Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2016, 61, 1, 88–105

The riddle of Siegfried: exploring methods

and psychological perspectives in analytical
psychology

Marco Heleno Barreto, Brazil

Abstract: Jung’s dream of the killing of Siegfried poses a riddle: why did the unconscious
choose precisely Siegfried as the hero to be murdered? Jung himself declares that he does
not know. This paper attempts to decipher this riddle using three distinct methodological
approaches accepted by Jung, two of them in fact grounded in his theories of dream
interpretation. Besides presenting some possible answers to the riddle of Siegfried, this
interpretative reflection brings to light the discrepancy of the psychological perspectives
created by the heterogeneity of methods within analytical psychology.

Keywords: Jung’s Siegfried dream, interpretation, analytical method, synthetic-

constructive method, method of interiorization

In 1925, in the seminar in which he presented the first public account of part of
his ‘confrontation with the unconscious’, Jung analysed his now famous dream
of the killing of Siegfried. In his memoirs, edited by Aniela Jaffé, he once more
alluded to it (Jung 1963a). And now, with the publication of The Red Book
(Jung 2009), we have access to the full and first-hand account of that psychic
material, as well as to Jung’s interpretation of it at that time. In all these
accounts, the importance of the dream is well established: according to Jung’s
interpretation, the killing of Siegfried was necessary in order to make it
possible for him ‘to carry the experiment of the unconscious to a conclusion’
(Jung 1963a, p. 181).
One point in the dream, however, remained enigmatic even to Jung himself:

Siegfried was not an especially sympathetic figure to me, and I don’t know why my
unconscious got engrossed in him. Wagner’s Siegfried, especially, is exaggeratedly
extraverted and at times actually ridiculous. I never liked him. Nevertheless my
dream showed him to be my hero. I could not understand the strong emotion I had
with the dream.
(Jung 1925, p. 56)

0021-8774/2016/6101/88 © 2016, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12190
The riddle of Siegfried 89

The choice of the specific form of hero who must be killed in order to give way
to the soul process in progress can inform us about what is truly at stake in this
process. As an essential agent in the process of establishing a new psychological
point of view, Jung’s conscious position regarding Siegfried should be taken
into account. Jung finds him ‘exaggeratedly extraverted’. From this aspect of
Siegfried comes the riddle that puzzles Jung and that he never solved: in what
sense could he, a notorious introvert, be identified with Siegfried, an
‘exaggeratedly extraverted’ hero?
In order to answer this question, I will reassess the dream according to the
two methods noted by Jung and briefly described in Two Essays on
Analytical Psychology: the ‘analytical (causal-reductive)’ and the ‘synthetic
(constructive)’ (Jung 1917/1926/1943, paras. 128–40). It should be noted that
Jung based his interpretation only on the latter, working with the
corresponding ‘subjective’ level of interpretation. Therefore, I will start by
providing an interpretation of the dream using the causal-reductive method,
which corresponds to the ‘objective’ level of interpretation, and we will see
that from this analytic approach the answer to Jung’s riddle is quite simple.
Then I will summarize Jung’s interpretation of his dream, and show that he
couldn’t understand the choice of the image of Siegfried due to a confusion of
two different standpoints within the subjective level of interpretation, and also
due to the inherent limitations of each standpoint as they were handled by
Jung. Finally, I will propose an interpretation which is different from Jung’s but
based on a methodological principle that he himself established. This last
approach is based exclusively on the notion of soul as the self-sufficient
interiority of psychic phenomena. In other words, it enables us to dispense with
the use of any other referent besides soul itself in the interpretation of the
Siegfried dream. After this interpretative exercise, I will conclude with some
remarks on the methodological diversity housed in analytical psychology.

Interpretation on the objective level: a chapter in the chronique scandaleuse of the

psychoanalytic movement
An interpretation on the objective level ‘equates the dream images with real
objects’ (Jung 1917/1926/1943, para. 130). It is analytic ‘because it breaks
down the dream content into memory-complexes that refer to external
situations’ (ibid.). It is based on the presupposition that the dream expresses
the interplay between objective relationships and the individual dreamer’s
drives and unconscious wishes. Consequently, in order to understand a given
dream image, we must examine the subject’s relations to outer, real people.
This is the specific method of dream interpretation of Freudian
psychoanalysis, as Jung understands it.
Our first task in interpreting Jung’s dream on the objective level, then, is to
consider the personal context of his life which could give us clues to the
90 Marco Heleno Barreto

meaning of the dream image. The dream happened on 18 December 1913.

Shortly before, in October of that same year, Jung had resigned from the
editorship of the Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische
Forschungen. The rupture with Freud and psychoanalysis certainly had
tremendous emotional impact upon him, so much so that he declared that,
when he was working on the book which sealed his divergence from Freud,
Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, ‘all my dreams pointed to a break with
Freud’ (Jung 1925, p. 24). By the time of the Siegfried dream, the emotional
temperature of this rupture was far from being lowered, as Jung’s resignation
from the editorship of the Jahrbuch shows. Arguably, this was one of the
central aspects of Jung’s life at that time. Many years later, recollecting his
experience in this period, Jung stated: ‘When I parted from Freud, I knew that
I was plunging into the unknown. Beyond Freud, after all, I knew nothing;
but I had taken the step into darkness’ (Jung 1963a, p. 199). His dream came
out of this darkness, which was opened up to him by consciously turning off
the Freudian light.
If, moved by Jung’s perplexity about the image of Siegfried and informed
about the context of his life at that moment, we turn to the dream with an
analytical eye, we have to pay attention to a simple yet highly significant
detail in the story of Siegfried, one crucial to an interpretation on the
objective level: Siegfried is the son of Siegmund. Jung publicly admitted that,
while he was still on good terms with Freud, they lived out a father-son
relationship: ‘I felt myself to be his son’ (Jung 1925, p. 22). Consequently,
‘Siegfried’ can be interpreted on the objective level as a sign for Jung’s sonship
with Sigmund Freud. By killing the position of the son, he is simultaneously
killing the position of the father. It is this whole form of the personal
relationship between the two men which is being destroyed.1
In the Siegfried saga, the hero is killed treacherously by Hagen. In the dream,
it is Jung who enacts the traitor’s role, thus being identified with it.
Consequently, the dream depicts the dark feeling of being guilty of betrayal.
And the betrayal is none other than Jung’s betrayal of Freud by refusing to be
his son. This feeling of guilt presumably had been repressed by Jung and
comes to the surface in the dream. The idea of having his murderous act
perceived by other people was distressing to Jung in the dream. In Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, he said that he fled from the murder scene, and that he

