157 
158 
159 
160 

LECTURE III 
youth will seek a man who is an alcoholic and marry him; and if by chance he should not be one, she will make him into one on account of that peculiar identity with one member of the family. 
Figure 9 is a very striking case, too. The father, who was a widower, had two daughters who lived with him in complete identity. Of course, that also is most unnatural, because either he reacts like a girl or the two girls react like a man, even in the way they speak. The whole mental make-up is poisoned through the admixture of an alien element, because a young daughter is not in actual fact her father. 
Figure 10 is the case of a husband and wife. This diagram gives an optimistic tone to my very pessimistic demonstrations. You see there is perfect harmony here; but do not make the mistake of thinking that this harmony is a paradise, for these people will kick against each other after a while because they are just too harmonious. A very good harmony in a family based on participation soon leads to frantic attempts on the part of the spouses to kick loose from each other, to liberate themselves, and then they invent irritating topics of discussion in order to have a reason for feeling misunderstood. If you study the ordinary psychology of marriage, you discover that most of the troubles consist in this cunning invention of irritating topics which have absolutely no foundation. 
Figure 11 is also interesting. These two women are sisters living together; one is single and the other married. Their summit is found at number V. The wife in Figure 10 is the sister of these two women in Figure 11, and while most probably they were all of the same type originally, she married a man of another type. Their summit is at number III in Figure 10. The condition of identity or participation which is demonstrated in the association test can be substantiated by entirely different experiences, for instance, by graphology. The handwriting of many wives, particularly young wives, often resembles that of the husband. I do not know whether it is so in these days, but I assume that human nature remains very much the same. Occasionally it is the other way round because the so-called feeble sex has its strength sometimes. 
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now going to step over the border i.nto dreams. I do not want to give you any particular in- 
77 

1. THE TAVISTOCK LECTURES 
troduction to dream-analysis.4 I think the best way is just to show you how I proceed with a dream~and then it does not need much explanation of a theoretical kind, because you can see what are my underlying ideas. Of course, I make great use of dreams, because dreams are an objective source of information in psychotherapeutic treatment. When a doctor has a case, he can hardly refrain from having ideas about it. But the more one knows about cases, the more one should make an heroic effort not to know in order to give the patient a fair chance. I always try not to know and not to see. It is much better to say you are stupid, or play what is apparently a stupid role, in order to give the patient a chance to come out with his own material. That does not mean that you should hide altogether. 
	161 	This is a case of a man forty years old, a married man who 
has not been ill before. He looks quite all right; he is the director of a great public school, a very intelligent fellow who has studied an old-fashioned kind of psychology, Wundt psychology,5 that has nothing to do with details of human life but moves in the stratosphere of abstract ideas. Recently he had been badly troubled by neurotic symptoms. He suffered from a peculiar kind of vertigo that seized upon him from time to time, palpitation, nausea, and peculiar attacks of feebleness and a sort of exhaustion. This syndrome presents the picture of a sickness which is well known in Switzerland. It is mountain sickness, a malady to which people who are not used to great heights are easily subject when climbing. So I asked, "Is it not mountain sickness you are suffering from?" He said, "Yes, you are right. It feels exactly like mountain sickness." I asked him if he had dreams, and he said that recently he had had three dreams. 
	162 	I do not like to analyse one dream alone, because a single 
dream can be interpreted arbitrarily. You can speculate anything about an isolated dream; but if you compare a series of, say, twenty or a hundred dreams, then you can see interesting things. You see the process that is going on in the unconscious from night to night, and the continuity of the unconscious psyche extending through day and night. Presumably we are dreaming all the time, although we are not aware of it by day 
4 "On the Practical Use of Dream Analysis" (C.W., vo!. 16). [Also "General Aspects of Dream Psychology" and "On the Nature of Dreams" (C.W., vo!. 8).] 
5 [The reference is to Wilhelm Wundt, of Leipzig (1832-1920).] 
78 

LECTURE III 
because consciousness is much too clear. But at night, when there is that abaissement du niveau mental) the dreams can break through and become visible. 
	163 	In the first dream the patient finds himself in a small village 
in Switzerland. He is a very solemn black figure in a long coat)· under his arm he carries several thick books. There is a group of young boys whom he recognizes as having been his classmates. They are looking at him and they say: "That fellow does not often make his appearance here." 
	164 	In order to understand this dream you have to remember 
that the patient is in a very fine position and has had a very good scientific education. But he started really from the bottom and is a self-made man. His parents were very poor peasants, and he worked his way up to his present position. He is very ambitious and is filled with the hope that he will rise still higher. He is like a man who has climbed in one day from sea-level to a level of 6,000 feet, and there he sees peaks 12,000 feet high towering above him. He finds himself in the place from which one climbs these higher mountains, and because of this he forgets all about the fact that he has already climbed 6,000 feet and immediately he starts to attack the higher peaks. But as a matter of fact though he does not realize it he is tired from his climbing and quite incapable of going any further at this time. This lack of realization is the reason for his symptoms of mountain sickness. The dream brings home to him the actual psychological situation. The contrast of himself as the solemn figure in the long black coat with thick books under his arm appearing in his native village, and of the village boys remarking that he does not often appear there, means that he does not often remember where he came from. On the contrary he thinks of his future career and hopes to get a chair as professor. Therefore the dream puts him back into his early surroundings. He ought to realize how much he has achieved considering who he was originally and that there are natural limitations to human effort. 
	165 	The beginning of the second dream is a typical instance of 
the kind of dream that occurs when the conscious attitude is like his. He knows that he ought to go to an important conference) and he is taking his portfolio. But he notices that the hour is rather advanced and that the train will leave soon) and so he gets into that well-known state of haste and of fear of being too 
79 

