Page 1 of 19 The Key to the Secret An Exploration of the Image of Secrets in Dreams and Fairtytales, and of the Importance of Secrets in Analytical Psychology Part 1: The Secret The years we spend in childhood are shrouded in mystery, not only from the perspective of later life, when we look back into “ the dark backward and abysm of time,” as Prospero says in The Tempest; but even, and especially, when we are living through them. Because the world - the human, animal and natural world - around us, holds so much that is unknown, and our own inner world in equal measure, secrets are the stuff of childhood. Everything is a game of hide-and seek, and we ourselves are as much the secret to be discovered as any place or object our curiosity eagerly pursues. We all remember the excitement of discovery, whether it is the strange- coloured pebble, the fragile shell, or the bird’s nest hidden in the leaves. And then the even greater excitement of secrets shared, or withheld, of treasures hidden and jealously guarded. We all have our memories of Blind Man’s Buff, of Hide and Seek, of Hunt the Thimble, of the Treasure Map, of hunting for Easter Eggs, of the Christmas stocking, of the neatly wrapped parcel. Many of us have followed, with bated breath, the Famous Five as they explored the Secret Passage. Who does not remember searching for some imagined treasure in the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, or mother’s handbag? There is, too, the dismay and grief when by some mischance our secrets are discovered by others. And, finally, there is the strange, stomach-churning feeling of the guilty secret, and the possibility of its imminent discovery. We learn in childhood that a secret can be the most wonderful and exciting thing in life, and at the same time the most terrible. We are aware, too, that at times we must tell our secrets, and at times conceal them. The energy held in the secret is what drives our whole existence. The secret is the dynamo that propels our libido, by evoking our curiosity and desire. But it may also be the source of our deepest shame and public humiliation. We carry our secrets with us all our life: some we may always be aware of, or may have at the back of our minds; some we may have forgotten, but may remember if something happens to jog our memory- like Proust, and the taste of the madeleine, releasing a whole world of the past. Some secrets may be so deeply repressed that we never regain a recollection of them. Yet they may send up ghostlike emanations through dreams and emotional disturbances, until they gain admission in the end. And finally, there are those secrets that continually surprise and astound us, as they emerge from the darkness of the psyche like epiphanies of another, unsuspected world. These are the angels and numinosities of childhood, the intimations of immortality that Wordsworth wrote about. “All of us are somehow divided by our secrets,” says Jung. And although he was Page 2 of 19 talking in that instance about how secrets divide us from one another, I think his statement has another interrelated meaning. We are divided internally by our secrets. The structure of the psyche implies a morphology based on secrets. In fact, the secret can be seen as the basic unit of the psyche, as the cell is that of the body. ‘Secret’, from the Latin, se-cerno, means to separate or put apart. The word ‘cerno’ has to do with the act of sifting, discriminating, distinguishing or discerning. A ‘secretum’ is something set apart or isolated, and has the quality of solitude and privacy. The body comes into being through the process of fission, in which the cells divide continually until the whole body is built up with all its organs. The psyche seems to come about in a similar fashion, with consciousness separating off from the unconscious through a process of fission, and subsequent differentiation in both systems taking place in like manner. At one stage Jung considered calling his psychology ‘Complex Psychology’, thereby emphasising this fissile aspect of the psyche. His early work in the use of the Word Association Test was revolutionary in demonstrating the existence of complexes in the psyche, of whose existence the subject was totally unaware. He writes: At the simplest words hesitations and other disturbances occur which can only be explained by the fact that the stimulus-word has hit a complex. But why cannot an idea which is closely associated with a complex be reproduced smoothly? The prime reason for the obstruction is emotional inhibition. Complexes are mostly in a state of repression because they are concerned as a rule with the most intimate secrets which are anxiously guarded and which the subject either will not or cannot divulge.CW Vol. 3 #93 Every complex is a secret, and hides secrets. What it hides within itself is the knowledge that should be in consciousness. When a client comes to analysis for the first time, the two overlappping realities, which the possessor of a secret is living in, whether aware of it or not, become particularly activated, and usually manifest in initial dreams. Quite often, the pervading atmosphere of these dreams