1
Five years before his Siegfried dream, in a letter to Freud dated 20 February 1908, Jung wrote:
‘The undeserved gift of your friendship is one of the high points in my life which I cannot
celebrate with big words. The reference to Fliess – surely not accidental – and your relationship
with him impels me to ask you to let me enjoy your friendship not as one between equals but as
that of father and son. The distance appears to me fitting and natural. Moreover, it alone, so it
seems to me, strikes a note that would prevent misunderstandings and enable two hard-headed
people to exist alongside one another in an easy and unstrained relationship’ (McGuire 1974,
pp. 59–60).
The riddle of Siegfried 91

felt relief after the rainfall, which presumably ‘showed that the tension between
consciousness and the unconscious was being resolved’ (Jung 1963a, p. 181).
Inside the dream, the relief brought about by the rain was related to the
erasure of the signs of the murder, which shows very clearly that a dominant
component of the dream is Jung’s feeling of guilt.
Interpreting the dream on the objective level forces us to stay with the
perspective of Jung’s ‘personal unconscious’. Hence, we can sum up the
interpretation up to this point: the loosening of the ‘forces of the unconscious’
is simply the conscious realization, through the dream, of Jung’s repressed
feelings of guilt for having broken with Freud.
Now, in Black Book 2 Jung wrote the following passage, absent in other
accounts of the dream: ‘I strode light-footed up an incredibly steep path and
later helped my wife, who followed me at a slower pace, to ascend. Some
people mocked us, but I didn’t mind, since this showed that they didn’t know
that I had murdered the hero’ (Jung 2009, p. 242, n. 115). This detail captures
the attention of the psychoanalytic interpreter: we are informed that in the
dream, after the murder of Siegfried and the subsequent fleeing from the murder
scene, Jung’s wife is following him. From the causal-reductive, objective
standpoint, this means that the killing of Siegfried discloses something related to
Jung’s marriage. What could that possibly mean? To answer this question, we
must follow a second associative thread to the image of Siegfried.
‘Siegfried’ was a longstanding metaphor used by Sabina Spielrein, referring to
an eventual son she would have, a wish later sublimated into her creative power
in general.2 As is well known, Jung had a very complex relationship with Sabina
Spielrein: analyst, teacher and very likely her lover (Carotenuto 1982).
Throughout their correspondence the mention of ‘Siegfried’ shows that the
metaphor was shared with Jung. Hence, it is fairly plausible to state that the
image of Siegfried evoked or was linked to their personal relationship too.
Following this line of association, the killing of Siegfried in the dream refers
to Jung’s whole complex relation to Sabina Spielrein, and the guilt he felt
after the murder of the hero points to his personal attitudes and decisions vis-
à-vis that relationship.3 In this connection, one could make sense of the

2
For instance: in the letter which she sent to Jung, written probably in the first months of 1912 and
accompanying the manuscript of her ‘Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens’, to be published in
the Jahrbuch, Sabina Spielrein refers to it as ‘the fruit of our love … the little son Siegfried’
(Carotenuto 1982, p. 115). In her diary entry dated ‘19.X.1910’, Sabina writes that her ideal of
Siegfried was inspired by Jung (ibid., p. 219).
3
‘The love of S. for J. made the latter aware of something he had previously only vaguely
suspected, namely of a power in the unconscious which shapes one’s destiny, a power which later
led him to things of the greatest importance. The relationship had to be ‘sublimated’, because
otherwise it would have led to delusion and madness (a concretization of the unconscious).
Sometimes we must be unworthy to live at all’ (Jung 2001, p. 194, my italics; letter of 1
September 1919).
92 Marco Heleno Barreto

