WELCOME TO Module 10

 

This Jungian Life @ www.thisjungianlife.com

Lisa Marchiano, Jungian Analyst, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Joseph Lee, Jungian Analyst, Virginia Beach, Virginia

Deborah Stewart, Jungian Analyst, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

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Module 10: The Self in Dreams

THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL EDITED TRANSCRIPT

 

Lisa: In this module, we’ll discuss Jung’s concept of the Self and how it manifests in dreams. The Self was one of Jung’s major ideas and it’s central to Jungian psychology. One way the Self manifests is through dreams. But before we begin to talk about the Self in dreams, let’s see if we can define this term.

Deb: What we’re going to do is circumambulate the term, because this was Jung’s term for the transpersonal—God, in effect–and that can’t be pinned down. Jung thought of it as the ordering principle that balances and unites the opposites, a principle of dynamic wholeness for which we strive for in the individuation process. He also said that the Self is bipolar, made up of both light and dark elements. So although it’s a principle of wholeness, it’s not the same as perfection.

Lisa: This sounds mysterious, and it is. Jung is talking about something we sense as the center of the personality and beyond ego. We intuit it, and we sense its manifestation through images and experiences–we can’t know the Self directly. Jung pithily and paradoxically says the Self is the center and the circumference. The Self the center of the totality of the personality, just as the ego is the center of consciousness.

Deb: We can’t define the Self precisely because the part cannot define or comprehend the whole. The unconscious aspect of psyche is huge. It’s much bigger than ego and perhaps bigger than our individual selves. However, as humans have long known, we can have a living connection to the Self through waking life experiences and dreams. In dreams, images of the Self show up that have a numinous, spiritual quality to them and feel more than what our personal psyche has created.

Joseph: There are times when we have dreams in which a miraculous person or animal appears that meets a need and gives us an experience of something spiritual. This can have a disintegrative effect as well as a synthesizing effect, because such dreams make demands of the ego. Let’s say a mythic creature is approaching. The dream ego might feel both entranced and terrified—entranced by its numinous quality terrified because such an image makes a demand on the ego to adopt a different attitude, or do something differently. It’s surprising, because if the ego already knew what it was being asked, there would be no need for the encounter. The Self is bringing what’s missing or undeveloped into awareness and that challenges us to embody it in our waking lives. This is part of what Jung meant by the need to develop an ‘ethical stance,’ one that honors a relationship to one’s deep truth, even if it is not in accord with collective norms.

Deb: You’ve just illustrated the bipolar nature of the Self. It can take us by surprise and be both terrifying and disintegrating as well as an experience of greater wholeness and synthesis. It can experienced as beatific or awe-full, so even if it shakes us to our core, it is not a nightmare—it’s like a ‘visitation’ and has deep meaning.

Lisa: This is what Jung was talking about when he said that an encounter with the Self is a defeat for the ego, because the Self is larger than the ego and it can make demands on us that don’t fit with the ego’s values or understanding. We are asked to submit to these demands for greater individuation. Either we work in concert with the Self and our ego bows down, or we will be dragged, kicking and screaming. Imagery in dreams, myths and fairy tales portray acknowledging or refusing such calls. Jung said that the Self could be considered the divine within, the force that provides a sense of direction and meaning and regulates psychic equilibrium. We feel the Self operating in our lives when we sense that we’re not living the life we’re meant to. There may be a sense of dis-ease or discomfort. It’s as though something in us is pressing to be realized, and that something is the Self. It may be very uncomfortable, but we can’t shake the feeling that something in us wants an important ‘more.’ Perhaps we were once happy in our careers or lifestyles, but we start experiencing a lack–at first, we can’t verbalize it, but something is ‘off.’

Deb: The Self presses us to be more inclusive, especially of our shadows and complexes and direction in life. We might not be able to name what’s going on at first, but something wants us to be more conscious and whole, and that energy does not come from the ego. For example, from the ego’s standpoint, the sensible and practical decision might be to stay in a solid, secure career, but there’s a ‘but’ that insists on finding and living into something more. It might not be a literal career change, but a new attitude—instead of working for a promotion and a pay raise, the person might see work as a commitment to something bigger and worthwhile.

Joseph: That calls to mind a wonderful writer, Diane Fortune, who wrote about kabbalah in the 1920s. She said we should image God as pressure which allows us to strip away all its anthropomorphic qualities. She was talking about its most abstract nuances to help us imagine the original spark. It’s a mysterious pressure. We don’t know where it comes from and often don’t know initially what it wants, but we feel something pressing.

