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There is a significant moment in “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”, in the chapter translated into English as ‘Confrontations with the Unconscious’ (this word ‘Confrontation’ in many ways fails to take up the subtle, dialectical, historical, and philosophical implications of Jung's German ‘Die Auseinandersetzung', but maybe stresses an ‘heroic’, assertive attitude). Jung is describing one of his fantasies in which he and ‘an unknown, brown-skinned man, a savage’ shoot at and kill ‘Siegfried’, the hero figure of Teutonic myth and, bedevilled, Wagnerian opera (and Nazi ideology). Jung describes the feelings of ‘remorse’ and ‘disgust’ that filled him after his act of killing, and how he felt compelled to understand the dream. Urgently pondering it, the meaning of the dream suddenly ‘dawned’ upon Jung. The figure of Siegfried represented a collective attitude: ‘What the Germans want to achieve, heroically to impose their will, have their own way … I had wanted to do the same … The dream showed that the attitude embodied by Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me. Therefore it had to be killed … This identity and my heroic idealism had to be abandoned …' ( C. G. Jung, Memories, Dream, Reflections. Recorded and edited by NewYork: Random Books, 1963. Pp. 180-1.) It would not be an understatement to say that this killing off of Jung's ‘heroic idealism’ and hence (potential, perhaps actual) self-idealization and inflation was fundamentally critical in the service of the ‘care of the soul’, which today we name ‘depth psychology’. Without this ‘crisis’, Jung's psychology would not have happened, for it freed depth psychology and its notion of consciousness from the inflation of the hero image.
The theme of the hero is thus an important one in the analytic tradition (‘psychoanalysis’ has its own hero legends which are intrinsic to its psychological