1. THE TA VISTOCK LECTURES 
LECTURE III 
A 

B 
the catastroPhe coming, the train goes off the rails, and he shouts, and then he wakes up with the fear characteristic of nightmare. 
	167 	Whenever one has this kind of dream of being late, of a hun- 
dred obstacles interfering, it is exactly the same as when one is in such a situation in reality, when one is nervous about something. One is nervous because there is an unconscious resistance to the conscious intention. The most irritating thing is that consciously you want something very much, and an unseen devil is always working against it, and of course you are that devil too. You are working against this devil and do it in a nervous way and with nervous haste. In the case of this dreamer, that rushing ahead is also against his will. He does not want to leave home, yet he wants it very much, and all the resistance and difficulties in his way are his own doing. He is that engine-driver who thinks, "Now we are out of our trouble; we have a straight line ahead, and now we can rush along like anything." The straight line beyond the curve would correspond to the peaks 12,000 feet high, and he thinks these peaks are accessible to him. 
	168 	Naturally, nobody seeing such a chance ahead would refrain 
from making the utmost use of it, so his reason says to him, "Why not go on, you have every chance in the world." He does not see why something in him should work against it. But this dream gives him a warning that he should not be as stupid as this engine-driver who goes full steam ahead when the tail-end of the train is not yet out of the curve. That is what we always forget; we always forget that our consciousness is only a surface, our consciousness is the avant-garde of our psychological existence. Our head is only one end, but behind our consciousness is a long historical "tail" of hesitations and weaknesses and complexes and prejudices and inheritances, and we always make our reckoning without them. We always think we can make a straight line in spite of our shortcomings, but they will weigh very heavily and often we derail before we have reached our goal because we have neglected our tail-ends. 
	169 	I always say that our psychology has a long saurian's tail be- 
hind it, namely the whole history of our family, of our nation, of Europe, and of the world in general. We are always human, and we should never forget that we carry the whole burden of being only human. If we were heads only we should be like little an- 
81 
late. He tries to get his clothes together) his hat is nowhere) his coat is mislaid) and he runs about in search of them and shouts up and down the house) "Where are my things?" Finally he gets everything together) and runs out of the house only to find that he has forgotten his portfolio. He rushes back for it) and looking at his watch finds how late it is getting)' then he runs to the station) but the road is quite soft so that it is like walking on a bog and his feet can hardly move any more. Pan tingly he arrives at the station only to see that the train is just leaving. His attention is called to the railway track) and it looks like this: 

FIG. 12. Dream of the Train 
	166 	He is at A) the tail-end of the train is already at B and the 
engine is at C. He watches the train) a long one, winding round the curve) and he thinks, "If only the engine-driver) when he reaches point D) has sufficient intelligence not to rush full steam ahead; for if he does) the long train behind him which will still be rounding the curve will be derailed." Now the engine-driver arrives at D and he opens the steam throttle fully) the engine begins to pull) and the train rushes ahead. The dreamer sees 
80 

1. THE TA VISTOCK LECTURES 
gels that have heads and wings, and of course they can do what they please because they are not hindered by a body that can walk only on the earth. I must not omit to point out, not necessarily to the patient but to myself, that this peculiar movement of the train is like a snake. Presently we shall see why. 
	170 	The next dream is the crucial dream, and I shall have to give 
certain explanations. In this dream we have to do with a peculiar animal which is half lizard and half crab. Before we go into the details of the dream, I want to make a few remarks about the method of working out the meaning of a dream. You know that there are many views and many misunderstandings as to the way in which you get at dreams. 
	171 	You know, for instance, what is understood by free associa- 
tion. This method is a very doubtful one as far as my experience goes. Free association means that you open yourself to any amount and kind of associations and they naturally lead to your complexes. But then, you see, I do not want to know the complexes of my patients. That is uninteresting to me. I want to know what the dreams have to say about complexes, not what the complexes are. I want to know what a man's unconscious is doing with his complexes, I want to know what he is preparing himself for. That is what I read out of the dreams. If I wanted to apply the method of free association I would not need dreams. I could put up a signboard, for instance "Footpath to So-and-So," and simply let people meditate on that and add free associations, and they would invariably arrive at their complexes. If you are riding in a Hungarian or Russian train and look at the strange signs in the strange language, you can associate all your complexes. You have only to let yourself go and you naturally drift into your complexes. 
	172 	I do not apply the method of free association because my goal 
is not to know the complexes; I want to know what the dream is. Therefore I handle the dream as if it were a text which I do not understand properly, say a Latin or a Greek or a Sanskrit text, where certain words are unknown to me or the text is fragmentary, and I merely apply the ordinary method any philologist would apply in reading such a text. My idea is that the dream does not conceal; we simply do not understand its language. For instance, if I quote to you a Latin or a Greek passage some of you will not understand it, but that is not because the text dis- 
82 