Deb: I like thinking of encounters with the Self as existing along a spectrum. It doesn’t have to be hugely numinous like Saul falling off his horse on the road to Damascus and becoming St. Paul. It can also simply be the sense of something pressing, insistently tapping you on the shoulder…

Joseph: …because we don’t always require a huge correction. The ego might be on the verge of absorbing or integrating something that was missing and need just a little nudge. If the ego is defensive about including new awareness, it can feel like a battle.

Lisa: That very much depends on the nature of the ego’s relationship to the unconscious. We’ll see how dreams show relationship to the super-ordinate. Let’s start with one of Jung’s dreams.

Deb: This is a dream that changed Jung’s life at a time when he was struggling with himself and his direction: I found myself in a dirty sooty city. It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining. I was in Liverpool. With a number of Swiss–say, half a dozen–I walked through the dark streets. I had the feeling that there we were coming from the harbor and that the real city was actually up above, on the cliffs. We climbed up there. It reminded me of Basel, where the market is down below and then you go up through the Totengasschen (“Alley of the Dead”), which leads to a plateau above and so to Petersplatz and the Peterskirche. When we reached the plateau, we found a broad square dimly illuminated by streetlights, into which many streets converged. The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the center was a round pool and in the middle of it a small island. While everything around it was obscured by rain, fog, smoke, and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the trees stood in the sunlight and were at the same time the source of light. My companions commented on the abominable weather, and obviously did not see the tree. They spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed surprise that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the beauty of the flowering tree and the sunlit island, and thought, “I know very well why he has settled here.” Jung said of this dream, “I saw that here the goal had been revealed. One could not go beyond the center. The center is the goal, and everything is directed toward that center. I understood that the Self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning. Therein lies its healing function”—the realization of his personal myth.

Joseph: I think some context about Jung’s life at the time of the dream is important. He had been suffering for several years. His unconscious had grabbed him and pulled him into excruciating emotions and visionary experiences that were highly demanding and disintegrative. At times he had difficulty holding onto his personal identity–but when he was broken open, there was room for the energy of the Self to manifest, bringing a new orientation. In his dream, the images of square, circle and the tree are not the Self per se, but they are representations of the organizing force of the Self. After this, Jung had a certainty about himself–he had a center to his personality.

Deb: The dream is a mandala with all the streets converging on the round pool and the tree in the center. You could draw it, and Jung did make it a practice to draw mandalas at this time. The organizing principle is depicted in the dream, and as you said, Joseph, was pulling together and patterning the disparate parts that had made his inner life feel so chaotic.

Lisa: Dreams that include images of the Self might come at a time when we’re in crisis or in transition and other times that our egos feel unstable or shifting. Such dreams sometimes occur at the beginning of analysis, when we’ve recognized that we’re on a rocky road. It may take time and effort to get to the goal the dream maker has indicated, but there’s a meaningful telos. Such dreams give us heart for the journey, because we sense that the psyche an intention and a path forward, and we feel companioned.

Deb: We know we are not alone, for something has shown us a path ahead. There are a number of classic images of the transpersonal, the Self, such as the world tree, or animals like whales and elephants—there are a number of images that convey what is larger than the personal.

Lisa: In fairytales, balls or rings can be symbols of the Self because roundness symbolizes wholeness. Such images can also show up in dreams—also things that are golden, or solar, or have four parts–quaternities.

Deb: None of this should be reduced to formulaic signs as if ‘this means that.’ These are just some examples of images that can carry numinous, that which is larger than the personal self.

Joseph: Jung tried to track this by studying anthropology and mythology. He was interested in God images around the world and throughout history, like an obscure Northern European God called Oannes, who was half fish and half man. Jung was fascinated by human cultures and the ways they imaged the supra-ordinate.

Lisa: When we consider images of the Self in dreams, there is no formula how it shows up. Dreams with images of the Self are highly emotionally charged. There is a sense of the numinous. We have a sense of awe that can sometimes be frightening, but we know we have been in the presence of something inestimably larger than our personal experience.

Joseph: We can also imagine the Self as the engine behind every dream. To manage the outer world, a lot of psychic content is excluded, so at night, something decides what’s missing and often highlights it in a dream. It calls us to a feeling that wasn’t noticed or an attitude or pattern that was not attended to. By compensating, or balancing the attitude of the ego, the Self influences every dream. There is a pattern of each person’s potential for wholeness, and it presses upon the individual. It’s the big pattern that adds the missing pieces.

Lisa: You’re speaking of the self-regulation of the psyche, with the Self as the architect of that process. That rebalancing process goes on—often in the background—all the time.

Deb: The Self is always operating in the background, or beneath the surface. We don’t see it and we may not consciously know it’s there, except that sometimes it emerges into the foreground as an experience that is numinous–wonder or terror or awe that is greater than personal experience.

