137 - Arthur I. Miller [68]
Jung’s theory was that dreams emerge out of the unconscious and therefore offer a means of understanding how it works. Dreams appear when the level of consciousness sinks below the unconscious, a situation most likely to occur during sleep. When we wake up the level of consciousness rises and the world of the unconscious disappears. But dreams can also occur when we are awake. Jung referred to such waking dreams as “visions.” Dreams and visions, he wrote, are the two keys to the unconscious.
The four consciousness functions in Pauli’s case. Thinking, the superior function, occupies the upper half of the circle. Feeling, the inferior function, is in the dark half. The two auxiliary functions, sensation and intuition, are partly in light and partly in dark.
Jung paid great attention to the imagery in a dream, linking it with images from alchemy, religion, and myth and applying his analytic psychology to seek out archetypes. In this way he hoped to use the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious to enable a patient to meet his “shadow”—his dark side—and to separate it from his anima, the female aspect of the male personality. This would bring about a struggle between opposites—of function types or dream symbols—that would enable the patient to come to terms with the fact that he himself was a combination of light and dark, and good and evil. Thus he could eventually create a balanced personality.
When archetypal symbols, most particularly mandalas, appeared in a dream, it often signaled that a previously disordered conscious was becoming ordered. This, however, did not necessarily mean successful analysis, Jung advised. “There are plenty of lunatics with the most wonderful individuation dreams, and nothing comes of it because there is nobody home,” he said.
So what sort of dreams did the tortured scientist have and how did Jung help him work through them? A selection of Pauli’s dreams and Jung’s comments on them give a flavor of the process through which Jung marked out a path through his chaotic mental state and helped him work toward individuation.
We cannot know exactly what transpired between Jung and Pauli in the privacy of Jung’s study. I have put together the following dialogue on the basis of the descriptions Jung made soon afterward and details from Pauli’s biographical materials.
Three women
Pauli dreams he is surrounded by a group of female forms. He hears a voice somewhere inside himself saying: “First I must get away from Father.”
Jung’s first comment is that the phrase “get away from” needs to be completed by the words “in order to follow the unconscious,” as embodied in the seductive female forms. Rising from his chair he walks over to his collection of alchemical texts. He opens a sixteenth-century book. In the image, Pauli’s own dream is depicted with amazing precision. It shows the sleeping dreamer, three maidens who, says Jung, signify the unconscious and Hermes—the ancient Greek name for Mercurius, the central figure of alchemy, who moves between the dark and light worlds. In Jung’s interpretation of alchemy, Hermes is the intermediary between the conscious and the unconscious.
Jung suggests that the “Father” of the dream is not Pauli’s actual father but represents the masculine world of the intellect and of rationality, in opposition to the unconscious. Perhaps the dream indicates that Pauli fears that giving rein to the unconscious will mean sacrificing his intellect, whereas in fact it is a matter of entering an entirely different world with different but equally meaningful experiences. As yet he is not