LECTURE 111 
simulates or conceals; it is because you do not know Greek or Latin. Likewise, when a patient seems confused, it does not necessarily mean that he is confused, but that the doctor does not understand his material. The assumption that the dream wants to conceal is a mere anthropomorphic idea. No philologist would ever think that a difficult Sanskrit or cuneiform inscription conceals. There is a very wise word of the Talmud which says that the dream is its own interpretation. The dream is the whole thing, and if you think there is something behind it, or that the dream has concealed something, there is no question but that you simply do not understand it. 
	173 	Therefore, first of all, when you handle a dream you say, "I 
do not understand a word of that dream." I always welcome that feeling of incompetence because then I know I shall put some good work into my attempt to understand the dream. What I do is this. I adopt the method of the philologist, which is far from being free association, and apply a logical principle which is called amplification. It is simply that of seeking the parallels. For instance, in the case of a very rare word which you have never come across before, you try to find parallel text passages, parallel applications perhaps, where that word also occurs, and then you try to put the formula you have established from the knowledge of other texts into the new text. If you make the new text a readable whole, you say, "Now we can read it." That is how we learned to read hieroglyphics and cuneiform inscriptions and that is how we can read dreams. 
	174 	Now, how do I find the context? Here I simply follow the 
principle of the association experiment. Let us assume a man dreams about a simple sort of peasant's house. Now, do I know what a simple peasant's house conveys to that man's mind? Of course not; how could I? Do I know what a simple peasant's house means to him in general? Of course not. So I simply ask, "How does that thing appear to you?"-in other words, what is your context, what is the mental tissue in which that term "simple peasant's house" is embedded? He will tell you something quite astonishing. For instance, somebody says "water." Do I know what he means by "water"? Not at all. When I put that test word or a similar word to somebody, he will say "green." Another one will say "H20," which is something quite different. Another one will say "quicksilver," or "suicide." In each 
83 

I. THE TA VISTOCK LECTURES 
case I know what tissue that word or image is embedded in. That is amPlification. It is a well-known logical procedure which we apply here and which formulates exactly the technique of finding the context. 
	liS 	Of course, I ought to mention here the merit of Freud, who 
brought up the whole question of dreams and who has enabled us to approach the problem of dreams at all. You know his idea is that a dream is a distorted representation of a secret incompatible wish which does not agree with the conscious attitude and therefore is censored, that is, distorted, in order to become unrecognizable to the conscious and yet in a way to show itself and live. Freud logically says then: Let us redress that whole distortion; now be natural, give up your distorted tendencies and let your associations flow freely, then we will come to your natural facts, namely, your complexes. This is an entirely different point of view from mine. Freud is seeking the complexes, I am not. That is just the difference. I am looking for what the unconscious is doing with the complexes, because that interests me very much more than the fact that people have complexes. We all have complexes; it is a highly banal and uninteresting fact. Even the incest complex which you can find anywhere if you look for it is terribly banal and therefore uninteresting. It is only interesting to know what people do with their complexes; that is the practical question which matters. Freud applies the method of free association and makes use of an entirely different logical principle, a principle which in logic is called reductio in primam figuram, reduction to the first figure. The reductio in primam figuram is a so-called syllogism, a complicated sequence of logical cond usions, whose characteristic is that you start from a perfectly reasonable statement, and, through surreptitious assumptions and insinuations, you gradually change the reasonable nature of your first simple or prime figure until you reach a complete distortion which is utterly unreasonable. That complete distortion, in Freud's idea, characterizes the dream; the dream is a clever distortion that disguises the original figure, and you have only to undo the web in order to return to the first reasonable statement, which may be "I wish to commit this or that; I have such and such an incompatible wish." We start, for instance, with a perfectly reasonable assumption, such as "No unreasonable being is free"-in other words, has free will. This 
84 

LECTURE III 
is an example which is used in logic. It is a fairly reasonable statement. Now we come to the first fallacy, "Therefore, no free being is unreasonable." You cannot quite agree because there is already a trick. Then you cOiltinue, "All human beings are free" -they all have free will. Now you triumphantly finish up, "Therefore no human being is unreasonable." That is complete nonsense. 
	Ii6 	Let us assume that the dream is such an utterly nonsensical 
statement. This is perfectly plausible because obviously the dream is something like a nonsensical statement; otherwise you could understand it. As a rule you cannot understand it; you hardly ever come across dreams which are clear from beginning to end. The ordinary dream seems absolute nonsense and therefore one depreciates it. Even primitives, who make a great fuss about dreams, say that ordinary dreams mean nothing. But there are "big" dreams; medicine men and chiefs have big dreams, but ordinary men have no dreams. They talk exactly like people in Europe. Now you are confronted with that dream-nonsense, and you say, "This nonsense must be an insinuating distortion or fallacy which derives from an originally reasonable statement." You undo the whole thing and you apply the reductio in primam figuram and then you come to the initial undisturbed statement. So you see that the procedure of Freud's dream-interpretation is perfectly logical, if you assume that the statement of the dream is really nonsensical. 
	lii 	But do not forget when you make the statement that a thing 
is unreasonable that perhaps you do not understand because you are not God; on the contrary, you are a fallible human being with a very limited mind. \Vhen an insane patient tells me something, I may think: "What that fellow is talking about is all nonsense." As a matter of fact, if I am scientific, I say "I do not understand," but if I am unscientific, I say "That fellow is just crazy and I am intelligent." This argumentation is the reason why men with somewhat unbalanced minds often like to become alienists. It is humanly understandable because it gives you a tremendous satisfaction, when you are not quite sure of yourself, to be able to say "Oh, the others are much worse." 
	li8 	But the question remains: Can we safely say that a dream is 
nonsense? Are we quite sure that we know? Are we sure that the dream is a distortion? Are you absolutely certain when you dis85 

