Children’s Dreams Seminars
Psychological Interpretation of Children’s Dreams (Winter Term, 1938/39) Lecture 3
- Dream of a Five-Year-Old Boy of the Man Covered with Hair Presented by Mrs. Margret Sachs
Text: In the dream, there appears a man covered with hair, who suddenly comes up from the dark basement.
He wants to seize the little boy and pull him down into the basement.
The boy wakes up crying loudly in fear.
Mrs. Sachs: The boy is five years old, at an age when first impressions are still very important, when fast developmental steps are made, but the personal world of consciousness is still very small and strongly under the influence of the collective unconscious, which is still close to consciousness.
A man covered with hair appears in the dream.
Now, what could this mean to the child?
Being an adult, this man is superior to the child. In addition, he is covered with hair.
This man is something that induces fear and terror, of which one is afraid, reminiscent of a giant; we may think of Rübezahl, the bogeyman in the Erzgebirge [Ore Mountains] who carried children away in a sack.
Here in Switzerland, this figure is known under the name of Böölima; in Flanders, he is called Biete Bouw; in Scandinavia, the kids are afraid of the troll, and in the United States of the “man in the woodpile.”
In children’s imaginations, he is always covered with hair and has a long beard.
In the imaginative world of primitives, too, hair and beard play an important role.
In The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer, we read, among other references, about the significance of hair: the chiefs and magicians of the Masai, the African tribe, were afraid to lose their supernatural powers if they let their beards be cut; in many primitive cultures, hair and beard are considered “taboo.”
In order to become immune to danger, they are not cut at all.
The Frankonian kings were not allowed, from childhood on, to cut their hair.
Cutting the hair would have meant relinquishing the throne and the power.
Hair is regarded as a sign of extraordinary power and magical strength.
The young warriors of the Teutons cut their hair and beards only after having slain the enemy.
Samson, too, was deprived of his power after Delilah had cut off his curls.
Cut hairs are kept in sacred places such as temples, graveyards, or trees.
In Swabia, cut hairs are hidden in a place where neither sun nor moon may shine.
Frazer gives a multitude of examples, from the Tyrd in Scotland and Ireland, from Siam, North Germany, Melanesia, and Patagonia, from Tahiti, or from the Solomon Islands.
Everywhere the guiding idea is that there is a sympathetic connection between the cut hair, symbolizing power, and its former bearer, and so it has to be hidden from hostile influence.
This dream is a parallel to another dream discussed earlier.
There it said: “something gruesome came in through the window, no bear, a man, he had those feet and stood on the quilt . . . ”
At the time we put this figure in analogy to a bear. In our dream, too, we can put the man covered with hair in analogy to a bear, which plays a great role in children’s imaginations.
For thousands of years, our ancestors saw the bear as something threatening and dangerous, and it was one of the worst enemies.
These impressions have been kept as such, and have an effect in the collective unconscious.
There is a report about a belief in Scandinavian literature that very old bears had something devilish within them, and that they could not be killed with a normal
shot, but only with a silver bullet.
In this connection we have also to draw attention to the connection between the bear and the Berserker.
The Bear Skinner is a vague allusion to it.
The notion of the soul is connected to the fur, the skin, the shirt, the outer form, for shirt (e.g., the swan shirt) and fur stand for a great potential of transformation in the Teutonic tradition.
Still today we use expressions such as aus der Haut fahren, an allusion to the bear, the skin of the Berserker.
The bearskin was taken off in the evening, when other people slept; it gave an enormous increase in strength, the respective person got beside himself with rage, a raging demon took possession of him.
The heroic song of King Rolf Krake, from the Danish house of Skyoldung, tells of such a berserker gang. In the werewolf legend, too, the pelt of the wolf gives enormous strength.
Summarizing the amplification of the “man covered with hair,” we get the following result: something children are afraid of, an uncanny and colossal power that can overwhelm you and make you so enraged as to lose consciousness; a magic force that overcomes you all of a sudden.
For every child, the dark basement is an uncanny place.
If consciousness is mostly symbolized by a house, then the basement is the unconscious, the place where one loses consciousness, the dark where all those things happen of which we are afraid, and which we do not know yet.
In the child’s imagination all the gloomy, all the undreamed of and mysterious things happen there.
The dark is the place where we feel lonely, where bad dreams come from, and where danger lurks.
We speak about the dark powers, the dark abyss.
The Chthonic Forces rise out of the dark; the Chinese Ying is dark, it is the shadowy principle.
Dark is the night, which devours and eats up the day; at night all things are made anew and are changed while we sleep.
The man covered with hair seizes the little boy and wants to pull him down into the dark basement.
He took possession of him, he let him feel his power.
Here the dream breaks off with the cries of fear of the awakening boy.
The dreamer is not yet overwhelmed completely, not yet deep down in the basement, but there is the danger of an inundation from below, the danger that he will be overwhelmed by a still unconscious instinctual state, by greed, passion, or desire.
He is threatened by an uncontrollable instinctual force, stronger than he, which tears him into the dark and threatens to devour his small world of consciousness.
As we do not know more about the child, we can make only some vague assumptions.
His being overwhelmed and pulled down into the dark womb of the house can be a danger for his psychical development.
Without insinuating conscious sexual feelings in the five-year-old child, we may still perhaps assume that the dream anticipates a later emotional outbreak.
