CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

HAUER'S ENGLISH LECTURE
then she came to me and almost succeeded in blasting me, because I had
to explain to her that I could not understand her dreams at all, two
thirds of them were absolutely dark to me on account of the peculiar
Eastern psychology. She kept on working bravely, and I did the same,
despite the fact that I could not understand—and here and there we got
a little flash of something. She developed an entirely new set of symptoms,
21 beginning with a dream which made a tremendous impression
on her: that out from her genital organs came a white elephant. I was
completely baffled, I had never heard of such nonsense—and yet she was
so impressed that she began to carve the elephant in ivory. Then organic
symptoms appeared: she had ulcers in the womb, and I had to send her
to a gynecologist. For months the thing would not heal; they tried everything
under the sun, and whenever she had a somewhat obstinate dream
things became worse. For at least five months her condition remained
like that, and then another set of symptoms began. She developed polyuria,
an impossible amount of fluid; she could hardly hold the urine. 22
Then the same amount of fluid also developed in the colon and intestines,
and caused such a rumbling that when I was outside the room and
left the door open I could hear it. It sounded like a little river pouring
down a staircase, and it lasted about ten minutes. With that there were
acute attacks of diarrhea—again floods of water with apparently no provocation;
it just happened. At the same time she really loved a man but
could not think of marrying him. And then the thought entered her
head that I, or circumstances, might persuade her to marry and have a
baby, but that was impossible. For a whole year she fought against this
idea, until she developed an entirely new symptom. She felt as if the skull
had become soft on top, as if the fontanelle was opening up—like a child
with an open skull—and that something like a bird was descending from
above with a long beak and going into her through the skull, meeting
something that was coming up from below. When that happened, the
whole thing cleared up, and she married and had babies. That was the
Fahrenheit or more. She also suffered from a compulsive argumentiveness and a fondness
for philosophical hairsplitting that was quite intolerable despite her high intelligence”
(§546).
21 In “The Realities of Modern Psychotherapy” Jung stated: “The first took the form of an
indefinable excitation in the perineal region” (§551).
22 In “The Realities of Modern Psychotherapy” Jung stated: “Psychologically, the symptom
meant that something had to be ‘ex-pressed.’ So I gave her the task of expressing by
drawings whatever her hand suggested to her. She had never drawn before, and set about
it with much doubt and hesitation. But now symmetrical flowers took shape under her
hand, vividly coloured and arranged in symbolic patterns. She made these pictures with
great care and with a concentration I can only call devout” (§553).
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