1. THE TAVISTOCK LECTURES 
cover something quite against your expectation that it is a mere distortion? Nature commits no errors. Right and wrong are human categories. The natural process is just what it is and nothing else-it is not nonsense and it is not unreasonable. We do not understand: that is the fact. Since I am not God and since I am a man of very limited intellectual capacities, I had better assume that I do not understand dreams. With that assumption I reject the prejudiced'view that the dream is a distortion, and I say that if I do not understand a dream, it is my mind which is distorted, I am not taking the right view of it. 
	179 	So I adopted the method which philologists apply to difficult 
texts, and I handle dreams in the same way. It is, of course, a bit more circumstantial and more difficult; but I can assure you that the results are far more interesting when you arrive at things that are human than when you apply a most dreadful monotonous interpretation. I hate to be bored. Above all we should avoid speculations and theories when we have to deal with such mysterious processes as dreams. We should never forget that for thousands of years very intelligent men of great knowledge and vast experience held very different views about them. It is only quite recently that we invented the theory that a dream is nothing. All other civilizations have had very different ideas about dreams. 
	180 	Now I will tell you the big dream of my patient: "I am in 
the country, in a simple peasant's house, with an elderly, motherly peasant woman. I talk to her about a great journey I am planning: I am going to walk from Switzerland to Leipzig. She is enormously impressed, at which I am very pleased. At this moment I look through the window at a meadow where there are peasants gathering hay. Then the scene changes. In the background appears a monstrously big crab-lizard. It moves first to the left and then to the right so that I find myself standing in the angle between them as if in an open pair of scissors. Then I have a little rod or a wand in my hand) and I lightly touch the monster's head with the rod and kill it. Then for a long time I stand there contemplating that monster." 
	181 	Before I go into such a dream I always try to establish a se- 
quence, because this dream has a history before and will have a history afterwards. It is part of the psychic tissue that is continuous, for we have no reason to assume that there is no continuity 
86 

in the psychological processes, just as we have no reason to think that there is any gap in the processes of nature. Nature is a continuum, and so our psyche is very probably a continuum. This dream is just one flash or one observation of psychic continuity that became visible for a moment. As a continuity it is connected with the preceding dreams. In the previous dream we have already seen that peculiar snake-like movement of the train. This comparison is merely a hypothesis, but I have to establish such connections. 
	182 	After the train-dream the dreamer is back in the surround- 
ings of his early childhood; he is with a motherly peasant woman -a slight allusion to the mother, as you notice. In the very first dream, he impresses the village boys by his magnificent appearance in the long coat of the Herr Professor. In this present dream too he impresses the harmless woman with his greatness and the greatness of his ambitious plan to walk to Leipzig-an allusion to his hope of getting a chair there. The monster crablizard is outside our empirical experience; it is obviously a creation of the unconscious. So much we can see without any particular effort. 
	183 	Now we come to the actual context. I ask him, "What are 
your associations to 'simple peasant's house'?" and to my enormous astonishment he says, "It is the lazar-house of St. Jacob near Base!." This house was a very old leprosery, and the building still exists. The place is also famous for a big battle fought there in 1444 by the Swiss against the troops of the Duke of Burgundy. His army tried to break into Switzerland but was beaten back by the avant-garde of the Swiss army, a body of 1,300 men who fought the Burgundian army consisting of 30,000 men at the lazar-house of St. ] acob. The 1,3°0 Swiss fell to the very last man, but by their sacrifice they stopped the further advance of the enemy. The heroic death of these 1,300 men is a notable incident in Swiss history, and no Swiss is able to talk of it without patriotic feeling. 
	184 	Whenever the dreamer brings such a piece of information, 
you have to put it into the context of the dream. In this case it means that the dreamer is in a leprosery. The lazar-house is called "Siechenhaus," sick-house, in German, the "sick" meaning the lepers. So he has, as it were, a revolting contagious disease; he is an outcast from human society, he is in the sick-house. 
87 

1. THE TA VISTOCK LECTURES 
And that sick-house is characterized, moreover, by that desperate fight which was a catastrophe for the 1,300 men and which was brought about by the fact that they did not obey orders. The avant-garde had strict instructions not to attack but to wait until the whole of the Swiss army had joined up with them. But as soon as they saw the enemy they could not hold back and, against the commands of their leaders, made a headlong rush and attacked, and of course they were all killed. Here again we come to the idea of this rushing ahead without establishing a connection with the bulk of the tail-end, and again the action is fatal. This gave me a rather uncanny feeling, and I thought, "Now what is the fellow after, what danger is he coming to?" The danger is not just his ambition, or that he wishes to be with the mother and commit incest, or something of the kind. You remember, the engine-driver is a foolish fellow too; he runs ahead in spite of the fact that the tail-end of the train is not yet out of the curve; he does not wait for it, but rushes along without thinking of the whole. That means that the dreamer has the tendency to rush ahead, not thinking of his tail; he behaves as if he were his head only, just as the avant-garde behaved as if it were the whole army, forgetting that it had to wait; and because it did not wait, every man was killed. This attitude of the patient is the reason for his symptoms of mountain sickness. He went too high, he is not prepared for the altitude, he forgets where he started from. 
	185 	You know perhaps the novel by Paul Bourget, L'Etape. Its 
motif is the problem that a man's low origin always clings to him, and therefore there are very definite limitations to his climbing the social ladder. That is what the dream tries to remind the patient of. That house and that elderly peasant woman bring him back to his childhood. It looks, then, as if the woman might refer to the mother. But one must be careful with assumptions. His answer to my question about the woman was "That is my landlady." His landlady is an elderly widow, uneducated and old-fashioned, living naturally in a milieu inferior to his. He is too high up, and he forgets that the next part of his invisible self is the family in himself. Because he is a very intellectual man, feeling is his inferior function. His feeling is not at all differentIated, and therefore it is still in the form of the land- 
88 