is that of guilt. Here are two such dreams: The first is that of Rainer, a young man of 27: I’ve got an office in my father’s factory. Some man tells me that the police will come and search it. I am not worried because I have nothing to hide. Nonetheless I look to see what I’ve got in my desk. I find a gun (a revolver) and remember that I killed a man. I am shocked and look around and notice that some young fellow observes me through the glass walls of the office, while I try to hide the gun. I get angry at him but can’t get rid of him. He follows me as I leave the factory. Jung says, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient’s secret, the rock Page 3 of 19 against which he is shattered. If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment. The doctor’s task is to find out how to gain that knowledge. MDR p.138 The symptom, the dream and the neurosis itself, are the containers, the complex structure that holds the analysand’s secrets. In this first dream, the young man has an office in his father’s factory. This was a revelation to him, as he had assiduously avoided having anything to do with the family business. Here he is, ‘about his father’s business’. Like his father, he thinks he has nothing to hide, when the dream pointedly uncovers for him a gun and the realisation that he has committed murder- he has a guilty secret after all. It took some time in analysis before Rainer discovered that he had a great deal of anger and destructiveness, a great deal of hostility and competitiveness towards his father, and quite an amount of natural masculinity which lay concealed beneath his passive, bland exterior. This external aspect of the personality, the mask that we show to the world, Jung called the persona. It is the veil or cloak, the membrane that hides our inner selves from the world. Because of the persona, our secrets are maintained in security. However, lurking behind the persona is that Other, the one who knows our secrets, just as in Rainer’s dream, when he is observed by the “young fellow” behind the glass walls. He is the Shadow, the carrier of our guilt, “the thing a person has no wish to be,” as Jung calls it. Rainer can’t get rid of him. Our shadow dogs our heels until we turn at last and acknowledge it as our own. “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” as Prospero again says, reconciling himself to the ugly Caliban. Rainer’s task was to turn and face his shadow, and discover that he was other, and more, than he imagined himself to be. It is a typical young man’s dream. The second dream is that of Roger, a man of 54: I drive to the home of Maria Antonia and Eugenio to give them an English lesson. I am very upset and I arrive there before they come home. When they come in, I’m apologetic and I hit them and bruise them (and their children). The police arrive and M.A. an E. help to protect me and hide my crime from the police. M.A. and E. move some pictures. They are completely forgiving; only concerned that the police won’t discover me. In this second dream, there is something more complicated happening. The guilty secret that Roger needed to hide was one of ambivalence. He is both apologetic and aggressive towards his benefactors, who are also his pupils. Roger was a minor novelist who was suffering from writer’s block, and was reduced to giving English lessons. He had grandiose fantasies of himself as a great writer, and was envious of both the settled home life of his pupils and their professional success. This generated a great deal of unconscious hostility, as he was economically dependent on them. Despite his attack, they protect him and conceal his ‘crime’ from the police. He himself becomes the secret. Page 4 of 19 However, we have to delve further into the secret life of this man’s psyche in order to discover the real source of the great energy of aggression and guilt apparent in the dream. The couple on whom one is dependent, and yet who protect us even when angry and destructive towards them, is initially the parents. Behind the image of the couple in the dream is the original parental couple, towards whom Roger still experienced a deep ambivalence, even though they were long dead. Ambivalence towards the parents, an emotion frequently felt in adolescence, is kept secret when we refuse to grow up. We need to be able to freely express our anger in order to separate from them and live our own lives. If we fail to do so, we never become truly independent, ready to face the reality of who we are, and give up the grandiosity of childhood for the maturity of adulthood. While Roger still held on to the image of the loving son of loving parents- a picture far from the truth- his creative energy would remain blocked. He needed the alchemical operation of separatio, which a too restrictive superego (based on his mother’s animus) was preventing. An interesting detail, following their protection of Roger from the police, is that Maria Antonia and Eugenio ‘move some pictures’. This gave me some hope for a positive outcome from the analysis. I take this to mean that some agency in the unconscious itself is changing the picture in the