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Charlottenburg-Berlin, Suarezstrasse 22 I
(Klingenberg)
[After 18 December 1916]
Dear Professor,
Thank you very much for your card* and the Dream Book. So far all I have attempted is a first cursory reading, but it was nevertheless complete—as was my pleasure at the thought that it will perhaps inspire people to assign more readily a meaning to the variety of their dreams, now that they have learnt that there is also a meaning in the apparent inconsequence of their slips. And as regards the conclusion I must confess that I am only now at last clear about the real difference between your view and that of the Maeder-Jung theory of dreams,80 even though I thought I knew it all before.
In reality it is the confusion about the dream-work, about what happens to the material, that makes the Ucs into so omniscient and prophetic a mystery for the Swiss. And that connects with the fact, by means of which I have chiefly explained it to myself so far, that the Ucs in the psycho-analytic sense of the word has always had a relationship to the Cs—either through previously having been conscious or through an approximation to this. In consequence it is possible that the Ucs may well contain elements which are simply reflections of this past; but when they arise from the colourless neutrality of the Ucs, we must first lend it recognizable features from our consciousness, in order to see it at all, and it then appears to us as preconditioned in an ‘unfathomably mystical’ way. Just the opposite of what used to be called unconscious, when one understood by this term the pre-conscious as something which had never become conscious.
I would prefer not to return the two English books just during these weeks of the Christmas rush, when the post is overburdened