186 
187 
188 

LECTUK.t. 111 
lady, and in trying to impose upon that landlady he tries to impose upon himself with his enormous plan to walk to Leipzig. 
Now what does he say about the trip to Leipzig? He says, "Oh, that is my ambition. I want to go far, I wish to get a Chair." Here is the headlong rush, here is the foolish attempt, here is the mountain sickness; he wants to climb too high. This dream was before the war, and at that time to be a professor in Leipzig was something marvellous. His feeling was deeply repressed; therefore it does not have right values and is much too na'ive. It is still the peasant woman; it is still identical with his own mother. There are many capable and intelligent men who have no differentiation of feeling, and therefore their feeling is still contaminated with the mother, is still in the mother, identical with the mother, and they have mothers' feelings; they have wonderful feelings for babies, for the interiors of houses and nice rooms and for a very orderly home. It sometimes happens that these individuals, when they have turned forty, discover a masculine feeling and then there is trouble. 
The feelings of a man are so to speak a woman's and appear as such in dreams. I designate this figure by the term animal because she is the personification of the inferior functions which relate a man to the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious as a whole presents itself to a man in feminine form. To a woman it appears in masculine form, and then I call it the animus. I chose the term anima because it has always been used for that very same psychological fact. The anima as a personification of the collective unconscious occurs in dreams over and over again.6 I have made long statistics about the anima figure in dreams. In this way one establishes these figures empirically. 
When I ask my dreamer what he means when he says that the peasant woman is impressed by his plan, he answers, "Oh, well, that refers to my boasting. I like to boast before an inferior person to show who I am; when I am talking to uneducated people I like to put myself very much in the foreground. Unfortunately I have always to live in an inferior milieu." When a man resents the inferiority of his milieu and feels that he is too good for his surroundings, it is because the inferiority of the milieu in himself is projected into the outer milieu and therefore he begins to 6 Psychological Types, De£. 48. See also Two Essays, pars. 2g6ff. [Also Aion (C.W ~ vo!. g. ii). ch. 3.] 
89 

1. THE TA VISTOCK LECTURES 
mind those things which he should mind in himself. When he says, "I mind my inferior milieu," he ought to say, "I mind the fact that my own inner milieu is below the mark." He has no right values, he is inferior in his feeling-life. That is his problem. 
	189 	At this moment he looks out of the window and sees the 
peasants gathering hay. That, of course, again is a vision of something he has done in the past. It brings back to him memories of similar pictures and situations; it was in summer and it was pretty hard work to get up early in the morning to turn the hay during the day and gather it in the evening. Of course, it is the simple honest work of such folk. He forgets that only the decent simple work gets him somewhere and not a big mouth. He also asserts, which I must mention, that in his present home he has a picture on the wall of peasants gathering hay, and he says, "Oh, that is the origin of the picture in my dream." It is as though he said, "The dream is nothing but a picture on the wall, it has no importance, I will pay no attention to it." At that moment the scene changes. When the scene changes you can always safely conclude that a representation of an unconscious thought has come to a climax, and it becomes impossible to continue that motif. 
	190 	Now in the next part of the dream things are getting dark; 
the crab-lizard appears, apparently an enormous thing. I asked, "What about the crab, how on earth do you come to that?" He said, "That is a mythological monster which walks backwards. The crab walks backwards. I do not understand how I get to this thing-probably through some fairytale or something of that sort." \Vhat he had mentioned before were all things which you could meet with in real life, things which do actually exist. But the crab is not a personal experience, it is an archetype. When an analyst has to deal with an archetype he may begin to think. In dealing with the personal unconscious you are not allowed to think too much and to add anything to the associations of the patient. Can you add something to the personality of somebody else? You are a personality yourself. The other individual has a life of his own and a mind of his own inasmuch as he is a person. But inasmuch as he is not a person, inasmuch as he is also myself, he has the same basic structure of mind, and there I can begin to think, I can associate for him. I can even provide him with the 
90 

