ABSTRACT
Jung was a revolutionary and disruptive thinker - his doubts about Freudian theory drove his own work in psychoanalysis forward and led to a schism in the discipline. He had severe doubts about what Freud had to say about the sexual origin of the neuroses, and the role of repression in this process. He attacked the theory and then the man behind it. This was not the first time that doubt had driven Jung first to reject a doctrine and then the purveyors of that doctrine. He had a dream aged three which he kept secret for most of his life that profoundly affected him - it was a dream of a giant phallus sitting on a throne, like God in the sky, but this king was underground. This dream seemed to him to be a revelation. It revealed the nature of God and our existence. He then rejected the Christianity of his father, who was a pastor, and the Church itself. He made a manikin and hid it with a stone, burying the secret. Later, he came to interpret the carving of the manikin and this stone as primitive and archaic unconscious rituals passed on to him without deliberate instruction and without the benefit of experience. He had no doubts about his interpretation. This formed the basis of his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious with innate knowledge passed on through each generation unconsciously. Doubt, it seems, can arise from a dream - from the unconscious itself. This can change a person and make them a doubter, and then in turn they can transform our cultural understandings of life itself, fuelled by these doubts.
