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Experience of the Self in a lifetimeGustav Dreifuss
(Lecture
presented at the Congress of AIPA, [Italian Association for the study of
Analytical Psychology], Naples, November 2000) When I was about 20 years old, I attended a
concert in the Tonhalle, the concert-hall of Zurich. I still see before my
inner eyes the place at which I sat, listening to a concert of chamber
music-I think a quartet of Schubert. Suddenly, a feeling of oneness overcame
me, difficult, almost impossible to describe. At about the same time while
hiking in the Alps, I looked at the panorama from a terrace. A group of
people, who happened to be there, observed the same scene. A man remarked:
“Le massif du Mont Blanc: c’est comme une symphonie”. (“The massif of the
Mont Blasnc is like a symphony”) I recognized the gentleman: he was Ernest
Ansermet, a well-known Swiss conductor from Geneva, at the time. Reflecting
on his words, it brought together the overpowering formation of the Alps with
the tremendous impact of a symphony. It corresponded to my love for nature
and music. There is of course also a difference: The Alps are a geological
structure having existed over thousands of years, whereas the symphony is a
result of the creative spirit of the composer. God created the Alps and the
composer, also by divine influence, by inspiration, created the symphony. A
common denominator of my two experiences, in the concert hall and in nature,
is the overpowering effect of the senses-of hearing and seeing.
Psychologically speaking, the composer expresses in his work the infinite of
the archetype, of the collective unconscious. published in THE JOURNAL OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Volume 46 No.4 October 2001 |
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