137 - Arthur I. Miller [27]
When one function is particularly dominant, the opposite one may lapse into the unconscious and return to its earlier archaic state. The energy generated by this inferior function drains into the conscious and produces fantasies, sometimes creating neuroses. One goal of Jungian psychology is to retrieve and develop these inferior functions. Jung was careful to point out that no one is strictly a thinking or feeling type. We are all combinations of the two types and the four functions. Our personality, or psychology, results from a struggle among these opposites for equilibrium.
At this time Jung had also begun to study the Gnostic writers, spurred on by his interest in myths. He was aware that Freud had derived his influential myth of the primal father and its effect on the superego from the Gnostic motifs of sexuality and Yahweh, which dated back to ancient Egypt and early Judaism. The Gnostics speculated that the content and images of the primal world of the unconscious might be clues to uncovering the mysteries of the universe. But at first Jung could find little relevance in their writings, nor could he find any historical bridge between Gnosticism and the contemporary world.
And still he dreamed. What could these images mean? Where did they come from?
Among the most vivid of his dreams were two in which he found himself in a huge manor house. In one he wanders from room to room and eventually ends up in a spacious library full of books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The engravings on the books are unfamiliar and the illustrations include curious symbols. In the second he is in a horse-drawn coach that enters a courtyard. Then the gates slam shut and a coachman screams that they are trapped in the seventeenth century. His efforts to explain this dream sent him delving into books on history, religion, and philosophy, particularly of that period.
Meanwhile, he was shaping his own method of treating neuroses. Freud interpreted a boy’s incestuous desires for his mother as a literal return to the womb, to a state free from responsibility and decisions. Jung preferred to see the positive side, as breaking down the bond between mother and son and thus freeing psychic energy to be transferred to other archetypal components. In this way he removed the purely sexual connotation of incest, choosing rather to explore it in terms of archetypal metaphors and symbols. By now Zürich had become the center for this developing technique of analysis, Jung’s “analytical psychology.”
Alchemy
Back in 1914, Jung had come across a book by Viennese psychologist Herbert Silberer, who was part of Freud’s circle. In Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism, Silberer discussed whether there might be a relationship between the imagery in alchemical texts, the imagery experienced by patients in the mental state between dreaming and waking, and Freud’s analysis of dreams. At first Jung was fascinated and corresponded with him. He was looking for something deeper than Silberer—to understand the imagery that had never been conscious, the imagery in the deep or collective unconscious. But he soon concluded that alchemy was “off the beaten track and rather silly.”
Nevertheless Jung began collecting ancient alchemical texts. Then, in 1928, his friend Richard Wilhelm sent him a copy of his translation of the thousand-year-old Taoist-alchemical text The Secret of the Golden Flower.
At first The Secret of the Golden Flower did not seem to make any sense. But Jung was intrigued. Silberer’s book came to mind and he suddenly realized that although he had appreciated what Silberer was suggesting, he had not understood how to interpret the alchemical texts Silberer used. For the next two years Jung pored over alchemical texts and began to find more and more passages that he could understand. Then he had a revelation. “I realized that alchemists were talking in symbols—those old acquaintances of mine,” he