Lisa: These are dreams that wake you up with a gasp. These are the dreams you remember for days, weeks, or even years. These are dreams that shake you. Probably each one of us has had such a dream. I’ve had several, including the one that jumps to my mind right now. I had this dream about two months before making a major decision–something was already cooking in the unconscious before I had a confrontation with the Self. The dream went something like this: I’m in an ancient city and I wander down to the harbor. There are two enormously large figures on the water. They’re almost like statues, but they’re living people, a man and a woman dancing together on the waves. It was a striking image and had a profound impact when I woke up. A couple of months later, I began a process of discernment about becoming a Jungian analyst.

Deb: Your dream tells us we’re in the archetypal realm with the larger-than-life figures dancing on the waves. Images like that indicate that we’re in a transcendent realm. I’ll share a dream, too. Although it was many years ago, it still moves me. I had climbed down from a tower to a riverbank, where a number of people were standing, waiting. Some big boats, like ferry boats, pulled over and some people got on. Then there were some smaller boats and eventually some motorboats. People seemed to know which boats to board. I was still standing there, observing and waiting, and a canoe came along, paddled by a man in a red shirt. I knew that was the right boat and got in. I was excited to go down the river on this journey. When I woke up, I was disappointed at not reaching the destination, yet realized something important had happened. The image of the journey and getting on the river in a canoe were compelling. Ego needs to paddle the canoe, but the river directs the journey. The man in the red shirt, the guide, seemed like an image of the Self.

Joseph: That’s a wonderful example of the dream ego’s willingness to accept the journey, not knowing the destination. What if we took the same scenario and shaped it differently? What if the ego was not up for the journey? What if the ego felt kidnapped, brought to the river’s edge, and a boat would drag her down the river? The ego could feel hijacked, which happens when the ego is defended against the Self. You were ready to embrace it.

Lisa: And just to dip into mythological waters, there’s a classic example of the ego being dragged–kicking and screaming–into an encounter with the Self. The story of Jonah and the Whale begins with Jonah being called to preach at Nineveh. He refuses to go and gets on a boat headed elsewhere. There was bad weather, and the crew realized it was because Jonah had not obeyed God. They threw Jonah overboard and he was swallowed by a whale, an image of an encounter with the dark side of the Self. It’s a vivid portrayal of what can happen if we resist what the Self wants from us.

Deb: As you said, Lisa, we can go willingly or be dragged, kicking and screaming, into recognizing the autonomous and volitional power of the superordinate, the Self.

Joseph: It’s about the failure of Jonah’s attitude. Jonah did not want to preach to the people of Nineveh, for they were enemies, heathens. He wanted Nineveh to flounder in sin and perish, so Jonah fled and boarded a ship headed away. His disobedience was a defense against having to change his attitude toward Ninevah. Jonah is called by the Self—God–and forced to develop a new attitude: compassion toward those he considered inferior and ‘other.’

Lisa: We could also say that Jonah was called to engage his shadow and wasn’t able to do that, so there’s a defense against an ‘inner Nineveh’ that he wants to avoid.

Joseph: I recall a dream about ambivalence toward the Self. I had had a couple of years of analysis and had this particularly vivid dream: I’m in a small boat that’s a few hundred yards off a beach. There’s a very long dock off to the side. It’s pleasant in the boat, and as I’m paddling around, I look down and see a shadow. It’s an indistinct, partially luminous form of a fish that’s about sixty feet long and my boat is maybe twelve feet long. I feel alarmed and worried that I am in danger, so I begin paddling aggressively to get back to the dock. As I’m paddling, I see this huge fish in the deep and realize it’s tracking the boat. I feel like it’s hunting me. On awakening, and with interpretation in analysis, it was actually just keeping pace with me.

Lisa: That’s how you know your ego is not all there is. Your ego is in a little boat, and beneath you is transpersonal energy that’s aware of you. That can be comforting or frightening.

Deb: There’s phrase that the authors of Portal to the Source use, the Guiding Self. This book is on our reading list. I like that phrase, because when these images show up, we’re being told something, just like Jonah. In your dream, Joseph, a dark but luminous fish was keeping pace with you: I am here and demand that you acknowledge me. The dream ego in the boat is like a little chip of consciousness on the waters of the unconscious. Something bigger insisted on being included in consciousness, and found a way to get your attention.

Lisa: Interestingly, Joseph’s dream was of a large fish and we just referenced the story of Jonah and the whale. I’ve had numinous dreams of whales since childhood. Sometimes I’m in a boat and suddenly an enormous whale surfaces next to me and I look it in the eye. It’s interesting that images of fish or whales come up in connection to the Self. These are denizens of the deep, alien intelligence from the depths of the unconscious. The ocean is a powerful symbol of the archetypal unconscious.

