Dreams of Authoritarianism and Apocalypse
Jung's end-of-life visions and selections from a lecture by Marie-Louise von Franz
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Then we’ll begin our “slow read” of Dancing in the Flames on April 12th. One chapter a week and two live gatherings (maybe more…) to discuss. Learn more, order the book, and register here.
Shortly after the election, my sister sent me a text asking if I’d read an article in The New Yorker called “How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism.” I hadn’t, but as I lay poolside on a chaise lounge on my rather dystopic post-election vacation, I read on my phone about one woman’s efforts to collect people's dreams under Nazi occupation. The resulting book, I learned, is called The Third Reich of Dreams by Charlotte Beradt and contains a selection of seventy-five of the three hundred dreams that she collected. It also includes an afterward by the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who “notes the collection’s many prophetic dreams, in which, as early as 1933, ‘the dreamer can recognise deep down, what the system is really like.’” I haven’t had a chance to explore the dreams firsthand because it’s been out of print for years, but it seems that it’s slated for a new English release at the end of April.
I look forward to exploring it when it’s published and will most likely write more about it here soon. Meanwhile, it got me thinking again about a presentation that the Jungian analyst and scholar Marie-Louise von Franz delivered to the Jung Institute in Los Angeles in 1976 (published in 2016 by Psychological Perspectives). It’s a long lecture—one of my favorites—in which she discusses everything from Carlos Castaneda and the use of psychedelics for visioning, to the four stages of active imagination, and the increasing frequency of apocalyptic images in people’s dreams and culture. Her twists and turns never disappoint. But her thoughts on catastrophe and apocalypse dreams have stayed with me for years.
“In my experience,” she expresses, “these apocalyptic themes are now occurring very, very frequently in the dreams of normal people. I am personally convinced that great world catastrophes are imminent, and it will need a miracle to escape them, and that therefore those dreams have to be taken partly, or nearly entirely, objectively.”
By “objectively,” she means that they should be viewed more literally than symbolically. In other words, she does not see them as related exclusively to the dreamer’s own life experience. Instead, she views them as collective prophecies.
In a section of the post-presentation Q&A that I share below, von Franz references the famous BBC interview of Jung in which he’s asked about the dreams of German patients before WWII and his thoughts on the future of war. It’s a wonderful clip to watch if you want to hear his words for yourself (it should begin at 29 minutes in).
Von Franz then goes on to share what Jung told her about his visions late in life, and how the unconscious can protect us—or not—from forthcoming danger.
von Franz: Well, you know, in the BBC interview "Face to Face," Freeman asked Jung that question too: "Have you now any such apprehensions?" And Jung answered that it is now much more difficult, because before the First World War when he had those apocalyptic visions, nobody thought of a war. But now everybody thinks of such possibility, and if you read science fiction, every third or every second science fiction novel begins with the destruction of the world and a flight to another planet, and so on. …People read about it, our newspapers print it, the talk goes on about it all the time. So it is not the same situation. Jung says that in the BBC interview, and having heard that from Jung, I don't dare to play the prophet. But I can only say personally: I am convinced that quite a lot is going to happen soon. I am only too glad if you can, in ten years, tell me that I was wrong. I'll be so happy that it hasn't happened that I won't mind being wrong.
…But I am not resigned.
Question: Can you say more about that?
von Franz: Well, how could I put that in words? It's very difficult. Naturally I have moods when I really am resigned, and then I pull up my socks and say, "You had so many miracles in your own life, why shouldn't there be another?" But the reason why I am pessimistic is something I have not ever told. When Jung was dying, he said to me, "When I shut my eyes, I see great stretches of the earth completely destroyed. Thank God it is not the whole planet." I had the feeling that that was an objective vision that has naturally stuck with me.
…[L]et's assume that Jung saw the truth. What can we do? We can only build the future that comes after the catastrophe. I mean, if you look at history, there have always been those big catastrophes and the crumbling of civilizations. We can be sure that, one day, we will all be in the dust and then they'll dig us up. I don't think there is any chance that our civilization would not go the same way as all the others—one day. But somebody like Lao Tse and what he has built in the spirituality of humankind is still alive. So let's go on with that and the rest we do what we can against it—in the power area where we can exert our will—and beyond that... I can't influence Brezhnev or Ford or all those people. I don't want to either.