dream detail about Emma Jung: after killing his extra-marital entanglement
with Sabina Spielrein, Jung could help his wife to ascend to where he was and
presumably occupy her place at his side as the legitimate ‘official’ wife.
Nonetheless, a psychoanalytic interpretation might be that the mockery of the
married couple and the detail that Jung’s wife followed him at a slower pace
are signs of Jung’s dissatisfaction with his marriage. And gossipmongers
would certainly smile and whisper the name of Toni Wolff.
Regarding Jung’s idea (upon waking from the dream) that he would shoot
himself if he could not understand its meaning: this could point to a supposed
unconscious resistance to giving up his position as the heir-son of Freud as
well as his entanglement with Sabina Spielrein. In this case, Jung is
confronted with a dilemma: he should break his identification with Siegfried,
otherwise he would suffer the latter’s destiny in the dream. The price to be
paid in order to preserve his life was the radical and total sacrifice of all that
is condensed in the image of Siegfried. But in so doing, he was betraying
Freud and Sabina Spielrein, and sacrificing a part of himself.
Hence, in the murder of Siegfried, the dream kills two birds with one stone, so
to speak. As a matter of fact, in reality the two lines of association come
together if we remember that in 1913 Sabina Spielrein had already declared
her commitment to Freud. Therefore, in ‘Siegfried’ we have a single bird with
complex (or overdetermined, in the psychoanalytic sense) meaning. This
should be obvious to any interpreter who would take the trouble to examine
the Siegfried legend as the first immediate and direct associative context to the
dream, for it is full of betrayal, incest, father-son conflicts, a father-daughter-
son triangle etc. And Jung had worked on Siegfried in his Wandlungen und
Symbole der Libido (see Jung 1919, pp. 216–36).
Ingenious and plausible as this psychoanalytic interpretation on the objective
level may be, it nonetheless has one major limitation: by its very methodological
procedure, it falls short of the meaning it draws from the Siegfried dream. It
goes against what is expressed in the dream action: in itself, as a form of
interpretation, it actually denies the killing of Siegfried as the son of
Siegmund. We could say that in this form of interpretation ‘Siegfried’ lives
and ‘Jung’ dies: it performs, on the very level of interpretation, what the idea
of shooting himself had commanded Jung to do. Had Jung stayed within the
limits of this kind of interpretation, he would never have really killed
Siegfried, and thus would have stayed forever nothing but a son of Freud.
Analytical psychology would be nothing but an offshoot from psychoanalysis,
and the Freudocentric interpretation of Jung’s psychology (Shamdasani 2003,
pp. 11–13) would be wholly justified.
To Jung, this analytical interpretation would have been – literally – a dead end.
In the dream, Jung knew that he had to kill Siegfried. In The Red Book, he wrote,
‘Through guilt I have become a newborn’ (Jung 2009, p. 242). This prospective
tendency of the dream is excluded in principle from a causal-reductive approach.
And this is precisely its greatest limitation.
The riddle of Siegfried 93

Therefore, this interpretation would bring to light nothing really new, either
to the dreamer or to psychology. In such cases, Jung warns us, ‘the moment
has come to look out for possible archetypal motifs’ (Jung 1917/1926/1943,
para. 129). In order to do so, one has to adopt a wholly new method: Jung’s
synthetic/constructive approach, which corresponds to ‘interpretation on the
subjective level’.

Interpretation on the subjective level: Jung’s twofold original contribution

In none of the existing accounts of the dream of the killing of Siegfried did Jung
interpret it on the objective (analytical, causal-reductive) level. He did not
mention his relation to Freud and psychoanalysis as the external, objective
dream context. According to his report, he interpreted the dream in a
different way right after waking up, and this interpretation seems to have
fully satisfied him. He adopts the synthetic-constructive method, which
provides an interpretation on the subjective level. Such interpretation is
synthetic ‘because it detaches the underlying memory-complexes from their
external causes, regards them as tendencies or components of the subject, and
reunites them with the subject’ (Jung 1917/1926/1943, para. 130).
Since this interpretation of the Siegfried dream by Jung is well known, I shall
only summarize it here. Briefly, he provides two different views on the dream’s
meaning: one personalistic, the other non-personalistic. I will address each
separately, and the reason for this will become clear after examining the
problem with the personalistic approach.
In the 1925 seminar, Jung interprets Siegfried as meaning his superior
function, his intellect and also his ideal of strength (Jung 1925, pp. 48, 57,
61), and comments: ‘It appeared as if Siegfried were my hero. I felt an
enormous pity for him, as though I myself had been shot. I must then have
had a hero I did not appreciate, and it was my ideal of force and efficiency I
had killed’ (ibid., p. 57). The personalistic nature of this interpretation comes
out even more clearly in the way Jung conceives the effect of the release of
tension between consciousness and the unconscious, symbolized by the rain:
‘The crime is expiated because, as soon as the main function is deposed, there
is a chance for other sides of the personality to be born into life’ (ibid., my
italics).
However, it is precisely here that we come across the riddle of Siegfried that
puzzled Jung: if he never liked Siegfried, and considered him exaggeratedly
extraverted and even ridiculous, why was he identified with this particular
figure of a hero? If what was being sacrificed was his superior function, his
intellect (and, thus, not his shadow), why did the dream not present an
adequate image to signify this function? In its original mythological context,
Siegfried has no particular association to the intellect (as, for instance,
Oedipus or Odysseus have). On the other hand, Jung himself had said in the
94 Marco Heleno Barreto

