknown. The doubt which I cast into his mind would not have helped except for the synchronistic event, but as it was, his attitude toward life was touched by an experience which seemed marvelous and mysterious. He therefore went on the bicycle ride with the girl with a different attitude instead of knowing all about everything. For the first time he was puzzled about a relationship, and when he slept in her arms, you see what the unconscious produced. It was as though the heavens below the meaningfulness of such sexual experience dawned on him, which explains why, while making the motions of riding a bicycle, he fell slowly into the heavens below.

The next theme in the dream is the explosion of light in the heavens below, which would mean a sudden realization and an illumination from below. It is a very interesting motif if you compare it with the experience of the medieval mystics who spoke of a light which they experienced from above. Here it is the light experienced from below, which comes from accepting the unknown of life and the unknown unconscious. We might say with the alchemists, "Heaven above. Heaven below." It is the same light but comes from the midnight sun and not the sun above. When Apuleius was initiated into the Isis mysteries, he described how he was illumined not by the heavenly sun but by the midnight sun, which he met face to face when he descended into the underworld. That would mean an experience which cannot be reached by intellectual effort, or exercises in concentration, or Yoga, or the Exercitia Spiritualia, but rather an experience of the Self, which one can only have by accepting the unconscious and the unknown in life and the difficulty of living one's own conflict.

When the dreamer gets further down, suddenly the heavens below solidify and look like the earth as seen from an airplane, with a quadrangular pattern of fields. It is a very positive image, for now the split is beginning to close. There is still a difference of levels, however, for between the earth above and the earth below there is a very sudden change of level such as often appears in the psychological geography of a dream where there are the two levels and no connecting steps. Such a dreamer might switch in his way of living between intellect and instinct, without any bridge between, but that would not show a very dangerous situation since it is one that occurs frequently in the case of young people who have not yet harmonized the relationship between the two. The wound in this dreamer's psyche is healing; the earth level is rising. He realizes that by accepting, for once, an unknown situation and venturing into it, he is for the first time touching human reality, the earth upon which we live. How would you interpret this? He could have seen woods below, or just the ground, but he sees the fields.

Answer: Matt in relation to the earth.

Yes, it is cultivated earth on which labor has been expended and which has been distributed among different individuals, with the disadvantage, also, of the many walls, fences and roads, and all the different regulations and controls concerning admittance and respect of property. It is the civilized earth and suggests work, so that one is reminded of Jung's words that work is part of the cure of the split and difficulties of the puer, just plowing some plot of earth, no matter which. I remember him saying once to a puer aeternus type, ''It does not matter what job you take. The point is that for once you do something thoroughly and conscientiously, whatever it is." This man insisted that if only he could find the right thing, then he would work, but that he could not find it. Jung's answer was, "Never mind, just take the next bit of earth you can find. Plow it and plant something in it. No matter whether it is business, or teaching, or anything else, give yourself for once to that field which is ahead of you."

Everybody has a field of reality to work in if he wants to. The childish trick of saying, "I would work if it were the right thing," is one of the many self-delusions of the puer aeternus by which he stays within the mother realm and his megalomanic identification with the godswho as you know do not work. Except for Hephaestus, who was despised by all the others, there are no working gods in Greek mythology. Fields would also imply limitation. That is the drawback of getting in touch with reality, because in that way one becomes limited, there are restrictions. One comes to the miserable human situation where one's hands are tied and it is not possible to do as one would like, something particularly disagreeable to the puer aeternus. In your work you come up against your own limitations, both intellectual and physical, for what one produces is always miserable compared with the fantasies one had lying in bed about what one would do, if one could! The fantasy is far more beautiful than the real product!

Next in the dream comes an autonomous switch, for the valley is suddenly replaced by stagnant, icy water. The dreamer thinks that that is the mother complex, into which he does not want to fall. It is treacherous, and what before looked like an explosion of light now resembles a soap bubble with a skull in it. The same world into which he is sinking now shows its completely destructive aspect, without anything happening in the dream to justify such a change. If in a dream the dreamer does or thinks something, after which the whole landscape turns negative, you can say that there was a wrong thought which caused this. If while sinking the dreamer had the thought that he did not like this narrow reality and then the change had come about, then the dream would be easy to interpret, for if one refuses the earth, then it becomes eternal stagnation and being haunted by the mother complex and, at the end, death. That would be a cheap and easy way of interpreting the dream, but here the thing is very mysterious, for he goes onone would think rightly-toward the bottom of the valley and the earth, and, quite of itself, what had looked so positive turns into something uncannystagnant ice water and a soap bubble with a skull in it. I do not pretend to have understood this in all its aspects; I intend just to tell you what I think about it.

Let us begin with the stagnant ice water. That suggests stagnation in reality, where the water of life does not flow. Ice suggests being frozen in the cold. Obviously this man was very cold. If he were not, he could not have behaved as he did with his girlfriend. His feeling was either nonexistent or else had been destroyed by the family situation or else he was so much tied to the mother that he had no feeling for other people. As you remember, I had met him only once, so I could not say where his feeling was-whether it was tied up with the mother or whether he was just an unfeeling cold fish, but certainly in his behavior he was cold. He associated the world below with the mother complex, into which he does not want to fall. There, I think we get on the track of the trouble. A soap bubble, in general, is a simile for an illusion, which can be pricked. It has great volume and a marvelous, beautiful surface if the sun shines on it, but it is an empty sphere which, when it comes into contact with some real body, dissolves into nothingness. So the soap bubble usually stands for illusions. It is possible that with little children who love to bubble with their spittle that that is accompanied by joyful fantasy. Building castles in the air, or in Spain, fantasizing, is like the inner cinema where you are the powerful stag or the beautiful woman. All those wonderful daydreams are bubbles which can be pricked. Here something appears below which means stagnation, coldness, illusion and death, and all that without apparently any fault on the part of the dreamer except that when he sees the stagnant, icy water, he says that is the mother complex, which he is not going to fall into.

I think that gives us the key. We must not forget that this man had had a Freudian analysis. What effect does that have on a human being? It produces an intellectual attitude toward life, robs it of its mystery: one knows all about it, and if one does not, then the doctor in the white coat who sits behind your couch does. Freudian analysis explains everything to you as the Oedipus complex, and so on, and dreams are no mystery; they are quite clear! All long objects are phallic, and the others are feminine, and the rest have some sexual connotation. If you know just a little anatomy you know all about it; you only have to make the connection. So dream interpretation becomes very monotonous and easy. Freud even once complained to Jung that he no longer worked much on dreams because it was too monotonous! Of course! He knew what would come out, so he played the magician's trick and first dropped a rabbit into the hat and then pulled it out! That is Freudian dream interpretation: one knows what it is driving at, namely, the Oedipus situation, which you first put in the hat and then triumphantly pull out again. It is an intellectual trick, always the same thing, and you get into a rut of monotony. Your mind is no longer open to the fact that something might exist which you do not yet know, or that you might dream about something which is not yet known to you. The ego is therefore fed with conscious illusions, namely, that it is just a question of knowing all about it, and with that comes the complete stagnation of life.

There is a certain type of man with a mother complex who is much attracted by Freudian psychology because its effect on the individual is similar to that of the mother complex itself; that is, it is another prison, and this time you are imprisoned in a situation which is known to your intellect. The Freudian system has its gaps, but these were not approved by its founder, who created the system as something entirely known, except for the physical aspect where there are openings left for biological chemistry. On the religious or philosophical side there are no openings. There everything is precisely defined, and for this reason Freudian analysis seems attractive to the victim of a severe mother complex, with his anxious and ungenerous attitude, because it offers him another cage of protection. One learns the language easily, and one who has had a Freudian analysis for six months or so knows all about it. If you have a patient who has had it, he will bring his dream to you with a cheap, ready-made interpretation. You feel puzzled by the dream and wonder what it means, but he will interrupt you and ask if it is not again the Oedipus situation. Such people have it all pat, and therefore life cannot flow. Freudian analysis is completely unfeeling, and this is also expressed factually in as much as the doctor is not allowed to have any personal feeling for his patients and avoids them by putting on his white coat and sitting behind the client; any personal feeling or feeling-reaction is suspect [15]. If the patient's feeling function is already damaged, the split will be worsened.

Our dreamer, like a clever monkey, had assimilated the Freudian standpoint as a justification for his Don Juanism. I am not accusing his Freudian analyst of that; I think that at least was his own trick. I do not know. But every time he felt rather too close to a girl, he thought that was the mother complex again, so he got out. In this way the Freudian way of thinking helped him to carry on his Don Juanism. What is so damnable about it is that there is even truth in it! Naturally, in Don Juanism, the partner who is looked for in different women (Goethe formulated it aptly as "seeing Helen in every woman") is the mother complex, so that to have an affair and then walk out of it because it is again the mother complex is quite justifiable. It is a wonderful excuse for escape! And it is quite true that these first fascinations are due to the mother complex; that is, to the play of the anima, and they do prove to be an illusion. I have not for a long time seen a man who has got into touch with a woman, with feeling, who has not suffered from certain disillusionments and disappointments and who, in the end, has not realized the transience and corruptibility of all earthly life.

I would therefore propose to take this dream more philosophically. If you venture into life, into reality, instead of keeping outside so as to avoid suffering, you will find that the earth and women are like a fertile field on which you can work and that life is also death; that if you give yourself to reality, you will be disillusioned and the end of it will be that you will meet death [16]. If you accept your life, you really, in the deepest sense of the word, accept death, and that is what the puer does not want. He does not want to accept mortality, and that is why he does not want to go into reality, because the end of it is the realization of his weakness and of his mortality. He identifies with the immortal and does not accept the mortal twin, but by going into life he would assimilate the mortal brother. Therefore you could say that this dream contains something, a kind of philosophy of life which would not surprise an Easterner. No Indian would be surprised by it. He would say: "Certainly, if you go into life, if you love a woman, then you embrace an illusion, and every illusion will show itself as Maya, as the great illusion of the world, the end of which is death."

All those who have read some Eastern mythology and philosophy will not be surprised by this, but it is surprising that in a modern European young man's dream such deep philosophy is brought up. The thought is put plainly before him: life and meeting a woman mean coming together with reality; to work means to meet the earth disillusion, stagnation and death. That is an honest answer to one who has doubts about whether he should live or not. We should not forget that due to his father's suicide this young man, as a child, had met death in a very shocking way. The father shot himself when the boy was six, and living in a small town the child doubtless heard gossip. It seems probable that he peeped into the coffin and saw the remains of his father, and if he did not hear outside talk, likely the maid in the kitchen made comments. He had met death in a shocking form as a sensitive boy, so death already belonged to his experience. This we should remember, for probably it partly accounts for his hesitation about going into life. The unconscious does not pour any balm over the facts at this moment, or comfort him about them, but presents him with the plain truth: life is death, and if you accept life and move into it, as you are now trying to do with this girl, you are moving toward your own death. Death is the goal of life.

From a therapeutic standpoint this fascinated me because the tendency of analysts is to look at one part of the analysand's life and endeavor to infect the other with a certain amount of optimism; namely, that one ought to go into life, one should believe in its meaningfulness, and so on. But see what the unconscious does here! It shocks the dreamer with the absolute dual aspect of reality. If he wants to say yes, he should have no illusions about that, for this is how it is. Now he can say yes or no on an honest basis. And if he prefers to kill himself, that can be his honest solution too.

Then later on, the dreamer left the girl again, in spite of all that had happened, and, in a big town, fell into the hands of a Russian prostitute whose chief customers were Negroes. These Negroes hated the young man because he was the only white lover and made several attempts to kill him. The Russian prostitute was the Mother Earth aspect of his mother complex-which the girl in whose arms he had dreamt was not, for she was a sensitive, introverted girl and not a very earthy person. With the Russian, he did fall into the stagnant water of his mother complex and did nearly meet death. His mother complex made him desert his relationship with the girlwhich would have been difficult but human-and then made him fall into the complex itself.

Notes

[12] See "The Psychology of the Transference," The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16, par. 384.

[13] The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, pars. 343ff.

[14] See "The Psychology of the Child Archetype," The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, esp. pars. 285ff.

[15] Here, I am speaking of the strictly Freudian school; there are now modified schools but I am referring to the original attitude.

[16] I heard since that the dreamer died in the middle of life.

Lecture 8

We stopped in the middle of the dream which the man had when lying on the girl's lap, in which he was slowly falling into the big split within the earth. You will remember that he first saw the stars in the heavens below, then an explosion of light, afterward fields, as one sees them from an airplane, and then a gray and dirty stagnant pool of water which was like ice but did not reflect. He then half wakes and says to himself that he is not afraid but that water is a symbol of the mother, into which he does not want to fall. Then, at the bottom of the valley, a round spot of light again appears, the borders of which are a bit blurred. This explodes like a soap bubble. In this spot of light he sees a skull and thinks that this is strange, for what has death to do with all this? He repeats that he is not terribly afraid but continues to fall slowly in the same place. Then, the dream says, the whole thing disappears and is replaced by a yellow linoleum floor with brown spots. The landscape has completely lost its gigantic proportions, and the dreamer wonders why there is linoleum at the bottom of the valley and says that it is really surrealistic. It is all very clear and he can see it quite plainly. He laughs a little about the linoleum, and in the letter he sent accompanying the dream he added: "I don't like linoleum. It is always cold and not aesthetic. I don't like it." He obviously has a strong feeling against it.

We have discussed the problem of the skull and said that, in a way, the dreamer is right in saying that falling into this water would be falling into the valley, where there is the skull; he would be falling into his own mortality and the stagnating aspect of matter. I mentioned last time that he did actually leave the girl in whose company he had had this dream, and afterward had an affair with a Russian prostitute who had a number of Negro lovers who several times tried to kill him. So one could say that he really did fall into a dirty pool and really risked death and complete stagnation. The Russian prostitute was a fat, earthy woman, obviously a mother figure, so in spite of his not wanting to fall into this condition-according to the dreamhe did afterward go through this phase and, so to speak, lost his wings completely. He already had the fear that a woman would land him there when he made his contact with the girl, which was why he feared to continue the relationship. It was for this reason that he always left women so quickly, feeling that behind every woman there was this whirlpool of matter which sucked one down. Falling into death does not always take such a concrete form, although it does happen and many pueri die between thirty and forty-five for this very reason. But there is another way of falling into something like this.

After the puer loses the ecstatic, romantic élan of youth, there is danger of an enantiodromia into a completely cynical attitude toward women, life, work in general, and money. Many men suddenly fall into an attitude of disappointed cynicism. They lose all their ideals and romantic impulses and also, naturally, their creativeness, writing it all off as the fantasies of youth. They then become petty, earth-bound, small-minded people who just want to have a family, money and a career. Everything else is regarded as romantic nonsense-what one wanted and did when one was young, which now must be written off. It is as though Icarus had fallen into the mud and life had stopped. This is due to a weak consciousness, which cannot conceive of the possibility of enduring the difficulties of reality and not sacrificing one's ideals but instead testing them on the touchstone of reality. Such men take the easy way and say that ideals merely complicate life and must therefore be written off. This is a great danger.

This dream, as you know, was very weak on the feeling side, and the cold ice at the bottom of the valley mirrors his own basically cold attitude and lack of feeling. It is the feeling function that gives life its color and values. In this case there had surely been a great shock to the boy's feeling when his father committed suicide, and life then became icy and stagnant. If you talk to such people, they say that there is always the same human dirt and that from now on they will just get up in the morning and have breakfast . . . and just continue to exist.

I told you last time of a man who had fallen into this state and then dreamed of a prince whom he had to follow. There the puer aeternus reappeared and wanted to be followed, but as a figure separate from the ego. After having been identical with the prince, the man fell into the mud of the road, after which they became two. Then the prince reappeared, still in love with his bride to whom he gave a jewel like a tear, and the man had to follow him and the bride, but got knocked down by shadow figures. So one could say that in order to avoid this stagnation it is necessary to face the shadow again and again. When you are identical with the puer aeternus archetype, then the shadow has to be faced in order to come down to earth. But when you are identified with the shadow, the archetype of the puer has to be faced again in order to connect with it, for facing the other side is what leads to the next step. I have seen several cases where this disappointment was not so much concerned with the mind and the spiritual side but has affected the man's attitude to marriage.

When this kind of Icarus loses his wings and falls into the stagnating aspect of the mother and matter, some very independent men cannot make up their minds to marry because they feel that marriage would be a prison, a thought which is typical of the mother complex and the puer aeternus mentality. After having married, as Jung once said of such a man, "He curled up in his little basket like a nice little dog and never moved again." They never move again; they don't dare look at other women, and they generally marry (even though she may be beautifully disguised in youth) a devouring-mother type of woman. If she is not already that, they force her into the role by being submissive and boylike and son-like. Then the marriage situation is changed into a kind of warm, lazy prison of habits which they put up with with a sigh. Such men continue on the professional side quite efficiently and generally become very ambitious, for everything is boring at homethere is the basket for the dog, the sexual problem is parked, as is the food problem. All ambition and power go over into the career where they are quite efficient, while on the eros side they stagnate completely; nothing goes on there any more, for marriage is the final trap in which they got caught. That is another way in which the puer aeternus can fall into stagnating watereither on the mental side, when he gives up his creativeness, or on the eros side, when he gives up any kind of differentiated feeling relationship and curls up in the habitual conventional situation.

We also said about the skull that naturally it could be taken as representing the problem of death. One of the problems is that if the puer enters life, then he must face the fact of his mortality and the corruptible world. He must accept the fact of his own death. That is a variation of the old mythological motif where after leaving Paradise, which is a kind of archetypal maternal womb, man falls into the realization of his incompleteness, corruptibility and mortality. From this skull, this realization of death, the dream then says, light explodes again, showing that in such a realization there is still more light to come. That is, the dreamer would be illumined if he could think about and accept these facts of life. Afterward the landscape changes completely and loses its gigantic proportions, and now there is the linoleum at the bottom of the valley. First the dreamer looked down into the split and saw the stars below, then came the dark sky with the light stars, and afterward the yellow linoleum, when what were light stars became brown spots. Again he is looking at the same picture, but in the color there is an enantiodromia, for what was light is now dark, and vice versa. This, he says, is really surrealistic. I have no amplifications for the linoleum other than his dislike of its coldness and unaesthetic effect, so we have to add our own material, though it may be arbitrary to do so.

One could say that linoleum is the typical floor covering in little bourgeois dwellings and poor people's homes. It is cheap stuff and brings to mind the rather disgusting atmosphere of cheap little flats that smell of cabbage. Now, for the first time, nature no longer covers the ground. Instead, there is an artificial man-made substance in all its smallness. This goes with the fact that the landscape loses its gigantic proportions and that everything is flattened; the stars have become dark spots, and what before was the brown earth has become a yellowish linoleum. Here again is the danger of falling into banality, connected with the fact that the floor is now artificial and man-made. Nature always prevents stagnation, for it brings up compensatory processes, as I illustrated last time with the case of the man who had begun to stagnate and whose unconscious then brought up the dream about the prince. That woke him up again and showed him that life was still exciting but that he had fallen out of its rhythm by curling up in the banality of his marital and professional situation. So it is the loss of nature which goes together with banality.

However, as we said last time, the picture now shows a positive aspect, for before there was a terrific and dangerous split in the psyche, but when earth appeared below, at least the split was lessened. Now the man is not falling into bottomless space, which would have meant madness (and he was in danger of going mad or of committing suicide). Now there is a floor below, although there still remain the two levels. If the gigantic proportions disappear and there is some leveling up, that means that even if he does fall into banality, the great polarities andfor his weak personality-the too great tension in his psyche have been flattened out and the opposites are nearer each other. The stars, however, which are the illuminating aspect of archetypal complexes in the collective psyche, have now turned into dark spots.

If you switch from this case and think of so-called normal people, how do the archetypes of the complexes appear to them? They would say that life was quite clear except for a few disagreeable spots, the dark spotsthe complexes! Actually, when Jung discovered the complexes of the unconscious, he did discover them as dark spots, namely, as holes in our field of consciousness. By making the association experiment he found out that the field of consciousness was tightly put together, that we can associate clearly and correctly except when a complex is touched, and then there is a hole. If a complex is touched in the association experiment, there are no associations. That, therefore, is the normal view of the unconscious, namely that everything is clear except for those disagreeable dark spots of the complexes, behind which are the archetypes. That is what one always realizes if there is a strong enantiodromia. After a psychotic episode, if people go through what one calls the regressive restoration of the persona, [17] they then call that which before had meant illumination to them (the source of the too bright insight which one has when one has fallen into the collective unconscious), the dark spots which have to be avoided. This is a very unhealthy state of affairs, but it frequently happens that if you get people out of their psychotic episode by pharmacological means, they then tend simply to push away the whole experience of the collective unconscious, with its excitement and illumination, and call that a dark spot about which they do not want to hear any more. This is the typical compensation in a case where the ego is too weak to stand the opposites and see both sides of the thing, namely, that the archetypes are the source of illumination on the one side but that one must also keep one's feet firmly on this world at the same time. From this dream it looks as if the dreamer were in danger of falling into the opposite, complete banality, but when I wrote him about the dream I said this was a phase he had to go through, and that after he had fallen into it he must trust the unconscious to take him the next step; that for the time being this is where he has to land and it is a process which cannot be stopped; that he will fall into utter banality and write off all his former idealsan angel who has lost his wings.

Remark: One could say that at least on such a floor he could walk, whereas on the sky he could not.

Yes, that is so, and he could also walk on the fields, which came first after which came the skull, where again he could not walk, and then the linoleum, where he could. Therefore, there are really two changes: there is the fruitful earth, then death, and then something he can stand upon. I think it is a pity that the dream did not stop when the fields appeared, for that would have been a complete solution of the problem, but he was not capable of looking at reality as something which one could form and work upon; his nature was too passive. He needed something on which to stand, but he could not turn to the masculine attitude toward reality and say that if things were not as he liked, he would change them and impress his own mind upon them. The creative masculine gesture of taking the clay and molding it according to his own ideas was what he could not do. He remains passive and accepts reality, but then it has to support him and be something on which he can stand. However, that is better than before, when he would have fallen into a bottomless abyss. He now has ground under his feet. But from this dream I would say that he has not yet found his masculinity, but is still dependent upon the mother-base and the form it takes. How much it is still a problem of not having found his masculinity is shown in the next dream.

Question: Could the yellow floor mean intuition?

To an intuitive person reality is always what creates difficulties and what one knocks up against in life. The yellow color would have to do with intuition, but I cannot quite fit in this floor as intuition, except that he was clearly a very intuitive kind of person, and it might mean that at least he had now found the basis of his main function. He was so completely unborn that he had not even developed a superior and an inferior function. The ego-complex was weak, and there was no developed consciousness, so at least his function of intuition could become something he could rely upon. Its opposite would be reality (which is related to through the sensation function), and intuition is always at odds with reality. To the intuitive type, earthly reality is the great cross.

Question: Could you say that the one aspect has to be lived in order to get to the other? It seems to me that if he has got his linoleum to stand upon he might find the stars too, since one replaces the other, and the colors replace each other.

Yes, I would say that the first step of his birth of consciousness is that he begins to develop a superior function and that later, after many, many years, then he might touch the other. Practically, it would mean that with a human being in such an unborn state one would have to concentrate not on getting them close to their inferior function but on first developing their main function, which normally takes place between the ages of ten and twenty. He still has to get to that, that is, to develop one main function, after which he could go on to the inferior function, namely, the problem of what is behind the irritating factors of reality.

In the next dream which he wrote me he says that he is in a sort of razzia (that is, a raid, or round-up, in which people are caught by the police). He does not try to run away because he thinks that his innocence will be revealed. He is put in a room, and after a while he opens the door and sees that his guard is a woman.

He asks her if she will let him go since he is innocent, and she answers, ''Yes, certainly I shall let you go because you are innocent, but first there are some questions to be put to you." Then behind the wall he hears moaning and realizes that the questioning is accompanied by torture. Actually, people are being beaten on the sinus. He is very much afraid of the physical pain and wakes up.

He did not give me any other associations, but this clearly refers to his prison-and-police phobia-complex. You remember he could not cross the Swiss border because he thought he would be put in prison, and he always ran when he saw a policeman. In connection with the woman guard, you will remember that he was a painter and had once painted the portrait of an unknown woman, an imaginary woman, as he wrote to me. For four years he worked on this painting, which became so vivid and significant for him that he had to keep it covered with a cloth, especially at night because he was always afraid it might come alive and threaten him. He could not sleep in the same room with it for that reason, so he painted and then quickly covered it over, and sometimes for weeks did not look at it because to him it was a living thing. That is a really amazing example of what the anima is. The painting itself did not remind him of any concrete woman. It was the representation of the anima, of the imago of the woman within, and it had become so alive to him that he was terrified of it. The old Pygmalion motif!

Now we should go to this strange police-prison complex, which he had as a kind of phobia in reality. The dream is very important because it begins to link up with what I wish to arrive at at the end of my lecture, namely, that we are dealing with a problem that is not only personal but belongs to our time: the police-state, the absolutist system, which tortures thousands of people, is becoming more and more the great problem of our day. The strange thing is that it is mainly the pueri aeterni who are the torturers and establish tyrannical and murderous police systems. So the puer and the police- state have a secret connection with each other; the one constellates the other. Nazism and Communism have been created by men of this type. The real tyrant and the real organizer of torture and of suppression of the individual are therefore revealed as originating in the not-worked-out mother complex of such men. That is what possesses them, and it is out of the state of possession into which such a complex plunges people that they act in this outrageous manner.

Since the dreamer is in the street, it can be said that he is in the collective. At present, in reality, he has no relationship to the collective since he is an isolated, lonely human being with an entirely asocial attitude. He is nowhere linked up with his feelings and has no real friends-only the man to whom he gave away his girl, but that had not been a strong feeling connection. Therefore he is lost in the collective. He is the anonymous man in the street, and there is where he is caught by the police system. Anyone who has a weak personality and who has not worked on his individuality is threatened from both sides, not only with being swept away by collective consciousness (outer collectivity). The person with a weak ego-complex swims between Scylla and Charybdisbetween the devil and the deep blue seaeither the collective unconscious or conventionality in some form (collective movements very likely), one or the other catches him. Identifying with the persona or identifying with a collective movement is therefore as much a symptom of a weak personality as to go mad and fall into the collective unconscious. It is merely a variation of the same thing, which is why the carriers of these collective, absolutist movements are generally very weak as far as the ego is concerned.

I remember a medical doctor telling me that at the beginning of the last war, when he was a stomach specialist and very well known, it happened that he had a patient with stomach ulcers who was a high Nazi official. He succeeded in curing this man, and as a result he was spoken of in Nazi circles as being a good stomach doctor. So throughout the war an enormous number of high-up Nazi officials came to him for private treatment, and under the religio medici (the medical code) he of course could not refuse to accept them as patients. He said it was amazing to see those concentration-camp torturers, those so-called heroes, take off the beautiful uniform and shirt and disclose a body tanned by sun and sport-and then to find nervous, hysterical stomach trouble underneath. These pseudo-heroes were merely weaklings-spoiled Mamma's boys. A large percentage he had to dismiss, telling them the trouble was purely psychological, sheer hysteria. To the doctor it was an eye-opener-not what he had expected, although to us it makes sense. If he told them of a cure or a regimen which was the least bit disagreeable, they would not try it. Moreover, if he poked into their troubles, many of them would begin to cry. He said that, when the beautiful hero-persona had fallen off, he felt as if he were confronted with an hysterical woman. If you look at the faces of the "heroes" who are again drawing the swastika everywhere, you see this same type.

Our dreamer thinks he can get away because he is innocent, so he still has the old-fashioned idea of a regular juridical State, such as we have in Switzerland, where one can only be arrested if one has committed some crime. One need not fear the police, for if one has done nothing wrong one can get away. It is quite clear from the end of the dream that the question of right or wrong plays no role here. He will get away, but all the same he will be tortured by the police, so his endeavor to plead innocent is not going to help him. How would you interpret his idea of being innocent? If you remember what I told you about him, about this beautiful, delicate blond young being with the heavenly blue coat, and if you ask what wrong he has done in his life, you could say that he has done practically none, except that he has not done anything! He has sinned by not sinning. He has not lived. If you live you are forced to sin: if you eat, then others cannot have that food. We shut our eyes to the fact that thousands of animals are butchered so that we may live. To live is to commit murder, and the more intensely I live the more I do wrong.

Life is connected with guilt, and he, by not living, has not accumulated much active guilt, but he has accumulated a tremendous amount of passive guilt. Think of all the girls he has just walked out on. True, he has not shouted at them or given them illegitimate babies. He has not done all those things that a more virile man might perhaps have done, but he just let women down by disappearing, which is as cruel and immoral as to do something which is called wrong. He has committed the sin of not living. He is typical of the kind of man who, on account of his mother complex, has a too aesthetic and high-up attitude toward life, who thinks that by staying above it all he can keep up an illusion of purity and innocence. He does not realize that he is secretly accumulating dirt, so this dream tells him quite clearly that he will not get away with that illusion. Life will catch up with him. He cannot continue as Mamma's innocent little boy who has never done anything wrong, even if he would like to do so, for it wants to catch him all the same. Therefore he is caught by collective forces in a negative form. You could say that the police represent his masculinity; because he does not live it himself, it is lived against him. Whatever one has within oneself but does not live grows against one, and so the dreamer is now pursued by these torturers and the police and discovers that the real devil is the anima figure whom he had painted for so long. She is the torturer behind the scenes. This anima figure is obviously a variation of his mother imago. It is not the anima yet, sensu strictiori; it is the anima, but the anima identical with the image of the mother, so the mother image is the devil behind the scenes. Do you know any mythological variations of the mother imago and her torturing questions?

Answer: The Sphinx.

Yes, naturally, that is the great mother image who asks torturing questions of those who want to remain innocent, and Oedipus too wanted to be innocent; he ran away from home in order to avoid fulfilling the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, and by running away from it, by trying to avoid the guilt, he ran into it. In the dream we have a modern version of the Oedipus motif: this man too thinks he can run away from fate, and he too falls into the grip of the Sphinx, who asks him an unanswerable question.

The motif of the Sphinx who propounds the riddle-or here, the sphinx-like woman who asks him questions while he is being beaten on the sinus-leads to an essential problem which is widespread and archetypal, and which I think has not yet been sufficiently addressed. It has to do with what I call pseudo-philosophy, the wrong kind of intellectualism induced by the mother complex. The best example of this is to be found in the Russian fairy tale, "The Virgin Czar," which I spoke about in my last lecture. The story is about the Czar's three sons who go out at his behest. As you remember, the two older brothers take the left and the right ways, the one who goes to the left being caught by a prostitute and the other caught, finally, by his own father (one falls into the imprisonment of the sexual drive, whereas the other regresses into tradition).

