The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

Then Saint-Exupery 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-Exupery’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.

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moment where things become difficult. It is the everlasting switching which is the dangerous thing,

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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-Exupery’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-Exupery 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-Exupery 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-Exupery switches at this crucial moment.

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Before we go into the symbolism of the sheep we should ask ourselves why Saint-Exupery 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- Exupery’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].

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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-Exupery’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-Exupery’s death, or to treat it as the divine spark of his creative genius.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 L?mmerw?lkchen (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.

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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 naivet? 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 naivet? 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.

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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.

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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.

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That is something very subtle and I think is specific to Saint-Exupery 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-Exupery’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- Exupery 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.

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Question: lf Saint-Exupery 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-Exupery 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

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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!

- Page 53 (location ~ 808-812)

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-Exupery did. Such writers always turn on the same gramophone record, whereas if you live it, the next thing will show progress.

- Page 53 (location ~ 808-824)

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-Exupery 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-Exupery 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.

- Page 55 (location ~ 835-847)

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-Exupery, 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-Exupery, 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.

- Page 56 (location ~ 847-865)

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.

- Page 57 (location ~ 869-883)

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-Exupery 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-Exupery 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-Exupery 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-Exupery 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.

- Page 60 (location ~ 905-932)

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

- Page 62 (location ~ 938-947)

I think Saint-Exupery 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-Exupery, 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-Exupery has been overwhelmed by the devouring unconscious?by the mother complex?or that the hero personality in Saint-Exupery did not have enough foundation in order to become real.

- Page 63 (location ~ 958-972)

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-Exupery,

- Page 63 (location ~ 958-963)

I think Saint-Exupery 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-Exupery, 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-Exupery has been overwhelmed by the devouring unconscious?by the mother complex?or that the hero personality in Saint-Exupery did not have enough foundation in order to become real. They are two aspects of the same tragedy.

- Page 63 (location ~ 958-972)

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.

- Page 65 (location ~ 987-999)

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.

- Page 65 (location ~ 987-1012)

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-Exupery 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-Exupery 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.

- Page 68 (location ~ 1032-1050)

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].

- Page 70 (location ~ 1059-1070)

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. Ren? 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].

- Page 71 (location ~ 1080-1094)

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.

- Page 73 (location ~ 1112-1125)

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.

- Page 75 (location ~ 1136-1143)

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.

- Page 76 (location ~ 1154-1189)

“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.

- Page 79 (location ~ 1202-1228)

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-Exupery, 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.

- Page 81 (location ~ 1240-1253)

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.

- Page 83 (location ~ 1267-1275)

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.

- Page 85 (location ~ 1302-1315)

Saint-Exupery 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-Exupery 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-Exupery 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-Exupery. Question: How old was he when his brother died? Saint-Exupery 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.

- Page 87 (location ~ 1322-1332)

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-Exupery 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-Exupery, 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.

- Page 88 (location ~ 1337-1352)

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-Exupery 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.

- Page 89 (location ~ 1352-1367)

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.

- Page 94 (location ~ 1431-1441)

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-Exupery. This means that the whole thing happens in the unconscious and moves the psychological nucleus away from reality again. It is really Saint-Exupery 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-Exupery 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.

- Page 95 (location ~ 1446-1458)

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.

- Page 96 (location ~ 1458-1475)

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.

- Page 97 (location ~ 1480-1499)

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!

- Page 99 (location ~ 1514-1526)

Saint-Exupery 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-Exupery 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-Exupery 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-Exupery, 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.

- Page 101 (location ~ 1538-1548)

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 si?cle?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.

- Page 102 (location ~ 1561-1568)

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 si?cle?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.

- Page 102 (location ~ 1561-1576)

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 si?cle?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.

- Page 102 (location ~ 1561-1582)

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.

- Page 105 (location ~ 1601-1622)

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-Exupery 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.

- Page 108 (location ~ 1642-1657)

“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.

- Page 110 (location ~ 1672-1684)

“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.

- Page 110 (location ~ 1672-1688)

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.

- Page 111 (location ~ 1694-1712)

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-Exupery. 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.

- Page 113 (location ~ 1729-1738)

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-Exupery: “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.

- Page 114 (location ~ 1742-1751)

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.

- Page 115 (location ~ 1764-1784)

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.

- Page 115 (location ~ 1764-1791)

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.

- Page 117 (location ~ 1791-1803)

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.

- Page 118 (location ~ 1809-1819)

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 naivet? 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.

- Page 120 (location ~ 1827-1833)

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.