seminar of 1925: ‘If a man has a good brain, thinking becomes his hero and,
instead of Christ, Kant, or Bergson, becomes his ideal. If you give up this
thinking, this hero ideal, you commit a secret murder – that is, you give up
your superior function’ (Jung 1925, p. 48). Why, then, did the dream not
present Kant or Bergson as the murdered hero? Either of these two
philosophers, highly admired by Jung, would better fit the role of signifying
his personal ideal of intellectual achievement and would be much more in
tune with his introverted nature.
We see that Jung tries his best to accommodate this personalistic emphasis
(his ideal of force and efficiency, his superior function) with the disturbing
fact that he did not appreciate Siegfried. The result is not fully convincing:
why wouldn’t he appreciate his ideal of force and efficiency at that moment?
After all, Jung confessed the ‘constant state of tension’ in which he lived
during his ‘experiment of the unconscious’, and stated: ‘My enduring these
storms was a question of brute strength’ (Jung 1963a, p. 177, my italics).
Why wouldn’t he appreciate his intellect, his superior function? Recollecting
his confrontation with the unconscious, he declared: ‘An incessant stream of
fantasies had been released, and I did my best not to lose my head but to find
some way to understand these strange things’ (ibid., pp. 176–77, my italics).
Indeed, had he not used his intellect to try to understand his Siegfried dream,
he might even have shot himself. And finally, in a paragraph omitted in the
English version of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung states: ‘In order to
achieve emancipation from the tyranny of unconscious presuppositions, two
things are necessary: the fulfillment of intellectual as well as ethical
obligations’ (Jung 1963b, p. 192, my translation). We are forced to admit
that Jung ought to have especially appreciated his strength, his efficiency and
his intellect as vital and indispensable resources during the confrontation with
the unconscious. And, besides not being in the least an intellectual hero, the
extraverted Siegfried was definitely not appreciated by the introverted Jung.
Therefore, the narrow personalistic interpretation gets entangled with an
unsolvable problem here. Siegfried is a kind of anomaly, not assimilable by
the personalistic standpoint of interpretation adopted by Jung, who is honest
enough to admit that he couldn’t understand why his unconscious got
engrossed in that specific hero-image.
In order to account for this anomaly on the subjective level, and aiming at a
solution of the riddle posed by the image of Siegfried, we have to disentangle
and differentiate the two different standpoints conflated in the interpretation
of the dream (the personalistic and the non-personalistic), and work
separately on the impersonal level to see whether this will give us a better
understanding.
When we consider the broader reach Jung attributes to what is happening to
him, as is testified by most of his reflections in The Red Book, as well as in other
later accounts of the dream, we see that he gives both an archetypal and a
historical amplitude to his ‘experiment of the unconscious’. For instance: in
The riddle of Siegfried 95

The Red Book, Jung’s interpretation of the murdered hero in the fantasy
preceding the Siegfried dream (12 December 1913)4 gives to the motif an
impersonal, collective dimension:

I would like you to see what the murdered hero means. Those nameless men who in
our day have murdered a prince are blind prophets who demonstrate in events what
then is valid only for the soul. Through the murder of princes we will learn that the
prince in us, the hero, is threatened…. we must recognize what is happening: there
are nameless ones in you who threaten your prince, the hereditary ruler.

But our ruler is the spirit of this time, which rules and leads in us all. It is the general
spirit in which we think and act today…. He is bejewelled with the most beautiful
heroic virtue, and wants to drive men up to the brightest solar heights, in everlasting
ascent.
(Jung 2009, p. 240)

This passage shows very clearly that Jung noticed that what was being killed in
the dream was not his personal hero, but the general hero ‘which rules and leads
in us all’, in the form of the ‘spirit of this time’. Apparently, then, this distinction
was not fully assimilated by Jung himself. If he had effectively differentiated the
personal level from the collective/impersonal one, really perceiving that
Siegfried was not his hero but a symbol for the ‘spirit of this time’, he would
not have been puzzled by the dream’s choice of the German hero, or would
have addressed it differently.
To Aniela Jaffé, many years later, Jung confirmed the further amplitude given
to the dream:

Suddenly the meaning of the dream dawned on me. “Why, that is the problem
that is being played out in the world”. Siegfried, I thought, represents what the
Germans want to achieve, heroically to impose their will, have their own way.
“Where there is a will there is a way!” I had wanted to do the same. But now
that was no longer possible. The dream showed that the attitude embodied by
Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me. Therefore it had to be killed…. my
heroic idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the ego’s
will, and to these one must bow.
(Jung 1963a, pp. 180–81)

We see that even here the personalistic trap is latent: he speaks of ‘my heroic
idealism’, and equates it to ‘the ego’s will’. However, if we truly accept that
Siegfried was not quite his personal hero but an image of a collective,
impersonal model in which Jung, despite being an introvert as a private
person, was located like most German and other European peoples, then
this heroic extraverted perspective poses no problem. The riddle dissolves in

4
Jung considers the Siegfried dream as an elaboration of the previous fantasy, in which the corpse
of a fair-haired man came floating in the water, and he thought: ‘That is the hero!’ (Jung 1925, p.
61).
96 Marco Heleno Barreto

the air. By killing Siegfried, Jung was sacrificing his spontaneous and
unconscious extraverted adhesion to the ‘spirit of the times’, not his superior
function. And, granting that ‘Siegfried’ as a symbol for the ‘spirit of the times’
included a reference to an ideal of force and strength, of achievement and
conquest, this ideal was not a private belonging of Jung, but the way through
which he participated in the ‘spirit of the times’, as a non-differentiated atom
in the mass. It could be thought of as the impersonal/archetypal matrix which
provided the model for ‘the ego’s will’, but not this will in itself, not Jung’s
particular ego will. In no way should Jung have given up his intellect, his force
and his strength (otherwise he would have succumbed in his ‘confrontation
with the unconscious’), but only the heroic and at bottom extraverted use of
his gifts. The ‘spirit of this time’, the true ruler behind the diversified multitude
of egos in the mass, ‘wants to drive men up to the brightest solar heights, in
everlasting ascent’. We could say that in shooting Siegfried Jung was killing his
unconscious, extraverted participation mystique with the collectivity, and thus
consciously achieving the psychological status of ‘modern man’.5
The situation depicted in the dream is somewhat analogous to what Jung tells
us about his initial identification with Faust:

