Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology

by C. G. Jung

In the evening he goes quietly to bed. But when he falls asleep it seems to him that a wicked black man with a sabre or gun lies on his bed—a tall, thin man who wants to kill him.

His parents sleep in the adjoining room. It often seems to him that something dreadful is going on there, as if there are great black snakes or wicked men who want to kill his Mamma. Then he has to cry out and his mother comes to comfort him.

Every time he wets his bed he calls his mother, who has to settle him down again in dry things.

The father is a tall thin man. Every morning he stands at the washstand naked in full view of the child, to perform a thorough ablution. The child also tells me that at night he is often suddenly waked from sleep by a strange sound in the next room; then he is always horribly afraid as if something dreadful were going on in there, some struggle—but his mother quiets him, says there's nothing to be afraid of.

It is not difficult to see whence comes the black snake and who the wicked man is, and what is happening in the next room. It is equally easy to understand the boy's aim when he calls out for his mother: he is jealous and separates her from the father. This he does also in the daytime whenever he sees his father caressing her. So far the boy is simply his father's rival for his mother's love.

But now comes the circumstance that the snake and the bad man also threaten him, there happens to him the same thing as to his mother in the next room. Thus he identifies himself with his mother and proposes a similar relationship for himself with his father. That is owing to his homosexual component which feels like a woman towards the father. What enuresis signifies in this case is, from the Freudian standpoint, not difficult to understand. The micturition dream throws light upon it. Let me refer to an analysis of the same kind in my article: "L'analyse des rêves, Année psychologique" (1909). Enuresis must be regarded as an infantile sex-surrogate; in the dream-life of adults too it is easily used as a cloak for the urge of sexual desire.

This little example shows what goes on in the mind of an eight year old boy, when he is in a position of too much dependence upon his parents, but the blame is also partly due to the too strict father and the too indulgent mother.

The infantile attitude here, it is evident, is nothing but infantile sexuality. If now we survey all the far-reaching possibilities of the infantile constellation, we are forced to say that in essence our life's fate is identical with the fate of our sexuality. If Freud and his school devote themselves first and foremost to tracing out the individual's sexuality it is certainly not in order to excite piquant sensations, but to gain a deeper insight into the driving forces that determine that individual's fate. In this we are not saying too much, rather understating the case. If we can strip off the veils shrouding the problems of individual destiny, we can afterwards widen our view from the history of the individual to the history of nations. And first of all we can look at the history of religions, at the history of the phantasy-systems of whole peoples and epochs. The religion of the Old Testament elevated the paterfamilias to the Jehovah of the Jews whom the people had to obey in fear and dread. The Patriarchs are an intermediate stage towards the deity. The neurotic fear and dread of the Jewish religion, the imperfect, not to say unsuccessful attempt at the sublimation of a still too barbarous people, gave rise to the excessive severity of the Mosaic Law, the ceremonial constraint of the neurotic.[159]

Only the prophets succeeded in freeing themselves from this constraint; in them the identification with Jehovah, the complete sublimation, is successful. They became the fathers of the people. Christ, the fulfilment of prophecy, put an end to this fear of God and taught mankind that the true relation to the Godhead is "love." Thus he destroyed the ceremonial constraint of the Law and gave the example of a personal loving relationship to God. The later imperfect sublimation of the Christian Mass leads again to the ceremonial of the Church from which occasionally the minds capable of sublimation among the saints and reformers have been able to free themselves. Not without cause therefore does modern theology speak of "inner" or "personal" experiences as having great enfranchising power, for always the ardour of love transmutes the dread and constraint into a higher, freer type of feeling.