Two king’s sons went out into the world and fell into a wild disorderly way of living such that they never came home again. The third and youngest, whom they called ‘Dummling’, then set out to find them, though, when he eventually did so, they mocked him for imagining he could help them manage the world where they had failed, given they were so much more clever than he. All three then travelled together until they came to a large anthill. The older brothers thought to experiment with the anthill, to tear it down and watch the ants scurry about in a panic but the youngest stepped in, ‘Do not disturb them! Leave the creatures in peace!’ They further journeyed on until they came to a pond with some ducks swimming. The older brothers wanted to catch and roast them but Dummling would not allow it, ‘Do not disturb them! Leave the creatures in peace!’ Further still they came across a nest of bees. The older brothers wanted to smoke out the bees and take their honey but Dummling prevented them, ‘Do not disturb them! Leave the creatures in peace!’
Eventually the three brothers came to a great stone castle. Inside was a very old man who gave them bed and board. Next morning he summoned the eldest and gave him three tasks, the completion of which would free the castle from enchantment. The first task was to gather up the Princess’s pearls which had been scattered in the forest by sunset. If he missed even one he would be turned to stone. The boy searched methodically from tree to tree but by the end of the day had only a few and was turned to stone. The next day the second brother tried, he made grids and drew maps but faired no better and was also turned to stone. Then it was Dummling’s turn. He knew he must fail and sat on a stone weeping.
Just then, the king of the ants, whose home he had saved, turned up with his entire army and found every pearl by teatime. The second task was to find the key to the Princess’s bedchamber hidden at the bottom of the lake. Dummling knew he could not achieve such a task but lo and behold, the ducks he had saved from being roasted arrived and quickly found it. The third task was the most difficult, to identify the Princess, the king’s youngest daughter who looked so like her sisters they could not be told apart, except that each had had a different sweetmeat before the test, the first a bit of sugar, the second some syrup and the third some honey. Dummling knew he could not tell them apart but then the Queen of the Bees arrived and settled on the lips of the youngest Princess who’d eaten the honey and so the tasks were completed, the brothers restored and the enchantment lifted.
Dummling’s apparent deficiency is revealed as actually having a different relationship with the world than his ‘clever’ brothers. He is receptive to what others overlook. His attention is drawn towards small, apparently insignificant things, and he responds to them with an instinctive generosity. His attention is associative and distributed across the environment rather than subordinated to a predetermined objective. He is receptive to the unexpected; what appears irrelevant to the other brothers becomes essential to the eventual solution. His relationships are reciprocal rather than transactional. His apparent distractions and diversions establish relationships which subsequently prove indispensable.
This story gives us the possibility of considering psychic states which seem to be purely debilitating but which in fact are just what is required to face the challenges set by the Self, ‘the old man’. We could think of the Dummling in an intrapsychic way, ie, as a representation of the inferior function, the less developed aspects of the personality, but so too could we think of him as being an undervalued aspect of the collective psyche, a way of thinking and operating largely rejected and demeaned by our dominant culture.
Whilst acknowledging the very real problems faced by what we could broadly call neurodiversity, the story of the Queen Bee invites us to reconsider prejudices we may, with the best will in the world, still bring to bear and to think about the redemptive qualities as well as the limitations present in cognitive styles outside the mainstream. Putting the question of genetic predisposition and the influence of early experiences, which of course can exacerbate matters, to one side for a moment, lets think of the story as a compensatory corrective to preconceptions we collectively tend to have about modes of being which do not chime with cultural norms but that nevertheless can achieve and create where the ‘better adjusted’ fail.
In his work, ‘Symbols of Transformation’, Jung distinguishes two very different ways of thinking. The first, ‘directed thinking’, is verbal, logical and effortful. It is the means by which we plan, communicate, solve problems and organise our relationship with the external world. It is the style of thinking represented by the two older brothers. The second, ‘fantasy thinking’, is the style represented by the youngest; it is associative, imagistic, spontaneous and relatively independent of conscious direction. It is characteristic of dreaming, myth, fantasy and the imaginative activity of the unconscious. Rather than proceeding towards a predetermined goal, it follows its own psychic associations, drawing together apparently unrelated material and allowing new symbolic possibilities to emerge.
