Reference: The Green Lion

The alchemical “green lion” devouring the sun relates to the experience of consciousness being overwhelmed by violent, frustrated desires (often masked by depression)

As the text which I gave you briefly in the last hour says, there is in this lead even the element of madness. This refers to another fact for if you dig up depressive states in people, usually at the bottom there are either creative contents or a violent, unsacrificed desire. Frequently depressed people dream of voracious lions or other devouring animals such as dragons, but particularly lions, which means they are depressed because they are frustrated in the fulfillment of their wild desires. They want everything: to be top dog, have the most beautiful partner, money, and everything else. They have the childish, wild desires which would like to eat everything up, but at the same time they are intelligent enough to know that life is not like that, that they cannot have what they want, so the desire curls up into sulky depressiveness. Such a depression has the quality of sulkily frustrated desire and explains why, after an unhappy love affair, people drop into an awful depression. Their lion has been frustrated and has returned sulking to its lair.

Some people have a frustrated infant within them. Usually they are very correct and polite, and make very few demands on the analyst, but being too polite and correct and considerate is always suspect. One knows they would like to eat up the analyst completely like the lion, making childish demands and scenes, because the analyst has stopped dive minutes before the time, or answered the telephone, or put off the hour, or even had the flu! Such demanding infantile people compensate by being very correct, knowing that if they admit their demands then the devouring lion will come up and the analyst will naturally hit back, something which they have experienced often in life when, after hiding their feelings, they one day took the risk and got banged on the head. So the hurt child retires once more, bitterly frustrated, and then comes the depression, the devouring lion. That is a part of primitive nature, of primitive archaic reactions which have all the conflicts of wanting to eat and not being able to do so, so that the depressive mania takes over.

That is the symbolism of the madness in the lead, but it also contains Osiris, the immortal man, and if only you accept that spot within you, you will come to the creative content where the Self is hidden. The frustrated child could be said to be an aspect covering up an image of the Self, and the devouring lion also an aspect of the Self.

If you take the image of the devouring lion this is quite clear. If I think I ought to be top dog everywhere, have the most beautiful partner, have money, be happy, and so on, that is a paradise fantasy, and what is that? It is a projection of the Self! So actually, the childish thing is the desire to experience everything in the here and now. The fantasy in itself is entirely legitimate, it has the idea of the coniunctio, a perfect state, a state of harmony. It is a religious idea, but naturally if projected onto outside life and wanted there, in the here and now, that is impossible. The *way* in which the person wants to realize the fantasy is childish, but in itself it is valuable and has nothing wrong or unhealthy about it.

So just in that undominated mad spot of the person, or the wild or problematic spot, there is the symbol of the Self. That gives it the drive, which is why people never know what to do for they cannot repress it; or if they are reasonable and just give the thing up and realize how childish it is and that one should be resigned and adapt to life then they feel that they are cured but that they have been robbed of their best possibilities and so are frustrated.

- Marie Louise von Franz, “Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology”