SYMBOLS OF ACTIVE IMAGINATION HANS DIECKMANN, Berlin INTRODUCTION IN HIs FIRST PAPER On active imagination C. G, Jung describes two opposite principles which inform this process: the principle of creative formulation and the principle of understanding. He writes: ‘The two ways do not divide until the aesthetic problem becomes decisive for the one type of n and the intellectual-moral problem for the other. The ideal case would be if these two aspects could exist side by side or rhythmically succeed each other; that is, if there were an alternation of creation and understanding. It hardly seems possible for the one to exist without the other, though it sometimes does happen in practice: the creative urge seizes Possession of the object at the cost of its meaning, or the urge to understand overrides the necessity of giving it form’ (Jung, 1916, p. 86). Later in the Mysterium coniunctionis Jung writes of expressing an opinion regarding the value of a matter instead of letting the principle of under- standing work. A decision of that sort is the opposite of the aesthetic standard, and it underlines the accent of psychic engagement (Jung, 1955). It is only relatively seldom in clinical practice that we come across the perfect combination, the symmetrical coexistence of skilful artistic work and intensive struggle for meaning, in contents which a patient has created unconsciously. Most patients will take pencil, paint-brush or clay merely ina Passing way during analytical treatment. Also on our side as analysts we attach more importance to the principle of understanding than to the beauty of the form. It is just for this reason that these cases are especially valuable in which the two principles come into harmony during analysis as a result of long and patient work, Such careful work, especially on the process of de- velopment, done with fascinated interest, not only liberates the libido from its fixation in symptoms, but can also in many cases endow the patient with a meaningful activity which will enrich his life long after the end of treatment. So Er as I know, no description exists in analytical literature which shows the working of this process over the whole period of an analysis, if we exclude those descriptions of professional artists like Neumann's book on 137128 H. Dieckmann Henry Moore (1959). The reason may be that most patients paint or draw only during a certain period in their analysis. Moreover, it is often difficult to publish pictures, and also many patients will not give their permission. Iam most grateful to this patient, whose pictures and figures appear here, for giving me this permission, although she did not find it easy to do so. I would like to point out that my patient had never painted, drawn or modelled before the analytical treatment started. BACKGROUND I will begin with some remarks about my patient’s symptoms and her life. She suffered from a severe schizoid-depressive neurosis. For hours and some- times days on end she had serious reactive depressions, accompanied by great inner torment and suicidal tendencies. In fact she had attempted to commit suicide several times. Apart from this, she had a paranoid jealousy of her husband and a tendency to run away from home. In stressful situations she left the house and ran around in a forest nearby, and her relatives had to search for hours before they were able to find her. She also suffered from psychosomatic illnesses in the gastro-intestinal area, gastritis, gall bladder spasm and diarrhoea. Altogether it was one of those borderline cases between neurosis and psychosis and the origin of the symptoms went back to early childhood. Deterioration took place after her marriage and the birth of her children. At the beginning of treatment there was the suspicion, as may be seen from the family history, that the patient had a psychosis. My patient was Dutch, born in Indonesia, where her parents worked as missionaries of a very strict religious sect. The father was German. He married the mother overseas, in a second marriage seven years after his first wife died. There were two daughters by the first marriage. The father had given them to foster-mothers in Europe shortly after their birth. In his opinion, this was necessary because the children disturbed his work as a missionary. The younger one is still living, but she is severely mentally retarded. The elder one became afflicted with schizophrenia, when my patient was fifteen years old, and had to be hospitalized for the rest of her life. As it became difficult for financial reasons to let her stay in a Dutch hospital, the father had sent her to Germany during the Nazi period. News soon came that she had died. The father was really a very religious man, but a murderous father, because he must have known what was happening in German mental hospitals at that time. During the second marriage, to the mother of my patient, five children were born. My patient was the second one. Of those five children three died during childhood: only my patient and a brother seven years younger are now living. For the first six or seven years of her life my patient lived in Indonesia withSymbols of active imagination 129 her sister who was two years older. Because the mother as well as the father was very active in missionary work, the children grew up under Chinese servants. After seven years the family had a long holiday in Euro, (during which time a brother was born) and they lived with relatives for eighteen months. My patient remembers that there were many quarrels and beatings. Her parents’ and also her relatives’ main motive was to break down the children’s will. They had to obey. At the end of this period the father decided