LECTURE HI 
necessary context because he will have none, he does not know where that crab-lizard comes from and has no idea what it means, but I know and can provide the material for him. 
	191 	I point out to him that the hero motif appears throughout 
the dreams. He has a hero fantasy about himself which comes to the surface in the last dream. He is the hero as the great man with the long coat and with the great plan; he is the hero who dies on the field of honour at St. Jacob; he is going to show the world who he is; and he is quite obviously the hero who overcomes the monster. The hero motif is invariably accompanied by the dragon motif; the dragon and the hero who fights him are two figures of the same myth. 
	192 	The dragon appears -in his dream as the crab-lizard. This 
statement does not, of course, explain what the dragon represents as an image of his psychological situation. So the next associations are directed round the monster. When it moves first to the left and then to the right the dreamer has the feeling that he is standing in an angle which could shut on him like open scissors. That would be fatal. He has read Freud, and accordingly he interprets the situation as an incest wish, the monster being the mother, the angle of the open scissors the legs of the mother, and he himself, standing in between, being just born or just going back into the mother. 
	193 	Strangely enough, in mythology, the dragon is the mother. 
You meet that motif all over the world, and the monster is called the mother dragon.7 The mother dragon eats the child again, she sucks him in after having given birth to him. The "terrible mother," as she is also called, is waiting with wide-open mouth on the Western Seas, and when a man approaches that mouth it closes on him and he is finished. That monstrous figure is the mother sarcophaga, the flesh-eater; it is, in another form, Matuta, the mother of the dead. It is the goddess of death. 
	194 	But these parallels still do not explain why the dream chooses 
the particular image of the crab. I hold-and when I say I hold I have certain reasons for saying so-that representations of psychic facts in images like the snake or the lizard or the crab or the mastodon or analogous animals also represent organic facts. For instance, the serpent very often represents the cerebro-spinal 
7 [E.g., Symbols of Transformation, Part H, ch. V, especially par. 395.1 91 