Like anyone who is capable of some introspection, I had early taken it for granted
that the split in my personality was my own purely personal affair and
responsibility. Faust, to be sure, had made the problem somewhat easier for me by
confessing, “Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast”; but he had thrown no
light on the cause of this dichotomy…. Therefore I felt personally implicated, and
when Faust, in his hubris and self-inflation, caused the murder of Philemon and
Baucis, I felt guilty, quite as if I myself in the past had helped commit the murder
of the two old people. This strange idea alarmed me, and I regarded it as my
responsibility to atone for this crime, or to prevent its repetition…. Faust struck
a chord in me and pierced me through in a way that I could not but regard as
personal.
(Jung 1963a, pp. 234–35)

Jung refers to this early interpretation as ‘my false conclusion’ (ibid.), and states
that ‘I was unconsciously caught up by this spirit of the age, and had no
methods at hand for extricating myself from it’ (ibid.). This applies to the
situation posed by the Siegfried dream as well. On the one hand, as can be

5
‘To be “unhistorical” [killing the ‘spirit of this time’!] is the Promethean sin, and in this sense the
modern man is sinful. A higher level of consciousness is like a burden of guilt…. only the man who
has outgrown the stages of consciousness belonging to the past, and has amply fulfilled the duties
appointed to him by his world, can achieve full consciousness of the present. To do this he must
be sound and proficient [the ideal of ‘force and efficiency’!] in the best sense – a man who has
achieved as much as other people, and even a little more. It is these qualities which enable him to
gain the next highest level of consciousness…. He must be proficient in the highest degree, for
unless he can atone by creative ability for his break with tradition, he is merely disloyal to the
past. To deny the past for the sake of being conscious only of the present would be sheer futility’
(Jung 1928/1931, paras. 152–53).
The riddle of Siegfried 97

seen in the quotation from The Red Book, Jung considered the murder of the
hero as a symbol for a process that affected the ‘spirit of this time’; on the
other hand, his perplexity about Siegfried shows that, around 1925, he had
not fully succeeded in extricating himself from the spirit of the age, remaining
to a large extent personally identified with it.
As a matter of fact, this feature, with its conflation of the personal and the
impersonal, is insidiously present in Jung’s psychological thought. It was his
creed that the individual is the ‘makeweight that tips the scale’ (Jung 1957,
para. 586). He believed that the psychotherapist’s work in the transference
meant ‘perhaps laying up an infinitesimal grain in the scales of humanity’s soul’,
being thus ‘an opus magnum’ (Jung 1946, para. 449). To Jung, ‘the psychology
of the individual is reflected in the psychology of the nation’, so that ‘only a
change in the attitude of the individual can initiate a change in the psychology
of the nation. The great problems of humanity were never yet solved by general
laws, but only through regeneration of the attitudes of individuals’ (Jung 1917/
1926/1943, p. 4). This personal creed accounts for the intermingling of the
personalistic and the non-personalistic standpoints in Jung’s theory and in his
interpretation of the Siegfried dream on the subjective level. It leads one to
consider the individual as the true subject of an archetypal or collective event.
According to Jung’s conflated interpretation, the personally subjective event
of sacrificing the superior function, badly allegorized by his hero, corresponds
to the collective process going on in the world, to what the Germans were
doing at the time of World War I. The trivial one-sidedness of an individual
consciousness would be equivalent on a small scale to the impersonal will to
power ruling the objective sphere and driving the world to the catastrophe.
This sounds far-fetched and would have the absurd implication that any such
individual process would be an expression of what is going on in the world at
large. Private affairs would then be given a totally inflated meaning.
But this is not the only problem with Jung’s interpretation (and with his
creed). Jung adopts a semiotic stance on the personalistic side of his
interpretation – Siegfried is the intellect, Jung’s superior function – and not a
truly symbolic one. The abstract formulation of the image of Siegfried in
terms of superior function is allegorical, in the sense he attributed to the
Freudian or causal-reductive method of interpretation on the objective level.
Indeed, Jung shows how to kill an initially symbolic image, translating it into
an abstract allegory: ‘Such things as I have described in these fantasies speak
in symbolic form of things later to become conscious and to take form as
abstract thought, when they look altogether different from their plastic
origins’ (Jung 1925, p. 49).6 However, the symbolic potential, in Jung’s sense,

6
In a letter to Jung, dated of 19 January 1918, Sabina Spielrein quotes Jung himself: ‘I reproduce,
in the first place, your words: “Siegfried is a symbol that ceases to be a symbol in the very moment in
which it is recognized as our specific heroic attitude”’ (Carotenuto 1982, p. 151). I could not track
down this quotation in Jung’s writings or in the available letters to Sabina Spielrein.
98 Marco Heleno Barreto

exceeds his semiotic personalistic interpretation precisely in his not knowing

why the image of Siegfried had been used in the dream. This amounts to
saying that the symbolic riddle of Siegfried is not solved by Jung’s
personalistic allegorical translation.
On the impersonal side of the interpretation, Siegfried is taken by Jung as a
symbol for what was driving all people, and especially the Germans at that
time, to ‘the brightest solar heights’. As this ‘ideal of force and efficiency’ has
not been overcome in the objective world – on the contrary, we may say that it
has increased exponentially with the development of technology since then –
the consequence is that the killing perpetrated in the dream would be restricted
to what Jung supposedly accomplished in himself, so that he would be the
surrogate of the murdered hero for the particular community that follows his
example and accepts his ideas. In this way, the psychological process
symbolized in the dream would not have a real psychological referent as a
lasting and essential transformation in the objective psyche, as Jung seems to
claim. This is the limitation in Jung’s non-personalistic archetypal
interpretation: on the one hand, divested of the personalistic burden, it dissolves
Jung’s perplexity concerning Siegfried; on the other, since what Jung identified
in Siegfried has not been ‘killed’ in the objective world, the riddle poses itself
again, on another level. We ought to find a further form of addressing it.