psyche, particularly in regard to the parental complexes. We are here moving beyond the complex into another, more hidden layer of the psyche. Behind the complex, or rather, hidden within it, is the archetype, which provides the complex with its centre, its structure, and its dynamism. The positive aspect of the couple archetype is bringing about some change in the psyche. The energy of this archetypal force, if consciously realised, if the secret is truly uncovered, would generate sufficient energy for Roger to overcome his writer’s block. The writer’s block is like those images in Fairy Tales, where the hero, or more often the heroine, must be dumb in order to undo some spell. Secrets and loss of speech are closely connected. Release from a spell happens when the energy hidden in the complex, its secret source of life, is finally revealed. Both of these men came into analysis unhappy and distressed. The real secret of their unhappiness was hidden from both, but their dreams give us an inkling. Although there is a superficial similarity in the display of guilt, and the references to the police, the secret complex at the heart of the neurosis is different for each. The unhappiness and isolation both were experiencing in their lives was very apparent, burdening them with a secret guilt, and it was this sense of isolation that drove them into analysis. Jung writes: Nothing makes people more lonely, and more cut off from the fellowship of others, than the possession of an anxiously hidden and jealously guarded personal secret. Very often it is “sinful” thoughts and deeds that keep them apart and estrange them from one another. Here confession sometimes has a truly redeeming effect. The tremendous feeling of relief which usually follows a confession can be ascribed to the readmission of the lost sheep into the human community. His moral isolation and seclusion, which were so difficult to bear, cease. Herein lies the chief psychological value of confession. CW Vol. 4, #432 Page 5 of 19 In a later place he says: Anything concealed is a secret. The possession of secrets acts like a psychic poison that alienates their possessor from the community. To cherish secrets and hold back emotions is a psychic misdemeanour for which nature finally visits us with sickness- that is, when we do these things in private. But when they are done in communion with others they satisfy nature and may even count as useful virtues. It is only restraint practised for oneself alone that is unwholesome. It is as if man had an inalienable right to behold all that is dark, imperfect, stupid, and guilty in his fellow men- for such, of course, are the things we keep secret in order to protect ourselves. CW Vol. 16 ##124, 132 One secret we carry into analysis, as these two men did, is that of the shadow, which pervades our psyches with the feeling of guilt. The shadow means that we have done the forbidden thing, have fallen from grace, and must be expelled from paradise. Shadow and secrecy are in many ways synonymous. Yet Jung goes on: How can I be substantial without casting a shadow? I must have a dark side too if I am to be whole; and by becoming conscious of my shadow I remember once more that I am a human being like any other…[T]hrough confession I throw myself into the arms of humanity again, freed at last from the burden of moral exile.. CW Vol. 16 #134 Analysis very often is initially about overcoming the isolation of those who are carriers of guilty secrets. It is about confession, as Jung says. He cites several cases in MDR, the most pertinent here being that of the upperclass lady doctor, who had poisoned her best friend in order to marry her husband. ‘She had thought,’ says Jung, ‘that if the murder was not discovered, it would not disturb her.’ However, after her daughter withdrew from her life, her favourite horse threw her, and her dog became paralysed, she felt forced to come to Jung, for one consultation only. Jung goes on: If someone has committed a crime and is caught, he suffers judicial punishment. If he has done it secretly, without moral consciousness of it, and remains undiscovered, the punishment can nevertheless be visited upon him…It comes out in the end. Sometimes it seems as if even the animals and plants ‘know’ it. As a result of the murder, the woman was plunged into unbearable loneliness. She had even become alienated from animals. And in order to shake off this loneliness, she had me share her knowledge. She had to have someone who was not a murderer to share her secret. She wanted to find a person who could accept her confession without prejudice, for by so doing she would achieve once more something resembling a relationship to humanity. MDR, pp. 144-5 The shadow, however, is not the only common secret we bring into analysis. To introduce another typical kind, I would like to offer the brief initial dream of Page 6 of 19 Michelle, a 25-year old woman client: I was doing gymnastics in my room. I may have been dancing around to music. I looked down and saw that my legs were bleeding. I didn’t feel shocked, although they were bleeding a lot. It was bright red blood. The secret that this young woman was