The hero, as you recall, despite having been warned that he would be going to his death, goes straight ahead, His horse goes through a death and resurrection process, but the hero stays alive. Then he comes to the great witch, the Baba Yaga, who is combing silk and who watches the geese in the field with her eyes, scratches the ashes in the stove with her nose, and lives in a little rotating hut on chickens' feet with a cock's comb on top. He first says a magic verse to stop the hut, which he then enters and finds the big old witch scratching the ashes in the stove. She turns round and says, "My child, are you going voluntarily, or involuntarily?" What she really means is, are you going on this quest of your own free will? Since the boys had been challenged by their father at the dinner party, when the father said that none of his boys had yet done as much as he had, in a way they did start involuntarily. The impulse came from the traditional past and was handed on to the future. On the other hand, it is voluntary, particularly in the case of the youngest, who has been laughed at as someone who must not go because he will never get anywhere and should stay at home by the stove. So although one can say that he really did go voluntarily, there is something wrong with the question. First, however, I should give you the answer because that shows how the problem should be dealt with. Ivan answers, "You should not ask a hero such questions, old witch. I am hungry and want my dinner, so you hurry up!" And he ends up with some threats-very vulgar and very delightful! He knows quite well, you see, that the witch does not want an answer and that the question is a trick designed to lame him. If he were to answer the question it would mean slipping on a banana-skin. It is just a diversion-not something that should be discussed.

The question of free will is one of the philosophical problems which has never yet been solved. Free will is a subjective feeling. Intellectually and philosophically, there is a pro and a con, and you can never prove either side. If you ask yourself whether you are doing something because you have to or because you want to, you will never find out. You can always say that you feel as though you wanted it, but perhaps it is only an unconscious complex which makes you feel like that. So how can you ever say which it is? It is a subjective feeling, but it is tremendously important for the ego to feel free to a certain extent. It is a feeling problem about the mood in which one finds oneself. If you cannot believe in a certain amount of free will and therefore free initiative of the ego, you are completely lamed because then you have to go into all your motives. You can go into the past and look into the unconscious more and more deeply, but you will never get out of it. And that is the spider's trick of the mother complex. That is how she tries to catch the hero. She wants him to sit and ask himself whether he really wanted it or not: whether it is really a question of opposing his father?if he does this, is he really just falling for his father's suggestion, or is he simply showing off? You can be sure that he will sit there forever and the witch will have him in her pocket. That is the great mother-complex trick.

Some pueri aeterni escape from the mother by means of actual airplanes; they fly away from mother-earth and from reality. Many others do the same thing in "thought airplanes"going off into the air with some kind of philosophical theory or intellectual system. I have not given much thought to it, but it has struck me that especially among the Latins the mother complex is combined with a strange kind of strong but sterile intellectualism, a tendency to discuss heaven and earth and God-knows-what in a kind of sharp intellectual way and with complete uncreativeness. It is probably a last attempt on the part of the men to save their masculinity. That simply means that certain young men who are overpowered by their mothers escape into the realm of the intellect because there the mother, especially if she is the earth type and a stupid animus kind of woman, is not up to it. They can slip out from under her skirts into the realm of the intellect, where she cannot follow. Therefore, since it is an initial attempt to escape the mother's power and the animus pressure by getting into the realm of books and philosophical discussion, which they can think mother does not understand, it is not altogether destructive. Such a man has then a little world of his own-he discusses things with other men and can have the agreeable feeling that it is something which women do not understand. In this way he gets away from the feminine, but he loses and leaves his earthly masculinity in the mother's grip. He saves his mental masculinity but sacrifices his phallushis earthly masculinity and his creativity. The vitality of action, that masculinity which molds the clay, which seizes and molds reality, he leaves behind, for that is too difficult; he escapes into the realm of philosophy. Such people prefer philosophy, pedagogy, metaphysics and theology, and it is a completely unvital bloodless business. There is no real question behind such philosophy. Such people have no genuine questions. For them it is a kind of play with words and concepts and is entirely lacking in any convincing quality. One could not convince a butterfly with such "philosophical" stuff. Nobody would listen to it.

The pseudo-philosophical intellectualism is ambiguous because, as I said before, it is a way by which to make a partial escape from the dominant grip of the mother figure, but is done only with the intellect, and only the intellect is saved. That is really what one sees in the tragedy of the Oedipus myth, where Oedipus commits the mistake of entering into the question instead of saying to the Sphinx that she has no right to put such questions and that he will knock her down if she asks such a thing again. Instead, he gives a very good intellectual answer. The play continues very cleverly with the sphinx apparently committing suicide. Oedipus pats himself on the back and steps right into the middle of his mother complex, into destruction and tragedy, just because he complimented himself on having got out of that difficulty by answering the question!

To my mind, the way Freudian psychology has taken this myth and generalized it is quite wrong, for the Oedipus myth cannot be understood without the background of Greek civilization and what happened to it as a whole. If you think of Socrates and the Platonists, you see that they discovered the realm of philosophy and pure mind in its masculine mental operations. But when you know what happened to Plato when he tried to put his ideas into reality, then you see that they had escaped reality and had not found a philosophy with which they could form it. It was a complete failure. They discovered pure philosophy but not the philosophy which can be put to the test in reality. In the same way they were the founders of basic physical and chemical concepts, but the Egyptians and the Romans had to change these concepts later into experimental science, for the Greeks could not put their ideas to the test in chemical experiments. Their science remained purely speculative, even in its most beautiful forms, and with it came the endless split of the little Greek towns and the tragic decay of Greek civilization. As soon as they were up against a nation with masculine and military self-discipline the Romans-the Greeks were at a loss. Therefore, although they were the great philosophical fertilizers of the Mediterranean world, they themselves could not follow up their own attempts in a creative way because they never understood the riddle of the Sphinx. They thought that the intellectual answer was the solution an illusion for which they paid. The Oedipus myth is actually the myth of this stage of cultural development. At the same time it is the myth of all those young men who have this same problem. That is why it is also a general myth.

The question of this Russian witchher philosophical question at the wrong moment-shows that this is a trick of the devouring mother's animus. In a manlater, when he is on his own-it is a trick of the mother complex to put a philosophical question at just the moment when action is needed. You often see this trick in actual life. For instance, a young man wants to go skiing or go off somewhere with his friends; he is filled with the élan of youth, which carries one out of the nest, eager to be with others of the same age. He and his friends are enthusiastic about taking a boat down the Rhine to Holland. The boy tells his mother what he plans to do. It is just youthful exuberance, but the mother begins to worry about his being away. The boy is living and learning about life in a natural way, if only the mother does not hang onto him. But if she does, then she starts: "Ought you to do this? I don't think it's the right thing. I don't want to prevent you. I think it is quite right for you to go in for sport, for instance, but I don't think you should go just now!" It is never right "just now." Everything must first be thought over that is the favorite trick of the devouring mother's animus. Everything must be discussed first. On principle, says she, there is nothing against it, but in this case it seems a bit dangerous. Do you really want to do it? And then if he is somewhat cowardly, he begins to wonder, and then the wind has gone out of his sails and he stays at home on Sunday while the others go off without him. Once more he has been defeated in his masculinity, instead of responding by saying that he doesn't care if it is right or not, he just wants to go! The moment for action is not the time for discussion.

I feel very negative in this regard for the generations who have to grow up under parents who have had analysis-whether Freudian, Jungian, or another kind because I see that nowadays the mother's animus even uses psychology to lame the son: "I don't know if it is psychologically right for you to go skiing," or whatever. In the second generation even psychology is dangerous; the children of un-psychological parents were often luckier. They could start something new, but not those whose parents' minds are already spoiled by psychology. The same thing applies also to analysts who want to keep the patient, for the moment the analysand wants to go into action the analyst may say that one must look first at the dreams to see if it is right psychologically. The puer aeternus shadow often does the same thing if no mother or analyst plays that role; every time he wants to go into action he will argue that he should not act until he has thought it over very carefully. One could call it neurotic philosophizing, philosophy at the wrong moment just when action is needed. That is the trick behind the myth of the riddle of the Sphinx and the devilish question of the Baba Yaga in the fairy tale. It is the mother-anima who says, "Oh, yes, you may go, but I must just ask a few questions!" And whether he answers the questions or not, he is tortured.

But there is also a positive, prospective aspect in the dream, for when the men are tortured they are beaten on the sinus. In this young man's country the language has Latin roots and he knows what sinus means in Latin: the curve, the bay at the seaside or any kind of curve, but specifically a female curve, namely, the bosom. Therefore, when he is beaten on the sinus he is hit on his hidden femininity. The sinus is also a cavity where you get infected, as doctors and others among you probably know. It is therefore a hollow empty place, and "sinus" refers to something which, in a hidden way, is feminine and within the head. It refers to the fact that this kind of head activity, this pseudo-philosophy and pseudo intellectualism, has hidden feminine qualities. Being this kind of a philosopher implies having hidden femininity, and though it is the mother-devil who induces the man into this, that is where she hits him. One sees in real life how mothers do everything they can to castrate their sons: keeping them at home and making women of them, afterward going about complaining that they are homosexual or that at forty-three the son is not yet married and how happy she would be if he would only get married; that it is so irritating to have him sitting about at home so depressed, and how much she has to suffer because of him; how anything would be better than to have him at home in that awful state. But if a girl comes on the scene, then she goes off on another tack, for it is never the right girl; the girl in question will never make him happy, she can guarantee that; that must be stopped. So the mother plays it both ways. She castrates her son and then perpetually hits that weakness, criticizing and complaining about it continually. That is how it looks on the personal level, and the same thing applies as far as the archetypal complex is concerned, for the cure can only be found where the destructive complex lies.

In this case you could look at such torture as a meaningless neurosis-causing activity of the unconscious psyche. He was actually terribly tortured by his symptoms at the time of the dream, for he could not go anywhere because of his prison phobia. The symptom by which the mother complex tortured him was at the same time a question, and if he could have understood it as such, he could have asked what it wanted of him: what was the trouble behind it? And then he would have found the answer. The torture has a completely double aspect: if he understands it as a question put to him by fate, then he can solve his problem, whereas if he only runs away from it, then it is eternal torture imposed on him by his mother complex. The decision is up to him. Unfortunately the dream ends: "I am very much afraid of physical pain, and I wake up," and this shows really that this is one of the basic troubles.

It is the quite simple but widespread trouble of a man who has fallen too much into the mother: he cannot endure physical pain. Generally, that is where the mother who intends to devour her son begins, when he is quite young, with her perpetual fussing care putting cream on the sore place telling him not to go with the other boys who are so brutal, and so on. When he comes home after having been beaten up, she says she will speak to the other boy's parents about the awful things their son does, instead of telling her own boy not to be such a coward but to hit back. So she turns him into a physical coward, and that forms a base for all the rest, for a coward has no foothold in life. I knew a man of fifty who would not go out with a woman because, he said, if he went with her to a bar and a drunken man challenged him, then he would be forced to fight, and that he would never be able to do.

Remark: But think of Julius Caesar! He was so afraid of physical pain, but you cannot say that he was a coward!

No, but he never gave in to his fear! To be sensitive is a different thing. There are people who feel pain more keenly, but the question is whether you give in to it. There is the story of a Frenchman and an Englishman who, during the First World War, were in a trench together. The Frenchman nervously smoked one cigarette after the other and walked up and down, and the Englishman sat quietly and then said mockingly to the Frenchman, "Are you afraid? Are you nervous?" And the Frenchman said, "If you were as afraid as I am, you would have run away long ago." It is not a question of being afraid. There are thick-skinned people who don't feel things, who have some lack of sensitivity and are really not so badly hurt, while others feel pain much more. The question is whether one has sufficient stamina to stand it. Caesar certainly faced pain with his legions, even though he hated and feared it. I would say that was really heroic. As the Frenchman intimated to the Englishman, it is not heroic not to be afraid. The Englishman was just unimaginative and therefore quiet. Many people are tremendously courageous, simply because they are not sensitive and cannot imagine what might happen. Highly strung, imaginative people naturally suffer much more, but the real problem of courage is whether one can stand it, or at least not lose one's fighting attitude, one's feeling of self-defense and honor.

This is a very deep-rooted instinct, which exists not only in the human male but also in the animal realm, for the male of many species cannot lose self-esteem and honor without paying for it. It is essential to basic masculinity, and to lose it means castration in a deep way. Among the cichlidaea certain breed of fisha male cannot mate with a bigger female. The reason is that these fish do not see very well, and there is no great difference between the two sexes. They swim toward each other, and the first thing the male notices is that the other is bigger, which alarms him slightly in case there may be a fight, and he goes pale; then when he approaches and sees that it is a female he cannot mate. A female meeting a bigger male may also be frightened, but she can still mate. The result, as the zoologists put it, is that, in the male, sex with aggression can be combined, but not sex and fear. In the female, sex and fear can be combined, but not aggression and sex. And there you have the animus-anima problem in a nutshell.

In other areas of nature, it has been discovered that if certain male animals lose their self-esteem they die. There is a beautiful story by Ernest Thompson Seton of a particularly good leader and cattle-thief wolf in a pack of wolves. This leading wolf was caught with much difficulty and, being such a famous animal, was not killed but tied up and brought home. At first it got absolutely wild, with manic eyes, but then, all of a sudden, to his astonishment, Seton, who had the wolf on his horse and was watching him, saw that the animal's eyes became quite quiet and had a faraway look, and the animal relaxed. He was left tied up in the courtyard, as no decision had been made as to what was to be done with him and the Government had offered a tremendous price, but the next morning the wolf was dead for no apparent reason. It had died of humiliation, and that is something quite common, particularly in the case of male animals.

The same thing happens in primitive masculine societies. Statistics were compiled during the last war to discover whether primitive or more highly educated people stand imprisonment best, and it was found that the more primitive the person the greater the rate of suicide from despair. The Red Cross compiled the statistics, and I got the information from my sister who was working with the Society. Apparently among the most primitive people there were mass suicides; they just ran amok. In one American camp where there were well-treated Japanese prisoners, an enormous number committed suicide in an outburst of despair. It is also well known that primitive Africans cannot be imprisoned for more than three days. Bushmen, for instance, cannot be impisoned, for no matter how well they are treated they just fade away. They lose hope and die for psychological reasons.

So it can be said that it is essential for the human male to have feelings of freedom, self-esteem and honor, and with that a certain amount of aggressiveness and ability to defend himself. That belongs to the vitality of the male, and if that is destroyed by the mother, then he falls an easy prey to the mother's animus. She punishes the son in a humiliating way, thus robbing him of his self-esteem. Another very wicked way by which it can be done is through mockery. I know of a mother who completely lamed her son by her witty tongue. Every time he wanted to assert his masculinity and be enterprising, she would make a little mocking remark which killed all his élan and made him look ridiculous. A young man who goes off to perform his heroic deed should not be ridiculed by the adult, but should be respected, for it means the growth of masculinity. If boys play at being gangsters and Indians they are funny, but one should recognize the necessity for the assertion of self-esteem and feeling of freedom and independence. That is essential, and stress should not be laid on what is ridiculous about it. For that reason, in many primitive male societies where they endeavor to keep their independence and masculinity, when the males go round wearing animal masks and tails attached to their behinds, and so on, the women may not look. In most male initiations in primitive tribes the women are kept out, for they could so easily just make a little mocking remark about the heroes, or something like that, and immediately the thing would fall flat. The men know very well that they look completely ridiculous in those demonstrative displays of masculinity and for that reason exclude the women. Women also have their women's mysteries, with the girl's first attempt at make-up and hair styles, and the mockery of their brothers is terrible. They laugh at the way she has made her first shy attempt at being a little feminine, so that usually girls prefer to get into groups at school and make their first attempts there, for they are also ridiculous, so they hide from the boys.

Question: Hasn't the sinus also to do with the nose, and if so would it not have to do with the breath of life? Isn't the nose stopped up when there is sinus trouble? Wouldn' t beating on the sinus imply beating on the breath of life?

No, I don't think so. After the beating one couldn't breathe any more, but in itself the sinus is a cavity, but what the medical function is I have never found out. It is a kind of remnant of the past, something like the appendix. Perhaps Dr. Mehmke can tell us about it? As far as I know it has little functional meaning.

Answer: I think its function is that it can be infected!

So it must be like the appendix, a rather meaningless thing. It has no function in itself. I think that makes it more meaningful and supports a prospective interpretation, for the woman in the dream does not hit on the breath of life but on something that is really unnecessary. This is what gives the dream a meaning which is not only negative. In other words, if he had not got such a cavity, if he did not have this unnecessary feminine weakness in him, she could not torture him. One can say that if he were masculine and strong and not already infected, and therefore weak, she would not be able to do anything. His lack of masculinity shows in the babyish cry that he is innocent. As if that matters! Instead of saying he is innocent, he should be furious and try to free himself. But he has this passive reaction, his hope that his innocence will save him-as if that would help in our world! According to Christian teaching, evil does not exist, and if one is innocent, everything will be all right. But Christianity by being misinterpreted in this way has made us all infantile and has robbed us of our sound instinctual attitude toward life. We all try to be innocent sheep, and then we are of course helpless. There we link up with the sheep-problem of St. Exupéry and the idea of sheep-mentality and infantilism and a certain kind of wrong Christian attitude where one is innocent so nothing can happen, for the protecting angels will apparently care for you. But reality contradicts this kind of teaching because in this world and in nature innocence does not help. It invites the wolves.

I have very little more information on this case, so we will next go into the puer aeternus problem as mirrored in Germany, and for this take a book by Bruno Goetz, Das Reich ohne Raum (The Kingdom Without Space), the first edition of which was published in 1919, the second in 1925. It is interesting that it was written and published before the Nazi movement came into being in 1933, before Hitler was ruminating on his morbid ideas. Bruno Goetz certainly had a prophetic gift about what was coming, and, as you will see, his book anticipates the whole Nazi problem, throwing light upon it from the angle of the puer aeternus. Goetz predicted the whole movement in his book, even what is now happening in Germany, and I believe that through the book we shall get to the point at which I am aiming, namely, the religious and the time aspect of the problem of the puer aeternus.

Notes

[17] See Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7, pars. 471ff.

Lecture 9

The Kingdom Without Space, written by Bruno Goetz, born at Riga in 1885, is a novel, but starts off with two poems which I would like to summarize:

When all we knew, destroyed, in ruins lay,

Encircled in death's mighty folds of darkness,

Our burning spirits strove

After the dream which led us on.

Far from our home and our maternal land,

On undetermined waves our ship drives on.

Laughing boldly we had ventured forth

As Vikings, searching undiscovered shores.

And if by night and horror overtaken, thou sing'st Us

songs of other homes,

Then phantoms vanish into gentle mist,

The world dissolves in dance and rhythm,

The stars disperse a fortune long delayed,

And radiant shines the kingdom without space.

Then comes a second poem dedicated to ''Fo," who, as you will see, is the puer aeternus figure in the novel:

When the dark cloud

Withdrew not from the sky

And from all the world

The sun was hid,

Out of the depths

A new light neared,

And in our sleep we knew

That Thou wert there.

O the suns that come

From the depths of thine eyes,

And from thy lips

The flowing streams of love.

Across the waves of an ethereal sea

The splendor of thy limbs

Entices us

To flaming courage.

Eternal youth.

Encircled by the music of the stars,

Giver of comfort,

Sparkling, free, and beautiful.

Men and women

Dance in thy glory,

Driving into death

For sight of thee.

Forever into light

Thy white form

calls Wave after wave,

And never do we age.

The second edition of this book was published in 1925, as I told you last time. I have not been able to find the first, but at the end of this edition it is said that this is the first unmutilated issue and that when the first was brought out the author was away and, either because he was so shocked or for some other stupid reason, the publisher cut out some of the chapters I will tell you which laterso that the first edition came out incomplete. The book was then misunderstood as being a political pamphlet. When the author returned he insisted on its being completely reprinted, and when speaking of the two editions at the end of the book, he says that he had never intended it as a political pamphlet.

It must be remembered that this was after the First World War, the time of the great debacle in Germany, of mass unemployment and all the post-war miseries. It was at this time that a certain pathological dreamer, a soldier named Schickelgruber (later known as Hitler), went about trying to form a group of young people around him with his ecstatic and crazy political programs. Goetz's book was published fourteen years before the Nazis seized power in Germany, while they were already working underground. It was a time of the utmost collective despair, aimlessness and disorientation, a time that in certain ways was similar to what we are now experiencing. Since the first edition of the book appeared in 1919 and since the author must have taken some time to write it, we can assume that it was being written during the war and that the ruins alluded to in the first poem refer to the catastrophes of that time. The author mentions the dream, so passionately pursued, that takes them away across the sea to new lands and into some unknown horror, and then he tells about one who sings of a new country and of the emergence, before their eyes, of a "kingdom without space."

The second poem in the book begins with the same motif of a sky darkened by clouds. Although the sun has disappeared, there is a new light which comes from the depths and which the still sleeping people feel as an invisible presence, described as "eternal youth encircled by the music of the stars." The author makes it clear that the eternal youth is the ruler of this kingdom without space and that one has to go into death in order to see him; that men and women dance ecstatically into death in order to see his completely transcendental form. It is therefore apparent that he entices people out of this world into another and seduces them into death.

The first chapter, entitled "Schimmelberg" (White Horse Mountain), says that the inhabitants of a little university town-the University of Schimmelbergwell remembered the old sea captain, Wilhelm van Lindenhuis. (The name is North German, tinged with Dutch, and is made up of the words Linde, lime, and huis, house, thus "Limehouse.")

There had been a lot of talk about his sudden death. First his gentle, rather woebegone and sickly wife had died, after which people noticed that he no longer took his evening walk, but when they saw a light in the house and his lean, furrowed face at the windows, they thought he must just have been indisposed for a while and was all right again, so did not bother any more. One evening, however, two unknown youths appeared wearing leather caps and what the author describes as "weather collars," that is, turned-up collars for protection in bad weather. They rang the bell at the Captain's house and he himself opened the door. Passers-by said that when he saw the boys at first he recoiled as if in surprise, but then he let them in and in a quarter of an hour they had left the house again.

Next morning the postman could get no answer when he rang the bell to deliver a letter, nor could he at midday, nor in the evening, so he informed the neighbors, and when the door was broken open they found the old man sitting dead in his armchair. Apparently he had died quite peacefully from a heart attack. On going through the house, a crown of thorns and an ivory cross were discovered on the son’s-that is to say, on Melchior'sdesk. Since there was no dust on these objects, they must have been placed there quite recently, for everything else was thick with dust.. Every effort was made to advise Melchior (the hero of our story) of his father's death; telegrams and letters were sent to him in Rome, but all were returned and he could not be found. Many years went by, and people had other things to think about than Lindenhuis and his strange son. Only when they went by the Captain's empty house did they wonder where Melchior could be and if he knew of his father's death and why he did not bother about the fortune he had inherited. They said he had always been a strange young man, and the following old story was dug up about him.

When he was about fifteen years old he had had two friends-Otto von Lobe and Heinrich Wunderlich. Otto von Lobe was a very slender, gentle, blond, aristocratic boy, and Wunderlich was a strong, brown, bold young man. The three became friends and founded a mystical secret club. They read a lot of alchemical and Rosicrucian literature and started alchemical experiments with the idea of finding an elixir which, when drunk, would enable them to change shape. After many attempts they believed they had succeeded in producing, but each of the three wanted to be the first to try it. Since they could not agree, they called the whole of their mystical club together. The others had been more fascinated by the romantic horror of the undertaking than by the details, which had been left to the three friends, and they knew nothing of the poisonous make-up of the drink. Lots were drawn and the lot fell to Otto von Lobe. It was then decided to have an all-night carouse in which their fantasy ran off into future possibilities and what they would do when, like magicians, they could change their shapes and how a new era would begin and mankind could be transformed. They became more and more ecstatic and in the early morning ran down to the sea and turned to the East. At the moment when the first rays of the sun appeared, Otto von Lobe sprang up, tore off his clothes and, standing in the early light, laughed happily and then slowly drank down the elixir. In a few minutes he was dead. A strict investigation followed. Melchior was expelled from the school, having refused to make any statement, and the others were severely punished.

Wunderlich, the strong, dark boy who had been the third in the group, changed noticeably after this event, dropping all unusual occupations and becoming very cynical and conventional in a rather pointed and exaggerated manner. He studied medicine and as a general practitioner retired to a little village, where he lived as a very down-to-earth, cynical, practical man who wished to have nothing more to do with anything fantastical.

Here we have the description of something we can recognize from former lecturesthe fallen Icarus who, after the elation of creative fantasy, now drops once and for all into banality.

Otto von Lobe was dead, and the third member of the trio, Melchior, having been expelled from school, retired to his home and stayed shut up in his room for many months. His father, who was very much interested in magic and Rosicrucian writings and alchemy, pardoned his son. Although his mother cried about the catastrophe she also did not say much to him. Actually, the father was rather pleased and thought his son was following up questions in which he himself was interested and that he would certainly get somewhere.

At first Melchior would sit brooding for hours in his room, to which his food was brought up. Then he slowly began to regain confidence and started scientific discussions with his father who, although interested in magic and such things, had no faith in the possibility of the chemical transformation of the human being. He saw that, even if it could be done, it would have no meaning, and he saw no point in it. But that was the son's fanatical idea, namely, that for its own sake and without any further purpose it should be possible to bum the original shape of the individual to ashes and make the physical human being transparenta mirror for the stars, as he called it. His father was more interested in astrology, Melchior considered him to be muddle-headed, so they slowly began to quarrel more and more. In spite of their similar interests they did not agree, slowly drifted apart, and in time ceased to talk to each other.

Melchior then began to visit Henriette Karlsen, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Director of the local Museum. She was very beautiful, fair, slenderly built, with pale, amber-colored eyes and limp, long-fingered aristocratic hands. Sitting locked up practically all the time in his darkened room, Melchior once saw her crossing the street, and the next day, for the first time he went out and they met in the Museum. She went up to him, took both his hands and looked at him for a long time without saying a word, her eyes full of tears. Then Melchior turned and hurried home. Thereafter he went to meet her every day in the Museum, but during all this time Henriette became paler and sadder. One day, by chance, the old Director overheard Melchior telling her how every night since his childhood a face had looked in through the window. In the evening, as a little boy, he would hear a knocking on the window and, looking up, would see a small brown-faced little boy with eyes just like his own looking at him through the window. When he ran toward it the vision would disappear, and then he would sit and cry for hours. These visions faded, but while he and his friends were making the death potion which they imagined to be a transforming elixir, he again saw the boy, this time surrounded by other boys, looking through the window with mocking faces. Since the catastrophe of Otto's death they had disappeared.

"Thank God," said Henriette, when he told her that.

At that Melchior went into a rage, asking how she could say such a thing, for since the boys had disappeared he was completely alone and nobody helped him. Otto had died merely because they had been in too much of a hurry and had not enough belief in the elixir, and Heinrich had betrayed them, and his father understood nothing, so now he was alone. To which Henriette replied that if he loved her he must promise to forget all that and if the boys called him he must not follow them.

In despair Melchior said how could he promise that, how could she ask such a thing of him. He wanted nothing more than to go with them and solve all their riddles, Henriette with him, and he seized her hand.

"Never!" cried Henriette with deadly fear in her voice. "Do you want to kill me as you killed Otto?"

Melchior then got very angry and, calling her a coward, stormed out of the room, past the dismayed Director, and back home.

On that same day he asked his father to send him to another town to school, to which his father agreed. Thereafter Melchior only came home occasionally for a few days and, after going to the University, remained away altogether. In the little town all they heard was that he was studying chemistry, at which he was very good, and that he eventually got a Ph.D. for it at Oxford. Henriette died of tuberculosis the year he got his degree. So the one who did not want to die, who refused contact with Melchior because she saw that the boys represented a pull toward death, soon died herself. A year before his mother died, Melchior returned to Schimmelberg and stayed three days, after which he went abroad and for a long time traveled in India and China. Then suddenly it was stated in the newspapers that the famous Professor Cux of the University of Schimmelberg needed an assistant and had taken Melchior for his chemical investigations. So he was coming back, and naturally everybody was very curious to meet the man about whose youth there had been such strange rumors.

When he returned he seemed disappointingly normal. He had a very cold and rather strange personality, with still gray eyes, but except for his rather strange look he seemed to be an amiable and even impressive personality. People were pleased that he was married and fascinated by his somewhat exotic looking wife.

On the first day Professor Cux told Melchior of the death of his father and of the strange apparition of the two boys who had deposited the crown of thorns and the ivory cross. When the boys were mentioned, Melchior seemed for a moment to have had a shock, but then quickly pulled himself together and pretended to know nothing about them. He just remarked that his father sometimes had strange ideas and for that reason had contacts with people he did not know, and that he himself did not know anything about the matter.

Melchior then took over and renovated his father's house, where he, but particularly his wife, started a very social life. The whole town met there, partly out of curiosity but also for other reasons, as we shall soon see. Large parties were given every evening, but Melchior himself always withdrew early, excusing himself, and went to his study where he remained until far into the night.

Slowly a scandal developed. Melchior began to be careless about his scientific activities and took more and more part in his wife's social life, which through him now acquired quite a different character. People were indignant over the mocking way in which he spoke of State and Church institutions. Above all they were upset by his ever- increasing influence over the students, whom he tried to incite against science. He wanted to imbue them with radical skepticism against the foundation and outcome of scientific knowledge and the institution of the Church. He spoke of science as a modern form of intellectual illusion, saying that there was as little certainty in it as there was in faith, for science too was a pseudo-faith. At first it was thought that Professor Cux might put a stop to this, but then slowly it was discovered that he was completely under the charm of his young assistant. In the end both were obliged to stop lecturing, the Professor always supporting Melchior in his views about science, saying that he was quite right and what was science? What was there in chemistry and science? Nothing! People thought this was meant as a joke, but then it was discovered that in all secrecy the old man had married a young dancing girl. Everybody shook their heads and remarked that that was the fatal influence of a certain circle. Consequently, people drew away from Melchior and few remained true to him.

The circle continued to meet once a week at Melchior van Lindenhuis's house. There were eccentric and orgiastic parties, and although reports were greatly exaggerated, there was said to be a terribly immoral atmosphere. People were astonished when the liberal-minded Lutheran priest of St. Mary's Church, Mr. Silverharnisk (silver harness), also joined the circle, but he justified his visits by saying that he was studying the disorientation and uprootedness of the modern soul! The real reasons, as you can guess, were quite different.

Melchior himself grew more and more peculiar, withdrawing entirely from the orgiastic parties given in his house. In November the strange boys who wore the remarkable clothes were seen around the house. Then the townspeople remembered the curious conditions surrounding Melchior's father's death and the stories told by the old Director of the Museum about Melchior's conversation with Henriette when she was sixteen years old. People came to believe that there was some insoluble secret, and irritation and tension increased.

The second chapter is entitled "The Meeting."

Melchior, in a very bad temper, sat on a bench, watching the heavy rain falling. He could not make up his mind to go home, for he was sure that his wife would have purposely forgotten to have his study heated in order to force him to join the party. He therefore preferred to freeze out of doors.

Steps on the gravel started him out of his apathy, and with a shock he saw a boy wearing a high collar and a leather cap loitering along the leafless alley of the city park. When the boy came nearer, Melchior saw a small brown face out of which the determined yet shy, rather staring, gray eyes looked straight ahead. He walked past Melchior, and as he passed, looked at him briefly, smiled, and then disappeared. Melchior gave a little cry and suddenly began to tremble without knowing why. Then at the other end of the alley appeared a tall man who looked uncertainly around, took a few steps, and then, stopping again, looked around once more.

Before the man could have seen him, the boy suddenly rushed toward Melchior and whispered to him to take his left hand and then quickly to put on his glove and not be surprised at anything and not tell anybody anything. The boy's voice expressed such panic and his eyes had such a feverish look and his beautifully formed lips quivered in such fear as he spoke, that Melchior involuntarily seized the hand held out to him. At the same instant the boy disappeared as though he had melted into thin air, and on Melchior's first finger there appeared a broad silver ring. Still under the influence of the boy's frightened request, Melchior drew out his glove and put it on. Then, he didn't know why, he suddenly had a feeling of tremendous happiness and felt that something he had long hoped for had now happened. His depression disappeared completely, and full of self-confidence he looked at the tall man from whom the boy had fled.

When the strange man saw Melchior he stopped and seemed undecided. He was clean-shaven, with clear-cut but rather faded features ending in a pointed, energetic chin. His mouth was thin and large, his nose small and bent, his cheeks sunken, and his eyes like bright transparent stones. When he raised his hat, Melchior noticed that he had a very large forehead and beautiful fair hair.

"Excuse me," said the stranger, "did you perhaps see a boy go by?"

"I haven't seen anybody," answered Melchior absentmindedly.

"Is that so?" said the stranger. "Excuse me." And he sat down on the bench beside Melchior. "I am a little tired. I have been running about the whole day looking for my pupil."

"What does he look like?" asked Melchior, and in spite of himself had to smile.

The stranger looked very suspicious and said: "But you did see him then? Did he speak to you? Did he . . .?"

"I haven't seen anybody," interrupted Melchior. "I have already told you so."

"I thought from your question that you remembered something," said the stranger.

"So you didn't see him! What a pity! Excuse me for persisting, but I am very worried."

Melchior continued to look mistrustfully at the tall man sitting beside him. The outwardly immovable face of the man seemed to change in expression from one second to another. Sometimes it seemed like the face of an old man, and sometimes there was a childish smile, and sometimes his features appeared severe and threatening and the eyes sparkled cold and penetrating.

He got up and said, "Excuse me once more. I have a request to make of you. I don't know why, but I have the feeling that it will be just you whom the boy will meet. I know that he will speak to you. Don't listen to what he says; it's not true. Don't take his hand if he asks you to. It might bring you trouble. I warn you! And if you see him, please be so kind as to tell me. Do not refuse to do so."

Melchior did not answer.

"My name is Ulrich von Spät," said the stranger. (Spät means "late.") "I am staying at the Grand Hotel and am passing through. You must think me completely crazy, and I cannot explain the whole thing to you, but please have confidence in me and do what I ask you. The boy has a thin brown face, steady gray eyes, long black hair, and wears a coat with a high collar and a leather cap. You will certainly recognize him. His appearance must strike you . . ."

At this moment Melchior dropped his head thoughtfully but did not say a word. Mr. von Spät waited a moment, then looked at Melchior and sighed. Stretching out his hand to him he said, "Well, let us hope! Auf Wiedersehen!"

Melchior suddenly felt a tremendously warm sympathy for the man and a deep inner relationship. He forgot the boy's warning, took off his glove and shook Herr von Spät warmly by the hand, and the latter saw the ring. His eyes flashed for a minute, but he hid his excitement and walked quietly away.

Melchior, suddenly remembering the ring on his finger, felt as though he had betrayed the boy. Only when it occurred to him that the stranger might not have seen it did he calm down a little, but without forgiving himself for his carelessness.

"What can that mean?" he thought. "I am losing control over myself. Things happen to me as if in a dream. Who was that stranger? What power had he over me that I suddenly loved him so that I forgot who he was? He is my enemy!"

The third chapter is entitled "Fo"the name of the boy.

On the way home Melchior felt as though he were dematerialized. Streets, walls, houses, surrounded him, tall and strange. They seemed to be made of air. It was as though he walked through them. They divided like curtains in front of him and closed behind him like clouds of mist. Everything was changed; buildings which he knew had existed in former times but were long gone, were suddenly there again. It was no longer the same town through which he walked.

The people also seemed changed. He caught fleeting glances and felt as though he looked into his own eyes as into a mirror. A smile, a wave of the hand, seemed to him an indication, a greeting, a sign of secret understanding.

Near the station, under a gigantic umbrella, sat a fat old woman selling apples. He went up to her, bought a couple of apples and put them in his pocket. To her astonishment, he stroked the wrinkled cheeks of the woman. "Yes, yes," he said, beaming, "we know each other. We are old friends. Do you see this ring on my finger? You never saw it before, did you? Nobody else may see it. That means that I am going away now, far away. You know how it is when someone wants to go far away and suddenly it is time, and one goes."

The woman didn't seem to understand and looked uneasy.

"I know," he went on, "that I don't need to tell you all this. We know each other so well. We have known each for a long time, ever since childhood . . ."

The woman, who had become more and more nervous, looked all around and at last, pulling herself together, interrupted Melchior: "Aren't you ashamed of talking like that to an old woman?"

"You don't know me?" asked Melchior. "Why, suddenly, don't you want to know me? You always sat at some corner when I was on the road. I always saw you when I left a place or arrived somewhere. Don't you remember how you sat at the station in Genoa with a bright parrot on your shoulder, and on my arrival I bought oranges from you? And in Vienna? In St. Petersburg? In Stockholm? In a hundred other cities! You were always there and greeted me with your fruit when I arrived and watched me when I left."

"There is some mistake, Sir," said the woman mistrustfully. "I have never been away from here."

Melchior looked her straight in the eyes and shook his head and finally said in a low voice, "I understand. You are careful. You don't want to be overheard. The stranger is hereour enemy. It was careless of me to talk to you. We may have been watched. Only I was so glad to see you. Now I know I am going away."

At this moment he saw a boy going past the apple-woman's stall who looked at him sharply and put his finger to his lips in warning and then rapidly went round the corner. It couldn't have been the same as the one who had disappeared, for this one's face was smaller, browner, bolder. Only the still gray eyes were alike.

Melchior nodded good-bye to the woman and went quickly away. "Who was it who warned me?" he thought, "He wore the same clothing as the one who disappeared. What circle have I run into? What is it that surrounds and captivates me? I have seen it all some time in a dream, The many trusted faces on the street, the winks and nods and greetings, the two boys, the stranger . . . But I can't remember. And the apple woman . . . Why did I say all that to her? It was idiotic! How should she know me? Old women sit in all railway stations. And yet, it was the same face, the same hair, the same wrinkles, the same voice . . ."

When he neared his home, Melchior saw in the dusk a number of boys who broke up at sight of him and hid behind the corner of the house and peeped out curiously.

''It is becoming more and more confusing," he thought. "Now there is a whole band of them !"

The windows of his dwelling, which was on the ground floor, were all lit up. There was the sound of laughter and confused talking and music. Among the murmur of many voices he thought he recognized the clear voice of Mr. von Spät. Then it occurred to him that he had never given von Spät his name or told him where he lived, so how could he be here? Melchior decided he had been mistaken.

In order not to be seen he went in the back door and straight to his study. There it was cold and dark. He turned on the light and lay down in his damp coat on the couch. The ring, which was loose on his finger, fell to the ground. In a fright he looked up.

The boy who had disappeared stood by the couch and looked at him, smiling. "You're cold," he said. "I'll light a fire." He lit the fire in the stove and then threw off his coat and cap and stood by Melchior.

"I knew that I would find you, Melchior," he said. "I had seen in your eyes that you would help me. You belong to us even though you don't know it. I thank you. We all thank you."

"Who are you? Who are you all?" asked Melchior. "I don't understand what is happening. Who is the strange man? How do you know my name?"

I have known about you for long. I am called Fo. I cannot tell you my real name. None of us may say that. We give ourselves nicknames so that we may speak to each other. Who are we? You will find out when you live with us. You have only to cry out that you want to go away and we will come to fetch you. But be careful of the stranger! He is our worst enemy! He saw the ring on your finger, and he will try to catch you. He has a secret which makes him very powerful. I was once in his power and could only get away by tricking him. I will tell you about it later when you come to us. You are still living among the others, and I cannot yet tell you anything. And now-thank you, and let me go. The others are waiting for me.

Melchior heard a noise at the window and saw many faces pressed against the window-panes, looking in out of the darkness into the bright room.

"I won't let you go," cried Melchior, "until you have told me everything. How do I know that you will come when I call? How can I follow you when I don't know who you are? How can I resist the stranger when I don't know his secret?"

"Who we are you can only know by living, not by talking. You will follow us if your heart drives you. We are always there when called. We ourselves don't know the stranger's secret; if we did he would not have any power over us. I have answered you. Now let me go."

"You want to run away from me," said Melchior, "but I know how to stop you with the ring."

"The ring won't help you, Melchior," said the boy, laughing. "It turns your life into mystery and confusion and change. But you won't get away. If you were to keep the ring, the town would always be to you as it was on your way home today. You would unravel nothing; you would take friends for enemies and enemies for friends, for you would not understand the signs which would explain them. Come with us and then you will be free. Call us when you want us. Until then, let me go. Open the window."

Still Melchior hesitated. Then he stood up silently, looked at Fo for a long time, and opened the window for him. The boy jumped out, and the crowd outside encircled him. They took one another's hands. A flame shot up in their midst, split up into sparks, and they had all disappeared.

You see that the story is very suggestive! It is something like Edgar Allen Poe's stories and might have been influenced by Kubin's The Other Side and by E.T.A. Hoffman. It is the kind of novel in which suddenly banal reality is dissolved in the mysterious events of the other side, where, in our language, the unconscious penetrates and dissolves the world of consciousness, and where from then on anything and everything can happen.

Mrs. Volkhardt has called my attention to the fact that not only Kubin, but also Gustav Meyrinck wrote at this time in Munich, so there was really a whole school of writers of this type of story in Germany. Meyrinck was also very much interested in alchemical experiments and bought old lavatories in the Prague ghetto because he had read in alchemical books that very old human excrement contained the mystical stuff of the Philosophers' Stone. He cooked this substance (he gives a description in a letter) and it exploded in his face! He also had contacts and conversations with ghosts. A whole circle of people there experienced the unconscious, or tried to describe an experience of the unconscious, under a para-psychological aspect. To them the unconscious was the spirit world, and they tried to contact it by para-psychological and magical means. They fell back onto the Rosicrucian and Freemason and other traditions, from which they tried to obtain some knowledge of the world of the Beyond. Not having the key concepts provided by psychology, it was their only way of approach. Bruno Goetz is of this type and belongs to this period.

The name of the town, "White Horse Mountain," is also meaningful, for the white horse was a very well-known attribute, and sometimes a personification, of the old god Wotan, who either appeared riding on the eight-legged white horse Sleipnir or was replaced by this magic horse. Those who have read Alfred Kubin's The Other Side know that a mad white horse who races through a destroyed world plays a similar role. Wotan retired to the mountain but will reappear at the end of time and reestablish his eternal and happy empire.

Lindenhuis, the family name of the hero of the story, means "Lime Tree House," and in olden times in most small German towns and villages there was usually a lime tree in the center of town. It is a feminine symbol and was dedicated to nature goddesses like Perchta, Hulda, Holle (plus all her other names). It was thought that the souls of unborn children lived under the leaves of the tree, and it was the mystical tree in the midst of the village around which the whole of life centered, very like the central pole which, for instance, you find in American Indian rituals. Old Lindenhuis, the father, is a sea-captain, and all the other names are slightly distorted by North German or Dutch dialects to draw attention to the fact that we are concerned with a North German country and its overseas contacts. Also, in the opening poem there is an allusion to seafaring people, the still living Viking spirit being a personification of the restlessness and transcendental eternal longing which is typical of Teutonic peoples. We cannot interpret the details in the book until later, for so far we have no key as to what the ivory cross and the crown of thorns allude to. The explanation comes only in the later chapters.

The rumors which spread about the hero of the story contain a very typical feature. For instance, there are the three boys: Otto von Lobe, an aristocratic type, dedicated to death, and described as being very delicate, and Heinrich Wunderlich, who is described as being very vital. Those two are obviously opposite shadow figures of Melchior's: one could be called a personification of the sensitive, artistic personality with a strong suicidal tendency, and Heinrich Wunderlich, the vital side of Melchior's personality which pulls toward adaptation to life and who therefore cuts off all the juvenile romantic longings. Otto von Lobe dies from drinking the elixir, and through the shock Wunderlich becomes quite cynical and realistic. You could say that one part of Melchior dies and another part of him reacts to that with a tendency to cynicism. The ego complex, which would be represented by Melchior himself, is between the two. As we hear, he retires into his room and into a deeply depressed introversion after the shock, while Otto von Lobe, the real puer aeternus in him, dies. It is well known that between the ages of fifteen and twenty suicides occur frequently, for it is a period when the pull toward death is strong. Generally, it is connected with puer aeternus problemsa crucial time when these problems are urgent.

Melchior describes how, from the time he was a little boy, he always saw his double at the window. What does that mean? I will read you the exact passage:

Father was at sea or occupied in some way, and Mother leant over the Bible, and he himself felt lost and sad. And then he heard a knocking at the window and saw the pale brown face with eyes resembling his own, and that always made him cry bitterly. His mother never knew about it, but he told his father, who only smiled but gave no answer.

Naturally, you can say that that was Melchior's early experience which foreshadowed all that was to come later, but I think we should amplify this with a very well-known fact, namely, that in early youth lonely children tend to produce a double personality with whom they entertain themselves. This double is the coming-alive of the unconscious personality, due to loneliness. It is typical that it is described in this way, namely, that he is a lonely child and in moments when he sadly realizes his loneliness this apparition appears. There are children who invent such a double and personify it and play with it for hours. Often this fantasy figure of early youth later reappears in dreams and really becomes a personification of the whole unconscious. It is the shadow, the anima and the Self, still in one. It is the whole other side of the personality.

We are always inclined to think of the unconscious in terms of the different classifications of Jungian psychology, so we could debate whether this first apparition is the Self or the shadow, but we should never forget that these concepts are only valid in certain psychological situations. When a human being first meets the unconscious in an autonomous form, either in childhood or, for instance, in the beginning of an analysis, there is no question of shadow, animus or anima, and Self. The first experience we usually have when we encounter the unconscious is with what we could best call the other side. In those early stages it is personified in different forms, and it is advisable in analysis not to start introducing those formal concepts but to let the person first simply experience that there is another side to the ego and its ordinary world. It is only after some time, when the fact of a completely different part of the personality has been realized, another inhabitant in our inner house, that then we slowly discern figures in the half darkness of the unconscious such as that of the inferior man, whom we might classify under the name of shadow, and the figure of the heterosexual partner, which we might classify under the name of anima, just to bring some order into that other side. But in itself, as a reality, it is really the impact of the unknown part of the personality. You will find all over the world that the first meeting with the unconscious is often with such a personification, or a double, in which shadow, Self and anima (if it is a man) are completely one.

There is the same idea in Persian teaching, which says that after death the noble man meets either a youth who looks exactly like himself (because in death he turns again into his beautiful and noble stature) or a girl of fifteen (that is, the anima). If he asks the figure who it is, it will say, "I am thy own self." If the man has been virtuous, then this figure is shining and beautiful. By living virtuously, with the right kind of religious attitude, he develops a double in the Beyond, and the moment of death brings reunion with the other half. This Persian myth has survived in certain Gnostic and Manichaean traditions in late antiquity. There it is absolutely irrelevant whether the figure appears as a shining youth or as a girl, for its answer to the dying person is the same, namely, "I am thy own self, thy other half."

This is a very primitive, archetypal idea. In many primitive societies, it is thought that every human being on entering this world is only a half, the other half being the placenta, that is, that part of the personality which has not entered this world. It is therefore ritually buried, or dried and worn in a capsule around the neck, and is the magic substance in which the double is supposedly located (the transcendental double, the other personality), and there is the same idea that after death the two become one again. There is even a myth which says that the first man was complete in heaven, but when he was incarnated in this world he was only a half, and therefore the first man, who is mythologically exactly the same type as our figure of Adam, is called the "Half One." So you could say that any human apparition is only a half; the other remains in the land of death in the Beyond, and one joins it after death. What this means ultimately we do not know because it is an archetypal representation whose meaning we can never exhaust intellectually. But we can say that among other things it mirrors the basic realization that the growth of consciousness, which begins in early youth and increases, is a halving of the total personality, and the more one becomes conscious the more one loses one's other half, which is the unconscious. It mirrors, as it were, the split of the human being into a conscious and an unconscious personality, and there are early-youth experiences in which this is realized.

I once read in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung a story told by a Hungarian officer which illustrates this. Before the First World War he was the only child of an aristocratic Hungarian family and was so lonely, having nobody to play with, that he invented a brother whom he called Stepanek and imagined as a very tough red-haired little boy. In his imagination this little boy would do all the mischief he hoped, or would have liked, to do, but for which he hadn't the courage. In his fantasy he lived mainly in imagining what his Stepanek would do. When he went to school and found real comrades, the figure faded and was forgotten. And then he says (and I am just repeating the story) that in the First World War he was shot and wounded. He fainted and came around after a time, bleeding and shivering and in a very bad state. And he saw a human figure bending over him, a red-haired man of thirty, and thinking it was somebody who had come to rescue him he muttered, "Who are you?" The other whispered "Stepanek!" The next thing he remembered was that he was being taken care of in a hospital and slowly coming back to himself. He was very much puzzled about whether he had had an hallucination-whether he had projected something onto the man who had brought him in, who perhaps had been a black-haired Red Cross man. He tried to follow up the problem and so asked the doctors and personnel at the hospital how he had got there, but nobody knew! The nurse knew he had been brought to the ward, and that he had been found on a stretcher in the hospital courtyard, but nobody knew who had brought him there, and could never find out! He said that he didn't want to theorize about it but that those were the facts. I have a rational explanation: As you see from the childhood story, Stepanek was his more ordinary and vital part, his inferior personality, the red-haired fellow who dared to do all the things he did not dare do. He himself was rather an introverted, sensitive kind of boy, and I think it quite likely that in the war situation, in a half-dazed way, he managed to drag himself to the hospital and was therefore literally saved by his inner instinctive personality, Stepanek. Then he broke down in the courtyard where he was found.

His wound was not too bad. That seems to me the only possible explanation. The other possibility is that a man from the lazaret had picked him up and that in his dazed condition he had projected Stepanek onto him. Nobody knows!

This is only to illustrate that fact that the lonely child very often finds a companion in the unconscious other half and thereby experiences the unconscious, but normally these shadow figures, and the other side, are at this age projected onto other children who take over the role of "the other." It also shows the problem of a certain amount of dissociation, a dissociation of the personality, which then comes up again in this rather exaggerated, romantic fit which the boys experience at school when Otto von Lobe dies from the elixir. The fascination comes from the idea that the human individual, in its material shape, could be trans- formed and dematerialized and then become, as Melchior says later to his father, a mirror of the stars. So, at bottom, the fascinating idea of an alchemical transformation haunts all those boys, and the accident happens through their attempt to put it into reality. There we see clearly that this double the puer aeternus boy has to do with the Self and that the realization of the Self, as it is presented in the alchemical process, is the real fascinosum. There you also see how the two rhythms set in, namely, the pull to death, expressed in Otto von Lobe, and the cynical pull toward reality, personified in Heinrich Wunderlich. I think we cannot say more about it until we see how it all turns out.

The next thing is that during Melchior's retirement into his dark room a first meeting with the feminine principle takes place, for when shut up in his room, having been expelled from school and quite under the shock of Otto von Lobe's death, he discovers the girl, Henriette Karlsen, who later dies from tuberculosis. He quarrels with her, as you remember, because she does not want to follow him into death. She feels that those boys he always sees and the visions he has of the boys mean a romantic pull toward death and does not want to follow him, but warns him, which is what causes the break between them. All the same she dies afterward. In anticipation of the story, I can tell you that the hero in it never unites with a woman in a real way. The marriage is nothing, for there is no relationship but complete hatred and disappointment on both sides. It is a complete fiasco. There is thus the same problem as in The Little Prince, for the contact with the anima does not work. Here is a different variation. You remember that the little prince also quarrels with the rose and leaves her on the planet. There the anima figure is not so aristocratic and lacking in vitality but rather childish and haughty and difficult to get on with. This girl, however, is more the aristocratic "broken lily," a very attractive anima type. But how would you interpret it psychologically? The first love of a man is always very meaningful, for the girl then is more the anima than she is real, and usually these love affairs do not end in marriage. It is mostly an anima fascination linked up with the mother in this story-that she was a sad, suffering woman who sat reading the Bibleand obviously Henriette Karlsen is a replica of the mother-image. Sometimes men have different animae, and one of them is like that, but there are others to compensate. If that is the dominant type, however, what conclusion would you draw? What does that predict?

Answer: That his vitality is feeble.

Not necessarily his vitality, but the feeling side; his eros is weak. He himself is not necessarily weak, for Heinrich Wunderlich is a vital type, the one who becomes the cynical realist, so it could mean that it would still be possible for the ego to be quite realistic. What would you guess if you met someone between eighteen and twenty who had such an anima figure? What would he look like if you met him again at fifty? I would say that he has every chance of becoming either homosexual or remaining a bachelor. Those would be the two possibilities because the whole relationship to the feminine side and to feeling-to eros, relationship-is weak and very likely to die, that is, to fade away. I have seen more cases like this among determined bachelors than among homosexuals.

I know of a man who got engaged three times to a dying girl and never understood that this must have something to do with him. After the funeral of the third girl he thought he was just persecuted by fate and gave up. I knew him as a very old bachelora very nice man. He never saw that his anima-constellation made him choose such women, that he had a real instinct for picking out the doomed woman. He always got engaged correctly and meant to marry, but the girl died, one from tuberculosis and one in an accident, and the third I don't remember how. What was so striking about this old man was the terrific sensitivity which he covered up by his odd behavior and scurrility. He went about dirty, covered with tobacco, and lived in a flat like a cave, decorated with beautiful things, but ash and cigars over everything. The mere mention of a charwoman put him into a rage, and he would shout about women-especially charwomen-who disturb everything. He was very artistic and had a beautiful collection; he knew more about art, with feeling and understanding, than anybody I have met since. He was the type of the spiritually, highly cultivated, funny bachelor!

You could see clearly that his anima was so sensitive that he could never get near a woman or make a friend of a woman, or even make male friends; his feeling was too delicate and too easily hurt. The only way he could survive was by keeping away from any close contact with other human beings. What saved him was his tremendous sense of humor. He always laughed at his own sensitivity, covering it up with ironic remarks, a trick of many sensitive people. He made fun of himself so as to keep his shell whole. That is the usual behavior of a man with this special predilection for dying girls. The other possibility is a relation to someone of the same sex, becoming homosexual, because there a certain distance and delicacy of relationship can be imposed and the snarls of passion and the realization of the marriage relationship with its disagreeable and wounding realities can be escaped. The similarity to The Little Prince is that the puer aeternus problem is here again connected with the problem of the weak anima figure and weak eros side, and relationship to the other sex is a problem.

Then there is a strange paradox, namely, that the girl Henriette, the only anima figure he meets before his wife, wants to prevent him from following up the romantic pull from the Beyond. Then she herself dies. How would you interpret that? In a way she does the right thing, for she warns him and tries to get him over onto this side and this life. But then she goes.

Remark: He has projected a sickly anima onto her.

Yes, and when she protests, then the anima projection falls off. If she had joined in with his romantic plans, she would have carried out the role of the anima, but by calling him away from those plans she refuses to take on that role. Why is not explained in the story, but at that moment the anima projection falls off because for him to be able to continue his projection she must cooperate in the pull toward death. Moreover, Melchior had chosen her because she was a dying person, which apparently the girl herself did not know and was consciously not attracted by death. This also shows a tendency typical of young people which is indicative of a certain weakness, namely, that he belongs to the type of person who, when a projection falls off, does not carry on the relationships-another sign of his eros weakness.

Some people, when they notice that the other person is not what they had assumed, are pulled by natural curiosity to find out more about the matter. They think it odd that they were so attracted by a woman who ceased to attract when she proved to be quite different. They try to find out what happened and why the attraction faded. In that way there is a chance of realizing the projection. But those who, as soon as they are disappointed, just finish, always remain in the projection. If one is disappointed, that is just the time to follow the relationship, at least for a while, in order to find out what happened. That is actually how Jung discovered, in himself, the anima. Being again disappointed in a woman, he asked himself why on earth he had expected anything else-what had made him expect something different? Through asking such questions and realizing an expectation which did not fit the outer figure, he discovered the image inside.

It is therefore always helpful if a relationship-not only a heterosexual relationship-disappoints you, to ask yourself such questions: Why did I not see that before? What did I expect? Why did I have a different image of this person?Where did the error come from? For the error is something real too. If one can do this, it indicates a desire to hold on to the human relationship and take back the illusion. When one does that and makes an effort to establish the relationship on its own level, then the illusions must be investigated as something interesting. But people with weak feeling tend to break off the relationship as soon as the other person disappoints them. They just walk out because it is no longer interesting, and questions about why one had the wrong expectation and why one is hurt are not asked.

Question: But isn't there something in the other person which formed the hook for the projection?

Yes, but one can only discover that if one goes on after the disappointment. Then one might find it. At first one thinks one knows the other person, for when I project I have the strong feeling of intimate knowledge. At the first meeting there is no need to talk: you know everything about each other that is a complete projection the wonderful feeling of being one and having known each other for many ages. Then suddenly the other behaves in an unexpected way and there is disappointment. One falls out of the clouds and feels that "this is not it." If you then go on, you must do two things, for now there is a double war: you must find out why you had such an illusion and who the other person is if he or she is not what you expected. Who is he or she in reality? That is a long job, and when you have done that have found the root of your own illusion and how the other person seems to be when looked at without projection then you may ask why your illusion chose that person to fall upon? And that is very difficult, for sometimes the hook is big, and sometimes very small, because the other person may have only few characteristics that fit the projection, so it may be more or less of an illusion. There are all degrees.

Obviously Melchior is the type who goes as soon as the projection falls off, as soon as the other person does not behave as expected. He even calls Henriette a coward: he just insults her and leaves her. Subjectively, that shows the weakness of his dying eros function. It is not even said that he was sorry afterward or suffered from unhappy love and disappointment. Other boys who had had such a silly experience with a girl at that age would sit down and write endless insulting letters, accusing her of being a cow and not understanding, and so on. They would follow up the problem, and this would show relatedness. It would be an attempt, even though based on error and projection; it would indicate a passionate interest in the other human being. But here there is nothing of the kind-he just writes the whole thing off, just like the little prince, only in a rather different form, for the latter leaves the planet and the rose, although she feels sorry and says, ''Yes, yes, go, go!" Out of pride, she sends him away. If someone writes off his relationship so quickly, you may be sure that he will write himself off equally quickly. That is the suicidal type of person.

Here there is the weak anima, typical of the suicidal tendency in the unconscious. That is how, to a certain extent, one can discover suicidal tendencies beforehand. I have met two types: one is not really suicidal but could finish himself off in a ragea kind of accident. There are irascible people (really something of the murderer type) who get sudden fits of rage which may also go against themselves, when they can kill themselves by mistake. They lose their heads-and if they could survive they would be very sorry! That is not a genuine suicidal tendency. It is an inverted aggression. The aggressiveness is not integrated and may suddenly turn against the person himself-like the scorpion's sting! But Melchior is the true suicidal type, and such people secretly, intellectually and coldly, write off those in their surroundings and also themselves. They never really trust themselves or those around them-there are no real relationships. That is something which runs through this whole book-there is no relatedness. That is the fatal thing right from the beginning.

After this comes the quarrel between Melchior and his father, which is very important. Melchior is still pursuing the idea of the transformation of the personality, while his father is an astrologer, a magician, and is also interested in occult sciences, not, however, for the sake of the transformation of the personality but rather out of curiosity or as a pseudo scientific occult occupation. This is where father and son clash emotionally and then again write each other off. It is another breaking-off reaction. This is so important because it indicates the main problem-the enmity of Fo, the boy, and Ulrich von Spät, his adversary. At the beginning, Ulrich yon Spät pretended to be Fo's tutor and wanted to catch him in some way and keep Melchior away from his influence. The boy, on the other hand, is afraid of Ulrich yon Spät and runs away from him all the time. He tries to bring Melchior under his own influence, and you will see that this battle continues. At one time Melchior really loves Ulrich von Spät; that is the moment when he takes off his glove and shakes hands with him and thus gives away the fact that he is wearing the ring. At other times he hates and wants to avoid him. We should go into this. Ulrich "Late" is an allusion to the fact that he is the elder and would have the father role in relation to the boy. He pretends to be the spiritual mentor, or tutor, or father, so obviously this conflict is a further development of the one we already saw between father and son. If the son believes in the transformation of the personalityin a most unreal and fantastic way admittedly, but still he believes in it and the father is also interested in magic and occult sciences, but not for the same reason, what two worlds clash there?

Answer: The two generations.

Yes, the father refused transformation and wanted to keep the status quo, while the son wanted renewal. If you refer that to the idea of the transformation of the personality in alchemy, what then?

Answer: The material and the spiritual are separated. In writing off his father he has written off the material side. Melchior is consciously searching on the spiritual level, but the material side then becomes the shadow.

Yes, but it is very subtle. In a way, the father is the material side-or which would you say he was?

Answer: He is both, for he is the wise old man and the magician!

You see, in a way, he is both! Because he studies the book, he is the spiritual side-he is investigating this world mentally-with a secret materialism. The other way around you could say that the Fo archetype is a spiritual archetype. It is the élan vital, the spiritual element, but at the same time that is materialistic too because the boys wanted to transform the personality with real poison. That is materialism. So in both figures spirit and matter fall apart, and when the one adopts a materialistic trend, the other breaks with the spiritual attitude. When the other takes on the materialistic trend, then Fo pulls for the spiritual attitude. So I agree that spirit and matter have fallen apart in the wrong waybut in both! And what is lacking? If spirit and matter have fallen apart, who is lacking?

Answer: The anima.

Yes, the psyche, that which is between the two. That is why in both opposite positions, in both enemy positions, there is a separation of mind and matter. There is no vinculum amoris (bond of love) to unite them, for the anima is lacking. So the father has spiritual interests with a secret materialistic background, and the son has chemical-materialistic interests with a spiritual background, and they clash and cannot understand each other.

