FromSelf-Realization in the Individual Therapy of C. G. Jung

Self-realization is a word that is being used today by various psychological schools, for the most part in a way based loosely on Jung's concept of individuation. Looking closely, we see, however, that they are using it in a different sense from Jung's, namely, in the sense of discovering a certain ego identity. Such an identity, as we know, arises through the ego's becoming more continuous and stable. The ego then knows something more about itself. Jung, by contrast, meant something entirely different, namely, consciously discovering and entering into relationship with another psychic content, which, drawing upon the Upanishads, he calls the Self. In this case also, a more continuous and stable ego identity develops, but of a rather different sort. It is less egocentric and has more human kindness. Here the ego does not so much realize itself, but rather helps the Self toward realization.

Initially, this certainly sounds a bit abstract. That is why, in what follows, I shall attempt to clarify this process through the interpretation of a dream that illuminates the principal aspects of our theme. I have chosen a dream because the dream is an expression of the unpreconceived, unconscious nature in human beings; thus it represents not a theory but rather a spouse on the part of the psyche itself to the question of self-realization.

Though the concepts of ego, Self, and the unconscious are known to most people in a theoretical way, many make use of them without knowing what they mean in terms of practical experience. That was the case also for the dreamer of our dream. He was a forty-year-old man of an English-speaking culture who had just passed his first examinations at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Theoretically, he was well informed about the concepts mentioned above. Now, however, the time had come to undertake, under supervision, his first treatment of patients. Understandably, he did not consider himself equal to this task and became frightened. His greatest fear was that he might be unable to understand his new analysands' dreams. (As is well known, a Jungian analysis is to a great extent based on the interpretation of a patient's dreams.) Everything seemed uncertain to him, and he began to ponder over what in fact a "correct" or "incorrect" dream interpretation was at all, and, even more generally, what in fact takes place in an analysis. One night, after having had a long discussion with a friend on this subject, he went to sleep and had the following dream:

I'm sitting in an open, rectangular square in an old city. I am joined by a young man clad only in a pair of trousers, who sits down in front of me with his legs crossed. His torso is powerful and full of vitality and strength. The sun shines through his blond hair. He recounts his dreams to me and wants me to interpret them for him. The dreams are like a kind of fabric that he is spreading out before me as he tells them to me. Each time he recounts a dream, a stone falls from the sky that strikes the dream a blow. This sets pieces of the dream flying off. As I take them in my hand, it becomes clear that they are made out of bread. As the pieces of the dream fly off, they lay bare an inner structure that resembles an abstract modern sculpture. With each dream that is recounted, a further stone falls on it, and thus more and more of the basic structure, which is made of nuts and bolts, begins to appear. I tell the youth that this shows how to expose the meaning of a dream—down to the nuts and bolts. Then it emerges that dream interpretation is the art of knowing what to throw away and what to keep, which is the way it is in life as well.

Then the dream scene changes. The youth and I are now sitting facing each other on the bank of a wonderfully beautiful broad river. He is still telling me his dreams, but the structure built up by the dreams has taken on a different shape. They do not form a pyramid made of nuts and bolts, but a pyramid made of thousands of little squares and triangles, it is like a Cubist painting by Braque, but it is three-dimensional and alive. The colors and shadings of the little squares and triangles are constantly changing. I explained that it is essential for a person to maintain the balance of the whole composition by always immediately countering a color change with a corresponding compensatory change on the other side. This business of balancing out the colors is incredibly complex, because the whole object is three-dimensional and in constant movement. Then I look at the peak of the dream pyramid. There, there is nothingness. That is indeed the only point where the whole structure holds together, but at that point there is empty space. As I look at it, this space begins to radiate white light.

Once more the dream scene changes. The pyramid remains there, but now it is made out of solidified fecal material. The peak is still radiating. I suddenly realize that the invisible peak is as though made visible by the solid shit, and that conversely the shit is also made visible by the peak. I look deep into the shit and recognize that 1 am looking at the hand of God. In an instant of enlightenment, I understand why the peak is invisible: it is the face of God.