Given how different these two modes of thinking are, difficulties might understandably arise if they cannot establish a fruitful relationship with one another. What might otherwise burgeon as creative imagination can become distraction, fragmentation or an inability to translate inner possibilities into lived reality.
Dummling’s apparently inferior mode of functioning is actually closer to the working of the unconscious. What directed thinking often dismisses as irrelevant actually contains precisely what is required for psychological renewal. The redemptive possibility in our story is not the elimination of Dummling’s difference, but the discovery of its value. Characteristics regarded as deficient within one psychological economy become valuable within another.
What if some of what we are tempted to call neurotic inattention is, in part, the failure of directed consciousness to establish a sufficiently creative relationship with fantasy thinking? How would it be if we explored neurodiversity as the expression of a psyche whose associative, imaginative and exploratory capacities are insufficiently accommodated by the directing function of consciousness? If you try to pour a gallon into a pint pot there will be some messy spillage.
Our modern culture tends very much to favour directed thinking over fantasy thinking. The prejudice is that the dreamer staring out of the window or absorbed in his or her own world is doing something unproductive and even infantile.
‘This opinion, however, is not altogether satisfying. It is no doubt true that fantasy-thinking is not immediately productive, i.e., is unadapted and therefore useless for all practical purposes. But in the long run the play of fantasy uncovers creative forces and contents, just as dreams do. They are not in themselves infantile, much less pathological.‘ (para 38 CW5)
In the realm of science, which you would think is entirely circumscribed by directed thinking there are a number of notable exceptions which depended on the receptive and associative capacity of fantasy thinking. August Kekulé imagined a snake seizing its own tail, leading him to the ring structure of benzene. Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed of the periodic arrangement of the elements, which helped him formulate the periodic table. Niels Bohr used the planetary image of electrons orbiting a nucleus to develop his early atomic model. Albert Einstein imagined riding alongside a beam of light, a thought experiment that helped lead to special relativity. James Maxwell imagined invisible mechanical vortices and idler wheels to develop an intuitive model of electromagnetic fields. Otto Loewi dreamed of an experiment involving two frog hearts, leading to the discovery of chemical neurotransmission. Francis Crick drew on the image of a spiral staircase in thinking about DNA’s structure. Alexander Fleming recognised the significance of an apparently accidental mould contamination, allowing an unexpected observation to become the discovery of penicillin. Scientific discovery often requires a temporary suspension of directed, goal-oriented thinking, allowing an image, analogy, dream or unexpected association to emerge before rational thought can test and develop it. Author Robert Pirsig goes further, asserting that it is often when directive thinking grinds to a halt and we become utterly stuck that creative solutions then present themselves.
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance. (W.H. Davies 1911)
We undervalue receptivity, the capacity to pause, attend without purpose, and allow the world to make an impression upon us, rather than continually directing our attention towards an object. A child who is imaginative, associative, physically exploratory and resistant to sustained, externally imposed attention may be poorly matched to an educational environment which demands precisely the opposite.
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. (Wordsworth 1807)
The philosopher Martin Heidegger adds nuance to our theme by distinguishing two very different ways of being-in-the-world which seem to underpin and provide context for Jung’s two types of thinking. Heidegger describes two fundamentally different attitudes or ways of relating which he calls, ‘present-to-hand’ and ‘ready-at-hand’. The first mode of being, ‘present-at-hand’ describes our two clever brothers, who are not only task oriented and focused in their thinking but who are self-serving in their attitudes. They position themselves in the world through conscious calculation, judgement and instrumental use, treating its inhabitants and resources as objects to be exploited. The Dummling by contrast embodies an attitude which is ‘ready-to-hand’; he participates in the world rather than standing apart from it. His relationship with the ants, ducks and bees is one of practical responsiveness, respect and reciprocity. He doesn’t calculate their future usefulness; he enters into an intersubjective relationship with them. Dummling’s apparent foolishness represents a more immediate, relational intelligence, less dominated by the exploitative attitude of his brothers whose world is characterised by objectification and evaluated in terms of material resources.
Dummling’s openness to the world enables a form of experience unavailable to the older brothers, more oriented to issues of meaning and purpose which then elicit a co-operative response from the world, kindness giving rise to good fortune.
