Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

84 Chicken Little: The Inside Story
stepping-stones to the future.”
Brillig unwound himself and beckoned to Norman, who threw
his hat back. Brillig tipped it at D. “Your friend Kafka showed me
the way out of what threatened to become a small box. Remember?
‘Strange,’ he writes, as if in answer to Céline, ‘how make-believe,
if engaged in systematically enough, can change into reality.’ 88
He stopped speaking and wiped his brow with his sleeve. I took
the opportunity to offer him a cabbage roll. He thanked me and
wolfed down two.
“Gentlemen, Ms. Rachel,” he said gravely, “I swear to you, there
is not one word of what I have just said that I really believe. That
is, I do believe it, perhaps, but at the same time I feel and suspect
that I am lying like a cobbler.” 89
I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing.
Brillig smiled at me.
“You get the point,” he said. “The only trouble with philosophy
is philosophers. As Jung said about improving education: it is first
necessary to educate the educators.” 90
He paused, looking into space.
“I think it was not until my fourth year of analysis,” he said,
“that I realized there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the
struggle to express an inner vision of a reality greater than the individual
self, a reality that transcends the mundane. And I still believe
that the struggle to understand and assimilate the essential
nature of man is more important in the long run than, for instance,
making money—but it’s not real, it’s creative make-believe.
“And that, dear friends, has become the governing principle of
my life.”
He stood up and stretched his little legs. Then he got down on all
88 The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923, p. 210.
89 This extraordinary admission is almost exactly the same as Dostoyevsky’s wry
comment in Notes from Underground (p. 36). I believe it to be an example of
cryptomnesia, or “hidden memory,” whereby something once known but long
forgotten comes to mind, but without the original source (so that it seems to be
one’s own). See Jung, “The Psychology of So-Called Occult Phenomena,” Psychiatric
Studies, CW 1, pars. 138-148.
90 See, for instance, “Analytical Psychology and Education,” The Development of
Personality, CW 17.