VII Sermones Ad Mortuos

In Jung's Memories, dreams, reflections the chapter entitled ‘Confrontation with the unconscious’ contains a detailed description of the experiences leading to the writing of the ‘Seven sermons to the dead’, but there is next to no information about the contents of the text. This work of Jung's forms the appendix to the German edition of the Memories, and is likely to be available in English, also in the form of an appendix, when Memories, dreams, reflections goes into its next edition. It has seemed worth examining it in some detail, first, in relation to the stage in Jung's development at which he wrote it; second, as containing some of the image material from which he drew his views on the ego, the self, and the unconscious; and third, as most likely to be the expression of the personal experience which formed the basis of the paper entitled ‘The transcendent function’, written in the same year, 1916, but not published until .

While reproducing here as little as possible of the chapter ‘Confrontation with the unconscious’ it will be valuable to point out some of those aspects of it which are particularly interesting in this connexion. The first is the way in which Jung reacted to the period of disorientation and inner uncertainty that followed his break with Freud in . Then there is the way of making use of what he allowed and encouraged to occur during the next four years. In his own words he was ‘dealing with his own neurosis’ by allowing free play to dreams and fantasies, and by reflecting on them in the light both of ‘Freud's view that vestiges of old experiences exist in the unconscious’ (Jung, 1963, p. 167) and of the knowledge he already had at this stage of gnostic writings. He did not know where this conscious submission to unconscious impulses would lead him; what he did know was that it was a painfully humiliating experience in some of its aspects, and really frightening to a psychiatrist who had observed what psychosis means to those who