bringing, which she needed to have heard, was that of Trauma. Michelle was unaware of how deeply wounded she had been, and still was. The trauma she carried was connected to actual wounding as an active playful eight- year-old, when she crashed through a plate glass partition, and almost died from loss of blood. She still carried the scars of that accident. Trauma is a secret wound, shameful and guilt-ridden. As Jung says, All personal secrets…have the effect of sin or guilt, whether or not they are, from the standpoint of popular morality, wrongful secrets. CW Vol. 16 #129 However, there was more guilt hidden in these wounds. Michelle’s mother, as a result of the shock and worry after the accident, became addicted to the tranquillisers she was prescribed, and continually blamed Michelle for her increasing invalidity. This had reached a climax at Michelle’s puberty, when the mother began to accuse her daughter of being a prostitute, and was convinced she would come home pregnant one day. We can see the suggestion in Michelle’s dream of both childhood accident and menstrual blood. One could say that, in order to keep her mother’s approval and love, and to assuage her own guilt at her mother’s condition, she had to bleed, that is, to be in continual trauma. However, Michelle had a problem with bleeding, as she had rejected the role of woman, had been a tomboy when young, and was very upset to find herself changing into a woman at puberty. So her unconcern in her dream is a double one: she is unconscious of both her woundedness and her femininity. The secret was the Trauma carried in her feminine essence, which was a closed space for her, since neither her mother nor grandmother provided a genuine feminine role model for her. There is another secret that comes into analysis, even more hidden than that of Trauma. That is the family secret, or ancestral ghost. It announces itself by uncanny disturbances, an occult atmosphere, a curious spell-binding effect, that penetrates the haunted client’s psyche, and the analysis itself. It is hard to get a hold on the imagery and symptoms, since they resist interpretation, especially from a subjective point of view. A woman in the early days of analysis dreamed: There is a ghost upstairs in the house. People don’t take it seriously. He puts the man asleep from his bed into the bath. The man is not horrified, but calls his son to discuss the problem. Downstairs there is a young couple kissing and wanting to be left alone. I will have to ask the boy to let me out when I go. The people upstairs are concerned he should be let out at evening time. This 35-year old mother’s approach to life was dictated by an animus that stemmed not from her own, but the family’s past. She had a stiff, unemotional manner, and held herself rigidly in the chair as she talked in a little-girl voice. It was as if an Page 7 of 19 impersonal force held her rigid. Her dream came after a session in which she said, in a rather calculating, business-like way, that she and her husband were planning to have another child. She had already ‘decided’ the sex and the month of birth of the child. She displayed very little maternal feeling, but had, rather, an efficient, perfectionist manner. Her alienation from true mothering arose from a deeply deprived childhood, in which the atmosphere was distorted by inadequate, immature, and disturbed parents. It was her animus that parented her, a cold, ghost-like spirit presence. While the couple in the dream are engaged in love-making, they are unconscious of the reality of the spirit world upstairs. The ghost in the attic is a revenant from the ancestral realm, engaged in a sort of rebirth ritual. My feeling was that, if the animus alone is involved in the conception of a child, some ancestral ghost may be inadvertently admitted into its destiny. There was a considerable inheritance of mental disturbance and compulsive behaviour in the family. There was also a stifling military and post-colonial atmosphere. What little family money there was meant that her father, a weak but patriarchal figure, had never really worked, while her mother had never grown up. All these family problems, originating many generations ago, were part of her secret endowment. In the dream we see the father passing on the problem to the son, which can be seen to be this woman’s animus, which had inherited the family ghost, and the problems it represented. He is the key to the whole issue, and the reference to his being let out in the evening seemed to indicate that it would take the greater part of this woman’s life to resolve it. What seemed to be indicated in this woman’s case is that the current real-life issues, particularly those of relationships, could be tackled in analysis, but the deeper secrets should be left to later on. Sometimes secrets must not be opened up. Marie-Louise von Franz in her book, Archetypal Patterns in Fairytales, discusses the importance of distinguishing those things that must be kept secret from those that can be revealed. She says, with reference to analysis, It is good to understand the neurotic mechanisms of the patient, to pull them into light