LEARNING FROM UNLIKELY SOURCES

The Sun's Phallus Staring out the window of the hospital corridor, a young schizophrenic patient
beckoned II Jung to his side. If you half shut your eyes, he told Jung, and stared at the sun, you could see
the sun's phallus, or penis. If you then moved your head side to side, the sun's phal-lus would also move.
The young man concluded his strange remarks to Jung with the matter-of-fact assertion that the
movement of the sun's phallus was the origin of the wind (Jung, 1931, pp. 151-152; 1912, pp. 100, 157;
and 1936, pp. 50-51). Jung had this enigmatic encounter with a psychotic 30-year-old clerk in 1906. Jung
originally dismissed the episode as one more strange hallucination or fantasy character-istic of
schizophrenia. Four years later, however, in 1910, while researching in the field of mythology, Jung
came across a book that reproduced the rituals of the ancient Mithraic Greek religious cult. Professor
Albrecht Dieterich, the author of the book, quoted one of the cult's visions:
And likewise the so-called tube, the origin of the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from
the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube. And towards the regions westward it is as though
there were an infinite east wind. But if the other wind should pre-vail towards the regions of the east,
you will in like manner see the vision veering in that di-rection. (Quoted in Jung, 1931, pp. 150-151:
italics added) Jung was startled by the almost exact similarity between this ancient pre-Christian myth
and the young schizophrenic clerk's hallucinatory vision. The clerk could not have read Dieterich's book
since he had been institutionalized before its publication. Nor could Jung explain the similarity as a
product of the young man's educational and cultural ex-perience. He had, after all, only the equivalent
of a secondary school education and he had not engaged in foreign travel. Further mythological study
convinced Jung that the no-tion of a sun phallus, or its equivalent, a divine phallus, was a common
theme in many cultures of the past. Jung wondered how to account for the presence of this myth in the
unconscious and conscious mind of a contemporary schizophrenic.