Deb: Dreams are often the vehicles by which these images come to our attention. They get in the way of our ego. I’d like to share a submitted dream that illustrates this. This dream had a title: The Bear in Central Park, and begins: We are in Central Park in New York, near the entrance to 59th Street. The large bear is slumbering his way out of the park with slow methodical movements. I am running around on the track around the park. A newsman from a New York TV station is carrying a needle to sedate the bear–hurry before he awakens. The newsman says, “don’t worry. I can do it.” Someone notices the bear has awakened. He slowly moves his head toward the newsman who is scaling the wall, about to step over the fence. The bear scoops him up in his claw and catches him off guard. The newsman scrambles around on the park, the needle falls down, and he falls and is pummeled. The bear continues to slumber out of the park behind the first couple of buildings. I continue to run around the track, a long-distance run. Later, scientists have put restraints on the bear with straps and are wheeling him back into the park. They need to hurry before he breaks out. The dreamer reported deep sorrow. The bear was bigger than apartment buildings and doesn’t belong in Central Park. Other forces are trying to contain it, to sedate it, to silence it, and not let it live as fully as it might. The bear is confined to the park, and the dream ego is running on the track, not at all connected with the numinous image of this gigantic bear.

Lisa: This dream tells us something about the relationship between the ego and the Self, doesn’t it?

Joseph: The image of the Self, the God image, manifests as a bear of mythical proportions. The ego isn’t prepared and doesn’t know how to relate to the Self when it appears in such an unmediated, theriomorphic form. Some ancient religions worshipped bears. A tribe on one of the Japanese islands had a pantheon of gods headed by a bear. Their rituals differentiated between the bear-body that God took on to manifest in the world, and the killing of bears needed for food and fur. They believed the god would take another bear’s form. I bring this up because it’s such a sophisticated way of thinking about how to relate to the bear as a god. In the dream, the ego is an orbit around it but also not knowing what to do–hunt it, worship it, or something else.

Lisa: That’s a great point, Joseph. If we have a religious tradition that provides forms for relating to this energy, the Self can manifest in images related to that religion. In Christianity, someone might dream of saints, or the Holy Mother.

Joseph: The religious instinct that Jung found so important is something all humans have. Humans have all over the world have always created religions. We carry the impulse to find ways to relate to the Self, and since we can’t relate to archetypes directly, we create images of the divine. We could imagine that when a new God image emerges in a culture, it takes generations to be amplified and ritualized. We can see that in Western culture, with the story of Christ. Our ancestors took that numinous story and created imagistic structures over many years for interacting with it.

Lisa: With the loss of formal religion as a shared cultural norm, we often don’t have a way of relating to transpersonal images that is mediated through ritual and tradition. What do the dreams we three have shared say about the relationship of the ego to the Self? Deb, in your dream you were very willing to get into the canoe with the guide. I was more of an observer in my dream—the dancing figures were in the distance, but awe-inspiring. Joseph, your dream ego was encountering the incredible numinosity of the Self. In the dream with the bear, the relationship between the ego and the Self is ambivalent.

Deb: The gigantic bear is seen as dangerous, and the human figures are puny in comparison. The relationship to this numinous image of the Self—in Central Park, no less–is perceived as frightening. It is seen as the dark side of the Self by the other dream figures.

Joseph: Remember Godzilla destroying Tokyo? When we think about the evolution of these movies, which I watched over and over as a kid, sometimes Godzilla was terrifying, and people tried to escape or fight. But sometimes Godzilla was needed to defend civilization from other marauding monsters. This demonstrates the bivalence of an image that carries the overwhelming energy of the transpersonal.

Joseph: Now let’s turn to a dream series that illustrates a process of integrating the influence of the Self. The dreamer is a 45-year-old engineer and the initial dream is: R and I are standing in a circle, a disc. We are both made of silver. Our arms are raised to the sky. R and I are identical. I am in his body and shape, the shape of a man. We start rotating in a counterclockwise direction, the direction of rotation of the moon. Behind us, there’s magnificent scenery of the mountains and rolling hills that are lush and green. We are one. The setting starts with the dream ego and its animus. They’re standing on a circle, a disc, a symbol of the Self.

Deb: There are so many circular images in this dream. A circle, a disc, counterclockwise rotation, the moon and rolling hills…

Joseph: …and they’re made of silver, which we associate with the moon and the unconscious. This suggests to me that in this initial dream, both of them are representations of the unconscious, and their sameness suggests participation mystique.

Lisa: Yes, they have become one. There is no differentiation, so that fits with participation mystique—a meger. I also think of a uroboric consciousness—oceanic and without distinction. It can be a wonderful feeling to lose ourselves in this way.

Joseph: Unconscious union is part of falling in love. Here, the female dreamer merges with the beloved and becomes just like him. Both of them are silver, which is easily melted and can flow together. There’s something blissful in like bonding with like, images of falling in love. We melt and meld in an effort to blend seamlessly because we want to experience oneness.

Lisa: I’m thinking about this in terms of the Self. All these images of circles and discs and rotation are images of the Self, which is often has circular imagery. The lack of differentiation and blissful oneness is characteristic of an early way the ego relates to the Self. The ego emerges from that oceanic oneness we experience as infants, consciousness without differentiation. The ego grows and differentiates, but because it’s blissful, it always calls to us. It can be regressive to sink back into undifferentiated oneness, such as by using drugs—and it’s also part of the magic of falling in love. We can melt our individual consciousness back into the ocean, as it were, and find that bliss again—and how we seek that feeling is something we need to be a little cautious about.

Joseph: It’s also a blessed stage. They’re standing on a disc, an undifferentiated symbol of wholeness, so it feels like the Self is engineering a preparation for something that will be more differentiated later on.

Deb: These are archetypal images without a real-world setting, indicating the transpersonal. If the dream maker had provided an image of two people on a beach making love, it would be in the human realm. They’re standing on a circular disc; they raise their arms and rotate like the moon. How that could best be understood by the dreamer could only truly be understood by work with an analyst, but we know we’re in a non-human realm.

Joseph: Rotating counterclockwise is an unwinding, whereas clockwise is winding to a center. So, they’re dissolving into each other, unwinding, and dropping into the unconscious. It’s a way of loosening things up, perhaps as preparation for something new–a solutio. Out of that, something more whole can emerge in the personality. Let’s move to the second dream in this series: I and R, a man I loved but only spoke to four times (we never became close), are two halves of a circle. One half is white, the other is black. I am told, “You and R are the yin and yang, and the two of you create the yin and yang sign and the full circle.” Then the yin yang sign is in front of me and it starts to rotate in a counterclockwise direction, the direction of the moon.

Lisa: This dream came about a month after that first dream and we now have differentiation. One is black and one is white—very definite. They are two halves of a circle, yin and yang, yet defined–a complete circle—a whole. This dream echoes and builds on the circular images in the first dream.

Joseph: If we think of the image of silver from the first dream as gray, it’s a mixture of black and white. Two distinct halves have congealed out of that solution. There’s still the desire to be connected, but the connection is going to happen in differently.

Deb: The yin-yang image is a wonderful image of the union of opposites: they come together, yet each retains its distinctive qualities while including a portion of the opposite.

Joseph: Conunctio is hinted at in the yin-yang, but has it really happened? The two of them, black and white are standing together. There’s a declaration that they are like the yin-yang, but they have not become it. All the elements are there, indicating a telos of coniunctio—union.

Lisa: Images of coniunctio, or yin and yang, speak to union and wholeness and are related to the Self.

Joseph: I think the dream is pointing in that direction because the yin-yang represents a harmonious relationship between opposites that’s contained in the circle of the Self. Opposites are in balance in a peaceful way. In the ancient world, which was full of hardship and danger, tranquility was valued, and that is still a goal in many religions—and life.

Lisa: The symbolism in this dream is in the direction of the Self. We think about the Self as wholeness, and the goal of individuation is to bring as much of our personality into consciousness possible, thus becoming more whole. I think the yin-yang symbol, the coming together of the opposites, is imagery related to the Self.

Joseph: Absolutely–the opposites coming together in a peaceful, contained circle is amazing, because generally our opposites are at war with each other. And the yin-yang image is not a human image—it depicts an archetypal dynamic, so we’re in the territory of the Self. It’s rather magical, which also conveys a God-like quality. Again, it’s rotating but the source of power is not visible. A part of the Self will always be mysterious, which helps us stay humble. When we’re gifted with even a small image, like the yin-yang, it provides a way to take a step toward wholeness.

Lisa: A wise analyst said that we sometimes have great dreams in life, dreams with imagery and the feeling tone of the Self, especially awe. They astound us. But oftentimes dreams carrying images of the Self are like the giant ships that are too big to come into the harbor, so smaller ships ferry the cargo to the shore of consciousness. Those more ordinary dreams nonetheless carry some of the ‘cargo’ of the Self.

Joseph: Let’s move to the third dream in this series: There are two birds, one white and one black. They are massive. Each is probably six feet across from one wingtip to the other. The birds are dancing together with their wings spread. As they dance, they become one and become a massive globe or sphere. The color white and black remains distinguished and the scene is breathtaking.

Deb: I want to note that we are all smiling broadly. Our feeling is one of wonder and delight at the image of these two huge birds with their wings spread, dancing and swirling together.

Lisa: There is still differentiation. The white and black remain distinct, but now there’s the aliveness of the birds and their dynamic movement. Discs, the moon, or yin and yang, are more abstract.

Lisa: Yet because the dream ego is an observer, it remains in the archetypal realm.