The dream would then anticipate the future.
Professor Jung: I thank you for your paper.
You have taken into account all the important aspects in your discussion of the dream.
I have chosen this case because with its help we can discuss the various possibilities of working with a dream in the simplest form.
As we saw in the last session, in most of the cases the dream is an unconscious reaction—albeit always in a different way—to a conscious situation.
So we always have to take into account the symbolic context of the unconscious as well as the individual psychological situation of the dreamer.
Children still have a vivid memory of that archaic world; it was born with them.
For this reason alone we cannot but notice the collective background of the dream.
The ubiquitous archaic images, the archetypes, play a very important role in the infantile fantasy.
That is why fairy tales in particular make such a strong impression, because they touch on a world related to them.
You have seen in the paper how we approach collective symbols.
This method of treating a dream is not sufficient, however, if a practical decision becomes important.
For practical treatment, it is useless to talk of archetypes and bearskins.
We have to ask more specific questions about the events of the previous day, and in general about the whole individual situation the child is in.
In this case, I do not know the psychological situation of the child.
We can try nevertheless to discuss the possibilities.
Suppose you know only the child’s mother, who presents you with the dream and tells you that the child is difficult.
What would you say? How much could you possibly see in the dream?
Participant: I would ask what the child had experienced the day before, and also, if he is fearful during the day, too.
Professor Jung: Yes, but this is not sufficient when it comes to the practicalities.
Participant: Couldn’t we interpret the man covered with hair as a compensatory figure to the dreamer’s conscious situation? In the paper he was portrayed only as a danger. But perhaps he also points to something positive, which the child still lacks and which would have to be accepted by him.
Professor Jung: This is a correct point of view.
Is he a real danger or, on the contrary, something to be accepted?
If the latter is true—what could we then say with regard to the child’s consciousness?
Participant: It would be too “light,” having too little relation to the unconscious.
Participant: It would be too rational.
Professor Jung: Oh no, no, even with the “best” education, a four year-old child can’t be rational!
Participant: It is educated too well.
Professor Jung: Yes, that’s a possibility.
It could actually be the case that the child is too well educated.
As a consequence, there comes the Böölima, who is bad like an animal.
He can do anything the boy cannot in the house.
In families where the children are too strictly educated, it is as if they were some little devils.
They then create the nicest anxiety dreams.
So the wild, hairy, black man may threateningly appear in an anxiety dream; but it’s only the nasty tricks of the child that he can’t play in reality.
A too-virtuous education causes rebellion, and the children then play the wildest tricks.
Participant: Wouldn’t the fact that the man covered with hair is an adult point into the future of the child?
Professor Jung: Yes, that’s also a possibility. What would it then mean?
Participant: That the child is too infantile.
Professor Jung: Right. Children have to be infantile, because otherwise they wouldn’t be children.
But it may happen that a child is too infantile, for instance, when children were bedridden for a long time because of illness, and are weakened.
Then they talk like little babies, cling to the mother—things they had already forgotten how to do.
They fall into a regression, and then such an anxiety dream can occur.
The dream is the natural reaction of their organism, which defends itself against the ridiculous infantilism.
It is not a moral reaction, but a reaction of nature.
When a seventy-year-old man thinks he could still accomplish the same as in younger years, nature will tell him, too, that he cannot—quite physiologically.
When children regress under a certain level of infantilism, such figures as the threatening, wild man may appear, but this is already an indication of a serious regression.
Here I would much rather assume that this is a well-mannered child who is too much under the influence of the mother.
Some mothers always try to turn their sons into paragons of virtue, who are terribly nice and decent . . . , and then it happens to them of all people that their boys are complete rascals.
That’s how it has to be! It can also be the case, however, that the boy loves the mother,
is very much attached to her, and does not want to cause her distress.
Then what is in him cannot come out; if he waits too long, then it will “happen.”
Participant: The Gilgamesh Epic is a good example of an education that is too good.
Professor Jung: Yes, there you have the animal man Enkidu or Eabani, who is supposed to pull Gilgamesh down, because he is the all-too-perfect son of the mother.
Participant: Don’t we have to take into account both sides of the figure of the man covered with hair, the helpful and the dangerous sides?
Professor Jung: This double aspect is always there.
Not only as a motive of the dream, but also regarding its effect.
Such a dream can have a very destructive effect, because it contains the evil.
When such a dream ends badly, we have an “anxiety child,” who cries every night out of the fear that the dream might recur.
On the other hand, a natural reaction is also possible.
Something in the child can understand: this is “he”!
It very much depends on whether the child has the right instinct or not.
Equally in the adult: the instinct decides whether we understand the dream correctly or not.
We then sense that something is about “so.”
When such a boy gets a bit older, he develops a certain pleasure in this hairy man and imagines all kinds of things he himself could do if he were like him.
Half consciously, half unconsciously, he draws the right conclusions after all.
Here we must trust nature. If the anxiety in the boy is reinforced, however, he is drawn into the wrong attitude, and only the destructive effect is intensified.
Participant: Couldn’t the hairy, wild man also have something to do with the parents?
Professor Jung: A dream need not always be mysteriously related, by unconscious infections, with the parents.
But this, too, is a possibility.
It could be about an ongoing conflict in the parents’ marriage, because the man covered with hair actually is the ape man, the primitive instinctual man.
There could be a connection with the father, or also the mother, most often with only one of the two parents.
As a rule, the situation in a marriage is such that the one sits in the warm nest and thinks that everything is all right.
The one is completely protected and warm, just like in the womb or on the lap of the father.
The other—outside—thinks, however: “This is quite nice, really ideal, if only there would be something that held me also!”
It can be the father who sits on the sill and looks out of the window.
In this case, it is there that the ape man is constellated, of whom he is afraid himself.
Or it is the mother who dances around on the edge of the nest, while the father is sitting inside, smoking his pipe.
So she dreams of a dreadful man of whom she is terribly afraid, while at the same time hoping he would break in sometime!
In both cases, the ape man can enter into the little child.
The more vital this is, the greater its effect.
It is extremely important in education, therefore, for the parents to know what they are doing, to know their problems and not to ignore them; otherwise, the children have to lead a life that is simply impossible.
They are forced to do dreadful things, which are not in their nature at all, but have been taken over from the parents.
Here we find really interesting phenomena.
When we study the history of a family, and investigate the relations between parents and children, we can often see the red thread of fate.
Sometimes there is more than one curse on the house of Atreus in a family.
Participant: Before you rejected the experiences of the previous day. But perhaps such an experience did indeed trigger the dream situation? For example, I know of the case of a little girl who saw her father naked and then dreamed of it.
Professor Jung: In general, being naked does not make an impression on little children. But if a certain kind of education is at work, it can indeed make an impression on the children. I want to give you an example:
When I was a little boy, between five and six years old, an old aunt took me to the museum to show me the stuffed animals.
This interested me very much, and I took a long time.
Then the bell rang; we had to leave.
The aunt could no longer find the exit and came into the hall with the sculptures, with the statues of gods!
She pulled me after her and said: “You naughty boy, close your eyes!” I didn’t even
think of it, because for the first time I saw pictures of gods, and I found them wonderful. That they were naked I only discovered because of the affect of my aunt.
I myself have seen my father naked more than once, and I was not traumatized by it.
It all depends on what soil such an observation falls.
When there is an overly satiated atmosphere, when the children are provoked and fed by unnatural blind affection, when the daughters slip around on their knees before the father, when the mother licks her son, but, on the other hand, everything is suppressed
by “education”—then we have the right breeding ground for neuroses.
When the child then sees the father or mother naked, a trauma ensues.
These natural things are never traumatic; otherwise, the whole of Africa would have a hell of a neurosis, but, of course, it wouldn’t even dream of it.
- Dream of a Six-Year-Old Girl of the Doll and the Monster Presented by Dr. Liliane Frey
Text: When I first dreamed this dream, I was definitely not older than six.
It recurred a couple of times when I was a young girl.
I undressed the Doll of my eldest sister and put it into the doll bed.
On coming up again, the doll is sitting fully dressed in its chair.
I undress it again and go downstairs.
A moment later I go up again, curious what might have happened now.
The doll is dressed again. Once again, I undress her and go down the stairs.
But in turning around I’m seeing a monster that did that, and which is now following me on the stairs.
The monster has a very big body, which completely fills up the staircase.
It moves sluggishly and clumsily, with short, nearly invisible paws—meaty. I am terribly afraid.
Dr. Frey: We can divide the dream into the following four parts:
- Locale: Place: playroom, stairs. Dramatis personae: child, monster.
- Exposition: The child is playing with the doll of the eldest sister.
- Peripateia: The game is thwarted three times.
- Lysis: The child meets the monster.
The dream begins with the following sentence: “I undressed the doll of my eldest sister and put it into the doll bed.”
What does the doll mean to the child?
In the form of the butterfly pupa it embodies the transitional stage between a crawling animal, closely nestling against the earth, and a winged one.
In myths and in poetry the butterfly is often the symbol for the psyche.
The soul soars up from the cocoon in the form of a butterfly.
So we might say that the pupa/doll represents a transition between a primitive, earth-bound stage and a freer, disembodied, winged, and elated one.
We also speak, for instance, of “shedding the pupal skin of our heart”
to gain inner freedom.
Dolls have also played a great role in the history of superstition: until the late Middle Ages, they were used to ward off evil spirits or as carriers of certain magical powers, and still today we find the mascot, a lucky magical doll.
There are many examples in the most varied countries, how dolls are brought to life,
and how spirits are laid by being forced to stay in them.
In connection with the motif of bringing a doll to life, I would like to refer to the figure of the homunculus in Goethe’s Faust.
With the help of Mephistopheles, Wagner artificially creates the homunculus in a vial, an artificial little man without soul.
The problem is how to fill him with soul and thus make him into a real human being.
But the vial of the homunculus is smashed to pieces on Galatea’s chariot and pours out into the sea waves, whereupon the homunculus rises again as a living man out of the waters of the unconscious.
But what does the doll in the girl’s playroom mean? What does the doll mean to the child?
It seems that the external form of the doll is not decisive in children’s games.
Aniela Jaffé has observed that children take a bottle of medicine or a piece of wood into bed and play with them as if these were the most beautiful dolls.
Just like a primitive man, the child brings the doll to life with the images of her unconscious, and so animates, “en-souls,” it.
In the hands of the child, the doll is just a receptacle into which the internal potentialities are laid, and through which the child’s world becomes alive.