In a very real way, we have now the same problem collectively. Think of such movements as anthroposophy. In Los Angeles, for instance, there is a new sect, founded by Manley Hall, whose members consider themselves to be something like the New Rosicrucians. There is a revival of interest in magic, in Freemasonry symbolism, in Rosicrucian symbolism, and in astrology and the occult sciences. The followers of these movements all reject psychology. They want the Beyond to be called the ghost world, or they claim that an apparition of the animus is an angel from the Beyond, and they give these factors, which we try to name in a psychological way, old names which they take out of the old traditional books. In Basel there is a man named Julius Schwabe, the founder of the Congresses on Symbolism held there every year. He invites people to report on symbolism and has professors from all schools. For instance, some talk on Tibetan medicine. He also once invited me to speak on Jungian psychology. As chairman he sums up, at the end, in occult terminology, and covers everything up by saying that such and such a thing is the old figure X of the Beyond, while the unconscious is called the "transcendental spirit world," and so on.

This is really Mr. von Spät (Mr. Late) because every one of his explanations is a backward pull. The explanations regress to medieval, and to even Sumerian and Babylonian, magical concepts. Or the speakers use concepts of the sixteenth century, or Paracelsus, and they are all nicely muddled up! It is a beautiful pot pourri of concepts from the past, pulled out of their context and now used as a name for the phenomenon of what we call the unconscious. That way everything is explained and made quite clear by just using the old names, that is, sticking them onto the phenomena. But behind that there is a tremendous power gesture. For instance, Schwabe would say here, "Well, Fo is, for instance, the Hermes infans, Mercurius infans, the young Mercurius." And then one feels that something has been said! That is Mr. von Spät! The outer and inner realm fall apart in this way, as well as spirit and matter, and any other factor.

If a man, for instance, has an obligation to his anima, and to the woman with whom he made friends, or married, then he gets into a typical duality situation of life where one always has a real conflict, a double obligation, and where one is always torn between obligations to the outer and to the inner side of life. That would be the realization of the crucifixion, or of the basic truth of life! Life is doubleit is a double obligation, it is a conflict in itself-because it always means the collision, or conflict, of two tendencies. But that is what makes up life! That realization escapes von Spät completely, or he escapes the realization! It does not even occur to him, and that is one more of the little, but fatal, turns in the story which point toward its tragic end.

Lecture 10

Last time I tried to give you an outline of Mr. von Spät, who is the great riddle in the book. The conflict between him and the boys mirrors, on a super-personal level, the conflict which has already begun on the personal level between Melchior and his father. Melchior is seeking an elixir of transformation in black magic, and his father is studying magic for its own sake out of curiosity, or the desire for such knowledge (although one doesn't feel he is seeking something especially creative in it). Father and son quarrel and break apart over this. Now the conflict appears on a much wider scale between the paternal protector and the runaway boy who gives the ring to Melchior, for Mr. von Spät alludes to the fact that he is chasing the boy to bring him under his power. But before we amplify these figures further I will give you a few more chapters of the book.

You remember that when Melchior has returned to his own home, suddenly the boy appears and warns him against von Spät, saying, "You belong to us, stay with us, and don't fall into the snares of von Spät. He has a secret with which he can petrify us." Melchior asks what the secret is, and the boy says that if they knew they would be free but they do not. Then he takes away the ring he had given Melchior, saying it would only pull him into complete chaotic confusion, and disappears out of the window in a spark of light.

The next chapter begins with someone knocking at the door, but Melchior does not answer.

The door opens carefully and his wife Sophie looks in. She is small and delicate looking, with black hair, and her green eyes look at Melchior, her sensual and rather shapeless lips quivering a little.

"There you are again," she says, "alone in your cold room. Won't you come down? We are having such an interesting party."

"You know I don't want to have anything to do with those people," he answers bitterly. "Why didn't you have my room heated?" (He knows it was a trick to force him to join the party.)

"I'm sorry. I forgot," says Sophie.

"You always forget when you have company," he replies. "You always want me to meet people who hold me back. I have no time for them."

"You have no time for me either," says Sophie. "With those people I can talk in a human way, but that bores you."

"Yes, always talking and chewing over the same thing does bore me," says Melchior, "You sniff at everything, and it is always the same stuff."

A very angry expression crosses his wife's face, but she controls herself and answers quietly, "I like to feel myself among familiar things, but you can't bear them. You always want to make me and everybody else feel insecure, and you try to take the ground away from under our feet. People have become quite stupid after they have met you, and it is impossible to have any serious conversation with them; they always begin to talk nonsense."

"

Yes, you can't understand me," says Melchior. "You always are so sure. I can only tell you that your security is a complete illusion, just as the former security of your people was a self-deception. The smallest thing upsets them, for there is nothing either above or below. Only the person who has gone through complete dissolution and chaos can talk about security. I do not trust any solidity, or gestalt, or permanence, or security."

Impatiently Sophie says, "Well, our guests are waiting. Come along! Today it is absolute chaos, for someone has come who causes even more confusion than you, a new man who talks very strangely and pretends that he has only to command and an army of ghosts will obey him."

Melchior smiles and then says, "Does he talk about ghosts? You would rather believe in ghosts than in the spirituality of the world. Who is this ghost-conjurer?"

"An old acquaintance of mine," says Sophie, "from my home town. We played together as children. But everybody always had to obey him, and we could never play as we wanted. He was small and weak, but nobody ever dared fight him. I left home very early and had never heard of him again. Now after fifteen years he has turned up unexpectedly, so I asked him to stay for tea."

"What is his name?"

"Ulrich von Spät!"

So we discover that von Spät was a friend of Melchior's wife when she was a young girl.

He says, "Oh yes, he is staying at the Grand Hotel, isn't he?"

"How did you know that? Do you know him?"

"Oh, I just got to know him by chance a couple of hours ago, and now he has sneaked into our party on the excuse of knowing you." And he becomes very excited.

Sophie says mockingly, "Now, all of a sudden, you have become very lively. Now you are interested. I see now that I must just get crazy people to come to my party in order to get you interested."

Melchior interrupts her, saying, "Come on, let's go to the party."

When they near the room, Mr. von Spät can be heard saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, you laugh at what I say, but I can assure you that I can show you things like a fairy tale come to life. Every one of you I can shut up in this little bottle which I hold in my hand."

As Melchior opens the door and comes in with his wife, there are shouts of laughter. He is immediately surrounded and notices that they all look excited and feverish, and he wonders whether Mr. von Spät is responsible for it all.

"Hullo, old man!" shouts the fat, vulgar art critic, Heinrich Trumpelsteg, patting him on the shoulder. "You have come just at the right time; your famous friend is about to show us a couple of tricks."

But Melchior's boss, Professor Cux, with his gold-rimmed spectacles, appears and introduces his wife, the dancer, a boyish-looking young girl, her face powdered green and her lips violet. Melchior is amazed by the whole company, and Professor Cux very tactlessly says, "Look at my wife! See how beautiful she is, and just look at these legs!" He lifts her skirts above the knees, and says, "And a further view is still more fascinating!"

Everybody laughs at this joke, Frau Cux loudest of all, and the women lift up their skirts and show their calves, each saying that hers are the prettiest legs, so Trumpelsteg says, "All right, ladies, I suggest we have a beauty show. Take off your clothes and show yourselves in all your beauty, and we will decide who is the most beautiful. Like the Greeks we want nothing but beauty, beauty!"

There are shouts of "Hurrah!" and a confusion of arms and legs and articles of clothing ensues, and in a few minutes all the women stand there naked. Melchior looks across at his wife and sees that she too has undressed and is looking at him mockingly.

"What on earth is happening here?" wonders Melchior. "lt's like a madhouse. Mr. von Spät must have this strange effect. Do my ideas seem like that to people when they think about them?" (He always wants to make people feel uncertain by destroying their false, bourgeois certainty, but here he asks himself whether this would be the result.)

Mrs. Cux dances naked through the room, embracing everybody, and all the women follow suit, hitting, scratching, biting and kissing each other, the men applauding violently. Melchior turns away and approaches Mr. von Spät, who comes toward him holding out his hand. "We meet sooner than we had expected,"he says. "What a strange chance that just you should be the husband of the friend of my youth!"

"I don't believe in chance," answers Melchior, returning von Spät's glance. "In one way or another we bring about chance."

It occurs to him that although that is a very banal way of talking, at this moment it has a real and definite meaning known only to him and Mr. von Spät.

Just then Trumpelsteg comes along and, having heard the last words, says, "Hurrah for philosophy!" He speaks so loudly that everyone becomes silent and listens.

"Chance! Chance!" he goes on. "Naturally there is no such thing as chance for a magician like yourself. One makes chance! Mr. von Spät directs a whole orchestra of ghosts." And he laughs again.

Then Mr. Silver harness, the parson, with his goggle eyes, who comes to study the disorientation of the modern soul. says, "Yes, Mr. von Spät convinces us of all the things you have spoken of. Don't only talk! We are enlightened present-day people, and we only submit to facts! Facts, Mr. von Spät!"

In a chorus all the others scream out, "Yes, facts!"

"Facts!" says Schulze, the school professor, joining in. "Only facts convince us; we believe only in facts, as the great time in which we live has taught us!"

"Bravo!" shouts the chorus.

Trumpelsteg, no longer able to contain himself, jumps onto the table, and waving his apelike arms, shouts, "But the arts, ladies and gentlemen, you forget the arts!" He then makes a long peroration and ends up by saying that they do not want facts. "Facts are mean. What we want is illusion! Let us be Knights of the Spirit!" (In the sense of illusion which takes us away from reality.)

Everybody echoes, "Let's be Knights of Illusion!" and claps. Even Sophie, who was standing silently in her corner, begins to get excited and smacks her naked thighs and joins in the general laughter.

Melchior and Mr. von Spät look at each other smiling. Melchior feels as if separated from the whole scene by a thin veil. The shrieks and all the noise don't seem so loud; everything seems farther off, more peculiar and stranger. Only to Mr. yon Spät does he feel himself near and closely connected.

In the next chapter things begin to calm down and people sober up a little, but then the atmosphere begins to get tense and people start whispering to each other. Mr. von Spät leaves the room to return in a little while, opening the door and coming slowly in with his eyes half shut and surrounded by a bluish shimmering mist, out of which his white head appears. In one hand he holds a wonderful little bottle and in the other a shining knife. He seems to notice nobody and with stiff dancing steps goes up the two steps leading to the opposite corner, and the unfriendly looks which had hitherto fallen on Melchior are now directed onto him.

As he passes them, Trumpelsteg, the art critic, and Mrs. Cux, the dancer, who had made signs to each other, move out of the group and, holding something in their hands, move cautiously after him. Mr. von Spät meanwhile reaches the window, places his bottle on a little table beside him, and turns around, his white face looking like a sleepwalker's.

Suddenly in Trumpelsteg's hand appears a revolver, and hoarse with anger, he stutters, "Stop! Stop! You mean to kill us all! It's not a joke any longer!"

Quickly Mr. von Spät holds his own first finger over the bottle and lets a drop of blood fall in. In the same moment Trumpelsteg, small as a thumb, sits in the glass prison.

Mrs. Cux, horrified, springs at von Spät to knife him. But the latter again quickly holds his first finger over the bottle, makes a cut with his knife, and lets fall a further drop of blood. Immediately Mrs. Cux is transformed and in the bottle.

At first everybody is dumb with astonishment, but then come shouts of laughter from all except Professor Cux who, bellowing like a wounded animal, yells, "Give me back my wife or I'll fetch the police!" But he doesn't dare go near Mr. yon Spät.

"Police! Police!" cry the others. "Where's the telephone?"

But Professor Schulze, the schoolmaster, runs from one group to another whispering, "For God's sale, don't irritate him! He could put us all in the bottle, even the police, and what would we do then? Then we would be lost! Keep quiet!"

Petrified with horror, nobody knows what to do, but Sophie creeps around to her husband and, taking his hand, begs him to ask von Spät to free the prisoners. She tries to keep back her tears and says, "Why must I bear all this? What do you want of me, Melchior?"

Melchior doesn't even look at her and only answers, "What do I want of you? Nothing! You made your decision long ago. We have nothing more to do with each other." Sophie drops to the floor, wringing her hands.

Then the parson, Mr. Silver harness, starts, "Dear Brethren in Christ, this is the judgment of God. We in our pride doubted His almighty power, and now we are punished. Let us fall on our knees, and perhaps in His impenetrable goodness He will free us from the coils of Satan. Let us pray!"

They all kneel down, but Mr. von Spät picks up the little bottle from the table and holds it up. Coming to look, they can all see how Trumpelsteg, completely naked, is beginning to get very fresh with Mrs. Cux in the bottle and how the two dance round and round, ever closer, until at last they sink together in a passionate embrace.

When the parson sees this, the prayer sticks in his throat and his eyes nearly fall out of his head. Everybody presses round Mr. von Spät to see what is happening in the bottle. Then some begin to laugh gently, and in a few minutes uncontrollable laughter breaks out and they fall into each other's arms, kiss, dance, and exhausted with laughter, look once more at the unconcerned loving couple in the bottle and burst out afresh.

Only Professor Cux is in a white-hot rage and wants to attack Mr. von Spät, but the others hold him back, and then tie him to an armchair with a rope so that he can't move. Mr. von Spät places the little bottle on the table and claps his hands. A white mist forms in the room, and seven white-clad maidens appear and bow before him. Out of the ground comes the sound of dance music. Mr. von Spät seizes the hand of one of the girls and now for the first time opens his eyes, from which there comes a silver glow. When his eyes are wide open, he stands there, sevenfold, dancing with each of the maidens. When the dance is over, he shuts his eyes and is once more one person.

Afterward, a great door in the wall of the room opens silently, and in the next room there stands a table covered with food and drink, and everybody is invited by a voice, which seems familiar to Melchior, telling them to come and eat.

In the doorway stands the old apple-woman of the station, throwing apples to the guests.

Laughing and talking, the naked women pair with the men. Sophie has slipped over beside Melchior, and Mr. von Spät is with one of the white maidens, and Professor Cux is forgotten. Wonderful dainties and wine cover the table, and the old apple-woman goes from one to the other serving the guests. As she pours wine into Melchior's glass, she whispers, "You were a clever boy to know me at once, but you are not clever enough. Be careful! I wish you well, but you must be obedient!"

"Of whom should I be aware?" asks Melchior softly.

"You must know that yourself," whispers the old woman. "I can't say a thing!"

Melchior takes her wrist and says he won't let her go, she must tell him more-she must tell him everything. But the old woman pulls away with unexpected strength and says.

Melchior silently repeats it all to himself, and then a great longing and restlessness surges through him. His throat feels tight through the tears he is holding back. He manages to control himself and looks round at the guests, but nobody has noticed except Sophie, who overheard and looks at him sadly, thinking he will leave her.

The seven girls sit there with their eyes shut as though they have fallen into a sweet sleep. Mr. von Spät also has his eyes shut; his head seems lifeless and made of stone. Melchior looks round excitedly and thinks, "Why do I hate and love him? Why do the boys run away from him? What is his power? What made him make such a demonstration of his power to these people? Did he want to tell me what I already know? Long ago I overcame these people. Another company calls me. Why do I hesitate? The stranger keeps me bound. What does he want of me?" His glance falls on the window and he sees Fo's face. For a minute it is there, and then it disappears again.

The other guests are still eating. Mr. von Spät opens his eyes and immediately he is again sevenfold, sitting beside all the seven girls at the same time. Suddenly Professor Schulze, the schoolmaster, pushes back his chair, and tapping on his glass begins to speak: "Ladies and gentlemen, even the most amazing miracles seem quite natural when one has grown used to them. Today, for a minute, we were shaken by unusual things which seemed like miracles to us, but now, think of it, there is imaginary food, people, wine, and so on, and we feel quite at home with it all! There are no miracles. There are only facts, and facts in themselves are always reasonable, so we don't need to get excited any more. Ladies and gentlemen, we can just remain ourselves, what we always were. Let us raise our glasses and . . . "

A terrible shriek interrupts him. The seven forms of Mr. von Spät moan and shut their eyes. The seven girls dissolve into mist. Mr. von Spät lies in his usual form unconscious on the ground.

Fo appears standing in the window corner and laughs. Mr. von Spät lies twisting in pain. His blue eyes stare blindly up. His whole body seems wracked with unbearable agony.

"D'you feel it now! D'you feel it now?" yells Fo. "You overdid it. You wanted to rest for a minute and play, eh? For a minute your power slept. D'you see now that you can never sleep? Now we are the masters!"

He dances round von Spät with great bounds. His body is lit up. His hair is a dark flame. Quicker and quicker he encircles von Spät with ringing cries.

Melchior looks at the face of the man lying on the floor. Horror and love battle within him. Almost unconsciously he wants to throw himself at Fo and tell him to stop, but Fo whirls, glowing, to the window.

''Take him away, Melchior!" he cries. "We are in your debt. We give him to you! He is yours!" He laughs once more, uncontrollably. Then, looking at Melchior, he says softly and urgently, "Melchior, we're waiting for you!" And he disappears.

Gradually Mr. von Spät's pain lessens. He begins to breath more quietly and seems to be asleep. The blue mist has gone, and he lies naked on the floor. Melchior looks at his beautiful body for a minute, and before the others can approach, he snatches a cloth from the table and throws it over the sleeping man. Then he carries him to the couch in his study. He pushes his chair to the head of the couch and sits down, watching the still body. Sleep has removed the tension from the face, and now Melchior sees the real features which had hitherto been hidden from him by the ever-changing expression. It is the face of a beautiful god, just slightly distorted. After a few minutes the features tense again and a movement goes through the body. The sleeper, making an immense effort, opens his eyes, which are almost colorless and seem not to see anything. After a bit he sits up and, noticing Melchior, lets himself fall back onto the cushions, and says hoarsely, "I came too late. I warned you too late. Fo is free again. You believe me to be your worst enemy. I came to your house to take the ring away, but sleep overcame me. Why did you protect me?"

"The sleeper was not my enemy," answers Melchior. "I realized that you were my brother."

Mr. von Spät shoots up and cries, "I shall never sleep again!"

"Never sleep again?" asks Melchior, concerned. "What am I to understand by that? You cannot mean that literally?"

"I shall never sleep again," answers Mr. von Spät and his eyes open wide and become darker. "When I sleep, my enemies tear me to pieces. Everywhere sleep lies in wait for me. I played for a minute, and for the last time he overpowered me. But I am his master. Our body is not earth. Our body is music, a mirroring of the stars."

Melchior lets his head sink and says gently, "I love the earth. I don't want to be the master. I want to give myself."

Mr. von Spät moves impatiently. "You speak like the boys," he says angrily.

"Who are the boys?" asks Melchior quickly. "Who is Fo?"

Mr. von Spät hesitates and at last, almost unwillingly, says, "Nobody knows, nobody knows their true form. They approach you as wandering boys, as fleeting girls, as animals. They lure you away into chaos and darkness. Somewhere they have a kingdom, the entrance to which I cannot find (the title of the book The Kingdom Without Space), but they are never there. They are always here. Perhaps they are here and there at the same time. They seduce everybody into an ecstatic dance. I must discover the way. I must destroy their kingdom. Those free unbridled people must be brought into my service. They must all be mine. Fo has escaped me, the freest, the strongest, the boldest of them all. No darkness must surround them, no night, no refuge. They must no more change, must not be transformed from one form into another. All around there must be light. Their wild love must die. They must be driven from the source of sleep. Nobody may sleep any more!"

He has got up. His body seems transparent. One can only see the gleaming outline. As he raises his face, the ceiling of the room disappears, and out of the darkness comes a face resembling his, looking down and dimly lit. "Who are you? Who are you?" cries Melchior, trembling. Mr. von Spät's form rises to an immeasurable height, becoming more and more misty. Melchior's blood feels turned to ice, but he cannot turn away.

"Choose, Melchior!" cries Mr. von Spät, and his voice is like the distant ringing of glass bells. "If you want to join the boys, you only need to call and they will forget everything-what you were and what you are. If you want to come to us, just knock on the wall of this room and a door will open to you; a way will open to you to mastery in light. Think it over. The way to us is full of danger. You have to go through the horrors of the world. You are still free. When you have chosen, you will have made the decision for yourself. A return will mean destruction. We shall not protect you."

As he speaks, Mr. von Spät's form dissolves completely. The ceiling closes, the lamps burn again, the couch is empty. Melchior finds himself alone in his room.

The discussion between Melchior and Sophie shows that their marriage is past repair: there is a complete split between the two; they do not understand and do not love each other any more. Obviously a terrific bitterness of disappointed love has piled up in Sophie, who feels that Melchior never takes part in her world and has never loved her. Like so many women who feel unloved, in her bitterness she has sold herself completely to the animus. Instead of relating to Melchior, she tries to play tricks on him. For instance, in order to force him to join her parties she does not have his room heated. She tries to catch and overcome him with tricks, and therefore love has turned into a fight for power. eros has disappeared from their relationship. She also hates her husband because of his spiritual searching and the fact that he is not at one with the bourgeois world but suffers restlessly from conflict and yearning, which upsets her need for peace and security. She wants to be the Professor's wife, to have a nice circle around her and to play a certain role in it. He, as she complains, destroys the security of the world she wants to build up. Therefore, they argue about security or insecurity. She accuses him of making everything insecure, of dissolving everything. And he, on the contrary, tries to show that the security of this bourgeois world is not real security, that only the people who can give themselves to the irrational adventure of life have genuine security. But the talk gets them nowhere, and so they break off their discussion and join the party.

It also turns out that Mr. von Spät has appeared and that he was a friend of Sophie's in her youth, and had then disappeared. Last time, you will remember, we tried to describe Mr. von Spät as the father-spirit, the spirit of tradition, which always comes from the paternal world. For a man, the father-figure represents cultural tradition. Von Spät therefore personifies cultural tradition. It is that which is opposed to renewal; it is, as I tried to make clear to you, knowledge with its poisonous "We know it all." Every cultural condition contains a secret poison which consists of the pretension of knowing all the answers. On a primitive level, you see this in the initiation of young men when the old men of the tribe tell them the history of the universe, how the world was made, the origin of evil, of life after death, of the purpose of life, and so on. On this level, for instance, all such questions are answered by the mythological tribal or religious knowledge conveyed by the old to the young, and on that level, with the exception perhaps of a few creative personalities, this is just swallowed wholesale. From then on, the young men know everything too; everything is settled, all questions are answered, so that if a missionary comes and tries to talk to these people, he is just informed how things are: "Oh yes, we know, the world was made in such a way; evil comes from this and that; the purpose of life is so and so." We do exactly the same thing, except that in our case it is a bit more complex; basically, however, it is the same.

Mr. von Spät represents the archetypal principle of handed-down traditional knowledge, and this contends eternally with the principle of the puer aeternus, the spirit of creating everything anew, again and again. Sophie Lindenhuis is secretly linked up with von Spät, who turns out to be the boyfriend of her youth. Seen from the standpoint of her psychology, he would therefore represent the father-animus. The pretension of knowing all the answers is exactly what the father-animus produces in a woman: the assumption that everything is self-evident-the illusion of knowing it all. This attitude is what Jung is attacking when he speaks negatively about the animus: "Everyone does that, everybody knows this"the absolute conviction with which women hand out "wisdom." When one examines it closely, however, one sees that they have just picked up what the father (or someone else) said, without assimilating it themselves. The daughter tends just to reproduce the knowledge of the past in the way she picked it up from her father. To hand on traditional knowledge-knowledge not worked on by the woman's individual consciousness and not assimilatedis dangerous and tends to be demonic.

It is also clear that von Spät's outstanding characteristic is a tremendous power-complex. Sophie says that even as a child he suffocated all creativity and that the children had to play the way he wanted. The basis of von Spät is power, and power, in a wider sense, corresponds to the instinct of the self-preservation of the individual.

On the level of animals you can say that there are two basic, natural tendencies which, to a certain extent, contradict each other: the sexual drive with all its functions, including, for women, the bearing of children and rearing of the young, and the drive toward self-preservation. These two drives are opposite in as much as procreation, birth and nurturing the young all mean the death of the old generation. There are many animals among which the male dies after propagation has taken place. Or, for example, there are the spiders where after the male has impregnated the female he is eaten by her. Having fulfilled his function, he is no longer useful except in helping to feed the young by being eaten by the mother. That is an extreme case, but frequently older animals completely exhaust themselves for the sake of their young, even to the point of destruction. As hunters well know, the sexual drive causes animals to forget self-protection entirely. They become blind to danger, and a roebuck pursuing a hind may run right into a man. If a buck is in that state, the hunter must hide behind a tree, for the shyest animal will be oblivious of his own security when sex is the important thing. Sex means the preservation of the species, and therefore the preservation of the individual is completely, or to a great extent, sacrificed to it. It is the species that is important-life must go on. In the usual state, when sexuality is not constellated, then the drive to self-preservation (which takes the form of either fighting or running away) is uppermost. The animal is occupied by eating and by keeping away from death-that is, by keeping alive as an individual.

These two drives, sex and self-preservation, are basic tendencies in animal life.

In humans they appear as two divine and contradictory forces, namely, love and power-love including sexuality, and power including self-preservation. Eros and power, therefore, as Jung always points out, are opposed to each other. You cannot have them together; they exclude each other. The marriage of Melchior and Sophie, for instance, has switched into a power game in which each tries to save his or her own world against the dangerous world of the other. The possibility of giving oneself, the generosity of letting the other's world penetrate one's own, is lost. Both partners fight for their lives against each other and do not love each other any more. It is therefore natural that since the wife has lost the capacity for love, she falls for the power-drive and for von Spät. That is the back door by which he gets into the house, but von Spät is just as much the power-drive of Melchior himself. How does the power-drive react toward eros?

Answer: By ridiculing and exposing it.

Yes, in the bottle! And what is the bottle? He puts it in a bottle and then ridicules and exposes it, a classic way in which the power-drive deals with love: he imprisons it! People imprison love and sex by behaving as though they were the owners. That would be the woman who uses her beauty and charm to catch a rich husband. That means she does not love him; she uses love, or what is supposed to be love. to make a career, to catch a rich husband, or whatever she may want. She behaves as if she were the owner, and she directs it. A woman who had fallen for Mr. von Spät would repress any spontaneous feeling of love. If she noticed that she was falling in love with a chimney-sweep, she would repress her feeling in statu nascendi (nip it in the bud) because it would not suit her to love a social nobody. On the other hand, she would deceive herself into believing that she loved the great Mr. X who had a lot of money. She would try to convince herself that she loved a man who would fit in with her ego and power plans, and any kind of spontaneous eruption of eros would be repressed. So love generally degenerates into its most basic fact, namely sexuality. It is reduced to its prima materia, so to speak, to physical sexuality, which is imprisoned in intellectual planning. Sexuality is used as a hook to catch a suitable partner for suitable reasons, and all real love, which generally dissolves the fetters and boundary lines and creates new life situations, is anxiously repressed.

Question: Isn't it important that it is a bottle rather than a box, or some other prison?

Yes, what is a glass bottle?

Answer: It could be used as a retort or something like that.

Yes, naturally. The whole thing reminds one of the alchemical retort in which, actually, the naked couple is together, but with a quite different meaning. Here, obviously, it is misused: it is a kind of cynical abuse of the alchemical mystery.

Remark: It is the "nothing but" attitude.

Yes, it is using an idea, or an intellectual system, with a "nothing but" nuance: it is "nothing but sexual liberty," or "nothing but the body," or "nothing but me with Mr. So-and-so,'' thereby excluding any of the mystery of emotion. It can be said that in general, glass is a substance which can be seen through but is a very bad conductor of warmth. One could say that it has to do with the intellect, that it represents a system which makes one able to see through something but which cuts off the feeling relationship. For instance, if Snow White is imprisoned in a glass coffin, she is not totally shut off from life as if in a wood or stone coffin. She is shut off from life as far as feeling, but not awareness, is concerned. If you are in a glass house, you can see and be aware of everything that goes on outside, but you are cut off from the smells, the temperature, the wind and so on. All such perceptions are excluded, and therefore the feeling relationship to the outer world or to the inner world. It is interesting that we put some animals in the zoo in glass cages, thus avoiding all of the reality-impact with danger; then from an intellectual distance we can study their behavior.

In alchemy, as you know, the glass retort is even regarded as being identical with the Philosophers' Stone. The vessel is the feminine aspect of the Philosophers' Stone, which is the masculine aspect of the Self, but both are the same thing. In the present story, the glass is a mystical factor which is now in the hands of Mr. von Spät. What would that mean practically? What is the difference, psychologically, between the glass as a positive alchemical symbol and this mock alchemical vessel? The subtle difference can be discovered by first considering what the alchemical retort is in its positive form. What would that mean, putting everything into a retort?

Answer: Accepting the suffering of it.

That is a part of it, but what does the retort represent psychologically? Most of you have read Jung's Psychology and Alchemy. What does it mean if I have everything in the retort?

Answer: A transformation takes place.

Yes, the retort is a place of transformation, and what is the precondition for any kind of psychological transformation? Looking at oneself, looking completely within. It means that instead of looking at the outer facts, at other people, I only look at my own psyche. That would be putting it into a glass. Suppose I am angry with somebody; if I turn away from that person and say, "Now let me look at my anger and what that means, and at what is behind it," that would be putting my anger into the retort. So the retort represents an attitude that aims at self-knowledge-an attempt to become conscious of oneself instead of looking at other people. As far as the will is concerned, it requires determination, and as far as intellectual activities are concerned, it means introversion, the search for inner self-knowledge at all costs, and objectively, not subjectively, musing about one's problems, making the effort to really see oneself. Nobody can find this attitude except by what one could call an act of grace.

For instance, if somebody is either madly in love, or madly angry over some problem, perhaps a money problem, one always tries to get the person for once to look away from that particular question, whatever it may be, and just for a minute try to be objective, to look at the dreamsee how it looks from within, from the objective psycheusing the dream life as a mirror for the objective psychological situation. Again and again, unless something like a miraculous turn takes place, people cannot do that even if they want to. They begin again, "Yes, but you see tomorrow I have to decide with my banker; I have either to sell the stock or not." Yes, but let's turn away, let's look for a minute at the objective side, at what the objective psyche has to say about it! "No, you see I have to decide!" And then it is like a miracle if that person suddenly becomes quiet and objective and makes that turn and looks inside and says, "I will just abstain from looking at the whole situation and abstain from the emotions which flow toward it and try to be objective."

That is a miracle, and it needs the intervention of the Self; something must happen in the person for him to be able to do it. One knows it oneself, for sometimes one wants to find that attitude again and cannot; one is pushed away from self- knowledge and can't do it, and then suddenly this strange peace comes up within, generally when one has suffered enough. Then one becomes quiet and silent, and the ego turns to look at the facts within, objectively, and stops the monkey-dance of thinking about the situation. The monkey-dance of ego self-assurance stops, and a kind of objectivity comes over the person. Then it is possible to look at oneself and be open to the experience of the unconscious.