This theme is one repeated time and again in fairytales from around the world. In ‘The Three Feathers’, three princes compete to win their father’s kingdom. The youngest, dismissed as a fool, follows his feather into the earth and discovers a remarkable subterranean world. His seemingly insignificant relationship with a toad ultimately wins him the kingdom. The story emphasises the capacity to descend beneath the dominant collective assumptions we have about competence and discover resources unavailable to conventional consciousness.
In ‘The Golden Goose’, the youngest of three sons, also called ‘Dummling’, shares his food with a little old man in the forest. In return, he receives a golden goose. Everyone who tries to take a feather becomes stuck to it, creating an extraordinary procession of people snared and transfixed by the narrow focus of their greed.. Kindness and generosity rather than self interested calculation generates the hero’s later abundance.
In ‘The Water of Life’, two older princes fail in their quest to find the healing water. The youngest succeeds because he listens to a dwarf whom his brothers have treated contemptuously, emphasising the ability to recognise and respect the seemingly insignificant. The ‘unsophisticated’ brother’s humility makes possible a relationship with the unknown.
What emerges from these stories is that attitude is everything. Dummling’s consideration of the ants, ducks and bees has significance far greater than the already considerable progression from having objects be present-to-hand, to the intersubjectivity of having the world be ready-at-hand where others are afforded the ontological validity of equal status.
Jung’s different types of thinking also have qualitatively distinct ways of relating to the Unconscious. Fantasy thinking affords inner objects, dream images and archetypal figures with subjective autonomy, embodying a symbolic attitude which experiences the psyche as being essentially alive and containing any number of independent loci of consciousness. Directive thinking tends to place itself at the centre of the psyche viewing other internal objects as derivative, as though what was in the unconscious was inert and there by virtue of repression rather than having an a priori existence from which consciousness itself is derived. Directed thinking views problem solving as something the ego does by itself by dint of strenuous effort. It is solipsistic and construes symbols and dreams as ‘parts-of-myself’ and thus subordinate to the ego, whereas fantasy thinking treats such phenomena as independent and charged with life in a way that will not permit the exploitation of the older brothers.
There are many everyday expressions which suggest we experience inner contents not simply as things we manufacture or possess, but as autonomous presences with something of their own life and agency. In common parlance we give testimony to this with such phrases as, ‘an idea came to me,’ rather than ‘I thought up an idea’. This is also expressed in the form, ‘Something is telling me…’ where an intuition is experienced as having its own voice. It’s stronger in the form of being ‘captured’ by an idea or intrusive thought.
‘It just occurred to me,’ denotes a thought arriving without conscious intention, as does, ‘I can’t get it out of my head,’ which acknowledges an image or thought as possessing a degree of autonomy. ‘The words wouldn’t come,’ here language is experienced as having its own availability or withdrawal. ‘Something took hold of me,’ describes an affect or complex experienced almost as an independent presence. ‘I need to sit with that,’ refers to the experience of an inner content requiring time and relationship rather than immediate action. ‘Getting out of one’s own way,’ suggests the recognition that conscious intention can impede solutions or suggestions from elsewhere in the psyche. ‘Something popped into my mind,’ expresses the autonomy of an idea. ‘I was triggered’, expresses the autonomy of an emotion. The concept of having a vocation, a calling, suggests intention outside ego’s perview, as does the experience of having a guiding star or a sense that things might be preordained, or conversely, ‘not meant to be’.
Such experiences of oneself do not require heroic action. They need sitting with and much staring out of the window. We might say that an inner image becomes ready-to-hand when we are in a living relationship with it. It is available to us, but not as an object under our control. We inhabit it, work with it, and allow it to disclose something. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard gives expression to the reality of what we could call ‘autonomous complexes’ being sources of help and inspiration, ‘There is what I want to think about and there is what wants to be thought.’
The two ‘sophisticated’ brothers in our story suffer from what Jung calls, a ‘monotheism of consciousness’. (CW 13, §51) Jung writes, ‘Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous.’ He observes that Western consciousness is characterised by the denial that these autonomous psychic systems can even be experienced.
We have a tendency to assume that there is one centre of psychic authority, the ego, and that our thoughts, feelings and actions should be subject to conscious direction. What we cannot consciously understand or control is construed as either unreal, irrational or pathological. Autonomous psychic activity is something to be explained away rather than encountered. Jung calls this a monotheism because consciousness has effectively installed itself as the sole legitimate authority in psychic life.
