“Do you sit there and tell me it is part of my treatment that I should fall in love with you?”

“It is one of those things that happens now and then, because I am a woman. But suppose I were a wise old doctor, like our great Dr Jung; you would hardly fall in love with me then, would you? Something quite other would happen; a strong sense of discipleship. But always there comes this period of special union with the doctor. This feeling you have—which I understand and respect, believe me—is because we have been talking a great deal about Judy Wolff.”

“You are not in the least like Judy Wolff.”

“Certainly not—in one way. In another way—let us see. Have you had any dreams since last time?”

“Last night I dreamed of you.”

“Tell.”

“It was a dream in colour. I found myself in an underground passage, but some light was entering it, because I could see that it was decorated with wall-paintings, in the late Roman manner. The whole atmosphere of the dream was Roman, but the Rome of the decadence; I don’t know how I knew that, but I felt it. I was in modern clothes. I was about to walk down the passage when my attention was taken by the first picture on the left-hand side. These pictures, you understand, were large, almost life-size, and in the warm but not reflective colours of Roman frescoes. The first picture—I couldn’t see any others—was of you, dressed as a sibyl in a white robe with a blue mantle; you were smiling. On a chain you held a lion, which was staring out of the picture. The lion had a man’s face. My face.”

“Any other details?”

“The lion’s tail ended in a kind of spike, or barb.”

“Ah, a manticore!”

“A what?”

“A manticore is a fabulous creature with a lion’s body, a man’s face, and a sting in his tail.”

“I never heard of it.”

“No, they are not common, even in myths.”

“How can I dream about something I’ve never heard of?”

“That is a very involved matter, which really belongs to the second part of your analysis. But it is a good sign that this sort of material is making its way into your dreams already. People very often dream of things they don’t know. They dream of minotaurs without ever having heard of a minotaur. Thoroughly respectable women who have never heard of Pasiphaë dream that they are a queen who is enjoying sexual congress with a bull. It is because great myths are not invented stories but objectivizations of images and situations that lie very deep in the human spirit; a poet may make a great embodiment of a myth, but it is the mass of humanity that knows the myth to be a spiritual truth, and that is why they cherish his poem. These myths, you know, are very widespread; we may hear them as children, dressed in pretty Greek guises, but they are African, Oriental, Red Indian—all sorts of things.”