It can therefore be said that in a way the alchemical vessel is a mysterious event in the psyche. It is an occurrence-something which takes place suddenly and which enables people to look at themselves objectively, using dreams and other products of the unconscious as mirrors in which one can see oneself. Otherwise one has no Archimedean point outside the ego by which to do it. That is why an awareness of the Self is necessary before one can look at oneself, and that is why very often people are touched in the beginning of the analysis by an experience of the Self. Only that enables them afterward to strive toward looking at themselves in this objective way. That is what the alchemists meant by the vessel. It could also be said that the vessel symbolizes an attitude which is, for example, the prerequisite for doing active imagination, for that you cannot do except with the vessel. You can call active imagination itself a sort of vessel, for if I sit down and try to objectify my psychological situation in active imagination, that would be having it in a vessel, which presupposes again this attitude of ethical detachment, honesty and objectivity, which is necessary in order to be able to look at oneself. That would be the vessel in a positive form. If with my ego I judge the unconscious, I put it in a vessel too, but then it is the glass prison, the "nothing but" attitude, which gives that prison a negative aspect. Then it is an intellectual system, and the living phenomenon of the psyche is always imprisoned in any kind of intellectual system. The owner of it is power.

This is very subtle. There are people willing to look at themselves, but only in order to be stronger than the other person or to master a situation. They still retain an ego-power purpose, and they even use the techniques of Jungian psychology-active imagination, for instance-but with their eyes fixed on power, on overcoming the difficulty, on being the big stag who did it. That gives it the wrong twist; nothing comes out of it. Or there are others who work for a certain time honestly analyzing themselves-but in order to become analysts and have power over others. That is another snare of the same kind: looking at oneself only in order to exercise power over others; looking within not for its own sakenot just because one has the need to be more conscious. Thus power sneaks into everything again and again, and turns that which has been a living spiritual manifestation into a trick, a technical trick in the possession of the ego. Mr. von Spät is the demon of misusing everything, of making everything-even the highest spiritual powers-degenerate into such a technical trick.

I have been asked several questions. One of them is this: assuming that von Spät represents the misuse of intellect with the shade of "nothing but" domination, then what about the miracles he performed? How would you interpret that? How can such an attitude produce miracles?

Question: Wouldn't the word "trick" be better than miracle?

Yes, one could also call it a collective hallucination trick. Someone goes into a trance, and then a collective hallucination takes place, which vanishes when suddenly they all wake up and the dinner and everything else has disappeared. It was a trick of illusion, but how does that connect with the meaning we have so far established? If we look at Mr. von Spät as being Sophie's animus, then he would be a father-animus image. And how does a father-animus in a woman produce not only opinions but also magic tricks?

I am reminded of the case of a woman who had a schizoid father, a rather cold sadistic man who perpetually criticized his children, constantly telling them that they were nobodies and nothing and would never get anywhere. If they tried in school he said that they would never succeed, or if they wanted to take up art, he told them they had no talent and would not make a success of it. There was always a negative attitude. He also had the habit, which drove the daughters mad, of cutting off the heads of flowers with a stick when they walked along in the fields. It was a tic nerveaux (nervous habit) and was done in revenge, or out of bitterness over his own disappointed and destroyed feeling life. There is an inherited schizophrenia of many generations in this family, and here the father cut off his children's heads by his discouraging remarks, or he tried to do so, so that they should not grow up. Now this daughter had a series of lovers-old men, young men, artists, business men-apparently all different kinds of people, but always, when she had known them for more than a fortnight, they would start to torture her in a sadistic way by telling her that she was nobody and was disgusting, would never get anywhere, that all she said was stupid, that her art would never lead her anywhere. It was exactly her father's gramophone-record kind of talk. I have never found out whether she made them do it, or if by some divination of instinct she always picked such men. Most of them I never got to know except through what she said about them, but you could say that it was like black magic.

In primitive language I would say that there was a curse on that girl, that she was compelled to choose critical, unloving sadistic men who trampled on her feelings, which were already nearly destroyed anyway. In the dreams it appeared that it was really the father. For instance, the night after one such quarrel with a lover who told her that she was no good and everything was wrong with her, and so on, she dreamt that her father always waited for her and beat her on the shinbone with a stick so that she should fall down. It is a well-known fact that the father-animus, or the mother-demon in a man, does not only act as an inner wrong fate, a distortion of the instincts in the choice of the partner and all these other things, but also is really like an outer fate, and can appear in synchronicities, in synchronistic miracles outside the personal life, in events for which we cannot make individuals responsible. I think it would be the wrong feeling-nuance to tell such a girl that she always fell for sadistic lovers because she had not overcome the sadistic father-animus within her. There is quite a bit of truth in that, but it is not the whole truth. Later, when she is further along, one may encourage her to see that she has such a father-demon and sadist within her and that it attracts sadistic men. Sometimes, however, when one tries to deal with such a dark fate, one feels that one is up against a divine destructive power, so much so that one cannot make the individual responsible.

Question: Couldn't you say that she always had that thought in her head, and then it became a part of herself? To get those people into the bottle von Spät always had to give a drop of blood, and it seems to me that the animus in a womanthat is the thought in her head-gets right into her blood and actually becomes a part of her. Von Spät gave his blood; he gave the whole of himself in making those tricks.

Yes, von Spät is naturally the secret thought-demon in a woman.

Remark: But he also gave his blood.

That is quite right, but there we have to go to another factor, namely, that when von Spät performs this magic he becomes untrue to himself, which is why Fo catches him. It is very important to remember that if von Spät hadn't performed this trick, if he hadn't started to display magic, Fo would not have overcome him. "I'll never sleep again," Mr. von Spät said after having been overcome by Fo. "When I sleep, my enemies get me; always sleep lies in wait for me. I played." So you see he became untrue to himself because for the minute he played: he forgot his power-drive; he became amused in the magical performance. For a moment he behaved like the Fo-band, like the boys. He played"and there he got me for the last time, but I am his master. Our body is not earth, our body is music, mirroring the stars." It is a true enantiodromia, and we must take Mr. von Spät as the spirit of intellectualism-thought-power-powerful only as long as he does not play. When he begins to produce magic, he begins to turn toward the Fo-principle. If you look at it as though there were two poles, one pole would be Fo and the other von Spät. When von Spät is at his best and is himself, then he is awake; he does not sleep, he does not play, and he does not perform magic tricks. But he got drunk on his power, and displayed it more and more; he produced magic stuff to show off, and slowly, as he says, forgot himself. He went to sleep-played. And then Fo got him! You could just as well say that he fell into Fo, for these two powers always fall into each other through an enantiodromia, as do all unconscious opposites. Both are unconscious opposites because they are gods, which means basic archetypal drives in the psyche.

It is a play of opposites in which Melchior is the suffering human, in the middle of the two, for von Spät and Fo both want his soul. When von Spät goes too far in his power-play, he snaps into Fo, and you will see that when Fo goes too far into his other play, he snaps round into von Spät. So when von Spät begins to perform magic by cutting himself and using his blood, he is really leaning toward the Fo side; he is switching over into the other. Secretly they are linked. You could say that they were two aspects of life, for both belong to life and you cannot live without either. But each claims to be the only one, making a total claim on the human being. Fo asks Melchior to give himself totally to him, and von Spät asks the same thing. As we shall see at the end of the book, the tragedy is that Melchior cannot hold his own standpoint. Seen from the personal angle, this is the weakness of the ego, which is switched around between the opposites and is their plaything. He is between two gods or demons who both claim to be his unique owner, and what he cannot do is to keep his feet on the ground and say, "I will not obey either of you, but will live my human life." And that is why he is caught up in this constant demonic play.

Miss Rump has discovered something very interesting about the word "Fo," namely, that its dominant meaning is Buddha; it is one of his designations. This makes sense because it is said that Melchior had traveled in China and India, and Fo is the ruler of an invisible kingdom, which would be Nirvana, as we shall see later. The decoration of the book cover is on one side something like a Japanese torii, which has a mystical meaning in the Eastthe door through which you go into the Beyond and at the back of the book there is an eightfold star. These two designs are probably chosen consciously. Obviously the author had read and was fascinated by Eastern material, as will become much more evident later, and he projects the puer aeternus-the creative-demon and eros- demoninto the East. So von Spät, on the other hand, represents late Christianity. Christian civilization is now old and worn out for us. It has lost the powerful élan vital that it had in the first centuries of its rising. We, the tired Western civilization, pretend that we know all the answers, but we are longing for a new genuine inner experience and are, to a great extent, turning to the East, expecting a renewal from there. (But this is obviously a projection.) That would be another aspect of von Spät, whose slightly morbid face suggests a beautiful divine image, slightly oblong and sickly. Which god looks like that in our civilization? Christ. So here is a hint that von Spät is not Christ but the image we have of him a suffering, dying god-something divine, but no longer capable of living.

Much of the book at this point does not need any comment. There is the journalist who just talks any kind of rot he thinks fitting at the moment and the parson who pretends that he is studying the disorientation of modern life and then in the midst of his prayer just stops to stare at the sexual intercourse. The irony in all these things is transparent and comes out of the conscious layers of the author. Therefore no further psychological interpretation is needed.

But the still unsolved problem is the role of the feminine. Women are described with the utmost scorn. There is not a single positive feminine figure in the book. The author ridicules them completely. Whether he is a homosexual or not I do not know, but he certainly displays the psychology of homosexuality. This may be due, however, to the general German attitude which, even in heterosexual men, is colored by a strong homosexual bias. There is no eros in the book, and the only positive woman in the chapters we have read is the apple-woman, who is a positive mother-figure. She brings a message to Melchior when von Spät's power is at its height. When everybody is fascinated by his magic, the apple-woman comes to the dinner party and whispers to Melchior, "Ring on the finger (the ring signified his betrothal, so to speak, with the boy), faces at the window, ways which cross each, winds blowing southwards, soon the time will come, they're waiting, they're waiting"meaning that they are waiting for him. The message she transmits to Melchior is that he should not become untrue and disloyal to them. She is the only feminine figure on the side of the boys, and this makes a cluster which consists of a group of mother-bound boys whose feminine ruler is archetypal mother nature and, at the same time, is the fat old woman who sells apples at the station.

That there is no young anima figure is typical of the German mentality. As Jung points out, on the other side of the Rhine the anima has not been differentiated but has remained completely within the mother complex. A man belonging to the Secret Service told me that when he wanted to loosen up young Nazi prisoners so as to get military information out of the them, the leadingand practically always successful-question to put when they were determined not to tell the enemy anything was (with a slightly sentimental quiver in the voice), "Is your mother still alive?" Usually they then started to cry, and their tongues were loosened. He discovered that this was the key question with which to penetrate the armor of the hostile attitude in German youths. Naturally generalizations must be taken as such; they are only half-truths in individual cases, but if we may characterize national differences, there is still a lack of differentiation of the anima in Germans compared with the more Latin-influenced peoples. Germany itself also differs in the south, where there was a Roman occupation. In the center of Germany the attitude is slightly different from that of the northern part, so the statement has to be taken with a grain of salt. This novel, however, shows clearly the state of complete undifferentiation of the anima, the only positive woman being this apple-mother.

Sophia means wisdom, and it is meaningful that Melchior's wife's name is Sophie. But she appears as a bitter, animus- possessed, socially ambitious, petty, unloving woman, the typical disappointed wife. Nevertheless, her name means wisdom, which shows how greatly the unloving attitude of the man has altered the feminine principle. Sophie could be Wisdom; she could incarnate the love of humanity-she could be all that the name Sophia implies-but instead she is changed into this destructive small figure because Melchior has not known how to turn toward her and make her blossom with his love. She is negative wisdom, and she is bitter because he does not love human beings. She likes human contacts and he hates them; she wants to force him to make human contacts, but he remains in inhuman isolation. This is what they fight about.

As you know, the Sophia is called philanthropos, "the one who loves man." [18] She is an attitude of love toward mankind, which naturally means being human among other human beings and loving them. That is the highest form of eros. As Jung sketches it in his paper on the transference, it is even higher than the highest love symbolized by the Virgin Mary because, as he says, very meaningfully, "the less sometimes means the more." [19] This means that if I have an idealistic love for mankind, wanting to do only good, that is less than just being human among human beings.

But that kind of love is lacking at this party in which a completely barbaric animality breaks through with its egoism, vulgarity and untruthfulness. This shows what happens if love for the human being is not present, and also shows what neglecting the eros side produces, namely, a conventional surface layer of so-called spiritual civilization and, underneath, the old animal ape-circus which may break loose at any minute. As soon as the conventions are gone and the women have undressed, there is just the ape-circus left, with a complete undifferentiation of anything human. One could say that this is the typical psychology of those schizoid intellectuals, so numerous in our civilization, in whom the feeling function has been completely repressed. This is what people look like when they haven't developed the feeling function, except that as a rule they don't have the courage to reveal the animality lurking underneath. It takes a revolution, a Nazi movement, or something of that sort, to bring it into the open, and then one is just amazed at what comes out. When the conventions are swept away, then this ape-circus appears.

Herr von Spät hates sleep. How would you interpret that? He says that when he has completely overcome his enemies there will be no sleep, and his way to overcome the boys will be to cut them off from the source of sleep.

Answer: In sleep there is no power-drive.

Yes, in sleep the power-drive is knocked out. We are completely helpless and passive, open to the whole world, naked in our surroundings. It is a state in which power is knocked out and the unconscious comes up, so you think at first that he must represent consciousness and Fo the principle of unconsciousness. But if we look more closely, it is a bit different. Mr. von Spät is something unconscious too, namely, the unconscious demonic aspect of consciousness. Consciousness consists of something we think we know; it is an immediate awareness. Even though we do not know quite what it is, we have a subjective feeling that what consciousness is is intimately known to us. But behind this conscious awareness lies an unconsciousness; in other words, behind the I and the whole phenomenon of consciousness lies the shadow, the power-drive, and something demonic.

We must never forget that consciousness has a demonic aspect. We begin now to be aware that the achievements of our consciousnessour technical achievements, for example-have destructive aspects. We are waking up to the fact that consciousness can be a disadvantage and that it is based on an unconsciousness. That which makes me so passionately want consciousness to dominate life is something unconscious. And we don't know what that is. The need, the urge and passion for consciousness is something unconscious, as is what we know as conscious tradition.

For example, to a primitive tribe its own tradition appears to it as consciousness. In an African tribe, if a novice-having been tortured and having had his teeth knocked out, or whateveris taught how the world was created, how evil comes about, that illness means a certain thing, that men must marry women of a certain clan for certain reasons, that to him is consciousness. The Africans say that a man is an animal until he has gone through an initiation whereby he assimilates the tribal tradition. The uninitiated they call animals, which shows that they would maintain that the acquisition of such knowledge is the step from animal unconsciousness to human consciousness. To us, however, who have a different tradition, the mythological teachings that the young primitive absorbs seem purely unconscious. We even interpret such teachings as we do dreams; that this is possible shows that what signifies collective consciousness to a primitive tribe is in reality full of unconscious symbolism.

I refer to other civilizations to illustrate my point because one can observe another society sine ira et studio, that is, dispassionately. But with our own religious tradition it is the same. We could say that Christian teaching is a content of our collective consciousness. If we look more closely, however, we see that it is based on symbols such as the crucified god, the Virgin Mary and so on. If we think about these, about what they mean and how to link them up with our actual life, we discover that we do not know because they are full of unconsciousness. We find that precisely those known aspects of our spiritual tradition are completely mysterious to us in many ways and that we can say nothing about them. So consciousness contains a secret reverse side which is unconsciousness. Just that is the demonic thing about von Spät, namely, that conscious views always behave as if they were the whole answer. One might say that perhaps it is now the task of psychology to uncover this secret, destructive aspect of consciousness and to fight it.

I hope that we may sometime get to the point where consciousness can function without the pretension of knowing everything and of having said the last word. If consciousness could be reduced to a function, a descriptive function, then people would cease to make final statements. Instead, one would say that from the known facts it appears at the present time as if one could explain it in such and such a way. That would mean giving up the secret power premise that claims to have said all there is to be said, so that now we know all about it and it is so. If that false pretension could be eliminated, that would be a big step. But that presupposes the integration of consciousness by our becoming aware of its relativity and its specific relation to the individual. (I must know that I know and that I have especially that view.) It is not enough to have a conscious viewpoint; one must know why one has it and what one's individual reasons for having it are. The average person is still possessed by collective consciousness and, under its influence, talks as if he knew all the answers. For example, people tend to regard a humanitarian attitude as being their own, forgetting that it is derived from the Christian Weltanschauung. They fail to realize that it is collective and that it is part of a Weltanschauung they no longer share. Power is the hidden motivation behind such behavior.

Knowledge is one of the greatest means of asserting power. Man has obtained power over nature and other human beings by brute force and also by knowledge and intelligence. It is uncertain which is the stronger, for strength and intelligence are the two aspects of the power-drive. They account for the many primitive animal stories in which the witty, clever one outwits the strong one: the hyena outwits the lion, and in South America the little dwarf stag outwits even the tiger. This shows up in the power-drive of the single individual; for instance, in the animus of women-either they trick their husbands or they make brutal scenes. Emotional brutality and cunning are the two manifestations of power. When my power-drive is irritated, I either hit the other person directly, or, if I am too cowardly or not strong enough, then I find a way of tricking him.

Our consciousness is still secretly coupled with these two tendencies for domination, and knowledge is generally combined with them. You see this most irritatingly in the prestige drive of the academic world. It is a rare event in university life that a professor is interested in truth for its own sake; usually he is more interested in his position and in being the first to have said something. Twenty-five years ago an anthropologist dug up an amazing skull in Tanganyika-what anthropologists had been searching for years-the ''missing link." It lies between the anthropoid ape and the human species and, as shown by the Geigercounter, adds about ten million years to the age of the human race. It has thus thrown over all the former findings of anthropology. This man published the facts about his discovery, but for twenty-five years, with the exception of Professor Broom in America, there was dead silence in all the universities. The discovery was absolutely ignored. Not one professor of anthropology corresponded with the publisher or tried to check up on the age of the skull. A Geiger-counter could have been used and a check made, but nobody did so for that would have meant revising their theories. They would have to say that something said in a former lecture must now be corrected, and academic vanity, the power-drive of the intellect, would not permit such a thing. Now another skeleton has been dug up in Italy, and facts are accumulating, so now, hesitatingly, here and there an anthropologist makes tentative allusion to such a discovery, but for twenty-five years they all sat on their power- knowledge and were not interested in the truth.

Remark: Les savants ne son pas curieux, as the French say.

Yes, exactly! Which shows that the power which is contained in knowledge, the demonic drive to dominate through knowledge, is stronger than the objective interest in finding out any kind of truth. That is only one example. There are many others.

Notes

[18] See references to Sophia in Jung's Psychology and Religion, CW 11, and in The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16; also Proverbs 8:31, and Ecclesiasticus 24:1922.

[19] The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16, par. 361.

Lecture 11

Last time we had reached that part of the story where von Spät suddenly wakes up and his magic is over because, for a minute, he slept or played, was not quite alert enough, and so the demonic boys overcame him. You remember that, at the dinner party which he had conjured up, von Spät had appeared with seven girls and sometimes multiplied himself so as to be the lover of all seven. He is seven men with seven girls, and then he is again one figure. At the moment when he wakes up, he is shocked out of his trance by the appearance of the boy Fo. The seven girls and the magic dinner party disappear. How would you interpret the one magician and the seven girls?

Remark: With himself it makes eight.

Yes, but when is there one with the seven? You must remember that the author had been interested in alchemy and had produced this alchemical pseudo-miracle of putting Trumpelsteg and Mrs. Cux in the bottle, a kind of mock representation of the alchemical mysterium coniunctionis.

In alchemy, especially in the later alchemical texts, which are probably the ones that our author knows, there are often representations of seven women sitting in an earth cave, and they are the seven planets or the seven metals, both representing the same thing. The idea was that every metal corresponded to a planet: gold Sun, silver Moon, copper Venus, leadSaturn, iron-Mars, tinJupiter, quicksilver-Mercury. The eighth figure among the seven women would represent the ruler of them all and would be either the sun-god or Saturn because Saturn was also represented as the old sun, the old form of the sun. From his name ("Late") one can also conclude that von Spät probably represents the old sun-god surrounded by the seven planets. We have interpreted von Spät as representing the principle of Christianity because he appears as an aristocratic but rather morbid-looking god, and now he appears as the old sun-god, which would mean that it is not Christianity in itself, whatever that is, for nobody knows, but the old tired Weltanschauung of Christianity, that which has been realized and is therefore a habit of thought that is no longer vitala kind of principle at the base of our social and religious institutions. In fairy tales, this corresponds to the old king who has lost the water of life and who needs to be renewed or has to be dethroned or to give up the throne to a follower. In other words, the Weltanschauung, having once again grown old, has become an aged ruler who is sterile and needs renewal.

There is a little incident which goes further, for at the end of the chapter I read you, Melchior asks von Spät who the boys are. Von Spät says,

Nobody knows their real essence. They approach you like wandering boys, like animals, like girls. They seduce you into chaos and darkness. Somewhere they have a kingdom, but I cannot find the entrance. They are never there. They are always here. They are in several places at the same time. I must find the way. I must destroy the kingdom. Those free people must be subdued and the strongest and boldest one, Fo, must be also. Their wild love must die. I will cut them off from the well of sleep. Nobody shall sleep any more.

At that moment von Spät gets up and looks as if he were transparent. He lifts his head, and the ceiling opens, and suddenly, from above, a mirror-image, his double, looks down, shining. Melchior is frightened when he sees somebody looking down who looks exactly like von Spät and he cries out, "Who are you? Who are you?" But von Spät disappears into a kind of cold mist, and then he calls down from far above:

"You must choose, Melchior! If you want to go to the boys, you need only call them and they will seduce you into the sweet darkness, and if you choose their way you will forget who you were and who you are. But, if you want to come to us, you must only knock on the wall of this room, and a door will open and the way toward the ruling of the light will come. Now think it over. The way toward us is full of danger, but you are still free. When you have chosen you can't go back. If you want to go back we will not spare you." After this the figure of von Spät disappears, and Melchior sees the lamp burning and the empty couch, and he is alone in his room.

How would you interpret this doubling of von Spät? The rest of what he says is more or less clear from what we said about him before, but how would you now interpret the fact that he becomes double and then disappears into heaven-into the sky, the firmamentlike mist?

Answer: Hasn't he been living as a human? He was living a human life, and now goes off into the god.

Yes, you could say that von Spät below would be an incarnation of a divine principle and now is again joining his eternal form. What would that mean also for Melchior, practically, if he could draw the conclusions from what he experiences? What does it mean if an unconscious figure doubles in a dream?

Answer: That something is on the border of consciousness.

Yes, and the conditio sine qua non of realizing consciously what a content means is realization of its inner opposite, that is, that it is this and not that. This is a table, which means that it is not a chair, and not something else. You cannot make a conscious statement without excluding all the other aspects, and this is why, if a dream figure doubles, that always means it wants to become conscious-that it touches the threshold of consciousness and thereby reveals the double aspect. We have interpreted von Spät as the Christian Weltanschauung. What would it mean if that is doubled?

Remark: That the dark side of God is constellated at the same time.

Not necessarily. That is not in it at this point; that will come later. Here the double is as light as von Spät. He is a kind of spirit magician.

Question: Would he be a pagan god?

Yes, that's closer! Do we, who belong to the Christian civilization, really know at bottom what it means? What archetype is behind the Christian civilization? Could we honestly claim that we know what we mean when we say we believe in a Trinitarian God and in Christ? Even the greatest theologian has never claimed to do so. Catholic theologians, for instance, speak of the mystery of each dogma. Some aspects can be put into words, but the nucleus is absolutely unknown to us. We would say that there is an archetypal content or an archetype behind it which, by definition, we do not know. One could therefore say that von Spät is that part which has entered human consciousness, which sounds familiar to us, and gives us that strange feeling of knowing what it means, of being aware and conscious of it. And then there is a whole other half which is completely unknown to us, and that would be his other part. One might say that only after having realized the pagan opposite pole-which would be the world of Fo and the pagan mother-goddess-could we become aware of the double aspect of Christianity-its conscious and unconscious aspects. As long as we are in it, we cannot become aware of it, for we are, as it were, wrapped up in it; it needs an Archimedean point outside to realize the specific nature of our own civilization. The pagan pole is projected onto the East, for the boy Fo has a name which points to Buddha, which means that the capacity for looking at our own cultural and religious background is only possible for us when we get into closer touch with other civilizations and their religions. If, with a certain equanimity, you can accept the fact that the other person's religion contains some truth too, then you are able to become aware, objectively, of the specific character of our culture.

Detached awareness such as this is, of course, a modern development, and it has increased to such an extent that it is no longer possible for us to get stuck in the medieval prejudice that ours is the only true religion. Now that the world has shrunk and we are confronted with millions of people who have other attitudes and other beliefs, we have to ask ourselves what is specific and different in our attitudes and in our civilization. That question introduces a certain relativity which makes us realize how much von Spät, in some ways, represents something we consciously know and which we attempt to convey to others (for instance, in foreign missionary work) and how much there is an archetypal, unknown background; namely, the eternal aspect of von Spät, which is the image of something divine behind any specific form in which it may appear.

In a way, you find this development very clearly in the writings of Toynbee, who tries, with a kind of extraverted approach, to say that it is quite clear, now that we have come into closer contact with the East and other civilizations, that we shall simply have to adopt a kind of mixed religion. He proposes a new form of prayer which would begin: "Oh Thou, who art Buddha, Christ, Dionysus . . ." We should just pray to a savior figure to whom one would ascribe all those names, and make a nice cocktail of all the essentials of all the religions, slightly blurring the not too important differences, so as to have a kind of generalized world religion where Buddhists and South African Negroes, and everybody, can join in and think what they like about these contents. This is the same reaction that we have already had on a smaller scale in the late Roman Empire. There, too, there were all those little nations with their local creeds and folklore and religious teaching-the Celts and the Syrians and the Israelites, and so onand then, when all this was put together in the Roman Empire, the Romans tried the same thing. They said that you just had to pray to Jupiter-Zeus- Amun, which was the highest god, and the underworld god would be Hades-Osiris (in Egypt, Sarapis), and there you have a new cocktail religion where even the attributes of the gods were mixed! That would be as if we would now have new images of Christ, in which he would be represented as sitting in a Buddha-position, with the mudra of pity, and somewhere the cross behind him in a decorative way. All that is possible-human naiveté is boundless!

This attempt at relativity-the typical development of von Spät, the late development of a tired civilization, of a worn-out and decaying Weltanschauunghas no chance of success because the very essence of religious experience is that it has an absolute character. If I say that my experience could, but just as well could not, be, or that I believe such-and-such but can quite understand another's believing something different, this indicates that my so-called religious experience is not genuine, because religious experience has a compelling and absolute character. One could say that this is the criterion of a religious experience. If someone asserts that his experience has changed his whole life and will now pervade everything and if it really does apply to everything, being a total experience, applicable to every field of activity, then you know that whatever it may seem, it is a truly religious experience. Otherwise it is merely an intellectual experience, or a mood, which passes away or which is kept in one drawer for Sundaystaken out and put away again.

So we are in a terribly contradictory situation, because in order to have a religious experience one needs some kind of absolute obligation, yet this is irreconcilable with the reasonable fact that there are many religions and many religious experiences and that intolerance is really outdated and barbaric. The possible solution would be for each individual to keep to his own experience and take it as absolute, accepting the fact that others have different experiences, thus relating the necessary absoluteness only to oneselfto me this is absolute (there is no relativity and no other possibility) but I must not extend the borders into the other person's field. And this is what we try to do. We try to let people keep a religious experience without collectivizing it and taking the wrong step of insisting that it must be valid for others too. It must be absolutely valid for me, but it is an error for me to think that the experience which is absolute for me has to be applied to others. We shall see that this shortly becomes a crucial point in our novel. Here, however, we see that the breaking in of a new religious experience, which is represented by Fo, makes it possible to realize two layers of the late Weltanschauung of von Spät, who says, "If you want to follow us (namely, him) toward the kingdom of light, then just knock on this wall and a door will open."

The next part of the book is "The Open Door," so we must conclude (and we shall soon see that this is true) that at this moment of the novel Melchior, or the author, chooses the way of von Spät and makes up his mind to leave Fo.

Melchior meditates on what has happened, and then he becomes very excited, just as though he heard a bell inside him ringing, and suddenly he says, "I must find certainty." And he bangs with his fist on the wall. At that moment he hears beautiful music and sees columns appearing, and a big gate opens and he sees the sea and the quiet waves. A great white bird spreads its wings and approaches him, and he sees a sailing boat coming in. But then everything becomes disagreeably quiet and dead. He shudders and is unable to move, and then he begins to delight in the stiffening which has taken possession of him. After some time the clock in his room strikes, and his numbness disappears. Tears come from his eyes. With widespread arms he passes through the gateway and out into the night. After a few steps he hears voices which he thinks are those of his wife, of Trumpelsteg, and of Professor Cux. Dark figures appear from all sides. A muffled, bitter voice cries, "Seize him, seize him!" Somebody catches hold of him from behind, and a black cloth is put over his face and he faints.

After some time he comes to and finds that he is lying bound on the deck of a little ship and that immovable figures are sitting beside him. A storm comes up and they are tossed ceaselessly on the waves. Hours pass and no one speaks. Then a torch is lit, and in the forepart of the ship a giant of a man makes signals, swinging the torch above his head. In time, answering signals come from the opposite shore, and Melchior is relieved to be once more approaching land. Before landing, a black veil is again put over his face and his hands are again tied. He tries to cry out, but cannot, and faints again. On land he comes to and has to walk in the darkness with others beside him. After a time they come to endless passages, and sometimes he hears the sound of a door. He is astonished to feel ground under his feet, for he had had the feeling of walking on air. Someone bangs on metal. Then everything becomes still and dark, as before. In that moment, life returns to Melchior, and he tries to fight, but he comes up against nothing but empty air. He is alone. Suddenly the darkness lifts, and a blaze of light stabs his eyes. He is in a big hall, decorated with red velvet, and behind a large table are enthroned three veiled people dressed in red. Along the walls sit all the men and women whom he has known during his lifetime. They look at him severely, whispering among themselves.

The next chapter is "The Judgment."

Melchior asks who tied him up and brought him there. But there is no answer. "I want an answer!" he cries and bangs on the table, but a stern voice says, "You stand before your judges, Melchior!" Somebody then says that the accusers should come forward, and there is a lot of movement and whispering and murmuring in the hall. Melchior looks around and recognizes friends and enemies, relatives and neighbors, comrades, and the maid servants of his own house. All their faces are gray and covered with dust, their mouths wide open and black, their lips bluish. Obviously they are all dead and have come back from the tomb. He looks for his wife and sees her standing in the front row, looking at him with mad, demanding eyes. Then he sees Professor Cux with his red beard, Trumpelsteg, and all the others. Mrs. Cux's beautiful legs now look like sticks. His wife, Sophie, says, "You never wore the slippers which I spent a whole year embroidering for you.

