Jung – Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process (Notes of C. G. Jung’s Seminars on Wolfgang Pauli’s Dreams)

Carl Gustav Jung

Lecture 1, page 163

Immediately after the first interview with the woman doctor, the patient dreamed the first dream of the series: He was in a social gathering at which there were many indistinct people. He had rather a vague feeling of people around him who were more or less familiar to him. As he was about to leave the party, he picked up his own hat, as he supposed. But when he put it on, he discovered that it was not his, but one strange to him. That is the whole dream. 

Now, of course, if a patient should tell me such a dream, I would feel rather hesitant about interpreting it because it was just a little fragment; and one has to be careful not to say too much about such a dream because one may go entirely wrong. In the light of subsequent events, one feels a bit safer. But if the patient should have insisted that I give him my thoughts about it, then I would say, “Of course, I don’t know what that dream means in your personal psychology at this moment.” For one must make that differentiation between an individual or personal meaning and a general meaning. Those symbols which are of an archetypal nature have a general meaning that can be established apart from a personal psychology. For example, in this dream, the symbol of the hat would suggest that part of a man’s attire which covers his head. The head is the seat of consciousness, of the conscious mind, and anything that comes from the conscious mind is a general idea. In the German language we use the metaphor verschiedene Sachen unter einen Hut zu bringen in order to express the idea of a complete subsumption, which means that when we have any conceptions or notions from which we create a general idea, we say “we gather many notions under one hat.” Also the hat may designate the general idea we have about the function of a man. For instance, if he is a very prominent individual, then he is “crowned.” He has a peculiar kind of hat, the sun hat, the crown of a king; and the crown of a king is the sun’s halo with the rays. The king is that human individual who is transformed into the sun. As the sun is in the heaven, so is the king upon earth. As the sun is radiant, so the king is radiant. As the sun is ruler of the universe, so the king or emperor wears the mantle covered with stars, just as the universe wears the celestial mantle. So the Roman emperors, and also the old Babylonian kings, wore mantles bedecked with stars like the medals or orders of today. This is the last remnant of the idea that an individual can be made into a cosmic being—into a sun. Also a doctor’s cap or hat is used to designate that particular individual as a scholar. So you see when the dreamer gets a strange hat it means he is not under his own ideas. A strange idea has caught hold of him. His unconscious has given him a new idea under which he is now. This has been made use of by a writer, Meyrink, of whom you may have heard. He wrote a book, Golem, in which he describes the case of a man who by mistake picked up the wrong hat.”