- Page 120 (location ~ 1837-1846)

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-Exupery, 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.

- Page 128 (location ~ 1952-1965)

You could say that now, after this experience of the Self and the Beyond, Saint-Exupery 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-Exupery, 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-Exupery, followed the other, and thus the departure of the little prince becomes an anticipation of Saint-Exupery’s death. With this goes the fact that Saint-Exupery 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-Exupery 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.

- Page 129 (location ~ 1972-1983)

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.

- Page 130 (location ~ 1984-1999)

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 Ker?nyi 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.

- Page 131 (location ~ 2006-2017)

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.

- Page 133 (location ~ 2028-2043)

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.

- Page 134 (location ~ 2044-2050)

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-Exupery 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-Exupery 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-Exupery was an artist?to depict the loneliness of the desert.

- Page 134 (location ~ 2051-2092)

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.

- Page 139 (location ~ 2126-2137)

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-Exupery’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.

- Page 140 (location ~ 2141-2154)

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.

- Page 142 (location ~ 2166-2186)

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.

- Page 147 (location ~ 2241-2256)

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.

- Page 148 (location ~ 2266-2278)

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.

- Page 148 (location ~ 2266-2286)

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.

- Page 153 (location ~ 2333-2347)

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.

- Page 154 (location ~ 2351-2361)

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.

- Page 155 (location ~ 2367-2378)

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.

- Page 156 (location ~ 2380-2396)

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.

- Page 158 (location ~ 2414-2429)

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.

- Page 160 (location ~ 2451-2463)

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 fianc?e, 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.

- Page 163 (location ~ 2498-2512)

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.

- Page 165 (location ~ 2527-2539)

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.

- Page 165 (location ~ 2527-2545)

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]

- Page 167 (location ~ 2559-2564)

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

- Page 168 (location ~ 2569-2581)

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

- Page 170 (location ~ 2594-2604)

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.

- Page 170 (location ~ 2594-2607)

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

- Page 173 (location ~ 2643-2652)

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.

- Page 173 (location ~ 2643-2655)

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 b?arnaise 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.

- Page 174 (location ~ 2660-2671)

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.

- Page 175 (location ~ 2671-2676)

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.

- Page 175 (location ~ 2671-2682)

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.

- Page 176 (location ~ 2686-2691)

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.

- Page 180 (location ~ 2751-2768)

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.

- Page 181 (location ~ 2770-2776)

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!

- Page 183 (location ~ 2803-2815)

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.

- Page 184 (location ~ 2815-2829)

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.

- Page 185 (location ~ 2834-2846)

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.”

- Page 187 (location ~ 2866-2874)

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.

- Page 188 (location ~ 2875-2892)

After the puer loses the ecstatic, romantic ?lan 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.

- Page 191 (location ~ 2918-2931)

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.

- Page 192 (location ~ 2932-2936)

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.

- Page 192 (location ~ 2932-2947)

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.

- Page 193 (location ~ 2949-2957)

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.

- Page 194 (location ~ 2967-2981)

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

- Page 196 (location ~ 2992-3005)

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.

- Page 196 (location ~ 2992-3009)

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.

- Page 197 (location ~ 3013-3027)

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.

- Page 198 (location ~ 3029-3048)

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

- Page 199 (location ~ 3048-3055)

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.

- Page 199 (location ~ 3048-3061)

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.

- Page 202 (location ~ 3091-3115)

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.

- Page 206 (location ~ 3150-3161)

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.

- Page 206 (location ~ 3150-3168)

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.

- Page 208 (location ~ 3180-3198)

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.

- Page 209 (location ~ 3204-3210)

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 ?lan 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.

- Page 209 (location ~ 3204-3224)

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. Exupery 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.

- Page 211 (location ~ 3229-3240)

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.

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of a certain circle. Consequently, people drew away from Melchior and few remained true to him.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Sp?t, his adversary. At the beginning, Ulrich yon Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t; 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 ?lan 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.

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founded by Manley Hall, whose members consider themselves to be something like the New Rosicrucians.

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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 Sp?t 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.

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“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?”

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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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t, 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 Sp?t’s glance. “In one way or another we bring about chance.”

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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 Sp?t. 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t!” 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t does he feel himself near and closely connected.

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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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t, but the others hold him back, and then tie him to an armchair with a rope so that he can’t move. Mr. von Sp?t places the little bottle on the table and claps his hands.

- Page 248 (location ~ 3799-3815)

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 Sp?t 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.