once again that his two elder girls should remain in Europe, while he, his wife and the son should go back to Indonesia. As both parents often said, the service of God was more important to them than the two little girls. At first nobody wanted to take them in as ‘holy orphans’ and it was a very difficult situation. But at last, so the family-myth goes, the Lord had mercy on them, Shortly before the parents and the boy were due to leave the country, the family went for an excursion to an old castle and there they made the acquaintance of the castellan. He was a fellow-member of their sect and had formerly worked in a remand home for delinquent boys. They had coffee and cake together and this old man was glad to take over the two girls for a very small sum. Neither God nor the two parents seemed to be disturbed by the fact that this man was a complete stranger. The elder sister of my patient was unable to accept this situation. She became ill and died of pneumonia a few days before the departure of the parents. This elder sister was the good one, the beloved one, and she had always been held up to my patient as a paragon of virtue. She herself was often an obstinate, defiant, but lively and spirited child. Now she was told: ‘Your sister has been allowed to go to in heaven so soon because she was such a good girl.’ My eight-year-old patient swore a graveside oath that from now on she would always be well-behaved, adaptive and good, and never again obstinate and lively. Thus she punished herself for her death wishes against the rival her parents had idealized, and also she identified with her, and hoped to escape in this way from an unbearable life. At this time Grimm’s fairy tale, ‘The star dollars’, became her favourite story. The foster parents with whom my patient now lived were, by her account of them, very sado-masochistic. The foster father liked to give hard and cruel beatings for every peccadillo and the foster mother, who was only a little better, used to say: “You do not belong to us. You only stay here till your parents come back. So I am not ‘allowed to love you and you are not allowed to love me.’ In this family, there was another foster child, a stupid boy. She was never allowed to be better than this boy, to play or learn anything other than he did, because this would be unchristian arrogance. If she was playing horses with him and had her own idea as to where they should go, she was ordered to stop because it was trying to dominate him in an unchristian way. The foster mother was depressed herself and always said that modesty was the greatest virtue on earth,130 . H. Dieckmann When my patient was fourteen years old there came the dreaded day of her parents’ return. Again she had to suffer a separation, this time from her foster mother, whom she now loved, in spite cfeverything, more than her own strange mother from Indonesia. The family lived at first in the same village. But she was not allowed to see or speak to her foster mother because she was not her child. Her own mother travelled around making speeches about Indonesia, and she stayed at home alone with her father. This may be the reason why she joined the sect at this time. She was converted, baptized and became a member of the sect, taking on the strict rules and prohibitions of this community. She told me that she was happy at last Fecause she believed, and she found peace by deeply suppressing all her wishes. Besides this, she noticed how happy her father was about her conversion. ‘When she left school she went at first as a servant to religious friends in another town, where she earned about 16 DM ($4) a month. She wished to become a gardener, but a secretary was needed in the office in her father’s village, and she had to obey her father and go to work there. She hated this work like the plague, but the parents’ wish was the will of God, and only her subsequent marriage liberated her from this drudgery. It was when she was fifteen that she met her future husband, who was eighteen at the time. Naturally he also was a member of the sect. It was a deep, stormy, and surely true love from the very first, but because she was so young, our two lovers had to wait. They were forbidden by her parents to see each other or to write to each other for three years. The object of this was that they should prove their love. Just when this time ended, and the two met each other again with un- changed feelings, her father died. Her mother made her promise at her father’s death-bed not to marry her boy friend but to stay at home with her and to help her bring up the little brother, who was by now twelve years old. There was a bitter, but of course suppressed, conflict of brother- sister rivalry between these two, as the brother was the crown prince of the family, the beloved and long-expected son and heir. He was always given preference over her, it was he who had been allowed to stay with the mother abroad. Fortunately my patient was sane enough to break the promise given to her mother in this highly charged situation, and she was married at the end of 1938. The early years of her marriage were over-shadowed by war and her husband’s military service. He had become a teacher before the war began, but it was a profession he did not like very much. During the war the first three of their children were born, a son and two daughters. In those years her husband was unfaithful to her once, which gave her deep feclings of insecurity. She developed a pathological jealousy of all women who came in contact with him. He was a little bit of the ‘homme a femmes’ type and always had a lot of women around him. In one way he was a nice helpless boy, who awoke motherly instincts in women, and on the other hand he) is = a syle Wl ebiie rh wh. Myelin Figs cao Th, aoe son,Figslig. 