Lecture VII

Dr. Jung

We discussed the ape-man in the dream last week, and today we come to the next point, the boy. You remember that we have occasionally come across the boy in former dreams. ¹ Of course, that symbol does not always mean the same thing. Sometimes it is repeated in exactly the same sense as before, and sometimes not at all. It always depends upon the context in the dream itself and also upon the conscious attitude of the dreamer. The best technique, therefore, is to take every dream as an entirely new proposition, every situation as entirely new, as if we had never heard of the meaning of symbols before. I recommend that technique in this case. The dramatis personae so far are the dreamer himself, the driver who has become the ape-man, and several unknown people only hinted at, among them a boy, obviously not very conspicuous to begin with. Have you an idea concerning these people?

Mr. Schmitz

They are those minor forces—sort of cabiri. ² They were the employees in the former dream.

Dr. Jung

It would be the same, but in this case without the particular connotation of the employees. You see, an employee denotes a person who is in a certain dependent or cooperative position, but here they are mere presences, and it is not sure that they are in any cooperative relationship to the dreamer. They are just there, and we cannot even say whether they are hostile or friendly. That is, they represent subconscious figures that are not yet clear, not yet decided, but among them there is this recognizable figure, the boy. Naturally we must have the dreamer’s associations in such a case, because we cannot afford to assume that the boy is exactly what he was in former dreams. You remember, for instance, a dream in which he had decidedly divine qualities, like a Greek god, Eros, as the dreamer said. Here the boy obviously functions as a sort of medium, for the dreamer says that he gets into a trancelike state and then that great-grandmother appears. This is the first time we have had such a figure in a dream. Now, that in itself is a symbol, because it is not reality; he is not concerned with any boy that would be a medium in reality, and therefore it is a perfectly fantastic symbolical creation. How would you translate that in psychological language?

Mrs. Sigg

The boy is young, so he suggests a beginning, a new attitude.

Dr. Jung

But what else?

Mrs. Fierz

Perhaps the mind of all those other subconscious figures.

Dr. Jung

If the dreamer were a woman, we might say that he represented a new thought in her, because the mind in a woman is usually represented by a male figure, but since the dreamer is a man, it would be something else.

Mr. Schmitz

A message from the unconscious to the conscious.

Dr. Jung

Yes, but that is a very positive interpretation. You can also interpret it a bit more reductively.

Mrs. Sigg

A boy also appeared in that former dream when the dreamer was doing acrobatics in the trees, and he tried to beat the dreamer with a rod.

Mrs. Sawyer

The dreamer pulled the rod out of the boy’s mouth so that he was bleeding.

Dr. Jung

That is true, The boy was holding in his mouth the rod with which he had tried to beat the dreamer, and when the dreamer took it out of his mouth, he made the boy’s mouth bleed. Well, here we have, as often happens, two motifs that have also occurred together in a former dream, in this case, the ape-man and the boy. So we are at once confronted with the question of what connection there is between them, and that leads us to the reductive interpretation of the boy. What is the boy?

Mrs. Crowley

The opposite of the man, the compensation for the ape-man.

Dr. Jung

That is again a very positive idea of the boy, but we could have a negative idea of him just as well. We might say, for instance, that he was the childish aspect of the dreamer, the dreamer himself as a boy. You know real boys have very ape-like qualities, climbing where they should not climb and playing all sorts of monkey-tricks; boys are known for that, they often behave like monkeys. We have absolutely no reason for thinking little boys are angels. So men who still have the boy in them are by no means charming human beings, they can be beasts. You see, when he turns up in connection with the ape-man, we have to look at the other side; the boy is a very ambiguous symbol. I hope you remember the German book which I quoted when we were speaking about this motif, Das Reich ohne Raum (The Kingdom without Space), by Goetz. ³ That is about the negative side of the Puer Aeternus, the story of the boys with the leather caps who played the most amazing tricks on people, by no means nice. In the former dream, then, we have the ape-motif, climbing in the trees, and the boy, and here again this ape-man appears, and immediately after comes the boy. So we must pay attention to the connection.