A methodological refinement: interiorizing the dream image into itself

In order to safely and effectively extricate the individual subject from the ‘spirit of
the age’ in the interpretation of the dream, and also to avoid the merely semiotic
translation of the dream-image, we can adopt a more specific way of handling
the method that Jung himself gave us. This specific way is substantiated on a
different understanding of the subjective level of dream interpretation, where
‘subjective’ does not refer to the dreamer, but to soul: ‘In myths and fairytales,
as in dreams, the soul speaks about itself, and the archetypes reveal themselves
in their natural interplay, as “formation, transformation/the eternal Mind’s
eternal recreation”’ (Jung 1945/1948a, para. 400, trans. modified, my italics).
We shall then consider the dream as ‘soul speaking about itself’, not about the
individual Carl Gustav Jung nor about the concrete events of the world. This is
the method of interiorization of the dream image into itself, the method of
psychology as the discipline of interiority founded by Wolfgang Giegerich in the
wake of Jung. This methodological perspective is based on the self-referential
principle according to which the dream image has everything it needs within itself
(Jung 1955–1956, para. 749), being its own interpretation (Jung 1976, p. 294).
We have to focus exclusively on what has strictly to do with ‘soul speaking about
itself’, methodologically leaving aside any reference to outer subjective objects,
both personal (‘my superior function’) and impersonal (‘what the Germans want
to achieve’).
The riddle of Siegfried 99

‘Siegfried’ is a hero. Not only that: Siegfried is a mythical hero, which means
that he belongs to a soul context in which supernatural beings and magical
events are accepted as perfectly real, entering the comprehensive definition of
reality. If this image is taken as a self-presentation of soul, then it represents
the mythical-heroic form of consciousness.7
‘Jung’, as a dream-image, taken not as simply identical with the concrete
individual dreamer Carl Gustav Jung, but as a self-presentation of soul, is a
psychologist, and a psychologist self-consciously devoted to carrying out an
‘experiment of the unconscious’ at the time of the dream. ‘Jung’ thus
represents the psychological form of consciousness, a form which is being
engendered through the ‘experiment of the unconscious’. Here we should
remember with Jung that ‘in any psychological discussion we are not saying
anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about
itself” (Jung 1954, para. 483). This means that psychology ‘is the soul’s
knowing itself’ (Giegerich 2001, p. 209).
Therefore, when in the dream ‘Jung’ kills ‘Siegfried’, what is happening, from
the particular perspective of soul speaking about itself, is a transformation at
the level of ‘the soul’s logical life’, as Giegerich (2001) would say. Soul is
abrogating its mythical-heroic form in favor of its modern psychological form.
As a matter of fact, this killing had already happened, but Jung was unaware
of it, and the dream presents this soul event to his consciousness. Let us
remember one special state of mind experienced by Jung in the aftermath of
the parting of ways with Freud – ‘a moment of unusual clarity in which [he]
looked back over the way [he] had traveled so far’ (Jung 1963a, p. 171). Jung
recollects what he thought then:

“Now you possess a key to mythology and are free to unlock all the gates of the
unconscious psyche”.8 But then something whispered within me, “Why open all gates?”
And promptly the question arose of what, after all, I had accomplished. I had explained
the myths of peoples of the past; I had written a book about the hero, the myth in which
man has always lived. But in what myth does man live nowadays? In the Christian myth,
the answer might be, “Do you live in it?” I asked myself. To be honest, the answer was
no. “For me, it is not what I live by.” “Then do we no longer have any myth?” “No,
evidently we no longer have any myth.” “But then what is your myth – the myth in
which you do live?” At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I
stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end.
(Jung 1963a, p. 171)

7
‘Siegfried’, ‘Kant’ and ‘Bergson’ may all function as embodiment of an ideal, and as such as
figures of the hero archetype. However, ‘Siegfried’ has a mythic quality, whereas ‘Kant’ and
‘Bergson’ are only human, historical persons. From the former to the latter we find a significant
change: demythologization. See below.
8
Cf. The Red Book: ‘The hero wants to open up everything he can’ (Jung 2009, p. 240). Elsewhere,
Jung examines the inflation of the analysand after gaining knowledge from the unconscious, and
says: ‘He feels as though he possesses a key that opens many, perhaps even all, doors’ (Jung 1928,
para. 224).
100 Marco Heleno Barreto

Arguably, the interrupted thread of this thought was resumed in the Siegfried
dream. For paradoxically, by explaining the myths of peoples of the past
in his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido and especially the myth of
the hero ‘in which man has always lived’, Jung had contributed to the
demythologization characteristic of modern consciousness,9 inasmuch as an
explained myth is no longer a myth in which one can continue to live. It is a
dead symbol, in Jung’s sense, and dead, moreover, due to Jung’s having
performed the killing of the mythic hero on psychological grounds.10 Myth had
been irrevocably dismissed by the modern psychological consciousness as a
possible living form of modern consciousness itself. Conversely, psychological
consciousness had become the surrogate of myth. And now there was no
longer any myth in which one could live.
The discomfort of the interrupted dialogue of Jung with himself reaches its
final destination in the ‘unbearable feeling of guilt’ remaining after the killing
of Siegfried. His strong emotion and the enormous pity he felt for Siegfried
are perfectly natural: he was forced to acknowledge the loss of the first
naïveté of the mythical form of consciousness, to which he was personally so
strongly committed, despite having inadvertently contributed to killing it. The
relentless direction of soul’s self-realization imposed itself brutally on Jung.
Indeed, it required personal brute strength in order to endure this experience
and go along with soul’s project for itself.
Now, we can narrow our focus within this broader horizon disclosed by the
interiorization of the dream image into itself, and see how it works within
analytical psychology as a particular expression of the objective soul. Our
question here is: what was the non-personalistic goal aimed at by soul in the
conclusion of Jung’s ‘experiment of the unconscious’?
The direction intended by the soul process inside the realm of psychology,
which includes as a key moment the killing of Siegfried, can be seen in the
last of the three catastrophic dreams that Jung reports, dating from June
1914:

