An episode from 10/15/20: Only the third episode in this podcast (and you can hear it in my voice, where I still sound a little uncomfortable), tonight I read Carl Jung’s description of his famous “Dream of the House.” In the dream, Jung walks from the top floor and down through the rest of the house, into the basement, and beyond.

As each lower level in the house appeared to represent an earlier moment in history, Jung considered the house to be a kind of map of the psyche, where the lower levels represented the unconsciousness itself. Jung said that it was this dream, which seemed to contain information both personal/autobiographical and impersonal/historical, which gave him his first inkling of what he would later call the “collective unconscious.” 

In September of 1909, Jung traveled to America with Sigmund Freud and others, and it was on the return journey that he had his dream. The account of the dream that I read from comes from Jung’s memoirs late in life, Memories, Dreams, Reflections; I then read from Ronald Hayman’s A Life of Jung, who notes some differences between this and earlier accounts of the dream.  

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