MYSELF: No. And yet … there was always something about him that held the imagination. He was an oddity, as I’ve said. But a man who never seemed to come to anything. He wrote some books, and Father said some of them sold well, but they were queer stuff, about the nature of faith and the necessity of faith—not Christian faith, but some kind of faith, and now and then in classes he would point at us and say, “Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don’t choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very creditable one, will choose you.” Then he would go on about people whose belief was in Youth, or Money, or Power, or something like that, and who had found that these things were false gods. We liked to hear him rave, and some of his demonstrations from history were very amusing, but we didn’t take it seriously. I have always looked on him as a man who missed his way in life. Father liked him. They came from the same village.

DR VON HALLER: But you never felt any urge to learn from him?

MYSELF: What could he have taught me, except history and the Plain Style?

DR VON HALLER: Yes, I see. It seemed to me for a time that he had something of the quality of a Magus.

MYSELF: In your Comedy Company, or Cabinet of Arche-types, you don’t seem to have any figure that might correspond to my father.

DR VON HALLER: Oh, do not be impatient. These are the common figures. You may depend on it that your father will not be forgotten. Indeed, it seems to me that he has been very much present ever since we began. We talk of him all the time. He may prove to be your Great Troll….

MYSELF: Why do you talk of trolls? It seems to me that you Jungians sometimes go out of your way to make yourselves absurd.

DR VON HALLER: Trolls are not Jungian; they are just part of my promise not to annoy you with jargon. What is a troll?

MYSELF: A kind of Scandinavian spook, isn’t it?

DR VON HALLER: Yes, spook is a very good word for it—another Scandinavian word. Sometimes a troublesome goblin, sometimes a huge, embracing lubberfiend, sometimes an ugly animal creature, sometimes a helper and server, even a lovely enchantress, a true Princess from Far Away: but never a full or complete human being. And the battle with trolls that Ibsen wrote about is a good metaphor to describe the wrestling and wrangling we go through when the archetypes we carry in ourselves seem to be embodied in people we have to deal with in daily life.

MYSELF: But people are people, not trolls or archetypes.

DR VON HALLER: Yes, and our great task is to see people as people and not clouded by archetypes we carry about with us, looking for a peg to hang them on.