Jung: The ‘Siegfried’ Dream

Jung's well-known dream of ‘the killing of Siegfried’ has generated considerable commentary over the years, starting with Jung's own interpretation(s) of it in at least three contexts. What Winnicott (in his analysis of Jung's posthumous memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections) wryly called ‘games of “Jung analysis”’ are in fact crucial matters: psychoanalytic theories (e.g. Jung's and Freud's) are built on the understandings and self-analysis of such personal experiences.

In this section we present two papers that take a close look at Jung's Siegfried dream and offer differing interpretations of it. The first, by Jungian psychotherapist and professor Marco Heleno Baretto, Ph.D., from Brazil, is published here for the first time. The second, by American psychoanalyst Stanley Leavy, M.D., was published over 50 years ago in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly (and is reprinted here with the kind permission of that journal and of Dr. Leavy). The editors would also like to thank our colleague George Hogenson for bringing the latter article to our attention.

The background material to the two papers is as follows. On 18 December 1913, Jung had the following dream, a decisive event in his ‘confrontation with the unconscious’:

I was with an unknown, brown-skinned man, a savage, in a lonely, rocky mountain landscape. It was before dawn; the eastern sky was already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard Siegfried's horn sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had to kill him. We were armed with rifles and lay in wait for him on a narrow path over the rocks.

Then Siegfried appeared high up on the crest of the mountain, in the first ray of the rising sun. On a chariot made of the bones of the dead he drove at furious speed down the precipitous slope. When he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck dead.

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Filled with disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so great and beautiful, I turned to flee, impelled by the fear that the murder might be discov