a stone lingam – representing cosmic energy and the union of male and female principles

The nightmares that Jung experienced as a child led to feelings of shame, and attempts to talk about them with his parents left him feeling worse and ‘unendurably lonely’. So, he stopped trying to communicate about what he felt, and retreated into himself where he realised he was really two persons in the one body. One of these persons:

‘…went to school and was less intelligent, attentive, hard-working, decent and clean than many other boys. The other was grown up – old, in fact – sceptical, mistrustful, remote from the world of men, close to nature, the earth, the sun, or the moon, the weather, and all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams and to whatever ‘God’ worked directly in him. As soon as I was alone I could pass over into this state. At such times I knew I was worthy of myself … I therefore sought the peace and solitude of this “Other,” second personality.’

Wrongly accused by a teacher of cheating in a writing competition during his early school years, Jung obsessed about the injustice and being branded in this way before suddenly separating himself from his distress, ‘as though a soundproof door had been closed on a noisy room.’ Commenting later Jung wrote:

‘… it was as though a breath of the great world of stars and endless space had touched me, or as if a spirit had invisibly entered the room – the spirit of one who had been long dead and yet was perpetually present in timelessness until far into the future. Denouements of this sort were wreathed with the halo of a numen’.

Donald Winnicott in a critical review of Jung’s autobiography controversially suggested that Jung suffered from childhood psychosis, a psyche split that left him searching to find a self, whilst at the same time pushing Jung to ‘exceptional attainment’. Winnicott saw the dream of the phallus [see last week’s post] as merely about the boy’s sexuality and aggression, rather than recognizing the links to collective religious rituals. For example, the ‘lingam’ sometimes called the Shiva lingam in Hinduism – is a phallus similar to that in Jung’s dream, and emblematic of the generative power in nature and the union of male and female principles, and also has links to a particular stone that has healing powers for the mind, body and soul.

Jung describes his own self-healing as a child, through various rituals. He found meaning in suffering which allowed him to see his experiences in a spiritual sense, and, even as a child from the wider standpoint of eternity. If we limit our suffering to our own narrow boundaries, the pain is greater than accepting that suffering is a universal experience.

Later in life, Jung saw the dream he had as a small child as revealing the other side of God, the dark-image of God, and he wrote about how God had to contain both the good and the bad – everything. he also wrote about the male and female principles within each person. At the end of his life Jung was able to write about the mystery of a love that contains everything, and where no language is adequate to express this paradox.

‘No words express the whole … only the whole is meaningful. Love “bears all things” and “endures all things” (1Cor.13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic* “love”.’

[*cosmogonic – the scientific or mythological study of the origin and development of the universe, celestial systems, or reality itself.]