You never loved me." Cux says, "You were never interested in my chemical discoveries, but you were always concerned with your own." Trumpelsteg says, "Always when I had an idea, you picked my brains and used it yourself, and I was left empty." And Mrs. Cux says, "You never admired my beautiful legs and now they have become like sticks. You were heartless to me."

So, one after the other, they all accuse him. Now ghosts keep appearing around Melchior. He sees his mother's suffering face, his father's face, and then an old great-aunt turns up and says, "You always laughed when I wanted to read you the verses out of my album. I showed them to nobody but you, and you laughed at them. So everything I loved died with me." School friends turn up, and among them he sees Otto von Lobe (the one who committed suicide at the beginning of the book) and Heinrich Wunderlich (the boy who became cynical) and also Henriette Karlsen. He wants to walk up to her and say, "Are you here too?" But others come between them. Then the old apple-woman is there and accuses him, saying, "He always went away. I sat at the station. I saw it! I know, I know!" Then they all begin to murmur in a hostile way and the Judge says, "You have heard the accusations. Do you admit your guilt?'' Melchior says, "Yes, I am guilty. Every step I took I did wrong. We kill while we live, but who wants to be the judge?"

There is silence and the Judge's voice says, "You deserve the death sentence. You must die." The three mummies get up from their thrones. But Melchior says calmly that there is nobody who can judge him. He gets up from his knees and says that he does not admit any judge. He asks who those are who accuse him and then says they are just crazy shadows. The people are infuriated and say he must die. They call two wooden figures at the entrance who seize him. He goes through a kind of nightmare of hell: there is fire and shut doors and doors which open and fall on him, and so onjust as it would be in a nightmare. In the end they take a black coat and nail it on him so that he feels great pain from the nails entering his flesh. They lead him on, in this hellish walk, to a big market place in a little town where all the houses are those in which he has lived during his life, and the people standing around are those whom he knew in his lifetime. He has to go up to put his head on the block, and there is great excitement, but just at the moment when his head should be cut off, he looks up and sees the white bird approaching, and that gives him courage, and he seizes the sword and kills the executioner. A loud cry goes up from the people, but at the same moment the sea breaks in a great wave, bringing a horse which halts before him. He has just time to mount and ride away before everyone is engulfed by the sea, and he hears their cries as they drown.

The next chapter is "The Call."

Melchior still has in his ears the sound of the cries of the drowning people. He goes up a mountain and finds a little river and drinks from its cold water, after which he feels quieter and as though freed from the nightmare. The horse has disappeared, but again he sees a white bird and follows it. He still feels that there is an abyss behind, which seems to be following his every step, but it never quite reaches him. The night is cold. Suddenly he hears a wolf barking.

How would you psychologically interpret the problem of the judgment? You see quite clearly that from a literary standpoint this is judgment after death. It gives the idea, more or less, of what we think will take place after death. The people who appeared were people who were still living, like his wife and Mrs. Cux, who, we presume, are still alive, but there are also a number of dead people, so the living and dead are together, and they look like half-decayed corpses. What would that mean? What is now approaching? What is the accusation? This is a fatal turning point in the story, to it is very important that it should be realized.

Answer: That he has not been related to anybody.

Yes, exactly. Now the unconscious catches up with him and the general reproach is unrelatedness. He has not worn the slippers his wife embroidered, he has not looked at his colleagues' work. It is complete, cold narcissism, which from the very beginning has been Melchior's disease, his absolute unrelatedness. We said before that with the lack of differentiation of the anima and without any relationship to the feminine principle there could be no eros and no relatedness. The essence of the whole reproach is unrelatedness, but why are they all dead?

Answer: He did not keep them alive?

Yes, exactly. It is relatedness which gives life to things. If I am not related to someone, it is absolutely irrelevant if that person is alive or dead. A person to whom I am not related is as good as dead to me; there is no difference. All the people in his surroundings are dead. It is a whole dead world, so it can be said that they also represent his unlived life, for having escaped into complete intellectualism, he has not suffered in life. He has not lived a normal, human life, so that unlived life catches up with him. Going through the door is like going through the unconscious, and the first thing which comes up is the revelation of all the unlived life which he has not lived because he had no feeling. How would you interpret the fact that he escapes his executioner?

Answer: It is a moment of realization and a determination to act for once.

You would evaluate it positively?

Answer: Well, he kills the executioner, doesn't he?

Yes, and do you think that is positive? What does execution by cutting off the head mean symbolically?

Answer: He could not think any more.

Yes, it would cutting off the intellect, so do you think it would be a good thing that he escapes that?

Answer: It gives him another chance.

Answer (front a different person): No, he should go through with it!

Yes, he should go through with it. What would the white bird be, therefore?

Answer: The spirit.

Yes, a spiritual attitude. That is the typical trick of the intellectual, onto whom all the unlived life and all the betrayed feeling-relationships fasten, giving him a terrific sense of guilt; he then makes a clever tour de passe-passe with a spiritual or intellectual explanation-and escapes again. For example, he may say that these are mere feelings of inferiority or of guilt which he must overcome. In fact, this is the explanation that Mr. von Spät gives. Melchior falls into the clutches of von Spät, who says, "Thank God you did not fall for those judges! Thank God you freed yourself from the wrong feelings of guilt." That is what the intellect calls it. We know that there are pathological and morbid feelings of guilt and that sometimes one has to push them off. There is a kind of wrong conscience which tortures people to death; in women, it is generally the animus and in men the mother anima that initiates such feelings. So it is a very mixed problem, because having the apple-woman in it and all these feelings of guilt, there is also a little bit of the mother- anima poison in it. What would that mean? How does it look in practical life if people fall into that state?if they suddenly realize their unrelatedness and the guilt they have piled up by unrelatedness, and then the apple-woman comes in and it becomes so dramatic?

Answer: The anima does not want any further consciousness. She wants to keep him where he is.

Yes, and she does that by a terribly exaggerated emotional upsurge, bathing him in feelings of guilt. This is also illustrated by the red velvet hangings and the childishly dramatic performance in which he is guilty of God knows what. That is the wrong kind of mea culpa (my guilt) combined with true guilt, making a mix-up of genuine guilt and an hysterical, exaggerated guilt-realization, which is just another kind of inflationan inflation of evil. "I am the greatest sinner. Nobody is as abject as I. I have done everything wrong in my life"and so on. That is inflation; it is simply swinging over into the opposite. There is a beautiful hint of this inflation of guilt, or inflation of blackness, in which motif? The cloak which is nailed onto him. What does that remind you of?

Answer: The cross.

Yes, before Christ was crucified a royal red garment was put on him because he was accused of pretending to be the King of the Jews; so they put a scarlet robe on him and a crown of thorns, and mocked him. That is a parallel. Only here the garment is black and the execution is that of beheading, which is symbolic, because he had to be "de-intellectualized." The garment is not the realization of his royal nature but of his black nature. It is a kind of reversed crucifixion. But the destructive or poisonous aspect of it is the exaggeration, namely, the idea of feeling like a negative Christ: "I am the greatest sinner in the world and am now suffering for my sins." The royal garment of sin!there is the inflation. What about the nails in the flesh? They nailed the black cloak on him, and that causes the suffering.

Answer: It's like being nailed to the cross, isn't it?

Yes, it is an allusion to the crucifixion of Christ, but with a variation, for it is the wrong kind of identification. I can give you here an interesting parallel in the dream of a woman who had tremendously impressive visions and because of that was very much estranged from reality. She had an urge to exteriorize all this inner material by telling it, but afterward she had the experience, common to many people after telling their great inner experiences, of being empty, deflated-now I have told it all and am empty. Because by telling the inner experience one dis-identifies, and just a miserable human being is left who says, "Yes, and now what?" As long as it remains an inner secret one is filled with it. According to her dream it was right for her to tell and be separated from her visions, but then she dreamed that a monument was shown her-the figure of a naked man with an enormous nail going through his shoulder and coming out at the hip, and a voice said, "Lazarus was dead, and Lazarus is alive again." She asked me what this nail meant and I could not figure it out. I remembered vaguely something about the thorn in the flesh of St. Paul but my knowledge of the Bible was not good enough to get it at once, so I said merely that in St. Paul there is something about a thorn in the flesh. I thought it a strange motif and looked it up in the Bible, and in 2 Corinthians 12:7 St. Paul says:

Because I have such great revelations I have this thorn in the flesh, so that I should not boast [I am putting it in ordinary language]. So that I should not boast of my revelations, God has put a thorn in my flesh, and the angel of Satan is standing in front of me, beating me down.

So, you see, the thorn in the flesh would be the reverse experience of being inflated. If I have great visions, if I have inner revelations and identify with them, then I get a thorn in the flesh, something which should remind one constantly of one's inferiority and meanness and human incompleteness. That is how St. Paul put it. And now with this woman it was the same thing. Through her inner experience she got a tremendous inflation, and this last dream was an effort to show her that the great inner experiences she had were, in another way, also a wound, a constant torture-something that made her incomplete and wounded. You could even say that those revelations are the thorn in her flesh.

It is a question of words whether in such cases you call the person a great religious mystic or a schizophrenic, for that is the closeness of the two. Here we have the same motif, which again indicates that there is a tremendous inflation of the feeling of guilt. You know that when some people go off their heads, they say that they are Christ, while others say that they caused the First World War. There is not much difference between the two! It is megalomania, this way or that. Sometimes it switches, and one minute they will say that they caused the First World War and two minutes later that they are the savior of the world. Once they have crossed the threshold, those two inflations are one and the same thing, and that is only the extreme case of something you always find on a minor scale when people have committed some sin. Either they pooh-pooh it intellectually or they bathe, in an emotional childish way, in their sinin order not to see their guiltbathing with hysterical pleasure in one's sins and feeling so awful that everyone has to give comfort! That is a pathological reaction which is just an escape from the realization of the real guilt. Another aspect of the weakness of the feeling function in the author (or in Melchior) is this typical reaction of an intellectual when he is hit on his inferior feeling function, and because that becomes too painful and too insufferable, the white bird, a kind of spiritual elation, caries him suddenly out of himself by a trick.

Remark: I think it is so surprising that von Spät tells him to knock on the wall and Melchior naturally expects them to get to him, but instead . . .

He does get to von Spät. You will see later that Melchior circles between the two worlds: the spirit world of von Spät and that of Fo-the world of the mother and the boys. This does not give the picture of a mandala but of an ellipse because it is unbalanced. The anima, which would make it round, is lacking. The mother would be an old figure like von Spät and the anima would be a young figure like Fo, and these two would make the circle complete. But these two poles are not there. Sometimes the apple-woman turns up at one masculine pole and sometimes at the other, and the anima is not there at all, which together with the unrelatedness shows the complete deficiency of the feminine principle.

Von Spät says, "Knock on the wall!" He is always connected with the idea of stars, the firmament, music, spirituality, power and order.

Melchior knocks on the wall and comes to the von Spät pole and is first attacked by his feelings of guilt. Afterward, as you will see, he will be attacked by something else, and he always breaks away by means of the white bird. Then he comes to von Spät, who says, "You did very well, you broke through the feelings of guilt." So you see the white bird is von Spät's messenger, and that would be the magic trick by which to get out of the feeling of guilt with a kind of false spirituality. You have just to do some Yoga exercises or Subbud, or something like that, and then you are free again. And von Spät is all for such tricks and compliments Melchior on his escape.

Remark: I don't see the importance of the slippers. I think the relationship might be under the slippers of one's wife!

To be sure, the slippers have a fatal implication, but on the other hand Sophie says, "I took a whole year to embroider them," which implies a lot of libido. Imagine embroidering for a whole year! It must have been petit point plus petit point, and she gave a lot of love to it. I don't see that Melchior would have been under the slipper, but simply to kick them away like that, after someone had worked a whole year for you, means being unrelated. If he had looked at the slippers, he would have said to himself that he must give some response to that feeling, but not get under her slipper. That would have created a conflict because that is what women always do: they give genuine love and add a little power-trap. That is exactly what the feminine problem is for the man: that usually there is in women a mixture of genuine love and devotion and then a little left-hand power-trick to put him in a box. His mistake is that he simply casts away the whole thing, and that is just what the puer aeternus man often does. Because there is always a little power-trick in the woman's love, he takes that as an excuse to reject the whole thing: all women are rotten-their love is nothing but putting one under the slipper, nothing but putting one into a box.

Cheap sweeping statements such as these save the man the difficulty of asking every minute of the day, "Is this a trick or is it love?" Such statements show that the man is not up to that problem with women. If he is not conscious of his anima and his own eros, he will always fall for tricks. For instance, he wants to go out, and his wife thinks that he might meet Mrs. So-and-so, in whom he is interested, so she pretends to have a headache and says, "Let's stay at home, I have a headache." But if he has a differentiated feeling function he will sense that today this is a trick, and he therefore will say that he is going out and that if she has a headache she can stay at home. The next evening she has a real headache, and it is very unrelated if he says, "No, to hell with you, I am going out!" Only if a man has a differentiated eros-development can he find out whether a woman is playing a trick or whether it is the real thing, and that is exactly what men do not like to do; they like sweeping generalizations: ''I never go in for that," or "I always such-and-such."

If a man takes a feeling-problem seriously, he has, from minute to minute, to relate to what the woman does and, on top of that, he has always to be aware of whether it is power or real feeling, which in an unconscious woman are very close to each other. If you are an analyst, the problem is the same: an analysand may bring you a tremendous amount of feeling, but, as Virgil says, there is always a snake in the grass, which means that you are never quite sure what she is up to, but if you reject the whole transference on account of that, then you destroy the patient's feeling. And you are not a good analyst. If you cannot accept the real feeling in a transference, you are destructive to the analysand. On the other hand, if you fall for the transference and eat it up, then she will nicely put you in her pocket and make a fool of you.

So whenever a man is confronted with the problem of relating to a woman, he has to perceive the difference between snake-in-the-grass tricks and genuine love, and he cannot discover that difference without possessing differentiated feeling. If he has that, he will just smell a rat and know from the woman's voice that she is up to something, or from her eyes and her voice he will learn that it is feeling to which he must respond. But a man can learn that only by differentiating his anima for a long time, by dealing with her and with the problems of relationship. If he makes a principle of yes or no, then he is not capable of relating to women or of being an analyst.

Here there is the either-or attitude. Melchior rejects women together with their slippers. Clearly he is not a man who falls under the domination of his wife's slippers. He fought against that, and you remember the trick she played by not having his room heated so that he should be forced to come to her party. That is a typical feminine trick, but Melchior does not fall for it. He sees through such tricks, but he does not see that Sophie also loves him; he doesn't realize that for a woman the one does not exclude the other. For her the two go together-she can love a man and yet play such tricksand it is the man's task to discover from minute to minute which is which.

You will remember that in the last chapter Melchior, with the help of the white bird, escapes the big wave which drowns all his accusers and executioners. Then he walks up a mountain and slowly rises above the trees.

Night comes on and he hears the howling of a wolf. In the light of the stars he sees shadows, and soon he sees that a ring of wolves surrounds him. Terrified, he stops, each time he moves they snarl, but when he keeps perfectly still they do not attack. So he sits there and does not know whether he has sat for hours or minutes. He looks toward the horizon where the sun is slowly rising, and at that moment tears come into his eyes. He sees the light coming and stretches out his arms toward it. The wolves disappear like clouds.

Toward midday he comes into a fog smelling of mold and decay. He cannot see well, but he arrives at a kind of wooden fence. He goes into a courtyard overgrown with grass, in the middle of which is a tumble-down hut full of people with birdlike hooked noses and piercing eyes who are selling large yellow mushrooms with green spots. The sun is shining on them, but a yellow mist rises from them and there is a strange smell. The little people say, "Please buy the mushrooms. They are the last. The earth is dissolving into mist, the sun rots. Buy mushrooms as long as there are any. The woods are dying, and the world is exploding. Bargains! Good bargains!"

He turns faint in the mist and feels heavier and heavier. Still feeling the wounds from the black coat on his shoulders, he walks around among them. It looks as though the whole earth were covered with dirt and mold. He hears uncontrollable feminine laughter, and turns around and sees the old apple-woman among the people, dancing completely naked and making indecent gestures. She too cries, "Buy mushrooms! Buy mushrooms! They are the last! Buy as long as there are any! The earth molds and the sun rots! The woods die! The world explodes! Bargains! Good bargains!"

Then a handsome, sensuous-looking young woman who also makes indecent gestures and who is also quite naked joins in. They surround Melchior more and more closely, and he gets terribly frightened and takes a knife and tries to kill them. But their blood changes into red mist, their wounds close, and they become alive again and laugh in a more and more cynical way. They seize him, and he shuts his eyes and sees a blue light within himself as if he had a vision of the cold sky with its stars, and in the cold sky an enormous body forming. He pulls himself out of the embrace of the women and tries to sing. His song is echoed a thousandfold until the music dies away. The lights go out and it is daytime again. He is standing in front of a glacier and sees far away a kind of crystalline building and von Spät standing in front of him. That hellish dream of the mushrooms has disappeared.

Von Spät says to him: "You have found the way. Now you are one of us. You have escaped the judgment of human beings. You have overcome the greed of the animals, and you have banished the vengeance of the decaying earth. Now you serve the stars, and you are master over human beings (the power principle), animals and the earth. Come, and we will crown you as one of our brothers."

Instead of pleasure, Melchior feels as if something deadly cold were creeping toward him, but von Spät takes his hand and leads him away. "Night and chaos are overcome," says von Spät. "Sleep has no power any more. It is daytime always and light all the time except when you go down onto the earth to appear to sleeping people like a ghost."

Then Melchior comes to a crystalline castle which is built like a mandala, with a round roof, but the cold is terrible. Von Spät tells him that he must wait until he is called and that his staff is there on the table beside him. (The staff is like a magician's wand and is decorated with pearls arranged as letters.) Melchior leans against a pillar and realizes it is made of ice. The room is empty. He takes the staff in his hand, and his clothes fall away from him. The wounds on his shoulders close and heal. He no longer notices the cold. A door opens slowly and he goes into a big open place filled with bright figures, their bodies like glass and their eyes like blue stones. On a big pedestal there is a crown. Bells ring, and everything vibrates in harmonious music. At one side he sees a group of petrified, immobilized boys, their heads hanging down. One of the glass people orders two of them to come forward, and with stiff movements they go up and take a shining crown and lift it up in the light. Melchior moves toward them. The ringing of the bells ceases.

At this moment he feels lost and alone. Then the eyes of one of the boys meet his, and he gets a terrific shock for they are the eyes of Fo. He then realizes that the boys belong to Fo's group, that they have been caught by their enemy, Ulrich von Spät, and are immobilized and petrified. He thinks: "I am going to become as rigid as they! What have I done? I have betrayed those to whom I belong and for whom I have longed and waited all my life. They came to fetch me for their group, and now I have betrayed them to the enemy. I am (and this is the important sentence) shattering life. I am breaking life apart."

With horror he suddenly looks around while the two boys who have to offer him the crown approach him. He feels a terrible shudder go through him when they hold the crown toward him, and then he hears a soft voice whispering, "Don't you want to go away from here? Don't you want to run away?" It is Fo's voice. At this Melchior comes alive again and thinks, "He is here! Fo is here!" For a moment he hesitates, for von Spät is looking at him threateningly. But then he throws out his arms and says, ''I want to go away, I want to go away."

At the same moment he feels the arms of the boys seizing him, somebody kisses him on the lips, and everything vanishes. The wind blows warm. He feels as though he were sinking down in the warm air. He opens his eyes and comes back to consciousness in a meadow. The moon is shining and innumerable fireflies dance in the summer air. He sees Fo's face bending over him and, smiling, falls into a deep sleep.

After having fallen into the half-right, half-wrong feelings of guilt and then having pulled away from them into a kind of wrong spiritualization, he falls into the pack of wolves. How would you interpret this psychologically? First the feeling of guilt because he has missed the experience of love with the other sex and has missed life, and now the wolves come up.

Answer: The wolf is an attribute of the witch and in its negative aspect denotes the devouring mother.

Yes, in some variations of the fairy tale Mother Holle has a wolf's head. Mother goddesses and witches have a wolf's head of iron, and it does sometimes denote the devouring mother.

Question: This would be the opposite of the extreme spiritualization, wouldn't it? It would be the other side.

Yes, one could say that whenever a man escapes the whole problem of relationship by a wrong kind of spiritualization, he is still in the clutches of the devouring mother. What is much worse, he turns all the women in his surroundings into devouring mothers. What else can happen? If he doesn't relate, he can only be eaten! That is naturally the wrong thing, but it is a kind of involuntary and automatic reaction in a woman. The more the man refuses to accept relatedness, the more she feels that she has to imprison him, catch him, eat him up, forbid him to move around. So he calls up the devouring mother in every woman, and then it is a vicious circle. He is disappointed because every woman turns out to be a devouring wolf. Then he says, "There you are! That is what I always said!" and walks out on the woman. Actually, his flightiness has constellated her devouring side, and for this reason he is again caught in the vicious, destructive circle. Because he does not relate, she comes with her trap and a box to put him in. Because he has no love, he summons her power-complex.

So you can say that a man with that attitude toward feeling finds the devouring mother everywhere within and without. And that would be the wolf. But beyond that, the wolf in mythology doesn't only have feminine witch qualities. There are other aspects: for instance, in the Etruscan tombs the god of death has a wolf's head or a wolf's cap. The Greek Hades was also often represented with a cap on which was the head of a wolf, so it is also the abyss of death, thought of as being a kind of devouring jaw, eating people up. The wolf stand-snot only in women but also in men-for this kind of drivenness in wanting to have things without any further purpose. Jung says that often among the strongest drives with which we are confronted when we open the door of the unconscious are the power drive, the sex drive, and then something like a hunger which just wants to eat and assimilate everything without any reason or meaning. It is that which always wants more and more. If you invite such people to supper, they are not pleased but simply furious when you don't invite them again next week. If you give a tip, they are not grateful, for the next time if you don't give them more, they say, "What? Only a franc?"

The worst are those who in early childhood have been starved of love. They go about pale and bitter with a "nobody loves me" expression, but if one makes a kind gesture, there is no appreciation, only the desire for more. If you don't give more, then they are furious and enraged. You could go on and on and pour the whole world into such an open mouthand it wouldn't help. You could throw everything in; you could be up nursing them night and day, give them all your money, do anything you likethey would never find it enough. It is like the abyss of death: the mouth never shuts; there is only the demand for more. It is a kind of driven passion of eating and eating, and it generally results from an early childhood experience where the child was starved and deprived of love or of some other vital need on the psychological or physical level. One day one can only say no whenever such greed comes up because there is no end to it. It is a divine-demonic quality. It is that thing which says, "More! Still more! Still more and more!"

The wolf in Germanic mythology belongs also to Wotan and one of his names is Isengrim, which really means "iron head." But it has also been interpreted in folklore as "grim, cold rage," and you can say that the wolf very often stands for a kind of cold, hidden resentment. Most people who have had a very unhappy childhood have something like this at the bottom of their souls. It never comes up. It is something absolutely frozen and cold, a form of petrified rage, and that is also behind the demand for more and more: "The others owe me everything." If one has to deal with orphans or children who have grown up in a ''home" and have been beaten a lot, one can generally see the wolf very clearly. But naturally it is not confined to them alone. Many others have this kind of wolf quality in them. Melchior has been frustrated from early childhood. We know that his mother was a weak, sickly woman, who did not look after him, that in early childhood he was so lonely that he saw his double at the window. We know that he did not grow up in a warm, instinctually healthy atmosphere. So this is a typical case of such a situation, and in him there is this greed and the longing always to have more.

After having overcome his half-right and half-wrong hysterical feeling of guilt, he now falls into this new trap, and here again he gets out of it by longing for the light. When he stretches out his arms for the light the wolves disappear, so he does not really deal with the problem; he falls into it, and then, by an enantiodromia, comes out of it when the night turns again into day. He falls into that state without realizing what it means and by the grace of God gets out of it again. Naturally, in such a case nothing is worked out at all. It sinks again into the night, and the next situation in life will bring it up again.

Some people who have this wolf problem realize that this kind of greedy wanting more and more and eating everybody and everything up is mad and unreasonable, so they don't let it out. They behave very correctly and never ask for more, but you always suspect that it is just politeness behind which is caged the starving wolf. Such people then suddenly fall into the wolf and come out with terrific and impossible demands which cannot be fulfilled, but if you want to discuss it analytically and say that now we must discuss that problem they want to tell a very interesting dream and the wolf side is just gone again. I may say, "Listen, I am sure you are furious because I could not do what you wanted when you rang me up, and I think we ought to talk about that." But they reply that that is quite all right, they quite understand. The wolf has gone into the woods again, although you know that nothing has been settled. It would be much better for that person to make a terrific scene, and then we could deal with it. But it has all crumbled away, and if you then artificially, on account of the dream, say that now they should come out with it, you will get the reply, "But I know it is unreasonable. I know you have no time. I know I should not have asked it of you." So the wolf has disappeared, but without being transformed. That is what happens in the story. Melchior gets into and walks out of it, and the next step is the same thing with those moldy mushrooms and those sensuous women dancing around, saying that the earth is now being destroyed. How would you interpret this motif?

Answer: The Great Mother and her dactyls or Cabiri.

Yes, it is the Great Mother with her primitive Cabiri adherents, but how would you interpret the mushrooms? They say the wood is decaying. Now the wood is a mother symbol, but what is this? You have the feeling that here is Great Mother Nature, but what about it?

Answer: She is not sane.

Yes, it is unhealthy nature, sickly nature. It is morbid and there is also morbid sensuality.

Remark: It is very probable that the last thing we shall see on the earth is a mushroom!

That is quite possible. There is an area where the mushroom now plays a role that is invading our world, namely, in the new drugs, some of which are made from some kind of fungus. This is invading psychiatry, and it is now hoped that a chemical cure for schizophrenia will be found. It is indeed quite possible that this can be done because any kind of overemotional state causes intoxication, and we believe that in schizophrenia there is a certain condition of intoxication, and then, naturally, you can eliminate these results. The snag is, however, that if you analyze people after they have been treated with these drugs, you find that the psychological problem which brought about the schizophrenic episode is not removed. All the morbid emanations of the problem-that people behave in a mad way and rave, and other symptoms-these things you can stop with the drug, but analysis shows that the basic problem remains unchanged. If at this point you do not use psychotherapy, the patient is just headed for another episode and then the drug will have to be given again. This process can continue endlessly. After such a partial cure with drugs a series of dreams will point out the danger of a counter-tendency-of saying that now I can continue with my wrong attitude, and the next time I go off my head I will just ask for another pill. The worst thing about the drugs is that with people of weak character they even have a demoralizing effect. Such people do not want to change their attitude; it is much easier to go on with it, and if a psychotic episode occurs and they fall into the unconscious, they can have a drug to get out of it again-so it is all right! They do not want to return to psychotherapy because the other is the easy way, but it results in constant relapses and more drugs.

I know the case of a woman, a nymphomaniac, who lived that to such an extent that she dissolved completely, physically and psychologically, and sank into a psychotic episode. She got the drugs, came out of it reasonably, and the next dream clearly announced that her real purpose was to carry on now. She did not need to face the thing which had led to her slipping off into the unconscious; she could just take the drug again. If you try to interfere therapeutically and say, "Now we have pulled you out of the acute episode, but we still have to face the problem," such people don't want to. They believe in the drug and think why make a psychological effort if they can go on in the old way and if anything goes wrong again, get another pill from the doctor! That is why curing people by drugs is a very risky and dangerous business. In a way, it is reasonable to use them, but it leads to a very difficult situation afterward. I would not speak against the use of drugs in such situations altogether. It is a short-cut to eliminate certain very dangerous conditions, but one pays for the short-cut because it undermines the confidence of the patient in being able to pull out through his own moral effort. It undermines his belief in himself and naturally makes him forever dependent on the doctors who have the pill when necessary. Those are the pros and cons of using these remedies.

Remark: In my observation there is something which goes dead in the personality. It's like a loss of soul.

Not always, if the drug has not been used over a long period. I have seen cases where that has not happened. Only belief and confidence have been lost, not the soul. It might go dead if the episode has already progressed very far and remedies have been used very much, but not necessarily. Confidence dies, however, and that is the danger.

Remark: We don't really know whether it might not in some cases be better in the long run for the person to go crazy. One doesn't know.

That is naturally a question of the ultimate Weltanschauung, and there we come to the end of a discussion, for you have to make up your own mind as to whether you want to help people to become mad.

Remark: Nature brings it about.

Well I think it is a dangerous attitude to say, "Oh well, there are people who are just good enough to go mad, so let them! That is how Nature removes useless individuals." There you come just as well in physical medicine into the problem of euthanasia, where you say, "Oh well, let's kill off the old people and the morons, and so on."

Remark: I did not mean it quite so negatively as that, but I have seen one or two cases which by these drugs were forced into a kind of sanity to which I would think madness was preferable.

Yes, certainly, but that is not sanity; that is this kind of persona existence, like a whitened tomb, which simply enables people to be less disagreeable socially. Their behavior is more tolerable, but except for that nothing has changed and they are just as mad as before. I have heard the confession of such a person. She had been changed into such a white persona, but later when her madness came back, and with it her better part, she said, "I was mad all the time. It was only covered up. I had a pseudo-adapted behavior." That is not a cure; it is only beating people into socially adapted behavior, so that they may be less disturbing, which is naturally useful for the doctor. It is really a self-defense mechanism of the doctor's.

Remark: I think if we don't use drugs too long that the effect is reversible, but also, what seems to be a loss of soul is really an abaissement of the emotional level. When asked, they all say that the hallucinations and other experiences of the psychotic stage are still there, but that they do not experience the emotional part so strongly.

Yes. In a case where there was a lobotomy, the person told me that all the time she felt that the madness was still there. She used a metaphor and said, "It was in the cellar but it could not come up the stairs any more." She was carefully living in the upper story, and the madness was one story lower, which would be exactly what you describe. The emotional problem is not solved; it is only removed. There is a certain distance between it and the person, and in this case the operation had the same effect; it simply means cutting off the too strong emotion. If people fall into too strong an emotion, they afterward generally switch to the opposite pole of being too reasonable, and then they have a secret homesickness for their former emotional madness because to be emotional and mad is to experience the plenitude of life.

You are never as fully alive as when you are mad. It is a kind of peak! If you are not mad enough to have experienced that, then just remember some time when you were absolutely madly in love, or in a mad rage. What a wonderful state of affairs that is! Instead of being that broken human being, always fighting between emotions and reason, you are for once whole! For instance, if you let out your rage, what a pleasure! "I told that person everything! I didn't keep anything back!" You feel so honest, and whole, for you haven't been polite, but just said everything! That is a divine state, absolutely divine, and it is a divine state to love in that way, where there is no doubt any more. Sheor heis everything! Divine, complete trust! No safeguards against the faults of the other fellow human! None of that distrust that everybody has toward everybody else, but instead: "We are one! We are one! And the stars dance around us!" It is a state of totality. And the next morning she has a pimple on her nose, and the whole thing collapses! You are out of the total state. But emotion creates the experience of being totally in something, whatever emotion it is, and that is why if one makes people too normal then they are adapted but do not feel complete any more. Secretly they long to return to their madness. So it is no solution. One has to swing back again into the emotion and try to get the two poles together. The reasonableness and the emotionality must both be lessened.

