458
ALVIN C. KIBEL
justify the romantic poet's yearning for a life of sensations rather than
thoughts; for him, genuine literature is the mature refinement of a more
basic process in which the self is nourished by psychic powers beyond the
reach of consciousness. According to Jung, Freud's "reductive" view of
fantasy resulted from the over-stringent rationalism that governed his
choice of a clinical standard by which
to
measure neurotic behavior.
Jung's intention is to return psychoanalytic theory upon the path of its
inner development by questioning whether the so-called "normative"
ego was not, in fact, responsible for the incompatibility between itself
and its unconscious promptings-whether a more generous relation be–
tween the evident and the hidden self might not be possible.
Jung's quarrel with Freud may be said to hinge upon his revalua–
tion of the nature of dreams. As we have seen, the phenomena of
dreams pointed for Freud to the existence of an unresolved conflict be–
tween the primal energies of the psyche and the demands of civilization:
the dream is a facade concealing impulses that menace the self. For
Jung, on the contrary, dreams indeed reveal
in the neurotic
the presence
of psychic components incompatible with a mature consciousness, but the
dream is not
in itself
a neurotic phenomenon and may, in normative in–
stances, become a vehicle of energies valuable to civilized life.
I was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a
"facade" behind which its meaning lies hidden-a meaning
already known, but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from cori–
sciousness. To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors
no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can,
just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best it can.
At this point we gain an opportunity to judge the character of Jung's
relation to the tradition of visionary dissent. That "nature harbors no
intention to deceive" contradicts not only Freudian psychology but the
entire movement of nineteenth-century thought of which Jung's system
purports to be the inheritor. True enough, it was an ability of the roman–
tic imagination to conceive nature normatively; "what man has made
of man" appeared as the condition of exile from a stream of general
tendency in the organic world. Yet nature, to which the visionary poet
might return from time to time for spiritual refreshment, was not with–
out its terrors-a famous passage in
Dichtung und Wahrheit
reminds us
how Goethe found therein something which manifested itself only
in
contradictions, something which often betrayed a malicious pleasure
and to which he gave the name Daemonic. The notion that nature is
beneficient, that its processes support the mature self, actually culminates
in the social vision of the eighteenth century, against which the rornan-
