Did Carl Jung Underestimate the Significance of This Transformative Dream?

No prisons are more confining than the ones of which we are unaware.
- Shakespeare, The Tempest

In 1913, a frustrated thirty-eight-year-old Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, broke with Freud, who had been an important mentor for many years. It was a scary and traumatic experience for Jung. He was leaving the popular authority of his time; he was leaving a system of dream interpretation, a body of techniques, ideas, and theories of analysis. And he was leaving what surely must have felt like a father-son relationship with Freud along with understandable feelings of betrayal, for both Freud and Jung. Of course this break-up also marks one of the most significant transitions in Jung