Joseph: This is happening in the realm of the gods. The dreamer has earned a glimpse of a cosmic truth that is beautiful and breathtaking, and is in awe. I’m always interested in how the dream ego orients to what happens in a dream. She is prepared for this encounter and drinks it in.

Lisa: There is a sequence in alchemy involving a number of birds. The sequence begins with a black crow followed by a white swan. The sequence continues with a peacock, a pelican and a phoenix.

Joseph: I fantasize that several other dreams will ensue as the opposites, black and white, come together without either being diminished. It’s as if they’ve been put back into a new egg from which a new life can hatch.

Deb: It’s as if the birds are mating. They’re generative, dancing together, a wonderful image of something in progress.

Lisa: Dancing has cosmic significance. In many creation myths, the world is danced into being.

Joseph: “I am the Lord of the dance, said He,” is the refrain from a Shaker hymn. Jung was interested in a sequence of alchemical woodcuts called The Rosarium. It pictures a king and queen as polarities. The king is the solar principle and the queen is the lunar principle. These two figures go through various stages of relationship and development. After they copulate, they drop down into a great watery depth and a period of tremendous stillness called mortificatio. After the opposites come together, a state of balance and quietude takes place. People can go into a creative stillness after a dream like this, a kind of brooding, the way hens brood over their eggs. It shouldn’t be disturbed–something important is gestating.

Lisa: I hope we have given you a start on recognizing how the Self can show up in dreams. It’s impossible to define the Self, or pin down it down to specific images and dynamics, but a feeling tone of wonder, awe, and even shock are often indicators of the Self.

 

© This Jungian Life 2021 all rights reserved throughout the universe in perpetuity, in any and all media now known or hereinafter devised.

 

 

By Joseph R. Lee

We can never fully know the Self. We are dwarfed by something greater than our cognitive capabilities, sensory experiences, and cultural adaptations. Essentially unseen, the Self nonetheless influences every aspect of human psychology, from the infant’s first impressions of selfhood to the end of life, “the sea to which all rivers wend their way.”

In another poetic expression Jung postulates the Self as the center and circumference of all psychic life; it is glimpsed in images gifted to us in dreams, active imagination, and myths–those representations of spiritual meaning and psychic truth that survive through time and across cultures. The effects of the Self are life-giving and terrifying, disrupting and organizing–all in service to incarnating the archetypal artifacts and instincts assigned to each of us at birth. Rumi speaks of this:

There are two kinds of intelligence: One acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says,  collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence, you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.

Jelaluddin Rumi. Versions by Coleman Barks and John Moyne. 2000. This Longing: Poetry, Teaching Stories, and Letters of Rumi. Shambala Press.

In Vol.9ii of the Collected Works Jung engages his concept of the Self, which he considers an empirical fact of psychic life. Because the Self is beyond ego comprehension, Jung tracked the progressive revelation of its archetypal images. Through these images and symbols, each of us can experience the numinosity of Self’s bivalent power—dark and light–in life events like birth, marriage, death, and resurrection.

With bivalency in mind, let’s consider the dark, or deconstructive aspect of the Self. Could this be considered radical transformation? Let’s turn to the 16th tarot card, the Tower, as a representation of archetypal darkness, and welcome it. In this image, we see 22 levels of a stone tower atop a barren mountain peak. A bolt of lightning dislodges its crown-like parapet, male and female inhabitants fall, and 32 tongues of flame framed in vibrant red are suspended beside it in two distinct configurations. A dynamic scene of violent change has been initiated from above.

Let’s consider the stone tower a symbol of the ego. It is built upon earth, suggesting the natural foundation of our sensory world. As infants, though we lack cognition, our psyches record each encounter with “not-I.” With every head bump and heel kick, we acquire evidence that we are distinct creatures. Each impression adds another stone to the wall that differentiates us from others and our environment. This developmental process, which Jungian Michael Fordham mapped, is secretly guided by the Self.

He noted that the infant psyche carries massive archetypal potential. Through a mysterious process, elements of the archetype of the Self scan for specific sensory experiences through which to come into being. These combine with impressions provided by caregivers and the environment that the infant integrates as foundational psychic fact. These are the building blocks of ego; without them, the Self would have no accessible representations and would not be able to incarnate.

In the course of normal development, we thus begin to create an extraordinary tower based first on sensory evidence, and then on our power to think and exert will. In time this builds ego. We also begin to weave narratives to make meaning of our world, which we then come to believe so unquestioningly that we permit them to define who and what we are. In time we gain such confidence in our tower that it crowns itself and declares sovereignty.