- Page 250 (location ~ 3819-3831)

‘‘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 Sp?t’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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t moves impatiently. “You speak like the boys,” he says angrily. “Who are the boys?” asks Melchior quickly. “Who is Fo?”

- Page 252 (location ~ 3851-3869)

For a man, the father-figure represents cultural tradition. Von Sp?t 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.

- Page 255 (location ~ 3899-3907)

For a man, the father-figure represents cultural tradition. Von Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t, 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.

- Page 255 (location ~ 3899-3911)

For a man, the father-figure represents cultural tradition. Von Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t, 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.

- Page 255 (location ~ 3899-3915)

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.

- Page 256 (location ~ 3918-3929)

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 Sp?t. That is the back door by which he gets into the house, but von Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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.

- Page 257 (location ~ 3932-3946)

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 Sp?t. 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.

- Page 258 (location ~ 3948-3968)

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

- Page 260 (location ~ 3977-3992)

It is a play of opposites in which Melchior is the suffering human, in the middle of the two, for von Sp?t and Fo both want his soul. When von Sp?t 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 Sp?t. So when von Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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.

- Page 264 (location ~ 4048-4060)

Christian civilization is now old and worn out for us. It has lost the powerful ?lan 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 Sp?t, 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 Sp?t is not Christ but the image we have of him a suffering, dying god-something divine, but no longer capable of living.

- Page 265 (location ~ 4062-4067)

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.

- Page 267 (location ~ 4080-4089)

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.

- Page 267 (location ~ 4090-4103)

Herr von Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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.

- Page 268 (location ~ 4108-4116)

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.

- Page 269 (location ~ 4120-4126)

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.

- Page 270 (location ~ 4134-4143)

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.

- Page 271 (location ~ 4144-4152)

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 Sp?t probably represents the old sun-god surrounded by the seven planets. We have interpreted von Sp?t 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 Sp?t who the boys are. Von Sp?t 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.

- Page 273 (location ~ 4174-4189)

How would you interpret this doubling of von Sp?t? 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t. 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 Sp?t 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.

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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 Sp?t, 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 Sp?t 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.

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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.

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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 Sp?t gives. Melchior falls into the clutches of von Sp?t, 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.

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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.

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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 Sp?t tells him to knock on the wall and Melchior naturally expects them to get to him, but instead . . . He does get to von Sp?t. You will see later that Melchior circles between the two worlds: the spirit world of von Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t pole and is first attacked by his feelings of guilt.

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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

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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.

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Von Sp?t 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 Sp?t takes his hand and leads him away. “Night and chaos are overcome,” says von Sp?t. “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.”

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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.

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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?”

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

- Page 295 (location ~ 4512-4539)

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.

- Page 297 (location ~ 4542-4567)

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,

- Page 297 (location ~ 4542-4569)

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.

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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 Sp?t. 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 Sp?t. 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 Sp?t is cold!

- Page 299 (location ~ 4580-4596)

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.

- Page 301 (location ~ 4601-4618)

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.”

- Page 302 (location ~ 4621-4635)

Earlier, we saw from an allusion that von Sp?t 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-Exupery’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.

- Page 304 (location ~ 4649-4660)

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.

- Page 305 (location ~ 4667-4676)

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.

- Page 308 (location ~ 4722-4735)

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.

- Page 310 (location ~ 4743-4762)

You will remember that I spoke of von Sp?t as being at one pole and Fo at the other, with Melchior in the center. At first von Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t’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.

- Page 311 (location ~ 4762-4770)

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.

- Page 312 (location ~ 4771-4775)

houses?brothels and so on?were full of life, but the atmosphere was hot and a bit unclean. A kind of miasma

- Page 313 (location ~ 4787-4787)

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

- Page 315 (location ~ 4820-4823)

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.

- Page 315 (location ~ 4823-4836)

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 Sp?t) 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!”

- Page 317 (location ~ 4853-4868)

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 Sp?t, 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.

- Page 321 (location ~ 4907-4935)

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 Sp?t 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.

- Page 326 (location ~ 4989-5007)

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 Sp?t 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 Sp?t. (You know that von Sp?t 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.)

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Von Sp?t 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 Sp?t 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!”

- Page 329 (location ~ 5033-5054)

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.

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“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 Sp?t 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.

- Page 333 (location ~ 5104-5126)

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.

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Again there was an enantiodromia. First Von Sp?t 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 Sp?t, Fo wins again, this time in this world. Fo remains victorious: he finds the kingdom at last, but he leaves his body behind. Von Sp?t 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 verit? dans sa mati?re 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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The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

A Review

Highlights