The opposites must unite, like the opposites in our book where pure emotion is represented by the boy Fo, and order and reason by von Spät. The author of the book is torn between these two. At one end everything is order, but rigid; it is a kind of madness, and that over-adaptation you get from drugs. The excess of reasonableness that people have after an episode is a form of madness. It is mad to be as coldly reasonable as that, and the opposite is another form of madness. If you cannot keep in the middle between the two you are lost, which is exactly the tragedy of the book. If you take it on a political level, you see the same thing in society: mad mass-psychosis emotional movements where people go around with either a Celtic cross or a Hakenkreuz, or whatever it may be, raving in emotion and feeling whole. It is so wonderful to walk in thousands through the streets, just howling, for then you feel whole and human. But then there are the police and order, business order, the law and all the rest, which is von Spät. Then you regress into what is called the restitution after revolutions in which everything is in order, but power dominates and people are deadly bored and think how nice it would be if they could go back into the chaos of revolution, where at least life flowed.

You see more and more how nations now switch between those two poles, just as individuals do. Groups do the same everywhere, and that is why we have to deal with the problem. It is urgent just now. For instance, those people behind the barricades in Algeria with their beautiful Celtic mandala cross, have practically no program! [20] I am sure most of those young people just enjoy the plenitude of life, feeling whole and heroic and themselves, without any further thought. They look as though they were moved by a total emotion of some kind, and then that switches back to the boredom of order. And what can you do with that? The order of von Spät is cold!

Notes

[20] [This lecture was delivered February 17, 1960.Ed.]

Lecture 12

You will remember that Mr. von Spät nearly won out last time and that Melchior was already in his glass and ice kingdom and on the point of being crowned when he suddenly realized he was getting into a prison and broke his bonds, saying he wanted to go away. By that he freed Fo who took him with the boys.

They come to a meadow lit by moonlight. It is warm and the atmosphere is beautiful. They dance around singing, and one of the boys throws a spear at Fo, hitting him in the heart. Fo pulls it out of his chest, and from the open wound a great stream of water, not blood, flows onto the ground, from which all the boys drink. As the flow decreases Fo becomes smaller and thinner until he collapses, and his whole body turns into a kind of mist which becomes transformed into waves of sound. The stream dries up, the boys sink back exhausted onto the grass and fall asleep with their eyes open. From their foreheads comes a glowing mist which turns into circles which float higher and higher, eventually forming one great ball of mist which whirls round the moon in ever narrowing rings, at last melting into it. The moon increases in size and after a pause sinks to the earth, splitting up into dustlike rays of light. Fo appears, coming out of the rays, and touches all the sleeping boys, who spring up, once more alive and laughing.

They surround Melchior and welcome him to their group, but tell him that now he has to be crucified. He is not frightened but accepts the ultimatum, and a crown of thorns is put on his head from which he feels no pain, only a slight faintness. Then they crucify him. The nails in his hands and feet feel like cold shadows, and his whole body like a light shadow. He hangs . . . a shadow on the shadow of a cross, high between heaven and earth, his face turned toward the rising sun. But he sees nothing, for heaven and earth disappear. The first rays of the sun strike his chest and tear open his body from which the blood rushes in a mighty stream, dividing up into innumerable little rivers which lose themselves in the earth.

Then he realizes that he is no longer hanging on the cross but has become one with it and that it has become an enormous tree. From his stretched-out arms come many branches: his hair waves in the wind, his head grows larger and larger, and his roots penetrate deep into the earth from which come springs of water. He hears the sound of a flute and sees Fo sitting in the shade of the tree playing. The whole troupe dances around and fades away, and already some of the boys are flying, as big birds in the sunlight, and nest in his hair. Innumerable animals surround him, and more and more come: leopards, stags, wolves, bears and foxes—they come from all parts of the forest.

A cry breaks from Melchior, and he becomes a boy like the others. Fo still plays the flute and together they sing: "All animals return to the Garden of Eden." As the song comes to an end, Fo puts aside his flute and, going to Melchior, takes his hand, saying, "You had a name. Do you still know it?"

Melchior tries to think but he cannot remember and says he does not know. He asks if he has been asleep and has just forgotten his dream?

Fo says that they all had other names before they were crucified, but now they will take him in their group and give him a new name, but it will not be his true name, for that he will only hear when he comes to the kingdom.

Melchior asks, "Which kingdom?"

Fo answers, "Our kingdom! That's where we are at home. There we play round the old fountains and drink of the holy waters, and there in black mirrors we see everything we have lived. From the dark surfaces (of the mirror) arise thousands of forms which we leave behind when we enter the kingdom and which we have to resume when we begin to wander again." (A very important place.)

Melchior asks, "And why have we to wander about?" (Notice that this question is not answered.)

"Don't you want to be everywhere?—to be the wind and the rain, the trees and the grass? Don't you want to be a part of the sunset and to melt into the moon? Don't you want to be every animal, and every human? To speak out of every mouth and see out of each eye? We escape into and out of every figure. Wherever we appear everything changes into a whirlwind, and nothing is durable."

"But when do we get to the kingdom?" Melchior asks again.

"Today or tomorrow, or in innumerable years. What does time matter? We can suddenly stand at the crossroads, and one of the roads leads to the kingdom, or it stretches out into faraway golden shores beyond great waters. Or we open the door in a strange house—and have arrived. Everywhere we can stand at its borders, but till then we must wander. If we stop we shall never get there."

"And where are we going now?"

"On and on," says Fo, his eyes shining, "and immediately in front of us is a big city, and when we leave it our group will have grown bigger. And in that city no one will know any more. . . . But you must have a name. Who should give it to you? He from whom you receive your name, he is your partner if the group scatters.

Melchior looks long at Fo and then asks, "Do you want to come with me?"

And Fo answers, "Yes, we have saved each other, so we will stay together."

He then beckons to the boys who circle around and says solemnly, "You shall be called Li!"

"Li ! Li ! Li !" the boys cry.

This is the anticlimax. In the previous chapter, Melchior was almost completely caught in von Spät's kingdom, but with a tremendous enantiodromia it turned into the opposite so that now he is in the kingdom of von Spät's enemy, Fo's kingdom. The first part of this chapter reveals who Fo is. We know that he is the leader of the boys and that his name points to Buddha; that Fo advocates eternal wandering in karmic incarnations, whereas Buddha teaches escape from the karma of incarnation, from the wheel of rebirth. Fo, on the other hand, considers endless incarnations a pleasure. Moreover, since he turns into the moon and then returns to earth after having been wounded, he is also a moon-god—a moon-god and the god of running water. When his chest is cut open, blood does not flow but a spring of life; it is specifically stated that a white stream comes forth and that this water revivifies all those who drink it.

Earlier, we saw from an allusion that von Spät is associated with the old sun—Sol Niger, Saturn. In old sun-god mythology he would correspond to the Greek Kronos and to Saturn in medieval alchemical mythology. This we deduced from the face that he danced with the seven girls who would represent the seven planets surrounding the sun-god. Fo, the opposite principle to the sun, is, logically, the moon-god, the god of night, of sleep, of the irrational, of eternal change, with naturally a latent feminine tinge. And it must not be forgotten that in German the moon is masculine (der Mond) while in Roman mythology it was hermaphroditic and was worshipped as both a male and a female figure. This hermaphroditic aspect of the soul shows that the symbol of the Self and the symbol of the anima are not yet separated. Fo represents the unconscious in its feminine and in its masculine personifications. He is the principle of the night, the other side of the light of consciousness, but the anima has not yet been differentiated.

I have been asked to compare this book with Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince to show the difference between German and French mentality. Unfortunately I can only do this very briefly, but one of the characteristics would be that on the other side of the Rhine, that is in Germany, the symbol of the anima is not as much differentiated. Practically the only feminine figures in this book are the apple-woman (the mother nature figure), Sophie, who is a very negative and also a rather maternal figure, and then the pale anima-girl, Henriette Karlsen, who dies almost before she appears on the scene. The powerful soul-figure is an hermaphroditic being—namely Fo, the moon-god. If you compare him with the soul-figure in Saint-Exupéry's book—the couple on the asteroid, the rose and the little prince—there the hermaphroditic aspect is at least differentiated into a couple, and the anima is differentiated one step further, although she is still a rather negative feminine figure, both haughty and hysterical. She has not progressed much, but at least she is separated from the symbol of the Self and appears as an independent being. The national differences are strongly contrasted in the two books. The German book gives the impression of a more archaic, more powerful symbolism and a much greater dynamism. While reading it you are pulled into an emotional, dynamic atmosphere with an hysterical, exaggerated tone which is not entirely agreeable. If we look at the negative factors, the French book is suffused with cruelty and childish sentimentality in contrast to the dynamism and hysterical exaggeration of the German book.

Two assumptions to account for this difference can be made: first, that the pagan, pre-Christian layer in France is more Celtic and in Germany Germanic (you can read about the difference between the Celtic and the Germanic character in Caesar and in Tacitus). Then—and perhaps this is even more important—there is the fact that France was thoroughly Romanized before it became Christian (and also southern Germany and Austria to some extent, and Switzerland too), whereas along the line of the Main River Germanic heathendom was directly covered over by Christian conversion. One can say that in the Mediterranean realm Christianity was the end-product of a long civilizing development and therefore became a spiritual and differentiated religious form—that on the basis of the Roman civilization it was possible for people to understand the Christian symbolism, and so, wherever Christianity was superimposed on a Romanized background there was the possibility of a transition. In areas where Romanization was lacking, the historical continuity of evolution was interrupted and Christianity superseded something very different. Using a metaphor, you could say that north of the Main, people have "a hole in the staircase"—a lower story and an upper story and in the middle an open space.

This situation is not only typical of Germany; it will arise soon (and there will be a much greater problem) in Christianized Africa, where it is already creating a terrific tension and restlessness, quite apart from the other cultural and economic problems. Africans who have been Christianized have that same hole in the stairs. The problem exists also among the Americans who fell, when they went West as pioneers, into a primitive civilization, namely, that of the American Indians. Survival in that primitive environment could only be achieved by becoming as tough and as primitive as the natives; on the other hand, the pioneers had a Victorian Christian past, and this explains why the North Americans have in many ways the same hole in the stairs (or a variation of it) that the Germans have.

Such a hole is not only a disadvantage, however. The inner polarity and tension which such a cultural situation creates makes people dynamic, efficient and active. It can be said that if the electric plus and minus poles are very far apart and very strong, then the electricity is also much greater. So it creates more dynamic and active personalities, with the drawback of a certain tendency to dissociate easily in mass movements, the nucleus of the personality and its balance being more easily disturbed.

Naturally, this hole in the stairs—now going back to a comparison of the French and German mentalities—is only relative, for the French have the same problem, but on a minor scale. It could be said to be only relatively different, and naturally when you make such sweeping statements about nations, there are many exceptions. This is just an attempt to characterize it in a general way.

Question: Would the fact that the author comes from Riga and is a Latvian influence the whole concept?

The fact that he is from northern Germany, or a Latvian, would make it worse since it would mean having no home but widespread Roman (underground), Russian and Slavonic influences. In northern Germany there is already a strong Slavonic influence, which is why there is in Germany a kind of secret hostility between north and south.

The crucifixion of Melchior is very revealing because one sees that Fo really represents the return of the archetypal figure which is also behind the figure of Christ, in an older form. If we try to compare Fo with other gods, one could say that he was closer to Dionysus. He is the god of roses and of grapes. Whenever Fo appears in the book, roses and grapes are mentioned, so he is a kind of return of Dionysus. Again, this crucifixion in which the crucified person turns into a tree reminds us of Attis, who was changed into the maternal tree. One could therefore say that in giving himself to Fo, Melchior becomes ''Attified." Since all the others had gone through the same fate, they seem to consist of people who had first lived an earthly life and then were crucified and turned into those eternally wandering boys. The myth of Attis is repeated in each one of them.

As we know, Dionysus and Attis represented the early-dying sun-god, the son of the mother, the god who dies in the spring. The date of the Feast of Easter has been taken over from the Feast of Attis, and mosaics were executed in ancient Rome with the cross with grapes around it and an invocation, "Oh thou, Dionysus, Jesus Christ." So at the beginning at least there was considerable doubt as to whether Christianity did not mean a rebirth of Dionysus—or of Attis—but in another form. The Church Fathers tried to make a definite break and establish Christianity, hoping in this way to prevent the new symbol from being sucked back into the past (which would have implied a victory for von Spät). To make sure of its creative élan, the newly converted Christians were emphatic in contending that Christianity was entirely different from the cult of Dionysus. But the similarity of the archetypal figure was so striking that everyone felt very doubtful, which accounts for such stress being laid on the fact that Jesus Christ was an historical personality in contrast to the archetypal god figure.

To return to the cultural problem: if, therefore, Fo returns in the form of Attis or Dionysus, he could be said to represent an attempt by the unconscious to create an archetypal experience which would bridge the gulf created by this sudden Christianization. One might think that, having passed through this experience, the author might now really understand what the figure of Christ means. If you sweep away all the accumulated historical dust, you see that this is a return to the original experience of what it means to take the cross upon oneself, to carry it and be crucified with Christ, only there is a different shade of something more ecstatic and more dynamic and, in an archaic way, vital. It is an attempt of the unconscious to recreate the Christian symbol and revive it in a form in which it is linked again with the deeper layers of the personality.

How widespread and how vital this problem is can be seen by the fact that one finds the same attempt of the unconscious in a completely different sphere. Those among you who heard my lectures on Niklaus von der Flüe will remember that there Christ appears with a bearskin— as a Berserk—and there too it is an attempt not to abolish the symbol of Christ but to reinterpret it, linking it with the archaic layers of the instinctive psyche. Only if we understand it in this more complete form can the symbol of Christ survive, for if it is not anchored in the depths of the soul it will be cast off and there will be a return to atheism and neo-paganism in some form.

The same thing can be seen in the Negro spirituals, which give a parallel phenomenon, for in them there is a pagan layer of the psyche with its symbolic expressions and religious emotions, and over that is layered a Christian doctrine, just a lacquer which any kind of movement or anti-propaganda would remove. Unless the main archetype of this Christian doctrine, which in our civilization is called Christ, constellates a similar archetypal symbol and links it up with the whole emotional personality, whereby it becomes a living faith, only then can people understand from underneath what Christ means in them personally. Otherwise it is purely intellectual and there is the hole in the staircase. Below one still prays to Dionysus, or in these cases, naturally, Wotan, because the one who is speared and who hangs on the World Tree is Wotan:

In this book the archetype constellated below is Wotan, as is naturally the case in a Germanic civilization. In France and those countries where there is a Celtic background the archetype called up in this form is not Wotan but Mercurius-Kerunnus, a stag god. This is a god who is transformed, who is crucified, and who is the sacrificed sun god—the spring god and the resurrected god—so in Celtic countries it is the archetype of Kerunnus which is constellated by Christ. In medieval legends, in the legend of the Holy Grail and also in Celtic material in England, Ireland and Wales, it is the archetype of Mercurius-Kerunnus. In all those cases there is an attempt to link these superimposed figures of God with the old roots of the archaic and genuine inner experience.

There are other motifs in the description of the kingdom of Fo, for he says, "We play around old fountains (which reminds one of the Germanic Fountain of Urd at the base of the World Tree) and we drink of the holy water. (If you drink from the Fountain of Urd, you become a seer. The shamans and the medicine men drink from that fountain.) In black mirrors we see what we were." Here an Eastern influence is introduced which we have already noticed before—the idea that in this kingdom you can mirror all former incarnations. We shall see later that the author believes in reincarnation, something he has derived from his Eastern studies and blended into this German material. Since the Germanic races were, in general, on the introverted side, pre-Christian Germanic civilization was introverted and had an affinity with the Chinese and Eastern spiritual life. The Germanic runes (which we now believe to be the letters of the Germanic alphabet) were originally used as an oracle, as are the sticks of the Chinese oracle, the I Ching, and even later were still used in this way.

For instance, when the Germans took prisoners, a certain number were slaughtered in honor of Wotan, for which purpose the captors "threw" the runes. That is, they took sticks on which they had carved different runes, and if the specifically marked death-rune lay on top, then that prisoner was sacrificed, while the others were kept as servants or slaves. According to the myth, this technique of divination was invented by Wotan when he was speared—we do not know whether by himself or by another, but we must also remember the spear of Longinus in the case of Christ—and here Fo is speared. Wotan then hung nine days and nine nights on the World Tree, Yggdrasil, after which in bowing down (when he fell down) he discovered the runes at his feet. Therefore, one could say that the creative product of the long crucifixion was the discovery of the runes—a new manifestation of cultural consciousness which originally consisted in reading the moment of fate. This also underlies the ideas at the back of the I Ching, which is a way of exploring the will of the gods, a method of divination based on the principle of synchronicity.

Even nowadays many people who have a Germanic racial background display a great affinity for the Eastern world, and it seems to me that there is at present in Germany quite a widespread tendency to seek the healing of their problem—the wounds caused by the war—by turning to Eastern philosophy. This would mean again finding a sufficiently introverted attitude with which to work out the problem from within, instead of from without. Naturally, the big economic boom now being experienced is very unfavorable for this, but all those who try to work out such problems turn to introversion and cling mostly to Eastern philosophy to help get into this attitude. I once suggested to one of my analysands, a man from North Germany who was in the habit of consulting the I Ching, to look at this problem in this way. The night after I told him what I am now telling you, he dreamed that he was in front of a Prussian military barracks. At the entrance was a shield with writing on it in Chinese signs and Germanic runes, which shows that the unconscious at once picked up the suggestion as relevant.

In Scandinavian mythology, trolls are also regarded as a manifestation of the principle of synchronicity. I do not want to go into that, but I would say that people from the north of the river Main, if they are creative, are more introverted and, like Eastern people, are more interested in synchronistic phenomena than in rational causality as is the case with Westerners. In the north of Germany there is a tendency, which you see more clearly in Russia, toward the great problem of uniting the Eastern and Western minds in a middle attitude. In the so-called Pan-Slavonic movement, to which Dostoyevski belonged, it was claimed that Russia was the chosen country which one day would be able to unite the introversion of the East with the efficiency and extraversion of the West. Currently they have departed from that idea by becoming completely extraverted.

The kingdom is characterized here in a strange way, for it is partly the Garden of Eden, to which all the animals return, and partly the old paradise of the Germans, the Fountain of Urd under the World Tree. But it is also clearly influenced by Eastern ideas of Nirvana, where one finally escapes the eternal wandering from one reincarnation to another, except—which is interesting—that Fo and his band have not reached the kingdom and that they see a meaning in wandering, which is opposed to the Buddhist teaching, according to which one should escape the karmic wheel of reincarnation. This is a more Western tendency, and a rather fatal one, namely, the glorification of dynamic movement in itself, even if it has no goal. But the exaltation of feeling psychologically alive and being in a creative movement with neither result nor goal is dangerous and demonic.

You will remember that I spoke of von Spät as being at one pole and Fo at the other, with Melchior in the center. At first von Spät was successful and then, with Fo and the crucifixion, came the enantiodromia which was really Fo's victory. Later it turns the other way once more. Von Spät is fatal, because at his pole things are absolutely static; once you are in the glass palace, in the spirit kingdom, nothing happens any more. Everything becomes glasslike, transparent and rigid, whereas at Fo's end there is an absolute glorification of the creative movement and ecstasy in itself, with the idea that creative ecstasy has a meaning in itself, irrespective of whether there is any result. What is being taught is a constant continuation of emotional and creative ecstasy. We find this expressed in rock-'n'-roll dancing, which represents the enjoyment of psychic and physical dynamism and musical rhythm, with no further goal. When it is over, you are tired, and the next evening you start again, and that in itself is satisfactory. On von Spät's side there is result without life movement and at Fo's end, eternal movement without result. It is another example of extreme one-sidedness, with no union of opposites. One is simply being torn between them.

There could only be healing if two other (feminine) poles had developed, because in a man's psychology the feminine, the anima principle, is the principle of reality and also realization. That is lacking in this constellation.

I will now condense the middle of the book. Fo, eyes shining, says that now they are going toward a city. He turns to give a name to Melchior—Li, consciousness, the thing that Melchior should provide. What follows is easy to understand and not very symbolic. It tells of the mischievous deeds of Fo and his band.

The story is that there was a town called Stuhlbrestenburg. (Bresten is an old German word for disease, and Stuhl means either chair or excrement, but here it obviously means the latter, so it would mean "Excrement-Disease Town.") In this town it is said that there was once a big fire which almost wiped out the town. The king, who was of a whimsical turn of mind, had thought the old walls should not be pulled down but that the burntout houses should be cut off at a certain level, say two meters above the ground, and left completely black. Over them a new town would be built in a very light and elegant Rococo architecture. The king, Walter II, thought this very amusing. But what happened was that a criminal world collected in the subterranean area and connected all the cellars, so that the whole underworld could communicate. From time to time these people made a sortie and robbed banks, etc., and then hid again in the burntout black cellars. The police could never completely exterminate them, so that the bourgeoisie in the upper stories of the houses were constantly threatened by them. The situation became aggravated when the police caught one of the chief criminals who divulged information concerning the geographical network of the underworld, with the result that the police decided on a big coup to clean up the whole gangster set-up.

Of the townspeople it was said that they worked hard but that they lived at a terrific pace, both violently and greedily. Their factories, churches and pleasure houses—brothels and so on—were full of life, but the atmosphere was hot and a bit unclean. A kind of miasma rose up perpetually from the black walls below.

Trouble now started up in the neighboring town of Rattenhausen when a school teacher who had once done some wrong to a pupil, a romantic boy of the type of Otto von Lobe, suddenly had the hallucination that one of the boys in his class was this same boy whom he had wronged twenty years ago. The teacher fell on his knees in front of the boy and begged for pardon. It turned out that the boy, Ranke, of whom he was supposed to have begged forgiveness, was at this time at home in bed and had not been at school at all at that time. The headmaster himself went to the boy's home and verified the fact. There was a great fuss and the teacher lost his job. The next morning more than half the boys could not be found. The second result, which occurred practically at the same time, was that a very honorable banker, Mr. Rotbuch, at mid-day when the rest of the staff was absent, was seized by a crazy idea. He opened a window on the first floor of the bank and threw all the money onto the crowded market place. This caused an indescribable tumult in which two people were killed and many severely hurt.

The banker was arrested and put in the lunatic asylum. When he regained control of himself he said he did not know what had come over him. Two boys wearing turned-up collars and leather caps had come to him and told him to do this, and he had acted under a kind of compulsion. On the same day, the doors of the prison were found open, the warders tied up in the henhouse and the director of the prison, dressed in full uniform, was discovered flaying around with his arms and crowing like a cock. All the prisoners had disappeared, and it was supposed that they had fled to Stuhlbrestenburg and joined up with the underground gangsters.

In the Rattenhuser Bote a leading article appeared explaining the whole thing as a mass psychosis, that a group of shameless teenagers had probably read too much of Sherlock Holmes, Karl Marx and Alexander Dumas. Poisoned by them they had tried to seduce the people into following impossible ideas. It was said that all this resulted from the haste and greed for new sensations which are part of present-day life—what was once a miracle is now a daily event—so that even sober people were no longer able to discriminate between the possible and impossible. In such stormy times, the article continued, when everything is topsy-turvy, we can only advise our worthy fellow citizens to believe only in things which are officially confirmed. The only thing which remains firm is official sanction—Sigillum signum veri (the seal of the State stands for truth). The principal officials recommended a search for the evil-doers so that they might not bring about more harm and confusion and said the people should follow the Government's lead—Caveant consules. A psychiatrist, Mr. Hinkeldey, wrote another article on mass psychosis and warned against overwork, too much introversion, and too many fantasies. He recommended cold foot-baths before going to bed and rubbing the whole body with a damp cloth on getting up in the morning!

In the next chapter the same boys wearing the turned-up collars and leather caps appeared in the Cathedral. People outside heard beautiful music and went in. They found the place full of people, the altar candles burning, and dance music being played, which infected everybody to such an extent that they forgot where they were and danced round madly. The music got wilder and wilder, with drums, violins and trumpets, and when the organ joined with the thunder of the underworld, people could stand it no longer. The teacher, the district court judge and the public prosecutor jumped about like goats, together with the market women. When the music ceased, Pistorius, an old member of the Consistory, appeared in all his vestments, and the people were suddenly silent and fell on their knees begging for pardon as he went up to the pulpit. But from the pulpit came loud continuous laughter. Pistorius's full red face became smaller and whiter. For a minute he looked like a half-grown boy, and then, standing up in the pulpit, his shaggy front legs supported on the reading desk, appeared a bleating white he-goat.

It was a mass hallucination in which they were all caught, all except Flamm, the teacher, who began to speak. But hundreds of boys descended on him from the organ and clapped and mocked him. Then a naked youth appeared at the altar and played on his flute, whereupon the choir appeared as dogs among the people. Those who were frightened tried to escape, but the doors were shut, so they climbed up on the benches and tried to get out through the windows. When the flute fell silent, the youth, the boys and the roses all disappeared and the doors stood open. No one dared say a word, and they slunk out onto the street.

The judge, who had been in the Cathedral, went across to the court where a man was to be tried for a sex murder. The public prosecutor stood up to speak and for an hour opened and shut his mouth, getting more and more excited, but not a word was audible. When he dropped white and exhausted onto his seat, a woman dressed in white clapped and applauded. The defendant's lawyer then got up to speak, but before he could begin his exact double appeared before him and accused him of being a fraud. He was so horrified that he could only stammer a few words, whereupon the other accused him of being unable to say anything in his defense. The uproar in the court was quelled with difficulty. Then the fraudulent lawyer began a long speech in which he said that after all the accused was only seeking his own pleasure, just as others seek their pleasure in judging. What was the difference? Some took pleasure in morality and others in immorality, some in murdering people and others in following the law. He turned everything upside down, and there was such confusion of the just and the unjust that everyone was exposed in his ape-like greed and amorality.

In place of the counselor appeared the naked boy who had played the flute in the Cathedral, and a woman dressed in white then intimated that she and the counselor had spent half an hour together in the next room, where she had been quite irresistible. and that he had stuck a paper knife into her breast when, in his arms, she had first turned into a boy and then a sow. The ivory handle of the paper knife was still visible in her breast. The boy took hold of the counselor's hand and said, "See, it is full of blood," and as the blood ran onto the ground the accused came up and good-naturedly asked the counselor for a kiss, saying they were all brothers.

The accused was then declared innocent, the boy and the woman in white clapped their hands and cried out, "And now kiss each other!" Once more there was a terrific scene in which everybody embraced and kissed—anyone and everywhere. Outside, all the bells of the town began to ring, and everybody questioned everybody else—contended, contradicted, fought, screamed and raged— until the police came with their swords.

While all this was happening in the Law Courts, the king was in the theater. (He was a romantic young man and sick of ruling. Actually, he appeared very much to resemble Ludwig II of Bavaria, the artist king.) He was deadly bored with his duties as king and, sitting in his royal box, was filled with romantic ideas and melancholy, and was bored with the play. In the principal scene, there was a discussion between the hero of the play, the director of some electricity works, and his step-brother. The director made a long speech in favor of materialism, of himself and of his like, saying that with them the gold is in the good hands of practical idealists. But then two boys appeared on the stage, and once more there was chaos. The director was transformed into a ball which was first tossed from one boy to another and then to the king, who caught it and threw it back, whereupon it burst with a loud bang. The king clapped delightedly, and two more boys appeared who put a crown on his head, scepter and orb into his hands, and an ermine cloak around his shoulders.

The boys took him by the hands and led him down a ladder of flowers which had appeared between the box and the floor of the theater. The audience stared in dumb horror. The court marshal tried to save the situation by shouting "Hurrah!," and some began to sing the national anthem. The crown fell from the king's head and proved to be made of paper. Smoke began to rise from the corners of the theater. King and boys disappeared, the doors burst open, and dark figures appeared with hatchets and pistols; people shrieked, saying they were from the underworld. People were shot, or killed by the swords and hatchets of the intruders; the smoke increased and the building burst apart, burying the people underneath it.

In the whole town a terrific battle was going on, and nobody knew who was fighting whom. In the market place a dark figure had swung himself onto the top of a stationary tram, and, standing in the glow of the burning theater, he cried out, "Friends! Stop! Be reasonable! It is only because you are afraid of each other that you are murdering each other. The old order makes enemies of you. Create a new order! Do not forget who are your real enemies—the boys! They hide everywhere and in every form. Who are they? Who knows them? Where do they come from? Wherever they appear everything becomes chaotic. If you follow them you will have no peace. The ground will shake under your feet. All life and order will vanish. A whirlwind will seize you, and madness will tear you apart in horror!"

For a minute the people remained motionless, but their uneasiness grew. Cries, oaths and questions broke out: "The boys! The boys! Where are they? Look for the boys! Kill them! No, kill that man, he is a traitor!"

Again the speaker stretched out his hands. "My friends," he began again, "You are searching for God, the new God, to be created by your own will, your longing, and your work." (The God whom the ego has created! What nonsense!) "You want your life to have a new form; you want a holy order, the holy order of your work. It lies within you, this holy order and longing. I will show it to you. I will teach you about that which you feel within you. I will give you the laws you can follow. We (the ghost world of von Spät) want to heal and to serve you!"

The moonlight fell on the figure, and a crowd of people surged around him, begging him to teach them and stay with them.

"We want to help you," answered the figure, his voice sounding like a bell. "Do not dive again into the old dark well! Do not hunger for an eternity that does not exist!"

Again the crowd cried out for the boys, saying they would kill them. The figure warned against touching them, but nobody listened. Then in the middle of the square a flame shot up, and in its red light appeared a group of naked boys. In a second there was a deathly silence. A boy moved forward and spoke: "Come to us, those of you who are free. Let the others build towers up to heaven! Let them petrify in their order, work and happiness! Let those who love the flame and eternal transformation come to us—into our night when their day suffocates you—into our kingdom when theirs is destroyed!"

From the naked group there broke out a song. A shudder went through the crowd. But then a new song joined in, for the glassy men were also singing. The crowd seized rifles, made a dash for the boys, but a gust of wind changed into the sails of an immense fireboat which lifted the singing group above their heads. There were shouts of "Shoot them down! Don't let them escape!" The guns took aim, the fireboat in which the boys were collected dispersed in sparks. Millions of roses were scattered all over the square and filled the air with sweet breathtaking scent.

From the boat (clearly the Thespis boat of Dionysus) and the roses, it becomes more and more evident that this is a new form of the old archetypal figure of Dionysus. From the two speeches it is clear who von Spät and Fo are, for the polarity is obvious.

