Carl Jung : Myths and Dreams

Carl Jung

Symbols of Transformation

(1912)

II

TWO KINDS OF THINKING

"(...) If we go further back into history, we find what we call science dissolving in an indistinct mist. The culture-creating mind is ceaselessly employed in stripping experience of everything subjective, and in devising formulas to harness the forces of nature and express them in the best way possible. It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted presumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men of the past — our material knowledge has increased, but not our intelligence. This means that we are just as bigoted in regard to new ideas, and just as impervious to them, as people were in the darkest days of antiquity. We have become rich in knowledge, but poor in wisdom. The centre of gravity of our interest has switched over to the materialistic side, whereas the ancients preferred a mode of thought nearer to the fantastic type. To the classical mind everything was still saturated with mythology, even though classical philosophy and the beginnings of natural science undeniably prepared the way for the work of “enlightenment.”

Unfortunately, we get at school only a very feeble idea of the richness and tremendous vitality of Greek mythology. All the creative power that modern man pours into science and technics the man of antiquity devoted to his myths. This creative urge explains the bewildering confusion, the kaleidoscopic changes and syncretistic regroupings, the continual rejuvenation, of myths in Greek culture. We move in a world of fantasies which, untroubled by the outward course of things, well up from an inner source to produce an ever-changing succession of plastic or phantasmal forms. This activity of the early classical mind was in the highest degree artistic: the goal of its interest does not seem to have been how to understand the real world as objectively and accurately as possible, but how to adapt it aesthetically to subjective fantasies and expectations.

There was very little room among the ancients for that coldness and disillusionment which Giordano Bruno’s vision of infinite worlds and Kepler’s discoveries brought to mankind. The naïve man of antiquity saw the sun as the great Father of heaven and earth, and the moon as the fruitful Mother. Everything had its demon, was animated like a human being, or like his brothers the animals. Everything was conceived anthropomorphically or theriomorphically, in the likeness of man or beast. Even the sun’s disc was given wings or little feet to illustrate its motion. Thus there arose a picture of the universe which was completely removed from reality, but which corresponded exactly to man’s subjective fantasies. It needs no very elaborate proof to show that children think in much the same way. They too animate their dolls and toys, and with imaginative children it is easy to see that they inhabit a world of marvels.

We also know that the same kind of thinking is exhibited in dreams. The most heterogeneous things are brought together regardless of the actual conditions, and a world of impossibilities takes the place of reality. Freud finds that the hallmark of waking thought is progression: the advance of the thought stimulus from the systems of inner or outer perception through the endopsychic work of association to its motor end, i.e., innervation. In dreams he finds the reverse : regression of the thought stimulus from the pre-conscious or unconscious sphere to the perceptual system, which gives the dream its peculiar atmosphere of sensuous clarity, rising at times to almost hallucinatory vividness. Dream-thinking thus regresses back to the raw material of memory.

As Freud says: “In regression the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved into its raw material.” The reactivation of original perceptions is, however, only one side of regression. The other side is regression to infantile memories, and though this might equally well be called regression to the original perceptions, it nevertheless deserves special mention because it has an importance of its own. It might even be considered as an “historical” regression. In this sense the dream can, with Freud, be described as a modified memory—modified through being projected into the present. The original scene of the memory is unable to effect its own revival, so has to be content with returning as a dream.

In Freud’s view it is an essential characteristic of dreams to “elaborate” memories that mostly go back to early childhood, that is, to bring them nearer to the present and recast them in its language. But, in so far as infantile psychic life cannot deny its archaic character, the latter quality is the especial peculiarity of dreams. Freud expressly draws attention to this: Dreams, which fulfil their wishes along the short path of regression, have merely preserved for us in that respect a sample of the psychical apparatus’s primary method of working, a method which was abandoned as being inefficient. What once dominated waking life, while the mind was still young and incompetent, seems now to have been banished into the night — just as the primitive weapons, the bows and arrows, that have been abandoned by adult men, turn up once more in the nursery.

These considerations tempt us to draw a parallel between the mythological thinking of ancient man and the similar thinking found in children, primitives, and in dreams. This idea is not at all strange; we know it quite well from comparative anatomy and from evolution, which show that the structure and function of the human body are the result of a series of embryonic mutations corresponding to similar mutations in our racial history. The supposition that there may also be in psychology a correspondence between ontogenesis and phylogenesis therefore seems justified. If this is so, it would mean that infantile thinking and dreamthinking are simply a recapitulation of earlier evolutionary stages.

In this regard, Nietzsche takes up an attitude well worth noting:

"In sleep and in dreams we pass through the whole thought of earlier humanity.…

What I mean is this: as man now reasons in dreams, so humanity also reasoned for many thousands of years when awake; the first cause which occurred to the mind as an explanation of anything that required explanation was sufficient and passed for truth.…

This atavistic element in man’s nature still manifests itself in our dreams, for it is the foundation upon which the higher reason has developed and still develops in every individual. Dreams carry us back to remote conditions of human culture and give us a ready means of understanding them better. Dream thinking comes so easily to us now because this form of fantastic and facile explanation in terms of the first random idea has been drilled into us for immense periods of time. To that extent dreaming is a recreation for the brain, which by day has to satisfy the stern demands of thought imposed by a higher culture.… From this we can see how lately the more acute logical thinking, the strict discrimination of cause and effect, has been developed, since our rational and intellectual faculties still involuntarily hark back to those primitive forms of reasoning, and we pass about half our lives in this condition."

Freud, as we have seen, reached similar conclusions regarding the archaic nature of dream-thinking on the basis of dream-analysis. It is therefore not such a great step to the view that myths are dreamlike structures. Freud himself puts it as follows: “The study of constructions of folk-psychology such as these is far from being complete, but it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the [age-long] dreams of youthful humanity.” In the same way Rank regards myth as the collective dream of a whole people.

Riklin has drawn attention to the dream mechanism in fairytales, and Abraham has done the same for myths. He says: “The myth is a fragment of the superseded infantile psychic life of the race”; and again: “The myth is therefore a fragment preserved from the infantile psychic life of the race, and dreams are the myths of the individual.” The conclusion that the

myth-makers thought in much the same way as we still think in dreams is almost self-evident. The first attempts at myth-making can, of course, be observed in children, whose games of make-believe often contain historical echoes. But one must certainly put a large question-mark after the assertion that myths spring from the “infantile” psychic life of the race. They are on the contrary the most mature product of that young humanity. Just as those first fishy ancestors of man, with their gill-slits, were not embryos, but fully developed creatures, so the myth-making and myth-inhabiting man was a grown reality and not a four-year-old child. Myth is certainly not an infantile phantasm, but one of the most important requisites of primitive life."

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