of understanding so that one can kill them. But on the other hand, there are always many secrets one should not understand about one’s analysands. One should not even try to understand. One should respect these aspects of their lives and leave them alone. P.154 I think something similar lies behind a dream I had while I was preparing this talk: I am bringing back an old lamp to some ancient shrine where it originally came from. There seems to be some secrecy about this as I hide the lamp under my coat/jacket. It is an old oil lamp, Greek or Roman. The place I am heading for seems to be some central shrine, like Delphi, but there are suggestions of Ireland, like Newgrange perhaps. As I walk along I am also thinking of a special stone associated with the lamp or the place. It is a stone with a sea urchin or starfish shape on it. As I go I am trying to avoid some man, a professor or authority figure. I want to put the lamp back in its original place, but if he gets involved or sees, he will want to interfere, perhaps use it for study etc. Also, as if he knows better, as he is the Professor. Page 8 of 19 I associate the lamp with the talk itself, the secret of secrets, a light that came from a sacred source, or omphalos. However, modern mankind has lost the connection to the secret source of life. For the Celts, the sea-urchin was the symbol of the world egg, the life-force, and the primordial seed. That is the secret at the heart of all ancient mysteries and religious beliefs, the secret that must not be talked about, as in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Jung says: The experience of the archetype is frequently guarded as the closest personal secret, because it is felt to strike into the very core of one’s being. CW Vol.7 #119 What the initiates experienced was the reality of the numinous archetype, which revealed to them the source of eternal life. This knowledge [f]rom the point of view of the conscious mind is highly irrational; it constitutes a secret which must be anxiously guarded, since the justification for its existence could not possibly be explained to any so-called reasonable person. CW Vol.12 #118 The ‘so-called reasonable person’ in the dream is the Professor, who will only use the lamp for intellectual, rational ends, which is to destroy its implicit meaning, its existence as a symbol. One has to face this conflict every time we approach symbolic, archetypal material in writing or lecturing. We have to serve the soul by hiding the secret meaning, and yet the collective demands a rational, articulate talk- words rather than images are valued. Analysis itself is a secretum, a place set apart, in which the secrets encoded in the analysand’s personal images can be shared and valued. It becomes of necessity a place of secrets. This not only refers to the secrets that the analysand brings into analysis, but the process that begins to happen to and through them. Jung says: …through the transference of his secret and all the unconscious fantasies underlying it, a moral bond is formed between the patient and his father confessor. We call this a “transference relationship”. Anyone with psychoanalytic experience knows how much the personal significance of the analyst is enhanced when the patient is able to confess his secrets to him. CW Vol.4 #432 That is, the entrusting of secrets is the primary act in analysis, from which follow the unconscious projections, and which is the foundation of the transference. How the figure of the analyst is perceived will have something to say about the place of the secrets themselves in the economy of the analysand’s psyche. But what if the analysand does not feel able to confess his or her secrets, even if they are pressing for revelation? One middle-aged woman had the following dream early in her analysis: Page 9 of 19 A. I arrange three things on this shelf. I don’t know what they are, but I put them in order. But one of the things I conceal behind the other two. I put them in order because I know that I have to prepare myself for something. B. Someone rings at my door, which leads directly into my room. Outside the door stands a huge figure, dressed in a long cloak with a hood. The figure stand swith its back to me. At the moment it turns I see that it is death, with a death’s head skull grinning at me. I scream out loud, but he says: You knew that I was coming, you put your things in order. (Or maybe he asked if I have put my things in order). Now I glance back at the three things and I hope that he doesn’t realise that I have concealed something. C. I sit with my boyfriend on the floor in a room. In front of him stands a little Box with nice things in it. Maybe jewellery, I don’t know exactly. He says: For every something-or-other you may take one thing out of this box. This was a woman who worked for a fashion magazine, and who lived her life totally from the persona. This consisted of a hard, business-like, fashion plate image, aimed towards attracting and flirting with men. She had been in five long-term relationships, two of them marriages, and was embarking on another relationship, with a very well- off man. For her, the