The Tower card represents this process: it both isolates us from, and provides a bridge to, the transcendent. Each stone signifies a hidden aspect of the Self. Jungians refer to this as “the mediation of the archetype,” which is never completed and always presses upon us. It is so central to all development that we might venture to say that at its core, the Self is the archetype of pressure. Subjectively, we experience this as telos, which Aristotle described as the uniquely manifested but universally inherent purpose of human life. It presses on us, like flowers, to grow and blossom. If blocked, it creates pathology—and ransoms us, though it may strike us like lightning.

Several times in my life, I have spoken to people who have survived lightning. One young man, a 19-year-old photography major, described standing in a rural meadow: his hair suddenly stood on end and the scent of ozone permeated the air. He felt dizzy and heard a crackling noise as lightning struck the field, traveled through the moist ground, and surged out his left eye into a nearby tree. He regained consciousness to find his friends taking him to the hospital. Their horrified faces told him something terrible had happened. He was remarkably calm, and reached out to touch one of them, but she recoiled. He realized later that his friend feared that his touch might be like lightning and strike her, too.

The activation of the Self is remarkably similar. Over time, unintegrated aspects of Self acquire libido in order to break into consciousness. Like the tongues of flame suspended around the tower, they organize and create a synergistic effect that increases potency. If we are attentive, we can notice these signs of gathering power. The young man in the meadow sensed ozone prior to lightning; similarly, synchronicities can precede the Self. To explain this, Jung hypothesized a unified field extending from the subtlest spiritual abstraction to matter itself. From this substance, which the alchemists called the prima materia, all things differentiate yet relate to a common origin.

This concept, the doctrine of correspondences, was captured in a portion of an ancient text, The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus:

True, without falsehood, certain and most true, that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, for the performance of the miracles of the One Thing. And as all things are from One, by the mediation of One, so all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation. The Sun is its father, the Moon its mother, and the Wind carries it in its belly, its nurse is the Earth.

Like a string of light bulbs, the emergent objects are distinct, but one current animates all. In heightened states, we may sense both separate objects and their shared energetic field. As the Self activates it quickens a quality of consciousness that can occasionally allow us to track the simultaneous emergence of phenomena on several levels through the unified field that connects them. Emergent phenomena were intuitively recognized in The Emerald Tablet and medieval alchemical and magical grimoires: long lists of correspondences were used to craft formulas or rituals to rouse specific archetypal forces. Groupings of objects were believed to generate from a common source. For instance, the underlying matrix of Mars could manifest as iron, the color red, rubies, a sword, war, or the scent of tobacco or sulfur.

Today, a similar sensibility informs how Jungians group the images related to a single archetype. Erich Neumann’s classic work, The Great Mother, traces the many ways in which the mother archetype can manifest. A personal experience of synchronicity clarified this for me. At an excruciating moment in my Jungian training, I felt I could no longer endure the process. Crucified by the demands of my personal life and the program’s requirements, I paced the house one evening. Just as I paused at a glass door, a large hawk soared through my screened porch and crashed to the floor in a tangle of nylon screen. The stunned creature lifted its head and held my eyes.

After this moment, we both began to move. I fetched leather gloves and scissors and began tentatively to snip the nylon mesh. Each cut sent the hawk into a frenzy. Finally, with the last snip, wings freed, it vaulted from the floor. Filled with awe and no small measure of fear, I sensed the hawk and I had been trapped in a single uncanny field. We were both enmeshed in a matrix brute strength could not overcome. We seemed to recognize each other. Suspending my personal angst and taking precise, thoughtful action freed both of us.

A deep sense of peace arose and this thought came with it: the entire training is happening inside of me. At that moment, my resentments subsided and I found I could continue. Synchronicities like this confront the ego’s tower of isolation. It challenges ego’s previous experience of separateness and disconnection. Like the dizzy feeling before lightning strikes, these events can signal the mounting tension preceding a manifestation of the Self.

Imagine the two figures in the tarot image of the Tower pacing in circles, their hair standing on end as electricity builds in the atmosphere. At the moment of highest tension, a lightning strike topples the crown of ego’s tower, setting the contents aflame and flinging the inhabitants out. The towering isolation and sovereignty of ego has been blasted, an experience of tumult and uncertainty.

Jung famously stated that “a victory for the Self is a defeat for the ego,” meaning that as the image of the Tower depicts, ego suffers in order to recognize (usually later) something greater. Jungians refer to such shattering moments as “the relativization of the ego” (to the Self), or a “creative illness.” However it is phrased, we know from reading Jung’s Red and Black books that Jung’s period of crisis following the break with Freud violently rearranged his personality by forcing his ego to encounter objective inner figures. The “gods” forced him to accept their reality. Encounter with the Self is the central therapeutic aim of Jung’s work, though it manifests in multitudes of ways.