Quite generally, the doll/pupa is the receptacle, the cover, containing the child’s psyche—the butterfly—as a present and future potentiality.
In addition, for the little girl the game with the doll is also quite specifically a preliminary exercise of later biological functions.
The child plays with the doll of the eldest sister.
The eldest sister or the eldest brother is a theme that appears again and again in fairy tales.
The elder siblings are most often the much-admired, beautiful, proud, seemingly virtuous children, favored by father or mother.
But they often fail precisely when the most difficult task has to be resolved, the treasure that is so difficult to attain has to be obtained, or the prince or princess has to be set free.
Most of the time this is done by the youngest sibling.
In all these cases, the elder siblings stand for the more developed capabilities.
They are mostly examples for the younger siblings.
In our dream, too, there is probably this same relation between the dreamer and the eldest sister: she is the role model for the younger child.
In this part of the dream it further says that the dreamer is playing with the doll.
What does that mean?
It probably indicates that the dreamer tries to live her life, her future potentialities, the way her sister does—which will perforce drive her into one-sidedness and into a crippling of instinct.
Moreover, it is a rule in the children’s room to play with one’s own doll, not with the sister’s doll.
Each child has her own doll, belonging to her and containing her own potential in nuce.
The dreamer, however, plays with the sister’s doll.
This shows us that she does not stand by herself and her own potentialities, but rather she is trying to cope with reality in her elder sister’s way.
She copies her way of adaptation, behaves as she does toward the external world.
The child probably feels that something is not right, because later on in the dream it says that she puts the doll into the bed. What does that mean?
The dreamer is in danger of an identification with the sister.
She sees her as her role model.
That is why the sister’s soul—the doll/pupa—has to be put to sleep.
The sister’s effect should be rendered ineffective. In this way the dreamer tries to get out of the state of adaptation to the sister.
We will see if the attempt succeeds.
After undressing the doll the child goes downstairs.
During her absence something inexplicable has happened, for the doll is dressed again and sits in its chair.
This process is repeated three times.
Each time her playing activity is reversed, made ineffective, during her absence.
The child is shown that something about her attempts is wrong.
Let us go through the individual motifs: the number three, the motif of above and below, and the thwarted game.
Thrice the game is interrupted, thus underlining the gravity of the motif.
The appearance of the three always has a fateful meaning.
In the dream seminar of 1936/37, Professor Jung says: “When trinity appears”—the three Fates, or triads of gods—“this means that a fateful point has been reached, that something unavoidable will therefore happen.”
Here there is no simultaneous appearance of three figures, however, not the motif of
the triad, but the triple repetition of the same process.
We find this theme, for instance, in the triple repetition of the conjuration or invocation.
Conjuring up the evil three times over is found in many legends.
Goethe’s Faust has to call out “Come in!” three times before Mephistopheles enters.
We also find this motif in St. Peter’s thrice repeated denial of knowledge of Christ.
“I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me” (Luke 22, 34).
Or a trial is repeated three times, as in the temptation of Christ by the devil.
Doing the same thing three times is, so to speak, a magic to make something effective, and in many fairy tales it leads to the solution.
Or it establishes the connection with the demonic.
What is most important happens afterward: a destiny is set in motion, the connection with something transpersonal is established.
We can also formulate the idea this way: the number three triggers the number four, causes something that should establish the wholeness of the person. . . .
In the present dream we can clearly see how the process being repeated three times—the undressing of the doll and its being mysteriously dressed again—forcibly brings about the fourth process, setting in with all its might: the confrontation with the monster.
Besides the theme of the thrice-repeated process, another motif is important in that part of the dream, namely, the alternation of above and below.
Each time after having undressed the doll, the child leaves the children’s room to go downstairs.
It is as if she cannot find rest anywhere.
If she is above, she is forced downward, and the other way around: if she is below, she has to go up once again.
Perhaps we may deduce that the child is insecure about the Above and the Below.
This alternation of above and below shows the continued sinking of the child into the collective mythical prehistoric world, into connectedness with the family, or into the mysterious depth of fantasy, into the world of emotions and of the body.
At the same time, the dream shows the thrice-repeated attempt to free herself from this, to go upstairs and to gain a conscious attitude.
The further dream text will show us whether the Above or the Below is “right.”
The third motif is that of the thwarted game.
Again and again the doll is sitting dressed in its chair.
A foreign power forces its way into her game, intrudes, thwarts the goal of her attempts in the game.
The child happens upon an unknown, powerful factor in her life, which prepares for a different direction of her play: the doll is to remain sitting dressed on its chair.
What does this mean for the child, this intrusion of a foreign, superior force into a personal sphere?
The personal activity is made ineffective and included in a transpersonal process.
Whenever this happens, the personal activity is too strongly directed against the original, natural inner destiny of the person, and his nature is oppressed.
We have already assumed earlier that the dreamer is too dependent on others, and imitates too much the mode of her sister’s adaptation.
She tried to free herself by putting her sister’s doll to sleep and thus reduce her sister’s influence on her.
In this context, the thwarting of the game means that this attempt is being stopped, and not accepted, by the unconscious.
Her way will have to be a different one.
In the next part of the dream there are the following motifs: that of turning around and that of the monster.
So when the child looks back, she sees a monster following her.
