Snake Dream: Bitten on the Heel

Jung: Case Summary of a 27 year old Army Officer

Dream: Bitten on the Heel by a Snake

The case is that of an officer, twenty-seven years of age. He was suffering from severe attacks of pain in the region of the heart and from a choking sensation in the throat, as though a lump were stuck there. He also had piercing pains in the left heel. There was nothing organically the matter with him:

The attacks had begun about two months previously, and the patient had been exempted from military service on account of his occasional inability to walk. Various cures had availed nothing.

Close investigation into the previous history of his illness gave no clue, and he himself had no idea what the cause might be. He gave the impression of having a cheerful, rather light-hearted nature, perhaps a bit on the tough side, as though saying theatrically: “you can’t keep us down.”

As the anamnesis revealed nothing, I asked about his dreams. It at once became apparent what the cause was. Just before the beginning of his neurosis the girl with whom he was in love jilted him and got engaged to another man. In talking to me he dismissed this whole story as irrelevant“a stupid girl, if she doesn’t want me it’s easy enough to get another one. A man like me isn’t upset by a thing like that.”

That was the way he treated his disappointment and his real grief. But now the affects came to the surface. The pains in his heart soon disappeared, and the lump in his throat vanished after a few bouts of weeping.

“Heartache” is a poeticism, but here it became an actual fact because his pride would not allow him to suffer the pain in his soul. The “lump in the throat,” the so-called globus hystericus, comes, as everyone knows, from swallowed tears.

His consciousness had simply withdrawn from contents that were too painful to him, and these, left to themselves, could reach consciousness only indirectly, as symptoms. All this was a rationally understandable and perfectly intelligible process, which could just as well have passed off consciously, had it not been for his masculine pride.

But now for the third symptom. The pains in the heel did not disappear. They do not belong in the picture we have just sketched, for the heart is in no way connected with the heel, nor does one express sorrow through the heel. From the rational point of view, one cannot see why the other two syndromes should not have sufficed. Theoretically, it would have been entirely satisfactory if the conscious realization of the repressed psychic pain had resulted in normal grief and hence in a cure.

As I could get no clue to the heel symptom from the patient’s conscious mind, I turned once more to the dreams. The patient now had a dream in which:

He was bitten in the heel by a snake and instantly paralyzed.

This dream plainly offered an interpretation of the heel symptom. His heel hurt him because he had been bitten there by a snake. This is a very strange content, and one can make nothing of it rationally. We could understand at once why his heart ached, but that his heel should ache too is beyond all rational expectation. The patient was completely mystified.

Here, then, we have a content that propels itself into the unconscious zone in a singular manner, and probably derives from some deeper layer that cannot be fathomed rationally. The nearest analogy to this dream is obviously the neurosis itself. When the girl jilted him, she gave him a wound that paralyzed him and made him ill.

Further analysis of the dream elicited something from his previous history that now became clear to the patient for the first time: He had been the darling of a somewhat hysterical mother. She had pitied him, admired him, pampered him so much that he never got along properly at school because he was too girlish.

Later he suddenly swung over to the masculine side and went into the army, where he was able to hide his inner weakness by a display of “toughness.” 

Thus, in a sense, his mother too had lamed him.

The patient’s conscious knowledge of the Bible was at a lamentable minimum. Probably he had once heard of the serpent biting the heel and then quickly forgotten it. But something deep in his unconscious heard it and did not forget: it remembered this story at a suitable opportunity. This part of the unconscious evidently likes to express itself mythologically, because this way of expression is in keeping with its nature.

But to what kind of mentality does the symbolical or metaphorical way of expression correspond? It corresponds to the mentality of the primitive, whose language possesses no abstractions but only natural and “unnatural” analogies. This primeval mentality is as foreign to the psyche that produced the heartache and the lump in the throat as a brontosaurus is to a racehorse 

The dream of the snake reveals a fragment of psychic activity that has nothing whatever to do with the dreamer as a modern individual. It functions at a deeper level, so to speak, and only the results of this activity rise up into the upper layer where the repressed affects lie, as foreign to them as a dream is to waking consciousness. Just as some kind of analytical technique is needed to understand a dream, so a knowledge of mythology is needed in order to grasp the meaning of a content deriving from the deeper levels of the psyche.

The snake-motif was certainly not an individual acquisition of the dreamer, for snake-dreams are very common even among city-dwellers who have probably never seen a real snake

I would like for the sake of completeness, to make a few more remarks about the snake-dream. It seems as if this hypothetical deeper layer of the unconscious the collective unconscious, as I shall now speak of ithad translated the patient’s experiences with women into the snake-bite dream and thus turned them into a regular mythological motif.

The reason or rather, the purpose of this is at first somewhat obscure. But if we remember the fundamental principle that the symptomatology of an illness is at the same time a natural attempt at healing the heartaches, for example, being an attempt to produce an emotional outburst then we must regard the heel symptom as an attempt at healing too.

 Collected Works 8
¶ 303 – 312