Marie Louise von Franz: To Dream of a Cat

A patient’s dream might illustrate what I have in mind.

The dreamer had a much too high-up religious, idealistic attitude and therefore a split-off shadow, which manifested in sudden outbursts of affect, but mostly in paranoic ideas: everything everywhere was evil, everybody had some arriére pensée [ulterior motive], and generally these accusations were not true.

Naturally, the patient herself was a dreadful liar.

She dreamed that she made a religious pilgrimage and suddenly, on the left, in a house, saw a decrepit old woman with a sick cat and a voice said: “This is existential fear” (Seinsangst).

The woman was terrified by this and asked a mature female figure, ‘Is it true that particularly people who suffer from existential fear and nervousness love cats?”

The elderly woman, a symbol of the wisdom of nature, said, “Yes.”

Then the dreamer quarreled over fifteen centimes with a very emotional shadow figure.

The latter got into a rage, and the dreamer was absolutely terrified and did not know what to do.

Then they both went to the mature woman, who turned to one and then the other and told both that they were right: that is, the emotional shadow figure and the frightened dreamer too.

If people are too sensitive, too easily frightened, and say things like, “If anybody shouts at me, I can’t stand it,” then you may be quite sure that they themselves are tremendously aggressive in their shadow side.

And, vice versa, the people who explode in aggression all the time are simply cowards.

The dog reacts more as we do and shows gratitude, but the cat is a princess.

She behaves as though she were conferring an honor on you, giving you the privilege of serving her and giving her milk.

Then she rubs herself against your leg and affords you the privilege of stroking her!

That is so suggestive that naturally you bend down and humbly do so and feel very honored! When the cat has had enough, she walks out!

She neither thanks you nor attaches herself to you. It does not matter who strokes the cat—what is important is that she gets attention.

The cat is therefore something absolutely divine and the right compensation for people who have existential fear.

People who suffer from such fear should cultivate the idea that they are conferring an honor on others by coming into a room and “letting themselves be stroked.”

They should take this as a symbol, and then they would feel secure and would learn what everyone who has a negative mother complex must learn: to look after themselves with the recklessness of nature.

The mature woman in the dream who says that both sides are right indicates the solution.

She would represent the Self who brings the opposites together so that fear and aggression are in the right proportion.

It also shows that the problem cannot be solved by understanding, only by outgrowing it.

It is one of those problems which one can only slowly and emotionally outgrow and not just conquer intellectually.

It requires long practice in being less frightened on the one side and less aggressive on the other, watching one’s fear while trying to give oneself security, putting a break on one’s own aggressiveness until one can slowly bring those two natural elements into the right balance, and thus outgrow this fatal constellation.

In women the negative mother complex often engenders a lack of basic vital security.

It is at the root of all kinds of destructiveness and inability to meet life. If one can integrate that problem emotionally, one acquires authority.

The Feminine in Fairy Tales

Pages 205-207