In traditional cultures, autonomous psychic forces are frequently experienced as gods, spirits, demons, ancestors or other supernatural presences. Whatever their metaphysical status, these images give expression to the experience of psychic forces which are not under the control of conscious intention.
Modern scientific rationality has largely dispensed with these figures. But, Jung argues, it has not dispensed with the psychic forces themselves. They continue to manifest in dreams, fantasies, symptoms, compulsions, projections and autonomous complexes. The danger is that we have lost the symbolic language through which these forces might be recognised and related to. This danger is expressed somewhat poetically in a Russian variant of the Queen Bee story in which the Devil attempts to ‘educate’ the people by climbing up a high tower and haranguing them to use their heads, but he became so tired and dizzy that he lost his balance and fell to his death. The story ends, ‘isn’t that silly? Teaching the people to use their heads, the devil forgot all about his own body.’
Associative fantasy thinking with its musing, pottering circuity, offers a counterweight to the monotheism of consciousness, which if discouraged or devalued or ‘educated’ is bound to assume the symptomatic expression of neurotic inattention, just as any natural tendency will become troublesome and unruly if it’s invalidatated or disenfranchised.
Myths and fairy tales, the bulletin board of fantasy thinking, remind and reconnect us to a world in which the psyche has resources and intelligences besides conscious intention represented by animals which speak and possess wisdom, objects which have agency and power, situations in which the insignificant or foolish person may possess unexpected abilities, where unconscious figures intervene in human affairs and the protagonist may be required to submit to circumstances which cannot be mastered through intelligence or will.
In other words, they restore a sense of psychic balance through representing the plurality and autonomy of the psyche for what it actually is. It is for this reason that Einstein famously said, ‘do you want your children to be intelligent? Then read them fairy stories. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy stories.’ Steeping oneself in fantasy and imagination at an early age, finding value in the flowers by the wayside, allowing dolls, bears and imaginary figures to be suffused with life can often speak to life’s conundrums in a way that the later development of directed thinking cannot.
The Dummling in our story is an especially good example. His brothers operate through instrumental intelligence, calculation and conscious intention and are therefor powerless when faced with the king’s challenging tasks of finding the Princess’s pearls, her key, her identity. The Dummling is receptive to what appears insignificant, including the needs of animals. What his brothers dismiss as irrelevant becomes the source of his eventual transformation and good fortune.
The value of fantasy thinking can be taken a step further than the already advantageous sense that it provides both connectedness to inner and outer objects. Psychotherapy itself depends upon developing and strengthening this facility to bring about healing in the psyche. No emotional or psychological problem was ever remedied by a frontal assault, by intentional intervention. It is invariably a matter of free-association, musing, amplification, receptivity, paying attention to minutiae, and, like Parsifal, having the right question rather than clever answers.
If the therapist assumes that psychological development consists primarily in increasing the patient’s capacity for conscious understanding, adaptation and control, the therapeutic process risks reproducing precisely the monotheism Jung is criticising. Our task is rather to cultivate a relationship with autonomous psychic life.
This means allowing images, dreams, fantasies and symbolic narratives to retain something of their independence, rather than immediately translating them into rational explanations, Jung’s concept of the symbolic attitude, the capacity to experience an image or situation as something more than a sign whose meaning is already known. This requires the therapist to actively renounce ‘knowing’, to embrace mystery and the non-rational so that directive thinking then has some soil to grow in, so that conscious and unconscious can be co-operative rather than distractedly at each others throats.
Jung’s criticism of the monotheism of consciousness embodied in the exclusivity of directive thinking which then manifests symptomatically as ADHD, autism and other related difficulties, draws our attention to the danger of identifying psychic reality exclusively with the intentions and authority of the ego. Fairy tales and the revaluation of fantasy thinking preserve an alternative remedial vision; a plural, animate psychic world in which autonomous agencies possess their own significance and are essential participants in the process of transformation. We could go so far as to say that the primary purpose and true goal of therapy is not to resolve problems or to be free of neuroses but to re-member and develop fresh respect for the psychic ground out of which the ego itself emerged such that it may then bear creative fruit.
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