CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

APPENDIX 3
is an impersonal thing, and it is extremely difficult for our Western mind
to grasp the impersonal in our mind as an objective happening.
I will give you an example. I was once treating a writer, a very clever
fellow. He was intelligent and very rational and explained everything to
the rule: everything had its natural cause, and everything was reasonable.
He had had a great deal of analysis with people of all the different
schools, and he used to explain his dreams according to the principles of
causal reduction. Of course, you can say of practically every figure or fact
or emotion that it comes from some definite experience, and hardly ever
do you come across something which has not been in your experience
before. Naturally one goes on as long as one can with this kind of thinking.
I thought that finally the dreams would bring up something that
could not be reduced, and after a long time of working together, he did
have dreams in which figures appeared that he could not trace. For instance,
he dreamed a great deal of women, as they played an important
role in his life. Formerly he was able to trace them in reminiscences, to
say, “She looks something like Mrs. So-and-So,” so we were able to stitch
the whole thing together. But then a woman appeared whom we could
not stitch together. He took the utmost pains to find the memory images,
and finally he had to give up; he found absolutely no association,
and he had to admit that he was unable to show a reasonable origin for
that figure. So I said, “Here we are at the end of your principle of causal
reduction. Now I propose something entirely different—that this thing
has not had its origin in your personal experience but is coming in all by
itself, just as if somebody were walking into this room whom we had not
invited, or as if she were stepping out of the wall—she walks, she talks—
she must be a ghost.” Naturally he had resistance against that proposition.
He said things could not come into his mind which had not been
there. He had that depreciation of the psychic world which is part of our
Western attitude. But he had to admit that something very definite had
come up in his mind which he had not invented and which caused him
great emotion in his dreams. That was the beginning of the recognition
of the objective autonomous factor and the beginning of the psychological
process. It was as if a real woman had come into his life—he did not
know why she existed, but he had to deal with her existence. I invented
the term anima in order to designate such figures, which, according to
our Western prejudice, should not be.
Now, this is the moment where the analogy with the Kundalini process
begins, when something stirs up and develops all by itself. If that process
is followed up on, one arrives at results which can be expressed in terms
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