Question: James Michener tells the story prior to the Second World War in the Pacific. A man in Australia had a vision, knew what was going to happen. There was going to be a war. He felt that Japan would invade Australia, and he was trying to think what he could do to protect his family. He thought one possibility would be to move into the outback area, that the Japanese probably would leave them alone because that would be an intolerable life. So he moved his family to this obscure island in the Pacific that nobody had ever heard of: Guadalcanal. In the end, this man brought his family straight into the lion's den!
von Franz: On the other hand, a German professor of art history told me about his experience in that last World War, which has the opposite outcome. He was not a Nazi and therefore entered the military service very unwillingly. He was on the Russian front when the news arrived: He and the men in his troop were going to be sacrificed—all killed—as a way to hold one position when the Russians attacked so that the other troops could rearrange themselves in the back and survive. That was the strategy: Push one company forward for the Russians to attack; the men have to hold on till nobody is alive. The men all knew that it was so, and they were all lying there, waiting for the attack and their end, when suddenly in the blazing sun this man, our art history professor, saw a German soldier, but without helmet, with bare head, blond hair, saying to him, "Orders. Come quickly!" He was lying on the ground—but he got up in response to the German soldier's word and stood there, in front of the Russians. Nobody shot at him. He followed his comrade into the woods some hundred meters. In the meantime he heard how the Russians had attacked in the back, and suddenly that figure of the German soldier dissolved—it had been a hallucination. All the others in his troop were killed; he alone had survived. So I always say to myself, if the unconscious wants to save somebody, it can do the craziest, most unexpected thing. If that man had figured out that he was hallucinating, he would have never saved himself. …So I would say, if the unconscious wants to kill somebody, it can kill you in bed, and if it wants to save you, it can save you even in a global catastrophe. So it's not worth bothering about it too much or in the wrong way!
Question: How do you explain why one person is saved and another person is completely misled into certain disaster?
von Franz: I wouldn't dare to explain that. …I don't speculate. I prefer to think it's a great mystery that we don't know.1
What have your dreams been like in recent years and months? How has the unconscious been expressing itself to you?
Coming up:
"Dancing in the Flames" Slow Read
The feminine Is not Dead Nor is she Sleeping Angry, yes, Seething, yes. Biding her time; Yes. Yes. -To Be a Woman, Alice Walker (*selection)
I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. All links can be found here.
Marie-Louise von Franz, lecture delivered to the Jung Institute in Los Angeles in 1976, published in 2016 by Psychological Perspectives.
I was able to get The Third Reich of Dreams on inter library loan as some universities have it on their shelves. Well worth it! Zadie Smith wrote a wonderful review of it in the New York Review of Books, too. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/12/05/the-dream-of-the-raised-arm-third-reich-of-dreams-beradt-zadie-smith/
These are wonderful stories! Thank you for sharing, and continuing the extraordinary work that feeds us Satya! I think maybe I am living a dream all the time...night and day...the Great Mystery as Von Franz says! My grandfather was sent to the US at the age of 17, from Poland. There was word that the Nazis were going to execute a young boy, and his family wanted to protect him. We have his signature on a document which was signed when he arrived at Ellis Island. When I was a young girl he would tell me stories of the Russian Czars. At that time it meant little to me. Suffering many hardships, he became a successful man, who loved the US. Many of his relatives, I met only once in 1999 when I visited Israel. My relatives gathered at the home of Saul Friedländer, who was married to my mother's cousin.
He is the author of many books, one, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: "The extermination of the Jews triggers disbelief. This volume presents a thorough historical study of the events that extends beyond the usual analysis of German policies, decisions, and measures that led to this most systematic and sustained of modern genocides. It includes the reactions of the surrounding world―authorities, populations, churches, social elites―related facets of everyday life throughout the continent, and their individual expressions.
The history of the victims is an intrinsic part of this overall context; their attitudes found expression in both collective responses and individual testimonies. Here, the individual voices are weaved into the narrative and are the main carriers of disbelief: Some of them end in liberation; most are cut short by extermination."
What we are facing today, globally, ignites fires in my belly and soul. The questions of what to do, rumble in my heart and mind with sobriety every moment.