Triplets

triplets, or even twins, give him the impression of too much of a blessing all at once. It seems to him quite sufficient if only the third child remains alive. He dwells now upon these dead children and says that spiritualism and Yoga seem to him to be such unnecessary children

Jung presents the patient’s own associations to the triplets dream, establishing that the two dead children represent discarded spiritual paths while the surviving third signifies the emergent anima-relation.

Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis

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the strange fact that the triplets, the efforts, were born all at the same time. That is an intimation that when a thing happens in time it becomes history, but in the unconscious there is no time, it is eternal.

Jung uses the simultaneous birth of triplets to articulate his core doctrine of unconscious atemporality: events that unfolded sequentially in waking life appear coeval in dream because the unconscious is not subject to chronological ordering.

Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis

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it is his wife who brings forth his honest attempt, the triplets.

Jung concludes the seminar discussion by identifying the wife as the psychic agent producing the triplets, underscoring the interpenetration of two psychologies within a close relationship.

Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis

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these three children are born at the same time, but it was not at the same time that he began those studies.

A seminar participant identifies the key interpretive anomaly of the triplets dream—the temporal displacement between waking sequence and dream simultaneity—which Jung then elaborates theoretically.

Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting

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when he speaks of spiritual interests, he could just as well say that his wife had fir

Jung contextualizes the triplets within the analysis of the patient’s psychological entanglement with his wife, arguing that their shared psychological material makes the birth dream belong to both equally.

Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting

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the genetic code consists of a series of nucleotide triplets, each of which contains the instructions for forming a unique amino acid.

Kandel deploys the biochemical sense of ‘triplets’ as codons in DNA, a usage structurally parallel to the depth-psychological interest in triadic units as carriers of essential information though drawn from an entirely different disciplinary context.

Kandel, Eric R., In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006aside

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