6Fig. 8Fig, 12Tig 4AySymbols of active imagination 131 was devoted to highly idealistic which made girls enthusiastic about him, Naturally he liked this enthusiasm, but my patient on the contrary was completely confused by it, because competition was not her strong point. After the war two further daughters were born and the husband started to study sociology. This was only possible if she, the mother of five children, went to the morning lectures at the university while he was teaching at school. She had to write down everything that was said so that he could learn it in the afternoon and evening. Besides this she had her children and the house, where she also had her parents-in-law living for a time. They could not afford a maid. The husband, who was certainly talented and intelligent, but also very narcissistic, passed his examination with excellent results. In 1960 he got his first job in his new profession and she started to feel: ‘Thave done everything for him and now he gets the glamour, he is the important one, I am only the poor wife.’ Her depressions, her fears, her aggressions and suicidal tendencies grew more and more severe so that she now needed help. Fortunately there was an old lady in their town, a sect-sister, who had studied a little psychotherapy, and she began treatment with her. She was there for three years before they came to Berlin, and several times durin, those years she tried to commit suicide. She told me that the treatment had Consisted mainly of efforts to fight against her arrogance, to accept the higher Position of her husband, to become completely unselfish and to give up her go. Many hours of treatment had started with praying together for humility. When she came to Berlin and began her treatment with me she was in a very chaotic psychic state. She was now forty-five years old. THE ANALYSIS The following series of pictures is centred, as I see it, on the great antagonism, whether it be between man and woman, between the world of drives and that of spiritual ideas, or between the circle and the square. My patient's unconscious always tried to bring these contradictions together in one Picture and to build a bridge over the deep split in her. But before considering the pictures I want to make some comments about the analytical process. During the whole treatment the patient was sitting facing me because she needed the possibility of contact and the reinforcement of her conscious ego against the overflooding archetypal images, coming from her unconscious. During the early months it was a very dramatic therapy. She wrote lo letters between the sessions, sometimes as much as twelve pages. She phoned me nearly every day and we often had to make extra appointments. [ had to tolerate this a deal at first, but slowly it became less necessary, less of a habit. She ice away piece by piece her earlier pattern of sacrifice, which was basically a shadow problem, because all tendencies to want or wish something or to possess something came from the devil.32 H. Dieckmann This was well illustrated in the following events. The family had come to Berlin with only three children. The son was married in Sweden and one daughter stayed on in Amsterdam for her training. Naturally this was too light a burden for my patient, and so she planned to adopt an orphan, a Negro boy. After prolonged emotional fluctuations in her analysis, instead of this adoption she bought herself a dress for the first time in her life. Until this time she had always worn the old clothes of relatives or sect-sisters, which they had given her. She was now forty-five years old and her husband earned a good salary. ‘When she found she could accept several aspects of her shadow and had discarded her ideal of being completely unselfish, she became able to deal with her severe aggressions. During this period there was again a scrious breakdown. She came to my house between two sessions with uncontrollable suicidal tendencies. At first I did quieten her down by talking with her for four or five hours, and I decided not to send her to hospital against her will. Then, during the night shetook sleeping pills, notso manyas to kill herself, but she went down to the cellar of the house and slept there on the bare ground. The family searched for her in the morning in the woods and at the lake, and when they were not able to find her they phoned me. I had an intuition as to where she might be, so I went there and I found her in the cellar, her body-temperature dangerously low and with insufficient circulation. I took her to hospital and within a few days she was well again. Then she stayed in hospital willingly for two months and we had two or three sessions there per week. It had not been a real suicide attempt: it was rather that she was trying to come out of her inner tensions and to sleep at last. ‘After this we were able to unfold a great many of the aggressions which lay in her animus problem and we worked them through. The first experi- ment in solving this problem had already begun before the suicide attempt: she had tried to express those aggressions by modelling a tiger. Step by step in artistic creation she learned to build up her own individual life, to cure herself, and to remould her nature. Moreover she enjoyed the newly- developing artistic possibilities and learned also to use the knowledge she had guined during her studies: by the end of the therapy she was an assistant in a psychological and educational team for young people, she gave lectures and also got paid for her work. So it was not necessary any more to be jealous, when her