In fairy tales and popular belief, looking back is always a dangerous thing to do, and strictly forbidden, therefore, in most cases.
According to the Bible, Lot’s wife becomes a pillar of salt because she cannot bear the terrible sight of what is behind her—Sodom and Gomorrah under a rain of fire and brimstone.
On the other hand, back is also the fertile womb; the rocks that Deucalion and Pyrrha throw behind their shoulders turn into the first humans after the deluge.
Probably, however, a very special inner situation of desperation and pressure is necessary to be able to bear the sight.
The child has to turn around.
She has to see what follows her, she has to encounter her shadow.
It is also not without importance that the shadow blocks the way upward.
The girl can no longer go up.
She has to go down, into the dark womb of the unconscious.
She will have to confront the foreign and the dangerous, precisely because anything that is split off from the girl, anything that is a “complex,” and which is now threateningly personified in this monster and persecuting her—because all this, as Professor Jung explained in our next to last meeting, basically wants to come to her in order to become one with her, so that she can become whole.
Before we enter into the interpretation, I would like to quote some more parallels in mythology and literature.
The first example coming to mind is the monster behemoth in the Book of Job. Job, who boasts of his virtuous life, who can say: “My foot hath held his steps, his way have I kept, and not declined” (Job 23:11), Job is humiliated by God and visited by the devil in the form of two monsters, the behemoth and the leviathan.
The form of the monster [in the dream] is described as follows: it has a very big body, it moves sluggishly and clumsily, with short, nearly invisible paws.
When we try to find an animal roughly fitting this description, the hippopotamus would come closest.
As we shall see later, it often appears in connection with evil.
Faust’s poodle also takes on the form of a hippopotamus; it says:
“It’s no doglike shape I see!
What a spectre I brought home!
Like a hippo in the room” —Faust I, verses 1252ff
In view of the monster’s form, particularly the heavy, meaty body, it is suggestive to think of those myths in which the “voracious maw of a fish” appears, for example, the myth of the whale described by Frobenius, or the myths of the dragon that the hero must kill to attain the treasure.
The Lamia, the terrible female ghost who frightens children at night, steals them, and eats them, was originally also a voracious sea fish.
Here we encounter the theme of the monster as the terrible mother, a symbol of death, which has to be overcome.
Now to the interpretation of the monster.
As shown by the analogy with the behemoth, such monsters represent the wild, dreadful side of nature’s abysses, the raw bestial nature of instinct.
As the child is in danger of alienating herself from her nature, as she has lost her body, she has to descend again into these depths, has to encounter this monster in order to attain bodily consciousness.
This bodily consciousness is attained from the instinctual sphere—after all, the monster is an animal.
The child has to regress to a state that she has already experienced earlier.
For we can only progress from a basis we know already.
She should remember that she has a body that is hungry and that she should feed.
This is the meaning of the meaty monster with the fat, rotund body, which grunts and gargles and roots through the mud.
This disgusting animal has nevertheless a beneficial aspect insofar as it wants to unite the child with the split-off parts of her personality.
After all these explanations the meaning of the dream becomes clearer.
This may not only be a dream that prepares the child for the erotic storms of puberty. In addition, the dream seems to indicate a problem of individuation, that is, it “is a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality.”
Professor Jung: Let us once again take a closer look at the basic motifs of this dream! First, the eldest sister.
Simply because she is older, she is a model or an anticipation for the younger sister.
The object of the game—the doll—is the playful preliminary exercise for the future.
The little girl identifies with the doll that belongs to her sister, as if this image of the future, the creative anticipating fantasy of the sister, were her own.
She sheds her own skin, so to speak, and projects herself into the eldest sister with all her vague wishes for the future.
The dream begins with the dreamer undressing the doll and putting it to bed.
What does this mean?
Let us be totally naive, as we have to be in such cases. It is analogous to a mother putting her child to bed.
Why does she do this?
Participant: To make the child sleep.
Professor Jung: Yes, that is also the intention of the little girl in the dream. The doll should sleep. Now what does that mean?
Participant: The anticipating activity of the sister should be put to sleep. It is thus rendered ineffective; it is a secret, somewhat malicious act against the sister.
Professor Jung: Exactly. How children play with dolls appears, so to speak, magical.
It has an effect on the persons who stand in relation to these dolls.
When the child puts to bed the doll of her eldest sister, she insults her.
It is as if she sabotaged a favorite activity.
She sort of tells the doll: “No more anticipating now. Just don’t do anything. You sleep!”
When the doll sleeps, the game between her and the sister stops!
The eldest sister is paralyzed, so that she can take over her functions herself.
We often see such acts of sabotage in children.
For instance, they put on their father’s hat and ruin it on occasion, or they smoke the father’s pipe and let it fall!
What happens in the dream is that the little girl—after a short absence—finds the doll sitting dressed in the chair!
An invisible monster has probably come, a cunning, crafty thing, which has taken possession of the doll and quickly dressed it again.
Whatever it is, the child’s prank is ineffective—the doll is being restored to the “status quo ante.”
The little girl sinks again back into the unconscious state.
She has gone up, has reached the level of her sister—and now everything is as it used to be.
She had not only wanted to take something away from her sister, but also to achieve something for herself in this way, that is, to make the sister’s anticipating fantasy her own.
She repeats the dressing and undressing three times.