Again the dream changes. Dr. von Franz and I are taking a walk along the river. She laughingly says: "I'm sixty-one years old, not sixteen, but both numbers add up to seven."

I wake up abruptly with the feeling that someone has knocked loudly on the door. To my amazement, the apartment is completely quiet and empty.

In the language of primitive peoples, this is a "big dream" or, in Jung's language, an archetypal dream, which is of suprapersonal, universal human significance. We must now attempt to understand it more precisely. It is composed of four sections. The location of the first set of events is a rectangular square in an old city, which suggests tradition and human culture, in contrast to the river in the next part of the dream. This is presumably related to the fact that the dreamer has been tormenting himself with the question, "What are we doing, what would I actually be doing, in an analysis?" The answer is that the telling and interpreting of dreams is an ancient cultural tradition, which formerly used to take place in public. Already the first patient who wants to have his dreams interpreted has come. He is, however, markedly vital and healthy, not sick. His blond, sun-illuminated hair perhaps even indicates that he is a solar hero of some kind. This healthiness emphasizes that dreams, even in sick patients, arise out of the healthy level of the psyche, but it says more than that: the solar hero in mythology is a bringer of new light, new consciousness. He is already an aspect of what Jung called the Self, a still-unknown aspect of the dreamer himself that will bring him illumination.

The dreams that this man recounts have a kind of substance. They are not something frothy, airy-fairy, but something real, a piece of matter, so to speak. Stones fall on them from heaven. In that, somehow, lies their interpretation. The dreamer was very apprehensive about whether he would be able to interpret dreams correctly. In compensatory fashion, the dream image here indicates clearly that a correct dream interpretation is something that strikes the mark. Rather than being something one has contrived, it is an impersonal psychic event. The stones fall from the sky; they must be meteorites. If something comes from above, this means in mythic language that it derives from the unknown spiritual sphere of the collective unconscious.

Thus, since ancient times meteorites have been highly venerated objects; they have been regarded as containing a divine spirit, as messengers of the gods. For example, the North American Ankara tribe tell us that the supreme god Nesaru sent them a black meteorite as an emissary, which taught them the ritual of the sacred pipe, the peace pipe. The famous Kaaba, the goal of the pilgrimage to Mecca, is also a black meteoric stone. Since the stones come from the sky, we see that dreams, on the one hand, and the interpretation of dreams, on the other,—the right idea that "strikes" you—both come from the unconscious. Both ultimately come from the same source, but only when the therapist and the analysand work together on the dream do the stones "strike."

The dream pieces that fly off when the stones strike turn out, upon closer examination, to be made out of bread, that is, something that one can eat, or in psychological terms integrate. It is in fact true, as we can all experience, that a successful dream interpretation, one that strikes the mark, is somehow nourishing for consciousness. A synthetic, constructive interpretation—one that does not attempt to reduce the dream content to "nothing but wish-fulfillment" or to some other "nothing but," and that instead follows the constructive thread of the dream, enriching its motifs—works like the "bread of life." Actually, in the Lord's Prayer, we are not asking for "daily bread," as the usual wrong translation runs. In the Greek text we find hyperousion, "supersubstantial bread."

That which cannot be eaten, or directly integrated, is the part of the dream that is left over. It is made of nuts and bolts, which gradually build up into an entire pyramid. These are, as the dream account says, the basic structure of the dream, what is left after the flesh, in this case, the bread, has been taken away. Later on we are told that we must do the same thing as we must do in life—lay bare the skeleton. This means that we must penetrate through to the deeper meaning that lies behind the dream images.

People often say, "Last night I had such a ridiculously stupid, absurd dream." They remain hung up on the surface of the dream, that combination of absurd images, without being able to penetrate through to the meaning. Jung often responded in such cases, "There are no stupid dreams, only stupid people who don't understand them."