I. THE TAVISTOCK LECTURES 
system, especially the lower centres of the brain, and particularly the medulla oblongata and spinal cord. The crab, on the other hand, having a sympathetic system only, represents chiefly the sympathicus and para-sympathicus of the abdomen; it is an abdominal thing. So if you translate the text of the dream it would read: if you go on like this your cerebro-spinal system and your sympathetic system will come up against you and snap you up. That is in fact what is happening. The symptoms of his neurosis express the rebellion of the sympathetic functions and of the cerebro-spinal system against his conscious attitude. 
	195 	The crab-lizard brings up the archetypal idea of the hero and 
the dragon as deadly enemies. But in certain myths you find the interesting fact that the hero is not connected with the dragon only by his fight. There are, on the contrary, indications that the hero is himself the dragon. In Scandinavian mythology the hero is recognized by the fact that he has snake's eyes. He has snake's eyes because he is a snake. There are many other myths and legends which contain the same idea. Cecrops, the founder of Athens, was a man above and a serpent below. The souls of heroes often appear after death in the form of serpents. 
	196 	Now in our dream the monstrous crab-lizard moves first to 
the left, and I ask him about this left side. He says, "The crab apparently does not know the way. Left is the unfavourable side, left is sinister." Sinister does indeed mean left and unfavourable. But the right side is also not good for the monster, because when it goes to the right it is touched by the wand and is killed. Now we come to his standing in between the angle of the monster's movement, a situation which at first glance he interpreted as incest. He says, "As a matter of fact, I felt surrounded on either side like a hero who is going to fight a dragon." So he himself realizes the hero motif. 
	197 	But unlike the mythical hero he does not fight the dragon 
with a weapon, but with a wand. He says, "From its effect on the monster it seems that it is a magical wand." He certainly does dispose of the crab in a magical way. The wand is another mythological symbol. It often contains a sexual allusion, and sexual magic is a means of protection against danger. You may remember, too, how during the earthquake at Messina8 nature pro- 
8 [The reference is to the disaster of 1908, when 90 per cent of the Sicilian city was destroyed, with a loss of 60,000 lives.] 
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LECTURE III 
duced certain instinctive reactions against the overwhelming destruction. 
	198 	The wand is an instrument, and instruments in dreams 
mean what they actually are, the devices of man to concretize his will. For instance, a knife is my will to cut; when I use a spear I prolong my arm, with a rifle I can project my action and my influence to a great distance; with a telescope I do the same as regards my sight. An instrument is a mechanism which represents my will, my intelligence, my capability, and my cunning. Instruments in dreams symbolize an analogous psychological mechanism. Now this dreamer's instrument is a magic wand. He uses a marvellous thing by which he can spirit away the monster, that is, his lower nervous system. He can dispose of such nonsense in no time, and with no effort at all. 
	199 	What does this actually mean? It means that he simply thinks 
that the danger does not exist. That is what is usually done. You simply think that a thing is not and then it is no more. That is how people behave who consist of the head only. They use their intellect in order to think things away; they reason them away. They say, "This is nonsense, therefore it cannot be and therefore it is not." That is what he also does. He simply reasons the monster away. He says, "There is no such thing as a crab-lizard, there is no such thing as an opposing will; I get rid of it, I simply think it away. I think it is the mother with whom I want to commit incest, and that settles the whole thing, for I shall not do it." I said, "You have killed the animal-what do you think is the reason why you contemplate the animal for such a long time?" He said, "Oh, well, yes, naturally it is marvellous how you can dispose of such a creature with such ease." I said, "Yes, indeed it is very marvellous!" 
	200 	Then I told him what I thought of the situation. I said, 
"Look here, the best way to deal with a dream is to think of yourself as a sort of ignorant child or ignorant youth, and to come to a two-million-year-old man or to the old mother of days and ask, 'N ow, what do you think of me?' She would say to you, 'You have an ambitious plan, and that is foolish, because you run up against your own instincts. Your own restricted capabilities block the way. You want to abolish the obstacle by the magic of your thinking. You believe you can think it away by the artifices of your intellect, but it will be, believe me, matter for some 
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I. THE TA VISTOCK LECTURES 
afterthought.' " And I also told him this: "Your dreams contain a warning. You behave exactly like the engine-driver or like the Swiss who were foolhardy enough to run up against the enemy without any support behind them, and if you behave in the same way you will meet with a catastrophe." 
	201 	He was sure that such a point of view was much too serious. 
He was convinced that it is much more probable that dreams come from incompatible wishes and that he really had an unrealized incestuous wish which was at the bottom of this dream; that he was conscious now of this incestuous wish and had got rid of it and now could go to Leipzig. I said, "Well then, bon voyage." He did not return, he went on with his plans, and it took him just about three months to lose his position and go to the dogs. That was the end of him. He ran up against the fatal danger of that crab-lizard and would not understand the warning. But I do not want to make you too pessimistic. Sometimes there are people who really understand their dreams and draw conclusions which lead to a more favourable solution of their problems. 
Discussion 
Dr. Charles Brunton: 
	202 	I do not know whether it is fair to ask about the dreams of 
someone who is not here, but I have a small daughter five and a half years old who has recently had two dreams which awakened her at night. The first dream occurred in the middle of August, and she told me this: "I see a wheel, and it is rolling down a road and it burns me." That was all I could get out of her. I wanted her to draw a picture of it the next day, but she did not want to be bothered, so I left it. The other dream was about a week ago, and this time it was "a beetle that was pinching me." That was all I could get about it. I do not know whether you would like to comment on them. The only thing I would like to add is that she knows the difference between a beetle and a crab. She is very fond of animals. 
Professor lung: 
	203 	You have to consider that it is very difficult and not quite 
fair to comment on dreams of someone one does not know; but I will tell you as much as one can see from the symbolism. The 
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LECTURE III (DISCUSSION) 
beetle would, according to my idea, have to do with the sympathetic system. Therefore I should conclude from that dream that there are certain peculiar psychological processes going on in the child, which touch upon her sympathetic system, and this might arouse some intestinal or other abdominal disorder. The most cautious statement one could make would be to say that there is a certain accumulation of energy in the sympathetic system which causes slight disturbances. This is also borne out by the symbol of the fiery wheel. The wheel in her dream seems to be a sun-symbol, and in Tantric philosophy fire corresponds to the socalled manipum chakm) which is localized in the abdomen. In the prodromal symptoms of epilepsy you sometimes find the idea of a wheel revolving inside. This too expresses a manifestation of a sympathetic nature. The image of the revolving wheel reminds us of the wheel upon which Ixion was crucified. The dream of the little girl is an archetypal dream, one of those strange archetypal dreams children occasionally have. 
	2°4 	I explain these archetypal dreams of children by the fact that 
when consciousness begins to dawn, when the child begins to feel that he is) he is still close to the original psychological world from which he has just emerged: a condition of deep unconsciousness. Therefore you find with many children an awareness of the contents of the collective unconscious, a fact which in some Eastern beliefs is interpreted as reminiscence of a former existence. Tibetan philosophy, for instance, speaks of the "Bardo" existence and of the condition of the mind between death and birth.9 The idea of former existence is a projection of the psychological condition of early childhood. Very young chil· dren still have an awareness of mythological contents, and if these contents remain conscious too long, the individual is threatened by an incapacity for adaptation; he is haunted by a constant yearning to remain with or to return to the original vision. There are very beautiful descriptions of these experiences by mystics and poets. 
	2°5 	Usually at the age of four to six the veil of forgetfulness is 
drawn upon these experiences. However, I have seen cases of ethereal children, so to speak, who had an extraordinary awareness of these psychic facts and were living their life in archetypal 
9 Cf. W. Y. Evans-Wentz. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. 
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1. THE TA VISTOCK LECTURES 
dreams and could not adapt. Recently I saw a case of a little girl of ten who had some most amazing mythological dreams.lo Her father consulted me about these dreams. I could not tell him what I thought because they contained an uncanny prognosis. The little girl died a year later of an infectious disease. She had never been born entirely. 
Dr. Leonard F. Browne: 
	206 	I should like to ask Professor Jung a question with regard to 
the interpretation of the dreams he told us today. In view of the fact that the patient was unable to accept the interpretation, I should like to know whether that difficulty could have been overcome by some variation in the technique. 
Professor lung: 
	207 	If I had had the intention of being a missionary, or a saviour, 
I should have used a clever trick. I should have said to the patient, "Yes, that is the mother complex all right," and we would have gone on talking that kind of jargon for several months and perhaps in the end I would have swung him round. But I know from experience that such a thing is not good; you should not cheat people even for their good. I do not want to cheat people out of their mistaken faith. Perhaps it was better for that man to go to the dogs than to be saved by wrong means. I never hinder people. When somebody says, "I am going to commit suicide if-," I say, "If that is your intention, I have no objection." 
Dr. Browne: 
	208 	Did you have any evidence that the symptoms of mountain 
sickness were cured? 
Professor lung: 
	20g 	The patient lost his neurosis in going down in life. That 
man did not belong at a height of 6,000 feet; he belonged lower down. He became inferior instead of being neurotic. Once I talked to the head of a great institution in America for the education of criminal children, and was told about a very interesting experience. They have two categories of children. The majority of them, when they come to the institution, feel ever so much better, they develop very nicely and normally and they 
10 [Cf. infra, pars. 525ff. The case is also discussed in Jacobi, ComPlex/ Archetype/Symbol, pp. 139ff.] 
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210 
211 
212 

