Boar-Sacrifice

As illustration of the value of anthropology for the understanding of dream symbols, and so of the psychological problem of the dreamer, I propose here very briefly to sketch out the symbolical significance of the pig (boar or sow) as archetypal image in relation to sacrifice.

I do this for two reasons: first, because the pig as archetype has as yet received scant attention; and secondly, because of the dream of a schizophrenic, in which the sacrifice of a boar played a decisive role and had such close similarities with those accompanying the sacrifice of tusked boars in Malekula that I have thought this a fit subject to expand upon.

Both forms of “sacrifice” are on a deep psychic level—one being concerned with psychosis diagnosed in a mental hospital as schizophrenia, that is to say, revealing very deep and very early factors in the life of a modern European, which have remained unintegrated as primitive autonomous complexes emerging at times in adult life with devastating effect; the other being part of the perfectly normal development of a primitive people isolated over a long period from the rest of the world and thus not having shared in its more general cultural advance. Both are on a very primitive level, but while one is pathological the other is not. I call attention to this because of the light shed by recent advances in our psychological understanding of the nature of psychosis in modern man (cf. Jung, 1952), et al.) namely, that psychosis making itself felt in later life is not necessarily pathological in origin, but on the contrary may represent a perfectly normal childhood experience which, however, has not been integrated into the personality but has got “left behind” in such an unintegrated condition that, when it does erupt, it does so in a form so unrecognizable that it needs all the knowledge that we can bring to bear to understand it, and to re-invest it with its originally healthy and life-promoting mea