This motif of the number three has been quite correctly interpreted [by Mrs. Frey] as a fateful process with a magical effect.
As a matter of fact, the “three” is always dynamics, rhythm.
The dynamism of the world in Hegel’s philosophy is partly based on the three phases or the three stages.
We also find this triad in the development of Goethe’s Faust: the boy charioteer, the homunculus, and Euphorion.
The boy charioteer is the soul-guiding function.
Here we find the motif of “puer aeternus.”
In his book Reich ohne Raum, Bruno Goetz gives an excellent description of this figure.
In it, he has anticipated a process in contemporary history in an interesting way.
The figure of the “puer aeternus” is born, so to speak, directly out of the unconscious.
The second figure in Goethe’s triad is the homunculus.
He, too, is an inner being, seen in a vision.
This figure also appears in Hermetic philosophy.
As you know, there is an idea in alchemy that one could create a wonderful being with godlike qualities in the phial through various procedures.
One alchemist even calls this being “deus terrestris.”
This is a metaphor for the inner experiences of the alchemist, who in his work experiences his own contents in the unknown matter.
The main figure in Hermetic wisdom is Mercurius, the well-known Re-bis (who consists of two things).
He is also called hermaphrodite because of his male-female double nature, or “lapis philosophorum,” or “lux moderna,” that is, the modern light.
In this latter sense he is viewed as “light of the lights,” a well-known term in alchemy.
The third figure in Goethe is Euphorion. He also is a son figure.
He is the fiery spark created by the unification of the opposites of the male and female, an alchemical figure as well—volatile Mercurius.
The fate of these “puer aeterni” is remarkable.
All three attempts to keep the fire-boy alive fail: the boy charioteer vanishes in the fireworks, the homunculus is smashed to pieces on Galatea’s chariot, and Euphorion runs after the beautiful nymphs and goes up in flames.
Precisely because of their doom, these figures are of importance to us as the devilish ambushes, into which we run in such inner processes, become evident.
This is particularly impressive in the case of the homunculus: he meets Galatea—and the process is already disturbed. “It” has burnt out in him, the lid did not stay on the pot, he is out of steam.
In this respect, women are very dangerous for male intentions.
A beautiful woman comes along—and he’s gone in a second!
There is a similar danger in women when they have to give birth to their inner child.
But in their case this is less transparent than in men. How does the “puer
aeternus” go to hell in her?
Well, the danger is that she meets the “spirit”!
By chance she reads a textbook or a newspaper article, written by a complete nonentity, but “it was written there,” and the steam is gone.
It says in alchemy: “Vas sit bene clausum, ut qui est intus, non evolet.”
Well, three leads to four! It leads to a result. This is a process.
This has already been said in the paper, and it is very important.
What is the fourth form of the “puer aeternus”?
Participant: Faust himself in the “choir of the young boys.”
Professor Jung: So this form is already beyond death.
Faust has arrived in the timeless sphere.
This is the fourth form resulting from the three attempts.
Here, however, we won’t go into that.
In our dream, the three leads to a, so to speak, catastrophic solution.
Being a solution, however, it also has its positive side.
How do you interpret the monster?
Participant: As a figure of the collective unconscious.
Professor Jung: In Egypt there exists such a monster, a goddess of the underworld, a devouring mother goddess—Tefnut.
She is known for always being present in the scene of “weighing the heart” in the
Books of the Dead. She is always standing there.
Should the heart of the dead person be found unworthy, she will eat it.
As a consequence, the dead person is then given over to the chthonic underworld, the cooking pot of creation, to be dissolved.
So the interpretation of the monster is quite correct.
It is a devouring mother, a negative mother, who does not give birth, but devours the creatures herself.
There is, however, also a positive aspect to this devouring: maybe it is the
preparation for a new birth.
How do you interpret the monster’s appearance on the top of the stairs, and not below?
Only when the dreamer goes down the stairs for the third time does she turn back and see the monster.
This is fateful. The three has been fulfilled.
Through the three stages comes the solution: there’s an impact, and something new begins.
Otherwise it would be incomprehensible why she could not see the monster already the first time.
For the monster is actually the soul of the doll/pupa in herself, the primal being, the dark abyss in man, which playfully creates life and creation.
The whole creation is this great primal being’s toy, playing with the doll of the elder as well as that of the younger sister.
It is the unconscious that undresses and dresses the doll, and that is in the way when the child turns back, that is, when she does not look ahead, but back.
Because at the back the sphere of the unconscious begins.
The magical effect comes from behind; that is why the primitives have neck amulets, often hewn out of stone or wood, as a deterrence against the evil eye.
These amulets have strangely rolled eyes: this is the evil eye with which the other’s evil eye is fought, on the principle of “similia similibus.”
So the danger zone is in one’s back.
In looking back the child gains a certain insight into the unconscious, and suddenly becomes aware of what is really at work here.
She gets a terrible fright.
Participant: How would we have had to interpret it if the monster had come from below?
Professor Jung: If the monster had been below, the child in the dream would have fled upstairs.
Then the family uterus would have been in danger.
But in our dream she is invariably driven downstairs:
“Don’t go to the upper floor ever again, don’t play there ever again!”
Participant: The child has made a mistake, and the unconscious reacts to this. Because she made the mistake at the top, the unconscious, too, appears there.
