Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process: Notes of C. G. Jung's Seminars on Wolfgang Pauli's Dreams

by C.G. Jung, Suzanne Gieser (Editor), Sonu Shamdasani (Contributor)

Jung's legendary American lectures on dream interpretation

In 1936 and 1937, C. G. Jung delivered two legendary seminars on dream interpretation, the first on Bailey Island, Maine, the second in New York City. Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process makes these lectures widely available for the first time, offering a compelling look at Jung as he presents his ideas candidly and in English before a rapt American audience.

The dreams presented here are those of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who turned to Jung for therapeutic help because of troubling personal events, emotional turmoil, and depression. Linking Pauli's dreams to the healing wisdom found in many ages and cultures, Jung shows how the mandala--a universal archetype of wholeness--spontaneously emerges in the psyche of a modern man, and how this imagery reflects the healing process. He touches on a broad range of themes, including psychological types, mental illness, the individuation process, the principles of psychotherapeutic treatment, and the importance of the anima, shadow, and persona in masculine psychology. He also reflects on modern physics, the nature of reality, and the political currents of his time. Jung draws on examples from the Mithraic mysteries, Buddhism, Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, Kundalini yoga, and ancient Egyptian concepts of body and soul. He also discusses the symbolism of the Catholic Mass, the Trinity, and Gnostic ideas in the noncanonical Gospels.

With an incisive introduction and annotations, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process provides a rare window into Jung's interpretation of dreams and the development of his psychology of religion.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis

376 pages, Hardcover

Published November 26, 2019

About the author

Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death.

The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types.

Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.

Reviews

[Castles · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book deals with lectures about the dreams of one dreamer (a famous scientist), who provided about 500 (!) dreams to one of Jung's students, and Jung himself treated the dreamer, if at all, only towards the end of his treatment, which hardly needed a close psychologist's comment if anything.

The amount of dreams of that dreamer is almost unimaginable, and in a rather strange way, they fit Jung's theory like a glove (of course, he puts aside the less important dreams for interpretation and focus in the more relevant dreams that serves the journey to individuation).

It is an impressive story of the dreamer's psyche and Jung's theories, and his consistent interpretation that combines religion, mythology, history, and much more, exemplified here in a spectacular manner. reading Jung's seminars is like reading the manual of his collected works at work.

As the book progresses, it seems that we are walking with the dreamer following his journey to a solution, since the dreams are consistent and tell a dramatic story, but the book is interrupted in one of those dreams and we still haven't reached the solution, but only Jung's intriguing diagnoses.

To my understanding, in volume number 10 of Jung's collected work, perhaps one can find the continuation of the work on the same patient.

[Aaron Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dream Analysis—Individuation—Anima—Shadow—Comparative Mythology—Some Types




Individuation… means intense consciousness of conflict. You never will be saved from conflict as long as you live, otherwise you would be dead before you die. Conflict cannot be removed. If it seems to be removed, that is imaginary. Conflict must be, if one lives at all. It is absolutely indispensable. But the way you deal with it, that is the question—whether you are overcome by the conflict, whether you get drowned in it, whether you get identified with one or other side of the conflict. Individuation simply means you find your place amidst the turmoil; you keep yourself in the midst of the conflict; you are in the conflict yet above it.

We all contain a pattern which neither we nor anyone else knows about. It is a basic pattern born with us, which only becomes known to us through what we do. Only in our deeds do we appear. We don’t know who we are; we would never know who we were if we were brought up alone on top of Mount Everest. We need many deeds, many actions, many aspects of life to know how we react. We learn to our utter amazement who we are by the reactions we make to our surroundings. Nobody can tell beforehand who he is; only afterwards does he come to know who he is.




Intellect should be an employee; it should not be the father, the authoritative principle which rules the psyche; rather it should be the employee, a servant, a very useful and dangerous servant, as Mephisto was.




You can only contain a very small amount, and even if you read and read and heap up knowledge, only a few things remain of all you have read; it has influenced you, but you could not for the world reproduce it, though you might get it back in a dream, or in the fantasy of a pathological condition. But to your consciousness it is extinct.




Shadow/Anima
When you are conscious that you are not an angel and that you really have some very dark sides to yourself, then you can assume that you have no repressions, that you yourself are human, the human animal, or the human beast. If you are conscious of that fact then you have no personal unconscious, and your unconscious will be represented by the anima. You will dream of the sun, inasmuch as you are aware of your shadow. If you are not aware of your shadow and think you are a Christ child or a little thing with golden wings, then naturally in that case your unconscious is represented by shadow; then you are up against a very bad world. The shadow is the unconscious cause of all your surroundings, and other people seem awfully bad. This problem will soon come to the foreground, for you will feel a tremendous need to improve the people in your surroundings. You will tell them all their faults. You are better in every case; you know where other people make their mistakes. You will run and tell them, because there is nothing in you left for possible correction. Those people who are always telling other people what they should do are unaware of their own shadow. They are like a man who leans over his garden wall and tells his neighbor all about his weeds, while his own garden is overgrown with weeds. A man who is aware of the weeds in his own garden will be confronted with the anima, or such a woman will be confronted with the animus, and will dream accordingly.




