Translation Exercise 10
Such material has mostly become unconscious because in a manner of speaking - there is no room for it in the conscious mind. Some of one's thoughts lose their emotional energy and become subliminal (that is to say, they no longer receive so much of our conscious attention) because they have come to seem uninteresting or irrelevant, or because there is some reason why we wish to push them out of sight. It is, in fact, normal and necessary for us to "forget" in this fashion, in order to make room in our conscious minds for new impressions and ideas. If this did not happen, everything we experienced would remain above the threshold of consciousness and our minds would become impossibly cluttered. This phenomenon is so widely recognized today that most people who know anything about psychology take it for granted.
But just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new contents, which have never yet been conscious can arise from it. One may have an inkling, for instance, 'that something is on the point of breaking into consciousness - that "something is in the air," or that one "smells a rat." The discovery that the unconscious is no mere depository of the past, but is also full of germs of future psychic situations and ideas, led me to my on new approach to psychology. A great deal of controversial discussion has arisen round this point. But it is a fact that, in addition to memories from a long-distant conscious past, completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also present themselves from the unconscious - thoughts and ideas that have never been conscious before; They grow up from the dark depths of the mind like a lotus and form a most important part of the subliminal psyche.
We find this in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations that appear suddenly from the unconscious. The ability to reach a rich vein of such material and to translate it effectively into philosophy, literature, music, or scientific discovery is one of the hallmarks of what is commonly called genius.
We can find clear proof of this fact in the history of science itself. For example, the French mathematician Poincaré and the chemist Kekulé owed important scientific discoveries (as they themselves admit) to sudden pictorial "revelations" from the unconscious. The so-called "mystical" experience of the French philosopher Descartes involved a similar sudden revelation in which he saw m a flash the "order of all sciences." The British author Robert Louis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his "strong sense of man's double being," when the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a dream.
Later I shall describe in more detail how such material arises from the unconscious, and I shall examine the form in which it is expressed. At the moment I simply want to point out that the capacity of the human psyche to produce such new material is particularly significant when one is dealing with dream symbolism, for I have found again and again in my professional work that the images and ideas that dreams contain cannot possibly be explained solely in terms of memory. They express new thoughts that have never yet reached the threshold of consciousness.
(adapted for educational purposes from Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols, Doubleday, 1964.)