Professor Jung: Yes, wherever something happened that was not right, the hostile effect of the unconscious makes itself felt.
If the child had played the “baby,” had always been within the family, or had identified with the little dog, the monster would probably have come from below.
But it comes from above, because the mistake was made there.
Participant: I notice that the monster is giving orders as if it were a mother.
Professor Jung: Yes, you could well say that.
But what would be the matter with the real mother then, if we linked the monster with the mother?
How would she have behaved in reality?
Participant: She would have held the child too tight and bound her to her.
Professor Jung: No, that wouldn’t have been the case.
Participant: The mother would have looked after the child too little, and so the monster has to behave as the mother should have.
Professor Jung: Yes, the monster has to intervene to keep the child from such tricks.
The dream shows a typical process in the infantile soul that is so subtle, however, that the usual education does not notice it at all.
The child lives the life of the elder sister.
So she herself comes to a standstill in her development, and after some time becomes infantile.
The “nicest” neuroses develop out of such habitual identifications.
This can reach the point that people do not come to themselves at all; they cling to the ground to make sure to evade themselves.
Participant: Doesn’t this repeated pull to the top point to a yearning, an attempt in the child to come to this upper level? But this attempt fails. Does this mean that it is the child’s fate not to belong in that sphere at all, despite her efforts?
Professor Jung: That is a very good question.
This situation is decisive for the child’s soul.
An identification is developing here that has to be stopped immediately.
The unconscious, the independent, autonomous functioning of the psyche, stops this identification because it could become dangerous.
It is stopped at the very beginning.
We can see no reason why this undertaking of the child would be harmful.
We can only understand the whole scenario of the dream, if we draw the most extreme consequences out of the tendencies that are present here.
If the child goes on identifying with the elder sister, she will soon find herself in the situation that she no longer lives her own life, but instead replaces it with the model of “elder sister.”
Her life will then become unoriginal. We can indeed slip into the skin of somebody else.
There are individuals who do not live their lives at all.
They slip into the father or the mother, and then at the age of forty-five or fifty go to a doctor who is supposed to help them.
Such cases are tragic and can end in catastrophe.
There is the most subtle, nearly inaudible allusion to that in this dream.
Such early warning dreams appear because those identifications are so extremely dangerous.
Consciousness knows nothing about such identifications, but nature does.
Just as it reacts to a bodily infection, although consciousness is not aware of it, the unconscious reacts to such identifications.
If you consider this point for a long time, you can draw highly interesting conclusions:
Why, for instance, should it be dangerous at all not to live oneself? Why is nature interested in living itself?
It is an extremely typical infantile dream: the child identifies with the elder sister.
She tries to free herself from this identification in putting the doll of the sister to bed.
She believes she can paralyze her sister in this way, and regain her own creative activity.
But this trick fails. We cannot solve psychic conflicts by acts of sabotage.
The warning to get off the high horse and come down again is repeated three times.
Here you see a mechanism at work that is driven as by clockwork: the triad is fulfilled, and then it happens.
The child turns back and sees the monster. She has to take a look back and register the danger zone.
What will result from this encounter with the devouring monster we do not know.
The child awakens in fear.
- Dream of a Six-Year-Old Girl of the Rainbow Presented by Dr. Emma Steiner
Text: The dreamer says: “There was a beautiful rainbow, rising just in front of me.
I climbed up on it until I came into heaven.
From there I called down to my friend Marietta that she should also come up.
But she hesitated so long until the rainbow disintegrated and I fell down.”
Dr. Steiner: First, let us structure the dream:
The locale shows a natural event: there was a beautiful rainbow, rising just in front of the girl.
The exposition indicates the event: the girl climbs up on the rainbow until she comes into heaven.
The peripateia, or the change, happens through her calling to her friend Marietta to come up too.
But she hesitates to come, and the lysis comes: the rainbow disintegrates, and the girl falls down to the ground.
Let us move on to a broadening of the context, the amplification: the girl dreams of a beautiful rainbow.
Our personal associations to “rainbow” are the following: the rainbow is a wonderful, oscillating bridge; it leads to a castle in the air and from there to the ground.
So the rainbow is a symbol linking heaven and earth.
This unification of heaven and earth suggests a link between above and below, between spirit and matter.
Although the rainbow owes its existence to a pair of opposites, the coming together of rain and sunshine, it is at the same time also a symbol of harmony; for in its magnificent play of colors and its structure according to natural law it is a perfect reference to harmony.
Let us consult the interpretations that popular belief has made of the rainbow since ancient times.
The rainbow as a colorful spectacle has always stimulated the fantasy of all peoples.
The Old Testament sees in the rainbow a symbol of peace.
God sealed his covenant with Noah after the Flood with a rainbow.
Here we see again the connection between heaven and earth, between God and man.
According to the Christian view, the righteous and the chosen ones go on a rainbow to the Last Judgement, while the unrighteous fail in this attempt because the rainbow breaks down under them.
The faithful see in the rainbow the bridge on which the Christ child and the angels float to earth.
According to an old gypsy belief, the man who finds the end of the rainbow at Whitsun can climb up on it and find eternal health up there.
In many instances, powers hostile to man are also ascribed to the rainbow. It pulls anything that comes near one of its ends.
So it pulls ashore the fishes, but also pulls little children into the air.
An old legend from Transylvania says: A shepherd boy was very nosy.