The contents of the book speak for themselves. It is amazing to think that the book was written about fifty years ago and that we have passed through all that was predicted—which shows how prophetic art can be. Even the burning of the Reichstag came about, and there is no need to make any further interpretation. But the strange and uncanny thing is the motif of the burned town, upon which the light-hearted and thin upper architecture is constructed. That shows that if there is such a hole in the staircase—such a blatant contrast between the lower, emotional, archaic parts of the psyche, with its pagan outlook on life, and an upper layer of a higher civilization—then, if the problem is not made conscious and faced, it continually creates general catastrophes such as wars and revolutions, followed by a kind of repressive reconstruction on top of the debris, the old rubbish not having been cleared away.

It is frightening that just this is happening again in Germany, for the Germans are again creating a big economic boom, with great élan, upon the burntout ruins of the world wars, and the one thing which one cannot now discuss with the Germans is what really happened. Most people in Germany do not want to face that particular question—it is all past and was horrible and ''I disapprove of what took place, but let us not look at it any more. Let us quickly build up again a new form of life"—which means that nothing has been cleaned up. Now that things have quieted down, they do not say, "Let us look back and ask ourselves what really happened, psychologically." Now should be the time for reflection. Instead, a subterranean world is again built up, teeming with revolution, which is already showing itself in the painting of swastikas and other impulses.

It is just the same if people break down neurotically and pick up again with the help of Largactyl or Serpasil, and so on, and then go on in the same old way, instead of for once turning to the unconscious and asking what was at the bottom of it. In a breakdown there is always something positive which wants to come through and creates the breakdown. If the person does not turn and do as Cinderella did—discriminate between the good and the bad corn—that person does not only lose connection with his or her own past and personal psychology, but also loses connection with the positive values of the unconscious. The same is true of National Socialism, which was a distorted impulse toward renewal and creativity. If this symbolic figure, Fo—who is clearly a new form of the archetypal savior figure—had been realized by the Germans, not in this political FÜhrer craze, but subjectively—that is, in an introverted way, inwardly—it would have been the beginning of a great creative dynamism. Instead of that, it was externalized and mixed up with political propaganda and a fatal power drive which culminated in the catastrophe which we have all seen and suffered from.

On a large scale we see a development absolutely parallel to the development of the neurotic individual, for what is constellated in a neurosis is really something creative which, if not recognized, will work toward a breakdown. If one turns toward it, that which makes one sick is also the healing thing. It is clear from this book that the romantic, religious élan vital of National Socialism might have brought about a tremendous cultural renewal of the German people and great progress in consciousness. But because of the wrong twist the dynamic energy became extraverted political aims instead, and the opposite came about—and the terrible catastrophe. There is another reason why I lecture on this book (I speak of the Germans because the book came out of Germany, but the problem is widespread). The same situation exists in America, especially with young people. In different countries there is a different tinge, but it is a modern problem and not just a German problem, although Germany was the first, the locus minoris resistentiae (place of little resistance) where the disease showed itself. We all suffer from it in different variations.

If this breaking through of the new god had been realized inwardly, it would have led to the discovery of the unconscious and of the necessity of turning creatively toward it. But von Spät, who represents the eternal seduction to turn the unique inner experience into an outer collective order, got the Germans into this fatal vicious circle. And what is more terrifying is that right now they are again building a light rococo architecture, all rosy and white, on top of the burntout ruins and are therefore moving toward another catastrophe—unless for once a few people notice what they (and we) are moving into.

Question: Are there any large groups in our society which do not have what you describe as a hole in the staircase?

I would say that that exists least in Italy and in the Mediterranean countries, but they have it too, because naturally this wind blows everywhere, even over the Alps. The book says it: "Winds blow southward."

Before I give a short resume of the rest of the book, I want to say what Miss Rump has found out about the name "Li." With "Fo" it is clear that the author means Buddha, but "Li" is a very great problem because, as Miss Rump showed me, in the Chinese dictionary there are innumerable ''Li's," and it is not clear which the author means. The most probable would seem to be "reason and reasonableness, order," because, you remember, Melchior represents the egofigure torn between those two opposites, so that Li—reason—would fit best with the ego. Moreover, Melchior is a chemist, and until he became torn between those two powers, he might really have been called the cultivated, reasonable scientist. So he is reason, or consciousness, torn between the opposites.

Miss Rump also informs me that the original meaning is quite interesting, namely, the secret tracings which one finds in precious stones, the tracings and patterns such as are to be found in an opal or an onyx, in which there are frequently dark interior patterns. But how does such a secret pattern become the basis for the word "Li"—reason? One must naturally think in Chinese terms. You know that all the cultural patterns in China were obtained, according to the myth, from the meandering of the big Chinese rivers. They sketched the map, and these patterns stand for the cultivated surface of the Chinese earth. So for China, consciousness would be an awareness of the secret pattern of nature, which is what I spoke of before. The Chinese, the Eastern peoples—and, strangely enough, to a certain extent, the Germanic people—are not interested in causal rationalism. Instead, the natural tendency is toward becoming aware of the patterns of Tao, an awareness created by divination of the unconscious, and, through that, an awareness of synchronicity and of image analogies. Within this mentality the secret patterns in a stone correspond to reason, but in the book there is a fatal association because Fo and Li connect, and if you write them together you arrive at "foli(e)." Since the outbreak of the whole mass psychosis is predicted in this book, it is possible that the author thought of this connection.

The next chapter is "The Transformation of Love."

Melchior (now Li) walks over the sunburnt earth. Bushes are in flower, and under his feet he feels the burning earth. He feels elated and relaxed as he walks through nature; every bush reaches out to him. The waves of the river follow along beside him, and as the sun sinks slowly, the river increases in size, as does the noise of the waves until they take hold of him, pressing on his feverish skin and lifting him off the earth. Suddenly he hears a cry from the earth and falls. Lips search for his mouth, and he realizes that he is embracing a delicate human being. He feels the pressure of lips on his mouth and enfolding arms. He feels skin against his own and hears the beating of a heart, and realizes that he is embracing a woman.

"Who are you? And where do you come from?" he asks.

Their embrace becomes more and more passionate. He feels as if a white hall with columns in it rises around them, but the columns dissolve in a blaze of scent, and there are dark walls which glitter fleetingly.

His body changes and is transformed, and he realizes that he has a woman's body and is in a Lesbian embrace with another woman who in turn changes into a bronze giant with a broad chest and strong bony arms, whose white teeth gleam between black lips and whose eyes are unfathomable. One change follows another, for the giant has changed into a being with a brown face and thick laughing lips, the long fingers of whose hands caress him. Afterward there is a Negress, then an Indian, and then a dark girl. In ever-changing embraces he knows himself to be in new rooms and with different bodies. Sometimes he is a slave, kissed by an emperor, sometimes a whore together with soldiers who smell of blood, sometimes a priest in the scented bed of a delicate woman.

Everything becomes dark, and he can no longer distinguish anything. Then he finds himself between temple walls, beside which stand motionless, slit-eyed priests. He himself is a black-haired peasant, tied together with a peasant woman on an altar, looking around with tortured animal eyes and bleeding from many wounds. The priests surround him, their swords raised; Li cries out in nameless terror and the swords strike. Li sees his blood spurt and everything becomes a red mist. Out of the moisture rises a primeval forest with giant trees and man-high bushes. The roars of tigers come out of the bushes. A panther digs his claws into Li's flesh, and he himself is a wild, spitting cat. Millions of gay colored birds scream overhead. Li dissolves in emptiness and knows no more.

He falls and falls. In one second he falls through all the rooms through which he has passed. He hears music. Through the endless forests of pillars move crowds of dancers. A tremendous light breaks and sunlight bursts through circles of blue. He awakes on cushions of clouds to find Fo sleeping beside him, breathing quietly. From his face comes a light, and his lips twitch now and again as though in slight pain. His body lies clear and white in the morning light and is of such grace and charm that the tears flow from Li's eyes. Fo opens his eyes, sees Li, and takes his face between his hands and kisses him on the brow. They look round and see how out of all the clouds, their comrades are awakening in the new dawn.

Here you can see that the kingdom and the power of Fo become as dominating, strong and absolute as was the power of von Spät. Li is now drawn into the earth and the principle of eternal transformation, whose main drive is eros, or even sexuality in all its different forms.

The next chapter is entitled "Downfall."

The boys raise their hands to the light in greeting, but there is a rushing in the air and they cry that the storm is coming. "The storm, the storm!" they cry. "The kingdom is approaching! We're home!"

"We are home!" repeats Fo. "We are diving into the black springs to bloom afresh in the world!" Then they sing a refrain which comes again and again in the book: "Time sinks, Space disperses, Gestalt is obliterated."

The boys surround Fo and tremble. Fo lets his arms sink and his limbs begin to shiver in pain. Soon the whole group is shaken with pain. Their faces suddenly seem age-old and faded, their eyes blind, their skin flabby, and their hands thin and clawlike. All look at Fo, who seems bent under a heavy burden. As in a fog, figures stream out of him, more and more. They flutter around and disappear into emptiness. Many figures also come out of the others, who are twisting in pain. There are girls, old people, ghosts, angels, wings, men in all kinds of dress, and soldiers in full uniform. Li sees hundreds of faces. He is plagued by dreadful pain and cries out and hears how the others also cry. Their groans are mixed with the sound of the forms in the air and the rising storm.

With every shadow that separates from the boys, their bodies become more ethereal, their movements weaker and their cries softer. They begin to glow with a soft, inner light, but the train of forms never comes to an end because they have to let out all those formations within themselves—the eternal incarnations in their different forms— before they can enter the kingdom. The boys grow weaker and weaker, but their suffering is voluntary because it means the approach of the kingdom. Their eyes fixed on Fo, they do not notice how the faraway lights of their home become covered with mist and disappear, do not feel the unfriendly air which surrounds them. They are lamed by their own heaviness. Who had them in his power? Who has approached to seize the defenseless blind? A roll of thunder gives them a terrible shock. The clouds in which they had floated disappear and earth shows up beneath them. They want to cry out but cannot. Almost soundlessly the words drop from Fo's lips: "That . . . is . . . not . . . the . . . kingdom."

With all their strength they try to pull themselves together before the last of the forms can leave them, but the swamp fastens on them and swallows them. Fo's eyelids droop over his eyes. Li sees how Fo falls to the ground but is unable to move to help him. Many colored birds circle around, fluttering hither and thither, and in the middle of the group strange figures appear. Silently they approach the stiffened figures and lay their arms round the necks of the boys to kiss them.

In the eyes of some of the boys appears a nameless horror. Fear gives new power to their limbs, and they thrust the strangers away, but the others let themselves be kissed. As one of the strangers approaches Fo, Li cries, "Wake up! Wake up!"

But Fo does not hear and the stranger bends over him. Scarcely has he touched him when Fo springs up, crying, "Hold back! Stop! Save yourselves! Hold back!" The few boys who had defended themselves make a terrific effort and recover. "To me! To me!" cries Fo to the others, but it is too late. The sacrifices, sunk in a deathlike sleep, do not hear, and the strangers breathe upon the floating, released shadows, which dissolve in the air. Without looking around, the strangers go, carrying their prisoners with them, and as they move off their bodies are transparent as glass.

Li finds himself on a wide, icy surface. "What is happening?" he asks himself. "Since the enemy barred the way to the kingdom, something has happened to us. We are losing ourselves hopelessly in a maze. We don't know each other any more. Our group is becoming scattered."

The sun shines red. A gust of wind comes and sweeps away the snow. The ice is like a mirror, and Li feels the freezing cold.

Here we have the other enantiodromia. Just as when Li was crowned and had cried out that he wanted to go away and the boys had come and carried him back, so now, when they are near the kingdom and detaching from all projections—in the Eastern sense of the word, getting free from karmic projections, from involvement in the world, and turning positively to the kingdom, discovering the Self—then at this moment the other pole again interferes and the pendulum swings back again. They have missed the turning point. Once more it is a meaningless enantiodromia.

Practically, this is best illustrated in the alternating states of schizophrenics, for there are moments when they are completely filled with the collective unconscious in the form of constant transformation. They may even claim that they are God, or Jesus, or the Tree of Life, or the gold and silver island. They may say, "I and Naples have to give macaroni to the whole world," for that is the kind of speech which is made at such a time. In that form the person is caught in the collective unconscious, in eternal transformation. But if it is a schizophrenic episode that has something fatal in it, there is fragmented rationalism in the material, for just as they say, "I am Jesus Christ, I am the World Tree," which is understandable, they go on, "I and Naples must provide the world with macaroni," which brings in absolute banality, a fragmented part of the outer-ordinary, which disturbs the harmony of this manifestation of the collective unconscious. Schizophrenic material can at once be recognized, for fragments of intellectual banalities are inseminated into very important material.

You could say that in such material there are von Spät fragments, that the glass kingdom is broken up and ground in with the collective unconscious material. To say, "I and Naples must provide the world with macaroni" is complete nonsense, but to say, "I am Christ and the World Tree" is quite meaningful because in the Self we have a divine source, and every Christian mystic must accept that with a grain of salt. If one could sort out the material, the illness would not be fatal, but if one pulls out of it with drugs, without sorting the grains, he falls into a rigid normality typical of the post-psychotic state. People become rigid, normal and highly intellectual. They totally condemn everything they had experienced, saying that they do not want to talk about it. They repress it and carry on in the rigid normality of established reason, which is generally the standard of the collective conscious and intellectually something very cheap.

In both cases two things are lacking: first, the possibility of realizing the reality of the psyche, for the schizophrenic when he is in this state takes the archetypes and the inner world as being completely real, which is why he thinks he is Jesus Christ. But he does not say that with the nuance of the mystic; he means it quite literally, for he will say that he is Jesus Christ and therefore is not going to his office tomorrow. This shows that he does understand it on the level of the soul, on the inner plane, but takes it literally and concretely. In my experience, the greatest fight one has in getting a schizophrenic out is to make him understand the symbolic level of interpretation, for he insists on the thing being concrete, and in that way introduces a strange rationalism and materialism into his madness. He does not see that there is a reality of the psyche. He cannot accept the hypothesis of psychic reality as opposed to outer physical reality. He mixes the two up, which accounts for the nonsense. When such people snap into the von Spät state they are rational, but again do not recognize the reality of the psyche.

The other thing which is lacking is the feeling function, that is, the possibility of assessing values correctly. Jung tells the story of a schizophrenic patient of his who from time to time stopped to listen to something. He had great difficulty in finding out what she was doing when she broke off like that, but after a long time she confessed that at such times she was telephoning to the Virgin Mary— just quickly getting her opinion! At such times the patient was inaccessible because there was someone else on the line, so to speak! Now if you had a mystical experience of the Virgin Mary, you would be completely overwhelmed. People who have had such inner experiences remain shaken for days afterward. This is a usual reaction to an overwhelming religious experience, but it is typical for a schizophrenic to say, "Hullo! Oh yes! The Virgin Mary? Okay," so that either you believe nothing of it, or you are horribly shocked. In that case the values are lacking. If people are raving, everything is said in the same tone, whether they are Jesus Christ or delivering macaroni. The cheapest banalities and the deepest religious material are interspersed without evaluation-that is why the story of Amor and Psyche is very meaningful. Psyche, like Cinderella, must discriminate between the different grains, separating the good from the bad; it is a function of the psyche to discriminate values. If the anima is lost, feeling is lost, and that happens often in schizophrenia. As soon as feeling has gone and contact with the anima in a man has gone, then there is this picture. When many people get into such a state, there is a mass psychosis as we have already had and may possibly have again.

Now Li is caught in the ice and finds himself among the ghosts of the dead. He sees his dead father, Henriette Karlsen, and Otto von Lobe once more. He feels cold and lost and does not know where he is and wanders about, and we see that he is slowly moving back again to the north and to the ice pole of von Spät. (You know that von Spät is associated with ice and the north and that when the wind blows southward Fo is approaching. Here naturally the cold belongs to the land of the dead.)

He sees a horse and a white bird and Fo beside him, and says to Fo, "Now let's go." They jump onto a black horse and ride off, but part of him feels doubtful and cheated—something is uncanny—but Fo hurries him on and they get into a boat. In the same moment, with no preceding dawn, the sun rises and Li looks into the eyes of the steersman and sees von Spät. He gives a cry and everything goes dark.

Von Spät had taken on the appearance of Fo and tricked him into the boat. It is again an enantiodromia, but this time one factor comes near consciousness, namely, that yon Spät and Fo are two aspects of the same thing—each is secretly the other. This is something one always finds in extreme psychological opposites, for at the turning point the two are one. It is the Tai-gi-tu of Chinese philosophy: the germ of the opposite is always in the black or in the white.

The next chapter is called "The Return." It opens in a lunatic asylum where people walk up and down in the garden.

One of the women has the beard of her late husband in a glass frame, and she asks the warden and everybody else to bring him back to life. Among the madmen is a sad-looking old man whom we can recognize as Melchior. (When he went into the boat, Melchior probably died and in a reincarnation arrived in a lunatic asylum. There is a description of the way the people in the asylum sing and fight with each other, all of which we have to skip.) Another old man, a bald-headed paranoiac, walks up to Melchior and says, "Listen quietly to me for once. We must not continue to misunderstand each other. Why do you always spy on me? That is senseless!"

"I don't," says the other.

"Yes, you do, I know you do, I can feel it. You have done so from the first day you came here, but let's not speak of that. I am the Emperor, as you know, but I don't want to be acknowledged as such. I live in a thousand forms, but you knew me at once. I also know who you are. You are a great man, a great Master. I will not mention names but I know you. Why should we live in enmity? We could unite.

Let's divide up—you take the south and I will take the northern part of the earth (the two poles). I am even ready to give you a part of my share, for I will admit that in the south the people are less intelligent, but that part is easier to rule. Let us join up! I will accept any proposition you care to make. Or, perhaps, you would like the north? Take it! I will take the south. I don't mind! The south is quite enough for me; that doesn't matter. The main thing is that you don't persecute me any more! Let's unite! It is high time, for otherwise everything will grow over our heads. We must destroy mankind before there are too many, and we must do it quickly before they notice anything, for otherwise they will stop us. We want to bring Paradise on earth again, for the world has become too ugly. We will save a few women so that by them we can generate new human beings. But be careful, for God's sake! Tell nobody! We must keep it all a secret. Will you do it?"

He stretches out his hand, but the other old man, Melchior, answers, "I don't know what you mean!"

The bald-headed man says, "Don't you want to do it? Do you want it all for yourself? Ah! Now I know! You want to kill me! But look out for yourself! I am watching! I know! I know!" He looks round everywhere and sees in the distance a white figure and runs away screaming.

The white figure, who is the doctor, approaches Melchior and asks how he is. Melchior asks to be set free. The doctor answers that he knows he is completely cured, that the wonderful chemical experiments he has performed there fully establish that. "And I shall not try to rid you of your fixed idea that you are the Dr. Melchior von Lindenhuis of Schimmelberg who disappeared a hundred years ago. I think it is impossible to get you away from that idea, but the wild fantasies you had a year ago when you were found in a boat drifting about on the open sea have left you. However, you still cannot remember your real name, so in order to make it easy for you with the authorities I will request that you may be allowed to use that name, and then you can continue your courses at the University and live a normal life again."

Three days later Melchior is set free.

This is a fatal turn, because, as you see, though veiled with madness, the other half—the shadow, the bald-headed old man—has tried to unite the opposites. It is a last-minute attempt in the lunatic asylum to unite them, to bring together the two sides—the southern and the northern half of the world, Fo and von Spät—to recognize the opposites and realize that they are two aspects of one and the same thing. But then it is mixed up with megalomanic ideas of destroying the whole world and creating a new race.

As you know, the Herrenrasse was one of the fantasies of the Nazi regime: all other people were to be destroyed quickly because of overpopulation (a part of the trouble that we are in at present) and a new race created. The proposition of the bald-headed man shows a strange mixture of constructive tendencies (the union of the opposites) and of megalomanic destructive fantasies. The union of the opposites does not succeed, and Melchior regresses into rational normality once more. If we relate it to the author, he must have been near complete madness, in which he could have realized the problem of the opposites, but instead he switches into the one-sidedness of his conscious standpoint. So Melchior is released from the asylum, becomes a professor at the University, and is once more successful in a boring way, just as at the beginning of the book.

One afternoon on his way home, he sees a young man in the street who has the typical beauty of the Ephebi and whose whole appearance attracts him. He hurries, and as he passes looks at the man and then lifts his hat and introduces himself. The young man looks astonished but says he is Walter Mahr (the "Mar," that is, nightmare, and "mare," the female horse). Lindenhuis explains that he had the impression that he had seen him somewhere before, but the young man replies that he does know how that could be, that he was born and grew up in that town from which he has never been away, and that Lindenhuis has only lived there for three years. But they are now standing at the door of Lindenhuis's flat, and he begs the young man to come in for a few minutes. There, Mahr confesses that as a boy he had often dreamed of a face like Melchior's, though much younger. "Yes," Melchior interrupts, "one dreams many things, and I may well have dreamed of you."

"I dreamed," Mahr continues, "that the face looked in at the window and called me, and the voice was also like yours. And once, another sat on the edge of my bed and said I should follow him and let myself be crucified."

Melchior's excitement grows as Mahr talks, and he says everything has become confused to him and that he cannot remember. He mutters to himself about the cross and streaming blood, and then tries to fire Mahr with the idea of their going off together. Mahr looks at him and then seizes his hand and kisses it and says he will come. Lindenhuis tells him to go now but to come again the next day and to get ready to wander.

When Mahr has gone, Melchior sits thinking for a while. Then he undresses and looks in the mirror at the young beauty of his body and wonders what his bald head is doing on such a body. Then he dresses again and sits down at his desk to write, but it occurs to him that there is no sense in doing that work any more. For the first time he goes out into the street and into a coffee house, where he meets a friend. They talk of the fête being held in commemoration of the big revolution a hundred years ago in Stuhlbrestenburg, of the scenes in the street and the killing of the king in the theater. Melchior interrupts, saying he is tired and must go home.

In the street he thinks he hears steps. The streets, the lamps, the heavens and the stars, all seem strange, and again he hears steps keeping pace with his own. Without noticing it he breaks into song in which he is joined by an invisible choir. The singing gets louder; pipes, drums and cymbals play a march, and he sees himself entering a city all lit up and he himself riding a white horse. At the windows and on the balconies of the palace are veiled women and girls, and as he reaches the middle of the square they let their veils fall and stand there naked, throwing roses. A door opens before Melchior, boys hold the bridle of the horse, and Melchior gets down—and finds himself in an empty street standing in front of his own door.

He cannot take another step; his knees give way and he falls down. Lying in the snow, he cries until he cannot cry any more. After a while he gets up and goes up the steps to the house door, but as he puts the key in the door, he shrinks back; it is as though the door were warning him. He hesitates and thinks of going back to the coffee house to wait there for the morning, but when he remembers all the empty streets and his tiredness he cannot, so he overcomes his horror. On the stair he stands in the dark, listening, and before his own door he almost turns away again—it seems so strange and frightening. In his flat he hurries to his room, strikes a light, and lets the match fall, feeling that a stranger is there. He then clearly hears the breathing of the sleeper and thinks he recognizes it. At last he lights a candle. In the armchair by the fireplace he sees a sleeping man with fair, wavy locks. Melchior looks at the sleeper and recognizes von Spät. At that moment the fog in his memory departs him and he remembers everything that happened.

"Now," he thinks, "now I have him in my power, now I am the master. I am awake and he believes me to be powerless. l shall call the boys and they will tie him up." He looks at von Spät and sees the morbid, divine face, which still fascinates him, but he shakes off the temptation and cries out, "I want to go away!"

Nothing happens. He raises his arms and cries again, "I want to go away!" But still there is silence and nobody comes. For a third time he cries out, but it is useless. He lets his arms drop and knows that he is alone, that the boys are in the power of the strangers.

"It is all over," thinks Melchior, and feels terribly tired. He looks at Ulrich again, who is still sleeping. He is afraid to look at his eyes and hear him speak. Carefully, without undressing, he lies down on his bed and immediately falls asleep.

He dreams that the glass men have overcome everything and that the boys are destroyed. It is a long dream. At the end of it he hears his name called and comes face to face with Ulrich. He draws his knife and dashes at him, and like a flash carves a cross on his breast. Ulrich cries out, "Melchior!" Melchior wakes up and sees Ulrich standing there, a lighted candle in his hand. It is still night.

''The world is mine," says Ulrich. "It was useless to call the boys. They could not hear you. They are only reflections in a mirror."

"I do not belong to you!" cries Melchior. "My will is my own!"

"I will break it, as I have broken others," says Ulrich calmly. "Come with me, and I will show you the last act."

"The game never ends," says Melchior.

"Come with me," repeats Ulrich, "and look!"

Out on the street the snowstorm has intensified. They walk for over an hour, the snow blowing in their faces. At last they come to a dark alley and a dilapidated house where an oil lantern burns. Ulrich halts. Over the entrance are the words: "World Stage Radium."

"We have arrived," says Ulrich, who had not spoken all the way, and he knocks with his stick three times on the door. A dwarf looks out. "You are late," he says. "The audience has all gone. Nobody wants to see it, but we are continuing the play to the end. The last act is just about to begin." He leads them through old passages with cracks in the walls, until they come to a door in the wall through which he begs them enter and enjoy themselves. They sit down and look into the empty auditorium, dark except for an occasional lantern in whose light a couple of forms move about.

"It's a good place," says Ulrich. "One can see the actors from an angle which prevents one from taking the play too tragically."

"What does it matter to us? What shall I see here?" says Melchior.

"The last act," repeats Ulrich.

A bell rings and the curtain flies up. There on the stage Melchior sees the boys and Mr. von Spät—doubled on the stage. Melchior sees the same streets that he had seen in a dream an hour or two before, the transparent inhabitants, and the immovable faces. And this time he knows who they are, for he recognizes the boys.

Ulrich gets up and then sits down on a rather higher chair behind Melchior. He pulls out some large opera glasses and, supporting his elbows on Melchior's shoulders, looks at the stage over Melchior's head. The boys dance round Ulrich's mirrored form, singing, ''Time sinks away, Space vanishes, Gestalt disappears." It is Fo's voice. Melchior starts to jump up but Ulrich's elbows press heavily on his shoulders and hold him down. The dancing boys separate into pairs. An immense gateway rises up in the background. The last smile is stiffening on the boys' lips, their eyes are shut in deep sleep, and the eyes of Ulrich's double also close slowly.

Melchior feels the pressure of Ulrich's elbows lessen. He turns and sees that he has fallen asleep. He shakes off his elbows and forces away the sleep he feels creeping over him. Strange words pour from his lips and re-echo in the place.

Then he sees a new figure on the stage and recognizes himself. He sees the figure hurry to Fo and shake him, and sees how Fo slowly opens his eyes and springs up. He hears himself cry, "He is asleep! Now is the time!" They dash at Ulrich's image with shining knives. At the same instant Ulrich falls lifeless to the ground. Melchior sees himself on the stage with Fo and sees how they hurry away.

The wind seizes Melchior and carries him. Snowflakes fall on his face, a pale light is dawning. He is alone on the snowy streets. Gradually the snowstorm diminishes, and the sun tries to break through the clouds. Melchior feels his strength leaving him. He is so weak he can hardly move. Powerless, he drops in the snow and looks into the distance.

"The circles are closing," he whispers. "Everything is fulfilled. My shadow has freed your shadow. The enemy is destroyed. Where on the wide earth are you? Beyond the great seas which divide us I hear your voice. Day and night, night and day, you wander over the plains and climb the high mountains. Golden ships with red sails carry you across the sea. Swarms of birds surround your head. Over wild roads you come nearer and nearer. In time it will be morning, and you will appear before me naked and glowing, stars in your hair, and your cool lips will kiss my beating heart. The earth will no longer be dumb. Your words will call to all life, your breath come from everybody, your love blossom from every heart. The cross will be raised. The newly risen will shed their blood into the veins of the world and will transform from one form into another. The new play begins. Grapes darken and await you. See, how we rest, breathing in happiness. Everything is still. Come to us in the foliage of night in naked conflagration, young flame, singing flame, Master and Child."

At the end of this hymnlike prayer he gets up and stretches his limbs. Stumbling through the snow, he thinks he sees a drop of blood against the white. He looks closer and sees it is a rose leaf. A few steps further on is another and another; the whole way is strewn with them, and in the snow is the trace of delicate bare feet. He follows the tracks, which lead higher and higher. The fog thickens round him and the earth disappears. Everything is white and grows whiter and whiter; only the rose leaves glow, blood red, and draw him on. Far ahead in the fog he sees the back of a figure. His weakness disappears. He feels nothing and knows nothing but the form in front of him. The sun comes out. The fog suddenly lifts. On a peak stands Fo in a glow of light, roses in his hair, his flaming arms spread wide.

The tired wanderer falls on his knees. "The kingdom!" he stammers. "The kingdom without space!" and dies.

Again there was an enantiodromia. First Von Spät had won by taking Melchior in the boat, and then a hundred years later Melchior is in the lunatic asylum (because as soon as you are in the kingdom of intellectual reason, anything experienced at the opposite end—in Fo's realm—seems to be sheer madness). Melchior escapes from the asylum, and on the stage, when they stab von Spät, Fo wins again, this time in this world. Fo remains victorious: he finds the kingdom at last, but he leaves his body behind. Von Spät gets the body. He himself is a dead old man, which means that the problem is not solved but is again postponed, because if a solution is described as taking place after death, it means that the conscious means for realization have not yet been found in this reality. That is why in Christianity victory over evil and the union of the opposites is projected into the time after the Day of Judgment. Paradise comes after death. In Faust, Faust finds redemption after death, and in The Kingdom Without Space the solution is again projected into the afterlife. Here it is clear that the bridge to realization has not been found because in this fight the reality of the psyche is not realized. It is all fought in the projection—intellect against the archaic reality of the unconscious—but having no name for it and not seeing its reality, the author mixes psychic reality with concrete reality.

This is also the ominous background of our present-day problem, in connection with which I would like to quote a saying of Rabelais to which Jung drew my attention: La verité dans sa matière brute est plus fausse que la faux (Truth in its prima materia, in its first appearance, is falser than falseness itself.) And that is very true of what we have just experienced. But in spite of it all, these are attempts to bring forth a new creative religious attitude and also a renewal of cultural creativity—which can only manifest in a psychological and individual form. The trouble is that it comes up with such a disgustingly false political twist that it is more false than falseness itself. In spite of this, however, we must turn toward it and discriminate the seeds in it. Otherwise we are stuck, forever building light, "rosy-colored" buildings upon burntout ruins.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Publisher's Note to the Third Edition

Lecture 1

Lecture 2

Lecture 3

Lecture 4

Lecture 5

Lecture 6

Lecture 7

Lecture 8

Lecture 9

Lecture 10

Lecture 11

Lecture 12

Bibliography