LECTURE III (DISCUSSION) 
eventually grow out of whatever their original evil was. The other category, the minority, become hysterical when they try to be nice and normal. Those are the born criminals whom you cannot change. They are normal when they do wrong. We also do not feel quite right when we are behaving perfectly, we feel much better when we are doing a bit of wrong. That is because we are not perfect. The Hindus, when they build a temple, leave one corner unfinished; only the gods make something perfect, man never can. It is much better to know that one is not perfect, then one feels much better. So it is with these children, and so it is with our patients. It is wrong to cheat people out of their fate and to help them to go beyond their level. If a man has it in him to be adapted, help him by all means; but if it is really his task not to be adapted, help him by all means not to be adapted, because then he is all right. 
What would the world be like if all people were adapted? It would be boring beyond endurance. There must be some people who behave in the wrong way; they act as scapegoats and objects of interest for the normal ones. Think how grateful you are for detective novels and newspapers, so that you can say, "Thank heaven I am not that fellow who has committed the crime, I am a perfectly innocent creature." You feel satisfaction because the evil people have done it for you. This is the deeper meaning of the fact that Christ as the redeemer was crucified between two thieves. These thieves in their way were also redeemers of mankind, they were the scapegoats. 
Question: 
I would like to ask a question about the psychological functions, if that is not going too far back. In answering a question last night you said that there was no criterion for considering either of the four functions as being superior in itself and you further said that all the four functions would have to be equally differentiated in order to obtain full and adequate knowledge of the world. Do you mean, therefore, that it is possible in any given case for all the four functions to be equally differentiated or to be arrived at by education? 
Professor lung: 
I do not believe that it is humanly possible to differentiate all four functions alike, otherwise we would be perfect like God, 
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1. THE TA VISTOCK LECTURES 
and that surely will not happen. There will always be a flaw in the crystal. We can never reach perfection. Moreover, if we could differentiate the four functions equally we should only make them into consciously disposable functions. Then we would lose the most precious connection with the unconscious through the inferior function, which is invariably the weakest; only through our feebleness and incapacity are we linked up with the unconscious, with the lower world of the instincts and with our fellow beings. Our virtues only enable us to be independent. There we do not need anybody, there we are kings; but in our inferiority we are linked up with mankind as well as with the world of our instincts. It would not even be an advantage to have all the functions perfect, because such a condition would amount to complete aloofness. I have no perfection craze. My principle is: for heaven's sake do not be perfect, but by all means try to be complete-whatever that means. 
Question: 
	213 	May I ask what it means to be complete? Will you enlarge 
upon that? Professor lung: 
	214 	I must leave something to your own mental efforts. It is 
surely a most amusing enterprise, for instance, to think on your way home what it possibly means to be complete. We should not deprive people of the pleasure of discovering something. To be complete is a very great problem, and to talk of it is amusing, but to be it is the main thing. 
Question: 
	215 	How do you fit mysticism into your scheme? 
Professor lung: 
	216 	Into what scheme? 
RePly: 
	217 	The scheme of psychology and the psyche. 
Professor lung: 
	218 	Of course you should define what you mean by mysticism. 
Let us assume that you mean people who have mystical experience. Mystics are people who have a particularly vivid experience of the processes of the collective unconscious. Mystical experience is experience of archetypes. 
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LECTURE III (DISCUSSION) 
Question: 
	219 	Is there any difference between archetypal forms and mysti- 
cal forms? 
Professor lung: 
	220 	I make no distinction between them. If you study the phe- 
nomenology of mystical experience you will come across some very interesting things. For instance, you all know that our Christian heaven is a masculine heaven and that the feminine element is only tolerated. The Mother of God is not divine, she is only the arch-saint. She intercedes for us at the throne of God but she is not part of the Deity. She does not belong to the Trinity. 
	221 	Now some Christian mystics have a different experience. For 
instance we have a Swiss mystic, Niklaus von der Fliie.11 He experienced a God and a Goddess. Then there was a mystic of the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Digulleville, who wrote the Pelerinage de l'ame de Jesus Christ,12 Like Dante, he had a vision of the highest paradise as "le ciel d'or," and there upon a throne one thousand times more bright than the sun sat le Roi, who is God himself, and beside him on a crystal throne of brownish hue, la Reine, presumably the Earth. This is a vision outside the Trinity idea, a mystical experience of an archetypal nature which includes the feminine principle. The Trinity is a dogmatic image based on an archetype of an exclusively masculine nature. In the Early Church the Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as feminine was declared a heresy. 
	222 	Dogmatic images, such as the Trinity, are archetypes which 
have become abstract ideas. But there are a number of mystical experiences inside the Church whose archetypal character is still visible. Therefore they sometimes contain a heretical or pagan element. Remember, for instance, St. Francis of Assisi. Only through the gTeat diplomatic ability of Pope Boniface VIII could St. Francis be assimilated into the Church. Vou have only to think of his relation to animals to understand the difficulty. Animals, like the whole of Nature, were taboo to the Church. Yet there are sacred animals like the Lamb, the Dove, and, in the Early Church, the Fish, which are worshipped. 
11 ["Brother Klaus" (C.W., voI. 11).] 
12 [Psychology and Alchemy (C.W., voI. 12), pars. 3ISff.] 
99