Jung's Big Phallus

In his 'autobiography' Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung tells of a dream he had when he was about four years old.  In it, he steped down from a lawn, where he would play, to an underground chamber with a gold throne at the end, atop which sat what was, apparently, as he realized only years later, an enormous ithyphallos, a terrifying presence (it may have been disguised surrealistically, as things can be in dreams-- the variant accounts I've read differ somewhat in what he actually saw).  His mother's voice comes to him from the world above: "Yes, look at him.  That is the man-eater." (probably as "Menschenfresser", which means 'cannibal, ogre').  Little Carl feared that this monster would crawl toward him like a worm and attack.  He didn't tell his mother later of this dream, but dreaded its recurrence.  He apparently kept it secret until he told his wife of it when he was 65, and may thereafter have kept it from all but a few followers until his autobiography was published after his death two decades later.  The variants of this Jungian 'big dream' I have read in several biographies were possibly influenced by what he told his intimates over that period.  Jung would interpret his 'big dreams' (those he felt were of a universal, archetypal importance) using his 'creative imagination' trance technique, thus revealing the underlying symbols informing the presenting images, which interpretations would go into the new, clearer text, so these revelatory dreams evolved in the telling over time, even over decades.  In addition, Jung and his followers often hid the true meaning of the Jungian teachings behind ambiguous or euphemistic code-words, and M,D,R itself was accused by a biographer, Richard Noll, in The Aryan Christ, of being 'hagiography', written up by the editor, Aniela Jaffe, as the spiritual testament of a 'wise old man' who had had profound inner experiences of awesome import for the world.  Beyond this, Jung's habit was to write ambiguously, contradictorily, perhaps intentionally so, on occasion.

In the case of the Chthonic Phallos dream, Jung seemed loath to give an interpretation of it, either because he felt it transcended interpretation, being so transcendently real in itself, or because he didn't want to reveal his true, unseemly interpretation.  But given his early championing of the heathen over the Christian worldviews, and despite his late theological writings, Noll believed Jung remained implacably anti-Christian, seeing it as a religion evil in effect.  Whatever interpretation you may prefer of this early dream-as-presented, of a psychiatric or developmental sort, I can't help but wonder if, eventually, Jung didn't come to see its powerful, fearsome figure as initiating him into a life-course that determined his life's work: as he says in M,D,R, "through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the earth"; and "it happened in order to bring the greatest amount of light into the darkness" (of his grim and disturbed early life).  Dare I suggest that this Chthonic Phallos was not, for him, just a dream-monster, but God, the true, actually-existing primordial God-within of the human species, that dwells in the deepest depth of the human brain-mind,  Which of course he would not have stated publicly, and only if you had been initiated into the Jungian mystery cult could you read beneath the usual screen of verbiage to see what lay starkly there, having been told outright what this figure was, or perhaps it was left a mystery, for those who had eyes to see to experience, themselves: the Chthonic Phallic God-within.