Infantile adaptations
…we have a perfectly infantile attitude to the state or government. We make the government father and mother. The state has an enormous udder, and everybody sucks, and nobody realizes that the state is a legend and does not really exist as a separate being; it is a mere abstraction. Governments do not exist; they are our own invention, and we think we have now invented a father or a mother to whom we can cling. This is the attitude of millions and millions of people.




Individuation
The individuation process, the normal process, naturally begins with the second part of life, because there consciousness begins to detach itself slightly, and then only are you able to understand. As long as your consciousness is absolutely bound up in your personalistic psychology, you cannot understand; you cannot see clearly; you cannot objectify. So usually this change begins at about thirty-five or thirty-six or thirty-seven, sometimes even later. There are exceptions, of course, but as far as I have seen, these have to do with young people who have a very short life, who will die in a relatively short time. I have seen a few cases where the difficult individuation process began in the twenties, and these people died shortly after. Ordinarily, in normal cases, no signs of any individuation process are visible before the middle of life.


Shadow/New Anima
Making a composition or compound of man and his shadow is a particularly important act, as if it were the decisive thing, and we can really understand it because when a man can see his dark side, he then becomes complete. And, moreover, if he accepts his own dark side, and agrees that there is such a side to himself, and draws conclusions from it, if he takes over responsibility for this fact, then he instantly takes away that burden of darkness, that heaviness of the flesh, and of that dark matter, from his anima; and then something further can happen to her, for she has no longer that bondage to the earth. She is only the dark woman when she is not detached from earthly matters, or from this physical world. Now the dreamer has no longer an attached anima, at least theoretically. Let us be hopeful and optimistic and believe that such a thing is possible. The man who is ready to accept the fact that he has a shadow cannot get excited if somebody makes a remark about him. He will say, “Why, yes, of course, I most probably am this or that.” He is quite ready not to flare up anymore, not to insist upon his point of view. He has no animosity, and so the anima has no place, because animosity is the real abode of the anima and the great temptation for her to jump into visibility. As soon as a man can accept his shadow, he can dismiss his anima; similarly a woman, when she accepts her other side, doesn’t need to have any animus. She does not need animosity any more, and then her animus is also alleviated, is liberated from the shadow. The shadow had weighed down the personification of the unconscious, but now the personal face of the unconscious, or the anima, can turn away from the reality towards the unconscious, and then something new happens. So then according to this dream, and according to many, many dreams I have seen, the pregnancy begins, or then the birth begins, and the anima can function in a creative way. But as long as you have the shadow in the unconscious, nothing can happen because it is a blight; it destroys; nothing can grow. As soon as the unconscious is released from something which really belongs to yourself and which you can take care of, the unconscious can function in a proper way and then it is creative. Then a birth can take place.
Of course, we all are, I assume, curious to know what the unconscious is going to bring forth, what is to be born out of the woman, the Virgin Mary, the anima. According to the Christian legend, it is the Redeemer, the incarnation of the Deity. According to the alchemistic tradition, it is the marvelous substance, the panacea, the elixir of life; it is the red stone; it is the thing that makes the gold; it is the philosophical gold; it is, the “lapis invisibilitatis,” the stone of invisibility, or the “lapis etherius,” the stone that is ether-like, of heavenly substance, or as the French alchemists called in, Notre Ciel, Our Heaven, the quintessence that was as blue as the blue of Heaven. Those are synonyms, designating that wonderful thing which is to be born.




Christianity
…you never get anywhere near to individuation if you can’t go through that intense mental suffering of the way of the Cross. That is another insight into the Christian mystery. And what happens when you don’t confess an external Christ and an external crucifixion, it is a crucifixion that happens to you in that place where you are the most sensitive, where you believe the most in yourself. There you will be crucified, and there you will undergo the worst torture. In the mind or in the intuition, or in the feeling of a feeling person, it is just as if the best fruit of all your attempts had to undergo the crucial pain, and that is again a repetition of the Christian mystery, but in your own psychology.




Types
In our strength we can stand alone. We don’t need other people. If a man has a good thinking function, he doesn’t need the thinking of other people to help him when he thinks. On the contrary, he much prefers to think all by himself. If a man’s feeling is strong, he doesn’t need other people to make him feel. He has his own feeling. He can make others feel, if he likes, but he doesn’t need other people to make him feel, and so on. So you see, through our strength we are, as a rule, rather separated from other people, because we prefer to act by ourselves and we are capable of so doing, but where we are weak, where we are dependent, where we are uncertain, there we need other people. There we even have a vital need of other people, and there we are related.