surface looks and the gleam of money dazzled her, and were confused in her mind with true love, for which she yearned, but of which she was mortally afraid. Her dream is facing her with a very stark truth. Her time of hiding is over. When Death himself comes there are no more secrets: he searches out our most intimate motives and secret values. Stripped of all veneer, his skull face requires us to examine ourselves, and see where we are deceiving the world. Putting our things in order is also finding a place for our shadows, and letting the world see us not as the persona image from a magazine, but as we really are. It was very hard for this woman to reveal her hidden need and vulnerability, and the childish greed which lay behind her relationship. This mercenary attitude is revealed in the third section of the dream, where she is engaged in some sort of trade-off with her boyfriend. The box ‘with nice little things in it, maybe jewellery’ is what really mattered, but it would be too shameful to reveal this, even in analysis. The myth that sustained her was that hers was an ideal, romantic love, a destined relationship, the love of her life. I imagined it would take something as radical as death or grave illness to bring this woman to an acceptance of her hidden side. Sometimes at the beginning of analysis there are dreams of secretaries or similar figures, which seem to indicate that the transfer of secrets is taking place. The secretary is the keeper of the secrets, a vital figure in the psychic economy. Marie- Louise von Franz writes: …if an analysis goes deep enough, there comes a point where analyst and analysand share the secret which both know could not be shared with anybody else and which therefore establishes a unique relationship…This condition of “togetherness,” which comes from participating in the same experience, cannot be explained- not because one wants to make a secret of it, but because it is inexplicable and irrational and very complex. So you can say that in every process of analysis there is a secret, and generally one cannot talk about it. Page 10 of 19 M.-L. von Franz, Alchemy, p.68 One of my initial dreams in analysis was about returning to the classroom where I taught, at the beginning of the school year, and realising all would be chaos because I had not done any prior preparation. However, help was at hand, in the form of the reliable, maternal school secretary, from whose great store I quickly extracted the materials I needed to deal with the situation, including a herbal pill for anxiety and tension! The secretary here knew what I really needed, as the brand name for such tablets is ‘Quiet Life’! The figure of the secretary here combined the current figure of the analyst, with its positive transference- that is, someone to whom I felt able to entrust my secrets- together with that of an old, trusted headmistress, and beyond them, the unconscious itself, the real Keeper of the Secrets. Part 2: The Keeper of Secrets The keeper of secrets, for the Greeks and Romans, and for the alchemists, was Hermes/Mercurius. He was named as the steward, attendant and minister of the Gods. In the alchemical tradition, Jung says: [Michael Maier]…was referring to Hermes the mystagogue when he made the Erythraean Sibyl say of Mercurius: “He will make you a witness of the mysteries of God and the secrets of nature.” Again, as the divinus ternarius, Mercurius is the revealer of divine secrets…CW vol.13 #278 Mercurius represents that figure in the unconscious, that, in the service of the wholeness and cohesiveness of the psyche, sequesters our secrets for us, that is, our wounds and traumas, and our unbearable pain, and the mysteries of childhood which are beyond our means of understanding. He also holds in safe-keeping for us those numinous experiences and strange dreams until the time we can make meaning of them. He is the initiator of secrets, he is himself the secret, and he is the key to the secret. How the latter is revealed to us in our lives becomes our individual destiny. It may be that we have to suffer trauma or abuse, accident or natural or human catastrophe. It may be that we have unusual dreams or childhood experiences that mark us out as followers of the secret way of Mercurius. It was Mercurius himself who lay behind the childhood experiences of Jung, and who led to the foundation of Analytical Psychology. Jung says, in reflecting on his ‘Big’ dream of the underground enthroned phallus: “Through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the earth.” The spirit in the earth, often represented as a phallus, was Hermes/Mercurius. This spirit hovered over all of Jung’s childhood, which is imbued with the atmosphere of secrecy and mystery. Reading the first two chapters of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, we come upon frequent references to secrets, and their crucial importance in the development of Jung’s life. The importance Jung came to attach to the whole subject of secrets is summed up in the very last chapter of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Here he writes: It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with