husband had to travel to another town or enjoyed professional success. ‘When he had to change his job near the end of our therapy and they were separated for six months, she was able to cope with the situation. Yet at the beginning of her analysis she broke down when he went for only a short journey. Later she bought something very nice for herself when he had to go ‘to Finland, where she would also ave liked to go: she came to the next session with a gold bracelet, the first in her life because until then jewellery had been out of the question.Symbols of active imagination 133 Finally, I will add a few words about her religious problem. My patient and also her husband broke their connection with the strict and intolerant sect to which they had belonged. Many patients who suffer during their childhood under the influence of such strict religious sects, have a tendency to break with all conventional religious systems. In this patient the inner image of God changed, as can be seen in the pictures, in such a way that she was able to remain inside the conventional Protestant church. Today this church, at Icast in Germany, allows its members the freedom of believing in a very undogmatic way. So my patient was outside her small sect-system, but living actively in a Christian community with a humanistic and tolerant attitude of mind. CREATIVE WORK To illustrate this paticnt’s experience of individuation I have selected the Most important pictures and sculptures she made during the treatment, together with her remarks about them, and my own thoughts and inter- Pretations. The first primitive pictures were made during a period of depression in July 1964 (during twenty sessions). They were very confused and all similar (Fig. 1). She described her situation at this time as follows: ‘It’s evening after my analytical session. My family is in our new room listening to music. I retire to my own room and try to sketch how I’m feeling. The music causes me pain. I can’t bear it. I want only candlelight and to be alone.” It was the beginning of introversion. At the end of this period she drew a circulus vitiosus and a hedgehog (Fig. 2) with a quotation from Marcus Aurelius, saying: ‘I want to roll myself up completely. I’m like a hedgchog today.’ The passage of Marcus Aurelius was: ‘Bear it in raind that it is characteristic for rational beings to submit themselves voluntarily to their fate rather than to involve themselves in ignominious battles like animals do.’ As always at the beginning of an introversion she met feelings of destruc- tion, suffering, darkness and loneliness. It was like the alchemical process where one goes at first into the nigredo. On September 15, 1964 she had an important transference dream, constellating for the first time the figure of a motherly father who was understanding and warm: ‘Iwas with Dr Dieckmann not as a patient but really like a beloved friend. Dr D. had two of his children on his knces, two girls, the one on the right, the other on the left, his arms around their Foulders. We all chatted together, a picture of peace and harmony. I felt I belonged to them. There was no more feeling of inferiority and I was very happy. I thought or knew: I should always be like that.’ And she added: ‘Recently I have been having the same repeated fantasy: I feel myself134. H. Dieckmann embraced by a great, strong, primitive man, sometimes a black one, who is not looking for me personally, but only for a woman. After a long struggle he will overpower me, because I want to be overpowered. Then my womanhood will awake in me: because I need this masculine con- quering before it can. Otherwise I remain, so to speak, dry.’ Soon after this she took the first step out of her masochistic behaviour attern. She lived relatively far from town and she carried all the shopping ee the five people in the family. I asked her why she did not use a shopping bag on wheels, She was very surprised to hear about this despite the fact that everybody uses them, but she bought one the next day. This was an import- ant event as that shopping bag was the first thing she bought for herself; for the first time her ego showed itself to be stronger than Ret masochistic tendencies. The next day she brought the model shown in Fig. 3 and said to me: ‘The depression of the last few days has not gone away yet, but it’s better. I feel as though I were in a spider's web. I wanted to make something in clay. I need strength to overcome a resistance against what I want to do and what could help me. I did not know how to begin. I thought about my black man, but my mind was too blocked for him. So I moulded the clay for half-an- hour in my fingers and watched the forms which came out of it. I saw the heads of avimals, I felt the cool clay and I didn’t think about it any more. And then I saw at last how the figure of a child came out of the earth. The child had toothache and went to its mother and put its head between her breasts. The suffering child is today again very present in my mind, because my husband is again teaching young girls’ fe 3). A few days later, on September 29, 1964, she made the empty mother (Fig. 4). Again the black, primitive man was in her mind, but she could not make him. For her the empty mother was a symbol of the search for meaning in her life. Her children were now grown up and soon she would be alone with her husband. The empty figure was waiting to be filled with a new meaning and between her knees there is the cross: the cross as the symbol of suffering but also as the symbol of a new spiritual life, which is imprinted over the broad belly. Then, by the 28th session, (September 22, 1964) she was at last able to make the great black father (Fig. 5). She said about him: ‘After I had made the two mother figures, my Negro came of his own accord, sitting like a yogi. I’m astonished because he is so big but not brutal. There is a kind of devotion about him. It is the primitive, unbroken strength of man, as there is also inside me. I’m glad that he is not a brute, he is more a supporting power. Lying on his knees is the woman. I find this astonishing. It is shecr womanhood, wide open in his hand and in great peace. It seems, that he has a fragile instrument to play on. I hear a melody and he does, too, with his eyes closed.”Symbols of active imagination 135 Six weeks later she made a model of two lovers in a boat (Fig. 6). It followed the first experiment in uniting the two opposites. She said about this figure: ‘This has made me very happy. I have been able to bring together the two great opposites in me: the negro and the madonna, The woman is no longer ten times smaller than the male and not in his arms but facing him, saying yes. You can see that in the kiss.’ But it was too soon. She always had the tendency to do things too quickly. T think that, in this state of mind, you cannot put a black primitive man and the madonna together in one boat. So I think that it was psychologically right that this model broke when she tried to fire it. After that she moved out of the archetypal world and tried at first to make a figure of herself: the birth of the ego (Fig. 7). She said: ‘There, I'm more myself. The head and shoulders are already free and one can see my own hair. But the face cannot be seen. This woman feels a deep sorrow. When I made it I was inspired by the funeral of Jesus Christ, where Mary Magdalene is following the procession deeply afflicted. But I’m more a Woman running away. I’m not good enough to stay with him, because I’m such a great sinner.’ In the meantime she had taken a few pottery lessons and made her first two vases. She told me in the following words how she made them: ‘I wanted to make another statue during the last few days while my husband was away. It would have been a woman who is again able to see the black man with the white girl in the boat. But neither is there now. So I made these two vases anda late. During these difficult days I fled again and again to my pottery and my work. It has been a long time, but now I find I can do all my housework, the ironing and the cleaning and I have also repainted a piece of furniture with new colours.” Some time later she got a letter from a friend, an elderly woman, also a member of the sect, who until now had been her spiritual guide, My patient had written to her with pride about beginning a new life and that woman had answered that she had lost the path of modesty, and that she was disa Pointed in her. This led to a deep regression in my patient and she made the hext figure, a mutilated one (Fig. 8): ‘T wanted to model myself in a praying position. Now you alone my Lord are my hope, my faith, my trust and my rock. Everybody left me alone including my friends from home. When I finished that figure I had to take a knife and cut off her head and her helping arms. Now she is only a mass of body. No head any more that is able to see and think and wish, and no hands, which can do something or hold something or begin something new.’ _- | think in one way it was a regression to her earlier masochistic way of life, She was punishing ‘herself because she had dared to revolt against her former patterns of behaviour.136. H. Dieckmann During the 35th session (October 16, 1964,) she was meditating again over the two figures of a man and his wife (Figs. 5 and 6): ‘In the first model she was too small, lying in his arms and completely under his influence. Then she was sitting opposite him on the same level, saying yes to him and their common life in the same boat. Now comes the next: the being together at a distance, to be one but also to be two. Two different forms, which do not exclude each other. There shall be no struggle and no fight between them but only the desired harmony.’ She was beginning to distinguish the opposites during those thoughts, like the second step in alchemy, after the materia prima has! been found, But she forgot that separation needs the forces of aggression. For her it was aggression which was still suppressed in her unconscious, and therefore in a very primitive and uncivilized state, Shortly afterwards this problem emerged clearly. She had a row with her husband, an outbreak of fury and hate, because again he had flirted with a young girl. Even after the session which followed this row her fury did not die down, and she ran around for two hours although it was a rainy evening. Then she found a window in her house which was still plastered with paper put on during the war, and she tore this paper down with all her srrenath, After that she was able to make a model of her state of mind: this was the tiger (Fig. 9). She told me: ‘I wanted to make a figure in desperate fury and out of my hands came this animal. It is not exactly a tiger, but a horrible and awful beast. It is a wildcat with a wide-open mouth, teeth and ears in the attacking position: the face is quite out of shape, threatening but nevertheless very frightened. My whole body was trembling when I made that figure. This animal shows how frightened I am_ of the strength of my instincts, 1 found I had to make a snake out of his tail. I was very astonished at this. So I shaped the badness in a double way, as a cat and as a snake. At first the tail seemed to me like a phallus and I put a tongue in the hole of it and made two eyes. The snake seems to like to erect herself in such a way that she will coil round and bite into her own tail.’ (I do not know for sure whether the patient knew the symbol of the uroborus, but I assume she did not.) A week after that tiger she made her first attempt to get more money for her housekeeping. I might add that by the end of treatment she achieved a sum three times the size of what she had at the beginning, an amount almost normal for her household of five people. At that time she told me: ‘With the tiger I feel myself coming out of the ane of my inner concentration camp’. (She had also had masochistic tasics of being together with her husband in a camp and either he or she being cruelly tortured.) ‘Now the tiger no longer has to be in prison and toSymbols of active imagination 137 be hungry. He is free, and may move as he naturally likes. It is the same as if a dog had been treated badly for a long time, but still barks and bites in spite of his present good treatment. The aj ion has got into his blood and he needs time to calm himself and to believe.’ About a month later January 1, 1965, she made a new figure, ‘the prayin, wife’ (Fig. 10). Just previous to this she had decided to learn to ride ani started her lessons. Referring to the model she told me: ‘That girl is not lying on the earth any more without a head and without arms, She is not full of sorrow like the other one but thankfully happy. I hope I will never lose the joy gained from knowing that my tiger is fee! As can be seen, ‘the praying wife’ has very aggressive breasts like guns and something of the tiger seems to have gone into this woman. Shortly afterwards she really attempted the experiment of ‘riding on a tiger’. She modelled a tiger with an angel on him, but the statue was not able to stand up and the angel’s sword broke. After that came the breakdown with the suicide attempt and treatment in hospital. During that time she painted five pictures. These pictures cannot be illustrated in this paper, but I will give a grote description of them. The first showed the steps leading from her house to the street. I was carrying her down these steps after finding her in the basement after the suicide attempt. The second was a shadow-woman. There is only the body; there are nocturnal animals on the left side. On the right side is a butterfly and a dragonfly. In the genital region there is a mousehole and mice. In the third she made a sort ofan —she was trying to put herself in order. The fourth was a landscape in the mountains, There are women emerging out of the rocks and a bird of death flying away. It was a picture of an incipi- ent resurrection coming from her sense of personal truth. The last picture was a hare in an egg done after the fashion of the famous picture by Diirer. It was a symbol of the rebirth which she was experiencing herself. The next statue, a witch (Fig. 11), was made while she was in hospital when she had already had her first visits home (March 19, 1965). She was now able to realize the dreadful strength of her aggressiveness and could accept that she herselffhad tortured her family for very many years with such a witch, who lived in her mind. She said about the witch: ‘She has a dis- torted and deformed face. She is destructive. She is the symbol of evil, the unmotherly woman, who only wants to have, to possess, to hold in her right hand everything that does not belong to her. Her left fist is clenched to smash things into small pieces. She says: “if anything will not go as I want it to, I will turn the whole world upside down”. Her mouth shows her rage against this world and her bitterness, into which she had manceuvred herself by her egocentric pattern.” At the same time as she made the witch she pictured her own reaction to that devilish woman in ‘the terrified one’ (Fig. 12). ‘She is standing there, stiff and motionless, frightened by what faces her. She has no words only138 H. Dieckmann wide open amazed eyes and her arms are hanging down. Who will help me against my witch?” Next she made a beggar (Fig. 13, March 29, 1965): ‘Last week I saw some sculptures by Barlach, and among them his Russian beggar. I was very impressed by her, so that I tried to make her myself. Does she really have to beg for alms? If she could throw away her shawl she probably could see that she has enough. She could go to work.’ At last she was able to build the united couple (Fig. 14, April 7, 1965), and said: ‘My sculpture of the couple is ready. After long hours of work those two are now standing there. She, who was given back to him, rests in his arms, she is stretching a little upwards and he bends down a little. I don’t know whether this sculpture is good or not. I only know that my whole intimate being is in her. It is the model more than any other in which I find myself.’ Ishould say here that when she first came to me her husband was an ideal man, the best there ever was, and she was a nobody. Then he became black, a swindler, a bad man whom she hated, Now, after the discussion with her witch, she is withdrawing her shadow projections from him and is beginning to find a real partnership. The next sculpture came after the following dream (June 4, 1965) and shows a new-born God, born inside a ball (Fig. 14a) ‘I’m at Dr D’s. There is a praying group around him, a community, which I miss now so much.’ e context was that at this time she was not going to her sect-groups any more. And about the model she said: ‘I want to come into that circle which I have lost. I’m free now from my first image of God, the God of the Old Testament. But I have lost the community of my sect and my home there. Now I find a God who is more merciful, kind, benevolent, understanding and forgiving. The figure of my second image of God is God as the father of the lost