Carl Gustav Jung’s Interpretation of Cardano’s Theories of Dreams and World Harmony

Between 1936 and 1941, Carl Gustav Jung presented a seminar on children’s dreams and the historical literature on dream interpretation in Zurich. As part of the seminar Jung analysed twelve dreams of Girolamo Cardano. These sessions do not only give an insight into Jungian dream interpretation in practice, but also demonstrate how Jung used Cardano’s dream reports to corroborate his ideas about a perennial philosophy, archetypes, the collective unconscious, the unus mundus, synchronicity and the harmonization of opposites. In his book on dreams, titled Synesiorum somniorum omnis generis insomnia explicantes, libri IV (1562), Cardano defends the merits of dream interpretation and offers a philosophical explanation of his views. Central to his dream theory is the idea that the cosmos is a unified, harmonic and animate entity. The universal harmonic interrelations between all cosmic phenomena provide the basis for Cardano’s theory of dream interpretation. In this paper I will investigate how and why Jung used Cardano’s dream reports to revive the Renaissance notion of a unitary harmonic world as the eternal ground of all empirical being. Moreover, I will analyse why Jung was prepared to make a “salto mortale” to appropriate Cardano’s dreams, while he considered Cardano’s “vulgar dream interpretation totally inadequate”.