In the third dream frightful cold had again descended from out of the cosmos. This
dream, however, had an unexpected end. There stood a leaf-bearing tree, but
without fruit (my tree of life, I thought), whose leaves had been transformed by the
effects of the frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and
gave them to a large, waiting crowd.
(Jung 1963a, p. 176)

Elsewhere I have interpreted more extensively Jung’s catastrophic visions and

dreams in their connection to the birth and nature of analytical psychology
(Barreto 2014). Suffice it to say here that in this third dream, ‘Jung’ is not an
extraverted hero but merely a mediator who plucks healing grapes and

9
This is pointed out in passing by Paul Ricoeur (1960, p. 326). See also note 6 above.
10
Concerning the distinction between living symbol and dead symbol, see Jung 1921, para. 816.
The riddle of Siegfried 101

distributes them to the crowd: this is what he has to offer as a psychologist; the
hero form has been dissolved back into soul; the alchemical stance was ripe to
be really/effectively achieved and transmitted. Soul would achieve, through
Jung’s work, a non-heroic psychological form of consciousness. We could use
the title of the Jung’s (1912) essay in a somewhat different way and say that
the slaying of the hero was necessary to make room for ‘new paths in
psychology’: from the hero-centered psychological perspective informing
Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido to the alchemical style of mind that
commanded Jung’s later thought.
From this narrowly delimited perspective, we can reassess and rescue Jung’s
take on the Siegfried dream. If we take the hero as the archetypal pattern for
‘ego’, inasmuch as ego is directed towards reality (no matter whether it is of
an introverted or extroverted kind, and no matter what superior function it
displays), this essential egoic feature is what is meant by the ‘exaggeratedly
extraverted’ nature of Siegfried. In other words: through ‘Siegfried’, soul
emphasizes the egoic bond to exteriority, in the broadest sense. Hence, the
killing of Siegfried is a pictorial representation of the inward direction of
soul’s activity, which grounds interiorization as a psychological method. Only
through the methodological exclusion of the extraverted egoic relation to
external reality can psychology as the discipline of interiority be born.
Consequently, we can say that the Siegfried dream expresses the dynamic
moment where the psychological difference between ‘soul’ and ‘ego’
(Giegerich 2001) comes to the fore.

Conclusion
Of the three interpretative results described in this paper, the first one certainly
contrasts most with Jung’s own interpretation of the Siegfried dream and with
his most characteristic way of approaching soul phenomena. However, Jung
never gave up the analytical-reductive method of interpretation of dreams,
even after having gone through his foundational ‘confrontation with the
unconscious’, out of which his truly original (not merely psychoanalytic)
psychological perspectives were created. For instance, this causal-reductive
stance informs the clinical vignette about a patient whose dreams depicted his
bride ‘in very unflattering guise’, and Jung advised him to ‘instigate some
inquiries’, and then it came out that she was not exactly a respectable woman
(Jung 1945/1948b, para. 542). And in his old age, recollecting his experiences
in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he interpreted a dream of his own – in
which he was crossing the Swiss-Austrian border at night, and there was an
elderly man in the uniform of an Imperial Austrian customs official, who still
couldn’t die properly (Jung 1963a, p. 163) – as referring objectively and
personalistically to Freud. Therefore, solving the riddle of Siegfried through
the use of a psychoanalytic approach is not alien to analytical psychology
102 Marco Heleno Barreto

itself, even if it does not endorse the uncritical belief that any mythological
image in a dream is always a spontaneous archetypal manifestation.
At the end of our interpretative journey, we can see how the meaning of a
given psychological phenomenon essentially depends on the methodological
stance adopted. I cannot deny that I find the third approach superior to the
other two, because it does not contradict the meaning it brings to light (as the
first approach does) and it avoids the shortcomings that both the personalistic
presupposition and the extraverted non-personalistic standpoint introduce in
Jung’s interpretation.
Nonetheless, all of the contrasting interpretations applied here to the
Siegfried dream are separately sanctioned by different methods and
assumptions accepted by Jung within analytical psychology. Jung’s decision to
harbour such methodologically heterogeneous perspectives within a single
discipline has epistemological consequences. The conjoining or juxtaposition,
within the purview of analytical psychology, of such drastically different
methods of approaching psychic phenomena, each of them grounded on
presuppositions incompatible with those of the other ones, may give rise to
the charge of psychological eclecticism on the part of Jung. On the one hand,
this can be considered a handicap with regards to the theoretical
accomplishment of a rigorous notion of psychology. Eclecticism would render
analytical psychology’s internal coherence uncertain and its epistemological
claims problematic. On the other hand, it could be justified by Jung’s
psychotherapeutic pragmatism, which places him within the respectable and
age-old tradition of medicine, interested first and foremost in the healing of
the patient from his malaise and using for this purpose any instrument which
can help.11
Jung’s apparent eclecticism is related to the epistemic stance underlying his
conception of psychology: skepticism – more exactly, a mitigated epistemic
kind of skepticism — which can be shown to be Jung’s main epistemological
position, embedded in his self-proclaimed empiricism (Barreto 2008). Here I
can only call attention to this dimension of analytical psychology without
discussing its consequences and the problems it poses to psychological
knowledge, especially the problem of the nature of psychology’s truth.12 This
would exceed the delimited purpose of this small paper: showing the ways in