He would have liked only too much to see how the rainbow attracts water.
He was punished by being pulled into the air himself, and now has to tend the sheep in heaven for all eternity.
Here the old wisdom is brought to life that man should not tempt the natural powers, for they are a matter of the gods.
Let us also consult those passages in Traumsymbole des Individuations prozesses
[Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process] that describe the following visual impression:
In our dream, the rainbow is the connecting symbol of the bridge.
The girl climbs on it up to heaven. Heaven is not described in more detail.
For the child it is the epitome of the beautiful, a castle in the air, something magnificent, something inexpressible.
It is probably also the fairy-tale fantasy world of this child.
It is so beautiful up there that the child is completely spellbound and cannot describe it because of its sheer magnificence.
But she would like her friend Marietta to share in this magnificence.
So she calls to her to come up, too.
The friend Marietta is probably not the physical friend of the child, but the other side of the girl, a side she is even more unconscious of, the earthy reality.
Up until now we have learned quite enough about the one side of the girl, that which longs to be in heaven, which builds castles in the air, and paints fantasy forms, the side that she symbolically relives in her walk over the rainbow.
In this call to Marietta, her earth-bound friend, the girl’s ego tries to pull the friend upward to an unreal world.
Professor Jung: In the case of this dream, we are in the same situation symbolically relives in her walk over the rainbow.
In this call to Marietta, her earth-bound friend, the girl’s ego tries to pull the friend upward to an unreal world.
For a moment, the updraft, the current of this unreal tendency, is stronger than the real world personified by Marietta, because it was precisely this updraft that has carried the girl up into heaven.
Let us return for a moment to the actual life situation of the girl, the situation before she had the dream.
On the basis of the dream and the symbolical updraft of its unreal tendency we may assume that in the everyday life of the child, too, there is a (albeit unconscious) tension between her fantasy world and reality, which she calls Marietta in the dream.
Such a tension at that age—the girl is six years old—may well be seen as a typical infantile situation.
There are very many children who are exposed to these tensions between fantasy world and reality every day.
The dream makes this tension acute, that is, a splitting occurs, a distancing from below, a walk over the rainbow, a distancing from Marietta, the reality.
Here we could ask whether it would have been dangerous if the child had succeeded in
pulling up Marietta, the reality. In any case, the child tries to undo the splitting by calling Marietta.
In the dream, however, a different solution occurs.
The splitting is undone by the unconscious, the upward tendency of the unreal sphere diminishes, and earth and reality gain force.
The rainbow vanishes through Marietta’s steadfastness—she hesitates to follow suit into the illusory world—and the child falls to the ground, back to reality.
We do not know about the circumstances in the girl’s life in more detail.
The dream could be a compensation for an all too sober, uncomprehending environment.
But it could also be a compensation for inner troubles of the child.
I would like to view the rainbow dream as an illustration of a typical situation of a child.
There are many children, probably those with a more intuitive disposition, who are, for
this reason, very often exposed to such tensions between reality and the fantasy world, and who are looking for a discharge by way of dreams, such as happened in this rainbow dream.
Professor Jung: In the case of this dream, we are in the same situation one of the most primitive definitions of the soul.
When you hurt the shadow, you hurt the person; when, for instance, you step on the
shadow, it is as if you gave the person in question a kick.
The chief loses his mana when someone walks over his shadow.
It is as if somebody had thrown himself at him and overcome him.
The primitives have another peculiar notion of the shadow: in southern countries, noon is the witching hour.
At noon the shadow is shortest, giving rise to the fear that it might disappear altogether.
This would be uncanny, for then one would have lost the shadow, the connection to the earth; one has suffered a loss of soul.
The shadow is the second person.
It is a personification of what follows behind us, what lies in the shadow of consciousness, and as a rule it also has—except for pathological cases—the meaning of earth.
In our dream, Marietta is the actual, real friend of this little girl. For reasons unknown to us, she has to represent the earth shadow of the dreamer.
It is actually not uncommon that friendships are formed in which one partner is the shadow of the other.
A psychological structure is expressed in this.
The language also refers to this, with expressions such as: he follows him like a shadow, he always runs after him.
In the case of children, we can often observe that one is taller than the other.
Or one is more stupid, the other more intelligent, one comes from a “special” family, and the like.
And yet these are friendships! One of the two has, as it were, accepted the
role of the follower, of the shadow.
In the dream the child tries to climb up from below, she climbs the rainbow bridge. How do we interpret this ascent?
The speaker has quite correctly stated that the motive for walking over the rainbow
bridge into a magnificent other world could be a certain deficiency in the environment, an all too rationalistic attitude in it.
This path is not without danger.
When the child gets lost in fantasy, she is in danger.
In fact, children can really go too far into fantasy, and so be exposed to psychical dangers.
It is possible, therefore, that the dream is based on such a thing.
But I wouldn’t like to attach too much importance to this, as this is certainly not the only possible motivation.
There is a much more general reason for such an ascent.
Participant: The desire to go back, to the collective security.
Participant: So would this dream indicate a regression then? I know children who still at the age of ten have that attitude, who are happy when they are in caves and who build little houses.
Professor Jung: So do you mean that these are regressive fantasies? Are they really regressive fantasies? Is this dream a regressive dream?
With this question we arrive at a very important but difficult problem.
To begin with, in th