son, the God of the New Testament, whose love embraces the world,’ In February 1966 her husband was offered and accepted a new and better position in another town in West Germany. That meant that they had to live separated for approximately six months, and her old fears of separations awoke. She had a dream of a great river, in which she was in danger of being swept away, full of fears of being lost. She painted that dream, calling it the ‘father river’. She herself is shown as very small in the left corner of this picture, between flowing streams. At the end of April 1966 she received her first payment for lectures in child education and for the first time she took her pottery to be fired. ASymbols of active imagination 139 ponte later she had a dream, in which she was able to deal with her beast at last: ‘Locked up in one room of our house was enormous sealion. I even closed all the other doors, so that he couldn’t come out. He rattled with his big, forceful fins at the walls and doors and one could hear his knocks. I felt sorry for him, being imprisoned in such a room, and at the same time I bee afraid that he could break through the door or the window, and get ree. I told my husband to phone the Zoological Gardens or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, so that they could take him away. 1 felt that if you could hold him professionally and transport him to the right place, it would not be necessary to kill him, I knew, and said to my husband, that sealions are intelligent animals and very valuable for the zoo or the circus. Then my husband told me that it is not a sealion in that room but a mammoth. They had always frightened him since he was a child because they sucked people into their caverns and swallowed them. Nobody could prevent it. Then the man we had phoned came from the Zoo or the Society, and after some time he brought out the big and ferocious animal, fettered but alive. Then we saw that it was not a mammoth but a panther, who could now go to the zoo or the circus as a great new attraction, which everybody would enjoy. The panther was so Black, so very big and powerful, that I'm still afraid of him.’ Then she was able to unite the angel and the tiger, but they are fixed in a relief (Fig. 15). The last thing is a story about the tea cups she made (Fig. 16). My Patient always had a strong aversion to the semen of her husband, and also to milk. Merely sceing milk brought on slight anorexia. What was behind this yap came out at the end of the treatment. She brought the teacups and said: ‘Thave always wanted to know what was behind this disgust and hoped I would find out. In the last three weeks I have been modelling these cups— they seemed simply to make themselves in my hands. One of my tenants told me that he especially liked the cup-shaped form because there could not be anything better than to drink out of one’s hands from a fresh spring in the mountains, holding the hands like a cup. The night after that conversation I awoke suddenly at two o'clock and remembered how our English teacher in the secondary school read us a story. When I heard it, I nearly fainted, so disgusting was the content. For us girls this teacher was a very awful man, because he was always improper, In the story a young man met a girl in the woods and forced her to xmo. H. Dieckmann hold her hands like a cup and collect his semen which he gave to her by masturbation. She had to drink it afterwards as a love potion. And that night this all suddenly came back to me. I had never thought of it since my schooldays. I had repressed it deeply. But now there it was again before my eyes, and I had to cry, being very touched by that experience. At first I had had to form those cups, then my tenant had to say that thing about the water in the mountains and that awakened my memory of schooldays, where the disgust began, because that girl could only react with disgust, being without any relationship to the man.’ My patient had solved the problem now by making those cups and putting them on stands inscribed with Chinese signs: with her Chinese nurse there had been the milk of a relationship she could drink. After that, the last thing she made was a big Dutch soup-turcen with six big dishes, so that everybody had enough to eat (Fig. 17). I think she had now united the piece of Indonesian culture she had had with the Dutch one, her early childhood and her life now: soup from Holland and tea from China. SUMMARY In considering the representations of a patient’s active imagination, analytical psychology generally ascribes greater value to the principle of understanding than to the aesthetic aspects of the creations. In this paper I have presented a case of a borderline patient in which the two aspects were fruitfully combined. In the process of working in painting and in clay a previously unknown clement of her personality was disclosed, akin to a musical gift, which united the two aspects. A particular part of the individuation process is described, during which the patient succeeded in anchoring her creativity to earthly reality. During and after analysis she was able to integrate her talent in her life without any pseudo-artistic pretensions. The maturing process is revealed in the pictures and symbols, which were intrinsically related to the behavioural and experiential patterns in her analysis: these were the ones which usually occur in the equivalent span of analytical work. REFERENCES June, C. G. (1916). “The transcendent function’, in Coll. wks., 8. —— (1955-6). Mysterium coniunctionis, Coll. wks., 14. Neumann, Ericu (1959). The archetypal world of Henry Moore. Trans. R. Hull. 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