Books: The Dark & Light of Dreams

MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS (398 pp.)—C. G. Jung—Pantheon ($7.50).

The dreamer was three years old and he loved the gentleman Jesus. Then came his dream of the phallus-king. The dreamer wandered through a stone palace under the meadow, and there, behind a curtain heavy as earth, stood the king, his one good eye gleaming up from his faceless head. "That is the man-eater!" the dreamer's mother cried out to him in the dream—but did she mean the king or did she mean Jesus? From that night on, the dreamer could never find comfort in Jesus' name. The sound of it flooded him with his frightful revelation: the phallic king of underground terror and the good Lord Jesus were both, somehow, the same.

In dreams, Carl Jung found a window to his "dark side," and, encouraged by the visionary knowledge that invaded his earliest nights, he never abandoned it in all his 85 years. Dreams became for him the stuff that life is made of, "the inner happenings that make up the singularity of my life." In his posthumously published autobiography, Jung ignores the outer events of his life for fear of obscuring the importance of its dreams. In the telling, the dreams become fascinating insights into Jung's thought, and the book becomes an adventurous example of the psychoanalytic monologue, in which events must be deciphered from the hieroglyphic language of the unconscious.

Jung rarely bothers to pursue an idea much past the bellwether dream that gave it birth. The fault of the introvert (a word Jung coined) is a reluctance to consider the significance of life in any terms but his own, and it is a fault that becomes the very spirit of Jung's book. The only encounter of his life he discusses in detail is his stormy meeting with Freud, to whom Jung pays the compliment of a full chapter (Jung's wife of 52 years is scarcely mentioned).

Blue Mountain Air. Long before his quiet death in the summer of 1961, Jung (TIME cover, Feb. 14, 1955) had quietly abandoned his century. With Freud and Adler, he had brought the Western world to the Age of Analysis. He was the last survivor of psychiatry's presiding trinity, but he forced himself back from the darkening spirit of his science. He studied ancient cultures and tribes, myths and symbols and alchemy, and from the overpowering sense of nostalgic recognition his studies brought him, he fashioned a new psychology that served him as a shield against Freud's disturbing ideas. To counter Freud's concept of man as an imperiled witness to the struggle between the sexuality and aggression within him, Jung produced a theory of the unconscious that showed each man to be a cultural museum filled with ancient wisdoms, beauty and God. "He has," says J. B. Priestley, the gentle anarchist, "cleared a way through dark jungles into blue mountain air. He has discovered at least one way out of the nightmare maze in which modern Western man was beginning to lose himself."