Given the availability today of many modern imaginative therapeutic techniques, we have found many ways of being informed by inner figures. We have written letters to our inner children and they have written back. We have connected with the chronic tension in our belly and found a grouchy troll staring up at us, followed by relief and symptom abatement. Although such experiences are examples of activation of the transcendent function, not encounters with the Self, they show that we are hardwired to capture affective experiences and organize them through image and symbol. The symbol-making function allows us to contain intense experiences and titrate our exposure to their affect. As we interact with such images in dreams and imagination, they slowly discharge their energy and find a place in consciousness. If this process fails, the energy is often stored in the body to ill effect. We find relief when we aid the psyche by crafting an imagistic vessel.

Jung famously stated that “a victory for the Self is a defeat for the ego,” meaning that as the image of the Tower depicts, ego suffers in order to recognize (usually later) something greater. Jungians refer to such shattering moments as “the relativization of the ego” (to the Self), or a “creative illness.” However it is phrased, we know from reading Jung’s Red and Black books that Jung’s period of crisis following the break with Freud violently rearranged his personality by forcing his ego to encounter objective inner figures. The “gods” forced him to accept their reality. Encounter with the Self is the central therapeutic aim of Jung’s work, though it manifests in multitudes of ways.

The activation of the Self, as the Tower depicts, is a more sober event, but it is life giving. It is the bite of the great serpent that first makes us ill, then heals. It is the irrefutable experience of the denizens of the objective psyche that dethrone ego. The ego is forced to recognize that it cannot shut out the living inner figures related to the Self. As ego built its tower, something greater was inside with it! Ego cannot control the actions of the inner forces or escape the demand of the Self to incorporate its elements.

About a decade ago, I concluded a sixteen-year series of hermetic kabbalistic retreats. Twice a year, a group of students and I gathered in the Smoky Mountains for a long weekend of rigorous chanting, meditation, ritual, and active imagination. Occasionally, a student would bring a friend or spouse. One fall, a student brought her new boyfriend, an officious man who had retired from a successful medical career; he conspiratorially informed me that he was attending only to support his girlfriend. Then he winked at me and sat next to her.

At the conclusion of our twelve-hour Saturday program, he approached me, visibly shaken. Sweating profusely, intermittently weeping, his hands trembling, he whispered, “It’s real. God is actually real.” I nodded and laid a hand on his arm. His girlfriend led him to their room. The following day, as the group gathered to process the weekend, I noticed an empty chair. I discovered he had left late that night, refused to return, and neither my student nor I saw him again. I imagine that his tower of isolation had been breached and demanded accommodation. I hope that like Jung and Rumi, he was later able consciously to experience the ultimately positive telos of the Self.

* Jelaluddin Rumi. Versions by Coleman Barks and John Moyne. 2000. This Longing: Poetry, Teaching Stories, and Letters of Rumi. Shambala Press.

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Discuss the images of the Self as they appear in the following dreams.

Dream 1

I am in a small boat in the middle of the ocean. Suddenly, a giant head rears out of the water. A whale! Is it so close, I worry it will capsize my boat. I look into the whale’s eye. It seems to see me. We hold each other’s gaze for a moment before it dives below the surface. I feel shaken and short of breath. I wake up.

 Dream 2

I am walking past a guest house in the country. I walk down a path that goes underground alongside a river. I walk quite a long way. Suddenly, I have entered a vast temple. There are columns that are intricately carved. I can hardly even see the ceiling it is so high up. I walk toward a column that is carved like elephants standing on one another’s backs as far up as I can see. I am simply in awe.

 

I was looking after my best friend’s baby. He is now 3 years old, but in the dream he was a small infant. I neglected to look after him properly and pay him enough attention, not on purpose, but because I was distracted. He quickly started decaying in my arms – in three stages, I watched him as he died. I held his dusty corpse. I started to feel worried, not so much that he had died but because I knew my best friend would be devastated and so angry with me.

Feelings in the dream: Distracted, but then worried once the baby died.

Context and Associations: Context and associations: My best friend and I were extremely close since teenagerhood, but have grown apart somewhat since she had her baby. We are now in our mid 30’s. We have both made an effort to keep our friendship alive. I was probably the one trying harder to keep the friendship going, visiting and calling more, up until recently. She is (of course, naturally) preoccupied with her child and is focusing on family very strongly now, to the exclusion of all other things. I am tired of waiting around for her outside her family circle, and have gotten on with my own life mostly without her, which I think she sometimes finds difficult to understand. I would like to have a child of my own, but unsure if I can due to my health issues (PCOS and Hashimotos Thyroid). This is a worry for me. Also, my mother had 6 miscarriages before me, and I worry I may have the same challenges. My family are living far away and this has been difficult when trying to decide whether to have a baby with my lovely boyfriend, whose family is around but who I am not close to / have little in common with.