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For A Number of years I have been paying special attention to early childhood experiences remembered and related by adult analysands. In the majority of cases I ask the patient at the beginning of analysis: ‘What is the earliest impressive experience you can remember?’ Sometimes the person then tells me a dream that he had at an early age; or he remembers a fantasy or vision-like experience. It also happens that the analysand relates an external incident which has remained unforgettable to him.
In this paper I have attempted to present a Jungian approach to the psychological interpretation of such experiences without entering into the very extensive literature on this subject. My justification for doing this will become apparent, I hope, as the discussion proceeds, but my main reason is that little or nothing has been written on this topic from C. G. Jung's point of view. There is a growing literature on children's dreams (cf. Fordham, 1944; Lewis, 1962), and examples will be found scattered in Jung's work. But apart from Jung's privately printed German language seminars on children's dreams (1938-40) no analytical psychologist has published anything on the theme that I intend to develop. In these seminars Jung introduces us to the idea that in early childhood, though the child is developing a sense of reality, he is also closely connected with a mythological world of magical images which, looked at in retrospect, seem to have determined the subject's future.
In my attempts to approach the meaning and significance of the early recollections, I have found Jung's idea confirmed: most of them originate in a mythical borderland where fact and imagination, reality and fantasy touch and merge. The experiences are still remembered by the adult because of the psychic reality which they once possessed for the child to whom they happened. But there is an additional reason for the human memory to hold on to those occurrences. As Jung (1938-40) and Neumann (1959) have shown, the