11
‘The right interpretation (analytical or constructive, cf. The Content of the Psychoses, 2nd Edit.)
of a symbol is the one that brings out the greatest value for our life (a pragmatic view). Theoretically
the symbol has debased as well as elevated meaning…. As long as personal repressions continue, so
that we are not aware of our incompatible wishes, we must continue to analyze in a personal way as
Freud does, without reaching the collective unconscious’ (Letter to Sabina Spielrein, 28 December
1917, in Jung 2001, pp. 190–91).
12
For a critical assessment of Jung’s epistemological stance, see Giegerich (2013). To be fair to
Jung, the problem of his apparent ‘psychological eclecticism’ should be discussed in the light of
his theory of psychological types and its intended project for the field of psychology.
The riddle of Siegfried 103

which the riddle of Siegfried can be solved and simultaneously exhibiting the
different and even divergent psychological perspectives that can legitimately
be traced back to Jung.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Le rêve de Jung du meurtre de Siegfried pose une énigme: pourquoi l’inconscient a-t-il
choisi précisément Siegfried comme héros qui va être tué ? Jung lui-même déclare qu’il
n’a pas la réponse. Cet article tente de déchiffrer cette énigme en utilisant trois
approches méthodologiques distinctes, toutes trois admises par Jung, dont deux sont
fondées sur sa théorie de l’interprétation des rêves. Au-delà d’offrir quelques réponses
possibles à l’énigme de Siegfried, cette réflexion interprétative met en lumière le
décalage des perspectives psychologiques, créé par l’hétérogénéité des méthodes en
psychologie analytique.
Mots-clés: le rêve de Jung sur Siegfried, interprétation, méthode analytique, méthode
synthétique et prospective, méthode d’intériorisation.

Jungs Traum von Siegfrieds Tod wirft ein Rätsel auf: warum wählte das Unbewußte
genau Siegfried als den zu ermordenden Helden aus? Jung selbst erklärte, dies nicht zu
wissen. Dieser Artikel versucht, das Rätsel zu entschlüsseln, wobei drei besondere von
Jung akzeptierte methodologische Herangehensweisen verfolgt werden, wovon sich
zwei direkt auf seinen Theorien zur Traumdeutung gründen. Neben der Präsentation
einiger möglicher Lösungen des Siegfriedrätsels fördert die vorliegende interpretative
Reflexion die Diskrepanz der psychologischen Perspektiven zu Tage, die durch die
Heterogenität der Methoden innerhalb der Analytischen Psychologie hervorgerufen
werden.
Schlüsselwörter: Jungs Siegfried-Traum, Interpretation, analytische Methode,
synthetisch-konstruktive Methode, Methode der Verinnerlichung.

Il sogno di Jung dell’uccisione di Siegfried ci pone davanti a un enigma: perché

l’inconscio scelse esattamente Siegfried come l’eroe che doveva essere ucciso? Jung
stesso dichiara di non saperlo. Questo lavoro è un tentativo di decifrare tale enigma
utilizzando tre distinti approcci metodologici accettati da Jung. Due di questi di fatto
hanno radici nelle sue teorie di interpretazione dei sogni. Oltre a portare qualche
possibile risposta all’enigma di Siegfried, questa riflessione interpretativa porta alla
luce la discrepanza delle prospettive psicologiche create dalla eterogeneità dei metodi
della psicologia analitica.
Parole chiave: Il sogno di Jung su Siegfried, interpretazione, metodo analitico, metodo
sintetico- costruttivo, metodo di interiorizzazione.

Сон Юнга об убийстве Зигфрида загадочен: почему бессознательное выбрало именно

Зигфрида как героя, который должен быть убит? Сам Юнг утверждает, что ему ответ
неведом. Эта статья пытается расшифровать эту загадку, используя три различных
104 Marco Heleno Barreto

методологических подхода, принимаемых Юнгом, два из которых на самом деле

базируются на его же собственных теориях интерпретации сновидений. Помимо
предъявления некоторых возможных ответов на загадку Зигфрида, эта
интерпретативная рефлексия выводит на свет расхождения психологических взглядов,
появившихся в результате гетерогенности методов в аналитической психологии.
Ключевые слова: сновидение Юнга о Зигфриде, интерпретация, аналитический метод,
синтетико-конструктивный метод, метод интериоризации.

El sueño de Jung sobre el asesinato de Sigfrido posee un enigma: ¿por qué el inconsciente
elige a Sigfrido como el héroe a ser asesinado? Jung mismo declara que él no lo sabe.
El presente trabajo intenta descifrar dicho enigma utilizando tres abordajes metodológicos
diferentes aceptados por Jung. Dos de éstos están de hecho basados en sus teorías sobre la
interpretación de los sueños. Además de presentar algunas respuestas posibles a dicho
enigma, esta reflexión interpretativa brinda cierta claridad a la discrepancia entre las
perspectivas psicológicas creadas a partir de la heterogeneidad de métodos al interior de
la psicología analítica.
Palabras clave: Sueño de Jung sobre Sigfrido, interpretación, método analítico, método
sintético-constructivo, método de interiorización.

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